Controlling the Troublesome Fringes

A pardoner was someone who collected charitable donations (“alms”) for Christian institutions such as hospitals and churches in return for a reduction (“remission”) of the penance the donor would have to undergo to reach heaven.9 They were also known as questors or collectors. Summoners, or “apparitors,” were people who formally called suspects and witnesses to church courts and sometimes visitations as well as assisting in the logistical operations of court sessions, witnessing documents, and performing various minor tasks in the administration of wills.10 Pardoners and summoners may not be immediately recognizable to students unfamiliar with late medieval church history, but they will be known in outline to many readers of Chaucer. In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer presents a pardoner and a summoner among his pilgrims in the “General Prologue.” Each tells a tale, and a summoner is also the subject of the “Friar’s Tale.” Chaucer’s depictions are satirical caricatures whose destabilization of value and truth is crucial to the artistic success of the poem. Although I will discuss these famous literary portrayals, my main subject is how real pardoners and summoners were handled by diocesan administrators as agents of the church.

That handling was fraught with difficulty. On the one hand, pardoners and summoners were essential to the work of the institutional church. Without pardoners raising funds through the sale of “indulgences” (the shorthand name for the remission of penance granted by popes or bishops), many cathedrals, hospitals, shrines, and even infrastructure like bridges would not have been built or kept in good repair. Some collectors had a local focus and others transferred money to major international institutions like the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem or the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Rome.11 Summoners were, meanwhile, the foot soldiers of ecclesiastical justice. Without them the private litigation business of the church courts would not have functioned, nor would episcopal efforts at social regulation have been possible. Most apparitors were engaged directly by bishops, archdeacons, and, in places, rural deans, while others were freelancers reliant on the business of the courts. On the other hand, regardless of their indispensability, pardoners and summoners alike were objects of great suspicion and mistrust, generating endless negative commentary and varied efforts at regulation.

Because they worked without direct supervision and were paid relatively low fees for each citation, there were significant incentives for summoners to game the church’s disciplinary system for personal gain.12 In the diocesan statutes of the thirteenth century, they were accused of various ruses to maximize their fees: citing people to court when there was no charge to answer, urging litigation when a dispute could be settled out of court, encouraging people to engage in extramarital sex and then reporting them, promising to conceal sins in return for money, and creating more business for themselves by issuing citations far away or at the last moment causing suspects to miss their court appearance (so that the summoner would have to begin again, thereby creating more work for which to be paid).13 Church criticism of pardoners was, meanwhile, directed toward the fear that they would overstep their authority: preaching when they were only permitted to publicize their indulgences, offering absolution from sin as opposed to remission of penance, and fooling the public with false relics and forged documents.14 As a wandering preacher, the pardoner wanted access to parish churches, bringing him into conflict with sedentary clergy. A papal bull in 1369 accused them of such protracted interruptions during the Mass that parish priests were prevented from completing services and, crucially, from receiving the associated monetary offerings from their parishioners.15

The root causes of suspicion were twofold. Neither role demanded that its holders be beneficed clergy, or even in clerical orders, and their work meant that they moved around a great deal. In the bishop’s eyes, ambiguity of clerical status coupled with occupational wandering set pardoners and summoners apart from the parish clergy. As we saw in chapter 4, the regulation of the parish clergy was a challenge met by rigorous if imperfect gender-based discipline. That was only possible because rectors, vicars, and parish chaplains were supposed to be sedentary, and they were surrounded by a defined population to whom they were answerable. Summoners and pardoners had no such natural community of regulation, and consequently, they slipped frequently beyond the institutional field of vision.

The summoner’s business was based almost entirely on mobility. Issuing a citation meant reading out a letter in public up to three times: first at the defendant’s home and then twice, if necessary, in their parish church. He was also to “tour the diocese” searching for rumors of public sins and citing those reported to appear before the bishop.16 Given the distances he was expected to cover, the summoner often chose to ride a horse, charging the parish clergy for the stabling expenses involved. In the thirteenth century there were some attempts to enforce foot travel on apparitors responsible for a single deanery (a small group of parishes), but this was impractical in many places and widely disregarded, with significant consequences, which are discussed further in this chapter.17 Pardoners were, meanwhile, lumped together with those “ronners over cuntreys” who, as a fifteenth-century sermon author wrote, “by-gyle fowle hem-silf” and their audiences. As “runners over countries” pardoners were a problem for a church organized for pastoral and economic purposes on territorial principles. The fourteenth-century manual for priests known as the Memoriale presbiterorum stressed how difficult it was to make pardoners, always on the move, come to confession, while a visitation in 1390s Wiltshire heard that one William Cokhull, an agent of the hospital of St. Anthony in Vienne, refused to pay his tithes; the rural dean said he had left the parish.18

Although individual pardoners are scantily evidenced in the surviving sources, most licenses suggest they possessed lay and not clerical status. They omit any title that would indicate a man in major holy orders, such as dominus or magister, or they use an epithet indicating the job or status of a layman. John Gaypenne’s license to collect for the completion of a causeway in Symondsbury (Dorset) in 1389, for instance, called him a “warden of bridges and causeways” (procurator pontis et calcetii). Others present somewhat ambiguous evidence, such as Thomas Large, collecting for Bethlehem Hospital in 1490, who was referred to as litteratus. This term, meaning “a literate man,” would at one time have been a clear indicator of clerical status, but by the later fifteenth century, it was not unusual for laymen to be so described too.19 Some pardoners were unambiguously married laymen, as Robert Swanson has confirmed from the 1377 poll tax, which lists occupations and marital status.20 Although there was no absolute requirement that pardoners should be ordained clergy, their treatment by parishioners and churchmen alike nonetheless kept alive a decided ambiguity throughout the later Middle Ages.

It was common to see them in the pulpit, treading a line so fine as to be imperceptible between publicizing their indulgence and preaching. By the terms of their licenses, some were indeed permitted to preach, which must have caused confusion when others were condemned for the same behavior. Statute law sometimes encouraged uncertainty. The crucial decree of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 had insisted that pardoners should “be modest and discreet, and . . . not stay in taverns or other unsuitable places.”21 Such were also the behavioral requirements for the parish clergy, discussed in chapter 4, but most pardoners were laymen. There may not have been any intention to muddy the waters, but such ambiguity of expectation became entrenched. For instance, in 1310 the official of York told Archbishop Greenfield that he had not dared to admit the collector for the Italian hospital of St. James Altopascio, since the archbishop’s license had stipulated that such collectors ought to be either “brothers [of the hospital] or suitable and fitting (honesti) messengers.” The official professed confusion: the Italian collector before him appeared to be a “layman or secular person,” which he clearly thought incompatible with being suitable or fitting, and he traveled with an English companion who was a notorious false pardoner, prohibited from collecting. What was he to do? Similar consternation is discernible in a warning issued to his diocesan clergy by Bishop Grandisson of Exeter in 1356. The bishop seems almost indignant that not only friars and clergy but often also “laymen or married men” were acting as alms collectors, bringing indulgences into disrepute and misleading the people.22

Ambiguity of status also dogged summoners. On the one hand the episcopal registers and diocesan statutes furnish many examples of citation being carried out by beneficed clergy, particularly rural deans.23 On the other hand, some of those deans would have immediately passed the task on to a retained apparitor who was not often in major or, apparently, even minor holy orders. Although a statute for the diocese of Worcester in 1219 had stipulated that summoners be ordained to the minimal level of acolyte, this was an isolated decree and the late medieval reality was decidedly mixed. Again, many identifiable summoners were addressed without clerical titles, and some were definitely laymen. In 1491 Richard Keys was identified as an “illiterate” apparitor when he presented evidence to the bishop of London’s consistory court. One late thirteenth-century summoner for Hereford diocese was even called John “le seculer.”24 The depth of the anxiety that summoners’ status—or lack of it—caused is strikingly revealed in one of the most surprising outbursts of emotion to be set down on parchment by a late medieval churchman. In 1396, the bishop of Hereford, John Trefnant, was involved in a dispute with Archbishop William Courtenay over the latter’s claim to conduct a visitation of Hereford as Trefnant’s superior. Courtenay had asked him to prepare for this unwanted visitation by citing the clergy and people of the diocese to appear at the various locations to be visited. Angered both by the usurpation of his authority and by being treated as the archbishop’s lackey, Trefnant sent a thunderous letter back to Canterbury. It tells us a great deal about ecclesiastical status anxiety. His message pointedly declared that “the office of apparitor or of citing is worthless [Latin: vile] and counted among the squalid things [sordida]; it is unbecoming and unworthy to be assigned to a bishop as it may be done by any clerk or layman.” Not only did the summoner sit at the very foot of a steep social and institutional gradient, but he was also thought “vile” and “squalid.” Trefnant here echoed the language of diocesan statutes, which painted summoners as “impudent,” “disdainful,” “damnable,” and even “Luciferan.”25 This was the trouble with the fringes of the clerical estate: where unpopular jobs could be done by “any clerk or layman,” and where the reins of discipline were of necessity loosened, unease over status became endemic.

That unease manifested itself in many ways. Chapter 5 drew attention to unease in the circumlocutions applied to women when they stepped into priests’ shoes. They might “dress as a priest” or be “pseudo-priestly women,” but they could never be priests. In this context, it is notable that when we turn to the great literary depictions of pardoners by William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer something similar is quietly present. In the prologue to his Vision of Piers Plowman, written and rewritten between the 1360s and 1390s, Langland introduces his character in the following manner: “Ther prechede a pardoner as he a prest were.”26 Standing in the pulpit was a claim to be a priest, either explicit or implicit, and Langland was echoing ecclesiastical concerns about ambiguous status deceiving the people. Similarly, in the prologue to the “Pardoner’s Tale” in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s pardoner says

I stonde lyk a clerk in my pulpet,

And whan the lewed peple is doun yset,

I preche so as ye han herd bifoore,

And telle an hundred false japes moore.27

This was echoed in the mid-fifteenth-century pseudo-Chaucerian Canterbury Interlude, which has one of its characters identify a pardoner as a “clerk,” despite the man’s declared wish to be married.28 Ambiguity of clerical status was firmly attached to perceptions of pardoners.

Before we delve more deeply into public feeling about pardoners, summoners and other difficult-to-govern “wandering stars,” it will be useful to consider the formal means by which bishops attempted to control them. Without the permanent mutual vigilance that made the parish clergy and laity a community of regulation, itinerants at the fringes of the clerical estate posed a problem.29 The regulation of pardoners concerned their authority and their behavior. Letters of appointment by the beneficiary institution or the pope were the sine qua non of alms collecting, but it was also expected that pardoners would carry and display a license issued by the bishop of the diocese in which they wished to collect money. In order to preach, that had to be included explicitly in the permission.30 Further monitoring by the parish clergy and laity was introduced in 1213 or 1214 for the diocese of Canterbury before spreading to many other parts of England over the course of the thirteenth century. Bishops did not, it seems, trust pardoners with the money they collected: the parish priest was to deposit the cash with two “trustworthy men of good witness” until it could be collected by the bishop’s representative.31 Presumably the bishop would then transfer it to the beneficiary institution. Bishop Quinel’s statutes for Exeter Diocese in 1287 took a slightly different approach, ordering that the money be kept by the local chapter (a collective of clergy) until the bishop’s messenger took it.32

There is some evidence that summoners were similarly monitored by the parish clergy. A few diocesan statutes insisted that they be accompanied by a chaplain from the parish where they were working, to ensure that citations were honestly delivered.33 No official role was imagined for the laity in regulating apparitors, as was the case for pardoners and the parish clergy themselves, but unofficial lay action against summoners formed a significant part of their history and is discussed in greater depth in the following pages. The main overt means by which bishops tried to manage the mobility and potential corruption of summoners was, however, via oaths.

If you would be faithful to us in the office of summoner and humbly do that which our ministers in our consistory . . . lawfully enjoin upon you, you will not reveal the secrets of the court; you will visit the diocese often and faithfully make known to the registrar of our consistory the excesses of our subjects which may be evident to you by fama; you will not disregard any suspected person nor cite anyone who is unsuspected in return for a bribe; you will neither make nor seek to be made any obstruction of the parties [to a suit] on behalf of any suspected person; however much the parties create resistance or impediments to some of our ministers, you will try to prevent them to the best of your ability so that our foresaid ministers are able, as they are obliged, to carry out their duty freely. And may the Lord and the holy evangelists of God help you.

The form in which this was recorded—this version comes from the register of Bishop Roger Northburgh of Coventry and Lichfield (1322–1358)—indicates that it would be read out to the appointee, who presumably then swore to abide by its conditions. Such oaths were commonly used.34

We also have the evidence of some letters appointing summoners to particular territories or duties. These are similar to the commissions discussed in chapter 1, which indicates that summoners were, in certain respects, treated as trusted members of the diocesan administration. For instance, when John Molyngtone was appointed as the bishop of Winchester’s “apparitor general” in 1368, it was on the understanding that his “faithfulness and discrete prudence” could be utterly relied on, and in 1387, the bishop of Hereford described his apparitor as a man “in whose faithfulness and zeal we place complete trust.”35 This mode of address is hardly surprising in one respect. Some apparitors were commissioned officers in diocesan government, and bishops evoked the fictitious equality on which collaboration in that endeavor was thought to rest. But when we consider the extent of episcopal criticism of summoners, and the fact that many were not appointed by bishops, we must be careful to consider what the ritual language of masculine friendship meant where they were concerned. Because they belonged to a group whose clerical status was ambiguous, and because they were itinerant, summoners were held at arms length.

Pardoners stand further away again from the circle of ritualized trust connecting bishops to their diocesan administrators. The alms collector was never described as someone in whom the bishop held any kind of trust. On the contrary, the parish clergy were explicitly warned not to trust pardoners. In a letter to his parish clergy about the dangers posed by false questors, Bishop Grandisson of Exeter made the comment that the clergy should not “place any faith in him or them beyond those things which are contained in our letters.”36 This is a complete inversion of the trust lexicon used in appointing men to diocesan commissions. Rather than positively asserting faith, it warns against trusting pardoners, and rather than permitting them to use discretion, Grandisson insisted they stick to their specific instructions. It is also notable that episcopal licenses for pardoners say nothing at all about their personal qualities. For example, a license issued to two collectors for the hospital of St. Thomas of Acon in 1421 by Bishop Lacy of Exeter simply justified the purpose of the indulgence.37 Individuality and character were not important, not even in a fictitious ritual sense, because they lacked freedom. And freedom, as we saw in chapter 1, was closely associated with masculinity. Only the license, and not the bishop’s trust, bound pardoners to their duty.

Without reliable formal means to control people like pardoners and summoners, bishops were often reduced to making waves in the unpredictable waters of public opinion and popular action. The dominant discourse here was, in contrast to those of friendship with respect to diocesan governance and suspicion regarding the parish clergy, condemnation. Condemnation arose from anxiety about ambiguous manhood and covert female influence while simultaneously turning those fears into an institutional opportunity. It was an opportunity taken at the expense of people whose gender defied late medieval norms.

Fears of Ambiguous Manhood

Ambiguity surrounding the manhood of people at the fringes of the clerical estate was closely connected to their uncertain clerical status, since debates about who was a man were often concerned with who could be a priest. For that reason, we must pay attention to how priests’ bodies and gender were theorized and policed before returning to the clerical fringes. In the abstract, the priest’s body was an object of theological, legal, and public interest, and actual bodies were monitored at least insofar as they were visible, as we saw in chapter 4. Priests were expected to have a complete male body, and any doubts about that brought gender and status anxieties to the fore. Bodies categorized in two different ways aroused concern: the body that was impaired or lacked something and the body that was ambiguously sexed. Some of the examples discussed in what follows may have been stimulated in part by hatred toward the gender of the individuals who became objects of attack. It is difficult to be certain of this because attacks that made a show of policing binary gender may have been opportunistic, generating symbolic hostility to protest actions that had nothing to do with a person’s presumed gender. In some cases, the attack on an individual was a way of saying something about gender and the clergy as a whole. We should also bear in mind that as with the regulation of clerical “concubines,” attacks on nonnormative gender may have occurred at relatively isolated flashpoints when tacit toleration was compromised by some aggravating factor in local politics.

Priests had to possess a whole male body and could in theory be refused ordination or removed from the priesthood if any part were missing or defective. The canon law on this topic derived from Old Testament prohibitions on priests with physical blemishes making sacrifices to God.38 Legal writers and courts often dealt with impairments to the senses, predominantly eyesight, and missing fingers, thumbs, and genitals.39 Certain aesthetic-theological concerns remained present in early medieval considerations of this topic, such as the conciliar decree that connected priestly office with the body “formed by God” (a Deo plasmati). But, interestingly, bodily wholeness was mainly viewed through the lenses of practicality and public opinion. Corrine Leveleux explains that practicality meant the priest’s ability to see his books or to hold the Eucharist between his thumb and forefinger during Mass, while public opinion meant the reaction of a priest’s parishioners. If their reaction amounted to “scandal”—something that prevented people from receiving the sacraments, for example revulsion at a bodily deformity causing them to stay away from church—then holy orders might have to be withdrawn.40

Both in canon law opinion and in the courts (specifically the office of the papal penitentiary) we find that the physical body was never considered separately from value judgments about it. The law was based on a system of “dispensations,” or exemptions to the absolute rules about imperfect bodies.41 Thus, someone who lacked a finger but could nonetheless raise the Eucharistic bread or someone lacking their right eye who could still read the lectionary could be dispensed from the prohibition and allowed to receive or retain holy orders. But canon law also dealt with deficiencies that were irrelevant to the performance of church services, particularly possession of incomplete male genitals. This had nothing to do with practicalities and everything to do with the gendered rule that only men could be priests. The dispensation system regularly dealt with men who said they had lost one or both testicles, their penis, or the whole caboodle, and the grounds for an exemption concerned intention.

In the mid-twelfth century, Gratian explained that only intentional self-harm should result in an incomplete body being barred from holy orders.42 This determination colored all subsequent discussions. According to a decretal of Pope Clement III “eunuchs from birth” and those who had been castrated by someone else were already authorized to receive holy orders and be promoted within the hierarchy.43 He also determined that a priest who had amputated his penis (virilia) believing that in doing so he was being obedient to God could continue in the priestly office though his bishop had the authority to decide whether this should be “without ministry of the altar” (absque altaris ministerio).44 If one’s intentions had been good, dispensation was possible. Innocent III in 1198 was less equivocal. Responding to an inquiry about a priest who had emasculated himself on the advice of physicians rather than God, Innocent replied that there was no legal prohibition on such a man serving at the altar and he should be allowed to continue in holy orders.45 Papal letters and the records of the papal penitentiary supply numerous examples that illustrate this distinction. For instance, John Skelton of York Diocese was dispensed in 1334 having castrated himself as a last resort after battling his own lust through “many mortifications and prayers;” John Albyston of Worcester Diocese noted in his petition of 1448 that he regretted his self-castration; both men were already priests, but they were permitted to continue in their orders and ministries.46

There is, however, reason to think that apparent leniency in the application of canon law did not rule out castrated priests feeling shame and their parishioners, disgust.47 And here we have a further source of judgment constructing the idea of proper genital maleness: public opinion. For instance, among the petitions to the papal penitentiary from the German dioceses we find priests requesting dispensation for having only one testicle, despite the loss occurring in infancy through no fault of their own, and for deformed testicles, despite that being caused by grave illness in adulthood.48 Strictly speaking such men did not require a dispensation because their situation was covered by the legislation—their lack was unintentional—but still they submitted their petitions.49 This would suggest that some people regarded imperfect genitalia as a disqualification from the priesthood however it had come about and had challenged the men in question. Seeking papal intervention was thus intended to remove any doubts about their status. A case from England that was certainly involuntary shows how ugly public interest in priests’ genitals could become. Walter Lawrence arrived as rector of Munslow in Shropshire in 1418, and within two or three years had been attacked by people who “horribly” cut off his “shameful parts” (sua pudenda).50 Lawrence was referred to in 1422 as being “lately” the rector of the parish, and there is no mention of his death, a detail that would not have been omitted. The only possible conclusion to draw is that he left the parish, and one may wonder whether this was through shame or fear, unable to carry on as their priest. With violence a possibility, it is clear why some priests would seek a dispensation for suspected genital “abnormalities,” despite this being unnecessary in law.

Castration was linked to assumptions about clerical masculinity. We can isolate two stages of implicit reasoning. First, there is the issue of chastity and its connection with manliness. In chapter 4, we encountered the idea, formed in the twelfth century, that chastity embodied a new ideal of masculinity, manfully resisting the body’s urges.51 Surveying the legal, theological, and literary sources, Arnaud Fossier, Leveleux, and Jacqueline Murray have furthermore discerned a pervasive feeling that castration was a form of cheating. It was widely believed that castration eliminated sexual feeling, and there was no merit in resisting urges one supposedly no longer felt.52 The second stage of reasoning follows from this. If a man wished to be a true clerical male, he had to possess the sexual organs he would not use. As Sara McDougall has put it, castration made men “less masculine and therefore less priestly.”53 The evidence of Walter Lawrence’s experience supports this implicit connection. The bishop’s response to Lawrence’s attack stressed that the victim was “in the clothes of a priest or going about clerical business, and publicly said, held, known, and reputed as clergy.”54 His status was clearly important information. While the bishop may have been simply angry that a priest was attacked in any manner, the canonical context suggests his recognition of a link between possession of male genitals and possession of clerical status. The attack on Lawrence’s genitals was also an assault on his clerical status. The general point is confirmed by one of the key papal decretals on the question, which was originally a reply to a man already—but only—ordained to the level of deacon.55 He was almost, but not quite, a priest, and now he or someone else felt he was almost, but not quite, a man.

Besides castration, canon lawyers also gave some attention to the bodies of people they categorized as neither male nor female who might present themselves as candidates for ordination. In line with contemporary medical theory, they called them hermaphrodites. The medieval hermaphrodite was someone whose body exhibited a range of genital characteristics, and so despite the pejorative connotations carried by that term today, we may draw a cautious transhistorical connection with the spectrum of nonbinary bodies encompassed by the modern term intersex or phrase differences of sexual development.56 As several recent scholars have pointed out, “hermaphrodite” was not derogatory in all medieval contexts. Beginning again with Gratian, we find that medieval canonists accepted without moral judgement the existence and humanity of people with bodies neither male nor female. In grappling with how to make a diverse biological reality compatible with the demands of law and society, however, binary values prevailed. It was widely assumed that although hermaphroditism encompassed a spectrum of bodily forms, no “true” hermaphrodite—that is, someone whose maleness and femaleness were in perfect balance—existed. They all supposedly tended toward male or female. For example, Causa 4 of the Decretum deployed the concept of being “predominantly” male when describing the circumstances in which hermaphrodites could witness documents, while the commentator Huguccio wrote that if the male sex “prevailed,” a hermaphrodite could marry a woman.57 Huguccio, in his summa on the Decretum, also discussed how hermaphrodites stood in relation to ordination:

What if the [candidate for ordination] is a hermaphrodite? The same distinction should be made concerning the reception of orders as for witnessing a testament. If therefore the person tends to the woman more than to the man, they do not receive orders. If the reverse, they are able to receive [holy orders], but ought not be ordained on account of deformity and monstrosity. What if a person equally tends to both? This person does not receive orders.58

The key phrase is that they are “able to receive” (recipere potest) holy orders but “ought not” (non deberet) to be ordained. The distinction is an interesting one and takes us into the anxiety felt around ambiguous bodies. In saying that a male-dominant hermaphrodite was able to receive holy orders, Huggucio meant that such an ordination would not—if it had been carried out—be invalid, and neither would the acts of that priest be invalidated. People who had received the sacraments from that priest would remain baptized, married, absolved, and so on. However, so intense was his response to “deformity and monstrosity” that he cautioned against a bishop knowingly ordaining even a male-dominant hermaphrodite. The logic seems to have been that if the body of a priest was sufficiently male, the sacraments would be valid, but at the same time, ambiguity was undesirable and should be avoided if possible. The importance of male genitalia to the definition of manhood and priesthood was deeply entrenched. In contrast to the situation for people whose genitals had been removed, there do not seem to be any medieval papal dispensations for people in, or seeking, holy orders whose genitalia were ambiguously sexed.59 This may have been because unusual genital physiology could remain hidden if priests were careful.60 Huguccio’s opinion does, nevertheless, demonstrate that bodies interpreted as ambiguous aroused a powerful moral-aesthetic aversion and that this was inseparably connected with widespread instincts about who could properly be a priest.

I have brought together discussion of intersex bodies and bodies deemed binary but imperfect (through injury or attack) because we do not know exactly what motivated hostility in any given example. In the case of Walter Lawrence, for instance, we do not know whether his castration was an attempt to discipline his inappropriate sexual behavior by (literally) removing his capacity to represent the perfect male body or whether it was intended to “correct” an already ambiguous body. A further possibility is that he was attacked because his gender expression was nonnormative, with the castration sending the message that unmasculine behaviors belonged with nonmale bodies.

Walter Lawrence was undoubtedly a priest, but for people occupying roles at the fringes of the church, their clerical status already in doubt, discussions about ambiguous gender became a particularly potent force in shaping institutional and popular perceptions of them. Anxiety about male physiology was a strong theme in texts about pardoners, including the famous fictional example in the “General Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s was a satirical characterization and should not be taken to represent all alms collectors. But this pardoner does represent several currents of what Chaucer believed his audience thought about the role. So great is the volume of literary interpretation relating to this character that it can be hard to wade through the interpretations.61 The weight of this scholarship has fallen on the pardoner’s implied gender and sexuality, particularly the line “I trowe [believe] he were a geldyng or a mare.”62 Here we have to grapple with the meaning and resonances of being a “gelding,” and in the following section of this chapter, we will turn to the suggestion that he may be a “mare.” What did these words mean to Chaucer’s readers?

A gelding was a castrated horse, its testicles removed in order to prevent it from mating and to make it more pliable for agricultural use or everyday riding. The word was also widely used to refer to a castrated man or eunuch.63 As we have seen, the absence of male genitalia could disqualify someone from receiving holy orders: the self-castrator had to seek papal permission to become a priest; the “eunuch from birth” or victim of attack needed no dispensation, but public disgust (refracted through the medieval understanding of scandal) might bar the way; and the known hermaphrodite fared no better. Chaucer does not take the reader explicitly down this road. The narrator “Chaucer” in the poem does not say that his fellow pilgrim was a gelding, merely that he believed him to be one or he could believe that he were one. This subtlety invites readers to share in the narrator’s curiosity about what such hidden physiology might mean, a favored technique of the poet.

The famous line wraps up a description of the pardoner’s appearance and voice: his hair is smooth, yellow, lank, and unbound; he has no beard and cannot grow one; his voice is “as small as a goat.” Elspeth Whitney has argued that this physiognomy signaled to Chaucer’s readers a male “phlegmatic.” In medieval humoral or complexion theory the phlegmatic was cold and moist, which were thought to be the characteristics of women; if a man, he was tending to sexual deviancy and effeminacy.64 Effeminacy meant being or becoming like a woman in temperament: weak, soft, and susceptible to pressure but also deceitful and beguiling. It was thought to arise from excessive lust for women and keeping female company.65 As Whitney explains, “hypersexuality or an excess of attraction to women, for example, was identified as effeminate because femininity was aligned with lack of restraint and masculinity with self-control.” Chaucer’s pardoner boasts that he deceives anyone he can and that he keeps “a joly wenche in every toun.”66

This profile of effeminacy was, as Henry Kelly has shown, common in a wide range of theological, medical, and legal texts.67 It was also echoed in many institutional criticisms of real-life pardoners, demonstrating the participation of bishops in a commonplace vilification that drew on reservoirs of hostility toward nonnormative gender. Uncontrolled passion was identified by the 1287 statutes for Exeter Diocese in pardoners’ penchant for waste, luxury, and drunkenness. Deception, meanwhile, emerges as a major theme in prohibitions on alms collectors wearing the “garb of false religion,” in other words undeserved clerical vestments, and their deployment of fraudulent relics and documents.68 English bishops also associated a man being or becoming female with physical appearance, particularly the hair, as shown in a statute that may have been known to Chaucer. The influential Council of London complained in 1342 that miscreant priests “disdain to wear the tonsure, which is the sign of the heavenly kingdom and of perfection, and they wear their hair long to the shoulders as if to distinguish themselves, as if effeminate (velut effeminati).”69 This is strikingly similar to Chaucer’s depiction of effeminate hair. But we should also note that the 1342 remark was made in connection with lack of priestly tonsure, suggesting that late medieval audiences may have associated Chaucer’s pardoner, and effeminacy in general, with ambiguous clerical status.

These derogatory tropes were also present in other late medieval satirical works that suggested that pardoners were not quite what they seemed. The Canterbury Interlude, for instance, revolves around a pardoner who cannot stay away from women. He is cast as effeminate, unable to resist the body’s urges, like a woman (or at least unlike a man): “nature must run its course, though men to the contrary swear,” he speciously proclaims with regard to his lack of self-control.70 John Heywood’s play, The Foure PP (or “Four Ps”) dating from the 1520s, depicts a palmer, a pardoner, a peddler and an [a]pothecary sharing the vices of the women they disparage, particularly deceitfulness. The palmer (or pilgrim) jokes about the pardoner’s introduction of himself as “truly . . . a pardoner,” saying,

Truly a pardoner that may be true

But a true pardoner doth nat ensew.

Ryght selde is it sene or never

That treuth and pardoners dwell together.71

In other words, nothing about him is genuine. Langland’s pardoner is, meanwhile, shown to be not quite a man. The poet calls him a “boy” in the context of his lack of proper authorization.72 In late medieval understandings of gender, boyhood as well as womanhood was opposed to manhood. In being not fully adult, the male child or youth was not fully a man.73

Thus, a cloud of pejorative ideas about castration, hermaphroditism, effeminacy, falseness, and ambiguity hung over late medieval pardoners, and—in different ways—over summoners too. Both roles attracted unease about ambiguous manhood as well as ambiguous clerical status. Not coincidentally, horses were involved in both cases. While Chaucer’s pardoner was metaphorically compared to a gelding—a castrated horse—real-life summoners very often suffered highly symbolic physical attacks against their horses, and it is to this that we now turn.

There were many ways of resisting apparitors in late medieval England, indicating both the challenges of the job and the unpopularity of these agents of ecclesiastical justice. Generic references to “impeding” a summoner are common, while violence and threats are also recorded. The apparitor of Carlisle deanery, for instance, had in 1359 gone to Bampton market to cite an offender where he was assaulted by people who said, “since you have had some of us called before the bishop’s ministers, take them these gifts,” presumably referring to the blows laid on him. The agents of secular justice often suffered similar symbolic violence, including being made to eat their mandates or their shoes.74 But the form of violence that would be lastingly associated with summoners was to cut or dock the tails of their horses.

As previously noted, summoners were meant to travel on foot, partly to reduce their expenses but also to emphasize their lowly status. When they rode horses, they therefore presented a ready-made and politically meaningful target to anyone opposed to their methods or purpose. For instance, again in 1359 the apparitor of Woodstock (Oxfordshire) was attacked by people who cut the tail and ears off his horse and committed other unnamed crimes against his person. It was said that they also tried to stop the archdeacon of Oxford from holding a chapter (court) at nearby Shipton.75 This was idiomatic political communication, whose meaning we can try to unravel, but it was also shockingly violent. The thirteenth-century legal treatise known as “Bracton” noted that the statutory punishment for rape should involve cutting off the tail of the offender’s horse “to the buttocks,” which would have been a major wound. Horses might even die, as happened once in Hereford Diocese in 1383.76 In addition to tails and ears, the horses ridden by unpopular episcopal servants might also have their lips cut off.77

We get an idea of what such attacks meant to their perpetrators in a fascinating court case from Middlesex in 1523.78 Ralph Walker had been cited to appear before the bishop of London’s consistory court following reports that he had committed fornication with Agnes Badcock; he was ordered to purge himself of the crime on the oath of three priests and three laymen of Isleworth. But very soon the bishop’s vicar-general heard that Walker had been making threats toward his apparitor Richard Tykyll. Walker is supposed to have said “if the summoner cites me, I shall thrust my knife into his belly and I shall cut off his horse’s tail and send him home to his master like a summoner knave.”79 The alleged comment about his being a knave, in other words an unfree servant, is a striking echo of Bishop Trefnant’s accusation that summoners were “worthless” (vile) a word similarly associated with unfree status through the legal category of villeinage. We also find it used in reference to Richard Keys, a deeply unpopular London apparitor who was convicted of perjury in the manor court of Lewisham and called a “false knave” by the court’s steward.80 This is a clear statement about the perceived status of summoners in general. But Ralph Walker responded with more than a little audacity that he had not spoken those words. He had, he claimed, actually said, “It would be well done to cut off his horse’s tail, for no man may score for summoners, and that he would lay his knife upon his face if he [the apparitor] slandered him again.”81

He may have said both things, but his retort was loaded with meaning. The phrase “to score for summoners” is a reference to the apparitor’s practice of keeping a record of people’s faults and payments, to which Walker added a pun linking the horse’s tail to a tally stick. Debts and payments would be scored or cut into such wooden sticks by individuals and institutions alike.82 Walker seems to have meant that if his horse’s tail (meaning tally stick) was removed, this would symbolize the summoner not being able to keep a record of his accusations.

Walker regarded the charge against himself as a slander, and his obstreperousness before the court seems to have rested on an assumption that others would share his view that summoners were corrupt. We have seen that satirists and churchmen alike agreed with him. But there were yet more layers of meaning in his words. The Middle English noun tayle or taille was an adaptable word meaning the rump of an animal or human as well as referring to the genitals of any sex. In the “Shipman’s Tale,” Chaucer had a merchant’s wife make a joke along these lines: if she were not able to satisfy her husband, she tells him to “score it upon my taille,” where taille carries the double meaning of a tally of debts and her own genitals.83 The penis could also be called a tail, as in the fifteenth-century song “My Gentil Cok,” where the cockerel’s “tayil” nightly entered “myn ladyis chaumbyr.” This was a meaning that persisted into early modern English.84 Laying one’s knife on another’s face was, meanwhile, a reference to the common association between a damaged sexual reputation (for men, possibly an imputation of sodomy) and a purposefully disfigured nose. As Valentin Groebner remarked in his study of late medieval German nose-cutting, “the nose points downwards” to the genitals and sexual behavior.85

The political symbolism of medieval horse mutilation—specifically tail cutting—has been studied by Andrew Miller, who associates it with emasculation. This is correct. Miller’s study encompassed horses owned by knights and other secular men as well as clerics. He describes in detail the culture of horse ownership and riding that was an ever-evolving yet constant thread in European elite formation for hundreds of years. One of the key elements in this was the unity of horse, rider, and gear that formed an assemblage, a single cultural unit of meaning made up of separate parts. The horse was an extension of the man and of his masculinity. This fact made attacks on the horse also an attack on the man, and the tail was chosen because of its close association in literature and language (the Latin cauda and Anglo-French queue besides Middle English tayl) with the penis: “by docking a man’s horse, the assailant might figuratively ‘castrate’ his human opponent to make him appear to be permanently afraid and ever vulnerable to being mounted by a real male—a stallion—not a ‘gelding’ like himself.”86

Knights were, Miller argues, degraded and made effeminate by the tail cutting. This is also correct. However, his discussion of the clergy makes two errors, which we must correct if we are to understand the politics of gender in the church. The first of these is not to differentiate at all between men at very different points on the steep status gradient of the church hierarchy. There was no strong cultural expectation that major ecclesiasts should not ride horses and travel in magnificent style. They were great lords. Even many rectors and perpetual vicars of parish churches enjoyed a status akin to that of the gentry and would, as such, be expected to ride on horseback, if not on particularly fine horses. There was nothing in the synodal legislation of the English church to prevent it.87 However, for certain men in church service, namely, apparitors, horse riding was regulated. As noted previously, there had been attempts in the thirteenth century to make apparitors go on foot, although this foundered on the difficulties of enforcement and the practicalities of working large territories. Nevertheless, it seems likely that horse riding and therefore horse mutilation meant something different for apparitors. Horse riding was clearly a live element in polemic against summoners in the later fourteenth century, when Langland signaled the corruption of summoners by saying they were “saddled” with silver.88

Corruption and status were therefore major issues: the summoner was “vile,” a “knave” who was suspected of profiting from the sins (or invented sins) of others. His ambiguous clerical status also mattered: apparitors might be, but did not need to be, in holy orders. This was true of a broader range of men in church service whose horses were mutilated in the same symbolic way. In various diocesan records we find examples of tail cutting targeting an advocate in the Lincoln consistory, two men described as “clerks of the rector” of Eyeworth (Bedfordshire), a monk executing a mandate of the Court of Canterbury in Gloucestershire, and “servants” of the prebendal jurisdiction of Salisbury Cathedral.89 Among tail-cutting victims the prevalence of men having ambiguous clerical status should not surprise us. As we have seen in the present chapter, castration and body morphology read as ambiguous could bar men from ordination. Despite the system of dispensations there was widespread public anxiety about clerical bodies that seemed imperfectly male. Gender ambiguity and clerical status ambiguity therefore went hand in hand. If the mutilation of horses’ tails was symbolic proxy for human emasculation, then when it was directed at churchmen of any kind, we should assume it was also a comment on this double ambiguity. But as figures on the margins of the clerical estate, summoners were even more exposed to this sort of popular regulation.

The second mistake Miller makes concerns the gender identity of the clergy. He writes that laymen cut the tails of clerics’ horses in order to reinforce the clergy’s “feminized” or “effeminate” gender identity and to tell them they should not be riding horses at all because horses were for knights.90 This is mostly wrong. Normative clerical gender was not—as a decade of scholarship and the present book have demonstrated—considered feminine or effeminate. Those were slurs against clerics who failed to live up to the standards of clerical masculinity (see chapter 4). The effeminate man, the hermaphrodite, the self-castrated man, and the woman could not be priests. In fact, Miller’s argument about degradation through emasculation—which he applied to knights—is more useful here. To be a priest, one had to be a man, and the possession of complete male genitals was a strong signifier of this identity. So the message of horse mutilation protests was not “You are a churchman, know your place” but “You are not a proper priest, and we will show this by telling the world that you are not a complete man.”91

The mutilation of horses’ tails, particularly affecting summoners and other men on the fringes of the clerical estate, was a form of symbolic communication and popular regulation or direct action.92 It was not institutional regulation. In fact, most of our evidence for this phenomenon comes from episcopal outrage that it should happen at all. Bishops, however, sometimes poked the hornets’ nest of public opinion with the stick of their frustration—saying summoners are vile, impudent, damnable, Luciferan—which relied on the very same tropes of corruption, money, sexuality, and horses as drove the direct action. They were, in this sense, relying on public anger to carry out the regulation that they were ill-equipped to perform themselves. There was a further, intermediate, sphere of regulation between popular direct action and episcopal government, consisting of beneficed clergy and ranking churchmen who employed the same violent sanction against their unbeneficed fellows. The mutilator of a horse belonging to Simon of Grimsby, an advocate in the Lincoln consistory court, in 1302 was John the rector of Buslingthorpe. In 1357, a very grand ecclesiast indeed, the prior of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, cut the tail of a horse belonging to a “servant and clerk” of the bishop of Lincoln.93

Such reactive and extreme measures were directed against individuals during the course of specific disputes. We have no way of knowing whether particular summoners were singled out because of suspicions about their gender or whether the symbolism of binary gender was deployed merely opportunistically as a way of ridiculing or shaming them. We also cannot know whether particular attacks were intended to send a message about the gendered boundaries of the clergy as a whole. But their cumulative effect was to place prominent markers in the landscape of public memory, associating uncertain clerical status with uncertain gender. Summoners were cast as not quite priests and not quite men. This benefited bishops for whom summoners were a necessary evil, difficult to control by institutional means alone. We may be very far from the conscious policies of ritual friendship and suspicious supervision that bishops applied to diocesan commissioners and the parish clergy, but with summoners as with pardoners, we are very far from the meaningful reach of episcopal power. While bishops found such people hard to control, the specter of gender ambiguity raised by literary satire and symbolic violence haunted the frontiers of the clerical estate in a manner that was politically useful for the church hierarchy.

Fear of Covert Women

As we have seen in chapters 4 and 5, late medieval thinking also connected the ambiguity of clerical status with the perceived threat of women. Parish clerks, who might be married, were regarded as a Trojan horse for female influence. This was also true of the itinerants discussed in the present chapter, for fear of women was also allied to fear of ambiguous manhood.

This is cast into sharp relief if we return for a moment to the opponents of Walter Brut, discussed in chapter 5. One of the tracts against his proposal for women to preach cited the biblical example of Deborah, a female prophet and judge of the ancient Israelites. Her example was something to be explained away: the “government of the people was granted to women,” wrote Brut’s opponent, only “as a reproach to men who had become effeminate” (in contumeliam virorum qui effeminati erant).94 In one sense this was a metaphorical and very general criticism of weakness in the church: it alleged that challenges to authority could only arise when weak authority permitted it. But it also reveals a more specific fear: that by becoming effeminate and harboring gender ambiguity, the church was opening the door to women. As Christoph Rolker has argued, it was “not so much the number of hermaphrodite priests that made canonists discuss [their ordination] rather, the case . . . provided an argument why women could not be ordained.”95

There were many ways in which female influence on the church was imagined. We have already encountered some of them: the abbess governing within the limits of her authority, the priest’s de facto wife who had no authority but ran a rectory, the female parishioner who stepped into priestly roles. Our topic here, though, is the imagined covert influence of women. I will examine three forms that this took: male involvement with women stimulating feminine or effeminate qualities in men, women having a hold over men, and women disguising themselves as men. All were vividly imagined in ecclesiastical documents, pastoral literature, chronicles, or poetry. In the last instance, we may again discern evidence for late medieval anxieties about nonnormative gender—the male-presenting person who was “revealed” to be a woman—as well as for a late medieval capacity to imagine transgender lives.

The principal feminine trait thought to arise from consorting with women, or from ambiguous gender of any kind, was seductiveness.96 There were structural reasons why pardoners and summoners would be particularly associated with this vice. In the first place, many such men were permitted to marry, but their itinerancy militated against their being perceived as stable masculine householders. Many others were simply attracted to women, as much as were any other men of the church. Several summoners in late fifteenth-century London were reported for fornication in the very courts that they served, for instance, while in early sixteenth-century Oxford, a pardoner was reported to the bishop of Lincoln’s visitation for sexual relations with a parishioner’s wife.97 This was run-of-the-mill stuff, but it was the backdrop against which more pointed accusations were sometimes made. As noted, summoners were suspected by bishops of fomenting vice in order to report it. Underpaid, they had to supplement their income somehow. We find confirmation of this in Bishop Waltham of Salisbury’s 1394 visitation of Wiltshire, where the parishioners reported that a rural dean and a summoner had “condoned and abetted” a couple in adultery. The preacher John Bromyard also accused them of taking bribes so often that “adulterers and fornicators are always able to persist.” Such intimate involvement in people’s lives inevitably led to suspicion, but it also encouraged the view that summoners might absorb the weaknesses of the women concerned. Like Chaucer’s summoner they might become as “lecherous as a sparrow.”98

Pardoners, it was believed at the time, were also incentivized to get too close to women, whom they supposedly saw as soft targets for alms and seduction. For Henry Kelly, Chaucer’s pardoner having a “jolly wench in every town” signified an excessive enjoyment of female company, of the sort that theological and medical writers believed would lead to a man taking on feminine attributes. Kelly writes that this made him a “woman-oriented effeminate” in the minds of contemporary readers. Something similar could be said about the pardoner in the Canterbury Interlude, who gravitates toward the young tapster Kit as soon as he enters her inn: he “coyly unlaced both his eyelids / And looked her lovingly in the face.”99 Such practiced expertise in lovemaking may have reminded readers of the common idea that seduction was a feminine trait that rubbed off on men who kept female rather than male company. It was a danger of women that could be embodied by men.

Seduction was also used to characterize the way in which pardoners operated more generally, particularly their allegedly fraudulent practices. As we have seen, Bishop Grandisson of Exeter was troubled by even authentic questors. He saw in their number too many laymen, even married men; they preached when they should not, and they “disguised” themselves in quasi-religious habits. This led to him claiming that the alms collector was a seducer or deceiver (seductor) of the people. Similar language was used in a 1414 program for church reform issued by the masters of the University of Oxford. False questors were roundly criticized in chapter 39 of the complaint, focusing on their alleged dishonesty about the scope and potency of their pardons. Whereas indulgences were envisaged as granting remission of penance, some pardoners—it was alleged—preached that they offered absolution of the sin as well. This was seen as giving people “frivolous hope and permission to sin,” and in requesting money for this deception, pardoners were said to “plunder and seduce” (spoliant et seducant) the people, dragging them down to Tartarus, the lowest region of hell. In these and other texts, seduce carried a range of meanings, from “deceive,” “lead astray,” and “betray” to sexual encouragement.100 Furthermore, we have seen several times that connections were drawn between seduction and waste: goods as well as people could be led astray. The intended inference was that the wealth of the church was not safe in female hands or, by extension, in the hands of men who had absorbed this feminine vice, through whom it might spread covertly among the clergy.

For a number of satirical writers, becoming seductive followed such men being seduced themselves. That could lead to women having a hold over alms collecting and the exercise of church justice.101 The Canterbury Interlude provides a fascinating example in which a pardoner, blinded by his own effeminate lust, does not realize that the tapster Kit is actually reeling him in: he is the one being seduced. Kit’s seduction is on the surface sexual—she plays along with his love game—but underneath consists of deception. She persuades the pardoner to pay for her company—and in advance at that. Although he plans to rob her later (with the double entendre of “picking her purse”), she takes his money, locks him out, and pays for dinner for herself and the innkeeper. She has outwitted him. This is presaged early on with her mocking remark that “it is no mastery to catch a mouse in a cage”—the pardoner has no mastery over her, on the contrary it is he who is mastered—and announced at the dénouement with the question “But who is [he] that a woman could not make his beard?” To “make someone’s beard” meant to outsmart and cheat them, and with this rhetorical question the narrator raises the specter of women’s power over men.102

In the end, Kit has not sold herself to the pardoner, but sex work was a persistent theme in literary and social stories about pardoners and summoners. Given the nature of their itinerant lives and precarious incomes, we should perhaps not be surprised by this. It was undoubtedly with some relish that apparitors, who profited from reporting other people’s liaisons with sex workers, were themselves reported by the communities they patrolled. Richard Keys, working as an apparitor in London in the 1480s and 1490s, was accused of being a “public bawd” who refused to cite a known sex worker. The implication was that he lived with, kept, and exploited her. Another London apparitor was accused of living with a prostitute who had already had two children with a servant of the archbishop of Canterbury. In early sixteenth century Lincolnshire, meanwhile, a summoner called John Barret was purported to keep suspect company with a woman known as “Litleprety Jane,” a nickname that may suggest the “indiscriminate availability” that Judith Bennett, Ruth Karras, and Janelle Werner associate with medieval sex work.103

Pardoners were also associated with prostitution, though real-life cases are more difficult to find. Thomas Gascoigne, the prolific fifteenth-century intellectual and sometime chancellor of the University of Oxford, once alleged that alms collectors were known to sell their indulgences in return for sex, though he may only have intended to imply they were flirtatious.104 One fairly commonplace story asserted kinship between pardoners and sex workers. Its earliest manifestation occurs in Passus V of Langland’s Vision of Piers the Plowman, where Piers is telling a crowd of people how to enter the Castle of Conscience. He advises them to ask themselves whether they can “claim kin” with any of the “seven sisters”: Abstinence, Humility, Charity, Chastity, Patience, Peace, or Largesse. Among the crowd, a pardoner groans that he is not well known there, rushing off instead to collect his box of papal bulls and bishops’ letters, which he hopes will impress the guard. In answer to this, a “common woman,” the late medieval term that encompassed sex workers and sexually immoral women, follows him. “Thow shalt seye I am thi suster,” she cries, hoping that kinship with the pardoner will substitute for affinity with the fruits of the Holy Spirit.105

Comparable narrative elements then appeared in two early sixteenth-century works. The first was an anonymous poem known as “Cocke Lorrelles Boat,” which was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1510 but surely circulated orally and in manuscript before then. In it a pardoner is selling indulgences not for a reputable institution but for certain “religious women,” praised for being “kind and liberal” in the stews by London Bridge. The stews were the bathhouses of Southwark, where sex work was tolerated and taxed, so the poem equates buying indulgences with maintaining prostitutes, with the pardoner becoming their bawd or pimp.106 The second was John Heywood’s play, The Foure PP, in which a pardoner tells a story about seeking the soul of his dead friend Margery. He fears she is in hell:

For with her lyfe I was so acqueynted,

That sure I thought she was nat saynted.

While searching for her, Lucifer gives him a letter of safe conduct that mimics and mocks episcopal licenses for pardoners. He eventually finds and rescues Margery, returning to the world and rather unceremoniously dumping her on Newmarket Heath, presumably having climbed over the earthwork known locally as Devil’s Dyke.107 This turnaround is of a piece with the play’s pervasive misogyny. Why has the pardoner rescued Margery? It is implied she was a sex worker who could be bought on Newmarket Heath: “yf that any man do mynde her . . . there shall he fynde her,” the pardoner announces.108 Perhaps she was “his” prostitute.

Being a seducer and being seduced allowed feminine and female influence to enter the church at its frayed edges where jobs were done by men of doubtful character, uncertain clerical status, and gender read as ambiguous. But those fears lay at the thin end of a wedge that widened to the point where churchmen and poets imagined what would happen if women disguised themselves as men (or as clergy) to inhabit clerical roles. There was some reality to this fear. Two of the judicial cases I have mentioned already—those of the clerk’s wife in Wantage who wore vestments at home and the sex worker Elizabeth Chekyn who dressed as a priest—suggest that the fear might have found some corroboration in life. What would such experiences mean? Here we encounter the possibility that people who would not have been thought male by society at large attempted to live as men. This group would include women who used disguises to occupy roles from which they were excluded, but it could include others too. Sara McDougall has suggested the possibility that “some sort of passing may have taken place” within the late medieval clergy and that “intersex individuals may have made their way into the priesthood.”109 In all likelihood this must remain conjectural, but it is an important conjecture. We must add to it, however, a transgender possibility: that people whose identities were analogous to today’s trans men found greater safety in the church than in lay society. This is highly speculative, but the possibility cannot be discounted; in parallel to what we have already seen with the response to women in roles ascribed to men, a trans reality would help to make sense of the antitrans reactions that appear in certain sources.

Later medieval England was a world where allegedly hidden gender was sometimes deployed in rhetorical or symbolic ways to create moments of transgression that existed only to be crushed. The salient text in question is the description of a pardoner in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. We have considered what it meant for the narrator to say he believed the pardoner could be a gelding, and we now turn to what was signified by saying he could be a mare: “I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare.” There are divergent literary interpretations of Chaucer’s pardoner being called a mare. For much of the later twentieth century, literary scholars pursued the idea that this word denoted a homosexual male. However, as Jeffrey Myers noted in 2000, there is no linguistic or contextual basis for such a reading. Critics had, he argued, missed the obvious point, that the gelding-or-mare remark constitutes a metaphorical pair: a gelding is a castrated male horse, a mare a female horse. It makes perfect figurative sense as such, and there is no reason to seek an alternative. This view was echoed in a 2017 article by Alex Da Costa, which provided examples of being viewed or read as male that would have been familiar to Chaucer and his audience.110 I wish to explore those examples further in order to assess the extent of this particular sort of gender anxiety and consider how it related to fears about weaknesses in church governance.

The examples are all fictional, but that does not mean they were not influential. They were repeated because they were an efficient means of expressing something that mattered to male authors writing about the church. They were fictions that shaped the reality in which women, intersex people and trans people engaged with ecclesiastical authority. Unlike the chronicler Henry Knighton, whose account of a young woman dressed and inexpertly tonsured “as if she were a priest” was examined in chapter 5, the following stories involve something much more than “dressing up.” We are looking at well-known stories about women who lived a large part of their lives, until death, as men. I will therefore not follow Myers’ suggestion that we talk about cross-dressing or transvestism, which imply dressing incongruously as the “opposite” gender, with an implication of merely temporary role play. Chaucer’s “mare” remark evinces, rather, a keen late medieval interest in lifelong performances of gender roles that seemed to some observers to cross a binary frontier but that to the individuals concerned may have been congruent with a long-lasting complex relationship to normative gender. Following M. W. Bychowski, I endeavor here to create interpretative space in which we can ask whether such practices were “authentic” and not mere disguises.111 Chaucer seems to have been evoking the well-known tale of Pope Joan and possibly some saints who lived their entire adult lives as males.112

The Pope Joan story is a myth, but it was often repeated. Although fictitiously dated to the ninth or eleventh century, the tale was first told by three Dominican writers between the 1250s and 1270s: Jean de Mailly, Etienne de Bourbon, and Martinus Polonus. It was Polonus’s version that became the most influential, spreading across Europe in hundreds of repetitions and adaptations.113 I will present the details of the story as found in the versions current in late medieval England, but first it is worth noting—in passing—a detail that was not part of the English tradition but that nonetheless indicates something of how it could be interpreted by contemporaries. In De Mailly’s Universal Metz Chronicle, the pope “discovered” to be female was punished by being “dragged by the tail of a horse and stoned to death by the people.” To be pulled along behind a horse may have evoked such equine humiliations as discussed earlier in this chapter that were intended to draw attention to the gendered boundary of the clergy.114 In all versions of the story, the explicit boundary is a binary one between women and men, but it is possible that the tale was also a repository for contemporary apprehension surrounding intersex or trans lives.

The earliest version of Joan’s story to circulate in England was an anonymous Middle English abridged translation of Martinus Polonus’s Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatum, made before 1330 for Bishop Robert Wyvill of Salisbury. This survives in four manuscripts, but much more important for the story’s transmission was Ranulf Higden’s Latin Polychronicon, compiled between the 1320s and 1350s and itself also an adaptation of Polonus’s text.115 I tell the story from this influential version:

After Leo [IV], John, an Englishman from Mainz, sat on the papal throne for two years and five months. This [pope], as is said, was a woman who when she was still young was taken by a certain lover of hers to Athens, dressed as a man. She advanced so much in various branches of knowledge that after coming to Rome she taught the trivium to many great men. Then, having been elected pope by the will of all [the cardinals], she was impregnated by her lover. Because she did not know the precise time of her delivery, when she was going from St. Peter’s to the [church of St. John] Lateran, distressed by the pains of childbirth she gave birth between the Colosseum and [the church of] St. Clement where, after her death, it is said, she was buried. And it is believed that the lord pope always avoids that street because of his detestation of those events. She is not placed in the list of pontiffs because of the inappropriateness (impertinentem) of her sex.

Higden’s Latin chronicle survives in more than 150 manuscripts from the later Middle Ages, making it one of the most widely read and influential texts of its day. His words achieved even greater reach through several English translations, the most important being that made by John Trevisa around 1385.116 In that version, Trevisa intervenes as a first-person narrator at times, for example telling the reader that “me seith that Iohn Englisshe was a woman,” something he calls a “wonder myshap.” Higden’s final line becomes even more emphatic in Trevisa’s English: “he was of wommen kynde, þat shulde nouȝt be pope.”117 Trevisa takes the opportunity provided by gendered English pronouns to emphasize Joan’s perceived incongruity. The essential elements of this popular tale of covert female influence are the long-term nature of her life as a man, the credulity of the men who elected her pope, and the role of her body in “revealing” her female sex.

At least three further chronicle versions of the story were circulating in England. The Eulogium historiarum, written in the 1360s at Malmesbury, drew on Higden but departed from his wording and made supplementary misogynistic comments. Its anonymous author explained Joan’s academic success in terms of female desire and lack of restraint: “it happens in general that women cannot contain themselves (non possunt continere) well when conversing with men; neither did she, because she loved a certain learned teacher too dearly.” He has her giving birth or “discharging the fetus” as she walks and he calls her covert life a “crime” (scelus) that was revealed.118 Adam of Usk’s chronicle was conceived as a continuation of Higden’s Polychronicon dealing with the years 1377 to 1421, so he does not relate the Joan story itself, but he does embellish a detail that was frequently appended to the legend in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This was the—equally fictional—account of a sex verification process following papal elections, popularized by Johannes Viktring in 1379. Usk wrote that as an eyewitness to the accession of Innocent VII, he had personally seen the pope-elect sit on a throne that had a hole in its seat, where he was “examined by one of the younger cardinals to ensure that he has male genitalia.”119 Finally, a Middle English so-called Lollard Chronicle written sometime between 1380 and 1420 based its telling on the earlier translations of Polonus with minor lexical alterations.120

The English chroniclers maintained the original story’s uneasy tension between disgust at the idea of a female pope, tacit recognition that lifelong “trans” identities were possible, and embarrassment at how easily the church establishment could be fooled. The anxious link between gender uncertainty and problems of church governance is therefore firmly embedded in the story.

In addition to chronicle accounts, theological writers made polemical use of the Joan myth while treating it as historical truth. In his “Work of Ninety Days” William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) referred to Joan in a discussion of what should be done with an illegitimate pope: if one knows them to be illegitimate one should not accept their authority, but ignorance would excuse obedience.121 Covering for institutional embarrassment, Ockham allowed that the men who failed to notice Joan was female should not be blamed for obeying her. For John Wyclif, the key lesson of the story was the disjuncture between the visible church, which harbored wicked and illegitimate humans, and the “real” church, which was made up of saints chosen by God. In his major work De potestate pape (“On the power of the pope”) written in 1379, Wyclif cited Higden’s account of Joan’s papacy, though he changes her name to Agnes, as evidence of how the visible church might sustain “unfit” persons in office. He repeated this in his 1382 polemic De cruciata (“On crusades”), adding that the cardinals had been misled or seduced (est seductus) as to the sex of the pope.

In the first of these works, Wyclif seemed to be heading toward support for women priests. He wrote that sin and not sex was the greatest barrier to the effective administration of the sacraments, but then he deployed Joan as a demonstration of why this was disastrous in practice: being female was an “indisposition of the body” (indisposicionem corporis) that disqualifies a person from office.122 Walter Brut, however, who in this was at odds with Wyclif, used the legend to argue for the validity of sacraments conferred by women. If, he contended, Joan’s ordinations as pope were considered valid, then female confection of the sacraments ought also to be deemed legitimate. But if, on the other hand, her ordinations were considered invalid, then potentially many others in his own day would be void too, given the chain of authority linking historic popes to contemporary bishops and priests.123 He did not conclude that women should be ordained, just that they could in theory confer valid sacraments.

The final text to be considered takes us into the fifteenth century, and to poetry. John Lydgate’s treatment of Pope Joan in his Fall of Princes (1438) was based on Laurent de Premierfait’s 1409 French work Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, which was in turn a translation of Bocaccio’s mid-fourteenth-century De casibus illustrium virorum.124 Bocaccio, or Bochas as Lydgate calls him, had made Joan into an archetype of women in positions of power: deformed and impotent, an inversion of proper authority. Lydgate follows Bocaccio and dwells on her appearance to a greater extent than had the chroniclers:

[Her hair was] lik a bisshop roundid & ishorn;

And as a prest she had a brod tonsure,

Hir apparaille outward & vesture,

Beyng a woman, wherof Bochas took hede,

Lik a prelat shapyn was hir wede.125

It is immediately notable that Lydgate echoes the circumlocutions around women and the priestly office familiar to us from the chronicles, visitations, and liturgical books discussed in chapter 5 and from Langland’s and Chaucer’s depictions of their pardoners. Joan was “like a bishop,” “like a prelate,” and had a tonsure “as a priest.” To him she could not really be any of these things. Building on and clarifying Higden’s slightly peculiar claim that Pope John/Joan was “an Englishman from Mainz,” Lydgate adds England to the itinerary of her youth, where “no-one supposed but that she was a man.” The credibility of her masculinity is repeated in the account of her election as pope, when it was thought “by no token but that she was a man.” Everyone was deceived, he claims, and no one would have been any the wiser had not her “natural disposition” led inevitably (“bi processe”) to temptation, pregnancy, and birth.126 Nonetheless the signs were there. When Lydgate writes that Joan was “a berdles prelat” with nothing to be seen on her face, he was handing his audience an image of gender disorder.127 It was both a heavy hint about gender, permitting the audience to feel themselves superior to the cardinals who failed to discover her, and at the same time a reminder that not only women but also effeminate men might wrongfully inhabit ecclesiastical office. As shown throughout this chapter, the two forms of disruption—women and “effeminate men”—were conceptually linked. As Brut’s opponent had said, women in priestly roles were “a reproach to men who had become effeminate.” The latter had been allowed in by the former.

Pope Joan’s story was, we must remember, not about something that had really happened. It was retold so often nonetheless because it spoke to a deep-seated anxiety about gender. Although we cannot be sure precisely what the object of this anxiety was, I think there are two main possibilities: either that people not considered men might inhabit proscribed roles through trickery and disguise or that authentic embodiments of nonnormative gender might bring about the same result. Explicitly, Pope Joan was a women dressed as a man, but the long duration of her masculine career indicates contemporary awareness of lives we would now consider transgender. More than mere dressing up or disguising, Joan as written in legend hints at contemporary desires to make outward gender appearance conform to inward reality. In this sense, it is a simple story that carries complex meanings, simultaneously “undermining and enhancing the flexibility of gender,” as Mathilde van Dijk has written of comparable medieval saints’ lives.128 Because the story is a fiction it makes no sense to ask who Joan “really” was, but its concerns reveal a footprint that may have been left on the literary imagination of late medieval Europe by nonnormative, or trans, experiences of gender.

It is worth returning at this point to the interpretative framework suggested by Myers and Da Costa: that Chaucer intended his pardoner to be suspected as a woman “passing” as a man. While this contains a truth, it may miss the mark on two fronts. Pope Joan and Chaucer’s pardoner were certainly written as people who hid, or might have been hiding, their “true” gender with deceptive performances of masculinity. In this sense, they were both symptomatic of the tendency noted by DeVun for medieval texts to use binary gender-crossing as a way of “stabilizing” or simplifying gender complexity. But the stories also presented audiences with vivid examples of complex individuals living “authentically,” as M. W. Bychowski put it, in tune with their gender identity.129 There is something very close to a recognition of trans lives here, cultural and terminological differences notwithstanding. While both the passing and the implied authenticity conveyed different forms of transmisogyny, it is nonetheless interesting that lifelong gender nonconformity was capable of being imagined in late medieval culture.

Where the “passing as a man” framework also misses the mark is in obscuring the particular performance of masculinity described in each case. Joan was a usurper, a “great outrage,” crossing boundaries not only in gender presentation but also in prelacy: she “sat unworthily in Peter’s place.”130 The pardoner was a deceiver and seducer, pretending to be a priest without authorization. Both were cast as disguising themselves in the clothes and customs of legitimately ordained members of the church hierarchy, claiming a status that was not theirs to hold. They are written as having lived and been viewed as clerical males, not simply as males. It is no accident that gender deception and sham clerical status coincided in the stories. As the present chapter has demonstrated, the fear that women might enter the priesthood by stealth simulated legal and literary responses to nonnormative gender: What if a woman convinced everyone she were not just a man but the pope? What if a “eunuch” or a woman posed not just as a sexually active man but as someone with license to preach and absolve? There are fears about women here, and fears about trans lives, but also—inextricably—fears about the indefinite edges of the clerical estate.

We have moved steadily away from the mandates, commissions, and visitations of bishops in this final chapter. That is because we have been looking at groups at the very edges of the institutional church whom bishops found difficult to control. Pardoners and summoners were not tied into the diocesan structures in the same ways that archdeacons, vicars-general, commissaries, rural deans, and parish priests were. Given the challenges bishops faced in regulating even those men in diocesan offices and stable benefices, we should not be surprised to find that things were even harder on the fringes. Bishops were intensely worried about what pardoners and summoners were getting up to. Corruption may not have been the norm, but it was commonplace enough to dominate public discussion of these roles, and bishops joined in the condemnation. Horse mutilation was certainly not episcopal policy—indeed bishops howled in indignation whenever they heard of it—but their distrust of summoners and their arch declarations about servile and crooked characters fed the anger that lay behind the violence. Nor were bishops directly responsible for the elaborate caricatures of pardoners that we find in poetry and drama. Nonetheless, all the ingredients of that discourse may be found in conciliar and synodal statutes and the rhetoric of episcopal letters. Bishops may have been grasping at reeds in their attempts to regulate the fringes of the institutional church, but when they did so, they sent ripples across the pond of public opinion that had real effects in the lives of pardoners, summoners, and the other people inhabiting that liminal region.

Constructions of gender were a major component of popular opinion about the clerical fringes and of episcopal interventions in that realm. Roles such as summoner and pardoner were widely associated with late medieval understandings of nonnormative gender. In our sources these understandings are pejorative—effeminate males, “hermaphrodites,” and covert women—and possibly unconnected to the actual gender identities or expressions of the individuals targeted by law, satire, and violence. But they do, nonetheless, seem to respond to a fairly widespread late medieval interest in and acknowledgment of what we would call trans lives. The present chapter could not have been written without the stimulus provided by a generation of trans medieval scholarship exploring premodern trans experiences, but my project is somewhat adjacent to that endeavor.

I have been concerned with the ways in which nonnormative gender was instrumentalized for institutional and political goals. It was deployed to police the boundaries of the clergy, where dog-whistle interventions in public opinion were the only way to reach groups who evaded other forms of regulation. If someone was not quite a priest, it was useful to authority that they could also be characterized as not quite a man. This was a discipline that made life difficult for any trans person at the fringes of the church, but it was primarily motivated by the desire to keep women out. The technique was one we have seen repeatedly in the preceding chapters: insisting on not just the masculinity but also the maleness of the clergy disqualified everyone else by default. It has also been noted in other historical contexts: for instance, in Claire Becker’s work on post-Tridentine Spain, where “by reinforcing the distinctions between male and female religious . . . priests, bishops, [and] high ranking inquisitors . . . ensured women, even those with attributes considered manly, could not easily usurp their positions. Their efforts may by described as transmisogynistic in their dual insistence on male superiority and the suppression of ambiguity and gender fluidity.”131 This captures very well the effect of discourses surrounding the late medieval clerical fringes in England.

The other dominant flavor in this recipe was the condemnation of ambiguous clerical status. Summoners and pardoners were regarded with suspicion because no one could be sure what sacramental and jurisdictional powers they possessed. Some were ordained priests and some were not. Many who were not abused the powers that belonged to those who were, causing confusion on the ground and consternation in episcopal palaces. The ambiguous authority of those at the fringes was very closely linked to their allegedly ambiguous gender, these things generally appearing together in episcopal, literary, and popular disapproval. They were two sides of the same false coin; each explained the other. Gender and status ambiguity among the clergy were also associated with the challenges of governance. In their debates about what rules should apply to the ordination of eunuchs and hermaphrodites, canon lawyers revealed the difficulty of ruling on bodies that defied easy categorization. And in their polemical discussions of Pope Joan, both Ockham and Wyclif expressed a deep-seated anxiety about the very foundations of church governance. If people are not easily categorizable, they are difficult to govern, causing governors to worry about the limits of their power.