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'Episcopal Power in Anglo-Norman England, 1066-1135'

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'Episcopal Power in Anglo-Norman England, 1066-1135' ‘Episcopal Power in Anglo-Norman England, 1066-1135’ Samuel O’Rourke Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD University of East Anglia School of History February 2014 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived therefrom must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 1 Abstract The thesis presents an empirical view of episcopal power in England from 1066 to 1135. For simplicity’s sake, ‘power’ is defined as efficacy, or the ability to achieve one’s ends. No formal distinction is made here between ‘power’ and ‘authority’. The bulk of the thesis (Chapters 3-5) consists of three case studies: the first examines the political relationship between bishops, the papacy and the kings of England; the second looks at episcopal landholding; and the third considers disputes between bishoprics and abbeys. These case studies start by asking what bishops did: what their political goals were and the extent to which they achieved them. They then ask how bishops did what they did: what resources bishops deployed; why certain actions were possible; why certain strategies were or were not successful. By doing this it is possible to determine the nature of the power which bishops exercised. Three conclusions emerge: firstly, that episcopal power was highly dependent on royal power in this period; secondly, that the basis of episcopal power was often intangible (ideology or personality), rather than material (land or money); and thirdly, that episcopal power was inherently limited, in that bishops sometimes had very little freedom of action. Chapters 1 and 2 are not case studies. They are concerned with ideals of episcopal power. Chapter 1 shows that ideals of episcopal conduct and episcopal power (as expressed in contemporary hagiography) changed in eleventh-century England. It attempts to link these changes to historical developments in this period. Chapter 2 shows that these changing ideals were reflected in the narrative sources for the episcopate of Anglo-Norman England, but not in the reality of episcopal conduct, and that historians have often been misled by these narrative sources, reproducing a model of episcopal power which was little more than a monastic fantasy. 2 Contents 4 – Introduction 16 – Chapter 1: Hagiographical Ideals of Episcopal Power 54 – Chapter 2: Narrative Sources and Spiritual Authority 92 – Chapter 3: Bishops, Kings and the Papacy 139 – Chapter 4: Episcopal Power and Land (Case Studies: Dorchester / Lincoln and Worcester) 183 – Chapter 5: Bishops, Abbots and Their Men (Case Study: Canterbury) 223 – Conclusion 230 – Abbreviations 233 – Bibliography 3 Introduction ‘Anglo-Norman England’ is simple enough to define. The Anglo-Norman period is generally understood as the century or so after the Norman Conquest of 1066. Here the end of Henry I’s reign (1135) is used as a loose cut-off point. The reign of King Stephen is both too large and too distinctive to be included. Besides, a study of Stephen’s bishops already exists.1 Martin Brett’s reasons for choosing the English Church as a unit of study (rather than the Anglo-Norman Church) are still valid, and do not need to be repeated here.2 The idea of ‘episcopal power’, however, is more of a sticking point. There exists a large and often contradictory theoretical literature on power, and a multitude of rival definitions of the word: such a multitude that the editors of a recent Handbook of Power proposed to solve the problem by allowing each scholar to adopt his own definition, tailored to his field of interest.3 In the present thesis power will be defined in the broadest, most basic and least ambiguous way possible: as the ability to get what one wants, or to achieve one’s desire, whatever the means employed.4 The thesis looks at how bishops in Anglo-Norman England acted; what they sought to do; what results they obtained; and what resources or faculties allowed them to obtain these results. The thesis does not make the distinction, sometimes found in scholarship on the Middle Ages and elsewhere, between authority (‘the generally accepted justification for action’) and power itself (‘the practical ability to induce others to obey or follow a lead’).5 According to the definition of power just given, authority 1 See below, n. 12. 2 Martin Brett, The English Church under Henry I (Oxford, 1975), pp. 4-14. Unlike Brett’s study, the present thesis also ignores the Welsh and Scottish bishops. Their political situation was more complicated than that of bishops in England, and deserves separate treatment. 3 Stewart Clegg and Mark Haugaard, ‘Introduction: Why Power is the Central Concept of the Social Sciences’, in The SAGE Handbook of Power, ed. Stewart Clegg and Mark Haugaard (London, 2009), 1-24, pp. 22-3. 4 Cf. Richard Jenkins, ‘The Ways and Means of Power: Efficacy and Resources’, in SAGE Handbook of Power, 140-56, p. 140: ‘Power, in this approach, is understood as “efficacy”: the many and varied ways in which humans, whether individually or collectively, attempt to achieve their objectives and to assist or obstruct others in the achievement of theirs.’ 5 Brenda Bolton and Christine Meek, ‘Introduction’, in Aspects of Power and Authority in the Middle Ages, ed. Brenda Bolton and Christine Meek (Turnhout, 2007), 1-19, pp. 1-2. This distinction is by no means anachronistic for the study of the Middle Ages: the Gelasian distinction 4 represents nothing more than one of the means through which power can be exercised; it is a form of power in itself. It is hard in any case to separate authority from power.6 Money, for example, might be seen as a concrete form of power. But money’s power comes from the commonly accepted attribution of value to essentially useless chunks of metal – from a kind of authority. Similarly, the most lawless robber baron (someone who exercised power without authority, but through force) was only able to commit his depredations because his violent followers did what he commanded – because of the authority they attributed to him. The word ‘authority’ is used in this thesis, but in a non-technical sense, generally to refer to claims of legal jurisdiction (as with papal authority in Chapter 3). *** Historiographically, this study of episcopal power fills an important gap. In recent years, historians have become increasingly interested in the medieval bishop. Timothy Reuter was planning a major project on the episcopate before his death, 7 and several collections of essays calling for renewed study of the subject have appeared over the past decade.8 It is not that bishops were ignored before, between auctoritas sacrata pontificum and regalis potestas was widespread: Frank Barlow, The English Church, 1066-1154: A History of the Anglo-Norman Church (London, 1979), p. 269. It is simply easier for our purposes to use a monolithic definition of power. 6 As noticed by Susan Reynolds, ‘Secular Power and Authority in the Middle Ages’, in Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies, ed. Huw Pryce and John Watts (Oxford, 2007), 11-22, p. 11. 7 Timothy Reuter, ‘Bishops, Rites of Passage, and the Symbolism of State in Pre-Gregorian Europe’, in The Bishop: Power and Piety at the First Millenium, ed. Sean Gilsdorf (Münster, 2004), 23-36; idem, ‘Ein Europa der Bischöfe. Das Zeitalter Burchards von Worms’, in Bischof Burchard von Worms, 1000–1025, ed. Wilfried Hartmann (Mainz, 2000), 1-28. 8 Bischofsmord im Mittelalter: Murder of Bishops, ed. Natalie Fryde and Dirk Reitz (Göttingen, 2003); The Bishop, ed. Gilsdorf; The Bishop Reformed: Studies of Episcopal Power and Culture in the Central Middle Ages, ed. John Ott and Anna Trumbore Jones (Aldershot, 2007); Patterns of Episcopal Power: Bishops in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Western Europe, ed. Ludger Körntgen and Dominik Wassenhoven (Berlin, 2011). 5 but – according to certain scholars – a new approach to the question is needed.9 A synthetic treatment of the medieval bishop is required. The older historiography tended to view the episcopate’s religious and political functions in isolation.10 This approach must be replaced by one which recognises that ‘the bishop’s duties and expectations were multifaceted and fundamentally interconnected – part of a single emotional, psychological, and social whole.’11 Furthermore, while older studies were often biographical, looking at a single bishop in isolation, the episcopate itself (or at least groups of bishops) must now be looked at in unison. Whether these writers are right to insist on the total synthesis of the medieval bishop is a matter of opinion (Chapter 3 of the present thesis suggests that this synthesis may be just as anachronistic as the older separation of the bishop’s temporal and spiritual functions). For now, it is sufficient to note that, to a certain extent, the call for more work on the medieval bishop has been answered. Stephen Marritt’s doctoral thesis on the bishops of King Stephen’s reign,12 and Mary Giandrea’s book on episcopal culture in late Anglo-Saxon England cover the periods immediately before and after the one looked at here. 13 Charlotte Lewandowski’s study of ‘Cultural Expressions of Episcopal Power, 1070-c. 1150’ covers much the same period as this thesis. 14 Richard Allen has studied the Norman episcopate between 989 and 1110.15 One might even describe the field of episcopal studies as congested. However, the present thesis differs from the works just cited in a number of 9 See especially Michel Parisse, ‘The Bishop: Prince and Prelate’, in The Bishop, ed.
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