The Magnificent Century

by Thomas B. Costain

  The order grew so rapidly throughout England that in thirty years it had 49 houses and 1,242 members. Haymo of Faversham had played a large part in its growth and had been instrumental in developing along practical lines the precepts of the founder. He it was who insisted that it was better to gain a living by work than by begging. St. Francis had insisted that his followers subsist on whatever they were given so that all their time could be used in the care of the poor. Haymo’s conception was more practical, a belief that a few hours of labor each day with hoe and mattock, saw and hammer, would suffice to provide the brothers with food and still leave them free in the service of the needy. This was more acceptable to English members. The begging bowl went out of use.

  In a still more important respect the order in England grew far away from the original conceptions of the Poverello. Francis had wanted men of small learning, even of an ignorance to match that of the poor people they served. In England the trend was in the other direction. It was men of learning who were attracted to the order, and those who came to the top were the most illustrious scholars of the age. The man chiefly responsible for this was Grosseteste, himself the most vigorous and enlightened of thinkers.

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  Robert Grosseteste was born at Stradbrook in Suffolk about the year 1175. His parents were humble people, and it was due to the aid of friends that he was able to go to Oxford and later to Paris. He became renowned for his learning and, on his return to Oxford, was rapidly promoted to a controlling post at that institution.

  If Grosseteste had possessed any inclination to secular activity, he would have become the greatest man of the century. But his nobly proportioned head with its massive brow (from which came his name) was the head of a scholar. His understanding of science was so profound that he started Roger Bacon on the path to his great discoveries. He was a preacher of mighty power and eloquence. Above everything else, he was a man of sublime courage: the unrelenting critic of the King, a thorn in the side of popes, a rod for the backs of venal churchman and indulgent monk.

  In the year 1235 he was elected Bishop of Lincoln, which at that time was the largest see in England, comprising Lincoln, Leicester, Buckingham, Bedford, Stow, Huntingdon, Northampton, and Oxford. The clergy had fallen into slack ways, and the new broom wielded with furious energy by the venerable man with the forehead of a dreamer but the zeal of a crusader swept out concubinage (the flaunting of it, at least), drinking, loose ways of living. He put a stop to such profane practices as the holding of games in churchyards, the Feast of Fools (a form of mummery at which many priests had been disposed to wink), the soft indulgences of refectory and chapter house. To accomplish these reforms it was necessary to visit the monasteries in his extensive province and, as a result of what he observed, he lopped off the heads of many abbots and priors. Rumblings of discontent rose on all sides, and even the canons of his own chapter at Lincoln became bitterly antagonistic. They denied his right to make visitations and carried their case to Rome. The feud continued for six years, and even when Pope Innocent IV gave a decision in favor of the bishop the stubborn canons refused to give in with good grace.

  Grosseteste was the great opponent of plurality. When the King desired to make John Mansel the prebend of Thane, the bishop came up to London and threatened to excommunicate the acquisitive royal clerk if he did not withdraw at once. Mansel not only resigned his pretensions in a great hurry but persuaded the King to give in as well. Once Grosseteste threatened also to lay the royal chapel at Westminster under an interdict because of some slyness the King was up to, and Henry retreated quickly.

  It was the determination of Rome to treat England as a fief and to demand an ever-increasing share of its revenues which roused the fighting bishop to his most courageous stand. He opposed the appointment of Italians to benefices in his territory and made visits to the papal court to protest against such exactions. On one of these visits, when Innocent IV was in temporary exile at Lyons, he preached a sermon denouncing the evils existing within the shadow of the Vatican and roused Innocent to an almost incoherent state of indignation. On returning to England after this bold defiance of the head of the Church, the bishop began an investigation which uncovered the fact that Rome was taking out of England each year the sum of seventy thousand marks, which was three times larger than the income of the King; and with this weapon in his hands he thundered still more boldly against the policy of the Vatican, not concerned that Pope and King were in alliance and equally resentful of his attitude.

  Through it all he remained in high standing even with those he attacked most openly and persistently. He was on friendly personal terms with the King, his advice was sought by the Queen on occasions, he carried on a voluminous correspondence with the prominent men of the country, the cardinals protected him from any hostile action as a result of the Pope’s resentment.

  Shortly before his death in 1253 he received through the papal commissioners an order to appoint to a canonry at Lincoln a nephew of the Pope, Frederick of Lavagna. The demand was couched in the most positive terms and carried the obnoxious clause Non obstante. The stouthearted bishop decided to disregard precedent by refusing, and his decision was conveyed in a letter to the papal executor which has been kept and studied down the centuries as a model of reasoning and firmness. He made his chief point that to continue the filling of important posts in the Church with Italians who could not speak the language and would never set foot in the country would make it impossible for the Church to minister properly to the spiritual needs of the people. No faithful subject of the Holy See, he declared, could submit to such mandates, not even if they came from “the most high body of angels.” He went on to protest that “as an obedient man, I disobey, I contradict, I rebel!”

  Innocent IV literally boiled over when this letter reached his hands. “This raving old man, this deaf and foolish dotard!” he cried. He went on to say that the English bishop had gone too far this time. He would be punished as he deserved. A command would be sent to the King of England for his prompt arrest. The punishment he would receive would make him a horror to the whole world.

  One of the cardinals, Giles the Spaniard, had enough independence to advise against any action. Grosseteste, he said, was “a holy man, more religious and of a more correct life than ourselves.” Other cardinals joined in with the same opinion. The Pope, refusing to look at them, as was his custom when annoyed, grumblingly gave in. The letter, unanswered, was committed to the files. For once the imperious Non obstante! was disregarded and Frederick of Lavagna had to be provided for elsewhere.

  Even if Innocent had decided to discipline the outspoken bishop, it would have been of no avail, for while the cardinals discussed his case that stouthearted man was dying at his manor in Buckden. On the night of St. David’s Day he breathed his last. He had lived seventy-eight years and in every conscious moment of his long span of existence he had been selfless, resolute, clear-seeing, filled with the kind of faith which knows when to warn and does not hesitate to oppose. The world had lost its soundest teacher, the Church its finest son.

  The night he died Faulkes, Bishop of London, heard a sound in the air like the ringing of a great convent bell. He roused himself and said this could mean only one thing, that the noble Robert of Lincoln had died. Some Franciscan monks, passing through the royal forest of Vauberge, heard the same bell tolling.

  Innocent IV had a different kind of intimation of the passing of his venerable enemy. He dreamed that Grosseteste came to him and wounded him in the side; and for the rest of the time that he had left of his own life he insisted he could feel the effects of the blow.

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  It is unfortunate that so little is known of Adam Marsh. He was the confidant of king and prince and, in the later years, adviser of the men who led popular opposition to the weak and vacillating Henry. Completely lacking in ambition, he had a clarity of vision and a fineness of judgment which would have elevated him to a prominent place. Roger Bacon, the most critical and outspoken ma
n of the age, referred to him as “perfect in all wisdom.” His piety led him to prefer the seclusion of the Franciscan school at Oxford and the wider scholastic arena of the university. He played a large part in the growth of Oxford and at the same time he saw, perhaps to his dismay, his reputation as an intellectual grow throughout Christendom. The stature he attained was so great that in the concluding years of his life a determined effort was made to elect him Bishop of Ely. He did not want a high place in the Church, being certain in his own mind that he was unfitted for administrative duties. It was undoubtedly with a sense of relief that he closed his eyes for all time before his appointment could receive the sanction of Rome.

  This gentle scholar and man of God was to do his greatest work, as will be seen later, in the influence he exercised over Simon de Montfort. Adam did not live to see the brave Simon leading the armies of the baronage against the King and calling the first Parliament in which common men were allowed to sit. That privilege was withheld from him, but there can be no doubt that he molded the thinking of the leader of the popular cause.

  Duns Scotus came later in the century, and the period of his greatest influence was in the opening years of the fourteenth. This learned man, who is claimed by the Irish but is generally conceded to have been born somewhere in the border country between England and Scotland, earned a place in the front rank of teachers and established a school of thought directly opposed to that of Thomas Aquinas. As Thomas was a Dominican and Duns a Franciscan, the antagonism between the two orders fanned the controversy over the beliefs and philosophies of the two men into a blaze of hatred. The sharpest clash was over the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which Duns supported with great earnestness and ingenuity, but the important differences were more general. Thomas Aquinas was a constructive thinker; Duns Scotus took the stand that no actual conception of the omnipotent God was possible to the human mind and that all men could accept was what revelation had supplied. The Thomists called their opponents Dunces, and the word made a place for itself in the language which would have distressed the eminent doctor had he lived to realize it. The controversy reached its peak, however, long after the two principals were moldering in their graves. It was perhaps not surprising that, as time rolled on and men began to delve more and more into the nature and meaning of things, the teachings of Duns Scotus fell into disrepute, culminating in such a low place in scholarly esteem that in 1535 one Richard Layton wrote to Thomas Cromwell, chancellor to Henry VIII, “We have set Dunce in Bocardo and banished him Oxford forever, and is now made a common servant to every man, fast nailed up upon posts in all houses of common easement.”

  There was not a hint of this eclipse in the days when the brilliant Duns was teaching at Oxford and writing his mighty effort, Opus Oxoniense, or in his later years in Paris. Scholars from all over the known world sat at his feet, delighting in the ingenuity of his dialectics and the forcefulness of his presentation. The influence of his ideas can be traced in the writings of most of his contemporaries. He never took staff in hand and walked the countryside barefoot, but his work, and the reputation he gained therefrom, helped more than any other single factor to maintain the prestige of the Franciscans through this period.

  Although the sharpest phases of the great controversy came after his death, Duns must have experienced some enmities in his lifetime. There was a rumor after his death at Cologne, where he had been sent to aid in establishing a university, that he had been made a prisoner and buried alive. The fact that such a wild story could gain circulation and some measure of belief is evidence that the great scholar had enemies who might be expected to go to any lengths.

  William of Ockham, an Englishman born in the Surrey village of that name, was a student under Duns Scotus and became leader of the whole Franciscan order. He proved a stormy pilot, preaching the doctrine of Franciscan poverty in the teeth of papal disapproval and being driven into exile. This, however, is a story of the succeeding century.

  Roger Bacon, that remarkable man whose enrollment in the ranks of the brown friars was sufficient in itself to lend the order distinction for all time, merits a later chapter to himself, where the magnitude of his work and the impenetrable nature of the mystery which surrounds him may be told.

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  The Crusades had been in a sense a direct development of the idea of pilgrimage which had seized on Christian people as early as the second century and had been growing continuously ever since. Beginning as an intense desire to manifest faith, pilgrimage had been fed by a number of more concrete motives: to bring back relics, to secure indulgences, to obtain absolution of sin. The great pilgrimage was, of course, to the Holy Land. Second in importance, and the one most commonly adopted, was to Rome, where the sites of early Christian martyrdom served as magnets as strong as the Vatican itself. All countries had shrines which drew visitors, the most famous being the tomb of St. Thomas the Martyr at Canterbury and the shrine of St. James at Compostela in Spain.

  In the thirteenth century the difficulties and the dangers of a pilgrimage to Palestine had been heightened by the fact that the Holy City was again in the hands of the infidels. To make it possible for courageous souls to perform this supreme act of faith there were, however, the two knightly orders of the Templars and the Hospitalers. The former had been formed to protect pilgrims on the road to Palestine, the latter to provide care for the sick and needy. They had grown into great and wealthy organizations; but, although other considerations now seemed to come first with them, they were still functioning along the routes the pilgrims took and as far as possible in the Holy Land. The Templars were making their headquarters at Acre, where they had built Castle Pilgrim. This mighty fortress stood on a high promontory extending out into the waters of the Mediterranean and contained within its walls woods and pastures and orchards. It was deemed strong enough to stand siege forever. The Hospitalers had institutions in Cyprus, Acre, Rhodes, and Malta and did a great deal to ease the sufferings of the pilgrims and reduce the mortality.

  The march to Palestine continued throughout the century, and for a very long time thereafter, on a truly amazing scale. Statistics are not available save the records kept at the ports of Marseilles and Venice. The ships of the two knightly orders took six thousand pilgrims each year from Marseilles and even more from Venice, from which port two annual round trips were conducted. When it is considered that ocean voyaging was confined to small ships which seldom ventured out of sight of land and that lack of the right winds could keep a vessel in port for weeks, that moreover the whole conception of travel was one of adventuring into strange and mythical lands, the magnitude of what was happening can be better comprehended. Ships were built for the pilgrimage trade alone, and the maritime powers found it necessary to frame laws and regulations for the protection of travelers from the rapacity of sea captains and innkeepers. Books were written and sold in great quantities containing information for pilgrims.

  The pilgrims came from all countries, earnest-eyed zealots and feverish penitents with sins to expiate, tramping the overland route to Constantinople and from there by way of Heraclea, Edessa, and Antioch to Jerusalem, or taking ship at Marseilles, Venice, or Genoa and landing at the port of Jaffa. There were hospices in the passes of the Alps and in all ports for the help and accommodation of the seekers after grace. Generally the traveling was done in groups in which at least one would have some knowledge of other languages and so be able to act as interpreter.

  There was a recognized costume for pilgrims consisting of a gray cowl, scrip and scarf, and a red cross on shoulder, a broad belt to which were attached rosary and water bottle and sometimes a bell (to make the walking easier), the hat broad-brimmed and turned up in front. Over their shoulders they carried a sack and gourd. This costume became familiar everywhere, but it is probable that the pilgrim would have been recognized without it. His eye, fixed on the horizon, had a fanatical light; his feet moved at a sclaffing gait; fingering his beads as he walked, he sang the words of Jerusalem Mir
abilis or, if he came from the Teutonic countries, the crusading songs of Walther von der Vogelweide.

  The cost has been exaggerated, some estimates being as high as one hundred silver marks per person. This was perhaps the figure which a knight would have to meet when he traveled with squires, grooms, and the necessary number of horses. The passage from Venice to Jaffa was one mark, but this was the fare only and did not take into consideration the food which became exorbitantly high. The poor pilgrim depended on begging and a free roof when he was ashore.

  Shipmasters competed for the trade of the pilgrims. While waiting in port they set up tables on the bows of their ships and invited the gray-cowled men to come aboard and partake free. They made all manner of promises, particularly in the matter of malvoisie, a wine from Crete which was supposed to be the only cure for seasickness. This was a great inducement because the poor pilgrims dreaded mal de mer more than anything, more than the blinding sun, the plague, or the loud screeching of Moslems on the raid.

  Once aboard, of course, this soft indulgence ceased. The pilgrim would discover that the efforts of the masters had more than filled the ship. He slept on the lower deck, being allotted six feet of space by two but seldom being able to claim that much. It was customary to sleep with the head to the side of the ship, the feet pointing inward; but it was only a very broad man, or a very pugnacious one, who could insist on his full two feet of space. The stench was unbearable to sensitive nostrils, for the hold directly underneath was filled with sand and bilge water. The sand was seldom changed and, as it was used for sanitary purposes and for the burial of those who died en route (in cases where it was necessary to bring the body back), the atmosphere became extremely foul. To complicate matters further, sheep and cattle were carried on board and stabled on the lower deck with the pilgrims. Most passengers brought hens with them in the hope of having fresh eggs, and they cackled endlessly in the daytime and roosted wherever they could at night.