2018 Lane Lois 1360779 Ethe
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Clerks and Commissioners The Role of Bishops in the Government of England, c. 1050-1087 Lane, Lois Eliza Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 27. Sep. 2021 CLERKS AND COMMISSIONERS: THE ROLE OF BISHOPS IN THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND, c.1050–1087 Lois Lane A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, King's College London December 2017 1 Abstract Bishops played a crucial part in the government of England and in the consolidation of the Anglo-Norman regime after 1066. Frank Barlow and H. R. Loyn, among others, highlighted the close relationship between William I and his prelates and yet, in spite of their fundamental importance, many of the Conqueror's bishops remain shadowy figures, especially those who began their careers as secular clerks rather than monks. This thesis re-evaluates the political and administrative activities of the Anglo-Norman episcopate, setting them within a longer tradition of episcopal involvement in lay administration and in a wider European context. In particular, it analyses the contribution made by bishops to the Domesday survey, especially in the south-western dioceses, and asks what their involvement reveals about the wider political role of the episcopate in late eleventh-century England. Employing evidence drawn from royal and episcopal acta, from Great Domesday Book, and especially from the Exon Domesday manuscript — newly digitised, edited and translated as part of the AHRC-funded project, 'Exon: The Domesday Survey of South-West England' (grant number: AH/L013975/1, dir. J. C. Crick, S. Baxter and P. Stokes) — it argues that bishops helped to shape the Domesday process at every stage, and that their involvement at a provincial level can be detected in the text of Exon Domesday itself. It reconsiders the transformation of the English episcopate in the 1070s and 1080s, suggesting that the replacement of native bishops by men from the continent may have been a symptom of the administrative challenges faced by the new Norman regime, as much as the product of ecclesiastical reform. These conclusions are set against the backdrop of a flexible and pragmatic system of local government in the shires, where bishops played a significant and lasting role, and a royal chapel which effectively prepared clerks and chaplains for episcopal office. 2 Table of Contents Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 4 Abbreviations 5 List of Tables and Figures 6 Introduction 7 Chapter 1: Episcopal Recruitment and the Royal Chapel 33 Chapter 2: Bishops in Local and National Government 92 Chapter 3: Episcopal Exon? Reading Between the Lines of 140 Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3500 Chapter 4: Hierarchy and Headings in the Editing of Great 202 Domesday Book Chapter 5: An English Reichskirchensystem? The Anglo- 243 Norman Episcopate in a Continental Context Conclusion 290 Bibliography 298 3 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I am indebted to my supervisors, Professor Julia Crick and Dr Chris Lewis, who have shown more faith in my research than I have sometimes felt myself. Thank you to Julia for her academic and personal support, her boundless enthusiasm, and for giving me so much of her time, and to Chris for his good humour, attention to detail, and encyclopaedic knowledge of the Domesday corpus. Without their encouragement and expertise, the process of completing this thesis would have been far less rewarding than it has been. I am very grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the three-year studentship which produced this thesis, attached to the project 'Exon: The Domesday Survey of South-West England' (grant number: AH/L013975/1, dir. J. C. Crick, S. Baxter and P. Stokes). Thank you to Professor Stephen Baxter, Dr Frank Thorn and Dr Francisco Alvarez Lopez for sharing work with me in advance of publication, and to all the members of the project team for their historical, textual and palaeographical insights. I would like to thank the teachers, friends and colleagues in the Department of History at King's College, London, who have provided such a supportive and collegiate working environment over the past three years, especially Professor David Carpenter, Dr Alice Taylor, Dr Rory Naismith, Dr Alex Sapoznik, Dr Daniel Hadas, Professor Richard Vinen, Dr Janel Fontaine, Dr Colleen Curran, Dr Simon Parsons, Alex Bowmer and Angelica Agredo. They have all helped to make the many hours spent on the eighth floor of the Strand campus less lonely and more productive. I am also grateful to the many friends outside King's who have taken an interest in my work and welfare: in particular Tom Messenger, Grace Barnett, Ed Taylor, Sarah Yardley and Natalie Kulenicz. Finally, thank you to my parents for all their love and support: the proof- reading, pep-talking and late-night phone calls. It is to them that this thesis is dedicated, with love. 4 Abbreviations Domesday Book Domesday Book, ed. John Morris, 35 vols. (Chichester: Phillimore, 1973–86) EDB Exon Domesday Book, ed. and trans. Frank Thorn, 'Exon: The Domesday Survey of South-West England', <https://exon- stg.dighum.kcl.ac.uk/digipal/manuscripts/1/texts/view> GDB Great Domesday Book, Alecto County Edition of Domesday Book, general editor R.W.H. Erskine; editor-in-chief Ann Williams, 31 vols. (London: Alecto Historical Editions, 1987–92) ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, <http://www.oxforddnb.com/> 5 List of tables and figures 1) English dioceses 1042–1087 25 2) Number of priests in Domesday Book by County 70 3) Chaplains of William I 80 4) Number of persons addressed in the writs of William I 101 5) Chronological distribution of address clause formulae in the 111 writs of William I 6) Geographical distribution of address clause formulae in the 116 writs of William I 7) Hundredal order of Exon entries in the fiefs of selected 158 tenants-in-chief 8) Hundredal order of entries in the fief of the count of Mortain in 164 Cornwall 9) Numbers of sheep in Exon Fiefs 185 10) Numbers of sheep on demesne and subinfeudated manors of 186 Bishop Osbern and Sheriff Baldwin in Devon 11) Average corrections per page for sampled tenants-in-chief 189 12) Average corrections per page for sampled tenants-in-chief 190 13) Average corrections per line for each scribe 193 14) Exon rubrics by scribe for each county 208 15) Exon rubrics for ecclesiastical tenants-in-chief 211 16) Exon Rubrics for lay tenants-in-chief 211 17) Order of episcopal chapters in Great Domesday Book 230 6 Introduction Bishops played a crucial role in the government of England and the consolidation of the Anglo-Norman regime after 1066. They served the king as royal justices and administrators, tutored his children, presided over meetings of the shire court, and organised and even led military expeditions on his behalf. The close relationship between William I and his prelates was highlighted by Frank Barlow and H. R. Loyn among others.1 Barlow characterised the Conqueror's bishops as 'the king's agents in the provinces', Loyn as 'men capable of bringing administrative order into their territorial dioceses'.2 Both viewed the mid-eleventh-century English episcopate as rather old-fashioned, behind the intellectual curve of the papal reform movement, 'monarchic in a revolutionary world', and appointed by a king whose ecclesiastical instincts were naturally conservative.3 Recent decades have witnessed an increase in scholarly interest in the figure of the bishop across Continental Europe. In an essay originally published in 2000, and translated into English in 2011, Timothy Reuter characterised millennial Europe as 'a Europe of bishops'.4 This influential article stimulated 1 Frank Barlow, The English Church, 1000–1066: A Constitutional History (London: Longman, 1963); Frank Barlow, The English Church, 1066–1154: A History of the Anglo-Norman Church (London: Longman, 1979); H. R. Loyn, The English Church, 940–1154 (London: Longman, 2000); H. R. Loyn, 'William's Bishops: Some Further Thoughts', Anglo-Norman Studies, 10 (1987), 223– 35. 2 Barlow, The English Church, 1000–1066, p. 65; Loyn, 'William's Bishops', p. 226. 3 Loyn, 'William's Bishops', p. 227; see also Barlow, The English Church, 1066–1154, p. 183. 4 Timothy Reuter, 'Ein Europa der Bischöfe. Das Zeitalter Burchards von Worms',