Chapter III: Part 3

The only protest against the general distress came from London, and not from the aldermen or burghers, but from the voteless labouring people upon whom the whole burden of raising the city’s taxes had been thrown. Against this monstrous injustice William Longbeard FitzOsbert stood out as the spokesman of the poor of London, and died a martyr for their cause.

London’s political importance had been seen in the struggles against King Cnut and William the Conqueror. Its remarkable influence in national politics (an influence that endured to the middle of the nineteenth century) was manifest when London acclaimed Stephen as King of England in 1135. At the close of the twelfth century, London, with the civic charter it had just obtained from Richard, with its thirteen convent churches and more than a hundred parish churches within its boundaries, with its great cattle market at Smithfield and its growing riverside trade, was already prosperous and overcrowded. “The city was blessed with the healthiness of the air and the nature of its site, in the Christian religion, in the strength of its towers, the honour of its citizens and the purity of its women; it was happy in its sports and fruitful of high spirited men.” It had its darker side, but at that time “the only plagues were the intemperate drinking of foolish people and the frequent fires.”

Richard’s charter left to the citizens the business of assessing their own taxes, and in 1196 there was trouble over this matter; for in that year the city fathers decided that the large sums required by Archbishop Hubert for the king’s needs should be paid in full by the poorer craftsmen and labourers, who had no say in the matter.[23]

“And when the aldermen assembled according to usage in full hustings for the purpose of assessing the taxes, the rulers endeavoured to spare their own purses and to levy the whole from the poor.” (Roger of Hoveden.)

Whereupon up rose William Longbeard, the son of Osbert, and made his memorable protest against these rascally proceedings, to go down to history as the first popular agitator in England.

An exceptional man was this Longbeard, a man of commanding stature and great strength, ready witted, something of an orator and a lawyer, who “burning with zeal for righteousness and fair play made himself the champion of the poor,” holding that every man, rich or poor, should pay his share of the city’s burdens according to his means.

Longbeard was not of the labouring people himself. He was a member of the city council, though by no means a rich man. He had distinguished himself as a crusader in 1190, making the journey to Portugal against the Moors; and a vision of St. Thomas Becket had appeared to him and his fellow Londoners when their ship was beset by storms off the coast of Spain.

Longbeard was known to the king, and he was already hateful to the ruling class because he had declared that Richard was being defrauded by financial corruption of the money raised for the crown. He had also accused his brother of treason in 1194, but the case was not proved.

Richard was in Normandy in 1196, and Longbeard having banded together 15,000 men in London, under an oath that they would stick by him and each other, went to the king and laid their grievances before him. Richard heard the appeal sympathetically enough, for after all, as long as the money was forthcoming, he had no particular desire that the pockets of rich burghers should be spared at the expense of the poor, but left matters in the hands of Archbishop Hubert the justiciar. Longbeard returned to London, and with his 15,000[24] workmen in revolt, bid an open defiance to the justiciar.

Only a fragment of one of Longbeard’s speeches has been preserved, a solitary specimen of popular oratory in the twelfth century.[25]

Taking a passage from the prophet Isaiah for his text: “Therefore with joy shall ye draw water from the wells of the Saviour” (Isaiah xii, 3), the agitator delivers his message.

“I am,” he saith, “the saviour of the poor. You the poor, who have endured the hard hands of the rich, draw ye from my wells the waters of sound doctrine, and this with joy, for the time of your visitation is at hand. For I will divide the waters from the waters, and the People are the waters. I will divide the humble and faithful from such as are proud and froward. I will divide the just from the unjust, even as light from darkness.”

For a time Longbeard was too strong for the justiciar. Archbishop Hubert had no force at his disposal for the invasion of London, for a battle with Longbeard and his league.

At a great gathering of citizens, held in St. Paul’s Churchyard, the justiciar’s men sent to arrest Longbeard had been driven out of the city with violence. All that Hubert could do was to give orders for the arrest of any lesser citizens found outside London, and two small traders from the city actually were taken into custody at the town of Stamford on Mid-Lent Sunday, 1196, under this authority.

But the aldermen grew more and more frightened at Longbeard’s bold speeches and his big public meetings, and weakness and cowardice began to demoralise the league. The people, who had risen for “liberty and freedom,” fell away from their leader, and FitzOsbert was left with a comparatively small band to face the anger of the justiciar.

Backed up by the city fathers, Hubert’s officers again attempted to seize the agitator. Longbeard, hardly pressed, snatched an axe from one of his assailants--a citizen named Godfrey--and slew him; and then retreated, overwhelmed by numbers, to take refuge in the church of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. There was a right of sanctuary in this church, a right not to be denied to the commonest felon.

But what were rights of sanctuary to the justiciar--bent on hunting his prey to the death? He commanded Longbeard “to come out and abide by the law,” and gave orders to his men that, failing instant obedience, he was to be dragged out.

Longbeard’s answer was to climb up into the church tower, and thereupon Hubert ordered the tower to be set on fire, and this was done. And now the only chance of life for William Longbeard and his followers was to cut their way through the host of their enemies and make a bold rush for safety. It was a remote chance at the best, but sooner that than to perish in the burning tower.

At the very church door Longbeard was struck down--some say by Godfrey’s son--and his little company were quickly slain or taken prisoners. Loaded with chains, the once bold advocate of the poor of London, now badly hurt, was at once haled off to the Tower. Sentence was pronounced without delay of the law, William, the son of Osbert, was to be dragged to the elms at Tyburn and there hanged in chains.

A few days later--it was just before Easter--the wounded man was stripped naked, tried to the tail of a horse and dragged over the rough stones of the streets of London. He was dead before Tyburn was reached, but the poor broken body, on whom the full vengeance of the rich and mighty had been wreaked, was strung up in chains beneath the gallows elm all the same. Bravely had Longbeard withstood the rulers of the land in the day of his strength; now, when life had passed from him, his body was swinging in common contempt. And with him were nine of his followers hanged.

So died William, called Longbeard, son of Osbert, “for asserting the truth and maintaining the cause of the poor.” And since it is held that to be faithful to such a cause makes a man a martyr, people thought he deserved to be ranked with the martyrs. For a time multitudes--the very folk who had fallen away from their champion in the hour of battle and need--flocked to pay reverence to the ghastly, bloodstained corpse that hung at Tyburn, and pieces of the gibbet and of the bloodstained earth beneath were carried off and counted as sacred relics. All the great, heroic qualities of the man were recalled. He was accounted a saint. Miracles were alleged to take place when his relics were touched.

Then the dead man’s enemies were aroused, an alleged death-bed confession was published, wherein Longbeard was made out to be a sorry criminal. Not the least of the offences laid to his charge was that a woman, who was not his wife, had stood faithfully by the rebel, even when the church was on fire.

The times were rough. It is probable that Longbeard, crusader and fighting man, had sins enough to confess before death took him. But his traducers were silent as to these sins in the man’s lifetime. They waited until no answer could be given before uttering their miserable libels against the one courageous champion of the poor.

Longbeard had roused the common working people to make a stand against obvious oppression and injustice--there was the head and front of his offending, there was his crime; earning for him not only a felon’s death, but the loss of character, and the branding for all time with the contemptuous title “Demagogue.”

Yet in the slow building up of English liberties William FitzOsbert played his part, and laid down his life in the age-long struggle for freedom, as many a better has done.

In 1198, two years after the death of Longbeard, Hubert was compelled to resign the justiciarship. His monks at Canterbury, to whom the Church of St. Mary, in Cheapside, belonged, and who had no love for their archbishop,[26] indignant at the violation of sanctuary and the burning of their church, appealed to the king and to the pope, Innocent III. to make Hubert give up his political activities and confine himself to the work of an archbishop. In the same year a great council of the nation, led by St. Hugh of Lincoln, flatly refused a royal demand for money made by Hubert.

Innocent III. was against him, the great barons were against him, and Hubert resigned. But he held the archbishopric till 1205.

Stephen Langton and the Great Charter

1207–1228

AUTHORITIES: Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris; Walter of Coventry; Ralph of Coggeshall (Rolls Series); _Letters of Innocent III._; Rymer’s _Fœdera_; K. Norgate--_John Lackland_; Stubbs--_Select Charters_; Mark Pattison--_Stephen Langton_ (Lives of the English Saints); C. E. Maurice--_Stephen Langton_.

STEPHEN LANGTON AND THE GREAT CHARTER

1207–1228

When Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury--the old Justiciar of Richard I.--ended his long life of public service on July 12th, A.D. 1205, King John exclaimed, with frank satisfaction, “Now for the first time I am King of England!” As long as Hubert was alive there was one man strong enough to restrain the king, and the primate and William the Marshall together had done something to guard England against the foulest and most ruthless tyranny of all its kings. To the end William the Marshall was a brave and patriotic statesman, but he served the crown rather than the people.

On Hubert’s death John meant to have for archbishop a creature of his will, and he was defeated by Pope Innocent III., who, dismissing the appeal of the monks of Canterbury for Reginald, their subprior, and John’s appeal for his nominee, John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich, proposed the English-born Cardinal, Stephen Langton, “than whom there was no man greater in the Roman court, nor was there any equal to him in character and in learning.” The monks consented to Stephen’s appointment, but John’s reply was a flat refusal, and when on June 7th, 1207, Pope Innocent proceeded to consecrate Stephen Langton Archbishop of Canterbury, the king’s rage broke out. Innocent’s wise judgment gave England one of its noblest and greatest archbishops, and the service wrought by Langton for the liberties of England’s people was of deep and lasting value. But the immediate price to be paid for later profit was heavy.

John met Langton’s consecration by seizing the estates of Canterbury, driving the chapter into exile, and proclaiming that anyone who acknowledged Stephen as archbishop should be accounted a public enemy. The remonstrances and warnings of the pope were disregarded, and in March, 1208, all England was laid under an interdict, and there was an end to the public ministrations of religion in the country for six years--to the bitter distress of the common people.

Immediately the interdict came into force, John declared all the property of the clergy, secular or monastic, to be confiscated, and there was no one to stay his hand from speedy spoliation. For the barons were willing enough to see the clergy robbed and the king’s treasury filled at the expense of the Church, and of the bishops only two were left in England--Peter des Roches, of Winchester, and John de Gray, of Norwich--and both these were willing tools of the king. Never did John enjoy his royal will and pleasure with such unhindered ferocity as in that year 1209. Had the barons stood by the Church they might have saved England unspeakable miseries, and as it was the laity were soon in as sorry a plight as the clergy, “and it seemed as though the king was courting the hatred of every class of his subjects, so burdensome was he to both rich and poor.”[27]

In 1211 came Pandulf from Pope Innocent with suggestions for peace. Let the king restore the property of the clergy, and receive Archbishop Langton, with his kinsmen and friends, and the other exiled bishops “fairly and in peace” and the interdict should be withdrawn. John declined to receive Langton as archbishop, and Pandulf, in the presence of the whole council, pronounced the papal sentence of excommunication on the king, absolving all his subjects from allegiance, and commanding their obedience to whomsoever should be sent as John’s successor.

John treated the excommunication with cheerful contempt, and pursued the evil tenour of his way. But his position was precarious, for the barons--especially the northern barons--were plotting his overthrow, and the pope had decided that Philip of France should depose John and reign in his stead. John was driven to capitulate to the pope at the end of 1212, and in May, 1213, Pandulf arrived, and the invasion by Philip was stopped, to the exceeding annoyance of the French king.

John met the papal legate at Ewell, near Dover, and in the presence of “the great men of the realm,” swore to carry out all Innocent’s demands, promising that Stephen should be received and recompense paid to the clergy for their losses. Then the King of England formally surrendered “to God and to the Holy Mother Church of Rome, and to Pope Innocent and his Catholic successors,” the whole realm of England and Ireland, “with all rights thereunto appertaining, to receive them back and hold them thenceforth as a feudatory of God and the Roman Church.” He swore fealty to the pope for both realms, and added that he would send a yearly tribute of 1,000 marks. At the same time John declared that the act of homage was voluntary, done, “not at the driving of force nor the compulsion of fear, but of our own good free will and by the common counsel of our barons.”

There is no evidence that the pope asked for this abject submission, but there are good reasons why John desired that political protection of the papacy which he obtained by the act of homage.[28] (Matthew Paris has a story that John was willing to pay homage and tribute to the Mohammedan Emir of Morocco in order to effect an alliance with some foreign power.)

The barons themselves appealed to the pope two years later to take their part against John, on the ground that it was only by their compulsion the king had been brought to pay homage to Rome, and though they were then to curse the papal overlordship they had helped procure, and England was to come to regard John’s surrender to the pope as “a thing to be detested for all time,” in that year 1213 the protection of the pope was invaluable to John and, as some thought, to the country. “For matters were in such a strait, and so great was the fear on all sides, that there was no more ready way of avoiding the imminent peril--perhaps no other way at all. For when once he had put himself under apostolical protection and made his realms a part of the patrimony of St. Peter, there was not in the Roman world a sovereign who durst attack him or would invade his lands, in such awe was Pope Innocent held above all his predecessors for many years past.” (Walter of Coventry.)

The long war being at an end Stephen Langton and four of the exiled bishops landed in June, and Stephen was now to do the work of archbishop, the work he had been solemnly consecrated to six years before.

John met the primate at Winchester, and swore on the gospels in the cathedral “that he would cherish, defend and maintain the holy Church and her ordained ministers; that he would restore the good laws of his forefathers, especially St. Edward’s, rendering to all men their rights; and that before the next Easter he would make full restitution of all property which had been taken away in connection with the interdict.” Then Stephen formally absolved the king from excommunication and gave him the kiss of peace, to the general rejoicing.

And now England was to see what sort of archbishop it was Pope Innocent had sent to Canterbury. With a king as cruel as he was vigorous, and as astute as he was unscrupulous, with barons who knew neither loyalty nor patriotism. Archbishop Stephen, out of such materials, was to win for his native land the Great Charter, and to have it written in black and white that all who would might read the several duties of king and people. In August Langton, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, read to the barons the old coronation charter of Henry I., and reminded them that the liberties promised in that document were to be recovered. “With very great joy the barons swore they would fight for these liberties, even unto death if it were needful, and the archbishop promised that he would help with all his might.” Thus within three months of his setting foot in England Langton had started the movement for the Great Charter.

But not with king and barons only had the archbishop to deal. There were endless difficulties with the clergy concerning the restitution of their property, and the payment of compensation to be settled. And above all there was Nicholas, the papal legate, in England, usurping the primate’s functions, filling up vacant bishoprics and churches, regardless of the rights of the Church and of the archbishop. Nicholas was recalled to Rome when the interdict was finally removed, and in November, 1214, John made a public proclamation that free and undisturbed election to all the churches in his realm should be allowed henceforth. This was an attempt on the king’s part to have the Church on his side against the barons, for the battle was beginning between John and the barons which was to be fought to a bitter end.

John’s last campaign to recover the lost Angevine provinces for the English crown ended in disaster, and he returned to England in 1214 to face the full discontent of the barons whom he had harassed and insulted from the day he came to the throne, and of a country suffering from “the evil customs which the king’s father and brother had raised up for the oppression of the Church and realm, together with the abuses which the king himself had added thereto.”

The national grievances were enormous and intolerable. The whole 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.)

Again in 1252 Henry summoned the bishops, and tried to coerce them into giving him money by producing a papal mandate, authorising the payment of a full tithe of all Church revenues to the king for the space of three years. To make matters worse, “payment was not to be made on the old assessment, but on a new assessment conducted with strict inquiry, at the will and judgment of the royal agents and extortioners, who would seek their own profit before the king’s.” The excuse was that the king was about to start on a pilgrimage. Grosseteste was then an old man, but he blazed out at this monstrous demand, especially when the king’s messengers went on to explain that the tithe for two years might be paid at once, and that the third year’s tithe could also be raised before the king actually started. “By our Lady,” said the sturdy bishop of Lincoln, “what does all this mean? You assume that we shall agree to this damnable levy, and go on arguing from premises that have not been admitted. God forbid that we should thus bend our knee to Baal.”

The king’s half-brother, Ethelmar, bishop-elect of Winchester, deprecated resistance to the will of pope and king, and urged that the French had consented to pay a similar demand. “Yes,” said the Bishop of Ely, “and it brought their king no good.” “For the very reason the French have yielded must we resist,” replied Grosseteste. “To do a thing twice makes it a custom, and if we pay too, we shall have no peace. For my own part, I say plainly that I will not pay this evil demand, lest the king himself as well as us should incur the heavy wrath of God.” The other bishops followed Grosseteste’s lead, and the old man went on to advise them to pray the king to think of his eternal salvation, and to restrain his rash impulses. Henry naturally declined to send an independent remonstrance to the pope against the mandate, and the bishops decided they could do nothing in the way of granting this special tithe. But they were hard put to it, “between the pulling of the king and the pushing of the pope.”

All Grosseteste’s dealings with the king show the same firm resolution to stop the royal extortion, and to insist on the fulfilment of the charters of liberties obtained from the crown. He carries on the work of Stephen Langton, always backing up the unsuccessful efforts of the good St. Edmund Rich (Archbishop of Canterbury, 1234–1240) to keep Henry faithful to his word, and prepares the way for the great campaign of his friend Simon of Montfort.[37] The very worst period of Henry’s long reign is covered by Grosseteste’s episcopal life. Hubert de Burgh’s wise rule was over by 1232, and Peter des Roches and the horde of aliens were fleecing the country for the next twenty years. It is not till after Grosseteste’s death that the barons dealt with Henry’s misrule to any purpose.

At the great council held in London in 1248, at which Grosseteste was present, a full list of the national grievances is given: the lavish waste of the wealth of the country on foreigners, the ruin of trade by the arbitrary seizure of goods by the king and his agents, the robbery of poor fishermen by royal authority, “so that they think it safer to trust themselves to the stormy waves and seek a further shore,” and the keeping bishoprics and abbacies vacant so that the crown may enjoy the revenues therefrom, are the chief causes of complaint. They were not new grievances, for the most part, and they were not to die with Henry III., all charters and royal promises notwithstanding.

Added to the common wrongs of Henry’s wretched misrule were the papal extortions, directly encouraged by the king. In return for papal mandates directing churchmen to supply the king with money, what could Henry--himself the most devoted servant of the papacy--do but help the pope to get what he could out of England? The wealth of England was held to be of fabulous amount at Rome, and popes beset by fierce ungodly emperors naturally turned to it in their need as to a treasury.

But the thing was intolerable to Grosseteste. He had studied in Paris, he welcomed Dominican and Franciscan friars from the continent as no other prelate did, and had no objection to foreigners _per se_. But the pope claimed the revenues of church livings for boys and presented illiterates to benefices--to the obvious degradation of the Church in England. Grosseteste was always willing enough to raise what money he could for the holy see, but appoint unworthy and incompetent clerks to livings in his diocese, that he would not do--not for any pope.

The country groaned under the biting avarice of the Roman see, as it bled under the vampire politics of Peter des Roches and his needy, greedy crew of Bretons and Poitevins.

What it all meant to England Matthew Paris has told us in his description of things in 1237:

“Now was simony practised without shame and usurers on various pleas openly extorted money from the common people and lesser folk; charity expired, the liberty of the Church withered away, religion was trampled to the dust. Daily did illiterate persons of the lowest class, armed with bulls from Rome, burst forth into threats; and, in spite of the privileges handed down to us from good men of old, they feared not to plunder the revenues consecrated by our holy forefathers for the service of religion, the support of the poor, and the nourishment of strangers, but thundering out their excommunications they quickly and violently carried off what they demanded. And if those who were wronged and robbed sought refuge by appealing or pleading their privileges, they were at once suspended and excommunicated by a papal writ. Thus mourning and lamentation were heard on all sides, and many exclaimed with heart-rending sobs, ‘It were better to die than to behold the sufferings of our country and its saints. Woe to England, once the chief of provinces, the mistress of nations, the mirror of the Church, the exemplar of religion, and now brought under tribute,--trampled on by worthless men, and the prey of men of low degree.’”

The arrival of Otho, in 1237, a papal legate (on the request of Henry), far from remedying, increased the contemporary distress. For though Otho was a discreet man, he was more eager to get money for Rome than to deal with the oppression that plagued England, and when he did give advice it was spurned by those who saw his grasping hands. Archbishop Edmund was particularly vexed at having a papal legate set over him, and what with one disappointment and another finally gave up in despair the task of guiding the English Church, and in 1240 went to die at Pontigny, where his predecessors Anselm and Thomas had lived in exile.

Grosseteste stuck to his post, and the Franciscans and Dominicans, whom he aided, poured in oil and wine on the wounds of the Church folk, and revived religion in the country.

Grosseteste fought the extortionate papal demands for Church revenues all the time. In 1239, with his fellow bishops, he tells Otho plainly that the Church is drained dry by the grasping importunity of Rome. Otho left in 1241, and that same year saw Boniface of Savoy, a handsome, soldierly man appointed to Canterbury as St. Edmund’s successor. The following year came a new extortioner from Rome, named Martin, an altogether inferior person to Otho, but with all the legate’s powers of suspension and excommunication. His confiscations and rapacity provoked a remonstrance to the pope even from Henry. Martin at last, in 1245, had to fly for his life from England, and when Grosseteste subsequently had a calculation made of the English Church revenues enjoyed by foreigners, it was found that the incomes of foreign clerks appointed by Pope Innocent IV. amounted to more than 70,000 marks--more than treble the king’s income. And all this was done in spite of refusals by Grosseteste to appoint illiterates or allow boys to hold benefices.

The barons sided with the Church against Martin, and drew up a long protest which they sent to the pope at the council of Lyons in 1245. In this they complained:--That the pope, not content with Peter’s Pence, which had been paid cheerfully from old times, wrung money from the Church against the law of the realm, without the king’s permission; and that the pope wrongfully put ignorant, covetous, or absentee Italians into English livings notwithstanding his own promises, the rights of patrons, and the privileges of the English clergy. A year later the protest was repeated with another item objecting to the pope’s claim to recall former charters.

Innocent IV.’s answer to this was to threaten to dethrone Henry as he had dethroned his brother-in-law, the Emperor Frederick. The king weakly said no more, the barons, without a leader, were equally silent, and the Church continued “to sate the greed of Rome.”