60. READING IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL OF A FABRICATED PAPAL BULL, A.D. 1399.
(From the MS. Harl. 1319.)
The effect of solemn parchments and large seals displayed from the pulpit rarely failed upon the crowd, and in some circumstances of more importance than the retail selling of the merits of saints in heaven, recourse was had to such exhibitions. When Henry of Lancaster came to turn his cousin Richard II out of the English throne, the first thing he did, according to Créton, was to have a pretended papal bull, granting a plenary indulgence, read from the pulpit of Canterbury cathedral and commented by Archbishop Arundel (whose brother, the earl, King Richard had caused to be summarily executed). As Créton was not present when this scene, which he describes only on hearsay, took place, the speech he gives is the more interesting, for it may be considered an average speech, such a one as was usual and likely to have been pronounced on the occasion.
“My good people,” the Archbishop is supposed to have said, “hearken all of you here: you well know how the king most wrongfully and without reason has banished your lord Henry; I have therefore obtained of the holy father who is our patron, that those who shall forthwith bring aid this day, shall every one of them have remission of all sins whereby from the hour of their baptism they have been defiled. Behold the sealed bull that the Pope of renowned Rome hath sent me, my good friends, in behalf of you all. Agree then to help him to subdue his enemies, and you shall for this be placed after death with those who are in Paradise.”
“Then,” continues the narrator, describing the effect of the speech, “might you have beheld young and old, the feeble and the strong, make a clamour, and regarding neither right or wrong, stir themselves up with one accord, thinking that what was told them was true, for such as they have little sense or knowledge. The archbishop invented this device . . .”[438] {322}
The burst of eloquence of Chaucer’s pardoner is a caricature, but not an unrecognizable one, of the grave discourses of this sort.
The Pope has still more to say: “For some insignificant sum of money, they extend the veil of a lying absolution not over penitents, but over men of a hardened conscience who persist in their iniquity, remitting, to use their own words, horrible crimes without there having been any contrition nor fulfilment of any of the prescribed forms.” It almost seems as if the Pope himself had listened in disguise, on the road to Canterbury, to Chaucer’s man saying:
“I yow assoile by myn heyh power,
If ye woln offre, as clene and eek as cler