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Bishops As the Kings Judges in Later Medieval England

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bs_bs_banner Reason, Conscience and Equity: Bishops as the King’s Judges in Later Medieval England GWILYM DODD University of Nottingham Abstract It has long been recognized that many late medieval bishops were heavily involved in secular government. Scholars have tended to characterize these activities in fairly general terms, labelling those who chose to serve the crown as ‘administrators’, ‘bureau- crats’ or ‘civil servants’. In fact, they are better described as king’s judges, for a large part of what bishops did in government was dispensing justice in the king’s name. The first part of this article explores the contexts of this judicial activity, showing that bishops were especially active in institutions such as parliament, chancery and the council which offered justice to the king’s subjects on a discretionary basis. Discretion- ary justice was closely informed by the precepts of natural law, which in turn derived authority from the abstract notion of the divine will. The second half of the article suggests that the strong theological underpinning of discretionary justice meant that bishops’ involvement in secular government did not stand in opposition to their spiritual vocation or their role as leaders of the church. I argue that the sweeping and rather disparaging contemporary and modern characterizations of ‘civil-servant’ bishops as self-serving careerists ought to be replaced by a more nuanced understanding of the rationale and motivation of those senior clergymen who involved themselves in secular governance. n 1418 the prior of Bath presented a bill to the chancellor complaining about the noise and disturbance caused by the ringing of parish bells at the behest of the mayor and citizens of the town of I 1 Bath. He claimed that this was in contravention of a long-held custom which ordained that the bells of the priory cathedral church ought to have precedence over the town and that no other bells should sound between the curfew and the first ringing of the cathedral bells the next morning. The difficulties faced by the prior and monks of the Benedictine monastery were especially acute because the bells of the parish church were said to sound louder in the cathedral than in the parish churches I would like to thank Julia Barrow, Fr. Anselm Gribbin O.Praem, Pippa Hoskins and Matt Phillips for their extremely helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article. I take full responsibility for any errors. 1 The National Archives [hereafter TNA], SC 8/302/15089, printed in G. Dodd and A. K. McHardy (eds), Petitions to the Crown from English Religious Houses, c. 1272−c. 1485, Canterbury and York Society, 100 (Woodbridge, 2010), no. 131. Unless otherwise specified all references to manuscript sources refer to collections held by TNA. © 2014 The Author. History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. [This copyright line was revised on 27 May 2014.] 214 REASON, CONSCIENCE AND EQUITY themselves. Indeed, such was the cacophony of noise that the monks claimed that they were prevented from performing their divine service. This case has obvious interest as an early example of the more modern phenomenon of ‘noisy neighbours’, but there was probably more at stake for the monks of Bath than the peace and tranquillity of their early morning masses, for bell-ringing was an important symbol of authority and prestige, and could be used to demarcate (and overstep) lines of authority.2 For our purposes, however, the importance of the dispute lies in the role of the episcopate in bringing the warring parties to terms. The initial petition was sent to Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham, then chancellor; but he appears to have been ineffective in the matter.3 The real peacemaker was Nicholas Bubwith, bishop of Bath and Wells. As a result of his mediation, the ‘bell-wars’ of Bath came to an end and peace, in all senses of the word, was restored: in return for supplying candles to the cathedral, the citizens of Bath were permitted to sound their bells throughout the day, but they were strictly forbidden to ring before six in the morning, thus giving the monks the respite they so desperately sought.4 The resolution of the dispute by Bishop Bubwith nicely illustrates the mediating role of bishops in difficult and often protracted local conflicts in late medieval England. There are obvious reasons why Bubwith should have been involved in this episode, since the city of Bath was part of his diocese and the dispute related to matters of a broadly ecclesiastical nature;5 but the case itself had initially been brought to the attention of the crown, and Bubwith himself was functioning, in essence, as the agent of the king in seeking a resolution to the problem. Acting in this way, as a judge-delegate of the king, Bubwith was working in accordance with a tradition that had long seen members of the episcopacy fulfil quasi-jurisdictional functions on behalf of the state. It is a role which, though recognized in the late Middle Ages, has never received direct or full consideration. For the most part, studies investigating how late medieval bishops acted as the agents of the crown have concentrated on their activities as the raisers of taxation,6 the propagators of war propaganda,7 and/or the political supporters or 2 Ibid., p. xxxvii. 3 For the commission issued to the chancellor charging him to resolve the dispute, see Calendar of Signet Letters of Henry IV and Henry V (1399–1422) (London, 1978), nos. 811 and 843; Calendar of Patent Rolls [hereafter CPR], 1416–22, p. 205. 4 T. Scott Holmes (ed.), Register of Nicholas Bubwith, Bishop of Bath and Wells, 1407–1424, Somerset Record Society, 29 (1914), pp. 460–4, no. 1266. 5 W. Page (ed.), The Victoria County History of Somerset (10 vols; London, repr. 1969), II, pp. 70–1. 6 For example, A. Rogers, ‘Clerical taxation under Henry IV’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 46 (1973), pp. 123–44; A. K. McHardy, ‘Clerical taxation in fifteenth-century England: the clergy as agents of the Crown’, in R. B. Dobson (ed.), The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century (Gloucester, 1984), pp. 160–92. 7 For example, W. R. Jones, ‘The English Church and royal propaganda during the Hundred Years War’, Journal of British Studies, 19 (1979–80), pp. 18–30; A. K. McHardy, ‘Some reflections © 2014 The Author. History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd GWILYM DODD 215 opponents of the king.8 Moreover, on questions of legal process, and more generally of jurisdictional identity, historians have tended to cast the church and state in oppositional terms. It is a view informed by an implicit assumption that bishops were interested only in the operation of canon law in the ecclesiastical courts, and had little interest in the workings of the common law and other lay jurisdictional contexts, other than to defend their ecclesiastical interests from royal encroachment.9 In fact, there was no theoretical basis why bishops could not admin- ister justice in a secular context, providing these judicial activities did not involve the shedding of Christian blood.10 Before the mid-thirteenth century the king sometimes appointed bishops as his senior judges, or more commonly, he chose some bishops from a pool of clerks who were professional judges serving on the bench and/or eyre.11 Admittedly, from this point onwards, the clergy were increasingly sidelined, as a professional class of lawyers emerged to take over the running of the on Edward III’s use of propaganda’, in J. S. Bothwell (ed.), The Age of Edward III (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 171–92. 8 For example, K. Edwards, ‘The political importance of the English Bishops during the reign of Edward II’, English Historical Review, 59 (1944), pp. 311–47; R. G. Davies, ‘The episcopate and the political crisis in England of 1386–1388’, Speculum, 51 (1976), pp. 659–93; R. L. Storey, ‘Episcopal king-makers in the fifteenth century’, in Dobson (ed.), Church, Politics and Patronage, pp. 82–98; B. Thompson, ‘Prelates and politics from Winchelsey to Warham’, in L. Clark and C. Carpenter (eds), The Fifteenth Century IV: Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 69–95; and, most recently, W. Mark Ormrod, ‘An archbishop in revolt: Richard Scrope and the Yorkshire Rising of 1405’, in P. J. P. Goldberg (ed.), Richard Scrope: Archbishop, Rebel, Martyr (Donington, 2007), pp. 28–44. 9 The work of W. R. Jones is of most relevance in this respect: W. R. Jones, ‘Bishops, politics, and the Two Laws: the Gravamina of the English Clergy, 1237–1399’, Speculum, 41 (1966), pp. 209–45; idem, ‘The Two Laws in England: the later Middle Ages’, Journal of Church and State, 11 (1969), pp. 111–31; and idem, ‘Relations of the two jurisdictions: conflict and cooperation in England during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History,7 (1970), pp. 79–210. 10 James A. Brundage, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession: Canonists, Civilians, and Courts (Chicago, 2008), pp. 174–9. 11 For example, William de Vere, bishop of Hereford 1186–98 (justice of the eyre 1185, 1186, 1192, 1193 and 1194); Herbert Poore, bishop of Salisbury 1194–1217 (justice of the bench, 1190–7); Godfrey Lucy, justice of the eyre and of the bench from 1179, becoming bishop of Winchester in 1189; Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, 1205–38 (justiciar, 1213–15); William Raleigh, justice of the bench from 1229, until made bishop of Norwich in 1239 and later bishop of Winchester; William of York, justice of the bench from 1231, until made bishop of Salisbury in 1247; Simon of Walton, bishop of Norwich, 1257–66 (noted as chief justice of the bench of common pleas in 1257); John le Breton, justice of the king’s bench until made bishop of Hereford in 1269.
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