False Oaths The Silent Alliance between Church and Heretics in England, c.1400-c.1530 Sarah Raskin Submitted in partial fulFillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Sarah Raskin All rights reserved ABSTRACT False Oaths: The Silent Alliance between Church and Heretics in England, c. 1400-1530 Sarah Raskin This dissertation re-examines trials for heresy in England from 1382, which saw the First major action directed at the WyclifFite heresy in Oxford, and the early Reformation period, with an emphasis on abjurations, the oaths renouncing heretical beliefs that suspects were required to swear after their interrogations were concluded. It draws a direct link between the customs that developed around the ceremony of abjuration and the exceptionally low rate of execution for “relapsed” and “obstinate” heretics in England, compared to other major European anti-heresy campaigns of the period. Several cases are analyzed in which heretics who should have been executed, according to the letter and intention of canon law on the subject, were permitted to abjure, sometimes repeatedly. Other cases ended in execution despite intense efforts by the presiding bishop to obtain a similarly law-bending abjuration. All these cases are situated in the context of the constitutions governing heresy trials as well as a survey of the theology and cultural standing of oaths within both WyclifFism and the broader Late Medieval and Early Modern world. This dissertation traces how Lollard heretics gradually accepted the necessity of false abjuration as one of a number of measures to preserve their lives and their movement, and how early adopters using coded writing carefully persuaded their co-religionists of this necessity. Furthermore, it will argue that the bishops who conducted the trial system deliberately constructed it to encourage this type of perjury, even suppressing attempts to alter heretics’ actual convictions, for the sake of social order and stability. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1. False Heretic 29 Chaper 2. The Tale of Two Heretic Bishops 55 Chapter 3. Learning to Lie 87 Chapter 4. The Subtleties of Prelates 123 Chapter 5. Into the Fire 158 Conclusion 188 Bibliography 194 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS All doctoral dissertations require an army, but mine, written in bed through a decade of severe and untreatable Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, required so much more. My mother, Marina Bergelson Raskin, cared for a patient with the physical needs of a toddler while dealing, always First and more often than anyone else, with the anxieties and perplexities of a doctoral student. My father, Victor Raskin, supported me Financially and made library runs long after I lost the ability to do so for myself. My dear friend, Kate Pease Williams Holden, went far outside her own Field to copy-edit every chapter. To her and to Alissa Rosellini, Karen Totsuka, and Mattias Smängs, I owe, entirely, my sanity and my conviction, against what seemed much evidence to the contrary, that I would Finish the work I had set out for myself. I am grateful to the Richard III Society and the Medieval Academy of America for taking a chance on a disabled student and funding my research, and to all the archivists and librarians who gave me good advice, especially Consuelo Deutchke at the Columbia Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and Martin Kauffmann at the Bodleian Library. Many also generously took photographs of manuscripts for me when I was unable to do so, particularly Gaye Morgan at the Codrington Library, Anna Sanders, and Silke Schaeper. My advisors, Euan Cameron and Martha Howell, have been inFinitely patient and supportive through many years, and waiting and Fighting my battles for me through many long relapses when I could do nothing, Professor Cameron discussed every section of this dissertation with me. He has been not only mentor and Doktorvater in the fullest sense of the words, but also conFidante, cheerleader, therapist, spiritual advisor. His quiet assumption, from the moment I was stricken into, at First, complete verbal as well as physical incapacity, that I ii would inevitably complete my degree because I had an argument worth making, and his gentle reminders of the fun in academia that no degree of pain or exhaustion could obscure, are only small signs of an unfailing generosity of spirit that leaves me in utter awe. Anything of interest in this thesis would have remained dormant and unwritten without him; all errors and omissions have crept in despite his advice. The circumstances of its production leave this dissertation with many omissions and gaps that, due to the support with which I have been so blessed, I trust that I will eventually be able to Fill. In the meantime I ask the reader, also, to be generous. I write these thanks with full heart, on my own behalf and that of the seventeen million silent ones, of whom so many lack the belief and help that came to me, on my tenth awareness day for a debilitating disease of which too few are aware.—May 12, 2016. iii To my parents, Drs. Victor Raskin and Marina Bergelson Raskin To all my family who were martyred for their religious identity To all my family who lived in the shadows (as I, because of my parents’ courage, never have) iv Introduction Medieval heretical movements were necessarily clandestine. Much energy has gone into efforts to uncover what they really believed and what they did when church oficials were not looking. I believe, however, that the greatest mystery, as well as the most neglected area of research, surrounds their most direct public statement and the centerpiece of their trials: the oaths of abjuration and/or compurgation that erased their crime or declared it non-existent and returned the vast majority of heretics to the society of the faithful. The function of this type of speech is obvious: it turned a suspected deviant into an ofFicially orthodox member of the body of the Church and prevented his or her execution for relapse or obstinacy, along with all the upset and upheaval in their communities that an execution would have entailed. The beliefs, cultural imperatives, and machinations that led to this happy result, however, are anything but obvious. The issue is especially obscure in the case of heretics who had been accused repeatedly, had retained close links to other heretics (after swearing to break off all contact with them), had left prosperous homes to start their lives anew in an unknown place, and had sometimes aided violent rebellions. It seems odd that people so committed would yield to the demands of an ecclesiastical hierarchy they considered the source of all evil in the church, through an act, that of swearing an oath, which they considered intrinsically suspect. It seems downright incredible that church oficials, knowing all the details of the cases and indeed after having expended considerable time and energy to collect them, would not merely allow but actively assist such lifelong heretics to Find legal loopholes that would enable them to swear such an oath more than once. Why would the devout risk damnation by publicly denying !1 their faith and humiliating themselves before institutions and procedures that were abhorrent to them? Why would the guardians of Christendom knowingly risk leaving a “parasite” and source of “poison,” as heretics were often called,1 ensconced within the body of Christ forever? In ifteenth and early sixteenth century England, however, this is exactly what happened, and it happened, as I will demonstrate, so often as to be the norm rather than an exception. My aim, then, is to expose the machinations, origins, and consequences of a system of regulating—not suppressing—heresy, a system that was entirely built around sanctioned perjury. The First major heresy trial in medieval England was an utter failure.2 The notoriously combative John Wyclif, already called “the heresiarch” by his theological opponents, had been condemned and excommunicated by the pope (at least, by the one to whom England was nominally loyal at the time). An ambitious and well-connected bishop, having expended considerable time and energy drawing papal attention to what the rest of Europe then still regarded as a local English matter, was eager for a public denouement at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Wyclif, however, was the protégé of one or possibly both of the co- regents (John of Gaunt and Joan of Kent) during Richard II’s minority, and was protected both publicly—John of Gaunt and a number of other ofFicials entered at his side—and, when a further trial was attempted, more quietly.3 The results were unsatisfactory all 1 E.g. Rogeri Dymmok, Liber contra XII errores et hereses Lollardorum, ed. Rev. H. S. Cronin (London : Pub. for the Wyclif Society by K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., ltd., 1922). Much anti-Lollard writing used these metaphors. 2 All of the events of the succeeding two paragraphs, see the highly hostile chronicle of Thomas Netter, Fasciculi Zizaniorum Magistri Johannis Wyclif cum tritico, ed. Walter Waddington Shirley (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts,1858), 272-340. 3 See Joseph H. Dahmus, “John Wyclif and the English Government,” Speculum 35:1 (Jan., 1960): 51-68, and The Prosecution of John Wyclyf ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952). Dahmus argued that a subsequent attempt to try Wyclif again was quashed by behind-the-scenes machinations on the part of John of Gaunt and his co-regent, Richard’s mother, Joan of Kent. !2 round. The episcopacy was humiliated, with the heresiarch still free and functioning, with an enhanced national proFile; Wyclif, though returning triumphantly to Oxford for a while, was probably made painfully aware that his career and possibly his life, as well as those of his many students and like-minded colleagues, depended on a single patron; and John of Gaunt, whose public intervention had provoked a murderous and Financially devastating riot, was forced to face the consequences of his unpopularity.