1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (16 page)

In 1215 the phrase ‘the freedom of the English church’ meant freedom from secular power and, above all, from the power of the Crown. For many centuries, most churchmen had in practice been appointed by laymen. It had been laymen, whether kings, nobles or lords of a manor, who had given the land on which churches were built, and who had often paid for the building. Unless churchmen were prepared to give up their estates, which they were not, it seemed to laymen only right that they should retain some control over the selection of those who were going to enjoy the fruits of their generosity.

In the eleventh century a group of ecclesiastical reformers, many of them monks, had begun to argue vehemently that churchmen should be ‘freely’ chosen by other churchmen. The reformers argued that the soul was more important than the body and so priests, who looked after people’s souls, were more important even than kings since kings ruled only over people’s bodies. If churchmen were to have the rights they demanded, freeing them, as it were, from the control of lay society, then they should be able, the reformers argued, to show that they were superior to laymen. Priests should do this by keeping themselves sexually ‘pure’. Yet for centuries most priests had had wives and children, and many were themselves sons of priests. When a reforming archbishop of Rouen told a meeting of his clergy that they should give up their wives, he was answered by a hail of stones. Wives and laymen, those who cared for bodies, held strong cards and at first nearly everyone regarded the reformers’ assaults on long-held assumptions about sex, property and power as absurdly unrealistic. But, very slowly, the reformers began to achieve parts of this astonishingly radical programme. One of the churchmen who campaigned hardest for the celibacy of priests and for what they called the ‘liberty of the church’ was Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085). In consequence the reformers, especially the hard-line ones, are usually known as Gregorians.

In England the most dramatic episode in the struggle for the liberty of the Church had come soon after John’s birth: the murder of Thomas Becket on 29 December 1170. By the middle of the twelfth century men of goodwill had come to realise that Church–State relations bristled with intractable problems that could only be managed in a spirit of compromise. But in 1162, in an uncompromising demonstration of traditional royal power, Henry II had pushed through the selection of his trusted friend and adviser Thomas as archbishop of Canterbury. In the eyes of respectable churchmen, Becket, who had been chancellor since 1155, did not deserve the highest ecclesiastical post in the land. He had enjoyed a notably extravagant lifestyle and he had led troops into war. This was no way for a man with his mind on higher, spiritual things to behave.

But no sooner had Thomas been ‘freely elected’ than he set out to prove, to an astonished world, that he was the best of all possible archbishops, a true Gregorian. Right from the start he went out of his way to oppose the king. For example he objected to the marriage of Henry’s younger brother to a wealthy heiress on the grounds that they were too closely related. Naturally Henry felt betrayed, and an angry Henry was not a pretty sight. On one occasion when he thought another servant had betrayed him he ‘fell into his usual rage, flung his cap from his head, pulled off his belt, threw off his cloak and clothes, grabbed the silken coverlet off the bed, and started chewing pieces of straw’.

He chose the issue of ‘criminous clerks’ as the one on which to settle accounts with Thomas. Like many laymen, Henry resented the way in which clerks who committed felonies could escape capital punishment by claiming trial in an ecclesiastical court. He demanded that they should be unfrocked by the Church and then handed over to the lay courts for punishment. Becket’s resistance to this only made Henry press harder for a definition of royal rights over the Church. He summoned Becket before a royal court to answer trumped-up charges. In 1164 Becket fled to France and appealed to the pope. He stayed in exile for five years, but when Henry wanted to secure the succession by having his eldest son Henry crowned, a new urgency entered the seemingly interminable negotiations between king, pope and archbishop. Becket returned to England, and was greeted by cheering crowds. In a rage Henry spoke the words that caused four of his knights, William de Tracy, Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville and Richard le Bret, to ride off to do what they felt sure he wanted: silence the archbishop.

On the afternoon of 29 December 1170, after an alcoholic lunch, they were shown into his chamber in the archiepiscopal palace at Canterbury. Becket, sitting on his bed, did not rise to greet them, although he knew they had come from the king. After a shouting match they stormed out and armed themselves. When they attacked the palace, Becket’s advisers managed to move him into the cathedral, but he would not have the door barred. A church was not a castle. With swords in their right hands and axes, for breaking down doors, in their left, the four knights entered, shouting, ‘Where is the traitor?’

‘Here I am. No traitor to the king but a priest of God. What do you want?’ Reginald FitzUrse tried to arrest him, and Becket resisted, calling FitzUrse a pimp. The knights struck out at the archbishop’s head with their swords. After the murder they searched the palace, looking for documentary evidence of treason, and helped themselves to all the loot they could find.

The deed shocked Christendom. Overnight Becket’s tomb became the most popular shrine in England, visited each year by thousands of pilgrims, such as those described two hundred years later in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
. The murder proved to be wonderfully inspiring for the makers of pilgrim badges: badges depicting the sword that struck him down or the head which received the fatal stroke, badges in the shape of a T for Thomas, badges showing the ship in which he had returned from exile. The variations were endless. No other shrine matched Becket’s Canterbury for the sheer numbers of souvenir badges it produced, or for the inventiveness of their designs. In 1173 Pope Alexander III declared Becket a saint. This was canonisation in record time.

No doubt Henry deeply regretted what had happened. He certainly had little choice but to say sorry. In 1174 he arrived to do penance at Thomas’s tomb in Canterbury Cathedral. The bishop of London explained to all present why the king was there: ‘Our lord the king declares before God and before the martyr that he did not have Saint Thomas killed, nor did he command that he should be assaulted, but he freely admits that he did use words that resulted in Thomas being murdered.’ Garnier of Pont-St-Maxence tells us what happened next.

At first sight it seems that the medieval church had the capacity to humiliate even kings of England. But we should be careful before we jump to conclusions. We might think, for example, that anyone, even a head of state, responsible for a murder should be punished, and that, if anything, Henry II was being treated lightly – especially since he did not have to take off his green tunic. According to one of Henry’s household clerks, Peter of Blois, many knights were ashamed to do penance in public, believing it showed either weakness on their part or hypocrisy. On the other hand, for a politician then, as now, to apologise occasionally can be a shrewd move, and no politician ever said sorry more theatrically than Henry II. Few have been able to exploit their penance more cleverly. On 13 July, the day after Henry’s penance, his great enemy, King William of Scotland, was captured while leading an invasion of England. It seemed that, once again, Henry had God on his side.

In theory, twelfth-century kings of England conceded the Gregorian principle that bishops and abbots should be freely elected by the canons of a cathedral chapter or the monks of an abbey, but in practice they continued in their old ways, controlling appointments just as before. That kings wanted to control ecclesiastical appointments is hardly surprising, given how wealthy and well integrated into society the Church was. A conservative estimate of total annual ecclesiastical income in England puts it at about £80,000. Although churchmen themselves were forbidden to take part in war, the bishoprics and major Benedictine abbeys were required to provide the Crown with contingents of troops, amounting to about one-seventh of the total service owed by English landowners.

The practice, as opposed to the theory, of appointment was expressed in the writ allegedly sent by Henry II to the monks of St Swithin’s Priory, the cathedral chapter of Winchester, in 1173: ‘I order you to hold a free election; nevertheless I forbid you to elect anyone save Richard my clerk.’ As this writ indicates, the electors were expected to wait until they had received the king’s permission before they proceeded to choose a new bishop or abbot. In the meantime, the Crown collected a church’s revenues during the period of the vacancy. Not surprisingly, there was a tendency for vacancies to be prolonged. After the death of Hugh of Lincoln in November 1200, John kept the see vacant until July 1202, making a net profit of £2649. Generally, the electors chose the kind of men the king wanted. It was, after all, very much in the interest of cathedral canons and monks that their churches were governed by men who had the king’s confidence. Thus Richard had been able to secure the free election of his trusted counsellor, Hubert Walter, as archbishop of Canterbury – the supreme embodiment of the civil servant-prelate and generally considered one of the ablest royal ministers of all time, the man who sent Longbeard to the scaffold. When John came to the throne he appointed Hubert as chancellor, and relied on him to administer England while he tried to keep Philip Augustus at bay in France. When Hubert died in June 1205 John is said to have remarked, ‘Now I can be king at last.’

After Hubert’s death who was to be the next archbishop of Canterbury? Both the monks of Canterbury and the bishops of the province of Canterbury claimed the right to participate in the election, and appealed to Rome. John persuaded both parties to agree to a postponement of the election, but a group of monks went ahead and secretly elected their sub-prior, Reginald, who at once set off for Rome. Then, in the king’s presence, the monks remaining at Canterbury thought better of it, and in December 1205 elected John’s candidate, John de Gray, bishop of Norwich. Innocent III rejected the bishops’ claim to have a voice in the election of their archbishop, but ruled both elections invalid, and invited the monks at Rome to hold another election. With the monks still split between Reginald and Gray, Innocent proposed a new candidate, Cardinal Stephen Langton. The Canterbury monks at Rome acquiesced. John, however, refused his assent. As he saw it, the traditional royal right of patronage had been infringed, and Stephen’s long career as a teacher of theology at the embryonic university of Paris meant that he was guilty of association with his greatest enemy, the king of France. Both sides dug their heels in. Innocent consecrated Stephen as archbishop; John refused to allow him into England and seized the estates of Canterbury. Innocent responded by imposing an interdict on England in 1208. It lasted until 1214. For those six years no church bells rang out over England. This eerie silence carried a message. The clergy were on strike.

The papal interdict meant that the regular church services on Sundays and feast days were banned, and that no one could be buried in consecrated ground. Horror stories were told of corpses being put into coffins and hung from trees in the churchyard until they could be buried later on. New burial grounds had to be opened up in the expectation that they would be consecrated when the interdict was over – as indeed they were, eventually. But it was not a general strike. Parsons were instructed to continue to baptise infants and give confession and absolution to the dying. In 1209 the pope allowed monasteries and nunneries to celebrate mass once a week – although it had to take place behind closed doors, and with no ringing of bells. In an impressive demonstration of papal authority Innocent III’s orders were carried out. There is no record of any priest celebrating Sunday mass – the only regular religious ritual most people attended.

Churchmen put a high value on mass: ‘The value of this sacrament is beyond all estimation’, wrote the Cistercian Baldwin of Ford, who became archbishop of Canterbury in 1184 and died on crusade in 1190. The regular Sunday sermon was thought to be vital for the religious instruction of parishioners. Yet during the six years that the interdict lasted there is not a shred of evidence that any lay person protested. Not a mouse squeaked. There are no recorded petitions begging John to end his quarrel with the pope so that the churches might be re-opened. To all appearances no one – except the clergy – gave a damn.

In fact, parsons continued to provide important services uninterrupted by the interdict. Priests continued to hear confessions, which should have helped them reconcile village enemies. They probably continued to bless animals and crops – and curse caterpillars. Miracles recorded at the tombs of the bishops of Lincoln, Salisbury and Worcester suggest that many shrines remained open, and that pilgrims continued to visit them. Tithes continued to be paid; in each parish the government appointed four men to guard church barns. Church courts continued to sit. Church building continued.

The history of marriage shows clearly the extent and the limitations of the interdict. Marriage had originally been a purely secular affair – one for arrangement between the two families concerned – but it was one that the Church was now increasingly trying to influence. In 1200, for instance, an English church council held at Winchester decreed that no marriage should be contracted without a public announcement in church on three occasions and that no one should be joined in matrimony except publicly in front of the church and in the presence of a priest. The custom was that the banns should be read on the three Sundays preceding the wedding, and that the wedding itself would take place at the church door. It has been suggested that the magnificent porches of some churches were built so that the wedding party could keep dry on a rainy day. During the wedding ceremony the husband handed his wife a symbolic object, a knife for example, to signify that he was giving her a dower. The wedding itself was now over, and it was only at this point that the wedding party went into the church to hear mass. During the mass the newly-weds lay prostrate before the altar, while the altar cloth was held over them. During communion the husband would give the kiss of peace to the priest and afterwards kiss the bride.