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William of Newburgh and Hubert Walter

William of Newburgh and Hubert Walter

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English Historical Review EHR(N1)/0013–8266/3064/1275 ᭧ Oxford University Press 2004

The Historian as Judge: William of Newburgh and

OF all the histories written in Plantagenet , William of Newburgh’s History of the English1 is the one which has most impressed modern historians, and not only thanks to the Prologue with its devastating critique of ’s pseudo-history as ‘wanton and shameless lying’.2 William of Newburgh has been almost universally praised for his incisive critical acumen, impartiality and capacity for independent judgement.3 According to Nancy Partner, ‘his acuity and freshness of thought’, ‘his unusual willingness to talk about testimony, plausibility, interpretation, and explanation’ all make him appear to modern historians as though he were one of us, ‘a distant, honored and familiar colleague’.4 For him, however, – or so he said – history was a stroll offering mental relaxation from the more taxing disciplines of theology and scriptural study.5 A of Newburgh Priory (fifteen miles north of ), a close friend of the of Byland and Rievaulx Abbeys, author of a commentary on the Song of Songs and of some sermons, he was by far the most religious-minded of later twelfth-century English historians.6 As the German scholar, Rudolf Jahncke, pointed out long ago, he judged men by strict Christian moral standards – and did so even-handedly, applying those standards to the English as well as to French and Germans, to churchmen as well as to

1. The principal edition remains William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, ed. R. Howlett Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, vols 1 and 2 (Rolls Ser., London, 1884–5). To facilitate reference to other versions such as the edition and translation of Book One by P. G. Walsh and M. J. Kennedy, William of Newburgh: The History of English Affairs Book I (Warminster, 1988), I shall cite William’s text as WN and by book and chapter. Although the work is conventionally known as The History of English Affairs, the earliest manuscript, BL Stowe 62, which had belonged to Newburgh, bears the title Historia Anglorum. 2. The prologue could well, as Gransden suggested, once have been a separate tract, ‘’s Reputation as an Historian in Medieval England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xxxii (1981), repr. in A. Gransden, Legends, Traditions and History in Medieval England (London, 1992), pp. 20–2. 3. See, for example, Howlett, Chronicles, i. p. liii; K. Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings, 2 vols (London, 1887), ii. p. 444; Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550–c.1307 (London, 1974), pp. 219, 264; R. B. Dobson, The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190 (York, 1974), p. 24; Frank Barlow, (London, 1986), pp. 7–8; Walsh and Kennedy, William of Newburgh, p. 16 and back cover; Janet Burton, The Monastic Order in Yorkshire 1069–1215 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 295; Amaury Chauou, L’idéologie Plantagenêt (Rennes, 2001), p. 68. 4. Nancy Partner, Serious Entertainments (Chicago, 1977), pp. 51–2. 5. ‘Spatiari ad tempus tanquam pro quadam ex facilitate operis recreatione ingenii’, WN, Prefatory Letter to the of Rievaulx. 6. For a revealing analysis of the manner in which religion informed his history, see M. J. Kennedy, ‘“Faith in the one God flowed over you from the Jews, the sons of the patriarchs and the prophets”: William of Newburgh’s Writings on Anti-Jewish Violence’, Anglo-Norman Studies, xxv 2002 (2003), 139–52.

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1276 THE HISTORIAN AS JUDGE: laymen.7 In Nancy Partner’s words, he worked within a tradition which demanded that ‘an historian attempt to be a higher critic and judge who “reads” morally as he records’ and she identified his sharp criticisms of prelates involved in secular politics as a recurring theme.8 Her remarks are fully borne out by what he had to say about Roger of ,9 Roger of Pont L’Evêque, ,10 du Puiset, ,11 William Longchamp, ,12 Walter of Coutances, and archbishop of Rouen,13 Geoffrey, archbishop of York14 and Robert, abbot of Caen.15 When writing about all these prelates William showed himself keenly aware of the two masters topos; in his view ‘the bishops of our day’ were fixated on the world.16 He was writing during Richard I’s reign, during the high-point of cooperation between ‘church and state’ in England. In Richard’s reign, four ecclesiastics were chief in succession: Hugh du Puiset, William Longchamp, Walter of Coutances and Hubert Walter. No less than fourteen bishops and four acted as royal justices, although only seven (including the four chief ) did so with any frequency.17 This was in flagrant violation of one of the canons of the Third Lateran Council of 1179 which re-inforced earlier legislation by decreeing deposition for clergy who undertook secular jurisdiction. William of Newburgh knew this very well. One of the few documents he included in his history was a full text of these Lateran decrees.18 Although some clerks such as Ralph of Diceto and

7. Rudolf Jahncke, Guilelmus Neubrigensis. Ein pragmatischer Geschichtsschreiber des zwölften Jahrhunderts (Jena, 1912), pp. 121–2. William it was, for example, who referred to John Lackland as ‘nature’s enemy’, WN IV. 34. 8. Partner, Serious Entertainments, pp. 52, 85–94. 9. He devoted virtually the whole of Book I chapter 6 to the bishop, arguing that as in regno a rege secundus Roger deeply offended God and was punished by being driven mad, ‘his heart poisoned by the mundani virus amoris’. His is the earliest surviving account of the famous story of how attracted Henry I’s attention by the speed with which he could get through Mass. 10. Book III chapter 5 is almost entirely devoted to Roger of York. For reasons why a canon of Newburgh might have been particularly hostile to this archbishop, see J. Gillingham, ‘Two Yorkshire Historians Compared: Roger of Howden and William of Newburgh’, Haskins Society Journal, xii (2003), 15–37, at 28–34. 11. On the ambition of Hugh du Puiset, WN IV. 4–5, citing Matthew 6:24, ‘No man can serve two masters’. ‘It is certain that the King of Heaven does not approve, nor accept, any half-service. What will be the fate of a bishop who attends wholly to the business of this world, the court and public assemblies?’ cf. WN V. 10–11. 12. WN IV. 14, 17, V. 29. 13. WN III. 8 (though he adopts a warmer tone in WN IV. 15). 14. WN II. 22. 15. WN V.19. 16. WN V. 10. 17. R. V. Turner, The English Judiciary in the Age of Glanvill and Bracton, c.1176–1239 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 40, 75. 18. WN III. 3.

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WILLIAM OF NEWBURGH AND HUBERT WALTER 1277 defended the practice,19 William emphatically did not. ‘In our time’, he wrote, ‘pastoral virtue has so diminished that among ecclesiastical pastors rare indeed is the one who understands or seeks God, while almost all hunger after material possessions’.20 In the light of his general verdict on the churchman of his day, it comes as something of a shock to see what William made of the most powerful of all English prelates: Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canter- bury from 1193 to 1205, the prelate who, in Christopher Cheney’s words, ‘towers above his English contemporaries’.21 Of the archbishop’s power in worldly affairs there can be no doubt, even if ’s story of John rejoicing when he heard of Hubert’s death – ‘Now for the first time I am king of England’ – is apocryphal.22 In Gerald de Barri’s eyes, Hubert was the archetypal secular-minded prelate, like a fish out of water when not immersed in worldly business. Admittedly, Gerald’s thwarted ambition meant that he had his own special reason to dislike Hubert – indeed the main subject of the Retractions which he wrote c.1217 was precisely his earlier treatment of Hubert. In the Retractions, he admitted that he had previously written about him in bitterness and a desire for vengeance, but even here Gerald insisted that Hubert was less interested in spiritual than in secular matters – though he now put a positive gloss on this by saying that he had been an effective restraint on the King and an obstacle to tyranny, as became apparent from what happened in England after his death in 1205.23 Despite his hostility towards powerful and secular-minded prelates, William wrote about Hubert Walter in extraordinarily positive terms. According to William, no sooner had Hubert received the pallium as archbishop than ‘he took the habit of a canon of Merton, manifesting his religious cast of mind by his outer garment.24 He managed to be agreeable to the monks of , whom the excessive zeal of his predecessor, Archbishop Baldwin, had embittered, yet he achieved this

19. Radulfi de Diceto Decani Londiniensis Opera Historica, 2 vols, ed. W. Stubbs (Rolls Ser., London, 1876), i.435, ii.77; Letter 84 in Peter of Blois, Opera Omnia, 4 vols, ed. J. A. Giles (Oxford, 1846–7), i. 252–5. The subject is magisterially discussed in C. R. Cheney, From Becket to Langton (Manchester, 1956), pp. 21–6. 20. WN IV. 27. The context here is the quarrel between Geoffrey of York and Hugh of Durham. 21. Cheney, Becket to Langton, p. 32. Partner did not consider the case of Hubert Walter, the powerful prelate whom William did not condemn. 22. Matthew Paris, Historia Anglorum, ed. F. Madden (Rolls Ser., London, 1866–9), ii.104. For comment C. R. Cheney, Hubert Walter (London, 1967), p. 87. 23. Gerald, ‘De Invectionibus’, ed. W. S. Davies, Y Cymmrodor, xxx (1920), 97; Retractiones in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, 6 vols, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock and G. F. Warner (Rolls Ser., London, 1861–91), i. 426–7. On the date of composition of the Retractions see Robert Bartlett, 1146–1223 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 220–1. Coggeshall reckoned he restrained Richard I’s rapacity, Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. J. Stevenson (Rolls Ser., London, 1875), pp. 92–3. 24. WN IV. 35. William, an Augustinian canon, is the only source for this association between Hubert and an Augustinian house. See Cheney, Hubert Walter, pp. 51–2 for the suggestion that the link was one of confraternity, and cf. Cheney, Becket to Langton, p. 39. On Hubert’s piety, Robert Bartlett, ‘The Hagiography of Angevin England’, in Thirteenth Century England V (Woodbridge, 1995), 51–2.

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1278 THE HISTORIAN AS JUDGE: without detracting from Baldwin’s honour.’25 Although William must have known that Hubert took personal command of the siege of Marlborough in February 1194, he made no mention of it, confining himself to describing the attacks on John’s castles as ‘just and necessary’.26 In reporting that Hubert was left in charge of the government of England when Richard returned to a few months later, he referred to him in matter of fact but positive fashion as vir industrius.27 As a northerner, William might have been thought to resent the way in which Hubert carried out a visitation in the province of York in 1195–6. Indeed, he observed that the , as chief justiciar and as , went to York ‘to demonstrate the glory of the two powers’, and that when he summoned all the prelates of the province to a council, none protested

either because they were disloyal to their own metropolitan (Geoffrey of York being overseas at the time) or because they were stricken with terror. . .. They might have tried to avail themselves of that privilege of exemption from the authority of any legate in England which had been obtained some years earlier, but instead they saw him, and not without cause, as someone to be feared. They preferred to submit to him as legate, as friend and as patron, rather than feel the impact of a power which could not be restrained.28

William’s words here are cool and no doubt realistic. They stand in marked contrast with his diatribe against Longchamp’s tyranny and rapacity occasioned by the latter’s display of dual authority, as chancellor and papal legate, over the province of York just a few years earlier.29 No doubt Hubert concealed his iron hand more tactfully than Longchamp, but even so William’s tone is restrained.30 Most remarkable of all is William’s account of how soldiers under Hubert’s orders set fire in April 1196 to the church of St Mary Arches in London, a church belonging to the cathedral priory of Canterbury. The two chapters, Book Five chapters 20 and 21, in which Newburgh tells the story, fully bear out Antonia Gransden’s admiration of his skill as raconteur.31 The church was fired, he explained, so that a house of prayer did not become a den of thieves. The archbishop/justiciar had earlier

25. Evidently William had not revised his history since the renewal of the bitter quarrel between archbishop and monks at the end of 1197. 26. WN IV. 42. cf. Roger of Howden, Chronica, 4 vols, ed. W. Stubbs (Rolls Ser., London, 1868–71), iii. 237. Equally he made no mention of Hubert’s campaign against Gwenwynwyn of Powys in 1196, , Opera Historica, 2 vols, ed. W. Stubbs (Rolls Ser., London, 1879–80) i. 543. 27. WN V.1. 28. WN V. 12. 29. WN IV. 14. 30. Diceto quotes a letter from all the conventual churches of the province informing the of the mild and helpful way in which Hubert had carried out his visitation. Significantly the letter had been sent at Hubert’s request, Diceto, Opera Historica, ii. 146–8 31. Gransden, Historical Writing, p. 264.

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WILLIAM OF NEWBURGH AND HUBERT WALTER 1279 sent men to arrest William FitzOsbert, known as Longbeard, the all too eloquent leader of demonstrations protesting against the unfair burden of taxation on the poor and moderately well-off, and in the fracas which ensued one of the archbishop’s men had been killed. FitzOsbert and his followers, including his mistress – for, according to Newburgh, she would not be separated from him – then took sanctuary in St Mary Arches until they were forced out of the church by flames and smoke. FitzOsbert and nine accomplices who ‘refused to desert him’, were drawn and hanged. Longbeard, William tells us, was looked upon by many as a martyr, and the place of his death as a shrine; the gibbet was secretly removed to be treated as a sacred relic, the earth below the gibbet was believed to have healing powers. Inevitably Hubert Walter was ‘reviled as a murderer’. In William’s words, ‘the number of fools is infinite’ and ‘the more honour the idiot rabble paid to the dead man, the greater the crime of which they accused the man by whom he was put to death’.32 Faced with this situation, Hubert once again sent troops in. They dispersed those who gathered at the shrine, imprisoned others and set an armed guard over the place. In William’s view this was appropriate action, digna ecclesiasticae severitatis praeunte vindicta. These forceful measures worked. The embryonic cult collapsed, and this persuaded those who had initially been attracted by Longbeard’s cause to realize they had been deceived, since, William noted, while falsehood quickly fades, it is the nature of truth to endure. In any event FitzOsbert was no saint. He had polluted the church in which he took refuge by having sex with his concubine there and – even worse – when it became plain to him that no help could be expected from the son of Mary, he had invoked the aid of the devil. Although FitzOsbert’s adherents claimed that these reports were lies put about by the government, he – Newburgh – knew better since reliable sources informed him that Longbeard himself confessed to these scandalous acts.33 In the story as told by Newburgh, the combination of force and news management is very striking. It does much to support Cheney’s view of the English government while Hubert Walter was justiciar: ‘the most conspicuous qualities of English government in these years was its ruthlessness and its success in stifling opposition’.34 Newburgh was certainly not the only one to take an understanding view of the archbishop’s attack on sanctuary. Given their backgrounds, none of the contemporary commentators was likely to sympathize with a cause seen as subversive of the social order. Ralph of Diceto, dean of St Paul’s, naturally condemned turbulence on the streets of London, and even Gervase, the spokesman for the monks of Canterbury, was on the

32. Cf. WN III.7 where he once again quoted Eccles.i.15 (Stultorum infinitus est numerus) – a caustic comment on the miracles reported at the tomb of the Young King. 33. WN V. 20–21. 34. Cheney, Hubert Walter, p. 91, and cf. ibid., p. 94, ‘Thanks to the archbishop-justiciar the city elders could again sleep quietly in their beds’.

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1280 THE HISTORIAN AS JUDGE: archbishop’s side when it came to dealing with ‘demagogues’ and the ‘mob’.35 Until November 1197 when Hubert decided to revive Baldwin’s plan of establishing a college of canons at Lambeth, Gervase was very impressed with the new archbishop.36 It is none the less surprising that a Yorkshire historian should devote much more space to the episode than Gervase and Diceto, two historians much closer to the action. Moreover, William’s commentary is doubly interesting in the light of what another Yorkshire contemporary had to say about it. This was Roger of Howden. According to Howden, even though Hubert was serving the King, he ought not to have been responsible for damage to ecclesiastical rights. Roger also took a more sympathetic view of FitzOsbert, describing him as ‘zelo justitiae et aequitatis accensus. . . pauperum advocatus’.37 In a later passage Howden returned to the subject of Hubert’s involvement in secular affairs:

Unhappy prelate. Although he had often read that no one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other (Matthew 6:24), yet choosing to neglect his avowed priestly duty rather than his avowed authority in the government of the kingdom, he lightly esteemed the conduct of his ecclesiastical offices and applied himself to the defence of the king of England’s castles.38

Although Howden has traditionally been regarded as a colourless, non-judgmental historian, deeply interested in administration – of which Hubert was, of course, the master – it is the civil servant historian, not the thoughtful and deeply religious regular canon, who condemned the archbishop-justiciar. When discussing the part played by senior ecclesiastics in the king’s government in England, Cheney pointed to the contrast between the repeated prohibitions of the practice and the seeming lack of any attempt to enforce them. ‘We can cite only one instance’, he wrote, ‘of papal intervention in England and the story depends solely on one chronicler.’39 Significantly this one chronicler is Roger of Howden. According to Howden, in 1198

the monks of Canterbury at Rome complained to Pope Innocent that Hubert was acting as chief justiciar and a judge in cases of blood against his order and dignity and was so involved in secular business that he was unable to give proper attention to the affairs of the church (contra ordinem et

35. Diceto, Opera Historica, ii. 143–4; Gervase, Opera Historica, i. 532–4. 36. et bonus; vir industrius, prudens et providus; and see the long account of Gervase’s own conversation with the archbishop, Gervase, Opera Historica, i. 516–17, 537–42. 37. Howden, Chronica, iv. 5–6. It could be that Roger had a special sympathy for FitzOsbert as a fellow crusader, Roger of Howden, Gesta Henrici II et Ricardi I, 2 vols, ed W. Stubbs, (Rolls Ser., London, 1867), ii. 116; Howden, Chronica, iii. 42. On the other hand, William of Newburgh was also an enthusiast for the crusade. 38. Howden, Chronica, iv. 12–13. 39. Cheney, Becket to Langton, p. 25.

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WILLIAM OF NEWBURGH AND HUBERT WALTER 1281 dignitatem suam, gerebat se justitiarium regni, et judicem sanguinis, et ita saecularibus negotiis implicitum quod minime sufficere possit ecclesiasticis causis regendis). They accused him saying that it was on his orders that the peace of St Mary Arches was violated, William cum Barba dragged to the scaffold, condemned to death and hanged. It was in consequence of this that the lord pope admonished King Richard that he should no longer permit the archbishop to engage in secular administration, . . . and he ordered all prelates in virtue of obedience not to undertake secular office.

As a result of this pressure, Howden continued, Hubert resigned as justiciar.40 Even this one instance of enforcement has been doubted. Hubert undoubtedly resigned but most modern historians have preferred to follow the official version as outlined in Richard I’s letter of 11 July 1198: it was owing to his ill-health and the excessive burden of work.41 Lady Stenton dismissed Howden’s version on the grounds that he, ‘a loyal member of the northern province, is recounting the gossip of the north’. In this approach she was followed by F. J. West and C. R. Young.42 However, my reconstruction of Howden’s Chronica as in large part a journal of his own travels, places Howden himself at Rome in late 1197 or early 1198, a time when the Canterbury monks were there lobbying hard in their dispute with the archbishop.43 If Howden was recounting gossip, then it was the gossip of the Roman curia. It is, in any event, not quite right to say that only Howden reported Innocent III’s intervention. There is support for this from both Gerald de Barri and Gervase of Canterbury. According to Gerald, Hubert was deprived of his power as justiciar per curiam Romanam.44 According to Gervase, when two Canterbury monks went secretly to Rome early in 1198 to protest against the archbishop’s revival of the Lambeth scheme, both pope and cardinals received many negative reports about Hubert (‘Audierant enim ex conquestione multorum multa sinistra’). Among the multa sinistra must surely have been the accusation that Hubert had violated sanctuary. It is at any rate clear that memories of April 1196 were

40. Howden, Chronica, iv. 47–8. 41. Foedera, conventiones, litterae et cujuscunque generis acta publica, ed. T. Rymer, new edn, Record Commission (London, 1816), i.71. 42. D. M. Stenton, Great Roll of the Pipe for the first year of the reign of Richard I (Pipe Roll Soc., London, 1932), p. xxxiii; F. J. West, The Justiciarship in England 1066–1232 (Cambridge, 1966), p. 96. C. R. Young, Hubert Walter, Lord of Canterbury and Lord of England (Durham, N. Carolina, 1968), pp. 129–30. On the other hand Cheney was inclined to believe there was something to the story, suggesting that the pope’s intervention, even if it would have received short shrift from the King, probably re-inforced the archbishop’s own wish to resign. His replacement as justiciar, moreover, was a layman, Cheney, Hubert Walter, pp. 99–100; cf. Cheney, Becket to Langton, pp. 25–6. In the next year, however, Hubert returned to secular office as chancellor. 43. ‘The Travels of Roger of Howden and his Views of the Irish, Scots and Welsh’ Anglo-Norman Studies, xx, 1997 (1998), 151–69, at 165–6; repr. in J. Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 69–91. 44. ‘iusticiarius fuit, ea vero potestate per curiam Romanam ei sublata, statim cancellarius regis fieri procuravit’, Gerald, De Invectionibus, 97. Cf. Cheney, Becket to Langton, p. 25 n.3. Gerald also got his information while at the curia. The Invectives were written in 1200 and in Rome where, against Hubert Walter, Gerald was pursuing his own struggle for St David’s.

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1282 THE HISTORIAN AS JUDGE: revived in the context of the struggle over Lambeth. Later in 1198, the Canterbury monks were, according to Gervase, alarmed by rumours that Hubert intended to occupy Christ Church with troops, ‘as in the capture of William’. 45 Anyway, whether the gossip was accurate or not, the fact that Howden chose to report it reflects his more jaundiced view of Hubert Walter. Although in his earlier Gesta regis Roger referred to Hubert as nobilissimus on the occasion of his appointment as in 1186, there are no such adjectives for him in the Chronica.46 In his Chronicle Roger is either neutral or critical, as here and as also in his account of ’s opposition to the scheme for the organization of a standing army in Normandy which Hubert Walter pushed for at a council held at Oxford in December 1197. In this context Roger referred to Bishop Hugh as ‘verus dei cultor abstinens se ab omni opere pravo’.47 It is worth noting that by contrast, for all his approval of bishops who took their pastoral role seriously, Newburgh never mentioned Hugh of Lincoln by name.48 The contrast between William and Roger is all the more striking if we consider that throughout his history William’s main source of information was Howden,49 and that he was still turning to Howden for information on the wars of summer 1196 and summer 1197.50 This means that he would have read both Howden’s narrative of the FitzOsbert affair and the comment criticizing Hubert for damage to ecclesiastical rights.51 Despite this, he clearly took a view very different from that of his fellow historian. How then can we explain both the amount of detail, unique to him,

45. Gervase, Opera Historica, i. 551–2, 555. 46. Howden, Gesta Regis, i. 360. In the light of Stubbs’s comment on this group of notices, ibid., p. 360 n.1, the note on Hubert’s appointment to York looks like a copy of a note made in 1186–7, with the phrase qui postea archiepiscopus Cantuariensis factus est added later. In the , when Howden re-wrote his account of Hubert’s appointment as dean, he omitted the nobilissimus and instead added the information that he got the deanship dono regis, Howden, Chronica, ii. 310. 47. Howden, Chronica, iv. 40. See Gillingham, English in the Twelfth Century, pp. 87–8 and, for the tension between Hubert and Hugh of Lincoln, Cheney, Hubert Walter, pp. 97–8. 48. He never appears politically, only in dealing with false cults and revenants, WN IV. 7 and V.22. 49. William, who wrote his history at the request of the abbot of Rievaulx, may well have used a copy of Howden’s chronicle very similar to that in the extant Rievaulx manuscript, Inner Temple 511.2, of the first half of Howden’s Chronica, an early thirteenth-century manuscript unknown to Stubbs. On the relationship between the two Yorkshire historians, see J. Gillingham, ‘Royal Newsletters, Forgeries and English Historians’, in M. Aurell (ed.), La Cour Plantagenêt (1154–1204) (Poitiers, 2000), pp. 180–2; id., ‘William of Newburgh and Emperor Henry VI’, in W. Koch et al. (eds), Auxilia Historica. Festschrift für Peter Acht (Munich, 2001), pp. 51–71; and id., ‘Two Yorkshire Historians Compared’, 15–29. 50. WN V. 25, 30–2. William’s account of the capture and treatment of the bishop of Beauvais (WN V. 31) includes words identical to some in Howden, Chronica, iv. 23. On this see my ‘Royal Newsletters’, pp. 184–5 and ‘William of Newburgh and Henry VI’, p. 61 n.55. 51. However, he probably did not read Howden’s comment on the two masters, Chronica, iv.12–13, for although this was placed in the entry for 1196, it must have been inserted several years later. It follows a narrative of Scottish affairs which refers to events as late as spring 1199. See A. A. M. Duncan ‘Roger of Howden and Scotland, 1187–1201’, in Barbara E. Crawford (ed.), Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and early Renaissance Scotland (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 142–3.

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WILLIAM OF NEWBURGH AND HUBERT WALTER 1283 with which he enlivened his own narrative and his approval of the archbishop’s forceful action? In part it may be a consequence of William’s own devotion to the crusade, for this was a cause to which Hubert, while still , contributed far more than any other English prelate. In part it may also be explicable in terms of the date at which William was writing. Apart from the addition of one note, about a shower of blood at Les Andelys in 1198 he left his history in the state it had reached by autumn 1197.52 Hence he could not take account of the increasing volume of criticism of Hubert Walter audible from the end of 1197 as a result of the archbishop’s revival of the Lambeth plan and of the opposition led by Hugh of Lincoln at the meeting at Oxford in December 1197.53 But none of this quite explains why he was so relaxed about Hubert Walter’s violation of sanctuary. Was his hostility to Fitz Osbert just ‘plain snobbery’, as Nancy Partner has suggested?54 But William remarked that even sensible people would have been impressed by FitzOsbert the martyr, had they not used some judicious caution, and had it not been for the confession which the condemned man had made while waiting to die, a confession which he himself had learned about a viris fide dignis.55 These are phrases which suggest that for a while William too might have been inclined to see FitzOsbert as Howden saw him, as a man moved by zeal for justice and equity. Moreover, although William quite often claimed to be relying upon the evidence of witnesses, in his treatment of FitzOsbert he employed this device unusually insistently. Not only does he tell us that trustworthy men revealed to him the contents of FitzOsbert’s confession; in Book Five chapter twenty he tells us that he had been informed about the power of Longbeard’s oratory from a truthful man (vir verax) who had been there and had heard it himself (‘se concioni ejus interfuisse et concionantem audisse’). Can William’s source, or sources, be identified? I believe that they can.56 William dated Longbeard’s death by saying that it occurred a few days after the death of the abbot of Caen. In the previous chapter (V. 19), entitled ‘Of the sudden death in England of the Abbot of Caen’, he had given a more detailed account of that abbot’s mission to England than any other historian. Robert, abbot of St Stephen’s Caen, was a senior

52. See Gillingham, ‘William of Newburgh and Henry VI’, pp. 68–70. 53. Cheney, Hubert Walter, pp. 94–5; Young, Hubert Walter, p. 122; John Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven and London, 1999), p. 280. 54. Partner, Serious Entertainments, pp. 74, 111–12. Snobbery may well have played a part in Gervase’s account, with his description of FitzOsbert as an homuncionem pauperculum, contemptible in appearance, Opera Historica, i. 532. 55. WN V. 21. 56. Gransden suggested that William’s detailed knowledge of the riots in London in 1196 may have been derived from the Augustinian Priory of Holy Trinity in London, from where he could have got his copy of the Itinerarium Ricardi, Gransden, Historical Writing, p. 267, but at this point she seems to have forgotten that Richard of Holy Trinity compiled his narrative of the c.1220.

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1284 THE HISTORIAN AS JUDGE: official of the Norman who, to Hubert Walter’s irritation, had been sent to investigate reports that official dishonesty in England was depriving the King of revenue due. William described the abbot as wise in the ways of this world, a vainglorious monk who ignored the biblical injunction: ‘Nemo militans Deo implicet se negotiis secu- laribus’. That is to say William quoted 2 Timothy ii.4 – precisely the passage that was cited in the 1179 decree ordering churchmen not to undertake secular office. William’s account of Abbot Robert’s death is sarcastic. The abbot had summoned all the sheriffs to render account to him after Easter, but he died before Easter, summoned to render an account of his own stewardship to the highest of all judges. Howden’s report of the abbot’s mission is shorter, and more businesslike. Characteristically he adds two pieces of ‘hard’ information. First, he says that the abbot was taken ill after being entertained to a meal by Hubert Walter and died five days later. Second, he says that the abbot was joined in his mission by Philip, bishop-elect of Durham. A little later we learn that Philip was consecrated priest at Durham in June 1196.57 This means that Philip was in London during the violent events of April 1196 and then subsequently in the north, where either he himself or, perhaps more likely, someone on his staff, was in a position to give William of Newburgh a great deal of insider information about Longbeard’s eloquence and fate. There are fifteen episodes in which William states or implies that he was relying upon the evidence of witnesses. There is a local dimension to six of these fifteen.58 Of the other nine, no less than five can be linked with one and the same man, Philip of Durham.59 One of these five was indeed the very last entry made in William’s History, the story of the shower of blood in May 1198 that was not allowed to interrupt the building of Chaˆteau-Gaillard.60 The new bishop of Durham was one of King Richard’s most trusted advisers, his confidential clerk, Master Philip of Poitou, whom William described as ‘circa principem multo tempore sedulus, laborum particeps,

57. Howden, Chronica, iv. 5, 9–10. 58. The six concern Wimund who became a monk at Byland, WN I. 23–4; the death of Archbishop William of York, WN I. 26; the life of Ketell, WN II. 21; the deathbed of Roger of York, WN III, 5; and the stories of revenants and the Malton limepit, WN V. 24, 33. 59. The other four are WN I.19, relating to the heretic Eudo of L’Etoile and his condemnation at Rheims (discussed by Peter Biller, ‘William of Newburgh and the Cathar Mission to England’, in Diana Wood (ed.), Life and Thought in the Northern Church (Ecclesiastical History Society, Subsidia xii, 1999), pp. 11–30; WN I.27, the ‘green children’ story; and two dealing with earlier crusades, WN I. 21 and II. 23. 60. Including the episode considered here, these five are WN IV.18, V.9, 16, 20–1, and 34. See Gillingham, ‘Royal Newsletters’, p. 183; id., ‘William of Newburgh and Henry VI’, pp. 60–70. Newburgh’s narrative of the murder of William Trencavel (WN II. 11) at Béziers, by far the most detailed of all twelfth-century accounts, may also be derived from Philip of Durham.

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WILLIAM OF NEWBURGH AND HUBERT WALTER 1285 et conscius secretorum’.61 Philip has been identified by Hans Eberhard Mayer as the chamber clerk who was the author of most of the letters and charters written in Richard’s name between May 1191 and February 1194; in other words he was with the King throughout his crusade and captivity.62 He remained a key player. In December 1196, he was sent to Rome to put Richard’s case in the dispute with the archbishop of Rouen, a mission he completed successfully.63 In 1198, he led the embassy which went to Germany and successfully negotiated the election of Richard’s nephew, Otto of Brunswick, as king of the Romans. 64 One of the many remarkable qualities of William of Newburgh’s history is the keen strategic understanding it reveals – for example, the perception that by his gains in Berry in 1196 Richard obtained compensation for the losses suffered in Normandy.65 When Richard made peace with Count Raymond of Toulouse in 1196, only William of Newburgh had the kind of overview which enabled him to see it as marking the end of a bellum Tolosanum which had gone on for forty years through both Richard’s and his father’s reigns. Particularly striking is his assessment of the strategic situation after the summer of 1196. ‘The king of the English, who had hitherto been split three ways by the need to fight three wars at once, and who had thus achieved correspondingly less in each of them, was able, once two of the wars – the Breton and Toulousan – had been ended, to concentrate all his resources on the third, his war against the king of the French. In consequence, he began to campaign more powerfully and make himself more terrible to his enemies.’66 Insights such as these may have been derived from conversations with people close to one of the King’s most important advisers and diplomats. If William talked to an informant close to Philip he would undoubtedly also have been given an interpretation sympathetic to Hubert. Philip and Hubert were close colleagues. From the moment of Richard’s arrival at Acre in 1191, Philip and Hubert had been at the King’s side throughout the struggle against . Both of them had been with Richard in Germany. Indeed William is the only source to report that Hubert had been in when he heard the news of the

61. WN V.11. Howden described him as clericus et familiaris Ricardi regis, Howden, Chronica, iii. 308. As Felix Liebermann long ago recognized, it is likely that Philip was one of Howden’s sources, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, xxvii, 135. See also D. Corner, ‘The Earliest Surviving Manuscripts of Roger of Howden’s Chronica’, ante, xcviii (1983), 297–310, at 309–10 and J. Gillingham, ‘Historians without Hindsight: Coggeshall, Diceto and Howden on the Early Years of John’s Reign’, in S. D. Church (ed.), King John: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 16–21. 62. H. E. Mayer, ‘Die Kanzlei Richards I. von England auf dem dritten Kreuzzug’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichte, lxxxv (1977), 22–35. 63. Howden, Chronica, iv.17–18; WN V. 28. 64. Howden, Chronica, iv. 37–8. 65. WN V. 15. 66. ‘Itaque rex Anglorum, qui ad tria bella quasi trifariam divisus erat, atque ideo minus in singulis poterat, duobus finitis, Britonico scilicet et Tolosano, ad tertium, quod cum rege Francorum gerebat, integer redditus, coepit robustius agere et terribilior hostibus apparere’, WN V. 30.

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1286 THE HISTORIAN AS JUDGE: King’s captivity.67 The election of Philip as bishop of Durham took place at Northallerton, only fifteen miles from Newburgh, on 29 December 1195. As William knew only too well, this was an election in appearance only. What counted was the King’s will.68 What William doesn’t mention, but Howden does, is that at Northallerton the of Durham was informed of the King’s will by Hubert Walter in person.69 Once Philip had been elected to Durham, then he and Hubert Walter had in common not only their experience of royal service in extraordi- nary circumstances but also the problems of a bishop faced by a chapter of monks. The bishops of Durham, like the archbishops of Canterbury, were ‘faced by an ambitious and tenacious corporation which, if uncontrolled, would have prevented them from being master in their own house’.70 Philip, like his predecessors, wished to use the convent’s churches as gifts for his own clerks, but he quickly ran into the kind of resistance from the monks of Durham which would have made him understand why an archbishop of Canterbury would wish to establish a college of secular canons.71 In 1198 indeed the conflict between episcopal and monastic claims resulted in the bishop’s supporters laying siege to monks in the church of St Oswald in Elvet. When the monks appealed to Rome, Philip’s nephew, Aimeri, set the church on fire, and then ejected the monks with armed men.72 Howden’s report on this case is sympathetic to the monks, just as he had been in the case of Hubert Walter and St Mary Arches.73 It can hardly be doubted that sources close to Philip of Poitou would have sympathized with the actions taken by Hubert Walter in April 1196, and it seems likely that it was from such government circles that William of Newburgh derived an interpretation of the events of that month so much at odds with his usual line on the morality of ecclesiastics meddling in secular politics. There can hardly be a better illustration of the efficiency with which Hubert Walter’s administration dealt with protest than the way it used scandalous tales of sex and blasphemy in order to destroy an opponent’s reputation and so persuade even as independent-minded and critical a historian as William of Newburgh

67. WN IV. 33. 68. WN V. 11. 69. Howden, Chronica, iii.308 70. Frank Barlow, Durham Jurisdictional Peculiars (Oxford, 1950), p. 9 71. By May 1196, the monks had got Pope Celestine III to confirm a forged charter giving their prior the dignity of an abbot and the office of archdeacon over all the convent’s churches, Barlow, Durham Jurisdictional Peculiars, p. 22. 72. After the death of Hugh de Puiset’s son, Archdeacon Bouchard, on 6 December 1196, Philip (still bishop-elect) made his nephew Aimeri archdeacon and gave him the church of Aycliffe, one of the churches which — to William of Newburgh’s intense disapproval (WN V. 11) — had made Bouchard a rich man. Philip must have acted very quickly if Aimeri obtained the archdeaconry and church in 1196, Howden, Chronica, iv.14, but Roger’s date here may refer only to Aimeri’s succession to the archdeaconry of Carlisle. For the background see Barlow, Durham Jurisdictional Peculiars, pp. 22–6, 33 n. 2. 73. Howden, Chronica, iv. 69–70.

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WILLIAM OF NEWBURGH AND HUBERT WALTER 1287 that it had been right to fire a church and violate sanctuary. In this sense William was indeed ‘one of us’ – for who are we to claim to be immune to the spin-doctors, the charms of insider-gossip from those in the know? Roger of Howden, an insider himself, saw things differently.

Brighton JOHN GILLINGHAM

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