[25] William of Newburgh.
[26] “Hubert, Archbishop of Canterbury, was a shrewd financier, and an honourable, conscientious statesman; but as a prelate he is noted chiefly for his quarrels with his chapter.”—W. H. Hutton, Social England.
[27] Matthew Paris.
[28] “If he was to give up all for which he had been fighting, and fighting successfully, against the pope and the Church for the past six years, he must make quite sure of gaining such an advantage as would be worth the sacrifice. Mere release from excommunication and interdict was certainly, in his eyes, not worth any sacrifice at all. To change the pope from an enemy into a political friend was worth it, but—from John’s point of view—only if the friendship could be made something much more close and indissoluble than the ordinary official relation between the pope and every Christian sovereign. He must bind the pope to his personal interest by some special tie of such a nature that the interest of the papacy itself would prevent Innocent from casting it off or breaking it.... To outward personal humiliation of any kind John was absolutely indifferent, when there was any advantage to be gained by undergoing it. To any humiliation which the crown or the nation might suffer in his person, he was indifferent under all circumstances. His plighted faith he had never had a moment’s hesitation in breaking, whether it were sworn to his father, his brother, his allies or his people, and he would break it with equal facility when sworn to the supreme pontiff.... There seems, in short, to be good reason for believing that John’s homage to the pope was offered without any pressure from Rome and on grounds of deliberate policy.”—K. Norgate, John Lackland.
[29] K. Norgate, John Lackland.
[30] “By the intervention of the Archbishop of Canterbury, with several of his bishops and some barons, a sort of peace (quasi pax) was made between the king and the barons.”—Ralph of Coggeshall.
[31] Matthew Paris, Greater Chronicle, quoted by K. Norgate.
[32] “The Charter was a treaty between two powers neither of which trusted, or even pretended to trust, the other.”—Stubbs, Constitutional History. Vol. II.
[33] Luard. Preface to Grosseteste’s Letters. Rolls’ Series. 1861.
[34] A well-known passage in Matthew Paris, vol. v, gives the monk’s point of view of Grosseteste, the reformer:—“At this time the Bishop of Lincoln made a visitation of the religious houses in the diocese. If one were to tell all the acts of tyranny he committed therein, the bishop would seem not merely unfeeling but inhuman in his severity. For amongst other things when he came to Ramsey he went round the whole place, examined each one of the monks’ beds in the dormitory, scrutinized everything, and if he found anything locked up destroyed it. He broke open the monks’ coffers as a thief would, and if he found any cups wrought with decoration and with feet to stand on he broke them to pieces, though it would have been wiser to have demanded them unbroken for the poor. He also heaped the terrible curses of Moses on the heads of those who disobeyed his injunctions and the blessings of Moses on those who should observe the same.... And it is believed all this he hath done to restrain from sin those over whom he hath authority, and for whose souls he must give account.” This was written in 1251, when Grosseteste had been sixteen years at Lincoln.