A mediaeval burglary

by T. F. Tout

So lacking in humour was the Westminster annalist that he did not scruple to borrow the phraseology and the copious Scriptural citations of a certain “Passion of the monks of Westminster according to John,” the whole text of which is unfortunately not extant. I may say, however, that the species of composition called a “Passion” was particularly in vogue at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and is mainly characterised by its extraordinary skill in parodying the words of the Scripture in order to describe in mock heroic vein some incident of more or less undeserved suffering. For profanity, grim humour, and misapplied knowledge of the Vulgate the “passions” of this period have no equal. They are a curious illustration of the profane humour of the mediaeval ecclesiastic in his lighter moments.

The Westminster annalist did not stand alone. Other monastic chroniclers took up and accepted his story. It became the accepted monastic doctrine that one robber only had stolen the king’s treasure, and that therefore the monks of Westminster were unwarrantably accused. One writer added to his text a crude illustration of how, it was imagined, Pudlicott effected his purpose. You may see opposite this page his rude pictorial representation of the “one robber” kneeling on the grass in the churchyard, and picking up by a hand and arm extended through the broken window the precious stores within. But Pudlicott’s arm must have been longer than the arm of justice to effect this operation, and must have been twice or thrice the length of a tall man. This same chronicler was not contented with repeating the parallel now recognised between the sufferings of the monks of Westminster, under their unjust accusations, and the passion of pope Boniface, five months later, at the hands of the robbers hired by the ruthless king of France. He must give a picture of the Anagni outrage as well as of the orthodox version of the Westminster burglary. How far he has succeeded, you may gather from the rude sketch figured on the opposite page. Not only does he give us so vivid a picture of pope Boniface’s sufferings from the rude soldiery that the drawing might well be used as a representation of a martyrdom, like that of St. Thomas of Canterbury. His sketch of three other sacrilegious warriors, rifling the huge chest that contained the papal treasures, skilfully suggests that robbery was the common motive that united the outrage at Anagni to the outrage at Westminster. He leaves us to draw the deeper moral that the sinful desire of unhallowed laymen to bring holy church and her ministers into discredit was the ultimate root of both these scandals.

Edward was satisfied with his Scottish campaign; he was becoming old and tired; he was pleased to know that a great deal of the lost treasure had been recovered; and he was always anxious to avoid scandal, and to minimise any disagreement with the monks of his father’s foundation. He, therefore, condoned what he could not remedy. He soon released all the monks from prison. He even restored Shenche to his hereditary office of the keepership of the palace. Richard of Pudlicott alone was offered up to vengeance. In October, 1305, Richard was hanged, regardless of his clergy.

The Outrage at Anagni.

Affairs at the monastery of Westminster were not improved after these events. There was much quarrelling among the monks. Walter of Wenlock died. There were disputes as to his succession; an unsatisfactory appointment was made, and there was a considerable amount of strife for a generation. The feeling against the king was shown equally against his son, and is reflected in the bitter Westminster chronicle of the reign of Edward II. One result of the demonstration of the futility of storing valuables within the precincts of the abbey was that the chief treasury of the wardrobe was bodily transferred to the Tower of London.

Some obvious morals might be drawn from this slight but not unpicturesque story; but I will forbear from printing them. One generalisation I will, however, venture to make by way of conclusion. The strongest impression left by the records of the trial is one of the slackness and the easy-going ways of the mediaeval man. The middle ages do not often receive fair treatment. Some are, perhaps, too apt to idealise them, as an age of heroic piety, with its statesmen, saints, heroes, artists, and thinkers; but such people are in all ages the brilliant exceptions. The age of St. Francis of Assisi, of Dante, of Edward I, of St. Louis of France, of St. Thomas Aquinas, the age in which the greatest buildings of the world were made, was a great time and had its great men. But the middle ages were a period of strange contrasts. Shining virtues and gross vices stood side by side. The contrasts between the clearly cut black and white of the thirteenth century are attractive to us immersed in the continuous grey of our own times. But we find our best analogies to mediaeval conditions in those which are nowadays stigmatised as Oriental. Conspicuous among them was a deep pervading shiftlessness and casualness. Mediaeval man was never up to time. He seldom kept his promise, not through malice, but because he never did to-day what could be put off till to-morrow or the next day.

Pudlicott then is a typical mediaeval criminal. He was doubtless a scamp, but most of the people with whom he had dealings were loose-thinking, easy-going folk like himself. Of course there are always the exceptions. But Edward I, with his gift of persistence, was a peculiarly exceptional type in the middle ages, and even Edward I found it convenient to let things slide in small matters. Thus on this occasion Edward began his investigation with great show of care and determination to sift the whole matter; but when he found that thorny problems were being stirred up, he determined—not for the first time—to let sleeping dogs lie, and avoid further scandal.

We must not, however, build up too large a superstructure of theory on this petty story of the police courts, plus a mild ecclesiastical scandal. Nor must we emphasize too much or generalise too largely from the signs of slackness and negligence shown in mediaeval trials. I become more and more averse to facile generalisation about the middle ages or mediaeval man. They may, moreover, be made in both directions. On the one side we have the doctrine of our greatest of recent scholars, bishop Stubbs, that the thirteenth century was the greatest century of the middle ages, the flowering type of mediaeval christianity and so on. But on the other hand there is the contradictory generalisation of students, like my friend Mr. Coulton, who surveys the time from St. Francis to Dante with the conviction that the so-called great days of faith were the days of unrestrained criminality and violence. Both these views can be argued; but neither are really convincing. They seem to me to be obtained by looking at one side of the question only. A more fruitful doctrine is surely the view that ordinary mediaeval men were not so very unlike ourselves, and that their virtues and vices were not those of saints or ruffians, but were not wholly out of relation to the ordinary humdrum virtues and vices that are found to-day.