The Papacy and the Historian—VII: The Feudal Papacy?

Abstract

An ideology was matured, if not created, in the reformed communities of the tenth and eleventh centuries. This was mostly done under the banner of the Rule of St Benedict. What this means, is not that all the reformed communities were really Benedictine, nor that all those who called themselves Benedictine were what we should recognise as Benedictine monks. In Northern Italy in the sources emanating from the more conservative churchmen it is obvious that the term Benedictine conjured up ideas of rabble-rousing radical churchmen urging their lay supporters to prevent married and unreformed priests from celebrating mass, by force of necessary. The centre of this activity was the Burgundian abbey of Cluny: it is instructive to compare the conventional image of a venerable, ivy-grown, primitive Ampleforth purveyed in the works of some modern historians of Cluny (the works of Dr Noreen Hunt are excellent examples of the scholarly hagiography of our own day that is quite as false as anything put out by a medieval writer) with the picture given by a hostile contemporary, Bishop Adalbero of Lâon. Adalbero presents us with a power-seeking, ruthless, abbot of Cluny, socially subversive, tottering on the verge of heresy, the enemy of the natural ‘feudal’ order of the day. Adalbero’s abbot is St Odilo, the charming old dear of modern hagiography. Adalbero, himself a deeply political bishop in an age when all senior churchmen, and above all the abbot of Cluny, had to be politically alert, knew what he was talking about. Cluny was born of an attempt to manipulate the intricacies of the feudal world to the advantage of the kind of monasticism envisaged by Gregory the Great, Columbanus, and St Wilfrid. Cluny lay in the kingdom of the West Franks, in the duchy of Burgundy, the territory of the count of Mâcon and the see of the bishop of Mâcon. But the original endowment was the property of the neighbouring and more powerful duke of Aquitaine, who was also count of Mâcon.