The ‘Violent’ Middle Ages and Clergy

Violence is central to popular images of the Middle Ages. The period is commonly perceived as dominated by warfare, conquest and invasion; bloody aristocratic and popular revolts; and brutal persecution of religious and other minorities.Footnote ¹ It seems to epitomise Hobbes’s vision of man’s natural state as constant interpersonal violence, where life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’. The stereotype is partly derived from medieval sources, notably those by clerical writers who expressed moral condemnations of violence, especially when they saw clergy and the Church as its victims; this ecclesiastical abhorrence of bloodshed enjoyed a long tradition going back to the Early Church and reached a peak in the Peace of God movement of the central Middle Ages. Claude Gauvard has observed that secular authorities also developed a discourse about widespread violence by the later Middle Ages and exploited it to justify their growing social control.Footnote ² Though historians are increasingly sceptical of such impressionistic evidence and critical of this received image of a ‘violent’ Middle Ages, they have to some extent reinforced it for the earlier medieval centuries. Scholarship has characterised the period as violent at its inception, with barbarian invasions marking the transition from ancient to medieval society, although more recent historians regard this process as marked more by gradual colonisation and acculturation.Footnote ³ In the early Middle Ages, historians have likewise argued, violence and its control formed the basis of Western social and political hierarchies:Footnote ⁴ aristocrats imposed their power on others by means of violence. In the tripartite model of society conceived by clerical writers in the central Middle Ages, these aristocrats were the bellatores, those who made war. Historiography, however, perceives a shift from the twelfth century as secular rulers, notably in England and France, established their authority over these military aristocrats by limiting violence among them and successfully leading them to war, a role symbolised by depictions of rulers as mounted warriors on seals and coins. Rulers also increasingly maintained central order through the exercise of law, so that the king’s peace replaced the Peace of God. Hence later medievalists have pushed back against violent stereotypes more than early medievalists, notably in reaction to Norbert Elias’s view of their period as ‘uncivilised’ (see p. 12). Historians, nevertheless, recognise that in the later Middle Ages violence remained intrinsic to human relations across the social scale:Footnote ⁵ James Given has described violence as a frequent resort of poorer peasantry in settling grievances in thirteenth-century England as they lacked access to more peaceful means of dispute resolution.

Where then do clergy fit into this picture of a ‘violent’ Middles Ages? It is easy to regard them primarily as victims since they often depicted themselves as such. Clergy in France and other regions promoted the ‘Peace of God’ to secure protection for themselves and other vulnerable groups from lay, especially aristocratic, violence in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Church authorities even commemorated some clerical victims of such violence as martyrs, especially Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.Footnote ⁶ Three years after his murder by four knights in his own cathedral in 1170, Becket received papal canonisation and consequently attracted a major international cult. Nevertheless, medieval clergy did not necessarily portray themselves as passive victims of lay violence; the ‘Peace of God’ movement expressed clerical resistance to violence, albeit invoking the physical force of secular protectors. Clergy typically depicted their own reaction to peacebreakers as non-violent and limited to spiritual sanctions, notably the ritual curses that Benedictine monks declared against their attackers in northern France.Footnote ⁷ The clergy’s own tripartite model of medieval society likewise suggested that violence was a specialism and right reserved to nobility, and that they, the oratores (those who prayed), were excluded from it.Footnote ⁸ Scholarship admittedly recognises that medieval clergy sanctioned secular use of violence in defence of the Church through the ‘Peace of God’ as well as crusades and the persecution of heresy, but it has been assumed that the clergy were not meant to be active participants in these or other kinds of medieval violence. Since the Early Church, theologians and ecclesiastical councils enjoined clergy not to carry arms or fight in warfare; some rulings even banned ordination of former soldiers; (accordingly, Christian emperors had not required clergy to serve in the army of the late Roman state).Footnote ⁹ These prohibitions were often renewed, especially under the influence of the ‘Peace of God’ and ecclesiastical reform movements in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The renewed bans formed part of the reform movement’s wider ideals to establish the clergy as an order separate from the rest of Christian society and reform their conduct so that they might teach Christian values by both word and example.Footnote ¹⁰ Christian scripture contained injunctions against violence, not only the Fifth Commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’ but also Christ and St Paul’s calls to avoid violence even in self-defence. Admittedly theologians had since developed ‘just war’ theory to excuse lay participation in warfare in certain circumstances, but the continuing ban on clerical involvement implied that clergy were still meant to conform to these pacifistic principles. The example of Becket (who died defending the reform movement’s ideals incidentally) suggests that at least some clergy did so. Medieval clergy were indeed meant to be not peacebreakers but peacemakers, a role that communities expected them to perform among feuding laity in late medieval England.Footnote ¹¹ Thus it might be assumed that clergy were the repository and exemplars of peaceable values in an otherwise ‘violent’ society.

But how far in reality did ecclesiastical authorities and wider society expect clergy to be non-violent? To what extent did such expectations change over time? And regardless of any ideal norms of behaviour were medieval clergy non-violent in actual practice? Over recent decades historians have begun to debate these questions and to challenge assumptions about medieval clergy as paragons of non-violent behaviour. Firstly, although church councils forbade clergy to participate in warfare except as military chaplains providing spiritual support to lay troops, a number of studies show that bishops assumed military duties by the early Middle Ages.Footnote ¹² In particular, Carolingian rulers obliged Frankish bishops and abbots to serve them by supplying and leading troops. These prelates often came from the ranks of the military aristocracy, thus some were even prepared to fight alongside their troops in defiance of conciliar prohibitions. The German episcopate was notorious for such belligerence by the twelfth century. Timothy Reuter has observed that bishops often raised larger military contingents in the Empire than lay magnates, and some even had successful military careers in imperial service, especially Archbishop Christian of Mainz (d. 1183), who commanded imperial troops in Italy for twenty years. Although warrior-bishops had incurred their episcopal colleagues’ criticism since the sixth century for setting a bad example to other clergy and Christian laity, they were no less common in the later Middle Ages, by when lower clergy are also found fighting in wars.Footnote ¹³ The ‘Peace of God’ and church reform movements had reacted against such belligerent clergy by renewing prohibitions on clerical participation in warfare during the central Middle Ages, but this reaction evidently enjoyed limited success. Even initial papal attempts to exclude clergy from crusading warfare were compromised with the emergence of the military orders in the twelfth century, and Bishop Henry Despenser of Norwich even led a crusade to Flanders in the 1380s.Footnote ¹⁴ In Lawrence Duggan’s opinion, this increasing clerical involvement in warfare, notably in crusading, led to the gradual relaxation of the ancient ban on clergy carrying arms in the medieval Western Church, despite reformers’ attempts to reinforce this.Footnote ¹⁵

Research on medieval clergy and violence has accordingly focussed on warfare.Footnote ¹⁶ By contrast, the clergy’s involvement in everyday violence, the violent crimes documented extensively in medieval judicial records, received less attention until recently. Until a decade ago, scholarship exploiting such sources for the history of crime and public order mostly discussed the clergy briefly and in passing. Even Claude Gauvard’s monumental study of crime and violence in late medieval France devotes only a few pages to the clergy, yet this and other similar studies reveal that clergy constituted a far from negligible proportion of the perpetrators and victims of medieval violent crime.Footnote ¹⁷ Clergy in both capacities have merited fuller treatment in recent studies which focus on specific clerical groups, namely monks, mendicants and university students.Footnote ¹⁸ In addition, two major monographs have appeared investigating the violence of parish clergy as part of wider studies of clerical masculinity and offer brilliant regional case studies of this phenomenon in Normandy (1066−1300) and fourteenth-century Catalonia. In addition, other scholarship on medieval masculinity has explored the place of violence within this, especially involving clergy.Footnote ¹⁹

The purpose of the present study is to investigate more fully clerical involvement in criminal violence tried before medieval secular and ecclesiastical courts. The topic is important since many scholars, not just historians, recognise that violent crimes generally occur in the context of established social relations and occasionally represent attempts to renegotiate or challenge those relations. The history of violent crime therefore illuminates how individuals and groups interacted and perceived themselves and each other, as well as the historical contexts shaping these social dynamics and identities. Exploring the medieval clergy’s involvement in violent crime hence usefully requires us to reassess their place within and relationship to the rest of medieval society. How far were the medieval clergy really set apart from society, as eleventh-century reformers intended? Did they share to some extent its cultural values, including those which underpinned violent behaviour? How far did their clerical status afford them special respect and, therefore, protection from lay violence in theory and practice? Conversely how far did their position in society make them vulnerable to such violence? How far did violence occur not only between clergy and laity but also among clergy themselves? In other words, did clergy’s involvement in violence ultimately make them little different from laity?

One important respect in which clergy differed from laity by the late twelfth century is that when accused of criminal offences, clergy were subject exclusively to the laws, courts and punishment of the Western Church and immune from secular justice, at least in theory. But Leona Gabel has shown that in later medieval English practice, clergy suspected of crimes were often arrested by secular agents and faced initial proceedings before royal judges, at which point they might ask to be transferred to ecclesiastical jurisdiction, but this was not always guaranteed.Footnote ²⁰ This, therefore, raises further questions. How did English royal and ecclesiastical authorities deal with clergy accused of criminal violence? And conversely how did these authorities deal with laity accused of assaulting clergy, and who might accordingly face legal proceedings in either royal or church courts?Footnote ²¹ Did the English Crown and Church co-operate in tackling both problems to some degree? Before addressing these questions in the chapters that follow, we need to contextualise our subject within wider approaches to medieval violence, since criminal violence involving medieval clergy was clearly part of a bigger social phenomenon.

Methodological Approaches to Medieval Violence

Violence has attracted scholarly interest across a wide range of humanities disciplines beyond history, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, political science and criminology.Footnote ²² Therefore, scholarly approaches to the topic are many and diverse. All, however, have sought to define violence, to understand why it is such a pervasive feature of human behaviour and to identify the motives, functions and purposes of violent behaviour. Such interdisciplinary debate has increasingly informed how historians of medieval violence frame their research questions and interpret their evidence.Footnote ²³ In particular, it poses a series of conceptual dichotomies as relevant to violence in the Middle Ages as in the present.

First of all, what is violence? A common Anglophone definition is physical harm inflicted on others. But some scholars see this as reductive, for not all violence is physical; for example, it can also be verbal.Footnote ²⁴ Both physical and verbal injuries seem to have been integral to medieval violence, since, as Claude Gauvard notes, fights in late medieval French society often started with exchanges of verbal insults.Footnote ²⁵ In the medieval ius commune, the wrong of iniuria indeed signified not physical injury but damage done to one’s public reputation by false accusations, which Gauvard sees as provoking many of these fights. Francophone scholars (and Gauvard is one) generally adopt a broader definition of violence,Footnote ²⁶ one influenced by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction between ‘overt’ violence (physical or economic) and ‘symbolic’ violence (expressed through moral or social obligations). But the latter is harder to define and detect, as Bourdieu acknowledged, and this discussion will limit itself to more visible, direct forms of violence, physical and verbal. Nevertheless, some anthropologists hold that violence can be mental as well as physical, involving violation of identities, and this sense is certainly reflected in medieval usage of the word. Gauvard observes that ‘violence’ and ‘violent’ are words rarely used in medieval sources, and tellingly they mostly occur in relation to rape.Footnote ²⁷ This book will focus on physical violence, especially homicide, assault and rape, but it will also discuss verbal exchanges that escalated into physical violence and how violent acts could be symbolic and communicate messages for their perpetrators, victims and audiences.

Violence also usually carries negative moral connotations as being illegitimate, unacceptable or unauthorised. As the anthropologist David Riches has observed, this definition of violence is basically subjective and depends on the perspective of those defining violence as such. As Riches puts it, violence is deemed illegitimate by the victim and (some) witnesses but may be legitimate from the perpetrator’s viewpoint.Footnote ²⁸ In other words, one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom-fighter. Medieval legal records of violence reflect this subjectivity. As Paul Hyams notes from the English evidence, it is often hard to determine who the ‘real’ victim of violence was since different people gave differing accounts of violent events. Plaintiffs tend to portray themselves as victims of unprovoked violence initiated by the other party, but their claim is not necessarily more plausible than their opponent’s, who naturally often saw things differently, thus ‘one person’s legitimate vengeance in redress of shame may easily appear to another a dastardly and unprovoked crime’.Footnote ²⁹ Likewise medieval perpetrators of murder often sought to portray their act as legitimate by pleading self-defence, but this was also a matter of perspective, since Gauvard has argued that some late medieval pleas of killing in self-defence made to secure French royal pardons (lettres de rémission) for homicide actually conceal acts of vengeance. Of course, in such cases the alleged wrongdoer, the person killed, was unable to depict themselves as the real victim, and we will see English examples of this below.Footnote ³⁰

However subjectively they are applied, such distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate violence are embedded in legal systems, medieval and modern. In his ‘Critique of Violence’, the philosopher Walter Benjamin held that any legal system differentiated between legitimate and illegitimate violence as the means to just or unjust ends, though he doubted whether any violence was legitimate even for just ends.Footnote ³¹ But, as Benjamin recognised, what a society and its laws consider appropriate ends justifying violence is historically contingent. For medieval historians of violence, this is problematic, for what Western society defines now as unjustified illegitimate violence was not necessarily classed as such in medieval society. Thus, husbands beating their wives are nowadays accused of committing the crime of domestic violence, but in medieval society this behaviour was considered acceptable provided that the intention was disciplinary and the force used not excessive.Footnote ³² So wife-beaters who did not transgress such legal limits did not usually end up in medieval courts and so leave little trace in their records. More pertinently, clergy could administer beatings to discipline penitents, and their superiors and pastoral writers considered this legitimate (see pp. 205–6).

The distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence is related to another dichotomy: violence as ordering or disordering. On the one hand, the sociologist Max Weber argued that the modern state has a monopoly on legitimate violence, which it uses to maintain the social order, and indeed this is often now classed as ‘force’ rather than (notionally illicit) ‘violence’. On the other hand, the anthropologist Emile Durkheim observed that societies deem violence illicit where it breaches the social order.Footnote ³³ In medieval society, rulers certainly used violence to maintain law and order, inflicting corporal punishments on criminals, though Weber held that the state did not fully establish a monopoly on legitimate violence until the early modern period. Nevertheless, medieval authorities legitimated violence depending on who exercised it and in terms of social harmony and order. Church authorities justified husbands chastising their wives physically as maintaining the familial hierarchy, since St Paul taught that wives were subject to and should obey their husbands; conversely they condemned wives who beat their husbands as subverting that patriarchy.Footnote ³⁴ Likewise, pastoral manuals distinguished that clergy beating subordinates to correct them acted out of ‘charity’, upholding right order in Christian society, but clergy striking others out of anger or malice acted illicitly (see p. 206). Violence was thus legitimate when serving the social order but illegitimate when undermining it. Given that the right to exercise legitimate violence was not exclusive to lay rulers but dispersed across social elites, including husbands, the nobility and even clergy to some extent, several historians have nevertheless interpreted the consequent widespread use of violence in medieval society as a sign of disorder. However, as Philippa Maddern argues for fifteenth-century England, contemporaries did not necessarily see it as such.Footnote ³⁵ Maddern observes that they could perceive chivalric pursuit of warfare and violent means of dispute resolution as restoring, not destabilising, order. In addition, political scientists observe that concentration of lawful violence within social elites was the means to controlling violence and establishing order in medieval society before the Weberian state monopoly on legitimate use of violence.Footnote ³⁶

Medieval secular and ecclesiastical authorities thus defined some violence as illicit to punish its perpetrators. Both developed systems of law that embodied social and moral norms about which violence was culpable and which was not. In both systems, malicious intent was central to definitions of culpable homicide, and some kinds of homicide, especially in self-defence or accidental, were deemed non-culpable since such intent was lacking. Theory of course is one thing in any legal system, but practice is usually another. The book will consequently explore how far practice followed the legal theory, not only when it came to clerical rights to Church protection from criminal violence and immunity from secular prosecution for violent crimes, but also when it came to definitions of violence, especially homicide. This was problematic for clergy especially because they might be prosecuted for homicide before both secular and church courts. Despite their shared concern with intent, did these courts agree on the dividing lines between legitimate and illegitimate violence in theory? And how consistently did they observe these distinctions in practice? This problematises the idea of what violence means, as it may signify different things in different legal contexts; Chapter 4 will explore this.

However one defines violence, scholars agree that it is a central fact of human life. Scholarly explanations for this vary.Footnote ³⁷ One is biological, that humans have an innate genetic propensity towards violence. After all other animals, notably predators, are also capable of violence. But this implies that violence is mindless, and although human violence is often described as such (including in Dante’s Inferno), this ignores how it is distinctively shaped by humans’ ‘unique mental capacities’, illustrated, for example, through ‘threats of violence’, as David Riches has argued.Footnote ³⁸ It is similarly debatable whether the evolutionary struggle for survival predisposes humans towards violence.Footnote ³⁹ Although scholars do not exclude biological influences, they also argue for cultural factors shaping human violence. One is psychological, namely that violence is a form of learnt behaviour, which some individuals are conditioned by personal experience to accept as normal; hence child abusers were often abused themselves as children. Historians deem this a persuasive explanation of much medieval violence, particularly given the regular physical discipline which people suffered from childhood inside and outside the family home and the popularity of violent games: ‘Thirteenth-century Englishmen were thus well schooled in violence [as Given notes] … A readiness to resort to aggression and violence was therefore a common character trait among thirteenth-century English peasants’.Footnote ⁴⁰ This learnt behaviour was also gendered, largely a habit of men, and this book will explore how far clergy resisted this cultural education and that of laymen around them and stood outside this violent culture.

Other cultural explanations of human violence are more sociological, that it is an integral part of social relations and acquires its meaning in this context. Many scholars have seen violence as having a strategic function within social interaction, which purpose is either ‘instrumental’, serving as a practical means to an end, or ‘symbolic’, as a highly visible means of expression. In particular, Bourdieu has interpreted violence in these strategic senses as maintaining power relations of domination and subordination throughout society.Footnote ⁴¹ Historians likewise recognise that medieval violence could serve ‘instrumental’ or ‘symbolic’ purposes if not both.Footnote ⁴² Given, as noted previously, saw violence in thirteenth-century England as a ‘tool’ mostly of the poor used to gain advantages or their own way in disputes when other means of conflict resolution were unavailable to them. Hannah Skoda considers medieval violence a vehicle of communication as well as a means of achieving goals, noting how it could express the perpetrators’ own self-image and was often enacted in public with an audience receptive to its message; in particular, aggressive students and wife-beating husbands, Skoda observes, used violence to assert their masculine identity. Indeed, gender was a key issue in the social context of medieval violence, as Given and Gauvard also argue, since almost all of those accused of homicide and most of its victims in thirteenth-century England and late medieval France were male.Footnote ⁴³ Sociological and psychological explanations here intersect, since Given attributes this phenomenon to the different gender roles assigned to the sexes in medieval society: it was culturally appropriate for men to use violence and learn to use it, but not women. He adds that taboos on assaulting women (other than one’s wife) and the fact that men were involved in wider social networks than women made men more likely to be victims of other men’s violence.

Jennifer Thibodeaux and Michelle Armstrong-Partida have contextualised clerical violence even more thoroughly in medieval ideas of masculinity. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of ‘performative’ gender, they argue that medieval men employed violence to express their masculinity. However, by the twelfth century church reformers expected priests to renounce violence and other markers of lay masculinity: sex and marriage. This prompted Thibodeaux, Armstrong-Partida and other gender historians to question whether clergy were consequently perceived as less masculine, and this made them less secure in their male identity. Skoda and others argue that this insecurity made certain clergy, notably students, more assertive of their maleness through extremely promiscuous and violent behaviour. Armstrong-Partida notably argues that parish clergy in Catalonia used violence as a source of male bonding with certain of their parishioners and to assert dominance in competition with their peers. This book will explore how far gender also shaped clerical violence and lay reactions to it in later medieval England and Wales, though my findings will differ somewhat from Armstrong-Partida’s.Footnote ⁴⁴

Another psycho-sociological theory that has been influential in explaining medieval violence but also controversial is Norbert Elias’s ‘civilising process’ thesis. Uninhibited aggression, in Elias’s view, characterised medieval society, especially the knightly class, who took pleasure in killing and cruelty and whose chivalric culture glorified warfare.Footnote ⁴⁵ Attitudes to aggression changed, he argued, as court culture refined social manners and encouraged self-constraint so that nobility learned to restrain their violent impulses and the rest of society followed suit. He saw this civilising process as reinforced by a growing Weberian state monopoly on legitimate violence and located both developments in the early modern period. Historiography provides some support for Elias’s view of medieval society; notably, Marc Bloch similarly perceived it as emotionally volatile and hence prone to unrestrained violence.Footnote ⁴⁶ Other medieval historians have adopted Elias’s paradigm, notably C. Stephen Jaeger, though he relocated the ‘civilising process’ to Ottonian courts of the central Middle Ages.Footnote ⁴⁷ Many historians, however, have been critical of Elias’s teleological model. Early modernists question his assumption of a top-down transformation in social manners, observing that in their period, violence, particularly duelling, remained an aristocratic privilege but was criminalised for the lower orders, implying instead that early modern society was ‘civilised’ from below.Footnote ⁴⁸ Medievalists have found Elias’s view of their period exaggerated and its attitudes to violence more sophisticated than he assumed.Footnote ⁴⁹ Notably Gauvard questioned whether society developed its codes of conduct by imitating the far from ideal example of the nobility and held that violence in late medieval France was not necessarily spontaneous and uncontrolled, as Elias thought, but was subject to certain socially accepted limits and usually unfolded in a series of stages as a calculated, ritualised reaction to personal affronts. Charles Phythian-Adams held that personal confrontations in late medieval England were also governed by rules, according to which violence escalated in ritual stages.Footnote ⁵⁰ Violent confrontations involving clergy indeed often escalated from quarrels with laymen and each other. Some clerks alleged trying to diffuse quarrels knowing where they might lead and ultimately resorting to self-defence, while others were said to incite quarrels and taunt others to provoke violence (see pp. 215–24, 291–94).

Another challenge to Elias and an alternative approach to understanding what drove medieval violence have come from historians of emotions. They reject the notion that lack of emotional self-control predisposed medieval people to irrational outbursts of violence. Medieval sources admittedly identify emotions as motivating violence, principally anger and hatred (or envy),Footnote ⁵¹ but historians have argued that the expression of these two emotions in medieval society was not uncontrolled but governed by accepted cultural conventions. As Stephen White claims on the basis of French vernacular literature, royal and aristocratic displays of anger were deemed appropriate responses to wrongs, especially those injurious to personal honour, and this anger might rightly be expressed through violence avenging such wrongs.Footnote ⁵² Anger, therefore, had ‘a rational function’ in medieval feuding culture,Footnote ⁵³ and even if it resulted in violence, it could be righteous when it followed certain rules. Richard Barton held that anger was most justified in eleventh- and twelfth-century France when exercised by those with proper authority, notably aristocrats engaged in disputes with their subordinates.Footnote ⁵⁴ According to White, ‘lordly anger’ was acceptable when not excessive and its cause just; later medieval French law condemned violence driven by ‘hot anger’ (chaude cole) or ‘fury’ as inhumane.Footnote ⁵⁵ In late medieval France, such intemperate violence was associated with the folly of youth, and those soliciting pardons for self-defence killings often attributed ‘hot anger’ to their victims, thereby denigrating their alleged assailants’ behaviour while justifying their own.Footnote ⁵⁶ Even when anger against an enemy was justified, once the offence prompting it was avenged or peace was made with the enemy, anger was meant to subside and turn into love.Footnote ⁵⁷ In medieval society, anger thus characterised a temporary repairable situation, as Daniel Smail distinguished, whereas hatred referred to an enduring public relationship. Despite its even greater potential to provoke violence, medieval hatred was arguably not uncontrolled either.Footnote ⁵⁸ As Robert Barlett contends, hatred or ‘enmity’ was a social institution by the twelfth century, based not on subjective feelings but describing an objective public relationship that was subject, like anger, to certain socially accepted rules. Later medieval society tolerated prosecution of enmity through violence provided that enmity had a legitimate cause, which Bartlett defined as an attack on the respectable, suggesting that enmity was again an aristocratic prerogative. The aggrieved party had to publicise his enmity before he might start hostilities against his enemy, Bartlett added, and a three-day truce might precede them, allowing the enemy time to prepare or even escape (thus avoiding the necessity of conflict). ‘If you did not treat your enemy according to the rules’, Bartlett concluded, ‘you could yourself become the enemy of the whole community’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Medieval people’s readiness to express anger and hatred, even violently, was therefore hardly evidence of the period’s emotional immaturity and instability, as Elias and Bloch thought, yet it appears a secular, aristocratic model of emotions. Hyams has contrasted this with a clerical model articulated in pastoral literature, rather like Georges Duby’s two models of marriage.Footnote ⁶⁰ Theologians indeed denounced anger as one of the seven deadly sins and, as Gauvard notes,Footnote ⁶¹ considered hatred worse than anger. They advocated Christ’s teaching to love one’s enemies contrary to the Old Testament lex talionis (‘an eye for an eye’) inciting vengeance, which in St Paul’s view belonged to God. Pastoral manuals and clerical preaching encouraged laity to practise the virtues to counter the vices, and specifically the virtue of charity against the vice of wrath. Nevertheless, as Barton argues and Hyams recognises, theologians distinguished by the twelfth century between sinful anger and righteous ‘zealous’ anger.Footnote ⁶² God’s anger against sinners, notably in the Old Testament, was of the latter kind, and Thomas of Chobham in his Summa confessorum (c. 1215) gave the example of Christ expelling the moneychangers from the Temple. Thomas recognised that this might provide a model for human behaviour, but he warned that Christians had to control their zealous anger lest it arose from mental disturbance that could blind them to reason. He was also wary of the potentially violent consequences of anger and hatred, but he accepted that laity and clergy might use physical violence as a means of punishment or discipline. Barton saw the concept of zealous anger as providing a religious justification for French aristocratic anger, while White observed parallels between the secular and religious uses of righteous anger, notably Benedictine monks performing ritualised anger in liturgical curses invoking the vengeance of God and the saints against their wrongdoers.Footnote ⁶³ Clergy might legitimately express ‘zealous’ anger by using disciplinary force, especially the penitential beatings they often inflicted on sinners,Footnote ⁶⁴ what Thomas clearly had in mind. This book will explore whether they also engaged in violence motivated by ‘sinful’ anger and how Church authorities and laity reacted to this; this again raises questions about how far the clergy really stood outside the secular culture around them.

Historians have also seen honour as another important motivation of medieval violence. This explanation has largely been adopted from anthropology, which has long perceived honour as a key value in Mediterranean societies.Footnote ⁶⁵ In this context, honour signifies personal reputation, hence it largely exists in the perceptions of others and requires men especially to be assertive and protective of their self-image in public. Therefore, violent encounters between men in this culture are occasions for them to defend or enhance their own honour and to challenge that of others, basically to compete over honour. It is valued as something worth fighting and even dying for, hence Bourdieu considered it a kind of ‘cultural capital’. Thus violations of honour, even verbal slights, may provoke violent retaliation, which in turn may prompt others to reciprocate with violence to preserve their own honour, hence unleashing a sequence of violence, as John Corvin argues.Footnote ⁶⁶ The ultimate vindication of honour in extreme cases is to take another’s life, where necessary not to back down to an opponent and lose face, as epitomised in the Spanish bullfight, so Garry Marvin observes.Footnote ⁶⁷

Gauvard describes a highly similar honour culture as the context for violence in late medieval France. In this society, honour also meant reputation and was not exclusive to nobles or gentry but mattered to all, regardless of social status, even clergy. Any offence damaging to personal reputation could likewise provoke violence, notably insulting words or gestures. These might be directed at men or women, but since medieval violence was largely a masculine trait, men responded violently to insults against themselves or their wives to defend their own and their women’s honour. French legal culture also intensified the significance of honour, since royal and ecclesiastical criminal procedure inquired into the accused’s reputation or fama, based on the community’s perception (vox publica) of their conduct. Hence those who saw themselves as publicly ‘defamed’ by insults reacted to them with violence in public to restore their fama and honour. Vengeance was thus the most common motive for homicide, easily provoked by affronts to honour.Footnote ⁶⁸ Hyams likewise argues that vengeance was frequently cause for violence in medieval England, even if it was not legitimate grounds for homicide as in France, and that it was often prompted by ‘people’s sense of face (if not honour in the technical sense)’. While Hyams views honour as an aristocratic concept, he recognises that ‘fear of losing face’ was a ubiquitous concern that could even ‘spur humbler men to seek revenge in appropriate circumstances’ by the thirteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁹ Reputation also mattered in English legal culture. Church courts in England followed continental inquisitorial procedure by relying on fama in criminal cases. Though English common law instead preferred trial by jury in such cases, an accused’s reputation in the community could still influence jurors’ verdicts.Footnote ⁷⁰ However, honour was not a Christian value, whereas humility was and appears its polar opposite. Avenging honour also ran counter to God’s ‘monopoly’ on vengeance. Hence it is a moot point whether honour also motivated clerical violence in later medieval England and Wales as Gauvard implies occurred in France, which again we will investigate later.

Medieval society, nevertheless, seemed to provide conditions in which anthropologists expect an honour culture to flourish, and this raises the question of how clergy fitted into this if at all, and whether their violent acts were ever motivated by honour. The anthropologist Anton Blok observed that in Mediterranean countries codes of honour developed where government was weak, so people resorted to self-help when their honour was affronted because they could not rely on the state to provide them with redress.Footnote ⁷¹ This seems to accord with the view of Elias, Gauvard and others that medieval states lacked a Weberian monopoly on legitimate violence. Pieter Spierenberg argues that this made medieval men more reliant on their own resources to defend themselves, their family or property and hence medieval society more violent. Hyams likewise holds that English society was less effectively policed and had less respect for rule of law in the Middle Ages than now, hence its legal system ‘required a far higher degree of individual initiative from, or on behalf of, the victim’ to obtain redress and was ‘vulnerable to an instinctive feeling that response to injuries and slights should be hot and quick.’Footnote ⁷² Hyams argues that the urge for vengeance did not necessarily decline as the medieval English state developed its judicial system, however, hence violent defence of honour was more a cultural choice than social necessity as other means of redress became increasingly available. Given admittedly suggests that it was a necessity for poorer peasantry who lacked the resources to access legal options, but the growth rather than the absence of law, as noted above, increased the importance of honour in medieval society. It is likewise debatable whether the Church’s concern to protect clergy from violence in its institutional interests (discussed in Chapter 2) necessarily made clergy less prone to resort to violence in self-defence let alone in pursuit of honour-based revenge. Indeed, we will see that clergy exploited violence for both reasons.

The approaches outlined above suggest why medieval society was violent, but historians have also sought ways to understand how violent it was. Many have eschewed a purely qualitative approach based on impressionistic evidence, partly because it relies on subjective perceptions of how violent the period felt to its authors. As already noted, these were often clergy writing from a particular perspective, whose views did not necessarily represent wider social attitudes nor correlate to actual levels of violence. Some historians have instead attempted to gauge the latter more objectively by counting instances of violent crime in medieval legal records. This quantitative approach is strongly influenced by criminology, which has long used statistics to trace crime trends and generate criminal profiles. Such statistical analysis has reinforced the impression that the Middle Ages were more violent than the present, showing that European homicide rates have fallen dramatically between then and now.Footnote ⁷³ Historians who posit this decline have tried to explain this largely by reference to Elias’s contested ‘civilising process’ theory and Weber’s more persuasive notion about the modern state’s monopoly on legitimate violence.Footnote ⁷⁴ Regardless of the plausibility of such theories, several historians of medieval and early modern English society doubt the reliability of these statistics and the resulting picture of this society as exceptionally violent.Footnote ⁷⁵ Maddern notably observed that the medieval figures related to indictments rather than convictions for homicide, and that accusations of violence in medieval judicial records for early fifteenth-century East Anglia on closer examination turned out to be fictional or conceal incidents less serious than alleged; she hence concluded that the actual level of violence in this region was quite low. Maddern and James Sharpe emphasised instead the importance of contemporary perceptions and attitudes regarding violence.

Arguably both qualitative and quantitative approaches contribute to a fuller understanding of medieval violence. Even if it is hard to measure accurately how violent medieval society was, notably when violence can be defined so subjectively, Given, Gauvard and Barbara Hanawalt demonstrate how statistical methods can be applied profitably in other ways to medieval legal records,Footnote ⁷⁶ especially to identify patterns regarding the gender, age and social status of killers; their relationship with their victims and accomplices; and location, timing, nature and motive of their crimes. These historians show how such patterns, when interpreted qualitatively, have potentially wide implications for medieval social identities and networks, regional differences (especially between town and country) and cultural attitudes. Their approach also represents a practical means to survey the large volume of extant medieval legal records and consequently allows broader generalisations than a selective case-study approach, where the question arises of how far the cases selected are genuinely representative.Footnote ⁷⁷ Therefore, this book will use both qualitative and quantitative approaches and engage with other methodological and conceptual dichotomies outlined above in interpreting primary evidence, the main kinds of which will be surveyed below.

To sum up, historiography on medieval violence has drawn on a variety of methodological approaches, notably from other disciplines. What all these approaches have in common is a sense that violence was very much a cultural force and social habit, especially among men, and this raises the central question this book will explore: how far clergy, notionally distinct from laymen, really differed from them in practice, notably in their involvement in violence. This question is also central to recent discussion of clerical violence in the context of gender, and while gender is an important approach for interpreting evidence of clerical violence and produces important results, anthropological approaches are still useful for our understanding of medieval violence, as Skoda and especially Gauvard have shown. Thus, in Chapters 3 and 4 especially, gender and anthropological approaches will be combined. Neither of these contemporary theories were of course known to people in later medieval England and Wales; their understanding of criminal violence was largely shaped by legal theory, especially canon and common law. Chapters 1 and 2 will thus focus on law and compare how far legal theory and practice differed concerning clergy as victims or perpetrators of violence, especially when it came to two legal privileges which were meant to set them apart from laity: benefit of clergy and privilegium canonis. Chapter 4 will also examine how the notionally distinct systems of canon and common law were closely comparable when it came to clergy (and laity) facing homicide charges. The key question again is how far clergy differed from laity in matters of criminal violence. This book is, therefore, a study in both legal and social history. Despite its broad aims, its coverage cannot be comprehensive and will principally focus on parish clergy. This largely reflects their predominance in the sources surveyed below. As other historians of clerical violence have shown, other kinds of clergy, especially religious and students, deserve special and separate study; and Skoda’s comparison of student violence in different European universities shows the benefit of this approach.Footnote ⁷⁸ This book hence gives limited treatment of violence among religious and students, and it does not seek to cover clerical involvement in violent criminal gangs, largely because this requires study of their wider criminality, notably burglary and theft.Footnote ⁷⁹ The book aims to understand instead what violent interactions between parish clergy and lay communities tell us about the relationship between the two and how far they were really as distinct from one another as canon law and canonists supposed.

Sources on Clergy and Violent Crime in Medieval England and Wales

The principal sources which inspired this book were the registers of the papal penitentiary, the highest office of the pre-Reformation Church concerned with sin. The office dealt with sins reserved to papal absolution, including one of the earliest ‘reserved cases’ in Western canon law. Canon 15 of the Second Lateran Council (1139),Footnote ⁸⁰ known from its incipit as ‘Si quis suadente’, ruled that anyone who laid violent hands upon a clerk or monk incurred ipso facto sentence of excommunication and might not obtain absolution until they appeared before the papal curia, except when close to death. Although further exceptions followed in subsequent canon law allowing absolution by local bishops, many violators of the canon still required papal absolution, and they could petition the papal penitentiary for this by the mid-fourteenth century. Therefore, its registers, extant for 1410−11, 1438−43 and in a near-continuous series from 1448 onwards, record requests for absolution from excommunication incurred under ‘Si quis suadente’ (and in other reserved cases). These petitions were copied in a section of the registers headed de diversis formis (miscellaneous matters) from 1458 (by when all entries in the registers were arranged under such subject headings). These and other requests normally appear in the registers with a fiat clause recording their approval by one of the penitentiary’s officials, either the cardinal penitentiary in charge of the eponymous office or his deputy (the regent), hence the registers apparently record only successful petitions. The date noted beside each registered petition is probably when it was approved. The office issued letters normally bearing the same date and authorising the grace sought in response to these petitions.Footnote ⁸¹

Most assailants of clergy seeking absolution from the papal penitentiary were laity, but some were other clergy, therefore its registers record violence by as well as against clergy. Clerical perpetration of violence is, however, more fully documented in another kind of request in the section of the registers headed de declaratoriis. This section records requests for ‘declaratory letters’ (littere declaratorie) comparable in some respects to royal pardons, since they cleared their recipients of actual or potential criminal charges before the church courts and the penal consequences of these.Footnote ⁸² Unlike the registered requests concerning ‘Si quis suadente’, which are usually brief and formulaic and probably abbreviated versions of the original petitions in most cases, the longest, least formulaic entries in the registers are under de declaratoriis (and probably preserve the original petition in full) since they usually contain a detailed narrative. It generally describes how the petitioner was involved in a situation which occasioned these charges but was innocent of them. Many such petitions came from clergy who were involved in violence and wished to avoid ecclesiastical trial and punishment for this. Some admittedly sought absolution, usually when they admitted their guilt, but most sought exoneration from homicide. In the latter case, littere declaratorie might be granted when there were mitigating circumstances, notably self-defence or accidental killing. The petitioner’s detailed narrative sought to demonstrate such circumstances and thereby obtain this favour. Normally petitions seeking this and other papal graces from the penitentiary were drawn up by ‘proctors’ (legal representatives) affiliated to the office, who knew how to present their clients’ requests in the way most likely to get what was sought. The narratives in de declaratoriis petitions, however, seem to be largely in petitioners’ own words. Each tells a different story giving vivid insights into daily life as well as clerical violence.

Some petitioners seeking littere declaratorie (or absolution) for involvement in violence were clergy who had been in war zones, even if they claimed not to have taken part in fighting and killing but feared guilt by association. Many such petitioners in fifteenth-century England and Wales described being present at conflicts in the Hundred Years’ War or Wars of the Roses.Footnote ⁸³ Clerical participation in warfare is too big a topic for inclusion in this book, but these sources deserve separate study. Another sub-group of de declaratoriis petitions that will be included, however, regard clergy who feared being held responsible for secular judicial violence since their actions had led to the execution of criminals or might be construed as having this effect.

Many penitentiary petitions concerning clergy and violence came from the German Empire and Scandinavia, and they have been studied for these and other parts of Europe.Footnote ⁸⁴ This book gives the first detailed treatment of such petitions from England and Wales down to 1503 (the end of Alexander VI’s papacy).Footnote ⁸⁵ Historians have not made extensive use of the penitentiary records in general for these countries, despite their significance for religious, social, cultural and even political history.Footnote ⁸⁶ This is largely because the registers were only made available to researchers in 1983, and access to them remains restricted to those with special permission of the office, now known as the Apostolic Penitentiary, which curates them in its own archive at Rome. Editions of entries in the registers for various regions of Europe, including England and Wales, have appeared since the 1990s, however, making this material more accessible.Footnote ⁸⁷ Hopefully, therefore, this book will encourage further use of this evidence.

Another major body of evidence exploited in this book are the English church court records. The jurisdiction of the pre-Reformation English Church was extensive, covering such issues as marriage, defamation, probate, perjury and breach of promise, and ecclesiastical rights and income, notably tithes.Footnote ⁸⁸ Most of these issues were the subject of civil or ‘instance’ litigation, i.e., cases brought before the church courts at the instance of the parties. But such courts also heard criminal or ‘office’ cases, so called because ecclesiastical judges prosecuted these by virtue of their office (ex officio). These cases concerned violations of canon law and offences against Christian teaching, notably sexual immorality (adultery, fornication), heresy and non-attendance at church. These crimes became known to the courts partly through public rumour (vox publica) about the accused’s reputation (fama), probably sometimes reported at diocesan visitations.Footnote ⁸⁹ However some office cases resemble instance litigation in that they were said to be ‘promoted’ by named accusers, usually those allegedly harmed by the offence in question.

Cases regarding violence against clergy could appear before the church courts in either way,Footnote ⁹⁰ as private actions initiated by the alleged victims or criminal proceedings (office cases). All were presented as violations of ‘Si quis suadente’, so the charge following the canon’s wording was usually recorded as violenta iniectio manuum or iniectio manuum violentarum (laying violent hands). Not only laity but also other clergy accused of assaulting clergy could face instance or office actions brought under the canon. ‘Si quis suadente’ did not normally cover clerical violence against laity, and this was usually prosecuted ex officio as conduct unbecoming of clergy.

English church court records comprising such cases are extremely voluminous.Footnote ⁹¹ Hence it has been necessary to be selective, limiting this study to records from the dioceses of Canterbury, Ely, London, Rochester and York down to 1500. These dioceses were chosen partly because their ecclesiastical court records are among the fullest for the medieval English Church, especially Canterbury and York, for which not only many act books recording court proceedings survive but also numerous original case papers. Other reasons for the choice are to represent different English regions and communities, from rural Kent to metropolitan London, and that previous research indicated that church court records from these dioceses contain material about clergy and violent crime.Footnote ⁹² In addition, the single extant medieval act book for Ely diocese was consulted for the latter two reasons and because Cambridge University lay in that diocese and clerical students were often involved in violence, as Skoda shows and the penitentiary registers also illustrate.Footnote ⁹³

For Canterbury, the main records studied are those of the archbishop’s diocesan court known as the ‘consistory court’ of Canterbury. It emerged during the thirteenth century as a distinct institution from the archbishop’s provincial court (the ‘Court of Arches’ in London) and his personal jurisdiction, exercised through his ‘audience court’ by the early fourteenth century. From at least 1278, the consistory court sat in Canterbury, presided over by the archbishop’s ‘commissary general of Canterbury’, and dealt with most diocesan litigation.Footnote ⁹⁴ Its records are chiefly a series of act books, most containing instance cases only but some including office material, which survive from 1364 and comprise twenty-two registers down to 1500. In addition, the five act books, or fragments thereof, surviving for the archbishop’s ‘audience court’ from the first half of the fourteenth century were consulted. Case papers from the consistory, audience and provincial courts, notably abundant for periods when the prior and chapter of Canterbury cathedral assumed sede vacante administration of the archbishop’s jurisdiction, also comprise relevant documents, especially from archiepiscopal vacancies in 1292−94 and 1313. Finally the archdeacon of Canterbury exercised jurisdiction overlapping with that of the consistory court in many parishes of Canterbury diocese. The archdeacon’s court presided over by his official heard both office and instance cases (except for marriage litigation, which was reserved to the consistory court).Footnote ⁹⁵ Two pre-1500 act books of this court survive (both from the last quarter of the fifteenth century and comprising both kinds of cases) and were also consulted.

By the sixteenth century, the northern archdiocese of York likewise contained several church courts and rival ecclesiastical jurisdictions.Footnote ⁹⁶ Those best documented for the medieval period are the archbishop’s consistory court and the audience court of the dean and chapter of York Minster.Footnote ⁹⁷ The consistory court had emerged by the late thirteenth century, was presided over by the archbishop’s official and his commissary general and dealt mainly with instance cases. Its records comprise a much fuller and more continuous set of case files than those preserved for Canterbury diocesan courts. Known as the ‘York Cause Papers’, these survive from 1301 onward. By contrast, act books survive less well for this court than its Canterbury counterpart, giving patchy coverage of the period between 1370 and 1489 and comprising seven or eight registers. These act books are also less informative about the nature of individual cases, being confined to recording largely the procedural stages in each case, hence researchers must rely (as the court seems to have done) on the cause papers for details of the cases’ substance. The two extant pre-1500 act books of the dean and chapter’s audience court were also consulted. York Minster’s peculiar jurisdiction emerged as separate from archiepiscopal jurisdiction by the late thirteenth century. It was principally exercised through the audience court, but Minster prebendaries also ran their own courts (capitula) in their prebends.Footnote ⁹⁸ The audience court dealt with both instance and office cases from many parishes within and outside York, which were heard before either its auditor of causes or members of the chapter acting as a tribunal. Office cases predominate in its act books, notably proceedings against clergy accused of violence.

London diocese also had many church courts, but medieval records survive for only two, the bishop’s consistory court and his lower commissary court.Footnote ⁹⁹ The former, presided over by the bishop’s official, heard largely instance cases. Its medieval records are sparse, mainly a few late fifteenth-century deposition books, although these include witness statements in cases of alleged assaults on clergy. The commissary court, whose judge was the commissary-general, is much better documented, with eight act books extant between 1470 and 1501. The court’s jurisdiction was limited to office cases arising within the city of London and the deaneries of Middlesex and Barking immediately surrounding the city, though many of those recorded in its act books were essentially instance litigation, as Richard Helmholz notes.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Rochester’s medieval diocesan court records are also mixed.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The earliest extant acta of the bishop’s consistory court and audience court, from Hamo Hethe’s episcopate (1319−52), are bound almost indistinguishably into the episcopal registers of Hethe and his successor John Sheppey.Footnote ¹⁰² The next extant act books of the consistory and audience courts, presided over by the bishop’s official and vicar-general respectively, are rightly described as ‘composite act books’, since they mix together instance and office cases as well as proceedings in both courts; four such registers exist covering years between 1437 and 1501. Finally, the single act book consulted for the bishop of Ely’s consistory court, which gradually emerged under the bishop’s official during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, dates from 1374 to 1381, comprises mostly instance cases, and it is the chief record of the court’s activity before 1500.Footnote ¹⁰³

The next main body of sources to be surveyed are the gaol delivery rolls, ‘the most important single source’, as Gabel recognised, on clergy accused of crimes before secular courts in later medieval England.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As early as 1195−96 and 1206, the English Crown commissioned justices to ‘deliver’ gaols of prisoners indicted of felonies. The original purpose of gaol delivery was to help clear a growing backlog of criminal cases awaiting trial by itinerant royal justices of ‘eyre’, who visited each county every few years. Initially sheriffs were commissioned for this purpose, but Magna Carta (1215) debarred them from executing royal justice and required the appointment of two royal judges and four knights in each county as ‘assize justices’, and they were increasingly commissioned to deliver gaols by the 1270s. Gaol delivery records initially were kept with the eyre rolls documenting the justices of eyre’s activity, but at the beginning of Edward I’s reign in 1271−72 gaol delivery became separate from the eyre, and its own series of rolls started. During Edward’s reign, gaol delivery expanded rapidly and overtook the eyre as the main local royal tribunal for trying and sentencing felons. Accordingly, commissions to deliver gaols were increasingly reserved to professional judges. In 1318, justices of the central royal court of King’s Bench were permanently commissioned to deliver jails as they travelled about the realm with the king, but as the workload of royal judges grew during the fourteenth century, local justices of the peace were increasingly commissioned to deliver gaols. Records of these gaol delivery justices’ activity survive to 1476 and are so voluminous that this book limits itself to those for Kent and Yorkshire. These were chosen since they roughly overlap with regions covered by the ecclesiastical courts of Canterbury, Rochester and York. Hence royal and church courts can be observed working alongside each other as they dealt with laity charged with assaulting clergy and with clergy accused of violent crime in these regions.

Finally, along with legal practice this book will examine legal theory, especially the Church’s canon law and commentaries on it. The most widely used collection of canon law by the later twelfth century was Gratian’s Decretum. Its origins and evolution are hotly disputed, but the ‘vulgate’ version of the text circulated from the 1140s.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The Decretum’s shadowy compiler Gratian seems to have designed it as a textbook to instruct his students at Bologna, and it was certainly a major stimulus to the growth of a canon law school there. Masters at Bologna and other nascent law schools across Europe, notably in England, France and the Rhineland, also adopted the book as the basis for their own teaching by 1200. The chief reason for its didactic success was its dialectical organisation, whereby Gratian assembled contradictory sources on points of law and sought to resolve these differences through interpretation (recorded in dicta interspersed among his sources). Accordingly, Gratian’s original title for the collection was a ‘concordance of discordant canons’. Teachers using his book later renamed it Decretum and so became known as ‘decretists’ but continued Gratian’s harmonisation of its sources in their lectures preserved as commentaries. The Decretum was not only influential in the schools but also consulted at the papal curia and lower church courts, where university-educated lawyers who had studied Gratian’s book increasingly practised. The Decretum (and its commentators) hence shaped ecclesiastical judicial practice by the late twelfth century, on clergy and violent crime among other issues, since it included the canon ‘Si quis suadente’ mentioned previously and other texts regarding the Church’s jurisdiction over clergy accused of crimes.

In the decades following the book’s diffusion, papal decretals were increasingly recognised as a source of ‘new law’ supplementing the ‘old law’ in the Decretum. Decretals were letters in which popes responded to external requests for legal judgement or advice. Many record papal decisions on specific cases appealed to Rome from lower church courts, and others replied to bishops consulting the pope on unclear or disputed points of canon law. By the 1150s, copies of decretals circulated as appendices to the Decretum, but by the 1170s independent decretal collections appeared. Initially they were compiled by recipients of decretals, notably bishops, as guides to judicial practice. But increasingly canonists in the schools collected decretals and cited them in their lectures to inform their students of new papal interpretations of canon law. Before 1234, five decretal collections, compiled between c. 1188−91 and 1226 and called the Quinque compilationes antique, were generally accepted in the schools, notably Bologna. By the early thirteenth century, popes were approving canonistic collections of their decretals as canon law and even commissioning them. Pope Gregory IX commissioned a collection of his own and other popes’ decretals and conciliar decrees and promulgated it in 1234 as definitive and authoritative, superseding all previous post-Gratian collections, and approved for use in law schools and church courts. This collection, known as the Liber extra (being ‘extra’ to the Decretum), did not remain definitive for long since canonists appended subsequent thirteenth-century papal rulings to their copies of it. In 1298, Pope Boniface VIII therefore promulgated a new collection, the Liber sextus, so-called as an addition to the five books of Gregory IX’s collection. Subsequent compilations of papal rulings appeared in the early fourteenth century and were also treated as part of canon law, namely the Clementine (comprising Pope Clement V’s constitutions promulgated by his successor John XXII in 1317) and the Extravagantes of Pope John XXII (c. 1325). This growing body of canon law added significantly to rulings in the Decretum about clergy and violent crime, notably through many decretals amplifying on the terms of ‘Si quis suadente’.

By the early thirteenth century, canonistic commentaries on decretal collections had begun to appear, especially at Bologna, then established as the leading international centre for studying canon law. In interpreting canon law, commentators cited not only the Decretum and decretals but also Roman law. Codified in the early sixth century under the eastern Roman Emperor Justinian and after centuries of patchy transmission largely recovered in the West by the mid-twelfth century, Roman law was increasingly studied alongside canon law in the schools and influenced many of its ideas as well as procedure in church courts by the late twelfth century. For example, the two main collections of Roman law, the Digest assembling the opinions of ancient Roman jurists and Codex comprising legislation of Justinian, significantly influenced canon law and canonistic doctrine on self-defence, one of the key issues relating to clergy and violent crime. Therefore, this book will examine medieval jurisprudence on Roman as well as canon law, notably the standard commentary (glossa ordinaria) of Accursius (d. 1259/63) on the Roman law, that of Johannes Teutonicus (revised by Batholomew of Brescia, c. 1245) on the Decretum and that of Bernard of Parma (d. 1266) on the Liber extra, which accompanied most copies of these law books in the margins. This Italian jurisprudence dominated study of canon and Roman law in the English universities, as their surviving library lists demonstrate, and thus influenced interpretation and application of canon law in English church courts.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

In conclusion, a large and diverse corpus of evidence will be examined, and the approach to it will be comparative. The papal penitentiary and local church courts will be compared on how they dealt with lay and clerical violators of ‘Si quis suadente’ and clergy implicated in violent crimes against laity. Comparisons between secular and ecclesiastical justice will also be made regarding their handling of laity charged with assaulting clergy and clergy accused of violent crimes. Finally legal theory and practice will be compared, especially in terms of how far the judicial practice followed Roman and canon law and learned interpretation of its rules, and conversely how far this legal theory was influenced by and responded to actual practice.