THE OXFORD DEBATE ON FOREIGN SERVICE (1197)
Great importance is rightly assigned to the first instances of 'a constitutional opposition to a royal demand for money',[1] of which the two alleged earliest cases are 'the opposition of St Thomas to the king's manipulation of the danegeld [1163], and the refusal by St Hugh of Lincoln to furnish money for Richard's war in France [1197]'.[2] These two precedents are always classed together: Dr Stubbs writes of St Hugh's action:
The only formal resistance to the king in the national council proceeds from St Hugh of Lincoln and Bishop Herbert of Salisbury, who refuse to consent to grant him an aid in knights and money for his foreign warfare ... an act which stands out prominently by the side of St Thomas's protest against Henry's proposal to appropriate the sheriff's share of danegeld.[3]
And Mr Freeman repeats the parallel:
Thomas ... withstands, and withstands successfully, the levying of a danegeld.... As Thomas of London had withstood the demands of the father, Hugh of Avalon withstood the demands of the son. In a great council ... [he] spoke up for the laws and rights of Englishmen ... no men or money were they bound to contribute for undertakings beyond the sea.[4]
Having already discussed the earlier instance,[5] and advanced the view that the Woodstock debate [1163] did not relate to danegeld at all, but to an attempt of the king to seize for himself the auxilium vicecomitis (a local levy) I now approach the later instance.
'This occasion,' we read, 'is a memorable one':[6] it is that of an 'event of great importance',[7] of 'a landmark in constitutional history'.[8] No apology, therefore, is needed for endeavouring to throw some further light on an event of such cardinal importance. But, to clear the ground, let us first define what we mean by 'opposition to a royal demand for money'. However autocratic the king may have been—and on this point there is not only a difference of opinion but a difference in fact corresponding with his strength at any given period—there were limits set by law or custom (or, should we rather say, limits, both written and unwritten?) beyond which he could not pass. 'Domesday', for instance, was a written limit: if the king claimed from a Manor assessed at ten hides the danegeld due from twenty, the tenant need only appeal to 'Domesday' (poneret se super rotulum Winton'). Or, again, if from a feudal tenant owing the forty days' service the king were to claim eighty days, he would be transgressing unwritten custom as binding as a written record. But outside these limits there lay a debatable ground where that elastic term auxilium proved conveniently expansive. It was here that the crown could increase its demands, and here that a conflict would arise as to where the limit should be placed, a conflict to be determined not by law, but by a trial of strength between the crown and its opponents. We have, then, to decide to which of these spheres the action of St Hugh should be assigned, whether to that of the lawyer appealing to the letter of the bond, or to that of the popular leader opposing the demands of the king, though they did not contravene the law. If one may use the terms, for convenience sake, it was a question of law or a question of politics; and only if it was the latter had it a true constitutional importance.
The two chief accounts of the Oxford debate are found in Roger Hoveden and the Magna Vita St Hugonis. As they are both printed in Select Charters, I need not repeat them here. There is, however, an independent version in the Vita of Giraldus Cambrensis, which it may be desirable to add:
In Anglicanam coepit [rex] ecclesiam duris exactionibus debacchari. Unde collecto in unum regni clero, habitoque contra insolitum et tam urgens incommodum districtiore consilio, verbum ad importunas pariter et importabiles impositiones contradictionis et cleri totius pro ecclesiastica libertate responsionis, in ore Lincolnensis tanquam personae prae ceteris approbatae religionis authenticae magis communi omnium desiderio est assignatum (vii. 103-4).
Gerald's editor impugns the correctness of these statements, on the grounds that the assembly was not clerical merely and that the bishop did not speak on behalf of the whole church. But the passage seems to me to refer to a meeting of the clergy in which it was decided that St Hugh should be their spokesman at the council. Of the other objection I shall treat below.