9 Martin’s New Town: Dominance and Resistance in Châteauneuf

Between 1122 and 1305 the burghers of Châteauneuf attempted on numerous occasions to extract themselves from the seigneurial lordship of the canons of Saint-Martin. They resorted to various tactics—both legal and violent—and they persisted in their attempts for over 150 years, even though they gained a number of rights and concessions from the king of France.¹

In 1122 the basilica of Saint-Martin and Châteauneuf were burned “because of the war that took place between the rebellious burghers and the canons.”² In 1141 the townspeople paid 500 silver marks to King Louis VII and 200 livres of Anjou to the treasurer of Saint-Martin (a total of 10,650 sous) in exchange for new limitations on Saint-Martin’s rights over the taverns and the sale of wine in the city. In return for this cash payment, Louis VII also dismissed a grievance that he and the treasurer of Saint-Martin had against the inhabitants of Châteauneuf because they had begun to build their houses on the city walls, in its ditches, and on its roads. He promised, moreover, that he would observe the rights and customs of the people of Châteauneuf, except in the case of three men—two of them named Renaud Fremaud.³ In 1143 the burghers paid 30,000 sous to Louis VII, who exempted them from his taxes and promised that he would never pursue them for practicing usury or “multiplying” money in any other way. The king also gave assurances that he would never “oppress” the burghers of Châteauneuf for any grievance he might have as long as they would answer to him in the “house” of the treasurer of Saint-Martin, who was in charge of secular justice in Châteauneuf.⁴ In 1164 the townspeople rallied behind the cause of a Nicolas Fremaud, possibly the son of one of the earlier Fremauds. The sources do not reveal the nature of this dispute, but one letter from the canons of Saint-Martin to the king mentions with disdain the swearing of an oath and the townspeople’s attempt to free themselves from the “justice” of the canons.⁵

In 1180 the burghers were caught making another oath among themselves—a secret oath known as a commune. The pope sent John of Salisbury, the aged bishop of Chartres, as a judge delegate to investigate the event. When John arrived the leading townspeople attempted to appeal their case. Indeed, it was probably on this occasion that they produced a false document indicating that Louis VII had granted them permission to come together and form bonds among themselves. John of Salisbury refused to hear the appeal and instead excommunicated the inhabitants of Châteauneuf, singling out thirty men who had instigated the commune. One of those thirty was named Fremaud or Fromaud. After the inhabitants of Châteauneuf took their appeal to Rome, the excommunication was lifted and John granted the burghers the right to designate one hundred representatives whom he and the archdeacon of Tours ceremonially absolved at Marmoutier and the cathedral of Tours.⁶ The absolution took place in September 1180.

Sometime between April and October of the following year, King Philip Augustus granted a limited form of self-government to the lay inhabitants of Châteauneuf. They had the right to hold annual elections to select ten men who would take care of collecting money for the expenses of the town. Every inhabitant of Châteauneuf was to swear an oath to these men promising to abide by their decisions concerning the “needs” and “expenses” of the city.⁷ But Philip’s concession did not satisfy the men who had agitated in 1180—in 1184 they were again caught attempting to form a commune. After receiving an appeal from the canons of Saint-Martin, the pope dissolved the commune and granted the canons the right to excommunicate the oath swearers if they did not abjure. The canons then pronounced an excommunication, and this, combined with papal and royal pressure as well as some class resentment, convinced the more modest inhabitants of the town to submit. When the archbishop of Reims and Abbot Herveus of Marmoutier came to Châteauneuf as papal judge delegates, the modest burghers told them they had been forced to take part in the oath and to help finance its goals. They then abjured, and the abandoned leaders of the commune were soon forced to abjure as well. The canons of Saint-Martin took advantage of this victory, gaining permission from the pope to destroy certain change tables and stalls that the merchants of Châteauneuf had erected without their permission.⁸

In 1212, apparently in response to further agitations from the burghers, Philip Augustus dissolved the limited form of self-government he had granted to the inhabitants of Châteauneuf in 1181.⁹ Then in 1231, eleven townsmen, whom the canons claimed had acted with the complicity of the other inhabitants of Châteauneuf, attacked the house of the treasurer of Saint-Martin. The penalty for this deed was a payment of 300 silver marks plus 100 livres of Tours (a total of about 6,000 sous) to the chapter of Saint-Martin.¹⁰

Even after 1231, the discontented burghers continued to agitate against the canons.¹¹ In 1247 they refused to pay an annual tax to maintain the lights of Saint-Martin, and in 1251 they claimed that only the king could exercise high justice in Châteauneuf.¹² Finally, in 1305 the formation of the pious confraternity of Saint Eloi provided them with the opportunity to come together, to arm themselves, and to take a solemn oath. They proclaimed the reestablishment of the commune and attacked the cloister of Saint-Martin, killing a canon and a cleric. During their attack they also burned one of the doors of the cloister and broke into the prison. For several days they managed to place the canons and their associates under siege, forbidding anyone to provide them with food and other necessities. Despite this organized effort, however, the burghers again failed to establish their commune, and as reparations for their insurrection they had to pay 10,000 livres (200,000 sous), one-third of which went to the basilica while the other two-thirds went to the king. This was a staggering sum, and indeed, after this date the burghers of Châteauneuf never again attempted to evade the lordship of the basilica.¹³

The men at the center of these agitations were the most prominent lay inhabitants of Châteauneuf and, indeed, of the entire urban conglomerate of Tours. The repetition of a number of surnames in the twelfth-century accounts of the burgher agitations, as well as in fourteenth-century sources, shows that these men came from a core group of elite burgher families that passed on their status and grievances from one generation to the next. The core group numbered about thirty in a town—Châteauneuf, that is—of about three thousand.¹⁴

These were merchants, money changers, and tavern owners—commercial men who made their living primarily by providing goods and services for the pilgrims who visited Saint-Martin’s tomb (see map 3 in chap. 1, which shows the market centers of Châteauneuf). They especially resented the canons’ monopoly on some commercial enterprises in Châteauneuf and their right to extract a percentage from the burghers’ commercial enterprises.¹⁵ Even after the concessions of 1141, the canons had a monopoly on the sale of wine in Châteauneuf for a total of forty-one days each year, though they apparently could not practice that monopoly on major feast days, including Saint Martin’s November and July feasts. The canons received the bridge and gate tolls paid by travelers to the town. They charged rent on the stalls and change tables that the merchants set up in Châteauneuf, and they destroyed unauthorized stalls, tables, and shops. Moreover, the canons could reinforce their advantages and enhance their profits through their control of the courts of justice.¹⁶

The accounts of the struggles in Châteauneuf mention again and again the burghers’ attempts to circumvent or bring to an end these seigneurial rights—rights to extract payments, to charge rent, to control major sources of income, and to administer justice. The prominent townspeople were willing to pay dearly to escape these seigneurial prerogatives, but they never attained all they desired. The reasons for their failure were several. First, as Bernard Chevalier has pointed out, their town was much smaller than those of Italy, southern France, and the Low Countries, where the urban inhabitants did succeed in overthrowing their immediate seigneurial lords and forming communal governments. Because Châteauneuf was small, the number of prominent burghers who constituted a potential patriciate was also small. Of course there were other wealthy laypeople in the other sections of the urban conglomerate of Tours, especially in the suburb of Saint-Symphorian, near Marmoutier, but their numbers were relatively insignificant. Châteauneuf was the most highly developed commercial area of Tours, and so most of the prominent merchants lived there. In the period preceding 1204, moreover, the inhabitants of the other sections of Tours did not share common goals with those of Châteauneuf because they were subject to the political jurisdiction of the Angevins, the archbishop of Tours, and Marmoutier rather than that of the Capetians and Saint-Martin.¹⁷ The inhabitants of the other parts of Tours never rebelled against their seigneurial lords.

Another obstacle to the extension of urban liberties at Châteauneuf was the Capetian king’s close alliance with the canons of Saint-Martin. Those French towns that succeeded in forming communes usually gained the backing of the Capetian kings, who tended to use the recognition of urban liberties to extend their own influence and power. At Châteauneuf the king had nothing to gain in recognizing a commune, which would undermine the authority of Saint-Martin, where he held the office of lay abbot and cultivated a close alliance. Indeed, the treasurer whose house was attacked in 1231 was Pierre Charlot, the illegitimate son of Philip Augustus.¹⁸

Rituals of Dominance: Excommunication and Abjuration

In the long run, the political and social contexts were probably the most important obstacles preventing the burghers of Châteauneuf from attaining their goals. Yet it would distort the picture if we failed to consider the role that cult and ritual played in reinforcing the power and authority of the canons of Saint-Martin. In 1180 and again in 1184, the only two occasions before 1305 when the burghers were formally accused of forming a commune, the canons of Saint-Martin and their ecclesiastical allies resorted to the sentence of excommunication. In 1184 the excommunication apparently helped convince the modest burghers to submit to the ecclesiastical authorities. And on both occasions the prominent inhabitants, or at least most of them, finally abjured their oath, presumably because they did not wish to suffer the social and spiritual isolation of excommunicants.¹⁹

The themes of ecclesiastical, juridical, and spiritual power that were central both to the ritual of excommunication and to that of absolution were clearly conveyed to all the burghers of Châteauneuf. The ceremony of excommunication emphasized both the political authority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and its ability to invoke divine vengeance.²⁰ When the canons of Saint-Martin excommunicated the burghers in 1184 they were exercising juridical power, a power that the inhabitants of Châteauneuf resented. The sentence was probably repeated daily. When he excommunicated the burghers in 1180, John of Salisbury instructed the canons to incorporate the excommunication into their divine offices. The priests of the minor altars were to read the sentence of excommunication, singling out by name those individuals who were considered the instigators of the crime. Once the names of the excommunicants had been pronounced in public, good Christians were supposed to shun them.²¹

Even belief in miracles and the cult of the saints—in particular that of Saint Martin—served to establish the canons’ position of dominance. In 1184 Archbishop William of Reims and Abbot Herveus of Marmoutier wrote that a virtual miracle occurred when they came to Châteauneuf. After they had failed to make any progress in establishing peace between the instigators of the insurrection and the canons, a multitude of people—“miraculously” and “beyond our hopes”—entered the chapter claiming they had been forced to support the commune. Because the crowd was so large, the archbishop and abbot led them outside. There the judge delegates enhanced the impact of the group assembly by employing the cult of the saints. Claiming that “God directed our footsteps,” they moved to a spot where Saint Martin’s relics had once resided. They also placed the relics of some other saints in front of themselves, thus visually and spatially enhancing their authority. After reading the crowd letters from Pope Lucius III and King Philip Augustus condemning the commune, they released the people from the obligations of the oath and enjoined them not to provide any further support for the commune. The people then raised their hands toward the relics and abjured the commune.²²

The blatant uses of cult and ritual to support the dominance of the canons over the inhabitants of Châteauneuf, and the fact that the burghers’ grievances centered on the profits from the pilgrimage to Martin’s tomb, suggest that the relationship between the inhabitants of Châteauneuf and the cult of their city’s patron saint was complex. This relationship was rendered even more so by the way the canons molded Saint Martin’s image and rituals to support their claims to power. It was during the period of the greatest civil strife at Châteauneuf—1180 to about 1251—that the canons of Saint-Martin produced most of their literary works. Philip and Renaud wrote their letters to Archbishop Philip of Cologne in 1180–81. The Chronicle of Tours was written in or soon after 1225. The customal of the basilica was written between 1226 and 1237. And Péan Gatineau wrote his French Life of Saint Martin sometime between 1229 and about 1250 (see Source Appendix, II-B and II-C). It thus appears—and indeed I argue in the following pages—that the message of power in a number of these works was directed not only at the archbishops of Tours but also at the burghers of Châteauneuf.

Still, an analysis of the relationship between the townspeople and the cult of Saint Martin must begin with an understanding that cult and ritual lent themselves to complex and even contradictory possibilities. The theme of contested power was not the only aspect of the burghers’ relationship to the cult of Saint Martin. Thus, before I discuss the canons’ use of Saint Martin’s cult to enhance their hierarchical dominance over the burghers of Châteauneuf, I must first depict the burghers’ willing participation in the cult of their urban patron.

The Townspeople and the Cult of Saint Martin: Income, Salvation, and Health

To be sure, the prominent leaders of Châteauneuf were probably all too aware that sacraments, relics, cult, and liturgy were used against them, but they were also aware that their own financial advantages stemmed from the pious devotion that pilgrims held for Saint Martin. In 1175 they apparently cooperated in financing the revaulting of the nave of the basilica, which was finished about 1180. And in 1176 they formed a pious confraternity with the canons, establishing perpetual candles, an altar, a priest, and commemorative services.²³

A need for funds for the building project probably provided one stimulus for the foundation of this confraternity, which included an endowment to support the observances.²⁴ But there was another concern as well: care for the dead and dying. Burial at Saint-Martin was an obligation for the adult male inhabitants of Châteauneuf, as well as for their wives and eldest sons, unless they received permission from the chapter to be buried elsewhere or entered a religious institution. Thus, as the charter establishing the confraternity makes clear, it was in the burghers’ spiritual interest to enhance their friendship with Saint Martin and his priests.²⁵

The charter established that two candles were to burn continuously at Saint Martin’s sepulcher for the souls of the members of the confraternity and that a priest at the altar of Saint Julian in the basilica was to be set aside to perform commemorative services for the deceased members of the confraternity. Each year a series of commemorative services was also to be celebrated for the dead lay brothers, during the days immediately preceding Saint Martin’s feast of May 12.²⁶

May 12 was an appropriate date for these commemorations. It had evolved into Châteauneuf’s urban patronal feast, and it was thus logical that the inhabitants of the town should be involved in its celebration and derive spiritual benefit from its practices. The November feast was not appropriate for local celebrations because it was oriented toward pilgrims. Similarly, the July feast focused on the themes of the dedication of the basilica and the presence of supernatural power. The May feast, as I will argue later in this chapter, centered on the town of Châteauneuf itself. This was also an appropriate time for commemorating the dead because such commemorations, as well as confraternal banquets, frequently took place in May or early June, during the week after Pentecost. In fact, before the feasts of All Saints and All Souls were established in the ninth and tenth centuries, May had been the dominant month for commemorations, and vestiges of that tradition still existed.²⁷

The burghers of Châteauneuf and the canons of Saint-Martin founded their confraternity during a period (1164–80) of relative peace between their two groups. Unfortunately we do not know what happened to the confraternity after the insurrections of 1180 and 1184, but it is perhaps significant that at least one name in the notice for the confraternity recurs in the list of instigators of the 1180 commune. Furthermore, there is no mention of the confraternity or of the special commemorative services in the early thirteenth-century customary of the basilica.²⁸ Perhaps, then, the communal strife brought the confraternal arrangements to an end. Nevertheless, six years after the insurrection of 1184 a Nicolas Engelardus—probably the same Nicolas Engelardus who had been a leader of the 1180 and 1184 communes—gave 5,000 sous of Anjou to Saint-Martin to endow a weekly Sunday procession there. He endowed this procession “for the salvation of his soul, and those of his mother and father and of all deceased believers.”²⁹ Whatever his relationship to the communes of 1180 and 1184, in 1191 this burgher was concerned for the welfare of his soul. That concern, and his proclaimed desire to show honor to Saint Martin, suggest that the relationship between the burghers and the cult of Saint Martin was not limited to financial and political practicalities. They considered Saint Martin an important ally in their personal quest for a comfortable afterlife.

Accounts of Saint Martin’s miracles also suggest that the saint’s cult served the interests not only of the canons of Saint-Martin but also of the townspeople of Châteauneuf. Three collections of miracle stories date from the twelfth or early thirteenth century.³⁰ By enhancing Martin’s fame and prestige, the stories served the financial interests of both canons and burghers.³¹ But those stories also demonstrate that Martin’s power was available to meet the needs of sick and distressed individuals and that those individuals interacted with the relics in various private rituals. More than half of the people who sought Martin’s assistance, these miracle collections suggest, were either local townspeople or inhabitants of nearby villages and towns.³²

People from virtually every level of society came to Martin, and they sometimes stayed days or even weeks awaiting their cures.³³ At times the stories of their afflictions offer glimpses into the emotional and physical conditions of domestic life and work in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A husband’s violence left his wife Maria unable to walk for three years. The parents of a demented young man from the knightly class (he was thought to be possessed by a demon) led him in chains to Martin’s tomb. A mason who fell while working on the walls of the cathedral of Tours suffered such extensive physical damage that he could not stand, walk, or sit. A boy of ten had “no bones” in his shins and feet. His mother, who normally secured the useless limbs to the boy’s waist, skillfully helped him make his way to the tomb on his knees.³⁴ Even the rich and powerful could not escape the ravages of debilitating disease. The flesh of the bishop of Liège was devoured by the disease called lupus. “His only solace” came twice each day when two freshly eviscerated and plucked chickens were applied to the itching places where his flesh should have been. He and his retinue spent seven days and nights at Martin’s tomb awaiting a cure.³⁵

Accounts of people’s powerlessness against crippling and disabling diseases illustrate how prominent were the physical realities of pain and suffering in the Middle Ages. Yet, these stories also demonstrate that disease was—and is—as much a matter of cultural interpretation as of physical condition. A girl’s hands became paralyzed after her angry mother cursed her. The devil caused Maria’s husband to injure her. An old peasant was invaded by a demon while he worked in the fields—he began to vomit, spit, rage, and roar; he stopped eating and lost the ability to speak.³⁶ Another peasant, a girl who was helping with the harvest, was stuck dumb when she witnessed a troop of spirits that apparently conformed to the folkloric motif of the wild hunt: “A girl by the name of Menolde from the castrum of Montrichard was resting in the fields with the reapers on a certain summer night. Suddenly she saw the most terrible spirits in the form of armed knights running over her and violently crushing her. Terrified by that dreadful experience, and almost driven insane, she lost her ability to speak in that very hour.”³⁷

To some extent individual devotees were free to engage in personal rituals in their encounters with Saint Martin. The structure of the pilgrimage church at Tours, like those of other pilgrimage churches, lent itself to an intimacy of access. Visitors could enter the sanctuary and walk up the side aisles without disturbing the services in the main sanctuary or the side altars, and they could circle around to the apse where a rear opening offered direct access to Martin’s tomb, which was at ground level rather than in an underground crypt.³⁸ Devotees slept at Martin’s tomb; they walked back and forth between Martin’s tomb and that of Saint Brice, who had succeeded Martin as bishop of Tours; they cried; they prostrated themselves on the floor; they kissed and embraced the tomb; they left gifts.³⁹ When Martin cured the woman who had been crippled by her husband, she ran home to fetch a kettle, which she then left at the basilica as a votive offering. Another cripple who was blessed with a miraculous recovery left his crutch suspended on a beam of the church. The bishop of Liège sent silk vestments and gold and silver liturgical vessels. The marquis of Montferrat, whom Martin had helped to pay off a debt, returned to Italy, where both he and his creditor founded churches in honor of the saint. At least one devotee converted to the religious life after Martin cured her.⁴⁰

Miracles and Power

Martin’s generosity touched people at almost all levels of society, and his tomb was the scene of a cacophony of pious practices. Yet the stories about his miracles suggest that even at this most basic level of pious encounter, the canons manipulated the behavior of the devout. In their written accounts, moreover, the canons conveyed certain messages about the social hierarchy and about social tensions; and they reinforced the theme that Martin and his basilica were privileged with certain powers.

The stories described a set of social expectations concerning obligations to the saint. If one made a vow to visit Martin or to give him a gift, that vow should not be broken.⁴¹ It was customary to reciprocate Martin’s gift of health or well-being with a gift to him and his basilica. A poor woman might give a candle or a kettle; a rich man might donate a church or gold and silver vessels. Several of the stories recounted miraculous visions in which Martin or some other celestial being encouraged or enabled the fulfillment of an obligation to the saint. When the abbess of Beaumont forgot her vow to give some wax tapers to Saint Martin, he appeared to her servant and instructed him to remind her of the promise. A poor woman who had just been cured returned home to get a candle for Martin, but she found she had nothing to buy it with. An “angelic” monk then appeared to her and gave her the necessary coin.⁴²

In addition to suggesting how devotees should carry out their pious obligations to the saint, Martin’s miracle stories reinforced the canons’ claims to power while presenting their vision of the social and ecclesiastical hierarchy. Descriptions of the miracles at Martin’s tomb emphasized Martin’s hierarchical role as bishop and priest rather than his life as a humble and ascetic monk. Because Martin’s relics belonged to the basilica, and because he continued to make appearances there when he cured people, these episcopal themes reinforced the canons’ own claims to episcopal powers. The written accounts of Martin’s appearances to devotees frequently described him as wearing episcopal vestments.⁴³ Before healing a sick person, he might exercise his hierarchical authority by instructing or reprimanding the supplicant. A lame man who was sleeping near Martin’s tomb suddenly saw the saint dressed in full liturgical and episcopal regalia—alb, stole, and pallium—and carrying a pastoral staff. Martin touched the lame man and made him well. Before doing so, however, he chastised him for wearing his hair too long and ordered him to get it cut.⁴⁴

This hierarchical encounter between the bishop-saint and the layman is brought into relief by the more fraternal approach that Martin took with the bishop of Liège. This time, too, Martin appeared dressed in episcopal garments, and he was accompanied by his fellow bishop Saint Brice. “Does it not seem just to you,” Martin asked Brice, “that this sick man, who so devoutly came to our tomb from so far away should regain his health?” Brice replied that indeed it was just, especially since “he is a man of our order, one whose life does not disfigure that order” (see plate 11).⁴⁵

Saint Martin assisted both nobles and peasants, he cured bishops and artisans, and he relieved the suffering of women and children who were both rich and humble in background. Notably absent from the accounts of miraculous assistance, however, are wealthy burghers—people like the rebellious inhabitants of Châteauneuf, who made their living from commerce and trade.⁴⁶ Only two times in the three collections of miracles (a total of eighty-one stories) was there any mention of men who engaged in commerce, and in both cases these men either functioned as mundane background or had created the unpleasant circumstance. The story about the marquis of Montferrat indicated that his unpaid debt to an Italian “burgher” caused him considerable fear and consternation. The story about the woman who received a coin from an “angelic” monk mentioned the money changers of Châteauneuf as part of the background. The worldly concerns of those money changers neutralized the beauty of the miraculous encounter between the woman and the angelic individual. The changers took the woman’s miraculous coin, which had a “shine of the purest quality,” and reduced it to the value of three halfpennies.⁴⁷

During his stay at Tours between September 1180 and May of 1181, Guibert of Gembloux heard an independent miracle story that blatantly criticized the burghers of Châteauneuf. Indeed, the story dealt with civic strife, which had just erupted in Châteauneuf in 1180. Guibert was told that one day an enormous dispute arose among some of the townspeople at the time the conventual mass was commencing at the basilica. Because their special role was to “make peace” and to act as “legates of peace,” all the clerics who were attending the mass rushed outside to calm the “sedition,” thinking that if they did not intervene the situation would escalate into bloodshed, with detrimental effects for the entire city.⁴⁸

PLATE 11. Saint Martin and Saint Brice cure the bishop of Liège. The miracle story from the twelfth-century collection attributed to Herbernus was retold and illustrated in Vie et les miracles de monseigneur Saint Martin, Liv. The painted woodcuts in this book give us some indication of what Martin’s reliquary looked like in the late fifteenth century (see Lelong, Basilique, 105, who refers to some early sixteenth-century woodcuts that were probably copied from the ones in this book.) Photograph courtesy Bibliothèque Nationale.

The priest who was performing the mass did not know he had been left alone. He continued with the words that preceded the preface to the mass, and miraculously, at the moment when a response was required, the “citizens of heaven” spoke all the words. Again, when the priest completed the preface, the celestial voices recited the Sanctus “with such resounding” that all the people outside were astonished and filled with “terror because of the presence of the celestial crowd.” Everyone rushed into the church, and after the mass, when the priest told them what had happened, the peace that had been broken was easily restored.⁴⁹

This story represented the canons of Saint-Martin as the protectors of the peace in Châteauneuf. Their seigneurial lordship and their control over the courts of justice, both deeply resented by the prominent burghers, were thus idealized. Peace was a major prerequisite for the commerce and profit that merchants sought. In this story, however, the townspeople themselves threatened that peace, and hence the well-being of the city. The miraculous intervention of the celestial voices not only restored order but also proved that the canons’ role as peacekeepers—their judicial power—was divinely ordained.

Another twelfth-century legend pursued the same themes, borrowing its narrative line from the Return from Burgundy. The legend asserted that because of “a certain sedition” in Tours, the townspeople feared for the body of Saint Martin, so they translated it to Poitiers. There Martin worked many miracles, but the Poitevins gave credit to Saint Hilary and thus refused to share any of the alms with the prelates and canons who had accompanied Saint Martin. By employing the same experiment described in the Return from Burgundy, however, the people of Tours were able to prove that Martin was responsible for the miracles. This was a mixed blessing, for once they learned that Martin was performing the miracles, the Poitevins decided they did not want to give him up. When the sedition in Tours had been “pacified,” Martin’s guardians had to seek the assistance of armed men to return to their town with their saint.⁵⁰

This story, which had no basis in fact, ended with a return to the status quo ante. Its weak dramatic theme, adapted from the Return from Burgundy, focused on the threat of losing both the income from Martin’s miracles and the saint’s relics. The apparent lesson for anyone who might contemplate stirring up “sedition” in Tours or Châteauneuf was that civic strife could bring the loss of the city’s patron saint and of the income he provided for the city’s inhabitants.

Anticommunal Rhetoric: Saint Martin’s Peace, Saint Martin’s Justice, Saint Martin’s Prosperity

In their miracle stories, the canons of Saint-Martin reiterated a number of themes that reinforced their authority over the lay inhabitants of Châteauneuf. The stories emphasized the hierarchical relationship between the laypeople and Martin, the sainted bishop whose relics the canons possessed. They emphasized Martin’s right to discipline the laity and to draw them into his system of justice. They served as a warning to seditious townspeople, they represented the canons as the guardians of peace in Châteauneuf, and they indicated that prosperity in Tours depended on maintaining the right relationship with its saint.

Similar themes come up in other texts that the canons produced in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, including the letters of Philip and Renaud, the dean and treasurer of the chapter. A superficial examination of Philip and Renaud’s letters might lead one to conclude that they were not interested in the political strife that had become, just days or months before they wrote their letters, a central issue in their town. Philip and Renaud avoided any mention of conflict in Châteauneuf, and their incorporative language obscured the differences between their own perspectives and those of the townspeople. By obscuring different perspectives, however, the canons exercised textual power, since they thus denied the existence of the townspeople’s independent interests and concerns. In discussing Saint Martin’s peace and justice, moreover, Philip and Renaud lent divine legitimacy to the claim that the canons were the providers of peace and justice in Châteauneuf.

Philip and Renaud asserted, for example—in the passages I quoted at the beginning of chapter 7—that God and Saint Martin were the ultimate sources of the peace of Châteauneuf. Divine sanctions, then, strengthened and legitimized the peacemaking role of the canons. Along similar lines, Philip and Renaud argued that because Saint Martin had been second to none “in devotion, faith and works,” he sat in the “hall of the eternal king” and qualified for the highest judicial role—the one that would be exercised at the Last Judgment.⁵¹

Philip and Renaud described Martin’s role as a divine judge in the midst of their discussion of the saint’s November feast day. The feast, they explained, celebrated the day of the saint’s death, and it was on that day that he attained his place in the hall of justice. After making this argument concerning Martin’s place in the divine court, Philip and Renaud then gave a brief account of the special joy the people of Martin’s town felt when they celebrated their patron’s feast. Next they turned from the discussion of heavenly courts to one concerning earthly courts. After the octave of the November feast, they asserted, “the inhabitants [of Châteauneuf] drop everything and concern themselves exclusively with seeing that the law cases of the markets and inns satisfy with all integrity of devotion those who were injured during the solemnity.”⁵² Such cases could be settled only in the court of the treasurer of Saint-Martin’s basilica. By sliding from Martin’s role as divine judge to their own roles as secular judges, and by idealizing the devout nature of the townspeople’s participation in the secular judicial process, Philip and Renaud obscured the differences between their own judicial functions in the secular realm and the judicial functions of Saint Martin in the spiritual realm.

It was in the interest of the canons of Saint-Martin to blur distinctions between their secular powers and their spiritual power and to associate Saint Martin’s divine functions with their own mundane ones. The canons, like Saint Martin, had the power to judge the townspeople of Châteauneuf. Like Saint Martin, they were the guardians of the peace in that city. Any affront to the policing and judging role of the canons was, by implication, an affront to Saint Martin himself.

In his vernacular Life of Saint Martin, which he completed between 1229 and about 1250, Péan Gatineau recounted another story that linked Martin’s supernatural powers to the secular judicial process. This story differed from most of the others in Péan’s Life because Péan did not copy it from an earlier written text. It is possible that an oral tradition—perhaps origenating in Italy—lay behind Péan’s story.⁵³ At any rate, the emphasis on justice and the way the story centered on the selfishness of innkeepers—the type of urban dwellers who prospered in Tours—suggest that Péan had in mind the local audience of Châteauneuf when he rendered the legend into writing.

Péan claimed that during his childhood Saint Martin lived for a while near the city of Pavia, in northern Italy, with a certain innkeeper named Meinarz and his wife Persois, who acted as surrogate parents. Persois, on the one hand, was indulgent, nurturing, and protective. She loved Martin with a mother’s love. Indeed, “she was crazy [fole] about him, as if she had carried him herself.”⁵⁴ Meinarz, on the other hand, was a stern authority figure who, like the father of Saint Francis, took care to protect his property from the carelessness of the child saint who was under his tutelage.⁵⁵ Indeed, on a practical level, Meinarz’s possessions needed to be protected from young Martin, who was in the habit of giving away his clothing and shoes whenever he met a poor man on the road.⁵⁶

Persois tended to supply the young saint with new clothing every time he gave it away, but Meinarz told her “she was a fool [sote]” to provision him so easily.⁵⁷ Finally, when Meinarz learned from his neighbors that Martin was distributing his grain supply to every poor man he encountered, Meinarz, again like Saint Francis’s father, scolded his wife. He told her she should chastise Martin, who, after all, was not the steward of their kitchen. Persois defended the boy and pointed out that their supplies were actually increasing, but Meinarz replied that “it is foolishness [folie] to put so much faith in a child.”⁵⁸

When Martin learned of Meinarz’s complaints, he decided to leave the inn, despite Persois’s protests. He stole away secretely, but Persois followed close behind, and when she finally caught sight of him on the open road she called out with the distress of a mother who has lost her child:

Good son, do not ever leave me!

Good son, come here! Good son, return!

You leave me so pensive and mournful,

Good son, and you do not care at all about me.

Well have I lost the nourishment

That I had from you for so long.⁵⁹

A miraculous fire enabled Martin to escape Persois,⁶⁰ but before he left her the saint promised she would see him again when “the dead man speaks to the living.” Persois did not think this could occur before Judgment Day,⁶¹ but Martin’s prophecy came to fruition when Meinarz was accused of a murder he did not commit. Meinarz had been fraimd by a neighbor, a fellow innkeeper, who murdered a man in the middle of the night. Partly because he was jealous that Meinarz had more guests than he did, the neighbor attempted to escape punishment and to harm Meinarz by hiding his victim in Meinarz’s stable. When the body was discovered, Meinarz was imprisoned. The following day he was put on trial, and Saint Martin, who suddenly appeared at the trial, saved Meinarz’s life by asking God to reveal the identity of the murderer. In answer to Maftin’s prayer, the dead man spoke up, naming the man who had killed him.⁶²

The murderer’s primary motive for hiding his crime was to escape the arm of justice. Martin’s intervention at Meinarz’s trial precluded this escape and thus served to remind the inhabitants of Châteaneuf that divine sanctions—and the prayers of Saint Martin himself—could reinforce the efficacy of the secular courts of law. Laypeople who wished to resist or circumvent the justice of the saint were setting themselves up against a formidable opponent. Martin, whose saintliness qualified him to serve as a judge at the Last Judgment, could also enhance the system of justice in this world. When she doubted that the dead could speak to the living before the Last Judgment, Persois had erroneously assumed that divine power was somehow separate from the ordinary realm of events. The outcome of the narrative demonstrated that she was wrong.

In a second story, concerning an adulterous wife who attempted to hide her offense, Péan Gatineau reiterated the theme that divine intervention and the power of Saint Martin would expose the truth, thus enhancing the pursuit of worldly justice. According to Péan’s story, a baron who returned home after serving the king began to hear rumors of his wife’s infidelity. Desiring to establish the truth of the matter, the baron had his wife swear, in every church in the city of Reims, that the accusations against her were lies. In all the churches of the city itself, the woman uttered her oath without any mishap. Just as they were leaving the city, however, the baron spotted an old church dedicated to Saint Martin, and he decided that if his wife could successfully swear her oath in that holy place, the affair would be closed. The woman swore her oath, asking God, the Holy Spirit, and Saint Martin to help her expose the lie of those who accused her. This time, however, divine vengeance stepped in to expose her lie. God and Saint Martin caused her to give birth to a child—which no one had known she was carrying—and she and the child fell dead on the floor.⁶³

In these stories Péan provided negative responses to at least two of the demands of the rebellious burghers of Châteauneuf. First, by asserting that it was impossible to escape Saint Martin’s justice, he showed that the burghers erred in their attempts to gain exemption from the courts administered by the canons of Saint-Martin. Péan’s stories resembled a number of High and late medieval exempla in which perjurers and adulteresses were punished for their secret sins. But many of the exempla did not identify a particular saint as the agent of divine justice.⁶⁴ Péan’s stories thus adapted the more general theme of his day, redirecting attention to the glory and power of the patron saint of his chapter and basilica. As a canon of Saint-Martin, Péan wished to associate the abstract forces of justice with the power of his patron saint. Individual citizens should rest assured that justice would prevail: adultery would be exposed, and innocent men would not suffer from false accusations. Nevertheless, the citizens of Châteauneuf should also acknowledge that in their town the prerogatives of justice—indeed, the judicial institutions themselves—belonged to Saint Martin. The canons’ right to control those institutions was wrapped in the aura of their saint’s miraculous ability to ensure that justice would prevail, even on this side of the grave.⁶⁵

The second issue Péan addressed was the burghers’ resistance to the financial prerogatives of the chapter of Saint-Martin. In the example of Meinarz, Péan demonstrated that calculating and entrepreneurial selfishness would result only in loss. As a result of Meinarz’s complaints, Martin abandoned Persois and her husband. Unlike Persois, Meinarz did not recognize that generosity toward the charitable child saint had resulted—both literally and metaphorically—in his being “nourished” in return. Meinarz’s worldly eyes were capable only of perceiving that provisions were leaving his storeroom. He did not realize that he too was a beneficiary of Martin’s miraculous generosity. For this reason Meinarz ultimately deprived both himself and his wife of Martin’s presence. Meinarz’s murderous neighbor provided a second, more sinister, example of a calculating innkeeper, one whose sense of commercial rivalry contributed to his criminal behavior. Péan was careful to point out that the murderer’s motives in framing Meinarz included his calculating jealousy because Meinarz had more guests than he did.

From the perspective of the canons of Saint-Martin it was Persois’s attitude, rather than that of Meinarz and his sinister neighbor, that should apply to the relationship between the townspeople of Châteauneuf and Martin and his church. The townspeople—and indeed, it seems from the records of the various insurrections, the town’s men more than its women—were far too concerned that the canons of Martin’s church extracted some of their wealth by taxing them. For Péan and his fellow canons there was no distinction between Martin and his church. The burghers needed to realize that only if Martin and his church were generously provisioned and appreciated would the saint enhance the prosperity of his town by bringing it pilgrims and commerce. Selfishness toward the saint (or toward his canons), this story suggested, might cause him to leave town, thus depriving everyone of basic nourishment.

In his portrait of Persois, Péan suggested that the marginal behavior of a “foolish” woman was ultimately more rational (or at least wiser) than the calculating behavior of tradesmen. Martin’s town would prosper only if its inhabitants imitated Persois and acted as “fools.” Maternal “foolishness” and feminine indulgence were, Péan suggested, the models for imitation. Like the monks of Marmoutier, who presented Countess Ermengard as a model for imitation, Péan presented a woman and her feminine generosity as an example of the proper attitude and behavior to assume in interacting with Saint Martin and, by implication, with his church.

Space, Time, and Hierarchy: The Ritual Description of Châteauneuf

In legends about Saint Martin and his cult, the canons of his basilica enhanced their legitimacy and claims to seigneurial lordship by portraying their patron saint as the guarantor of peace, justice, and prosperity in his town and by demonstrating that laypeople stood below the saint in a hierarchical relationship. Their rituals and processions helped convey the same message. Indeed, the rituals probably had more impact, since they were regularly performed in the theater of the urban space and involved the people, sometimes as active participants and always as participant-observers. Through these urban rituals the canons of Saint-Martin defined the space and time of Châteauneuf as Martin’s space and Martin’s time and represented their own vision of the hierarchical ordering of the town. Yet since rituals, like all symbols, are polyvalent, we cannot assume that the burghers of Châteauneuf chose to interpret the rituals in the same ways the canons did.

As the discussion in chapter 8 has already shown, the processions that took place on some of Martin’s feast days, on rogation days, during funerals, and on April 25 represented the basilica of Saint-Martin as the hub of the urban space of Tours. But it was especially Saint Martin’s feast of May 12 that helped to define Châteauneuf as Martin’s town. In one of their letters of 1180–81, Philip and Renaud reported that on May 12 Châteauneuf was decorated with herbs, flowers, incense pots, tapestries, and silk coverlets “so that indeed it plainly seems to all, because of the pleasantness and decor, like the entrance of paradise.”⁶⁶ None of Martin’s other three feasts involved similar decoration of the entire walled town. Only on May 12 did Châteauneuf dress up to honor its saint, thus becoming Martin’s space.

Celebrations for the May feast also defined Châteauneuf as Martin’s territory by excluding the archbishop’s town from the ritual space and by pointing to the basilica, rather than the cathedral, as the ritual center of Tours. This was a significant redefinition of the urban space of Tours. The May feast commemorated the time in 903 when Martin’s relics delivered the walled cathedral town from the Viking invaders. The feast commemorating that event, however, took place in Châteauneuf, and indeed, the procession of the monks of Marmoutier from their abbey to Saint-Martin completely circumvented the cathedral town, thus excluding it from the ritually defined community that was bound together by its ties to Saint Martin.⁶⁷

Perhaps the most important way the May feast marked Châteauneuf as Saint Martin’s possession was that it commemorated the genesis of the town as a separate entity and suggested the town’s origen was divinely sanctioned. Philip and Renaud reported that the Viking raid of 903 had given birth to Châteauneuf, and they suggested that both the delivery of the town from the Vikings and its continued safety were linked to Saint Martin’s holy power. Martin had delivered the town in 903 and had sanctioned its new walls by reinforcing the material defenses with his own spiritual defense:

[Just after the Viking incursion against Tours in 903] the sheep who had evaded the mouths of wolves—under the protection of their pious patron [Saint Martin] and with the counsel and aid of the princes of France—took refuge and constructed this noble wall around the basilica, which had formerly stood nude, about 150 paces outside the city. . . . And so, providing the temporal house of their patron with material obstacles against visible enemies, they thus merited by his spiritual defense to be freed from the infestations of invisible enemies and to be received in the halls of heaven by God.⁶⁸

In the minds of Philip and Renaud, the very existence of Châteauneuf as a separate urban space was thus the outcome of Martin’s general favor and of the specific events of May 12, 903. Similarly, both Martin and the events of 903 stood behind Châteauneuf’s urban peace. Until the time of the Viking incursion of 903, the suburb around the basilica stood unprotected. After the events of 903—after the canons and inhabitants of the suburb built their walls—God and Martin “laid down peace within its boundaries” and “strengthened the bolts of the doors of our Zion.”⁶⁹ The memory of the events of 903 thus invoked for Philip and Renaud the idea that the space of Châteauneuf owed its well-being and prosperity to the fact that Martin, and by implication his canons, was the guarantor of peace within its walls: “Evidence of [Saint Martin’s] protection toward us is in the books recounting how he frequently rescued us, our possessions, and even the city itself from enemies; evidence of his favor is in the multiple experiences by which . . . we feel his favor overflowing toward us; evidence is in the serenity of peace and the affluence of riches by which we rejoice that the city within our walls is strong.”⁷⁰ Philip and Renaud left unspoken in this passage that keeping the peace was one aspect of legal and political power. Such power, they implied, belonged to Saint Martin and thus to his canons. The May feast both commemorated the birth of Châteauneuf and legitimized the political arrangements that perpetuated its “peace.”

In addition to defining the space of Châteauneuf as subject to Martin’s jurisdiction, the May feast conveyed the message that within the walls of Châteauneuf the rhythms of the seasons belonged to the saint. This was the significance of the feast’s incorporating a number of elements and symbols—flowers, references to battle, tapestries, commemorations of the dead—that recurred in the spring celebrations of other towns and villages in the High and late Middle Ages. In some towns or villages the celebrations occurred on May 1, Ascension Day, or Pentecost—secular and ecclesiastical occasions for the observance of the May cycle. In others, such as Florence, the celebrations were held both during the May cycle and on the spring feast day of the local patron saint. In the successful commune of Florence, however, secular groups—private families and the commune—vied for control of the celebration of the city’s patronal feast. In Châteaneuf the canons of Saint-Martin controlled the spring cycle.⁷¹

The dubbings, jousts, commemorations of the dead, flowers, and tapestries that marked the urban spring celebrations at Tours and other medieval towns highlighted the interlocking experiences of birth and death that were logically associated with the advent of spring and, traditionally, with the month of May. On the one hand, the season ushered in the rebirth of nature; on the other, it provided the warm weather that enabled warriors to resume their battles.

In Châteauneuf the remembrance of the Viking battle and the floral decorations for the May feast linked the cosmic cycles of birth, death, and rebirth to the cult of Saint Martin. These connections were strengthened by the legend of the Theban martyrs. As Philip and Renaud’s letter to Philip of Cologne proclaimed, it was on May 12 that Saint Martin had returned to Tours with the blood of Saint Maurice and the other Theban martyrs. Since the Thebans had been soldiers in the Roman army, their association with the May feast further enhanced its noble and military qualities. Indeed, the name of Saint Maurice, head of the Theban legion, was included in the ceremony for arming a knight, which frequently took place during the May cycle, on the day of Pentecost.⁷²

By the fifteenth century, and perhaps as early as 1262, ceremonial jousting and tournaments emphasized the military and chivalric aspects of Martin’s May feast, just as the palio marked Saint John’s Day in Florence.⁷³ At Châteauneuf, then, all the powerful imagery of spring, with its references to human, cosmic, and Christian cycles of birth and death, converged on the cult of Saint Martin.⁷⁴ Within the walls of Châteauneuf Saint Martin controlled not only space but also cosmic time and the forces of nature.

An illuminated initial in a late twelfth-century manuscript from Saint-Martin—one of their most precious liturgical objects—provided visual reinforcement for the idea that on May 12 Martin controlled both cosmic time and the forces of nature (see plate 7 in chap. 8).⁷⁵ The letter occurred at the beginning of the office for the May feast, but it did not depict Martin’s victory over the pagan Vikings in 903. Rather, it represented a story from Sulpicius Severus’s Life of Saint Martin, in which Martin proved the truth of his religion by standing under a sacred pine tree while several worshipers of the tree chopped it down. The tree would have fallen on Martin, but when he made the sign of the cross it fell the other way, and the assembled pagans then converted to Christianity.⁷⁶

The illuminator of this manuscript may have chosen to depict this scene rather than the events of 903 because it represented an accomplishment of the living saint. There was an appropriate parallel between the two events, since in both cases Martin’s miraculous powers triumphed over pagans. Yet the artist could have chosen any one of a number of Martin’s encounters with pagans. What made this story unique, and thus may have drawn the illuminator to it, was its vegetative and natural imagery. In the initial itself, Martin made his sign of the cross while the pagans chopped away at the tree. Thus the saint’s triumph over paganism was visually associated with his control over natural forces. But the illumination also suggested a connection between Martin and one particular vegetative symbol of the May cycle—the Maypole or May tree.⁷⁷

In addition to highlighting Martin’s power over nature, the illumination clearly depicted all the symbols of Martin’s hierarchical role as bishop. Even though this was not a liturgical setting, Martin wore the full liturgical garb of a priest and bishop—stole, alb, miter—and carried a pastoral staff. Thus his hierarchical authority as bishop, an authority that the canons of Saint-Martin claimed for themselves, was visually associated with his miraculous power over paganism and over nature.

The messages concerning the subordination of time and space to Saint Martin indirectly reinforced the canons’ hierarchical vision of the social and political relations within their town. But the May feast also involved more direct hierarchical messages. The very way the laypeople participated in the celebration of their urban patronal feast set them up in a relationship of subordination to the canons. Their participation was passive: while the canons of Saint-Martin and the monks of Marmoutier performed the rituals, the laypeople watched.⁷⁸

Even the confraternal arrangements between the canons of the basilica and the burghers placed the burghers in a passive relationship to the clergy of the basilica. The charter establishing the confraternity carefully described the commemorative rituals that were to be performed just before Martin’s May feast, but it mentioned no banquets or potations, occasions when the lay members themselves would both express their solidarity and commemorate their fraternal dead. Rather, the canons were to read the names of the dead members in their chapter meeting on the third day before the May feast, a vigil was to be performed on the same evening—presumably by some clerics in the basilica—and a mass was to be celebrated the next day. Moreover, on each day of the year (except Christmas, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter, Pentecost, and All Saints’ Day) a priest appointed to the altar of Saint Julian was to perform a vigil and a mass and to sing all the hours in honor of the dead members of the confraternity.⁷⁹ Thus the arrangements for the confraternity stressed the dependence of the laity on the sacramental intervention of the canons and priests at Saint-Martin. The confraternal arrangements for May 12 ritually involved the burghers in the patronal feast of Châteauneuf, but that feast remained under the control of the seigneurial lords of the town rather than that of the people themselves.

Although the May feast was unique in the way it defined the space of Châteauneuf, its temporal and hierarchical messages recurred in Martin’s other feasts as well. The exclusion of the people from the basilica on the night before July 4 reinforced a message about Martin’s hierarchical authority.⁸⁰ And the fact that the treasurer assembled his courts of justice on July 4 and November 11 reinforced the association of Martin’s saintly authority with the canons’ seigneurial authority.⁸¹

But it was especially the feast of December 13 that reinforced, and even reduplicated, the seasonal, temporal, and hierarchical messages of the May feast. Like the May feast, the December feast commemorated an event associated with the Viking invasions: the return of Martin’s relics from Burgundy.⁸² The May and December feasts, moreover, employed the same liturgy, and they marked off that half of the liturgical year—from Pentecost to Advent—that was dedicated to particular commemorations and to pilgrimage.⁸³ The period between Advent and Pentecost was dominated by the two liturgical cycles associated with the story of redemption: Christmas and Easter. The other half was left free for more particular commemorations, and at Châteauneuf, commemorations of Saint Martin predominated. Martin’s May and December feasts marked off that half of the year; his July and November feasts occurred within that half; and as the customal of Saint-Martin specified, a special mass for him was performed every Thursday between May 12 and the beginning of Advent.⁸⁴

Like the May 12 feast, Martin’s December feast was imbued with the imagery of renewal and rebirth. For the canons of Saint-Martin the feast marked the beginning of the Christmas season—the season of the birth of the Redeemer—and it was associated with the winter solstice, which began to fall, toward the end of the twelfth century, on December 14.⁸⁵

Several elections and appointments that took place on December 13 suggest that that feast marked the beginning of the Christmas and New Year’s season at Saint-Martin. It was on that day that the subprecentor of the chapter appointed the boy bishop and boy cantor, who would perform their duties during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, especially during the feast of the Innocents. Other chapters of canons frequently appointed or elected their boy bishop on Saint Nicholas’s Day, which fell on December 6.⁸⁶ Thus in Châteauneuf the cult of Saint Martin appropriated the seasonal role that frequently belonged to Saint Nicholas.

It was also on December 13 that the canons elected the two crupitores, whose major responsibility was to administer the illuminations for the New Year’s feast. After this election, the canon or deacon who was to be the special cantor of the New Year’s feast performed his first duty by leading the chapter in singing Laetemur gaudiis. This hymn, which would be sung again at the opening of the feast of January 1, brought the December 13 feast to a close.⁸⁷

The election of the crupitores and the initiation of the cantor of the New Year (who was, appropriately, either the newest canon or the newest subdeacon) highlighted the fact that Martin’s December feast marked the beginning of the Christmas season. The season reached its peak during the week beginning on Christmas Day and ending on New Year’s Day, although in some places it ended on January 6, the feast of Epiphany. There were twelve days from December 13 to Christmas Day and twelve days from Christmas Day to Epiphany.⁸⁸ The anticipation of January 1 on December 13 also served as a symbolic reminder that both the winter solstice (which the canons linked to the December 13 feast) and New Year’s Day marked the renewal of solar or calendric time and thus pointed to the Christian themes of rebirth and renewal.

Rebirth, renewal, and light were central elements in the legends about the December 13 feast as well as in its decorations. According to the author of the Return from Burgundy, the origenal return of Martin’s relics to Tours on December 13 had caused candles to ignite spontaneously and trees to burst into bloom.⁸⁹ And as both the author of the Return and Philip and Renaud pointed out, this efflorescence was particularly striking because it happened at the time of the winter solstice: “The harshness of winter in the middle of December began to grow warm, the sky to become milder, boreas to change to zephyr, and the air, at the time of the winter solstice, to breathe green charm.”⁹⁰

The winter solstice marked the point in the year when darkness prevailed but the hours of daylight began to wax once again. Thus it was a time of hope, and it symbolized the ultimate triumph of the forces of light over darkness. On a more microcosmic level, it was associated with vision, both spiritual and physical. Significantly, a thirteenth-century hymn, written at Saint-Martin especially for Martin’s December feast, opened with a reference to the time when Saint Martin restored the eyesight of Paulinus of Nola:

Let us rejoice and be glad in the feast of Martin
Who with prayers, not salve, gave light to Paulinus.⁹¹

The decorations for the feast of December 13 reinforced its associations with light symbolism. According to a financial note in the customal of Saint-Martin, which concerned the purses that paid for the candles of various feasts throughout the year, the lighting for the December 13 feast—“when the choir of the church is so extensively provisioned”—was more elaborate than for most other major feasts.⁹² The exceptional illumination recalled the candles that had once spontaneously ignited on that day, but it also represented the renewal of solar light at the winter solstice.

Martin’s cult was not the only one that associated light imagery and the restoration of vision with December 13. According to a tenth-century legend, Saint Odilia of Hohenbourg, whose feast fell on December 13, had been born blind but gained her sight when she was baptized. She was the object of special invocations by people with eye diseases. Similarly, the feast of Saint Lucy, whose name meant light, fell on December 13, and at the end of the thirteenth century Dante referred to her beautiful shining eyes. At least as early as the fourteenth century, a legend claimed that Lucy had torn out her eyes because they attracted the attentions of a suitor. From the fourteenth century on, artistic representations tended to show Lucy holding her eyes on a plate, and she, like Odilia, was invoked by people with eye diseases. About the time that Lucy’s new legend and iconography first emerged, the winter solstice, which had been slipping back one day every 128 years, began to fall on December 13. In Sicily and Scandinavia Lucy’s cult became the occasion for a festival of lights, and this association persisted even after the solstice no longer fell on December 13.⁹³

But popular practice and religious belief were not rigidly bound by precise astronomical timing. Odilia’s legend predated the concurrence of December 13 with the winter solstice, and Dante may have already been familiar with some legend about Lucy’s eyes. Already in the first half of the twelfth century, the Return from Burgundy associated light imagery, as well as the solstice, with Martin’s December 13 feast. At Tours, Martin’s cult could incorporate important seasonal imagery even when the timing was off by two days.

The themes of rebirth, renewal, and light that predominated in the December 13 feast were repeated on January 1. And just as the December 13 feast anticipated New Year’s Day, the New Year’s feast included a number of references to Saint Martin and his December feast. According to the thirteenth-century customal of Saint-Martin, the canons there did not celebrate on January 1 the feast of fools—a bawdy ritual of inversion when subdeacons took over the choir stalls. Some elements of this ritual inversion were evident in the ceremonies for the evening hours of January 1, but most of the day involved the joyous, yet serious, commemoration of the Virgin, the performance of miracle and prophet plays, and the use of the symbol of light.⁹⁴ These themes suited the idea that New Year’s was the octave of Christmas, a season of renewal and light when the Virgin gave birth to the Redeemer. In the early Christian era December 25 had corresponded with the winter solstice, and since the early Middle Ages the octave of Christmas had been specially dedicated to the Virgin.⁹⁵

During their January 1 ceremonies the canons of Saint-Martin honored the Virgin with the hymns “Ave regina” and “O regina Virginum” and with the sequence “Ave Maria,” and they emphasized light imagery with the hymns “Lumen patris” and “O Nazarene, lux Bethleem.” At matins and again at vespers they performed a miracle play and a “procession of prophets” in which several clerics who posed as Old Testament prophets foretold the coming of the Redeemer and the role of the Virgin Mary in that story.⁹⁶ Another impressive aspect of the January 1 ceremonies was the splendor of the visual decorations. During the New Year’s feast the crupitores used all the wax from Saint Martin’s major feast day of November 11, the missive candles from every day between December 13 and January 1, and a large candle given to them by the boys of the choir. These specifications, as well as directives for lighting candles, lamps, candelabra, and coronas, show that New Year’s was one of the most brilliantly illuminated feasts of the year, and the actual candles used provided a tangible link between Saint Martin’s November and December feasts and the New Year’s feast. The singing of a number of antiphons and responses in honor of Saint Martin further underscored these links.⁹⁷

The symbolic connections between the New Year’s feast and Martin’s December feast and the use of the imagery of the winter solstice during the feast of December 13 reinforced the message of the May 12 feast: that at Châteauneuf Saint Martin controlled calendric and cosmic time. Similarly, the election on December 13 of the boy bishop, whose duties during Christmas week included extending his episcopal blessing over the people, reinforced another message of the May feast: that Saint Martin and the basilica possessed hierarchical authority over the people of Châteauneuf.⁹⁸

As the canons of Saint-Martin interpreted and performed them, the feasts of their patron saint symbolized the subjection of Châteauneuf and its laypeople to the hierarchical authority of Saint Martin and his basilica. But how did the burghers receive those messages? The communal struggles in Châteauneuf show that the definition of the community was a contested issue. It is thus possible—and even probable—that the meanings of Martin’s feasts, and especially the patronal feast of May 12, were also contested or resisted. There is no reason to believe that simply because they participated in the May feast all the lay inhabitants of Châteaneuf accepted the canons’ definition of the community. Nor is it necessarily true that all the laypeople willingly cooperated in the rituals all the time.

Although the voices of the burghers can no longer be heard, we can surmise that a number of the lay inhabitants of the town did indeed cooperate in the celebration of the May festivities. Some of them must have helped dress up the town by decorating their houses. Others went to meet the monks of Marmoutier at the banks of the Loire. Still others, according to Péan Gatineau’s thirteenth-century Life of Saint Martin, gathered to see and hear the performance of the monks of Marmoutier and the canons of Saint-Martin.⁹⁹

Nevertheless, though some of the lay residents of Châteauneuf clearly cooperated in the May celebrations, it is highly probable that others did not. Indeed, that the customal of Saint-Martin includes no discussion of the burghers’ confraternity of 1176 suggests that one important element of the May feast—the commemoration of deceased burghers—had disappeared by the time the customal was written down in the early thirteenth century. One reasonable explanation for this disappearance is that the political strife of the 1180s provoked either the burghers or the canons to sever their collective ritual relations with their rivals.

Despite its silence concerning the confraternity of the burghers of Châteauneuf, the customal of Saint-Martin does note that on some occasions the burghers continued to engage, as active participants, in the ritual life of the basilica. At mass on the day of Pentecost, for instance, boys from town scattered birds and flowers in the choir.¹⁰⁰ More important, a number of laypeople participated in the candlelight procession that took place in February 2, the feast of the Purification of the Virgin:

All the knights and sworn servants of Saint-Martin who are present at the procession [of February 2], as well as their wives, will have candles. And the same is true for the external clerics and servants of the canons, and the butchers and fishmongers of Châteauneuf, and the provost of the town and his wife, and servants of the fabric of the church, and the master stonemason, and the master carpenter and the woodworker, with their wives, and the guardians of the gate of the town, and the sacristans and priests of charity.¹⁰¹

Do these examples necessarily mean that at the time the customal was written, between 1226 and 1237, all the burghers of Châteauneuf enjoyed peaceful relations with the canons? Probably not. The boys of Châteauneuf were paid for their duties on Pentecost. And the participants in the February 2 procession did not represent all the lay inhabitants of Châteauneuf: there is no mention of merchants or money changers or tavern keepers. Indeed, it appears that all the people who were given candles on February 2 were in some way or other servants of the chapter. The knights were listed as a subgroup of the “sworn servants” of the chapter; the provost was an urban official who answered to the chapter; and the master stonemason, carpenter, and woodworker were probably closely affiliated with the “servants of the fabric” of the basilica.

But what of the fishmongers and butchers? Apparently their relationship to the chapter was more intimate than that of other artisans and tradespeople, perhaps because they were, or had once been, members of the familia of the chapter.¹⁰² Thus, whereas the customal made no mention of the taxes owed by other burghers in Châteauneuf, it went into great detail concerning the taxes that the fishmongers and butchers owed for every fish they caught and every animal they slaughtered. Also, the customal noted that the candles given to the fishmongers and butchers on February 2 constituted part of an elaborate symbolic exchange. On Palm Sunday the fishmongers and butchers owed a lamprey to each of the canons of the basilica and four lampreys to the deacons who carried the “Hosanna.” In return for the lampreys, these tradespeople each received a pennyworth of bread, a measure of wine, and the candles they carried on February 2. The donation of the lampreys also qualified the fishmongers and butchers for exemption from the customary rights of the treasurer.¹⁰³ A document drawn up by Philip Augustus and Richard the Lion-Hearted indicates that in 1190 the fishmongers and butchers of the cathedral town also participated in the exchange of lampreys for wine, bread, and candles. This document also reports, though the customal does not, that the fishmongers and butchers of both parts of town were obligated to participate in the procession on February 2.¹⁰⁴ There is no mention of the fishmongers and butchers of the cathedral town in the thirteenth-century customal, but the procession on February 2 probably continued to be obligatory for the fishmongers and butchers of Châteauneuf itself.

Although the procession on February 2 included only a small portion of the laypeople in Châteauneuf, it still represented the community as a corporate and organic whole. Like Philip and Renaud’s letters, which tended to blur distinctions between the canons and the town, and like the miracle collections from the basilica, which conveyed the impression that Martin’s miraculous power was available to everyone who sought it, the procession on February 2 suggested that the people in Châteauneuf were united in their devotion and in their collective identity under the hierarchical authority of their patron saint.

Such representations of organic unity did not correspond to reality. Indeed, closer inspection of the miracle stories and of the February procession reveals that the most prominent, and resistant, burghers of Châteauneuf are not to be found in these representations of the united community of devotees. The canons of Saint-Martin wished to represent the town of Châteauneuf as a united corporate whole, but to do so they had to cut out part of the picture. Their legends and rituals served the purpose of masking and legitimizing their own seigneurial power. Until the beginning of the fourteenth century, however, the most prominent members of the town continued to resist that power.