Diana Wood

Medieval Economic Thought

The Church dominated all aspects of medieval life. It controlled education, and therefore the shaping of attitudes. In formal terms this meant first the monasteries and cathedral schools, and later the universities. Less formally, education took place through pastoral instruction in pulpit and confessional. In towns and villages, fairs and markets, the Church controlled the whole rhythm of life. Time was measured by church bells, the calendar by the liturgical year, and leisure by holy days. But it had a more personal and direct hold over the economic life of Christians. The pope, as the head of the Christian body, claimed to be the universal judge of all mankind. This meant that everyone was subject to the law of the Church, canon law, and the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. The legal competence of the 'courts Christian' was enormous and included most economic matters. The Church claimed jurisdiction over all cases involving the clergy, even those in the most minor orders. It judged all matters which involved an oath, which meant matrimonial and probate matters, invariably concerned with property, and a whole host of other things, including commercial contracts. In England offences committed on Sundays or major feast or fast days might also be heard in the church courts, on the basis that the defendant should have been in church at the time. In 1488, for example, Thomas Samson of St Peter's in Thanet found himself before a Canterbury church court for looting a shipwreck, simply because he had chosen All Saints' Day on which to do it. Lucas Pancake of Otterden was accused of shaving his beard on a Sunday. Quite apart from the church courts, a priest might be used as arbiter in a secular dispute, perhaps in the market-place, as a 'good' man. Ultimately the Church had jurisdiction over all sin. Even if a particular crime did not come before it on earth, it still controlled the inner forum of conscience. And if it could not judge publicly in this world, it could and did judge in the next. Depictions of the Last Judgement, with St Michael weighing souls in the balance, as in a commercial transaction, featured prominently on Doom paintings above the chancel arch of medieval churches as a potent reminder.

The aim of the Christian society was salvation-union with God in Heaven-but it still had to exist on earth and therefore to concern itself with material matters. The Church was the largest landowner in Europe, much of the land being concentrated in the hands of bishops and abbots. Such men had to be responsible for the running of often vast estates, to say nothing of the responsibility of the pope himself for papal territories. Monks would be involved in the affairs of town and market-place through their lordship of boroughs, and in the country the parish priest would participate in the local economy as he disposed of tithe, often paid in kind, or the produce of his glebe land. Both monasteries and parishes had a special responsibility for the care of the poor and disadvantaged, and so for the distribution of charity.

The other-worldly aim of the Church meant that in theory at least the concerns of this world were secondary. Temporal ends and temporal affairs, the merely transient and mundane, always had to be subordinated to the higher, spiritual purpose of life. Because material matters were thought to be of so little account, the Church put a firm brake on economic development. It actively discouraged people from wanting to better themselves because to be socially ambitious, to want to be upwardly mobile, was a sin. 'Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called', advised St Paul, and this was how it had to be.