Conclusion

Gratian, writing in the mid-twelfth century, divided the church into two kinds of Christians:

There is one kind which, being devoted to God’s business and given up to contemplation and prayer, should refrain from all activity in worldly affairs. These are the clergy, and those devoted to God, that is the conversi … There is also another kind of Christian, laymen. For laos means people. These are allowed to possess temporal goods … They are allowed to take a wife, to till land, to judge between man and man, to conduct lawsuits, to place obligations upon the altar, to pay tithes, and thus can be saved if they avoid sin by well-doing.¹

This division was a clear and hierarchical one. Some late antique and early medieval clerics and ascetics also strove to define and differentiate themselves from the laity in this way and this book has analysed a range of ways they did so. They established a rhetorical separation of Christendom into ‘cleric and lay’ or ‘religious and secular’, and imposed different requirements, punishments and rewards upon each group. They divided spaces into sacred and secular and tried to control access to and use of these spaces accordingly. They conducted rituals from which the laity were increasingly excluded and argued that lay people could not be expected to meet the same levels of pious behaviour and religious knowledge as clerics and ascetics should. All of these actions were movements towards the world that Gratian described.

Even in the high middle ages, however, the division was not as neat as Gratian presents it, and in late antiquity and the early middle ages it was even less so.² The ambiguous situation of minor clerics, ascetics and lay conversi complicated any efforts to create a neat ‘dyad’.³ Clerical and ascetic writers acknowledged that it was possible to live a lay life without being given over to ‘secularity’, and set out models of how to do so. Some preachers devoted considerable effort to making sure lay people knew correct doctrine and could interpret the scriptures. Gallic lay people, meanwhile, still had significant agency in determining their own position within the church and their relationship with its institutions. They made their own uses of religious buildings and sacred objects, laid their own claims to urban and rural landscapes, and interpreted and used rituals to their own ends. They celebrated their own ideals of good behaviour and raised their own questions about Christian teachings. Sometimes they acted in defiance or subversion of clerical expectations; other times they absorbed and appropriated what the church gave them.⁴ These were important counter-tendencies to division and hierarchy-formation. The late antique Gallic church was not a monolith and it was not moving in one clear direction.

This book has taken an optimistic approach to the history of the Gallic laity. It is optimistic that we can understand or glimpse some details of their religious worlds, enough to ensure that they are not consigned to complete silence. It is also optimistic that the laity remained active and important in the Gallic church throughout late antiquity and the early middle ages. The scholarly construction of a late antique ‘negative trajectory’, which focuses on increasing separation between clergy and laity, and on lay exclusion from sacred spaces and acts, does not supply the whole picture. Instead, the image we get is complicated and messy, but full of vitality. The religious worlds of the laity were multiple and diverse, regionally specific, but also interacting with long-established traditions of belief and behaviour. This made lay people very difficult to control. Much greater efforts to exert such control were made by both the church and the state in the age of the Carolingians and after, but they only ever had limited success. The laity would continue to have a role in shaping their own religious worlds.