Introduction

From the beginning and throughout its history, the religious community at the basilica of Saint-Martin was very different from that of Marmoutier. Its primary religious purpose was neither the ascetic quest for personal salvation nor the monastic intercessory function.¹ Rather, its members cared for the tomb of a major pilgrimage saint and performed the elaborate liturgy there. This religious function, which involved daily contact between the members of the community of Saint-Martin and the pilgrims who visited Martin’s tomb, was not necessarily incompatible with Benedictine monasticism.² Nevertheless, efforts to maintain a cloistered life at Saint-Martin rarely succeeded. Its inhabitants were not disposed to a monastic renunciation of the world.

Columbanian reformers did manage to introduce monastic reforms at Saint-Martin in the mid-seventh century, but by the 770s the absence of monastic discipline there was drawing criticism. A few decades later, Charlemagne would complain that he could not tell whether Saint-Martin was a house of canons or a house of monks; and Alcuin, who was abbot there from 796 until 804, found it was easier to introduce the Benedictine Rule to the priory of Cormery, which was subordinated to Saint-Martin, than to reform Saint-Martin itself.³

PLATE 5. The basilica of Saint-Martin as it looked about 1700. The Gothic church of Saint-Martin was built about 1225-50 and destroyed during the French Revolution (see Lelong, Basilique Saint-Marlin, 96, 124-25). Photograph courtesy Tours, Bibliothèeque Municipale.

Sometime around 815 the ambiguous status of the religious life at Saint-Martin was resolved when the community officially became a house of canons.⁴ After 817 members of canonical communities had the right to possess private property, and that concession led, in the course of the ninth and tenth centuries, to the establishment of private residences for individual canons and to the creation of individual prebends—either landed property or incomes from landed property—that were assigned to each canon.⁵ There are references to private residences at Saint-Martin in sources that date back to 845 and to prebends there as early as 903.⁶

In describing and explaining the differences between the canons of Saint-Martin and the monks of Marmoutier, we must begin with these institutional arrangements. For though Benedictine monasteries were not collectively poor, each individual monk was symbolically poor because he was allowed no private possessions, not even the habit he wore. The canons of Saint-Martin, by contrast, lived in individual houses, ate at their own tables, and lived off the fruits of their own prebends. Moreover, the canons were not cloistered. Contemporary documents referring to the claustrum—the enclosed space within the defensive walls of Châteauneuf, built in 918—may lend the impression that Saint-Martin possessed a cloister,⁷ but this was hardly a religious enclosure. Both within its walls and outside, the houses of canons and laypeople intermingled, and women were allowed to enter its boundaries.⁸

That the canons were not cloistered and that they did not practice individual poverty contributed to an ambiguous quality in their religious life—a tendency to blend in with their secular surroundings. They were not even set apart by their relationship to the sacraments, since only a few of them (6 out of 150 in the thirteenth century) had to be priests: these were “ceremonial” rather than “sacramental” clergy.⁹ Some of the canons, in addition, privately owned and rented residential and business properties in Châteauneuf, just like their merchant neighbors.¹⁰ And like their burgher neighbors, all the canons derived their prosperity from the pilgrims who visited Martin’s tomb.

This tendency for the canons of Saint-Martin to be drawn into the secular sphere was sometimes exacerbated by their relationship to their lay abbot. The abbacy of Saint-Martin, like that of many other monastic and canonical communities, became in the late ninth century a private possession that secular lords could give away to their subordinates or pass on to their sons. In 866 Robert the Strong became the lay abbot of both Saint-Martin and Marmoutier; from 888 until 987 the abbacy of Saint-Martin was the hereditary possession of the Robertians; and from 987 until 1789 it belonged to the kings of France.¹¹ In the ninth and tenth centuries the community of Saint-Martin struggled to protect its assets from the depredations of these lay abbots, and the internal governance of the chapter, as well as the disposition of its revenues, became the provenance of its dean and treasurer.¹² Still, the lay abbot continued to exercise a considerable amount of indirect control over the community: from at least the time of King Hugh Capet (987-96) on, the king/abbot had the right to appoint the dean and treasurer of Saint-Martin.¹³

Ninth- and tenth-century developments laid the foundations for the way the canons of Saint-Martin lived and behaved in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Nevertheless, it is important to recall that during this period a number of religious communities, including Marmoutier, evolved into houses of secular canons under the jurisdiction of lay abbots. For our purposes here, then, the significant differences between Saint-Martin and Marmoutier emerged in the late tenth and eleventh centuries when Saint-Martin, unlike Marmoutier, remained unaffected, first, by the wave of monastic reform that turned Marmoutier into a model Benedictine abbey and later, by the Gregorian reform, which managed to turn some houses of secular canons into communities of regular canons who held their property in common.¹⁴

The canons of Saint-Martin were certainly exposed to these reform movements. Odo of Cluny began his religious career at Saint-Martin and remained a lifetime devotee of its patron saint; Herveus, who was treasurer of Saint-Martin between 1001 and 1022, had been a student of the great defender of monasticism, Abbo of Fleury; and some of the canons of Saint-Martin left the chapter at the end of the eleventh century to found a house of regular canons on the island of Saint-Cosme, which became a place of spiritual refuge for those canons from Saint-Martin who felt a need for a more serious, or more cloistered, spiritual life.¹⁵

Despite these influences, however, Saint-Martin remained a house of secular canons, and we can detect their more worldly orientation in the miracle stories they told about Saint Martin. Rather than assuring that Martin could assist sinners in attaining salvation or avoiding the punishments of purgatory, the canons recounted miracles that promoted the popularity of their pilgrimage shrine, indicating that Martin could restore physical health to those suffering from disease or injury. Other miracles, which I discuss in chapters 8 and 9, worked to support the canons’ competitive interests, conveying the message that Martin’s episcopal and judicial powers belonged to them.

Although the chapter of Saint-Martin was always inclined to merge with its secular surroundings, developments in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries introduced new problems for the community and its identity. As I explain in chapter 7, the most important of these attenuating forces was the king’s right of collation over the offices of dean and treasurer of the chapter. After 1139 the Capetians began to grant these offices to their relatives, and by the early thirteenth century they were using the offices to remunerate members of the royal court.

Outside forces may have threatened the community of Saint Martin, but as I show in chapters 7, 8, and 9, the canons’ response was to assert their collective rights vis-à-vis their king/abbot, their archbishop, and their burgher neighbors/subjects. In the course of defending those rights, I assert, the canons became even more aware of themselves as a collectivity. But to what degree did they see themselves as a community and, indeed, as a religious community with a religious vocation? This is the question I address in chapter 7. Our examination of Saint-Martin thus starts at the point where our examination of Marmoutier left off. The chapters in part 2 worked inward, from relations between Marmoutier and the outside world to relations among the monks themselves. With Saint-Martin, however, it seems more appropriate to begin with the group of canons themselves, because the very existence of that group appears problematic. Before we go on to discuss the interactions between the canons and other groups in society, we must establish in what ways the canons were aware of their identity as a religious community distinct both from a corporation of royal officials and from the secular society of Châteauneuf.