The English Church in the Middle Ages

by William Hunt

Stephen’s accession, 1135.

Under the Norman dynasty the natural results of the Conqueror’s ecclesiastical policy were controlled by the power of the Crown. Appeals to Rome were almost unknown; the principles which the Conqueror had laid down as defining the relations between the Crown and the papacy were maintained, and the establishment of ecclesiastical courts had not as yet proved mischievous; for in all serious cases the criminous clerk, after having been degraded by the spiritual judge, was handed over to the secular authority. Under a weak king, and then during a period of anarchy, the Church became invested with extraordinary power; her relations with Rome were increased, and new privileges were asserted which became dangerous to civil order. The weakness in Stephen’s title was a moral one, for he and the nobles of the kingdom were pledged by oath to Matilda. His right then depended on a question that especially concerned the Church; and though he had received civil election, Archbishop William hesitated to crown him. His scruples were overcome, and the approval of the Church was secured by Henry, bishop of Winchester, Stephen’s brother. Stephen was crowned, after swearing to maintain the liberty of the Church, and put forth a charter promising good government in general terms. The next year, at Oxford, the bishops swore fealty to him “as long as he should maintain the liberty and discipline of the Church,” a ceremony that may be described as a separate election by the Church, dependent on the king’s conduct towards her. Stephen, who had received a letter of congratulation from Innocent II., now put forth a charter in which he recited his claims. As king by the grace of God, elected by the clergy and people, hallowed by William, archbishop and legate, and “confirmed by Innocent, pontiff of the Holy Roman See,” he promised that he would avoid simony, and that the persons and property of clerks should be under the jurisdiction of their bishops. Thus, in order to strengthen his position, he not only gave prominence to the assent of the Church, but even cited the approval of the Pope, as though it conferred some special validity on the national election. This was, under the circumstances, the natural result of Duke William’s petition that Rome would sanction his invasion, and justified Hildebrand’s policy in espousing his cause.

The Battle of the Standard, 1138.

For a while the Church remained faithful to Stephen. The statesmen-bishops, Roger, the justiciar, and his nephews, the bishop of Ely, the treasurer, and the bishop of Lincoln, together with Bishop Roger’s son, also called Roger, the chancellor, continued to carry on the administration. In the north a Scottish invasion was checked by the energy of the aged Archbishop Thurstan, who from his sick-bed stirred the Yorkshire men to meet the invaders. He was represented in the camp by his suffragan, the bishop of the Orkneys. The standard of the English army bore aloft the Host, and the figures of the patron saints of the three great Yorkshire churches, and the “Battle of the Standard,” in which the Yorkshire men were completely victorious, had something of the character of a Holy War, in which the archbishop acted, as of old, as the natural head of the northern people.

The mischievous results of the appointment of Archbishop William as legate were apparent at his death; for Innocent granted a legatine commission, not to his successor, Theobald, but to Henry of Winchester. The authority of the see of Canterbury was thus grievously diminished, and the archbishop was made second to a resident representative of the Pope, one of his own suffragans. Stephen’s quarrel with the Church.The abasement of Canterbury naturally drew the Church into greater dependence on Rome, and appeals, which had hitherto been almost unknown, became of constant occurrence. Equally unlike the justiciar, Roger of Salisbury, who devoted himself to secular administration and ambitions, and the churchmen who, full of the new fervour of the Cistercian movement, sought to raise the spiritual dignity of the Church, Henry of Winchester used his vast powers to exalt her temporal greatness. His jealousy for the privileges of the clergy brought him into collision with the king, who now by an act of extreme folly provoked a quarrel with the clerical order. Stephen suspected the loyalty of the bishop of Salisbury and his house, and caused him and the bishop of Lincoln to be arrested at Oxford. They were powerful lords and had reared several mighty castles. These they were forced to surrender by threats and ill-treatment. Stephen acted with the violence of a weak man; he had already lost the obedience of the barons, and the people must have learnt that his promises were not to be relied on; now he ensured his fall by offending the clergy. The legate summoned him to appear before a synod at Winchester, and the king of England actually appeared by his counsellor, Alberic de Vere, who made his defence. When he refused to restore the bishops’ castles there was some talk of laying the case before the Pope. This he forbade, and yet appealed to Rome himself. At last he appeared before the legate stripped of his royal robes, and humbly received his censure “for having stretched out his hand against the Lord’s anointed ones.” Nevertheless the Church was alienated from him, and after his defeat at Lincoln the legate held another council at Winchester, and announced as its result that the majority of the clergy, “to whom the right of electing a prince chiefly belonged,” had decided to transfer their allegiance to the Empress. The legate found that Matilda had little respect for the rights of the Church, and after a while turned against her. The result of these rapid changes was to destroy the unity of the clerical party.

The dispute about the archbishopric of York.

Hitherto Archbishop Theobald had generally followed the legate’s lead, and had played a secondary part in the affairs of the Church. In 1141, however, a cause of difference arose between them. The York chapter elected Stephen’s nephew, William, to succeed Archbishop Thurstan. A minority of the chapter declared that simony and undue influence had been practised, and Theobald took their part, while Henry consecrated his nephew in spite of him. Anxious to put his power beyond the reach of fortune, the bishop of Winchester petitioned the Pope to make his see a third archbishopric. His request was refused, and his legatine commission expired in 1143, with the death of Innocent, the Pope who had granted it. Chief among the opponents of the new archbishop of York were the Cistercian abbeys of the north; and Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, the head of the order, who was the guiding spirit of the papacy at this time, threw all his weight on their side. He disapproved of the diminution of the rights of Canterbury, and held that, in securing the see of York for their nephew, Stephen and Henry were injuring the Church to serve their own ends. Eugenius III. accordingly gave the legatine commission to Theobald. Enraged at the opposition offered to Archbishop William by Henry Murdac, abbot of Fountains, his partizans sacked and burnt the abbey. As an answer to this outrage, Eugenius deprived William, and Murdac was elected archbishop by his authority, and received consecration from him. Stephen and Henry made a fatal mistake in matching themselves against the papacy, with Bernard and the whole Cistercian order at its back. They did not yield without a further struggle. Stephen forbade Theobald to attend the Pope’s Council at Rheims in 1148. In spite of this prohibition he went to Rheims. Stephen banished him and seized his temporalities, until an interdict was laid upon the royal lands, and he was forced to be reconciled to him. Murdac made his position good at York. His rival, William, outlived him, was re-elected, and died a month after he had received the pall. During his retirement he led a holy and humble life, and after his death became the special saint of his church. Stephen had one more quarrel with Archbishop Theobald. He desired to have his son Eustace, an evil and violent man, crowned as his successor. This was forbidden by the Pope, and the primate and his suffragans refused the king’s request. He tried to frighten them by shutting them in the house where they were consulting. The archbishop escaped across the Thames in a boat, and went abroad, and the king again seized the temporalities of the see.

Theobald, Archbishop, 1139-1161.

Unlike Henry of Winchester, Theobald was guided by the new ideas which were born of the Cistercian revival. While desire for the secular greatness of the Church, her splendour and her wealth, led Henry to scheme and change sides according as he found Stephen or the Empress acting against her interests, Theobald sought a higher power for her, and attached himself to Bernard, who ruled Christendom by his sanctity and his intellectual gifts. Theobald’s household was the home of a little society of men of like mind with himself. One of them was a young clerk of London, named Thomas, who soon became his chief adviser; another was John of Salisbury, who held a new office, that of the archbishop’s secretary, or, as he would be called now, his chancellor; for Theobald saw that the archdeacons were by no means trustworthy officers, and appointed a secretary to control the administration of ecclesiastical law. This was a matter in which he took a deep interest, and the frequent appeals that were now made to Rome gave it a special importance. Study of civil law.In 1149 he brought over from Italy a doctor named Vacarius, and set him to give lectures at Oxford on the civil law, which supplied the method of procedure in ecclesiastical cases. In the next reign the study of the canon law, which was first systematized by Gratian of Bologna, was introduced into England, and then the clergy had a code as well as a method of procedure of their own. Stephen sent Vacarius out of the country, probably because he hated new things; but the study of the civil law could not be stopped so easily.

With aims and interests such as these, Theobald had no desire to see the anarchy which is generally called Stephen’s reign prolonged. How terrible in some parts that anarchy was, when men “said openly that Christ and His saints slept,” need not be described here. Some of the bishops rode to war and behaved like lay barons; others were held back by fear from censuring the ungodly. Nevertheless the Church still exhibited a pattern of order, and strove to restore peace to the kingdom. Although Theobald entered into no schemes for dethroning Stephen, he was fully convinced of the importance of securing the succession for Henry of Anjou. His counsellor, Thomas, now archdeacon of Canterbury, was urgent on the same side, and they were at last joined in their efforts after peace by Henry of Winchester. The chief obstacle was removed by the death of Eustace, and the Treaty of Wallingford soon followed. Henry II. owed his throne in no small degree to the support of the clergy.