England under the Angevin Kings, Volumes I and II

CHAPTER X. — THE NEW ENGLAND, 1170–1206

To contemporary Europe, the most striking event in English history in the half-century after Henry II’s accession was the murder of Archbishop Thomas. The sensation it caused across western Christendom was wildly disproportionate to the victim’s personal influence and political impact. Thomas’s popular canonization was ratified by Rome in under two years, an unprecedented speed; pilgrim streams to his shrine rivaled those to the Apostles’ threshold or the Holy Sepulchre, flowing uninterrupted for over 300 years. Yet the true significance of his death was likely unseen. The great ecclesiastical struggle marked a social turning point in Henry II’s reign even more than a political one. With the Henry-Thomas quarrel, leadership of the moral and intellectual revival traceable from Henry I’s accession to Archbishop Theobald’s death passed from the higher clergy and monastic orders. Thomas’s flight scattered the small band of earnest churchmen who had shared Theobald’s policy, leaving the reforming party without a leader. Of the higher clergy, only Gilbert Foliot had the talent to take up the work, but subsequent events aligned all English religious opinion and popular sympathy with the martyred primate, casting Gilbert as an enemy of the Church. The final settlement was a partial defeat for both sides. The king was forced to abandon his plan to reform clerical morals via royal justice; clerical privilege was preserved, only to fall to another King Henry four centuries later. Even its staunchest supporters must have found their cause absurd when its first result was shielding the primate’s murderers from punishment. Bishop cowardice left them entirely at the king’s mercy after the struggle. The eight vacant sees plus Canterbury were filled after long delays with secular clerks wholly subservient to the crown; by the end of Henry’s life the English episcopate was as thoroughly secularized as in his grandfather’s worst years. If the bishops were corrupt, the lower clergy were worse. The cry against diocesan official extortion that had opened Henry’s reign in John of Salisbury’s writings rang even louder at its close in the works of Walter Map and Gerald de Barri. The monastic revival that had brightened the early 12th century died out long before the century’s end. Less than seven years after St. Bernard’s death, John of Salisbury was forced to admit that love of power and greed for gain had infected the entire monastic body, including the White Monks. The Cistercian fall was the most severe: within two generations their name, once a symbol of moral and spiritual perfection, had become a byword for corruption. Pledged by founding principles to protest Benedictine wealth, they became England’s richest, most powerful monastic body within a century of arrival, applying the same sheep-farming skill that marked all their undertakings. Their success paired with a wool-trade boom made them masters of England’s most profitable industry. Temptation came with prosperity, but the White Monks’ stern temper was undone not by obvious wealth temptations, but by the deadlier snares of avarice and pride. In the reigns of Richard and John, they bargained nearly on equal terms with royal ministers, wielding great power in Church and State—but that power no longer rested on a moral foundation. The monastic impulse was not entirely dead. On the continent, the earlier-established Grandmont and Chartreuse orders showed renewed vitality, but had little impact on English religious life. The Grandmont Good Men, though Henry’s favorites, never set foot in England; Carthusians arrived only in Henry’s final years, and their few settlements never gained significance. Only 113 English monasteries of all orders were founded during Henry II’s 35-year reign, compared to 115 founded during Stephen’s 19 troubled years. In Yorkshire alone, Stephen founded 20 new monastic houses, while Henry founded only 11. Cloister decay was highlighted by a great outburst of wholly new intellectual vigor. Literary activity, nearly extinguished during Stephen’s reign, revived after the great ecclesiastical storm under entirely new conditions. It remained primarily historical, first focusing on the new martyr: within 20 years of Thomas’s death, 10 different biographies of St. Thomas were written by a diverse array of authors, including John of Salisbury, three of Thomas’s confidential clerks, a Benedictine abbot, an Augustinian prior, a Canterbury monk, a French poet, and a Cambridge clerk. At the same time, a new school of English history emerged in the court rather than the cloister. The primary authority for English political history from Thomas’s death to Richard’s third year, the Acts of King Henry and King Richard long attributed to Peterborough’s Benedictine abbot, was actually written by Richard Fitz-Nigel, bishop of London and treasurer. His continuator Roger of Howden was a royal chapel clerk and trusted royal administration officer; a third chronicler, Ralf de Diceto, was archdeacon of Middlesex and later dean of St. Paul’s. Their strict chronological chronicles gaped far above ordinary monastic annals: as high-ranking ecclesiastical dignitaries and statesmen rather than obscure monks, their authors produced work of unmatched fullness, accuracy, proportional balance, careful order, and cosmopolitan scope covering the entire known world. While these early works rose far above mere annals, they still fell short of the literary standard set by William of Malmesbury half a century prior. The only 12th-century writer to match Malmesbury’s view of history as “philosophy teaching by examples” worked not in the court but the cloister: William of Newburgh, born 1136 in Bridlington, who entered the new Augustinian house at Newburgh near Coxwold as a child, and wrote his English History covering the Norman Conquest to his own day as Richard’s reign ended. His work is a commentary on 12th-century English political, ecclesiastical and social history. His single short chapter summarizing the causes and effects of the Anarchy under Stephen is worth more than all the disjointed fact chaos provided by other chroniclers. He had a sense of romance and humor, but would ruthlessly, quietly debunk any widely accepted story he knew to be false. Only once did his judicial calm give way to near-passionate indignation: this outburst earned him the title “father of historical criticism” as the earliest protest against a rising school of pseudo-historical writers. The ancient Celtic race’s remarkable literary vitality is nowhere more evident than in English romantic literature, which owes its origin to Welsh monk Geoffrey of Monmouth, who became bishop of St. Asaph’s roughly two years before Henry II’s accession. His History of the British Kings wove Celtic myths, legends, traditions, classical and Scriptural scraps, and fantastic inventions into a pseudo-historical narrative passed off as legitimate history, to astonishing success. William of Newburgh protested this blurring of truth and falsehood in the preface to his Historia Anglicana, but the fabulous Brut tales remained accepted as part of British history for generations, countenanced by elites for political ends. Henry II quickly seized on the lore to flatter his Celtic vassals’ national vanity, and in his final years tasked Glastonbury monks with finding Arthur’s grave. Sixteen feet below two ancient pyramidal stones, they found a wooden sarcophagus holding Arthur’s remains and a leaden cross inscribed with his name; the bones were re-buried before the abbey high altar. Arthur’s public burial symbolized the death of the Celtic nationalist dreams his name had embodied, and marked his final “passing” from politics into the realm of pure intellectual and philosophical romance. Geoffrey opened an almost inexhaustible well of inspiration for later poets: as Arthur and Merlin legends, then Lancelot, Tristan and Gawaine stories, were shaped into literary form, the 12th-century religious mysticism of the “quest of the Grail”—a wholly new creation, achievable only by the pure Galahad, whose figure has shone across all time since first appearing at the corrupt Angevin court—was developed as a unifying link for the tales. Most of this vast romantic fabric was woven by the genius of one man: Walter Map. Born on the Anglo-Welsh marches probably during the early civil war, he studied at Paris before returning to serve as the king’s chaplain. A scholar, theologian, poet, earnest political and ecclesiastical reformer, and polished courtier, he quickly rose to high royal favor. His only surviving named work, De Nugis Curialium, is a vivid, haphazard miscellany of Welsh marche folklore, pilgrim and crusader tales, personal anecdotes, contemporary life sketches, and court news, gossip and scandal, for a wide Latin-reading audience. His most impactful work is Bishop Goliath, whose massive figure embodies the vice and crime disgracing the clerical order. Having seen the reform dream buried with St. Thomas, Walter saw no way to address widespread corruption but to cast it into the furnace of public criticism and popular anger. He was the anonymous voice of a new, still-unrealized critical force, and of a public opinion no longer restrained by external authority, now emerging as an independent power. Walter Map’s likely younger contemporary Gerald de Barri (Giraldus Cambrensis) stands alongside him. Born in 1147 at Manorbeer Castle near Pembroke to a Norman family settled in South Wales during Henry I’s reign, Gerald’s mother Angareth was a granddaughter of Rees Ap-Tewdor, prince of South Wales. Known as “the little bishop” at Manorbeer, he studied at Paris three times, returned home in 1172 to reform the Welsh church, and was made archdeacon of Brecknock in 1175. His dearest wish was to restore the see of St. David’s to its ancient metropolitan rank, and he was nominated in 1176, only for Henry II to furiously refuse. Gerald returned to Paris to study civil and canon law, lecturing until 1180. His 1185–86 trip to Ireland produced the 1187-published Topography of Ireland and Conquest of Ireland. He accompanied Archbishop Baldwin on his 1188 Crusade preaching tour of Wales, recording the journey in his Itinerary of Wales, and spent his final years revising earlier hasty works. Known as “the father of our popular literature,” Gerald’s bold, offhand, magazine-style writing covers every topic he touches: history, archaeology, geography, natural science, politics, contemporary social life, Irish physical traits, Welsh scenery, court and cloister scandals, the fight for Welsh primacy, and the fall of the Angevin empire. His Conquest of Ireland is the most complete, authentic account of the Norman conquest of that country, with his Welsh Itinerary and follow-up Description of Wales equally representative of his work. The spirit animating Gerald and Walter’s work was that of the rising universities. Bologna’s law school sprang to life under Irnerius, lecturing on Roman civil law from 1113. In 1109, William of Champeaux opened a logic school on Paris’s Mont-Ste.-Geneviève that became Europe’s most frequented within years. Under his successors Abelard and Peter Lombard, Paris’s schools became the center of Christendom’s intellectual life, with teachers and scholars from every nation meeting as equals in a new global commonwealth of learning. Wandering scholars from Paris brought the impulse that founded Oxford’s schools, first documented with Robert Pulein’s appearance in 1133. Oxford’s intellectual history is blank until Vacarius arrived in 1149, but by the end of Henry II’s reign the university was effectively full-grown, with multiple faculties, scholars of all ranks, and enduring glory as home of “the most learned and renowned clerks in England.” Cambridge, Oxford’s future rival on a less naturally favored site, grew more slowly: over the next century, religious foundations clustered around St. Benet’s Church on the Cam’s right bank, with schools springing up wherever Austin canons settled. By the middle of the following century, old Grantebridge was a mere suburb of the new town across the river, and Cambridge’s schools were an established fact. 12th-century student life had none of modern college ease or dignity: no modern-style colleges existed, and students of all ranks and ages lodged as they could in dame’s houses or scattered hostels. Unendowed schools relied initially on sole Church support for scholars and teachers, led by a diocesan bishop’s officer serving as chancellor. The standard course of study, unchanged since the 5th century, consisted of the trivium and quadrivium, with separate faculties for theology and law. Early 12th-century traveled scholars’ translations of Arabic versions of Aristotle’s natural philosophy made his work partially accessible to Western students; even garbled, this new Aristotelian lore revolutionized Western Christendom’s schools by opening entirely new fields of criticism and speculation. The endless hair-splitting disputations and “systems of impossibilities” that dominated John of Salisbury’s era logic schools irritated the practical Gerald de Barri, but it was from these same schools that Gerald and his peers drew the fearless temperament that led them to criticize not just prominent individuals, but every institution and system. The democratic independence spirit of earlier clerical reformers moved to the universities, where it grew stronger. Largely through universities, the broader nation engaged with Theobald and his fellow workers’ reforms, and university scholars engaged with Thomas Becket’s work. A growing proportion of students and teachers were laymen, though an entrenched legal fiction still counted all as “clerks.” The schools had grown under Church patronage, but reached full maturity strong enough to free themselves from ecclesiastical control while retaining the privileges the clergy had fought for.