station wedded these reclaimed harlots in coarse robes. which cost the meanest price. These inauspicious marriages ended but ill. The passion of self-sacrifice soon burned out in the youths; they grew weary, and deserted their once contaminated wives. The passion of virtue with the women, too, died away; they fell back to their old courses. Bishop Hildebert, on his return from Rome, was met by no procession, no rejoicing at the gates. The people mocked his blessing: "We have a father, a bishop, far above thee in dignity, wisdom, and holiness." The mild Bishop bore the affront: he forced an interview on Henry, put him under examination. Henry knew not how-probably refused to repeat the Morning Hymn. The Bishop declared him a poor ignorant man, but took no harsher measure than expulsion from his diocese. A.D. 1134. Henry retired to the South of France, and joined Peter de Brueys as his scholar or fellow apostle. After Brueys was burned, he retired into Gascony, fell into the hands of the Archbishop of Arles, and was sent to the Council of Pisa. Innocent II. condemned him to silence, and placed him under the custody of St. Bernard. He escaped and returned to Languedoc. Desertion of churches, total contempt of the clergy, followed the eloquent heresiarch wherever he went. The Cardinal Bishop of Ostia was sent by Eugene III. to subdue the revolt; the Cardinal Alberic demanded the aid of no less a colleague than St. Bernard: "Henry is an antagonist who can only be put down by the conqueror of Abélard and of Arnold of Brescia." Bernard's progress might seem an uncontested ovation: from all quarters crowds gathered; Toulouse opened her gates; he is said by his powerful discourses to have disinfected the whole city from heresy. He found, so he writes, "the churches without people, the people without priests, the priests without respect, the Christians without Christ, the churches are deemed synagogues, the holy places of God denied to be holy, the sacraments are no longer sacred, the holy days without their solemnities." Bernard left Toulouse, CHAP. VIII. HENRY THE DEACON. 179 as he hoped, as his admirers boasted, restored to peace and orthodoxy.m Yet Bernard's victory was but seeming or but transient. Peter de Brueys and Henry the Deacon had only sowed the dragon seed of worse heresies, which sprung up with astonishing rapidity. Before fifty years had passed the whole South of France was swarming with Manicheans, who took their name from the centre of their influence, the city of Albi. Toulouse is become, in the words of its delegated visitors (the Cardinal of S. Chrysogonus, the Abbot of Clairvaux, the Bishops of Poitiers and Bath) the abomination of desolation; the heretics have the chief power over the people, they lord it among the clergy: as the people, so the priest." Tanchelin. The Anti-Sacerdotalists had at the same time, or even earlier, found in the north a formidable head in Tanchelin of Antwerp a layman, with his disciple, a renegade priest named Erwacher. Tanchelin appears more like one of the later German Anabaptists. He rejected Pope, archbishops, bishops, the whole priesthood. His sect was the one true Church. The Sacraments (he denied transubstantiation) depended for their validity on the holiness of him that administered them. He declared war against tithes and the possessions of the Church. He was encircled by a body-guard of three thousand armed men, he was worshipped by the people as an angel, or something higher: they drank the water in which he had bathed. He is accused of the grossest licence. A woman within the third degree of relationship was his concubine. Tanchelin began his career in the cities on the coast of Flanders; he then fixed himself at Utrecht. The bishops and clergy raised a cry of terror. Yet Tanchelin, with the renegade Erwacher, dared to visit Rome. On his return he was seized and imprisoned in Cologne by the Archbishop, escaped, first fixed himself m Epist. 241, vol. i. p. 237. "Ita hæretici principabantur in populo, dominabantur in clero; eo quod populus, sic sacerdos," et seqq. Epist. Henric. Abbat. Clairv. apud Mansi, A.D. 1178; and in Maitland, Facts and Documents. From 1122 to 1125. Script. apud Bouquet, xiii. 108, et seqq. Epist. Frag. Ecclesiæ. Sigebert, apud Pertz, viii. Vita Norberti, apud Bolland, Jun. 1. Hahn, p. 458. in Bruges, finally in Antwerp, where he ruled with the power and state of a king. He was at length struck dead by a priest, but his followers survived; no less a man than St. Norbert, the friend, almost the equal of St. Bernard, was compelled to accept the bishopric of Utrecht, to quell the brooding and dangerous revolt. Another wild teacher, Eudo de Stella, an illiterate rustic, half revolutionised Bretagne. He gave himself out "as he that should come," was followed by multitudes, and assumed almost kingly power. He was with difficulty seized; his life was spared; he was cast into prison under the charge of Suger, Abbot of St. Denys. He died in prison; his only known tenet is implacable hostility to churches and monasteries.P These, though the most famous, or best recorded AntiSacerdotalists, who called forth the Bernards and the Norberts to subdue them, were not the only teachers of these rebellious doctrines. In many other cities nothing is known, but that fires were kindled and heretics burned, in Oxford, in Rheims, in Arras, in Besançon, in Cologne, in, Trèves, in Vezelay. In this latter stately monastery, probably a year or two before the excommunication of King Henry by Becket, that awful triumph of the sacerdotal power, the Archbishops of Lyons and Narbonne, the Bishops of Nevers and Laon, and many abbots and great theologians, sate in solemn judgment on some, it should seem, poor ignorant men, called Publicans. They denied all but God; they absolutely rejected all the Sacraments, infant baptism, the Eucharist, the sign of the cross, holy water, the efficacy of tithes and oblations, marriages, monkhood, the power and functions of the priesthood. Two were disposed to recant. They were examined at the solemn festival of Easter, article by article; they could not explain their own tenets. They were allowed the water ordeal. One passed through safe; the other case was P Gul. Neubrig. sub ann. 1197. Continuat. Sigebert, apud Pertz, viii. 9 Some of these may have been Manicheans, or held opinions bordering on Manicheanism. On Oxford, Gul. Neubrig. ii. c. 13. Arras, in 1183, perhaps 1083. Besançon, 1200. Cæsar Heister bac, v. 15. Cologne, God. Monach. ad CHAP. VIII. THE WALDENSES. 181 more doubtful, the man was plunged again, and condemned, to the general satisfaction. But the Abbot having some doubt, he was put to a more merciful death. Appeal was made to the whole assembly: "What shall be done with the rest?" "Let them be burned! let them be burned!" And burned they were, to the number of seven, in the valley of Ecouan." Sacerdotalists. II. In Northern France these adversaries of the Church seem to have been less inclined to speculative Biblical Antithan to practical innovations. It was an hostility to the clergy, and to all those ritual and sacramental institutions in which dwelt the power and authority of the clergy. In Southern France Manicheism almost suddenly swallowed up the followers of the simple AntiSacerdotalists, Peter de Brueys and Henry the Deacon. In Italy, perhaps, the political element, introduced by Arnold of Brescia, mingled with the Paulician Manicheism which stole in after the Crusades, and appeared almost simultaneously in many parts of Europe. In the valleys of the Alps it was a pure religious movement. Peter Waldo was the St. Francis of heresy, the Poor Men of Lyons were the Minorites-the lowest of the low. Some of them resembled more the later Fraticelli in their levelling doctrines, in their assertion of the kingdom of the Spirit; in some respects the wilder Anabaptists of the Church of Rome. The simplicity of the Alpine peasants was naturally averse to the wealth of the monastic establishments which began to arise among them; there might survive some vague tradition of the iconoclasm and holiness of Claudius of Turin, or of the later residence of Arnold of Brescia in Zurich. But whether the spiritual parents, the brethren, the offspring of • Historia Vezeliac. sub fine, in Guizot, Collection des Mémoires, vii. p. 335. All these burnings were by the civil power, to which the heretics, having been excommunicated, were given up. Yet Eichhorn observes that neither the law of the Church nor the Roman law had any general penalty against heretics beyond confiscation of goods. "Obschon weder ein Kirchengesetz noch das Rö Peter Waldo t Peter Waldo. mische Recht etwas anderes als confiscation ihres vermögens allgemein gebot." Two statutes of Frederick II. (A.D. 1222) made the punishment, which had become practice, law. "Welche allgemeine Praxis wurden, in Verbrennen bestehen sollte."-T. ii. p. 521. The date of Waldo is doubtful from 1160 to 1170. Stephanus de Borbone de VII. Donis Spiritus, iv. c. 30, professes whether his teachers or his disciples-these blameless sectaries, in their retired valleys of Piedmont, clung with unconquerable fidelity to their purer, less imaginative faith. But whencesoever this humbler Biblical Christianity derived its origin, it received a powerful impulse from Peter Waldo. Waldo was a rich merchant of Lyons; his religious impressions, naturally strong, were quickened by one of those appalling incidents which often work so lastingly on the life of religious men. In a meeting for devotion a man fell dead, some say struck by lightning. From that time religion was the sole thought of Peter. He dedicated himself to poverty and the instruction of the people." His lavish alms gathered the poor around him in grateful devotion. He was by no means learned, but he paid a poor scholar to translate the Gospels and some other books of Scripture. Another grammarian rendered into his native tongue some selected sentences from the Fathers. Disciples gathered around him; he sent them, after the manner of the seventy, two by two, into the neighbouring villages to preach the Gospel. They called themselves the Humbled; others called them the Poor Men of Lyons. Two of Waldo's followers found their way to Rome. They presented a book, written in the Gallo-Roman language; it contained a text and a gloss on the Psalter, and several books of the Old and New Testament. The to have heard the origin of the sect from persons living at the time. The passage is quoted in the Dissertation of Recchinius, prefixed to Moneta, c. xxxvii. The two famous lines in the Noble Leyczion appear to assign a proximate date to the Biblical Anti-Sacerdotalists of the Valleys: "Ben ha mil e cent anez compli entierament, Que fo scripta l'ora, car son al denier temp." I see по reason for, every reason against, reckoning these 1100 years from the delivery of the Apocalypse, a critical question far beyond the age, or from any period but the ordinary date of our Lord. All it seems to assert is that the 1100 years are fully passed, and that the "latter days are begun. This in the usual religious language would admit, at least, any part of the twelfth century. The authenticity of these lines is asserted and argued to my mind in a conclusive manner by the highest authority, Mons. Raynouard, Poésies des Troubadours, vol. ii. p. cxlii. Compare, for similar dates especially, Dante Paradiso, xi.; Gilly, Introduction, p. xxxviii. " On Waldo, Reinerius Saccho, c. iv. v.; Alanus de Insulis; Stephan. de Borbone de VII. Don. Spirit. S. * Chronicle of Laon, apud Bouquet, xiii.; Gilly, p. xciv. The name Insabatati is derived by Spanheim (Hist. Christ. Sæc. xii.) from their religious observance of the Sabbath, in opposition to the holidays of the Church. It is more probably from the word sabot, a wooden shoe. |