Robert Coton, for a sermon preached at Atcham, near Shrewsbury, containing heretical teaching, was sentenced to carry a faggot in procession round the cathedral, and afterwards round Atcham Church.[613]
Robert Segefeld, chaplain, in 1455, confessing immorality, is sentenced to public penance in his chapel and in the cathedral, and to pay 6s. 8d. to St. Cuthbert’s shrine. This penance consisted in walking barefoot, in linen vestments (pannis lineis), carrying a candle before the procession, on a Sunday.[614]
Thomas Ferby, December 7, 1456, prayed to be released from the excommunication he had incurred for procuring the celebration of a clandestine marriage in St. Paul’s Cray Church. As a penance, he was ordered to visit the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury on Easter Day, and there offer a wax taper of one pound weight. The like offering was to be made to St. Blaize at Bromley and in Chislehurst Church. In addition, he was to allow exhibitions to two scholars at Oxford for two years. Ferby afterwards came to an understanding with his diocesan, and was dismissed from the suit. In the next February, John, chaplain of Paul’s Cray, doubtless the priest who had officiated on the occasion, swore before the bishop, in the cathedral, not to offend again, and was absolved.[615] He redeemed his penance by taking an oath to pay a mark at Lady Day in that and the two ensuing years.[616]
SIX KNIGHTS DOING PENANCE AT THE SHRINE OF ST. EDMUND.
XV. CENT. MS., 2278 f., 108 v., HARL.
The bishops had to deal, not only with the moral offences of the clergy, but also with the occasional crimes committed by members of this privileged class. Degradation from Orders, and imprisonment with penitential discipline, seems to have been the usual mode of punishment. We have seen that a Constitution of Archbishop Boniface, 1260, directed every bishop to have in his diocese one or two prisons for confining clerics flagitious in crime, or convicted by canonical censure, and that any cleric committing a crime such that if he were a layman he would, according to the secular law, suffer the extreme penalty, should be adjudged to perpetual imprisonment.
This spiritual power was strong enough to cope with the most powerful offenders. We all remember how Henry II., able and powerful king as he was, submitted to discipline at the hands of the monks of Canterbury Cathedral, before the shrine of St. Thomas.
The turbulent Fulke de Breauté, in the reign of Henry III., had plundered St. Alban’s Abbey and taken some refugees out of its sanctuary. Being warned by the saint in a dream, he offered himself at the monastery to suffer penance; and there despoiled of his clothes, with his knights similarly stripped, bearing in hand a rod, “which is vulgarly called baleis,” and confessing his fault, he received the discipline from each of the brothers on his naked flesh.[617] He refused, however, to make restitution.
When Thomas of Cantilupe was Bishop of Hereford (1275-1283), Lord Clifford plundered his cattle and ill-treated his tenants. When summoned by the bishop to make amends for his misconduct, he offered to do so by a money payment; but the bishop compelled him to walk barefoot as a penitent to the altar, while the bishop himself inflicted chastisement upon him as he walked.[618]
John Langton, Bishop of Chichester, c. 1314, excommunicated Earl Warren for adultery. The earl came to Chichester and endeavoured to seize the bishop; but Langton and his servants not only repelled the attack, but captured the earl and his retinue and put them all in prison.