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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 December 2010
Yet the churchman's personal sympathy with the peasant, in so far as we are able to judge from ecclesiastical records and writers, was at best imperfect. We find, indeed, every now and then, egalitarian utterances like that of Bishop Jonas of Orléans (821—843 a.d.). Jonas adduces a few biblical texts (Coloss. iv, 1; Gen. ix, 2; Matt. vii, 2; 1 Tim. vi, 7), and a quotation from Gregory's Moralizations on Job, and an eloquent passage from Augustine, who points out that the new-born noble is as indistinguishable from the new-born peasant as their bones will some day be indistinguishable in the grave. He then proceeds:
Let rich and mighty folk, taught by these sentences and those of other holy scriptures, learn that both their bondfolk and the poor are by nature their own equals. If therefore bondfolk are by nature the equals of their lords, nay, because they are so, let not the lords think that they will suffer it with impunity that [masters,] inflamed with boiling indignation and ungovernable fury against the faults of their bondfolk, transgress against them either by scourging them with most savage stripes or by maiming them with the loss of their limbs, since they have one and the same God in heaven. Let them learn that these folk, whom they see weaklings in the world, abject in clothing and in complexion, and unequal to themselves in wealth, are by nature their peers and their equals.
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