A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [25]
According to the ideal of St. Francis, they were supposed to wander the world to do good, to walk barefoot among the poor and the outcasts bringing Christian love to the lowest, to beg for the necessaries of life in kind, never in money. By a supreme paradox, the Order that Francis founded on rejection of property attracted the support and donations of the wealthy because its purity seemed to offer assurance of holiness. Upon the approach of death, knights and noble ladies would have themselves clad in the Franciscan habit, believing that if they died and were buried in it, they could not go to hell.
The Order acquired lands and riches, built itself churches and cloisters, developed its own hierarchy—all the opposite of the founder’s intent. Yet St. Francis had understood the process. Replying to a novice who wished to have a psalter, he once said, “When you have a psalter you will wish to have a breviary, and when you have a breviary you will sit in a chair like a great prelate and say to your brother, ‘Brother, bring me my breviary.’ ”
In some monastic orders the monks had regular pocket money and private funds which they lent at interest. In some they had an allowance of a gallon of ale a day, ate meat, wore jewels and fur-trimmed gowns, and employed servants who in wealthy convents sometimes outnumbered the members. Enjoying the favor of the rich, the Franciscans preached to them and dined with them and took office in noble households as counselors and chaplains. Some still went barefoot among the poor, holding to their role, and were revered for it, but most now wore good leather boots and were not loved.
Like the pardoner, they bilked the villagers, selling them relics of inspired imagination. Boccaccio’s Friar Cipolla sold one of the Angel Gabriel’s feathers which he said had fallen in the Virgin’s chamber during the Annunciation. As satire, this did not overreach the real friar who sold a piece of the bush from which the Lord spoke to Moses. Some sold drafts on the Treasury of Merit supposed to be stored in Heaven by the Order of St. Francis. Wyclif, on being asked what these parchments were good for, replied: “To covere mustard pottis.” The friars were an element of daily life, scorned yet venerated and feared because they might, after all, have the key to salvation.
The satire and complaints survive because they are written down. They leave an impression of a Church so pervaded by venality and hypocrisy as to seem ripe for dissolution, but an institution so in command of the culture and so rooted in the structure of society does not readily dissolve. Christianity was the matrix of medieval life: even cooking instructions called for boiling an egg “during the length of time wherein you can say a Miserere.” It governed birth, marriage, and death, sex, and eating, made the rules for law and medicine, gave philosophy and scholarship their subject matter. Membership in the Church was not a matter of choice; it was compulsory and without alternative, which gave it a hold not easy to dislodge.
As an integral part of life, religion was both subjected to burlesque and unharmed by it. In the annual Feast of Fools at Christmastime, every rite and article of the Church no matter how sacred was celebrated in mockery. A dominus festi, or lord of the revels, was elected from the inferior clergy—the curés, subdeacons, vicars, and choir clerks, mostly ill-educated, ill-paid, and ill-disciplined—whose day it was to turn everything topsy-turvy. They installed their lord as Pope or Bishop or Abbot of Fools in a ceremony of head-shaving accompanied by bawdy talk and lewd acts; dressed him in vestments turned inside out; played dice on the altar and ate black puddings and sausages while mass was celebrated in nonsensical gibberish;