Prayer, or profession of faith.’ The sanctions for males were ‘to be beaten or abstain from al Crink except water’, and for females Stripes or fasting’. These orders could not be carried out, since the trained clergy were lacking Or unwilling to live in country districts. Most country priests were ignorant men themselves, though in theory they had to be literate. This is a ground of bitter complaint by visiting and other dignitaries In every country throughout the Middle Ages. In 1222, out of seventeen priest s serving livings held by the dean and chapter at Salisbury, five could not construe the first sente nce of the first collect of the canon. such examples are endless. Guillaume le Maire, Bishop of Angers in the early fourteenth century, complained that his priests included ‘innumerable contemptible perso ns of abject life, utterly unworthy in learning and morals ... from whose execrable lives and pernicious ignorance infinite scandals arise, the church sacraments are despised by the laity, and in many districts the lay folk hold the priests as viler and more despicable than Jews.' This was a problem of poverty and education. The bishops might well complain: why did they not do anything? Selection and training of clergy was the bishop 's responsibility; yet not one built a seminary throughout the Middle Ages - there was no such thing until the sixteenth century. Nor did any bishop, so far as we know, institute diocesan funds to raise the stipends of the poorer priests and so improve their ‘abject life’ - though such equalization funds had been used in the earliest Church . The truth is that the Church tended to be hostile to the peasants. There were very few peasant Saints. Medieval clerical writers emphasize the bestiality, violence and avarice of the peasant. We get few genuine glimpses of peasant life in the documents; most clerical critics dealt with popular stereotypes. Clericalism was increasingly an urban phenomenon in the later Middle Ages. It was rare to see a priest in the country districts. Joan of Arc came from a pious family; but it is interesting to observe in her deposition how infrequently the clergy impinged on her life. What the Church and peasant had most in common was devotion to relics. In the villages they were used for oath-taking and all kinds of purposes. And the peasants valued the church for its efforts to avert natural disasters. * Parish priests exorcized and cursed storms, and they tried to drive away swarms of locusts by excommunications and processions. In a monastic formulary dating from 1526-31, we find a service for banishing caterpillars and ‘palmer worms' from the diocese of Troyes, on condition the peasants paid their tithes. Documents often refer to the excommunication (and hanging) of animals for antisocial offences. In 1531, a French canon lawyer, Chasse née’, defended the practice in his De Excommunicatione Animalium Insectorum. He claimed it had often worked, citing eels expelled from lakes, sparrows from churches, and so on. Caterpillars and similar pests would laugh if proceeded against in a secular court; therefore they should be struck ‘with the pain of anathema, which they fear more, as creatures obedient to the God who made them’. However, he added, the law should be observed, and an advocate appointed to plead their defense. In some cases, pieces of waste ground, to which they were sentenced to remove themselves, were provided. Above all, however, what the peasant wanted from the Church was some hope of salvation. This was the overwhelming reason why Christianity replaced paganism: it had a very clear-cut theory of what happened after death, and of how eternal happiness could be gained. The appeal was to all classes: it was the one thing which enabled the Church to hold society together. Yet this aspect of Christianity, too, was subtly changed over the centuries, and balanced in favor of the possessing classes: indeed, it became the central feature of mechanical religion. As we have seen, baptism was originally regarded as the prelude to an imminent parousia. Only gradually, as the parousia receded, did the Church have to grapple with the problem of sin after baptism, and the second (or third and subsequent) repentance. Moreover, it is fair to Say that the problem was never satisfactorily resolved. It was agreed that a post-baptismal sin had to be confessed in some form. Ambrose thought it might be done publicly, to a priest, or privately to oneself. If confession took place to a priest, he would try to intercede with God; but the confessors (here Ambrose quoted Origen) had no power to do anything except pray and advise. The Church's actual formularies were framed only for public 66