Confession in England and the Fourth Lateran Council

Rebecca Springer

Called by Pope Innocent III in April of 1213 and convened in November of 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council was attended by some eight hundred bishops and four hundred abbots, priors, and heads of collegiate churches, making it, at the time, the largest and most influential council ever assembled by the Western papacy. For historians interested in pastoral care and lay religious experience, canon twenty-one, Omnis utriusque sexus, is emblematic of the Council’s reforming agenda. This canon required all Christians aged twelve or older to confess their sins to their ‘own priest’ at least once a year in preparation for receiving the Eucharist at Easter, on pain of excommunication. Confession could be made to another priest only with the permission of one’s ‘own priest’. And the priest himself, as confessor, should be a medicus animarum, carefully advising and prescribing penances in order to heal the penitent’s moral sickness.1 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. and trans. N.P. Tanner, 2 vols. (London and Washington, D.C.: Sheed and Ward, 1990), i [hereafter Decrees], p. 245.

The sacrament of confession, and the theology, legislation and literature that accompanied it, have been the subject of extensive and fruitful scholarship.2 In addition to the scholarship discussed below see also studies which have fruitfully used confessional literature as a window into aspects of medieval social life, including: A. Murray, ‘Confession as a Historical Source in the Thirteenth Century’, pp. 49–86, and ‘Counselling in Medieval Confession’, pp. 87–103, both in A. Murray, Conscience and Authority in the Medieval Church (Oxford University Press, 2015); P. Biller, ‘Marriage Patterns and Women’s Lives: A Sketch of Pastoral Geography’, in P.J.P. Goldberg (ed.), Women in Medieval English Society c. 1200–1500 (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), pp. 60–107; P. Biller and A. Minnis (eds.), Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages (York: York Medieval Press, 1998), especially the contributions by J. Murray, Haren, and Baldwin; B.A. Barr, ‘Gendering Pastoral Care: John Mirk and His Instructions for Parish Priests’, in J.S. Hamilton (ed.), Fourteenth Century England IV (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), 93–108. Confession was for a long time the subject of Protestant-Catholic partisan debate: for Catholics it had developed gradually from the Church’s earliest days; for Protestants it was an unbiblical medieval distortion. Protestants in particular made Omnis utriusque sexus, seemingly the first clear and ecumenical mandate for confession in its late medieval form, emblematic of that distortion. They saw the Fourth Lateran Council as a turning point, whereas Catholics emphasised continuity.3 For a thorough treatment see R.E. McLaughlin, ‘Truth, Tradition and History: The Historiography of High/Late Medieval and Early Modern Penance’, in A. Firey (ed.), A New History of Penance (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2008), pp. 19–71. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the continuity-versus-change debate has continued, but in a different form. Recent scholarship upholds confession as an interface between academic theology and practical religious ministry,4 Representative works are: P. Michaud-Quantin, Sommes de casuistique et manuels de confession au Moyen Age (XII–XVI siècles) (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1962); J. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle, 2 vols. (Princeton University Press, 1970); L. Boyle, Pastoral Care, Clerical Education and Canon Law, 1200–1400 (London: Variorum, 1981); J. Goering, William de Montibus (c. 1140–1213): The Schools and the Literature of Pastoral Care (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1992). or, put more broadly, between the institutional Church and lay society. It is now commonly agreed that theology and canon law were moving rapidly toward Omnis utriusque sexus in the second half of the twelfth century, although in a somewhat disparate manner. The Council is therefore seen as a catalyst for the prioritisation and implementation of extant ideas, rather than an innovation in its own right.5 L. Boyle, ‘The Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology’, in T.J. Heffernan (ed.), Popular Literature of Medieval England (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), pp. 30–43, at 31; L. Boyle, ‘The Inter-Conciliar Period 1179–1215 and the Beginnings of Pastoral Manuals’, in F. Liotta (ed.), Miscellanea Rolando Bandinelli Papa Alessandro III (Siena: nella sede dell’Accademia, 1986), pp. 45–56; A. Murray, ‘Confession before 1215’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 3 (1993), pp. 51-81, at 64-65; J. Goering, ‘The Scholastic Turn (1100–1500): Penitential Theology and Law in the Schools’, in Firey, New History of Penance, pp. 219–37 at 226–7; R. Meens, Penance in Medieval Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 214–15. Much scholarship on confession after 1215 attempts to trace how and how extensively the Council’s directives on annual confession and clerical education in particular were actually carried out on a local level, either through the synodal decrees of bishops or the promulgation of pastoral manuals. The much less studied period just before 1215 has often been held to the same standards: that is, historians have tried to determine how pivotal Omnis utriusque sexus was by gauging how common annual confession had been in the preceding period.6 The classic work is Murray, ‘Confession before 1215’.

In this essay I want to approach what is ultimately the same question – whether the Fourth Lateran Council was a turning point – from a different perspective, and indeed a deliberately insular one. Rather than projecting the Council’s mandates backward as a benchmark for the period before they were issued, I want to stand in late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century England and look forward to 1215. I am primarily interested not in the opinions of the most influential theologians, but rather in those less-studied, middling sorts of writers who had direct or indirect connections to the schools, but who also had the pastoral care of lay souls in England, or worked closely with those who did.7 J.A. Robinson, Somerset Historical Essays (London: British Academy, 1921), pp. 80–5 [Thomas Agnellus]; D.A. Wilmart, ‘Un opuscule sur la confession composé par Guy de Southwick vers la fin du XIIe siècle’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, 7 (1935), 337–52; A. Morey, Bartholomew of Exeter, Bishop and Canonist: A Study in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1937), pp. 164–6; R.W. Hunt, The Schools and the Cloister: The Life and Writings of Alexander Nequam, 1157–1217, rev. M.T. Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984); F.M.R. Ramsey, English Episcopal Acta X: Bath and Wells, 1061–1205 (Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. lvii–iii, 218 [Thomas Agnellus]; G. Dinkova-Bruun, ‘Alexander of Ashby: New Biographical Evidence’, Mediaeval Studies, 63 (2001), 301–22; M. Worley, ‘Using the Ormulum to Redefine Vernacularity’, in F. Somerset and N. Watson (eds.), The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), pp. 19–30 [Orm]. I also draw on the works of two writers of somewhat greater stature: Goering, William de Montibus; F. Morenzoni, Des écoles aux paroisses: Thomas de Chobham et la promotion de la prédication au début du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1995). Their sermons are particularly useful because, as David d’Avray has argued, sermons tend to reflect widely-held assumptions more than innovative new ideas; they generally propound widely-held orthodoxies with the aim of reinforcing correct religious knowledge.8 D.L. D’Avray, ‘Method in the Study of Medieval Sermons’, in N. Bériou and D.L. D’Avray (eds.), Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons: Essays on Marriage, Death, History and Sanctity (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’Alto medioevo, 1994), pp. 3–29, at 9. This essay compares the demands of Omnis utriusque sexus to opinions and practices of confession ‘on the ground’ in England in the decades before 1215, and evaluates how closely that canon actually responded to the concerns of English writers and, as far as we can tell, English lay people.

Before continuing, one caveat should be raised and addressed. The Fourth Lateran Council represents the reform agenda of an Italian pope, educated in Paris,9 For Innocent’s education see K. Pennington, ‘The Legal Education of Pope Innocent III’ and ‘Further Thoughts on Pope Innocent III’s Knowledge of Law’, both repr. in K. Pennington, Popes, Canonists and Texts, 1150–1550 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993). taking into account, to an unknown extent, input from across Europe.10 A. Melloni, ‘Vineam Domini - 10 April 1213: New Efforts and Traditional Topoi - Summoning Lateran IV’, in J.C. Moore (ed.), Pope Innocent III and His World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 63–73, at 69–70; N.P. Tanner, ‘Pastoral Care: the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215’, in G.R. Evans (ed.), A History of Pastoral Care (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 2000), pp. 112–25, at 112; A.J. Duggan, ‘Conciliar Law 1123–1215: The Legislation of the Four Councils’, in W. Hartmann and K. Pennington, The History of Medieval Canon Law in the Classical Period, 1140–1234: From Gratian to the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX (Washington, D.C.:Catholic University of America Press, 2008), pp. 318–66 at 341. It is therefore reasonable to suspect that discrepancies between contemporary concerns and conciliar mandates should come to light, not only along the chasm between normative ambitions and real-world practice, but along the fault-lines of local and regional differences. But what I am not trying to do in this essay is to argue that England was exceptional among other European regions in its relationship with the Fourth Lateran Council or within Innocent III’s reform agenda more broadly. Rather, by taking a deliberately narrow geographical perspective, I hope to counteract the tendency to assume that Innocent III’s reforms were exactly what the whole Church, including the Church in England, needed or wanted.11 818 Tanner, ‘Pastoral Care’, p. 112; Duggan, ‘Conciliar Law’, p. 344; Goering, ‘Scholastic Turn’, p. 226. More positively, I hope to provide a contextual picture of confession in late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century England, a necessary prerequisite to understanding the Fourth Lateran Council’s effects or non-effects in the remainder of the thirteenth century.

Omnis utriusque sexus

I will begin by briefly examining the assumptions underpinning the Council’s decree on confession.12 For the text of the canon see Decrees I, p. 245. As already noted, the Omnis utriusque sexus required lay people to confess only to their ‘own priest’ – an idea to which we will return later – except with their priest’s express permission. They must do this at least annually, and implicitly this will be in preparation for receiving the Eucharist at Easter; thus, confession should occur during Lent. The canon also assumes that priests who hear confessions will assign some sort of penance. One aspect of the canon which I do not discuss in this essay is the so-called ‘seal of confession’, that is, the prohibition against priests revealing anything they have heard in confession to anyone. The practical necessity of such an understanding for facilitating trust and openness is manifest, and its implications have been written about elsewhere.13 Murray, ‘Historical Source’, pp. 53-7.

Fundamentally, Omnis utriusque sexus turns on the notion of the priest’s pastoral care of his penitent. I have argued elsewhere that the medieval conception of pastoral care was of a superior’s authority over, and responsibility for, the eternal welfare of his subjects’ souls, with strong connotations of both instruction and moral correction.14 R. Springer, ‘Prelacy, Pastoral Care, and the Instruction of Subordinates in Late Twelfth-Century England’, Studies in Church History, 55 (2019), 114–28. In the words of the Council, that superior had the power to ‘absolve or bind’, or more traditionally ‘bind and loose’, souls. As the bearer of pastoral care – for in the Latin syntax and the medieval writer’s imagination pastoral care was a burden carried, not a service dispensed – a priest would have to render account (reddere rationem) for the souls of his parishioners before God at the Last Judgement, bringing any punishment his parishioners received on himself.15 Ibid., p. 00. Moreover, such pastoral care required priests to possess an intimate knowledge of each individual person’s moral and spiritual state, a knowledge which confession could provide.16 This was the basic principle behind ad status sermon collections, which also proliferated in this period: see for example Honorius Augustodunensis, Speculum ecclesiae, PL, 172, cols. 861–70; Alan of Lille, Summa de arte praedicatoria, PL, 210, cols. 185–98; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 449, fol. 74va–b; Alexander of Ashby, Alexandri Essebiensis opera omnia I: Opera theologica, ed. F. Morenzoni, CCCM, 188 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), p. 27. The tradition harked back to book three of Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis, detailing how a preacher should tailor his instruction according to thirty-six potential categories of variation among listeners: Gregory the Great, Règle pastorale, ed. B. Judic, C. Morel and F. Rommel, Sources Chrétiennes, 381, 382, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1992), ii, pp. 262–518. The effect is less to provide a reference for tips on dealing with particular vices than to impress upon the reader the vast discretion and sensitivity which pastoral care requires. The requirement to confess to one’s ‘own priest’ follows from this basic premise. If someone confessed to a priest not her own, her priest – the priest responsible for her pastoral care – would be deprived of knowledge about her sins and hindered in his attempts to guide and correct her, thereby endangering not only her soul but his.

In a sense, then, the flow of the canon is inverse to its internal logic. At first glance it appears to place the onus on the shoulders of each individual lay person: confess to your own priest, because only he can help you. This is how most historians have interpreted the Fourth Lateran Council’s mandate, and from this interpretation follows the impulse to measure the success of the canon’s implementation, as far as possible, in terms of compliance. But it seems to me that contemporary clerical readers would have drawn the opposite conclusion: those priests who bear the burden of pastoral care need to be able to hear the confessions of every soul subject to them. Put another way, the Fourth Lateran Council saw confession not as a requirement for individual behaviour so much as a tool of pastoral authority. This notion of pastoral authority exercised through hearing confessions – and its practical implications – underpinned much of the contemporary disagreement about confession in England.

Confession in England

As noted above, modern scholarship generally describes how theological and canonical interest in confession was on the rise in the decades before the Fourth Lateran Council, and has argued that canon twenty-one solidified and promoted what was by 1215 an effective theological consensus. A cursory glance across the literature of confession written in England would seem to confirm this narrative. The Liber penitentialis of Bartholomew of Exeter, a noted canonist and bishop of Exeter who died in 1184, was read widely in England and France in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, surviving in twenty-two manuscripts in addition to six copies now lost.17 Morey, Bartholomew of Exeter, pp. 164–6; Bartholomew of Exeter, Bartholomaei Exoniensis contra fatalitatis errorem, ed. D.N. Bell, CCCM, 157 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), pp. xviii–ix. Bell omits two additional Bodleian copies, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 443 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lyell 3. A short tract on confession, De uirtute confessionis written in 1190x8 by Guy of Southwick, a regular canon of Southwick Priory, was less successful, surviving only in a single copy.18 Wilmart, ‘Opuscule’. William de Montibus, who headed the cathedral school of Lincoln from the 1180s to his death in 1213, authored several works on confession, including Peniteas cito, a treatise in Latin verse which survives in over 150 manuscripts, and Speculum penitentis, which survives in eleven copies.19 Goering, William de Montibus. Thomas of Chobham composed his highly influential Summa de penitentia in around 1215x17 while he was a canon of Salisbury cathedral, and his Summa de arte praedicandi, a wide-ranging instructional treatise, while teaching at Paris in the 1220s.20 Thomas of Chobham, Thomae de Chobham summa confessorum, ed. F. Broomfield, Analecta mediaevalia Namurcensia, 25 (Louvain: Éditions Nauwelaerts, 1968); Thomas of Chobham, Summa de arte praedicandi, ed. F. Morenzoni, CCCM, 82 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1988).

The conciliar evidence similarly suggests an uptick in interest in confession shortly before 1215. The canons of the 1175 Council of Westminster, a Canterbury provincial council, do not mention confession or penance at all,21 Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, I: A.D. 871–1204, ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett and C.N.L. Brooke, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) [hereafter Councils and Synods I], ii, pp. 983–92. and in the canons of Hubert Walter’s legatine council held in 1195 in York, confession is only cursorily mentioned as a sacrament which deacons are not allowed to perform unless absolutely necessary.22 Ibid., ii, p. 1049, c. 6. But just five years later Hubert Walter presided over another council, this time at Westminster as archbishop of Canterbury, and included among the canons the instruction that ‘during confession priests should diligently take note of the circumstances: the quality and quantity of the person’s offence; the time, place, cause, and delay in committing the sin; the devotion of the penitent’s soul’.23 Ibid., p. 1062, c. 4. In 1213x14, archbishop Stephen Langton issued statutes for the diocese of Canterbury, which repeated Hubert Walter’s canon about how penitents should be examined, but also added instructions about confession by priests to their prelates; a prohibition against priests hearing the confessions of other priests’ parishioners; and the instruction that lay people should confess at least once a year during Lent.24 Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, II: A.D. 1205–1313, ed. F.M. Powicke and C.R. Cheney, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964) [hereafter Councils and Synods II], i, pp. 27, 30, 32, canons 13, 27, 40, 43.

These two categories of evidence, pastoral texts and conciliar statutes, are the categories on which most scholarship on pastoral care and clerical ministry around 1215 has primarily relied.25 In addition to the works in n. 5 see, representatively: M. Gibbs and J. Lang, Bishops and Reform, 1215–1272, with Special Reference to the Lateran Council of 1215 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934); C.R. Cheney, English Synodalia of the Thirteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1941); J. Avril, ‘Eglise, paroisse, encadrement diocésain aux XIIIe et XIVe s., d’après les conciles et statuts synodaux’, in M.-H. Vicaire (ed.), La Paroisse en Languedoc (XIIIe–XIVe s.) (Toulouse: Private publ., 1990), pp. 23–49. The quantitative impression they give is clear: interest in confession, or at least interest in writing and legislating about confession (the two are distinct), was on the rise in England in the decades before 1215. What we cannot conclude is that this rising interest accompanied rapid progress toward a theological and practical consensus, with the Fourth Lateran Council as its culmination. Instead, reading the instructional literature and conciliar decrees alongside a broader range of sources from late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century England reveals an array of opinions, many of them held rather casually. Moreover, in England this variation was not the result of intense scholarly debate so much as of local practice and personal preference. Three main inconsistencies can be discerned among English writers of this period in the treatment of confession. First, to whom should a lay person confess? Second, when should one confess? And third, what is the role of penance, and how should priests assign it?

On the question of to whom one should confess, as we have seen, Omnis utriusque sexus is unequivocal. An earlier endorsement of this view in England comes from Guy of Southwick’s De uirtute confessionis:

Confession should not be made here and there and indiscriminately to whatever priest, but only to him to whom the care of our souls is principally committed, and who will render account [redditurus est racionem] for us before God. For how will he be able to render account for us if he does not know our way of life, namely that which has not been revealed to him through the appropriate confession? Therefore confession should be made to him who has the power to bind and loose.26 Wilmart, ‘Un opuscule’, p. 348.

By contrast, some of Guy’s English contemporaries held that confession should be made not just to one’s own priest, but to whatever priest one preferred, and even to several priests. ‘It is advantageous if you confess to many priests’, William de Montibus advises in Peniteas cito.27 Goering, William de Montibus, p. 121. Another preeminent theologian, Alexander Neckam, encouraged lay people in a sermon to confess to as many priests as possible, so long as each confession was complete; that is, one should not confess a few sins to one priest and a few more to another in an attempt to make oneself appear less of a sinner.28 ‘Nec confessionem uestram diuidatis ut quedam peccata reueletis uni sacerdoti, quedam alii. Reuera plures adire sacerdotes salubre est ut pluribus confitens magis erubescat, et salubriter confundatur, sed cuilibet sacerdoti omnia detegat’, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Wood empt. 13, fol. 19v.

One reason for the prevalence of this view must have been the perceived inadequacy of the parish clergy. The writers who advocated for confession to multiple priests were drawing on an old and persistent theological tradition,29 J. Goering, ‘The Internal Forum and the Literature of Penance and Confession’, in Hartmann and Pennington (eds.), Medieval Canon Law in the Classical Period, pp. 379–438, at 383 n. 15; Murray, ‘Counselling’, pp. 63–77 at 69–72. and its resilience in the twelfth century seems to have derived in large part from a hesitation to assign the full authority of pastoral care to local or parish priests – presbiteri or minores sacerdotes. For much of the Middle Ages the Latin phrases cura pastoralis or cura animarum had been virtually synonymous with the office of bishop or abbot,30 Springer, ‘Prelacy’, pp. 118–19. relevant to local priests only insofar as they were agents of the bishop’s will. Bede had likened the role of local priests to that of the seventy-two apostles mentioned in Luke’s gospel: ‘In the early days of the Church, as the apostolic writings testify, there were those called presbiteri and those called bishops; one signified the maturity, the other the industry, of pastoral care’.31 Bede, In Lucae euangelium expositio 3.10, in D. Hurst (ed.) Bedae Venerabilis opera, pars II, 3: opera exegetica, CCSL 120 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1960), p. 214. That formulation still rang true enough in the thirteenth century to be repeated by the likes of Thomas Aquinas.32 Thomas Aquinas, Catena aurea in quatuor evangelia, ed. P.A. Guarienti (Turin: Marietti, 1953), p. 142. Only in the twelfth century did theologians accept that all priests had the power to bind and loose souls.33 Goering, ‘Internal Forum’, pp. 381–2. At the root of this hesitation was the vast discrepancy between the received rhetoric of pastoral care and the real shortcomings of clerical personnel. Pastoral care theoretically required enormous virtue and discretion, not to mention learning: a burden to which Gregory the Great had complained he himself was unequal.34 Gregory the Great, Registrum epistularum, ed. D. Norberg, CCSL 140, 140A, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1982), i, pp. 22, 31–2, 47, 174; quote at p. 22. A writer who was reluctant to thrust the entirety of this burden onto the shoulders of lesser priests – perhaps reflecting upon the imperfect education or personal foibles of priests whom he personally knew – might understandably prefer to give penitents the option of choosing the most suitable confessor they could.

There was another reason why some English prelates may have hesitated to restrict confession only to one’s own priest. Omnis utriusque sexus assumes that every lay person has one priest whom they can identify as ‘their own’, and most historians have followed suit. It is widely accepted that by c. 1200 England had been completely or almost completely carved up into parishes.35 See especially J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford University Press, 2007); J. Blair (ed.), Minsters and Parish Churches: The Local Church in Transition, 950–1200 (Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, 1988). This is true enough as long as we are dealing in generalities, but from the perspective of any given person in England at the time, it is not entirely accurate. Although most people in England probably knew who their priest was, it is clear that not everyone did. Guy of Southwick acknowledged the alternative view that one should choose the best confessor available, but argued that this applied especially to ‘those who are not assigned by certain right [certo titulo] to the care [cura] of any priest, and to those who, because they are staying in courts or in the schools or on a journey, are not able to have access to their priests’.36 Wilmart, ‘Un opuscule’, p. 349. Courtiers, students, and wealthy travellers would presumably have private chaplains as confessors – but what did Guy mean by implying that some people did not clearly belong to any priest’s cura?

There are a number of possibilities. In the late twelfth century, the regular canons of St Frideswide’s Priory in Oxford appear to have been accustomed to provide burials for very poor people in the priory’s cemetery. An account of 110 miracles which occurred after the translation of St Frideswide’s remains to a new shrine in around 1180 mentions a woman named Leviva, who customarily travelled between Oxford and Shifford, about ten miles west, begging in order to provide for her children, and who had already buried five children in the priory cemetery.37 Acta sanctorum Octobris VIII (Brussels, 1858), p. 574 The transient poor did not clearly belong to any parish. Similarly, an agreement made by the canons of St Frideswide regarding the chapel of Elsfield, lying just northeast of Oxford, had to specify that not only the bodies of Elsfield’s parishioners but ‘the bodies of the paupers who die in the vill of Elsfield’ should be buried in the chapel’s cemetery – again apparently a reference to poor people who were likely transient and not considered to belong to any parish.38 The Cartulary of the Monastery of St. Frideswide at Oxford, ed. S.R. Wigram, Oxford Historical Society, 28, 31, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1895–6), ii, p. 70.

It was also entirely possible that there were people in late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century England who were not transient, but who lived too far from any church to be thought of as its parishioners, or indeed who lived in areas where the notion of structuring religious life around parishes had not yet taken hold. An example of the latter is provided by the town of Exeter, where there were at least twenty-three chapels and a handful of private chantries within the walls by c.1200, all directly under the control of the cathedral as a mother church.39 N. Orme, The Churches of Medieval Exeter (Exeter: Impress Books, 2014), pp. 5–6, 18–30. For what follows on Exeter see R. Springer, ‘Bishop and City in Dialogue: Cultivating Charity in Twelfth-Century Exeter’, Historical Research, 92 (2019), 267–87. All lay residents of the city were buried in the cathedral cemetery unless they received special dispensation from the cathedral,40 For examples of such dispensations given for the burial of lay residents in the houses of Exeter religious houses see Papsturkunden in England, ed. W. Holtzmann, 3 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1930–52), i, p. 297. An episcopal confirmation of 1177x84 refers to the ‘cimiterium Exoniensis’: EEA XI: Exeter, 1046–1184, ed. F. Barlow (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 87. and an early fourteenth-century cathedral chronicle records that in 1222 the parishes of the city were demarcated (limitate), apparently for the first time.41 Quoted in Orme, Churches, p. 28. The result of the situation pre-1222 was that at least the elite citizens maintained ties with all the city’s churches collectively, rather than with particular ‘parish’ churches.42 R. Springer, ‘Bartholomew of Exeter’s Sermons and the Cultivation of Charity in Twelfth-Century Exeter’, Historical Research, 92 (2019), 267–87, at 273–75. From at least the 1180s into the 1220s, chaplains of the city’s churches collectively celebrated obit masses for leading citizens in exchange for gifts of one penny each per year.43 Devon Heritage Centre, ECA 53A, fol. 35v. The names and obits from this folio are printed in D. Lepine and N. Orme, Death and Memory in Medieval Exeter, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, new series, 46 (Exeter, 2003), p. 262, but with errors and omissions. The lay residents may have chosen which church to worship at based on familial or social connections, or lordship, or preference,44 Orme, Churches, p. 28. and they may have worshipped at multiple churches simultaneously.

Confession as an outworking of pastoral care, then, is problematised when we realise that many people were not obviously anyone’s parishioners. To whom did people who did not have their ‘own priest’ confess? Likely to someone else’s priest, in many cases, or to a monk or canon. Guy of Southwick, an Augustinian, and Alexander Neckam, a close affiliate of the Augustinians until he became one himself, may have leaned toward allowing multiple confessors because they recognised that the regular canons could in some circumstances minister to lay people instead of, or in addition to, parish priests.45 For Alexander Neckam see A.N.J. Dunning, ‘Alexander Neckam’s Manuscripts and the Augustinian Canons of Oxford and Cirencester’ (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2016), pp. 17–23. Murray, ‘Confession,’ pp. 78–79, sees the regular canons in twelfth-century England as prefiguring the mendicant friars in the function of confessors to the laity. If this analogy is to be drawn – and it must be drawn cautiously, for the regular canons did not have a unified pastoral mission – it is worth contrasting the twelfth century’s ambivalence toward ‘alternative’ confessors with the protracted conflict around the mendicants in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: on which see M.J. Haren, ‘Friars as Confessors: The Canonist Background to the Fourteenth-Century Controversy’, Peritia, 3 (1984), 503–16. Tom Licence and Carl Watkins have suggested that hermits and anchorites, whose numbers swelled in twelfth-century England, may have heard lay confessions.46 T. Licence, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–1200 (Oxford University Press, 2011), chs. 4–6; C.S. Watkins, ‘Sin, Penance and Purgatory in the Anglo-Norman Realm: The Evidence of Visions and Ghost Stories’, Past and Present, 175 (2002), 3–33, at 30-1. But lay people may also have turned to confessors of another kind. Guy of Southwick feels it necessary to clarify that ‘it is not sufficient to confess to God, or angels, or apostles, or other saints, or before an altar and relics’.47 Wilmart, ‘Opuscule’, p. 348. He may have been thinking of rituals such as the one which Gerald of Wales observed at the shrine of St Eluned in Brecon. In his Itinerarium Kambriae, Gerald reports that on Eluned’s feast day people gathered in the churchyard, and after dancing in a circle suddenly began to mime whatever work they usually performed on feast days – ploughing, weaving and so on. Then they entered the church, made offerings, and were absolved of their sin (particularly, it seems, of the practically necessary sin of working on feast days) by the priest before the altar.48 Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriæ et descriptio Kambriæ, ed. F. Dimock, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera (Rolls Series, 1868), vi, p. 32. See also C.S. Watkins, History and the Supernatural in Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 100–1. Although in this case the priest still functioned as an intermediary, the performance of the ritual on St Eluned’s feast day, rather than during Lent, suggests that the real business of absolving sin was being conducted between people and saint. Gerald was, after all, trying to make sense of the event from his perspective as an elite cleric and theologian. From the perspective of a lay person who was not steeped in the theology of pastoral care, performing a ritual penance in the presence of a supernatural being might seem more efficacious than confessing to a mere man.

The second area of theological disagreement on the subject of confession was the question of when and how often lay people should confess. It should first be noted that, in contrast to the longstanding scholarly preoccupation with divining how many lay people went to confession regularly before 1215,49 J. Avril, ‘Remarques sur un aspect de la vie religieuse paroissale: la pratique de la confession et de la communion du Xe au XIVe siècle’, in L’encadrement religieux des fidèles au Moyen-Age et jusqu’au Concile de Trente, 2 vols. (Paris: C.T.H.S, 1985), i, pp. 346–63 at 352–3; Murray, ‘Confession’. there is little evidence from late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century England to suggest that prelates and theologians were worried about lay people failing to go to confession altogether. There was significantly more discussion of when one should confess, and on this question opinions varied. Stephen Langton’s 1213x14 statute for Canterbury regarding the frequency of confession seems to advocate several contemporary approaches simultaneously:

The laity are admonished to confess immediately at the start of Lent, or at other times during the year immediately after sinning. And in order that they might receive the Eucharist three times per year, namely at Easter, Christmas, and Pentecost, they should be prepared beforehand by undertaking some little abstinence on the advice of the priest, and through confession.50 Councils and Synods II, i, p. 32, c. 43.

The logic behind confession at Lent was as a preparation for receiving the Eucharist at Easter. We can see this quite clearly in an Easter sermon of Alexander of Ashby, an Augustinian prior who died in either 1208 or 1214.51 Alexander of Ashby, Alexandri Essebiensis opera I, pp. 359–63. It should be noted that Morenzoni admits some doubt as to his attribution of this sermon to Alexander of Ashby. However, the sermon is preserved in a fourteenth-century manuscript which includes a large number of sermons under William de Montibus’ name, including twenty-seven other sermons firmly attributable to Alexander of Ashby and sermons from another known twelfth-century English collection. This suggests that if the sermon was not written by Alexander then it is likely to have been written by another roughly contemporary English writer: ibid., pp. 16–17, 115. The sermon begins with a welcome to the ‘boys, girls, shepherds and servants who cannot come to the church on other days because of service to their lords’ – the same problem faced by the Gerald of Wales’ dancers – and proceeds with a very brief explanation of the significance of Easter, some words of moral admonition for the aforementioned listeners: shepherds, for example, should not steal any livestock.52 Alexandri Essebiensis opera I, p. 360. The sermon closes with what was evidently to be a transition into the administration of the Eucharist to those present, including a stern warning about the spiritual danger of receiving the sacrament without having confessed all of one’s mortal sins. The speaker then issues a call for any who have not confessed to do so immediately, to him and to some other priests who are present: ‘Behold here are the ashes, here is the cross, and we are ready to hear the confession of those who have not yet confessed’.53 Ibid. The ashes are evidently present because, as another of Alexander of Ashby’s sermons explains, confessions were customarily made on Ash Wednesday, at the beginning of Lent.54 Ibid., p. 145. But Stephen Langton’s statute expects lay people to receive the Eucharist, and therefore to confess, not only at Easter but at Christmas and Pentecost as well. It seems likely that practice varied among English localities, and probably also, as Alexander of Ashby’s sermon suggests, by social status, since some people had greater leisure to attend Mass than others.

Langton’s statute also allows for lay people to confess ‘immediately after sinning’, apparently in acknowledgement of an alternative approach. A number of late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century writers characterised confession not as an annual ritual but as a remedy to be applied whenever a serious sin was committed. The opening lines of William de Montibus’ widely influential poem Peniteas cito urge the sinner to ‘confess urgently, so that the Judge may have mercy’.55 Goering, William de Montibus, p. 116. Bartholomew of Exeter warned in a sermon that delaying confession was like choosing to remain in the tomb with Lazarus for four days.56 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 449, fol. 59vb. Orm, the author of a collection of English homilies, pauses during an exposition of the ten commandments to urge lay people who commit adultery to confess immediately:

For both are seriously guilty [of adultery], if it pleases both of you, and both are thus separated from God, and destroy yourselves. But if you wish to overcome this in any way, and if you understand that it is not easy to overcome heavy sin, then you should shun to fall into it. And whoever rejects it and ceases to follow it, and inwardly repents of ever doing it, and goes under a priest’s judgement to overcome it with confession, and commits to labour bodily for his sin, will be cleansed by the priest of all his uncleanness, so that he can overcome all sin with God’s help, and worship God with a holy life, and win God’s mercy.57 The Ormulum, ed. R.M. White and R. Holt, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1878), i, ll. 4494–517.

The assumptions an author makes in passing can sometimes be more revealing than focussed explanation. Here Orm portrays confession as an incidental remedy for particularly bad sins, taking for granted that it would be available whenever needed.

Orm’s mention of physical labour as penance brings us to the third matter of variation: what penance was for, and how priests should go about assigning it. The mid-twelfth century has traditionally been marked as a turning point in the theology of penance, although there are dissenters.58 Meens, Penance, pp. 200–3. Abelard argued that the guilt of sin originated with the sinner’s intention, and this led, by the time of Peter Lombard, to the conclusion that the remission of guilt (culpa), the most essential part of confession, was effected through contrition and at least the intention of oral confession; subsequent penance dealt only with the penalty (pena) of sin.59 B. Poschmann, Penance and the Anointing of the Sick, trans. F. Courtney (Freiburg: Herder, 1964), pp. 158–62. This distinction was related to the development of the doctrine of Purgatory, or at least of purgatorial fire (ignis purgatorium) in which a soul could be cleansed of any outstanding penalties after death.60 Watkins, ‘Sin, Penance and Purgatory’, esp. 4. In practice, as Mary Mansfield has shown for northern France, public penitential rituals could long outlive the theological ‘interiorisation’ of the sacrament.61 M.C. Mansfield, The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

It is not altogether unsurprising, then, that the English writers responded unevenly to this new theology of penance. Thomas Agnellus, archdeacon of Wells from c.1168 to 1195, took a conservative view. He wrote of priests who fail to harshly condemn sin that

‘they stand surety of sin for the people whose iniquity they fail to accuse in order to provoke them to penance. … They either deny the future judgements of God entirely, or diminish the imminent humiliation of sinners; they promise the ease of obtaining mercy and declare that the sinner’s momentary sigh is sufficient for the remission of sins’.62 ‘Populo prestant peccandi securitatem, cuius iniquitatem non arguunt ut ad penitentiam prouocet. … Iudicia dei futura uel omnino negant uel imminentia peccatorum subplicia extenuant; uenie facilitatem promittunt; momentaneum peccatoris gemitum remissioni sufficere asserunt’, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 71, fol. 12ra–b.

Thomas’ reference to ‘the sinner’s momentary sigh’ appears to be a jab at the idea that contrition was sufficient to effect remission of guilt. Indeed he believed that the whole process of confession and penance should be rigorous:

The lamp of the mind, extinguished by vices, is set alight by the holocaust of a contrite heart; by confession of the mouth the locked door of sin is opened with the crowbars of salvation; the tenacious rust of judgement is rubbed off with the file of satisfaction, and the hurt of being bound with chains is dissolved. And so first it is necessary that the sinner should know and understand the misery of his downfall and his yoke, and recall in memory from the glory of how great a blessedness he has fallen. He should weigh carefully with the scale of discretion how miraculous is the blessedness of liberty that he destroyed, and how miserable is the oppression of servitude that he found. He should set before the eyes of his mind which and how many taxes of sin await him, and attend to how many and how severe are the interests of the penalties to be paid, in order that his spirit might be pierced by the nails of fear.63 ‘Contriti cordis holocausto extincta uiciis lucerna mentis accenditur; oris confessione preclusa peccati uectibus ianua salutis aperitur; satisfactionis lima, criminum rubigo tenax abstergitur, & constringencium iniuria cathenarum dissoluitur. Primum itaque necesse est ut cogitet et intelligat peccator sui lapsus miseriam et iugi, recolat memoria a quante felicitatis exciderit gloria. Libret attentius lance discretionis quam mirabilis est beatitudo libertatis quam perdidit, quam miserabilis est oppressio seruitutis quam inuenit. Statuat ante mentis oculos que et quot sibi immineant peccati uectigalia, attendat quot et quam graues exsoluende sint penarum usure, quatinus uel sic clauis timoris anima configatur’, ibid., fols. 39vb–40ra.

Alexander of Ashby was similarly aware of the new theology of penance, and similarly sceptical about the practical effects it might have. In sermons to religious audiences he acknowledged that venial sins could be purged after death if adequate satisfaction had not been made in life.64 Alexandri Essebiensis opera I, pp. 272, 279, 351–2. But in sermons to lay audiences Alexander never mentions ‘purgatorial fire’, focussing instead on the necessity of confession for dealing with criminal sins.65 Ibid., pp. 145, 156, 360. He was apparently concerned that alerting lay people to the option of effectively delaying their satisfaction until after death would result in fewer confessions, or the shirking of assigned penances. ‘It is more merciful when you flog sinners physically with hunger and thirst and other punishments’, he explains, ‘so that they will repent. But if they will not repent, then in the day of judgement you will kill the body and send the soul to Hell’.66 Ibid., p. 42. In the 1220s, Thomas of Chobham would address the same concern in his widely popular Summa de arte praedicandi. He predicts that lay people will want to put off doing penance until after death, but warns that enduring purgatorial fire is a much more painful way to expiate sin: ‘Therefore, preachers should with greatest diligence persuade the faithful not to wait for this place of torments, when they could easily free themselves beforehand, because there are many remedies for this, of which the first and foremost is to confess often to priests’.67 Thomas of Chobham, Summa de arte praedicandi, p. 36. It is worth noting that conservative voices on the subject of contrition and satisfaction did not come only from the religious orders; both Thomas Agnellus and Thomas of Chobham were secular clerics.

Others opted for a lighter touch. Bartholomew of Exeter’s Liber penitentialis offers a catalogue of penances for priests to choose from, emphasising the priest’s discretion to tailor the assigned penance in response to penitent’s status and moral condition. Although he warns that ‘true penance, pure confession, making satisfaction … and forgiving from the heart’ are always necessary,68 Morey, Bartholomew of Exeter, pp. 184–92. other penances, including alms, prayer, fasting, sorrow and tears and silence and manual labour, vigils, genuflections, lashes of the body, cheap and rough clothing, pilgrimage, ‘should be relaxed or omitted in consideration of many reasons’.69 Ibid., p. 178. He suggests that almsgiving is a particularly commodious option: ‘The ease of giving alms is so great that it is easier for someone to give alms than to find an excuse for not giving alms, especially because God looks not at how much is given, but from how much’.70 Ibid., p. 184.

Conclusion

Opinions about the nature and frequency of confession varied widely in late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century England, and were closely tied to observations and concerns about the practical implications of theological mandates. When we return to the Fourth Lateran Council, the formulation of Omnis utriusque sexus feels incongruous against such nuance. There was nothing in the council that was totally unprecedented within or contradictory to prevailing clerical opinion, of course, and in any case Innocent III’s aim may well have been to alter proactively the trajectory of contemporary practice on particular issues. Of course, the pope’s opinion, by definition, is always relevant. Yet it is difficult to say, unless from a position of theological conviction or historical hindsight, that the Lateran Council responded to the English Church’s pastoral needs. Indeed it may have exacerbated tensions, latent or overt, which were already growing.

Omnis utriusque sexus effectively evades the question of what penance is for, and how it should be assigned, by appealing to the priest’s discretion. Those who confess are instructed to ‘take care to do what they can to perform the penance imposed on them’, leaving the severity and purpose of penance to the priest’s discretion. The ‘various means’ which the medicus animarum must use to heal his patients presumably allowed priests to employ some combination of counsel, exhortation and penalty. Perhaps in its relative uninterestedness in penance, and in the slightly equivocal suggestion that penitents should ‘do what they can’, the canon leans toward more recent theological developments, which emphasised interior contrition and intention over subsequent penitential action. Yet hard-liners like Thomas Agnellus would have found justification in the canon for assigning penances rigorous enough to file off the ‘rust of judgement’, if they judged it necessary. It is interesting that on this question, in Thomas Agnellus’ quip and in Alexander of Ashby’s reticence, we can detect a hint of an active dispute in circles of English prelates and writers. They might have wished for clearer instruction from the pope.

By contrast, the Council’s requirement for annual, rather than occasional, confession made an unbending rule where the English Church had been accustomed to pluralism. Theologically, the change was unlikely to ruffle any feathers: confession as Lenten preparation for receiving the Eucharist had been a common tradition since time immemorial. But practice appears to have varied by locality, by social status, and likely also according to the opinions of various prelates and priests. No one seemed much bothered about this: contemporaries appear to have thought, on the whole, that an acceptable proportion of people went to confession with an acceptable level of regularity and enthusiasm, whether annually or whenever they committed an egregious sin, or both. Exhortations to confession were not more frequent or severe than exhortations to any other moral good.

The mandate to confess to one’s ‘own priest’ alone was arguably the most important and the most problematic aspect of Omnis utriusque sexus. Its inflection depended on perspective. Educated English clerics, steeped in the concepts of pastoral responsibility, discretion and burden, would have inferred that Innocent III was taking a stand on a theological ambiguity which had until then allowed for a range of opinions. Although some English writers were still hesitant to endow little-educated parish priests with complete pastoral authority, Innocent was unequivocal that each person’s ‘own priest’ – in most cases a parish priest – had not only the power to bind and loose, but the role of the medicus animarum, an epithet originally reserved for Christ and prelates.71 Alcuin, Epistolae, ed. E. Duemmler, MGH Epp. 4 (Berlin, 1895), p. 57; Gottfried of Admont, Homiliae dominicales, PL, 174, col. 542; Origen, Homélies sur les Psaumes 36 à 38, ed. E. Prinzivalli, H. Crouzel and L. Brésard, SC, 411 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1995), p. 260. Indeed the ‘discerning and prudent’ priests of Omnis utriusque sexus stand in glaring contrast to the negligent tipplers implied in the reprimands of the previous seven canons, which decry reported clerical abuses such as engaging in drinking games, sleeping through mass, depositing personal furniture in churches, and carelessly leaving the chrism and Eucharist out in the open.72 Canons 15, 17, 19, 20, in Decrees, I, pp. 242–4. No doubt this was troubling to prelates anxious to deal with the repercussions of clerical incontinence. Such contradictions were not new to England, of course, but they had previously been cushioned by an accepted variance of opinion and a wide allowance for making exceptions. When we look forward to the rest of the thirteenth century, we should focus on the ways in which prelates tried to address the gap between the idea and the reality of the parish priest.

Interpreting the canon from a lay perspective is more difficult, and not only for the obvious reasons. If the canon’s internal logic derived from clerical ideas about pastoral authority, its stipulations for enforcement confuse the issue. It requires that if any person does not confess and receive the Eucharist annually, ‘they shall be barred from entering a church during their lifetime and they shall be denied a Christian burial at death. Let this salutary decree be frequently published in churches, so that nobody may find the pretence of an excuse in the blindness of ignorance’. There is an in-built problem of circularity. The provision that the canon should be publicised in churches would, in theory, help ensure that parishioners would confess annually to their priests. But very poor or transient people who belonged to no parish, or urban dwellers who flitted from church to church, would be unlikely or less likely to hear such an announcement. How would they learn of the requirement? Or who would know enough about their whereabouts to excommunicate them? If the purpose of the canon was to shore up pastoral authority, then strictly speaking this was not a problem: such people were under no one’s pastoral care, no one’s parishioners, and therefore their salvation was, if not unimportant, then not the matter immediately at hand. For those clerics and religious involved with ministering to lay people on a local level this was not so cut and dried. One wonders whether the canons of St Frideswide’s Priory continued to bury poor people who died in Oxford in contravention of the Council’s command that those who did not confess annually ‘shall be denied a Christian burial at death’; or if Alexander of Ashby much cared, when he heard the confessions of servants and shepherds on Easter morning, whose parishioners they technically were. Moreover, if a congregation of parishioners were instructed that anyone who failed to confess would be excommunicated, we might imagine its members would be likely further to ostracise those poor and migratory people who were already confined to the margins of the community. Omnis utriusque sexus, far from bringing about more uniform devotional practice, may have exacerbated existing social and religious divisions.

Of course, part of what we are seeing is a difference in genre. Papal councils are meant to create law, not debate nuance; they prescribe norms which are supposed to shape current practice, not reflect it. But it is important to emphasise the difference between practical theology – the theological developments associated with Peter the Chanter’s circle – and theology in practice – the ways in which confession was dealt with by those who, although they had connections with the schools, were more directly involved in ministry to the laity. It is currently unfashionable to assert that canon twenty-one heralded a significant turning point in the history of confession, particularly (but not exclusively) among those who study the early Middle Ages.73 Mansfield, Humiliation of Sinners; Meens, Penance, esp. conclusion; S. Hamilton, The Practice of Penance, 900-1050 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), pp. 2–24. My alternative view is based on a difference of scale, not of interpretation. Seen in a long and broad sweep, confession or penance in Europe from the Carolingian period to the end of the Middle Ages perhaps exhibited more continuities than changes. But through the eyes of clerics and lay people in England in 1215, without the benefit of historical hindsight or perspective, Omnis utriusque sexus, to whatever extent it was known and enforced, would have seemed jarring. When we look forward in time toward responses to the Council in England – as well as later phenomena such as the popularity of the mendicant friars in the thirteenth century, and the spread of anticlericalism in the fourteenth – we should do so with this contrast in mind.

 

1      Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. and trans. N.P. Tanner, 2 vols. (London and Washington, D.C.: Sheed and Ward, 1990), i [hereafter Decrees], p. 245. »

2      In addition to the scholarship discussed below see also studies which have fruitfully used confessional literature as a window into aspects of medieval social life, including: A. Murray, ‘Confession as a Historical Source in the Thirteenth Century’, pp. 49–86, and ‘Counselling in Medieval Confession’, pp. 87–103, both in A. Murray, Conscience and Authority in the Medieval Church (Oxford University Press, 2015); P. Biller, ‘Marriage Patterns and Women’s Lives: A Sketch of Pastoral Geography’, in P.J.P. Goldberg (ed.), Women in Medieval English Society c. 1200–1500 (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), pp. 60–107; P. Biller and A. Minnis (eds.), Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages (York: York Medieval Press, 1998), especially the contributions by J. Murray, Haren, and Baldwin; B.A. Barr, ‘Gendering Pastoral Care: John Mirk and His Instructions for Parish Priests’, in J.S. Hamilton (ed.), Fourteenth Century England IV (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), 93–108. »

3      For a thorough treatment see R.E. McLaughlin, ‘Truth, Tradition and History: The Historiography of High/Late Medieval and Early Modern Penance’, in A. Firey (ed.), A New History of Penance (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2008), pp. 19–71. »

4      Representative works are: P. Michaud-Quantin, Sommes de casuistique et manuels de confession au Moyen Age (XII–XVI siècles) (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1962); J. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle, 2 vols. (Princeton University Press, 1970); L. Boyle, Pastoral Care, Clerical Education and Canon Law, 1200–1400 (London: Variorum, 1981); J. Goering, William de Montibus (c. 1140–1213): The Schools and the Literature of Pastoral Care (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1992). »

5      L. Boyle, ‘The Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology’, in T.J. Heffernan (ed.), Popular Literature of Medieval England (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), pp. 30–43, at 31; L. Boyle, ‘The Inter-Conciliar Period 1179–1215 and the Beginnings of Pastoral Manuals’, in F. Liotta (ed.), Miscellanea Rolando Bandinelli Papa Alessandro III (Siena: nella sede dell’Accademia, 1986), pp. 45–56; A. Murray, ‘Confession before 1215’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 3 (1993), pp. 51-81, at 64-65; J. Goering, ‘The Scholastic Turn (1100–1500): Penitential Theology and Law in the Schools’, in Firey, New History of Penance, pp. 219–37 at 226–7; R. Meens, Penance in Medieval Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 214–15. »

6      The classic work is Murray, ‘Confession before 1215’. »

7      J.A. Robinson, Somerset Historical Essays (London: British Academy, 1921), pp. 80–5 [Thomas Agnellus]; D.A. Wilmart, ‘Un opuscule sur la confession composé par Guy de Southwick vers la fin du XIIe siècle’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, 7 (1935), 337–52; A. Morey, Bartholomew of Exeter, Bishop and Canonist: A Study in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1937), pp. 164–6; R.W. Hunt, The Schools and the Cloister: The Life and Writings of Alexander Nequam, 1157–1217, rev. M.T. Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984); F.M.R. Ramsey, English Episcopal Acta X: Bath and Wells, 1061–1205 (Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. lvii–iii, 218 [Thomas Agnellus]; G. Dinkova-Bruun, ‘Alexander of Ashby: New Biographical Evidence’, Mediaeval Studies, 63 (2001), 301–22; M. Worley, ‘Using the Ormulum to Redefine Vernacularity’, in F. Somerset and N. Watson (eds.), The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), pp. 19–30 [Orm]. I also draw on the works of two writers of somewhat greater stature: Goering, William de Montibus; F. Morenzoni, Des écoles aux paroisses: Thomas de Chobham et la promotion de la prédication au début du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1995). »

8      D.L. D’Avray, ‘Method in the Study of Medieval Sermons’, in N. Bériou and D.L. D’Avray (eds.), Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons: Essays on Marriage, Death, History and Sanctity (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’Alto medioevo, 1994), pp. 3–29, at 9. »

9      For Innocent’s education see K. Pennington, ‘The Legal Education of Pope Innocent III’ and ‘Further Thoughts on Pope Innocent III’s Knowledge of Law’, both repr. in K. Pennington, Popes, Canonists and Texts, 1150–1550 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993). »

10      A. Melloni, ‘Vineam Domini - 10 April 1213: New Efforts and Traditional Topoi - Summoning Lateran IV’, in J.C. Moore (ed.), Pope Innocent III and His World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 63–73, at 69–70; N.P. Tanner, ‘Pastoral Care: the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215’, in G.R. Evans (ed.), A History of Pastoral Care (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 2000), pp. 112–25, at 112; A.J. Duggan, ‘Conciliar Law 1123–1215: The Legislation of the Four Councils’, in W. Hartmann and K. Pennington, The History of Medieval Canon Law in the Classical Period, 1140–1234: From Gratian to the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX (Washington, D.C.:Catholic University of America Press, 2008), pp. 318–66 at 341. »

11      818 Tanner, ‘Pastoral Care’, p. 112; Duggan, ‘Conciliar Law’, p. 344; Goering, ‘Scholastic Turn’, p. 226. »

12      For the text of the canon see Decrees I, p. 245. »

13      Murray, ‘Historical Source’, pp. 53-7. »

14      R. Springer, ‘Prelacy, Pastoral Care, and the Instruction of Subordinates in Late Twelfth-Century England’, Studies in Church History, 55 (2019), 114–28. »

15      Ibid., p. 00. »

16      This was the basic principle behind ad status sermon collections, which also proliferated in this period: see for example Honorius Augustodunensis, Speculum ecclesiae, PL, 172, cols. 861–70; Alan of Lille, Summa de arte praedicatoria, PL, 210, cols. 185–98; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 449, fol. 74va–b; Alexander of Ashby, Alexandri Essebiensis opera omnia I: Opera theologica, ed. F. Morenzoni, CCCM, 188 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), p. 27. The tradition harked back to book three of Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis, detailing how a preacher should tailor his instruction according to thirty-six potential categories of variation among listeners: Gregory the Great, Règle pastorale, ed. B. Judic, C. Morel and F. Rommel, Sources Chrétiennes, 381, 382, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1992), ii, pp. 262–518. The effect is less to provide a reference for tips on dealing with particular vices than to impress upon the reader the vast discretion and sensitivity which pastoral care requires. »

17      Morey, Bartholomew of Exeter, pp. 164–6; Bartholomew of Exeter, Bartholomaei Exoniensis contra fatalitatis errorem, ed. D.N. Bell, CCCM, 157 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), pp. xviii–ix. Bell omits two additional Bodleian copies, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 443 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lyell 3. »

18      Wilmart, ‘Opuscule’. »

19      Goering, William de Montibus. »

20      Thomas of Chobham, Thomae de Chobham summa confessorum, ed. F. Broomfield, Analecta mediaevalia Namurcensia, 25 (Louvain: Éditions Nauwelaerts, 1968); Thomas of Chobham, Summa de arte praedicandi, ed. F. Morenzoni, CCCM, 82 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1988). »

21      Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, I: A.D. 871–1204, ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett and C.N.L. Brooke, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) [hereafter Councils and Synods I], ii, pp. 983–92. »

22      Ibid., ii, p. 1049, c. 6. »

23      Ibid., p. 1062, c. 4. »

24      Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, II: A.D. 1205–1313, ed. F.M. Powicke and C.R. Cheney, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964) [hereafter Councils and Synods II], i, pp. 27, 30, 32, canons 13, 27, 40, 43. »

25      In addition to the works in n. 5 see, representatively: M. Gibbs and J. Lang, Bishops and Reform, 1215–1272, with Special Reference to the Lateran Council of 1215 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934); C.R. Cheney, English Synodalia of the Thirteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1941); J. Avril, ‘Eglise, paroisse, encadrement diocésain aux XIIIe et XIVe s., d’après les conciles et statuts synodaux’, in M.-H. Vicaire (ed.), La Paroisse en Languedoc (XIIIe–XIVe s.) (Toulouse: Private publ., 1990), pp. 23–49. »

26      Wilmart, ‘Un opuscule’, p. 348. »

27      Goering, William de Montibus, p. 121. »

28      ‘Nec confessionem uestram diuidatis ut quedam peccata reueletis uni sacerdoti, quedam alii. Reuera plures adire sacerdotes salubre est ut pluribus confitens magis erubescat, et salubriter confundatur, sed cuilibet sacerdoti omnia detegat’, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Wood empt. 13, fol. 19v. »

29      J. Goering, ‘The Internal Forum and the Literature of Penance and Confession’, in Hartmann and Pennington (eds.), Medieval Canon Law in the Classical Period, pp. 379–438, at 383 n. 15; Murray, ‘Counselling’, pp. 63–77 at 69–72. »

30      Springer, ‘Prelacy’, pp. 118–19. »

31      Bede, In Lucae euangelium expositio 3.10, in D. Hurst (ed.) Bedae Venerabilis opera, pars II, 3: opera exegetica, CCSL 120 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1960), p. 214. »

32      Thomas Aquinas, Catena aurea in quatuor evangelia, ed. P.A. Guarienti (Turin: Marietti, 1953), p. 142. »

33      Goering, ‘Internal Forum’, pp. 381–2.  »

34      Gregory the Great, Registrum epistularum, ed. D. Norberg, CCSL 140, 140A, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1982), i, pp. 22, 31–2, 47, 174; quote at p. 22. »

35      See especially J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford University Press, 2007); J. Blair (ed.), Minsters and Parish Churches: The Local Church in Transition, 950–1200 (Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, 1988). »

36      Wilmart, ‘Un opuscule’, p. 349. »

37      Acta sanctorum Octobris VIII (Brussels, 1858), p. 574  »

38      The Cartulary of the Monastery of St. Frideswide at Oxford, ed. S.R. Wigram, Oxford Historical Society, 28, 31, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1895–6), ii, p. 70.  »

39      N. Orme, The Churches of Medieval Exeter (Exeter: Impress Books, 2014), pp. 5–6, 18–30. For what follows on Exeter see R. Springer, ‘Bishop and City in Dialogue: Cultivating Charity in Twelfth-Century Exeter’, Historical Research, 92 (2019), 267–87. »

40      For examples of such dispensations given for the burial of lay residents in the houses of Exeter religious houses see Papsturkunden in England, ed. W. Holtzmann, 3 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1930–52), i, p. 297. An episcopal confirmation of 1177x84 refers to the ‘cimiterium Exoniensis’: EEA XI: Exeter, 1046–1184, ed. F. Barlow (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 87.  »

41      Quoted in Orme, Churches, p. 28.  »

42      R. Springer, ‘Bartholomew of Exeter’s Sermons and the Cultivation of Charity in Twelfth-Century Exeter’, Historical Research, 92 (2019), 267–87, at 273–75. »

43      Devon Heritage Centre, ECA 53A, fol. 35v. The names and obits from this folio are printed in D. Lepine and N. Orme, Death and Memory in Medieval Exeter, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, new series, 46 (Exeter, 2003), p. 262, but with errors and omissions.  »

44      Orme, Churches, p. 28. »

45      For Alexander Neckam see A.N.J. Dunning, ‘Alexander Neckam’s Manuscripts and the Augustinian Canons of Oxford and Cirencester’ (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2016), pp. 17–23. Murray, ‘Confession,’ pp. 78–79, sees the regular canons in twelfth-century England as prefiguring the mendicant friars in the function of confessors to the laity. If this analogy is to be drawn – and it must be drawn cautiously, for the regular canons did not have a unified pastoral mission – it is worth contrasting the twelfth century’s ambivalence toward ‘alternative’ confessors with the protracted conflict around the mendicants in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: on which see M.J. Haren, ‘Friars as Confessors: The Canonist Background to the Fourteenth-Century Controversy’, Peritia, 3 (1984), 503–16. »

46      T. Licence, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–1200 (Oxford University Press, 2011), chs. 4–6; C.S. Watkins, ‘Sin, Penance and Purgatory in the Anglo-Norman Realm: The Evidence of Visions and Ghost Stories’, Past and Present, 175 (2002), 3–33, at 30-1. »

47      Wilmart, ‘Opuscule’, p. 348. »

48      Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriæ et descriptio Kambriæ, ed. F. Dimock, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera (Rolls Series, 1868), vi, p. 32. See also C.S. Watkins, History and the Supernatural in Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 100–1. »

49      J. Avril, ‘Remarques sur un aspect de la vie religieuse paroissale: la pratique de la confession et de la communion du Xe au XIVe siècle’, in L’encadrement religieux des fidèles au Moyen-Age et jusqu’au Concile de Trente, 2 vols. (Paris: C.T.H.S, 1985), i, pp. 346–63 at 352–3; Murray, ‘Confession’. »

50      Councils and Synods II, i, p. 32, c. 43. »

51      Alexander of Ashby, Alexandri Essebiensis opera I, pp. 359–63. It should be noted that Morenzoni admits some doubt as to his attribution of this sermon to Alexander of Ashby. However, the sermon is preserved in a fourteenth-century manuscript which includes a large number of sermons under William de Montibus’ name, including twenty-seven other sermons firmly attributable to Alexander of Ashby and sermons from another known twelfth-century English collection. This suggests that if the sermon was not written by Alexander then it is likely to have been written by another roughly contemporary English writer: ibid., pp. 16–17, 115. »

52      Alexandri Essebiensis opera I, p. 360. »

53      Ibid. »

54      Ibid., p. 145. »

55      Goering, William de Montibus, p. 116. »

56      Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 449, fol. 59vb. »

57      The Ormulum, ed. R.M. White and R. Holt, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1878), i, ll. 4494–517. »

58      Meens, Penance, pp. 200–3. »

59      B. Poschmann, Penance and the Anointing of the Sick, trans. F. Courtney (Freiburg: Herder, 1964), pp. 158–62. »

60      Watkins, ‘Sin, Penance and Purgatory’, esp. 4. »

61      M.C. Mansfield, The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). »

62      ‘Populo prestant peccandi securitatem, cuius iniquitatem non arguunt ut ad penitentiam prouocet. … Iudicia dei futura uel omnino negant uel imminentia peccatorum subplicia extenuant; uenie facilitatem promittunt; momentaneum peccatoris gemitum remissioni sufficere asserunt’, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 71, fol. 12ra–b. »

63      ‘Contriti cordis holocausto extincta uiciis lucerna mentis accenditur; oris confessione preclusa peccati uectibus ianua salutis aperitur; satisfactionis lima, criminum rubigo tenax abstergitur, & constringencium iniuria cathenarum dissoluitur. Primum itaque necesse est ut cogitet et intelligat peccator sui lapsus miseriam et iugi, recolat memoria a quante felicitatis exciderit gloria. Libret attentius lance discretionis quam mirabilis est beatitudo libertatis quam perdidit, quam miserabilis est oppressio seruitutis quam inuenit. Statuat ante mentis oculos que et quot sibi immineant peccati uectigalia, attendat quot et quam graues exsoluende sint penarum usure, quatinus uel sic clauis timoris anima configatur’, ibid., fols. 39vb–40ra. »

64      Alexandri Essebiensis opera I, pp. 272, 279, 351–2. »

65      Ibid., pp. 145, 156, 360. »

66      Ibid., p. 42. »

67      Thomas of Chobham, Summa de arte praedicandi, p. 36. »

68      Morey, Bartholomew of Exeter, pp. 184–92. »

69      Ibid., p. 178. »

70      Ibid., p. 184. »

71      Alcuin, Epistolae, ed. E. Duemmler, MGH Epp. 4 (Berlin, 1895), p. 57; Gottfried of Admont, Homiliae dominicales, PL, 174, col. 542; Origen, Homélies sur les Psaumes 36 à 38, ed. E. Prinzivalli, H. Crouzel and L. Brésard, SC, 411 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1995), p. 260. »

72      Canons 15, 17, 19, 20, in Decrees, I, pp. 242–4. »

73      Mansfield, Humiliation of Sinners; Meens, Penance, esp. conclusion; S. Hamilton, The Practice of Penance, 900-1050 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), pp. 2–24. »