The Penitentials began to come into use in the seventh century, and became of wide prevalence and authority during the ninth and tenth centuries.  They were bodies of law, partly spiritual and partly secular, and were thrown into the form of catalogues of offences with the exact measure of penance prescribed for each offence.  They represented the introduction of social order among untamed barbarians, and were codes of criminal law much more than part of a system of sacramental confession and penance.  In France and Spain, where order on a Christian basis already existed, they were little needed.  They had their origin in Ireland and England, and especially flourished in Germany; Charlemagne supported them (see, e.g., Lea, History of Auricular Confession, vol. ii, p. 96, also Ch.  XVII; Hugh Williams, edition of Gildas, Part II, Appendix 3; the chief Penitentials are reproduced in Wasserschleben’s Bussordnungen).

In 1216 the Lateran Council, under Innocent III, made confession obligatory.  The priestly prerogative of regulating the amount of penance according to circumstances, with greater flexibility than the rigid Penitentials admitted, was first absolutely asserted by Peter of Poitiers.  Then Alain de Lille threw aside the Penitentials as obsolete, and declared that the priest himself must inquire into the circumstances of each sin and weigh precisely its guilt (Lea, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 171).

Long before this period, however, the ideals of chastity, so far as they involved any considerable degree of continence, although they had become firmly hardened into the conventional traditions and ideals of the Christian Church, had ceased to have any great charm or force for the people living in Christendom.  Among the Northern barbarians, with different traditions of a more vigorous and natural order behind them, the demands of sex were often frankly exhibited.  The monk Ordericus Vitalis, in the eleventh century, notes what he calls the “lasciviousness” of the wives of the Norman conquerors of England who, when left alone at home, sent messages that if their husbands failed to return speedily they would take new ones.  The celibacy of the clergy was only established with the very greatest difficulty, and when it was established, priests became unchaste.  Archbishop Odo of Rouen, in the thirteenth century, recorded in the diary of his diocesan visitations that there was one unchaste priest in every five parishes, and even as regards the Italy of the same period the friar Salimbene in his remarkable autobiography shows how little chastity was regarded in the religious life.  Chastity could now only be maintained by force, usually the moral force of ecclesiastical authority, which was itself undermined by unchastity, but sometimes even physical force.  It was in the thirteenth century, in the opinion of some, that the girdle of chastity (cingula castitatis) first begins to appear, but the chief authority,