Address to The Selden Society - A Twelfth Century Succession at York
Maitland called the twelfth “a legal century”. The American legal historian, Harold Berman, has called it the legal century. It was a formative period for the common law, the civil law and canon law. The doctrines and institutions developed in that century continue to have an influence down the centuries to our own time.
Over recent decades a new legal system has emerged in Western Europe. The European Union has developed, and is in the course of expanding, a supra-national system of law. The same phenomenon occurred from the middle of the eleventh century through the twelfth century. What we today call Europe was then known as Christendom, specifically Western Christendom. The church, under the monarchical authority of the papacy, exercised legislative, executive and judicial authority over, broadly, the same territory as the European Union now exercises similar authority.
The matters that are now regarded as appropriate for supra-national jurisdiction are primarily economic. In the twelfth century, the centralised institutions were not concerned with issues of free trade or competition policy and the like, rather they focused on health, education, tourism - then called pilgrimage - and, of course religious ritual, the single most important social bond of the time - the church, was an essential part of the infrastructure, like roads, bridges and telecommunication cables today. Its role was, in large measure, governmental. The church levied taxes called tithes. Baptism was a kind of citizenship. Eventually, Western Christendom performed the ultimate act of a supra-national authority: it went to war as a single polity, in the crusades. It was only last year that the European Union, for the first time, did the same in Kosovo.
The united legal system of Christendom encompassed any conduct by the clergy, marriage, inheritance, legitimacy, property over benefices, jurisdiction over sins, which encompassed much of what we would now call tort and some of what we would now call crime. Significantly, for purposes of this lecture, was the body of rules with respect to appointment to the multiplicity of offices in every cathedral, monastery, nunnery and church. This body of law, if only because of its significance in medieval society, may be appropriately characterised as a form of constitutional law. In every respect, it is a recognisable form of corporation law.
From the middle of the eleventh century, the great creative impetus of the canon law was the flow of decisions in individual cases, hardening into precedents, made by the popes. These papal decretals were known as the ‘new law’ or jus novum, to distinguish them from the conciliar canons, the “old law” or jus antiquum. As the supreme legislator and the supreme judge, the pope asserted a right to hear appeals from anywhere in Christendom. In 1140, Gratian’s compilation of these decisions in his Decretum, provided an authorised text for the application and further development of this European system of law.
As this audience is aware, late last year I delivered an address to the St Thomas More Society on the subject of Henry II and Thomas Becket. That address concentrated on the early years of their relationship. I have undertaken to the St Thomas More Society to deliver a series of lectures ultimately, I presently intend, five. When selecting a topic, after being invited to address the Selden Society, I have chosen to focus on a conflict which, in some respects, raises similar issues to those involved in the Becket dispute, although I will endeavour not to trespass on the matters I will address in the lectures I have undertaken to give to the St Thomas More Society.
I look north to the see of York. To a battle over the succession as Archbishop of York.
In the first of my lectures to the St Thomas More Society last year, I argued that the basic fault line of political life in Western Christendom during the twelfth century was constituted by the conflicting institutional imperatives of the church, on the one hand, and secular rulers, on the other. The fault line of political life over, approximately, the last two centuries, has been the conflict of institutional imperatives between the centralised state, on the one hand, and private organisations of various kinds, particularly commercial corporations, on the other.
In the twelfth century, as in ours, the pursuit of institutional self-interest was a mainspring of social action. Institutional loyalty was a primary social bond. As I said to the St Thomas More Society, institutions, like individuals, have a craving for self esteem. The drive for prestige, recognition and freedom amongst individuals is also reflected in institutional demands for autonomy. A pre-occupation with institutional loyalties is present in all ages, but in some periods of history, it proves to be more central to the issues of the time than in others. The centrality of institutional loyalty is something which our own times share with the twelfth century.
In many respects, the origins of Western constitutionalism and its protection of freedom, is to be found in the accommodation between the two great power structures of medieval society.
The issue in what historians call the investiture contest was whether any lay ruler could invest an ecclesiastic with his office. This was the fundamental aspect for the institutional autonomy of the church. It was however merely representative of a multifaceted territorial imperative. For over a century that imperative produced quakes by the score and tremors by the hundred. At the very highest level of intensity was the bitter conflict between the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. Other disputes, like the conflict between Becket and Henry II measured equally high on the relevant Richter scale. But the imperative was also reflected in hundreds of less prominent disputes. This was a conflict about institutional legitimacy which penetrated all layers of the formal medieval hierarchy.
What was at stake in those disputes was no less than the church’s claim of sacramental legitimacy based on a direct line of succession from Jesus Christ and his Apostles to the bishops and priests who, it was believed, had inherited special sacramental powers by succession. Direct succession was a more powerful claim than adoption or submission, just as inheritance by blood was regarded as more legitimate than accession, let alone conquest. The church’s claim to authority by lineal descent is the most successful claim of direct institutional legitimacy in history, with the possible exceptions of the Chinese imperial tradition and the Egyptian phaoronic tradition.
Nothing threatened this claim to succession more than the idea that any bishop, or worse the pope himself, had actually been appointed to office by a lay ruler rather than by legitimate authority under canon law. Even worse was the taint of corruption that sometimes accompanied appointment to these very valuable offices - valuable in the light of the substantial property controlled by a bishop or abbot, or indeed, by clergy throughout the hierarchy. That sin was called simony, named after Simon Magus, who according to the Acts of the Apostles was the first Christian to attempt it.
The abolition of a lay investiture and the attack on simony, together with the re-assertion of celibacy as the distinctive characteristic of the priestly caste, were at the forefront of the idealistic reforms - the “progressive” project of the age - that became the papal revolution of Leo IX, spurred by his Archdeacon Hildebrand and continued by Hildebrand himself, when he became pope as Gregory VII. The changes or sometimes called the “Gregorian reforms”. The assertion of institutional autonomy, indeed of superiority, on the part of the church - libertas ecclesiae - gave rise to the most important conflicts of the age.
These themes permeate the Becket dispute. They are also present in the events that unfolded when Archbishop Thurstan of York, after more than a quarter of a century in office, died in 1140.
I note for tonight’s purposes, that the first dramatic phase of the struggle between Pope Gregory VII and the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV - culminating in the snows at Canossa - began with a dispute over the appointment of an Archbishop of Milan.
In some respects the appointment and early career of Thurstan, paralleled that of Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury about half a century later. Thurstan was Henry I’s personal chaplain and a long-serving intimate at court. Henry I appointed a series of loyal servants of the Crown as bishops and archbishops. In 1114 he appointed Thurstan Archbishop of York. He appeared to represent a Bayeux faction: three Archbishops of York and two bishops of Durham, York’s sole suffragen, emerged from the circle of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and, by appointment off the Conqueror, Earl of Kent.
Thurstan was not even a priest at the time of his appointment, but a mere archdeacon. Perhaps he found solace in the fact that a few decades before when Archdeacon Hildebrand was elected Pope as Gregory VII. Hildebrand had not yet even been ordained a priest, let alone a bishop.
More significantly, there was a tinge of illegitimacy about Thurstan’s appointment, because the free election by the cathedral chapter was plainly overborne by the will of Henry I.
Thurstan, like Becket, immediately became an ardent advocate of the institutional interests of his see. Any sense of apprehension that the canons of the cathedral at York may have had about the appointment of a royal servant, were quickly swept aside as Thurstan took a firm stance in the long running institutional conflict, between York and Canterbury, as to whether or not York was subservient to Canterbury in the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
To the fury of Henry I, who had adopted the policy of his own father, William the Conqueror - or Guillaume Le Bâtard as French historians still affectionately call him - that it was in the royal interest to have a church organisation that was precisely parallel with his kingdom - just as the Archbishop of Rouen covered the same area as the Duchy of Normandy - Thurstan refused to profess obedience to Canterbury. Henry I supported his Archbishop of Canterbury, who refused to perform the consecration of Thurstan without a profession of obedience. This occurred during the course of a long running dispute between the king and the pope over the latter’s assertion of a right to exercise direct jurisdiction in England. Henry ordered that Thurstan must refuse any consecration by the pope, or by anyone authorised by him.
In 1119 a Council of the Church was called at Rheims. It was there that this dispute would be dramatically escalated. Rheims was a location of solemn symbolic significance for all those clerics who believed in the papal revolution and its central premise that the church was the dominant authority in all of Europe. In 1049 it had been the location of the first conspicuous assertion of this ideology, and of its first success, when the newly elected Pope Leo IX, had summoned a council of the French Church. It was at Rheims that Leo revealed the program that would dominate European political life for over two centuries. At the council, which he chaired, Leo IX declared that the pope alone was the universal primate, the “Apostolicus”. Although by no means a new claim, its reassertion at this time constituted an aggressive agenda of self-conscious change. The pope was to rule the church and the church was to rule Christendom. Lay rulers received their authority from the church. King Henry I of France, perhaps knowing something of the intentions of Leo IX, did not attend the council and, as a result, the bulk of French bishops and abbots stayed away. Nevertheless, Leo pursued his plan.
His first task at the Council of 1049 was to transfer the bones of St Remigius (St Remi) who had converted Clovus I, King of France in the fifth century, and who was the patron saint of Rheims. It was at this cathedral that the kings of France were traditionally crowned. Leo’s first task at the Council was to transfer the bones to the high altar of a new church at the monastery named after the saint.
On October 1, the Feast of St Remigius, his bones were carried around the town amidst throngs of excited laymen. Leo IX dramatically delayed the internment of the saint in his new resting place. Leo ordered that his remains be lain on the high altar. He proceeded to conduct the three day council in the saint’s “presence”.
At the outset of the council, Hildebrand, the future Gregory VII, innocently requested that all present should declare whether they had committed simony. The consternation was immediate. Even the host, the Archbishop of Rheims was implicated, as everyone knew. After inquisition, one-quarter of the bishops present confessed. One was eventually ex-communicated. Some were demoted. Others reinstated. As far as the general public was concerned, Leo had achieved a public relationship triumph by re-asserting the integrity of the Church.
At the end of the Council, Leo personally carried the relics of St Remigius to their new resting place.
The themes were not dissimilar seventy years later in 1119 when there was held in Rheims a formal Council of the whole Western Church - in effect, a meeting of the European Parliament. Archbishops, bishops, and abbots from all over Europe gathered in the town - according to one count, four hundred and twenty four staffs of office were present on Sunday, 19 October 1119. The council, in its final resolution, reinforced the church’s claim to complete autonomy from monarchs and the Holy Roman Emperor. In an affirmatory clarion call of the radical movement for reform of the church, the progressive idealism of its time, the council reaffirmed the principles that had emerged at the earlier gathering in Rheims, in the following terms:
“1. We confirm all that has been ordained … about the sin of sinomy. If anyone sells or buys any bishopric, abbeys, deanery, parochial cure, provostship preband, churches or ecclesiastical benefices of any kind or promotions, ordinations, consecrations, dedications of churches, clerical tonsure, stalls in choir or any other ecclesiastical office both the buyer and the seller shall be liable to forfeit his dignity and office and benefice.
2. We utterly forbid the investiture of bishoprics and abbeys to be performed by lay hands. …
3. We decree that the possessions granted to all churches by the generosity of Kings or the bounty of magnates or the gift of any of the faithful shall always remain secure and inviolate. …
4. No bishop, no priest, no member whatsoever of the clergy shall bequeath ecclesiastical offices or benefices to anyone as if by hereditary right.
5. We utterly forbid priests, deacons and sub-deacons to cohabit with concubines or wives.”
It was at this Council that the Pope, in defiance of the orders of the King of England, consecrated Thurstan as Archbishop of York. The taint of illegitimacy about his appointment had been swept aside. This is not the succession at York on which I wish to concentrate this evening. However, the background is instructive for an understanding of what happened after Thurstan himself, following a long and illustrious career, died in 1140.
This was a time of civil war over the succession to Henry I, a conflict between King Stephen and Henry’s only surviving child, Matilda, known as the Empress because of her marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor, having been brought back by Henry from Germany after the death of her husband, to lay claim to the throne. In large measure because of the sexism of the aristocracy, the throne had been usurped by Stephen of Blois, grandson of William the Conqueror by his daughter Adela, Henry I’s sister. This conflict was only finally resolved when Stephen - in accordance with a treaty negotiated when Stephen’s own son died - was succeeded by Matilda’s son, Henry in whose favour Matilda had abdicated her claim.
On Thurstan’s death, Stephen together with his own brother, Henry of Blois, the Bishop of Winchester, procured the post of Archbishop of York for a member of their own extended family: William Fitzherbert, illegitimate son of their half sister. He was already Treasurer of the cathedral at York. He was one of the inexhaustible supply of nephews placed in key positions by the house of Blois, a House which had its primary ancestral lands in a region adjacent to the core lands of the King of France around Paris and, as such, a natural ally for the Duke of Normandy. Hence the marriage alliance of the Conqueror’s daughter to the Count of Blois and Chartres.
Complying with the formal requirements, William Fitzherbert was elected by a majority of the canons in the cathedral chapter. However, this occurred in the presence of Stephen’s staunch ally and local viceroy, the Earl of York. It was said that the King ordered the election of his relative, William. He defeated a candidate of the Cistercian order, an idealistic group of monks from nearby monasteries. The minority immediately appealed the election to the Pope in Rome.
The issues raised went to the heart of the legitimacy of the election. There was a suggestion of simony. There was a conviction that there had been improper influence by the King and the Earl of York. After all members of a cathedral chapter often had property which the secular rulers could devalue or confiscate. They all had relatives with such property or who were otherwise susceptible to the pressure of secular authority.
Here, in this distant outpost of Christendom, a battle for the succession would be fought, with passion and intensity. It concerned the electoral principle as the basis of legitimacy of the occupation of office. Just as a pope was elected by the cardinals so - pursuant to a decree of April 1059 which was, in effect, a declaration of independence by the church - the key hierarchical posts were elected: an abbot by the monks of the monastery, a bishop by the chapter of the cathedral consisting of the canons and, often, other clergy of the capital. Less usually, the monks of nearby monasteries were included in the chapter. York was such a case. The rules for such elections were in substance a branch of corporations law although the significance of the office of archbishop, suggests that such an election could be seen to be a form of constitutional law.
Although not mentioned in the contemporary chronicles to which I have had reference, it may be that part of the passion about York arose from the fact that it was at York that Constantine crowned himself Emperor of the Romans, before taking his legions in a successful invasion of Europe and then Italy. Constantine was, of course, the Emperor who converted the empire to Christianity and, even though he moved the focus of the empire east to his new imperial capital of Constantinople, his legacy was of central significance in the political issues of the day.
It was, after all, the belief of the reform papacy that Constantine had made the Western empire a gift to the pope. The so called Donation of Constantine was then universally accepted as the foundation of the church’s claim to control the secular world. The great pioneer of textual criticism, the Renaissance scholar Lorenzo Valla, revealed the Donation to be a forgery by the papal chancery. No doubt the Donation was believed to be, like many such clerical forgeries - of which there was a very substantial industry in the twelfth century - to merely provide documentation for an actual event which had, or should have, occurred, but which was negligently conveyed in oral form, or even worse, left to implication.
The Donation was the centrepiece of a ninth century compilation of legal precedents - some seven hundred and fifty pages in length, of which at least a third were new fabrications and the balance significantly distorted - known to historians as the False Decretals or Pseudo-Isidore. The series of letters and charters, prepared in sham chronological sequence, faked even their author by fraudulently adopting the name of a highly respected legal scholar, Isadore Mercator. They had originally been compiled by a group of clerics in Rheims itself as part of their resistance to the attempt by the Archbishop of Rheims, to prevent his clergy from appealing disputes to Rome. These false decretals were not in fact accepted by the Pope for about two centuries. However, the reform papacy of the eleventh century accepted them without question. It may be that that curious document of Gregory VII, the Dictatus Papae - a series of assertions of papal authority which Gregory appeared to address only to himself - in fact constituted chapter headings for his own collection of constitutional law texts, a collection which was never completed.
Beginning with the purported decisions of the earliest popes, the compilation by the Pseudo Isidore of alleged ancient precedent gave legitimacy to the papal program in an era where law was regarded simply as the revelation of custom. It was in fact a new political program for the independence of individual bishops and abbots from the control of laymen and also of the independence of various levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy from the level immediately above, by reason of the right of any ecclesiastic to appeal to Rome. This assertion of direct subjugation to the overriding authority of the pope proved particularly appealing to Rome and ensured that this false compilation became the key legal precedent book of the middle ages. Its centrepiece was the Donation of Constantine.
Of central significance in the conflict over the succession to Thurstan of York, was the assertion by the unsuccessful minority, that they had been defeated by the influence wielded by the secular power on the electoral body in the chapter. This tainted the legitimacy of the election.
The unsuccessful candidate was a monk of the Cistercian order. Encouraged by Thurstan during his long period as archbishop, the wilds north of York had become the English centre of this order. The order was a fundamentalist revival of the most rigid application of the original monastic rule, symbolised by the white robes of pure undyed wool - “dressed as the angels might be” as one Cistercian monk demurely noted - consciously chosen to distinguish them from the black robes of the Benedictines. The white monks, as they became known, sought to return monastic life to a rigid asceticism which involved the strict application of the life of the rule, from which the Benedictines had strayed as their wealth and comforts had grown.
An offshoot of the revival of monasticism at Cluny, the Cistercians were the most idealistic clergy of their time. The Cistercians called for simplicity in all things, including buildings, dress, liturgy, organisation, together with a literal interpretation of the rule of St Benedict. The order chose secluded distant sites as part of this return to simplicity and abandonment of the temptations of this world.
It was the very isolation and poverty of Yorkshire that had attracted the Cistercians to that region. Unlike the black monks who required a small fortune to be endowed in order to create a new monastery, the white monks needed only a small building and uncultivated land. The greater the rigours of the toil in forest or wilderness to eke out their basic sustenance, the closer they believed themselves to God. There was no shortage of such land in Yorkshire.
The leader of the order was Bernard of Clairvaux, gaunt ascetic, mystic and puritan, with the appearance and hectoring tone of an Old Testament prophet. He was the driving force of the order in its repudiation of ornament and ostentation. He went so far as to forbid the illumination of manuscripts a speciality at Citeux - Cistercium in Latin - the founding monastery of the order, which Bernard with his boundless energy had revived, before forming, in 1115, a daughter abbey at Clairvaux, in an isolated location on the River Aube. As one of St Bernard’s contemporary biographers put it:
“For all his fleeing from it, glory chased after him as relentlessly as it always evades those who grasp at it. A proverb he often had on his lips was ‘doing what no-one else does, draws all eyes’.”
Herewith, Bernard himself on the monastic life and one of its great contributions to contemporary civilisation; the cultivation of wine:
“Naturally all of us, as monks, suffer from a weak stomach which is why we pay good heed to Paul’s advice to use a little wine. It is just the word little gets overlooked, I can’t think why. And if only we were content to drink it plain, albeit undiluted. … But once the wine is flowing through the veins and the whole head is throbbing with it, what else can (monks) do when they get up from table but go and sleep it off? And if you force a monk to get up for vigils before he has digested, you will set him groaning rather than intoning. Having got to bed, its not the sin of drunkenness they regret if questioned, but not being able to face their food.”
St Bernard wrote prose of great force and clarity. In his Latin verse, however, he refused to be bound by the rules of metre so, as Gregory of Tours said of another, his poetry had no feet to stand on.
This self-appointed conscience of Christendom, stamped the whole order with his overweening self righteousness. That characteristic would be particularly manifest in one of the great confrontations of twelfth century Europe between Bernard, the advocate of faith, and Abelard, the liberal minded advocate of intellectual freedom, at the nascent university in Paris.
Bernard had a personal interest in the affairs of York. A group of Yorkshiremen, who had been his own disciples at Clairvaux - including Bernard’s own former secretary - had set up the new monastery at Rievaulx, thirty miles north of York. Bernard himself wrote, portentously, to King Henry I:
“In your land there is an outpost of my Lord and your Lord, an outpost which he has preferred to die for rather than to lose. I have proposed to occupy it and I am sending men from my army who will, if it is not displeasing to you, claim it, recover it and restore it with a strong hand. Help them as messengers of your Lord and in their persons fulfil your duties as a vassal of their Lord.”
The idealism of Rievaulx, by invidious comparison, created disaffection within the Benedictine house of St Marys in York. A group of idealistic monks dissatisfied with what they saw as laxity in observance, formed a splinter group under the protection of Archbishop Thurstan, and created Fountains abbey at Ripon by the river Skell, on land granted them by the Archbishop himself. Fontaines, north of Dijon in Burgundy, was the birthplace of Bernard of Clairvaux.
These two abbeys of Rievaulx and Fountains, forged in the white heat of ideological fervour under the direct patronage of Bernard himself, were determined that their local Archbishop would live up to their expectations. William Fitzherbert, the nephew of the House of Blois, who had apparently served well as Treasurer of the see of York for over twenty years, was not a monk and had no intention of living as one. He had the support of the majority of the canons of York cathedral, no doubt due to lay influence from the Earl of York, on the urging of King Stephen. William was also personally popular in the city, the population of which remained his enthusiastic supporters throughout the dispute.
The patron and uncle of William Fitzherbert was Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester. Henry represented everything in the church which Bernard of Clairvaux despised.
Henry, grandson of the Conqueror by his formidable daughter Adela, had systematically established one of the great private empires of the twelfth century, stepping easily from ecclesiastical to secular politics and back. Displaying resoluteness of purpose, a thorough grasp of detail and consummate administrative skill, he accumulated the basic elements of social power and wealth - manors, castles, ecclesiastical rights. As a great Lord of substantial secular property, Henry built and extended numerous castles, fortifying Wolvesy Palace in his episcopal seat of Winchester - in the defence of which, on one occasion, he caused the destruction of much of the surrounding city.
Without any sense of inconsistency with his secular and military conduct, Henry remained an energetic and dedicated advocate for the Church of Rome. He embraced the ideology of the independence and predominance of the church under the control of the Pope. He accepted the central tenet that the church should be independent of, indeed superior to, secular authority. This came naturally to him as a political program for his own autonomy, perhaps more so than as a moral ideal. He had no difficulty rejecting his brother the King - indeed for one brief period, he openly supported the rival claims of the Empress Matilda - when Stephen purported to confiscate some of the secular property of other bishops. This was a precedent that Henry would have found most distasteful.
One contemporary chronicler described Henry as “a new kind of monster, compounded of purity and corruption, a monk and a knight”.
Henry was a worthy - almost Venetian - leader of a city which was then still the second city of England, as the former capital of King Alfred’s Wessex Kingdom. The cosmopolitan tone of the city was affirmed a few decades later by a cleric who described the orgy of mass murder of Jews that engulfed England in 1189 on the coronation of Richard I, and who said:
“Winchester alone, a people prudent and far seeing, and a city always acting with a due regard for civil rights, spared its worms. Never has the city done anything with excessive haste; fearing nothing more than to be obliged to repent, it calculates the issue of events before it thinks of the beginnings.”
Qualities worthy of Venice.
Henry of Blois commenced as a monk at Cluny, the focal abbey of the epoch - the original centre of the revival of monasticism, with its daughter houses, uniquely, headed by priors responsible to the abbot at Cluny. This was the first multinational corporation and, in many respects, a model for the reform papacy.
Whatever else Henry imbued at Cluny, however, it was not a taste for the monastic vows involving self denial and simplicity of life. Henry of Blois was an active, vivacious extrovert, a princely connoisseur and one of the great collectors of his time: from classical antiquities - called pagan statues by his critics - to lavish golden bejewelled ornaments, including crosses, alters, chalice cups, vestments, gospel books, illuminated manuscripts, including the exquisite Winchester Bible. Cistercian establishments scorned all but a single chalice cup.
Attached to one portable altar, which Henry donated to his cathedral, was a gilded enamel plaque which read:
“May the angel take the giver to heaven for his gifts, but not yet, lest England groan for it, since on him it depends for peace or war, agitation or rest.”
Most of all, in an age gripped with a mania about relics, Henry donated many to Winchester cathedral to ensure the status of his bishopsic and the tourist income of the city. These gifts included two of the small forest of surviving pieces from the True Cross and one from the Manger; one indelible band of the Blessed Virgin’s hair and bits and pieces from Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, St Matthew, St Stephen, St George, a piece of the Holy Winding Sheet and a chip from the stone which Jacob used as a pillow. A great cornucopia of human credulity.
Appointed when in his twenties, by his uncle King Henry I, as abbot of Glastonbury - by a considerable margin the wealthiest abbey in England with an annual income of over eight hundred pounds, about half that of the Archbishop of Canterbury - Henry never relinquished the wealth and power it brought him. At thirty, he was appointed Bishop of Winchester, still the second city of England and second after Canterbury itself as the wealthiest see in England. By special papal dispensation, Henry held both positions of abbot and bishop in “plurality”, as it was called by those in the church who denounced the venality of the practice as inconsistent with the spiritual mission of the church.
First amongst those was Bernard of Clairvaux. He called Henry “the whore of Winchester”.
When the dissident minority appealed the appointment of William Fitzherbert as Archbishop of York, Bernard eagerly threw his considerable influence behind them. Henry displayed his skill as a masterful ecclesiastical politician and outmanoeuvred him. The pope decided the legal issue in the appeal, but remitted the matter for a trial on the facts, under the presiding jurisdiction of the papal legate. The papal legate was, none other than the Bishop of Winchester.
Henry acquired this additional function as legate after his brother King Stephen - who had plainly decided that Henry’s wealth and power was already significant enough, without further aggrandisement - orchestrated the appointment of Theobold as Archbishop of Canterbury, a position to which Henry had aspired. The King of England made the appointment in secret on 24 December 1138 at the royal court at Westminster, without any notice to Henry, who was attending to his acting episcopal duties of the then vacant London see at an ordination of deacons in St Pauls, just around the bend of the Thames in the City of London. The fact that the King felt obliged to act in this covert manner was a testimony to the power of his brother. When he heard the news of the fait accompli, Henry stormed out of St Pauls, without completing the ceremony.
Henry acted swiftly to improve his position. Pope Innocent II made him the papal legate for the whole of the Kingdom of England. As the Pope’s delegate, Henry - who as the Bishop of Winchester was Theobold’s subordinate or suffragen - had authority over his own archbishop. This unprecedented separation of the offices of papal legate and that of Archbishop of Canterbury, undermined the claims of the Archbishop to primacy over the English church.
In the trial that the pope had ordained to occur before his legate to resolve the factual issues in the contested election at York, there were two matters in dispute. First, would William, the Archbishop elect, himself swear that he had not bought his election. The taint of the sin of simony must be removed. Secondly, would William of Ste-Barbe - the dean of York and an upright clergyman plainly regarded as honest by the Cistercian advocates in Rome - swear that the Earl of York had not delivered an order from Stephen to the chapter, commanding the election of William. There seems little doubt that the Cistercians knew the answer to the second question.
By a strange coincidence, William of Ste-Barbe had, in the interim been consecrated by Henry as Bishop of Durham, the sole suffragen of York. To the surprise of the Cistercians, at the trial held at Winchester to resolve the facts, a document was produced - either a forgery or obtained by fraud and of which no trace could be found in the papal registers only a few years later. The document authorised Henry to act on the testimony of other witnesses in the unlikely event that William of Ste-Barbe happened to be unavailable. It was no surprise, by then, that the pressure of his duties at Durham had prevented William of Ste-Barbe from attending the Council. The formal finding that the Earl of York had not influenced the outcome was made. Henry consecrated his nephew as Archbishop of York.
Bernard of Clairvaux was outraged by the blatant rigging of the appointment. He wrote to the Pope with a pen dipped in the vitriol of sarcasm:
“I returned home to my own affairs from that excellent meeting of your Curia strengthened by the grace of God. Since then I have been waiting to see if the flower of the decision you made in Rome would bear the appropriate fruit in Winchester. O happy Winchester, second Rome, happy in your choice of so great a name! O city so powerful that you can withstand the authority of your might fathers in Curia, change their decrees, pervert their judgment, defame the truth, and with a great vice confirm what Rome has most rightly judged shall not be confirmed without the prescribed condition. What will not the “cursed lust for gold” drive a man to do! Winchester has arrogated to himself the venerable name of Rome and not only the name but the prerogatives too. Behold here, here I say is the enemy, here is the man who walks before Satan, the son of perdition, the man who disrupts all rights and laws. Would that the song that they sing that Winchester is greater than Rome could be silenced on their lips. Lest such contumacy should become a custom and example, lest the dignity of Rome should be torn to shreds, lest the authority of St Peter succumb to these new and great humiliations, lest religion should grow cold in the diocese of York, yea, lest it be wholly uprooted and scattered to the winds, let Rome in the sole interests of justice, crush the contumacy of this stubborn man.”
Bernard was not given to understatement.
Unbeknown to Henry, just two days before he consecrated his nephew William, at Winchester on 26 September 1143, Innocent II died. Henry’s legateship had automatically terminated. William’s appointment to York was not canonical. Bernard was determined to overthrow the new Archbishop of York. The next Pope did not act but soon died.
On 15 February 1145, Bernard of Pisa, abbot of the Monastery of ss Vincenzo e Anastasio at Rome was elected pope and took the name Eugenius III. His was a monastery of the fundamentalist Cistercian order. Eugenius was a personal disciple of Bernard of Clairvaux and he brought the grievances of the order to the papacy.
In his first letter of congratulations to Eugenius, Bernard - emaciated by self-inflicted austerity and writing from his tiny cell-like nook in an angle of the staircase of Clairvaux - specifically drew attention to the inequity in the see of York.
“When you have time”, he confidently advised his disciple, “deal with them according to their works, so they may know a prophet has arisen in Israel”.
He went on to declaim “My pen is directed against the idol of York with all the more reason because my other attacks with this weapon have not gone home. It belongs to the Roman pontiff to command the deposition of bishops, for although others may be called to share his cares, the fullness of power rests with him alone.”
Eugenius acted quickly. William, in Rome to receive the pallium, was suspended. The election had been illicit. It was not a free election.
On 7 December 1147, Eugenius appointed the originally unsuccessful candidate, the abbot of Fountains - a stern Cistercian protégé of Bernard’s called Henry Murdac - as Archbishop of York. An ardent, ascetic disciplinarian, Murdac’s original arrival at Fountains, then already known for its rigour, was described with biblical sweep by a contemporary: “He cut down the groves, and destroyed the high places, searched Jerusalem with lamps, swept out the house and scoured off the rust still clung to the sides of the vessel.” The contrast with the lifestyle of Henry of Blois and his family, could not have been greater.
To appoint an Archbishop without the approval of the King of England was of course a challenge to Stephen’s institutional authority which - in a world obsessed with the force of precedent and the recognition of prestige - could not be ignored. The King’s liberty or dignity or honour had been challenged. His sovereignty was tarnished. When Eugenius summoned a General Council of the Church to meet, again, in Rheims on 21 March 1148, Stephen in retaliation against the Pope, nominated three specific bishops who would represent the English Church. All other bishops were forbidden from attending.
King Stephen sought to prevent the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Theobold, from attending. Stephen himself attended the consecration of Theobold’s brother Walter as Bishop of Rochester, a see long regarded as a subsidiary of Canterbury and within the sole gift of its archbishop. This consecration occurred on 14 March, just one week before Eugenius’s Council had been convened for Rheims. The English theologian, John of Salisbury - then serving on the staff of Eugenius and probably already in Rheims, and who later became Theobold’s personal secretary - stated that Stephen’s presence at Canterbury for the consecration of Walter, was some kind of personal mission to prevent Theobold escaping over the channel. John was never short of a personal melodramatic touch. At that time Stephen was still holding all the assets of the Archbishop of York and was refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of Henry Murdac’s appointment. The King’s sanctions over ecclesiastic defiance were being exercised.
Nevertheless, Theobold had decided to defy his King. He set sail on a tiny fishing boat to cross the Channel in stormy conditions. Theobold described his voyage as “more a swim than a sail”. He was accompanied to Rheims by a single aid, Thomas Becket - no doubt a formative experience for the young cleric.
Having displayed his loyalty to the reform papacy, Theobold raised at Rheims the question of the primacy of Canterbury over York. The previous year he had successfully resisted the appeal to the Pope by Bernard, Bishop of St David, to liberate the Welsh church from Canterbury. Whilst postponing a final resolution of what he described as “the truth about the dignity of the Church of St Davids and its liberty”, Eugenius had accepted Theobold’s witnesses who testified - contrary to Bernard’s denial - that at Bernard’s own consecration over thirty years before, he had professed obedience to the church of Canterbury.
In the case of York, however, Theobold was seeking to change the status quo established by Thurstan. The Council of Rheims was not an auspicious moment to raise such an issue. On the agenda of the Council were a series of identical legal appeals.
The Bishop of Paris claimed jurisdiction over the abbot of St Germain, the Bishop of Autun claimed jurisdiction over Vezelay, the Archbishop of Rouen over Fécamp, the Archbishop of Sens over Ferières and St Colombe, the Archbishop of Lyons asserted primacy and right of obedience from the Archbishops of Rouen and Sens - as well as Tours, the Archbishop of Vienne claimed the subjection of Bourges, the Archbishop of Bourges claimed the subjection of both the Archbishop of Norbonne and the Bishop of Le Pui. The greatest merriment and clamour arose from the claims by Alberic, Archbishop of Trèves, to the subjection of Rheims itself. John of Salisbury reported that the gathering thought him mad.
A few months later at the succeeding conference of Italian Bishops - only one of whom could come to Rheims - Eugenius would have to deal with the mutual claims of precedence over each other between the Archbishops of Ravenna and Milan; the claims of Milan over Genoa; the claims of Ravenna over Piacenza and other such jurisdictional sprats.
All the claims, including that of Theobold were rejected. It may well be that Eugenius, imbued with the Cistercian’s zeal to reform the Church’s worldly ways, simply treated the jurisdictional disputes with contempt and confirmed the status quo in detached disdain. In any event, the regional claims of primacy had come to be resented in the curia as an interference with the powers of the centralised papacy. They too had come to love the joys of a federal structure. After a century of active reform, Rome found that it could deal with a wide range of disputes directly, without the need for a regional overlord.
Eugenius showed the extent of these powers by taking upon himself the direct discipline of the English church. Stephen had challenged the authority of the Pope both by refusing to accept his consecrated Archbishop of York, Henry Murdac and by interfering with the Pope’s summons to a general Council. Eugenius suspended all the bishops who, in obedience to the King, had stayed in England. He gave Theobold the power to lift the suspensions, except in the case of Henry of Winchester. Henry had to appeal to the Pope himself.
In the concluding session at Rheims, the Pope himself prepared to conduct the ceremony of excommunication of the King of England. The candles were lit when Theobold - either overcoming an earlier reluctance to raise a matter which he was sure to lose, or choosing the moment when the very breach of decorum emphasised the strength of his opinion - stepped in and begged for a stay of the order. Eugenius was plainly astounded. “After a little thought and a few sighs” as John of Salisbury put it later, he declared:
“Behold! Brethren, a man who in our own day has fulfilled the Gospel’s precepts, who is wont to love his enemy and ceaseth not to pray for his persecutors. Therefore, although this King has properly incurred our wrath and that of God’s Church, we cannot but approve such charity manifested by one whose wishes we are compelled to obey.”
This last phrase, reported without comment by John of Salisbury, is redolent with irony addressed, perhaps, to Bernard and the Cistercians camp, who probably sought excommunication to enforce the final acceptance of the their colleague as Archbishop of York.
King Stephen still refused to let Henry Murdac return to England. This was the first Archbishop since the Norman Conquest who had been elected and consecrated without the approval of the King. When Henry Murdac did return, the majority faction at York cathedral, backed by the Earl of York, denied the Archbishop access to the city itself. He had to conduct his archiepiscopal duties from Ripon, near Fountains abbey.
Henry Murdac served as Archbishop of York from 1147 to 1153. His installation occurred during a brief period where the Cistercian order combined both political power and moral authority, particularly in the region of Yorkshire. Murdac himself was a Yorkshireman who had submitted to the charisma of Bernard at the abbey of Clairvaux, no doubt in a period of idealism. The combination of real authority and idealism proved, as is often the case, to give rise to contradictions. Henry Murdac proved an entrepreneurial abbot of Fountains, establishing daughter houses, even as far away as Norway. As archbishop, he maintained his authority over the abbey by hiring and firing a series of stooges as abbot of Fountains and appeared to find spiritual fulfilment, not merely in the cloister but also by maintaining the rights of his see in as aggressive a way as Thurstan had done.
The surviving records are not adequate to be able to finally judge on which side of that fine line between principle and self-righteousness he should be seen to fall. His great ally in his succession to the archdiocese was William of Rievaulx, another Englishman and the first abbot of the other great Yorkshire monastery of the Cistercians. As I have noted, he had also been a monk at Clairvaux and an intimate disciple of St Bernard. Second to no-one in zeal, the records do not suggest any lapsing from principle into self righteousness on his part. In the case of Henry Murdac, his lip service to the ban on holding ecclesiastic offices in plurality, by retaining effective though not formal control of Fountains abbey, suggests on which side of the line he fell.
After his removal from office, William Fitzherbert, entered retirement in the cathedral monastery at Winchester, it appears without complaint.
In 1153, within a few weeks of each other, Eugenius (on 8 July) Bernard (on 20 August) and Henry Murdac (on 14 October) all died. The new pope Anastasius IV was not of the Cistercian faction, which was in eclipse because of the calamitous second crusade - cut to pieces in Asia Minor without ever reaching the Holy Land - that had been proposed by Eugenius and launched with ardour in a stirring oration by St Bernard at the church at Vezelay.
With the Cistercians in political retreat, William Fitzherbert was re-appointed as archbishop. His return to York was described by contemporaries as a triumphant progress. The local mythology tells how the bridge at York broke under the crowd which had gathered to welcome him and all were miraculously restored by his prayers. One of William’s first tasks was to visit and offer compensation to the Cistercian abbey at Fountains which his supporters had invaded and sacked upon his removal six years before.
Another nephew of the House of Blois was given immediate preferment. Hugh du Puiset, son of Agnes of Blois, the sister of Stephen and of Henry of Winchester, had been bishop Henry’s archdeacon at Winchester from 1139 and became the Treasurer of York during William’s first appointment to the see. His arrogance is manifest in the way he described himself during this period as: Hugh “By the grace of God, Treasurer and Archdeacon”. For a time he, together with the Earl of York, was instrumental in denying Henry Murdac access to the city. When the archbishop had excommunicated his treasurer and the Earl, Hugh retaliated by excommunicating his own archbishop. In 1153 Hugh de Puiset was appointed as Bishop of Durham, the sole suffragen of the see of York.
It does appear that William’s appointment to York and Hugh’s appointment to Durham were locally popular. No doubt, the population rejected the puritanical regime of the Cistercians.
Hugh du Puiset would, in a long life, establish a reputation for avarice. He was, one historian has said, one of the most avaricious public figures in twelfth century England. A big call.
William Fitzherbert, however, had only one year to live. He died in 1154. His own archdeacon, and one of the principle opponents of his original election in 1141, Osbert of Bayeux, then archdeacon of York, was accused of administering poison to his archbishop in the chalice at mass. Osbert was the nephew of the former Archbishop Thurstan and another member of the Bayeux faction in the twelfth century English church.
Theobold, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had kept aloof from the decade long battle in the see of York, intervened decisively on William’s death and secured the appointment of his own archdeacon, Roger de Pont L’Eveque as Archbishop of York. This was a crucial event in Theobold’s household, permitting the promotion of Thomas Becket and at the same time establishing a personal rival in what became in the future an extension of the traditional institutional rivalry.
Hadrian IV - the only English pope - reinforced the precedent of Eugenius’ decision in the case of William Fitzherbert by promulgating, on 5 February 1156, a formal edict which prohibited the consecration of a bishop “who had not been freely elected and without previous nomination by the secular power”. It was a ruling which could taint the appointment of Becket to Canterbury.
The case against Archdeacon Osbert for murder of his archbishop was brought before King Stephen’s court. King Stephen was proposing to exercise that jurisdiction, notwithstanding the objection of the clergy, including Archbishop Theobold, who advanced the claim of clerical immunity from such secular jurisdiction, even for crimes of this character. Stephen apparently asserted that he should exercise jurisdiction, not only because of the atrocity of the crime, but also because he happened himself to be in York when the alleged offence was committed. Stephen died later that same year of 1154.
At a time when the new Henry II was at his most vulnerable and needed the support of the church, Theobold prevailed upon him to permit the church to conduct the trial. Theobold reported to the Pope “We just, and only just, succeeded in recalling the case to the judgment of the church”.
This moment of weakness would prove to be of considerable significance for the future controversy between Henry II and Becket. The church proved unable to satisfactorily resolve the allegation of murder. Years later, Archbishop Theobold himself had to tell the pope that the case failed “owing to the subtlety of the laws and the canons”. Osbert was never punished. Belief in his guilt, however, reflected in the recollections of John of Salisbury amongst others, was so widespread that he left the clergy and lived out his life as a minor baron.
The procedure of the ecclesiastical courts was not, in the event, able to cope with the accusation. The case was never resolved. There is little doubt that Henry II was very conscious of this failure in his subsequent determination to bring criminous clerks under the jurisdiction of the royal courts. When Henry II launched his campaign against the criminous clerks, he did so having been told that since his coronation, more than one hundred murders had been committed by clerks.
Perhaps it was because of the manner of his death, perhaps because of his ability to bear adversity with dignity, William Fitzherbert became St William of York, canonised by Honorius III. No historian can think of a reason which justified this elevation. Most attribute it to the anxiety of the canons of York to have saintly relics in their cathedral. By that stage, Canterbury, with the relics of Becket, was beginning to monopolise the pilgrimage trade.
St Bernard of Clairvaux is one of the few people who are specifically mentioned by Dante as having been admitted to Paradise. If the mutual belief of St Bernard of Clairvaux and St William of York has proven true, and all saints are in heaven, I have no doubt that St Bernard, has for the last eight hundred years, been berating the Almighty himself for allowing entry to William Fitzherbert.
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