A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [24]
The clergy were partners too. When prelates were gorgeously clad, the lower ranks would not long remain somber. Many were the complaints, like that of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1342, that the clergy were dressing like laymen, in checkerboard squares of red and green, short coats, “notably scant,” with excessively wide sleeves to show linings of fur or silk, hoods and tippets of “wonderful length,” pointed and slashed shoes, jeweled girdles hung with gilt purses. Worse, ignoring the tonsure, they wore beards and long hair to the shoulders contrary to canonical rule, to the “abominable scandal among the people.” Some kept jesters, dogs, and falcons, some went abroad attended by guards of honor.
Nor could simony stay isolated at the top. When bishops purchased benefices at the price of a year’s income, they passed the cost down, so that corruption spread through the hierarchy from canons and priors to priesthood and cloistered clergy, down to mendicant friars and pardoners. It was at this level that the common people met the materialism of the Church, and none were more crass than the sellers of pardons.
Supposed to be commissioned by the Church, the pardoners would sell absolution for any sin from gluttony to homicide, cancel any vow of chastity or fasting, remit any penance for money, most of which they pocketed. When commissioned to raise money for a crusade, according to Matteo Villani, they would take from the poor, in lieu of money, “linen and woolen stuffs or furnishings, grain and fodder … deceiving the people. That was the way they gave the Cross.” What they were peddling was salvation, taking advantage of the people’s need and credulity to sell its counterfeit. The only really detestable character in Chaucer’s company of Canterbury pilgrims is the Pardoner with his stringy locks, his eunuch’s hairless skin, his glaring eyes like a hare’s, and his brazen acknowledgment of the tricks and deceits of his trade.
The regular clergy detested the pardoner for undoing the work of penance, for endangering souls insofar as his goods were spurious, and for invading clerical territory, taking collections on feast days or performing burial and other services for a fee that should have gone to the parish priest. Yet the system permitted him to function because it shared in the profits.
The sins of monks and itinerant friars were more disturbing because their pretensions as men of God were higher. They were notorious as seducers of women. Peddling furs and girdles for wenches and wives, and small gentle dogs “to get love of them,” the friar in a 14th century poem “came to our dame when the gode man is from home.”
He spares nauther for synne ne shame,
For may he tyl a woman synne
In priveyte, he will not blynne
Er he a childe put hir withinne
And perchance two at ones.
In the tales of Boccaccio, in the fabliaux of France, in all popular literature of the time, clerical celibacy is a joke. Priests lived with mistresses or else went in hunt of them. “A priest lay with a lady who was wed to a knight,” begins one tale matter-of-factly. In another, “the priest and his lady went off to bed.” In the nunnery where Piers Plowman served as cook, Sister Pernell was “a priest’s wench” who “bore a child in cherry time.” Boccaccio’s rascally friars were invariably caught in embarrassing situations as victims of their own lechery. In real life their sinfulness was not funny