Women, Death, and the Sacraments: Lay Confession in the Black Death

On January 10, 1349, with plague moving through Somerset, the bishop of Bath and Wells sent a circular letter to the clergy of his diocese. Its subject was not the disease itself but a problem the disease had created. Parish priests were dying or staying away, and people were dying without confession, many of them believing that no confession counted unless a priest heard it. The bishop’s answer was to tell them, in plain terms, whom else they could turn to. If no priest could be found, the dying should confess “even to a layman, and, if a man is not at hand, then to a woman.”¹²

That line has a long afterlife. It is quoted in modern discussions of what the church permits in an emergency, and it is sometimes remembered as a papal decision. It is better understood as one bishop applying, under severe pressure, a teaching that medieval theologians had argued over for two centuries. Following it back shows how the medieval church thought about the sacraments at the edge of death, and why women appear in that thinking at all.

A letter from Somerset in January 1349

The bishop was Ralph of Shrewsbury, whose register survives and records the institutions of new clergy to vacant parishes. The historian F. A. Gasquet, who printed an English version of the letter in 1893 from the Latin in Wilkins’s Concilia, used those institutions to argue that mortality in the county was already heavy by November 1348 and probably peaked around Christmas.¹ Gasquet dated the letter January 17, but the Latin text in Wilkins and the printed calendar of the bishop’s register both give the fourth ides of January, which is January 10.³²

The letter itself is specific about the emergency. Churches were “destitute of curates and priests,” it says, and no priests could be found willing, “out of zeal, devotion, or for a stipend,” to visit the sick, perhaps from fear of contagion. As a result, “many, as we understand, are dying without the Sacrament of Penance.”¹ The bishop ordered rectors, vicars, and rural deans to announce publicly that confession to a layperson in this situation could be “most salutary and profitable” for the forgiveness of sins, “according to the teaching and the sacred canons of the Church.”¹

He anticipated an obvious fear. A neighbor who heard a dying person’s sins might repeat them. The letter declares that lay confessors were bound by the precepts of the church to keep such confessions secret and were forbidden to reveal them “by word, sign, and by any other means whatever.”¹ The wording echoes the rule for priests laid down at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Its canon on confession, which opens “All the faithful of both sexes,” required annual confession to one’s own priest and threatened any priest who revealed a confession with deposition and lifelong penance in a monastery.⁴

The letter then set out further limits. Anyone who confessed to a layperson and recovered was bound to confess the same sins again to the parish priest. When no priest was available, a deacon might give the Eucharist. If no one could give extreme unction, the last anointing, “faith must, as in other matters, suffice for the Sacrament.”¹ The bishop also offered forty days of indulgence to those who confessed to a priest while still healthy, rather than waiting for sickness to force the matter.¹

Confessing without absolution

The bishop did not say that a layperson could forgive sins. The distinction matters, and the theologians he was relying on drew it carefully.

The idea that a sinner without a priest might confess to a neighbor came from a treatise widely read in the Middle Ages, On True and False Penance, which was attributed to Saint Augustine until the sixteenth century and is now regarded as apocryphal, its author uncertain. Its axiom, in the Catholic Encyclopedia’s translation, ran: “So great is the power of confession that if a priest be wanting, one may confess to his neighbour.” The same passage explained that the neighbor had no power to absolve; the penitent became worthy of pardon through the desire for a priest.⁵ In the twelfth century Peter Lombard, in his Sentences, turned this into an obligation in case of necessity: confess first to God, then to a priest, and in the absence of a priest to one’s fellow.⁵

Thomas Aquinas took up the question in his commentary on the Sentences. Material drawn from his writings was later arranged as the Supplement to his unfinished Summa Theologiae, probably by his companion Reginald of Piperno, since Thomas stopped writing the Third Part partway through the treatise on penance.⁶ There the argument runs by analogy. Baptism and penance are both necessary sacraments, and baptism has an ordinary minister and an emergency one, so “in a case of necessity even a layman may take the place of a priest, and hear a person’s confession.” Such a confession is “quasi-sacramental, although it is not a perfect sacrament,” because the priest’s part, absolution, is missing; God supplies the defect. The penitent must still confess again to a priest when one can be found.⁷

Not everyone agreed even this far. The Catholic Encyclopedia’s survey notes that Albertus Magnus gave a layman’s absolution a certain sacramental value, while Duns Scotus thought confession to a layman was not obligatory and saw dangers in it, and others called it merely permissible.⁵ The bishop of Bath and Wells was, in other words, choosing the more generous of the positions on offer and making it public diocesan instruction.

Why a woman, and why last

The phrase that has drawn modern attention is the ranking: a priest if possible, then a layman, then a woman. Women could not be ordained and held no jurisdiction in the church, so in the scholastic framework a woman hearing a confession was doing nothing a layman could not do. That she came last reflects the ordinary hierarchy of the period rather than a separate rule about confession. The same ordering appears in the rules for emergency baptism, which the later Roman Ritual, as summarized in the Catholic Encyclopedia, gave as a priest before a deacon, a cleric before a layman, and “a man to a woman.”⁸

Confession heard by women was not new. The historian H. C. Lea, writing in 1896 from a critical Protestant standpoint, collected earlier cases: a seventh-century rule by Donatus of Besançon prescribed that nuns confess to their abbess, and Pope Innocent III later forbade Cistercian abbesses in Spain to hear their sisters’ confessions. Lea also cites the canonist Henry of Susa as allowing confession to laymen and even to women in necessity, and a synod of Cahors, around 1325, that approved deathbed confession to laymen and women, not because they could absolve but because, it held, the reverence this showed for the sacrament allowed a priest to absolve the sinner after death.⁹ The Catholic Encyclopedia, whose editors disputed much of Lea’s interpretation, likewise records that the synodal statutes of William, bishop of Cahors, about 1325, obliged sinners to confess to a layman in necessity.⁵

A well-known lay confession from the century before the plague was a man’s. In 1250, captured with Louis IX’s army in Egypt and expecting to be beheaded, the knight Jean de Joinville knelt before his captors on a galley. Guy of Ibelin, Constable of Cyprus, knelt beside him and confessed, and Joinville told him, “I absolve you, with such power as God has given me.” Afterward, he wrote, he could remember nothing of what he had been told.¹⁰ Lea observed that such episodes reached the chronicles mainly when prominent people were involved, though he judged from the cases collected by the scholar Edmond Martène that the practice was common. How often it happened cannot be measured.⁹

Women, childbirth, and baptism

There was one setting in which medieval clergy expected women to administer a sacrament: the birth of a child in danger of death. Baptism, unlike penance, could be fully given by anyone. Pope Urban II wrote that “It is true baptism if a woman in case of necessity baptizes a child in the name of the Trinity,” and the Council of Florence in the fifteenth century stated that in necessity “even a layman or woman” may baptize.⁸ The Roman Ritual’s order of preference made an exception “as in cases of childbirth,” where modesty might require that only a woman act, and pastors were told to teach midwives the correct method.⁸

English pastoral manuals turned this into practical instruction. John Mirk, a canon of Lilleshall in Shropshire, wrote his verse Instructions for Parish Priests in English; the best manuscript was copied not later than 1450, in the judgment of its Victorian editor. Mirk tells priests to teach pregnant women, as their time approaches, to confess and receive communion together, “For drede of perele that may be-falle” in labor.¹¹ He tells them to teach the midwife to have clean water ready and to baptize at home a child in danger, even one only partly born. For the case in which the mother died in labor, he gives instructions for the midwife to deliver the child so that it could be baptized, and to call a man to help if she could not do it herself.¹¹

Taken together, these texts show where women stood in relation to the sacraments at the hour of death. They could not absolve or anoint. But in an emergency, a midwife could give the one sacrament the church held most necessary for an infant, and in a plague, according to one English bishop, a woman at the bedside could hear the last confession of the dying.

What the pope did grant

Pope Clement VI, at Avignon, is sometimes credited with authorizing lay confession during the Black Death. The documents in Gasquet’s collection point elsewhere. A canon from the Low Countries, writing from Avignon on April 27, 1348, reported that in mid-March the pope had given “plenary absolution till Easter, as far as the keys of the Church extended,” to all who had confessed, were contrite, and died of the sickness.¹ In England, Bishop Edyndon of Winchester announced on January 19, 1349 that the pope had granted his diocese a plenary indulgence at the hour of death for all who confessed with sincere repentance “to any priest they might choose”; the grant was later extended to Michaelmas.¹ The pope gave similar faculties to the archbishop of York in March 1349 and allowed him extra ordinations so that parishes would not be left without priests.¹

Those measures widened the choice of priest and the reach of indulgences. None of the papal grants quoted in Gasquet’s account mentions confession to laypeople. The instruction about laymen and women in his book comes from the bishop of Bath and Wells, who cited existing church teaching for it rather than a new papal grant.¹

The shortage of clergy behind all this was real. Gasquet estimated from the Yorkshire registers that “one-half at least of the clergy” there were carried off, though this is his own 1893 calculation from printed lists of institutions to benefices, which record only beneficed clergy, not a contemporary count or a current scholarly estimate.¹ Bishops also made arrangements for women religious: before the plague reached Winchester, Edyndon gave every abbess and other head of a house of nuns in his diocese permission to appoint two or three priests to hear their nuns’ confessions, so that no convent would be left without a confessor if its chaplain died.¹

How the practice faded

Confession to laypeople in necessity survived the plague years but lost ground over the next two centuries. In 1418 Pope Martin V, questioning followers of Wyclif and Hus, asked whether they believed a Christian was bound to confess “to a priest only and not to a layman or to laymen however good and devout.” In 1520 Leo X condemned Martin Luther’s proposition that “any Christian, even a woman or a child” could absolve in the absence of a priest, and the Council of Trent defined bishops and priests as the only ministers of absolution.¹² Trent did not rule directly on confession to a layman in necessity, but sixteenth-century writers called the practice dangerous and said it had fallen out of use. By the end of the seventeenth century, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, scarcely a memory of it remained.⁵ The theologian Domingo de Soto, writing in the sixteenth century, found it hard to believe the custom had ever existed.¹²

The letter of January 1349 records something less dramatic than a reversal of doctrine. A bishop facing empty parishes told his people that the dying could still confess, that a neighbor of either sex could listen, and that the listener must keep silent. In doing so he kept within limits theologians had already set, while making sure ordinary people in Somerset knew those limits included them.

Footnotes

1. Gasquet 1893, ch. 3 (Avignon letter), ch. 5 (Bath and Wells letter, translated from Wilkins, Concilia ii, 745-6; Gasquet cites pp. 735-6 and dates it Jan. 17), ch. 6 (Edyndon), ch. 8 and ch. 10 (York). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³

2. Wilkins, Concilia (1737), vol. 2, pp. 745-746. ↩ ↩²

3. Holmes (ed.), Register of Ralph of Shrewsbury (1896), no. 2130 and note. ↩

4. Fourth Lateran Council, canon 21, trans. Schroeder (1937). ↩

5. Boudinhon, “Lay confession,” Catholic Encyclopedia (1910). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

6. Kennedy, “St. Thomas Aquinas,” Catholic Encyclopedia (1912). ↩

7. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Suppl. q. 8, a. 2, corpus and replies 1 and 3. ↩

8. Fanning, “Baptism,” Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), sections on the minister of baptism. ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Lea 1896, vol. 1, pp. 217-222. ↩ ↩²

10. Joinville, trans. Marzials (1908), pp. 223-224. ↩

11. Mirk, Instructions for Parish Priests, ed. Peacock (1868), preface and lines 77-108. ↩ ↩²

12. Hanna, “The Sacrament of Penance,” Catholic Encyclopedia (1911). ↩ ↩²