Europe in the High Middle Ages by William Chester Jordan

Author:William Chester Jordan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780140166644
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2001-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Society, it must be said, was not supposed to be so complicated. German ministeriales, serfs with the powers and authority of knights! And what of the inmates of the military orders? Were they knights or monks? Merchants who specialized in the exchange of goods rather than in the labour of their own hands, was their activity properly to be considered work at all? Worse still were the moneylenders, a lot of whom were Jews. They, so the indictment ran, exploited the poor, elevated themselves by wealth above productive and honourable groups of men and women, and even sold time, which was a gift of God and ought not to be sold. Lend, Christ had said, hoping for no gain in return (Luke 6:35); yet the deniers of Christ, often with the toleration of Christian princes, were disobeying this command. Apologists had answers for some of these problems (perhaps Christ’s command extended only to Christians lending to Christians), but it was a messy world.

Things were supposed to be simpler. Christendom was supposed to have three orders: those who prayed, those who fought, and those who worked with their hands. Merchants and their commerce, markets and the cacophony of hawkers, street children at play and cut-purses, jongleurs with filthy songs, were an ugly fact of urban life to ecclesiastical conservatives who endorsed the three orders ideal of Christian society. The twelfth century had been a marvellously creative period, even conservatives might have admitted, save for the growth of towns, of their sinful marginal populations, and of a money economy based on filthy lucre. Bernard of Clairvaux condemned Christians who polluted themselves in money traffic as quasi-Jews. But name-calling was hardly an effective response to the complex changes that had taken place over the past hundred years.

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