eternal damnation was powerful indeed in the twelfth century, still, moneylending continued.
Of course, merchants and others continued to devise clever schemes to hide what they were doing. They not only manipulated exchange rates but also wrote misleading contracts and created false stock companies (sound familiar?) to hide their true financial arrangements. The risks (including eternal damnation) had been raised, so naturally the expected rate of return had to rise too. The consequence was to make loans costlier and thereby to diminish money for investments and growth relative to what it otherwise would have been.
If we look at last wills and testaments after 1215 we discover a great increase in deathbed confessions of usury. These confessions were frequently accompanied by wills that make penance by leaving money to the Church to make up for the dying sinner’s usurious past. This was a great boon to Church income and took a great deal of money out of the secular economy. It must have left relatives pretty unhappy, but how could they argue against the greater good of eternal salvation?
During the twelfth century the Church also adopted new rhetoric that limited growth even as it promoted wealth within the Church’s lands. At the same time that new mendicant orders like the Cistercians built and operated wind and water mills and other labor-saving devices to improve efficiency, the Church began to promote the view that idle hands are the work of the devil. The Church discouraged the spread of machines and other labor- saving technology in the secular realm (though not within its own domain). Certainly by discouraging the spread of labor-saving technology, the Church was reducing labor productivity and thereby economic growth in the lay sector. This, as we saw, could only improve the pope’s chances of getting the bishops he wanted.
Kings, of course, did not sit idly by while the pope worked to strengthen his hand and weaken theirs. The decades immediately after the Concordat of Worms saw a dramatic flowering of political institutions in England, in France, and elsewhere on the Continent. Whether intentionally or not, many of these new institutions and programs challenged the pope’s influence and secured a higher economic growth rate for the king’s subjects, and thus higher tax revenues for the king—higher, that is, than they would have been if the pope’s policies had been left unchallenged. Consider, for instance, the series of legal reforms introduced by Henry II (you know,
Henry moved to protect property rights and rights of inheritance. These actions made it easier for peasant families to predict whether they would continue to benefit from the land they worked after the head of the family died or whether the lord of the manor would take away their opportunity to farm the land. Henry’s writs greatly shortened the judicial process for determining rights of access to the land and made for a more smoothly operating agricultural system. His new rules proved highly popular and effective in securing the property rights that are essential to economic growth, and they enhanced the king’s credibility as the person who would ensure order and justice in matters of property. Before the writs, tenant farmers were reluctant to invest in their land, but once Henry’s writs protecting property rights were in place, more effort was made by those working the land to produce more—for their own benefit as well as for the benefit of the lord of the manor.
Henry did not limit himself to improving property rights for ordinary people. He also acted to impose restrictions on Church rights, a bold move indeed. Through a writ called
Henry’s effort to strengthen his hand against the church was further reinforced by his use of the jury system to replace trial by ordeal. Trial by ordeal decided innocence or guilt through the presumed intervention of God. Two common ordeals, both supervised by the Church, involved submersion of the accused in deep water or forcing the accused to hold a red-hot piece of iron for a prescribed amount of time. Failure to stay submerged for the prescribed time was taken as proof of guilt, as was the inability to hold the red-hot iron. As Henry’s legal adviser observed at the time, guilt or innocence had more to do with the thickness of one’s calluses or the ability to hold one’s breath than anything else.
The shift to a jury system helped weaken Church institutions and income. Trials by ordeal were supervised by the clergy, who were well compensated for their participation. For instance, two priests are known to have been paid ten shillings for blessing the ordeal pits near Bury St. Edmunds in 1166. At the time, a worker’s daily wage was about one penny, and a villein and his entire family could be purchased for 22s.2 So 10s for a blessing was a significant amount of money. At 12 pennies to the shilling, the blessing cost the equivalent of 120 days of labor for an ordinary worker. That amounts to over $5,600 at the current U.S. minimum wage just to get the ordeal pit blessed (it’s about double that when evaluated relative to the income of the average American worker rather than those earning just minimum wage). With the stroke of a pen, Henry cut Church income substantially and increased his own by introducing the jury system.
The administrative structure of the modern state also began to emerge in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The king’s right to levy taxes for reasons other than necessity gradually developed in exchange for political concessions to his subjects, most notably in 1297 when Edward I accepted Confirmatio Cartarum. Edward, in “confirming the charter,” acquiesced to the changes that had been wrought by Magna Carta eighty years earlier (King John had agreed to and then promptly reneged on the deal). These new tax revenues gave the king the ability to muster an army without having to rely on the intricate rights and restrictions implied by the feudal order. Consequently, the bishop’s military guarantee to the king “through the lance,” granted at Worms, diminished in importance. The pope, in contrast, continued to rely on feudal commitments to raise an army.
King’s courts at fixed locations in England and in France replaced the itinerant justice of an earlier time, thereby centralizing judicial control in the hands of the king, further diminishing the role of the Church as an adjudicator of disputes and further emphasizing the king’s territorial sovereignty. Additionally, kings began to claim that they ruled by divine right, thereby challenging the pope’s special position as allegedly chosen by God. In the jockeying for control, both kings and church evolved new institutions and methods to foster or stymie economic growth and wrest political control.
The eventual result of all of this competition was just what the game set up at Worms predicts. The Church worked to keep income high within the ecclesiastic domain and low elsewhere. Kings worked to achieve the opposite, seeking control over courts and taxes wherever and whenever possible. Eventually, secular wealth became so great that, as the game implies, kings stopped caring who the bishops were. Kings no longer felt a need to keep the pope happy, and the dominance of the Catholic Church was replaced by the dominance of sovereign states in a secular world.
Now that we have seen how we could peer ahead to the big picture five hundred and more years after 1122, let’s do the same for our own time. Let’s take a look at the inconvenient truth that won Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize.
