“As Mote in at a Munster Dor”: Sanctuary and Love of This World

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“As mote in at a munster dor”: Sanctuary and Love of This World

ELIZABETH ALLEN

In Patience, the Gawain-poet’s retelling of the story of Jonah and the whale, the moment of Jonah’s comeuppance conjures an image of a cathedral: he tumbles into the filthy jaws “as mote in at a munster dor” (268).1 There in the belly of the whale, he finds a safe corner where he falls asleep. Malcolm Andrew rightly notes that the striking perspective of this entry into the fish’s gullet “suggests the futility of [Jonah’s] struggle against God” (n268) and that the appearance of a cathedral (“munster”) door is especially remarkable because the whale is associated with hell and the devil.2 Surely the reluctant prophet’s spiritual penance constitutes the central focus of the poem, as he suffers first in the fish and afterwards in the desert outside the city of Nineveh. But because he is still fleeing God’s vigilance, his tumble in at the church door also evokes the legal act of seeking sanctuary from criminal prosecution. In late-medieval England, felons and debtors could seek safety in churches for up to forty days, after which they had either to stand trial or abjure the realm. This essay explores what happens if we view the undersea minster as a place of temporary respite akin to sanctuary. The image of the “mote in at a munster dor” raises crucial questions about the function of Jonah’s sojourn in such a messy and creaturely minster. Inasmuch as sanctuary was appropriated by the legal system, it represents an eccentric locus for examining religious attitudes; arguments about its powers and privileges belong less to the world of sacrament, penance, and absolution than to the world of crime and punishment.3 The religious underpinnings of the practice emerge, however, in accounts of its breach or violation. This essay contends that sanctuary and its violation provide a singular venue for dramas of what we might call secular or worldly religion: dramas that call attention to the instrumental uses of the minster’s sacred space. When

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civic officials and royal henchmen enter churches, they make the sacred space contingent and negotiable, but by profaning it they also elevate its power. When sanctuary-men and clerics come out of their protection to battle it out with civic officials, or are dragged out to be put into jail, they polarize the community into conflicts between sacred and profane. Such sanctuary dramas would seem to widen the gap between secular and clerical interests, but actually the imbrica- tion of clerical and secular forces makes for a remarkably flexible notion of holy space, one that does not suffer from profanation in the way that we might expect but gains a certain vigor from the corrup- tions that are said to surround it. Cases of violated sanctuary reveal the practice’s dependence on an idea of holy space not as timeless and unchanging, but as fundamentally vulnerable to circumstance. As Gervase Rosser and others have pointed out, Victorian and mid-century scholars understood sanctuary as a “quintessential manifestation of the privileges of the medieval church,” necessary to regulate a savage and primitive culture. The decline of the practice during the Reformation has generally been considered, Rosser writes, “symptomatic of a double triumph of the modern secular state, respectively over primitive human passions and over priestly privilege.”4 Certainly sanctuary shares with other medieval religious practices a central insistence on the earthly manifestation of divine aegis, and the legal permission to avoid trial by retreating to a holy place essentially submits judicial process to the power of the church. In its assertion of clerical privilege over secular jurisdiction, sanctuary would seem to represent a typically “medieval” institution. Moreover, the jurisdictional language that arose after the consolidation of sanctuary law in England frequently did employ an opposition between secular interests and clerical privileges.5 Because of its status as both a sacred and a secular institution, sanctuary generates especially clearly drawn oppositions—but as Rosser’s critique suggests, sanctuary does not undo but reworks the mutual dependence of church and secular government.6 From the thirteenth century, royal law and ecclesiastical power generally acted cooperatively in sanctuary cases. The legal role of the king’s agent—the coroner—in recording and overseeing cases of sanctuary and abjuration demonstrates one way in which clerical and lay authorities worked together both to protect and to prosecute sanctuary-seekers. Typically, after forty days in sanctuary, a fugitive had either to go to trial or confess his crime and abjure England.7 SANCTUARY AND SACRED SPACE IN PATIENCE 107

Usually carried out in the yard or on the porch of the church, the abjuration ritual required the presence of both priest and coroner, as well as a jury from the surrounding area to witness the criminal’s con- fession. When the abjurer had confessed, he turned over his goods to the king and departed for the nearest port, dressed as a pilgrim and carrying a cross. The ritual thus functioned as confirmation of the criminal’s social separation from the community; as sanctification of his exile; and as (small) economic benefit for crown and coroner.8 However “legalized,” sanctuary practices implicitly invoke ideas about holiness and purity that not only speak to the uses of religion generally but bear upon the peculiar image and the larger form of Patience. To call upon divine aegis, to involve the holy in quotidian affairs, is to raise the stakes of those affairs. Yet when a holy place houses criminals, comes under siege, becomes the site of transgression, or simply provides a safe zone for common criminals, holiness gets bound up with instability and contingency. To be sure, the worldly investments of spiritual practices are salient in other contexts, including the sale of indulgences, pilgrimage, relics and saints, even the eucharist. But sanctuary-seeking emphasizes a narrative structure markedly different from those delineated in practices of salvation; for sanctuary garners its authority in part from narratives of profanation. Rather than enact conversion or atonement, the practice dramatizes the worldly uses of the sacred, rendering resonant the quotidian and the corrupt. In this sense, sanctuary provides fertile ground for ex- travagant tales of crime and abjuration from the most ordinary to the most opportunistic and grandiose uses of religious belief. Before returning to Patience, the present essay explores a fourteenth-century cause célèbre in London, the so-called Hawley-Shakell affair, an explosive breach of sanctuary at Westminster which became a lightning rod for debate about clerical and monarchical power. The essay focuses on two documents of the affair: the polemic of John Wyclif against sanctuary privilege and the outraged chronicle of the event by Thomas Walsingham. The idea of sanctuary that emerges from these documents resists easily codified resolution. The sacred remains immanent even as its space can be profaned or corrupted, whether by sanctuary-men themselves or by their enemies. Yet a sense of human vulnerability permeates the refuge and indeed seems crucial to its power. The holy thus makes use of the profane—at once a more archaic and a more variable sort of sacredness than sanctuary laws would suggest. Sanctuary narratives are stories of “man in the 108 ELIZABETH ALLEN

middle,” to use V. A. Kolve’s anti-apocalyptic term.9 Despite their secular engagement, sanctuary narratives rely on a certain non- rational apprehension of holiness inhering in the sacred space, both generating and containing violence. Such stories engage the political and social conﬂicts of the saeculum and, as we shall see, elucidate the deeply worldly, secular holiness adumbrated in the exegetical homiletic of Patience.

BREACH OF SANCTUARY: THE HAWLEY-SHAKELL AFFAIR

In 1378, the first year of Richard II’s minority, a spectacular breach of sanctuary set debate raging in London.10 Two squires named Robert Hawley and John Shakell held a valuable Spanish prisoner, the son of the Count of Denia. The ransom they expected (60,000 crowns) proved difficult to raise, but the English government, invested in its relations with Spain, intervened at the request of the Count’s kins- man, the king of Aragon.11 The squires were duly imprisoned in the Tower; but they escaped and fled to Westminster, where the King’s constable and 50 armed followers pursued them. In the midst of the mass, the constable and his men killed a sacristan and Hawley himself on the high altar.12 The Bishop of London, William Courtenay, excommunicated everyone involved in the breach with the pointed exceptions of the king, the princess of Wales, and Gaunt, “as if to imply that he suspected their involvement.”13 The Abbot of Westmin- ster refused to hold services or reconcile the church. In the tense aftermath of the event, the 1378 parliament removed to Gloucester, where the abbot and convent of Westminster petitioned to remedy the breach. The parliamentary argument of John Wyclif, Gaunt’s principal defender and a lightning rod for debate about clerical liberties and endowments, appears in expanded form in his De Ecclesia. Walsingham’s highly-charged chronicle account, written within a few years of the affair, appears in his universal chronicle. Both sides of the debate emphasize opposition between secular and sacred jurisdictions. However logically Wyclif seeks to rationalize sanctuary out of existence, his language retains a suggestion of the corruptible physicality of holy spaces. Walsingham, on the other hand, narrates the breach in a homiletic voice that characterizes the event as a profane violation—a breakdown of meaning to which his typologically-informed narration can restore significance. Wals- ingham deploys sanctuary to avoid (however temporarily) the real SANCTUARY AND SACRED SPACE IN PATIENCE 109 sources of division in the church, including Wyclif, whom he never mentions in connection with the Hawley-Shakell affair. Indeed, the language of sanctuary lies at a distance from the discussions of ortho- dox and heterodox beliefs about clerical endowment, transubstantia- tion, and biblical translation that created so much religious ferment in fourteenth-century England.14 While sanctuary registers a sense of the contingency of religious meaning shared by many different sorts of texts, both sides of the argument rely on the legal context of the privilege. Holy space thus becomes instrumental in worldly affairs, however quotidian, without losing its connection to the sacred and timeless. The rolls of the Gloucester parliament draw more than incidental attention to holy space.15 The Chancellor opened the session with an array of biblical quotations authorizing the change of venue. With the papal schism looming before them as well, the Parliament desper- ately needed the peacemaking efforts of the church:

[this] congregation is thus assembled in so holy a place, of which the scriptures say “Terrible is this place” [Gen. 28:17]; so it be done, if God pleases, in the name of God and with the grace of the Holy Spirit, concerning which the Gospel says, “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am amongst them, sayeth the Lord” [Mat- thew 18:20]. And because of this, if any discord or ill will should arise or be conceived amongst any persons here present, which God forbid, the cornerstone of holy church, which rightly signiﬁes God, for as the holy scriptures say, “Christ is the cornerstone” [Ephesians 2:20], shall reconcile them and draw them together in unity and concord. (item 5)16

The Genesis quotation here calls up the awesome nature of the holy place, framing raw spiritual power as a force beyond government, into which the “congregacion” can enter only with respect. The Gospel quotation institutionalizes and rationalizes that power. The invocation confirms the parliament’s function in resolving devilish conflict and, more important, asserts its reliance on the church, fig- ured in the architectural metaphor of Christ as cornerstone. Drawing the cathedral as an eternal, unifying structure, the Chancellor calls particular attention to the parliament’s new location; insisting on the Gloucester Cathedral’s power of reconciliation, he staves off the divisive drama at Westminster. The prelates’ plea concerning Westminster, however, underscores the vulnerability of holy space. Hawley and the sacristan were killed most mercilessly and horribly by a multitude of armed men, “en despite de Dieu et de seinte eglise” (item 27). In a context of papal schism, the threat to sanctuary must have seemed all the more syn- 110 ELIZABETH ALLEN

echdochic, and all the more dire; the church’s subjection to devilish corruption is clear. The prelates’ request emphasizes the king’s youth and innocence, calling upon the power of his counselors in “using their good ofﬁces (bones mediacions) with our lord the king,” reminding their audience of the importance of good advice and cor- rect governance. If the king could properly reassert control then the sanctuary could resume its proper place, both politically and spatially. The lords respond with the claim that for non-capital crimes, sanctuary should not be allowed at all, because it encroaches upon the king’s majesty. This represents a remarkable historical shift: whereas the Norman kings had understood their capacity to grant sanctuary as an expression of mercy and an indication of their power, both sides of the 1378 parliament depict a far more vulnerable monarch. In Wyclif’s extended argument in chapter 7 of De Ecclesia, Richard’s very vulnerability spiritualizes and authorizes the breach. By now a well-known and popular ﬁgure in London, Wyclif was fresh from a third abortive trial before the bishops at Lambeth, where he had reas- serted his call for the papacy to divorce itself from secular affairs and live in apostolic poverty.17 In his account of sanctuary privileges, he works hard to recuperate the king’s power,18 drawing a stark opposition between secular and sacred:

Multiplying their prior disobedience, they violently broke out [of prison] against the command of the king, and having knocked down a guard of the prison they en- tered the enclosure of Westminster, in which they claimed to be completely released from subjection to the king, based on the liberty of that church…. It is said that they equipped themselves with arms, procured letters of safe conduct from our enemies and publicly challenged the council of our lord king as false.19

Far from being simple fugitives, the squires of Wyclif’s argument claim immunity from the king’s rule. By threatening to take up arms and make alliance with outsiders (a report peculiar to Wyclif’s account), they disobey their lord and array themselves publicly against their own society. Wyclif deliberately skirts the problem of Hawley’s death, avoiding mention of it in his initial summary of the case and adding, “In this tract I intend to proceed conditionally . . . not to justify the attack against the killed man nor his killing because of my ignorance of hidden circumstances.”20 His insistence on the squires’ violent acts deﬂects the violence perpetrated against them; his emphasis on the vulnerability of realm and king does not simply register a political reality (Richard II’s minority) but minimizes the squires’ vulnerability and establishes grounds for the government to claim SANCTUARY AND SACRED SPACE IN PATIENCE 111 the vocabulary of victimhood in launching its attack. Thus the tract derives the king’s right to invade from his threatened authority and from the violated sacred space itself. Indeed, Wyclif refrains from denying sanctuary privilege outright, because his image of secular authority here depends on the sanctuary’s pre-existing sacred power.21 Instead, he increasingly divests the privilege of its power by opposing it to the God-given authority of kingship:

Therefore, given the fact that it is not in the ruler’s power to grant what would amount to an injury against God, to the destruction of his realm, and to the weakening of royal power and the laws through which he rules his realm, it is clear that what is submit- ted in the case presented to us is not to be included in that general privilege. What, I ask, would amount more to an injury against God than to make his house the den of thieves? Or what would be more destructive of kingdoms than to protect, in nests devoted to [that purpose], the enemies of God, the church, and the realm?22

Though Wyclif concedes sanctuary may be granted by the king, it is not a God-given right of the holy place, even a place as central as Westminster. As the essential expression of Christian authority in the realm, the monarchy should never protect threats to itself. Indeed, sanctuary brings about an improper split between sacred and secular jurisdiction because when the church protects criminals who should be tried under secular law, it contravenes the divinely sanctioned authority of the king: for Wyclif, it is “blind presumption” to protect the enemies of God and the realm under pretence of piety (7.147). Although ostensibly leaving the privilege itself intact and excepting the present case, Wyclif dismantles the logic of sanctuary protection by insisting that God’s will inheres in the king’s power, not in the church’s material endowment.23 But his rhetoric here is worth remarking, for his argument actually relies on the material terms of sanctuary. He veers away from logical vocabulary (suppositum, in casu nobis exposito) into a language more associated with Gospel and revelation—the den of thieves, the nest of enemies. This vocabulary of corruption lets the physical world leak into Wyclif’s decidedly rational spiritual ideal, turning the sanctuary, in all its vulnerability, into a place that demands assertion of God’s aegis, in the form of the king’s divine right. Explicitly, however, Wyclif remains committed to a hierarchical distinction between spiritual and physical realities, in which the physical violability of any sanctuary is far less important than the sins of those it protects. The distinction becomes crucial when he takes up the ex- 112 ELIZABETH ALLEN

communication of the king’s ministers. Because excommunicating a person is a spiritual punishment, its effects are far more serious than any physical violence, even murder:

Moreover so much more does an excommunicator seem to defile the sacred church than the person physically killing a man at the altar; on this it must be observed that defilement of the body does not belong to excommunication, however much it tastes of sin, both because defilement by spitting or other burdens of nature might be more base than defilement through semen or blood, and also because that defilement is wiped out by bodily cleansing. . . . Just as the soul exceeds the body, so a killing perpetrated against the soul exceeds in evil the killing of the body.24

Excommunication for murder confuses the spiritual with the physical and fails to keep mere bodily realities in their proper place, hierar- chically below spiritual acts. Locally, this argument further deflects blame for the death of Hawley onto the excommunicating prelates. But the hierarchy of spitting and other bodily acts seems gratuitous and designed to make the rhetorical point vivid, implying the degree to which Wyclif is relying on the power of physical corruption to heighten the effectiveness of his argument. The point here seems to be that, although spitting may not be encoded as sinful in the way of sex and murder, all bodily fluids nevertheless have the capacity to defile a place—spitting perhaps even more than semen or blood—but still only physically, not spiritually. Even as he denigrates the importance of physical sins, Wyclif relies on their shock value to dramatize the truly desecrating effects of excommunication. Moreover, the reference to various sorts of bodily fluids anachronistically evokes an archaic world of taboo and exorcism: a world whose “various forms of sullen self-maintenance . . . resisted eradication” by successive ide- alizing reforms of the Church.25 It is this sacral yet bodily world into which Jonah enters when he is thrown into the gullet of the whale. Overtly, then, Wyclif insists that defilement of a physical place does not impede worship of God: “It can be seen that, since sin cannot be built into a stone or corporeal edifice, the place itself does not defile its inhabitants. . . . And it is clear that defilement of a place would not reasonably impede the worship of God, unless out of the great horror it instilled by reason of the sin.”26 If the space reminds people of sin, then, they should worship elsewhere—not for fear of contamination but in order to focus their attention on spiritual matters. The church represents, rather than manifesting, the sacred; it can easily be re- placed by another space. Wyclif everywhere diminishes the power of material bodies and physical space, except as distractions from spiri- SANCTUARY AND SACRED SPACE IN PATIENCE 113 tual realities. But the language of defilement attracts him, and as we have seen, the argument is undergirded by a basic acceptance of the peculiar purity and corruptibility of holy space.27 Because it fails to shut out the charged language of pollution and desecration, Wyclif’s tract cannot finally divorce spiritual from physical concerns; instead it calls attention to the most concrete manifestations of divinity, and even relies upon them for its rhetorical power. This severe yet partial division between physical and spiritual experience reveals a deep ambivalence about worldly power, that is, about the saeculum. Wyclif’s argument against sanctuary faults the clergy for questioning the rights of monarchy by meddling in affairs that belong to the king’s law. His argument jibes with his general skepti- cism about clerical privilege and his consequent preference for royal power. De Ecclesia’s larger concerns have much to do with the criti- cism of clerical endowments and call for apostolic poverty (see, for example, chapter 8, 176–77). Fantasizing an entirely spiritual clergy, he depicts the church’s pragmatic concerns as almost inevitably corrupt. Yet Wyclif’s own polemic is distinctly worldly: he appeared before parliament to argue on behalf of his secular patron, John of Gaunt (“domini mei,” 266). He answers clerical corruption not by splitting sacred from secular concerns, but by imbuing the monarchy with God-given authority.28 His argument uses sanctuary to embrace, even sacralize, secular power, claiming that anything that threatens it should be curtailed. If Wyclif exerts every effort to rationalize sanctuary, Thomas Wals- ingham deliberately mystifies its power. He overtly restores the God- given sacredness of the sanctuary, claiming for his own chronicle the power to lend significance to the apocalyptic chaos of the breach.29 As a chronicler rather than a polemicist, Walsingham embraces the artifices, even the fictions, necessary to make the story morally under- standable. In no way does he shy away from the physical details of the breach, nor does he divorce spiritual power from physical space. But Walsingham does open a profound rift between secular and sacred forms of authority—even as he perceives that sanctuary expresses temporal, not just spiritual, authority. Moreover, Walsingham’s de- piction does not simply provide “evidence” for a conservative clerical retrenchment against the progress of state power.30 Rather, he deliberately depicts the event as a conflict between church and state. By drawing a bright line between offended clerisy and careless secular officialdom, he avoids jurisdictional issues in favor of moral ones, and 114 ELIZABETH ALLEN

paints himself and the clergy as meek and innocent victims of brutal secular desecration in order to assert the social need for sanctuary privilege. Walsingham’s account of the event is framed by outrage, expressed in the homiletic voice that often characterizes his accounts of violence or heresy. He spends a good deal of time introducing the story of the “Deﬁlement of Westminster” (De pollucione Westmonasterii):

I, who would always have preferred to write comedy, am about to describe something more than tragic; a crime has been committed by men of our world, and moreover, perpetrated, alas, in our times. Satan’s minions, assailing God’s temple, have perpetrated a vile form of crime [literally, an awful exemplum of crime], the deﬁlement of God’s house, consecrated by the chief of the apostles, which up to the present day had been undeﬁled even by unbelievers and enemies who were without faith.31

Walsingham starts out in the world of literary genre, not chronicle history but comedy and tragedy. The terms also invoke sacred typol- ogy: Walsingham would rather write a timeless human comedy—a story of salvation—than a tale of the falls of men. What he finds at hand instead is an exemplum: the story he will tell takes place in “our world” (nostris seculis), among men of our time. Despite the way in which he lodges the event in “modern times” (modernis tem- poribus), Walsingham’s homiletic language suggests that there is, in fact, a typological and hence transhistorical space opened up by this narrative, where human crime shades over into the workings of the Antichrist. The world breaks into dichotomies between crime and consecration, pollution and faith, and the perpetrators, “Satan’s minions,” take on such profound evil that they become, Walsingham says, “worse than heathens,” who at least “protect unimpaired the liberties and rights of their sacred places, which are not supported by charters of sultans, emirs, or kings, but only by the people’s devotion.” This “people’s devotion” mystifies sanctuary as a human impulse that precedes temporal systems of power. Modern Christians, for all their charters of kings, nevertheless enslave and even defile their churches with human blood. Walsingham embraces the heathen devotion of the people and anathematizes the official culture that destroys Chris- tian holy places. The archaic pagan respect for sanctuary naturalizes the practice and demonstrates the apocalyptic extravagance of the present-day event. The introductory rhetoric continues by nearly shutting itself down, as if no future could be imagined in such a post-apocalyptic world: SANCTUARY AND SACRED SPACE IN PATIENCE 115

What is to be said then, when faith has perished, and justice vanished, when devotion has grown cold and departed? . . . Grief compels us to be silent, even more so does the perilousness of the times, during which there are treacherous Christians, followers of the Antichrist, preachers of the divine word, or rather writers of their own loathsome practices, assailing the Church with hate, causing harm and injury. (237)

Walsingham has earlier associated John Wyclif with Antichrist—”a true adversary of God,” “that disciple of Antichrist” (75, 175)—and included documents of Wyclif’s Conclusions along with Pope Grego- ry XI’s bulls and letters to England warning bishops and king against Wyclif’s propositions. Thus the violators of sanctuary have called up the heretical preacher. Both forces threaten the church, the populus, and the very audibility of Walsingham’s chronicle. Yet Walsingham does not report Wyclif’s appearance in parliament but refers to him in covert terms as if to keep his power at bay. In the process he adduces the breach of sanctuary as an emblematic instance of the embattled state of the Christian church, whose own members have attacked it as though to bring it to an end. Walsingham’s oracular discourse here overtakes the chronicler’s engagement with the events of “modern times”; in his rhetoric, those times appear so dramatically altered as to look like the end of days. When Walsingham shifts once again toward the human time of the affair he is about to relate, he claims that the evils of the land ought not to be hidden, but brought to the notice of posterity: apocalypse must be historicized, explained, made manageable. He authorizes his chronicle, then, by depicting it as the means of making sense of clerical victimization. He puts on stage the grief-stricken helplessness of clergy, which imbues his account with righteous authority. Thus his “more than tragic” narrative will give form to a desecrating ﬁction, and in the process retrieve the sacrality of Westminster. Walsingham’s emphatic framing evades schism and heresy (though both receive detailed treatment earlier and later in the chronicle), using the drama of breached sanctuary, however temporarily, to crowd out threats to a stable church hierarchy and externalize the forces of transgression. The account promises to retrieve “cold and departed devotion,” heal- ing institutional division for the sake of an older, natural religion. Walsingham sets this unimpeded religious devotion against implicitly senseless secular machinations. The breach arose from monarchical weakness: as Walsingham writes, “after the two illustrious Edwards had paid their dues to nature, I mean King Edward the father, and Prince Edward the son,” Richard’s counselors tried to reclaim the Spanish hostage for the crown. The euphemistic juxtaposition of war 116 ELIZABETH ALLEN

debt with the deaths of warrior kings—their deaths themselves char- acterized as payments—makes the counselors’ action seem callow and trivializing. Their desire to reclaim the hostage is not fully expli- cable: according to the chronicle, some think it was an effort to gain the favor of John of Gaunt, others declare it part of a diplomatic plot to marry the son of the count to the king’s widowed sister Matilda. The political causes of the affair’s eruption are hidden; the hostage himself is hidden; the story is peppered with “it is saids” and “it is thoughts,” which serve both to authorize the account by implying a plurality of witnesses and, simultaneously, to raise questions about the real stakes of the breach. As we have seen, according to Nigel Saul, the real stakes were likely international, for the release of the hostage paved the way for improvement in Anglo-Aragonese relations.32 But Walsingham’s account gives no final authority to this explanation, creating instead a sense of secular government as undermotivated and full of multiple conspiratorial possibilities. Counselors and constable plan to invade the sanctuary; they intend to take the squires back to the Tower, and to treat them so badly as to make them take their own lives. They plan to do all this in secret, so as to avoid stirring up the citizens of London (241). The details of the plot reaffirm the government’s investment in secrecy, motivating Walsingham’s earlier claim that the event should not be hidden from posterity. Of course, the affair was a cause célèbre and indeed its drama depends upon this public knowledge and outcry.33 The rumors about the reasons for the attack suggest uncertainty about the facts and provisionality in historical explanations.34 But the rumor that the attackers intended to brutalize the sanctuary-seekers until they died in prison heightens the dichotomy between the officials and the sanctuary-men, between the senseless machinations of secular violence and the naturalized symbolic power of sacred victimhood. Both the chaos of the breach and Walsingham’s ability to invest it with meaning come to a head in the brutal scene in the church, which Walsingham, unlike Wyclif, narrates in full. Hawley is at mass when the king’s men accuse him of spurning the king’s commands. When Hawley accuses them of injustice, the men draw arms; he runs. The scene pivots on a narrative interruption: once Hawley is surrounded, Walsingham writes, “Quid multa?” What more is there to say? The moment opens into chaotic noise and violence: the men attack with terrifying shrieks, horribiliter exclamando. They threaten the monks, kill a sacristan, strike Hawley on the head as he prays, and finally stab SANCTUARY AND SACRED SPACE IN PATIENCE 117 him in the back in the choir. Afterward they drag his body through the church and throw it outside: “They were like beasts possessed by a fury, who had no fear of God and no regard for men.” Subsequently, the archbishop’s excommunication is published three times a week for a long time, eventually prompting repentance (242–45).35 Walsingham’s rhetorical crescendo to this outcry depicts Hawley and Shakell as worthy and pious, and there is no indication that their expected ransom is exorbitant or their claim to the hostage anything but legitimate. Their hope of coming into a large fortune and their risking prison suggest at least some level of economic need, but nothing in the account suggests that they are even criminals. Hawley is at mass when the king’s men arrive, which identifies the scene immediately as desecration. His defenselessness places him, however awkwardly, in the role of embattled clerical figure (the sacristan killed on his behalf conveniently impersonates this role more clearly). He defends himself verbally against his attackers’ injustice, greed, and false testimony, but does not attack the king. He fights off a dagger, but carries no arms himself. He runs around the choir twice and pleads for his life, in a scene of abject desperation. A year later, it turns out that the hostage, the count’s son, posed as their servant for years and stood by them, incognito, during the entire episode (311– 13). Desperation makes them perfect representatives of the need for sanctuary. In this instance, the sanctuary fails to protect the humble innocent—conveniently eliding the tangled issue of criminals cor- rupting the church. Framing the attackers as uncontrolled and even mob-like, while depicting the victims as ordinary men protecting their just claim, Walsingham figures the breach of sanctuary as an uncontrolled encroachment on sacred space. The sacred falls victim to unknown rationales, secret plans, inarticulate violations by secular forces that cannot even be clearly identified with John of Gaunt.36 Walsingham’s emphasis on rupture between government and church may dichotomize them, but ultimately makes a claim for the church’s integral place in the goings-on of the kingdom. In the last paragraph of the account, the homiletic voice returns to elevate the event once again into typological time: “In this way the sanctuary is defiled, Zion is in mourning, the shrine of St. Peter resides in sadness, this retreat for kings, this chief of churches has become a reproach and a laughing-stock [Jer. 20:8].” For Walsingham, kings are unmistakably protected by, hence subordinate to, the church. That role is authorized by prophecy: “And what has our Lord said? 118 ELIZABETH ALLEN

He foretold that crime. . . . He also foretold the penalty to be paid for the murder of St. Thomas the martyr and archbishop of Canter- bury when the holy shrine of Westminster would be defiled with human blood. Such a penalty should have been feared, and we should ask the Lord for peace and truth in our time” (242–43). This is the homiletic voice with which Walsingham so effectively invigorated the conflict between church and state (and recalls a paradigmatic moment of clerical self-assertion that famously weakened the state). But now the language is psalmic, not apocalyptic: lamentation reins in the extravagance of the breach and generates hope for “peace in our time.” Lamentation for the defiled church becomes the means of reconnecting the church to secular authority. The typological similarity between murder at Canterbury and defilement at Westmin- ster expresses a symmetry in the workings of God’s justice, matching past crimes to present. Recalling prophecy produces coherence, contextualizing the chronicle of “modern times” within a broader temporality. As the chronicles continue, Walsingham recounts briefly the modi- fications to sanctuary law in the next two parliaments. The issue loses its charge quickly, largely because the principle of sanctuary itself goes essentially unmolested; in Walsingham’s account, parliament clearly sanctions the use of holy places as refuge from the law. Wyclif’s actual argument does not surface. Indeed, between 1377 and 1382, the chronicle essentially sets aside Wycliffite ruptures in Christian concord. This absence hints that the Hawley-Shakell affair threatens Walsingham’s notion of clerical authority far less than Wyclif’s reasoned arguments. The governmental breach of sanctuary—for all its outrageous violence—banishes a certain incoherence from the chronicle. The dramatic breach of sanctuary provides a stage for reconciliation, a conceptual hiatus or refuge from the real divisions in the church, a place where dichotomy can be exaggerated and displaced in order to be resolved. Dramatic narrative here provides a “safe” zone, even a figurative kind of sanctuary: in response to a “more than tragic” desecration Walsingham uses various homiletic voices to enclose one chaotic moment within a meaningful narrative. The breach of sanctuary could of course make the church also look weakened and dissipated, but the involvement of sanctuary in the secular and the profane empowers Walsingham’s account. By revving up the noise of his own outrage, Walsingham invests in the language of the embattled church because it authorizes a defense and reasser- SANCTUARY AND SACRED SPACE IN PATIENCE 119 tion of authority. His account registers the degree to which, far from simply offering a gate to eternity, protected sacred space is remarkably contingent, and inextricably tied to the political problems from which the sanctuary supposedly provides escape—tied, that is, to the very realm of intrigue, violence, and desperation which reverence for holy places should, for Walsingham, overcome. Like the divine presence in sanctuary, prophecy and lament are deployed in the service of political and communal interests. Sanctuary provides the stage, finally, for instrumental and worldly uses of divinity. As we shall see in Patience, such valuation of the saeculum is not cynical, but actually expresses a crucial aspect of Christian belief.

PATIENCE’S MINSTER AND LOVE OF THE WORLD

Accounts of sanctuary-seekers from the humble to the notorious polarize sacred and secular precisely in order to stage their reconvergence.37 In the Hawley-Shakell affair, holy space is repeatedly revealed to be essential to the construction of secular power; in turn, the breach reaffirms the divine presence in the space, and bolsters the clerical institutions authorized by that presence. The physical violence that so often attends recorded instances of sanctuary may seem to corrupt or destroy the space, but fears of sacrilege actually maintain and even heighten its sacredness. Narratives of the use, violation, and defense of sanctuary thus give holy space its vibrancy and its political leverage; however secular many of the arguments surrounding the privilege may appear, their basis lies in a conscious- ness of divine aegis that expresses itself in worldly forms. However final Hawley’s death may be, the affair resists finality, continuing in polemic, chronicle, two parliaments and assorted court cases; the squires’ flight to sanctuary sets the stage for years of negotiation at several levels. Thus sanctuary practice emphasizes what V. A. Kolve terms “man in the middle,” humans experiencing the world during the saeculum, the time between birth and death before judgment has been finally passed. Patience also unfolds as a narrative of man in the middle. To be sure, the poem’s initial definition of patience would seem to discourage the preoccupation with worldly experience that Kolve describes: “For ho [patience] quelles vche a qued and quenches malyce; / For quoso suffer cowþe syt, sele solde folwe, / And quo for þro may noght þole, þe þikker he sufferes” [For she kills everything bad and extinguishes 120 ELIZABETH ALLEN

malice; / For if anyone could endure sorrow, happiness would follow; and anyone who, through resentment, cannot endure suffers the more intensely] (4–6).38 Patience here causes initial displeasure, but if achieved, can quell evil and quench bad feeling. The vocabulary of suffocation suggests that patience requires tamping down emotional and ethical protests against human loss: “suffering” suggests submit- ting oneself to the powerful inevitability of pain. As most critics have seen, however, the meaning of patience shifts in the course of the poem, becoming associated with God’s mercy toward both Jonah and Nineveh. Indeed, far from tamping it down, the poem stages human protest in such a way as to reveal the value God places upon the created world. But Patience is not solely “about God.”39 Instead, it focuses our attention on the ways in which God tries to sharpen Jonah’s vision of—and ability to value—the saeculum, the time between. Of course, when Jonah expects to find sanctuary from God he misunderstands the nature of divine mercy; despite his attachment to his own life, he also undervalues Nineveh and with it the world of created things. By the poem’s end, Jonah’s resistance and anger do not evaporate, but do not condemn him; they demonstrate “the human preoccupation with ordinary circumstance so intense as to exclude most other concerns” (Kolve, 36). If we understand the whale’s belly in terms of sanctuary practices, we can see more clearly the poem’s emphasis on God’s protective presence. God’s judgment is expressed, but His final condemnation suspended; the sanctuary-man experiences violence, but remains under God’s aegis; the sanctuary marks Jonah’s vulnerability, but forces renegotiation of his social obligations. In this sense the rebellious prophet experiences a far more efficacious version of sanctuary than his historical counterpart Hawley, even as the Hawley- Shakell debates reveal the extent to which Jonah’s enclosed space points him not away from the world but back into it.40 Patience was probably composed far from London’s causes célèbres. If Michael Bennett is right about the context of its composition, the poem could be a product of Cheshire, a center of Ricardian affin- ity from the late 1380s.41 A separate palatinate with special feudal privileges, Cheshire also had its own practice of perpetual sanctuary, which was secular rather than religious, and from which the Earls of Chester gained valuable revenue and military personnel. The area became a notorious refuge for criminals, giving perpetual asylum to felons, Jews, and traitors as wells as debtors and thieves.42 Such a context associates secular sanctuary with geographical marginality SANCTUARY AND SACRED SPACE IN PATIENCE 121 and legal outlawry, and may lend resonance to the poet’s choice of the alienated Jonah as “hero” of his tale. But even more generally, as Rosser points out, sanctuary-men were very often outsiders to the area where they sought refuge.43 Regardless of the precise location of its author and production, Pa- tience concerns a provincial and reluctant prophet called to announce doom to the large, far-off city of Nineveh in Assyria, a city that takes three days simply to walk across, in a foreign place where he fears for his life:

I com wyth þose tyþynges, þay ta me bylyve Pynez me in a prysoun, put me in stokkes, Wryþe me in a warlok, wrast out myn yghen. (78–80)

[If I come with those tidings, they [will] seize me right away, Conﬁne me in prison, put me in the stocks, Twist me into fetters, gouge out my eyes.]

Jonah anticipates that a Jewish prophet in Assyria will be treated as a criminal, subject to torturous punishments; he figures the Ninevites as “mansed [cursed] fendes” but also as political “enemyes” (82). When he finally does carry out God’s command and cry through the streets of its impending destruction, the Ninevites actually take his message to heart and engage in radical penance, the king declaring a universal fast that extends to suckling babies and farm animals; and God withholds His wrath. But the salvation of the city gives Jonah no pleasure because it weakens his own role as prophet—he would rather die, he says, “Þen lede lenger Þi lore þat þus me les makez” [Than pursue any longer your truth that makes me a liar] (428). When he sets himself up to the east of the city to watch what will become of it, he acts out this defensive posture: as a prophet he is an outsider to the city’s fate, but as its false prophet his role is even more insecure. This tenuous social status resonates with the accounts of Hawley and Shakell and many other sanctuary-men, whose flight to the unsafe refuge of the church points out their social insecurity. Jonah makes himself an outcast from the beginning by trying to flee God’s purview. Boarding a boat at Japha, he pays the mariners to take him to Tarshish, believing he has escaped the command to prophesy. When God raises a storm that tears the ship apart, the sailors seek out a guilty party to throw overboard, “sum losynger, sum lawles wrech / Þat hatz greued his god and gotz here amonge vus” [Some liar, some lawless wretch, / That has angered his god and 122 ELIZABETH ALLEN

goes here among us] (170–71). The vocabulary here equates sin with crime—the term “losynger” is generally associated with betrayal of women, flattery, and bad counsel, and the notion of lawlessness cov- ers both legal error and Old Testament transgression.44 Once they find Jonah hidden in the hold, the poem identifies him as “þe Jwe,” pointing to his idiosyncrasy even before he is revealed as the lawless wretch they seek. He is marked as both authoritative prophet and Old Testament throwback, as visionary and as partially blind; although he converts the sailors, he remains archaic from the perspective of the Christian reader.45 When Jonah flees from God, he preserves his life by abjuring both social and spiritual community. Though God cannot properly “breach” his own protection, the boat’s “hurrok” or hold works much the way sanctuaries work in documentary contexts: the offender flees there for safety and respite from his obligation, but instead of simply protecting him, the ship calls attention to his vulnerability, and here, as God tosses it on the high seas, expresses the communal costs of sheltering a criminal. Be- cause God is the agent of justice in the poem, the destruction of the boat clearly demonstrates divine aggression more directly than do invasive constables or martyred sacristans. Nonetheless, Jonah’s presence still generates negotiation as the sailors discuss which god made the storm and how much protection to afford His creature: initially they fear throwing Jonah overboard because of the power of his god. Meanwhile the boat, described in loving detail, is destroyed piece by piece in the storm. Like the Westminster Abbey of Walsingham’s chronicle, Jonah’s first sanctuary registers not just his vulnerability but the permeable physicality of the space itself. The whale’s belly is another permeable sanctuary, where divinity not only inheres but derives power from the most physically corrupt environment. Patience’s long description of the whale-minster’s “glaym ande glette” [slime and filth], justly famous for its concrete detail, represents just the sort of sensory vividness that Wyclif unwit- tingly calls up when he claims bodily fluids cannot defile the church and then goes on to parse which fluids rank where in the ladder of corruption. As we saw, the fusion of corruption with sacredness implicitly empowers Wyclif’s insistence on royal jurisdiction. Hawley should not have tried to escape the purview of his king, any more than Jonah should try to flee from God’s sight; for both Wyclif and the Patience-poet, the sanctuary contains and makes visible the sinner in the midst of his sin. To be sure, the whale’s belly differs from sanc- SANCTUARY AND SACRED SPACE IN PATIENCE 123 tuary in important ways: instead of intending to flee there, Jonah is thrown in by a stern God. But the minster simile, with the pattern of refuge that structures the poem, evokes the special protective function of sanctuary and calls attention to the dynamic presence of divinity—in the most peripheral spaces, with the most isolated persons. Moreover, despite the penitential aspect of both whale and church, Jonah, like sanctuary-men more generally, avoids contrition and con- fession, the hallmarks of penitential process.46 The prophet’s initial prayer to God acknowledges his own sin only in order to quell God’s wrath: “Thagh I be gulty of gyle, as gaule of prophetes, / Þu art God, and alle gowdez ar grayþely Þin owen. / Haf now mercy of Þy man and his mysdedes, / And preue Þe lyghtly a Lorde in londe and in water” [Though I be guilty of trickery, the scum of prophets, / You are God, and all goods are truly your own. / Have now mercy on your man and his misdeeds, / And prove yourself easily a lord over both land and water] (285–87). With this prayer, Jonah attains a measure of stability, finding a corner free of filth where he sits “saf for merk one” (291), safe except that he is in physical and moral darkness. Yet his beating at the sides of the whale confirms his continued rebellion; Jonah seems unaware that the whale is God’s shelter not his prison. The whale’s distress (“wamel,” 300) emphasizes the physical consequences of Jonah’s situation, his reluctant involvement in (and effect upon) the life of this world. By throwing him to the whale, God takes Jonah out of circulation, limiting the prophet’s otherwise uncontrolled, centrifugal energy of disaffection and containing the ramifications of his rebellion within a suggestively hellish, yet in the end relatively harmless, beast. God thus challenges Jonah to rene- gotiate his social obligation to prophesy. Although most readings of the poem emphasize Jonah’s spiritual progress, however incomplete, looking at the whale’s belly as a sanctuary allows us to see the degree to which his character resists a penitential understanding of the poem. When Jonah admits only to having tried to trick God, he makes peculiarly instrumental use of his own acknowledgement of error. When he prays to God a second time, he still does not express contrition, but submits to God’s power, promising to “halde goud þat Þou me hetes: haf here my trauthe” [hold well to your command: have here my troth] (336). To be sure, Jonah’s experience of his creaturely status—his vulnerability and submission to God’s might—chimes with the initial definition of patience, which in response to the sub- 124 ELIZABETH ALLEN

jection of the body preaches subjection of the will to divine power. Obedience is essential to the notion of patience and remains the first layer of significance available to the shaken prophet.47 Emerg- ing from sanctuary, Jonah obeys God and preaches at Nineveh. But despite his channeling of divine power, he remains an embattled and exiled creature. We have seen how Thomas Walsingham garners authority from his embattled status by deploying the voice of the outraged prophet to confirm his institutional and political authority. But Jonah (himself the sanctuary man as well as the prophet) has limited resources for lending such recuperative significance to his plight, and derives no such power from his sojourn in the whale. Jonah lacks the scriptural awareness of a modern cleric, of course; but he also refuses the consequences of finding himself part of typological or providential history.48 Instead, he views the whale as one in a series of infuriating divine buffetings. In this way, he teaches only by negative example the initial moral of the poem: the patient man abides his sorrows without complaint (7–8). Jonah’s resistance calls attention to the fact that avoiding complaint, obeying God, and accepting physical misery and danger without “grucchyng” provide an impoverished vision of the poem’s titular virtue. Not only the whale’s belly and the hold of the boat, but the woodbine bower outside Nineveh capture, in little, the mortal world. If the whale-sanctuary is described with sensory vigor that becomes crucial to its significance, then its land-based counterpart, the woodbine bower where Jonah lives outside the city, is even more overtly sensory and achingly beautiful: “Such a lefsel of lof neuer lede hade” [Such a praiseworthy bower a man never had] (448). These spaces are temporary and represent the changing nature of both suffering and pleasure; both referred to as bowers (276, 437), they evoke the hortus con- clusus of the Song of Songs, emphasizing God’s role as artificer of both Jonah’s punishment and his protection. Jonah is so taken with his beautiful woodbine house that he lounges in it, laughs, rolls around in it all day and forgets about eating. Though infused with irony, the poetry achieves a moment of stasis here.49 Verbally echoing Jonah’s tumble in at the minster door, the effusive description of the bower emphasizes its protected enclosure: “Þe schyre sunne hit vmbeschon, þagh no schafte myght / Þe mountaunce of a lyttel mote vpon þat man schyne” [The bright sun shone around it, though no shaft could / Even the size of a tiny mote shine upon that man] (455–56). If Jo- nah’s creaturely status was made obvious when he tumbled into the SANCTUARY AND SACRED SPACE IN PATIENCE 125 whale, here his creaturely fear and anger against God are temporarily glossed over, utterly unlit by the blazing sun outside. More than any other sanctuary space we have examined, this one seems to promise a refuge from the violence and corruption that seem so inextricably part of other “safe” spaces protected by divinity. The palpable relief offered in the woodbine bower does not last. When God commanded him to prophesy doom, Jonah fled to save his own life, but now, when God sends a worm to eat the woodbine, Jonah is so outraged and grief-stricken that he invites God to kill him. These reactions gesture toward an aspect of patience that does not simply quell worldly pain. For the woodbine’s destruction, like the belly of the whale itself, finally points less toward Jonah’s ac- complished penance than toward his love of life—just that love of life that made him refuse to prophesy to the Ninevites—emphasized by the surly pretense of his angry death wish. In this moment, Jonah resembles the carter in Kolve’s account of Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale: a man in the heart of “continuing contestation” between good and bad (29), cursing and blessing his horses with equal robustness and equal inattention to the eventual finality of God’s judgment. Ironically, since attachment to his own life was what got Jonah into trouble in the first place, his absorption in life is the basis of God’s ultimate lesson in Patience. We might recall that Jonah, like Christ, was meant to be a savior: the prophetic task God assigned him had precisely to do with maintaining a secular city, God’s own creation, a city He made and then “loked hem ful longe and hem on lode had” [watched over them a long time and took them under guidance] (504). If He had destroyed the city, God tells Jonah, “Þe sor of such a swete place burde synk to My hert” [The sorrow for such a sweet place ought to sink into my heart] (507)—a sorrow which ought to persist, He adds, despite the malicious men in the city and those who don’t know the upright of a ladder from the rung. God proves unwilling to destroy his created world, even though, according to Jonah, his change of heart makes his prophet look false. God’s destructive worm is a reply to Jonah’s complaint:

If I wolde help My hondewerk, haf þou no wonder; Þou art waxen so wroth for þy wodbynde. . . . Þenne wyte not Me for þe werk, þat I hit wolde help, And rwe on þo redles þat remen for synne. (496–502) 126 ELIZABETH ALLEN

[If I wanted to aid My creatures, you should not wonder; You have become so angry about your woodbine. . . . Then don’t blame me for wanting to help my own creation, And for pitying the helpless who cry out for their sins.]

Jonah’s wrath, the reverse of patience, points out the quality of mercy embedded in the poem’s central virtue, for it is mercy toward the created world (including the self-preserving Jonah) that reveals God’s own patience—both in the sense of suffering on behalf of his sinful creation and in the sense of mitigating his punishment.50 Patience here is not defined as stoic acceptance of loss and tamping down of worldly attachment but the reverse: the poem advocates an attachment to the whole created world that makes the virtue of patience all the more complex, since it involves strenuous resistance to the loss of physical life. God will not destroy his penitent city, but the cities and sanctuaries that He provides are neither unfailingly safe, physically stable, nor spiritually final. They are instead the temporary stages upon which troubled life plays out. In one sense God’s love for Nineveh, which he created, provides readers with an alternative to the exemplum of the benighted Jonah, who never answers God’s final speech and hence remains, within the frame of the poem, aggrieved and outcast.51 The poem associates his archaism, his distance from salvation, and his isolation with that which resists the presence of divinity. Yet Jonah’s resistance is exemplary in another sense: it provides a picture of human desire for protection, a resistance to loss and pain that bespeaks a certain (however limited) involvement in and appreciation of living.52 Kolve writes of man’s situation “in the middle” before final judgment that “the eschaton is not yet; change remains possible, however rare the signs of movement in that direction” (41); human lack of awareness or conformity to the will of God is a condition of experience in the saeculum, the time between birth and spiritual end. During that time, God has patience with humankind. Patience slowly develops the definition of its titular virtue as mercy and divine love, and the poem thus concludes in an implicit imitatio dei.53 As our exploration of sanctuary allows us to see, however, the spiritual journey of the poem occurs in and through the physical world, indeed through the narrow, angry world of Jonah. If the Hawley-Shakell affair reveals the convergence of secular government and clerical privilege, the poem’s sanctuaries reveal the spiritual meaning of the saeculum in a broader sense. God’s statement about Nineveh suggests a complex awareness of the lives SANCTUARY AND SACRED SPACE IN PATIENCE 127 lived there in various states of awareness, from the malicious to the innocent, inadvertently and constantly under divine protection.54 In this loosest sense, God’s sanctuary is perennial and ubiquitous. God’s patience is not a quelling or quenching of attachment, then, but an expression of love for the saeculum itself. While Jonah wants his prophecy to have the final authority of apocalypse, God values both him and the Ninevites for their worldly engagements, their existence in time. In this sense, the whale’s belly typifies the protection God has to offer: physically harsh, lively, mobile, and corrupt. Its protection is also temporary, forcing Jonah out of his escape narrative into the story of his own life. Late-medieval sanctuary practices point to just such instrumental, even opportunistic uses of sacred space. But this does not impoverish the idea of the holy that undergirds them. Sanctuary documents point out the world-oriented usefulness of sacrality, the world-sustaining power of divine aegis, with which Patience is principally concerned. University of California, Irvine

NOTES

1 Patience is quoted by line number from Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, eds., The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript (U. of California Press, 1978).

2 See “The Munster Dor,” ELN 14 (1977): 164–67. On parallels between the whale in Patience and the chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, suggesting the penitential character of both, see Andrew, “The Diabolical Chapel,” Neophilologus 66 (1982): 313–19.

3 The distinction between penitential and punitive valences of sanctuary is drawn by Karl Shoemaker in Medieval Sanctuary Law: Changing Conceptions of Law, Crime and Punishment (forthcoming). Shoemaker argues that an older penitential idea of sanctuary is gradually displaced by the increasing strength of punitive attitudes toward crime, in both common and canon law.

4 Rosser, “Sanctuary and Social Negotiation in Medieval England,” in The Cloister and the World, ed. John Blair and Brian Golding (Oxford U. Press, 1996), 58. For complications of the secularization thesis see also Peter Ivor Kaufman, “Henry VII and Sanctuary,” Church History 53 (1984): 465–76.

5 The sanctuary at Westminster, like those of several other places in England, offered perpetual or permanent protection based on (usually forged) royal charters; these became the focus of arguments against the practice. Norman Maclaren Trenholme, The Right of Sanctuary in England (Columbia: U. Missouri Press, 1903), 47–61; Rosser, “Sanctuary,” 70–74. 128 ELIZABETH ALLEN

6 The term “secular” has a wide range of applications ranging from State power to civic governance. Its origins, however, are temporal: the saeculum, writes Robert Markus, is the “meantime” before the ﬁnal judgment, during which the church understands itself as the center of a wider circle: “The inner circle, the Church, is the sacramental anticipation of the future Kingdom which it is charged to proclaim to the world. The outer circle is the secular, the realm which is still in a state of waiting for the proclamation to be heard and received.” See Christianity and the Secular (South Bend, IN: U. Notre Dame Press 2006), 15.

7 Breach of sanctuary was not particularly common; R. F. Hunnisett, The Medieval Coroner (Cambridge U. Press, 1961), 37.

8 The thirteenth-century codiﬁcation of sanctuary practices is well-documented. See Charles Cox, Sanctuaries and Sanctuary Seekers of Medieval England (London: Allen, 1911); Trenholme, Right of Sanctuary; Hunnisett, Medieval Coroner; and for the rela- tion to outlawry see André Reville, “L’Abjuratio Regni: Histoire d’une Institution Anglaise,” Revue Historique 1 (1892): 1–42, and Krista Kesselring, “Abjuration and Its Demise: The Changing Face of Royal Justice in the Tudor Period,” Canadian Journal of History 34 (1999): 345–58.

9 “Man in the middle” is V. A. Kolve’s ﬁgure (“‘Man in the Middle’: Art and Religion in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 [1990]: 5–46) for “human preoccupation with ordinary circumstance so intense as to exclude most other concerns,” including God’s judgment (36). In the middle, “the eschaton is not yet; change remains possible, however rare the signs of movement in that direction” (41). Subsequent citations are parenthetic.

10 On the parliament’s periodic involvement with ﬂare-ups of argument about sanctuary-seeking, see Isobel D. Thornley, “The Destruction of Sanctuary,” in Tudor Studies, ed. R. W. Seton-Watson (London: Longmans, Green, 1924), 182–207; for conﬂict between city and church, see Thornley’s “Sanctuary in Medieval London,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 2nd ser., 38 (1933): 293–315.

11 E. Perroy, “Gras proﬁts et rançons pendant la guerre de cent ans; l’affaire du comte de Denia,” Mélanges d’histoire du moyen âge dédiés à la mémoire de Louis Halphen (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951), 573–80. As Nigel Saul, Richard II (Yale U. Press, 1997), 36. puts it, “faced with this conﬂict between private interest and public need, the [English king’s] council had little hesitation in giving priority to the latter.”

12 Shakell was sent back to prison, where he was kept for thirteen months. The prisoner remained in his possession, and as late as 1393 he sent via merchants to Aragon various bills for about 23,000 gold francs still owed. See Perroy, “Gras proﬁts,” 579–80; Herbert B. Workman, John Wyclif: A Study of the English Medieval Church, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 322.

13 On John of Gaunt’s absence from London at the time, see John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs, and Leslie Watkiss, eds., The St Albans Chronicle: The “Chronica maiora” of Thomas Walsingham, vol. 1, 1376-1394 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), and Saul, Richard II, 35–36 and 41–44. SANCTUARY AND SACRED SPACE IN PATIENCE 129

14 As David Aers and Lynn Staley have written, fourteenth-century writers are cap- tivated by “the processes, the doubts, the conﬂicts, the arguments—the often contradictory and shifting, unstable groupings in which ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘tradi- tion’ was [sic] being put into question.” See The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State U. Press, 1996), 6. Walsingham is elsewhere highly concerned with Wyclif’s develop- ing heresy, but strategically marginalizes him in the account of the Hawley-Shakyll affair.

15 A later chronicler decries the disturbing effect of the parliament on the abbey’s daily life, especially the entertainers and ball games on the abbey lawn, in Chro- nique de la Traison et Mort de Richart Deux Roy Dengleterre, ed. B. Williams (London, 1846), xlviii, cited in Martin, “Parliament of October 1378, Introduction.”

16 “[Celle] congregacion issint faite en si saint lieu, dont l’escripture dist ‘Terribilis est locus iste’; si est fait, si Dieu plest, en le noun de Dieu et de la grace del Sainte Espirit, dont l’Evangile dit, ‘Quod ubi sunt duo vel tres congregati in nomine meo, in medio eorum sum, dicit Dominus.’ Et par tant si aucun descort ou male volentee par l’instigacion du deable y feust moevez ou conceuz parentre aucunes persones cy presentz, qe Dieu ne veulle, le perre du corner de seinte esglise, qe droitement signiﬁe Dieu par l’escripture, qe dit, ‘Lapis angularis Christus est’; les fra mettre et trera a unitee et concorde.” Quotations from the parliamentary rolls are from “Richard II: Parliament of October 1378, Text and Translation,” ed. Geoffrey Martin, in The Parliamentary Rolls of Medieval England, ed. Chris Given- Wilson et al., Internet version, at http://www.sd-editions.com/PROME.

17 Workman, John Wyclif, 300–13. Wyclif’s battle with Pope Gregory XI ended when the latter died in 1378, but his anti-papal views had become widely known and by 1380 he had been declared a heretic. In 1378 however, he remained a favorite of Gaunt and other aristocrats as well as a popular ﬁgure. On Wyclif’s attitudes toward the papacy, see Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wyclifﬁte Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 327–34, and toward clerical disendowment, 334–51.

18 See Tractatus de Ecclesia, ed. Johann Loserth (London, 1886; rpr. New York: John- son, 1966). Subsequent quotations are from this edition, cited by page number; I am immensely grateful to Cristiana Sogno for consultation on the translations, which are my own. Begun before the Hawley-Shakell affair, the tract responds to the papal schism and to attacks by, among others, Bishop Courtenay (Loserth, “Introduction,” iii–iv; Saul, Richard II, 37). I focus here primarily on chap. 7, which gives a detailed argument against sanctuary per se and was probably inserted into the tract after much of the rest had been written (xxv). The following nine chapters repeatedly return to the privileges of Westminster but concern more broadly the problem of church privileges and endowments, insisting that the church’s power derives from the civil power of the King, whose appointment by God trumps the power of clerics within its institutions. See also Reginald L. Poole, review of Johannus Wyclif Tractatus de Ecclesia (English Historical Review 3 [1888]: 571–75), which speculates that the whole of chaps. 7–16 were an expansion on the testimony Wyclif gave before parliament. For more on de Ecclesia see Loserth’s “Introduction,” iii–xxxii, and Workman, John Wyclif, 321–24. 130 ELIZABETH ALLEN

19 Loserth, De Ecclesia, 142–43: “Superaddentes inobediencie priori exierunt contra mandatum regis violente de carcere et prostrato custode carceris intrarunt septa Westmonasterii, in quibus vendicarunt omnino eximi a subieccione regis ex illius ecclesie libertate . . . Dicuntur arma sibi parasse, literas salvi conductus ab hostibus procurasse et consilium domini nostri regis tamquam falsum publice diﬁdasse.”

20 Loserth, De Ecclesia, 143: “In isto autem articulo intendo condicionaliter . . . et nec invasionem occisi nec suam occisionem propter ignoranciam occulte circumstancie comprobare.”

21 Wyclif never quite states that sanctuary should be illegal across the board: here, his argument is against perpetual sanctuary for debt. See for example chap. 11, pp. 244–45, where he argues that Westminster should not be a perpetual sanctuary but should observe the legal forty-day limit and be overseen by the coroner.

22 Loserth, De Ecclesia, 148: “Cum ergo not sit in potestate principis concedere quod vergeret as Dei iniuriam, ad destruccionem regni sui, ad enervacionem regalie et legum per quas regeret regnum suum, patet quod illud suppositum in casu nobis exposito non includitur in illo privilegio generali. Quid queso foret magi ad Dei iniuriam quam facere domum suam speluncam latronum? Aut quid foret magis destructivum regnorum quam protegere in nidis ad hoc deputatis hostes Dei ecclesie atque regni.”

23 For a cogent analysis of Wyclif’s views on dominion see Michael Wilks, “Predes- tination, Property, and Power: Wyclif’s Theory of Dominion and Grace,” Studies in Church History 2 (1965): 220–36; for Wyclif’s use of his ideas about dominion against the clergy, see Hudson, Premature Reformation, 359–62, and on the power of the secular ruler, 262–67.

24 Loserth, De Ecclesia, 153: “Talis autem excommunicator videtur plus polluere sanctam ecclesiam quam corporaliter occidens hominem ad altare; pro quo no- tandum quod corporalis pollucio videtur esse excommunicacione impertinens, nisi de quanto sapit peccatum, tum quia pollucio per sputum vel alia pondera nature foret turpior quam pollucio per semen vel sanguinem, tum eciam quia illa pollucio deletur per locionem corpoream. . . . Sicut anima excedit corpus, sic occisio in animam perpetrata excedit in malicia occisionem corporis.”

25 The phrase is Dyan Elliott’s, in Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 1. Elliott’s subject, the post- fourth-Lateran high Middle Ages, differs substantially from that of the later fourteenth century; yet her analysis traces a persistent sense of archaic religiosity that acknowledges the presence of human and demonic pollution in sacred places; she elucidates the incomplete way in which reforming idealism (like Wyclif’s) sought to rationalize and systematize religious belief.

26 Loserth, De Ecclesia, 154: “Videtur, cum peccatum non potest subiectari in lapide vel ediﬁcio corporali, quod locus per se non polluit suos incolas…. Et patet quod pollucio loci non impediret racionabiliter cultum Dei, nisi de quanto horrorem incuteret ex peccato, et cum maius peccatum maiorem horrorem incuteret, sequitur quod peccatum gravius commissum in sanctuario pocius retraheret a divino servito.” SANCTUARY AND SACRED SPACE IN PATIENCE 131

27 Wyclif also insists that the church should concern itself “more with sin than with the place [where sin occurred]” (225), but later advocates keeping the space pure when he warns against mortal sin in church, the holding of fairs in churchyards, and the holding of the King’s court in cathedrals (236–37).

28 Hudson states that “From an early stage in his career Wyclif came to see the chief hope of reform in the church to lie with the king and the secular nobility” (362).

29 A monk at St. Alban’s, Walsingham lived 20 miles from London; he ﬁrst wrote two to four years after the event, though he seems to have compiled his Chronicle in the early 1390s. Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England II (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 124 n55.

30 Gransden paints St. Albans generally as involved in a “struggle against secular encroachment” (119).

31 The translation is from the facing-page edition and translation of Taylor et al., St. Alban’s Chronicle, 237. Subsequent quotations are cited parenthetically by page number.

32 Such relations were for twenty years an important part of English national diplo- macy, often in the form of secret negotiations. On Anglo-Aragonese relations, see Saul, Richard II, 38–41; and in detail, P. E. Russell, The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and Richard II (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955).

33 The phrase is used by Perroy, “Gras proﬁts,” 574 ; Taylor et al., The St Albans Chronicle, lxxxi; and Saul, Richard II, 36.

34 On “it is said” (ut fertur, ut dicibantur, etc.) as an indication of uncertainty or re- luctance to engage controversy, see Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 9. Wyclif and Walsingham disagree not only about the reasons for the prosecution of Hawley and Shakell but about the degree of rebelliousness expressed by them.

35 Walsingham implies Archbishop Simon Sudbury was the engine of excommunication, whereas Wyclif says it was London Bishop William Courtenay. Walsingham’s account refutes Wyclif’s accusations by insisting the bishops had to “pluck up courage” (concepta audacia, 244–45) to impose such a terrible sentence.

36 Gransden shows that Walsingham’s attitude toward John of Gaunt started out hostile and changed over time, as Walsingham later became a supporter of the Lancastrians, and he or others at St. Albans seem to have corrected parts of the chronicle that would be offensive to Gaunt, 130; 138–40; 142–43. See also V. H. Galbraith, “Thomas Walsingham and the St. Albans Chronicle, 1272–1422,” English Historical Review 48 (1932): 12–29.

37 On the “reconvergence” of sacred and secular concerns, see Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft Between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame, IN: U. of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 205–34.

38 Translations from Patience are my own except where indicated; this is Andrew and Waldron’s. 132 ELIZABETH ALLEN

39 A. C. Spearing, “The Subtext of Patience: God as Mother and the Whale’s Belly,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999): 295, 293; Spearing describes the sentiments expressed in the opening of Patience as Stoic.

40 Sarah Stanbury, Seeing the “Gawain”-Poet: Description and the Act of Perception (U. Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 71–95, understands the poem primarily in terms of Jonah’s limited human vision and provides a sustained analysis of the poem’s spatial imagery—demonstrated in the hold of the boat, the whale’s belly, and the woodbine bower—in terms of its “persistent construction of space according to perceptual logic, a system that foregrounds experience even as it diminishes formal or externally imposed meanings” (91).

41 Michael Bennett, Community, Class, and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (Cambridge U. Press, 1983) maintains that the manuscript containing Patience along with Pearl, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was a product of Richard II’s Cheshire circle. See also John Bowers, Politics of “Pearl”: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001).

42 On palatinate sanctuary see Trenholme, Right of Sanctuary, 85–89 and R. Stewart- Brown, “The Avowries of Cheshire,” English Historical Review 29 (1914): 41–55. For complaints in the time of Henry VIII, see Thornley, “Destruction,” 183–84.

43 Rosser, “Sanctuary,” 67.

44 MED s.v. “losenger.”

45 Elizabeth D. Kirk, “‘Who Suffreth More Than God?’: Narrative Redeﬁnition of Patience in Patience and Piers Plowman,” The Triumph of Patience: Medieval and Re- naissance Studies, ed. Gerald J. Schiffhorst (Gainesville: U. Press of Florida, 1978), 88–105.

46 Here I differ from very many readings of Patience in terms of Jonah’s spiritual progress. For example, see Spearing, “God as Mother,” and Ad Putter, An Introduction to the Gawain-Poet (London: Longman, 1996). On Jonah’s process of conversion, see Sandra Pierson Prior, “Patience—Beyond Apocalypse,” MP 83 (1986): 337–48, who argues that in contrast to both the sailors and the Ninevites, Jonah’s conversion is “individualize and internalized, and it is open-ended” (343). For her, the whale is where Jonah goes “to acquire self-knowledge” (345).

47 Andrew and Waldron, Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, “Introduction,” 20.

48 Jay Schleusener, “History and Action in Patience,” PMLA 86 (1971): 959–65.

49 J. A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Langland, and the “Gawain” Poet (New York: Penguin, 1971), 40–41, locates irony in the passage’s extravagance which is then undercut by God’s destruction. Prior, “Patience—Beyond Apocalypse,” 347, dis- cusses the “disproportion” in Jonah’s appreciation of his bower.

50 Kirk, “Who Suffreth More?” 93, 96–97. SANCTUARY AND SACRED SPACE IN PATIENCE 133

51 On the problem of voicing at the end of the poem, see Andrew and Waldron, Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, 206 n524. See also Spearing, “Subtext of Patience.”

52 Here I differ from a number of critics, e.g., David Benson, “The Impatient Reader of Patience,” Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the “Pearl”-Poet, ed. Robert J. Blanch, Miriam Youngerman Miller, and Julian N. Wasserman (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1991), 147–61, who argues for Jonah’s obsessive and sinful interest in the physical instead of the spiritual (150), which among other things generates the narrator’s and reader’s contempt (151). Though Benson finally argues that we are meant to examine our own contempt in light of our resemblance to Jonah, I find the poem finally more attentive to God’s protection of humanity than to human self- condemnation.

53 “Such a redefinition of patience as God’s sufferance makes the narrator’s desper- ate efforts at self-control look almost as antithetical to it as Jonah’s overt rebelliousness. . . . This positive definition of patience as imitatio dei or imitatio christi is based on seeing a continuity between God’s creative and salvific roles” (Kirk, “Who Suffreth More?” 94–95).

54 Prior, “Beyond Apocalypse,” 337, argues that patience is the virtue suited to those in “‘the middest,’ those who must work within history, who must cease looking to a distant, timeless future and become instead responsive to the present reality of God and his will.”