Inertia and Reform in the Pre-Tridentine French Church: the Response to Protestantism in the Diocese of Rouen, 1520–1562

Abstract

The French Church on the eve of the Reformation presents a varied and complex spectacle. Since the end of the Hundred Years War the number of clergy had grown significantly, much of the material damage caused by the war had been made good, and an army of administrators had placed the Church on what seemed to be a healthy financial base. In the diocese of Rouen under Guillaume d'Estouteville (1453–83) the archbishop's annual revenues rose from about 4,000 to about 10,000 livres; the Church was served by an excellent administration; and an abundance of priests ensured that there were few or no empty benefices. Yet neither a more numerous clergy nor sound finances could guarantee a religious revival or an active faith. The Church's aim never went beyond an attempt to turn the clock back, and it did not adapt to the expanding economy of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Ecclesiastical institutions failed to invest in anything other than land and, to a lesser extent, urban property, and too much capital was immobilised in land and ‘treasure’, while the expanding commercial sectors of the upper-Norman economy went ignored. Similarly, corruption, abuses and apathy existed alongside the first glimmerings of new attitudes, and without a lead from the top the forces of regeneration would be blocked by traditional attitudes and styles of administration, and the combined effects of the rise of Protestantism and the raging inflation of the sixteenth century could be temporarily disastrous.