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Archbishop Pecham and the Decrees of Boniface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
At the Council of Lambeth in 1261, Archbishop Boniface of Canterbury promulgated canonical legislation which may fairly be described as a belated retort by the ecclesia Anglicana to the Constitutions of Clarendon. Almost a century before, Henry II at Clarendon had insisted on a formal and public recordatio vel recognitio of the limitations imposed on canonical jurisdiction by English law and custom, and after the murder of Becket he had achieved a concordat with the papacy which amounted to de facto recognition of most of them; now Boniface’s decrees denounced many of those limitations as intolerable, and prescribed in detail the severest canonical penalties for all those—whether clerk or lay—who connived at their maintenance. These decrees provided a constructive gloss on the vague promise in the Great Charter, quod Anglicana ecclesia libera sit, et habeat sua iura integra, et libertates suas illaesas, and their promulgation marks the end of a period during which the episcopate had repeatedly tried and failed to get the agreement of the crown and the lay baronage to such a gloss. In short, they were the product of an ecclesiastical revolt which ran parallel to, but was quite independent of, the baronial revolt of 1258.
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References
page 215 note 1 C, 1, 746-55.
page 215 note 2 R. Foreville, L’Église et la Royauté. . ., 431-61.
page 215 note 3 The Articuli in AM, 1, 422 are characteristic of an early phase in the argument (c.1236-40), while those printed (with the answers given by the ‘Crown side’) by H. Cole in Documents Illustrative of English History . . ., 354-8, fall between the first drafting of Boniface’s decrees in 1258 (C, I, 736-40) and their promulgation in 1261.
page 216 note 1 C, 1, 648-9.
page 216 note 2 Constitutions of Clarendon, c. 7 (SC, 165).
page 216 note 3 For references to this in 1225 and 1232, see AM, 1, 66, 417, and 11, 310.
page 216 note 4 For the form of the sentence of 1253, see C. Bémont, Chartes de Liberté Anglaises, 72-3. The addition seems to have been modelled on the first clause of Langton’s Oxford sentence of 1222 (C, 1, 585).
page 216 note 5 Bémont, op. cit. 73-4.
page 216 note 6 CCR (1261), 481.
page 216 note 7 For the successful use which Henry III made of his coronation oath as a ground of appeal to the papacy against attempts to limit his freedom of action by canonical sanctions during this period, see Richardson, H. G., ‘The English Coronation Oath,’ Speculum, xxiv (1949), 44–75 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Powicke, F. M., ‘The Oath of Bromholm,’ EHR, LVI (1941), 529-40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
page 216 note 8 . . . cum voluntate et beneplacito .. . regis Angliae (C, I, 760.)
page 216 note 9 Perhaps because of the Crown veto at London in 1237, the legate Otto seems to have done nothing to support the first set of articuli mentioned in n.3 above. In 1255, the nuncio Rostand failed to give any reply to those of the clerical gravamina addressed to him which referred to church liberty (AM, I, 360-2).
page 217 note 1 . . . licet ex sui forma viderentur honestatem et iustitiam continere, tarnen celsitudini tuae deferre volentes illa distulimus confirmare (C, 1, 760).
page 217 note 2 Dictum de Kenilworth, cc. 3-4 (SC, 408).
page 217 note 3 Only c. 12 of Ottobono’s decrees (C, 11, 8) touched directly on questions raised at Lambeth. In 1279 Pecham incorporated the substance of this in the version of the ‘Great Curse’ which he published at Reading, but he was compelled to revoke the second part of it in the subsequent parliament (see p. 218, n. 5 below).
page 217 note 4 AM, 11, 113-15, 380-1, and iv, 463-4.
page 218 note 1 For the instructions given to royal representatives at the council, see Cole, op. cit. 358-9.
page 218 note 2 From Accursius’ report on the negotiations ( Langlois, C. in Rev. Hist., LXXXVII, 66 Google Scholar).
page 218 note 3 . . . vivae vocis oraculo (C, 11, 33).
page 218 note 4 See, for example, the letter to the pope—apparently written soon after the Council of Reading—in which he made what seems to have been his first reference to church liberty (Registrum Johannis de Pontissara, ed. C. Deedes, 1, 201-2).
page 218 note 5 MS Bodley 794, f. 182ra.
page 218 note 6 For his earlier career, which included an absence from England which lasted from c..1257-c.1272, see D. Douie, Archbishop Pecham, c,1, passim.
page 219 note 1 The Osney annalists (AM, iv, 285-6) place this intervention in the later Council of Lambeth, but for the view that they confused the two councils (which is supported by the fact that Pecham took a much weaker line ab initio in 1281) see Douie, op. cit. 119, n.3. As in 1237, the intervention took the form of a veto, not a canonical appeal.
page 219 note 2 There is a preliminary discussion of these by Cheney, C. R. in EHR, L (1935), 407-8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More recently, Prof. Cheney has kindly allowed me to see his collated text, and I am indebted to him for all references to MSS other than Bodley 794 in the following notes.
page 219 note 3 For the appeal and memorandum see Douie, op. cit. 103-4, 118. In MS Harley 52 these are headed, respectively, istud lectum fuit seorsum inter fratres secrete and istud capitulum non fuit coram episcopis recitatum.
page 219 note 4 I.e. MSS Bodley 794, Harley 52, and Harley 3705.
page 219 note 5 C, 11, 40. For a council minute drawn up before the actual proceedings in parliament, see PRO, C49/33/6.
page 219 note 6 C, 11, 51.
page 219 note 7 Douie, op. cit. 129.
page 219 note 8 . . . supplicamus humiliter quatenus istis nostris exhortationibus aurem dignemini inclinare . . . (Reg. Pecham, ed. C. T. Martin, 1, 243).
page 219 note 9 Volume two of Councils and Synods with other documents relating to the English Church, edited by Powicke, F. M. and Cheney, C. R. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964 Google Scholar) appeared too late for reference here.