customary taxes while granting them the right to “appoint as sheriff from themselves
whomsoever they may choose, and [they] shall appoint from among themselves as
justice whomsoever they choose to look after the pleas of my crown.”^3 The king’s
law still stood, but it was to be carried out by the Londoners’ officials.
Church Reform and its Aftermath
Disillusioned citizens at Milan denounced their archbishop not only for his tyranny
but also for his impurity; they wanted their pastors to be untainted by sex and by
money. In this they were supported by a new-style papacy, keen on reform in the
church and society. The “Gregorian Reform,” as this movement came to be called,
broke up clerical marriages, unleashed civil war in Germany, changed the procedure
for episcopal elections, and transformed the papacy into a monarchy. It began as a
way to free the church from the world; but in the end the church was deeply
involved in the new world it had helped to create.
THE COMING OF REFORM
Free the church from the world: what could it mean? In 910 the duke and duchess of
Aquitaine founded the monastery of Cluny with some unusual stipulations. They
endowed the monastery with property (normal and essential if it were to survive), but
then they gave it and its worldly possessions to Saints Peter and Paul. In this way
they put control of the monastery into the hands of the two most powerful heavenly
saints. They designated the pope, as the successor of Saint Peter, to be the
monastery’s worldly protector if anyone should bother or threaten it. But even the
pope had no right to infringe on its freedom: “From this day,” the duke wrote,
those same monks there congregated shall be subject neither to our
yoke, nor to that of our relatives, nor to the sway of any earthly power.
And, through God and all his saints, and by the awful day of judgment, I
warn and abjure that no one of the secular princes, no count, no bishop
whatever, not the pontiff of the aforesaid Roman see, shall invade the
property of these servants of God, or alienate it, or diminish it, or
exchange it, or give it as a benefice to any one, or constitute any prelate
over them against their will.^4
