The English Church in the Middle Ages

by William Hunt

Edward I., 1272-1307.

In the reign of Edward I. the relations between the Church and the Crown were defined and settled on a constitutional basis, and the clergy were assigned their own place in the national system. The king was a great lawgiver, and out of a chaotic mass of customs and institutions chose those best adapted to create an orderly polity, in which every class of men fitted for political purposes had its own share both of rights and duties. At the same time, he had no intention of giving up any of the prerogatives of the Crown, for he both loved power for its own sake and was in constant need of money. His reign was, therefore, full of struggles with those to whom he was giving ascertained rights to share in the government. He met with considerable opposition from the clergy, for the influence of the mendicant revival was directed to uphold the papal pretensions, and as far as possible to render the Church independent of the State. The main history of his struggles with the clergy assumes two distinct phases during the periods of the archiepiscopates of Peckham and Winchelsey. Peckham contended chiefly for the privileges of the National Church; and the king, who still remained in accord with Rome, got the better of him, and prevented clerical privilege from hindering his scheme of national government. Fortunately for the Church and the nation, the hold of the Pope upon the country was loosened by the breach of the accord between the papacy and the Crown which had existed ever since the submission of John. This breach was brought about by the extravagant pretensions of Rome. During the latter part of the reign, Winchelsey endeavoured to uphold these pretensions, as he was to some extent bound to do by his office. He did not, however, confine himself, as Peckham had done, simply to an ecclesiastical policy; for he took a leading part in various attempts to diminish the power of the Crown, and sought to secure a separate position for the Church, with the Pope instead of the king as her ruler, by allying himself with the party of opposition. Edward was forced to yield to the political demands made upon him; but he successfully maintained the rights of the Crown over the Church, and punished the archbishop for the part he had taken against him. The clergy equally with the laity had to bear their share of the national burdens; the claims of Rome were defeated, and the parliament set out on the course of resistance to the papal usurpations which found its completion in the sixteenth century.

During the early years of Edward’s reign matters went on smoothly between the Church and the Crown. Gregory X. was the king’s friend, and had accompanied him on his crusade; and his chief adviser and chancellor was Robert Burnell, a churchman of great ability and wisdom, who thoroughly understood how to forward his master’s ecclesiastical policy. Before Edward became king he had endeavoured to prevail on the monks of Christ Church to elect Burnell to succeed Archbishop Boniface. Archbishop Kilwardby, 1273; res. 1278.Nevertheless they chose another as archbishop; the king refused his assent to the election, and Gregory, to put an end to the vacancy, appointed Robert Kilwardby, a Dominican friar. Kilwardby, however, was by no means sufficiently vigorous in asserting the rights of the Church to satisfy Nicolas III., and allowed the privileges of the clergy in matters of jurisdiction to be curtailed by statute. Nicolas accordingly raised him to the cardinalate in 1278, called him to Rome, and thus forced him to resign the archbishopric. Edward secured the election of his friend and minister, Burnell, then bishop of Bath and Wells, and urged the Pope to confirm it. Archbishop Peckham, 1279-1292.He was again foiled; for Nicolas, after causing inquiries to be made as to the fitness of the archbishop-elect, informed the king that he could not assent to his request, and appointed John Peckham, the provincial of the English Franciscans, laying down the rule that, as the death of a prelate at Rome had long been held to give the Pope the right of appointing a successor, a resignation, which was, he declared, an analogous event, had the same effect.

Robert Burnell and the new archbishop were extreme types of two opposite sorts of churchmen. The chancellor, who was wholly devoted to the king’s service, was a statesman of high order. He was magnificent in his tastes and expenditure, held many rich preferments, and took care that his relations also should be enriched out of the wealth of the Church. His mode of life was secular, and the grand matches that he arranged for his daughters created no small scandal. Peckham, on the other hand, was a model friar, pious and learned, with exalted ideas of the rights of the papacy and the privileges of the clergy. He was fearless and conscientious, unwise and impracticable. Between him and Bishop Robert and the other clerical advisers of the king there was, of course, no sympathy. He was anxious that the dignities and benefices of the Church should be worthily bestowed, and laboured to carry out the injunctions of Nicolas III. against the prevalent abuse of pluralities. On this matter Peckham wrote plainly to Edward that he would oblige him as far as he might without offending God, but could go no further, and that he was already sneered at for “conniving at the damnable multitude of benefices held by his clerks.” Nicolas strove to check the promotion of secular-minded bishops, and when Edward procured the election of Burnell to the see of Winchester, ordered the chapter to proceed to another election. Peckham was blamed for this, and it was also alleged that he had used his influence at Rome against another of the king’s ministers, Anthony Bek, afterwards the warlike bishop of Durham. However, he denied that he had said anything to hinder the promotion of either.

Almost immediately on his arrival in England in 1279, the archbishop came into collision with the king. He held a provincial council at Reading, in which, besides publishing the canons of the Council of Lyons against pluralities, he decreed that excommunication should be pronounced against all who obtained the king’s writ to stop proceedings in ecclesiastical suits against any royal officer who refused to carry out the sentence of a spiritual court, and against all who impugned the Great Charter; and further ordered that the clergy should expound these decrees to their parishioners, and affix copies of the Charter to the doors of cathedral and collegiate churches. These decrees were a direct challenge to the king, and Edward treated them as such; for in his next parliament he compelled Peckham to revoke them, and to declare that nothing that had been done at the council should be held to prejudice the rights of the Crown or the kingdom.

Statute of Mortmain, 1279.

Edward further rebuffed the archbishop by publishing the statute “De Religiosis” or “of Mortmain.” This statute, though, as regards the date of its promulgation part of Edward’s answer to Peckham’s assumption, was directed against an abuse of long standing, and was in strict accordance with the king’s general policy. It forbade, on pain of forfeiture, the alienation of land to religious bodies which were incapable of performing the services due from it. Land so conveyed was said to be in mortmain, or in a dead hand, because it no longer yielded profit to the lord, who was thus defrauded of his right of service, escheat, and other feudal incidents. Besides the vast amount of land that was held by the Church, estates were often fraudulently conveyed to ecclesiastical bodies, to be received again free of services by the alienor as tenant; and thus the superior lord, and the king as capital lord, were cheated, and the means for the defence of the realm were diminished. These evils were partially checked by Henry II., who levied scutage on the knights’ fees held by the clergy, and the practice of conveying lands in mortmain was prohibited by one of the Provisions of Westminster in 1259. Edward’s statute gave force to this provision by rendering it lawful, in case the immediate lord neglected to avail himself of the forfeiture, for the next chief lord to do so. Moreover, the king still further showed his discontent at the attitude of the clergy by demanding an aid from them. In spite of these rebuffs, Peckham pursued his policy of attempting to enlarge the sphere of spiritual jurisdiction at the cost of the jurisdiction of the Crown, and proposals were made in a council which he held at Lambeth in 1281 to remove suits concerning patronage and the goods of the clergy from the royal to the ecclesiastical courts. Here, however, the king interfered, and peremptorily forbade the council to meddle in matters affecting the Crown. Peckham was forced to give way, and shortly afterwards sent Edward a letter asserting in the strongest terms the liberties of the Church as agreeable to Scripture and the history of England, pointing out that it was his duty to order his conduct by the decrees of the Popes and the rules of the Church, referring the oppressions under which, he said, the clergy were suffering to the policy of Henry I. and Henry II., and reminding the king of the martyrdom of St. Thomas of Canterbury for the Church’s sake.

Conquest of Wales, 1282.

When Edward invaded Wales in 1282, Peckham, moved with a desire for peace and with compassion for the Welsh, endeavoured to persuade Llewelyn to submit to the English king, and, contrary to Edward’s will, went alone to Llewelyn’s fortress of Aber, and tried to arrange terms. When his efforts proved in vain, he wrote an angry and irritating letter to the Welsh prince. Nevertheless he exerted himself on behalf of the Welsh clergy, prayed Edward to allow the clerks in Snowdon to leave the country with their goods, wrote indignantly to Burnell to complain that some clerks had been hanged at Rhuddlan, “to the reproach of the clergy and the contempt of the Church,” and exhorted the king to restore the churches that had been destroyed in the war. The backward and disorderly condition of the Welsh Church caused him much concern, and he urged the bishops of Bangor and St. Asaph’s to put a stop to the concubinage or marriage of the clergy, their unseemly dress, and their neglect of their duties, to insist on the observance of the decrees of Otho and Ottoboni, and to do all in their power to overcome the angry feelings of their flocks towards the English, so that the very word “foreignry” might no more be used among them. Moreover, he was anxious to see the Welsh become civilized, and wrote to Edward advising him to encourage them to settle in towns and follow industries, and, as there were no means of education in Wales, to make the Welsh boys come to England and be taught there, instead of entering the household of a native prince, where they learnt nothing but robbery. Indeed, it would have been well for Wales had Peckham’s wishes on these and other matters been carried out. The war taxed the king’s resources severely, and, towards the end of it, Edward ordered the seizure of the money that, in accordance with a decree of the Council of Lyons, had been collected for a crusade, and stored in various great churches in England. This brought an indignant letter from Pope Martin IV. Before its arrival, however, the king had promised that the money should be refunded. Not content with a promise, the archbishop went off to meet Edward at Acton Burnell, and prevailed on him to make immediate restitution.

Limits of spiritual jurisdiction defined.