“Indulgence” was at first simply a commutation of penance. The punishments inflicted for sins were of long duration; fasting and mortification had to be carried on for months and years. The faithful were permitted to transform these interminable chastisements into shorter expiation. Thus a clerk might exchange a year of penance against three hundred lashes, reciting a psalm at each hundred.[432] Tables of such exchanges were drawn up by competent prelates. The learned and autocratic Theodore, born at Tarsus, Cilicia, an encyclopædic mind and a strong disciplinarian, archbishop of Canterbury from 669 to 690, who left on the British church a permanent mark, had published a tariff allowing people to be excused of a month’s penance on bread and water if they sang instead twelve hundred psalms with bended knees; for a year’s penance the singing was increased, and each course of psalter singing was accompanied with three hundred strokes in the palm of the hand (_palmatæ_). But it was possible to compensate {313} a year’s penance and escape at the same time the psalms, fasts and strokes by paying a hundred shillings in alms.[433] In another such table, drawn up in the ninth century by Halitgarius, bishop of Cambrai, is found this additional facility, that if the sinner, sentenced to a month’s penance on bread and water, chooses rather the singing of psalms he may be allowed not to kneel while he sings, but then instead of twelve hundred he will have to sing fifteen hundred and eighty psalms. He may in the same manner be excused of more than one month, up to twelve, in which last case, if he chooses not to kneel, he will have to sing no less than twenty thousand one hundred and sixty psalms.[434] Laymen, who had their choice, frequently preferred a payment in money, the rich having to pay more than the poor, and the sums thus obtained were usually well employed. We have seen them serve for the support of roads and bridges; they were also applied in reconstructing churches, in helping the sick of a hospital, and in covering the expenses of numerous public enterprises. The entirety of punishments was taken off by a plenary indulgence; thus the French pope, Urban II, at the Council of Clermont, in 1095, granted one to all those who, through pure devotion and not to acquire booty or glory, should go to Jerusalem to fight the infidel; and this was the first crusade.