administration of justice was corrupt, and no one could be sure how
the arbitrary decisions of the king’s officers would be carried out.
Liberty of the person was a farce when free men could be arrested,
evicted from their lands, exiled and outlawed without legal warrant
or a fair trial. “In a word, the entire system of government and
administration set up under the Norman kings, and developed under Henry
and Richard, had been converted by the ingenuity of John into a most
subtle and effective engine of royal extortion, oppression and tyranny
over all classes of the nation, from earl to villein.”[29]
Here and there the barons had struck against some act of personal
injury, and the northern barons had been conspicuous in their
resentment, refusing to follow John as their liege lord in his
expeditions to France. But there was neither cohesion nor any sense
of national injury amongst the barons until Stephen Langton, with a
full sense of the responsibility laid on the successor of Lanfranc
and Anselm, of Theobald and Thomas, took the lead, and by strong,
courageous effort sought to end for all time in England such tyranny as
the country had endured under John’s rule. To Langton this was no mere
struggle between a despotic king and a set of turbulent nobles. It was
a struggle to win recognition of law for _all_ men, and to restore some
measure of justice and the enjoyment of fair liberty throughout the
land. The people had neither spokesman nor champion, and no man heeded
their wrongs save Langton. More than 150 years were to pass before
John Ball and Wat Tyler would appear at the head of a peasant army in
revolt. In the reign of John, yeomen, peasant and artizan were dumb. It
was Langton who saw that the barons fighting for their own rights could
be made to fight for all England.
In November the barons came together at St. Edmundsbury, and in the
abbey church “they swore on the high altar that if the king sought to
evade their demand for the laws and liberties of the charter of King
Henry I., they would make war upon him and withdraw from fealty to him
till he should by a charter furnished with his seal confirm to them all
that they demanded. They also agreed that after Christmas they would
go all together to the king and ask him for a confirmation of these
liberties, and that meanwhile they would so provide themselves with
horses and arms that if the king should seek to break his oath, they
might, by seizing his castles, compel him to make satisfaction. And
when these things were done every man returned to his own home.” (Roger
of Wendover.)
John kept Christmas at Worcester, but his court was very small, and he
realised that he stood alone. All through the years of the interdict
the pope’s ban had not kept the nobles from attendance on the king; it
was now when he stood reconciled to the Church that John found himself
deserted. He moved to London at the new year, and there on the Epiphany
came the confederate barons, making display of arms, and praying that
the laws and liberties of Edward the Confessor written in the charter
of Henry I. might be confirmed. John urged that the question was
too big and too difficult to be settled off hand, and asked that it
should be put off till Easter. This was agreed to on condition that
the king pledged himself by three sureties to fulfil his promises.
Archbishop Stephen, William the Marshall and the Bishop of Ely were
accepted as sureties, and in accepting the post Langton proved his
great statesmanship. There was no question of going over to the king’s
side. The barons knew the archbishop as their chief ally, but John knew
that Langton was to be trusted as implicitly as he trusted William
the Marshall. Langton’s one desire was to see the written enactment
granting constitutional liberties, and ending the worst of the royal
abuses.
John did not waste the time allotted to him, but worked his hardest to
gain friends and supporters against the barons, and to break up the
confederacy. It was all to no purpose. His commissioners to the County
Courts--in the southern and midland shires, sent to explain the king’s
cause--met with no success. Nobles and churchmen alike stood aloof,
and all John could do was to write to the knights at Poitou to send
him mercenaries, and to appeal to his liege lord, the pope, against
his rebellious subjects. Finally, he took the cross, hoping for the
favours awarded to a crusader. These efforts were all of no avail. The
mercenaries were inadequate. The pope’s letters of rebuke to the barons
for their conspiracies and conjurations were unheeded, and at Easter,
John (whom the pope had warned to harken to “just petitions”) was
driven to send the primate and the Marshall for a definite statement of
the laws and liberties demanded.
The barons, who were assembled at Brackley, presented “a certain
schedule,” probably compiled with Langton’s assistance, and this was
read to the king by the primate. “They might as well ask for my kingdom
at once,” was John’s reply to the various items, and he swore he
would never grant liberties that would mean his own enslavement. Both
Langton and the Marshall strove to persuade the king to yield, but to
no purpose; and all that remained was to return to the barons and to
state that the king refused their demands. Then the barons, on hearing
this, flew to arms, formally renounced their homage and fealty to the
king, and chose a military leader for themselves--Robert Fitz-Walter.
London welcomed the insurgents on May 24th, and John, with a handful
of mercenaries, had the whole baronage against him. Capitulation was
inevitable. From Windsor John sent envoys to the barons in London,
promising, for the sake of peace and for the welfare and honour of his
realm, to concede the laws and liberties demanded, and advising the
appointment of time and place for a meeting for “the settlement of all
these things.” The barons at once fixed the meeting for June 15th, in
a meadow called Runnymead, between Staines and Windsor, and there, in
the presence of well-nigh all the baronage of England, of Archbishop
Stephen, and seven bishops, and “a multitude of most illustrious
knights,” the Great Charter was signed. It was the work of Langton.[30]
It was he who had inspired the movement, had framed the articles, and
had brought the struggle to a successful issue.
“One copy of the Great Charter still remains in the British Museum,
injured by age and fire, but with the royal seal still hanging from the
brown, shrivelled parchment. It is impossible to gaze without reverence
on the earliest monument of English freedom which we can see with our
own eyes and touch with our own hands, the Great Charter to which from
age to age patriots have looked back as the basis of English liberty.”
(J. R. Green.)
Yet the Charter itself was in the main but the old charter of Henry I.
writ large. It set up no new rights and conferred no new privileges.
It sanctioned no constitutional changes, and proclaimed no new
liberties. Its real importance is in the fact that it was a _written_
document--“this great table of laws, won by the people of England from
a tyrannous king, was the first great act which laid down in black and
white the main points of the constitution and the several rights and
duties of king and people.” (F. York Powell.)
“The bonds of unwritten custom, which the older grants did little
more than recognize, had proved too weak to hold Angevins; and the
baronage now threw them aside for the restraints of written law. It is
in this way that the Great Charter marks the transition from the age
of traditional rights, preserved in the nation’s memory and officially
declared by the primate, to the age of written legislation, of
parliaments and statutes, which was soon to come.” (J. R. Green.)
The first article of the Charter guaranteed the freedom of the English
Church, and, in especial, the freedom of elections, “which was reputed
most requisite.”
By the Great Charter the feudal rights of the king over his vassals
were defined and settled, and the tenants of the barons were protected
in similar way from the lawless exactions of their lords.
No scutage or aid was to be levied by the crown, “save by the common
council of the realm”--except the three customary feudal aids for
the ransoming of the king, the knighting of his eldest son, and the
marriage of his eldest daughter. This common council, consisting of
bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons, was to be summoned by
special writ. The free rights of London and the other chartered towns
were fully admitted.
The Court of Common Pleas (cases between subjects) was to sit at
Westminster (and not to follow the king in his wanderings), and judges
of assize were to go on circuit four times a year.
No free man was to be seized, imprisoned, ousted of his land, outlawed,
banished, or in any way brought to ruin, save by the legal judgment of
his peers or by the law of the land.
To no man was justice to be sold, denied, or postponed by the king.
The free right of Englishmen and foreigners to pass in and out of the
country in time of peace was granted.
The king’s mercenaries, “all the gang that came with horses and arms to
the hurt of the realm,” were to be sent out of England.
Finally, by a supplementary document, the barons present at Runnymead
were to choose out of the whole baronage twenty-five sworn guardians of
the Charter, who, in the event of any violation of its articles, were
not to hesitate from making war on the king till the matter had been
put right.
Well might John exclaim, in a wild burst of rage, when the Charter was
signed, and he was alone with his foreign troops, “They have given me
five-and-twenty over-kings!”
The twenty-five were to ensure the king’s obedience to the Charter,
but who was to ensure the obedience of the twenty-five?--all of whom
were of the party of revolt against the king. A safeguard was obviously
necessary, and a second court of barons, thirty-eight in number, was
chosen--(which included William the Marshall)--and these first swore
obedience to the twenty-five, and then a second oath to enforce on king
and barons mutual respect.[31]
The Great Charter was signed, and within a week it was published
throughout all England. But the “sort of peace” patched up between John
and the barons was not to last. None of the barons believed that the
king would abide by the oaths he had sworn, and they, for their part,
prepared for war.[32]
To the Continent John looked for aid, “seeking to be revenged upon
his enemies by two swords, the sword of the spirit and the sword of
the flesh, so that if one failed he could count upon the other for
success.” He had appealed to the pope in May, and Innocent’s reply had
been a general condemnation of all disturbers of the peace. Pandulf,
the papal legate, was at Runnymead, and in August, when the barons
were openly making ready for hostilities, he and Peter des Roches, of
Winchester, called on Stephen Langton to enforce the papal sentence
of excommunication against certain of the barons. Langton, who was
about to set out to Rome for a general council, declined to do this
until he had seen the pope and discussed the whole question with
him. He believed the sentence had been drawn up by the pope under a
misunderstanding. Thereupon Pandulf and Peter des Roches, by virtue of
their authority, declared Stephen disobedient to the papal mandate, and
pronounced his suspension from his office of archbishop.
Langton made no protest against the sentence but went to Rome, and
was present at the general council in November. His chiefest work for
England was done when the Charter was signed at Runnymead. With the
king and the barons at civil war, the country ravaged by John’s foreign
bands of merciless savages, and the barons praying Louis, the son of
Philip of France, to take the English crown, what could Archbishop
Stephen accomplish? Pope Innocent had declared the Charter annulled on
the ground that both king and barons had made the pope the over-lord
of England, and that in consequence nothing in the government and
constitution of the country could be altered without his knowledge and
sanction. But as the legate, the primate, and the bishops had all left
for Rome, the pope’s disallowing of the Charter never got published in
England at all, though it was known that he had sent letters.
The sentence of suspension was removed from Langton in February, 1216.
A few months later the great pope, Innocent III., passed away, and in
October John was dead.
In 1217 Stephen Langton was back again at Canterbury, to remain for
eleven more years the primate of England. With William the Marshall and
Hubert de Burgh, Stephen worked for the preservation of public peace
during those early years of Henry III. We find him in 1223 demanding
a fresh confirmation of the Charter in the council at Oxford, and two
years later its solemn proclamation is required by the archbishop
and the barons as the price of a new subsidy. Equally resolute is
Archbishop Stephen for public order, threatening with all the pains
and penalties of excommunication the barons, who (in spite of Hubert
de Burgh’s letters from the pope declaring Henry to be of age) were
anxious to keep the royal castles in their own hands. “At a time when
constitutional freedom was hardly known, when insurrection seemed the
only possible means of checking despotism, he (Langton) organized and
established a movement for freedom which by every act and word of his
life he showed to be in opposition to mere anarchy.” (C. E. Maurice.)
Stephen Langton was never canonized, though application was made to
Rome to that end shortly after his death in 1228. His learning had made
him famous in Paris before Pope Innocent summoned him to Rome to become
cardinal priest of St. Chrysogonus. His wise statesmanship was proved
by the victory he won for England’s liberties over so energetic and
ruthless a despot as John, and with such material as the barons. His
strength of character and disinterested patriotism were impaired by no
taint of baseness or self seeking. If Stephen Langton is not numbered
with the saints, he ranks high in the great list of England’s primates,
serving religion as faithfully as he served justice and social order,
and his name is resplendent for all time in the charters of English
liberty.
Bishop Grosseteste, the Reformer
1235–1253
AUTHORITIES: _Letters of Robert Grosseteste_, edited by Luard;
_Monumenta Franciscana_; _Letters of Adam of March and Eccleston on the
coming of the Friars_, edited by Brewer; _Annales Monastici_--Burton
and Dunstable; Matthew Paris (Rolls’ Series); Samuel Pegge--_Life
of Robert Grosseteste_, 1793; F. S. Stevenson, M.P.--_Robert
Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln_; M. M. C. Calthrop--_Victoria County
History--Lincolnshire_; Gasquet--_Henry III. and the Church_.
BISHOP GROSSETESTE THE REFORMER
1235–1253
The story of Robert Grosseteste’s bishophood is the record of eighteen
years’ unflinching battle with abuses in Church and State. From his
enthronement as Bishop of Lincoln in 1235 till his death in 1253
Grosseteste is conspicuous as a reformer. Now it is the slackness of
the clergy he is combatting, enforcing discipline on men and women
who, vowed to religion, preferred an easier way of life. At another
time he is maintaining the laws and liberties of the nation against
Henry III., who with all his piety knew neither honesty nor truth in
his sovereignty. Right on till the last year of his life Grosseteste
is as vigorous in resisting papal encroachments on the English Church
as he is in dealing with his clergy or with the king. As a reformer
his work is threefold:--(1) The correction of current abuses in the
Church. (2) Maintenance of justice under the misrule of Henry III. (3)
Resistance to the aggressive claims of the papacy. With all this work,
fighting enemies of England at home and abroad, Grosseteste is busy
administering his enormous diocese of Lincoln--then the largest in
the country, including as it did the counties of Lincoln, Leicester,
Buckingham, Huntingdon, Northampton, Oxford and Bedford (Oxford and
Peterborough were afterwards carved out of Lincoln)--and is found
writing to and advising all manner of men, kings, nobles and peasants.
Here is the character of Bishop Grosseteste as his contemporary,
Matthew Paris, saw it, and Matthew was a monk, and the champion of the
monks, and hated Grosseteste’s stern interference with monastic life:--
“He was an open confuter of both pope and king, the corrector of monks,
the director of priests, the instructor of clerks, the support of
scholars, a preacher to the people, a persecutor of the incontinent,
the tireless student of the Scriptures, the hammer and despiser of the
Romans. At the table of bodily refreshment he was hospitable, eloquent,
courteous, pleasant and affable. At the spiritual table devout, tearful
and contrite. In his episcopal office he was sedulous, venerable and
indefatigable.”
Six hundred years later the whirligig of time leaves this verdict
of old Matthew Paris unreversed, and finds Grosseteste’s reputation
enhanced.
“There is scarcely a character in English history whose fame has been
more constant, both during and after his life, than Robert Grosseteste,
Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 to 1253. As we find his advice sought
universally during his lifetime, and his example spoken of as that
which almost all the other prelates of his day followed, so was it
also after his death. If threats from Rome and excommunications from
Canterbury fell harmlessly upon him while alive, his example nerved
others in subsequent years--as in the case of Sewal, Archbishop of
York--to bear even worse attacks without giving way. And probably no
one has had a greater influence upon English thought and English
literature for the two centuries which followed his time; few books
will be found that do not contain some quotations from Lincolniensis,
‘the great clerk, Grostest.’”[33]
A Suffolk man was Grosseteste, and born of humble parents. Sent to
Oxford by his friends he becomes master of the schools and chancellor
of the university--the foremost scholar of his day--receives various
ecclesiastical preferments, and at the age of sixty is freely elected
by the chapter of Lincoln as their bishop. If the canons of Lincoln
believed that Grosseteste’s age would ensure comparative quiet for
the diocese and a continuance of the loose order of his immediate
predecessors, they were speedily undeceived.
Grosseteste brought into Lincoln an energy for religion that disturbed
the easy-going monks, with their comfortable common-room life, and
altogether upset the secular clergy with their illegal marriages
and their parochial revellings. In the first year of his authority
Grosseteste’s letter to his archdeacons, followed by his diocesan
constitutions, shows the hand of the reformer. He calls attention to
the neglect of the canonical hours of prayer--certain clergy “fearing
not God nor regarding man, either do not say the canonical hours or
say them in mutilated fashion, and that without any sign of devotion,
or at an hour more suitable to their own desires than convenient to
their parishioners”--to the private marriages of many priests, to the
strife and bloodshed and desecration caused by the miracle plays in
churchyards, and to the drunkenness and gluttony attendant on funeral
feasts. Grosseteste also complains that the parochial clergy oppose
the preaching friars, “maliciously hindering the people from hearing
the sermons of the friars, and permitting those to preach who make
a trade of it, and who only preach such things as may draw money.”
Incidentally, and with a curiously modern touch, Grosseteste urges
his archdeacons to warn mothers and nurses against overlaying their
children at night, for it seems many infants were suffocated in this
way.
Grosseteste relied on the friars, Franciscan and Dominican, to revive
religion in his diocese. From their first coming to England he had
befriended the little brothers of St. Francis and St. Dominic’s order
of preachers, and at Oxford had been conspicuously their rector. He
writes to Pope Gregory IX. in the highest praise of the Franciscans:
“Inestimable benefits have been wrought in my diocese by the friars.
They enlighten our whole land with the bright light of their preaching
and learning.”
The secular clergy and the monks generally by no means shared
Grosseteste’s appreciation of the preachers of poverty, and when the
Bishop of Lincoln began to rout up the monasteries in his diocese
with visitations and enquiries the dismay was considerable. The
Benedictine monks in England were good, easy men in the thirteenth
century--Grosseteste finds no grave faults against morality to rebuke
in them--fond of their pleasant social life, and enjoying the comfort
of an existence that had few temporal cares beyond finding money for
pope and king. At the worst their sloth was culpable. Grosseteste
charged upon them with his preaching friars, calling for amendment and
the fulfilment of duties, attacking old abuses sanctioned by custom,
and showing no tolerant sympathy for the infirmities and shortcomings
of middle-aged clerks.[34] Respect him they must, for the learning
and high character of the bishop were conspicuous in the land, but
the dislike of all this strenuous exhortation was not concealed. The
very chapter of Lincoln, which had elected him bishop, refused to
admit Grosseteste as their visitor, or to acknowledge his jurisdiction
over their proceedings, and only after six years of controversy and
litigation was the case finally decided at Rome (1245) wholly in the
bishop’s favour. A sentence of excommunication pronounced upon him by
the monks at Canterbury during the vacancy of the see was of course
entirely ignored by Grosseteste. If the clergy resented Grosseteste’s
call to arms, it is to be remembered that they had suffered
considerably from the tyranny of the times, and had been reduced under
the general oppression to a feeble and sluggish timidity. The old “Song
of the Church”[35] tells how low they had fallen:
Free and held in high esteem the clergy used to be,
None were better cherished: or loved more heartily.
Slaves are they now: despised, brought low,
Betrayed (as all deplore)
By those from whom: their help should come;
I can no more.
King and pope alike in this: to one purpose hold.
How to make the clergy yield their silver and their gold.
Truth to say: the pope gives way,
Far too much to the king
Our tithes he grants: for the crown’s wants
To his liking.
To check the rapacity of the king, and to stop the seizure of Church
revenues for Italian clerics, and thereby to raise the English clergy
from their state of sluggish despondency was Grosseteste’s work for
England. We find him conspicuous at the council summoned by the king
to meet at Westminster in 1244. In vain Henry III. appealed for
money, bishops and nobles reminded him that the money so frequently
granted had done no good either to the king or the country, and that
a justiciar and chancellor must be appointed for the strengthening of
the state. Henry demurred, tried postponements and delays, and these
failing, summoned the bishops alone, and confronted them with a letter
from Pope Innocent IV. exhorting them to give liberally to the king.
Even this failed to move the prelates. After much discussion, however,
some were for “a mild answer,” for many of the prelates “fearing the
king’s instability and the pusillanimity of the royal counsellors,”
were unwilling to deny the pope’s request. Grosseteste clinched the
matter by declaring they must all stand together with the barons:[36]
“We may not be divided from the common counsel. For it is written if we
be divided we shall all perish forthwith,” The next day Henry tried to
get at each of the bishops separately--an old device. “But they with
wary heed would not be so entrapped, and by departing early in the
morning escaped the net in which they had once been caught; and so the
council broke up to the king’s discontent.” (Matthew Paris.)