“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 sanc- tuary 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; ar- guments 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 at- tention to the instrumental uses of the minster’s sacred space. When 105 106 ELIZABETH ALLEN 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 no- tion 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 prac- tice 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 sanc- tuary 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 transgres- sion, or simply provides a safe zone for common criminals, holiness gets bound up with instability and contingency. To be sure, the world- ly 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 four- teenth-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 cru- cial 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 homi- letic 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 him- self 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 lib- erties 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 rational- ize 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.