The abbey of Moissac is most often discussed because of its fine Romanesque portal and cloister arcade. Its site just on the edge of Gascony near the confluence of Tarn and Garonne Rivers north of Toulouse meant that it was often visited by pilgrims en route to Saint James of Compostela. Its history is somewhat entwined with that of Cluny whose customs its monks had adopted in the eleventh century. Some historians still treat it as part of the Cluniac Order at that time; certainly from de Peña's examination, it seems clear that it was treated thus later in the Middle ages. Moissac was subject to the bishop of Cahors and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the counts of Toulouse owed homage to the abbot--an homage that fell into abeyance in the mid thirteenth century with the death of the last of the Raimondine counts and the takeover of the Midi by Alphonse of Poitiers, brother of Louis IX and husband of Raymond VII's daughter, Jeanne.
This study of Moissac concentrates on a period often ignored by historians of French monasticism, the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, a time when papal politics enter this region of France because of the ties between Avignon popes and the region, and when the prelude to the Hundred Years' War begins to make this a strategic area in the concerns of the King of France. The second half of this publication by Nicole de Peña consists of her edition of three late-medieval customaries or statutes for the abbey of Moissac: abbot Guillaume de Durfort's (Oct. 28, 1305); those of his successor and relative, abbot Auger de Durfort (presented in two versions, first that forwarded by the monks to Pope John XXII in April 1331, and then the version confirmed in a papal bull of October 31, 1331); finally the much later statutes of abbot Pierre de Caraman (6 November 1453). There are also several other texts: a list of duties of the sacristan and the papal documents establishing several new officers to oversee the internal and external finances of the abbey. The first half of the volume considers the personnel, organization, ecclesiastical politics, and finances of the abbey. De Peña has consulted not only the materials found in the statutes and documents she publishes, but materials from the archives for Moissac for the period 1295-1334 (now in the AD Tarn-et-Garonne in Montauban), in papal registers for the period found in the Vatican, in royal document collections in Paris such as the Doat Collection in the BN and from the AN JJ series a document detailing the acquisitions of the abbey of Moissac from 1275 to 1319. This last was made because the King claimed a huge fine from the abbey because its acquisitions during that period were found to have been made without payment to the King for the rights of amortissement--in English this is the equivalent of Mortmain, the King's rights to a fine if relief-paying properties when they fell into the 'dead hand' of monastic communities.
There are few studies of Benedictine-style monasticism for this period, making the commentary and texts particularly welcome. The picture of Moissac derived from these materials has a number of surprises. First, it was subject to considerable strain in part because of papal appointments to its priories. Second, its community was large, indeed over-crowded--indeed, larger than its considerable endowment could support, particularly given what is revealed to be systematic efforts by other ecclesiastical corporations and the King to attach part of its revenues in support of their own candidates. Moreover, despite papal efforts to limit its size, to 70 in 1331 and 80 in 1333, the community was always very much in excess of that until the Black Death of 1348. Indeed it numbered 140 in 1295 and in 1306 had 136, although abbots of the earlier part of the thirteenth century had assumed that there would be about sixty. Despite the over-crowding, there is no evidence of scandal that de Peña has found. The author has used the cases of appearance of the same individual in more than one document to calculate minimal times for the religious life of monks in this period. Thus, there were two who spent more than fifty years on the monastery, another two documented as spending between 46 and 50 years, etc. twenty-six spent at least twenty years, and so on. . . . She estimates, moreover, that one in two could read and that many of those most long-lived came to have some sort of office in the monastery.
Despite the good efforts of the abbots of Moissac, the abbey was increasingly impoverished. There was debt. And old loans were often repaid by new ones. It is likely that this is despite the best efforts of its administrators, for the documents suggest that abbots were regrouping properties through exchanges, purchases and sales, and that increasingly the abbey was acquiring urban land and rents that would be more valuable than distant rural ones. Local rural investments were increasingly in vines whose production was a source of good revenues. Moreover, urban acquisitions were increasingly in the town of Moissac itself, where abbots can be seen to be investing to good effect. Much of this is shown to good effect by the many tables, graphs, and maps that are included in the text. (Beware, however, of a statement directly above the pie-chart on page 45, which has, I suspect, mis-spoken about its import.) In addition to providing us with the customaries themselves, de Peña has through her careful archival work improved our understanding of how papal provisions, royal claims to admortissements, nepotism and the appointments of friends and cronies to monastic and other ecclesiastical positions undermined the medieval church's ability to provide prayers for the souls of the dead or places in the religious life for family members of long-time patrons. This is a different view of the 'Babylonian captivity' of the Avignon papacy--one which in its own way indicates why the Church hierarchy came in for increasing disrespect in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Texts and appendices will be useful for anyone working on the Church in southern France in the late middle ages. A commendable study.