1

Laity, Clergy and Ascetics

The bishops meeting at the Council of Mâcon in 585 felt compelled to resolve a problem of greeting etiquette between clergy and lay people. ‘We decree’, they ruled:

that if any secular person of honourable rank should meet in their travels someone of any ecclesiastical grade including the minor orders then, as is proper for a Christian, he should bow his head reverently to the cleric, through whose offices and services he gains the rights of the Christian condition. And if indeed that secular person is travelling on a horse, and the cleric likewise, the secular person should doff their hat and give the cleric a sincere greeting; if the cleric is travelling by foot and the secular person travels by horse, he should dismount and show to the cleric the debt of sincere love which is his due, so that God, who is true love, is pleased with both of them and accepts both with his love.¹

The issue perhaps appears a minor one, but their ruling speaks volumes of a clerical worldview. They assumed a fundamental divide between men ‘of the church’ (clerici) and men ‘of the world’ (saeculares). Within this dyad, moreover, there was a clear hierarchy. Secular people should defer to clergy, bowing, doffing their hat or dismounting their horse, regardless of any other considerations of status such as wealth, power or birth. The special religious services performed by the clergy, in the eyes of the clergy, entitled them automatically to higher status than any lay person. Even more evocative is that the authors of the canon chose to refer to a ‘secular person’ (saecularis), rather than a lay person (laicus).² Secularity, or worldliness, was considered so definitive of the lay state that it could stand in for it. The man of the church, by implication, was therefore otherworldly, or defined by his separation from secularity. In this conflation, we can see clerical self-definition at work – it was precisely this claim of separation from the world that justified the ecclesiastical assertion of superiority and due deference.

This equation of ‘lay’ and ‘secular’ was fundamental to the clerical worldview, but it raised a number of potential complications. ‘Lay’ was a technical category meaning ‘not ordained’, whereas ‘secular’ was a judgement on lifestyle. Even though the church council records regularly equated laici and saeculares, in point of fact, all kinds of people who were not ordained as clerics could nonetheless claim to be ‘otherwordly’ and therefore not secular. Indeed, some of these people could claim to be more otherworldly than some clerics, especially than junior clerics who lived lives seldom distinguishable from those of their lay neighbours. If secularity was definitional of laity, then monks were not lay, regardless of whether or not they were ordained. If secularity was definitional of laity, then female ascetics who rejected marriage, or possessions, or food, or the world in general, were not lay, even if they had never taken any formal vows. By equating secularity and laity, therefore, the clerics at the Council of Mâcon were diminishing the force of their ordination as their key point of difference, even though they were at the same time attempting to privilege the clergy as a group, regardless of level (which implied that ordination was the main thing that mattered). This canon therefore captures the confusions within the definition of clergy and laity in late antique Gaul. The laity were essential to the clerical representation of themselves and the projection of their power and authority. But even in the process of using the laity in this way, the clergy who produced this ruling demonstrated the complications that surrounded their apparently neat definitional dyad.

This chapter is about how late antique and early medieval Christians defined the laity. Both clergy and ascetics talked about the laity in the context of their own self-definition: they depicted themselves as otherworldly, and separated from secularity, as part of a claim to superiority. Their Christian hierarchy was therefore based as much, if not more, on claims to religious lifestyle as on the technical status of being ordained. Indeed, our sources have relatively little to say about ordination.³ This approach also allowed ascetics to claim a status akin to or sometimes even superior to clergy, on the basis of their virtuous way of life. However, the lifestyle distinction carried the risk of complication and ambiguity. Our sources admitted and accommodated the existence of clergy who were still in many ways ‘of the world’, of ascetics who were not ordained but not secular, of laity who were seeking to separate themselves from aspects of the world even as they remained within it, and of laity who became part of the economy of the church, either as necessary supporters of it, or as dependent upon it. This meant that it was never entirely possible, ideals aside, to present a neat, separated, hierarchical and morally justified bipartite view of the Gallic church. This chapter is therefore not only about how clergy and ascetics defined the laity, but also about how they struggled to do so with any clarity. It explores what these categories meant at the time, what our authors saw as the implication of being in one category or the other, where the boundaries between each group lay, how people moved from one category to another, and how they showed others that they had moved. More than any other part of this book, therefore, this chapter will address what it meant to be a cleric, or what it meant to be an ascetic, since both of these groups were defining themselves against the laity, the people of the world.

I have chosen to approach the question of definition, and the location of boundaries between categories, in three ways. The first section of this chapter examines how lay people were paired in various texts with either clergy, ascetics or both, and explores the implications of such pairings, as well as the people who disrupted them. It draws in particular on normative texts – church council records and secular law codes – which lay out a particular vision of the world as it should be. The second section centres on conversion – one of the mechanisms by which a person could move out of the category ‘lay’ and into another category. I investigate what conversion can tell us about what it meant to be lay and secular, and what some of the complications could be. The focus in this section is on hagiography and the ways in which authors describing ascetics in particular used ‘conversion’ as a moment of separation from secularity, so that their subjects could no longer be deemed ‘people of the world’ even before they took a formal vow or received ordination. However, I also consider in this section the evidence of people who have been described as conversi – that is, lay people who undertook some kind of ascetic renunciation while remaining within a secular environment. They appear to have constituted an important phenomenon of lay piety, which indirectly served to challenge any clerical or ascetic efforts at neat categorization and contrast. The third section of the chapter looks at the idea of service, and the ways in which lay people could become not only servants of the church but also servants of God, and therefore a part of the religious world. Various individuals who were not clergy, and not ascetics, nonetheless acted in ways which associated them with the church and which therefore made them no longer wholly secular, in the eyes of our sources. The notion of service to the church encompassed people we would describe as servants, as bound workers, and as ecclesiastically supported paupers and disabled persons, but also extended all the way up the religious hierarchy to professed ascetics, bishops and even sainted abbess-queens. ‘Service’ cut across categories, even defied them. Thus although the terms ‘lay’, ‘cleric’ and ‘ascetic’ all mattered greatly, they were very unstable in practice and had blurred boundaries, which indicated a broad range of religious possibilities.

Categories and complications

The clearest categorization and demarcation of the laity comes in a group of texts that were actually far more interested in the clergy: the church council records. One of the key concerns of these texts, over a period of centuries, was to define the clergy as a distinct group, with particular behavioural obligations and entitled to the kind of deference described at the start of this chapter. The laity largely served in the canons, therefore, as the negative counterpoint to clerical self-definition – in order to be distinct, the clergy had to be definitively ‘not-lay’, and this consistently drove the definition of lay people in these canons, over a long period of time, and in multiple regions of Gaul.

Depending on context, the authors of the canons used a number of different terms to describe those members of the Christian community who were ‘not-clergy’. On two occasions, two centuries apart, the term ‘the faithful’ (fideles) appeared in the canons in contrast to the ministers of the church, with the ministers in each case enjoined to provide an example to the rest.⁴ In other instances of its use, however, fideles simply referred to baptized Christians in general.⁵ Canon authors also used ‘the populace’ (populus) to indicate particular Christian communities or congregations.⁶ ‘Citizens’ (ciues) appeared less commonly, but with even greater specificity to the city context.⁷ ‘The people’ (plebs), meanwhile, occurred on only four occasions, twice to indicate a congregation and twice in a non-religious context.⁸ None of these terms carried a strong contrastive implication with the clergy.

The terms which bore this contrastive implication most often, and most obviously, were ‘lay people’ (laici) and ‘secular people’ (saeculares) – they were the people who were ‘not clergy’. In the church council records, the terms laici and saeculares were used as synonyms. Both appeared frequently in a dyad with ‘clerics’ (clerici), to indicate that a given ruling was intended to apply to all members of the church, so that the pairing can be seen as expressing the gamut of Christian possibilities because everyone was deemed to fall into either one category or the other. For example, in 394–96 the Council of Nîmes prohibited bishops from allowing anyone, ‘whether cleric or lay’ (siue clericum siue laicum), into their communion if condemned by their own bishop.⁹ The Statuta ecclesiae antiqua discussed dissident Christians, ‘whether cleric or lay’ (siue clericos siue laicos), and ordered that anyone who communicated with an excommunicate would themselves be excommunicated, ‘whether cleric or lay’ (clericus uel laicus).¹⁰ It also decreed that a bishop should be ordained with the consensus ‘of the clerics and of the laity’ (consensu clericorum et laicorum).¹¹ In 506, the Council of Agde noted that everyone, ‘whether clerics or lay people’ (clerici siue laici), should avoid the feast of the Jews and that whoever studied auguries, ‘whether cleric or lay’ (clerici siue laici), should be punished.¹² In 567, the Council of Tours decreed that ‘no-one, whether of the clergy or of the laity’ (nullus clericorum uel laicorum), should presume to write letters of recommendation except the bishop.¹³ The pairing of clericus with saecularis functioned in exactly the same way and was sometimes used by the same councils. The Council of Arles (442–506) condemned anyone who received an excommunicate, ‘whether a cleric or a secular person’ (siue clericum, siue saecularem), while in 506 the Council of Agde criticized those, ‘whether clerics or secular people’ (clerici etiam uel saeculares), who kept testaments for themselves, an injunction repeated at the Council of Clichy in 626–27.¹⁴ No Christian, ruled the Council of Mâcon in 581–83, ‘either cleric or secular person’ (clericus aut saecularis), was to allow others to attend the feasts of the Jews.¹⁵ These phrases expressed a bipartite view of the Christian community: all members were either clerics or lay/secular. They also demonstrate how the categories of ‘lay’ and ‘secular’ were conflated in the church council records. Occasionally, indeed, they appeared together. At the Council of Angers in 453, attendees denounced fellow clergy, ‘who, leaving the clericate, had turned to secular service, and to the laity’ (qui relicto clero se ad saecularem militiam et ad laicos contulerint).¹⁶ At the other end of the period, in 673–75 the Council of Losne insisted that ‘lay people in secular clothing’ (laici homines in seculare habitu) should not be permitted to hold the honour of archpresbyter in their parish.¹⁷ According to this worldview, lay people were by definition secular – they were the people of the world (saeculum).¹⁸ They were the other side of the clerical coin.

Several church council rulings made clear that movement over the border between clergy and laity was a transition of serious and permanent import. In 511, the Council of Orléans ruled against secular people who aspired to clerical office improperly.¹⁹ No lay person, the Council of Épaone ruled in 517, was to be ordained without prior religious commitment, while a few years later the Council of Arles went into more detail: no lay person was to be ordained without prior ‘conversion’ or before the age of thirty.²⁰ These rulings were repeated at the Councils of Orléans in 538 and 549: no lay person was to become a cleric without proper preparation.²¹ The Council of Chalon (647–53) ruled that ‘secular people’ who had not yet converted ‘to the clericate’ should not have control of the parish’s goods.²² It went the other way as well. At the Council of Tours in 461, excommunication was prescribed for any cleric who relinquished the offices of his ordination and wished to live a ‘lay life’.²³ These were important boundaries and the participants at church councils sought to strengthen them.²⁴

The canon authors reinforced these boundaries and the distinction between clergy and laity by insisting that the clergy separate themselves from the secularity that was appropriate only to a lay person. Several councils reminded clergy that they were supposed to have renounced all secular things as part of their conversion to service of the church.²⁵ At Agde in 506, attendees denounced clerics who strove for ‘secular profits’ instead of attending to their clerical duties, while at Clermont in 535 a canon ordered clerics to avoid the polluting ‘secular luxuries’ of weddings.²⁶ The Council of Bordeaux (662–75) attacked clerics who condemned their bishops, wore secular clothing and did many destructive things, even worse than a ‘secular person’.²⁷ Clothing was important – a visible marker of difference. In 506, the Council of Agde deemed that clerical clothing should be fitting for religion, while according to the Councils of Mâcon (581–83) and Bordeaux (662–75), clerics were not to wear ‘secular clothing’, shoes or a military cloak.²⁸ They were also not to bear arms or practise the hunt ‘in the secular custom’.²⁹ It is no accident that in such injunctions, the canon writers generally preferred to emphasize ‘secular’ rather than ‘lay’. They were making an argument here, that being a cleric required separation from the world, a world that was negatively labelled as polluting and incompatible with religious dedication. In an age when infant baptism was becoming the norm, ordination, or the expressed desire for it, was to be treated as the true moment of ‘conversion’, when the things of the world were left behind and a new, better life was embraced. Clergy were to free themselves of secular entanglements of any kind.

One of the most obvious expressions of this was in the repeated concern of councils over clerical contact with women. Women represented secularity par excellence and rare was the council that did not have something to say about them. Women were decisively ‘laicized’ by church council legislators and excluded from any clerical duties.³⁰ The Statuta ecclesiae antiqua refused women the right to teach or to take roles in the running of the church and restricted their role in the baptism ceremony.³¹ The Councils of Épaone in 517 and Orléans in 533 attacked the category of ‘deaconess’, and attempted to eliminate this title.³² For the church council legislators, clergy were definitively male, and women were not to be considered as properly ordained within the church, despite the fact that the verb ordinare was used to describe the appointment of women to ministry roles in some late antique texts.³³ A number of councils attempted physically to separate clergy from women. Clergy of the major orders were not to live with any women aside from immediate family.³⁴ Women should not even be permitted into the inner quarters of episcopal residences.³⁵

In particular, however, church councils insisted that clerics should be marked as separate from the laity by their abstention from marriage, or from sexual relations within marriage. Higher clergy had long been commanded to separate from their wives, but this had proved difficult to enforce over the years.³⁶ The Second Council of Arles (442–506) decreed that married men were not to be ordained deacons unless they had made a profession of continence and that any cleric who was sexually active with his wife after accepting the levitical benediction was to be cast out of office.³⁷ In 461, the Council of Tours ruled against bishops and priests who had children after their election, and deemed them ineligible to offer the sacrifice or minister to the people.³⁸ At the Council of Clermont in 535, the rule of abstinence was extended also to deacons, specifically on the grounds that sexual activity was secular.³⁹ In 538, the Council of Orléans excommunicated clergy who married after receiving the benediction and condemned high-level clerics who committed adultery to be deposed and confined to a monastery.⁴⁰ In 541, the Council of Orléans insisted that married clergy should physically separate from their wives in order to demonstrate their chastity. Then in 549, the Council of Orléans insisted that clerics should inform on one another to stamp out sexual improprieties and forbade sexual relations within marriage for clerics of the upper orders.⁴¹ The legislation of the Council of Tours in 567, meanwhile, introduced an entire system of surveillance to ensure clerical chastity and to make sure that the laity had no grounds for suspicion regarding their activities.⁴² The Council of Mâcon (581–83) ordered higher clergy to renounce all secular acts and treat their wife as a sister.⁴³ The rulings against procreation and continued relations with wives were extended to subdeacons by the time of the Council of Auxerre in the late sixth century.⁴⁴

Robert Godding has noted the ‘extraordinary insistence’ on clerical chastity that characterizes the Merovingian church councils, as this became the chief legislative focus when it came to dividing clerics from secularity. He speculates that it was motivated by the feeling that sexual activity rendered one impure and unsuited for contact with the Eucharist. David Hunter likewise points to the importance of ritual purity in distinguishing the role of the priest from that of lay people.⁴⁵ Chélini notes, indeed, that laici and saeculares were deemed to be terms interchangeable with conjugati (married people) because marriage was regarded as a definitive characteristic of the lay state.⁴⁶ Women, even the honoured wives of bishops, episcopae, could therefore stand as the ultimate representation of the laity, and of secularity.⁴⁷ There are many reasons to doubt that reality was quite so neat. There is considerable evidence that clergy, even at the higher levels, continued to enjoy marital sex, and it would not be until the high middle ages that celibacy was effectively enforced as a clerical norm.⁴⁸ Women, moreover, continued to hold significant positions within the institutions of the church, both formally and informally.⁴⁹ Nonetheless, the legislative intention is very clear. Separation and distinction of clergy from laity was to be achieved by clerics either not marrying, or abstaining from sex if already married. This separation from secularity, then, would set the clergy apart from the laity and would be the basis of their claim to due deference.

We find a similarly strict categorization of laity and clergy in other normative texts. Secular rulers and their legal bureaucracy were not as interested as the church councils in a negative construction of secularity. However, they were interested in defining the clergy as a distinct group, because clerics had been entitled to legal rights and protections from the time of Constantine onwards.⁵⁰ In the Lex Romana Visigothorum, the status of clerici was explicitly contrasted to that of laici or plebs and the clergy were marked as exempt from specific secular obligations, but also forbidden from engaging in secular activities such as trade.⁵¹ The clergy were here a distinct group, whose status entailed a range of legal rights and duties. The Codex Euricianus also sought to keep the group intact, legislating against those who tried to convert from the clergy back to lay life.⁵² Likewise in penitentials, tariffed penalties varied depending on whether the culprit was a cleric or lay person.⁵³ All of these ‘legalistic’ texts required neat separation of categories and therefore traded in clear contrasts between lay and cleric.

As these final examples suggest, the behavioural contrast between clergy and laity was an important part of the way these normative texts differentiated each category. As we saw in the penitential of Finnian, the lower penalty endured by a layman was explicitly tied to the lower behavioural expectations placed upon him.⁵⁴ More virtue was expected from clerics, since they had been constructed as ‘otherworldly’. If abstinence is commanded to the laity, the Council of Tours concluded, how much more so to the clergy?⁵⁵ If even the laity are prohibited from attending the feasts of the Jews, the Council at Épaone ruled in 517, how much more so the clerics?⁵⁶ Caesarius of Arles repeatedly lamented in his sermons that the sins he described were being committed not just by the laity, but even by the clergy, who should be holding themselves to higher standards.⁵⁷ These complaints reveal an essential worldview: the laity were lesser in status for a reason – they had lower standards to meet. The clergy might not always live up to higher expectations, but those higher expectations were assumed to be valid. The differentiation was hierarchical and it was supposed to have manifest consequences for all who formed a part of it.

For the remainder of this section, I want to focus on two groups who complicated the categories of lay and clerical, albeit in different ways: minor clergy and ascetics. As I have already noted, not all clergy were equal, and not all were therefore equally distinguishable from the laity. The major orders, usually understood as bishop, priest and deacon, were definitely ‘not-lay’. They were ordained, and they had the ability to dispense the Eucharist. However, the term clerici was used to describe a large number of other people, including subdeacons, lectors, exorcists and doorkeepers.⁵⁸ These clergy also underwent ordination or initiation ceremonies, but it is less clear what the exact significance of such ceremonies was.⁵⁹ They had undertaken a ritual which separated them from the laity, but did not have the right to dispense the Eucharist, and they appear in our sources as a delineated group: the junior or minor clergy, in contrast to the senior or major ones. In 517, for example, the Council of Épaone sentenced a ‘superior cleric’ who associated with heretics to excommunication for a year, whereas a ‘junior cleric’ was to be flogged.⁶⁰ The Synod of Auxerre in the late sixth century distinguished in one ruling between priests, deacons and ‘anyone from the clergy or the juniors’, a condemnation repeated with only slight variation at the Council of Paris in 614.⁶¹ That same 614 council also ruled on the care to be given to the goods of the church in the event of the death of ‘a bishop, priest or deacon, or anyone from the junior clerical orders’.⁶² In 567, the Council of Tours ruled that in order to allay any suspicion of their chastity, senior clerics should be accompanied when travelling by a number of subdeacons, lectors or lay people, who, interestingly, are associated together here.⁶³

We find this same kind of distinction of clerical level in the secular law codes as well. As these laws make clear, the status of clergy was not an absolute one, and one’s privilege and protection depended on one’s particular rank. In the Leges Alamannorum, a bishop was treated at the same level as a dux, but priests, deacons and monks came further down the payment scale, and junior clerics were simply worth what their parents were – in other words, their status as minor clerics did not give them additional value.⁶⁴ Similarly, the Lex Ribuaria had a sliding scale from bishop down through priest, deacon, subdeacon and ‘free cleric’ (clericum ingenuum).⁶⁵ The Leges Baiuwariorum simply divided between minor and major clergy, with the cut-off between deacon and subdeacon.⁶⁶ The difference in status between them and the major clergy was made clear in an anecdote from Gregory of Tours where Riculf, attempting to take over the church in Tours, offered ‘valuable presents’ to the senior clergy, but beat the junior ones – their goodwill was not worth cultivating.⁶⁷

In various respects, therefore, the junior clergy were closer to the laity. They would certainly not have been separated from the world. The rules on chastity and separation from one’s wife only applied to bishops, priests, deacons and occasionally subdeacons, which meant that other clerics could be conjugati.⁶⁸ It is unclear whether they were visually distinguished by means of dress or hairstyle. They might reside near the church, but so did many lay people, for reasons I will explain below. They did not necessarily have to exercise any pastoral or liturgical function, they could be subject to secular justice, and their various titles and ranks were surprisingly variable.⁶⁹ The function of even the subdeacon, one of the more clearly established positions, is obscure to us.⁷⁰ They frequently appeared in the works of Gregory of Tours as part of the entourage of the bishop, carrying out his dirty work as required, but also guarding the church’s sacred sites.⁷¹ They could even be attached to secular households.⁷² However, they were not treated exactly as lay people – special rules applied, and the widow of a subdeacon, exorcist or acolyte could not remarry.⁷³ They were sometimes viewed as ‘major clergy in waiting’, figures to whom the high behavioural standards of clergy in general should apply.⁷⁴ The minor clergy, therefore, occupied something of a grey zone. They were no longer lay, but not completely separated from secular things, nor did they enjoy the full privileges or obligations of major clergy. They had one foot in the world and one foot out of it.

The second group which complicated the clear division between lay and cleric was ascetics. As we have already noted, modern scholars have been unsure or inconsistent on whether ascetics should be considered lay people. In this, they reflect the confused situation in late antique sources. Occasionally, ascetics appear in our texts as a third group. In 511, for example, the Council of Orléans condemned anyone, whether cleric, monk or secular (clericus, monachus, saecularis), who believed in observing auguries or divination by lot.⁷⁵ In 567, the Council of Tours described the suspicion that lay people (laici) might have of the sexual activities of priests (sacerdotes) and monks (monachi), and the steps that should be taken to preserve good reputations.⁷⁶ This tripartite conception can also be found in Gregory the Great, who divided the Christian community into pastors, the continent and the married.⁷⁷ Professed ascetics, like clergy, were deemed to have undertaken a ritual, or vow, which separated them from secularity, and from an ordinary lay life. As Gary Macy points out, ‘abbots, monks, and others entering the religious life were referred to as ordained throughout the early Middle Ages’, women included.⁷⁸ Some ascetics could be ordained as clergy, enabling them to offer the Eucharist to other members of their communities. The majority, however, would not have received this kind of ordination, and some actively resisted it.⁷⁹ Clergy and ascetics were therefore associated groups without being identical.

As far as law codes were concerned, ascetics were generally linked with clergy as another type of ‘religious’, and they received similar privileges. The Lex Romana Visigothorum grouped together a number of ‘religious people’ who should be subject to the same property regulations, including bishops, priests, deacons, deaconesses, subdeacons, clerics of ‘any other rank’, and monks and women dedicated to the solitary life, many of whom came under the heading of ‘religious’ (religiosi vel religiosae).⁸⁰ Similarly, the Codex Euricianus linked together clergy, monks and religious women.⁸¹ In the Formulae Marculfi, the transition from a lay state into either the clergy or a monastery was treated as interchangeable, with the same formula making do for either situation.⁸² As far as the state was concerned, therefore, people who lived a religious lifestyle were separated from secularity and were, by implication, no longer lay. When Clovis wrote to the bishops of Aquitaine, meanwhile, he declared that religious protections applied to an extraordinarily wide range of people. ‘In the first place, we declare regarding the governance of the Church that no one may attempt to steal its property, either from those women performing holy functions, or from widows who have devoted themselves to the religious life, or from clerics or the children of clerics and widows who live with their parents; likewise, concerning ecclesiastical slaves, who are proven by episcopal oaths to have been taken from the church, they must not endure any violence or injury on our order.’⁸³ Here, therefore, we have a far wider concept of what it might mean to be ‘of the church’ than the clerical/lay pairing can possibly accommodate.

To add to this, we can note the complete lack of clarity around these categories in the sermons of Caesarius of Arles. Caesarius paired laity and clerics on a number of occasions as contrasting groups.⁸⁴ However, he also paired laity and religious, or contrasted laity to a range of clerical and ascetic roles.⁸⁵ Sometimes he separated junior clerics and laity on the one hand, from monks and higher clergy, on the other.⁸⁶ And sometimes he simply listed different categories in apparently random fashion, as in sermon 155 when he declared that his injunctions applied to ‘all of us, brethren, whether clerics or the laity or monks or religious or those in the married state’.⁸⁷ The neat pairings of the Concilia Galliae records are here in utter disarray.

Finally, we should note that our evidence reveals some clergy and ascetics who did not treat ordination or vows as a permanent separation from lay life. Gregory of Tours tells two intriguing stories of high-status clerics who treated their ordination as temporary. In one case an aristocrat who had had himself ordained and tonsured to save his life and even became bishop of Vannes, decided to give it all up once the danger was removed – he ‘renounced his vows, grew his hair again and took charge of both the wife whom he had deserted when he became a religious and his brother’s kingdom’.⁸⁸ Likewise Merovech, a member of the ruling Merovingian dynasty, was tonsured, ordained a priest against his will and packed off to a monastery to prevent him seeking royal power, but afterwards escaped and readopted ‘secular clothing’ (veste saeculari).⁸⁹ Gregory provides a number of examples of forcible ordination or claustration in a monastery as a means of getting rid of a political enemy.⁹⁰ It is unsurprising that the victims of these efforts preferred not to view it as a life sentence. Ecclesiastical legislation also transmitted great anxiety that religious men and, in particular, women, might change their minds and decide to marry.⁹¹ Some of these people may have always intended to do so, with the religious habit serving as a means to dissuade unwanted admirers or potential abductors.⁹² As Peter Hatlie points out, many young people would enter monasteries around the age of ten to receive an education and had an ambiguous status. Some would stay and become monks and nuns, others were there only temporarily, and then re-entered the world.⁹³ In 581–83, the Council of Mâcon dealt at length with the case of Agnes, who had left her monastery and subsequently used her wealth to obstruct any efforts to return her to it.⁹⁴ This fluidity further complicated the neat categories which church council records and other normative texts were seeking to create. Individuals in late antique and early medieval Gaul did not necessarily fit easily into one side of the lay/clerical or secular/religious divisions.

Conversion

The term ‘conversion’ has been used to describe a variety of types of religious change. In the modern era, it is usually used to indicate a change from one set of religious beliefs to another, and this kind of conversion has dominated scholarly discussion of the topic in our period.⁹⁵ In late antique Gaul, however, the concept of conversion was more often used to indicate some kind of especial religious commitment within Christianity, and a separation from secularity. This type of conversion therefore reveals what it meant to people to separate from secularity, how one made such a change, what this involved, and how the converted person signalled their change to the outside world. Four important points emerge from this analysis. First, conversion mattered. It was treated as a moment of great import that should have visible consequences. The transition out of laity or secularity therefore received dramatic treatment in a number of late antique texts, especially hagiographies, which could depict this as an important moment in the character development of their hero-saint. Second, the important change that conversion involved was usually depicted as internal – this mattered far more than technical status. Third, external changes were frequently depicted as following on from this internal conversion, to signify to the world that a change had been made. These most typically involved differences in dress and hairstyle, to mark distinction in physical terms, although it could also mean a change in location, or rejection of family and sexuality. Fourth, however, some converted people (conversi) remained engaged with the world, exercising a kind of informal asceticism and engaging in some external markers of difference, without committing themselves wholly to a life of religion. These conversi were lay but had a complicated relationship with secularity. They therefore represent a particularly interesting group, indirectly challenging any neat clerical categorizations and definitions.

Ordination was treated by some late antique Gallic writers as a moment of conversion, requiring change.⁹⁶ Such a change is detailed in Constantius of Lyon’s Life of Germanus of Auxerre, a particularly dramatic account because the hero was elected bishop directly from a lay state. His ordination was therefore presented as resulting in an immediate conversion: ‘he was suddenly changed in all ways’ (repente mutatur ex omnibus).⁹⁷ This kind of sudden change, however, was relatively unusual. More often, ordination was a planned step and the term ‘conversion’ could refer to the decision to undertake this step, and the period of preparation for it. For example, Faustus of Riez advised Ruricius of Limoges to live a life of prayer and repentance before his ordination, which Ruricius regarded as a proper path towards it.⁹⁸ This kind of conversion was about internal commitment and in some hagiographies it was explicitly privileged as the important moment of change, over and above ordination or monastic profession. In his hagiography of Hilary of Arles, for example, the author Honoratus of Marseilles wrote that: ‘He was consecrated into the priesthood, who had been consecrated a long time ago by the merits of his virtues; … he was made a priest in name, who had already long since been decorated by the insignia of his virtues.’⁹⁹ In Hilary’s own Sermo sancti Honorati, his subject’s conversion from the world was shown as significantly predating his ordination. That served as institutional recognition of his virtue, not a spur to change his life.¹⁰⁰

Conversion could also mean formal entry to a religious community. We find this at the Council of Orléans in 511, which spoke of a monk as having ‘converted’ to a monastery.¹⁰¹ This is also the sense in which the word was used by Jonas in his Vita Columbani, where a virgin named Gibitrude ‘asked to be accepted into [the] convent as a convert from the world (conversa e saeculum)’ and where even an infant could be described as a conversa upon entering the religious community.¹⁰² The author of the Vita Balthildis likewise described Balthild as having a long-standing desire to convert (conversare) to the monastery at Chelles.¹⁰³ Benedict would use the term conversion to mean entry to the monastic life and by the middle ages this was the conventional sense of the term. ‘Conversion’ was not a singular concept in late antiquity – it described various types of changes, but all involved some kind of transition out of secularity and into a life of religious commitment.

Our fullest accounts of conversion as a moment of transition come in Gallic hagiographies. It is true that, as John Kitchen notes, many texts of this period present saints as ‘not made but born’, giving us portraits of men and women who were holy even in childhood or before their birth.¹⁰⁴ Nonetheless, many of these texts still included a conversion moment, the moment when the hero of the story was enabled or emboldened to adopt his or her chosen religious life openly, free of secular constraints. This transition was considered important enough to receive careful dramatic treatment by many Gallic hagiographers. In the Sermo sancti Honorati, for example, Hilary described his subject’s long preparation for baptism and the opposition of his friends and family, which kept him from ‘converting himself’ for so long.¹⁰⁵ Eventually, however, not long after his baptism, he was consumed by the ‘flame of conversion’ and indicated this by cutting his hair and adopting a severe style of dress, a decision that his elder brother soon emulated, likewise ‘called to conversion’.¹⁰⁶ This change, Hilary made clear, involved a rejection of the worldly ambitions and lives that their aristocratic family wished for them, and led them to embark on lives of asceticism. Even Austreberta, who was depicted as destined to the holy life before conception, was still given a conversion moment by the author of her Vita. In her case, she ran away from a planned marriage and threw herself at the feet of a holy man who consecrated her, upon which she took the veil. This did not result in an immediate change of locale (she still lived with her parents for a while), but did amount to a public declaration of her long-standing commitment.¹⁰⁷ This external signalling of her internal commitment was a crucial element in the hagiographic conversion moment. This is what marked the hero as separated from secularity.

The combination of internal decision followed by external markers is very clear in one of the most detailed conversion moment accounts in our period: the description by Venantius Fortunatus of the Frankish queen Radegund’s transition from a secular to a religious life. As in other hagiographies, Radegund was depicted as saintly even before this moment, but her conversion marked her ability to bring her external circumstances into full alignment with her internal state. In Venantius’s account, it was a moment of high drama that received extended and interesting attention.¹⁰⁸ According to the author, it was sparked by the traumatic death of her brother, after which Radegund left her husband the king and went directly to Medard, bishop of Noyon, to whom she begged that she might change her clothes and be consecrated to God. The bishop initially refused to garb her in the clothing of a religious woman (monacha) because he was frightened of what the king might do.¹⁰⁹ Radegund therefore took matters into her own hands and, according to Venantius, ‘sizing up the situation, entered the sacristy, put on monastic garb and proceeded straight to the altar, saying to the blessed Medard: “if you shrink from consecrating me, and fear man more than God, Pastor, He will require his sheep’s soul from your hand”.’ He was thunderstruck by that argument and, ‘laying his hands on her, he consecrated her as a deaconess (diacona)’.¹¹⁰

Radegund did not immediately join a religious community as a result, but did, according to the text, separate herself physically and symbolically from the palace and from her husband. She also lived even more ascetically than before, consuming humble food and drink, grinding flour, serving the poor and tending the sick. Eventually, she enclosed herself in a cell and gathered religious women around her.¹¹¹ Her activities were not greatly changed from her previous condition and Radegund engaged in many of the same kinds of charities and self-abasements. The difference was that she was able to act freely and did not need to hide her austerities. The conversion moment and veiling-consecration ceremony, in other words, enabled her and marked her as outwardly different. She was no longer a ‘secular person’.

Radegund was also given a conversion moment in Baudonivia’s version of her Vita, although she emphasized some slightly different elements. Baudonivia described Radegund’s departure from the palace as a conversion (conversio), noting that ‘moved by divine power, she parted from the earthly king, which her vows required’.¹¹² Medard did not appear in Baudonivia’s account, there was no description of any consecration, nor was there any explanation of when and why she had made these vows. Nonetheless, like Venantius, Baudonivia saw this moment as enabling the queen to live openly as an ascetic – she required the conversion to move from a lay world in which she ‘played the part of a wife’, to an environment where her location and clothing were brought into accord with her inner state.¹¹³

In each of these hagiographic accounts, conversion marked the moment of transition out of secularity and it was envisaged as requiring change: in clothing, in lifestyle and in location. In some conversion stories there was a formal element of consecration ritual, whereas in others this went unstated or was de-emphasized. This points to the important informal element of conversion, as opposed to ordination, as a moment of transition: conversion did not necessarily require the involvement of a church official or holy figure. The converting person could undertake it themselves if they wished. It is striking, indeed, that even in the Radegund story, where her consecration was performed by a bishop, it was Radegund herself who put on monastic clothing and forced his hand.

‘Conversion’ is a useful way to think about these movements out of secularity, because they could take a variety of forms, or have different levels of formality, yet all amounted to an important transition from one category to another. The relative flexibility of conversion as a concept describes well the environment of late antique Gaul, where many ascetics experienced very little central direction and where those who did not join a professed community were seldom subjected to much ecclesiastical oversight.¹¹⁴ Gregory of Tours’ account of Monegund is instructive. Although married, Gregory described her as having a conversion experience after the death of her daughters, following which she decided to live as an ascetic. ‘Despising the vanities of the world and having nothing more to do with her husband, she devoted herself entirely to God.’¹¹⁵ Initially, Monegund shut herself up in a small room at home, engaging in ascetic renunciation and prayer. Only after her family began to advertise and exploit her miraculous powers did she relocate to a small room in or near the basilica of St Martin in Tours, although her formal relationship to the church and its institutions remained entirely unclear. Her husband attempted to force her back home again, but she eventually managed to return, and gathered around her a small community of like-minded women. Monegund has often been considered a ‘nun’.¹¹⁶ However, Gregory did not state that she made a vow, that she took the veil or that she followed any kind of rule. She was not guided by any authority figure, nor sanctioned by any formal ceremony or ritual. Technically, she was lay, but clearly she was not secular, and she was treated by contemporaries as a ‘religious’. Gregory gave her a conversion experience to mark her transition out of secularity, and described her as changing her behaviour as a result. He shows both that the distinction between secular and religious was considered profoundly important, and that the boundary between them could be wholly informal.

The most informal group we need to consider here were those Harry Neff Waldron has termed conversi, and whom he describes as ‘a vague class of laymen living without immediate ecclesiastical supervision while following some religious regimen’.¹¹⁷ This ‘religious regimen’ usually involved some kind of informal asceticism, but did not amount to withdrawal from the world – conversi were characterized, in Waldron’s terms, by ‘an internal resolve to adhere more closely to religion … within a secular environment’.¹¹⁸ This group, in particular, demonstrates that it is more useful to think in terms of a spectrum of religious commitments and behaviours rather than strictly delineated categories.¹¹⁹ These were people who wished to mark their religious commitment in some way, yet were unwilling or unable to commit to it completely. Conversi who still needed to work to sustain themselves may have been in the latter group. Gregory of Tours mentioned in passing two servant women who had made some religious gesture or decision, yet evidently were not able to withdraw from the world completely. One, Marcovefa, was seduced by King Charibert despite the fact that she ‘wore the clothing of a religious’.¹²⁰ On another occasion, Gregory expressed outrage at the accusations against an earlier bishop of Tours levelled by a pregnant washerwoman who ‘in the semblance of religion had changed her clothes’.¹²¹ Others seem not to have wanted to disengage entirely from family. Gregory told several stories about lay couples who lived ascetic lives together, such as the couple in Clermont who secretly agreed to abstain from sex but continued to reside in the world until old age, when they eventually made more formal commitments – he tonsured as a cleric and she ‘putting on religious garments’.¹²² He also gave the example of Simplicianus, who had established a ‘most chaste’ relationship with his wife even before becoming a bishop.¹²³ Others had children together, like Helarius and his wife, but were deemed by Gregory to have established in their house ‘such chastity and complete purity, as much of soul as of body, that no one would presume to engage in adultery there’.¹²⁴ Other conversi were described as leaving their households and residing at or near a church, as Monegund had. Gregory told the story of Guthedrud who, after receiving a cure for her blindness at the church of St Martin in Tours, abandoned her husband and children, changed her clothes and resided at the church.¹²⁵ We are reminded also of Clotild who, after the death of her husband, the Frankish king Clovis, ‘served at the church of St Martin’, and seems to have maintained a full household there.¹²⁶ Sometimes conversi chose to manifest their change of status by undertaking penance voluntarily, a phenomenon which Waldron and Galtier have studied at length.¹²⁷ Kevin Uhalde has also demonstrated how the category of penitents blurred with those in religious orders, and how penance could be an honourable state of religious dedication.¹²⁸

The boundaries between these people and more formal categories of religious were sometimes unclear. The Vita Trudonis, for example, notes that although its subject was a layman, ‘on account of extreme abstinence and great cultivation of religion he appeared a monk’.¹²⁹ The author of the Vita Anstrudis described both the saint’s mother and grandfather as religiosi even though both married, had children and never withdrew from the world.¹³⁰ Sidonius Apollinaris described the widow Eutropia as sancta even though she lived in the world: she earned this appellation through a life of abstention and charity.¹³¹ The ambiguity of such renunciation, in terms of categories, is vividly conveyed in a letter of Sidonius. Upon meeting an acquaintance, Maximus, Sidonius immediately noted the changes in him: ‘his dress, his step, his modest air, his colour and his talk, all had a religious suggestion [religiosus]; moreover, his hair was short, his beard long’ and his household frugal in furnishings and hospitality. Confused, Sidonius needed to ask: was he a monk, a clergyman or a penitent?¹³²

The external markers which each of these types of ‘conversions’ involved were fundamentally similar, accounting for Sidonius’ confusion and reinforcing the idea that the change away from secularity was what mattered first. We have already noted the concern in the Gallic church council records that clergy should be marked as non-lay in their appearance, wearing clothing ‘suitable for religion’ rather than that which indicated secularity.¹³³ Indeed, Bonnie Effros has argued that the authority of clergy depended on appearing as a distinct group.¹³⁴ However, exactly what this clothing looked like is not clear.¹³⁵ Reynolds argues it was based on Roman dress, and Godding maintains that recommended clerical dress was derived from traditional Gallic costume, which may have become increasingly distinctive, as Frankish styles of dress became more common in the general population.¹³⁶ It was perhaps the case that clothing was expected to be simple, inexpensive and undecorated.¹³⁷ It is unclear how distinctive the clergy were, as a result, or how widely followed these prescriptions were.¹³⁸ Dress was not, however, the only visual clerical marker. Godding argues that tonsure also served this purpose perhaps as early as the first half of the sixth century, and that it took on a particular significance in a Frankish context where long hair was a marker either of royalty or of free status in general.¹³⁹ Interestingly, the church councils have relatively little to say on the subject of a distinctive clerical hairstyle, although growing your hair and shaving your beard were both deemed unseemly for clerics in two church council rulings.¹⁴⁰ Gregory of Tours wrote that when Patroclus fled an unwanted marriage, he begged the bishop of Bourges ‘to cut off his hair and admit him into the ranks of the clergy’.¹⁴¹ By contrast, not being able to cut your hair, as a cleric, was a sign that one’s clerical status was suspended. Gregory reported that when bishop Ursicinus of Cahors was excommunicated and forced to undertake penance for three years, he had to refrain from cutting his hair or beard, among other restrictions.¹⁴² Growing your hair also appeared as a sign that someone had left the clergy and returned to a lay life.¹⁴³

Dress and hairstyle therefore seem to be common external markers of a conversion to the clericate. However, there is plenty of evidence that ascetics adopted very similar visual gestures to mark their separation from secularity. According to his hagiographer, the first act of Honoratus, after deciding to live a religious life, was to cut his luxuriant hair, set aside splendid clothing and adopt a stiff cloak.¹⁴⁴ Likewise, when Gallus sought to join a monastery, he asked the abbot first to shave the hair of his head and Gregory praised the hermit Leobardus for imitating a clerical style in refusing to let his hair and beard grow too long.¹⁴⁵ In the Formulae Marculfi, hair cutting was presented interchangeably as the moment of transition into the state of either cleric or monk.¹⁴⁶ In the Vita Geretrudis, Gertrude’s mother cut her daughter’s hair to signal her dedication to a religious life and exemption, therefore, from the interest of predatory men who wished to pull her into ‘the world’ by force.¹⁴⁷ This was followed immediately after by the taking of the veil.¹⁴⁸

Clothing seems to have been especially important for ascetic women.¹⁴⁹ The church council canon recorded in Statuta ecclesiae antiqua 99 urged any religious virgin (sanctimonialis uirgo) who was offering herself up for consecration to dress as was fitting for her profession, while the Council of Orange recommended that religious women wear widow’s garb.¹⁵⁰ Because the commitments of ascetic women were variable and often informal, distinctive clothing was necessary to mark them as no longer available in the sexual or marriage market. This was the point of Gregory’s anecdotes about the serving women in religious clothing: they might be still ‘in the world’ physically, but they were supposed to be marked as separated from it spiritually.¹⁵¹ Venantius presented clothing as central to Radegund’s conversion story. While still living with her husband, Radegund expressed her desire for a religious life by wearing a hair shirt beneath her ‘royal garment’ (veste regia), and refusing a veil ornamented with gold and gems.¹⁵² Once she decided to make the break, however, as we have already noted, she did so by dressing herself in monastic garb. After this, Venantius gave four successive vignettes in which Radegund travelled to a church or monastic cell dressed in royal finery, then divested herself of garments and jewels and donated them to the altar. The ‘change of clothing’ ceremony, in other words, was repeatedly re-enacted, presumably for a variety of audiences.

Some texts downplayed the importance of clothing to a religious life. When Caesaria, abbess of St-Jean, wrote to Radegund, she emphasized that it was not enough to ‘change clothing’, since ‘we can put off worldly clothes and assume religious ones in a minute or an hour’.¹⁵³ The Vitae of Austreberta and Eustadiola both presented their subjects as living religious lives, despite remaining in secular dress.¹⁵⁴ Nonetheless, for both of these women, their moment of freedom from secular ties, and true transition out of secularity, was marked by a change of clothing. For Austreberta, it was specifically the veil that signalled her commitment – she had visions of it around her head while still a child, and after she fled her planned marriage, she took it formally, to mark her consecration. Later on in the story, it was her veil which indicated her sacrosanct status – when threatened with a sword, she drew her veil around her neck, as though challenging her attacker to cut through it.¹⁵⁵

Even for informal ascetics remaining in the world, these same visual markers mattered. Tonsure appears so often as a marker for conversi that the Carolingians eventually had to restrict it to those in clerical or monastic orders, to reduce the resulting confusion of categories.¹⁵⁶ The Council of Agde noted that penitents were expected to mark themselves as a group, with a changed and humiliating clothing and hairstyle.¹⁵⁷ Caesarius even commented in his sermons that this could be a disincentive for some to undertake penance.¹⁵⁸ Waldron argues that by the second half of the sixth century, ‘the change of garments was recognized as the constitutive act of lay conversio for women in Gaul, and it is highly probable that it was not necessary for them to seek ecclesiastical benediction in order to be bound by the obligation of continence while remaining in secular society’.¹⁵⁹ Changing your appearance was central to the act of conversion, and to moving yourself out of secularity, but it also lifted you into a grey zone where your exact status was not necessarily clear to others. All of these converts would have been externally marked as ‘religious’, although they would have had a variety of technical positions and relationships with the world.

Nor was appearance the only thing which clergy, monks, ascetics, informal ascetics and penitents of various stripes had in common. All were increasingly expected to undertake similar renunciations, which separated them from secularity. The most obvious of these was chastity. Ability to marry was a defining characteristic of the laity, who were sometimes termed conjugati in the sources.¹⁶⁰ Renunciation of marriage, or of sex within marriage, was therefore a gesture of separation from the lay world. We have already reviewed the increasingly strict regulations on the continence of higher clerical orders over this period, but these were in many ways a response to the ascetic insistence upon chastity as central to Christian virtue and purity. By renouncing sex, clerics were becoming more like monks. However, chastity was also a standard expectation for penitents and conversi. The first decision made by many saints in their hagiographies, long before they took any more formal steps, was to refuse marriage or sex within marriage. Penitents were also expected to be chaste and councils ruled in consequence that young people, who might struggle to honour this, should not be admitted to formal penance.¹⁶¹ This insistence on chastity once again served to blur boundaries between different types of people who had sought to separate themselves from secularity. As Waldron notes, ‘One distinguishing characteristic of conversio which seems to have been invariable was the practice of total abstinence from sexual intercourse. Because such abstinence was a requisite for clerics and monks also, the practice helped to assimilate converts and penitents to the category of religiosi, and to mark them off from the world while remaining in lay society.’¹⁶²

Conversion mattered to these people. They felt a need to separate themselves from secularity in some visible and dramatic fashion. Some underwent rituals to mark their separation, but many did not. Most spent part or all of their lives continuing to reside in the secular world, even as they strove to distance themselves from it. The vocabulary to describe these people was very imprecise, which itself suggests that the various categories of renunciation were not clearly differentiated by contemporaries.¹⁶³ Did they think of themselves as lay? Did those around them consider them to be lay? The answers to these questions are not clear. What is clear, however, is that the neat canonical equation of laity with secularity disguised and distorted a complex range of behaviours, commitments and identities. Outside the normative texts, late antique authors treated religious and secular categories in a wide variety of ways.

Servants of the church, servants of God

The third angle from which I approach laity, clergy and ascetics in this chapter is that of service. Clergy and ascetics both employed the metaphor of service, to the church or to God, to describe their positions. This displayed an appropriate humility and the inversion of social hierarchies. In doing so, however, they intersected with the large group of lay people who served the church and its representatives in less metaphorical ways: cleaning, providing food, washing linen, lighting lamps and so forth. The concept of service therefore cut across the categories of lay, clerical and ascetic and offered a means for understanding and representing a range of quite different relationships with religious institutions. However, there is also evidence that lay people who served the church in these ways were brought into the ambit of religious life in interesting ways and were considered, as a result, no longer wholly ‘secular’. Service is therefore another way to think about the complications of religious categories in late antique and early medieval Gaul.

The image of the good Christian as a servant of God was founded in biblical passages celebrating Christian inversions and styling the apostles as servants of Jesus.¹⁶⁴ It was a common motif in hagiographies, with saints depicted as embracing the humiliating titles and roles of service to others as part of their self-abnegation. However, this rhetoric of service was about the inversion of hierarchies for symbolic purposes, not the actual destruction of them. For example, both versions of the Vita Radegundis depicted the former queen humbling herself by taking on the role of a servant: cooking, bringing food, cleaning, washing and drawing water.¹⁶⁵ Although born to be a Lady (domina), she became a handmaid of the Lord (ancilla Domini).¹⁶⁶ This chosen servitude, Baudonivia made clear, however, was not to be confused with actual servitude. When the housemaid Vinoberga dared to sit in Radegund’s chair, she was miraculously punished.¹⁶⁷ The service model therefore co-existed with a strong social hierarchy and service was constructed by these authors as a voluntary meritorious act, much like the voluntary poverty of the formerly rich. Those who had no choice in their poverty or service were not supposed to take credit for it.

This model of service to God as a Christian ideal, however, extended far beyond hagiographies. Gallic epitaphs were filled with this language, with deceased individuals described in various ways as a servant of God: famulus dei, famula dei, servus dei, servus christi, ancilla dei, and puella dei.¹⁶⁸ Handley assumes that all people given such appellations in their epitaphs should be categorized as ecclesiastics rather than lay.¹⁶⁹ Certainly the term was sometimes accompanied by indications of a formal religious role, suggesting that the deceased was a member of an ascetic community.¹⁷⁰ For example, the linked epitaphs of Hilaritas and Lea, who were described as servants of God (puella Dei and sacra Deo puella respectively), strongly suggest a religious community context, with the commemorations representing the bonds between members.¹⁷¹ Likewise Dulcitia, the ‘handmaid of God’ (famola dei) who was also described as sanc[timonialis], was most likely a formal ascetic.¹⁷² However, we should be cautious in making this assumption about all instances of these terms. In a number of cases a description of the deceased as a ‘servant’ was not accompanied by any clear indication of ascetic or institutional commitment, and both Adolar Zumkeller and L.J. Van der Loft have argued that in some contexts the term can have a very general meaning of ‘good Christian’.¹⁷³ Van der Loft insists, indeed, that for Augustine, the various kinds of servants of God were originally lay people determined to live the full life of a Christian – he equates them to conversi.¹⁷⁴ For example, the epitaphs of Obtulfus (famolus de[i]) and Claudia (famula d[e]i) are among many which use such appellations without any sign that they lived in formal religious communities.¹⁷⁵ Given the wide range of forms of Christian life which could be lived within the world, we need to be open to the idea that such appellations could apply to lay people. The man described in an inscription from Ligugé as a ‘servant of the Lord Martin’ may have been a monk at a monastery dedicated to Martin, as Coquet argues, but he may also have been a lay person tied to Martin in some relationship of obligation or dependence.¹⁷⁶

Gregory of Tours provides us with some glimpses of what such service relationships may have looked like. He told the story, for example, of Aquilinus, who was attacked by demons and eventually brought to the church in Tours, where he received his cure. From that point, ‘forgetting his parents, he served in that place up to today in return for the favour he received’.¹⁷⁷ A young boy cured of his blindness during the funeral procession for Nicetius of Lyon was subsequently ‘assiduous in his service in the basilica at the tomb of the saint and in lighting lamps’.¹⁷⁸ In another case, Ursulf seems to have served at the church before receiving his cure from muteness, but was perhaps more formally ‘dedicated’ to the service of St Martin afterwards.¹⁷⁹ In this last case, Gregory might be implying that Ursulf was ordained, and it is clear that this did sometimes happen after a cure. A priest named Symon, Gregory recounted in another story, promised that a slave of his would be freed, tonsured and ‘transferred to [the saint’s] service’ if cured of his gout.¹⁸⁰ More often, however, Gregory did not feel compelled to specify what ‘service’ to the church meant. Ordination was clearly not implied when Gregory told the story of a woman who went blind because she baked on the Sabbath. After her cure at Martin’s tomb she ‘vowed … that each month she owed service for one week at the holy church.’¹⁸¹ Her commitment was not constant, but it was still considered permanent and binding. When she missed one week, after having served faithfully for a year, she was punished by being immediately struck blind. As already noted above, in the examples of Guthedrud and Clotild, lay people could ‘serve’ the church in some capacity, without being a cleric or even a dedicated ascetic. Aside from Clotild, most of these cases appear to be from the lower social classes. These people might not have been able to show their gratitude to the saint by building a shrine, dedicating an oratory or granting some land. All they had to offer was their labour. Such was apparently the case with the virgin mentioned in the Vita of Austreberta, who was ‘undeservedly reduced to poverty’ and therefore gave service to the saint by sweeping out her church every Saturday.¹⁸²

This service needs to be understood in the extensive but often invisible context of late antique unfree or barely free service labour.¹⁸³ As major landowners, property holders and members of the elite, churches, as well as monasteries and individual holy men and women, were supported by a vast network of servants and slaves. They appear only occasionally in our sources, intruding themselves upon the clerical mental map of the church and its operations. Most of them were anonymous, like ‘one of the girls’ (una puellarum) filling lamps with oil in the monastery of St Martin, the ‘little girl’ (puellulam) accompanying an old woman lighting lamps in a crypt in Bordeaux or the ‘boy’ (puer) who collected miraculous lamp oil from Martin’s tomb and brought it to Gregory.¹⁸⁴ The Vita Bertilae talked of a crowd of servants of both sexes in the monastery, and the Vita of Aldegund made frequent reference to those who carried messages, lit lamps and candles, and brought water for the sisters.¹⁸⁵ We also hear incidentally about those who served the religious in more individual capacities.¹⁸⁶ It was considered a great hardship for a bishop to be restricted to only one servant, while the Vita Radegundis mentions it as a particular point of sanctity that the former queen would not let her maid serve her.¹⁸⁷ Caesarius’ Regula virginum had to insist that even the abbess should not be able to keep a personal servant, suggesting that this was an expectation for some of the aristocratic women who joined the community.¹⁸⁸ Sometimes, these servants were expected to follow a life of asceticism along with their master or mistress. When she withdrew into a small room, Monegund took her serving girl with her and relied upon this girl to bring her various necessities. When the girl rebelled and departed, stating: ‘I would rather enjoy the world and consume food and drink in abundance’, Monegund nearly starved to death and had to be saved by a miracle.¹⁸⁹ When Caluppa became a recluse he was accompanied by a serving boy who shared his abstinence.¹⁹⁰

Occasionally, these servants could move up to a higher level of status. For example, Gregory wrote of a young boy and girl who were servants of the cathedral in Tours, fell ill with a fever and were cured at Martin’s tomb.¹⁹¹ Gregory viewed this as a sign that they should not remain servants – ‘when news of these things reached us we admitted the boy to this monastery, with a tonsure, and we directed the girl, with changed clothing, to be joined to a community of religious women to serve God’.¹⁹² Others moved up under their own direction, as in the case of Agustus, a servant of Desideratus, bishop of Bourges. He used alms from the pious to build an oratory to St Martin, received a cure from his illness and began a monastic community there, complete with a rule.¹⁹³ Service to the church in one capacity could segue into service in another. This movement, however, was not always smooth. The list of miracles appended to the Vita of Austreberta tells of a girl who had repeatedly sought to become a nun in the convent where she served. After being refused again, she grabbed the pall from the saint’s tomb, declaring she would not let go until she was admitted. The abbess responded by declaring ‘You were born a servant in this monastery and you ought to do servile work as you would have to do outside. Do you dare to imagine that you can make yourself a lady by stealing the corpse of another nun?’¹⁹⁴ Only after the abbess fell gravely ill did she realize her mistake and command that the girl be admitted.

When a servant or slave was cured by the powers of a saint, the church sometimes bought their freedom. Gregory of Tours’ Virtutes sancti Martini gave several accounts of this kind. There was, for example, the woman from Poitiers who came to Martin’s tomb to be healed of a crippled arm, but whose injury returned as soon as she was once again subjected to slavery by her masters. She returned to Tours, but her masters tried to abduct her, at which point they were bought off with a payment from the church’s resources and the woman was given her freedom.¹⁹⁵ Elsewhere, Gregory gave a very brief account of a slave woman who was cured of muteness in the church at Tours and then redeemed to freedom, presumably by church representatives.¹⁹⁶ Another cured slave was freed for half her value.¹⁹⁷ It is likely that such people, indebted to the saint for their cure and their freedom, were expected to ‘serve’ the church in return.¹⁹⁸ Other slaves were manumitted to the church directly, while the Lex Ribuaria makes clear that a slave freed within a church was deemed to be under the protection of that church.¹⁹⁹ Such a freedman was called a tabularius of the church and the law decreed: ‘let one and all descendants of him remain free and be under the church’s protection and let the entire income of [their social] position remain with the church’.²⁰⁰ If he died without heirs, his inheritance would go to the church.²⁰¹ The position of these servants, who kept churches and monasteries functioning, separated them from ordinary secularity. They did not share in the status of the ordained, or the vowed, but they did share in some of their elevation above secularity.

Peter Sarris has drawn attention to the fact that as the church ‘emerged as an increasingly significant landowner from the fourth to the sixth centuries’, it became ever more involved in ‘exploitative, and potentially highly antagonistic, economic and social relations’.²⁰² Secular legislation details for us how numerous and complex were these relationships.²⁰³ ‘Servants of the church’ (servi ecclesiae) appear throughout the secular laws, as a designated category, separate from other servants and slaves. The Leges Alamannorum listed servi and ancillae among the possessions of the church which were not to be stolen and decreed that a freewoman who had been manumitted in the church and afterwards married a slave, was to remain a servant of that church.²⁰⁴ The Lex Ribuaria has much to say about the wergeld (man price) of church servants of various kinds, described with terms such as: homo ecclesiasticus, servus ecclesiasticus, femina ecclesiastica, ancilla ecclesiastica and ancilla tabularii.²⁰⁵ A servant of the church who was killed was compensated for at the same rate as a servant of the king according to the Leges Alamannorum.²⁰⁶ Various other dependants of the church also appear in these laws; some are clearly tenants on church lands, others are dependent in an unspecified way, such as in Formulae Andecauenses twenty-six, which spoke simply of ‘a man of that saint’.²⁰⁷ The special position of ecclesiastical slaves was also laid out in the letter of Clovis to the bishops of Aquitaine.²⁰⁸

The meaning of the terminology is not always clear to us, and was probably anyway imprecise.²⁰⁹ What emerges is that there was a wide range of lay people who were judged, both legally and morally, to be bound to religious institutions. Some were clearly not there voluntarily, as in the case of the burglar who was made to work in the monastery he had robbed until such time as he could pay off his debt.²¹⁰ The laws also suggest, however, that some situations could be more complex than simple exploitation. The Leges Alamannorum ruled on the practice of handing over one’s own person to the church, declaring that a Christian man was permitted to serve God of his own free will.²¹¹ Naturally it was the non-exploitative relationships which more often appeared in the clerical sources. However, lay people could also get something in return for their service – perhaps only payment of their debts, but perhaps a cure, or protection, or support of some kind. The power dynamic was not as wholly one-sided as Sarris suggests.²¹² Even the clerical perspective reveals that some laity could benefit from a relationship with the church which was not wholly on clerical terms.

The other group of lay people with a special status were those enrolled on the matricula (poor list), and who were entitled to financial support from the church. That a matricula was an expected element of a sacred site’s apparatus is supported by Formulae Marculfi 2.1 which provided for the foundation of an oratory and lands supporting twelve paupers. Their status was declared by their title: ‘holy paupers of God’.²¹³ These paupers sometimes resided on site in special accommodation provided by the church and could be quite organized and long term.²¹⁴ Virtutes sancti Martini 3.23 mentioned a mute man on the matricula for six years and those on the matricula appeared in the background of several of Gregory’s miracle stories, as part of the community physically present at the church.²¹⁵ Occasionally, it seems, these paupers were expected to serve the church in some capacity in return for this support – for example Gregory told the story of a dead saint who appeared to one of these poor men in a dream and ordered him to clean an oratory, washing it with water and sprinkling it with herbs.²¹⁶

We come back, therefore, to the concept of service and the very wide range of ways in which lay people could engage in this, form part of the support systems for the church, and themselves benefit from their engagement with it. These people were lay, but they were profoundly attached to or dependent upon the institutions of the church. They may have seemed, to outside observers, indistinguishable from the lower clergy.²¹⁷ For example, when sources refer to ‘custodians’ of tombs, it is seldom clear whether they were lay people or clerics of some kind.²¹⁸ The confusion is not solely ours. Gregory of Tours reported two disputes over the exact status and obligations of people who were within the ambit of the church in some way. In the first, the Frankish king Chilperic attempted to punish the ‘paupers and juniors of Tours cathedral and Saint Martin’s church’ because they had not mustered for his army, as he believed they were obliged to do. Gregory insisted, however, that ‘it was not customary for them to do public service’, presumably because he deemed them exempt, just as the clergy were.²¹⁹ In the second instance, a decree was issued against anyone who had not joined in a military expedition, and the Count of Bourges sent his men into ‘the house of the blessed Martin’ to force the men who resided there to pay the fine. The steward of the house resisted, however, insisting that ‘these are men of Saint Martin’ and that it was not their custom to take part in military actions.²²⁰ Gregory did not explain exactly why they were exempt, or what their status was, but he clearly agreed, since the steward’s argument was subsequently confirmed by a miracle.²²¹ A fourth-century law for the Theodosian Code had decreed that just as clergy were ‘legally free from sordid and onerous services, so were their properties and the people on them’.²²² Gregory apparently felt that this still applied, and that the exemptions of the church extended to those dependent on the church. These were lay people, but they were not wholly secular. Their service to the church had also made them servants of God, separated from secularity to at least some degree.

To quote Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Subjects are constituted discursively, but there are conflicts among discursive systems, contradictions within any one of them, multiple meanings possible for the concepts they deploy.’²²³ Clergy and ascetics sought to define themselves and their religious subjects in opposition to secularity and to laity. However, they did not do so in a constant or coherent fashion. It was not easy to create well-demarcated religious categories in late antique Gaul and various groups defied or disrupted the process of doing so. Moreover, clerical and ascetic ways of thinking about secularity created opportunities for lay people to adopt their own religious behaviours and identities. To categorize people as lay was to create a restrictive language, but it did not determine identity, environment, behaviour or belief. Lay people had the possibility of agency, and I will explore what they may have done with it in the chapters which follow.