The English Church & The Papacy In The Middle Ages

271 Pages·1999·6.904 MB·English

by  C.H. Lawrence

T E
he nglish
C &
hurch the
P
apacy in the
M
iddle ages

T E
he nglish
C &
hurch the
P
apacy in the
A
middle ges
C. H. L A W R E N C E
SUTTON PUBLISHING
First published in 1965 by Bums & Oates Ltd
This revised edition published in 1999 by Sutton Publishing Limited
Phoenix Mill • Thrupp • Stroud • Gloucestershire GL5 2BU
Copyright © C.H. Lawrence, 1965,1999
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN o 7509 1947 7
Cover illustration : Coronation of Pope Boniface IX (1389-1404), from Froissart's
Chronicle (British Library; photograph BridgemanArt Library)
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CONTENTS
Introduction vii
C. H. Lawrence
The Celtic Church and the Papacy i
Kathleen Hughes
The Anglo-Saxon Church and the Papacy 29
Veronica Ortenberg
From the Conquest to the Death of John 63
Charles Duggan
The Thirteenth Century 117
C.H. Lawrence
The Fourteenth Century 157
W.A. Pantin
The Fifteenth Century 195
FR.H. DuBoulay
Index 243

INTRODUCTION
The six essays in this book provide a study of the relationship
between England and the papacy from the conversion of the
heathen English until the eve of the Reformation. The papacy is a
doctrine embodied in a unique institution, the oldest in fact of all
Western institutions, with an unbroken existence from the age of
imperial Rome to the present day. Its history occupies a central
place in our understanding of the medieval world. The long
process by which a spiritual authority, which traced its origins to
a divine commission, was translated into organs of government
and gradually welded the churches of the West into a united and
articulated body under a common system of law, forms the ever-
changing background to these studies of the links that bound the
English Church to the Apostolic See.
After the lapse of Roman imperial administration in the West,
the papacy, located in the ancient capital, remained the repository
of the imperial tradition. But the claims of the popes to spiritual
authority over all members of the Church, including secular
rulers, rested upon a deeper basis than the imperial status of
Rome and one that was unquestioned in the middle ages. This
was the tradition that the Apostolic See had been founded by
St Peter, to whom Christ had entrusted the keys of the kingdom
of heaven with the power to bind and loose, and had commanded
him, with reiterated emphasis after the resurrection, to ‘feed my
sheep’. The bishop of Rome was the successor of Peter and the
heir to his pastoral office. The historian’s task is one of
explanation. This doctrinal premiss, which informed the actions
of successive popes, inspired the whole process of institutional
development which in time gave the medieval Church a
centralized monarchic structure, but the question of its ultimate
validity lies outside the scope of this book.
England had a unique role in the early stages of this process
viii Introduction
because the church of the English was a colony directly planted
from Rome. Augustine’s mission founded a church which, so far
as the politics and demography of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
allowed, was organized on the Roman model proposed by Pope
Gregory himself, and guided by his repeated instructions. Ties
between the infant English Church and the papacy remained
strong in the century that followed. The popes continued to
confer the pallium - the woollen stole symbolising the delegation
of authority to a metropolitan — on Augustine’s successors at
Canterbury. Veneration for the see of Peter and his shrine drew
many English pilgrims to Rome, among them kings of Wessex,
two of whom abdicated and elected to live in Rome at ‘the
threshold of the apostles’.
This Roman orientation of the early English Church had far-
reaching consequences for the organization and ethos of western
Christendom. In the East, the primatial claims of the popes had to
contend with the caesaropapism of the Byzantine emperor;
whereas in the West the way ky open for the realization of the
Petrine mission to the Germanic peoples. It is arguable that when
Pope Gregory dispatched a mission to convert the barbarian high-
king of the southern English, he was, perhaps unconsciously, calling
a new wodd into existence to redress the spiritual balance of the
old. In the eighth century, English veneration for the successor of St
Peter in the old Rome was disseminated among the Germanic
peoples settled in Germany and Gaul by St Boniface and other
missionaries from English monasteries. They transmitted their
notions of ecclesiastical order to their foundations on the continent.
In the course of time, they instructed the Carolingian dynasty and
the Frankish Church in the authoritative status of Roman customs
and liturgy and in the centrality of the Apostolic See in the
ecclesiastical cosmos.
In the last age of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, when often
unworthy popes were immersed in the dynastic politics of Rome
and papal influence in the churches of northern Europe was at
low tide, regular intercourse between England and the papacy was
maintained by archbishops visiting Rome to seek ratification of
Introduction ix
their appointment and to receive the pallium. It was in this
period that veneration for the mother-church was expressed by
the annual alms of Rome-scot or Peter s Pence, collected from
the people by royal command and dispatched to Rome for the
support of St Peter’s basilica and the Schola Saxonica - the
English colony in the Leonine City.
A new era in Anglo-papal relations began with the Gregorian
Reform movement of the eleventh century, which initiated a
great expansion of papal government. The reform movement was
a reaction against the widespread secularisation of ecclesiastical
office. Its object was to renew the Church by restoring what the
reformers believed to be the proper hierarchical order of Christian
society. A cardinal item of this agenda was the exaltation of the
Apostolic See and the assertion of its right and duty, implicit in
the Petrine commission, to oversee and difcçct the life of the
universal Church. Reverberations of all this were brought to
England during the reign of Edward the Confessor by English
bishops attending the councils of Pope Leo IX. But it was the
Norman Conquest, followed by an influx of prelates and monks
from the continent, that exposed the English Church to the
reforming spirit of the Gregorian age and the mounting assertion
of papal authority in the affairs of local churches.
The reformers found a vital agency for disseminating
Gregorian ideals and implementing the reform programme in the
new literature of canon law. Here again England made a
significant contribution to the growth of papal sovereignty
through collections of papal decretals compiled by English
canonists. These, like Gratian’s classical Concordance of ancient
law, which appeared at Bologna about 1140, pointed to the legal
supremacy of the pope as ultimate judge and law-maker. In due
course, Gratian s text was supplemented by official collections
containing the decretals of subsequent popes, and these were
promulgated by the expedient of sending them to the Bologna
schools for copying and scholastic commentary. Through the
lectures of the law-doctors and the students who flocked to hear
them from all parts of Europe the new law was transfused into
X Introduction
the mental bloodstream of the whole western Church. Its
reception in England was assured by the large number of English
students who frequented the Bologna law-schools and returned
home to staff the courts and chanceries of English bishops.
From the twelfth century onwards The English Church, like
the other churches of western Christendom, experienced the
unfolding process of papal sovereignty. This meant a constant
growth in the volume of appeals to Rome by individuals,
monasteries and collegiate bodies, a stream of travellers leaving
England for the papal Curia - royal ambassadors and clerks,
attorneys, prelates, penitents and pilgrims — and more frequent
visits by legates a latere, usually cardinals, invested with the full
panoply of papal powers. In the thirteenth century, the expansion
of the central power was manifested by a growing number of
papal provisions to English benefices and by papal taxation of
benefices to finance the crusades. Bishops were summoned to a
series of ecumenical councils, culminating in the Fourth Lateran
Council, summoned by Innocent III in 1215, which set out the
Gregorian agenda for the eradication of abuses, the moral reform
of the clergy, improvement of the pastoral ministry, and the
liberation of the Church from lay control.
Most of the English bishops who attended these assemblies made
genuine efforts to apply the conciliar programme in their own
dioceses, but at home they belonged to a different sort of world.
They were part of a long-established political and social structure in
which the activities of church and state were inextricably
intertwined; in which bishops and abbots were not only spiritual
pastors, but also royal councillors and administrators, landlords and
agents of local government; and in which laymen were not only
spiritual sheep, but also benefactors of monasteries and patrons of
churches, with important rights over them which the courts would
uphold. In this world, the reforming ideals of theologians, and the
sharp distinctions of the canonists, only slowly penetrated the
stubborn realities of power and patronage.
Collisions between the claims of the Gregorian canonists and
the advancing powers of the Norman and Angevin monarchy