Adrian IV The English Pope (1154–1159)

Studies and Texts

Brenda Bolton, Anne J. Duggan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351960731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The year 2000 witnessed the 900th anniversary of the birth of Adrian IV, the only Englishman to sit on the papal throne. His short pontificate of four and a half years, distracted by crisis and controversy and followed as it was by an 18-year schism, could be judged a low point in the history of the papacy. The studies in this book challenge the view that Adrian was little more than a cipher, the tool of powerful factions in the Curia. This is the first large-scale work on Adrian since 1925, and is supported by a substantial appendix of relevant sources and documents in facing translation. Relations with the Empire, the Norman kingdom and the Patrimony are all radically reassessed and the authenticity of 'Laudabiliter' reconsidered. At the same time, the spiritual, educational and devotional contexts in which he was operating are fully assessed; his activities in Catalonia and his legatine mission to Scandinavia are examined in the light of recent research, and his special relationship with St Albans is explored through his privileges to this great abbey. These studies by leading scholars in the field, together with the introductory chapter by Christopher Brooke, reveal an active and engaged pope, reacting creatively to the challenges and crises of the Church and the world.

PART I
The Pontificate of Adrian IV

Chapter 1
Adrian IV and John of Salisbury

Christopher N. L. Brooke

Pope Adrian IV illustrates to a quite exceptional degree the cosmopolitan nature of twelfth-century religious culture. He was born in England, near the western edge of Christendom, yet passed his early maturity in Provence, as canon and abbot of Saint-Ruf at Avignon. As such he was a leading member of one of the most rapidly expanding religious orders, which expressed in a complex of fashions the religious impulses of the age throughout western Christendom. From Saint-Ruf he was called to the centre of the western church, to Rome itself, as cardinal; from there he was sent for a while to the northern frontier, to Scandinavia, on a crucial mission. Finally, in 1154, he was elected pope.

Why it was so cosmopolitan an age is one of the supreme puzzles of medieval history. For the present we are concerned only with the fact. In the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries students in search of the new learning hastened to distant schools whose fame had somehow reached them—to Liège, Laon, Orleans, Montpellier, Arles, and a dozen others; as the century advanced, more and more went to Bologna or Paris from every comer of Europe. Litigants in search of justice or injustice travelled to Rome, or wherever the papal Curia might be found. Pilgrims and crusaders journeyed to many regions, above all to the Holy Land. The love of travel—anyway for a part of humankind—was central to the culture of the age.¹ These adventures started on a remarkable scale in the eleventh century, and perhaps they have never ceased. But at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we can discern a certain narrowing of horizons: provincial universities were founded in Oxford and Cambridge and elsewhere, so that students could study without travelling afar—and soforth.

This is not to say that the universal perspectives involved in the twelfthcentury renaissance affected every contemporary attitude: far from it. The same period saw a heightening of local awareness, and the development in all manner of ways of local loyalties, as Rees Davies and others have taught us.² Between the longer and the shorter view, between local loyalties and the cosmopolitan culture, there were many tensions. What is significant is that they flourished together. Human nature is full of paradoxes, and paradox is close to the heart of historical understanding.

Thus if there ever was to be an English pope, the mid-twelfth century was a likely time to encounter him.

The path to Rome

Of Adrian’s early life we know very little. His father’s name was recorded in Canterbury obituaries as Richard, priest and monk.³ The only reliable early account is by Cardinal Boso in the official Roman Liber Pontificalis; but this is exceedingly terse on his early life—it tells us merely that he was English by birth and in adolescence left his homeland and his family in pursuit of letters, coming to Arles—where in due course he became a canon of Saint-Ruf, then near Avignon, later translated to Valence.⁴ Adrian’s father was a priest—we cannot be sure he was already in higher orders when his son was born, but it is likely that he was in orders incompatible with legal marriage, so that Adrian was in all probability technically illegitimate (however much his family lived in accordance with some of the accepted social norms of its time and place).⁵ There may thus have been special reasons for the cardinal’s reticence; but in any case it was not the practice of the authors of papal biographies to record much detail about the pope’s early life: one has only to recall the rivers of ink which have flowed in speculation about who Gregory VH’s parents were, and where he was a monk, to observe the force of this tradition.⁶ Even of Adrian’s eminent successor, Cardinal Roland, Alexander III, John Noonan in a celebrated article asked ‘Who was Rolandus?’ and had much ado to answer his own question.⁷ Serious attempts have been made tofill out Boso’s summary of Adrian’s—or Nicholas Breakspear’s—youth by recourse to two English sources: William of Newburgh and Matthew Paris.⁸ William tells two highly improbable stories which savour of gossip rather than sober history: he tells us that the young Nicholas was abandoned by his father when he became a monk at St Albans, had to live on the monastery’s daily handouts, and could not afford to go to school. After a harsh rebuke from his father for his idleness, he travelled many hundreds of miles and became a hanger-on at Saint-Ruf, eventually being received as a canon—there is no mention of the schools. Later he became abbot of Saint-Ruf but his canons quarrelled with him, and this led him tofrequent visits to the papal Curia, where he became friends with Pope Eugenius III who made him a cardinal. These stories by-pass the two best authenticated features of his early life: the search for the schools of the wandering scholar and the diplomatic skill which Nicholas, as cardinal legate, was to show in reordering the churches of Scandinavia. Viewed critically, both William of Newburgh’s tales seem implausible: the kind of stories which might well circulate to explain two very striking puzzles in the career of the only Englishman to become pope: why he fled from St Albans in the first place, and how the abbot of a Provengal house came to be sufficiently well known to an Italian pope to be made a cardinal. The only certain fact about his relations with St Albans are that his father became a monk there, and that Adrian as pope rained privilege after privilege upon the abbey, of which he evidently retained fond memories.⁹ As for Saint-Ruf, it was evidently the case that he travelled to the Curia on the business of his house: we have Cardinal Boso’s word for it.¹⁰ It is indeed likely that he was involved in serious local problems which demanded papal support. A few years later—while he was pope—the house was moved from the outskirts of Avignon to the neighbourhood of Valence. For a young community to move from site to site was not uncommon—some early Cistercian houses moved two or three times. But for an old established monastery of the fame and prestige of Saint-Ruf to seek a new home was a very rare event. Whatever lay behind it, we can imagine that already in Abbot Nicholas’ time there was frequent need to resort to Rome—and no doubt that the abbot’s personality and mental and spiritual qualities appealed to the Cistercian Eugenius.¹¹

Unlike William of Newburgh, Matthew Paris and the monks of St Albans evidently had access to some genuine information about the family and early life of the pope.¹² The difficulty is that Matthew regularly embroidered his information, and the only facts in his account which we can check are wrong. He tells us his father’s name was Robert de Camera, whereas better sources call him Richard;¹³ that he was rejected as a postulant monk at St Albans by Abbot Robert, who was elected in 1151, when Nicholas was a cardinal;¹⁴ that he studied in Paris—a natural invention for an imaginative thirteenth-century monk called Paris—and (most excusably) that Saint-Ruf was near Valence when he became a canon there. This trail of error does not inspire confidence in what remains; and yet, ironically, the other details are those most likely to be right. He gives his father the surname ‘de Camera’—which perhaps suggests he was a clerk in the abbot’s chamber¹⁵—tells us that his surname was ‘Brekespere’, and that he came from Abbots Langley, which fits well with the idea that Adrian’s father was in the abbot’s employment. For Matthew undoubtedly had access to good information on the period from the late eleventh century on, from the roll of Adam the Cellarer.¹⁶ When he lacked this guidance, he made nonsense of the history of the abbey in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and even when he came to the accession of Abbot Paul in 1077, he succeeded in converting the nephew of the Lombard Archbishop Lanfranc into a Norman.¹⁷ Thus the combination of genuine and false information is what we would expect—and find; and only on a few local details, such as Langley and the Camera, is he likely to be correct.

There is one other English witness who brings us much nearer to Adrian than William of Newburgh or Matthew Paris could do, and that is John of Salisbury. John’s career, like Adrian’s, is a model illustration of the cosmopolitan culture of the age. Between 1136 and 1147 he was a student in the schools of France, mainly (it seems) in Paris; between 1147 and 1161 he was in the service of Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury—one of Theobald’s chief legal advisers and in particular his representative in the papal Curia, attending Theobald at the papal council at Reims in 1148, and cros...