Society in the 12th and 13th centuries

The Church
It is probable that the Christian Church had a greater hold upon the minds of
men in the Middle Ages than it had ever had before or since. Its primary
function was to lead men to salvations. There were certain acts and
ceremonies –known as sacraments through which God’s grace was imparted by
the church to people an which exerted an incalculable influence over the
society as a whole. But the church touched men’s lives in countless other ways.
The parish church in a small village was a social as well as a religious centre- the
village market might be held in the churchyard, and social life revolved around
the festivals of the Christian year. The painting of religious scenes on the inner
walls of the parish church were vivid works of art. Cathedrals in the towns
embodied the majesty of the church. The church courts dealt not only with
heresy, but with perjury, moral offenses and matrimonial cases, and the
probate of wills and settlement of property. The church was also responsible
for education in its cathedral and monastic schools.

Archbishops, bishops and parish priests formed the three principal ranks of the
secular clergy. The word secular here means that they lived among ordinary
people and did not separate from society like monks and nuns. The bishop
ruled over an area known as the diocese. A group of dioceses made up a
province whose head was the archbishop. In England there were two
provinces: Canterbury and York. The rural parish usually covered the area of a
small village. The priest was often of peasant origin.

During the century following the Norman Conquest there was a remarkable
revival of monasticism in England. The monastic ideal of rejection of the world,
of devotion to religion in the regulated life of the monastery, caught the
imagination of the people. Because monks and nuns lived according to rules,
they were called members of the regular clergy. (‘Regular’ from the Latin word
‘regula’, which means rule). The monks also became the custodians of learning,
copying and illuminating manuscripts- they also kept chronicles, like the Anglo-
Saxon chronicle in Alfred’s time, and taught in monastic schools. The
movement declined somewhat in the 13th century, for it was almost impossible
to maintain the high ideals of monastic life after a monastery had become
wealthy- thus monasteries lost much of their early religious fervour.

The friars, who represented the last great movement of reform within the
medieval church, were perhaps the most vital element in English religious life
during the 13th century. Rather than separate themselves in cloistered abbeys,
they lived in the world in order to convert sinners, rejecting all kinds of worldly
possessions. The Franciscans (founded by St Francis of Assisi, modern Italy) and
the Dominicans (founded by St Dominic from Castile, modern Spain) became
popular orders. In the course of time, their movements became orders with
their own monasteries like those of the ordinary monks.

Intellectual Awakening and the rise of universities.

In the 12th and 13th centuries a remarkable awakening of intellectual life took
place in Europe, which at the beginning centred in the schools connected with
the cathedrals of northern France. It was cosmopolitan in nature since people
from all over the continent travelled to France to meet the scholars, who spoke
Latin, the language of the Church and of the new scholarship. Its first
expression was an intense interest in the classical literature of Rome, and then
in Greek philosophy, which led to the recovery of the works of Aristotle. About
the middle of the 12th century, the interest in philosophy and medieval
theology developed into a type of learning known as scholasticism, an attempt
to apply reason and deductive logic to the study of theology, and to seek the
solution of theological questions through logical argumentation.

The study of the works of Aristotle required knowledge of Greek, which was
almost unknown among the scholars of western Europe. Hence the writings of
Aristotle and other Greek philosophers and scientists had to be translated into
Latin. There was some translation from Greek, but a much larger portion of the
writings of the Greeks made their way into western Europe through the Arabs,
who had fallen as conquerors upon Asia minor, southern Italy, Sicily, the old
Roman Africa and had reached Spain in the 7th and 8th centuries. They had
studied Greek civilization, had translated Greek texts into Arabic and, especially
in mathematics and medicine, had developed Greek thought. The Crusades
made this contact with the Arab world possible. It was by contact with Arab
sources in the conquered territories mentioned above that western scholars
learnt of Eastern science.

Interest in Roman antiquity in the 12th century included a study of the Roman
law, which in turn produced a notable advance in the development of the
canon law of the church. In England the spirit of the Roman law, rather than its
substance, influenced the development of the common law, which began
during the reign of Henry II (see the notes on Norman Kings).

The rise of universities in the 12th and 13th centuries was the result of the new
learning that was coming into western Europe, for there was now much more
to teach and many more men who were eager to acquire knowledge. But
universities grew slowly and imperceptibly. At first, these schools consisted of
teachers and students with few, if any, buildings, with lessons being delivered
in the open air. When either the teachers or students organized a medieval
association called a guild (in Spanish, gremio medieval) for the purpose of
administering their academic affairs, a university came into existence. In the
13th century a university had distinct characteristics. It contained a
cosmopolitan student body drawn from a number of countries -it was a
studium generale, a general resort of students. This was the term generally
employed to call the guild of teachers and students, for the word universitas
meant the total membership of any guild and might apply equally to guilds of
carpenters or students. The faculty of teachers held the degree of MA.
Furthermore, a university contained at least one of the higher faculties of law,
medicine or theology. As it has been mentioned above, the masters or
students, or both, had formed a guild. And finally, the university had obtained
from kings or from the papacy a charter or formal official document conferring
upon it various immunities and privileges of self-government, such as the right
to collect their own taxes.

The first English university developed at Oxford, a very small village back then.
Several Oxford schools turned into a stadium generale when Henry II (engaged
in his quarrel with Becket, who was being protected by the King of France while
he was on exile on the continent) ordered that all the English students at Paris
should return to England and a number of them presumably went to Oxford.
Since then, the Oxford schools developed steadily. In 1209, however, a serious
incident occurred when one of the students killed a woman. The townspeople
arrested several of his fellow students and hanged two of them. Lectures were
at once suspended, and students and faculties dispersed, not to reassemble
for some five years. But a segment of the academic community migrated to
Cambridge, which by the end of the 13th century was still smaller that Oxford,
and grew more slowly.

A unique feature of English universities was the system of colleges which

developed in both places. Originally, the colleges were hostles where the
students could live under some supervision. Every day they used to go where
their teachers delivered their classes. For some reason, the teachers
themselves began to go to the ‘hostles’ to meet their students, and the
stadium generale developed there. This means that the colleges in the ‘hostles’
grew independently one from the other, leading to the fact that the same
subjects could be taught in different colleges at the same time.
Social and economic life
During the 12th and 13th centuries, England became more populous and
wealthy. During this period there was no plague that could cut down
population and the economic development of the country lessened the danger
of famine. A large part of the new wealth was in the hands of a few men at the
top of society –the members of the nobility and the high clergy, both secular
and regular. They were the agricultural magnates of the kingdom. A big
landlord probably used the manor surrounding his castle or manor house to
supply his table, while his more distant manors produced grain, meat or wool
that could be sold. Thus agriculture expanded greatly. Below the magnates a
much larger number of knights and country gentlemen also shared in the rising
prosperity. Meanwhile, a peasant’s status and obligations remained much the
same as they had been in the years following the Norman Conquest. The village
was likely to be larger than in the past. The basic division among the peasants
was that between the few freemen that exited, who were the virtual owners of
their land, and the largest number of peasants, who were unfree villeins, or
serfs, holding land by servile tenure. (See the notes on the manorial system).

There was great development of commerce in medieval England. On the local

level, weekly or monthly markets were held in towns and many villages. We
must not forget that the typical way of exchanging products at those levels was
basically barter, e.i. exchanging goods without the use of any type of money.
Far more elaborate were the annual fairs held by a lord or a high churchman
under a royal grant, which attracted merchants from all over the country and
sometimes from abroad. It is evident that foreign commerce existed. As far as
England is concerned, her main export was wool, which was produced in
enormous quantities.

The leading merchants of a town composed a guild, one of several associations

in the Middle Ages created to defend common interests. (See the section on
the rise of universities for details about other types of guilds). The guild
regulated trade in the town, and protected the merchants and the buyers
against excessive competition: this means selling at a just price to the
consumer and protecting the local merchants from outside competition. Guild
economy policy opposed open market and free competition.

Towns, of course, were also industrial centres, and craftsmen formed

themselves into guilds to protect their own interests and monopolize their
craft. These guilds regulated the industrial process. They set standards for the
quality of the goods produced, regulated hours of work, and fixed prices and
wages to some extent. For example, there were guilds of carpenters, builders,
manufacturers of woollen cloth and so no.
The desire to ensure high standards of competence in trade and industry led to
a system of apprenticeship, which generally lasted about seven years. During
this period children and young people learned about a particular activity. When
the seven years were over, the apprentice was eligible to become a master,
open his own shop and become a member of the guild. However, it was
sometimes difficult to be admitted as a new member, and the apprentice often
remained as an employee working for wages. It was the masters who ran the
guilds and who were in control of the government of the towns. These masters
belonged to the highest social class in their town, as social classes were
determined by the possessions people had, such as their houses, workshops,
etc.

By the end of the 13th century, there were more than one hundred towns or
boroughs in England, London being by far the largest. They were becoming an
important element in medieval society, although life was basically rural with
agriculture as the most significant economic activity of those times. A village
became a borough when the lord permitted its inhabitants to hold their land by
burgage tenure, which allowed them to pay rent instead of the normal
obligations of the manor (such as giving the lord part of their produce). This
was possible when the village for some reason became a centre of commerce
alongside its traditional agricultural activities. A market that attracted
merchants and buyers from outside the manor sometimes developed when the
village was located on a river or on the coast, which enabled merchant ships to
reach the manor with their products. In this way, the manor became a town,
and as the town grew in size and wealth, it became a self-conscious community
with a corporate spirit, and its increased wealth permitted its inhabitants to
bargain with their lord or with the King for charters granting them varying
degrees of self-government and independence. The towns obtained various
privileges such as the right to collect their own taxes and be free from
interference by the sheriff in its internal affairs. Towns also wished to receive
and execute the King’s writs (written orders) and to hold a court. In a simple
form of government, the burgeses (the people who lived in the town or
borough and who were freemen) met in the borough court and elected a
mayor, who was assisted by a council in the largest towns. By the close of the
13th century, many towns had lost their democratic features and were
governed by oligarchies over which the burgesses had little control.

Adapted from A History of England by D. H. Willson