Alongside building castles and keeps for security, the Normans built stone cathedrals, churches and abbeys. Many date from the 12th century. The Normans brought the Roman Catholic Church with clergy from Normandy to England.
Saints were venerated on many alters around cathedrals and there were shrines with relics in crypts. Stained glass windows told the stories of Biblical figures, saints and prelates. The soaring spirituality of these impressively high religious buildings was balanced out by hideous gargoyles spouting rainwater off cathedral roof gutters outside.
The Roman Catholic Church was formed after the rift between east and west of 1054 and the Norman conquest of England took place 12 years later. The power of this church, headed by the Pope in Rome, rivalled or surpassed the power of kings.
Abbeys and Priories
Abbeys and priories fitted into the feudal system of the Normans as land-owners. In marginal areas monks toiled in the fields to turn unploughed land into fertile fields. It was always possible to escape dire poverty by becoming a monk and being sent out to toil on the land. Abbeys then became rich by farming the newly created agricultural land. Abbots and priors also negotiated the buying of land and administered donations of land to their foundations by benefactors. The dues of serfs to specific pieces of land were all laid out in legal documents now held by the National Archives. It seems that acquired land came with its dues.
Abbeys and priories ran much of the economy of Europe in the early Middle Ages. Religious establishments dominated the economy of the north of England.
The Crusades
Islamic Moors took over most of Spain from 711 AD and there were Muslim raids along the coast of Italy. By the time of the new millennium the Pope commanded armies and there were Norman knights dressed in armour, trained, armed and supplied with horses ready for battle looking for a cause to fight for. A call to arms in defence of Christendom was raised by the Pope. The rallying cry was that Christians could no longer access pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land. This led to the Crusades.
The First Crusade was in 1095. It was directed against Muslims, and Orthodox Christians too. A split had occurred between the Latin Catholic Church and the Greek-speaking Orthodox churches in 1054 with mutual excommunication.
Richard I of England set off on the Third Crusade which took place between 1189 and 1192 to fight Saladin the Sultan of Egypt and Syria.
Saladin was a Kurd from Tikrit in Iraq. A pious Muslim and devotee of jihad he vowed he would put an end to the Crusader city states of the Levant. Saladin captured almost every Crusader city, he took control of the coast from Lebanon to Egypt and he laid siege to Jerusalem in 1187. Sultan Saladin with his heraldic Eagle of Saladin symbol still represents, in the Arab world, a hero in the struggle against the West.
Richard I became Richard the Lion Heart by rising to the challenge. He took Jaffa and Acre re-establishing Crusader control of the coast. He finally succeeded in taking back Jerusalem in 1192. The peace treaty established the right for pilgrims to go from Europe to Jerusalem unarmed.
After six major crusades, crusading stopped in 1291. By the end of this time all the Catholic outposts fell to the Muslims again. But the Moors were finally ejected from Spain in 1492 by Catholic King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel. The result was stale mate – Europe remained Christian while the Near East and Middle East remained Muslim.
The Crusades drew together Catholics from different groups to fight together against an external enemy. New patron saints were called up in the battles fought by Crusaders.
Crusaders adopted soldier saints as patrons and invoked them to fight alongside them in battle. Richard the Lion Heart adopted Saint George as his patron. (I will describe St George in an article on English legends). The strongest helper of all was deemed to be Saint Michael the Archangel. Angels were thought to determine the outcome of warfare as they represent principalities and powers. Saint Michael the Archangel is always depicted ready for battle in churches and cathedrals.
Relics of Saints
People who were not literate required tangible objects as the focus of their devotions. There was a large commerce in the bones of saints who were celebrated on the day of their death. To set up a shrine and found a new pilgrimage required relics. Without relics it wasn’t going to happen. The pilgrimage of Santiago of Compostela was set up with the relics of the body of James the Great Apostle (brother of the Apostle John). James was beheaded in Jerusalem in 44 AD. His body minus the head was taken to Spain to the shrine at Compostela cathedral. It attracted the biggest pilgrimage in Europe by four or five different routes that still goes on today.
Obviously there were no relics of Jesus, as he was resurrected from the dead and ascended into heaven. But the shroud his body was wrapped in was carefully conserved by the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople and finally found its way to Turin where it is known as the Shroud of Turin. There was also a lot of Vera Cruz, the wood of the True Cross.
Obviously there were no relics of the Virgin Mary since, although she died and was buried in a tomb in Gethsemani, she underwent an Assumption into heaven from the tomb in Jerusalem. (This was the Orthodox belief, but more recently the Catholic Church has relocated the Assumption to Ephesus). Relics of Mary consisted of a large number of flasks containing milk.
St Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland and this is entirely due to the conservation of the Apostle’s relics there at St Andrews, on the Fife of Scotland on the east coast.
St Andrew’s bones arrived in Scotland in 747 AD. This is the story of how they got there:
The relics of Saint Andrew resided at Patras in Greece until invasion meant they had to be removed for safe-keeping. A monk called Regulus took it upon himself to preserve the relics of St Andrew. He set sail for Scotland and was shipwrecked on the coast of Fife in 747. This was a sign to build a shrine and keep the relics there.
Oengus II King of the Picts saw a X in the sky like the cross of St Andrew before going into battle in 832. He vowed that if he won the battle, he would make St Andrew patron saint of Scotland. The battle was won for the Picts and Scotland got its flag of a white saltaire on a celestial blue background. Today the relics of St Andrew are housed in St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh.
The relics of the Apostle Andrew were brought to Scotland long before the arrival of the Normans when the church in Britain was still an Orthodox church.
Thomas Becket Norman Martyr (1119-1170)
The Saxon Canterbury cathedral was built on the site of a Roman church so this had been a religious site from the very beginning. The Saxon cathedral was damaged by fire in 1067 and was rebuilt under the supervision of the first Norman bishop Lanfranc sent from Normandy. The new, expanded cathedral was completed in 1077, although modification works continued after this.
It became a place of pilgrimage as pilgrims flocked to the tomb of the Norman martyr Thomas Becket in the 12th century.
Young Thomas was a clerk in the household of Theobald of Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury. His parents were Gilbert and Matilda, Normans. In 1154 Theobald named Thomas Becket Archdeacon of Canterbury as he worked efficiently and well. In 1155 he was made Lord Chancellor and then in 1162 he was made a priest and became Archbishop of Canterbury when Theobald died.
Thomas Becket took on an ascetic life when he was made priest and archbishop (unlike some). Thomas Becket as Archbishop, had the son of King Henry II living in his household to school him.
The event that marked national history and showed Thomas to be a hero took place in 1170. The Pope was involved in political decisions in England and an issue arose. Archbishop Thomas Becket, despite being the guardian of King Henry II’s son, stood up against the power of the king and sided with the Pope on an issue.
King Henry II was heard to say one day “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” Shortly after, when Thomas Becket was saying Vespers in the evening in the cathedral, armed men came from the king. The monks tried to keep the men out. Thomas continued to say Vespers. The armed men came in and cut him down in front of the alter leaving blood everywhere.
The story of the courageous and saintly priest standing up against the power of the king and being murdered, made Thomas into a martyr in the eyes of the people. They flocked to his tomb in Canterbury Cathedral to venerate him as a saint. Really it was the Pope V King, and the Church won. The Pope canonized him not long after.
Canterbury is said to have got its name from pilgrims on horseback cantering to reach the city gates before they closed at sundown. Pilgrims purchased a pilgrim badge made of lead stamped with an image of Thomas Becket. Income from pilgrims paying for accommodation and buying merchandise paid for the rebuilding of the cathedral.
The ground plan of the Saxon cathedral shows buildings with one high alter at the front where mass would be celebrated. The ground plan of the Norman cathedral shows a more complex building with various chapels surrounding the high alter at the front of the building. Each chapel had its own alter and dedication to a saint. Relics were housed beneath these alters in medieval churches. Masses could be celebrated in these side chapels. This shows the development of the cult of saints at this time.
Third Orders within the Catholic Church
Early on, abbeys were governed by the rule of St Benedict. The Order of Saint Benedict was founded in 529 AD. This was the oldest order of the Latin Church. Benedictine abbeys were based on the communal life. First orders are monks and second orders are nuns, while third orders are lay people. The members of all orders gathered to follow the spirituality of their founder. New orders with rules of life were added in the High Middle Ages.
The High Middle Ages (1000 – 1300) saw the founding of universities in European countries where theology was taught and debated. Oxford University was founded in maybe 1096 and certainly in 1167, and Cambridge University was founded in 1209.
Ancient Greek philosophy became known through the translation into Latin of texts in Arabic, and later by direct translations from the Greek.
Saint Thomas Aquinas (died 1274) foremost doctor of the Catholic Church combined the teachings of Aristotle and Saint Augustine of Hippo with his own insights to reach conclusions that became the basis to Western Civilisation. The crucial insights of Thomas Aquinas were about the personhood of individuals even if they were women or slaves; slavery was deemed to be morally wrong therefore. The feudal system had serfs and servants, but not slaves; and each person was believed to have their own individual soul, rather than a participation in a collective soul.
Thomas Aquinas would have been too highbrow for most of the faithful, but Saint Francis of Assissi (died in 1226) and Saint Anthony of Padua (1195-1231) had founded the Franciscan Order. Saint Clare founded the Poor Clares for nuns. The Third Order of Franciscans had a large, popular following among lay people.
The Rosary
At the same time as the Franciscan Order was founded by St Francis in the 13th century, Saint Dominique (1170-1221) founded the Dominicans whose devotion was to the Virgin Mary using the Rosary as a way of praying. The Dominican Order popularized the Rosary as a form of prayer. In Rosary Groups devotees still recount the miracle stories of their founders who were canonized as saints.
Devotion to the Virgin Mary became devotion to a particular invocation of Mary and a recognizable statue. For example, Our Lady of Walsingham from the 11th century, and in the 19th and 20th centuries Our Lady of Lourdes.
Merry and True 