A CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 83has heen recognised. Certainly in Martin and his successors at Dumio
there existed a line of bishops whose seat of authority was a monas-
tery rather than a city.
Martin, like his namesake of Tours, is often considered to have
been an active opponent of rural paganism. This is quite possibly
true, but it cannot rest, as is usually assumed, upon the evidence of
his book De Correctione Rusticorum (Reforming the Rustics). This took
the form of a letter in reply to a request from Bishop Polemius of
Astorga, which contains a sermon that Martin composed. The work
is largely modelled on a treatise by Augustine, and the gods, or rather
for Martin demons, that it sought to oppose were those of classical
paganism. There are no points of contact with what little is known of
the indigenous pre-Christian cults of rural Galicia. Despite superficial
appearances this is a model composition, rather than a work intended
for practical application.
The peculiarities of Galicia are held to have produced a distinctive
form of monastic regulation, known as 'pactualism'.54 This stems from
the survival of a small number of agreements made between bodies
of monks and their abbots, and take the form of a simple contract by
the former to accept the authority of the latter. They lay down certain
regulations that all agree to follow, as for example the procedures to
be followed should the community be dispersed by war. Although no
manuscript of such agreements survive from before the ninth cen-
tury, it has been argued that the origins of the practice go back to at
least the mid seventh century.
This is quite a reasonable assumption, but the attempt to make of
them a distinctively Galician feature is less seductive. Such pacts are
not incompatible with existing monastic rules of the same period,
such as that of Fructuosus, which are generalised and theoretical.
Pacts could have been employed to supplement regular observance
with special conditions. They are not especially egalitarian or deleter-
ious to the authority of the abbot. Surviving examples from the ninth
and tenth centuries come from Galicia, Castille and the Rioja, but
general problems of the survival of evidence make the lack of such
texts from Leon and even more the Arab-held south less surprising.
'Gallegan pactual monasticism' as distinct from other forms of regu-
lar observance may be a fantasy.
The development of monasticism in seventh century Spain is not
easy to assess. Compared with Gaul in the same period, the sites of
very few monasteries can be recorded with any degree of certainty.