Rethinking Clerical Marriage in the Norman Church (1050–1300): A Top-Down Model?

Recent scholarship on the clergy and masculinity has pointed to the prevalence of  concubinage and marriage among the medieval clergy.  This paper takes a long range view of clerical marriage and unions in Normandy from the beginnings of reform in the mid-eleventh century to the thirteenth century.  From the eleventh century onwards, many bishops and upper clergy engaged in marital unions, despite the canons of reform which prohibited such unions. As Gregorian reform got underway in Normandy, bishops slowly were transformed into agents of reform and opponents of clerical marriage. Yet, while the reformation of the elite clergy in Normandy was a largely successful endeavor by the late twelfth century, the lower clergy, especially parish priests, continued to engage in clerical concubinage. To what extent did the practice of clerical marriage among the elite clergy influence the practice among the lower clergy? And why did clerical celibacy, eventually embraced by Norman bishops, continue to be problematic for rural parish priests? This paper, utilizing a variety of primary source documents, analyzes the history of concubinage among Norman clerics. It pursues both questions of how prevalent clerical marriage was in medieval Normandy as a practice, and why it persisted among the lower clergy in the face of its eradication among the upper clergy.