Archbishop Langton

After 1206, what another king might have handled more lightly, an attempt to intrude a royal candidate into the archbishopric of Canterbury developed into a full-scale standoff between the King and the Church, with the Pope seizing the opportunity to discipline a Christian ruler he had long had in his sights, insisting not only that John’s candidate for the archbishopric withdraw but that the monks of Canterbury accept a complete outsider, Stephen Langton, as leader of the English Church. Langton was an Englishman, born to a minor family of Lincolnshire knights. At one time he had been associated with the household of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Henry II’s illegitimate son. He had gained his reputation, however, and had passed most of his life since the 1180s not in England but in Paris, as a commentator on the Bible and as one of the most famous masters of the Paris schools, the first and the greatest of all universities established north of the Alps.

Reading Langton’s Bible commentaries today, one is struck, first and foremost, by their vast, still unpublished and probably unpublishable length, secondly, by their determination to interpret absolutely everything in scripture, from Hebrew names, to the significance of the creatures in Noah’s ark, through to the hyacinth fringes with which the Jews were enjoined to trim their clothes, according to Langton, as a symbol of the blue of the heavenly kingdom. Langton was clearly a great teacher. Like many great teachers, he was also something of a bore, fond of the sound of his own voice, hammering home sentence after sentence of his own opinions into the unformed but perhaps rather over-stuffed minds of his students. Langton’s Bible commentaries are also shot through with a deep distrust of monarchy in general, and of Plantagenet monarchy in particular.

Inheriting an entire programme of ecclesiastical prejudice, Langton believed that kingship was an unpleasant compromise, imposed upon the Jews of the Old Testament in punishment rather than reward: ‘I gave you a King in my wrath’, as God is said to have threatened (Hosea 13:11). Unlike the kings of France, who tempered privilege with justice and who took their counsels from the Church – a sensible exception for Langton to make, given his own residence in Paris – the kings of England, murderers of the sainted Archbishop Becket, ruled by the sword and according to the arbitrary traditions of the Exchequer, failing to heed the injunctions of scripture or to accept a written code of laws equivalent to the Old Testament book of Leviticus for the guidance and instruction of kings. The English themselves, in Langton’s writings and sermons, are presented as a nation of drunks, hardly deserving a better king or the liberty which was the privilege of the French.

Drink had already been mentioned in William fitz Stephen’s description of London as the greatest of English vices and, together with fire, the most severe of threats to London itself. In July 1212, as the result of a rowdy drinking contest or ‘scotale’, at the height of Langton’s dispute with the King, drink and fire did indeed combine with horrendous ferocity to burn the suburbs south of the Thames, from Lambeth to Bermondsey. One contemporary, noting that the flames had spared London Bridge and hence had allowed many people to escape, concluded that God was in the process of testing the English. Conventional sin had been purified by the waters of Noah’s Flood. Only the unnatural vices of Sodom, or now of London, he concluded, could have persuaded God to attempt purification by fire. Even in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, English ‘binge drinking’ exacted a heavy toll. Modern politicians who hold forth against the demon drink might care to remember that drunkenness, and the expression of moral outrage against it, is an English tradition even older than Parliament.