A history of England

by Charles Oman

Thus England was pacified, brought under firm and regular rule, and restored to her ancient frontiers. Henry even thought at this time of invading Ireland, and got a Bull from Pope Adrian IV., the only Englishman who ever sat upon the papal throne, to authorize him to subdue that country. The pretexts alleged were, that the Irish church was schismatic, inasmuch as it refused to acknowledge the papal authority, and also that Ireland was infamous for its slave-trading in Christian men. But no attempt was made to enforce the Bull Laudabiliter for many years to come.

The War of Toulouse.—Scutage.

Ireland might rest secure, because the king had turned aside into schemes for the augmentation of his continental dominions. Long and fruitless bickerings and negotiations with Lewis VII., the shifty King of France, ended in 1159 in the War of Toulouse. Henry laid claim to the great south-French county of Toulouse, as owing fealty to his wife's duchy of Aquitaine. He led against it the greatest army that had been seen for many years, in which the King of Scotland and the Prince of Wales served as his chief vassals. But when Lewis of France threw himself into Toulouse, Henry turned aside, moved, it is said, by the curious feudal scruple that it did not befit him as Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou to make a personal attack on his suzerain, the King of France. He ravaged the county, but did not proceed with the siege of Toulouse itself. Next year he patched up a peace with his feudal superior, which was to be confirmed by the marriage of his five-year-old son and heir, Prince Henry, with Margaret, the French king's daughter (1160). The chief interest of the very fruitless war of Toulouse was that Henry employed in it a new scheme of taxation, which was an indirect blow at the feudal system. As Toulouse was so very far from England, he allowed those of the English knighthood who preferred to stay at home, to pay him instead of personal service a composition called scutage (shield-money). The money thus received was used to hire a great body of mercenary men-at-arms, whom the king knew to be both more obedient and more efficient soldiers than the unruly feudal levies.

Quarrel with the Church.—Thomas Becket.

The interest of Henry's reign now shifts round to another point—the question of the relations between State and Church, which we have already seen cropping up in the reigns of Rufus and Henry I. In 1162 he appointed Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury, and rued the choice ever after, for now his troubles began. Thomas, the son of a wealthy merchant of London, had been the king's chief secretary or Chancellor for the last eight years. He was a clever, versatile, not very scrupulous man, with a devouring ambition: hitherto he had been a devoted servant, and a genial companion to the king, and had lived much more like a layman than a cleric. In spite of his priesthood, he had borne arms in the war of Toulouse, and even distinguished himself in a single combat with a French champion. Henry thought that Thomas would be no less obliging and useful as archbishop than he had been as Chancellor. He was woefully deceived. No sooner was Thomas consecrated, than his whole conduct and manner of life suddenly changed. His ambition—now that he had become a great prelate—was to win the reputation of a saint. Casting away all his old habits, he began to practise the most rigid austerity, wearing a hair shirt next his skin, stinting himself in food and drink, and washing the feet of lepers and mendicants; from a supple courtier he had become the most angular and impracticable of saints. But it was not merely to mortify his own body that Becket had accepted the archbishopric; his real object was to claim for the head of the Church in England what the Popes of his day were claiming for themselves in Western Christendom—complete freedom from the control of the State. His dream was to make the English Church imperium in imperio, and to rule it himself as an absolute master. Without the reputation of a saint, he could not dare to compass this monstrous end, so a saint he had to become. The moment that he was consecrated, he opened his campaign against the king; he threw up the Chancellorship, which Henry had asked him to retain, and commenced at once to "vindicate the rights of the see of Canterbury," that is, to lay claim to a number of estates now in the hands of various lay owners, as being Church land. When his demands were withstood, he in some cases went to law with the owners, but in others used the arbitrary clerical punishment of excommunicating his adversaries. But this was only the beginning of troubles; in 1163 he began to oppose the king in the Great Council, taking up the ever-popular cry that the taxes were over-heavy. Henry, surprised at meeting opposition from such an unexpected quarter, withdrew his proposals, which seem indeed to have been intended rather to limit the profits of the sheriffs than to raise more money.

Claims of the Ecclesiastical Courts.

But the growing estrangement between the king and the archbishop did not come to a full head till the end of 1163, when they engaged in a desperate quarrel on the question of the rights and immunities of the clergy. We have mentioned in an earlier chapter how William the Conqueror had established separate courts for the trial of clerical offences, and had put them under the control of the bishops. Since his day, these courts had been steadily growing in importance, and putting forth wider and wider claims of jurisdiction. The anarchical reign of Stephen, when all lay courts of justice came to a standstill, had been especially favourable to their growth. The last development of their demands had been the extraordinary assertion that they ought to try, not only all ecclesiastical offences, but all offences in which ecclesiastics were concerned. That is, not only were such crimes as bigamy or heresy or perjury to come before them, but if a member of the clerical body committed theft or assault or murder, or, again, if a layman robbed or assaulted or murdered a cleric, the cases were to be taken out of the king's court, and to be brought before the bishop's. The most monstrous absurdity of this claim was that the ecclesiastical tribunal had no power to impose any but ecclesiastical punishments, that is to say, penance, excommunication, or deprivation of orders. So if a clergyman committed the most grievous crimes, he could not receive any greater penalty than suspension from his clerical duties, or penances which he might or might not perform. It had come to be a regular trick with habitual criminals to claim that they were in holy orders—which included not only the priesthood, but sacristans and sub-deacons and other minor church officers—and so to exchange death or blinding for the milder ecclesiastical punishments.

The Constitutions of Clarendon.

A very bad case of murder by a priest, which Becket punished merely by ordering the murderer to abstain from celebrating the Sacraments for two years, called King Henry's attention to the usurpation of the Church courts. When he found that their claims were quite modern, and had been unknown to the old English law, he resolved at once to take in hand the settlement of the whole question of the ecclesiastical courts. At a Great Council held at Westminster, he proposed to appoint a committee to investigate the matter, and to draw up a statement of the true law of the land with regard, not only to "criminous clerks," but to all the disputes between lay and clerical personages which could arise. Becket opposed the proposal as an invasion of the rights of the Church, and by his advice the other bishops, when asked if they would undertake to abide by the decision of the committee, replied that they would do so in so far as it did not impugn their rights—which meant not at all.

The statement of the laws of England was prepared by the committee, drawn up by the Justiciar, Richard de Lucy, and laid before the Great Council at Clarendon [14] early in the next year (1164), whence the document is known as the Constitutions of Clarendon. The king in it proposed a compromise—that the Church court should try whether a "criminous clerk" was guilty or innocent, and, if it pronounced him guilty, should hand him over to the king's officers to suffer the same punishment that a layman who had committed a similar offence would suffer. In other matters, where a layman and a cleric went to law on secular matters, the case was to be tried in the king's court. No layman was to be punished for spiritual offences, or excommunicated, without the king's leave, and the clergy were strictly prohibited from making appeals to Rome, or going thither, unless they had the royal authorization.