CHARACTER

Robert Winchelsey was a man of stern and determined character. ‘He was equitable in all things, severe in his censures and no respecter of persons, nor could many gifts ever turn him from justice.’ So commented a Cistercian chronicler. The attacks upon the archbishop by another chronicler, William Thorne of St Augustine's Canterbury, are hardly to be trusted considering the acrimonious conflict between the abbey and the archbishop especially between 1300 and 1303. But Thome's bitterness reflects the resolution with which Winchelsey had fought the abbey's attempts to gain bulls granting exemption to their churches. This is how Thorne described Winchelsey when the archbishop was suspended from office in 1306: a man ‘hateful to God and proud, who throughout the whole realm of England had by the pride of his lips, like a harlot, brought disgrace on the priesthood and the clergy, and exercised unheard of tyranny over the people… this unhappy man, who often, proudly boasting, used to say “No man beneath the sky do I fear”, was now proved a liar, for he feared both pope and king, and was afraid of losing what he had or of suffering worse afflictions because of his imperfections’. On at least one occasion there was conflict between the vigilant archbishop and another exempt Benedictine abbey, St Albans. Winchelsey wished to stay at the abbey of St Albans on his way to Scotland in 1300, but, refusing to set his seal to a declaration presented to him by the abbot that this would not prejudice the rights of the abbey in future, he lodged in the town instead.