Trial by Ordeal by Jury in Medieval England, Or Saints and Sinners in Literature and Law

Chapter 2 Trial by Ordeal by Jury in Medieval England, or Saints and Sinners in Literature and Law

Elizabeth Papp Kamali1

With a vacancy in the coveted archbishopric of York in 1140, several candidates, Henry de Sully and William Fitzherbert included, vied for the title. Henry’s election was quashed, due in part to his conflicting duties as Abbot of Fécamp. A lengthy and bitter contest ensued, with accusations of impropriety lodged against the remaining candidate, William, by the Cistercian luminary Bernard of Clairvaux, in correspondence with successive popes.2 Among other things, Bernard accused William of simony and unchaste living. When Bernard died in August 1153, the cloud over William’s candidacy lifted, and in December, he finally secured his archiepiscopal title. As fate would have it, less than a month after his triumphal return to York, William himself died, reputedly from poison in his chalice.3

1 I offer my thanks to the participants in the Medieval Studies Seminar at Harvard, especial- ly Sean Gilsdorf, Piotr Górecki, Intisar Rabb, and Daniel Lord Smail, as well as Rabia Belt, Glenn Cohen, Andrew Crespo, Christine Desan, Charles Donahue, John Goldberg, Thomas Green, Richard Helmholz, Genevieve Lakier, Adriaan Lanni, Thomas McSweeney, John Rappaport, Daphna Renan, Jocelyn Simonson, Henry Smith, and my research assistant, Michael Reiterman. Sincere gratitude is owed as well to the participants in the Harvard Law School Faculty Workshop, and to Dr. Bruce Barker-Benfield, Senior Assistant Librarian in the Department of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, who examined MS Dodsworth 125 on my behalf. 2 On the controversy surrounding William’s election as archbishop, see David Knowles, “The Case of Saint William of York,” The Cambridge Historical Journal 5, no. 2 (1936), 162–77, 212–4; Reginald L. Poole, “The Appointment and Deprivation of St. William, Archbishop of York,” The English Historical Review 45, no. 178 (1930), 273–81; C. H. Talbot, “New Documents in the Case of Saint William of York,” The Cambridge Historical Journal 10, no. 1 (1950), 1–15; Watkin Williams, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (Manchester: 1935), 167–76. 3 For an account of William’s life by the fourteenth-century Dominican friar Thomas Stubbs, see The Historians of the Church of York and Its Archbishops, ed. James Raine, vol. 2 (London: 1886), 396–7. For a brief biography, see Janet Burton, “William of York (d. 1154),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: 2004). For a chronology of William’s death and canonization and an introduction to the later Whitsuntide Commemorations in his memory, see Nigel K. Tringham, “The Whitsuntide Commemoration of St William of York: A Note,”

William’s death marked a new beginning for York Minster, with regard to both its physical footprint and its reputation vis-à-vis its great rival to the south, Canterbury. During the tenure of William’s successor, Roger de Pont L’Évêque, York Minster was rebuilt. Roger, however, caught the ire of Canterbury’s Thomas Becket after having the audacity to crown Henry the Young King, heir apparent to Henry II, in York in 1170, a privilege normally reserved for Canterbury.4 Becket, in turn, excommunicated Roger, but soon after met his own earthly end. By 1173, Becket was canonized—a rival saint for a rival city— as was William’s old nemesis, Bernard of Clairvaux, a year later. Perhaps not coincidentally, within a few years miracles began to be reported in York, cen- tered around the tomb of the now Blessed William, a site of popular veneration by the 1170s.5 From 1177 onwards, miracles at William’s tomb gathered pace.6 According to one such miracle story, the focal point of this essay, William healed the hand of a woman condemned to death after undergoing trial by hot iron. In some instances by means of holy oil oozing from his tomb, William reportedly healed the blind and deaf, the crippled and maimed, and even a woman experiencing digestive difficulties after inadvertently swallowing a frog baked into Eucharistic bread (panem vitae)—an ordeal, no doubt, all its own, albeit of the amphibian variety.7 By 1180, toward the end of Roger’s time as archbishop, a cult had formed around William’s memory as York consciously developed a new civic order, visually represented in the city’s infrastructure by a chapel dedicated to William on a new bridge over the river Ouse, the site of his first miracle in 1154.8

Records of Early English Drama 14, no. 2 (1989), 10–12. On the trial of Osbert of Bayeux for the alleged poisoning of William, see R. H. Helmholz, “The Early History of the Grand Jury and the Canon Law,” The University of Chicago Law Review 50, no. 2 (1983), 618–9; Adrian Morey, “Canonist Evidence in the Case of St. William of York,” The Cambridge Historical Journal 10, no. 3 (1952), 352–3. For letters to Pope Adrian IV regarding Osbert’s pending case, see The Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot (Cambridge: 1967), ed. Z. N. Brooke, Adrian Morey, and C. N. L. Brooke, 164–5; The Letters of John of Salisbury, ed. W. J. Millor and H. E. Butler, vol. 1 (London: 1955), 26–27. 4 Rosalind M. T. Hill and Christopher N. L. Brooke, “From 627 until the Early Thirteenth Century,” in A History of York Minster, ed. G. E. Aylmer and Reginald Cant (Oxford: 1977), 38–40. 5 Christopher Norton, St William of York (York: 2006), 150 ff. 6 See ibid., 165–6; Ellen K. Rentz, “Castles for St. William: The Late Medieval Commemoration of York’s Local Saint,” Viator 43, no. 2 (2012), 115. 7 For the Latin accounts of these miracles and others, see Raine, Historians, vol. 2, 531–43. 8 On the development of William’s cult, see Sarah Rees Jones, “Cities and Their Saints in England, circa 1150–1300: The Development of Bourgeois Values in the Cults of Saint William