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5 Shepherding the Shepherds The Challenges of Supervising Normandy’s Secular Clergy Eudes’s Register suggests that he did not have much direct contact with ordinary, lay parishioners. Aside from some residents of the city of Rouen who would have heard him preach in the cathedral, most laymen and women in the diocese probably had little familiarity with the archbishop. During his visitations of the parish clergy, Eudes did not question the laypeople about the conduct of their priests or about their own lives. This was in contrast to at least one thirteenth-century archdeacon, who took an active interest in parishioners during his visitations of individual parishes.1 Eudes reached the laypeople of his province indirectly, however, through the parish priests who interacted with parishioners on a daily basis and were charged with the salvation of their souls. Acting as the archbishop’s representative in their respective parishes, the clergy performed five of the seven sacraments: baptism, the Eucharist, penance, marriage, and extreme unction. Only the sacraments of confirmation and holy orders were reserved for the archbishop. The parish clergy included not only rectors and vicars but also large numbers of chaplains, who were not beneficed but were hired for wages by rectors and vicars.2 It was these chaplains, vicars, and rectors who served as the pastoral workforce of the medieval church. And it was the archbishop who supervised them, first ordaining them as priests, then instituting them with their benefices, monitoring the way they conducted themselves in their benefices, and working with them in councils and synods. Celebrating the sacrament of holy orders presented Eudes with his first opportunity to ensure that the right kind of men were ordained and admitted to service in the church. A candidate could be disqualified for failing to meet certain canonical requirements relating to his birth, age, learning, and character.3 In theory, each candidate for the higher orders was also ex- The Challenges of Supervising Normandy’s Secular Clergy 105 pected to show a “title,” or statement of affiliation with a parish. The title was meant to ensure that each ordinand was economically self-sufficient and had a home in which to exercise his ministry. But the titles tended to be formalities; often a letter attesting to a candidate’s good reputation sufficed. Eudes presided over sixty-one ordination ceremonies during the twentyone years covered by the Register. For nineteen of these ceremonies, the Register provides the names of 2,012 ordinands, including not only secular clerics but Augustinian and Premonstratensian canons and Benedictine, Cluniac, and Cistercian monks.4 The large number of clerics ordained at a ceremony (often well over one hundred) would have made it difficult for the archbishop to screen candidates individually beforehand, so Eudes may have left the preordination scrutinies to his archdeacons.5 Yet it is also evident that the archbishop took a personal interest in who was ordained. Eudes performed ordination ceremonies three or four times a year in a variety of locations in his diocese: parish churches, abbeys, the chapter at Les Andelys, the Franciscan and Dominican convents in Rouen, the royal chapel at Pont-de-l’Arche, and the private chapel of Eudes’s archiepiscopal manor in Rouen. He included charts in his Register that listed the names of every cleric he ordained. The names were arranged in columns according to clerical order. Eudes’s secretary updated these lists regularly, crossing out the names of clerics who had resigned, died, or been deprived of their benefices, indicating in the marginalia resignuit, mortuus est, privatus est, or incarceratus est et de maleficiis convictus.6 When he admitted a subdeacon or deacon to a benefice, Eudes required him to swear an oath that he would be ordained to the priesthood within a specified period of time or risk losing the benefice. The ordination lists permitted Eudes to see whether these clerics were advancing as they promised. The patron (or patrons) of a church controlled the church’s buildings, lands, and revenues, including the tithe collected from the parish. In addition , the patron usually held the right of presentation, that is, the right to appoint a church’s rector or priest. The person whom the patron appointed was not automatically instituted but required the approval of the ecclesiastical ordinary, normally the bishop or archbishop. Still, with the initial right to appoint the curate, the patron’s power was vast. The Gregorian reformers of the eleventh...

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