Evidence of the Ordinary: Wives and Children of the Clergy in Normandy and England, 1050–1150

Summary

Clerical marriage has been the subject of debate for the best part of 1,700 years, and is as contentious now as it was in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Hitherto, modern scholars have focused on the campaign to impose celibacy on the secular clergy primarily from the perspective of medieval ecclesiastical authorities intent on eradicating clerical marriage. Recent studies have overwhelmingly relied on normative sources and related texts written by ‘reformers’, the term, for the purposes of this paper, I use to describe those ecclesiastics intent on imposing celibacy. Modern historians have tended to treat the issue as a predominantly theological and ideological one, centred on the papacy in western Europe. As a result current scholarship perpetuates the same unquestioning, or at least unwitting, assumptions – that the ‘reformers’ were correct in their characterization of the failings of the church, and that their solution (the imposition of cultic purity) had indeed made the church ritually and spiritually purer. Following this interpretation the practice of clerical marriage necessarily undermined the church, and the drive to enforce celibacy on all secular clergy, alongside the idea of ‘reform’ more generally, has been assumed to be a ‘Good Thing’. Accordingly, a married cleric has been considered ‘bad’. Such attitudes are in part responsible for the relative neglect of the sources defending clerical marriage until recently. Awareness that the current grand narrative is at best problematic and at worst inadequate is gradually gaining traction, especially in the work of Maureen Miller, Conrad Leyser and Kathleen Cushing. As yet no new consensus has been reached. In respect of England and Normandy, the focus of this paper, the most recent studies examining aspects of clerical celibacy and marriage – by Jennifer Thibodeaux, Hugh Thomas and Maroula Perisanidi – have not questioned older narratives and assumptions.

My central argument is that the married clergy, their wives and their children are missing almost entirely from the current debate, except in a piecemeal and selective fashion. If we are to understand how celibacy became the norm amongst them, we need to understand not only who these men and women were, but also when and where they can be found throughout the period. Only then can we offer conclusions as to what, if anything, changed over time.