Foundations of the Anglican Church XVIII

York Minster, Cathedral of

the Archbishops of York

It is interesting that every so often while researching one topic, I trip across another with which I had not been familiar.  In looking at the life of Edward I, I found that he had a daughter a nun—and her life gives us a picture of the thirteenth century English Church and its spiritual vitality—or, in this case, its sad state. 
The princess Mary, known as Mary of Woodstock, was the thirteenth of sixteen children born to Edward I and his wife Eleanor of Castile.  (The widowed Edward had three more children by his second wife, Marguerite of France.)  When her grandmother, Eleanor of Provence, the widow of Henry III, decided to take the veil as a nun at Amesbury Abbey in Wiltshire, she asked that two of her granddaughters, Mary and Eleanor of Brittany, be sent along to the convent as well.  Mary was only seven years old when fated to convent life, though she was not officially veiled as a nun until she was twelve. 
Amesbury was an English house of the Fontrevault order.  Fonterevault was a monastery in Anjou (France) with strong ties to the Plantagenets, the English Royal Family.  Fontrevault had been founded by Robert of Abrissel (1045-1116), a reformer and preacher.  It was a double monastery of nuns and monks with the Abbess of the nuns as superior of both communities.  Henry II, as Duke of Anjou, had been a major benefactor of the Abbey and he, his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, and several of their children—including Richard the Lionheart—are buried there.  Amesbury Abbey had been founded under the Rule of Saint Benedict in Anglo-Saxon days but had been suppressed under Henry II and turned over to the Fontrevault Order which sent nuns to the monastery which was by  this fact reduced to priory status as a dependent house on Fontrevault.  Fontrevault was regarded as a reformed order and its level of observance was supposed to be quite strict.  But not for the Lady Mary.
Mary was given a very generous allowance worth about $100,000 a year in modern sums.  She also had a special allowance for clothing (habits and veils are expensive, I guess).  She also was entitled to 20 tuns of wine (over five thousand gallons) a year from the royal stores.  Despite the papal bull, Periculoso, requiring nuns to remain in their convents, Mary travelled freely about and maintained an entourage of servants to accompany her.  She often returned to court and she sometimes went on pilgrimage.  She ran up considerable gambling debts which her brother, King Edward II, had to pay off and she may have had an affair with John de Warrenne, a political foe of her brother the King. 
Meanwhile, her cousin, Eleanor of Brittany had become Abbess of the mother house at Fontrevault and tried to rein in this loose-living nun, but was quite unsuccessful in doing so.  Her brother the King defended her and even the Pope took her side.  Meanwhile, seeing her free lifestyle, various daughters of the nobility decided that being a nun wasn’t all that bad a deal and entered the priory at Amesbury under Mary’s “guidance,” leading to a decline in the house’s observance and reputation. 
Looking at the life of Mary of Woodstock, one can see the sort of nun that Chaucer would use as his model in the Canterbury Tales. 
Let’s go back to Henry II for a moment—remember him?  Henry was the king who had the fight with Becket.  In addition to the six legitimate children he had with Eleanor of Aquitaine Henry fathered at least two bastard children. The elder of these, indeed the eldest of all Henry’s children, was Geoffrey, not to be confused with a legitimate son also named Geoffrey.  Henry’s father was named Geoffrey and Henry idolized his father.  His father, a man of remarkable military prowess but of cold and evil temper was not worthy of his son’s obsessive admiration.  (Isn’t that so often the way?) In any case, young Geoffrey—being illegitimate and of a commoner mother—was not a suitable heir for the kingdom.  The Church could provide a career for the young man and at age 21 he was named Bishop of Lincoln.  He wasn’t ordained a priest yet, of course, and he delayed taking Holy Orders while collecting the bishop’s income.  That was not uncommon in the Middle Ages.  Geoffrey was more cut out for secular life—like his grandfather, he was a prodigious soldier.  When in 1173-74, his half-brothers (Henry the Young King, Richard, Geoffrey and John) rebelled against their father in an attempt to seize the kingdom, Geoffrey took his father’s side and played an important role in defeating the over-anxious princes. In 1181Pope Lucius III demanded that Geoffrey be consecrated a bishop or give up his diocese.  He gave up his diocese and his father, Henry, named him Lord Chancellor.
When Henry died in 1189, Geoffrey was in trouble.  Richard the Lionheart remembered this older brother had fought against him in the rebellion of 1173 and Richard was not about to allow him to remain as Lord Chancellor.  Richard wanted to neutralize any claims to the throne that Geoffrey might make, especially given that Richard was planning on going on Crusade and wanted to leave his kingdom secure.  He named Geoffrey Archbishop of York and forced him to receive episcopal consecration in 1191.  Geoffrey was a most quarrelsome prelate—fighting with his cathedral chapter, with the other bishops of England, and with his half-brother, the King.  Geoffrey adopted for himself and by no authority other than his own, the title “Primate of England” which set off a fight with the Archbishop of Canterbury who claimed the primacy.  (Eventually it was settled with York being the “Primate of England” and Canterbury being the “Primate of All England.”  (Wasn’t there something in the gospels about the apostles arguing over which was the greatest?  Do we ever learn?)   He seems to have had a chip on his shoulder that he had not been allowed to succeed to the crown and was forced to a career in the Church, a career he never truly embraced other than as a source of power and pride.  This was a huge problem in the medieval Church, however, where prelates were chosen not for their pastoral gifts, or even for their piety, but regardless of their character they were named for political reasons. 
These stories—of the princess-nun, Mary of Woodstock, and the bastard Archbishop Geoffrey fitzHenry, give us a glimpse of the malady into which the Church of England had sunk in the thirteenth century.     Traditionalist Catholics often hold that century up as the apex of Catholicism.  A century ago, the pseudo-historian, James J. Walsh even wrote  a book The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries.  It remains a perennial favorite among Catholic romanticists.   The truth is, however, that the same century that gave us Francis and Dominic also gave us characters of much lower sanctity and worth.  But every century is like that.  There is no golden age of Catholicism—the wheat and the tares grow alongside one another in the field until the day of judgment. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church, XV

The stone in the pavement of Canterbury

Cathedral that marks the site of the

martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket

The issue of papal authority in England became more acute in the reign of Henry II and in particular with his conflict with Thomas Becket, his onetime chancellor and then, as Archbishop of Canterbury, the fierce opponent of royal authority over the Church. 
Medieval canon law, recognized by the King and his law as governing the Church, exempted members of the clergy from royal justice and mandated they be tried in Church courts.  In other words, there were two parallel legal systems.  If a layman stole a cow or killed his brother-in-law he was tried in the King’s Court and punished by the King’s court.  If a member of the clergy stole a cow or murdered his brother-in-law he was tried and punished by Church courts.  As Church courts were limited in their ability to punish grave crimes—they could only impose sentences of fines, flogging, loss of clerical state and office, and excommunication—the King was not convinced they could adequately punish—or deter—grave crimes.  Moreover, clerical privilege applied not only to bishops. Priests, and deacons but to any man who had been tonsured as well as monks, nuns, friars, hermits (both monastic and lay), pilgrims and anyone who lived “under the protection of the Church.”  There were many men who had been tonsured—subdeacons, acolytes, lectors, sacristans, clerks in minor orders, as well as most university professors and even students. Probably 15% or more of the adult population qualified for Church protection.  Many of these men—the majority in fact—had no intention of ever advancing to higher orders or Church ministry.  In addition to the problem of clerical exemption for the King’s justice, there were other issues where royal authority was coming into conflict with the Church or papal authority.  Some of these matters concerned appointment to certain church posts, what happened to church revenues during the vacancy of an ecclesiastical post, the right of a bishop to appeal over and against the King to the Pope and various other issues.  In 1164 King Henry issued a charter of 16 provisions called the Constitutions of Clarendon.  They were meant to regulate the conflicting authorities of the Crown and the Church.  Needless to say, they regulated them in favor of the Crown but to the modern ear, even the Catholic ear, they do not sound unreasonable.  They did not sound unreasonable to the Bishops and Abbots of England who, with one exception, approved them.  They did, however, sound unreasonable to Thomas Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of England.  Becket refused to accept the royal decree and for that was tried for contempt of royal authority and malfeasance in his office as Lord Chancellor.  Becket fled to France before he could be apprehended.  Louis VII of France, an enemy of Henry, was only too happy to give refuge to the exiled Archbishop.  Becket spent six years in exile before Pope Alexander III was able to negotiate a compromise between King and Archbishop that allowed Becket to return to his see.
Henry was a proud man and demanded a humiliation of Becket in return for his having had to accept the Archbishop back on more or less Becket’s own terms.  Henry arranged that his eldest son should be crowned king in June 1170.  This was not unusual in the central Middle Ages—the crowning of the “young king” while the old one was still alive and well.  In fact, Henry the Father would outlive Henry the Son by six years.  The point of a coronation, somewhat strangely, is not the crowning but the anointing.  The anointing with sacred chrism confers a special character on the monarch with the scriptural admonition: “Touch not the Lord’s anointed” (1 Chronicles 16:22).  While a second coronation would often be held when old king had died, having the heir in place, crowned, and anointed was seen to provide for a smooth transition.  So Henry the Father arranged for Henry the Son to be crowned with all due pomp at Westminster Abbey.  Henry invited the Archbishop of York, assisted by the bishops of London and Salisbury, to do the honors.  But the honor of crowning the monarch belonged by right to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Becket.  Becket—for his revenge—excommunicated Roger de Pont l’Évȇque of York, Gilbert Foliot of London, and Josceline de Bohon of Salisbury for usurping his, Becket’s, right to crown the king.  The bishops, all political enemies of Becket, fled to Henry who was at the time in Normandy. Becket was on a roll and went on to excommunicate several of the King’s nobles who had committed offenses against the Church, including one who had, in violation of the Church’s right to administer justice to its own, arrested a priest, tried him for murder (outside a Church Court) and hung him.  These excommunications were seen as challenges to Henry and his authority.  Shortly after Christmas 1170, Henry, probably under the influence of too much wine, exasperated “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their Lord the King be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?”  Four knights, overzealous to win the royal favor, immediately set out, crossed the channel, and arrived at Canterbury on December 29, 1170. They were Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard de Brito.  They forced their way into the cathedral where they confronted Becket on his way to vespers and in the ensuing scuffle killed the Archbishop.
The murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury was not initially to the political advantage of the Crown.  Henry treated the matter lightly, advising the knights to flee to Scotland where Henry could not reach them so that he would not have to punish them.  Their property escheated to the Crown but Henry seems to have allowed them to continue to receive their incomes from their lands.  Pope Alexander III excommunicated them several months later, however, and the King was unable to protect them from the papal sanctions.  All four were ordered to go on Crusade to the Holy Land.  None seem to have returned.  Henry, though not personally excommunicated (though his lands were for a while placed under interdict), was sentenced by the Pope to go on Crusade.  Henry agreed but never, in fact, went.   By the Compromise of Avranches Henry permitted the English Church to appeal over royal authority to the Pope—thus expanding papal power in England.  He also annulled the Constitutions of Clarendon and restored the authority of Church courts to punish members of the clergy.  In other words, Henry lost the battle with Becket, but he still managed to win the war.   Henry managed to “spin” the cult of the martyred Archbishop to his own benefit and by his accepting his penances and then building shrines to the Becket and furthering the cult of the martyred Archbishop, actually became the hero of the story in the popular imagination rather than the villain.  Henry was far more cynical than he was pious but his strategy worked.  The conflict with Becket was a political misstep and Henry was unable to push back on the expansion of papal power in England, but he emerged all the stronger nonetheless.  His son, King John, would squander that heritage and lose even more power to Rome.   

 

Foundations of the Anglican Church XIII

The murder of Archbishop

Thomas Becket

The dispute between Canterbury and York over Canterbury’s claim to a primatial jurisdiction over York and the northern dioceses flared up briefly in the reign of King Stephen but there were far more important issues facing England with the Crown being disputed between Stephen and the Empress Matilda, the daughter of Henry I.  This was a time of civil war as Stephen’s having grabbed the throne after the death of his uncle, Henry I, displaced the rightful heir, Henry’s daughter Matilida.  The Barons of England, and the Church as well, were divided in their allegiance.  The issue was, of course, whether a woman could inherit the throne but in this case Stephen’s claim was shaky for while he was  male, his claim to the throne was through his mother, the daughter of William the Conqueror. If a woman could not inherit the throne, her son had no right to it. Moreover, if one were to acknowledge a grandson’s claim through his mother, Matilda herself had a son whose claim would be stronger than Stephen’s—and who, in fact, did eventually succeed to the throne as Henry II.  But we are not only getting ahead of ourselves, we are wandering away from our main point—the contested claims of Canterbury and York and their involvement of the papacy in the dispute.  If faithless to the oath that he swore to Henry I to support his daughter Matilda as Queen, Stephen was otherwise a pious man, especially so when it came to the rights of the Church.  William of Corbeil, Archbishop  of Canterbury, had also ignored the oath he had sworn to Henry to support Matilda, and crowned Stephen in Westminster Abbey on the day after Christmas, 1135.  Archbishop Thurstan of York also supported Stephen’s claim against Matilda. When William of Corbeil died in 1137, Canterbury remained empty for two years until Stephen appointed Abbot Theobald of Bec the new Archbishop.  Despite this appointment, Theobald and Stephen were not to have a good relationship as the Archbishop found himself in conflict with the King’s brother, Henry, who was Bishop of Winchester. Winchester was supposedly suffragen to Canterbury, but Bishop Henry played on being the King’s brother and ignored his Metropolitan Archbishop. The King was caught between his brother and his Archbishop. Stephen also had difficulties with the See of York as King and Pope could not agree on a candidate to serve as Archbishop and candidates proposed by each were refused by the other.  Nevertheless, the issue of primacy remained on a backburner during this time until the realm was more settled with Stephen’s death and the accession of Matilda’s son, Henry of Anjou as Henry II.
During the reign of Henry II the issue of Canterbury’s claim to primacy was inextricably tied to Archbishop Thomas Becket whose turbulent relationship with the King made things way more complicated than they needed to be.  In 1163 both Becket and Roger de Pont l’Evȇque, the Archbishop of York, attended a papally convened council at Tours and argued over who was to be seated senior to whom.  After three wasted days of arguing, Pope Alexander III placed them in places of equal dignity which was a loss to Canterbury’s claim of primacy.  To add insult to injury, the following year Alexander named Roger a papal legate though he exempted Becket’s archdiocese from Roger’s legatine authority.  When Alexander did declare Canterbury to be Primate in 1166, Roger—as papal legate—still held senior honors.  Three weeks later Becket also was named a papal legate, but his authority did not extend over Roger’s Archdiocese.  This left matters somewhat at a draw as far as Roger and Becket personally were concerned, but in fact gave Becket’s Archdiocese a leg up with a recognized primacy.  Roger’s legateship would expire on his death, as would Becket’s, but the primacy did not expire but passed down to the succeeding archbishops. 
Roger infuriated Becket four years after Canterbury was named a primatial see when he, Roger, crowned Henry’s son, Henry, King.  This was in the midst of Becket’s dispute with King Henry and although it was not an unusual practice at the time to crown the successor while the king still lived, King Henry had explicitly designed the coronation of the prince by the Archbishop of York to be a slap at Becket as it was Canterbury’s prerogative to crown the monarch. 
Roger for his part aggravated Becket further by having his (Roger’s) archepiscopal cross carried before him wherever he was in England.  This practice has been discontinued only recently in the Vatican II reforms, but historically a bishop had a second processional cross carried immediately before him in a procession in his own diocese.  An Archbishop would have the cross, in this case specially designed with two crossbars, carried before him throughout his province—that is, in the dioceses suffragen to  him. By having his archepiscopal cross carried before him not only in his own Province of York but also in the Canterbury Province, Roger was claiming a jurisdiction in Becket’s territory.  Finally Pope Alexander had to intervene and demand that Roger stop this provocation.
The battle of the crosses continued, however, under the successors of Roger and Becket, Geoffrey of York and Hubert Walter of Canterbury. Each had his cross carried before him in the other’s province as well as his own and each appealed to King Richard, Henry’s son and heir, for the authority to do so.  Richard declined and referred the matter to Rome.  It was only in the fourteenth century when the Avignon Pope, Innocent VI (1352-62) confirmed the right of each prelate to have the cross carried before him throughout England and gave York the title: Primate of England while giving Canterbury the slightly higher title: Primate of All England.  After the schism under Henry VIII, Parliament enacted a bill giving Canterbury the higher position.  And so it still stands.  The chief winner in this dispute between Canterbury and York was the papacy to which both appealed and which used those appeals to further establish papal power over matters in the English Church. 
 

The Gregorian Reform and the Political Independence of the Church

The Emperor Saint Henry, the last
of the Ottonian Dynasty, with a
German Archbishop

Well we have looked at the Carolingian and the Ottonian Reformations  and now we can take a look at the Gregorian Reformation—named after Pope Gregory VII—one of the greatest men to occupy the Chair of Peter.  The name is a bit misleading, however, as Gregory didn’t start this Reformation and there were many other players, several of whom played as crucial a role.  In many respects it was simply the second phase of the Ottonian Reformation—it proceeded almost seamlessly from the Ottonian Reformation and yet it took a remarkably different course and in fact it overthrew the Ottonian Reformation in its efforts to purify the Church even further than the Emperors had.  Indeed it wanted to purify the Church from Imperial control.   
    The Ottonian Reformation, you may remember, is named after the Emperors Otto I, II, and III—a series of German Holy Roman Emperors in the tenth century.  Otto I (912-973), a descendent of Charlemagne but in the matrilineal line, in fact had restored the Empire in 962 after it had all but ceased to exist.  His policy was to strengthen the Church by appointing capable bishops and abbots who, loyal to him, were a counterweight to the secular nobility who resented the expanding Imperial control over their ancestral princedoms, duchies, and counties.  To do this Otto and his successors endowed the Church with considerable wealth to make it independent of all outside (except his, of course) control.  He also needed to have capable men as Archbishops, bishops and Abbots—and capable women too as Abbesses who often held political and religious power and authority  equivalent to the Abbots and Bishops—and not mere sycophants and dependants of the various dukes and counts who were threats to the expanding Imperial power.   
      There were two other aspects, also important, to the Ottonian Reform.  The Emperors used the Church as a tool to expand the imperial power, particularly eastwards into the Slavic lands that today comprise the Czech Republic, southern Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary.  Establishing Archdioceses, dioceses, and abbeys in these new lands they expanded the Church and also brought the subjugated and converted peoples into the Empire as well as into the Church.
     The final characteristic of the Ottonian Reformation was that after long struggles with the old Roman families (and here you should probably read “Mafiosi,” which while not technically true captures the nature of the problem) who controlled the papacy which they filled with some of the most profligate men known to history.  The Roman Church was and had been through most of the ninth century and well into the tenth a scandal to Christendom and had lost the respect of all and thus any real authority.  The Church in Rome, throughout most of Italy, and beyond the Ottonian Realm was of no better moral character than the secular nobility.  There were isolated men and institutions of character—the Abbots and Abbey of Cluny and its dependencies being most notable—but the Church was almost universally beholden to the secular powers for its wealth, and bishops and Abbots were most frequently appointed not for their moral character but their family connections.   
     I do need to be careful here when I say “appointed,” as technically bishops and abbots were elected—bishops by their cathedral chapters, abbot by the monks of their abbey.  But such “elections” were all but universally directed by the king or a more local political authority who had his favored candidate who, once installed as bishop or abbot, would do his bidding.  And this would be the very abuse the Gregorian Reform would seek to end. Political control of the Church all worked fine where the Emperors Otto held sway, but what of the day when kings of lesser character sat on the Imperial throne and abused their powers over the Church?  No, the honest prelates put in place by the Ottonians knew that the Church could not risk remaining under the imperial thumb.  Otto III was succeeded by the last of his dynasty, the saintly (and indeed Sainted) Henry II.   But Henry would die without an heir—supposedly he and his wife, also Sainted, Kunigunde, had committed themselves to celibacy within their marriage (no virtue in light of the royal responsibility to provide an heir)—and a new dynasty, the Salians, came to the throne.  This was not good for the Church, but that is what we shall look at over the next few weeks with the Gregorian Reform.