Family, Community and Cult on the Eve of the Gregorian Reform

Abstract

One of the most obvious novelties of the eleventh century is the appearance of the crowd on the stage of public events. It would not claim to rival its counterparts in Antiquity or the Renaissance in the permanence of its presence or the scale of its activity, still less in the vividness with which it can be portrayed, or the wonders of analysis that can be performed upon it by its historians. Some of them, indeed, might hesitate to distinguish categorically between thepopuluswhich attacked the clergy of Milan in 1056 or formed an army for Peter the Hermit and that which surrounded the tomb of a Merovingian saint or attended the court of a Carolingian lord. But to indulge that hesitation to the point of silence would be to grant to semantics priority over common sense. It is impossible to contemplate the events of the eleventh century, to observe the turbulence of Florence in the 1060s or the Flemish and Rhineland cities in the 1070s, to hear a Gregory VII appealing to the people to boycott their priests and spurn their bishops, a Sigebert of Gembloux lamenting ‘sudden unrest among the populace, new treacheries of servants against their masters and masters’ mistrust of their servants', or a Marbod of Rennes protesting that to denounce the errors of the clergy before the people was ‘not to preach but to undermine’, without conceding not only that a new fear of social upheaval had been generated, but that in some manner it was founded in reality, that the course of events had been changed, and changed significantly on occasion, by the availability of the force of popular indignation to those who knew how to raise it. And quite clearly ‘knowing how to raise it’ was, for the greater part of the century, a religious matter, at least in the sense that the language that stirred the passions of the mob was religious language: the cry that brought out the crowds was that priests were unchaste, or simoniacal or corrupt, a whole generation and more before it became effective to raise the shout for a commune, or against the Jews, or towards the holy places.