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90 Chapter 2
Until the mid-eleventh century many of the clergy in Western
Europe lived respectably if not perhaps quite legitimately under
a matrimonial or quasi-matrimonial regime not unlike that of the
laity. One symptomatic example: at the beginning of the eleventh
century we find an archbishop of Lyons and another bishop granting
in return for rent a property to a certain Rozelin—a canon
and thus a clergyman with a substantial position—and to his partner
Amandola. The modern English usage of ‘partner’ precisely
renders the Latin word fidelis. There is no hint of disreputability.
By and large this was not untypical of the better-o· clergy’s
lifestyle in the early Middle Ages, so far as one can judge from
patchy evidence. There is a change of atmosphere with the Gregorian
reform in the mid to late eleventh century, a fierce attempt to
make clerical celibacy a reality. Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand)
was associated in people’s minds with this campaign, though it
began well before he became pope. A little Ely chronicle says simply
that ‘Hildebrand the archdeacon, elected as pope, himself banned
clerics, apart from the ones to whom the canons permitted it,
from living with women’. Even after Gregory VII put the full
force of his intense personality as well as the papal oce behind
the campaign for clerical celibacy, it took quite a while to change
practice. Arguably,unrespectable concubinage at parish-priest level
remained common until the eighteenth or nineteenth century: but
it had no legitimation, and in some regions it was believed that
French Literature (Cambridge, 1995), which develops (pp. 94, 103) the analogous
argument that clerical writers of romances, like Chr‹etien de Troyes, cannot be
aligned with either the female or the male protagonists, because the latter are knights,
whose social status and values are quite di·erent from their own; and I think the
idea of the clergy as a third gender is generally ‘in the air’ among scholars at present.
Die Urkunden der burgundischen Rudolfinger, ed. T. Schie·er with H. E. Mayer
(Monumenta Germaniae Historica Regum Burgundiae e Stirpe Rudolfina, Diplomata
et Acta; Munich, 1977), no. 152, p. 334.
For a survey of the history of celibacy see G. Denzler, Das Papsttum und der
Amtsz•olibat, i.Die Zeit bis zur Reformation (P•apste und Papsttum, 5.1; Stuttgart,
1973).
See e.g. C. N. L. Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford, 1989), 64.
This presumably refers to clerics in minor orders. Cf. C. Mirbt, Quellen zur
Geschichte des Papsttums und des r•omischen Katholizismus, 5th edn. (T •ubingen, 1934),
no. 291, pp. 151–2 (and no. 271, p. 143, item 3, for the celibacy decree of Pope Nicolaus
II at the Lateran synod of 1059); Denzler, Das Papsttum und der Amtsz•olibat,
i. 65.
‘Hyldebrandus archidiaconus papa electus ipse [ms. corrected and unclear] interdixit
clericis cum mulieribus habitare nisi quas canones exceperunt’ (MS BL
Cotton Domitian XV, fo. 6VA, new foliation).