William of Newburgh and Hubert Walter
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MFK-Mendip Job ID: 10374BK-0096-7 5 - 1275 Rev: 27-09-2004 PAGE: 1 TIME: 15:19 SIZE: 59,06 Area: BOOKS OP: AB English Historical Review EHR(N1)/0013–8266/3064/1275 ᭧ Oxford University Press 2004 The Historian as Judge: William of Newburgh and Hubert Walter OF all the histories written in Plantagenet England, 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 Geoffrey of Monmouth’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 canon of Newburgh Priory (fifteen miles north of York), a close friend of the Cistercians 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, ‘Bede’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, Thomas Becket (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 abbot 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. EHR, cxix. 484 (Nov. 2004) OUPEHR OUP: THE ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW MFK-Mendip Job ID: 10374BK-0097-4 5 - 1276 Rev: 21-09-2004 PAGE: 1 TIME: 10:50 SIZE: 59,06 Area: BOOKS OP: AB 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 Salisbury,9 Roger of Pont L’Evêque, archbishop of York,10 Hugh du Puiset, bishop of Durham,11 William Longchamp, bishop of Ely,12 Walter of Coutances, bishop of Lincoln 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 justiciar in succession: Hugh du Puiset, William Longchamp, Walter of Coutances and Hubert Walter. No less than fourteen bishops and four abbots acted as royal justices, although only seven (including the four chief justiciars) 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 Peter of Blois 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 Roger of Salisbury 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. EHR, cxix. 484 (Nov. 2004) OUPEHR OUP: THE ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW MFK-Mendip Job ID: 10374BK-0098-4 5 - 1277 Rev: 21-09-2004 PAGE: 1 TIME: 10:50 SIZE: 59,06 Area: BOOKS OP: AB 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 Matthew Paris’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 Canterbury, whom the excessive zeal of his predecessor, Archbishop Baldwin, had embittered, yet he achieved this 19.