But the Church did not usually allow its penalties to be disregarded; against heretics there were, even in England, severe statutes,[[375]] and they would be seized by the civil forces and burned alive. Any one who had offended against the Canons, and who refused to do penance, could be excommunicated, and then he became liable to arrest.[[376]] In this country if the offender ignored it for forty days,[[377]] the King’s Court, on the request of the bishop,[[378]] issued a Writ of Significavit,[[379]] or some similar injunction, ordering the sheriff to imprison him until he had satisfied the claims of the Church.[[380]]
The hierarchy, although, as we have seen, debarred from directly inflicting such penalties as death or amputation of members, resorted to many forms of corporal punishment. Floggings for penance or discipline were administered frequently;[[381]] the younger monks in the monasteries commonly received thirty-nine stripes.[[382]]
But the bishops had other and worse penalties in reserve, and, unlike the secular rulers, they employed imprisonment as a means of punishment in itself. The Catholic Church, with its ideals of cloistral life and ascetic seclusion, sought to produce remorse through mental affliction, and in its high-walled abbeys and gloomy courts had buildings ready to immure any one. The first cells were among the exedrae round churches and bishops’ houses and were called the decanica,[[383]] while refractory monks were freely imprisoned in the great monasteries.[[384]]
Though the ecclesiastical punishments[[385]] were accounted generally merciful—as we shall see presently from English comments on them—they could be pitiless enough on occasions, especially against heretics. The secret and dreadful Inquisition had its own prisons,[[386]] in which it tortured its victims by every means that subtlety could suggest, and in which the mind-wrecking results of solitary confinement were probably first discovered, and at any rate utilised.
Already back in the thirteenth century the authorities had frowned on prison association.[[387]] In 1229 a Council of Toulouse ordered that the “converted” heretics (i.e. those who had recanted from the fear of execution, and who were even then sentenced to imprisonment for life; vide Lea, on Laws of Frederic II., Bull of Gregory IX., etc., in his Middle Ages, i. pp. 321, 484) should be kept from corrupting others. The new prisons built for the Church and the Inquisition[[388]] were ordered to have small dark dungeons for solitary confinement. In 1246 a Council of Beziers[[389]] ordered that the captives should be kept separate in secret cells, so that no one might corrupt another. It speaks of the “enormis rigor carceris.”
The prisoners of the Church[[390]] were subjected to various kinds of incarceration. There was the Murus Largus, under which they were allowed about the place;[[391]] the Murus Strictus, Durus, or Arctus, by which they were supposed to be confined in separate cells upon bread and water;[[392]] and the Murus Strictissimus, where they were kept in dungeons and in heavy irons.[[393]] The Inquisition employed, besides, innumerable torments, and could learn little from the imaginings of Dante; but that dread organisation has a history of its own.
Apart from it, the bishops[[394]] possessed their prisons, and the great convents had penal cells,[[395]] and these they would use to inflict penance or punishment.[[396]] Thus at Canossa, in 1077, Pope Gregory VII.[[397]] consigned the rebellious German prelates to solitary cells with bread and water dietary.
Again we may read of another example occurring in the year 1283. A certain Brother John had, it appears, bitten his prior’s finger “like a dog,” it was said; and for this we find the bishop ordering the outraged prior[[398]] “to keep the said Brother John in prison under iron chains, in which he shall be content with bread, indifferent ale, pottage, and a pittance of meat or fish (which on the sixth day he shall do without) until he is penitent.” A worse fate befell Alexander de Langley in the same century.[[399]] This unfortunate creature was a man of great culture and was the keeper of the abbot’s seal. Either from approaching general paralysis, or from some other form of insanity, he passed into a state of extreme exaltation, perhaps to the extent of being, as they would take it, mutinous or blasphemous. A severe flogging having failed to restore his sense of proportion, he was consigned in fetters to a cell in which he ultimately died, and was buried, the corpse still chained.
There had also existed within the monasteries the dreadful punishment of solitary confinement known as In Pace. “Those subjected to it,” says Dr. Lea,[[400]] “died in all the agonies of despair. In 1350 the Archbishop of Toulouse appealed to King John to interfere for its mitigation, and he issued an ordinance that the superior of the convent should, twice a month, visit and console the prisoners, who, moreover, should have the right, twice a month, to ask for the company of one of the monks. Even this slender innovation incurred the bitterest resistance of the Dominicans and Franciscans, who appealed to Pope Clement VI., but in vain.”
There could indeed be abuses and cruelties in ecclesiastical prisons, as there always are where high walls conceal. For instance, we may read[[401]] that in A.D. 1283 certain monks were seized by the Abbot of Westminster, “and so greatly beaten that one of them has miserably expired.” There were cases where the Church took the extreme step of degrading from orders. In the very early period this often meant that degraded clerics would be immediately claimed by the secular authorities and set servile tasks[[402]]—after which they could not be reinstated. Very often they were shut up in the monasteries,[[403]] a course which the bishops preferred to remitting them to lay punishment.[[404]] Innocent III. (1198–1216), however, directed that clergy who had been degraded should then be handed over to the secular powers.[[405]]