The Social and Intellectual Context of Church Reform
The generations who lived between the turn of the first Christian millennium and the appearance of the Decretum of Gratian about 1140 experienced a radiÂcal transformation in Western European culture.
Thought and society by 1140 were far different from what they had been in the year 1000, although the full significance of the changes that had taken place was probably not apparent to most of those who lived through them. During that century-and-a-half, EuÂrope’s population increased enormously, and its patterns of settlement and economy began to change in fundamental ways. In the year of the millennium, no city of great size existed anywhere in the Latin West, and there had not been one for centuries. The largest, most prosperous European cities were in MusÂlim Spain—places such as Cordoba, with a population of perhaps 90,000, and Seville, with slightly more than 50,000 inhabitants. Northern European towns were much more modest in size: London’s population in 1086, for example, probably did not exceed 8,000. Although Rome, the Eternal City, had only about 30,000 people at the first millennium, Venice and perhaps Milan seem to have been somewhat larger, with populations approaching that of Seville. But even towns of these modest sizes were few and far between. The overwhelming majority of Europe’s people lived in small villages and hamlets that ranged in size from perhaps a dozen to one or two hundred families. The denizens of these rural settlements made their living, such as it was, from one or another form of agriculture: they were nearly all peasants, of whom a substantial fracÂtion in many regions were serfs, legally bound to the land they tilled.By the mid-twelfth century, however, Europe’s total population had grown significantly. Even more important, the process of urbanization, or reurbanizaÂtion, had commenced in earnest.
Existing population centers—mainly the see cities of bishops—grew in size. In addition, new towns began to attract considÂerable populations. By 1140, there were still no large cities in Europe west of Constantinople, but Western towns elsewhere than in the Iberian Peninsula were larger and more numerous than they had been a century-and-a-half earÂlier. The populations of the greatest ones had grown to around 40,000. By 1140, the consequences of these changes were beginning to be felt in many departÂments of life.[699]Demographic alterations in settlement patterns had brought about imporÂtant readjustments in European economy and society. Inhabitants of the new towns and the rapidly growing older cities depended primarily upon commerce and manufacturing, rather than agriculture, for their livelihood. As urban busiÂness activity grew along with the town populations, further changes in social structure were bound to follow—and so they did. Bourgeois townsmen were, by and large, legally free, not bound to the soil, as were many of their contemÂporaries in rural areas. Townsmen in the prosperous urban centers sought, and most of them sooner or later obtained, rights of self-governance: they made laws and created courts to enforce them, they levied taxes and chose officials to collect and disburse them, they raised armed forces and allied with other towns for mutual defense.[700]
In the burgeoning towns of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries the beÂginnings of an intellectual revolution were slowly taking shape. Townsmen more than peasants had need of literacy. Growing numbers of secular clerics required schooling. The cathedral schools of bishops expanded in size and academic scope. Although there was a demand for greater numbers of people with experÂtise in the seven liberal arts, both lay and clerical students increasingly sought training in law and medicine, while interest in the “sciences” of theology and philosophy began to outstrip interest in the older arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic.