Religion, Politics and Society in Britain 1066-1272

Henry Mayr-Harting

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780582414136
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317876618
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

The period from 1066 to 1272, from the Norman Conquest to the death of Henry III, was one of enormous political change in England and of innovation in the Church as a whole. Religion, Politics and Society 1066-1272 charts the many ways in which a constantly changing religious culture impacted on a social and political system which was itself dominated by clerics, from the parish to the kingdom.

Examining the various ways in which churchmen saw their relation to secular power, Henry Mayr-Harting introduces many of the great personalities of the time, such as Thomas Becket and Robert Grosseteste. At the same time he shows how religion itself changed over the course of two centuries, in response to changing social conditions – how rising population fuelled the economic activities of the monasteries, and how parish reform demanded a more educated clergy and by this increased the social prestige of the Church.

Written by an acknowledged master in the field, this magisterial account will be an unmissable read for all students of Norman and Plantagenet England and of the history of the medieval Church as a political, social and spiritual force.

CHAPTER 1

Church and Economy in the Long Twelfth Century

The ideas of both the church and the economy are in an important sense anachronistic for this period. The concepts of the universal church and of the English church (not the British church) were of course there in the background, but in the foreground what generally mattered most to people were their own individual churches – the church of Christ Church Canterbury, the church of St Augustine’s Canterbury, the church of Bath, the church of Wells, the parish church of Kirklevington, etc. So when I talk about the church, I am usually talking about observable trends or tendencies or mentalities within the churches. Again, for this period it would be absurd to think of an entity called the economy of a country which anybody could perceive as a whole, let alone try to manage. But that does not make it nonsense to observe some widespread economic trends or developments occurring in various parts of the country, not least within the churches, which because of the preservation of their records often give us our best evidence of such developments.

There can be no doubt that the long twelfth century, say from the Norman Conquest of 1066 to Magna Carta of 1215, saw a great rise in population and economic prosperity.¹ Within Britain the evidence for this is by far the clearest in England. How do we know about population in twelfth-century England? We do not have censuses; they started only in 1801. We do not have parish registers, which have enabled the Cambridge Institute of Demography to make great strides forward in the study of their subject; they started only in the sixteenth century. For twelfth-century demography we are not in a world of accurate quantitative measurement. Nonetheless we have strong if impressionistic indications that population was rising, of which nobody doubts the validity. They relate partly to evident pressures on land – the assarting (forest clearance for cultivation) and draining of lands, or the demand for peasant tenancies; partly to the large numbers of new towns being established and established ones being enlarged; and partly to the ease with which the new religious orders, like the Cistercians, Augustinians and Gilbertines, could recruit not only many monks and nuns but also thousands of lay brothers to act as their labour force.² This rise in population carried on continuously throughout the thirteenth century, and here we get a new kind of evidence for it, new because it comes from a type of manorial account which landlords only began to keep in the thirteenth century, but evidence of pressure on land entirely congruent with that of the twelfth century. This evidence is the writs of entry, showing that landlords could continue to charge peasants a high price when they entered on a land tenancy.³

A neat example of the importance of assarts comes from Peterborough Abbey. The abbey nearly went broke as a result of the Norman Conquest and the Norman abbots using its lands to reward their followers, military and otherwise. It was saved in the twelfth century by the new wealth acquired from assarting on its lands in Northamptonshire. This process was already well under way by 1143 when King Stephen granted Peterborough freedom from secular impositions for its assarts there.⁴ None of it, however, would have been any good to the abbey if it could not find tenants for its new holdings.

The Cambridge demographic research has shown that, on its evidence, the key factor in demographic growth is nuptiality, namely the age at which people get married. The younger they tend to marry, the greater the rise in population. We have no evidence for this factor in the twelfth century. On the Cambridge showing, however, the growth in the means to feed and care for people once they are born cannot be taken as revealing the cause of population growth, but it can be seen as a response to and stimulated by it. In the pages of the Economic History Review during the 1950s, two fine social and economic historians had a debate about the estates of Glastonbury Abbey, Somerset. Reginald Lennard said that by 1189 20 Glastonbury manors had peasants occupying some of its demesnes, i.e. lands which would otherwise have been directly administered by the abbey and from which it would directly draw all the profits. M.M. Postan replied that this was only since the previous Glastonbury estates survey of 1171, and that therefore there were far more of such peasant holdings than Lennard had thought.⁵ Both of them saw this only from the point of view of the landlord, Postan thus taking the gloomier view of the Glastonbury Abbey economy. But the situation was obviously good for peasants who wanted to feed their families. So was all the assarting and draining of lands in Lincolnshire at the same time, as H.E. Hallam showed; to a great extent, he wrote, this was ‘a small man’s enterprise’.⁶ In fact it is now argued that in many twelfth-century villages the pattern and conditions of peasant tenancies did not evolve gradually but were created at a stroke, with an implication that peasants had at least some bargaining power on their side.⁷ In this connection, one cannot help observing that in the accounts of miracles of healing collected at saints’ shrines, of which more later and which are so revealing of social ills, there is very little evidence of anything like malnutrition. At his Canterbury shrine, Thomas Becket was far more likely to have to cure you of insomnia or constipation, typical ills not of economic misery but of rising economic opportunities!⁸

One may question whether the spread of peasant holdings on to the demesnes of landlords was such a bad business for landlords either. In the expanding economy of the twelfth century landlords needed labour to meet new consumer demand, whether in the form of labour services due from the tenancies or of money in the form of rents to pay for labour. In the twelfth century landlords often did not try to maximise their profits either by direct management of much of their estates or by drawing up written accounts for their manors.⁹ Why this was so is a complex question, but it was so. Perhaps they felt well enough off as it was. Only towards the end of the twelfth century did this seriously begin to change, partly because landlords started to feel the pinch of increasing royal taxation. The point to make here is that while landlords were extensively leasing out, lesser men could profit mightily from the situation. For example, the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds had long leased out its manor of Tilney (Norfolk) for £5 a year. Five pounds represented the annual income of a comfortably off parish priest or the annual salary that a Spanish professor of mathematics would be paid by the king for teaching in the school of Northampton.¹⁰ Around 1190 Abbot Samson of Bury decided to take Tilney back into his own direct administration. The first year he made a profit of £25 out of it, and in the second, not quite so good year, £20.¹¹ Somebody – it might have been a knightly man or an enterprising merchant or peasant, but in any case somebody too unimportant to be named in the historical record – must have been making a fortune out of that lease.

The estates of Glastonbury Abbey have already been mentioned. Going back to Somerset, the biography of an anchorite, or recluse, Wulfric, who lived next to the church in the village of Haselbury Plucknett during the second quarter of the twelfth century, gives us an interesting economic setting. Haselbury was situated in one of the richest parts of Somerset both in agrarian and pastoral terms already in the time of Domesday Book (1086), and during the twelfth century marshes were being drained on the nearby River Yeo. In the Life of Wulfric new fisheries on this river are also mentioned. Wulfric himself had a full-time ‘boy’ as a servant, he could call on the services of a scribe, and he accumulated sheep, cows and lots of gold, silver and precious clothes, probably by no means all of it other people’s.¹² Even an ascetic could flourish materially in a prospering community!

The great expansion of towns is predicated on the rising profitability of agriculture. As Susan Reynolds has said – and she applies this even to sea-ports which engaged in long-distance trade – ‘what provided the basis of most towns’ livelihood was not the cake of overseas commerce but the bread and butter of distribution and marketing for the surrounding region’.¹³ Between 1066 and 1215 something over 100 new towns were successfully established in England.¹⁴ A good example of these is Banbury in North Oxfordshire, founded by Bishop Alexander of Lincoln in the 1140s primarily to act as a market for the surpluses of the more southerly estates of his bishopric. The town was laid out in a planned way with burgage tenures on either side of the main street.¹⁵ Burgage tenures usually involved no labour services but only payment of a money rent, parts or the whole of them could be sub-let, and they allowed of unusually free sale or purchase. Hence such tenures were much in demand not only by merchants, bakers and the like, but also by religious houses and country barons and knights, because they were an exceptionally fluid form of investment. It goes without saying, however, that they were in demand only so far as the market was a success.

Of towns which had been Saxon burhs, many were only on the threshold of their true development at the time of the Norman Conquest. With Oxford, for example, the initial boost probably came with William the Conqueror’s putting its castle into the hands of Robert d’Oilly. Some destruction of Saxon houses was almost certainly the initial result of the building or enlargement of this castle, but thereafter the greater security which it afforded surely stimulated Oxford’s market, trade and industry. The clearest sign of its twelfth-century growth in prosperity is the large number of stone churches whose existence is attested within a radius of a few hundred yards of its centre, Carfax. These churches are too early to be explained by the rise of the university; the very earliest evidence of scholars in any numbers comes from the 1170s. Another sign is the establishment of Jewish money-dealers in the town from no later than about 1140, with a Jewish quarter in existence by 1180. We meet the Oxford Jews, several of whom we can name, including one Moses the Liberal apparently a patron of learning and supporter of scholars, first of all in the records of the royal Exchequer a propos of their financial dealings with Henry II’s government. Some remarkable documents survive, however, recording loans by Jews to Oxford citizens of the 1180s and 1190s.¹⁶ The first specialised Oxford guild was in existence by the 1160s – a guild of shoemakers.¹⁷ Some of the tired old oxen who crossed the ford probably failed to make it much further!

Bristol is another town, originally also an Anglo-Saxon burh, whose rising prosperity can be charted by the number of its Norman churches. They included Earl Robert of Gloucester’s foundation of the Benedictine priory of St James (Robert a natural son of Henry I), and, more important, the Abbey of St Augustine, a house of Augustinian canons founded by Robert Fitz Harding, a wealthy Norman supporter of Henry I’s daughter Matilda against Stephen, and of her son Henry II. Thus Bristol rose on the Angevin cause. Once again, a fine early Norman castle had much to do with its rise. During the twelfth century the import of wine and wood and the export of (Cotswold) wool became big business at the port of Bristol.¹⁸ But every conurbation needs a secure food supply. London, for instance, besides its vital agragrian hinterland, particularly in Kent, received a regular supply of pickled herrings from Yarmouth.¹⁹ When Henry II’s expedition of 1171 sailed to Ireland (to cut a baron, one of the Clares called Strongbow, down to size), the king’s fleet was provisioned with huge quantities of grain, raised quickly in Somerset by his sheriff in that shire.²⁰ We are catching a glimpse here of how and from where the city itself was normally fed. Like Oxford, Bristol had a flourishing Jewish community in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; Moses the Liberal, mentioned above, had migrated from Bristol to Oxford before 1177.²¹

Both Oxford and Bristol became cathedral cities only in the 1540s under Henry VIII, both episcopal seats being created out of the two distinguished houses of Augustinian canons which had been dissolved as such in the Dissolution of the Monasteries, St Frideswide’s at Oxford, and St Augustine’s at Bristol. Unlike Oxford, Bristol did not become a notable centre of learning until modern times. Yet strangely enough, the university in Oxford probably owed its rise in part at least to the town’s commercial decline in the thirteenth century. For its food and its trade, Oxford had depended very much on the navigation of the River Thames. It was at the point on the Thames, also, where the road from Southampton to Northampton, much used by the kings in their journeys, crossed the river. Oxford reached its commercial apogee in the late twelfth century. Thereafter the Thames got clogged up with fish weirs and navigation suffered. A clause of Magna Carta (1215, cl. 33) complains about it – a clause very likely inserted as a result of Oxford pressure, but probably without avail. So the merchants moved out, leaving a lot of cheap run-down property, ideal for scholars to move into.²²

For comparison with Bristol and Oxford we may move up to York. Donald Nicholl gives a lively picture of York around 1114, when Thurstan became its Archbishop. He writes of the contribution of the Jews to the life of the city. They came as money-lenders who could advance York’s commercial enterprises, but they could and did also help Christian scholars with their study of the Hebrew Bible. For example, a Yorkshire boy studied Hebrew with them for three years, and copied out 40 psalms in Hebrew script, whose calligraphy was much admired by the Jews themselves. That was Maurice who later became Prior of Kirkham, a house of Augustinian Canons in Yorkshire. Having written of the Scandinavian and Norman elements in the city, and of the establishment after the Norman Conquest of important monastic communities there Nicholl continues^22a:

It can be seen that the community of some eight or nine thousand souls at York which now had Thurstan as its pastor embraced a variety of races and cultures such as few modern communities of a similar size could equal … Around the cathedral centred the life of the archbishop’s familia and his canons, the intellectuals, the music master and the master of the schools; around the mint dwelt the goldsmiths and metal-workers; along the wharves traders berthed their ships from the East Riding, from Ireland and Germany and the shores about the North Sea.

One of the most revealing signs, or indeed consequences, for English religious life, of rising economic prosperity in the twelfth century, is the large number of recluses. There have always been hermits, anchorites and reclusive holy persons, male and female, in the Christian religion and not only in the Christian religion. But they appear to be extraordinarily numerous in twelfth-century England. When the Cistercian abbot, John of Ford, was writing his Life of Wulfric of Haselbury in the 1180s, some thirty years after that Somerset anchorite had died, he uncovered a whole network of recluses in South Somerset and Dorset who had known him (this way of life was a good recipe for longevity!), including several women – Matilda of Wareham, Odolina of Crewkerne and Aldida of Sturminster Newton. Much earlier, c. 1115–20, when the celebrated Christina of Markyate was looking to establish herself in a hermitage, she ran into a whole network of male and female recluses in Eastern England. The pipe rolls (the royal Exchequer accounts) show that in 1162–63 Henry II was paying out sums of money in various parts of the country to support at least six recluses. This year is not chosen quite at random, for it was the first year that the king’s redoubtable clerical opponent, Thomas Becket, was Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1169 when Nigel, Bishop of Ely and Royal Treasurer, died, and the revenues of the bishopric of Ely fell into the king’s hands, and its accounts are r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Church and Economy in the Long Twelfth Century
• 2 The Church and the Norman Conquest
• 3 Henry I and His Religion
• 4 The Conflict between Henry II and Thomas Becket
• 5 Parishes and Parish Priests
• 6 The Monastic Century 1066–1216
• 7 Archbishop Hubert Walter and St Hugh of Lincoln: Church and King in the Late Twelfth Century
• 8 Intellectual Life and Culture and How They Related to Politics in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Century
• 9 The Early English Franciscans
• 10 Changes and Continuities under Henry III
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index