monasteries, like the England of Stephen's reign. The Cistercians were outstanding beneficiaries of this syndrome. A robber-baron might also, it is true, have to perform a physical penance himself; but we hear less and less of such after the twelfth century. The mechanical process had taken over. And, of course, its forms proliferated. In 1095, Urban II, propagating the First Crusade, laid it down that a crusade to the Holy Land was a substitute for any other penance, and entailed complete remission of sin. This, of course, involved an actual and hazardous crusade, and the privilege, or indulgence, was hedged about with careful qualifications and terrific penalties if a man reneged. Throughout the twelfth century, crusading was the only source of indulgences, except in rare individual cases. But of course it was always these rare individual cases (that is, the rich, the well placed, the smart cleric) which shipwrecked the principle. Early in the thirteenth century, Innocent III extended crusader indulgences to those who helped merely with money and advice. Fifty years later, Innocent IV awarded indulgences without any conditions of crusader service, naturally only in special circumstances. By the end of the thirteenth century, indulgences were being granted to secular princes for political reasons. Soon after, individuals were allowed to buy plenary indulgences from their confessors on their death-beds; this meant they could enter Heaven immediately, provided they died in a State of grace, immediately after full confession. In the first six months of 1344, Clement VI granted this privilege to two hundred people in England alone; it cost them less than ten shillings each. The Pope justified this by saying: 'A pontiff should make his subjects happy.’ By this time, the idea had already been extended to boost the pilgrimage trade to Rome. Boniface Vill gave a plenary indulgence to all confessed sinners who, in the course of the jubilee year 1300, and every hundredth year in future, visited the churches of the Holy Apostles in Rome. In 1343, Clement VI reduced the period to every fifty years, remarking: 'One drop of Christ's blood would have sufficed for the redemption of the whole human race. Out of the abundant superfluity of Christ's sacrifice, there has come a treasure which is not to be hidden in a napkin or buried in a field, but to be used. This treasure has been committed by God to his vicars on earth.’ The period was reduced to a third of a century in 1389, to a quarter in 1470, and, from about 1400, extended to many local churches on special occasions. At this point the dam burst, and indulgences were sold on almost any ecclesiastical occasion for quite trivial sums; or, indeed, given away by indulgent or emotional popes. We have an eye-witness account of an occasion in 1476, when Sixtus IV, on the spur of the moment, gave planarians to the Franciscan nuns of Foligno every time they confessed their sins. This, of course, was to destroy the idea of physical penance absolutely, and for ever. The cardinals who were with the Pope clamored for the privilege too; and he generously awarded it. By this time, inflation was bringing the system into disrepute. It had already completely devalued the Roman jubilees. It is significant that rich men continued to endow expensive chantries, thus ensuring that prayers and masses were said perpetually for their souls, although the easy availability of plenary indulgences should have made such largesse unnecessary. Here, of course, the class-wealth factor came in again. Indulgences lost their value once they became generally available to the poor; a man’s road to salvation became more sure if he paid for hundreds, or thousands of masses, or better still if he invested his wealth to enable faithful monks to pray for him as long as the world should last. Thus the mechanical system of religion projected into eternity all the materialist divisions of the transient world. Yet it would be wrong to categorize the medieval centuries as a slow descent into purely automatic forms of religious life. Christianity retained an astonishing dynamic, and great powers of spontaneous expression; the theological wisdom of Christ, in providing a whole series of matrices for future experiment, was demonstrated again and again as new varieties of Christian action came into existence, flourished and declined. But as always there was tension between such innovations and the existing order; indeed, as the claims of the clerical caste expanded, and as canon law, which underwrot e them, became more magisterial, containing the religious impulse within the ecclesiastical system became progressively more difficult. Certainly the Church tried, creating new institutions to give orthodox vent to every form of religious 69