2

Environments

Preaching on the anniversary of a church’s dedication, Caesarius spoke of it as a place which should be shining with cleanliness and light and which was the proper context for religious rituals. He urged his congregants to prepare themselves, physically and spiritually, before entering this sacred space. ‘If it is wicked and disgraceful to approach the altar with dirty hands, how much worse is it to receive the Body and Blood of Christ into a soiled soul?’¹ Caesarius’ sermon traded on his audience’s expectations that a church should be a special environment, but did so in order to subordinate it in the Christian scheme of salvation. Indeed, he systematically undercut the importance of sacred space, insisting that the state of the souls of believers should be more cherished, nurtured and polished than the physical building they inhabited. ‘Today we are celebrating with joy and exultation the feast day of this temple, dearly beloved, but it is we who ought to be the true, living temple of God.’²

A range of rather different attitudes to sacred space emerge in a passage from Gregory of Tours’ miracle stories about Julian of Brioude. Faced with a marauding army, the inhabitants of Brioude had sought refuge, along with their possessions, in the church of their patron saint. However, the soldiers displayed no respect for sacrosanctity – they broke into the church and seized the possessions of the people. In Gregory’s telling, the proper respect for sacred space was promptly reasserted by two different higher authorities. First, King Theuderic sentenced a number of these soldiers to death for their crime. Then, more dramatically, the instigator of the theft was ‘devoured by fire from heaven’, and denied even a proper burial, while his companions were possessed by a demon and ended their lives in various painful deaths.³ The story ended with a legal confirmation of the principles of sacrosanctity that had already been established. Theuderic returned all the goods that had been stolen and ordered that no one was to use violence within seven miles of the church. Gregory made clear that an attack on a church was an act of sacrilege, and it would be punished by both secular justice and divine vengeance. The villagers of Brioude who sheltered in it clearly believed that the church would be a protected place, and King Theuderic reinforced this expectation by outlawing violence in a wide space around it. On the other hand, Gregory’s description of the soldiers pillaging the church in Brioude suggests that at least some people refused to respect a church as sacred space, and treated it as they would any other structure: ripe for the picking in a time of war.

These conflicting attitudes to religious environments had a long history in the Christian tradition.⁴ Many early Christians saw sacred sites as a pagan phenomenon and saw themselves in contrast as part of a ‘de-territorialized’ religion with minimal connections to this world or its physical environment.⁵ Because God was omnipresent, and everything was a part of his creation, everywhere was, at least in potential, equally sacred.⁶ Clerical discomfort with locative approaches to religion can still be felt in Caesarius’ sermon: he would prefer that his congregants think of ‘the holy’ in spiritual rather than physical terms.⁷

On the other hand, from an early point, some members of the Christian community had treated the sites of Jesus’ life and death, the locations of martyrial self-sacrifice, and the tombs of those celebrated figures as places of particular importance. These were locations where the divine was deemed to be more accessible, or where a saint could be most effectively invoked.⁸ By late antiquity, Christians had developed a series of rituals to consecrate a site, while the presence of relics, of a holy person, or of a religious action, was felt to sacralize a location almost automatically.⁹ Markus has argued that this enthusiasm for holy places had its origins with the laity, and that clerical opinion played catch-up.¹⁰ This is difficult to trace in Gaul, given the sources we have, but it is nonetheless clear that lay attitudes to space were important to the clergy, and that they were not always what clerics wanted those attitudes to be. Religious environments served, in late antique Gaul, as sites of distinction between clergy and laity, as places of conflict between them, and as locations of both pious and impious lay behaviour. They were fundamental to the religious worlds of lay people.

The spatial turn has had a profound impact on how historians view the world of late antiquity, and questions around space have important implications for the study of the laity.¹¹ This chapter explores different ways in which religion formed a part of the physical worlds of lay people, both through ideas about sacred space and, where we can access it, lay uses of sacred spaces. Although our evidence is overwhelmingly from non-lay sources, we can still establish how clergy and ascetics expected lay people to interact with religious environments, as well as how they tried to shape those interactions, and we can also occasionally trace lay conceptions of religious spaces as forces against which clergy might have to struggle, or with which they tried to work.

Lay people interacted with religious environments in a multitude of ways. Clergy and ascetics made various attempts to control sacred spaces: determining boundaries, restricting lay access, using buildings, artwork and objects to convey their own particular messages and hierarchies. However, these efforts were only occasionally successful, and there is evidence that some lay Christians resisted or subverted such controls. This chapter therefore begins by exploring the intentions of religious elites, focusing specifically upon the church as a religious environment which was ideally under clerical direction. Churches were sites where the clergy were, or could be, most separated from the laity – they conducted the rituals and they were demarcated in spatial terms. Even churches, however, were difficult to control completely – they could have multiple foci, and needed to serve important purposes other than the enforcement of hierarchy and distinction. The second section of the chapter therefore examines what evidence we have for lay usage of church spaces. This evidence is problematic, because it comes largely from clerical authors who were either endorsing or condemning particular lay behaviours. However, lay people were sufficiently present in these texts to suggest that they interacted with church environments in their own ways, and prioritized different spatial elements than some of the clergy. The third section of the chapter shifts focus to other religious environments, under less clerical direction. Private chapels proliferated in late antique and early medieval Gaul, particularly in the countryside, and were spaces where the clergy were not necessarily in charge. Ecclesiastical authorities recognized these spaces as legitimate, but tried to exert their influence within them as much as they could, to ensure that they did not become wholly lay-controlled. Lay people, meanwhile, also pressured to have access to ascetic sites such as monasteries and appear to have placed great importance on alternative sites of veneration, such as tombs. These provided many opportunities for lay interaction with the divine on their own terms. Finally, this chapter briefly details some of the limited evidence we have for the role of religious objects in the lay experience. This issue has been explored by others in relation to the veneration of relics, but there are also interesting suggestions that religion entered lay experiences of their environments in a number of other material ways as well. Religion formed an important but highly variable element of the lay world.

Churches: clerical intentions

Our knowledge of the exact message which church structures conveyed in Gaul is limited by the nature of our evidence. As Doig puts it, ‘there is precious little hard archaeological evidence giving us insights into the detail of Gallo-Roman ecclesiastical architecture’.¹² Lavan goes further, insisting that ‘it is still not simple to reconstruct church interiors of this period. Regional variations in spatial organization are very great, and our evidence is far too patchy to describe them fully.’¹³ Despite the efforts of many scholars, our archaeological picture of the Gallic religious landscape is extremely scant. We can pinpoint the probable locations of many religious buildings, but know the structures of only some, can securely reconstruct the interior shapes of very few, and can establish a picture of a fully furnished and decorated church for none at all. Specificity is therefore difficult. Nonetheless, we can make some general comments about the probable internal spatial arrangements of Gallic churches and their intended impact.

We saw in the previous chapter how various members of the Gallic clergy attempted to separate themselves from the laity in terms of both behaviour and appearance, as part of an argument for their superiority within a spiritual hierarchy. These ideas also emerged in the organization of religious space.¹⁴ Clergy insisted that churches, as the premier religious environments, should be separated from secularity. Internal church spaces were also ideally organized around a hierarchy of sacredness, radiating out from a central point at the altar, over which clergy presided.¹⁵ This hierarchy of sacredness was articulated in architecture, artwork, furnishings, sound, smell and lighting.¹⁶ Several scholars have produced powerful imaginative reconstructions of the experience of being in a late antique church, emphasizing the otherworldliness of the spaces and the impact upon the faithful of the multiple sensory elements a church could contain.¹⁷ All of this was intended to separate the church as a space from the ordinary secular world and to highlight the position of the clergy as those who presided over it. Churches were designed as statements of power.

The ideal of separation from secularity, and the importance of eliminating the pollution of the world, was articulated in a number of sources.¹⁸ The clergy at the Council of Auxerre refused to let lay people sing songs within a church, even religious ones, and they were prohibited to prepare feasts within the building.¹⁹ In the mid-seventh century, the Council of Chalon extended the prohibition on lay singing during the festivals of martyrs to the enclosures, porticoes and atria around the church.²⁰ Clergy were especially worried that the singing might be obscene, and could involve women. These were taints of secularity which they wished to banish from the church grounds. Law codes reinforced this idea of separation, providing severe penalties for anyone who committed crimes within a church or entered it bearing arms.²¹ The Leges Alamannorum specified that such acts ‘polluted’ (polluit) the church.²² The laws of sanctuary also relied upon the notion that a church was a protected zone and that those within it were therefore temporarily out of the secular world. The altar was the best place for a refugee to seek protection, but not the only ‘safe’ place – in the early fifth century, the protection of the church was extended to fifty steps from the door.²³ Later, the right of sanctuary extended to all the buildings belonging to the church.²⁴ This had the effect of creating a gravitational field of sacredness that radiated out from the centre and still had force at a surprising distance.²⁵ This sacredness did not mean that a church was necessarily a safe zone. Quite aside from the many violations of sanctuary, and the many acts of violence, both of which I will discuss below, churches could also be filled with demons or house evil spirits.²⁶ A church could even become so polluted that Avitus of Vienne worried about whether it could ever be made properly pure again.²⁷ These ideas of sacred space, therefore, were arguments for how a church should be treated. Sacred space was not assured, and clergy insisted that it had to be carefully maintained and worked at by all members of the Christian community.

Dominique Iogna-Prat emphasizes that church architecture developed at least in part in response to the need to differentiate sections of the Christian community in spatial terms. In particular, it served to divide clergy and laity, and men and women, in ways which the house church never could, or perhaps never needed to.²⁸ Although by no means the only church form, the basilica was predominant in Gaul in this period, and the process of adapting this architecture to the needs of Christianity ‘necessitated a strict separation between the area set aside for the altar and priest (presbytery) and the space occupied by the congregation’.²⁹ The transept, a feature of many Gallic churches, may have developed to solve problems of circulation, but served also to focus attention upon a central architectural point, and a concomitant hierarchy.³⁰ Yvon Thébert argues that the basilica structure ‘singles out one place as special, as dominant over other spaces to which participants or spectators are confined … Onlookers are grouped together in the long naves, where they can do nothing but look straight ahead, into the apse.’³¹ This hierarchy, and distinction of clergy from laity, was articulated within the church in other ways as well. As Torjesen notes, the seating for the clergy in the apse ‘signalled that the clergy were rulers over the laity’, while the position of the bishop’s throne, beneath the mosaic of the enthroned Christ, found in many churches, established him as Christ’s representative.³² Within a basilica, there was a clear progression of sacredness up to the culminating point of the altar.³³

The altar, moreover, appears to have been demarcated as a clerical space. Although internal arrangements could vary, lay worshippers generally watched the Eucharistic rites from a distance, and were separated from the altar by some kind of visible marker or barrier.³⁴ In a sermon on the dedication of a church, Avitus of Vienne spoke of an altar, ‘discretely separated from the nave by a slightly elevated platform’.³⁵ Gregory of Tours mentioned railings marking out an area where the clergy stood to sing psalms.³⁶ In 567, a canon from the Council of Tours decreed that ‘the laity should not at all dare to stand at the altar, where the sacred mysteries are celebrated interiorly among the clergy either at vigils or at masses, but that part, which is divided by the chancel facing the altar, should be accessible only to the choirs of clerics singing psalms’.³⁷ This restriction was not absolute, however. The canon went on to state that: ‘For prayer and communication the holy of holies (sancta sanctorum) should be accessible to laity and to women, as is the custom.’³⁸ In other words, the spatial restriction was only particularly strict when the rituals were under way, and it was the rituals, and the clergy who enacted them, which had to be kept apart from secularity most of all.³⁹

Exactly how much the lay people could see of those rites has proved a controversial question. Some scholars have argued for a substantive screen or curtains between the laity and the altar.⁴⁰ Joan Branham and Richard Kieckhefer see some archaeological evidence for screens, but emphasize that these were symbolic demarcations of space, rather than obstacles to vision.⁴¹ It would be misleading to project into the late antique and early medieval periods the far more elaborate screening of later ages, in both the East and West.⁴² Moreover, even in times and places where elaborate screening did exist, it did not necessarily serve as a mechanism of exclusion.⁴³ Nonetheless, it was important to those building and using a church that the most sacred area around the altar be symbolically marked by some kind of barrier. This was part of the physical and rhetorical separation of the laity and their secular world from the clergy and their sacred one.

The intended impact of the spatial arrangements within a church would likely have been bolstered by its decoration and artwork. Architectural decoration often highlighted the area around the sanctuary by the use of columns of different colour or capitals of a particular type. Sometimes images would follow the faithful to the sanctuary as they moved towards it, or would emphasize the way in which divine power emanated from this central point.⁴⁴ In many cases where we can reconstruct the artwork from this period, Christ was represented in the apse, ‘to convince the worshipper that his God was truly present in the sanctuary’.⁴⁵ Indeed, the artwork within churches, now almost wholly lost to us, would have been a central part of the religious experience of the laity standing within them. Raymond Van Dam even argues that church buildings were primarily scaffolding for the paintings, frescoes and inscriptions which conveyed the most important messages to the laity.⁴⁶ This decoration also celebrated particular saints, and these images could become sacred sites in themselves. For example, Gregory of Tours told of the priest Fortunatus, who cured his eyes with oil from a lamp burning beneath a portrait of Saint Martin.⁴⁷ Christian images have been sometimes understood as the ‘Bible of the illiterate’, and Paulinus of Nola argued that they were essential to reach ‘peasant people’ who could not read, but could admire the works of Christ in the pictures around them.⁴⁸ Beat Brenk has expressed scepticism as to the practical persuasive power of these images, and indeed many of them seem to have required prior knowledge or careful interpretation.⁴⁹ However, we can view them as parts of the whole effect created by a Gallic church, an impression that was emotive rather than directly didactic. They provided congregants, as Brenk himself notes, with ‘a glimpse of heaven’.⁵⁰ The artwork served, just as the architecture and internal divisions of the church did, to mark it as a sacred space.

Contemporary clerical accounts of churches emphasized the intended powerful impact of all of these elements upon the faithful. These accounts are sparing in detail, to the frustration of modern scholars, but give a strong impression of sensory impact. In his account of a church in Clermont, Gregory described its fresco as ‘wonderful’ but did not even describe what it depicted, instead emphasizing its ‘many different colours’. It was part of the impressive image evoked by his account of columns of Parian marble and Herclean stone.⁵¹ Similarly, when describing the church built by Namatius in Clermont-Ferrand, Gregory gave its measurements, number of windows, columns and doorways, noted the presence of mosaics and marbles, and gave a general description of its layout, which he said was ‘elegant’. His emphasis, however, was on the impact created by all of these elements together: ‘In it one is conscious of the fear of God and of a great brightness, and those at prayer are often aware of a most sweet and aromatic odour which is being wafted towards them.’⁵² For Avitus of Vienne, the architectural structure of the church and the ornamentation within it worked together to create the overall effect. Imagining the speeches at a church dedication he had been forced to miss, he predicted the speakers praising ‘all parts of the lofty structure’, but especially,

the elegance of its fittings, the sacrifice involved in its great cost, the harmonious proportions of its dimensions, its size, the height of its roof, the firm solidity of its foundation. They would be able to polish with praise the glory of the marble revetments [and] … to praise the daylight collected somehow and enclosed by man’s labour, alive with the light of so many precious shining metals.⁵³

However, this picture of a carefully controlled hierarchical church space, serving clerical needs and conveying clerical messages, is overly simplistic. Basilicas were by no means the only style of church design in this period. In some church layouts, the model was that the faithful were immediately surrounded by a sacred world upon entry – the dome was about spreading attention, not necessarily focusing it on one end of the building.⁵⁴ Moreover, many of the Gallic churches described in our sources, or in the archaeological record, were not large, impressive buildings. They could be squeezed into small areas, or expanded as need required over time into somewhat incoherent, complicated structures.⁵⁵ Churches collapsed, were rebuilt, were restored, were extended, were formed out of pre-existing buildings, and generally followed no consistent pattern of design history.⁵⁶ Artwork and decorations were added at different times by different patrons and did not necessarily form a coherent overall programme. Lay people also paid for churches, for decorations, for additions and objects within them.⁵⁷ Their tastes and preferences inevitably intruded. It is a mistake to imagine churches as sites of controlled clerical message production.

Churches also had to serve needs and priorities other than the enforcement of hierarchy. Mathews emphasizes very strongly how church architecture responded to the needs of liturgy.⁵⁸ The design and organization of space therefore needed to allow for ceremonial entrances, processions, performance of ritual, singing and spectators. John Crook sees lay access to relics as a central element in where and how church buildings were formed, and there is evidence that they were altered to make this access possible, so that the laity were invited into some of the most sacred areas of the church, instead of being excluded.⁵⁹ The importance of access comes across in an anecdote. Two priests, Gregory of Tours recorded, were buried in adjacent sarcophagi, and ‘it was not possible for the sarcophagus [in back] to be honoured because of the sarcophagus that was in front [of it]; that is, no shroud could be unfolded there, and no lamp could be lit’.⁶⁰ In this particular case, the problem was solved through the miraculous relocation of one sarcophagus, but we might suspect that more prosaic solutions were found in other cases.⁶¹ In his account of the Vita of Gregory of Langres, for example, Gregory noted that the bishop had been buried ‘in a corner of the basilica, in a very narrow place, so that the people could not approach him as their devotion demanded’.⁶² The saint’s son and successor therefore built an apse behind the altar, and translated his father’s remains to this new site. In many of Gregory’s miracle stories, he emphasized that lay people tried to get as close as possible to the centre of sacred power. In one case, he observed that people who swore oaths at the tomb of the martyr Pancratius approached ‘all the way to the railings that are beneath the arch where the clerics usually stand and chant the psalms’.⁶³ In order to effect a cure, it might be necessary to kiss or touch the shroud over relics on the altar, or covering a tomb.⁶⁴ Other lay people, Gregory recorded, would lie for a day between the altar and the holy tomb, perhaps trying to maximize the effect from the two centres of radiating sanctity.⁶⁵ Exclusion of the laity, and enforcement of a religious hierarchy, were clearly not the primary spatial considerations in these cases.

Furthermore, as these examples suggest, the central altar was not always the only or even the main focus of lay religious attention within a church. Churches could have multiple foci.⁶⁶ Burial places of saints could be the chief targets of pilgrims or those seeking a cure. The bishop’s seat and the ambo were also both points to which architecture and liturgical movement drew attention.⁶⁷ By the late sixth century, we have the first clear reference to more than one altar within a single church.⁶⁸ By the mid-seventh century, it seems that extra altars inside church buildings were provided with settings and embellishments and served as places of private liturgy, of private prayer and of burial.⁶⁹ The proliferation of relic sites and chapels within churches was an important part of this. Vincent Michel points to the ways in which small chapels created a whole new constellation of focal points for the faithful.⁷⁰ The multiplicity of the church, its places of retreat, and its complex components, was a particular point of praise in Avitus’ dedication sermon.⁷¹ The hierarchy of sacred space within a church could therefore be very far from clear and the laity could not be easily excluded from all of these sacred zones. These additional altars may have been screened, or marked, or they may have been accessible to the laity in ways which the central altar was not. As we have already seen, even the main altar of a church was accessible to the laity outside of services, while lay people may have been able to get direct access to, and clear vision of, the Eucharistic ceremonies when held outdoors, in domestic chapels, and in their own homes.⁷² It would have been very difficult for the clergy to control sacred space under these circumstances. Lay people had many opportunities to make their own uses of it.

Churches: evidence for lay uses

The previous section ended with some evidence that lay people had more access to sacred spaces than the clerical ideal permitted. Our evidence for this still largely comes from clerical and ascetic texts, but even these offer interesting and suggestive accounts of how lay people may have used these religious environments, in ways both endorsed and critiqued by our authors. These can indicate significant gaps between clerical ideals and lay conceptions of sacred space. For example, our sources provide many examples of misbehaviour in churches, and of lay people acting as though they were in a secular environment. Caesarius of Arles complained repeatedly about the behaviour of his congregation in church, lamenting that they chattered among themselves, conducted business and quarrelled.⁷³ Caesarius emphasized that the sacred space made the sin more severe. ‘I ask you brethren, if it is wrong for men to engage in idle conversation outside of church, what kind of a sin do you suppose it is to do so in church?’⁷⁴ Some sat in church when they should be standing.⁷⁵ Others arrived late, or left early, before the mass had even been celebrated.⁷⁶ Caesarius found it necessary to remind his congregants to bow or genuflect to show respect at the appropriate moments, and complained that ‘most of the people frequently remain standing like straight columns’.⁷⁷

Other sources described more extreme lay disrespect for the sacred space. Churches could be the settings for brawls and violence, their sacred objects and decorations were the object of thieves, and clergy could be arrested mid-mass or killed at their altar.⁷⁸ Gregory of Tours recounted an argument which broke out after a man swore an oath at the tomb of Saint Denis and his enemies accused him of perjury: ‘they all drew their swords, rushed at each other and started killing each other in front of the altar … Many received sword-wounds, the holy church was splattered with human blood, the portals were pierced with swords and javelins and weapons were drawn in senseless anger at the very tomb of Saint Denis.’⁷⁹ In another case, Gregory alleged that the bishop Praetextatus was murdered during a church service and ‘as he prayed and gave thanks to God the hands which he stretched out over the altar dripped with blood’.⁸⁰ Gregory milked the contrast between sacred setting and appalling violence for all the pathos it could muster, but if his accounts are even half true, these anecdotes evoke little effective veneration for the sacredness of church space.⁸¹

Neither was sanctuary necessarily respected by those in pursuit of the asylum seeker.⁸² Although Gregory reported miracles indicating the punishment of those who violated sanctuary, his many examples suggest a widespread disregard for the sacredness of the church or its status as a site exempt from secular violence.⁸³ A sermon in the Eusebius Gallicanus collection was less explicit, but likewise urged that Christians respect the right of sanctuary in a church, implying that it was not always respected.⁸⁴ Nor did those seeking sanctuary in the church necessarily treat it as sacred space, even though their action would appear to evoke its power as such. When Leudast sought sanctuary in the church of Hilary in Poitiers, Gregory of Tours claimed that he would emerge from the church periodically to rob people, and ‘was even seen to interfere with women in the porchway of the church’.⁸⁵

One particular extended episode told by Gregory gives a good picture of these complex lay attitudes: the account of the refuge taken by Eberulf in the church of St Martin in Tours. Eberulf, the former treasurer to the Merovingian king Chilperic, had sought sanctuary in the church after falling out with Chilperic’s widow and brother. Gregory set his account of Eberulf’s activities very firmly against the various sacred spaces of the church, and his violation of those spaces both before and after seeking sanctuary therefore served, for Gregory, to explain why Saint Martin had not protected him. Eberulf had frequently attacked or appropriated the church’s property, and ‘often committed manslaughter in the very vestibule which led to the Saint’s tomb, and … behaved in there in a drunken and stupid way’, including attacking a priest who had refused to serve him further wine when already drunk.⁸⁶ During his time in sanctuary, Eberulf took up residence in the sacristy and his retinue would abuse their physical position to enter the church after hours to gape at frescoes and pry at decorations, ‘all of which was a desecration of religious feeling’.⁸⁷ When the clergy tried to secure the doors to prevent this, Eberulf complained that they had cut off his access to the tomb itself, the ultimate site to which he could cling for sanctuary. Indeed, Eberulf declared his intention, if threatened, to hold the altar-cloth with one hand, draw his sword with the other, and kill as many clerics as he could, before being taken. Although Eberulf expected his presence in church to exempt him from secular violence, he still failed, in Gregory’s telling, to give it proper respect as a sacred space. According to Gregory, Claudius, the man sent to drag Eberulf out of the church, had far more fear of the consequences of enacting violence within it.⁸⁸ Supposedly, Claudius questioned a number of people as he approached, to discover whether Martin was likely to enact a miraculous vengeance, requested Martin to keep him alive, and hesitated to perform his deed due to respect for the saint’s powers. However, this did not prevent him from swearing falsely on the bishop’s tomb that he would not harm Eberulf, oaths given ‘in the church itself and in the portico and in the other venerated parts of the vestibule’.⁸⁹ He and Eberulf ‘walked up and down the forecourt of the church-house’, until Eberulf invited Claudius back to his lodging within the church.⁹⁰ There, Claudius’ men graphically murdered him, and his brains were scattered.⁹¹ The appeal to and subsequent violation of sacred space, however, did not end there. Fearing retaliation, Claudius then sought sanctuary in the abbot’s cell, along with the abbot himself, but Eberulf’s men showed no respect for either place or person. They threw spears through the windows, killed Claudius, and left the abbot ‘more dead than alive’.⁹² Finally, Gregory described a blood-soaked mêlée, in which the church’s paupers, resident beggars and local possessed people also joined in, ‘to avenge the violence done to their church’ by enacting still more.⁹³ On the one hand, this story is resonant with the idea that the church should be a sacred space, and this is reflected in the behaviour of the many lay people in the story: Eberulf fled there in order to be safe from the violence of his royal rulers, and the men sent to extract him acted with caution and anxiety about sacrilege. Ultimately, however, the episode ended in a bloodbath enacted in various parts of the church complex. The sacredness of the site was not enough to stay the hands of secular actors when their motivations were strong enough.

This violence was an extreme and unusual example of apparent lay refusal to treat a church differently than they would a secular environment. Even here, however, lay attitudes were presented by Gregory as ambiguous. His point, after all, was the shocking contrast between what should be the case (recognized by the various players) and how they acted regardless. Gregory, and other sources, in fact provide us with extensive evidence suggesting that lay people regarded churches as non-ordinary spaces, even if they did not always treat those spaces as clergy thought they should. Many lay people, for example, resided at churches because they were sites of power, both monetary and thaumaturgical. Pilgrims, cure-seekers and ascetics, all might dwell in parts of the church complex, sometimes on a semi-permanent basis. Porticoes, cloisters and colonnades could be turned into residences with the use of curtains.⁹⁴ Some might even sleep in the church itself, incubating in hope of supernatural assistance.⁹⁵ Chapels within or around the church might also serve as places of retreat – Gillian Mackie speculates that this might have been especially appealing for upper-class pilgrims who wished to pray and contemplate during festivals apart from the noisy and often drunken masses.⁹⁶ On the other hand, major churches were also gathering places, or dumping grounds, for the sick, poor and demonically possessed – people without recourse other than to beg for support from church funds, and from the piety of visitors. This could make the great basilicas, as Peter Brown comments, into grim places: ‘A human refuse tip was piled up against their walls.’⁹⁷ From our literary accounts, it would seem that these people congregated particularly in the atria, porticoes, courtyards and other liminal areas around the church proper. For example, Gregory writes of the paralytic Foedamia, who slept on a couch in the colonnade of the church of Julian in Brioude, and of Anagild, thrown in front of the holy threshold to beg for support from believers, where he remained for a year before receiving his cure.⁹⁸ Other examples tell of possessed or paralysed people who slept in the forecourt of a church, in the courtyard, in a church colonnade or in a wagon in front of the church.⁹⁹

These areas just outside the church appear to have been considered as appropriate sites for conducting business or negotiations. They were zones that were somehow special, and under divine or saintly protection, while still being suitable for certain lay activities such as festivals and commerce.¹⁰⁰ Among the miracles connected to Julian’s tomb, for example, was the case of two men who met in the courtyard of the saint’s church to discuss a disputed loan, and the saint was able to enforce justice by punishing the perjurer.¹⁰¹ Gregory also recounted an anecdote during the festival of Eugenius, when much business apparently took place in the church courtyard, and a girl stole something from a merchant with a stall set up there, only to be miraculously punished.¹⁰² The nature of appropriate activity in this exterior zone, however, could be an apparent source of conflict between lay people and clergy. In one tale, lay people were warned not to eat grapes from a courtyard outside a church of St Martin, because ‘everything in this courtyard is dedicated to him’.¹⁰³ The boundaries between the sacred and the secular in the zone around churches were not necessarily clear, or agreed upon.

Private chapels and other religious spaces

So far, our attention has been focused on urban churches – these appear in our clerical sources as the centre of the religious environment, in part because they were the spaces most directly under clerical control. However, our sources also refer to buildings with names such as sacrarium, oratorium, oraculum, memoria or confessio, words usually translated into English as chapel, oratory or shrine, depending on context.¹⁰⁴ Sometimes these buildings formed parts of a church complex, and were therefore another aspect to the multiple foci of sacredness described in the previous section. Gregory recounted setting up an oratory with relics and an altar in a church storeroom, and described another oratory containing a cell for a recluse in front of a village church.¹⁰⁵ However, oratories could also be found in domestic contexts. It is perhaps not surprising to find an oratory in the bishop’s house in Tours, but there are also multiple examples of oratories in the houses of lay people. Gregory mentioned in passing an oratory in his mother’s house and noted that it contained relics.¹⁰⁶ The home of Nicetius of Lyon’s mother also contained an oratory where the saint performed the divine office.¹⁰⁷ Gibitrude asked her parents to build an oratory for her in their home, so that she could show her Creator her devotion.¹⁰⁸

This kind of domestic devotional space had a long and respectable Christian history. The first Christian churches had been rooms in private houses, and this tradition of private religious space continued after the conversion of Constantine.¹⁰⁹ Even beyond this, moreover, domestic worship continued to be a major feature of the lives of women, who were anyway more confined and oriented to their own homes. Elite women might choose to mark the Sabbath in the respectable privacy of their own home rather than descend to the hurly-burly of the public church. This practice resulted, over time, in the development of domestic chapels, or other rooms set aside for quiet prayer.¹¹⁰ Ascetic women who did not have the option or desire to join a community could practise their privations in their own homes, with or without the support of their families.¹¹¹ These spaces within homes are difficult to identify in the archaeological record, but textual sources suggest their widespread existence.¹¹² Caesarius of Arles strongly encouraged domestic piety – in no way did he regard the lay home as an inappropriate space for religious practices – but this kind of practice could be controversial or bring lay people into conflict with clergy.¹¹³ Meier notes that it was particularly associated with heresy, because it was out of public view, and therefore suspect.¹¹⁴ A sixth-century episcopal letter to some renegade Breton priests expressed great concern that they were conducting services in private houses, noting that this enabled all kinds of irregularities, including the involvement of women in the service.¹¹⁵ Domestic religious spaces were outside the direct control of bishops, and could be a source of some anxiety to them.

This lay independence from episcopal supervision was nowhere more obvious than in the religious spaces of the countryside. Bishops were still largely city-bound in late antiquity and into the early middle ages.¹¹⁶ The religious landscape outside cities, therefore, was much more directly influenced by lay interests, lay money and pre-existing lay social arrangements. Moreover, this religious landscape was not purely Christian. As Béatrice Caseau has noted, by the end of the fifth century, all pagan cult was private and imperial edicts probably had little impact on estate temples or rural house shrines.¹¹⁷ Winrich Löhr has argued for very slow and very gradual ‘Christianization’ of the Western rural world.¹¹⁸ Certainly, the sermons of Caesarius were full of complaints that the countryside was infested with pagan practices – even the landscape itself was viewed as problematic, with rivers, fountains and trees that had long been the site of non-Christian veneration.¹¹⁹ This picture may have been exaggerated by fretful city-bound bishops, but it reflects a very real sense that the countryside was a zone beyond their influence.

In this environment, villas, the aristocracy who built them and the society which formed around them, were of central importance. A number of scholars have noted that late antiquity was a period when villas and villa culture flourished in Gaul.¹²⁰ The imperial government feared that powerful aristocrats were building their own impenetrable spheres of power, perhaps a natural reaction as the central state became weakened. Many villas had at least the potential for self-sufficiency, and the disruptions of the fifth and sixth centuries had little obvious impact on occupation.¹²¹ After this period, however, Percival has traced a change in how villas were used, with evidence of luxury areas converted to practical purposes, signs of dilapidation, partition of rooms and cordoning off of collapsed areas.¹²² Villas continued to function, but by the early middle ages they were no longer sites of aristocratic display – they gathered other residences around them and became the centre of ‘villages’.¹²³ Others became monasteries.¹²⁴ The presence of a chapel in the villa may have actually speeded or eased these changes. They were already religious centres of the rural world.

Sometimes this manifested in a very direct lay control over space, in the phenomenon of the villa-church or oratory.¹²⁵ Kim Bowes suggests that at least some of these villa-churches could have accommodated processions and ‘a surprising degree of ritual sophistication’, although it is unclear what precisely these rituals were.¹²⁶ Some complexes included baptisteries.¹²⁷ These churches can be considered ‘private’ in the sense that they were built and paid for by lay individuals and were designed for the use of their own family, friends and dependants.¹²⁸ These arrangements were not necessarily antagonistic to the institutional church and clerical hierarchy; they simply existed quite separately from them, and often out of their practical power.¹²⁹ Clerics tried to keep them under some kind of supervision, but it is unclear how successful they were. At the Council of Épaone in 517, the assembled clerics determined that ‘the relics of saints shall not be placed in villa oratories, unless perhaps a cleric of some parish happens to be near, who can serve the sacred ashes with frequent psalm-singing’.¹³⁰ Church councils also insisted on the right of bishops to supervise clerical appointments in such chapels.¹³¹ In practice, however, any clergy serving at such establishments did so at the pleasure of the building’s owners, and would have considered themselves under their patronage, perhaps even as part of the family’s retinue. In the mid-seventh century, clerics at the Council of Chalon were still complaining about the independence of villa churches. In particular, they noted that the powerful lay people who controlled these oratories treated them as their own private concerns: ‘they oppose the bishops and do not permit those clerics which served at that oratory to be controlled by the archdeacon’.¹³² The assembled clergy insisted that the ordination of clerics in such places, the structure of the divine office and the dispensation of resources should all be in the purview of the local bishop, but the canon made clear that local landowners did not agree. Yet despite these anxieties, the villa-church or oratory was recognized as legitimate and supported in both legislation and in literary sources. For example, Gregory reported on the existence of an oratory in a villa in the territory of Tours and stated that Martin himself had often prayed in it. If that was not sufficient confirmation of its legitimacy, he followed it up with an anecdote of a bishop who was reluctant to stop and pray in it as he passed, and was miraculously compelled to do so.¹³³

Even outside of villas, Gregory of Tours’ miracula collections suggest that the rural landscape was filled with oratories for saints, where lay people could pay reverence to relics, attend services or seek cures.¹³⁴ One was built by Patroclus, for example, in the village of Néris and furnished by him with appropriate relics.¹³⁵ The church councils confirmed the legitimacy of these establishments, but tried to make sure that they did not become permanent alternatives to the episcopal church. In 506, the Council of Agde decreed that it was legitimate to build a rural oratory and hold masses there, but that the faithful should still travel to the city for major festivals.¹³⁶ For many rural dwellers, the churches of the city were distant monuments, both physically and psychologically. Their religious worlds may have centred on the estate church where they attended services, the monastery down the road or the oratory marking the site of a saint’s former dwelling. These religious spaces were highly amenable to lay construction.

The other religious sites which drew significant lay attention were tombs of saints.¹³⁷ Perhaps building on Roman customs of dining at the gravesites of relatives, feasts at martyrs’ graves became important events in their commemoration, drawing people to pray and to celebrate.¹³⁸ These tombs, often situated outside city walls, ‘emerged as premier staging grounds for many of Christianity’s public spectacles’.¹³⁹ The tombs were often in fact the initial point of Christian veneration – if a cult was sufficiently popular or successful, a church might follow after, on or near that site, or a larger building might be constructed to allow easier access to pilgrims and other visitors.¹⁴⁰ The tomb might then remain as a crypt or vault beneath the church, as an alternative central point from which power radiated.¹⁴¹ In other cases, tombs might be part of freestanding hypogea. Access to the relics could then be organized in other ways, such as through the provision of relic shafts or windows through which people could insert objects, offerings or prayers.¹⁴² The works of Gregory of Tours are filled with tombs, and anecdotes of Christian ritual, prayer or other action taking place at them.¹⁴³ Tombs were often appropriated by the clergy, as Gregory’s stories made clear, but veneration of them could come from lay initiative, and they could be an alternative site for lay religious attention, beyond the episcopal church.

Monasteries were also buildings that received lay religious attention, although these were not spaces to which the laity had an automatic right or expectation of access. Barbara Rosenwein has traced the process by which monastic spaces became increasingly inaccessible to the laity over time, which she links to developing ideas about sacrosanctity and enclosure.¹⁴⁴ The Synod of Auxerre, in the late sixth century, laid out punishments for any abbot who allowed women into a monastery in order to celebrate a festival.¹⁴⁵ Moreover, part of the resistance of bishop Maroveus to Radegund’s acquisition of the relic of the Holy Cross may have been that it would have been inaccessible to most of the local population within the carefully enclosed female monastery at Poitiers, and Saint Romanus supposedly insisted that he be buried outside the monastery he had co-founded, since women would not otherwise be able to visit his tomb.¹⁴⁶ Lay access to monasteries was therefore a problematic issue.

Nonetheless, monasteries were still part of the religious landscape, and they were places to which lay people were apparently drawn, as centres of prayer, and as locations of relics. The Regula Benedicti insisted on the obligation of hospitality, and many late antique monastic communities do seem to have welcomed some lay presence, although the access levels of lay people could vary widely.¹⁴⁷ At Marmoutier and Ligugé, even women appear to have been permitted entry to parts of the monasteries to venerate relics or to pray, and the presence of women at the monastic graves of holy men was attested in Gregory of Tours.¹⁴⁸ Our sources provide examples of lay people using monasteries much as they did churches. In the Vita of Anstrude, for example, we hear of an ill matron and her daughters, who took up residence in a monastery, in hope of a cure.¹⁴⁹ The Vita Romani also spoke of lay people coming to the monastery to be cured, and in the Vita of Lupercinus we hear of lay people seeking food from the monastery in a time of need.¹⁵⁰ In Gregory of Tours’ Vita of Abraham, the forecourt of the monastic church was treated as an appropriate place to offer refreshment to those attending a feast day. Among those reported to be present were the local bishop, duke and a number of citizens.¹⁵¹ The laity sought to enter any site they deemed a source of religious power and were often successful in doing so, despite the barriers.

Religious objects in the environment

Any consideration of religious spaces in late antiquity and the early middle ages should ideally also include some discussion of the objects within those spaces. As the editors of a recent volume on material spatiality have noted, furnishings could alter the hierarchy of a space by controlling access to sacred foci within a church.¹⁵² Objects could therefore play a significant role in the lay experience of particular religious environments. Unfortunately, the furnishings of Gallic churches from this period are not well represented in the archaeological record. We have already noted the scholarly controversy over the possible existence of screens or curtains around the altar – other important features such as the placement of the pulpit and the seating arrangements for clergy and important laity have also proven very difficult to establish with any security.¹⁵³ We can be clearer, however, on the splendour and importance of liturgical vessels within the churches. Caseau’s study of church inventories has revealed quite surprising wealth and opulence in even small and ordinary churches.¹⁵⁴ These objects displayed wealth and power very visibly and seem to have been a favourite donation by the powerful, as well as targets for thieves.¹⁵⁵ Gregory described a Gospel cover, paten and chalice, ‘made from pure gold and precious gems’, donated by the emperor Leo to the church at Lyon.¹⁵⁶ When Childebert attacked Barcelona, he carried off, among other treasures, ‘sixty chalices, fifteen patens and twenty Gospel bindings, all made of pure gold and adorned with precious gems’. These were donated, Gregory asserted, to various churches and monastery chapels in Gaul.¹⁵⁷

Sacredness was not confined simply to religious spaces, or to liturgical objects – any object within churches could be marked with sacred power.¹⁵⁸ Many miracle stories referenced the curative power of objects, or scrapings from large objects, taken from a saint’s tomb.¹⁵⁹ Since sacredness was represented in our sources as able to be spread by touch or ritual, almost any object could be made no longer secular. Bread, blessed by a priest, could save a man from an attack by demons.¹⁶⁰ A belt, once donated to a church, could bring punishment upon a sinner who appropriated it.¹⁶¹ Roses scattered in front of a saint’s tomb could exorcise a demon.¹⁶² A saint’s cloak, made into socks by a disrespectful successor, brought about demonic seizure and death.¹⁶³ A bed, once slept in by a saint, was thereafter a sacred object.¹⁶⁴ In the stories of Gregory of Tours, sacredness attached as strongly to objects as it did to places, and this provided plentiful opportunities for lay interaction and contact with divine power. There was no way that lay people could be excluded or separated from a sacredness so contagious.

We have also already noted how important physical access to relics could be within various sacred spaces. Touching them fulfilled, Crook argues, a ‘mammalian need’, and he emphasizes the lengths to which people would go to achieve this physical contact.¹⁶⁵ This desire extended to wearing relics on one’s person.¹⁶⁶ Some contemporary authors expressed discomfort about this – such objects could seem dangerously similar to phylacteries, which were widely condemned.¹⁶⁷ They also clearly had an apotropaic function.¹⁶⁸ Caesarius of Arles preferred that people made the sign of the cross to ward off evil, and condemned the wearing of sacred writings, but the view of ecclesiastical authorities was far from consistently negative.¹⁶⁹ Gregory’s stories contained many examples of people wearing relics on their person and Gregory himself testified that he did this as a young man.¹⁷⁰ Furthermore, many ordinary objects could be marked with some kind of religious sign, especially crosses. There are crosses on hairpins, rings and spoons and in the form of brooches, other rings with the alpha and omega, belt buckles emblazoned with various Christian markers, or images of Daniel in the lions’ den, pitchers with Gospel scenes and oil lamps with the Chi-Rho.¹⁷¹ It is wholly unclear whether these markings were intended as statements of Christian identity, as reminders of religious centrality or as apotropaic devices.¹⁷² Christian imagery was by no means ubiquitous. Most ordinary objects were not marked as religious, and many ornaments and decorations were produced in pre-Christian styles. Nonetheless, these objects demonstrate the normalization of Christianity within the physical environment of lay people. It was a part of their world, part of their surroundings.

In conclusion, clergy did not and could not control the religious environments of the laity. Lay people interacted with sacredness in private homes and in rural landscapes. They made their own uses of churches, chapels and tombs, and they brought religious imagery into their worlds through a variety of mundane objects. Although we can document various clerical efforts to separate sacred from secular spaces, it was not feasible to exclude lay people from such spaces completely. Within each local material environment, there would have been many opportunities for lay people to engage with the sacred.