CHAPTER 3
THE
CHURCH AND THE CLERGY
VOICES
FROM THE PULPIT
1378
On 26
March [1378] came the death of Pope Gregory [XI]. He was a particularly good
and just man, who had been greatly troubled by the losses suffered by the
kingdoms of both England and France and had worked hard to bring about peace
between them … He was succeeded by Bartholomew, archbishop of Bari, who
suffered many tribulations.[1]
Thomas
Walsingham, Chronica Maiora
In his
description of the pontificate of Urban VI (the former archbishop of Bari), Thomas
Walsingham was, for once, rather restrained. The ‘tribulations’ he described
were to do with nothing less than the Great Schism (1378–1417), a disastrous
rift that divided the Western Church, caused by a struggle for the papal
throne. With one claimant resident in Rome and his rival at Avignon the secular
European powers – France and England chief among them – sought to gain
advantage in their own conflicts by securing the papacy for their respective
candidates. Consequently, like the Hundred Years War with which it became
linked, the Schism polarised Western Christendom and, because of it, churches
throughout Europe became bound increasingly tightly to their respective nations
and to issues of national politics. War and the Schism acted together to place
great pressure on the institutional fabric of the Church and on relations
within Christendom. Churchmen found themselves in an invidious position, torn
between the demands of the ‘universal’ Church and those of their royal masters.
Churchmen
had, of course, always been closely involved in national and local government,
but during the Hundred Years War members of the monastic and secular clergy
played increasingly important roles in diplomacy, tax collection, military
planning, local defence and the distribution of information. This growing
involvement had a considerable impact on those men and women, on ecclesiastical
institutions and on attitudes towards the Church, much of it negative. The
reputation of many of the clergy suffered and its members faced escalating
criticism of their involvement in and failure to heal both the Schism and the
Anglo-French conflict. Consequently, the Hundred Years War and the
ecclesiastical disruption that accompanied it increased scrutiny of the Church
and its members, and some were found wanting; others, however, saw their
reputations enhanced. Communities still looked to their parish priest for
guidance – spiritual and temporal; people continued to go on pilgrimage, and
the fifteenth century saw a huge resurgence in church-building. So, whereas
some monastic and mendicant orders were subjected to biting criticism, others
were praised for their religious commitment.[2]
The
Hundred Years War also had much more direct consequences for clergymen and
members of religious communities: many suffered terribly during the conflict
and faced brutal assaults with fire and sword. This shaped not only the
clergy’s wartime experience but also the impressions of the war which they left
to posterity, because despite the disruption to daily life they continued to
write accounts that coloured contemporary and later attitudes to the conflict.
Their involvement in the distribution of propaganda helped form popular
opinion, and the records they left – administrative, legal, literary and
historiographical – continue to inform modern views of the war. Hence, although
an increasing number of laymen and some very notable women began writing their
accounts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, ecclesiastical authors
offer some of the most telling perspectives on the Hundred Years War. Through
their works they immersed themselves directly in the war effort. Clerical
writings and sermons provided a mouthpiece for royal policy and a vehicle for
propaganda, and they also armed each side with a range of additional
intellectual and spiritual weapons. In this fashion the clergy played a central
role in the prosecution of the Hundred Years War. The academic exchange between
the French and English clergy mirrored the physical exchange between the French
and English armies – it is entirely appropriate that a débat (an
intellectual debate) can also be translated as a battle.
The
war began with a flurry of bulletins, broadsides and manifestos: both sides
placed great value on winning the propaganda war at home and abroad, and the
Church provided the main conduit for that propaganda. In England, as Edward I
had done, Edward III mobilised the Church. Every parish and monastic church
gave the Crown a direct link to the population – from the centre to the
periphery – and a means of accessing local communities. ‘It was through prayers
and other liturgical practices on behalf of the war effort that the king’s
ambition was presented to the English people.’[3] Prayers for king and
kingdom were supplemented with bell-ringing, processions and other ceremonial
events. Sermon collections were distributed containing model prayers so that
priests might exhort their congregations to beseech God to aid their king in
his just cause. Sermons, of course, were delivered in the vernacular and so
they provided an ideal way of transmitting information about the political,
military and economic issues confronting the kingdom – or at least those about
which the Crown wished the people to be informed. Such actions were considered
vital in guaranteeing tax revenue and encouraging general support for the war.
They were not, however, merely propagandist; they were believed to have real
spiritual value. In the religious climate of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries it was thought they might even tip the balance in a battle.[4]
Edward
III issued writs de orando pro rege (prayers for the realm and
its good government) almost annually from the late 1330s to the mid-1350s. He
also called on the preaching talents of the English clergy to explain his reasons
for going to war, the legitimacy of his claim to the French Crown and to
emphasise the remarkable patience he had shown before he had been compelled to
take up arms. The friars were particularly important in delivering these
messages. The Dominicans were required to present the king’s claim in ‘public
and private sermons’ and to emphasise his restraint, his desperate attempts to
keep the peace in the face of the duplicity of ‘Sir Philip de Valois’ (Philippe
VI), who ‘calls himself king of France’ and who ‘by force and against justice’
had usurped the French throne, seized Gascony, stirred up the Scots and
conspired even to ‘subvert the English language’.[5]
The
use of the Church for these purposes continued throughout the war. Richard II
ordered the clergy to stage masses and processions for Bishop Henry Despenser’s
‘crusade’ against the Flemings in 1383, to pray on behalf of the earl of
Arundel’s expedition to the continent in 1386 and to support his own Irish
campaign of 1394. During Henry V’s reign lavish processions and ceremonies were
organised to thank God for the remarkable triumph of Agincourt. When the king
returned to London in 1415 he was greeted en route to St Paul’s Cathedral by 12
bishops wearing mitres, who led him to the high altar before he rode through
the city to Westminster, where the monks and abbot escorted him into the abbey
church so the king could make his devotions to St Edward. In 1419 a writ
announced the discovery of a ‘magicians’ plot’ against Henry V, which, it was
said, could be countered only by prayers offered for the success of his French
expedition. In 1436 prayers and processions were requested for the campaign
that Humphrey, duke of Gloucester (1390–1447), led to relieve the siege of
Calais. This work and the administrative tasks the clergy undertook ensured the
Church played a vital role in prosecuting and promoting the Hundred Years War,
and in sharpening a sense of national identity and patriotic feeling in both
countries.[6]
The
clergy also furnished successive kings with more formal legal foundations for
their respective claims to France and to territories within France. Like their
English counterparts, French ecclesiastics were involved with popular
propaganda, especially pamphleteering, but they made a more distinctive contribution
in the composition and distribution of major treatises and legal documents that
emphasised the rights and legitimacy of the Valois claim to the French throne
and exalted French royal power. They also wrote histories, some of which the
Crown commissioned, in order to present an official perspective on recent
events and to shape a powerful image of royal authority and legitimacy. Some of
these works were designed to win over public opinion and were disseminated to a
wide audience; others were for diplomatic use and reflect the unique
intellectual character of the Valois court.[7] The Parisian abbey of
Saint-Denis was at the heart of this work. There, successive generations of
Benedictine monks from the time of Abbot Suger (d.1151) onwards chronicled the
history of France from a consciously royalist perspective. From the beginning
of the thirteenth century some of these works, such as the Grandes
Chroniques, were composed in or translated into the vernacular.
By the
time the Hundred Years War began, monks at Saint-Denis were appointed to the
position of royal historiographer. Richard Lescot (d.1358) styled himself
‘historiographer royal’, and as such publicised a Carolingian redaction of
Salic law that he ‘discovered’ in the archives of Saint-Denis; this played a
vital role in discounting any claim to the French throne transmitted through a
female. Michel Pintoin (c.1349–1421) was another who composed his chronicle ‘by
the authority of the king’, and Jean Chartier received the title chroniqueur
du roi in 1437. Clearly a great deal of importance was placed on this
role and on the ‘fabrication’ of an official account of the Hundred Years War.
Following this example, Philippe the Good, duke of Burgundy, appointed Georges
Chastellain his official chronicler in 1455. It is striking that, by contrast,
after the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ceased to be compiled in the
twelfth century no English royal historical writing centre existed, and
although monarchs did try to influence the contents of individual chronicles
there appears to have been no comparable production line of official
historiography during the war.[8]
There
was, however, no shortage of English chronicles in the later Middle Ages
composed by monastic authors, clerks and, increasingly, laymen. A number of those
clerical authors were closely associated with the royal court. Adam Usk
(c.1350–1430), for example, was a Crown lawyer, while the anonymous author of
the Gesta Henrici Quinti (written 1416–17) was almost
certainly a chaplain in Henry V’s household. Other monastic writers had fewer
direct connections to the centre of power but were still well informed. Henry
Knighton (d. c.1396), an Augustinian canon from St Mary of the Meadows,
Leicester, wrote extensively on the prosecution of the war and fearfully of John
Wyclif (c.1320–84) and the threat posed by England’s first heresy. Knighton had
close links to the Lancastrian households of Henry of Grosmont, John of Gaunt
and Henry Bolingbroke. Thomas Walsingham (c.1340–c.1422), a monk from St
Albans, also had links to the court – although he was far from favourably
disposed to Gaunt. Walsingham continued the monastic chronicle tradition
championed by Matthew Paris and produced a series of remarkably detailed and
extraordinarily vituperative works on a wide variety of subjects during Richard
II’s reign and those of the early Lancastrians. His comments on the poverty of
the English war effort after 1369 are particularly scathing. For Walsingham
‘[t]he land that once bore and gave birth to men who were respected by all who
dwelt nearby and feared by those who lived far off, now spews forth weaklings
who are laughed at by our enemies and a subject for gossip among our people’.[9]
In
France, in addition to those writing the Grandes Chroniques and
other official records, there were a number of other important ecclesiastical
authors. The Carmelite friar Jean de Venette (c.1307–c.1370) expressed his deep
concern for the lot of the French peasantry and blamed a vain, avaricious and
venal knighthood for many of the early disasters in the war. Jean Gerson
(1363–1429), chancellor of the University of Paris, provided fascinating
insights regarding the conciliar movement (the series of church councils which
sought a resolution to the Great Schism), and on the career and reputation of Joan
of Arc. He argued that the French were a chosen people, and that because their
king’s power was divine everyone should offer him obedience.[10] The royal notary and
secretary Jean de Montreuil (1354–1418), a writer deeply influenced by Italian
humanism, was another who promoted Salic law, especially in his Traité
contre les Anglais, in order to repudiate English pretensions to the French
throne.[11] Jean Juvénal des
Ursins (1388–1473) drew heavily on Montreuil’s work and discussed similar
themes in Audite celi (1435) and Tres crestien, tres
hault, tres puissant roy (1446)[12]. Alain Chartier
(c.1385–1430) wrote of Mère France (Mother France) in Le
quadrilogue invectif(c.1422), a work designed to unite the people of France
in the service of the dauphin (Charles VII).[13] Noël de Fribois
(fl.1423–67/8), sécrétaire du roi, who presented Charles VII with
his Abrégé des Croniques in 1459, considered the changing
political landscape of France at the end of the Hundred Years War and the
growth of royal power.[14] By no means do all
these accounts, French or English, provide first-hand experiences of war and
many are exaggerated, formulaic and driven by personal and political impulses.
Some clerical authors wrote to encourage moral reform and saw conflict as
evidence of social and spiritual decay; they are, nonetheless, vital for an
understanding of English and French mentalités during the
Hundred Years War.
Churchmen
and clerics were not, however, the unthinking tools of kings – many criticised
royal policy and personnel. In a number of sermons Thomas Brinton, bishop of
Rochester from 1373 to 1389, censured both Edward III and Richard II: ‘Armies
go to war,’ he said, ‘not with the prayers of the people behind them but with
the curses of many; for they march not at the king’s expense or their own, but
at the expense of churches and the poor, whom they spoil in their path.’[15] Jacques Legrand, an
Augustinian preacher, is well known for condemning the vices of Charles VI’s
court and particularly what he saw as Queen Isabeau’s excesses.[16] Thomas Basin, bishop
of Lisieux (1447–75), chronicled the reign of Charles VII and detailed the
misery of the French people. He was certainly no royal apologist: Charles, he
argued, ‘allow[ed] his English enemies to bleed and dismember his people like fierce
beasts, [and] he even in a certain fashion participated himself, since he had
to know that these cruelties were perpetrated not only by the enemy but also by
his own men’.[17]
Despite
these exceptions, both sides were generally able to use the Church to justify
the war and their respective aims. The English also employed clergymen to
legitimise territorial conquests. Once he had recaptured Normandy (1417–19),
Henry V took steps to ensure the French clergy were well treated. This was not
only for the good of his soul; Henry was keen that he should be accepted
as de jure, not just de facto,ruler of the duchy. The
Church could help with this since it played a key role in determining political
and social attitudes; it served as a stabilising force in local communities
where priests tended to be influential. Additionally, the new regime made
extensive use of the clergy as administrators. Henry encouraged churchmen to
cooperate with the new government by offering patronage and/or threatening to
remove it. In the initial phase of the reconquest of Normandy many clergymen
fled before the invaders; Henry urged them to return and while they could
easily be replaced if they did not, their absence could result in considerable
upheaval just at the time when the fledgling administration required stability.
There was also some outright resistance: a number of clergymen were deeply
involved in plots against the English administration. For example, the canons
of Sées in Normandy contacted the Armagnacs in 1421 offering them access to the
fortress through the cathedral treasury. The plot was discovered while workmen
were digging a hole through the treasury wall, but the Armagnacs were able to
capture the town nonetheless and it remained under their control for eight
weeks. Elsewhere defiance often did not extend beyond a refusal to offer
prayers for the new regime, and many clergymen decided that the English,
although not entirely welcome, did at least offer the possibility of political
and economic security.[18]
In
Paris, the Church also played an important role in shaping political attitudes
in the 1420s and 1430s. There was considerable support for the Burgundians in
the capital: in 1418, 227 priests, ranging from important figures in the
hierarchy of Notre Dame to (some impoverished) men without benefices, swore an
oath of allegiance. This level of support would prove vital in sustaining the
English and their allies in the French capital after the treaty of Troyes in
May 1420. During that period of occupation oaths of allegiance and spiritual
sanctions were used extensively to try to control political behaviour. Indeed,
this was the case throughout the French civil war: both sides deployed a
variety of weapons from the religious arsenal. Images of saints were decorated
with ‘party’ symbols, and Armagnacs and Burgundians excommunicated each other
with vehement frequency, bringing the spiritual power of the Church to bear on
their own struggle.[19]
Churchmen
were also involved in a variety of other aspects of the war effort. Although clerics
no longer held a monopoly on governmental office, they represented a
significant proportion in both administrations. A number were, of course,
hugely significant in the Hundred Years War, such as Cardinal Henry Beaufort
(1375–1447) who served the Lancastrian kings in numerous offices and often
bankrolled their military efforts. Pierre de la Forêt, chancellor of France
from 1349, rose through the ecclesiastical ranks to become archbishop of Rouen
in 1352 and then cardinal. He was closely involved in diplomatic activities
within France and in negotiations with England.[20] Men such as these,
at the apex of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, were supported in great numbers by
less eminent clergymen who paid taxes and sometimes collected them;[21] some of them had duties
in local defence, and others, like the extraordinarily martial Bishop Henry
Despenser (c.1341–1406), even led campaigns. Indeed, ecclesiastical influences
meant that the Hundred Years War gained some crusading characteristics in both
England and France. Such attitudes were not difficult to inculcate when the
enemy, often described as all but heathen, attacked churches, abbeys and
monasteries, some of which had been converted to defend parishioners against
assault. As the Parisian Bourgeois (the anonymous author of a chronicle
composed in the French capital) wrote in an entry for 1419: ‘Alas, never, I
think, since the days of Clovis the first Christian king, has France been as
desolate and divided as it is today. The Dauphin and his people do nothing day
and night but lay waste all his father’s land with fire and sword and the
English on the other side do as much harm as Saracens.’[22]
Such
attacks, perpetrated by both sides on ecclesiastical property and
non-combatants alike, were very frequent in France and not unknown in England
despite the prohibitions of military ordinances and spiritual dictat. They
imply that although the Church remained wealthy and highly influential, certain
aspects of its authority declined in this period, and there is a good deal of
evidence to suggest this was the case. If so it happened for several reasons.
Of these the most important were the relocation of the papacy in 1309 to
Avignon (soon denigrated as a ‘Babylonish Captivity’) and the Great Schism of
1378–1417. These events brought the Church into disrepute and firmly within the
grubby orbit of Anglo-French politics. The Church had never been apolitical
but, as a result of these events and because of the Hundred Years War, its
‘universal’ character was diminished. It was symptomatic of this decline that
soldiers on both sides could raid churches and monasteries with impunity and
impiety, and ecclesiastics were often looked on with suspicion.
As a
consequence, slowly and partially over the period of the Hundred Years War, the
English Church became divided from the rest of the Continent. This influenced
the character of worship and the political and spiritual orientation of the
clergy in England: churchmen were forced to decide where their priorities and
loyalties lay – with the king or the pope.[23] In France, too,
national loyalties began to influence attitudes to the Church and papacy
detrimentally. Throughout the period of the war increasing French royal control
over the Church, a process known as ‘Gallicanism’, saw the Crown gain greater
influence over ecclesiastical resources, appointments and policies. This began
in the years leading up to the relocation to Avignon when the vicious dispute
between King Philippe IV (r.1285–1314) and Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303)
placed Franco-papal relations under enormous strain. However, once the papacy
had taken up residence near the southern border of the French kingdom the
Capetians and their Valois successors sought to take advantage of its
proximity. The association also improved on account of the nationality of the
Avignon popes – all were French. Valois influence waned, however, when Gregory
XI (1370–78) returned to Rome in 1378, at which point French cardinals, at the
instigation of Charles V, helped engineer the Great Schism.
As
Philippe de Mézières noted in 1395, the political division between England and
France became mirrored in the division of the papacy. This intensified an
ongoing process of ecclesiastical politicisation and ensured that the Church
itself became a subject of contention. De Mézières wrote: ‘This accursed wound
… is the mortal schism in Holy Church, the mother of these two sons of St
Louis. And, what is worse, each of our two kings has taken to himself one half
of his said mother, claiming to heal her sickness, while abandoning the other
to be devoured by dogs and birds of prey.’[24]
Prior
to 1378 churches, monasteries and clerics were attacked, churchmen raised money
for the war effort, preaching on behalf of their respective king’s campaigns,
and successive popes made determined but forlorn efforts to resolve the
struggle. But in 1378, with the election of Antipope Clement VII (1378–94) as a
rival to the recently installed Urban VI (1378–89), the institutional Church
itself also became a battleground for the Anglo-French conflict; and because of
the Hundred Years War the ramifications of the Schism would be felt deep into
the fifteenth century and perhaps until the Reformation.
The
Schism divided Europe as it divided the Church and further compromised the
authority of the papacy. This had been in decline for some time. Over the
course of the thirteenth century, conflicts with European rulers, first the
German emperors and later the French and to a lesser extent English kings, had
seen the Papal Monarchy fall from the position of apparent political and
spiritual impregnability it had acquired during the pontificate of Innocent III
(1198–1216). The clearest indicator of this decline was the relocation of the
papal curia from Rome to Avignon in 1309. There were good reasons for doing
this, not least Rome’s disruptive political climate and uncomfortable (and
often unhealthy) summer weather. Indeed, because of such considerations it had
not been uncommon for the papal curia to reside outside the Eternal City for
extended periods, although it tended to remain in the Papal States. Pope
Clement V (1305–14), however, never even managed to get to Rome after his
election. Poor health, a fondness for his home in southern France and the
political chaos of northern Italy were among the reasons that led to the papal
curia taking on a somewhat peripatetic existence until 1309 when it became
fixed, more or less, in Avignon.
Located
in the Comtat Venaissin, Avignon was a possession of the Church on the borders
of, but not technically within, the Capetian kingdom. However, especially in
those countries that opposed France, this soon came to be seen as a ‘Babylonish
Captivity’, which did nothing to strengthen the papacy’s increasingly fragile
spiritual authority. Even before 1305, when the papacy left Rome, Anglo-papal
relations had been strained, but thereafter many in England believed, not
without some justification, that the Holy Father was little better than a
French pawn. Clement V, the first of the Avignon popes, had been archbishop of
Bordeaux (as Bertrand de Got) and as such he tended to be well disposed to
England, but there is little doubt that for much of the fourteenth century the
Avignon papacy favoured – and was seen to favour – the French monarchy. As a
consequence it came to be widely felt in England, certainly by the time of the
pontificate of Clement VI (1342–52), that whereas Christ Jesus was,
unquestionably, English, his vicar was unapologetically French[25]. Clement, perhaps
the most overtly Francophile of the Avignon popes, was a product of the French
court and former keeper of the seals in Paris, whose pontificate has been
characterised by its ‘subservience to French interests’.[26] Because of
this the papacy could not play its traditional role as an arbiter in European
affairs effectively, and certainly not in those disputes involving England and
France. The English became increasingly and instinctively wary of any measures
originating from Avignon that sought to bring a peaceful resolution to the war.
Although
its spiritual authority was compromised, in other spheres the papacy gained a
great deal from the ‘Babylonish Captivity’. The seven Avignon popes sought and,
in the early fourteenth century, gained ever greater control over patronage and
appointments to benefices throughout Europe. This provided the papacy with
political leverage but did nothing to improve its popularity. In addition, the
machinery of papal government improved very considerably during the Avignon
period, and the Holy See used that administrative efficiency to raise the very
considerable sums of money needed to build and expand the extraordinary papal
palace at Avignon and to wage a number of military campaigns in Italy to
re-establish its authority. Although this was a tribute to the organisational
ability of various members of the papal curia and perhaps financially
necessary, because the papacy had been cut off from many of its traditional
Italian revenues, it too proved deeply unpopular.[27]
In
part because of the papacy’s attempts to increase its income and influence over
ecclesiastical appointments, by the middle years of the fourteenth century
relations between Avignon and England had deteriorated markedly. Then, in the
1360s, matters became even worse when, under pressure from Charles V, Pope
Urban V (1362–70) refused a dispensation for a marriage between Edmund of
Langley (Edward III’s fourth surviving son) and Margaret of Flanders – this was
needed because they were related within the prohibited degree. It proved to be
a decision of enormous significance because, as one of the richest heiresses in
Christendom, Margaret’s eventual marriage to Philippe of Burgundy provided the
foundations for the development of the Burgundian state. Edward III, furious at
being thwarted in his attempt to extend English influence in the Low Countries,
stymied a programme of ecclesiastical reform which Urban wished to implement in
England.[28] Widespread
anti-papal feeling coupled with a substantial dose of political expediency had
already led to the Statutes of Provisors (1351, 1365) and Praemunire (1353,
1365), which Richard II reissued in 1390 and 1393 respectively. This
legislation replaced papal with royal provision to many ecclesiastical
benefices in England and, as a result, the Crown began to exercise increasing
authority over ecclesiastical affairs. It became common to promote king’s
clerks into the ranks of the episcopacy. Simon Islip, for example, became
archbishop of Canterbury (1349–66) having served as keeper of the seal
(1347–50). In this period, when the state sought to maximise and exploit all
the resources at its disposal, it is no surprise that attempts were also made
to extend secular administrative control over the Church.
It was
this desire that also explains royal support for the heresiarch John Wyclif in
the 1370s: his call for royal supremacy over the ecclesia Anglicana and
the disendowment of church property proved very popular in this febrile
climate. For Wyclif the king of England held the same political and spiritual
authority as the kings of the Old Testament – he was rex et sacerdos –
with the power to appoint, depose and dispossess priests. It was only with the
Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when any threat to the social or political status quo
became tainted with suspicion, that Wyclif truly fell from favour with the
royal family. The proposal to take church land into secular control did not
disappear, however; it resurfaced in the early years of Henry IV’s reign when
the October Parliament of 1404 suggested the confiscation of church property
would alleviate a financial crisis.[29]
The
situation was different in France but not completely reversed. The Avignon
Papacy was popular, broadly speaking. But the violent disputes between Philippe
IV and Boniface VIII had soured Franco-papal relations at the beginning of the
1300s and Gallicanism became an ever more potent force, as the French monarchy,
like the English, sought greater authority over the Church. Over the course of
the Hundred Years War Gallicanism developed into a movement that promoted the
concept of an independent French Church, free from papal interference while
acknowledging it should remain ‘Roman’ and Catholic. The movement gathered pace
during the Avignon period and subsequently when various French theorists such
as Nicole Oresme (1320×25–82) and Jean Gerson argued that the French king
as rex Christianissimus (the Most Christian King) had the
authority to stamp out religious abuses and a duty to restore the Church to
spiritual health.[30]
The
Hundred Years War directly contributed to the process by which secular rulers
gained greater authority over their ‘national’ Churches. Numerous attempts were
made to establish control over ecclesiastical lands, properties, resources and
revenues, and to make the Church subject to secular authority and a part of the
state machine. The Great Schism galvanised this. In January 1377, after nearly
eighty years in Avignon, Gregory XI returned the papal court to Rome. He died,
however, in the following year, and in a reaction against what was widely seen
as the extravagance and licentiousness of the papal curia his successor, Urban
VI (elected on 8 April 1378 partly because of pressure brought to bear by the
Roman mob), instituted major reforms, beginning with the college of cardinals
itself. This proved deeply unpopular and Urban was far from diplomatic in his
dealings with the cardinals – he is even reported to have punched one of them.
Consequently, and with the support of Charles V, on 20 September thirteen
disgruntled cardinals, led by Jean de la Grange, the cardinal-bishop of Amiens,
elected a new pope, Robert of Geneva (the French king’s cousin), who took the
title Clement VII and established a rival curia back in Avignon. Each pope
immediately excommunicated the other and created his own bureaucracy and
college of cardinals. Clement received support from the French Crown and those
countries allied to it, including Scotland, Naples, Castile and Aragon. The
anti-French powers – England, Scandinavia, Germany, much of Italy, and the
eastern European states – supported Urban. The Great Schism was, therefore,
shaped by the European political situation which the Hundred Years War had
created.[31]
This
led to the most dramatic manifestation of clerical military activity during the
Hundred Years War – the Flemish ‘crusade’ of Henry Despenser, bishop of
Norwich. The targets of the campaign were the supporters of the Avignonese
pope, Clement VII. The Roman pope, Urban VI, was naturally supportive of the
venture as were the English Parliament and aristocracy, since it had clear
political and economic advantages which the Church would fund. Plans began to
be put in motion in 1381, not long before the Peasants’ Revolt, which Despenser
brutally suppressed in Norfolk. With his reputation subsequently enhanced (and
probably exaggerated), he began a major preaching campaign in 1382 that laid
the foundations for a crusade against the schismatics. His message was warmly
received. On 17 May 1383 Despenser crossed to Calais with an army of 8,000
soldiers. After some initial success against a Flemish and French force near
Dunkirk he besieged Ypres. This proved disastrous and soon had to be abandoned.
The bishop then proposed to invade Picardy but was opposed by his lieutenants,
including the highly experienced mercenary captain Sir Hugh Calveley (d.1394). Despenser
continued in spite of this, but the appearance of a French army led by Charles
VI himself forced him to submit to a humiliating settlement at Gravelines.
Despenser returned to England to face bitter recriminations and impeachment in
Parliament, although he was not imprisoned nor did he lose his episcopacy.[32]
The
political climate that emerged in the following years soon brought changes to
Anglo-French diplomacy and their respective relationships with the
papacy/papacies. Albeit with opposition from the more hawkish elements at their
respective courts, the efforts of Charles VI and Richard II to resolve the
Hundred Years War became mirrored in attempts to heal the Schism. Following the
deliberations of the First National Council of the French clergy (February
1395) – a meeting that itself indicated the increasingly national focus of the
French Church – it became Valois policy to try and end the Schism by securing
the abdication of both popes, an approach known as via cessionis.
This marked a major change in strategy – from creating the Schism to ending it
– and it involved a significant reorganisation of ecclesiastical life
throughout France. This intensified in 1398 when, in order to try to compel
papal compliance, ecclesiastical obedience was ‘subtracted’ from the papacy – a
process given teeth since it involved withholding taxes due to the pope. The
French Church instead found itself paying its dues into royal coffers. This
policy, drawn up by various members of the University of Paris, amplified wider
calls for a General Council of the Church and further encouraged ‘Gallican’
ideas that were again expressed in a National Council in 1406[33]. The policy did not,
however, succeed.
More
than twenty years of failure to heal the rift in the Church was accompanied by
the outbreak of heresies in England (Lollardy) and Bohemia (Hussitism), and, in
response, demands for a General Council of the Church grew louder. Neither
pope, however, would call one. Finally, in 1408, a sufficient number of
cardinals from both colleges agreed to summon a council under their own
collective authority – this met in Pisa in the following year. There the
council deposed both the Avignonese pope (Benedict XIII, 1394–1417) and the
Roman pope (Gregory XII, 1406–15), and replaced them with Alexander V
(1409–10). However, neither Benedict nor Gregory accepted the legality of the
proceedings and each maintained just enough support to cling to office. The
first council, therefore, merely compounded the problem – there were now three
popes.
The
second council met with more success. Primarily the work of Emperor Sigismund,
who was eager to heal the Schism so that the Church could turn its attention to
the problem of the Hussites in Bohemia, the Council of Constance (1414–18) made
much better progress. Gregory XII resigned voluntarily in 1415, and the new
Pisan pope who had succeeded Alexander V, John XXIII (1410–15), was deposed and
imprisoned. Benedict XIII was able to retain a vestige of power until his death
in 1424, but the council’s preferred candidate, Martin V (1417–31), became
broadly accepted as the Holy Father, with his income, rights and powers much
reduced.
In
essence the process that led to the resolution of the Great Schism established
the principle that the authority of a General Council superseded that of the
pope. In token of this, from 1417 onwards the pope was required to summon a
council at regular intervals (in five years, again seven years later, and then
every ten years thereafter). The first of these meetings had to be postponed
because of plague, but in 1431 a council met at Basel that saw a pope, Eugenius
IV (1431–47), again in conflict with his cardinals. Once more the papacy found
itself dependent on the support of secular rulers to secure its position. It
was in this context that Charles VII was able to extend royal control further
over the French Church through the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438), which
placed still more restrictions on papal rights. Hence, as a consequence of
developments during the Hundred Years War, by the start of the sixteenth
century at the latest, effective royal control over the Church in France had
been achieved.[34]
The
struggle within the Church and the battle to establish control over the Church
were, therefore, in large part, a consequence of the Hundred Years War. The war
itself also had a deeply significant and much more direct impact on churchmen
in England and France. As Honoré Bonet said, witheringly, ‘the man who does not
know how to set places on fire, to rob churches and usurp their right and to
imprison the priests is not fit to carry on war’[35]. The Church had
tried to provide its members with protection from physical attack for many
generations prior to the outbreak of the conflict – those who attacked
churchmen and their property had long been subject to dire spiritual sanctions.
This tradition stretched back at least as far as the Peace and Truce of God
movements in the tenth century and the practice continued in the later Middle
Ages. For example, the archbishop of Canterbury threatened excommunication to
anyone who plundered church property – a sanction proclaimed twice-yearly, on
All Saints’ Day and Palm Sunday. English military ordinances also sought to
protect churchmen and church property.[36] However, in spite of
the dangers to soul and salvation, there was in reality little regard for the
belongings and persons of the Church, particularly in France. Attacks on
churchmen and ecclesiastical property fill the pages of chronicles and
administrative documents. In 1357 Jean de Venette wrote that ‘enemies’ – he did
not distinguish between English soldiers and European mercenaries of various
nationalities, some French – ‘seized castles and fortresses and captured the
men who dwelt around them. Some they held for ransom; some they slaughtered
miserably. Nor did they spare the religious. Monks and nuns abandoned their
monasteries and took refuge as best they could.’[37] Froissart, similarly,
tells of an English squire who entered a church during mass and stole a chalice
from a priest at the very moment of consecration[38]. Such items were
clearly valuable and highly prized: Sir John Harleston, captain of Cherbourg
and one of Richard II’s chamber knights, was witnessed sitting with some
companions drinking from the silver chalices they had recently looted from
churches.[39]
Such
attacks were an implicit if not explicit part of English chevauchée policy
in the fourteenth century. As raiders in the past had recognised, churches and
monasteries were often storehouses of valuable goods. So, despite military
ordinances and spiritual prohibitions designed to protect churchmen and their
property, both suffered a great deal. Chronicles and government documents are
littered with examples such as that of the curé of Comblisy
who, during the turmoil that followed the battle of Poitiers in September 1356,
was set such an excessive ransom by the Navarese forces who captured him that
he was forced to repay them by singing masses in their fortress.[40] The depredations of
mercenary troops meant that even during so-called periods of truce there was
little relief for the clergy. Because of this there was barely a church,
monastery or hospital in France which the Hundred Years War did not affect
adversely, for if not subjected to direct attack then its revenues and goods, even
its ability to give alms, were damaged. Of course, as the conflict wore on the
demands on churches mounted because of the trauma suffered by members of their
congregations and those others who depended upon them. Ecclesiastical revenues
plummeted because of the war. When combined with the effects of depopulation
brought on by plague and famine, many religious institutions faced a financial
crisis.
The
Hundred Years War, therefore, tested, and in some places tore the institutional
fabric of the French Church. By the 1370s problems had become acute: in
Brittany and Normandy parishes were deserted in the dioceses of Dol and Bayeux;
successive English raids devastated Artois and Picardy, and the situation in
the Île de France was not much better. Conditions in Champagne – in Troyes,
Reims and Chalons-sur-Marne – were also very difficult. In Burgundy a great
deal of land and property was laid waste and many villages were deserted. A
quarter of the population of Beaune had been lost by 1366 and numbers continued
to fall thereafter. Auvergne suffered too, from depopulation brought on by
disease, and emigration encouraged by heavy taxation. In Languedoc the threesénéchaussées of
Toulouse, Carcassonne and Beaucaire all experienced major population decline.
In Quercy that decline is very evident from the time of the first outbreak of
the Black Death and it continued after the treaty of Brétigny in 1360 which
brought the area under English control. Numerous towns and villages were
abandoned. In Figeac more than five hundred wealthy inhabitants felt so
impoverished on account of the new administration that they left the town.
Cahors may have lost half its population; the outskirts of the town were
deserted and so silent, it was said, that not even a cock crowed there. Some of
the surrounding areas remained desolate for thirty years afterwards. War,
mercenary activity, heavy taxation, plague and famine each devastated whole
areas in their turn, and the consequent depopulation impacted heavily on
ecclesiastical incomes and on the role the Church could play in people’s
everyday lives. Parishes were left without priests.
Because
of its economic, political, social and physical consequences, the war also
adversely affected religious discipline and reduced the pastoral activities of
both monastic and secular clergy.[41] In 1360 the
‘infestation’ of the diocese of Lyon with mercenary companies forced many
communities to abandon their monasteries. In 1375 the Augustinian priory of
Sainte-Gulles at Montpellier had its cloister destroyed by the Free Companies
and the brethren were forced to beg for food. The Benedictine abbey of
Montolieu in the diocese of Carcassonne suffered regular attacks by mercenary
forces until, finally, they invaded the property, and stabled their horses in
the church, cloisters and even the sanctuary. The divine office ceased to be
sung and many monks renounced their vows. Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy was
besieged in the winter of 1423. Even Paris suffered: there were regular
embargos, and the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Denis-en-France had to pay for
protection for its property outside the city and its income was severely
reduced. Mercenary activity also affected academic life in the capital: in 1387
the General Chapter of the Cistercian Order deplored the attacks that led to
the college of Saint-Bernard in Paris being abandoned by students. Parochial
life was also affected even when parishes were defended. The fortification of
many parish churches protected congregations from raiding parties but often
invited attack from French royal and aristocratic authorities concerned about
the unlicensed construction of fortifications. There were also serious
consequences for ecclesiastical activities: by compromising the sanctity of the
buildings one might compromise the rigour, rhythm and routine of religious
life.[42]
It was
not only French churches that were devastated. In 1364 Urban V had to borrow
30,000 florins to improve the defences of Avignon against potential mercenary
attack. Anglo-Scottish warfare, meanwhile, put ecclesiastical possessions on
both sides of the border in jeopardy. For example, in 1385, partly because of
Scottish support for the Avignon pope, Clement VII, English forces burned the
abbeys of Melrose, Dryburgh, Holyrood and Newbattle. Nor were ecclesiastics in
southern England safe. Monastic properties on the coast suffered sporadic
assault. Thomas Walsingham described, perhaps in exaggerated terms, a
particularly brutal episode in 1379. An English raiding force under the command
of Sir John Arundel sought lodging at a nunnery near Southampton, probably
Cornworthy, while awaiting a favourable wind to take it across to France.
Despite the objections of the mother superior, the soldiers entered the house
where they proceeded to assault and rape the sisters. The surrounding
countryside was pillaged for food and other supplies. Walsingham even suggests
that Arundel and his men kidnapped many of the nuns to take them to France, and
then when the weather turned the women were thrown from the ships to lighten them.[43]
Attacks
on ecclesiastics in England also took on a more institutional form. Alien
monks, like other foreigners in England, became objects of suspicion from the
outbreak of hostilities. From 1337 until 1360, and then from 1369 onwards,
dependent houses of French monasteries, the so-called alien priories, were
taken into royal control and exploited financially. The practice of seizing
alien priories and ecclesiastical resources was not new; it had a history
stretching back to 1208 when Pope Innocent III had placed the realm under
Interdict and King John had responded by taking possession of church property.
Edward I (in 1295) and Edward II (in 1324–27) had followed suit, although in
response to war with France. These alien priories were said to be havens for
enemy spies and serve as channels through which money, goods and resources
poured in aid of the French war effort. Of these concerns the most serious was
money, and the confiscation of the alien priories, which were defined very
loosely and inconsistently, proved extremely profitable to the Crown in terms
of hard cash as well as ecclesiastical patronage. The Crown granted seized
properties to individuals, some as rewards, some in return for an annual
payment. The beneficiaries often had little interest in maintaining the fabric
of the priories and many caused considerable financial damage through
exploitation and lack of care. Many priories were ‘farmed’ (rented) at too high
a rate, and so when faced with the Exchequer’s demands, the keepers had two choices,
to sell off financial assets and neglect repairs or go into debt to the Crown.
From 1375 a stream of commissioners was sent to investigate claims of damage
perpetrated by keepers and former keepers.[44]
While
action was taken to prevent excessive exploitation, some priories became so
impoverished that they could not continue to exist as religious foundations and
were sold as secular manors. Some tried to save themselves by seeking
denization and hence ‘becoming English’, whereas others took on a new identity
and were used to endow a different house or Order. The Carthusians became
particular beneficiaries of this process: Henry V was a keen supporter of the
Order, like a number of soldiers before him. Sir Walter Mauny (c.1310–72), for
example, founded the London charterhouse in 1371; William, third Lord Zouche
(c.1340–96), that at Coventry in 1381–2. Henry V founded a house at Sheen for
forty Carthusian monks in 1415, partly to fulfil the penance Gregory XII
imposed on his father in 1408 for the execution of Richard Scrope, archbishop
of York, who had been implicated in the Percy family rebellions against Henry
IV. The charterhouse was to be simple and austere – clothing, bedding and diet
were all plain, silence was to be maintained, and individuals lived separately
except in choir and chapter. The house was, however, richly endowed with
properties confiscated from alien priories[45]. Carthusian
austerity explains the patronage and support the Order enjoyed in the later
Middle Ages. By comparison with the criticism suffered by some of the larger
and wealthier Orders, they were praised and flourished during the Hundred Years
War.[46]
Despite
action taken against the alien priories, concern about the activities of
foreign ecclesiastics continued to be voiced regularly in Parliament. For
example, in 1373 the Commons called for legislation to prevent daughter-houses
of French monasteries sending resources and intelligence across the Channel[47]. In reality, members
of alien priories often supported the English war effort. They included the
French-born prior of Lewes in Sussex, who in 1377 defended the town against a
raid by his former country-men.[48] This is an
indication of the new role demanded of the clergy in this period. For the first
and only time, between 1369 and 1418 the English clergy were arrayed for
military service as part of royal policy and were compelled to take up arms to
defend against threatened invasion. Stipulations were made regarding the arms
and armour with which a clergy-man should be equipped. A clerk with a benefice
worth between £40 and 100 marks should be armed with chain-mail gloves, plates
of armour covering his back and chest, a helmet with visor, and with protection
for the stomach, arms, thighs and lower legs. Alternatively he could substitute
this expensive plate armour with a leather tunic and shirt of chain mail. He
was also to provide a lance, shield, sword, knife and three horses. Those
clergymen with a larger income were to bring armed retainers with them; those
with fewer resources did not have to bring horses; and the poorest merely had
to bring a longbow or send an archer in their place. Those unable to serve
because of age or infirmity were to contribute towards a replacement[49]. These
responsibilities were defensive, but clergymen were often called on to fulfil
them. Haimo of Offington, abbot of Battle in Sussex (1364–84), spent a good
deal of the later years of his abbacy defending the south coast against French
assault. In response to an attack on Rye in 1377, he prepared a defence plan and
fended off an attack on Winchelsea. He was less successful in 1380 when the
town was captured and one of the monks captured.[50]
Hence,
despite the fact that clerics were forbidden to shed blood, clergy-men of all
ranks participated in the war and many served on campaign. Guillaume de Melun,
archbishop of Sens, and the bishop of Châlons were in the French ranks at the
battle of Poitiers in 1356, and Richard Courtenay, bishop of Norwich, died of
dysentery while serving at the siege of Harfleur in 1415.[51] English priests
regularly accompanied expeditions to France: those who did so needed special
episcopal licences permitting them to be absent from their parishes. Soldiers,
it seems, could find plenty of foreign priests to rob while on campaign, but
they did not always trust or understand them sufficiently to look to them for
confession or to receive the Eucharist. And perhaps French priests were less
than amenable to the idea of caring for the spiritual welfare of soldiers who
plundered their churches[52].
Campaigning,
undoubtedly, was harsh and a difficult experience for those unused to long
periods in the saddle, out of doors and under threat of attack. The author of
the Gesta Henrici Quinti described the discomfort of the
priestly contingent on the 1415 campaign: how they were ‘made faint by great
weariness’, their ‘dire need of food’, and their fear that caused them to look
‘up in bitterness to Heaven, seeking the clemency of Providence’. He and his
fellows accompanied the army to celebrate the divine office, hear confessions
and pray for success. He described how, during the battle of Agincourt in 1415,
he remained with the baggage train, sitting on a horse and praying for the
destruction of the enemy, calling on God to ‘Destroy their strength and scatter
them’. And when the French finally engaged the English and drove them back,
having fought through successive volleys of arrows, the anonymous chaplain and
his fellows feared the worst: ‘And then we who had been assigned to the
clerical militia and were watching fell upon our faces in prayer … crying out
aloud in bitterness of spirit that God might even yet remember us and the crown
of England and, by the grace of His supreme bounty, deliver us from this iron
furnace and the terrible death which menaced us.’[53] Henry V and his men
may well have believed that their prayers secured the miraculous victory.
The
Hundred Years War placed ecclesiastical life under enormous strain. Forms of
observance and the character of worship were changed by the experience of war,
but spiritual life was not completely stifled. Rather, the struggle helped
stimulate a process of reorganisation and revival. Clergymen were not only
victims of war; they shaped and directed the conflict. In their literary and
diplomatic efforts, they promoted the war and sought resolutions to it. They
were victims and instigators of violence, propagandists and peacemakers. The
war divided the European Church and the Great Schism made that theoretical
division a practical reality. Such divisions were, in part, the product of the
Hundred Years War and they ensured that the Church could not play an effective
role in resolving the conflict. This was a great pity when the calls for peace
resounded in the 1390s.
[1] Walsingham, Chronica
Maiora, trans. Preest, 64; St Albans Chronicle, I, 223.
[2] J. G. Clark, The
Benedictines in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2011), 255–6.
[3] A. K. McHardy, The
Age of War and Wycliffe: Lincoln Diocese and its Bishop in the Later Fourteenth
Century (Lincoln, 2001), 30–1; D. S. Bachrach, ‘The Organisation of
Military Religion in the Armies of King Edward I of England (1272–1307)’, Journal
of Medieval History, 29 (2003), 265–86.
[4] See C. Beaune, The
Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of France in Late Medieval France,
ed. F. L. Cheyette, trans. S. R. Huston (Berkeley, CA, 1991), esp. 172–96; H.
J. Hewitt, The Organization of War under Edward III, 1338–62 (New
York, 1966), 154 ff; P. S. Lewis, ‘War Propaganda and Historiography in
Fifteenth-Century France and England’, Essays in Later Medieval French
History (London, 1985), 193–214; A. K. McHardy, ‘Liturgy and
Propaganda in the Diocese of Lincoln during the Hundred Years War’, Religion
and National Identity, ed. S. Mews (Oxford, 1982), 215–27; D. Pearsall,
‘“Crowned King”: War and Peace in 1415’, The Lancastrian Court, ed.
J. Stratford (Donington, 2003), 163–72; N. Pons, ‘La Guerre de Cent Ans vue par
quelques polémistes français du XVe siècle’, Guerre et société, ed.
Contamine, Giry-Deloison and Keen, 143–69. For examples of legislation against
rumour-mongering, see Rymer, Foedera, II, ii, 775; III, i, 72; C.
T. Allmand, ed., Society at War: The Experiences of England and France
during the Hundred Years War (London, 1973), 149–50.
[5] ‘The Great Chronicle
of London’: Allmand, Society at War, 102–3.
[6] Walsingham, Chronica
Maiora, ed. Preest, 413; Gesta Henrici Quinti, 102–13; W. R.
Jones, ‘The English Church and Royal Propaganda during the Hundred Years
War’, Journal of British Studies, 19 (1979), 19, 22–3, 27; G. W.
Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church: Vitality and Vulnerability
before the Break with Rome (New Haven, CT, and London, 2012), 24.
[7] A. Bossuat, ‘La
littérature de propagande au XVe siècle: la mémoire de Jean de
Rinel, secrétaire du roi d’Angleterre, contre le duc de Bourgogne
(1435)’, Cahiers d’histoire, 1 (1956), 146; N. Pons, ‘Latin et
français au XVe siècle: le témoignage des traits de
propagande’, Le Moyen français, 3 vols (Milan, 1986), II, 71; J.
Krynen, L’empire du roi: idées et croyances politiques en France, XIIIe–XVe siècles (Paris,
1993), 311; C. Taylor, ‘War, Propaganda and Diplomacy in Fifteenth-Century
France and England’, War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France,
ed. C. Allmand (Liverpool, 2000), 71.
[8] C. Given-Wilson, Chronicles:
The Writing of History in Medieval England (London, 2004), 153–4; G.
M. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis: A Survey(Brookline,
MA, and Leiden, 1978), 72–4, 121, 124–5; G. Small, George Chastellain
and the Shaping of Valois Burgundy: Political and Historical Culture at Court
in the Fifteenth Century (Woodbridge, 1997), esp. 128–61.
[9] Walsingham, Chronica
Maiora, ed. Preest, 210; Henry Knighton’s chronicle, written between 1379
and 1396, is a history of England from the Norman Conquest to the last decade
of the fourteenth century, with some introductory passages on events before
1066. Adam Usk began writing his chronicle in the spring of 1401. It is at its
fullest for the years 1397–1402 and has valuable accounts of the Parliament of
1397, the revolution of 1399 and the first two years of Henry IV’s reign. The
years 1402–14 are sparse on English affairs, but contain a good deal of
information on the Glyn Dŵr revolt and the politics of the papal court; Thomas
Walsingham’s main historical works include: Chronica Maiora (written
1376–1422, with a retrospective section stretching back to 1272), Gesta
Abbatum (written in the 1390s) and Ypodigma Neustriae (a
digest of English and Norman history covering the period from 911 to 1419); the
anonymous author of the Gesta Henrici Quinti compiled his
narrative of the Agincourt campaign and surrounding events between 1416 and
1417.
[10] J. Gerson, ‘Vivat rex’
and ‘De puella Aureliansi’, Oeuvres complètes, ed. P. Glorieux, 10
vols (Paris, 1960–73), VII, 1137–85; IX, 661–5; J. Chiffoleau, ‘La religion
flamboyante (v.1320–v.1520)’, Du Christianisme flamboyant à l’aube des
Lumières (XIVe–XVIIIe siècles), ed. J.
Chiffoleau et al. (Paris, 1988), 60.
[11] B. Guenée, Between
Church and State: The Lives of Four French Prelates in the Late Middle Ages,
trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago, IL, 1991), 149–50.
[12] Lewis, ‘War Propaganda
and Historiography’, 201–2.
[13] Chartier, Le
quadrilogue invectif, esp. 10–19; see also J. Laidlaw, ‘Alain Chartier and
the Arts of Crisis Management, 1417–1429’, War, Government, and Power
in Late Medieval France, ed. Allmand, 37–53.
[14] N. de Fribois, Abrégé
des Croniques de France, ed. K. Daly (Paris, 2006); P. de
Nesson, Pierre de Nesson et ses œuvres, ed. A. Piaget and E. Droz
(Paris, 1925); J. Juvénal des Ursins, Les écrits politiques, ed. P.
S. Lewis and Anne-Marie Hayez, 3 vols (Paris, 1978–92).
[15] Wright, Knights
and Peasants, 36.
[16] H. Solterer, ‘Making
Names, Breaking Lives: Women and Injurious Language at the Court of Isabeau of
Bavaria and Charles VI’, Cultural Performances in Medieval France,
ed. E. Doss-Quinby, R. L. Krueger and E. J. Burns (Cambridge, 2007), 213–15.
See also T. Adams, The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria (Baltimore,
MD, 2010), esp. 124–5, who argues that the attacks on Isabeau were politically
motivated and not as widespread as has been commonly asserted.
[17] Basin, Histoire
de Charles VII, ed. C. Samaran, I, 220–2; M. Spencer, Thomas Basin
(1412–1490): The History of Charles VII and Louis XI (Nieuwkoop,
1997), 104–5.
[18] C. T. Allmand, ‘The
English and the Church in Lancastrian Normandy’, England and Normandy,
ed. D. Bates and A. Curry (London, 1994), 287–9, 292. On clerical resistance,
see R. Jouet, La résistance à l’occupation anglaise en Basse-Normandie,
1418–1450 (Caen, 1969), 73–7; J.Barker, ‘The Foe Within: Treason in
Lancastrian Normandy’,Soldiers, Nobles and Gentlemen, ed. Coss and
Tyerman, 314–15.
[19] G. Llewelyn
Thompson, Paris and its People under English Rule: The Anglo-Burgundian
Regime 1420–1436 (Oxford, 1991), 152–3, 174–5.
[20] G. L.
Harriss, ‘Beaufort, Henry (1375?–1447)’, ODNB (online edn,
2008); idem, Cardinal Beaufort: A Study of Lancastrian Ascendancy and
Decline (Oxford, 1989); R. Cazelles, Société politique,
noblesse et couronne sous Jean le Bon et Charles V(Paris, 1982), 125, 155,
175, 244. Over the course of the war thirteen of the twenty-five French
chancellors were churchmen; D. Potter, ed., France in the Later Middle
Ages, 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2002), 257–8; F. Lot and R. Fawtier, Histoire
des institutions françaises au Moyen Age, III: Institutions
ecclésiastiques (Paris, 1962), 407–37. A huge preponderance of English
lord treasurers and chancellors in this period were bishops – although the first
lay chancellor, Robert Bourchier, served in 1340–1. In addition churchmen
served as finance ministers and diplomats, e.g. Jean la Grange and Henry
Burghersh, bishop of Lincoln; A. McGee Morganstern, ‘The La Grange Tomb and
Choir: A Monument of the Great Schism of the West’, Speculum, 48
(1973), 52–3; N. Bennett, ‘Burghersh, Henry (c.1290–1340)’, ODNB (online
edn, 2004)). Others were involved in military matters such as defence, e.g.
Hamo Hythe, bishop of Rochester (1320–52); M. C. Buck, ‘Hythe, Hamo (b. c.1270,
d. in or after 1357)’, ODNB (online edn, 2009)
[21] The French clergy were
exempt from direct taxation, but indirect taxation affected them and their
institutions in a variety of ways. In addition, clerical tenths (levies of
one-tenth of clerical income) were granted to French kings by popes regularly
up until c.1350 and then again after c.1420.
[22] Anon., A
Parisian Journal, 1404–49, ed. and trans. J. Shirley (Oxford, 1968), 147.
See also T. Guard, Chivalry, Kingship and Crusade: The English
Experience in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2013), 193–6.
[23] Bernard, Late
Medieval English Church, 27–33.
[24] P. de Mézières, Letter
to Richard II: A Plea made in 1395 for Peace between England and France,
trans. G. W. Coopland (Liverpool, 1975), 21.
[25] Cited by Barnie, War
in Medieval Society, 12. See also K. Plöger, England and the
Avignon Popes: The Practice of Diplomacy in Late Medieval Europe (London,
2005), 23.
[26] G. Barraclough, The
Medieval Papacy (London, 1968), 153; D. Wood, ‘Omnino Partialitate
Cessante: Clement VI and the Hundred Years War’, The Church and War,
ed. W. J. Shiels (Oxford, 1983), 179–89.
[27] P. N. R. Zutshi, ‘The
Avignon Papacy’, The New Cambridge Medieval History, VI: c.1300–c.1415,
ed. M. Jones (Cambridge, 2000), 669–70.
[28] J. J. N. Palmer,
‘England, France, the Papacy and the Flemish Succession, 1361–9’, Journal
of Medieval History, 2 (1976), 339–64; Ormrod, Edward III,
442–4.
[29] C. Given-Wilson,
‘Parliament of October 1404: Introduction’, PROME;
Walsingham, Chronica Maiora, ed. Preest, 333–5; M. Wilks, ‘Royal
Patronage and Anti-Papalism from Ockham to Wyclif’, Wyclif: Political
Ideas and Practice (Oxford, 2000), 132–3; Bernard, Late
Medieval English Church, 18–19, 27, 31–3.
[30] B. P. McGuire, Jean
Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation (University Park, PA, 2005),
49–51.
[31] H. Kaminsky, ‘The
Great Schism’, New Cambridge Medieval History, VI, ed. Jones,
675–6. Cardinals usually numbered between 10 and 25. It was a matter of pride
for the major states to produce at least one cardinal. The College of Cardinals
elected a pope when the incumbent died, usually from among their own number.
[32] J. Sumption, The
Hundred Years War, III: Divided Houses (London, 2009),
493–510; R. Allington–Smith, Henry Despenser: The Fighting Bishop (Fakenham,
2003), 54–81.
[33] H. Kaminsky, ‘The
Politics of France’s Subtraction of Obedience from Pope Benedict XIII, 27 July,
1398’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 115
(1971), 367–71.
[34] Kaminsky, ‘Great
Schism’, 696; J. H. Lynch, The Medieval Church: A Brief History(Harlow,
1992), 328–35.
[35] Bonet, Tree of
Battles, 189.
[36] Walsingham notes that
when Henry V’s ordinances became common knowledge, many people began wandering
through English encampments in France wearing clerical garb having shaven their
heads, ‘engaged in the transactions of the marketplace, and coming and going as
they pleased with the English outwitted by their holy cunning’,Chronica
Maiora, ed. Preest, 423; St Albans Chronicle, II, 713–14.
[37] Chronicle of Jean
de Venette, 67.
[38] Froissart, Chroniques,
ed. Luce, V, 175; also see ibid., XIV, 164.
[39] Keen, Chivalry,
232.
[40] Wright, Knights
and Peasants, 65.
[41] H. Denifle, La
désolation des églises, monastères et hôpitaux en France pendant la Guerre de
Cent Ans, 2 vols (Paris, 1897–99), II, 592–601.
[42] Denifle, La
désolation, 613, 615–16, 689, 731–3; Clark, Benedictines, 274.
[43] Walsingham, Chronica
Maiora, ed. Preest, 97–9.
[44] A. K. McHardy, ‘The
Effects of the War on the Church: The Case of the Alien Priories in the
Fourteenth Century’, England and her Neighbours, 1066–1453: Essays in
Honour of Pierre Chaplais, ed. M. Jones and M. G. A. Vale (London, 1989),
277–88.
[45] Allmand, Henry
V, 273–4; Bernard, Late Medieval English Church, 189–90, 200;
Clark, Benedictines, 275.
[46] A.
Emery, Greater Medieval Houses of England and Wales, 1300–1500, II
(Oxford, 2000), 370; McHardy, ‘Effects of War on the Church’, 278–84; A.
McHardy and N. Orme, ‘The Defence of an Alien Priory: Modbury (Devon) in the
1450s’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 50 (1999), 303–4.
[47] W. M. Ormrod,
‘Parliament of Nov. 1373: Text and Translation’, PROME, item 32.
[48] John Cherlewe, prior
of Lewes (c.1366–96), was captured during a French raid in 1377:
Walsingham, Chronica Maiora, ed. Preest, 46.
[49] McHardy, Age
of War and Wycliffe, 36–7.
[50] Walsingham, Chronica
Maiora, ed. Preest, 36–7, 46, 110.
[51] Chronicle of Jean
de Venette, 64; Gesta Henrici Quinti, 44. Courtenay led
embassies to France in 1414 and 1415.
[52] G. E. St John, ‘War,
the Church, and English Men-at-Arms’, Fourteenth-Century England,
VI, ed. C. Given-Wilson (Woodbridge, 2010), 74–7, 83.
[53] Gesta Henrici
Quinti, 66, 78, 84, 89.
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