Henry IV (76 page)

Reformation might come in many guises. Monastic reform, an extreme version of which favoured extensive disendowment, also encompassed the less radical notion of shifting resources towards more ascetic orders such as the Carthusians, or more fashionable institutions such as colleges and chantries (as happened with much of the property held by the alien priories).
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It was the interface between clergy and laity at the parochial level, however, in which parliament showed greater interest. Its principal concern – as witness the growing emphasis in the debate over provisors on issues such as almsgiving and hospitality – was the provision of pastoral and sacramental care by resident parish priests. This is why, beginning in 1394, the commons presented a succession of petitions complaining about pluralism and non-residence by curates, although the king took the view that these were matters for the bishops to deal with. The clamour to reform hospitals also grew louder, leading in 1414 to the first parliamentary petition to place them under closer supervision.
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It was the issue of appropriations, however, upon which the commons really chose to bite. By the late fourteenth century, around a quarter of the 9,000 or so parishes in England had been appropriated, mainly by monasteries, giving the latter the right to receive the income of the church in return for appointing a vicar to perform the pastoral functions of the parish priest. The issues this involved were far from simple: parishes depopulated by plague could scarcely maintain a priest, while many Oxford and Cambridge colleges relied heavily on appropriated livings. On the other hand, it was alleged that monks in particular were neglectful of their duties, leading, like non-residence, to the dilapidation of parochial buildings and disregard for the sacraments, preaching, almsgiving and
hospitality.
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The commons' campaign began in 1391 with a statute stating that all licences to appropriate churches must include provision for vicars to be properly endowed, but it was a surge of bulls of appropriation from Boniface IX after 1397 which led them to step up their attacks. In 1401, they asked that no further licences be issued; the king replied that he would consider this further, but in the following year a long-running dispute between the prior of Launceston (Cornwall) and the residents of three parishes appropriated to his house brought the issue to a head.
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The parishioners claimed that they had no resident ministry, hospitality, or provision for baptisms and burials, even though convocation had recently persuaded the pope to revoke his bulls. Within weeks a statute was passed annulling all appropriations made since 1377 and prohibiting future appropriations unless accompanied by the appointment of a properly endowed and instituted secular and perpetual vicar. Boniface accepted much of this, issuing his own bull on 22 December 1402 confirming that appropriated parish churches be served by secular, rather than monastic, curates, and annulling his own and his predecessors' earlier bulls to the contrary, but although a letter from the king in the following year referred to the ‘general revocation of appropriations by the apostle [pope]’, in fact matters did not go that far. Nevertheless, Boniface issued no further bulls of appropriation after 1402.
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There was no doubting the strength of feeling on this subject in England (as in Bohemia, where it was one of the main Hussite grievances). It drew on both a genuine concern for the provision of pastoral care at parish level and popular resentment at the wealth and elitism of the older-established monastic orders, not just from the laity but also from friars and secular clergy.

The campaign against appropriations between 1391 and 1402 represented a striking success for the reformers; not so the simultaneous campaign for disendowment, the most persistent and divisive reformist issue of the time. This was a debate that went back to the old question of whether or not the Church should be permitted to hold property, into
which new life was breathed by Wyclif's insistence that it should not.
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Proposals had been put to parliament in the 1370s and 1380s for the confiscation of a proportion of clerical temporalities, but by marginalizing such views as the work of a radical and arguably heretical fringe, and by omitting mention of them from the official record, it had been possible to ignore them.
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Yet disendowment in some form was favoured by many moderate as well as radical reformers, and after 1399, sensing a king who might be more sympathetic to their wishes, groups of royal and parliamentary knights renewed their efforts to push it through. The great councils of 1403 and 1405, and the parliaments of October 1404 and 1406, witnessed angry debates between bishops and royal councillors on the issue.
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The culmination of this campaign came with the Lollard Disendowment Bill presented to the parliament of January 1410, drafts of which had been circulating for at least fifteen years, which proposed the confiscation of the temporalities held – or ‘arrogantly plundered’ – by all the major monasteries and cathedrals in the realm. Their resources, it suggested, should be redeployed to support the foundation of five (or perhaps fifteen) universities, a hundred almshouses for the support of the poor, and the endowments of fifteen earls, 1,500 knights and 6,200 esquires.
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Like its precursors, the bill was too radical even to be enrolled on the official parliamentary record. Walsingham described it as the work of ‘the accursed company of Lollard knights . . . whose aim was to rob the Church of God’. Such diehards tended to characterize the disendowment party as motivated by greed, and the chronic bankruptcy of Henry's government lent plausibility to such arguments, but at its heart lay the age-old desire to strip away the Church's material encumbrances to allow it to focus upon its spiritual mission on earth. Against disendowment stood both those clerics whose communities and careers depended on endowment and the powerful laymen whose ancestors had founded or endowed monasteries as powerhouses of prayer for their and their families' souls. It was monastic wealth against which disendowment was mainly directed.

Also unmistakable were the social concerns underlying the 1410 bill: one of the aims of founding a hundred almshouses (not hospitals, which were
to be disendowed) was to allow each town in the realm to support ‘all the poor and the beggars who are not able to work for their living because of the requirements of the Statute of Cambridge’. The ‘First English Poor Law’ passed at the Cambridge parliament of 1388 had placed the onus of feeding the deserving poor on their natal towns. Almshouses were intended to help civic authorities to perform this role, just as the campaigns against pluralism, non-residence, papal provisions and appropriations sought to remedy the decline of pastoral welfare at parochial level.
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Such concerns resonated with Wyclifite thinking, which emphasized the social, as well as religious, value of pastoral care, the needs of the poor and vagrant, and the importance of education – hence the desire for English translations of the scriptures and the foundation of additional universities. Although most of those who campaigned against appropriations or in favour of disendowment had little option but to disown Wyclif's ideas in public, in fact their attempt to create a more responsive Church in England owed a good deal to him. So too did their desire to make parliament a forum for discussion of ecclesiastical reform – indeed it is striking how much of the legislation of Henry's reign related to the Church, and how often it was Church affairs that provoked the most testy exchanges in parliaments and great councils. This was new, and was resented by most senior clergy, who believed Church reform to be an internal matter, yet it was exactly what Wyclif and his followers had advocated: that it was the moral obligation of the lay power to reform the Church. What parliament was doing was trying to persuade Henry to implement the reforms it wanted, adopting in the process some of the solutions Wyclif had proposed.
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Arundel was only too aware of the threat posed by the anticlerical and reformist rhetoric rippling outwards from parliament and court, yet he was far from being the hidebound chief whip often depicted. As a young man, he had mixed with Cambridge-educated canon lawyers who had absorbed the spiritual and eremitical aspirations of mystics such as Richard Rolle; as archbishop of York (1388–96) he had encountered the pastoral reforms introduced by his predecessor John Thoresby (d.1373) to encourage lay men
and women to take more responsibility for their own salvation.
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Yet Arundel also believed in firm direction of the laity by the Church. The line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy was a fine one and, as Wyclif's followers demonstrated, too personal a religion often led to fragmentation and heresy. The problem lay in trying to preserve what was best in lay religious enthusiasm while maintaining the integrity of Catholic liturgy and doctrine. One way to do this was to control the diffusion of meditative texts, as Arundel did when in 1411 he approved the publication of the
Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ
, an English translation by Nicholas Love, prior of Mount Grace, of the pseudo-Bonaventuran
Meditationes Vitae Christi
. Written for ‘the edification of the faithful and the confutation of heretics’, this was a life of Christ based on the gospels, but with Catholic interpretation (including anti-Lollard invective) embedded in the narrative.
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Arundel saw the combating of heresy as the principal mission of his primacy.
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This, convocation was repeatedly told, was the main reason for its summons. Yet it was a battle that required the support of the secular authorities, and despite the burning of Sawtry and the passing of
De Heretico Comburendo
in 1401, the archbishop's reluctance to place himself at the heart of Henry's government during the next few years left the ecclesiastical hierarchy fighting a rearguard action against calls for disendowment, violations of clerical immunity, and the reformist strictures of parliament. By late 1406, however, the death of Richard Scrope, disputes over episcopal appointments, growing pressure to end the Schism, and the revival of Wyclifism at Oxford – as illustrated by the sermon advocating disendowment preached by William Taylor, principal of St Edmund Hall, at St Paul's Cross in November 1406 – persuaded Arundel to take a more active role.
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The so-called Statute against Lollards, passed in December 1406, bears his stamp, especially in its condemnation of the disendowment party and its attempts to control the spread of reformist ideas through preaching. It also ordered that suspected heretics be brought before the chancellor, who would decide whether to have them tried in parliament;
since Arundel was about to become chancellor, this enhanced his authority in the war against heresy.
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Wielding his two swords in tandem, Arundel now attacked the Wyclifites head on. As chancellor, he had the notorious Lollard preacher William Thorpe brought before him, interrogated and cast into the archiepiscopal dungeon at Saltwood (Kent), where he probably died.
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As archbishop, he turned his attention to Oxford University. Arundel had clashed with Oxford over academic privileges and Wyclifite theology during his first convocation as primate in 1397, but ten years on there was still no consensus as to what was permissible. What forced his hand was the emergence around 1406 of a group of freethinking masters such as William Taylor and Peter Payne, both open admirers of ‘the great logician’ (Wyclif).
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Summoning convocation to Oxford in November 1407 (the only time during the reign that it met outside London), the archbishop presented to it his much-maligned
Constitutions
, thirteen articles addressing three main issues.
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First, tighter controls were established over preaching through the issuing of licences, and the exclusion from sermons of controversial topics, especially in relation to the sacraments. Secondly, restrictions were imposed on the teaching of theology at Oxford and Cambridge, including a ban on Wyclif's works (unless vetted by a committee of twelve chosen with Arundel's approval), closer supervision of disputations, and the authorization of monthly enquiries by the principal of each college into the opinions voiced by his scholars. Thirdly, article seven prohibited the translation into English, without authority, of any text of holy scripture, or the reading of any such work in English written during or since Wyclif's time, unless approved by a provincial council. This unwarrantably most famous article was justified on the grounds that scriptural truth was liable to be lost in translation, but it was not nearly as wide-ranging as often pretended and had little effect in the short term. The controls on preaching (articles 1–4) took up a familiar and important strand of anti-Lollard measures, and added the penalty of forfeiture for offenders, which in 1414 would be incorporated in Henry V's
statute against Lollards.
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Of greater importance, even if not entirely novel, was the attempt to muzzle the Oxford masters.
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It was primarily at the university that the
Constitutions
were directed. (It was more than a year before they were even promulgated outside Oxford.) Yet even here, with the archbishop distracted through 1408 and 1409 by the Schism and the chancellorship, they were only indifferently observed, and the summer of 1409 witnessed further defiance from a group of academics protesting at the restriction of their intellectual freedom.
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When Arundel lost the chancellorship on 21 December 1409, the challenge to his authority grew bolder. It may be that the reformists hoped for support from the new chancellor, Sir Thomas Beaufort – the man who had wrestled Archbishop Scrope's cross from his hands at Pontefract in June 1405. It was at any rate to the parliament of January 1410 that the root and branch Disendowment Bill was presented, as well as a petition asking for relaxation of the procedures for the arrest of heretics set out in
De Heretico Comburendo
.
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Smelling danger, the archbishop reacted as he had in 1401 by taking his stand on the Eucharist. On 1 March, he brought forth from his prison John Badby, a tailor from Evesham (Worcestershire) who, like William Sawtry, had unequivocally denied that the host changed substance into the body of Christ. Disparagement of the Eucharist was a matter about which Arundel felt strongly: at the Coventry parliament of 1404 he had railed to the king after seeing a group of household knights and esquires show ‘no more honour to the Body of Christ than they would have shown to a dog's body’.
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Yet Badby's trial was manifestly opportunistic: like Sawtry, he had already spent a year in prison before Arundel presented him to a tribunal of lords and prelates.
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Asked if he had changed his mind, Badby replied that he had not, ‘If it pleased the reverend fathers’. The Eucharist, he asserted, was of less value than a toad or a spider, which were at least living creatures. At this point, it was claimed, a large black spider appeared on Badby's lips and, resisting his attempts to brush it away, disappeared into his mouth. ‘Now we see who it was that taught him to
speak,’ exclaimed the archbishop.
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Condemned on 5 March, the heretic was handed over to the lay power for punishment, although Arundel apparently asked that he be spared the death penalty and unlike some other bishops he seems not to have attended the execution. This took place immediately: Badby was chained to a stake set in a heap of faggots at Smithfield, ringed by a throng including Prince Henry. When the pyre was lit he cried out, and the prince, perhaps thinking that he wished to recant, ordered the flames to be extinguished and offered the blistered martyr a life pension of three pence a day to recant.
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It was refused, whereupon the fire was rekindled and an obscure tailor from Worcestershire became the second and last heretic of the reign to be incinerated. For those involved (the culprit apart) it was a satisfactory outcome: the prince had publicly demonstrated leadership and orthodoxy, he and Arundel had both, in their different ways, shown a degree of clemency, the procedure for the arrest of heretics was confirmed, and no more was heard in parliament about seizing the Church's temporalities.