20 Strange Ways The Medieval Church Controlled Everyday Life

Burchard, a bishop in Germany in the early 11th century, penned a handbook for parish priests hearing confession titled the Corrector sive Medicus. This text established a marital sex calendar forbidding conjugal relations on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, as well as during Lent, Advent, and pregnancy. There was no police force prowling around the bedroom. Rather, priests policed the schedule by means of the confessional, giving penances such as bread-and-water fasting for couples who confessed to having transgressed the calendar.

Nobles who perished far from home on crusades or during military expeditions were occasionally butchered and boiled so that their remains could be transported back for reburial, in a process known as the mos Teutonicus. Pope Boniface VIII, the head of the Catholic Church at the time, outlawed the practice in 1299 with a papal bull called Detestandae feritatis. He threatened excommunication and ordered that bodies be buried whole, or transported uncut.

In 1139, Pope Innocent II called a meeting in Rome of the Second Lateran Council. It decreed that it was forbidden to use the crossbow and siege archery against any Christian on pain of excommunication. They believed this tool had too much potential to disrupt the feudal hierarchy of warfare. And indeed, the crossbow allowed an untrained foot soldier the chance to take down an armored knight. However, the crossbow was still permitted for use against non-Christians in the Crusades.

There is one provision in canon law, called the privilege of the forum, which says that an ordained cleric accused of a capital crime goes to a church court, not the king’s court, and a church court has no jurisdiction to order execution. It turned out to be highly controversial in 1164, when King Henry II of England argued with the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, about how some clergymen accused of serious crimes were getting away with it. If you wanted to check if a man was a cleric, the easiest way was to get him to read a Bible passage in Latin. This is generally the “neck verse,” the first part of Psalm 51. But many ordinary men learned the neck verse. And in the end, the guilty ones were sentenced to penance, defrocking, or prison by church courts.

In 732 AD, Boniface, a Christian missionary working among Germanic peoples, wrote to Pope Gregory III, leader of the Catholic Church, for guidance on how to treat some customs he was encountering. Gregory commanded that all horse meat must be abolished, declaring it an abomination. The reason had nothing to do with cleanliness or starvation. Horse sacrifice and ritual feasting on horse meat were central to Germanic and Norse pagan religion, and the ban was intended to eliminate pagan practice.

It may surprise you to learn that “usury” once didn’t mean charging outrageous interest but rather any profit at all above what was lent. The rule, decreed by Pope Alexander III at the Third Lateran Council in 1179 and reconfirmed by Pope Innocent III in 1215 under canon law, held that time belonged only to God, and therefore nobody could sell it. Those lenders who refused to give up their gains were excommunicated, forbidden burial in consecrated ground, and disqualified from making a valid will.

In November 1215, Pope Innocent III convened the Fourth Lateran Council in Rome, where, among other decrees, medical treatment itself was reorganized. Physicians across Western Europe were told, under threat of excommunication, to call a parish priest before treating a sick patient’s body, since illness was widely believed to start with sin. Doctors could still treat the patient afterward.

Between 1208 and 1214, Pope Innocent III, the leader of the Catholic Church, put all of England under an interdict: no public Masses, no ringing of church bells, no Christian burial anywhere in the kingdom. The interdict was aimed at King John, who had been feuding with the Pope over the right to choose England’s archbishop. Bodies went into unblessed ground without funeral rites for years on end, and only emergency baptisms of children remained permitted. Eventually, John bowed his head and submitted to the Pope.

In November 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, Pope Innocent III’s bishops decreed that Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of Christian lands must be distinguished by their dress, in order to forestall marriages and other relationships between Christians and members of the other faiths. The Council did not stipulate a specific design. In the following decades, local secular authorities and bishops chose their own distinguishing marks, such as pointed hats or colored badges.

Some church officials protested against jousting as early as 1130. In 1179, Pope Alexander III decreed at the Third Lateran Council that no Christian who fell in a tournament should receive Christian burial. He viewed jousting as both a frivolous display of wealth and a wasteful exercise of manpower for the defense of the Holy Land. Most kings and nobles ignored these objections and continued to joust.

Pope Innocent III decided at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 that the Church would no longer accept secret marriages. Instead, couples were required to have their banns, announcements of their intended marriage, read by their priest for a number of weeks before they were to get married, so that the rest of the community could object if the two of them were related, or if either of them was already married. Such secret marriages, although still valid according to canon law, were considered illicit. The practice itself continued for a few more centuries, until another council completely annulled such marriages in 1563.

Prior to 1215, canon law prohibited all marriages between relatives, including those as distantly related as sixth cousins. That meant most European nobles were in violation of the law at any given time. This allowed spouses who disliked one another to petition for an annulment of marriage quite easily. When the bishops assembled at the Fourth Lateran Council convened by Pope Innocent III, they reduced the prohibition of marriage to only fourth-degree relatives, third cousins and their equivalents by affinity.

The canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, held in November 1215, dictated how priests were to behave. They should not become secular judges, nor go to plays, roll dice, or frequent ale-houses other than in transit. The church also issued decrees about what priests were permitted to wear: no red or green cloth, no embroidered garments, no gold clasps, no pointed shoes. These were regulations for clerics, and none pertained to the laity.

Canon law decreed that all households must contribute a tithe of their grain, livestock, wool, and trade earnings to the local church. These tithes were not donations, but mandatory payments. Those who failed to pay were called before Church courts and threatened with excommunication. Tithes paid for parish priests, charity, and the administration of dioceses throughout the Middle Ages.

The right of sanctuary, codified in one of the great collections of canon law around 1140, declared that if an alleged criminal sought refuge within a church or its hallowed yard, they were under God’s protection. If the local sheriff tried to drag them out, he could expect to be excommunicated. But this protection was fleeting. In England as on the Continent, it endured for no longer than 40 days, at the end of which time the fugitive had either to stand trial or face exile forever.

An unbaptized infant, according to canon law, could not go to heaven, which presented a difficult situation as deaths among babies were frequent. Church synods, including one at Exeter in 1287, along with canon law from around 1140, permitted midwives, who were laywomen, to perform emergency baptisms themselves if necessary. Midwives were given the power to pour water over the infant while uttering the words of baptism in the vernacular rather than in Latin. Beforehand, parish priests tested their midwives to ensure that they knew what to say. This was a legitimate and recognized practice, not a loophole.

Confessing sins to a priest was common before 1215. But in November of that year, the Fourth Lateran Council of Pope Innocent III made confession mandatory by enacting a decree called Omnis utriusque sexus. All Christians who had attained the “age of discretion,” usually defined as 7-14 years old, had to confess their sins at least once per year and receive communion at least once a year, on Easter. Otherwise, they were to be barred from the church in life and denied a Christian burial in death.

For hundreds of years, the literate doctors who treated Europeans’ illnesses had been members of the educated clergy. A council convened at Tours in 1163 prohibited monks from studying medicine, and Pope Innocent III’s Canon 18 at the Fourth Lateran Council banned priests, subdeacons, and deacons from performing surgery, cauterizing, and bleeding. As a result, the medical roles of clergy were limited to prescribing medicines and diagnosing illness. Surgery, cutting, and bleeding were left to laypeople, especially barber-surgeons.

In the medieval period, church bells in a town would ring to signal when to pray, work, or do business. The system came about from the Rule of Saint Benedict, c. 529, which established a daily liturgy based on a series of seven prayers, designated by the number of hours of light left in the day rather than the time of day itself. One of those prayers, called Nones, was originally said at 3:00 p.m. But over time, that time got earlier, until the prayer was said around noon.

For centuries, when a person’s guilt was uncertain, the suspect would hold a red-hot piece of iron or reach an arm into boiling water, while a priest blessed the ritual, calling for God to punish the guilty and protect the innocent. But at the Fourth Lateran Council in November 1215, Pope Innocent III’s bishops banned priests from blessing trials by ordeal or issuing any sentence that called for the shedding of blood. Deprived of the church’s approval, trial by ordeal died out throughout Western Europe in a matter of decades, replaced by juries and witnesses.

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