The two most recent volumes of the late Padre Antonio García's splendid initiative, now under the direction of Francisco Cantelar Rodríguez, continue to shed penetrating light upon the objectives and realities of the Spanish Church in the later Middle Ages,Footnote ¹ in this case those of Catalonia as well as Castile. And wherever one looks, at one level it is the similarities between the two nations and the clergy of each that most impress. At Osma in 1444 it was reported that in their sermons friars were treating the question of notorious fornication by the local clergy ‘lightly’, thereby sowing much discord and tares (‘discordia e zisanya’) amongst the faithful and setting them against their pastors. Note the terminology, recalling the title of the English anti-Wyclif tract of an earlier generation as well as the language in which it was expressed, with the use of the vernacular openly acknowledging the clergy's inability to cope with ecclesiastical Latin. By 1444 proceedings at Osma were conducted in Spanish, thereby dispensing the curious faithful from the need to reach for their dictionaries in order to understand some of the intriguing Latin exploits under the headings of gula and luxuria unintelligibly alluded to by confessors who were firmly directed not to put ideas into the penitents’ heads by going into details (Urgell, 1364). Nor should they be heard to gasp at what women revealed ‘quantumcumque turpis’, the 1518 synod of Ager insisted. Here and elsewhere the influence of Raymond of Peñafort and other penitential authors asks to be investigated.

But insecurity with the subjunctive was the least of the clergy's problems. As Michelle Armstrong-Partida's recent work has indicated,Footnote ² too many of them had altogether too much else to think about, their wives and children in particular. In earlier volumes of this series clerical concubines have already been established as familiar elements of the peninsular scene. On papal instructions, in 1250 Cardinal Gil Torres had commuted the legatine penalties prescribed some twenty years before (automatic excommunication and burial of their paramours with the beasts) in terms the text of which became embedded in the synodal record of at least five Catalan dioceses, reported here with the same apparatus unnecessarily repeated.

By 1308 the Lérida clergy were having both the fines and the canonical sentences which had replaced them remitted and at Segorbe in 1320 the emphasis switched to deterring clerical offspring from assisting at the altar. At Sigüenza by 1533 it was a case of preventing the clergy coming to church with ladies on their arms or, if perchance they had children (‘lo que Dios no quiera’), not to flaunt them abroad. If they did, they risked a fine of three months’ income, in accordance with ‘the constitution of the cardinal of Santa Sabina’, by which must have been meant either John of Abbeville in 1228–9 (who in 1314 was remembered at Lérida as Jacobus) or Guillaume Godin in 1322. Although Bishop Poncio of Barcelona in 1306 would substitute an agenda of his own, two centuries later the Ager synod of 1518, while forbidding clerics to bear arms (‘unless to frighten their enemies or for other just cause’), was still citing the ‘cardenal de Savyna’ (Osma, 1444) and Pedro de Albalat of Tarragona's provincial council of 1244 as the last word on the subject.

So fornication flourished, the 1364 Urgell synod reported, to the extent that ‘amongst many adultery is thought nothing of or is regarded as a minor sin’. Swords were not to be worn in choir, the same assembly ruled, just as clerics were reminded not to run pubs (Barcelona, 1354) and, as well as requiring an examination on the canon of the mass, were directed to refrain from acting as laymen with mud on their boots and from singing at night (Lerida, 1407–11). They were also to shave at least once a month (Segorbe, 1358). But by 1444, it was reported, the examination of such ‘unworthy’ individuals was being foiled by letters from Rome ordering their ordination, and Sunday mass was said to be bringing crowds together only to facilitate the devil's work, occasioning dissolute behaviour and making that day the most sinful of the week rather than serving as an opportunity for checking that conversos were doing their religious duties. After all, tornados needed watching, as did Jews. Sacred Christian texts were not to be sold to them. There was to be no sharing of ovens or food with non-Christians (Barcelona, 1306, 1318, 1347–53; Tortosa, 1311, 1359). Nor were Jewish medics to operate without a Christian present (this at a time when the baptism of stillborn babies was an issue).

Meanwhile, the challenge of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments was never far away. Had they ever come to church ‘propter hoc plus quam propter Deum’?, men were to be asked in the confessional, the Urgell synod of 1364 prescribed (assuming that they ever got near one). And laymen were not to minister in parish churches, the Barcelona clergy were reminded in 1339, repeating a measure from a Tarragona council of the century before.

Not that the outlook was uniformly murky. The Tortosa synod of 1433 prescribed keeping a record of those performing their Easter duties, for example, as at Segorbe in 1485, where more than a century before an ABC of prayers for children (abecedarium) had been developed. Though not a single synod was held at Sigüenza between 1455 and 1533 and the evidence for regular assemblies at Barcelona in the twelfth century appears more fragile than has been claimed, the 1240s and ’50s witnessed a flurry of activity both there and in other Catalan dioceses, especially Valencia, inspired chiefly by Pedro de Albalat, the archiepiscopal author of an influential Summa septem sacramentorum, and his brother Andrés. By 1314 annual meetings were being held at Tortosa where the custom developed of assembling on Good Shepherd Sunday for a three-day gathering; likewise at Segorbe six years later. By 1511 the Osma synod was lasting for more than a week with extensive printed constitutions circulated, a development which thirty years on would afford the breviary supplied to all the diocesan clergy of Urgell an influence potentially far greater than that of the French liber sinodalis amongst its fourteenth-century peninsular readership. Now the new technology enabled questions and answers – ‘dubia et determinatio’ – to be circulated (Ager, 1518).

There is of course much repetition in this material (this was the Middle Ages after all), with twenty-three citations from earlier synods at Lérida in 1325, for example. The Osma case involving the substantial rehearsal of the 1444 legislation in 1511 and again in 1536, which occupies more than five hundred printed pages here, may prompt the reflection that modern scholars might not need to have as much material inflicted upon them as the late medieval clergy. However, so much of that material has perished in Spanish archives – and can be provided here (for Tortosa and Segorbe in particular and to a lesser extent Valencia) only because it was transcribed by Jaime Villanueva well before the civil war – that perhaps we should not cavil at such provision but rather allow it to remind us that the thousands of pages now to the Synodicon’s credit continue to furnish a treasury of instances of the ever revealing tension between prescriptions for living and descriptions of life lived in the pre-Tridentine peninsula.