Crutched Friars and Croisiers: The Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross in England and France by J. Michael Hayden (review)

The medieval western Church was a great corporate body, larger and more powerful than any European kingdom. The basic division of Church personnel was between the secular priests and the monastic clergy. In this wide-ranging book brimming with new research, Michael Hayden examines a little known group of monastic churchmen: the Crosiers. Hayden focuses on their northwest European heartlands of England and France, and on their medieval heyday, but he enlarges his story to include the origins of the Order, as well as the great changes that they experienced in the early modern and modern periods. He thus begins his story in the thirteenth century in the diocese of Liège (modern Belgium) and ends up in North America in 2010.

Hayden’s first task — not as simple as it might sound — is to define who the Crosiers were. In the twenty-first century Crosiers are canons, men living under the ecclesiastical rule of their Order, The Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross, with their headquarters in Rome (the Crosier Generalate, the publisher of Hayden’s book). In the thirteenth century the definition was not so clear. Hayden therefore devotes the roughly fifty pages of chapter one to establishing the origins and early identity of the Order. The problem for historians is the lack of surviving documentary evidence for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a situation in part created by the fifteenth-century canons’ attempts to reinvent the Order and its past. Hayden does a remarkable job of piecing together the evidence, beginning with a small and mixed religious community of canons, laymen, and laywomen in the early thirteenth century at Clairlieu in the diocese of Liège. This group lived a communal religious life offering hospitality, and the men would probably have preached and heard confession. As the group gradually solidified into a more formal (and male) religious order during the first half of the thirteenth century, they (like many other small religious orders) were not specifically identifiable as friars or canons. They broadly followed Dominican statutes but they did not adopt the strict mendicant ideal of poverty.

When these preacher-canons started setting up new houses, they were given various labels. Arriving in England in the 1240s, they were considered friars. Their Latin names fratres sancte crucis (brethren of the Holy Cross) or fratres cruciferi (Crossed brethren) were presumably based on an image of the cross on their outer apron. This reviewer suggests that Englishmen, pronouncing the Latin cruciferi with a proper British accent (crutchy-furry), naturally called them the Crutched friars. Arriving in France at about the same time, the fratres became the Croizies or the Croisiers — the Crossed canons. The precise title of Hayden’s book then becomes clear: in chapter two he reconstructs the history of the English Crutched friars between the 1240s and 1538, while in chapter three he tackles the rather longer history of the French Croisiers between the 1250s and 1791.

Hayden takes the reader on a priory-by-priory tour of the few English houses (never more than five at any one time), providing much new detail on their dates, layout, and personnel. The English Order came to an end in the 1530s, bowing to the heavy pressure from Henry VIII’s vicar-general, Thomas Cromwell. Hayden rightly emphasizes the positive contributions of priors like William Bowry at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who brought spiritual reform and physical reconstruction, rather than simply recounting the sometimes lurid stories generated by government propaganda of the 1530s (a senior Crutched friar caught in bed with a mistress, blackmail, slander, and so on).

In chapter three, Hayden turns to the Order in France, concentrating on the well documented Paris priory with its valuable relic of the True Cross at the high altar. He...