The Papal Revolution

The history of the church in England in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries was deeply influenced by the aftermath of two revolutionary events. The Norman Conquest was no less dramatic in its impact on ecclesiastical life than in the changes which it wrought in secular society. The church, like the land, was under new management, and the new French élite introduced important organisational changes based on continental models. Even more significant than the Norman take-over of the Old English church, however, was the rise to power at Rome of a radical group who shattered age-old concepts of the relationship of religion and government within Christian society. This movement is known to historians as the papal reform, or the Gregorian or Hildebrandine reform, after its most dramatic exponent, the archdeacon Hildebrand, who from 1073 to 1085 pontificated over the western church as Pope Gregory VII.

The reform movement at Rome falls into two distinct phases. From 1046 to 1057 the emphasis was placed on moral renewal. A succession of German popes, of whom the greatest was Leo IX (1048–54), with the full co-operation of the Emperor Henry III, mounted a determined attack on those clergy who had fallen from the ideals of the early church. The twin evils which they sought to eradicate were simony, or the purchase of ecclesiastical office from patrons, and nicolaitism, the keeping of wives, or in reforming eyes mistresses, by priests. Simony was regarded by hard-liners at Rome as heretical, for it involved trading in the gift of the Holy Spirit. The squalor of sexual relations could not be tolerated in those who celebrated the sacrament of the altar. Clerical marriage, moreover, created the likelihood of an hereditary priestly caste, passing on churches and bishoprics from father to son as family possessions. The papal reform movement was an attempt to recover the purity of the primitive church. It offended a great many vested interest, but it is remarkable how quickly its basic premises came to be accepted by Western Christendom.