Saints and Sinners

The period from 1170 to the 1260s had witnessed a remarkable flourishing of saints’ cults in England, associated principally with English bishops famed for their devotion to the liberty and reform of the Church: Thomas Becket (d.1170, canonized 1173), St Wulfstan of Worcester (d.1095, canonized 1203), St Hugh of Lincoln (d.1200, canonized 1220), St Edmund of Canterbury (d.1240, canonized 1246), St Richard Wyche of Chichester (d.1253, canonized 1262) fell within this category, as did the bids, unsuccessful though they proved, to obtain the canonizations of Stephen Langton (Archbishop of Canterbury d.1228), Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln (d.1253) and even, most improbably, King Henry III’s half-brother Aymer de Valence of Winchester (d.1260), and Henry’s uncle Boniface of Savoy (Archbishop of Canterbury, d.1270). Boniface was rumoured to have worn chain mail under his clerical habit and to have once delivered a distinctly un-archiepiscopal punch to the jaw of the prior of St Bartholomew’s Smithfield. He was nonetheless a conscientious visitor of monasteries, an issuer of reformist legislation for the English Church and even, in the 1250s and 60s, an upholder of the rights of the community of the realm to better government than had previously been supplied by his royal nephew’s incompetent favouritism. In Italy and southern Europe, saints in the thirteenth century were almost exclusively holy men set apart from the mainstream of ecclesiastical administration or secular politics. In England, with its well-regulated Church matching the state’s increasing obsession with law-making and legality, it was bishops who achieved sainthood and a role as intercessors for their local communities from beyond the grave.

The last of these saint bishops, Thomas Cantiloupe of Hereford (d.1282), was canonized in 1320 having been so at odds with his archbishop, John Pecham, that he spent the final months of his life as an excommunicate exile in the court of Rome. Thereafter, the electrical matter of sanctity seems to have passed underground, no longer channelled through an episcopal hierarchy increasingly reserved for civil servants and royal diplomats. Virtually every archbishop of Canterbury after 1300 had seen previous service as King’s clerk or ambassador, and several of them continued, even after their promotion as archbishop, to hold office as chancellor or treasurer to the crown. It was not that Pecham’s successors lacked either courage or competence. Even the supine civil servant Archbishop Walter Reynolds had broken with Edward II in the 1320s and assisted the court coup which brought Edward III to the throne, preaching on the ancient proverb ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God.’ Most of these men were well schooled. Archbishop Reynolds owned an impressive library, although he was perhaps more familiar with the covers than the contents of his books.

With the exception of William Courtenay, son of the Earl of Devon and great-grandson of Edward I (the first archbishop of Canterbury to have been of direct royal lineage, succeeded by Archbishop Thomas Arundel, a great-great-grandson of King Henry III), most of these men emerged from precisely that stratum of the lower gentry or upper levels of freeholder that had produced the Thomas Beckets or Stephen Langtons of the past. William of Wykeham’s father was a man with the far from aristocratic name John Long, a yeoman freeholder, married above his station to the granddaughter of a minor local knight. Compared with their predecessors, nonetheless, the bishops of the fourteenth century can only be regarded as second-raters. They included the first English bishop ever to be tried for incitement to homicide (Thomas Lisle of Ely, a Dominican friar, accused of leading a gang of fenland brigands) and the only two bishops ever to have been beheaded by the London mob: Walter Stapeldon, bishop of Exeter, treasurer of the deposed Edward II, decapitated in Cheapside with a breadknife in 1326, and Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, killed during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, his head displayed on London Bridge with an episcopal cap nailed to the skull. Both Stapledon and Sudbury were ‘building’ bishops, Sudbury as principal benefactor of the new nave at Canterbury Cathedral, Stapeldon as the second founder of the cathedral church of Exeter. Yet in neither case was there even a token suggestion that these agents of royal government be acknowledged as martyrs or workers of miracles.

Many but not all of these bishops were learned men. Louis de Beaumont, a cousin of Edward I’s Queen, was accused in 1318 of floundering through the Latin of his consecration service and of muttering, after one particularly troublesome polysyllable, ‘By St Louis, he was no gentleman who wrote that word!’ Beaumont was amongst the first of the English bishops to plaster his episcopal seal with his own heraldic arms. From the time of his successor, Thomas Hatfield, the bishops of Durham, as ‘palatinate’ lords of their county, employed a double-sided seal, on one side showing them enthroned, on the other as a mounted warrior, with sword and crested helmet barely concealed beneath their episcopal mitre. Not since Odo of Bayeux in the eleventh century had an English bishop been portrayed in this way on his seal, riding into battle. Meanwhile, rather like star conductors or musicians of the twentieth century, the bishops of fourteenth-century England were capable of a virtuoso performance using the materials already at their disposal, but were not themselves able to rewrite the music, let alone to compose new tunes.