A PROCTOR AT ROME
William Colchester ceased to be Treasurer in the autumn of 1376, and within eight months circumstances had arisen in which his capacities were to be put to a severer and more prolonged test. We are all familiar with the expression "St. Stephen's," as applied to Parliament House. But it is not as readily realized that the House of Commons, after sitting for long years in the Chapter House[ 18] at the Abbey, removed itself at the Dissolution to the ancient Chapel of St. Stephen in the Palace of Westminster. I am only concerned now with the story of that chapel[ 19] as it is related to William Colchester's career. Placed where it was, it stood within the ancient limits of our Abbot's jurisdiction, but its Dean and his twelve Prebendaries had good grounds for regarding themselves as a royal foundation, and they craved the kind of ecclesiastical independence which attaches to-day to St. George's Chapel in Windsor Castle. Our Convent resisted this claim, which, on the other hand, had the good will of the Court. In 1377 a suit to test the rights of the case was entered before the Roman Curia, and it was necessary to appoint some careful and astute person to take charge in Rome of the Abbey's interests, and to negotiate their success. I will not go further into the merits of the case. It lasted for seventeen years, and was ultimately settled, on the whole, in the Abbey's favour, the College of St. Stephen agreeing to pay to the Abbey a yearly sum of five marks, and the right of the Abbot to instal the Dean of St. Stephen's being upheld.[ 20] What concerns us is that the Abbot and Convent chose William Colchester as their proctor at Rome in this suit, and that by good fortune there survive long statements of his personal and legal costs in carrying out the task laid upon him. They will serve as a guide-book of his journey and will give us considerable insight into his adventures.[ 21]
He left Westminster on June[ 22] 10, 1377, and was absent, as he is careful to record, for two years, twenty-three weeks, and three days. His first business was to furnish himself with official commendations, and to this end he sought for royal letters—pro expedicione cause—from the Keeper of the Privy Seal; he paid 3s. 4d. to the Keeper's servant to urge his master to dictate them, and by a like payment he made things right with the scrivener who would execute them; but the letters were not ready when he started. Meantime we can watch him as he reckons up the difficulties of his ordeal. It was arranged that he should go by way of Avignon, for Master Thomas Southam,[ 23] Archdeacon of Oxford, was still there, settling the affairs of Cardinal Langham's will. But the Pope was no longer there. Gregory XI. had quitted that scene of luxurious exile and ravenous extortion on September 13, 1376, and had entered Rome on January 17, 1377.[ 24] Most Englishmen had resented the Avignonese sojourn because it threw the Papacy into the hands of the French, but William Colchester, as he packed his valise, saw the matter in a different light. Because the Pope had left, there was no great chance of finding company for the journey;[ 25] and company meant so much the more security. There was nothing for it but to hire a companion, and he found one Gerard of London, who was willing to face the journey for 20s. and his expenses. Colchester is conscious that this seems an extravagance, but he enters in his account a plea that it was justified by the variety of language and the dangers of the roads in foreign parts.[ 26] For the road to Dover he bought for himself a horse and saddle which cost 34s. 8d.; but it appears that he rather expected the man Gerard to walk, for he extenuates a further payment of 26s. 8d. for a horse, a saddle, and bridle for Gerard, by stating that the man entirely declined to go afoot. Thus mounted, they reached Dover, where they wasted five days in waiting for a passage, and all the time the cost of food was mounting up at the rate of sixpence a day for each horse, and fivepence a meal for each man. The passage, when they obtained one, cost 3s. 4d. each for the men, and double for the horses. At that cost they reached Calais, and within three days were at Bruges, where again there was a long halt. For the royal letters had not come. Edward III. was on his death-bed, and passed away eleven days after our travellers left London. But Colchester is convinced that an enemy had done this, and when he insists that the issue of the letters has been frustrated "per aduersarios," we must remember that the Dean and College of St. Stephen's were closer to the royal ear than our Abbot and Convent. Whatever the cause, the result was the entry in his account of the cost of nine days' commissariat at Bruges, together with a reward of 10d. to the hotel servants, which he at once resents and excuses as being the custom of the country.[ 27] In brief, he had already spent nearly all the £10 which he received at his journey's start from the hands of Brother John Lakyngheth, his rival for monastic promotion.
So now he converts his balance of 16s. 8d. from sterling into florins, reckoning a florin at 3s. 2d. To this he adds seven florins by the sale of his own horse—a creditable bargain, for, having paid 34s. 8d. for the beast in London, he has ridden it to Bruges, and there parted with it for 22s. 2d. On the other hand, Gerard's horse has turned out badly; the journey has nearly killed it;[ 28] and it goes for three florins, or 9s. 6d. Colchester negotiated a loan of twenty-three florins, and on they went towards the south, sometimes hiring mounts, sometimes begging a ride in a cart, often in terror of the Frenchmen, who laid an ambush for them as they entered Dauphiné, so that our travellers hired a guide and went through byways. On the 27th day after leaving Bruges they entered Avignon, and next day they found Master Southam at his lodgings by the church of Our Lady of Miracles.
For a moment I lay aside Colchester's ledger and turn to a separate document; for Southam had with him at Avignon another Westminster monk, John Farnago, who became Colchester's paymaster and in due course presented to the Abbey an account[ 29] of what he had laid out on his behalf. We are thus furnished with the date of the arrival of Colchester and Gerard—July 24—and learn that they required bed and board at Avignon till August 19. Farnago purchased for his Brother a fresh outfit—cape, tunic, and hood of black Benedictine cloth, a scapular and cowl, and a plain colobium (or sleeveless tunic), buying the last, as he says, from Hagyuus, a Jew, whose real name was probably Hayyim. He also provided a horse for the journey to Marseilles, where Colchester was to take ship, and put some money in his scrip. So our Proctor turned his back on Avignon, perhaps not fully realizing that when on August 14, five days before his departure, he and Farnago witnessed the probate of Cardinal Langham's will,[ 30] he had been concerned with a document which was to have a vast effect on the church and the conventual buildings of St. Peter, Westminster.
We turn back to Colchester's own ledger, and note that he does not enter the actual date of his arrival in Rome; but we can fix it fairly closely. He says that, having got thus far, he was obliged to move on to Anagni, some forty miles southward from Rome on the road to Naples; and we know that Gregory XI., who had spent the summer of 1377 there, returned to Rome on November 17.[ 31] Colchester must have found the Papal Court busy at the packing of its trunks and must have returned with it forthwith to Rome; for the first date that he mentions is November 20. It would be wearisome to pursue the details of his activity in engaging counsel, English and Italian, and in paying their fees; but it is worth while to notice that there has been no great change since his day in legal expressions—retinuit duos aduocatos—and perhaps not a complete reform of illegal practice; for instance, he explains that he gave six florins to the valet—cubicularius—of the Cardinal of Milan, who was concerned in the decision of the case, with a view to the man's stirring up his master to sign a certain document; the object of the gift, says Colchester, was greater security, because at the moment there was a fierce altercation between the parties to the suit.
His expenses, already large, received a sudden addition through the death, on March 27, 1378, of Gregory XI. Seldom can an observant traveller have had a more exciting experience than to be in Rome during the session of the Consistory[ 32] which set Bartolommeo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari, upon what Colchester calls "the apex of the chief Apostolate." On personal grounds our monk must have been pleased at the choice of the electors, for the new Pope was the special protégé of the French Cardinal of Pampeluna, Simon Langham's friend and executor. But financially the effect was provoking. We know that Urban VI. proved himself a man "full of Neapolitan fire and savagery," who thought "that the Cardinals could be reduced to absolute obedience by mere rudeness,"[ 33] and we are quite prepared for Colchester's statement that between the Pope and the Sacred College there arose a great dissension. Cardinals and curials fled secretly, he says, in some numbers, and among the latter the two advocates whom he had briefed and paid. That money at any rate was a dead loss, but there was this advantage in Urban's case, that, knowing the preference of the Cardinals for Anagni as a summer residence, he decided for Tivoli in their despite, and Colchester could get there in a few hours for a couple of florins. Six weeks had to be spent within sound of Horace's waterfall before his business was finished. His return journey led him through Nice, where he was robbed of his cloak and other property. Then to Avignon once more, and thence in due course—at least, so he hoped—to the Abbey.
But he was fated, nevertheless, to turn again and revisit the Roman Court; for while he tarried in Master Southam's lodgings at Avignon, in September, 1378, there came news of a notable murder committed in the church of Westminster while the Gospel was being read at High Mass,[ 34] on August, 11. The victim was one Robert Hawle, who had escaped from the Tower and had taken sanctuary at Westminster. The incident had its political aspects; it raised various perilous questions; and Southam advised that Colchester should return to Rome in order to counteract any plots that might be mooted in behalf of the authors of "that horrible deed." So again the expenses began to roll up—the journey overland to Marseilles; a passage by galley to Ostia; a sojourn in Rome for the greater part of December, 1378; gratuities on several occasions to the Papal janitors for free entrance to the Chamber and the Consistory, and to the valets for access to the Pope himself; an expensive struggle by each faction to extract from the Curia the kind of Bull that each side wanted, in which our Proctor was apparently successful; and a journey from Rome to Bruges lasting forty-one days. Colchester waited for three weeks at Sluis to secure a passage across the Channel, in the belief that the enemy was watching Calais with the intention of doing him violence;[ 35] and when he reached his native shore, he rode up to London by ways that were devious for the same reason, arriving there in November, 1379. It was neither easy nor without peril to be the chosen representative of Westminster at the Roman Court.