Foundations of the Anglican Church XVII

Henry III's shrine of Saint Edward the
Confessor in Westminster Abbey

Well, I am back.  I was having some computer issues.  And then there is the usual end of term craziness.  But I think we are back in business and on with our story about the history of the Church of England.  We left off with the story of King John—one of England’s worse monarchs—and his struggles with the Church.  John took on the Church and lost valuable ground—actually losing his kingdom to the Pope and receiving it back, not in his own right but as a papal fief.  While this surrender and regrant were more a symbolic gesture and a legal fiction than a practical loss of power, in an age where symbol carried far greater meaning than it does today, indeed where symbol carried far greater meaning than actual political clout, John’s failure was the apex of political power of the papacy in Britain.  But under John’s son, Henry III, the relationship of crown to Church deteriorated even more. 
Unlike his cynical and even agnostic father, Henry was an exceptionally pious man.  Henry was only a boy of nine when John died—some allege from a surfeit of peaches, though more likely from dysentery (which most unpleasant symptoms are not unlike a surfeit of peaches) and Henry inherited the throne.  As a minor, his authority was exercised by a regent, William Marshall, who was, according to Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton,  “the greatest knight who ever lived.”  William died however before Henry reached his majority and Hubert de Burgh, justicar of England and Ireland, took the regency into his own hands.  It was not as satisfactory an arrangement as might be hoped.  Henry found much of his reign a struggle with the barons of England who were trying to fend off the royal authority that was threatening their own customary feudal rights and privileges.  The issue at hand was the efforts for a central and national government (the King) to emerge from the feudal society based on regional powers exercised by local nobility.   The Church favored, not only in England but generally, the emergence of strong central monarchy and Henry depended on the structures both of the English Church and the papacy for his support. 
Henry’s ties to the papacy led him into a war in Sicily when Pope Innocent IV tried to name Henry’s son, Edmund, King of Sicily to replace Conrad IV Hohenstaufen as king there.  It was a fruitless effort.  Sicily was too far away for English victory and this war simply meant expense in money and life.  In fact, Henry was just a pawn of the pope who—like other thirteenth century popes—was determined to break the power of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in Italy.  The English barons revolted against the king’s policy and Simon de Montfort emerged as head of the baronial resistance.  de Montfort defeated and captured Henry at the battle of Lewes in 1264.  Henry was reduced to a figurehead and de Montfort, in the King’s name, summoned the Great Council of the Realm—an assembly of the nobility which had met from the time of the Norman invasion and which itself had been preceded in Anglo Saxon days by the Witenagemot, an assembly the leading men of the realm—to which de Montfort added representatives of the gentry from each shire and the burgesses from each town.  This effectively created the institution which today we know as Parliament.  Henry was freed from his captivity in 1265 and took savage retribution on his enemies among the barons. 
Henry was a complex character.  He was a passive man, lacking strength of character, but vicious in his retribution to his enemies once he had the upper hand.  He was pious to a fault and that political indecisiveness, even weakness, was probably related to being overly pious.  His hero was Edward the Confessor.  He rebuilt not only Edward’s tomb in Westminster Abbey but the Abbey itself at great expense, hiring the architects of the new Gothic styles from France.  Reading that Edward dressed simply and without ornaments, Henry did likewise. And he named his first son and heir Edward so that an Edward would once again sit on the throne of England.  By his reign one could say that the once autonomous Church of England was thoroughly absorbed into the Roman Communion, no longer a Church in communion with Rome but definitively “under” papal rule.   For all his efforts to overcome the barons and establish a strong crown, Henry, in  his piety,  missed the threat the Church presented to royal authority.   
Henry’s son, Edward, was as strong a king as his father had been weak.  Like his father, Edward was a prisoner of the barons from 1264 until his escape the following year.  He rallied the royalist party against the barons and defeated de Montfort at the battle of Evesham in 1265.  He was responsible for the mutilation of de Montfort’s corpse in retaliation for his father’s, King Henry, captivity.  Edward succeeded Henry in 1272.  Edward was off on Crusade at the time of Henry’s death, but his reputation cause sufficient fear among the baronage that there was no challenge to his authority during the time it took for him to return to England.  And in fact Edward had the confidence to take his time on the return, stopping off to oversee his French possessions.  Edward was a great king but like his father, who was a good man but a bad king, Edward was a great king but a bad man.  It very often goes that way.  Edward is often remembered for two things.  In 1295 he summoned “the model parliament.”  Following on the precedent set by de Montfort in the 1265 assembly, the peers were joined by two knights from each shire and two burgesses from each town.  Moreover, these “commons” (as opposed to the nobles) insisted that they should not merely assent to the decrees of their betters, but have a direct role in shaping the decisions.  (They did not meet separately as a “House of Commons” for almost another fifty years, but sat in council with the nobles.) 
Edward had a long history of anti-Semitism.   The Jews in England “belonged” to the Crown—just as the Jews of Rome belonged to the Pope.  The King was free to do with them as he liked.  Edward taxed them into poverty.  He exploited their unpopularity among the common folk—the Jews were the moneylenders since usury (the charging of interest) was forbidden to Christians—for the popularity of the monarchy.  In 1279 he had three hundred Jews executed for “coin clipping”—the practice of shaving the edge of coins to accumulate the small amounts of gold or silver such shaving might yield, but, at the same time, debasing the coinage.  In 1280, he forced the Jews to submit to listen to sermons preached by Dominican friars in efforts to convert them.  Finally in 1290 he confiscated their property and ordered all Jews expelled from the realm.  Jews were only allowed to return to England in 1656 by Oliver Cromwell during the Commonwealth.   The seizure of Jewish property gave the crown great financial advantage and would be copied by Philip the Fair of France in 1306. 
Edward’s need for money made him turn against the Church as well as the Jews.  In 1279 and again in 1290 Edward enacted “statutes of mortmain.”  Mortmain, from the old French morte (dead) and main (hand) was the practice of leaving land to the Church.  If Lord Jones owns a field and leaves it to his son, his son pays an inheritance tax on it.  And when the son dies and the grandson inherits it, the grandson pays an inheritance tax on it.  And so to the great grandson and each future generation—they must pay the tax again and again.   The land would in each generation provide income to the Crown.  But when Lord Jones leaves that same land to the Church, the land passes into “the dead hand” of the Church, that is to say it no longer passes from one generation to the next but now is owned in perpetuity by an institution that never dies and thus never is subject to the inheritance tax.  That land passes out of the Crown’s income.  Modern folk don’t tend to leave land to the Church or to other institutions.  We may leave money, even trusts, but not land.  But in the Middle ages such bequests were not only common—they were all but universal.  More and more land was being left to parish churches, abbeys, hospitals, friaries, collegiate churches, bishoprics and other religious institutions.  The wealth of the Church was growing exponentially. Edward was determined to stop this but it was perceived to be an attack on the Church.  Nevertheless, ways around the statutes of mortmain were devised and the Church continued to benefit from the generosity of the faithful.  It would in the long term be fateful, however, as the wealth of the Church would prove to be too tempting a plum for King Henry VIII to resist. 

The German Popes

Leo IX--one of the
German Reform Popes

When Gregory VI resigned under pressure from the Synod of Sutri in 1046, the Emperor Henry III nominated Suidger of Morsleben and Hornburg, the Archbishop of the newly founded Archdiocese of Bamberg, to be Pope as Clement II.  This will begin a series of German Popes appointed by the Emperor.  Clement had a short reign, less than a year.  The Emperor then appointed Poppo of Brixen as Damasus II but there was a challenge to the succession.  Benedict IX, the dissolute gay-rapist-adulterer who had sold the papacy to his godfather, Gregory VI, tried to make a comeback and actually took control of Rome before the new pope could travel down from Germany and take possession of his See.   Henry had to send troops to Rome to clear out Benedict and when Damasus was able to be installed, he reigned only twenty-three days before dying—most likely of malaria, though some thought he had been poisoned by the anti-Reform party.  Rome was notorious for malaria in the early and central Middle Ages because of the swamps that surrounded the city.  On the other hand, poison was a reasonable suspicion given the politics of the day.  Benedict, you may recall, was a member of the Theophylact clan which had dominated the papacy during the pornacracy of the tenth century and while his uncle Benedict VIII had been a reform pope, Benedict the nephew represented the old fashioned corrupt popes dominated by the Roman mobs who, in turn, were driven by the various noble houses—the Theophylacts (Dukes of Spoleto/Counts of Tusculum) and the Crescentii.  The Emperors had long fought these rival factions for control of the papacy as a means of trying to reform the Church.  Thus the imperial appointees were generally reform popes and the traditionally elected popes were, for the most part, the anti-reform party.  This is important to note, because the equation will change during the course of the Gregorian Reform. 
     Upon hearing of the death of Damasus II, Henry III appointed Bruno of Eguisheim-Dagsburg pope and this was confirmed by a synod at Worms.  Notice that the Roman clergy and people had no voice in this election—it was pure appointment by the Emperor.  This practice of Imperial appointment was an innovation introduced by Henry.  Even the Ottonian emperors had gone through the motions of a traditional election to get their candidates into office.  Henry III was a good man and had the good of the Church at heart.  Indeed, he saw that involving the Roman clergy and people in the election as had been their right from the earliest days of the Church only ran the risk of very unsuitable men being made pope.  He also, as did the Emperors of the East as well as the West, saw that he—the Emperor—was Vicar of Christ and head of the Church—and the pope was his viceroy in matters ecclesiastical.  Keep this in mind as it will become a source of tension.  In any event, Bruno of Eguisheim-Dagsburg understood the significance of this change of procedure and despite having been appointed by the Emperor, insisted on a proper canonical election before he took office.  Thus the Roman clergy met and chose their candidate—not surprisingly (given the Emperor’s army sitting there) the imperial nominee—the Roman faithful gave their acclamation of assent, and the bishops of the Sees surrounding Rome (the so-called suburbican sees) approved and Bruno of Eguisheim-Dagsburg became Leo IX. 
     Leo was a very busy pope; a model of a reforming pope.  Although he reigned only six years, he customarily held an Easter Synod of the clergy at Rome to pass important reform legislation.  He was concerned about the celibacy of the clergy, the conservation of Church property, and the elimination of the practice of the buying and selling of church offices.  When he was not busy reforming the Roman Church, he kept himself occupied travelling throughout northern Italy and Germany-Austria holding local synods to bring the various Churches of the Empire into conformity with Roman reform practices. 
     A new political threat appeared on the scene as the Normans conquered much of southern Italy.  This was both good and bad for the Roman Church.  This area had been held by the Byzantine Empire and the Church in Sicily and Southern Italy followed the Greek practices.    
     The Normans, originally Scandinavian pirates—that is to say, Vikings—had been converted to Christianity when they began to settle along the northern French coast in what is now Normandy.  An inherently restless—and warlike—people, they continued their conquests spreading down into the Mediterranean fighting Greeks and Arabs alike for the rule of Sicily and Southern Italy.  (This explains why there are so many Sicilian red-heads, supposedly more than in Ireland.)   In conquering these lands they brought the Church in those regions into Western rather than Eastern practices, saving the Christians there for Catholicism rather than the Orthodoxy they would have practiced had they remained under Greek influence.  But the news was not all good for the pope found his southern boundaries manned not by a distant Emperor in Constantinople but very near and very aggressive warriors who might recognize his spiritual leadership but not his political domination.  The day would soon come when the Normans would save the papacy, but initially they were a threat to the pope’s political power. 
     Leo led a German army against the Normans and not only lost, but was taken captive.  The Normans treated their prisoner with all the respect due to the Pope, but kept him prisoner none the less.  Eventually freed, he died shortly after his return to Rome.  The Emperor Henry then appointed the fourth German pope in a row, Egbert of Calw, who reigned as Victor II.  
     In the final months of his reign, Leo IX sent an embassy to Constantinople to protest to the Emperor the interference of Michael Caerularius, the Patriarch, in the Western Church.  It was a disaster, but we will deal with that topic at another time.