44 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1073-1085.
Partidas," punished sacerdotal marriage with deprivation of function and benefice, and authorized the prelates to com mand the assistance of the secular power in enforcing this punishment. " After this we hear little of regular marriage, which was replaced by promiscuous concubinage or by per manent irregular unions."1
In France the efforts of reform made by the predecessors of Gregory had little effect. A Paris synod of 1074 declared Gregory's decrees unbearable and unreasonable.2 At a stormy synod at Poitiers, in 1078, his legate obtained the adoption of a canon which threatened with excommunication all who should listen to mass by a priest whom they knew to be guilty of simony or concubinage. But the bishops were unable to carry out the canon without the aid of the secular arm. The Norman clergy in 1072 drove the archbishop of Rouen from a council with a shower of stones. William the Conqueror came to his aid in 1080 at a synod of Lillebonne, which forbade ordained persons to keep women in their houses. But clerical marriages continued, the nuptials were made public, and male children succeeded to benefices by a recognized right of primogeniture. William the Conqueror, who assisted the hopeless reform in Normandy, prevented it in his subject province of Britanny, where the clergy, as described by Pascal 11., in the early part of the twelfth century, were setting the canons at defiance and indulging in enormities hateful to God and man.
At last, the Gregorian enforcement of sacerdotal celibacy triumphed in the whole Roman Church, but at the fearful sacrifice of sacerdotal chastity. The hierarchical aim was at tained, but not the angelic purity of the priesthood. The private morals of the priest were sacrificed to hierarchical ambition. Concubinage and licentiousness took the place of holy matrimony. The acts of councils abound in complaints of clerical immorality and the vices of unchastity and drunk- 1 Lea, p. 309. 2 importabiUa ideoque irrationabiUa.
§ 14. THE WAR OVER INVESTITURE. 45
enness. "The records of the Middle Ages are full of the evidences that indiscriminate license of the worst kind pre vailed throughout every rank of the hierarchy."1 The corruption again reached the papacy, especially in the fif teenth century. John XXIII. and Alexander VI. rivalled in wickedness and lewdness the worst popes of the tenth and eleventh centuries.
§ 14. The War over Investiture.
The other great reform -scheme of Gregory aimed at the complete emancipation of the Church from the bondage of the secular power. His conception of the freedom of the Church meant the slavery of the State. The State exercised control over the Church by selling ecclesiastical dignities, or the practice of simony, and by the investiture of bishops and abbots ; that is, by the bestowal of the staff and ring.2 These were the insignia of ecclesiastical authority; the staff or crosier was the symbol of the spiritual rule of the bishop, the ring the symbol of his mystical marriage with the Church.
The feudal system of the Middle Ages, as it developed itself among the new races of Europe from the time of Charlemagne, rested on land tenure and the mutual obliga tions of lord and vassal, whereby the lord, from the king down to the lowest landed proprietor, was bound to protect his vassal, and the vassal was bound to serve his lord. The Church in many countries owned nearly or fully one-half of the landed estate, with the right of customs, tolls, coinage of money, etc., and was in justice bound to bear part of the burden attached to land tenure. The secular lords regarded themselves as the patrons of the Church, and claimed the right of appointing and investing its officers, and of bestow ing upon them, not only their temporalia, but also the insignia of their spiritual power. This was extremely offen sive to churchmen. The bishop, invested by the lord, became
1 Lea, p. 341. 2 investitura per baculum et annulum.