Town and countryside are contrasting, even opposed ideas: one of those doublets which have dominated European thought since antiquity. Our vocabulary of ‘politics’ and ‘civilization’ bears ample testimony to the deep hold that the prejudices of the townsmen of antiquity have established over our language and our thinking. Sometimes, even in antiquity, those prejudices would be turned on their head: the town, the exclusive milieu of culture, refinement and rational human behaviour, could become, as for instance in the eyes of a Jewish rabbi of the third century the seat of iniquity, set up to extort and to oppress. Whatever the attitude one took to the town, the dichotomy of town and countryside became almost a category in the Kantian sense in terms of which modern Europeans have come to perceive the world around them. With Max Weber it became a fundamental category of sociological understanding, with Rostovtzeff of historical analysis, especially of the ancient world in its decline; and in the hands of William Frend—the Rostovtzeff of ecclesiastical history—it showed its power to illuminate, even to transform, the study of ancient heresy and schism. ‘The church in town and countryside’ might be thought to extend the franchise of a notion which has already had too wide and at times, as some would have it, perhaps even a baleful, influence. But both the value of the notion of town and country as an interpretative tool for the ecclesiastical historian, and its limitations, its liability to obscure and to distort, will, I hope, become clearer in the course of discussion.

It is the aim of this paper to ask questions rather than to answer them. The area with which I am concerned is a strip of central Syria extending from the Euphrates in the north to Baalbek (ancient Heliopolis) in the south. This region has a large number of village-remains from late antiquity, some of them exceptionally well preserved. These remains have yielded a large number of inscriptions, of which a significant proportion bears a date. They are being collected in the volumes of the Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie. Seven volumes have appeared.

The inscriptions start in the early empire and continue to the end of the sixth century. They thus start in pagan times and cover the whole development of Syrian Christianity. Only a few of the Christian inscriptions come from the great cities of Syria, for example Antioch, Aleppo [Beroea], the ancient Apamea, or Horns [Emesa]. They do not therefore throw light on the development of urban Christianity, which at Antioch especially was of great importance, and of long standing. The development reflected by the inscriptions is the conversion of the countryside.

A visitor to the Greco-Roman world about the year 350 AD would have found himself confronted by one of the great ‘sea changes’ in the lives of its peoples. The structure of city, farm and village that had persisted for centuries would appear to be intact. The market-places of the towns would be lined with altars and statues of long-dead benefactors. Temples to the gods of Rome and perhaps to a native deity duly Romanised, would dominate the scene. Wherever one stood in the city the temples in the forum would be the landmark. Nearby, would be the amphitheatre and great bath-building, the social centres of the old community, and near the entrance to the town the triumphal arch, marking perhaps the unification of Roman citizen and native inhabitant into one community.

When Martin became bishop of Tours c370, Christianity had already taken root in the town; but the surrounding countryside was still untouched by the new religion. Although it was over fifty years since Constantine had first recognised Christianity, and thirty-three years since Tours had had a permanent bishop, the attention of the Gallic bishops had been distracted first by the Arian heresy, and latterly by Julian’s revival of paganism. Martin was therefore the first bishop of Tours to concern himself with the conversion of the countryside, and this work was continued by his successors in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Although Merovingian cities were not prepossessing they were important. Physically they straggled outside the Roman walls of the third century and divided increasingly into suburbs dependant on the great basilicas. Dijon, technically a castrum, was thought to be worthy of higher status, but its aspect was one of walls, fields, streams and mills. To be fair, urban centres throughout the middle ages possessed equally bucolic attributes. More important, the civitates were secular and ecclesiastical centres. The greatest of them could boast strong associations with the royal court, but even those with no such cachet were distinguished by the presence of a bishop. This last figure has attained considerable eminence in the eyes of historians and perhaps his authority has been exaggerated, nevertheless if his position was weaker than we have been taught, it was because of the strength and vigour of urban society; the reputation of the cities is not diminished. Not surprisingly they provided the backcloth for many of the dramas of sanctity and martyrdom recorded by the hagiographers.

Held almost as an article of faith amongst Merovingian historians is a belief in the strength of the bishops’ position in the town in early Frankish society. Passages from the life of bishop Desiderius of Cahors are often used to illustrate the busy bishop at work in his town, responsible, it seems, for maintaining the town’s defences. The assumption of secular duties by the bishop has been charted by a German scholar—Claude—who shows how in many cases the crown’s principal representative in the town—the count—began to reside outside the town, having been deprived of his specifically urban functions by the bishop. The interest shown in the bishops in the town has, however, led to a rather unbalanced picture of the bishop as an urban creature. In contrast, the Merovingian church councils of the sixth and seventh centuries show that the bishops were very much concerned with rural work, and from the legislation which applies to both town and country it could be argued that the distinctions between the two are less clear-cut than a concept such as bischöfliche Stadtherrschaft implies.

Although there were both urban and rural monastic communities in the Frankish kingdoms in the Carolingian period, far more is known about the landed monasteries in the countryside regarding both their internal organisation and the relationship between them and the rural community in which they lived and over which they were the lords. The statutes of Adalhard of Corbie for example provide information concerning the monastery both within the monastic community and on its estates, and show us the abbey as the centre of an agricultural region. The monasteries in the towns on the other hand are much less well-documented and the evidence for Carolingian towns themselves is both sparse and difficult to interpret. If a town is understood to be ‘a concentration of population larger than the neighbouring agricultural settlements in which there is a substantial non-agricultural population which may be concerned with defence, administration, religion, commerce or industry’, there are not very many Carolingian centres for which enough evidence survives to justify their being called towns. Valenciennes for example, described recently as une ville carolingienne, is mentioned in the sources occasionally as a portus and seems to have succeeded Farrars in importance in the region sometime in the eighth century. In the time of Charles the Bald it had a mint, and Charlemagne, Charles the Bald, Lothar I and Lothar II are all known to have issued charters from a royal palatium at Valenciennes. There were several churches and the abbey of St Salvius in the settlement, and it is likely that some trading activity went on. But other than that Valenciennes was a settlement which carried on some sort of economic activity, very little is known. The abbey of St Amand, a rural monastery nine miles from Valenciennes, achieved a far more influential and important position in the kingdom than the town of Valenciennes ever did.

‘The church in town and countryside’ is a fruitful theme. But for early medievalists it is an especially challenging one. We first have to establish our right to participate at all. There is a classic tradition of interpreting western history, and the history of western Christianity too, in terms of an opposition between town and countryside: but according to exponents of this tradition, from Marx and Engels through Weber and Troeltsch to some contemporary historians, the early middle ages present a dull, townless void between antiquity and the eleventh or twelfth century. We have to begin then, by affirming that there were towns in the early middle ages. To justify this, we must do more than point out continuity in the terminology used by late classical and early medieval writers. We need to show that places existed which functioned as towns. Biddle has given a useful archaeologist’s list of functional criteria: defences, a planned street-system, a market, a mint, legal autonomy, a role as a central place, a relatively large and dense population, a diversified economic base, plots and houses of ‘urban’ type, social differentiation, complex religious organisation, a judicial centre.

To begin, as is natural, by considering the sedes episcopales of early England is to realise how little we know of its significant places—even to use the word ‘town’ is to beg a question. It is certain that some sedes were established at major centres of authority. Bede used metropolis to describe London and Canterbury and by that he meant the capital of a kingdom. Gregory the Great was probably wise in selecting London as the seat of an archbishop, an intention in which he seems to have persisted even after he was informed of English conditions. Not only was it the capital of a kingdom but it had geographical advantages which Canterbury could not rival. Even though Canterbury was established as the archbishops’ sedes there are indications that already from the seventh century they were using London as a meeting place, and perhaps as a dwelling place, at least on occasion. No major council of the early English church was held at or near Canterbury. York’s position in the north probably resembled that of London in the south. Our view of it has been transformed by Phillips’s excavations, which have shown that the great headquarters building of the legionary fortress was maintained and used, at least in part, until well after the conversion period.

It is fifty years since Germain Morin, in an article in the Revue Bénédictine articulated discussion of the tensions and developments in eleventh and early twelfth-century regular, and para-regular, life around a central ‘crisis of cenobitism’, and twenty years since Leclercq stabilised the debate in a wide ranging article which has become the basis of all subsequent comment. This crisis in the cenobitic life is now a commonplace, expressed in Leclercq’s terms as ‘the crisis of prosperity’ and answered by the resurgence of rural monasticism, eremitical in character, in reaction to the elaborate structures and relationships of an established monasticism resident in the urban centres of population and influence. The individual austerities and renunciations of Romuald stand at the beginning of a proliferating development in western Christendom, and may, in a general sense, be taken to characterise these new initiatives. The direct influence of Romualdine ideas and practices, whether through his foundations or through his self-proclaimed spiritual heir Damian, which is sometimes alleged is difficult to prove, but there is an obvious consonance between the Italian experiments and those elsewhere in the west, a compatibility of outlook and attitude between Romuald and Damian, and men like Bruno, Stephen Harding, Robert of Arbrissel.

Christian teaching places man’s origin in paradise, a rural setting, and the end of mankind in the celestial city of Jerusalem. Thus both town and country have potentially positive connotations to the believer. Yet just as the angel could fall to become satan, so town and country could acquire evil reputations, depending on the behaviour of human beings in these settings (after all, the fall of man took place in paradise).

Christian writings draw in many respects on human experience, including the setting of man in society. At times in history town and country were experienced as different settings of life. Certainly there existed a notion of a superiority of urban over rural existence in classical Greek times; in contrast, Roman civilisation was more geared towards rural life. Both Hellenic and Roman thought contributed a great deal to the shaping of early Christianity. I am concerned here primarily with medieval attitudes towards town and country, but it is a fact that these were, partly at least, based on earlier tradition.

Although the great majority of first-generation western settlers in the crusader states must have come from rural areas, most of them lived in towns when they reached the levant. This presented no problem: there was plenty of space in the towns of Outremer, for the Franks either slaughtered their Moslem inhabitants or, more commonly, expelled them. Initially, therefore, the towns of Frankish Syria were inhabited only by Franks and native Christians. The crusaders did not pursue a similar policy in the countryside because they were conscious of the need to keep an adequate labour-force. Native Christian peasants presented no problem in any case, while the Moslem peasants, who were probably the more numerous, were left undisturbed by their new rulers.

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that the practice of religion will be influenced by the social conditions prevailing in any given locality.’ The debate on this statement is largely concentrated for present purposes into a consideration of activities between c1100 and c1250 in two distinctive societies: Westminster abbey and its environs and, in contrast, the city and diocese of Worcester. The essential function of Westminster abbey was, of course, intercessory, and while this role was shared with Worcester cathedral, the latter church had also a wide-ranging pastoral responsibility. In this sense, no exact equation can be made, yet the richness of the records which both churches accumulated presents adequate material for a valid comparison in other respects. It is not intended, and is, indeed, impossible to make an arbitrary definition of Westminster as town and Worcester as countryside. Elements of both were contained in Westminster and Worcester alike.

‘Implantation urbaine des orders mendiants a-t-elle eu une influence sur le type de piété et de spiritualité qu’ils proposaient?’ This was one of the questions posed in the Annales programme of research on the friars and the towns, and the recent study of mendicant spirituality by Rosenwein and Little is an answer to more or less the same question. They conclude that within the period when the original ideal remained more or less intact, the preaching of the mendicants was one of a number of related responses to urban money-making. This is an excellent and stimulating study, and one of the lines of research it should stimulate is the analysis of the mendicant sermons themselves, which have survived in great numbers. A number of years spent with these sources has left me with the impression that the urban context can provide a non–trivial explanation for certain aspects only of the ‘spirituality’ of mendicant preaching, and that many of its distinctive features will have to be accounted for in other terms. Provided that we do not mistake the part for the whole, however, those elements of mendicant preaching which can be directly related to their urban environment—both economic and political—are worthy of attention in their own right, and it is with them that I am concerned here. The sermons which I will discuss illustrate the church’s effort to adapt itself to the re-emergence of a bourgeoisie, after the long centuries during which its social context was predominantly rural.

A few months after the end of the second world war a journalist, walking through the streets of devastated Hamburg, saw a girl come out of the basement of a bombed house. She was wearing a clean white tennis-dress and carrying a racquet, and as she picked her way through the piles of burnt-out rubble he pondered, as historians have often pondered before him, upon the remarkable capacity of people not only for surviving, but for continuing the ordinary pattern of their lives, in the most adverse circumstances. I have often remembered that girl in Hamburg as I worked my way through the letters of archbishop Melton’s register with its record of the way in which the ordinary people of the north, the town and country mice of my title, survived and carried on their normal activities, and even re-built and extended their churches, in the midst of the troubles in which they found themselves.

There were several possibilities open to a man entering the secular clergy in the later middle ages. Among these were careers as a royal, papal, or episcopal servant, as a teacher or scholar, or as the rector or vicar of a parish church. If he did not set his hopes high, he could join the ranks of the chaplains of his diocese, helping the incumbents of the parish churches with the administration of their benefices and with the cure of souls, serving chapels and perpetual chantries, and serving oratories in noble and gentry households. Whatever his ambitions and aspirations, however, the secular priest’s situation depended entirely upon the charity and good will of those in a position to exercise patronage: family and friends, the beneficed clergy, the bishop and his familia, and the established, landed families of the area. And whether the possibilities became opportunities in the form of the patronage desired depended to a large extent upon the social position of the priest’s family, the proper connections, and the extent of his education. These were the realities faced universally by the clergy of the universal church, but each region had its own particular system of patronage, varying with the needs and structure of society. As a case in point, the lives and success of the clergy of the northern English diocese of Carlisle, despite the mission and aims held in common with the clergy of the entire church, were dictated to a degree by the rural nature of the diocese and its location on the Anglo-Scottish border.

In this paper I want to look not only at the late Byzantine monastery in town and countryside, but how each category fared after the Turkish conquests, when towns became important again. By the late Byzantine monastery I mean one commonly established by a founder’s typikon, and commonly enjoying stavropegiac rights of autonomy (especially from the thirteenth century). Material for the late Byzantine monastery is abundant enough both before and after the conquests, especially on Athos which is a special case. But it is comparatively less explored after the conquests. This is curious, for if it is true, as we are so often told, that it was the Orthodox church which kept alive the flame of Hellenismes during the dark centuries of the Tourkokratia, and if it is true that it is monasticism which is the peculiar guardian of Orthodoxy, and that monks are, in Theodore of Stoudion’s words, ‘the nerves and foundations of the Church’, the fate of the late Byzantine monastery should be an important field of study. I have adapted my approach to the nature of the bulk of the surviving evidence, which is economic. This may be like trying to write an account of a university’s research on the basis of its finance department’s records alone, but in times of a squeeze it may not be an unfair approach. A late Byzantine monk had to feast so as to fast. I began my study by making a census of known Byzantine monasteries, within the twelfth-century borders. This has been done before. Beck worked on a corpus of a hundred and sixty monasteries, which Charanis brought up to two hundred and forty one. Charanis reckoned that there might be about seven hundred recorded all told, less than a tenth of the actual total. By chance my list of monasteries came to exactly seven hundred, so I drew the line there, although it is clear that diligence would unearth up to one thousand.