Three sorts of priest, part I: evidence for priests and their books on the tenth-century Spanish March

Since I was invited to join Cliopatria I haven't really done much of what be thought of as my actual remit, that being, to bring the history of the Middle Ages to your screens for your general entertainment and some contrast with the other contributors' material. The problem is one of judging when an idea I have is too abstruse for Cliopatria, or too huge, too involved or alternatively too flip or trivial. But noting that I certainly could be posting more, I have been looking at a series I am running at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe that, it seems to me, has not found its audience there and thinking that maybe it should have gone here first. It was originally a spin-off from a seminar report that I wrote, in which I sidetracked to say that, contrary to what some commenters had thought, I thought there was reasonable evidence we could use to say some things about the early medieval priesthood. I wound up by picking up on three sorts of priest particularly who stood out in their social positions in my material, and since Christianity, Christianization, organised religion and what it does to society are what you might call abiding themes I hope that, with a light reframing for this forum, it may interest you too.

My particular corner of Europe is fairly farflung, and almost all the textual evidence from it is land charters, so you could be forgiven for thinking it was difficult to say much about pastoral care. And it is, especially liturgy: most of the evidence for the liturgy comes from the kingdoms next door like León and Asturias, where the Carolingian project of cultural unification wasn't carried out, and if one's interested in liturgy, which I'm not really, then that must be quite annoying as this ought to be a locus classicus for testing the Carolingian cultural effect, and it won't let one look.¹ In fact, where one can say something about priests, it's not because of the Carolingians but because of the Visigoths. It is laid down in the Visigothic Code, the Forum Iudicum yet, already, by the 'glorious Flavius Reccensvinthus, king', as follows:

As soon as a bishop has been consecrated, he shall straightway proceed to make an inventory of the property of his church in the presence of five freeborn witnesses; and to this inventory the said witnesses shall affix their signatures. After the death of a bishop, and as soon as his successor has been consecrated, the latter shall require a second inventory of the church property to be made; and if it should appear that said property had, in any way, been diminished, then the heirs of said bishop, or those to whom his estate was bequeathed by will, shall make up the deficiency.²

I don't suppose this was actually done everywhere, but it was done at least twice at Vic d'Osona.³ And, because books are very expensive when you're killing a sheep for every eight pages or so, they are listed too. So, circa. 970, after the murder of Bishop Ató (not Archbishop, no matter what you may have heard), Fruià his successor appears to have done this and the books are inventoried too, after their papal and royal precepts. The interesting thing is that the books weren't at the cathedral, in some cases. Fruià himself had a volume of canones on loan, and a woman called Riquilda had a copy of Kings, so there's an interesting thing for other reasons. More relevantly for the post, there were several small clusters out at other churches. At Castellar, far out at the west end of Manresa in Segarra, out in the wilds, someone had an antiphonary, a lectionary and a missal. Valldaneu, which I can't place, had an antiphonary and a missal, and out at Artés in Manresa, there was an antiphonary, a missal and a volume of dispositos (any ideas? I'm guessing a penitential). This is interesting because that's most of what you'd want as a mass priest; I'd expect a Psalter, too, and I'm surprised that none are mentioned, but maybe the priests had their own.

Also, these were development areas: Vic got hold of Artés only in 938, when 50-odd people from there were made to swear to the bishop's lordship.⁴ We don't even securely know of a church out there before the eleventh-century Santa Maria; you can see from the picture above that it's a bit busier now, but in this inventory we can see that Vic had a kind of mission station out there, and one at Castellar too. Part of the development that the cathedral was putting into these areas was supplying the textual necessities for cult. It may well be that they didn't intend these books to stay there, were hoping that the new churches' resources would eventually permit them to buy their own copies, but for then, the cathedral's chosen hot-spots were getting their start-up costs met centrally. Likewise, one of Vic's richest priests, a guy called Guifré Brunicard, had borrowed a lectionary; I rather suspect that he, too, was spreading the good word in some of the places he'd managed to buy and which, via his two nephews, the cathedral would eventually also come to own.⁵

This still doesn't tell you what the priests in question knew, where they'd been taught (though as Ató was a learned man and one of the teachers of Gerbert of Rheims—the later Pope Sylvester II and later still infamous for sorcery—a cathedral school doesn't seem a difficult thing to envision) or what liturgy they used, what hymns they sang, and how fierce they were about superstition, or whatever; it doesn't tell us, either, how Christian or not their `flocks' were; but it does show that someone in these wild areas was interested to ensure that people got the law and Mass right.⁶ Obviously this is not a typical area, but where is? And obviously also, this is not the whole of the Spanish March: this is three or four places in two counties with hundreds of churches, so there must be other possibilities. Part 2 and part 3 will try and explore some of those, but this is enough for now.

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1. On this replacement the chapter and verse (no pun intended) is now Rose Walker, The change from the Mozarabic to the Roman liturgy in Spain at the end of the eleventh century (London 1995); Rose is also one of the few people who can interest me in this stuff, but I still haven't read it I'm afraid.

2.Karl Zeumer (ed.), Leges Visigothorum, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Leges Nationum Germanicum) I (Hannover 1902, repr. 2005), transl. S. P. Scott as The Visigothic Code (Boston 1922), Book V Chapter 1 Title II.

3. Eduard Junyent (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic, segles IX-X, ed. Ramon Ordeig i Mata (Vic 1980-1996), doc. nos 303 & 413, following discussion of 413 which is also illus. ibid. làmina 92.

4.Ibid., doc. no. 182. On Vic's development and its management of its lands, you can see Paul H. Freedman, The Diocese of Vic: tradition and regeneration in medieval Catalonia (New Brunswick 1983); online at http://libro.uca.edu/vic/vic.htm, last modified 16^th August 2000 as of 22^nd November 2003.

5. His will, made before departure on pilgrimage from which, seemingly, he did not return, is Junyent, Diplomatari, doc. no. 479.

6. On Ató and his tuition of Gerbert, one can see firstly Ramon Ordeig i Mata,"Ató, bisbe i arquebisbe de Vic (957-971), antic arxiprest-ardiaca de Girona" in Studia Vicensia Vol. 1 (Vic 1989), pp. 61-97, and secondly J. M. Masnou,"L'escola de la catedral de Vic al segle XI" in Immaculada Ollich i Castanyer (ed.), Actes del Congrés Internacional Gerbert d'Orlhac i el seu Temps: Catalunya i Europa a la Fi del 1r Mil·lenni, Vic-Ripoll, 10-13 de Novembre de 1999 (Vic 1999), pp. 621-633.