Religious patronage and burial

Abstract

Some of the best-documented testimonies to aristocratic outlook and behaviour in the regions along the Norman frontier are almsgiving ceremonies. The charters which record these endowments are the most comprehensive source for the landowning community in northern France in this period: they easily surpass the only comparable source in detail and scope, the Norman exchequer rolls, mentioning almost every member of the aristocracy known to history. Religious patronage, in its broad sense of all forms of endowment of religious houses, can cast much light upon aristocratic mentalities in these regions, and hence upon the significance of the frontier itself. However, benefactions for religious houses raise numerous problems of interpretation, as historians of France and England in the central Middle Ages have recognised. Most monastic charters from the period employed venerable formulae which reveal little about the actual process of endowment. They invariably state that they were made for the wellbeing of the souls of the donors and their ancestors: long before the twelfth century the aristocracy had come to see their way to salvation as lying in the maintenance of monasteries, collegiate churches or cathedral prebends which could provide the necessary masses and prayers. No study of religious endowments can ignore the spiritual intentions expressed by the donors; but since gifts of land and rents affected the chief resources of a landowning aristocracy, religious benefaction and secular power were closely connected.