A long and very respectable tradition of thinking about the morality of warfare has accustomed us to looking at Augustine’s views on the ‘just war’ through the wrong end of a telescope. By common consent, Augustine is the fountain-head of a tradition almost ubiquitous in medieval thought, and still to be discovered lurking, as recently as last April, in a leading article in The Times. In reading Gratian, Thomas Aquinas, Vittoria or Cardinal Bellarmine, one is constantly reminded that, as the author of the most recent study of the just war in the Middle Ages put it, ‘the influence of Augustine was all pervasive.’ The best of modern studies are, indeed, informed by a sense of the ambiguity of Augustine’s legacy to medieval thought; but even so, and unavoidably, they reinforce the tendency which leads us to think of Augustine as the father of this tradition of thinking. There is no need to question this consensus—indeed it seems to me to be very largely correct—to be conscious that there is nothing that can obscure the true nature of an original thought as radically as the tradition to which it gives rise. What, therefore, I am trying to do in this paper is, for once, to turn the telescope the right way round and to look at Augustine’s thinking not in the long perspective of the tradition which his ideas inaugurated, but in the immediate context of his own intellectual biography.

‘Comparisons are odorous’. Modern historians, far from sharing Dogberry’s repugnance, have found the scent of the comparative method irresistible. ‘Perhaps even the future of our discipline’ depended on its pursuit, wrote Marc Bloch in 1928. Since then, comparison has become fashionable enough, and hardly remarkable in our contemporaries’ work. Remarkable it certainly is, however, in the ninth century. I would like to begin by quoting a passage written in 857 or 858 by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims:

One of the most important intellectual problems which the Church faced in the Middle Ages was to reconcile warfare with the Christian message. But the presence of, and the necessity for, war affected not merely the intellectual attitudes and social message of medieval ecclesiastics. The institutional Church faced obvious practical problems when confronted with external warfare or civil disturbance. On the one hand the ruler might well, indeed usually did, require churches with extensive property and wealth to contribute to the burden of defending the community. On the other hand churches might well, especially if the ruler’s authority was weak, face the need to defend themselves against the aggression of their neighbours. Churches therefore needed a military potential, whether or not the state laid this obligation upon them. Even the Church’s attempts to control warfare, the Peace and Truce of God movements, tended to embroil it in military activity, since exhortation and spiritual sanction often needed the backing of force to convince a recalcitrant laity of the virtues of bridling its internal violence.

Charters, Chronicles and letters which record the foundation of religious houses in the period 1050–1250 abound in the images of both war and peace. Whereas king Henry I of England, a military leader of renown, founded an abbey at Cirencester for the repose of his soul and the stability of his realm, Bernard of Clairvaux, that celebrated man of religion, wrote of the new Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx as an outpost of his lord which he proposed to occupy. The juxtaposition of such conflicting ideas is epitomised by the military orders, formed to fight holy wars against the infidel; and a logical symbol of the triumph of Christianity is the foundation of a monastery such as Louis IX’s Franciscan friary at Jaffa, created in 1252 after the capture of this Moslem stronghold, or the building of Alcobaça by Alphonso I of Portugal (c1153) after his great victory over the Moors at Santaren.

The track to be explored in this paper was laid down when I realised how relatively unexamined the actual working out of Christian ideas about war within the medieval period is. Recent years have seen appear a notable book about the development of ideas on the Just War, and a great deal of work on the role of the military aristocracy and on its ideals, but upon the coming together of Christianity and actual events there seemed to me very little, at least in the period which interests me most. The one series of events which has attracted attention within what one can call loosely the twelfth century is, of course, the Crusades, but I decided to put them rather at the edge of my focus since they raised special questions, and to invite a scholar who has devoted much time to their elucidation to give a paper upon a crusading theme later in the conference. Yet when one turns for guidance for the history of western Europe there is only one book which stands out, La Guerre au Moyen Age by Philippe Contamine which appeared in the Nouvelle Clio series as recently as 1980, and it, as one would expect from its author’s earlier achievement, is strongest when it deals with the period of the Hundred Years War. Nonetheless it is a remarkable achievement, and one to which I am deeply indebted. But given the fact that the subject is still so unmapped, only two approaches seemed feasible to me, one where I would try to look at a series of specific wars and see what the Church did about them, or one where I would look at a source or group of sources, and see what it, or they, had to say about war and the Church.

It was accepted in western Europe, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that there was an obligation upon the military classes, and indeed on Christians generally, to take up arms in defence of the Holy Sepulchre, or to participate in other expeditions authorised by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. War ceased to be, for Christians, a regrettable necessity, and became a virtue, and armies were summoned by the trumpet-blasts of the Prince of Peace. There has been a great deal of work by historians in recent decades on the transformation of earlier Christian ideology, and we now understand much more about the origins of crusading ideas, the discussion of warfare by theologians and canon lawyers, and the profound changes in spirituality which accompanied the rise of militarism. There is however a technical aspect of the subject which is less often considered: the actual methods by which the new ideals were communicated to western society generally. By any standards, it was a remarkably successful exercise in publicity. It was also, in the first instance, very rapid. Urban II announced the expedition to Jerusalem at the Council of Clermont in November 1095, and he fixed the date of departure as 15 August 1096. The summons was heard by groups far wider than the princes and their households, and by Easter 1096 an army led by Peter the Hermit had already arrived in Cologne on its way from northern France. Within a few months, therefore, and well in advance of the papal deadline, the message had spread to all levels of society over a wide geographical area. A system of communication as effective as this deserves our respect and study. It would be a mistake to conclude from the total absence of modern technology that the control of opinion was unimportant in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The Christian missions to the Muslims in the Near East during the Central Middle Ages have already attracted much attention from historians, but as yet no real attempt has been made to analyse the relationship between those who advocated peaceful conversion by means of preaching and teaching, in other words a programme of missionary work, and the crusaders, who sought to defeat the enemies of the faith in battle. In the past, historians have tended to portray advocates of missions as opponents of the crusades and it has been suggested that by the late thirteenth century, as a result of a series of Christian defeats in the Near East. the missionary ideal had won a great deal of support and that this was one of the factors which contributed towards the decline of the crusading movement. The aim of this paper is to challenge this thesis. The first step towards this reappraisal will be to examine the attitude of certain prominent supporters of a policy of peaceful conversion towards the crusades.

To believe that a political community might justly go to war in defence of its legitimate interests was a necessity of daily life to the city states of northern and central Italy from the twelfth century onwards. This belief as such was of course hardly confined to them among medieval European societies, but there are certain features of the Italian experience of war which, taken with the character of the cities themselves, contributed significantly to the emergence and formulation of those secular attitudes to political life which are so often regarded as typical of renaissance culture. The Italian cities lived close to the papacy, which claimed the authority to identify the enemies of the Church and to declare on them wars which were not merely just but holy. Insofar as the enemies of the Church proved to be Italians, or to be operating on Italian soil, those cities which allied themselves with the papacy could acquire the tincture of holiness for wars that were essentially fought in pursuance of local interests. There could be little doubt, for example, that the immediate cause of the great battle of Montaperti, fought on 4 September 1260 between the guelfs of Tuscany, headed by the Florentines, and the Sienese, aided by Florentine ghibelline exiles and by German troops of Manfred of Sicily, was the territorial rivalry of Florence and Siena in southern Tuscany, and most immediately of all the struggle for control of the little town of Montalcino. Manfred and his allies, like Lewis of Bavaria and his ally the Lucchese tyrant Castruccio Castracani, another local enemy of Florence, two generations later, were however the enemies of the Church, and thus Florence’s war-effort was sanctified.

Waldensians figure high among the protagonists in accounts of medieval pacifism. The two areas on which these accounts usually concentrate correspond to two broad areas in the sect’s history—the genesis of abhorrence of killing during the formative early years, and the perseverance (or decline) of this position during the later centuries of an underground and only slowly changing movement—and they are also the two themes of this paper. The first theme poses a question. Is the received account of the genesis of this position satisfactory?

Placed as they are at the extreme outpost of Western Europe, the British Isles have been, over the centuries of their recorded history and probably for millennia before the Roman invasion, a melting-pot of peoples. R. G. Collingwood described them, correctly if unflatteringly, as an ethnic scrap-heap. As each new set of immigrants arrived they were scrutinised, assessed and usually heavily criticised by the resident population before being allowed to settle down. Matthew Paris may have been a little uncertain as to what, in the thirteenth century, constituted a foreigner, but nevertheless he was quite clear in his own mind that all those whom he considered to be foreigners were bad, unless they stayed in their own countries. Foreign laymen, he suspected, would do anything, even to poisoning their fathers-in-law with blue venom, in order to lay hands on English estates. Foreign clergy were nearly as bad—of one set of Poitevins he remarks that they had faces like play-actors, and were moreover given to wearing indecent boots. Matthew was a particularly intolerant critic, but some two hundred and fifty years later Andrea Trefisano noted that ‘the English have an antipathy to foreigners, and imagine that they never come into the island but to make themselves masters of it, and to usurp English goods,’ although he admits that the natives, when they see a handsome foreigner, are apt to remark that ‘he looks like an Englishman’.

For much of his political life John Stratford was to be actively engaged either in unleashing or in muzzling the dogs of war. On occasion he seemed to be endeavouring to combine these disparate functions. Here I propose briefly to examine his involvement in and his attitude to the three-headed monster represented by the perennial Anglo-Scottish conflict, civil strife within England, and the initial phase of the Hundred Years’ War. I am, of course, appreciative of the fact that in the fourteenth century it is difficult to determine the originators of particular policies and equally hard to discern the attitude of prominent men to such policies when formed. Much is known about the course and outcome of diplomatic negotiations; remarkably little about the thinking of those at the heart of policy making.

The Contribution made by the Church to the English war effort during the Hundred Years War was immense. It is the purpose of this paper to describe the forms which this contribution took, and then to offer some reflections on it.

The most important clerical contribution to the war was financial: the taxes voted by the clergy in their two convocations and collected by themselves for the benefit of the crown. These corresponded to the lay subsidies voted in parliament. Normally such taxes were tenths of clerical income as it had been assessed, about 1291, for the benefit of the papacy. No new assessment of clerical wealth was made in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, but during the decade 1371 to 1381 a series of experimental taxes was levied from clergy and laity alike. These experiments, culminating in the notorious poll tax of 1380–1 which provoked open rebellion, were not repeated. But in the fifteenth century successive governments tried to tap the wealth of the chantry and stipendiary chaplains through a series of taxes of the poll tax type. Unlike the fourteenth-century poll taxes these measures were imposed at infrequent intervals (in 1406, 1419, 1430, 1436, 1449), but, like them, were abandoned because they failed to bring in the hoped-for revenue.

The attitude of the Limousin pope Clement VI to the early stages of the Hundred Years War between France and England occasioned conflicting verdicts. These varied predictably according to the nationality of their authors. One of the pope’s biographers, the Frenchman Jean la Porte, hailed him as a creator of concord, a lover of peace. By contrast the Englishman William of Ockham accused Clement of being ‘schismatic’, in the sense that he deliberately provoked hostilities between the two countries and favoured one side against the other. The German Conrad of Megenberg tried to adopt a via media. Replying to Ockham he claimed that he had himself seen Clement sending out cardinals to conduct peace negotiations between the kings of France and England. On the other hand, he was driven to admit Clement’s partiality, excusing it somewhat feebly on the grounds that the Holy See had always adhered more to France than to other nations, so one read. Some impression of the truth of these differing judgements can be gleaned from the registers of Clement’s correspondence, from the political collationes he delivered both as pope and earlier as Pierre Roger, the trusted counsellor and official of Philip VI, Valois, and from contemporary accounts of a peace conference over which the pope presided at Avignon in 1344.

The traditional role of the medieval latin church in legitimising warfare tends to fall into two main categories. On the one hand, there are the secular political wars, in which the church can perhaps be seen as a third force: while called on to legitimise and support partisan conflict between supposedly Christian antagonists, it could also work as a force for peace. On the other hand, there are the religious wars, to which the church was itself a party, either in warfare against infidels, or against those who, in their obstinacy, refused to recognise and accept the authority of the Roman church.

Few countries have been more notorious for having a militant clergy than Spain: the experience of the Carlist wars and Franco’s war gives sufficient evidence of this. Unfortunately, these are examples of state conflicts in which the Church happened to participate, and the present paper is concerned less with the institutional violence of the state than with the inherent violence of the Church itself. War as such does not enter into the discussion, since war can be declared only by the state, not by the Church. Interestingly, however, though much ink has been spent discussing whether Christians and the Christian state may go to war, there has been less debate over whether the clergy may legitimately resort to force. In what follows I propose to suggest that the participation of the Hispanic Church in violence arose not simply from identification with the institutional violence of the state but from the peculiar development of the Church itself. Violence in this context will be seen to be not dysfunctional but normal, a logical relationship between the Church and society. Participation in violence became a recognisable feature of the Hispanic Church: the problem is to understand how and why this occurred and seemed acceptable.

The most important cause of the French civil war, starting in 1562, was religion. Of course, there were other motives too, especially the resistance of nobles to the centralization of power in Paris, but it was the struggle for freedom of religion which gave this war such a destructive character. The young Calvinist churches provided their warriors with all the mental and spiritual support they needed. In their opinion it was a struggle for the sake of God; it was a just war. As magistratus inferiores the nobles had the right, even the duty, to control and eventually to oppose the higher authority of the king. With arguments borrowed from the old testament and natural law they even defended the right of violent resistance to the government. Theological support came also from Geneva, especially from Theodore Beza. Without the Calvinist reformation there would not have been such a violent civil war, such a revolt, at that moment in the history of France.

The views of clergymen towards virtually any activity under the sun, and many over it, are preserved in an inexhaustible seam of sermons published between the Restoration of Charles II and the end of the Seven Years’ War. Thousands were listed by Sampson Letsome in his The Preacher’s Assistant, which appeared in 1753, and in an updated sequel by J. Cooke in 1783. Nor were these all-inclusive.

Faced with this mass of evidence, historians are forced to be selective. They can concentrate on the works of certain preachers, on precise dates or on particular genres of sermon, such as those preached at Assizes or funerals. The authors of this paper have studied three types. One of them is working on the Jeremiad in the years 1660–1720, Jeremiads being sermons preached during, immediately after, or on the anniversary of such national disasters as the plague in 1665, the fire of London in 1666 and the hurricane of 1703. War featured in them as one of the many visitations of Providence held to be afflicting the nation. The other addressed himself specifically to fast and thanksgiving-day sermons published during the wars of 1739 to 1748 and 1756 to 1763. These were delivered expressly to comment on military setbacks and failures, and to celebrate victories.