denial. Thus most early penances centered on endless periods of fasting. Wulfst an of York refers {0 one man who was sentenced to fast, barefoot, on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, for the rest of his life, to wear only a woolen garment, and to have only three haircuts a year. Fasting was often accompanied by compulsory pilgrimages, or visits to large numbers of shrines. Thus parricide - quite a common crime in the Dark Ages - was punished by exile: the penitent, bound in chains, had to go on pilgrimage until the chains were so worn that they fell off. | | There were many practical problems connected with penance. Custom varied enormously. Written penitentiaries disagreed wildly, and rival experts heaped abuse on each other. Peter Damian was particularly violent in his criticism of confessors who took sodomy lightly; he thought the eighth-century penitentiary of Archbishop Egbert of York, standard in England, composed of ' theatrical ravings’, ‘the incantations of the devil', and 'a monster created by man, with the head of a horse and hooves of a goat’, Then, too, many penances were almost impossible to perform. The more sincere the repent ance, the more seriously the penitent would take the task imposed on him: often a man might spend the rest of his life in terror at failure. And what if he died before the penance was over? The Church only slowly adopte d the theory of purgatory to meet this difficulty. The harsh, even cruel, Dark Age practice of inordinate penance not only gave credibility to the idea of salvation; in a way, it gave credibility to the whole of Christian society. The brutal scourging of a naked king or archbishop was exciting evidence of spiritual equality before God, and man. But once the clerical experts found mechanical means to erode the full penitential rigours, a yawning hole began to appear in the fabric of Christian conviction. Such means were all too easily discovered: the real evil of canon law was that it constantly chipped away - rather like modern tax-lawyers - at the egalitarian provisions in Christianity. It rebuilt hierarchies and pyramids on democratic spiritual foundations, and introduced the cash nexus into the supposed world to come. The canon lawyer was always engaged in a struggle with Death the Leveller, and always beat him - at least to the satisfaction of the papal curia. It is in the seventh century that we first hear of men undertaking to perform the penances of others, in return for payment. This was forbidden; indeed, at first the Church opposed any form of commutation. The first loop-hole allowed was vicarious penance without pay. A man might perform another's penance from motives of love (or fear; or hope of future favor). Thus we find an early case where a powerful man got through a seven-year fasting penance in three days with the help of 840 followers. And once vicarial penance in any form was admitted, it proved impossible to keep money out of it. Was not alms-giving a form of penance? There, it was argued, the payment was to God, or to God's servants to perform God's purposes, and could not, therefore, be reprehensible. The Church at first opposed penitential alms-giving, {o0, as an easy way to Heaven for the rich man. But it soon found justificatory texts: 'The ransom of a man's lifé are his riches’ (Proverbs, 13 :8); and ‘Make unto yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.’ This last passage was particularly useful; it might almost have been framed by an ingenious canon lawyer for his professional purposes. Thus the penitential system was quite quickly transformed into a means whereby the wealth of the sinful rich could be diverted into ecclesiastical endowments. An early case was that of the Anglo Saxon Wulfin, who slew six priests; he went on a penitential trip to Rome, and was there told to endow a foundation for seven monks to pray for him for ever. Another case, from the tenth century, was Eadwulf King Edgar's Chancellor. He loved his little son so much that he had him sleep between himself and his wife: one night, both were drunk and the son was suffocated. Eadwulf proposed to walk to Rome as a barefoot pilgrim; but he was told to repair a church instead. The idea of ecclesiastical foundations as atonement for grievous sin became a striking feature of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. It explains why so many abbeys and priories were endowed by wicked men. Thus a period of pillage and lawlessness might also be characterized by a luxuriant crop of new 68