1215 and All That

by Ed West

  William of Newburgh said that under the king ‘a virgin could walk from one end of the realm to the other with her bosom full of gold and come to no harm.’ That is clearly not true, but Henry II left a huge legacy, and for inventing the jury system he was honored by the British people in 2002 by being voted the ninetieth most important Briton, thirteen places below Robbie Williams from Take That.13

  But the king’s expansion of power would also have an influence on the barons when his demented son took over; after all, if all subjects had to be held accountable, why not the king? And yet, despite all this, there were one group of people Henry couldn’t bring to justice.

  ____________

  * Although the twelfth century was not ideal, compared to just two hundred years earlier, during the period of ‘feudal anarchy’ in which lords were at almost constant war with one another and before the Church had installed ‘the truce of God,’ it was paradise.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Lowborn Cleric

  Priests, meanwhile, were made to go through a different type of ordeal, having to stand in front of a church altar and eat a slice of cheese on consecrated bread. If they were guilty, the clergy argued, God would intervene and stop them from swallowing; you can see why the Church didn’t have any trouble recruiting at the time.

  It rather goes without saying that during this period the Catholic Church held enormous power in western Europe, and kings were wise to keep it on side; and the respect shown by royalty was generally not just cynical politics. Henry II was a devout man, despite his fidgeting during Mass, and when he swore on his eyes, he expected to go blind if he broke his oath. Significantly, Clause 1 of Magna Carta starts by stating ‘that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired.’ For central to the conflict of this age was the relationship between the Plantagenet monarchs and the only being more powerful—the Almighty.

  Under the Normans, the Holy See had gained greater control over English affairs, but even back in Anglo-Saxon times the Crown had been obliged to hand over an annual fee to Rome, called ‘Peter’s Pence’ (after the first Pope, St. Peter). The Church was more than just a religious institution, and rather like a government in itself. It ran vast areas of life that the state would now consider its problem: schools, hospitals and relief of the poor especially. And, unlike the staid world of the Crown, where positions were inherited and only changed hands at the point of a sword, the Church accepted men of all backgrounds. Within it, a man could even rise up the social ranks, providing he had a decent education, although admittedly finding a good school in the catchment area was a difficult task for the typical twelfth-century serf. Among the great clerics of the time, many had come from poor families, such as Robert Grosseteste (‘big head’), who grew up in Herefordshire and went onto become Bishop of Lincoln; Grosseteste is widely credited with introducing the idea of the controlled experiment into western science. However, wealthy families often ensured one of their own got a prize job; an illegitimate son of Henry II became Archbishop of York, the number two position in the English Church.

  But all this power made the clergy unpopular to some, especially as everyone was expected to hand over a share of their income—a tithe (literally, tenth)—to the Church, a payment that was routinely avoided, and by many accounts considered socially acceptable to do so.

  And, human nature being what it is, sometimes the clergy didn’t live up to their own exacting standards. Monks denied themselves meat, as they were supposed to, but they had started to define this as only freshly cut meat from the bone; therefore, bacon was technically sort of okay, and they could also eat ‘umbles,’ sheep entrails like heart and liver cooked in bread crumbs. (Since this was considered far inferior to other dishes, someone forced to eat ‘umble pie’ was seen as suffering an inferior position.) Monks were also only allowed wine on feast days, although every third day was a feast day, so they could still easily consume well above the government recommended daily limits and keep their vows.

  In one instance, when the shrine to St. Edmund at Bury was damaged and the Abbot blamed the monks for their gluttony, he suggested they should cut back on the food and save money to spend on restorations. They suggested that St. Edmund could restore his own shrine without their help. Indeed, the stereotype of the chubby friar is fairly accurate, as research on monk skeletons from three London monasteries showed that they were five times as likely as the population as a whole to get obesity-related joint diseases; over 11 percent of those buried at Eynsham Abbey in Oxfordshire had ‘DISH’ a condition related to being overweight.1

  Popular cynicism about the clergy is reflected in a style of poem of the time, known as a fabliaux, which often had a bawdy theme. One such song told the story of a bishop who finds a ‘sparkling, jeweled ring’ on the road and takes it only to find it gives him an uncontrolled erection that breaks out of his clothes and drags along the ground. The fabliaux were filled with rude words such as vit, coilles, con, cul, and foutre, which you’ll only understand if you listen to French hip-hop.

  Some clerics were quite bawdy, and in the words of one historian: ‘The parish priest was often grossly illiterate, with scarcely enough Latin to repeat the church services correctly; he was shockingly ill-paid, and was driven to take money for Masses and other spiritual offices to supplement his meager income.’ Priests often married or ‘kept a hearth-girl in his house who kindled his fire but extinguished his virtue.’2

  Some, however, did live by the rule of celibacy, whatever the cost. In 1114, Thomas, Archbishop of York, was seriously ill, and at the time it was generally believed that sex was vital for health, so the doctors recommended he take a woman and told him God would understand as it was for his health.3 They provided him with a room and an ‘attractive’ young lady, but in the morning when they examined his urine they (somehow) deduced that he hadn’t actually done the deed and he admitted he had only gone into the room with her so as not to hurt their feelings.4 The archbishop told them he’d rather die than break the vow of chastity—which he did. Although a chronicle praised Thomas’s great virtue, he was actually unwell because he had become morbidly obese, so the sex might have killed him anyway.

  Churchmen were not always that meek, however. In 1176, a dispute over who was senior between the Archbishop of Canterbury and Archbishop of York—a long-running argument—ended in ‘fists, sticks, and clubs.’ Likewise, many viewed them as being overpaid and with overlarge entourages, similar to the criticism leveled at politicians and public sector officials today. In recognition of this, Archbishop Hubert Walter published a decree in 1179 that limited the number of retainers an archbishop could have to just fifty men, and thirty for a bishop.5

  The Church’s rules against working on holy days also caused resentment. One story from the twelfth century has a Londoner being reproached by a priest for laboring on the feast of St. Erkenwald, an obscure figure who most people even then had never heard of. The man replied, in a tirade that sounds like something from modern talk radio: ‘You lot grow fat and soft with idleness, you don’t have a real job, your life is just a game or a play . . . You clerics with your everlasting useless dirges despise us, though we are the ones who do all the real work. And then you go and bring in some Erkenwald or other to justify your idleness. When we’ve made a bit of money then we have a holiday, and a good time dancing and singing. You keep your festivals, your mouldy old tunes and your Erkenwald to yourselves. Leave us alone.’6 According to the canon at St. Paul’s who recounted this tirade, the man ranting about Erkenwald then staggered under the weight of timber he was carrying, tripped over a half-buried skull that happened to be lying in the churchyard and was fatally injured. Well, perhaps.

  Despite our image of medieval people living in a world of superstition, abject terror, and haunting Gregorian chants, there was also a surprising amount of nonbelief. Peter of Cornwall, prior of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, complained in 1200: ‘There are many people who do not believe tha
t God exists, nor do they think that the human soul lives on after the death of the body. They consider that the universe has always been as it is now and is ruled by chance rather than providence.’

  The king wasn’t among them, but the biggest problem, as far as he was concerned, was the ‘Benefit of Clergy,’ whereby churchmen were tried in religious rather than state courts. Although the earliest surviving record of clerical trials suggests that a large proportion of these were for sex offenses, this does not mean it was a land populated by amorous Friar Tuck-types feasting on ale and ogling wenches, since most of these wrongdoers weren’t even priests. Technically a cleric included anyone in Minor Orders, including clerks, doctors and lawyers, and almost any literate person with some position in the church, many of which were part-time or semiofficial. So they weren’t necessarily men of the cloth, just those who worked for the institution, who were expected to shave the crown of their head and renounce facial hair, colorful clothes, weapons, and pubs. All of these people could claim Benefit of Clergy, the right to be tried by a Church court, and by the end of the thirteenth century, some forty thousand ordained men were across England, one in twenty-five of the adult male population.7

  Besides which, detailed study has found that most people who claimed Benefit of Clergy weren’t actually clerics, with as few as 24 percent being genuine in the later Middle Ages.8 The plea evolved so that eventually anyone able to show proof of literacy could use it to reduce their punishment, and even as late as 1613 it cropped up when two men were convicted of burgling the Earl of Sussex’s house. The judge passed down his sentence: ‘the said Paul reads, to be branded; the said William does not read, to be hanged.’9 Fifteen years earlier, the playwright Ben Jonson had used the technicality to escape serious punishment after killing a man in a duel in Hoxton. The part of the Bible people were expected to recite—Psalm 51—therefore became known as ‘the neck verse’ because it would save you from hanging. Benefit of Clergy was last used in 1827, although it could no longer be applied for serious offenses from the sixteenth century.10

  There had been some one hundred murders by clerics during the reign of Henry but there were four especially scandalous cases that angered the king, among them one of a man in Worcestershire who had raped a girl and stabbed her father; all he received was lifelong penance in a monastery, which outraged public opinion. Despite such deplorable cases of injustice, Pope Gregory VIII said that clergy were immune to layman’s law, and so they could not be prosecuted in ordinary courts.

  Part of the problem were the low standards for qualification to the Church. Since clergy who had committed a crime mostly just got a penance, this ‘had no terror for the disreputable multitude of persons who, without occupation or scruple, swelled the lower ranks of the profession,’ since there was a very low bar for joining the clergy in terms of education or character. ‘Scandals were frequent; crimes were committed almost with impunity.’11

  Henry had a different view to the Pope on the relationship between Church and state. When the Bishop of Chichester said in his presence that only the Pontiff could hire and fire bishops, Henry replied: ‘Quite right, a bishop can’t be deposed,’ and then, gesturing with his hands, added, ‘but he can be ejected with a good shove.’ The king once sent a note to the monks of St. Swithin’s Priory, stating: ‘I order you to hold a free election; nevertheless, I forbid you to elect anyone save Richard, my clerk.’

  The impunity of clerics was a big problem for the king, but he thought he could solve it through cronyism. Thomas Becket was about the least likely person to be put in charge of the Church, being a nouveau riche merchant’s son with brains and ambition. He had become a knight and then a clerk, his financial skills helping him climb the corporate ladder, and he also did well financially out of Henry’s various small wars on the continent. Like any cockney—the word, from the term ‘cock eggs’ (i.e., rotten eggs), emerged in late medieval times—Becket was extremely flash about his appearance, wearing the finest clothes and jewelry; he even kept a pet monkey and some wolves, which he trained to hunt other wolves. During the 1158 Paris trip, Becket’s private wardrobe contained twenty-four changes of silk robes,12 and when he became archbishop he had an entourage of fifty-two clerks working for him.

  Through his work Becket had become the king’s boozing pal, though their friendship had a macho rivalry to it that, were it shown in a gangster film, would obviously suggest things would end violently. They were once seen wrestling over Becket’s coat as the royal carriage went through London, after he had pointed out a poor man’s coatless condition and the king suggested he give him his. The king won, but then kings tended to.

  So when Archbishop Tedbald of Canterbury died in 1161, Henry could think of no one better suited to the job of leading the nation’s spiritual health than his old cockney wheeler-dealer friend. Becket was quickly ordained a priest, and the following day he was made archbishop.

  But if Henry thought he would have a pliant yes-man working for him, he was sadly mistaken—for his worldly buddy turned into a bigger pain than previous archbishops. To the king’s fury, Becket refused to allow clerics to be tried like laymen, and this came to a head in 1163 when Philip de Broc, the Canon of Bedford, was accused of murdering a knight. After he was acquitted at the Bishop of Lincoln’s court and brought to a lay court, the canon refused to recognize the secular court and laid at the judge ‘distressing insults, and many abuses’ that the official Simon Fitz Peter reported to the king.13

  Becket would not help try the cleric, and he had also begun to show disturbing signs of actually taking the job seriously, shouting ‘whoremonger’ at the king’s assistant (who, to be fair, was a sort of pimp, his job being to find his boss mistresses), and publicly disavowing luxury.* He also protected clerical privileges, and was known to allow his archdeacons to accept fines rather than give a penance, a system that is quite obviously going to be exploited.

  It did not help that the king’s circle was quite seedy. Henry’s court was described as being filled with ‘actors, singers, dicers, confectioners, huxters, gamblers, buffoons, barbers.’14 Walter Map said the courtiers of Henry were ‘creatures of the night’ and ‘who leave nothing untouched and untried.’ One courtier described life at court as Hell, filled with ‘the foul trailings of worms [and] serpents, and all manner of creeping things.’

  In contrast, the new saintly Becket even started wearing a rough goat’s hair shirt infected with lice, a sign of extreme piety and, stranger still, began to walk around with a massive crucifix around his neck. Becket’s enormous ego grew larger, a condition reflected in his personal copy of the Bible, which had a picture of himself below that of Christ. The king’s cunning plan had completely backfired.

  With their relationship in tatters, the archbishop attempted to leave England in 1164, leading Henry to ask ‘Don’t you think the country is big enough to hold both of us?’ But later that year the king expelled him, and Becket spent the next six years in France, no longer on speaking terms with his old friend and with no sign of reconciliation in the air. Becket must have had an inkling that it would not be a happy ending; in November 1166, he dreamed that four knights were murdering him and, as they say, sometimes dreams do come true.

  Becket tried to resign by throwing the ring of office at Pope Alexander III but he returned it; being Archbishop of Canterbury really was the impossible job. Henry also banished or imprisoned Becket’s friends and relatives. Overall there were twelve peace talks over the years 1164–1170. On one occasion, Becket annoyed his opponents by making a point of arriving while carrying a full-sized cross, the kind of histrionics that really got on everyone’s nerves.15

  While intermediaries tried to bring the two together, the king grew impatient; in 1170 he needed an archbishop nearby because he was desperate for his eldest son, Henry, to be crowned (wary of what happened when Henry I died, the king wanted his heir ready as coruler). The king made the Archbishop of York, England’s second most senior priest, do the honors, and h
e blocked all ports so that any disapproving message from the Pope couldn’t reach him (similar to putting your fingers in your ears and shouting ‘la-la-la,’ but on a very large scale).

  When the two enemies met on July 22, 1170, at the ill-named site of Traitor’s Field by the Loire, they hugged and made up. But then Henry told Becket about the coronation performed without him, and the archbishop exploded in a rage, his mood worsened by the extremely uncomfortable hair shirt underwear he now insisted on wearing as a mark of holiness.

  Becket returned to England later that year, The evening before crossing the channel he excommunicated the Archbishop of York and eight other bishops present at the coronation of the younger Henry. And on Christmas Day 1170, he again slammed the king from the pulpit of Canterbury Cathedral, throwing a candle to the floor and saying of those who had taken part in the coronation: ‘May they be damned by Jesus Christ!’

  When he heard this, Henry was naturally furious and went on one of his many rants, but he never said, ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ as he is commonly misquoted. What he actually shouted was the much angrier: ‘What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a lowborn cleric?’ Four young knights in attendance, eager to impress the boss, rode to the Channel to confront Becket at Canterbury. The men, led by Reginald FitzUrse (‘son of a bear’), were severely hungover by the time they arrived in England the following day, and having picked up another twelve men on the way, they were pumped up for a fight.