LITMIR.BIZ

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of infection of the eye. Paulinus it was who introduced Sulpicius Severus to Martin. It is to Paulinus’ polite letter of congratulation that we owe our knowledge about the preaching of Victricius in the north-east of Gaul. Martin knew Victricius: we glimpse them together once at Chartres when Martin cured a girl of twelve who had been dumb from birth. (It would seem that Victricius was among the few Gallic bishops with whom Martin did not mind associating.) Martin also knew Priscillian and his work: he interceded with the Emperor Maximus on behalf of Priscillian when the latter had been found guilty of heresy.

      Archaeological discoveries have furnished confirmation of the destruction of sites of pagan worship at this period which, in the words of Paulinus of Nola, was ‘happening throughout Gaul’. At a temple of Mercury at Avallon in Burgundy pagan statues were smashed and piled up in a heap of rubble: the coin series at the site ends in the reign of Valentinian I (364–75), which suggests that the work of destruction occurred shortly afterwards. The shrine of Dea Sequana, which marked the source of the river Seine not far from Dijon, was destroyed at about the same time. Sulpicius locates one of Martin’s temple-smashing exploits in this Burgundian area.

      Martin did not only destroy: he also built. ‘He immediately built a church or monastery at every place where he destroyed a pagan shrine,’ tells Sulpicius. Martin’s distant successor as bishop, Gregory of Tours (d. 594), has left us a list of the places where Martin founded churches in the diocese, at Amboise, Candé, Ciran, Langeais, Saunay and Tournon. To these we must add the monastic communities he established at Marmoutier and Clion. These rural churches were staffed by bodies of clergy, as we may see at Candes. Such bodies were probably quite small and few members of them need have been priests; there was only one priest, Marcellus, at Amboise. These foundations were intended to have potential for Christian ministry over a wide area. Sulpicius refers to Martin making customary visits to the churches of his diocese, which would have enabled him to perform his episcopal duties, to check up on his local clergy, to nourish his network of contacts and to disrupt any manifestations of paganism which he might encounter. (It is notable that most of the stories told of Martin by Sulpicius Severus have a journey as their setting.) A structure, even a routine, of episcopal discipline is faintly visible.

      Martin’s successors as bishops of Tours carried on the work he had started of building churches at rural settlements in the diocese. Brice, Martin’s first and very long-lived successor (bishop 397–444) built five; Eustochius (444–61), four; Perpetuus (461–91), six; Volusianus (491–8), two. We know of these because they were listed, like Martin’s, by Gregory of Tours towards the end of the sixth century. Gregory did not list these churches out of mere antiquarian interest: he listed them because they were episcopal foundations, the network through which the bishop supervised his diocese. What he does not tell us about, because he had no interest in so doing, was the progress of church-building by laymen on their own lands; estate (or villa) churches built by landowners for their own households and dependants. We hear about such churches only by chance. For example, Gregory introduces a story about the relics of St Nicetius of Lyons with the information that he, Gregory, had been asked to consecrate a church at Pernay. In another of his works we learn that it had been built by a certain Litomer, presumably the lord of the estate. Litomer must have been building his church at Pernay in the 580s. By that date Touraine was fairly densely dotted with churches. It has been plausibly estimated that by Gregory’s day most people in the diocese would have had a church within about six miles of their homes.

      It must be emphasized that Touraine is a very special case as regards the extent of our information about it. Thanks to Gregory’s writings we know more about the ecclesiastical organization of the diocese of Tours than we do about any other rural area of comparable size in fourth-, fifth- or sixth-century Christendom. We should never have guessed that there was a church at the little village of Ceyreste, between Marseilles and Toulon, had its control not been disputed between the bishops of Arles and Marseilles: the dispute elicited a papal ruling in 417, the source of our knowledge. We hear about the church at Alise-Sainte-Reine, about ten miles from the ruined shrine of Dea Sequana, only because when St Germanus of Auxerre stayed a night there with its priest in about 430 the straw pallet on which he had slept was found to possess miraculous curative properties: his hagiographer Constantius recorded the fact and thus preserved the notice of the church. It is from the Vita Eugendi that we hear of the existence of a church at Izernore, between Bourg-en-Bresse and Geneva, and from the Vita Genovefae that we hear of a church at Nanterre, then about seven miles from Paris; both of these from the second quarter of the fifth century. At Arlon in Belgium, close to the modern borders with both Luxembourg and France, archaeologists have excavated what might have been a church of the late Roman period: caution is necessary because excavated church buildings from this period are difficult to identify as such. We know that Bishop Rusticus of Narbonne consecrated a new church at Minerve, which has given its name to the wine-growing district of Minervois, in 456 because an inscription recording the fact has survived. At Chantelle, near Vichy, a landowner called Germanicus built a church in the 470s: it is referred to in one of the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Clermont.

      We hear of these churches because of the chance survival of a legal ruling, three pieces of hagiography, the buried foundations of a building, an inscription and a bishop’s letter-collection. It is a ragbag of odds and ends of evidence, some of them of rather doubtful status, characteristic of the coin in which the early medieval historian has to deal. So slender are the threads by which our knowledge hangs, so fragmentary and isolated its separate pieces, that we have to exercise the utmost caution in teasing out what it might have to tell us. To the question, How far may we press our evidence? different historians will give different answers. How representative was Touraine in respect of the building of churches? To what degree, if at all, may we generalize from its circumstances? Were the dioceses of Arles or Auxerre or Paris or Narbonne or Clermont as well provided with rural churches by the year 600 as was the diocese of Tours? These are – given our sources, these have to be – open questions. The reader is free to speculate.

      We rarely know anything at all of the precise circumstances which brought any individual rural church into being. Here is an example, deservedly famous, of a case where we do know something: it also shows that not all bishops were as violently confrontational in their methods as Martin was.

      In the territory of Javols [on the western edge of the Massif Central] there was a large lake. At a fixed time a crowd of rustics went there and, as if offering libations to the lake, threw into it linen cloths and garments, pelts of wool, models of cheese and wax and bread, each according to his means. They came with their wagons; they brought food and drink, sacrificed animals, and feasted for three days. Much later a cleric from that same city [Javols] became bishop and went to the place. He preached to the crowds that they should cease this behaviour lest they be consumed by the wrath of heaven. But their coarse rusticity rejected his teachings. Then, with the inspiration of the Divinity this bishop of God built a church in honour of the blessed Hilary of Poitiers [Martin’s patron] at a distance from the banks of the lake. He placed relics of Hilary in the church and said to the people: ‘Do not, my sons, sin before God! For there is no religious piety to a lake. Do not stain your hearts with these empty rituals, but rather acknowledge God and direct your devotion to His friends. Respect St Hilary, a bishop of God whose relics are located here. For he can serve as your intercessor for the mercy of the Lord.’ The men were stung in their hearts and converted. They left the lake and brought everything they usually threw into it to the holy church instead. So they were freed from the mistake that had bound them.⁶

      This shrewd manoeuvre by the unnamed bishop of Javols probably occurred in about the year 500. It is a fine example of a technique of rural evangelization which became classic: the transference of ritual from one religious loyalty to another. Gregory of Tours, reporting the story, plainly thought that the bishop had thereby made his lakeside flock more Christian. Perhaps he had.

      There is a further layer of interest in the story of the sacred lake of Javols. The episode demonstrates the local standing and authority of the bishop; it may have enhanced them too. We saw some signs of the beginnings of a change in the nature of a bishop’s public role in the career of Gregory of Pontus. Change was accelerated in the wake of Constantine’s conversion. Further impetus was given

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