1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (24 page)

Despite this, litigants continued to go to Rome and often decisions made in cases taken to the curia became in effect papal legislation for the whole Church. Likewise papal councils, often held in the Lateran Palace in Rome, became councils for the whole Church. And none more so than the Fourth Lateran Council summoned by Innocent III in 1215. This was attended by hundreds of prelates from all over Latin Christendom, including nine English bishops and eleven heads of English religious houses, among them Alexander Nequam as abbot of Cirencester. The decrees promulgated at this Council dealt with virtually every aspect of the Church’s teaching and organisation, and did so in ways that had profound consequences for its future structure. Papal authority over churchmen, however much they might complain or joke about it, had become extra-ordinarily effective. And through it all the city of Rome remained a place of pilgrimage. Despite the failure of his litigation in the papal court, Gerald de Barri went there again in 1206, this time as a pilgrim.

For those who love medieval cathedrals and parish churches it cannot but seem that this was, as it is often called, an ‘Age of Faith’. Why else should people have spent such huge sums in erecting and furnishing churches? Yet the rich and the powerful spent far more money on building and decorating houses to live in than on churches to pray in. It is just that the churches survive while their houses do not. It is easy for us to imagine medieval people at prayer. Apart from the Jews, everyone throughout Europe was supposed to be taught the Lord’s Prayer (beginning
Pater noster
, ‘our father’) and the Creed beginning with the word ‘Credo’ – ‘I believe’. But many may have been careless or indifferent. One preacher complained that people repeated the creed like magpies, not knowing what they were saying. Some may have been agnostic or even atheist. According to the prior of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, Peter of Cornwall, writing around 1200:

What did Peter of Cornwall mean by ‘many people’? How many believed in a steady-state Godless universe? We cannot tell.

In some respects the Christian laity allowed the Church to organise their life. They allowed, for example, jurisdiction over wills and marriage, the question of what made a marriage valid or invalid, to pass to Church courts. But when it suited them the laity could dig their heels in. According to canon law, the children born out of wedlock were legitimised by the subsequent marriage of their parents. In 1236 at a meeting at Merton, Surrey, the barons rejected a proposal made by some bishops to bring English law into line with canon law. ‘We will not change the laws of England,’ they declared. Under English law, once a bastard, always a bastard. On the other hand English common law happily accepted the canon law dictum that a priest’s child was necessarily illegitimate.

Very many, probably a majority of the population, resented having to pay tithes. A story told by a twelfth-century canon of St Paul’s Cathedral reveals another cause for resentment: the Church’s rule against working on Sundays and holy days. When a man working on the feast day of London’s St Erkenwald was reproached for doing so, he ‘belched out his poisonous brew of insults’:

As is inevitable in stories such as this, the critic had no sooner finished his diatribe than he was struck down dead. In this case he staggered under the heavy weight of timber he was carrying, tripped over a half-buried skull in St Paul’s churchyard and fell on his head. The author was delighted by the swiftness of God’s justice, but even he acknowledged that not everyone who witnessed the fatal accident interpreted it in the way he did.

In 1199 a charismatic preacher named Eustace de Flaye came over from Normandy and drew large crowds. His favourite subject was Sunday observance. According to the historian Roger of Howden, the people of York were impressed by his preaching and swore not to work on Sunday and not to sell anything on that day, except food and drink to travellers; even then from every five shillings they took in payment, they were to put a farthing into the church box for the burial of the poor. But after Eustace had returned to France, Howden noted, people returned to their old ways, holding Sunday markets just as before.

Critics of the clergy had plenty of material to hand. Priests were supposed to be celibate, but many ‘lived in sin’. Gerald de Barri described the house of the typical parish priest as ‘full of bossy mistresses, creaking cradles, newborn babies and squawking brats’. Learned men criticised the poor quality of education of country priests. But ordinary people may have taken a different view of the alleged priestly shortcomings. Other evidence suggests that learning could erect a barrier between a parson and his flock, that what they needed was a man who could bring comfort and the sacraments to the dying, and who could, with good sense and tact, help to resolve local feuds. For these tasks the experience of farming and of family life that he shared with his parishioners might well have been of more use than a knowledge of Latin. Understanding human relationships might have been more helpful than a ‘correct’ understanding of the mysterious relationship between the three persons of the Trinity.

Many learned churchmen argued that illness was God’s punishment for sin, and the more unpleasant the disease the worse the sin. Since the fifth century leprosy had often been interpreted as the reward for sexual excess. One of the early Norman bishops of London, Hugh d’Orival, chose to be castrated in the hope of obtaining a cure but, according to William of Malmesbury, the only result was that he spent the rest of his life a eunuch as well as a leper. Doctors, of course, explained leprosy as the result of an imbalance of humours. Undoubtedly leprosy was a real scourge in King John’s England. Archaeological evidence has proved that Hansen’s disease, as leprosy is now termed, was present in several forms including lepromatous, the most virulent and disfiguring. One of Bishop Hugh of Lincoln’s claims to sanctity was his habit of kissing lepers; the more unpleasant their appearance the more tenderly he embraced them. When challenged by a learned master of the schools of Lincoln to follow the example of St Martin of Tours and heal one of those whom he kissed, Hugh replied that it was not the leper but himself who was being healed: kissing them dissipated his own ‘sickness of spirit’. In 1200 King John helped to carry Hugh’s coffin, and in 1220 the bishop was canonised.

To have dealings with lepers was a sign of true humility. When Henry II was on his way to do penance at Becket’s tomb, he stopped just outside the walls of Canterbury to pray at the church of the leper hospital founded by Lanfranc at Harbledown. Whatever we may think of his motives, he made a lavish donation to the hospital in Becket’s memory. The foundation of no less than three hundred leper hospitals between the Norman Conquest and 1250 was a huge philanthropic achievement, however mixed the motives behind it might have been.

We will restore at once the son of Llywelyn and all the hostages from Wales and the charters delivered to us as security for peace
.

We will treat Alexander, King of the Scots, in the same manner in which we will act towards our other barons of England
.

Magna Carta, Clauses 58 and 59

E
ngland, in the view of English writers of the time, was ‘a land of untold riches’ where ‘no one who wanted to make money need ever die poor’. The English saw themselves as prosperous, urbanised, enterprising, peaceful and law-abiding. They admitted to only one serious fault. They were, wrote Richard FitzNigel, ‘natural drunks’. Certainly they impressed the inhabitants of other countries with their hard drinking.

‘God! how handsome Englishmen are!’ was the first thought of a French princess as she gazed at the man she was falling in love with – or that at least was what the patriotic author of a narrative poem written during John’s reign imagined she would think. The poem is the
Roman de Waldef
and was written in the variety of French known to scholars as Anglo-Norman.
Deus! tant sunt Engleis beles genz!
are the actual words. In another Anglo-Norman work composed at about the same time, its author, Chardri, compared England to a fair meadow covered with flowers, and went on:

Works like this show that, by John’s reign, English patriotism could be expressed in French. Indeed the earliest known history in the French language was written in the 1130s by an author called Geoffrey Gaimar and – remarkably – it was not a history of France, but of England, the
Estoire des Engleis
. Figures such as Hereward the Wake, leaders of the resistance against the Norman Conquest, are portrayed as heroes of the nation. Just as today intense Irish patriotism can be expressed in English, the language of the former colonisers, so too English patriots at the time of Magna Carta could think and speak in French.

This means that the picture of England created by Sir Walter Scott in
Ivanhoe
is entirely wrong. According to Scott:

Thanks to film and television, Scott’s portrayal of English society around 1200 as having been bitterly divided between English and Norman still lingers in the public imagination. In this scenario English freedom fighters such as Robin Hood – Scott’s Robin of Locksley – still roamed the forest, doing their best to save the poor from Prince John’s tyranny and the bullying of the Norman sheriff of Nottingham. Indeed there had been English freedom fighters in the forests and wild lands in the years immediately after 1066, but that had been – as Scott noted – four generations ago, and now there were none. Nor was there any longer, as there once had been, an ethnic divide between English and Norman. Apart from the royal family and a handful of other aristocrats, everyone who lived in England felt themselves to be English. Everyone spoke English, and everyone who wanted to be someone in culture or in politics learned to speak French as well. French gave the English easy access to a very cosmopolitan world, for in 1215 French was a fashionable language not just in Britain and Ireland but also in Spain, Germany, Italy, Sicily, Greece, Constantinople, Cyprus and Syria. Those who spoke Parisian French were proud of their ‘good’ French and mocked the Anglo-Norman dialect. For instance, they enjoyed the confusion that arose when ordering a roast dinner from the English inability to make a clear difference in pronunciation between
anel
, donkey, and
agnel
, lamb.

The mother-tongue of those who lived in this bilingual society was enormously enriched as a result of their intense familiarity with French. By 1215 French words such as ‘baron’, ‘feast’, ‘noble’ and ‘servant’ had entered the English language, and over the next two hundred years many more came in. By 1400 there were about ten thousand French loan-words in English. Chaucer, for example, used nearly five hundred words borrowed from French in the 858 lines of the Prologue to
The Canterbury Tales
. Sometimes the old word was driven out. The word
stow
meaning ‘place’ for example no longer exists – except in some place-names such as Godstow, the nunnery where Henry II’s mistress, Fair Rosamund, was buried. More often both the English and French words for something continued simultaneously in use, with the English generally retaining a more common or garden sense, as in English ‘house’ and French ‘mansion’. Sometimes spelling changed. For instance the spelling of the modern word ‘queen’ comes from the French combination of letters
qu
replacing its English equivalent
cw
. Also of French origin is the convention, exasperating and confusing, of using
c
instead of
s
for the ess sound in words such as cell or circle.