The Ecclesiastical Roots of the
Norman Conquest, 1043-1087
Vladimir Moss
© Vladimir Moss
CONTENTS
Introduction: England and the
Continent…………………………………..4
The Beginning of the End – The Rise of the
Heretical Papacy - The Growth of Feudalism – The English Monarchy - Rome and
the Holy Roman Empire – The Papal Reform Movement – The Rise of the Normans -
The Aims of the Present Work
1. Saint Edward the
Confessor (1043-1066)……………………………………61
Early Years – Years in Exile – Edward the
King – Edward the Miracle-Worker – The Rebellion of Earl Godwin – The Affair of
Archbishop Stigand – The Papal Embassy – The Question of the Succession – The
Rebellion of Earl Tostig – The Prophetic Moses
2. Martyr-King Harold and the Norman Conquest
(1066-1070)……………..…....121
The Wages of Sin – Harold the King – The
Battle of Stamford Bridge – The Battle of Hastings – The Burial of King Harold
– William the King – The Harrowing of the North – The Last Stand of the English
3. Doomsday (1070-1087)……….……..162
The Papist Reformation of
the English Church – The Gregorian Revolution - The King in the Church – The
English Diaspora – The Death of the Persecutor
Conclusion. The Hope of
Resurrection…………...………………..212
The Anglican Reformation – The Non-Jurors –
The Branch Theory – “He That Restraineth” – The Return of the Branch
Appendix
1. St. David, the Celtic Churches and Eastern Orthodoxy……240
Appendix 2. When did the West fall away from Holy
Orthodoxy?…….…...285
INTRODUCTION: ENGLAND AND THE CONTINENT
On October 14, 1066, at Hastings in southern England, the last Orthodox
king of England, Harold II, died in battle against Duke William of Normandy.
William had been blessed to invade England by the Roman Pope Alexander in order
to bring the English Church into full communion with the “reformed Papacy”; for
since 1052 the English archbishop had been banned and denounced as schismatic
by Rome. The result of the Norman Conquest was that the English Church and
people were integrated into the heretical “Church” of Western, Papist
Christendom, which had just, in 1054, fallen away from communion with the One,
Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, represented by the Eastern Patriarchates
of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. Thus ended the nearly
five-hundred-year history of the Anglo-Saxon Orthodox Church, which was
followed by the demise of the still older Celtic Orthodox Churches in Wales,
Scotland and Ireland.
This small book is an account of how this came to pass.
Now the Celtic Churches had had little to do with Rome – not out of
antipathy, but because of distance and, especially, a long period in the fifth
and sixth centuries during which the Celts had been cut off from the Church on
the continent by the pagan invasions. In any case, Celtic Christianity owed as
much to Eastern, especially Coptic Christianity as it did to Rome.[1] By
contrast, after the English were converted to Orthodoxy in the seventh century,
they became perhaps the most fervent “Romanists” of all the peoples of Western
Europe.
This devotion sprang from the fact that it was to Rome, and specifically
to Pope St. Gregory the Great and his disciples, that the Angles, Saxons and
Jutes of Southern England owed their conversion to the Faith in the late sixth
and early seventh centuries. From that time English men and women of all
classes and conditions poured across the Channel in a well-beaten path to the
tombs of the Apostles in Rome[2], and a
whole quarter of the city was called “Il Borgo Saxono” because of the large
number of English pilgrims it accomodated.[3] English
missionaries such as St. Boniface of Germany carried out their work as the
legates of the Roman Popes. And the voluntary tax known as “Peter’s Pence”
which the English offered to the Roman see was paid even in the difficult times
of the Viking invasions, when it was the English themselves who were in need of
alms.
However, the “Romanity” to which the English were so devoted was not the
Franco-Latin, Roman Catholicism of the later Middle Ages. Rather, it was the
Greco-Roman Romanitas or Rwmeiosunh of Orthodox Catholicism. And the
spiritual and political capital of Romanitas until the middle of the
fifteenth century was not Old Rome in Italy, but the New Rome of
Constantinople.[4]
Thus when King Ethelbert of Kent was baptized by St. Augustine in 597, “he had
entered,” as Fr. Andrew Phillips writes, “‘Romanitas’, Romanity, the universe
of Roman Christendom, becoming one of those numerous kings who owed allegiance,
albeit formal, to the Emperor in New Rome…”[5] Indeed,
as late as the tenth century the cultural links between England and
Constantinople remained strong.
We may tentatively point to the murder of King Edward the Martyr in 979
as the beginning of the end of Orthodox England. “No worse deed for the English
was ever done that this,” said the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle[6]. And
while it was said that there was “great rejoicing” at the coronation of St.
Edward’s half-brother, Ethelred “the Unready”, St. Dunstan, archbishop of
Canterbury, sorrowfully prophesied great woes for the nation in the coming
reign.[7]
He was right; for not only were the English successively defeated by
Danish pagan invaders and forced to pay ever larger sums in “Danegeld”, but the
king himself, betrayed by his leading men and weighed down by his own personal
failures, was forced to flee abroad in 1013. The next year he was recalled by
the English leaders, both spiritual and lay, who declared that “no lord was
dearer to them than their rightful lord, if only he would govern his kingdom
more justly than he had done in the past.” [8]
But the revival was illusory; further defeats followed, and in 1017,
after the deaths both of King Ethelred and of his son Edmund Ironside, the
Danish Canute was made king of all the English. Canute converted to the faith
of his new Christian subjects; and the period of the Danish kings (1017-1042)
created less of a disruption in the nation’s spiritual life than might have
been expected. Nevertheless, it must have seemed that God’s mercy had at last
returned to His people when, in 1043, the Old English dynasty of Alfred the
Great was restored in the person of King Ethelred’s son Edward, known to later
generations as “the Confessor”.
It is with the life of King Edward that our narrative begins.
However, in order to understand the world of King Edward it is necessary
briefly to review cultural and ecclesiastical developments on the continent of
Europe, which began to influence England precisely in his reign. These included
the rise of the heretical papacy and the growth of feudalism.
The Rise of the Heretical Papacy
As the power of the “Holy Roman Emperors” of the West declined in the
ninth century, so the power of the Popes increased. Beginning with Nicholas I,
they began to claim a quasi-imperial rule over the whole Church, East and West.
And this imperial role began more and more to resemble the
“imperator-plus-pontifex maximus” role of the pagan Roman emperors: the heresy
of Papism was born.
However, for the first eight centuries, every attempt to combine the
roles of king and priest in a single person had been decisively rejected by the
Popes. Thus when, in 796, Eadbert Praen, an English priest, assumed the crown
of the sub-kingdom of Kent for himself, he was immediately rejected by
Archbishop Aethelheard of Canterbury and anathematised by Pope Leo III, who
wrote that such a priest-king was like Julian the Apostate.[9] But
gradually, and with increasing self-assertion, the Popes themselves claimed a
kingly power and role.
One of the reasons for this was that after the Western Empire had
collapsed after 476 and split up into a number of independent kingdoms, the
Church remained united, making her by far the most prominent survival of
Christian Romanity in the West. Even the most powerful of the western kings did
not command a territory greater than that of a Roman provincial governor,
whereas the Pope was not only the undisputed leader of the whole of Western
Christendom but also the senior hierarch in the whole of the Church, Eastern
and Western. However, as long as the Popes remained both Orthodox in faith and
loyal subjects of the Eastern Emperor in politics, – that is, until Pope
Stephen’s political break with Byzantium in 756, – the lack of a political
power in the West commensurate with the ecclesiastical power of the Popes was
not a pressing necessity; for everyone accepted that in the political sphere
the Eastern Emperor was the sole basileus of the whole of Christendom,
and the western kings were his sons or satraps; while in the ecclesiastical
sphere there was no single head, the Body of Christ being overseen by its “five
senses”, the five patriarchates, of which Rome was simply the primus inter
pares.
But problems arose when Rome broke its last political links with the
Eastern Empire and sought a new protector in the Frankish empire of Pepin and
Charlemagne. This caused changes in the political ideology of the Franks, on
the one hand, who came to see themselves as the real Roman Empire, more Roman
and more Orthodox than the Empire of the East; and on the other hand, in the
ecclesiology of the Popes, who came to see themselves as the only Church of
this renewed Roman Empire, having ultimate jurisdiction over all the Churches
in the world. Frankish caesaropapism soon collapsed; but Roman papocaesarism
continued to grow until it claimed supreme authority in both Church and State…
In fact, there is a strong argument to be made for the thesis that the
ultimate gainer from Charlemagne’s coronation in 800 was not the new emperor,
but the Pope. Judith Herrin writes that his “Of the three powers involved in
the coronation event of 800, the Roman pontiff emerges as the clear winner in
the triangular contest over imperial authority. By seizing the initiative and
crowning Charles in his own way, Pope Leo claimed the superior authority to
anoint an imperial ruler of the West, which established an important precedent…
Later Charles would insist on crowning his own son Louis as emperor, without
papal intervention. He thus designated his successor and, in due course, Louis
inherited his father’s authority. But the notion that a western rule could not
be a real emperor without a papal coronation and acclamation in ancient Rome
grew out of the ceremonial devised by Leo III in 800.”[10]
So the foundations were laid for the growth of papal power in the
political as well as the ecclesiastical spheres, which growth was especially
evident as Carolingian power declined later in the ninth century.
The significant figure here is Pope Nicholas I, whose first task was to
establish his supremacy over the Church in the West. However, here an Orthodox
ecclesiology still prevailed at the metropolitan and lower levels. Thus the
archbishops of Trèves and Cologne replied to an unjust sentence by
Nicholas as follows: “Without a council, without canonical inquiry, without
accuser, without witnesses, without convicting us by arguments or authorities,
without our consent, in the absence of the metropolitans and of our suffragan
bishops, you have chosen to condemn us, of your own caprice, with tyrannical
fury. But we do not accept your accursed sentence, so repugnant to a father’s
or a brother’s love; we despise it as mere insulting language; we expel you
yourself from our communion, since you commune with the excommunicate; we are
satisfied with the communion of the whole Church and with the society of our
brethren whom you despise and of whom you make yourself unworthy by your pride and
arrogance. You condemn yourself when you condemn those who do not observe the
apostolic precepts which you yourself are the first to violate, annulling as
far as in you lies the Divine laws and the sacred canons, and not following in
the footsteps of the Popes your predecessors…”[11]
Nicholas did not confine himself to unjustly deposing western bishops:
he also deposed St. Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, whose speedy
promotion to the rank of patriarch from the lay state he considered uncanonical
(although many holy patriarchs, and the famous St. Ambrose of Milan, had risen
to the episcopate as quickly). All this was in accordance with his theory,
first put forward in 865, that the Pope had authority “over all the earth, that
is, over every other Church”, “the see of Peter has received the total power of
government over all the sheep of Christ”. The Emperor Michael III was furious,
but Nicholas replied: “The day of king-priests and emperor-pontiffs is past,
Christianity has separated the two functions, and Christian emperors have need
of the Pope in view of the life eternal, whereas popes have no need of emperors
except as regards temporal things.”[12]
This would suggest that Nicholas supported the Orthodox teaching on the
separation of the secular and ecclesiastical powers. However, while it was
useful for him to preach the Orthodox doctrine in order to limit the power of
the emperor, he accepted few, if any, limitations on his own power. He even
hinted that the Byzantine emperors might not be legitimate emperors of the
Romans, which would imply that the only legitimate emperor was the Frankish
one, or, if the forged Donation of Constantine was to be believed, the
Pope himself! Thus he said that it was ridiculous for Michael to call himself
Roman emperor, since he did not speak Latin.[13]
Then he demanded from the Emperor the return of his territories in the
Greek-speaking south of Italy for no other reason than that they had once,
centuries before, come within the jurisdiction of the Roman patriarchate: “Give
us back the patrimony of Calabria and that of Sicily and all the property of
our Church, whereof it held possession, and which it was accustomed to manage
by its own attorneys; for it is unreasonable that an ecclesiastical possession,
destined for the light and service of the Church of God, should be taken from
us by an earthly power.”
Finally, he sent missionaries to Bulgaria, which was deep within the
traditionally Byzantine sphere. To add injury to insult, these missionaries
preached the heresy of the Filioque to the newly converted Bulgarians.
For this reason, a Council convened at Constantinople in 867 presided over by
St. Photius, and at which the archbishops of Trèves, Cologne and Ravenna
were present, excommunicated and anathematized Nicholas.
Two years later, however, a palace revolution enabled another
“anti-Photian” council to be convened, at which the Council of 867 was
annulled. Papists have often counted this anti-Photian council as the Eighth Ecumenical
– not least, one suspects, because the new Pope, Hadrian II, demanded that all
its participants recognized him as “Sovereign Pontiff and Universal Pope”. But
a much better claim to ecumenicity can be made for the Great Council convened
at Constantinople in 879-80, which four hundred Eastern bishops and the legates
of Pope John VIII attended. This Council annulled, under the legates’
signature, the acts of the anti-Photian council. It also made two very
important decisions. First, it decreed that there was no papal jurisdiction in
the East, although the papal primacy was recognised. And secondly, it
reaffirmed the original text of the Nicene Creed without the Filioque,
and explicitly condemned all additions to it. So a Roman Pope formally
recognised that he had no jurisdiction in the Eastern Church and that the Filioque
was a heresy!
The
Growth of Feudalism
Thus was the Papist heresy crushed – for
the time being. However, the serpent of Papism lay bruised, not completely
scotched; and a more permanent triumph could be hoped for only if a healthy
antidote against its poison could be built up within the West. This depended,
above all, on the strength of the other pillar of Christian society in the West
– the sacred power of the anointed kings. Such an antidote existed, as we shall
see, in England, where a powerful monarchy ruling most of the country arose in
the person of King Alfred the Great. On most of the continent, however, the
monarchy was deeply involved in a phenomenon that had a profoundly negative
impact on both political and ecclesiastical life – feudalism.
The word “feudalism” comes from the Latin feuda,
translated as “fief”, which means a piece land held in exchange for service to
a lord. Feudalism, in the sense of the widespread division of the land into
fiefs, is a common phenomenon in many lands in time of invasion or social
decline. But the term was invented to describe the particular socio-political
organisation of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages. It arose as a
defensive reaction to the Viking invasions of the ninth century, and the
breakdown in central authority which they caused. The breakdown was worst in
West Francia, modern France, where royal authority almost disappeared. One
result was serfdom: the lands which had belonged to the crown, the royal
“fisc”, were given to local landowners, both ecclesiastical and lay, and the
peasants who had cultivated the land, deprived of any protection from the
crown, threw themselves on the mercy of the local landowners, bartering their
and their children’s labour in return for protection. The second was feudalism
proper: the freemen became vassals of lords, swearing to fight the lord’s
battles in exchange for protection. A vassal was a knight – that is, he owned
arms and a horse and was able to fight. Since this required money, he very
likely owned land – either inherited, “allodial” land, or a “benefice” or
“fief” granted temporarily, in the vassal’s lifetime only. A vassal might
himself have vassals. Thus many of the king’s counts, or local officials, were
at the same time both feudal lords and vassals of the king.
Feudalism ate into the king’s power in two
ways: first, the kings’ peasants hardly counted as his subjects any more since
their real masters were now their landowners; and secondly, the king’s vassals
tended to leave his service for that of the most powerful local feudal lord.
The king did not always resist this process, but rather reinforced it, since he
saw that the feudal lord was the only guarantee of law and order in the countryside.
Thus in the capitulary of Meersen in 847 King Charles the Bald ordered all free
men to choose a lord, and likewise forbade them to leave their lord without
just reason – which effectively made the bond of vassalage permanent in all
normal cases. Again, in a capitulary issued at Thionville, he gave official
recognition to the vassal’s oath, which thereby replaced the oath of allegiance
as the main glue holding society together. Finally, in the capitulary of Kiersy
in 877, Charles sanctioned hereditary succession to counties and other fiefs,
which meant that county administration became hereditary and passed out of the
king’s control.[14]
As a defensive system to preserve a
minimum of order in a time of foreign invasion, feudalism undoubtedly had
merits. But it was evidently much inferior not only to Byzantine-style
autocracy, but also to the Carolingian system that preceded it. Moreover, as
the threat of invasion passed, and feudalism spread from its homeland in
Northern France throughout Western Europe in the eleventh century, its
degrading and coarsening effect on general morality, and its potential, in
certain circumstances, for a more-than-local despotism, became more obvious.
As Maurice Keen writes: “In effect, as a
result of the confusion of the ninth and tenth centuries, government had ceased
to have much to do with even a rudimentary state machine. It had become part of
the patrimony of powerful men. What bound this society together was not a sense
of obligation to a common weal, but the personal oaths of individual men to
individual lords. The peace of society depended on how far these individuals
were prepared to observe their promises, and here force was a moving factor.
The system had grown out of the exigencies of a military situation, and bore
plenty of marks of its origin. The true centre of a lord’s authority was his
castle, behind whose walls or pallisades he could defy all comers: where too he
held his court and judged his subjects. The most essential obligation of the
vassal was his service in war: his estate was valued by the number of soldiers
it could maintain. And if a man was injured in his right by a rival, or if his
lord or his underling broke the sworn agreement between them, what king and
count and vassal alike fell back on was the ancient right of the free man, the
vendetta. He defied his rival in solemn language, and he made war upon him. The
wars of feudal noblemen left little peace in many parts of Europe over the four
centuries following the year 1000.”[15]
According to Solonevich, feudalism could
be defined as “the splintering of state sovereignty among a mass of small, but
in principle sovereign owners of property”. Contrary to Marx, it had nothing to
do with ‘productive relations’ and was far from being an advance on previous
forms of social organisation. “It is sufficient to remember the huge cultural
and unusually high level of Roman ‘production’. Feudal Europe, poor, dirty and
illiterate, by no means represented ‘a more progressive form of productive relations’
– in spite of Hegel, it was sheer regression. Feudalism does not originate in
productive relations. It originates in the thirst for power beyond all
dependence on production and distribution. Feudalism is, so to speak, the
democratisation of power [my italics – V.M.] – its transfer to all those
who at the given moment in the given place have sufficient physical strength to
defend their baronial rights – Faustrecht.. Feudalism sometimes
presupposes a juridical basis of power, but never a moral one.
“The
feudal lord does not rule ‘in the name’ of the nation, the people, the
peasants, or whoever else there might be. He rules only and exclusively in his
own interests, which have been strengthened by such-and-such battles or
parchments. For the feudal lord the monarch is not the bearer of definite moral
ideals or even of the practical interests of the people or nation, but only
‘the first among equals’, who has had the luck to be stronger than the rest…
“The thirst for power is, of course, a property
common to all humanity, and therefore the tendency to the development of
feudalism will be to a greater or lesser degree characteristic of all countries
and all peoples of the world…. But if we discard trivialities, then we must say
that Rome, for example, had no knowledge at all of feudal relations. There were
landowners and there were senators, there were proconsuls and there were
emperors, but there were no barons. The sovereign power ‘of the people and
senate of Rome’, engraved on the Roman eagles, remained the single indivisible
source of all power – even the power of the Roman emperors. The civil wars of
Rome bore no relation to the feudal wars of medieval Europe. Nor did Ancient
Greece with its purely capitalist relations know feudalism. Yes, Greece was
split up into a series of sovereign states, but, though tiny, these were
nevertheless states – monarchies and republics, in principle having equal
rights in relation to each other and by no means in relations of feudal
submission or co-submission.”[16]
One of the worst aspects of feudalism was the fact that the Church, too,
was bound up in the feudal nexus, with churchmen having lay lords higher than
themselves and vassals lower than themselves, which resulted, as Papadakis
writes, in “the unrestrained secularization of the western clergy. By the 900s
most churchmen – both high and low – had lost nearly all their independence and
sense of corporate identity, as their functions everywhere became identified
with those belonging to lay vassals. Quite simply, as rulers came to regard all
ecclesiastical organization under their effective control as a facet of the
secular system, conventions governing one sphere were adjusted to fit the
other. As a result, bishops and abbots were not exempt from the secular
obligations and responsibilities attached to feudal tenure. As feudal
dependents they, too, had to attend court, give advice and, when required,
supply their lay superiors with military service… Characteristically, promotion
to an episcopal see or a rich abbey was often the reward of previous dutiful
service in the royal household. It is worth adding that ecclesiastical tenants
were also preferred for many posts because their lands and their jurisdictions
were not governed by inheritance [celibate priests had no (legal) children].
Whereas the heirs of a lay vassal holding of the king by hereditary right could
occasionally create legal difficulties or foment rebellion, an heirless but
enfeoffed celibate cleric was incapable of doing so. This was probably a
decisive reason why so many high ecclesiastics, time and again, became
essential associates in royal government everywhere.”[17]
The control exercised by feudal lords over
clerical appointments was symbolised by the ceremony of “lay investiture”, whereby
the lord endowed the cleric with a ring, signifying the cleric’s entry into
feudal tenure of a church or lands. Such a ceremony was distinct from
ecclesiastical ordination. But in practice the power inherent in lay
investiture determined who should be ordained (and for how much).
“The hastily ordained and ‘invested’ clerk was often altogether unworthy
(if not also incompetent and untrained) of the priestly calling. Church
assemblies and individual churchmen, it is true, routinely complained. All the
same, neither the power of laymen to appoint and invest clergy, nor the
encroachment and spoliation of Church property, was ever discontinued. As a
matter of fact, lay nominations to vacant sees became so frequent that they
were no longer regarded a radical departure from canonical tradition. The abuse
was recognized as a perfectly acceptable practice. In 921 the archbishop of
Cologne was thus solemnly admonished by the pope himself for attempting to
block a royal appointment at Liège. Pope John X’s letter informing the
archbishop that no episcopal candidate was to be consecrated in any diocese
without royal authorization still survives. As far as pope John was concerned,
the right of the feudal power to interfere at the highest level in the internal
affairs of the Church was ‘ancient usage’. Ecclesial autonomy, to say nothing
of ecclesial political and economic freedom, was apparently of little
consequence. Canon law evidently had long given way to the feudal system…”[18]
The development of feudalism was aided by the German land law system,
which prevailed throughout the former Carolingian empire. The result, continues
Papadakis, “was the so-called Eigenkirchentum, or proprietary church
system, an arrangement by which the parish with all its appurtenances became
the private property of its founder. In terms of ecclesiastical power,
according to one investigator, the main result of this ‘Germanization’ or
‘privatization’ was complete revolution. Its overall effect on Latin
ecclesiastical organization at any rate was profound as well as extensive.
“This becomes evident when traditional canon law is compared or
contrasted with German land law. Plainly put, unlike the Church, early
barbarian Europe did not understand the legal concept of corporate ecclesiastical
ownership. The idea of an abiding corporation with legal rights simply did not
exist in German customary law. Thus, the conviction that the Church could also
simultaneously own land or real property, as a corporate personality or
institution, was unknown. Rather, according to Germanic law, everything built
on a plot of land, whether it was the local parish church or the monastery, was
considered the exclusive ‘property’ of the landlord; the man who had built and
endowed it was also its real owner. Control and rights of ownership of the
foundation constructed on an estate, quite simply, continued to be in the hands
of the proprietor. To be sure, the church could never actually be secularized.
On the other hand, it could always be given, sold, traded, or exchanged if
necessary. It was even possible to dispose of it as a sort of fief by leasing
it to one’s relatives or liegemen. In sum, the treatment of parishes was
identical to the holding of ordinary pieces of real property… It is worth
adding that the resident priest of the Eigenkirche (usually an
ill-trained serf from the lord’s own estate) was in practice appointed and
dismissed by the proprietor. His status resembled a small quasi-feudal
dependent. Almost invariably, if the incumbent was married or living in
concubinage he was able to pass the parish on to his son or heir.
“…The practice of buying and selling rural parishes as a profitable
investment was in time also applied to bishoprics and cathedrals. Although such
sales were not a general phenomenon, it remains true that in some areas such as
the Midi region, bishoprics were habitually sold or bequeathed as Eigenkirche.
This was presumably still the practice in 1067 when the bishopric of Carcassone
was sold to the count of Barcelona by the viscount of Albi….
“Everywhere the priest had really become essentially an estate servant.
His private arrangement with the lord of the parish had in fact replaced the
canonical bond uniting him to his bishop. It was this personalized local
relationship that ultimately mattered, rather than the bishop’s potestas
jurisdictionis. Throughout Europe, to put it another way, episcopal control
enjoyed by all prelates was succeeded by a division of control among an
unlimited number of owners. The diocese no longer actually functioned as a
single administrative unit, but as a collection of private independent
churches, in which the bishop’s pastoral and disciplinary powers were in
practice relaxed or ignored altogether. Before long, given the moral and intellectual
shortcomings of the priesthood, this diocesan centralization was to generate
further serious pastoral and canonical problems. The confusion of authority and
rights within the diocese just described was, in the main, also responsible for
the ensuing simony and incontinence among the western clergy.
“It was undoubtedly lay control of ecclesiastical structure that made
possible the purchase or sale of virtually every clerical grade the general
rule by the tenth century. Simony became in fact unavoidable once clerical
offices began to be treated like secular appointments. If a secular vassal
could be taxed on inheriting his fief, so could every clerical candidate on his
elevation to office. Besides, the offices in question were profitable, and to grant
them out without any remuneration would have been pointless if not unusual in
the agrarian world of the Middle Ages. In the event, the bishop who had
received his position by canonical election (without paying for it) had before
long become a great rarity...”[19]
The
English Monarchy
“In the intricate web of vassalage,”
writes J.M. Roberts, “a king might have less control over his own vassals than
they over theirs. The great lord, whether lay magnate or local bishop, must
always have loomed larger and more important in the life of the ordinary man
than the remote and probably never-seen king or prince. In the tenth and
eleventh centuries there are everywhere examples of kings obviously under great
pressure from great men. The country where this seemed to present least trouble
was Anglo-Saxon England…”[20]
England before the Viking invasions, which began in 793, was divided
into seven independent kingdoms. Each had its own bishops, but all, from the
time of St. Theodore the Greek, archbishop of Canterbury (+691), recognised the
authority of the archbishop of Canterbury. In 786, however, Prince Egfrith of
the kingdom of Wessex was anointed even before he had ascended the throne of
his father, and from the time of this, the first royal anointing in Anglo-Saxon
history, the Wessex dynasty gradually came to dominate political life in
England. In the late ninth century, under Alfred the Great, it led the recovery
against the Viking invaders, and Alfred’s successors succeeded in uniting most
of Britain in a single Orthodox kingdom until the Norman-papist invasion of
1066-70. In a real sense, therefore, the anointing of Egfrith may be said to
have been the critical event that led to the creation of one nation and one
State.
King Alfred came to the throne of Wessex when English civilisation was
in the process of being wiped out by the pagan Danes. Almost single-handedly,
he defeated the Danes and laid the foundations for their conversion and
integration into his All-English kingdom. But not content with that, he
undertook the organisation and education of the badly shattered Church,
beginning by sending all his bishops a copy of his own translation of the Pastoral
Care by Pope Gregory the Great – the Roman connection again! Indeed,
re-establishing links with both Rome and the Eastern Orthodox Church was a
priority with Alfred. He corresponded with the Patriarch of Jerusalem and sent
alms to the monks of India.
The stability of Alfred’s dynasty and kingdom by comparison with the
sub-Carolingian kingdoms on the continent was partly owing to the fact that,
like the Roman missionaries in the early seventh century, this Romanising
monarch found a tabula rasa and was able to rebuild on relatively
uncluttered, but firm foundations. In particular, the tensions between the
monarchy and the local aristocracies which so weakened the West Frankish
kingdom, hardly existed in England after 878 and surfaced again in a serious
way only in 1052. There are several indications that the English kingdom
modelled itself on Byzantium. Thus King Athelstan gave himself the Byzantine
titles basileus and curagulus.[21] Again,
in 955, King Edred called himself “King of the Anglo-Saxons and Emperor of the
whole of Britain”. And a little later King Edgar is also called basileus et
imperator.
In the tenth century, England reached the peak of her glory as an
Orthodox kingdom, based on a monastic revival supported by a powerful king,
Edgar, and a holy archbishop, Dunstan, working in close harmony. Ryan Lavelle
writes: “A document from around 973, the Regularis Concordia,… was
intended as a rulebook and liturgical guide for English monks and nuns, but it
was also a bold statement of the relationship between God, the king and a
Christian people. The king and queen were seen as protectors of monks and nuns
in the temporal world, while, in return, the souls of the West Saxon royal
family were protected with prayers by the same monks and nuns. The positions of
the king and queen were therefore inextricably linked with the survival of Christianity
in the kingdom. This was part of a process of legitimising royal power to an
extent that was hitherto unparalleled in Anglo-Saxon England. The king had
become part of the ecclesiastical order in a coronation ceremony that made him
God’s representative on earth. The original meaning of Christ’s name, Christus
meant ‘the anointed [king]’, and the inauguration of Edgar used an ordo (an
order of service) that put Edgar on a similar level – directly anointed by God.
The monastic reform movement gave this a new impetus, to such an extent that
King Edgar could go through such a royal inauguration for a second time.”[22]
Edgar’s first anointing had taken place in 960 or 961, when he became
King of England. For many years he was not allowed to wear his crown in penance
for a sin he had committed. But in 973, the penance came to an end, and at the
age of thirty (perhaps significantly, the canonical age for episcopal
ordination in the West) he was anointed again, this time as “Emperor of
Britain” in the ancient Roman city of Bath (again significantly, for Edgar was
emphasising the imperial, Roman theme). In the same year, again emphasising the
imperial theme, he was rowed on the River Dee by six or eight sub-kings,
include five Welsh and Scottish rulers and one ruler of the Western Isles.[23] “This
was a move,” writes Lavelle, “that recalled the actions of his great-uncle
Athelstan, the successful ruler of Britain, but it was also an English parallel
to the tenth-century coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto of Germany, in
which the stem-dukes had undertaken the task of feeding the emperor.”[24]
Edgar’s ascription to himself of the trappings of Romanitas was
not without some foundation. The economy was strong, the tax and legal systems
were sophisticated, the coinage was secure (with an impressive system of
monetary renewal whereby all coins issued from the royal mints had to be
returned and reissued every five years). England was now a firmly Orthodox,
multi-national state composed of three Christian peoples, Anglo-Saxons, Celts
and Danes[25],
living in mutual amity. She was at peace at home and respected abroad,
spreading her influence in a beneficial way outwards through missions to the
Norwegians and Swedes.[26]
Edgar married twice, the first marriage producing a son, Edward, and the
second another son, Ethelred. When he died in 975 (his relics were discovered
to be incorrupt in 1052), Ethelred’s partisans, especially his mother, argued
that Ethelred should be made king in preference to his elder half-brother
Edward, on the grounds that Edgar had not been anointed when he begat Edward in
959 or 960, and that his first wife, Edward’s mother, had never been anointed,
so that the throne should pass to the younger son, Ethelred, who had been born
“in the purple” when both his parents were anointed sovereigns. The conflict
was settled when the archbishop of Canterbury, St. Dunstan, seized the
initiative and anointed St. Edward. In this way, through her stewardship of the
sacrament of royal anointing, the Church came to play the decisive role in
deciding the question of succession.[27]
The religious nature of Anglo-Saxon kingship is seen in the fact that
the king was seen as the “warden of the holy temple”.[28] Crimes
against the Church or her servants were seen as crimes against the king, and
were duly punished by him. It was seen as his duty to look after the Church and
enforce her laws with secular penalties. “For a Christian king is Christ’s
deputy among Christian people”, as King Ethelred’s laws put it. Both he and the
archbishop were “the Lord’s Anointed” – the archbishop so that he might
minister the sacraments of salvation, and the king so that, as Bede wrote in
his commentary on Acts, “he might by conquering all our enemies bring us
to the immortal Kingdom”.
The king was sometimes compared to God the Father and the bishop – to
Christ (the bishop is often called “Christ” in Anglo-Saxon legislation).[29] He was
the shepherd and father of his people and would have to answer for their
well-being at the Last Judgement. Regicide and usurpation were the greatest of
crimes; for, as Abbot Aelfric wrote in a Palm Sunday sermon, “no man may make
himself a king, for the people have the option to choose him for king who is
agreeable to them; but after that he has been hallowed as king, he has power
over the people, and they may not shake his yoke from their necks.” And so, as
Archbishop Wulfstan of York wrote in his Institutes of Christian Polity,
“through what shall peace and support come to God’s servants and to God’s poor,
save through Christ, and through a Christian king.”[30]
Nor was the king’s authority confined to the purely secular sphere. Thus
“in England,” writes Barlow, “just as the king referred to his earls and
thegns, so he addressed his archbishops, bishops and abbots. The prelates were
his men, his servants; their churches and estates were in his gift and under
his protection and control. He could even grant the rank of bishops without the
office or benefice. It was he who decided under what rule his monasteries
should live, what saints should be recognized, what festivals observed.”[31]
And yet the relationship between Church and State in England was one of
“symphony” in the Byzantine sense, not of caesaropapism; for the kings, as well
as being in general exceptionally pious, did nothing without consulting their
bishops and other members of the witan or assembly – who were not afraid
to disagree with the king, or remind him of his obligations.[32]
Thus, continues Barlow, “a true theocratic government was created, yet
one, despite the common charge of confusion [between spiritual and political
functions] against the Anglo-Saxon Church, remarkably free of confusion in
theory. The duality of the two spheres was emphatically proclaimed. There were
God’s rights and the king’s rights, Christ’s laws and the laws of the world.
There was an independent ecclesiastical jurisdiction under the control of the
bishop, but there was also the helping hand of the secular power which the
church had invoked and which it could use at its discretion.”[33]
Rome and the Holy Roman Empire
Turning to Rome now: the first half of the tenth century was probably
the period of the deepest degradation in the eternal city’s pre-schism history
- the so-called “pornocracy” of Marozia, an evil woman who with her mother
Theodora made, unmade, lived with and begat a series of popes. However, in 932
Marozia’s second son Alberic, marquis of Spoleto, imprisoned his mother, took
over the government of Rome and gave it a short period of peace and relative
respectability. But in 955 Alberic died and his son Octavian became Pope John
XII at the age of sixteen.
“Even for a pope of that period,” writes De Rosa, “he was so bad that
the citizens were out for his blood. He had invented sins, they said, not known
since the beginning of the world, including sleeping with his mother. He ran a
harem in the Lateran Palace. He gambled with pilgrims’ offerings. He kept a
stud of two thousand horses which he fed on almonds and figs steeped in wine.
He rewarded the companions of his nights of love with golden chalices from St.
Peter’s. He did nothing for the most profitable tourist trade of the day,
namely, pilgrimages. Women in particular were warned not to enter St. John
Lateran if they prized their honour; the pope was always on the prowl. In front
of the high altar of the mother church of Christendom, he even toasted the
Devil…”[34]
Retribution was coming however. Berengar, king of Lombardy in northern
Italy, advanced on Rome, and the pope in desperation appealed to Berengar’s
feudal lord, Otto of Germany. This was Otto’s opportunity to seize that
imperial crown, which would give him complete dominance over his rivals. He
marched into Italy, drove out Berengar and was crowned Emperor by John on
February 2, 962. However, when Otto demanded that the inhabitants of the Papal
states should swear an oath of allegiance to him, Otto, and not to the pope,
thereby treating the Papal states as one of his dependencies, the Pope took
fright, transferred his support to Berengar and called on both the Hungarians
and the Byzantines to help drive Otto out of Italy. But Otto saw this as
treachery on the part of the pope; he summoned a synod in Rome, deposed John,
and placed Leo VIII in his place. Then he inserted a clause into his agreement
with Leo whereby in future no pope was to be consecrated without taking an oath
of loyalty to the Emperor.
Although Otto was crowned in Rome, he did not call himself “Emperor of
the Romans”, but preferred simply “emperor”. This was probably because he did
not wish to enter into a competition with the Byzantine emperor. It may also
have been because he had little admiration for Old Rome.
Nor they for him. Indeed, it is from this time that the struggle between
the Franco-German and Greco-Roman parties for control of the papacy began, a
struggle which ended in the middle of the eleventh century with the final
victory of the Franco-German party – and the fall of Orthodoxy. Thus Cyriaque
Lampryllos writes: “The people of Rome preferred to govern themselves, under a
republican form of government, with a consul as their supreme magistrate, under
the nominal protectorate of the Greco-Roman emperors of Constantinople, rather
than support the temporal domination of their bishops, who had often been
imposed on them by the Teutonic emperors and kept there by force. For one
should note that in general, before the pontificate of Gregory VII, the party
of the Popes in Rome was usually the same as the imperialist party (with the
emperors of the West, of barbaric origin), and that, by contrast, the popular
party sympathised with the Greco-Roman empire of the East. Those of the popes
who were supported by the Teutons also laid claim to temporal power, either as
receivers, or as vicars of the emperors of the West, while the others
restricted themselves to spiritual power alone…. Voltaire, in his Essay on
history and customs (chapter 36) made the observation that the imprudence of
Pope John XII in having called the Germans to Rome was the source of all the
calamities to which Rome and Italy were subject down the centuries…”[35]
Be that as it may, Otto seems to have impressed the Byzantines
sufficiently to obtain their recognition of his imperial title (which, as we
have seen, did not contain the word “Roman”), and to persuade them to send
Princess Theophano to be the bride of his son, Otto II. The marriage was
celebrated in Rome in 972. Theophano then introduced another Byzantine, John
Philagathos, as godfather of her son, Otto III. He later became head of the
royal finances and finally - Pope (or antipope) John XV. This led to a sharp
increase in Byzantine influence in the western empire,[36]
and the temporary eclipse of the new papist theory of Church-State relations.
Thus in an ivory bas-relief Christ is shown crowning Otto II and Theophano – an
authentically Byzantine tenth-century motif.
“The image,” as Jean-Paul Allard writes, “was more eloquent than any
theological treatise. It illustrated a principle that the papacy and the Roman
Church have never accepted, but which was taken for granted in Byzantium and is
still held in Orthodoxy today: Christ and Christ alone crowns the sovereigns;
power comes only from God, without the intercession of an institutional
representative of the Church, be he patriarch or pope. The anointing and
crowning of the sovereign do not create the legitimacy of his power; but have
as their sole aim the manifestation of [this legitimacy] in the eyes of the
people.”[37]
“Sole aim” is an exaggeration: anointing and crowning also sanctify the
sovereign, giving him the Divine grace without which he cannot fulfil his
duties in a manner pleasing to God. Moreover, there is a difference in
legitimacy between the God-chosen Orthodox sovereign and any other ruler, a
difference that is expressed by the Latin terms legalis and legitimus.[38]
Nevertheless, the main point stands: legitimate political power comes directly
from God.
In 991 Princess Theophano died and the young Otto III became Emperor
under the regency of his grandmother Adelaide. He “dreamed of reuniting the two
empires [of East and West] into one one day, so as to restore universal peace –
a new imperial peace comparable to that of Augustus, a Roman Empire which would
embrace once more the orbis terrarum before the end of the world that
was announced for the year 1000.”[39] To
signify that the Renovatio Imperii Romani (originally a Carolingian
idea) had truly begun, he moved his court from Aachen to Rome, and began
negotiations with the Byzantine Emperor for the hand of a daughter or niece of
the basileus that would enable him to unite the two empires in a
peaceful, matrimonial way. And, imitating the Byzantine concept of a family of
kings under the Emperor, he handed out crowns to King Stephen of Hungary and
the Polish Duke Boleslav.
The plan for union with Byzantium was foiled; but Byzantine influence
continued to increase.[40]
Moreover, it spread outwards from the court into the episcopate. Thus Gerbert
of Aurillac, who became the first French pope in 999, took the name Sylvester
II, reviving memories, in those brought up on the forged Donation, of the
symphonic relationship between St. Constantine and Pope Sylvester I.[41]
The new Pope, breaking sharply with recent tradition, emphasised that while the
Renovatio embraced Empire and Church, it had to be led by the Emperor.[42]
Again, it was Sylvester who, in 1001, inspired Otto to issue an act
demonstrating that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery.[43]
Another striking characteristic of this very unpapist Pope was his
declaration that there could be no question of the Pope being above the
judgement of his fellow-bishops. Thus he wrote in 997: “The judgement of God is
higher than that of Rome… When Pope Marcellinus offered incense to Jupiter [in
303], did all the other bishops have to do likewise? If the bishop of Rome
himself sins against his brother or refuses to heed the repeated warnings of
the Church, he, the bishop of Rome himself, must according to the commandments
of God be treated as a pagan and a publican; for the greater the dignity, the
greater the fall. If he declares us unworthy of his communion because none of
us will join him against the Gospel, he will not be able to separate us from
the communion of Christ."[44]
Thus by the year 1000 there was little trace of papism in the west: it
was the Byzantine ideal of “symphonic” Church-State relations that had
triumphed in the west’s most powerful monarchies.
However, Otto III died in 1002 and Pope Sylvester in 1003; after which
the “symphony” between Church and State at the highest level of western society
began to break up. Like a spinning top that, as it begins to slow down, at the
same time begins to lurch more and more sharply from one side to the other, so
the balance of power shifted first to the Emperor and then to the Pope. In the
first half of the eleventh century, it was the German Emperors who held the
upper hand, as the Papacy descended into one of its periodic bouts of
decadence. “Suddenly,” as Papadakis puts it, “the papacy was turned into a sort
of imperial Eigenkirche or vicarage of the German crown. The pope was to
be the instrument and even the pawn of the Germans, as opposed to the Romans.”[45]
At the same time the heresy of the Filioque reared its head
again. In 1009 Pope Sergius IV reintroduced it into the Roman Symbol of Faith[46], upon
which the Great Church of Constantinople promptly removed his name from the
diptychs. In 1014, the heretical innovation was recited again, at the
coronation of Emperor Henry II. Some date the beginning of the Great Schism to
this period, although it was another forty years before the formal lack of
communion between East and West was cemented by the anathemas of 1054.[47]
In 1046 Emperor Henry III acted decisively to stop the chaos into which
the Roman papacy had descended, as rival families of Roman aristocrats, the
Crescentii and Tusculum counts, each tried to place their candidate on the
throne of St. Peter. At the Council of Sutri Henry forced the resignation of
Pope Gregory VI and the deposition of Popes Sylvester III and Benedict IX. Then
he proceeded to nominate four German Popes in succession: Clement II, Damasus
II, Leo IX and Victor II. However, in 1056 Henry died while his son was still a
child; and it was at this point that German caesaropapism began to fall. It was
struck down by one of the greatest “spiritual” despots in history, Pope Gregory
VII, better known as Hildebrand…
One of the Emperor Henry’s appointees,
Pope Leo IX, had been bishop of Toul in Lorraine, an area that had come under
the influence of a network of monasteries under the leadership of the great
Burgundian abbey of Cluny, founded by Duke William the Pious of Aquitaine in
910. The Cluniac monasteries were not Eigenkirchen, but “stavropegial”
foundations independent of the control of any feudal lord. As such, they had
assumed the leadership of a powerful reform movement directed against the
corruptions introduced into the Church by the feudal system, and had had
considerable success in this respect.[48]
They stressed papal authority, clerical celibacy and ecclesiastical
centralisation.
Leo IX now introduced the principles of
the Cluniac movement into the government of the Church at the highest level –
but with results, in the reign of his successor, Gregory VII (Hildebrand), that
went far beyond the original purposes of the movement, and which were finally
to tear the whole of the West away from New Rome and the Byzantine commonwealth
of nations… “From the outset,” writes Papadakis, “the new pope was determined
to make the papacy an instrument of spiritual and moral rejuvenation both in
Rome itself and throughout Europe. To this end Pope Leo journeyed to central
and south Italy, but also to France and Germany, crossing the Alps three times.
Nearly four and a half years of his five year pontificate were in fact spent on
trips outside Rome. The numerous regional reforming synods held during these
lengthy sojourns often had as their target the traffic in ecclesiastical offices
and unchaste clergy. Their object above all was to rid the Church of these
abused by restoring canonical discipline. The need to reassert both the
validity and binding power of canon law for all clergy was repeatedly
emphasized. In addition to the decrees against simony and sexual laxity
promulgated by these local synods, however, simoniacal and concubinary clergy
were examined and, when required, suspended, deposed and, even excommunicated.
The object, in short, was to punish the offenders as well. Even if the synods
were not always successful, no one was in doubt that Leo IX and his team of
like-minded assistants were serious. The immediate impact of this flurry of
activity was often extraordinary…
“Overall, the progress of the new papal
program was not all smooth sailing. Widespread protest, often accompanied by
violent protest, was to continue for decades. Yet, all in all, by the end of
the century the popular defenders of simony, of clerical marriage, and of the
evils of the proprietary church had by and large vanished. The champions of
reform at any rate proved more unyielding than their often more numerous
adversaries. This was particularly evident in the skilful drive of the
reformers to make celibacy an absolute prerequisite to ordination. This part of
the Gregorian platform was reinforced by the monastic ideal, since many of the
reformers were actually monks and had already embraced a continent life. Some,
like the ascetic Peter Damian, cardinal-bishop of Ostia, were even eager to
treat the problem as heresy and not as a matter of discipline. But the
reformers were perhaps also uncompromising on this issue because they were
convinced that compulsory clerical continence could advance the process of
de-laicization – another more general item of their platform. A monasticized
priesthood, quite simply, was viewed by reformers everywhere as a crucial
corrective to clerical involvement in the world. If successful, the strategy,
it was hoped, would provide the clergy with that sense of solidarity and
corporate identity needed to distinguish them from the laity. In all essential
respects, as one scholar has put it, the reforming initiatives of the popes
were ‘an attempt by men trained in the monastic discipline to remodel Church
and society according to monastic ideals… to train churchmen to rethink
themselves as a distinct ‘order’ with a life-style totally different from that
of laymen.’ Behind the campaign for celibacy, in sum, aside from the moral and
canonical issues involved, was the desire to set all churchmen apart from and
above the laity; the need to create a spiritual elite by the separation of the
priest from the ordinary layman was an urgent priority. Doubtless, in the end,
the Gregorian priesthood did achieve a certain libertas and even a sense
of community, but only at the expense of a sharp opposition between itself and
the rest of society.
“By contrast, in the Christian East, as in
primitive Christianity, a wholly celibate priesthood never became the norm…”[49]
As so often in history, one important historical process going in one
direction masks the presence of another going in precisely the opposite
direction. The process of ecclesiastical reformation initiated by Pope Leo IX
in 1049, which aimed at the liberation of the Church from secular control, was
- generally speaking, and with the exception of the element of clerical
celibacy – a laudable and necessary programme. But the increasing distance it
placed between the clergy and the laity was fraught with danger. In particular,
it threatened to undermine the traditional place in Christian society of the anointed kings, who occupied a kind
of intermediate position between the clergy and the laity. And in the hands of
two ambitious clerics who entered the service of the papacy at about this time,
Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida and Archdeacon Hildebrand (the future Pope
Gregory VII), it threatened simply to replace the caesaropapist variety of
feudalism with a papocaesarist variety –that is, the subjection of the clergy
to lay lords with the subjection of the laity, and even the kings, to clerical
lords – or rather, to just one clerical lord, the Pope.
The problem was that by the middle of the eleventh century Church and
State were so deeply entangled with each other that nobody, on either side of
the controversy, could conceive of a return to the traditional system of the
symphony of powers, which allowed for the relative independence of both powers
within a single Christian society. Thus the Church wished to be liberated from
“lay investiture”; but she did not want to be deprived of the lands, vassals
and, therefore, political power, which came with investiture. Indeed, the last
act in the life of Pope Leo IX himself was his marching into battle at the head
of a papal army in 1053 in order to secure his feudal domains in Benevento,
which had been granted to him by his kinsman, Emperor Henry III.
Contemporary western society was shocked by that; for, worldly and
entangled in secular affairs as bishops had become, it was still felt that war
was not an activity suited to a churchman. But that shock was as nothing to the
trauma caused in the 1070s and 1080s by Hildebrand’s creative interpretation of
the basic feudal relationship: all Christians, he said, were “the soldiers of
Christ” and “the vassals of St. Peter”, i.e. of the Pope, and the Pope had the
right to call on all the laity to break their feudal oaths and take up arms
against their lords, in obedience to himself, their ultimate feudal suzerain,
who would repay them, not with lands or physical security, but with the
absolution of sins and everlasting life! Thus freedom from lay control, on the
one hand, but control over the laity, and greater secular power, on the other:
that was the programme – both contradictory and hypocritical - of the
“reformed” papacy
But before undertaking this assault on the West, the papacy needed to
secure its rear in the East. This was achieved by picking a quarrel with the
Eastern Church[50]
and sending Cardinal Humbert to Constantinople to anathematize it in 1054. Pope
Leo IX was actually dead when the exchange of anathemas took place, but that he
was a truly papist pope is proved by his words: “If anywhere in the universe
any people proudly disagrees with the Roman Church, it can no longer be called
or considered to be a Church – it is already an assemblage of heretics, a
conventicle of schismatics, a synagogue of Satan”.[51] To
which Patriarch Michael of Constantinople replied: “O you who are Orthodox,
flee the fellowship of those who have accepted the heretical Latins and who
regard them as the first Christians in the Catholic and Holy Church of God!”
For, as he said a little later, “the Pope is a heretic.”[52]
In this proud exaltation of the opinion of one local Church, the
Roman – or rather, of one man in one
local Church – above the Universal Church lies the whole tragedy of the further
development of Western civilisation…
The now definitely secular character of the papacy was demonstrated at
the inauguration of Pope Nicholas II, at whose inauguration a quasi-royal coronation was introduced as part of the
rite. Then, in 1059, he decreed that the Popes should be elected by the
cardinal-bishops alone, without the participation of the people. “The role of
the Roman clergy and people,” writes Canning, “was reduced to one of mere
assent to the choice. The historical participation of the emperor was by-passed
with the formula ‘saving the honour and reverence due to our beloved son Henry
[IV] who is for the present regarded as king and who, it is hoped, is going to
be emperor with God’s grace, inasmuch as we have now conceded this to him and
to his successors who shall personally obtain this right from the apostolic
see’.”[53]
Sixty years before, Otto III had bombastically claimed that he had
“ordained and created” the Pope.[54]
Now the wheel had come round full circle: the emperors were emperors only by
virtue of receiving this right from the Pope.
The Rise of the
Normans
Four months later, the new Pope made a hardly less momentous decision:
he entered into alliance at Melfi with the Normans of South Italy, the same
nation whom the last Orthodox Pope, Leo IX, had died fighting, and whom he had
cursed on his deathbed. The alliance was momentous because up to this moment
the Popes had always turned for protection to the Christian Roman Emperor,
whether of East Rome or of the “Holy Roman Empire” of the West. Indeed, the
Pope had insisted on crowning the “Holy Roman Emperor” precisely because he was
the papacy’s official guardian. For it was unheard of that the Church of Rome
should recognise as her official guardian any other power than the Roman
Emperor, from whom, according to the forged Donation of Constantine, she
had herself received her quasi-imperial dignity and power. But just as, in the
middle of the eighth century, the Papacy had rejected the Byzantines in favour
of the Franks, so now – after Cardinal Humbert had cut the last remaining links
with Byzantium by “anathematising” the Orthodox Church in 1054[55] - it
rejected the Germans in favour of the Normans, a recently formed nation of
Viking origin but French speech and culture.
Now the Normans had recently seized a large swathe of land belonging to
the Lombards and Byzantines in Southern Italy. The Pope legitimised this robbery
in exchange for the Norman leaders Richard of Capua and Robert Guiscard
becoming his feudal vassals and swearing to support the Papacy. In addition,
Robert Guiscard specifically promised: “If you or your successors die before
me, I will help to enforce the dominant wishes of the Cardinals and of the
Roman clergy and laity in order that a pope may be chosen and established to
the honour of St. Peter.”[56]
Guiscard was as good as his word. “Every stage in the Norman progress
entailed from the first a practical extension of papal power in the countries
which were being subjected to the Normans."[57] “Thus
after 1059 the Norman conquests were made progressively to subserve the
restoration of the Latin rite and the extension of papal jurisdiction in southern
Italy"[58]
- at the expense both of the Byzantines and of the German Emperor, Henry IV,
who was at that time still a child and therefore unable to react to the assault
on his position.
Even before this, the Papacy had begun to forge close bonds with the
Normans in their homeland in Northern France, whence the papal assault on that
other fortress of old-style Orthodox Autocracy, England, would soon be
launched. Thus in 1055, the year after Duke William of Normandy seized
effective control of his duchy by defeating a coalition led by his lord, King
Henry I of France, the old-fashioned (that is, Orthodox) Archbishop Mauger was
deposed to make way for the more forward-looking Maurilius. He introduced “a
new and extraneous element”[59] – that
is, an element more in keeping with the ideals of the heretical, “reformed
papacy” – into the Norman Church.
Then, in 1059, papal sanction for the marriage between Duke William and
Matilda of Flanders, which had been withheld by Leo IX, was finally obtained,
opening the way for full co-operation between the Normans and the Pope.
Finally, William supported the candidacy of Alexander II to the throne as
against that of Honorius II, who was supported by the German Empress Agnes.[60] The
Pope now owed a debt of gratitude to the Normans which they were soon to call
in…
By the 1060s, then, there were only two
powers in the West that stood in the way of the complete triumph of the crude,
militaristic ethos of feudalism: the Orthodox autocracies of England and
Germany. By the end of the century both powers had been brought low – England
by military conquest and its transformation into a single feudal fief at the
hands of the Normans, and Germany by cunning dialectic and the fear of
excommunication by the Pope.
The weakness of the English consisted in
the fact that in their whole history there was not a single instance of
struggle with Rome over doctrinal (as opposed to canonical or administrative)
matters, nor any appeal by the English Church to the Eastern Churches against
the Pope; so that there were no clear indications as to how a struggle between
the King and the Pope, or the local Church and the Pope, would end…[61]
It is neither the aim of the present writer, nor would it be within his
competence, to give a detailed political, military or social history of the
period. With regard to most of the major issues disputed by historians, he has
simply adopted, without detailed argument, what seems to him to be the most
plausible version of events. Thus with regard to King Edward’s alleged bequest
of his kingdom to William of Normandy, he has adopted the position taken by Ian
Walker[62]; while
with regard to the Pope’s involvement in the invasion, he has followed David
Douglas[63], Frank
Barlow[64], David
Howarth[65] and
Frank McLynn[66].
The main aim of the present work is
twofold: first, to provide a spiritual
(as opposed to a political or social) history of the decline and fall of
Orthodox England, and secondly, to collect material relevant to the hoped-for
future glorification of the great spiritual heroes of the period – notably King
Edward the Confessor and Martyr-King Harold – in the Orthodox Church. The
writer feels that such an undertaking is especially timely now that the relics
of Martyr-King Harold have been discovered and identified through the
invaluable research carried out by John Pollock.[67] It is
this spiritual and hagiographical nature of the present work that explains why
the writer has made much more extensive use of the hagiographical materials
available from the period than most modern researchers into the period, with
their bias against anything that smacks of the miraculous.[68]
Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers,
Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us! Amen.
East
House, Beech Hill, Mayford, Woking, Surrey, England.
May
26 / June 8, 2004.
St.
Augustine, Archbishop of Canterbury.
The
Venerable Bede of Jarrow.
1. SAINT EDWARD THE
CONFESSOR (1043-1066)
The holy King Edward was born near the beginning of the eleventh
century. His father was the English King Ethelred, and his mother – the Norman
princess Emma. When Queen Emma was pregnant with him, “all of the men of the
country,” as his earliest, anonymous biographer records, “took an oath that if
a man child should come forth as the fruit of her labours, they would await in
him their lord and king who would rule over the whole race of the English.”[69]
In spite of this promise, Edward’s claim to the throne was laid aside in
favour of those of Ethelred’s six sons by an earlier marriage – in particular,
Edmund Ironside, who became king in 1015 and was killed in the same year, and
the Danish King Canute’s sons by Elgiva of Northampton (Harold I) and Queen
Emma (Hardacanute). It must therefore have seemed a great miracle to his
contemporaries that Edward should finally, when already in middle age, have
succeeded to the throne of his fathers, reigning in peace for another
twenty-four years. It must have seemed, moreover, that God was taking pity on
His people again after the heavy chastisement of the Danish yoke (1016-1042);
for, as the anonymous biographer writes, “just as a father, after chastising
his children, is a peace with them again, shows himself a soothing comforter,
so God’s loving kindness, sparing the English after the heavy weight of his
rebuke, showed them a flower preserved from the root of their ancient kings,
and both gave them the strength and fired their minds to seek this flower for
the kingdom as well as for their salvation.”[70]
When
Edward was still in his cradle, he was brought to the monastery of Ely by his
parents, “and was offered,” according to the monastery’s chronicler, “above the
holy altar… Moreover, as the elders of the church who were present and saw it
used to tell, he was brought up there in the monastery with the boys for a long
time, learning the psalms and hymns of the Lord with them.”[71]
Some have doubted whether an English king could have been dedicated his
son to a life of monastic chastity in this way. But he was not regarded as the
immediate heir: in the charters of the latter period of Ethelred’s reign, his
name is added at the bottom of the list of princes.[72]
Moreover, so close were the links between the English royal family and the
monasteries that both Kings Edgar and Edward the Martyr were brought up by
monks, while the daughters of Kings Alfred and Edward the Elder, and the sister
of Edward the Martyr, were dedicated as nuns. It is therefore not impossible
that the future King Edward was brought up by monks, at least until the royal
family was forced to flee to Normandy in 1013. And his later virginal life,
even in marriage, is certainly not inconsistent with a vow made by his parents
when he was only a child.
The fruits of the boy’s pious upbringing were soon evident. On February
2, 1014, King Swein of Denmark was miraculously killed by St. Edmund while he
was ravaging East Anglia.[73] This
event was made known by revelation to Prince Edward, although he was only a boy
of twelve at the time.[74]
But when Edward had this revelation, his father King Ethelred and the
whole of the royal family were in exile in Normandy, expelled by their
subjects, who had been exasperated by his failed policies against the Danes,
and especially by the fruitless payment of ever larger amounts of tax, the Danegeld.
Archbishop Wulfstan of York saw in this and other betrayals the root cause of
the people’s failure to repel the pagan Danes: “For there are here in the land
great disloyalties towards God and towards the state, and there are also many
here in the country who are betrayers of their lords in various ways. And the
greatest betrayal in the world of one’s lord is that a man betray his lord’s
soul; and it is also a very great betrayal of one’s lord in the world, that a
man should plot against his lord’s life or, living, drive him from the land;
and both have happened in this country. They plotted against Edward [the
Martyr] and then killed him… Many are forsworn and greatly perjured, and
pledges are broken over and again; and it is evident in this nation that the
wrath of God violently oppresses us…”[75]
The English repented and recalled their king from exile. However, on
April 23, 1016, he died “after a life of much hardship and many difficulties.
Then, after his death, all the councillors of England chose Edmund [Ironside,
his eldest son by his first wife] as king, and he defended his kingdom
valiantly during his lifetime.”[76]
The seven short months of Edmund’s reign are among the most dramatic in
English history, matched only by the nine months of Harold Godwinson’s in 1066.
The pattern of events, moreover, was very similar to that later drama: great
extremes of heroism and treachery, culminating in the crucifixion of a
conquered country. Thus immediately after the witan proclaimed Edmund
king in London, the bishops and chief men of Wessex assembled and unanimously
elected Canute, the son of King Swein, as king. Meeting him at Southampton,
writes Florence of Worcester, “they repudiated and renounced in his presence
all the race of Ethelred, and concluded peace with him, swearing loyalty to
him, and he also swore to them that he would be a loyal lord to them in affairs
of Church and state.”[77]
Undeterred by this treachery to the ancient royal dynasty that had served
England so well, King Edmund raised no less than five armies against the Danes,
and was finally killed, on November 30, not by a Dane, but by the ubiquitous
traitor of his father’s reign. He was buried beside his grandfather, King Edgar
the Peaceable, at Glastonbury. And so the whole of England passed into the
hands of Canute the Dane…
The young Prince Edward, lover of monasticism though he was, had shown
great valour as a warrior in this period. Thus we read in a Scandinavian source
that, during a battle for London between the English and the Danes, “Thorkel
the Tall had taken the one part of the town; many of his host had fallen there.
Then Earl Thorkel the Tall went to King Canute to win the other part of the
town, and as luck would have it, just saved his life, for Edward, King
Ethelred’s son, struck at that time a blow which men have held in memory in
after days. Thorkel thrust Canute off his horse, but Edward smote asunder the
saddle and the horse’s back. After that, however, the brothers had to take to
flight, and Canute exulted in his victory, and thanked King Olaf for his help.”[78]
Canute was to become an exemplary defender of the Church[79]; but at
the beginning of his reign he acted like the inveterate pagan that he still
was, inflicting the last and largest ever Danegeld tax on the nation,
while disposing of all his possible political opponents. Thus Prince Edwy, St.
Edward’s half-brother, was killed, while his brothers Edward and Edmund were
sent “to the king of the Swedes to be killed.”[80] The
Swedish king, however, was a Christian, baptised by the English missionary
bishop St. Sigfrid. So he would not acquiesce in Canute’s demand, in spite of
the treaty he had with him. Instead, “he sent them to the king of the
Hungarians, Solomon by name, to be preserved and brought up there…”[81]
To avoid the same fate, St. Edward and his brother Alfred were forced to
return to Normandy.
Soon the princes had another shock. In July, 1017 King Canute married
Emma, King Ethelred’s widow. To her sons in exile in Normandy it must have come
as a shock that their mother should marry the conqueror of their country and
the murderer of their brothers, while letting them languish alone in exile.
This may explain, at least in part, the difficult relations King Edward had
with his mother at the beginning of his reign.
Now on the death of King Canute, the throne of England passed to his son
by Elgiva of Northampton, Harold, while Denmark was ruled by his son by Queen
Emma, Hardacanute. Initially, Emma hoped that her son Hardacanute would become
king; and, supported by the powerful Earl Godwin of Wessex, she even had coins
struck in Hardacanute’s name at her base in Winchester, while the coins in
currency north of the Thames bore Harold’s name. However, when it became clear
that he was not going to come to England from Denmark, she turned to her sons
in Normandy. She wrote to them to leave Normandy and join her at Winchester.[82]
Now Edward, as David Raraty says, “never regarded either Harthacnut or
Harold as legitimate rulers, but had himself begun to use the royal style in
Normandy, on Mont-St-Michel and Fécamp charters as early as the reign of
Duke Robert.”[83]
So he had no hesitation in responding to his mother’s call. However, he was
forced to return after a battle in the Southampton area.
Then came his brother Alfred. The murder of Prince Alfred – probably by
Emma’s former ally Earl Godwin at King Harold’s instigation – was, as we have
seen, one of the excuses William of Normandy used for the invasion of 1066. The
Abingdon manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (c. 1050) records:
“Godwin prevented him [Alfred], and placed him in captivity, dispersing his
followers besides, killing some in various ways. Some were sold for money, some
cruelly murdered, some put in chains, some blinded, some mutilated and some
scalped. No more horrible deed was done in this land after the Danes came and
made peace with us.”[84] And in
another chronicle we read that in 1040 Godwin admitted to the murder, but swore
to King Hardacanute and all the chief men of the land “that it was not by his
counsel or his will that his brother was blinded, but that his lord King Harold
had ordered him to do what he did.”[85]
Prince Alfred actually died from his wounds in the monastery of Ely,
that great fortress of Anglo-Saxon Orthodoxy. The body was buried with great
honour in the southern porch of the west end of the church, where “wondrously
beautiful visions of lights often occur”, wrote the monastery chronicle. And
there were “many miracles…, as people report who even declare most repeatedly
that they have seen them.”[86]
The years which followed Prince Alfred’s murder, until his brother
Edward ascended the throne, were among the most wretched in English Orthodox
history. The Danish rule, which had been tolerable under Canute, now became an
oppressive yoke. In 1038 Archbishop Athelnoth “the Good” died, followed, seven
days later, by Bishop Athelric of Selsey: “for he had besought God that he
should not live long in this world after the death of his most beloved father,
Athelnoth.”[87]
In the next two years these losses were compounded by the deaths of Bishops
Alfric of Elmham, Beorhtheah of Worcester, Beorhtmaer of Lichfield and Edmund
of Durham, who were succeeded by men of much lower spiritual stature. Thus to
York came Alfric Puttoc, or the Hawk, who was angry when, in 1038, the vacant
see of Worcester was not also given to him, as it had been, by an exceptional
measure, to two of his predecessors. Instead the king gave it to a favourite of
Godwin’s, Lifing of Crediton, who now held three sees simultaneously. Nor was
this the only case of sees held in plurality or through simony. Elmham was
given to a king’s chaplain, Stigand (later archbishop of Canterbury). “But he
was afterwards ejected, and Grimcetel was elected for gold, and held then two
dioceses.”[88]
However, as the spiritual atmosphere darkened, a revelation was given to
one of the last of the holy bishops – Brihtwald of Ramsbury. He was once
weeping over the plight of the people, “and asked,” records King Edward’s
anonymous biographer, “that God’s mercy should look favourably upon them. At
that time he passed the watches of his weeping in the monastery of Glastonbury,
and weary after so many tears the man of God fell asleep. When lo! In the Holy
of Holies he saw the blessed Peter, the first of the Apostles, consecrate the
image of a seemly man as king, mark out for him a life of chastity, and set the
years of his reign by a fixed reckoning of his life. And when the king even at
this juncture asked him of the generations to come who would reign in the
kingdom, Peter answered, ‘The kingdom of the English is of God; and after you
he has already provided a king according to His will.’”[89]
The “seemly man” marked out for a life of chastity was King Edward. And
the prophecy began to be fulfilled when King Harold’s successor Hardacanute
died suddenly while drinking at a marriage feast in 1042. Supported by the most
powerful man in the realm, Earl Godwin, Prince Edward was recalled from exile.
And so Edward was consecrated king of England in London at Pascha, 1043.
“Great was the joy that the English had,” writes an early French chronicler.
“For the Danes had held them cheap, and often humiliated them. If a hundred of
them met a single Dane, it would go badly for them if they did not bow to him.
And if they met upon a bridge, they waited; it went badly for them if they
moved before the Dane had passed. As they passed, they made obeisance, and
whoever failed to do this was shamefully beaten if caught. So cheap were the
English held. So much did the Danes insult them.”[90]
The long years of exile in Normandy seem to have wrought a profound
change in the former fiery warrior of London bridge. He was a man, writes
William of Malmesbury, “from the simplicity of his manners, little calculated
to govern, but devoted to God, and in consequence directed by Him; for while he
continued to reign, there arose no popular commotions which were not immediately
quelled. There was no foreign war; all was calm and peaceable, both at home and
abroad, which is the more an object of wonder, because he conducted himself so
mildly that he would not even utter a word of reproach to the meannest person….
In the meantime, the regard which his subjects entertained for him was extreme,
as was also the fear of foreigners; for God assisted his simplicity, that he
might be feared who knew not how to be angry.”[91]
And yet the inner fire was still there, though well controlled. “If some
cause aroused his temper,” writes William of Malmesbury, “he seemed terrible as
a lion, but he never revealed his anger by railing. To all petitioners he would
either grant graciously or graciously deny, so that his gracious denial seemed
the highest generosity. In public he carried himself as a true king and lord;
in private with his courtiers as one of them, but with royal dignity
unimpaired. He entrusted the cause of God to his bishops and to men skilled in
canon law, warning them to act according to the case, and he ordered his
secular judges, princes and palace lawyers to distinguish equitably, so that,
on the one hand, righteousness might have royal support, and, on the other,
evil, when it appeared, its just condemnation. This good king abrogated bad
laws, with his witan [parliament] established good ones, and filled with
joy all that Britain over which by the grace of God and hereditary right he
ruled.”[92]
Indeed, in later centuries, when the English groaned under the exactions
of their Norman kings, they appealed for a return to the just laws of the good
King Edward.
“In the exaction of taxes he was sparing, as he abominated the insolence
of collectors: in eating and drinking he was devoid of the addiction to
pleasure which his state allowed: on the more solemn festivals, though dressed
in robes interwoven with gold, which the queen had most splendidly embroidered,
yet still he had such forbearance as to be sufficiently majestic, without being
haughty; considering in such matters rather the bounty of God than the pomp of
the world. There was one secular enjoyment in which he chiefly delighted; which
was hunting with fleet hounds, whose baying the woods he used with pleasure to
encourage: and again, the flying those birds, whose nature it is to prey on
their kindred species. In these exercises, after hearing Divine service in the
morning, he employed himself whole days. In other respects he was a man by
choice devoted to God, and lived the life of an angel in the administration of
his kingdom: to the poor and to the stranger, more especially foreigners, and
men of religious order, he was kind in invitation, munificent in his presents,
and constantly exciting the monks of his own country to imitate their holiness.
He was of middle height; his beard and hair swan-white; his countenance florid;
fair throughout his whole person; and his form of admirable proportion.”[93]
Moreover, according to the anonymous biographer, who learned it “from
the joint testimony of good and fitting men”, God glorified King Edward with
the gift of miracles.
“A certain young woman, already provided with a husband, but gladdened
with no fruits of the marriage, had an infection of the throat and of those
parts under the jaw which.. are called glands. These had so disfigured her face
with an evil smelling disease that she could scarcely speak to anyone without
great embarrassment. She was informed in a dream that if she were washed in
water by King Edward she would be cured of this most troublesome pox. She then,
with the certainty of faith, revealed the dream’s instructions. And when the
king heard of it, he did not disdain to help the weaker sex, for he had the
sweetest nature, and was always charming to all suitors. A dish of water was
brought; the king dipped in his hand; and with the tips of his fingers he
anointed the face of the young woman and the places infected with the disease.
He repeated this action several times, now and then making the sign of the
Cross. And believe in wonder one about to relate wonders! The diseased parts
that had been treated by the smearing of the king softened and separated from
the skin; and, with the pressure of the hand, worms together with pus and blood
came out of various holes. Again the king kneaded with his holy hand and drew
out the pus. Nor did he shrink from the stench of the sick woman until with his
healing hand he had brought out all that noxious disease. Then he ordered her
to be fed daily at the royal expense until she could be fully restored to
health. And hardly had she been at court a week, when, all foulness washed
away, the grace of God moulded her with beauty. And she, who formerly through
this or some other sickness had been barren, in that year became pregnant by the
same husband, and lived henceforth happily enough with all around her. Although
this seems new and strange to us, the Franks aver that Edward had done this
often as a youth when he was in Neustria, now known as Normandy.
“Likewise a certain blind man was going about claiming that he had been
advised in sleep, that if his blind face were washed in the water with which
the king rinsed his hands, he would both overcome the blindness and restore his
lost sight. When Edward heard of this from his privy councillors, at first he
contradicted and blamed them for believing it to be true. But when they
demanded urgently that he should not resist God’s will, at length he
courteously agreed. It was then, as they say for certain, the day of the vigil
of the festival of All Saints, when the king, having made his morning
ablutions, entered the chapel. Meanwhile his servants washed the blind man with
the same water, and conducted him after the king into the house of prayer. When
the king left after the canonical hours had been solemnly sung in honour of all
the saints, word was brought to him by his courtiers that he who was blind now
saw. The king, therefore, with pious curiosity, came unto him in the chapel,
and, calling him to him, inquired whether he could indeed see. This the man
began to affirm and gave thanks to God. To test the truth of his words,
however, the king, as pure as a dove, stretched forth the palm of his hand, and
asked for an account of his action. ‘You stretch out your hand, oh my lord
king,’ the man replied. Once more the king, grasping his forefinger and middle
finger like a pair of horns before the man’s eyes, asked what he did. And the
man answered what he saw. Also, a third time, the king, grasped his beard in
his hand, again asked him what he did. And the man furnished correctly the
information that he sought. Then the king considered that he had been
sufficiently examined, and went forward for a little to pray; and, having
thrice bowed his knee before the altar, he gave thanks to God and entrusted the
man to his servants to be maintained as long as he lived at the royal charge.
The man lived for a long time at court, a witness to the virtue he had received
by the glory of God.”[94]
“Again,” writes Osbert of Clare, “it was revealed by a sure vision to a
man who had been completely blind for three years, and who sprang from the
citizens of Lincoln town, that he would recover the sight of both eyes from..
Edward. For he was ordered to be washed in the water poured on the king’s
hands, and so be freed at length from the darkness of his former blindness. The
blind man hastened quickly to court, and asked the king’ servants to grant him
that which he had not had for a long time. And so, when his face had been
washed in the same way as the previous blind man, he was restored to health,
and the renewed glory of his former condition was given back to him. There
still survives to this day a witness who saw him long ago as a blind man and
afterwards knew him clear-sighted, with the darkness dispelled.
“The glorious king ordered a royal palace to
be built at Brill, whereupon a great crowd of rustics poured into the wood with
axes. It was summer time, when men, after they have filled their bellies, are
quick to rest, and then, in the afternoon, hasten back more eagerly to work.
Among the other labourers on the royal building was a young man named Wulfwi,
who, from his greediness for wheat, was surnamed ‘Spillecorn’. He rose from
sleep having lost his sight, and remained blind for nineteen years. At length
God’s mercy looked upon him, and he who had lacked sight for so long a time
regained it through a heavenly visitation. A citizen’s wife approached this man
who laboured under so wondrous a disability, and told him in clear words what
she had learned about him in a vision. ‘Dear man,’ she said, ‘visit eighty
churches, bare-footed and wearing only woollen clothes; and thus you will
experience the merit of the saints, whose patronage you seek with faith, in the
purging of your blindness; but the privilege is reserved especially to St.
Edward the king that the water in which he washes his hands should restore to
you the light of your eyes.’ No sluggard after hearing this, the visited that
number of churches, and finally he put his case to the king’s chamberlains.
These made no haste to seek out the king and acquaint him with the poor man’s
requirements. ‘For the poor man is always despised’; and when money runs out
the name and fruits of friendship are wont to perish. The mendicant, however,
battered diligently at the door of God’s mercy, in order to recover the sight
of his eyes through.. Edward the king. At length, worn out by the insistence of
the blind man, a chamberlain went straight to the prince and related from
beginning to end the vision which had been told the poor man. ‘Mother of God,’
said the king, ‘my Lady and ever virgin Mary, stand witness that I shall be
exalted beyond measure [‘I shall be very grateful’, according to another
version] if God should work through me that of which the vision told.’ Then the
king dipped his fingers in the liquid element and mercifully touched the
sightless eyes. And lo! Blood poured copiously through the hands of the prince.
The man, cured of his blindness, cried out, and, filled with a great joy,
exclaimed, ‘I see, O king, your bright countenance. I see the gracious face of
life. God has given me light, and Edward the anointed.’ The man of God,
contemplating this deed, gave thanks to Almighty God, by Whose mercy a day of
brightness had dawned for the blind man. This miracle was performed by the
dispensation of the Lord, just as it had once been revealed to him by the
woman’s vision, at the royal house called Windsor… To the blind man
miraculously made to see, he entrusted the custody of his chief palace for the
term of his whole life.
“… When one of the courtiers had witnessed this great miracle, in which
a blind man was freed from darkness by the king, he endeavoured reverently to
steal what remained of the king’s washing water. Having carried the water out
of doors, he came upon four beggars, of whom three were burdened with the loss
of their eyes, and on the fourth only one eye was bright. But the courtier, a
man of faith, washed their blindness, and the power of God restored to them, in
the court of the great king, the seven lost eyes.”[95]
The only serious blot on the life of King Edward, according to his
biographers, was his relationship with his mother, Queen Emma – although, as we
shall see, he repented of his harshness towards her. In 1043, the king, with
Earls Godwin, Leofric and Siward, came to Winchester and imprisoned her. Then,
according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, they “deprived her of all her
innumerable treasures, because she had been too strict with the king, her son,
in that she had done less for him than he wished, both before his accession and
afterwards…”[96]
It seems that she was also accused of plotting with King Magnus of Norway.
However, as Frank Barlow writes, “Emma, when reduced to poverty and
despair, had a dream in which [St. Mildred] promised to help her because she,
with Cnut, had patronized the translation of St. Mildred from Thanet to St.
Augustine’s, Canterbury. Whereupon Emma borrowed 20s., sent it by means of her
thegn [retainer], Aethelweard Speaka, to Abbot Aelfstan of St. Augustine’s,
and, miraculously, the king’s heart was changed. Edward ‘felt shame for the
injury he had done her, the son acknowledged the mother, he restored her to her
former dignity and he who had proclaimed her guilty begged her pardon.’
Everything she had possessed was restored to her; her accusers and despoilers
were confounded.”[97]
Nor is this the only time that the queen was exonerated through the
intercessions of the saints. Thus Canon Busby writes: “She had been accused of
unchastity in association with Bishop Alwyn of Winchester. In order to prove
her innocence she was obliged to undergo the ordeal of walking over nine
red-hot ploughshares placed on the pavement of the nave of the Cathedral. The
Cathedral annalist says: ‘The news was spread throughout the Kingdom that the
Queen was to undergo this ordeal; and such was the throng of people who flocked
to Winchester, that so vast a concourse on one day was never seen before. The
King himself, Saint Edward, came to Winchester; nor did a single noble of the
Kingdom absent himself, except Archbishop Robert, who feigned illness and,
being inimical to the Queen, had poisoned the King’s mind against her, so that
if her innocence were proved he might be able to make his escape without
difficulty. The pavement of the church being swept, there was placed upon it
nine red-hot ploughshares, over which a short prayer was said, and then the
Queen’s shoes and stockings were drawn off, and laying aside her mantle and
putting on her veil, with her garments girded closely round round her, between
two bishops, on either hand, she was conducted to the torture. The bishops who
led her wept, and, though they were more terrified than she was, they
encouraged her not to be afraid. All persons who were in the church wept and
there was a general exclamation “O Saint Swithun, Saint Swithun, help her!” The
people cried with great vehemence that Saint Swithun must hasten to the rescue.
The Queen prayed: St. Swithun, rescue me from the fire that is prepared for me.
Then followed a miracle. Guided by the Bishops she walked over the red-hot
ploughshares, she felt neither the naked iron nor the fire.’”[98]
Edward’s suspicions of his mother may have been the result of her close
links with Earl Godwin of Wessex, the murderer of his brother Prince Alfred.
The king, as we have seen, owed the smoothness of his accession to the throne
in large part to the support of Godwin, and it was probably in gratitude for
this support that he had agreed to marry his daughter Edith. However, he had
never really lost his distrust for the powerful earl, and in 1051 the latent
tensions between the two men flared into open conflict.
The king had promoted to the see of Canterbury a Norman, Bishop Robert
of London, in preference to Godwin’s candidate (and relative), the Canterbury
monk Alfric. The new archbishop quarrelled with Godwin, accusing him of
encroaching on church lands in the Canterbury diocese. Then, in September,
Count Eustace of Boulogne, the king’s brother-in-law, came to Dover with a
small detachment of men. A riot between the Frenchmen and Count Eustace’s men
ensued, in which several people were killed. Godwin took the side of the men of
Dover, which was in his earldom, and, having with his sons assembled a large
military force, demanded of the king that he give up Count Eustace and his
companions. However, the king, supported by the forces of Earls Siward, Leofric
and Ralph, refused.
Through the mediation of Earl Leofric, a military confrontation was
avoided, and it was agreed that the king and Godwin should meet in London. But
before they could meet, Godwin, seeing that his support was waning, fled. Then
the king and the witan ordered the banishment of him and his five sons.
Moreover, the king renounced his queen, Godwin’s daughter, and she retired to
the convent of Wherwell.
After Godwin’s expulsion, the earldom of his eldest son Swein was given
to Earl Odda, and it looked for a time as if King Edward would really be able
to rule his kingdom through subordinates whom he trusted. But, even in exile,
Godwin’s power was still great. “If any Englishman had been told that events
would take this turn,” wrote the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, he would have
been very surprised, for Godwin had risen to such great eminence as if he ruled
the king and all England.”[99]
So the next year Godwin attempted to win back his former position by
force. Helped by his sons Harold and Leofwine, who had levied troops in Ireland
and landed in the West Country, he marched on London. Once again, a military
confrontation was avoided, and both sides disbanded their troops. But this time
the advantage was with Godwin, and the king fully restored to him and his sons,
except Swein, all the honours they had forfeited.[100] The
king took back his queen, while Archbishop Robert, mounting a horse and
dropping his pallium in the process, fled to the continent. Peace was
restored, but in circumstances so detrimental to the king’s authority, and
accompanied by the fickleness of such a large part of the people, that the
omens for the future looked grim.
In the very year of Godwin’s rebellion, 1052, a sign was manifested
signifying the holiness of the royal line of Wessex of which King Edward was
the heir, and the evil of those who would attempt to contest its authority. For
the body of Edward’s grandfather, King Edgar the Peaceable, was found to be
incorrupt by Abbot Ailward of Glastonbury. Moreover, the irreverence with which
the holy body was handled indicated how irreverently the royal authority of St.
Edward was soon to be treated.
“For when,” writes William of Malmesbury, “the receptacle which he had
prepared seemed too small to admit the body, he profaned the royal corpse by
cutting it. When the blood immediately gushed out in torrents, shaking the
hearts of the bystanders with horror. In consequence his royal remains were
placed upon the altar in a shrine, which he had himself given to this church,
with the head of St. Apollinaris and the relics of the Martyr Vincent; which,
having purchased at great price, he had added to the beauty of the house of
God. The violator of the sacred body presently became distracted; and, not long
after, as he was going out of the church, he met his death by a broken neck.
But the display of royal authority did not cease with that: it proceeded
further, a blind lunatic being cured there…”[101]
At about the same time the relics of the Martyr-King Edmund of East
Anglia were uncovered and found to be incorrupt by Abbot Leoftsan of Bury St.
Edmund’s, which further helped to demonstrate the holiness of the royal rank
that Godwin had so dishonoured by his actions.[102]
In 1053, however, when he was at the height of his power, Godwin himself
died in dramatic circumstances that suggested Divine retribution. He choked on
a piece of bread after swearing to the king: “Let God Who knows all things be
my judge! May this crust of bread which I hold in my hand pass through my
throat and leave me unharmed to show that I was innocent of your brother’s
death!”[103]
“Vengeance is Mine, I will repay, saith the Lord!”
We now come to the affair of Archbishop Stigand, which was to have such
fatal consequences for England. As we have seen, in 1052 Archbishop Robert fled
to the continent, leaving his pallium behind. With the acquiescence of
the king, but in face of the furious opposition of successive popes, Bishop
Stigand of Winchester was allowed to take up the pallium and serve as
archbishop in Robert’s place. The question is: was he a true archbishop? And:
if so, could the English Church be said to have been under the pope’s
jurisdiction during his archbishopric, that is, from 1052?
The fact that Stigand had not received his pallium from the pope
may not have seemed important; for a generation before both Archbishop Wulfstan
of York and King Canute had protested against the supposed necessity of English
bishops’ travelling the long and difficult journey to Rome for the pallium.
Moreover, it was an historical fact that before 735 no English archbishop had
done this. But Archbishop Robert was still alive and had not been formally
deposed…
Frank Barlow has shed some light on this problem. “Three aspects of the
story need investigation,” he writes. “Was England aware of Stigand’s
incapacity as archbishop, of his suspension from his episcopal office, and of
his excommunication?
“There is no doubt that during Edward’s reign Stigand was not recognised
as an archbishop except in 1058 after the receipt of his pallium [which,
however, he received from an “anti-pope”, Benedict X, thus forming the basis
for another of the charges that the papal legates levelled against him in the
council of 1070]. Until that year he consecrated no bishop. By 1061, when two
bishops went to Rome for consecration, his incapacity was again notorious. The
Normans, too, were either aware of the position or learned it in England.
William, who needed traditional and legitimate coronation, must have
disregarded Stigand with the greatest reluctance. But from 1067 to 1070 he
seems to have been accorded full metropolitan respect by the Normans.
Expediency or William’s arbitrariness may have been the cause.
“On the other hand, there is no evidence that anyone regarded Stigand as
suspended from his episcopal office. He appears in all the witness-lists to
‘royal’ diplomas. He is known to have blessed abbots in 1061, 1065, and 1066…
There is no strictly contemporary evidence that he was at any time shunned by
the English kings, prelates, or laity…”[104]
The
whole matter is greatly complicated, as we have seen, by the fact that the
Roman papacy was anathematised by the Orthodox Church of the East in 1054,
which meant that the anathemas that the Popes launched against Stigand from
that time were null and void. Thus even if we agree that Stigand’s position was
strictly uncanonical, it must also be admitted that it was providential, in
that it meant a loosening of the ties between England and Rome at precisely the
moment when the latter was falling into heresy and schism. Stigand had the
other, not inconsiderable advantage that he was accepted by both sides in the
near-civil war that had only just come to an end; so he could serve as a
peacemaker between the king and Godwin’s faction.
King Edward’s decision to support Stigand as against his friend
Archbishop Robert and the pope himself may seem surprising in view of his close
co-operation with Pope Leo in his reforming councils since 1049.[105] It may
be that he thought that the unity of the English Church and nation at this
critical hour was the overriding priority – and if, so then in view of what
happened after his death, we must believe that he was right. It was at this
point that the king’s reputation for holiness may have played a critical part
in saving his nation; for however much the popes fulminated against the
“schismatic” Stigand, they never said a word against King Edward, and were
forced to wait until after his death before launching an anti-English crusade…
The traditionally turbulent Anglo-Danish North had been remarkably quiet
during Godwin’s rebellion. This had much to do, no doubt, with the firm hand of
Earl Siward of Northumbria. However, in 1053 Earl Siward died and was buried in
the church which he had dedicated to St. Olaf outside York. Since his son had
been killed in a battle against King Macbeth of Scotland[106], he
was succeeded by one of Godwin’s sons, Tostig. Then, in 1057, the good Earls
Leofric and Odda, who had been the foremost defenders of the Church in the Midlands,
also died.[107]
England’s spiritual heart was beating more faintly now; and from now on
pressure on the sickly organism from without – specifically, from Rome – began
to increase. Thus it was at about this time that one of the bishops-elect, Walter
of Hereford, decided to go to Rome to be consecrated. If, as seems likely, he
was trying to avoid the “schismatic” Archbishop Stigand, then he avoided
Stigand only to fall into the hands of the much more surely schismatic Pope
Nicholas![108]
In 1061 this visit was followed by that of the archbishop-elect of York,
Aldred, who went to Rome for his pallium in the company of Earl Tostig
of Northumbria and several other English nobles. But “he found Pope Nicholas at
first no friend to his desires,” writes William of Malmesbury, “for Aldred was
not minded to give up [the diocese of] Worcester. Aldred was so bound by ties
of love to Worcester that it was dearer to him than the dignity of the
archbishopric. So, after long disputation, Aldred returned homeward and came to
Sutri. Earl Tostig who was with him was threatening that for this [refusal by
the pope] there would be no more paying of Peter’s Pence from England.”
However, in the course of their journey home, Aldred and Tostig “were
attacked by robbers and stripped, to the great horror of beholders, and made
their way back to Rome. Their sufferings so far melted the rigour of the
apostolic see, that Aldred received the pallium of York, having pledged
himself to resign Worcester provided that he could find a better priest in the
diocese to put in his place.”[109]
It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if Aldred had
returned to England without the pallium. It is quite possible that,
following the example of Stigand, and with King Edward’s support, he would have
assumed the archbishopric anyway, thus placing both of England’s metropolitan
sees in schism from Rome. But the robbers – and Pope Nicholas’ sense of realpolitik
– saved the day for Rome.
And to reinforce his authority in England, the pope now sent two
cardinals with Aldred on his journey home – this was the first papal legation
to England since the council of Chelsea in 787. They stayed with Prior Wulfstan
at Worcester, and, impressed by his piety, suggested him for the bishopric of
Worcester. “By these praises,” we read in Wulfstan’s life by William of
Malmesbury, “they aroused the goodwill of King Edward in whom the trafficker in
benefices and the covetous man never found anything to forward their designs.
The Archbishops of Canterbury and York gave their support to the Cardinals, the
one of kindness, the other of knowledge; both by their sentence. With them in
praising Wulfstan were the Earls Harold and Elfgar, men more famed for warlike
courage than for religion. They bestirred themselves vigorously in his cause,
sending mounted messengers on Wulfstan’s behalf, who rode many miles in little
time to hasten on the matter. So [Wulfstan] was presented to the Court, and
bidden to take upon him the office of Bishop. He earnestly withstood them,
crying out that he was unequal to so great a charge, while all men cried that
he was equal to it. So entirely was the whole people agreed, that it were not
wrong to say that in all those bodies there was, concerning this matter, but
one mind. But, to be brief, the cardinals and archbishops would have lost their
labour, had they not pleaded against his unwillingness the duty of obeying the
Pope. To that plea he must needs yield… So King Edward well and truly invested
Wulfstan with the Bishopric of Worcester… Not long after he was consecrated at
York by [Archbishop Aldred]: because Stigand of Canterbury was under the Pope’s
interdict.”[110]
The new Bishop Wulfstan was the one Englishman, besides the king
himself, who, by the reputation of his asceticism and miracle-working, and the
power of his preaching, could have inspired his countrymen to rebel against the
now schismatical papacy if he had chosen to do so. But it may be wondered
whether the legates’ choice of Wulfstan for the bishopric (although they did
not consecrate him) made him, so to speak, “the pope’s man” at this time. As we
shall see later, he served his country well in 1066 when he galvanised support
in the North for the new King Harold; but after 1066 he sadly succumbed to the
new Norman-papist regime.
Much depended now on the character of Wulfstan’s close friend, Earl
Harold, the new head of the Godwin clan and the most powerful man in England
after the king. We have seen him supporting his father in rebellion against the
king in 1051; but this may have been the result of family pressure rather than
proof of a rebellious disposition. From 1052 he appears as completely loyal to
the king, even as against the interests of his brothers; and the king appears
to have trusted him in a way he never trusted his father. Unlike his father, he
gave generously to the Church. And his religious feelings, already in evidence
through his love for Bishop Wulfstan, were further stimulated by his healing
through a holy relic which had been revealed some years earlier and had passed
into the possession of his earldom.[111]
King Edward was childless; so the question of who should succeed him
became more pressing as he grew older. The king and his witan thought of
Prince Edward, the son of King Edmund Ironside and the king’s own nephew. After
the Danish conquest of England in 1016, Edward and his family had gone into
exile, first in Ladoga[112] and
Kiev in Russia, and then in Hungary. When they heard that he was alive, the
English immediately sent an embassy headed by Bishop Aldred to the German
Emperor Henry III in order to secure the prince’s return from Hungary. Aldred
failed because of Henry’s conflict with Hungary; but on the death of the
emperor in 1056, the king tried again, sending, probably, Earl Harold, to
perform this difficult and important task.
This time the mission was successful; but shortly after his arrival in
England on August 31, 1057, Prince Edward died. Great was the sorrow of the
English people, who suspected foul play: "We do not know for what reason
it was so arranged that he could not see his kinsman, King Edward", said
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle pointedly.[113] Many
in the Norman faction suspected the Godwin family of removing another strong claimant
to the throne.[114] But
since, as Walker[115]
argues, it was Harold Godwinson who carried out the difficult task of getting
Edward from Hungary to England, it is very unlikely that he would have had any
hand in an assassination attempt. Moreover, Edward’s son Edgar was always
treated with honour by Harold.
In 1063 Earls Harold and Tostig conducted
a highly successful campaign by land and sea to subdue Prince Gruggydd of North
Wales, who had been encroaching on English territory. The subjection of the Welsh
further enhanced the prestige of Earl Harold, who, as well as being the biggest
landowner in the country and the king’s brother-in-law, was now the king’s most
trusted and efficient servant. There must have been many at this time who
thought that he, rather than the young and inexperienced Prince Edgar, should
succeed the old King Edward.
But in 1064 Earl Harold made a great blunder. The story is related with
variants and inconsistencies in the Norman sources and on the Bayeux tapestry,
but is not related at all in the pre-Conquest English sources. Nevertheless,
this much is clear: that Harold sailed from Bosham in Sussex on a mission to
the continent, that he was storm-driven onto the coast of Ponthieu, where he
was captured by Count Guy, that William of Normandy ransomed him from Guy and
treated him kindly at first, but that later he was persuaded, whether
voluntarily or involuntarily, to make an oath over a box of artfully concealed
holy relics in Rouen that he would support William’s claim to the English
throne.
Now William’s claim was based, in the first place, on his blood
relationship to Queen Emma, King Edward’s mother. But his case rested mainly on
his assertion that in 1051 King Edward had promised him the throne on his
death. The Norman sources further assert that in 1064 Harold was sent to
Normandy by King Edward in order to confirm his earlier promise to William and
in order that Harold should swear fealty to him.
Most modern historians doubt that King Edward made this promise. Thus
Ian Walker writes: “We have seen that it is unlikely that any such promise was
given by Edward, but rather that it was probably invented and imparted to
William by Robert of Jumièges, Archbishop of Canterbury, following his
exile in 1052. If this was the case, could Edward nevertheless have intended to
make William his heir at this later date? This is highly unlikely. In 1051
Edward had no clearly established heir, although he did have a number of
potential heirs, all with better qualifications than William. Now, he had
secured a suitable and established heir in the person of his nephew, Atheling Edgar, and a reserve in Harold,
the son of his deceased nephew, Earl Ralph. As a result of this change in
circumstances the reasons adduced against the nomination of William as heir in
1051 apply with even great force to any such nomination in 1064. He remained a
man with only distant links to the English dynasty and little or no support in
the country, although he was now secure in possession of his duchy and much
more widely known and regarded than in 1051. In addition, William’s recent
conquest of Maine had resulted in the imprisonment and death of Edward’s
nephew, Count Walter of the Vexin. Count Walter died in suspicious
circumstances while in William’s custody, allegedly by poison, something
unlikely to endear him to Edward. William of Poitiers hints that Edward was
close to death and this was why he now sent Harold to pledge his kingdom. There
is no support for this in English sources, which show that the king was still
healthy enough to go hunting in autumn 1065. The suggestion that Edward
intended William as his heir in 1064 seems less credible even than the case for
this in 1051.”[116]
Why, then, did Harold make the fateful journey? One Anglo-Norman source
suggests that he was simply on a fishing trip and landed up on the wrong side
of the Channel. However, the eleventh-century Canterbury Monk Edmer of
Canterbury, using sources close to the family, has a much more plausible story,
namely, that Harold “asked leave of the king to go to Normandy to set free his
brother and nephew who were being held there as hostages” (Godwin had given
these hostages to the king after his abortive coup in 1051). In support
of this theory is the fact that Harold did return with one of the hostages, his
nephew Hakon. William continued to hold Harold’s brother, Wulfnoth…
Edmer continues: “The king said to [Harold]: ‘I will have no part in
this; but, not to give the impression of wishing to hinder you, I give you
leave to go where you will and to see what you can do. But I have a
presentiment that you will succeed in bringing misfortune upon the whole
kingdom and discredit upon yourself. For I know that the Duke is not so simple
as to be at all inclined to give them [the hostages] up to you unless he
foresees that in doing so he will secure some great advantage to himself.’”[117]
The king’s prophetic spirit did not fail him; and according to a
twelfth-century tradition, a great blow was miraculously struck at the oak in
Rouen where Harold made his oath to support William’s claim to the throne – an
oath, which, since he broke it when he himself became king, led to his and his
country’s downfall. “For the oak, which was once a tree of great height and
beauty, … is stated, wonderful to relate, to have shed its bark, and to have
lost its greenness and its foliage. A sight well worth seeing, for a tree which
a little time before was remarkable for the number and thickness of its leaves,
shrivelled up from the roots, as quickly as did the gourd of Jonah and the
olive of that other prophet and all its branches became white.”[118]
Just as the Lord’s withering of the fig tree signified the falling away
of the Jewish synagogue, so the withering of the oak at Rouen signified the falling
away of the English Church.
In 1065 a serious rebellion against King Edward’s rule broke out in the
North.
Now the traditionally turbulent Anglo-Danish North had been remarkably
quiet during Godwin’s rebellion in 1051-52. This had much to do, no doubt, with
the firm but just government of Earl Siward; but his successor, Earl Tostig,
while no less firm, appears to have been considerably less just. According to
the anonymous biographer, several members of the witan “charged that
glorious earl with being too cruel; and he was accused of punishing disturbers
more for desire of their property which would be confiscated than for love of
justice.” But the same author excused Tostig on the grounds that “such.. was the
cruelty of that people and their neglect of God that even parties of twenty or
thirty men could scarcely travel without being either killed or robbed by the
multitude of robbers in wait.”[119]
However, that there was probably some justice in the accusations appears
from the fact that St. Cuthbert once intervened on behalf of a man condemned by
Tostig, as Barlow describes in this summary of Simeon of Durham’s account:
“[Tostig] had succeeded in arresting a man named Aldan-hamal, a malefactor
notorious for theft, robbery, murder and arson. The criminal was condemned to
death, despite attempts by kinsmen and friends to bribe the earl; and while in
fetters at Durham awaiting execution, when all efforts at rescue had failed,
his conscience was smitten, he repented of his crimes, and he promised St.
Cuthbert that if he could go free he would make full atonement. St. Cuthbert
heard his prayer, struck off his fetters, and allowed him to make a lucky
escape into the church. The guards, under Tostig’s thane Barcwith, went in
pursuit and considered breaking open the doors of the cathedral, for freedom of
sanctuary, they thought, would allows all thieves, robbers, and murderers to
laugh in their faces. But Barcwith was immediately struck down by heaven for
his impiety and within an hour or two died raving mad; and Earl Tostig,
terrified by his fate, pardoned the criminal and, later, held him in esteem.”[120]
The immediate cause of the rebellion appears to have been an extra tax
imposed by Tostig on his earldom. Just before the rebellion, in March, 1065,
the relics of Martyr-King Oswin of Deira (Durham) had been discovered[121], and
the holy Bishop Ethelwine of Durham had presented Countess Judith, Tostig’s
wife, with a hair of the holy martyr. Could this have been a prophetic warning
not to rise up against the lawful king?
The rebels seized York while Tostig was hunting with the king in
Wiltshire, and proceeded to slaughter his officials and seize his treasury.
They then summoned Morcar, younger brother of Earl Edwin of Mercia, and with
him as their “earl” marched south to plead their case with King Edward,
ravaging Tostig’s lands on the way. Earl Edwin joined them at Northampton, and
there Earl Harold also came as the emissary of King Edward.
Harold was in a most difficult position. His natural desire was to
support his brother against the rebels. But that would have led to civil war,
which Harold now drew back from, just as his father and King Edward had done
during the earlier crisis of 1051-52.
In his meeting with the king at Oxford Harold counselled agreeing to the
terms of the rebels. With great sorrow and reluctance, the king complied:
Tostig was deposed, the rebels were pardoned and Morcar was confirmed as Earl
of Northumbria. In the following month Earl Tostig and his wife fled to her
brother, Count Baldwin of Flanders.[122]
Tostig was bitter that the king had not supported him against the
rebels. But he especially blamed his brother Harold, claiming that the
Northumbrians “had undertaken this madness against their earl at the artful
persuasion of his brother, Earl Harold.”[123] Harold
denied this on oath; and since he gained nothing from the affair except the
undying enmity of his brother, who fought against him in 1066, he must be
believed.
The most serious result of the rebellion was the breakdown in health of
the king, who, according to the anonymous biographer, had wanted to fight the
rebels, but had been prevented by bad weather, his inability to raise enough
troops and the reluctance of those around him to engage in civil war.
“Sorrowing at this, he fell ill, and from that day until the day of his death
he bore a sickness of the mind. He protested to God with deep sorrow, and
complained to Him, that He was deprived of the due obedience of his men in
repressing the presumption of the unrighteous; and he called down God’s
vengeance upon them…”[124]
In the second half of his reign, as the situation within the country
worsened, the holy King Edward turned more and more to heavenly pursuits, and
his prophetic gifts manifested themselves in still greater abundance.
Once, at Holy Pascha, the king returned after the Divine Liturgy to his
seat at the royal banquet in Westminster. “While the rest were greedily
eating,” writes William of Malmesbury, “and making up for the long fast of Lent
by the newly provided viands, he, with mind abstracted from earthly things, was
absorbed in the contemplation of some Divine matter, when presently he excited
the attention of the guests by bursting into profuse laughter: and as none
presumed to inquire into the cause of his joy, he remained silent as before,
till satiety had put an end to the banquet. After the tables were removed, and
as he was unrobing in his chamber, three persons of rank followed him; of these
Earl Harold was one, the second was an abbot, and the third a bishop, who,
presuming on their intimacy with the king, asked the cause of his laughter,
observing that it seemed just cause for astonishment to see him, in such perfect
tranquillity of mind and occupation, burst into a vulgar laugh while all others
were silent. ‘I saw something wonderful,’ said he, ‘and therefore I did not
laugh without a cause.’ At this, as is the custom of mankind, they began to
inquire and search into the matter more earnestly, entreating that he would
condescend to disclose it to them. After much reluctance, he yielded to their
persevering solicitations, and related the following wonderful circumstance,
saying that the Seven Sleepers in Mount Coelius [Ephesus] had now lain for two
hundred years on their right side, but that, at the very hour of his laughter,
they turned upon their left; that they would continue to lie in this manner for
seventy-four years, which would be a dreadful omen to wretched mortals. For
everything would come to pass, in those seventy-four years, which the Lord had
foretold to His disciples concerning the end of the world: nation would rise
against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there would be earthquakes in
divers places, pestilences and famine, terrors from heaven and great signs;
changes in kingdoms; wars of the Gentiles against the Christians, and also
victories of the Christians over the pagans. Relating these matters to his
wondering audience, he descanted on the passion of these sleepers, and the make
of their bodies, thought totally unnoticed in history, as readily as though he
had lived in daily intercourse with them. On hearing this, the earl sent a
knight, the bishop a clergyman, and the abbot a monk, to Maniches the Emperor
of Constantinople[125],
giving them at the same time what is called a holy letter, that the
martyr-relics of the Seven Sleepers should be shown to the delegates of the
king of England. It fell out that the prophecy of King Edward was proved by all
the Greeks, who could swear that they had heard from their fathers that the men
were lying on their right side, but after the entrance of the English into the
vault, they published the truth of the foreign prophecy to their countrymen.
Nor was it long before the predicted evils came to pass; for the Hagarenes,
Arabs and Turks, nations averse to Christ, making havoc of the Christians [at
the battle of Manzikert in 1071], overran Syria, Lycia and Asia Minor,
altogether devastating many cities, too, of Asia Minor, among which was
Ephesus…”[126]
Thus the reputation of King Edward, already renowned for his holiness in
England and Western Europe, was beginning to spread even to the Orthodox East –
whither so many exiled English families would soon have to flee.
On another occasion, as Ailred of Rievaulx tells the story, the king
attended the service for the consecration of a church at Havering in Essex. As
he was coming out of the church, a beggar met him and asked for alms. Edward
did not have any money on him at the time; but since he never liked to send
beggars away empty-handed, he gave him the costly ring which was on his finger.
Some time later, some English pilgrims were in trouble near Bethlehem in the
Holy Land. A beggar came up to them and asked them what the matter was. When
they had explained it to him, he helped them. Then he gave them a ring and
asked them to give it to their king in England, with a message from St. John
that for his chaste life he was to inherit the joys of Paradise in six months’
time. Edward received the message with joy, realizing that the beggar to whom
he had given the ring was St. John the Evangelist and Theologian. And in six
months’ time he reposed in peace.[127]
The ring was found again when St. Edward’s tomb at Westminster was
opened in 1102. A sweet fragrance filled the church, and the body was found to
be completely incorrupt. On the finger of his hand was the ring.[128]
In 1163 the tomb was opened again. Frank Barlow writes: “They saw, a
little obscured by the mortar and dust which had fallen down, the saint wrapped
in a cloth of gold, at his feet purple shoes and slippers, his head and face
covered with a round mitre, likewise embroidered with gold, his beard, white
and slightly curled, lying neatly on his breast. Joyfully they called over the
rest of the party, and as they cleared out the dirt from the tomb, they
explored everything gently with their hands. To their relief nothing had
changed. The body was still intact and the vestments were only a little dulled and
soiled. Six of the monks lifted the body, laid it on a carpet, wrapped it in a
precious silk cloth, and placed it in a wooden coffin or feretory, which they
had prepared. Everything they found with the body was transferred to the new
shrine, except the ring, which Laurence [the abbot of Westminster] removed to
preserve as a memorial and as a sign of his personal devotion to the saint.”[129]
And so the holy king approached his departure from this life. One more
public act of his reign remained to be performed: the dedication of his
favourite project, the Abbey of St. Peter at Westminster. This act was of great
symbolic importance; for according to tradition, the original church built on
the site in St. Mellitus’ time had been dedicated, not by hand of man, but by
angels[130];
and now the last man of truly angelic life in the land of the Angles, the
virgin King Edward, came to lay the last stone in the edifice of Anglo-Saxon
Christianity. Built to atone for his inability to keep a vow he had made to go
on pilgrimage to Rome, it became the last monument of English Orthodoxy before
its engulfment by the papist heresy.
A
great assembly of men from all parts of the land assembled to celebrate
Christmas and then the dedication of the church to Christ. Then, as the Monk
Sulcard relates, “on Christmas Eve itself, the most kindly king began to get
worse. Concealing the fact, however, he spent Christmas day both in the church
and in the palace rejoicing with his nobles. But on the morrow, when he could
hide it no longer, he began to rest apart, and sent messengers to bid his court
be of good cheer and to carry out the dedication of his monastery through
fitting persons.”[131]
The dedication of the abbey church took place on Holy Innocents Day,
1065, as the innocent sufferer lay on his deathbed.
The anonymous biographer, writing from eye-witness testimony, continues
the story: “When King Edward, replete with faith, perceived that the power of
the disease was forcing him to his end, with the commendation and prayers of
the most important of God’s faithful he resigned himself to the funeral rites…
“While he slept those in attendance felt in his sleeping body the
travail of an unquiet soul, and woken by them in their terror, he spoke these
words. (Up till then, for the last two days or more, weakness had so tired him
that when he spoke scarcely anything he said had been intelligible.) ‘O eternal
God,’ he said, ‘if I have learned those things which have been revealed to me
from Thee, grant also the strength to tell them. But if it was only an
illusion, let my former sickness burden me according to Thy will.’ And then, as
they who were present testify, he used such resources of eloquence that even
the healthiest man would have no need of more.
“’Just now,’ he said, ‘two monks stood before me, whom I had once known
very well when I was a young man in Normandy, men of great sanctity, and for
many years now relieved of earthly cares. And they addressed me with a message
from God.
"’”Since,” they said, “those who have climbed to the highest
offices in the kingdom of England, the earls, bishops and abbots, and all those
in holy orders, are not what they seem to be, but, on the contrary, are
servants of the devil, on a year and one day after the day of your death God
has delivered all this kingdom, cursed by Him, into the hands of the enemy, and
devils shall come through all this land with fire and sword and the havoc of
war.”
"’Then I said to them, “I will show God's designs to the people,
and the forgiveness of God shall have mercy upon the penitents. For He had
mercy on the people of Nineveh, when they repented on hearing of the Divine
indignation.”
"’But they said, “these will not repent, nor will the forgiveness
of God come to pass for them.”
“’”And what,” I asked, “shall happen? And when can a remission of this
great indignation be hoped for?”
“’”At that time,” they answered, “when a great tree, if cut down in the
middle of its trunk, and the part cut off carried the space of three furlongs
from the stock, shall be joined again to the trunk, by itself and without the
hand of man or any sort of stake, and begin once more to push leaves and bear
fruit from the old love of its uniting sap, then first can a remission of these
great ills be hoped for.”’
“When those who were present had heard these words – that is to say, the
queen, who was sitting on the floor warming his feet in her lap, her brother,
Earl Harold, and Rodbert, the steward of the royal palace and a kinsman of the
king, also Archbishop Stigand and a few more whom the blessed king when roused
from sleep had ordered to be summoned – they were all sore afraid as men who
had heard a speech containing many calamities and a denial of the hope of pity. And while all were stupefied and silent from
the effect of terror, the archbishop himself, who ought either to have been the
first to fear or give a word of advice, with folly at heart whispered in the
ear of the earl that the king was broken with age and disease and knew not what
he said. But the queen, and those who had been wont to know and fear God in
their hearts, all pondered deeply the words they had heard, and understood them
quite otherwise, and correctly. For these knew that the Christian religion was
chiefly dishonoured by men in Holy Orders, and that.. the king and queen by
frequent admonition had often proclaimed this.”[132]
King Edward died on January 5, 1066. The first part of his prophecy was
fulfilled exactly; for one year and one day after his death, on January 6,
1067, Duke William of Normandy, having been crowned as the first Catholic king
of England, set off on the three-and-a-half-year campaign which destroyed the
face of the country - the Antichrist had come to England!
Modern historians have accused King Edward of weakness. Humility,
gentleness and chastity in the midst of a corrupt and adulterous generation are
not properly thought of as signs of weakness, but rather of great spiritual
strength and grace. However, let us concede that St. Edward had a certain
weakness: like Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II, whom he resembled so closely, his
weakness was that he trusted people too much, and was constantly being betrayed
by them.
In 1013 he and his father had been betrayed by the people when they
drove him into exile in Normandy. In 1016 the people had again betrayed his
brother King Edmund, forcing him into exile again. In 1017 his mother had
married his country’s conqueror and abandoned him with his brother Prince
Alfred in a foreign land. In 1036 his brother had been murdered, and only a few
years later, in 1045, he had been forced to marry the daughter of his brother’s
murderer. He had trusted Archbishop Robert, who was the only man to share his
perception of the danger posed by Earl Godwin – but the people forced the
expulsion of Robert and the reinstatement of Godwin. He had trusted Earl
Harold, but Harold refused to fight against his rebellious brother Tostig. He
had trusted the English people when they recalled him from exile in 1043,
thereby ending the hated Danish yoke; but the people had often, like the
stiff-necked Israelites, longed to return to the spiritual Egypt, as when the
Northumbrians, demanded a return to the laws of the Danish Canute.
And yet as the English Moses lay on his deathbed there were still a few,
those who had been his closest attendants, who wept for him. To these he said,
as the anonymous biographer recounts it: “’Do not weep, but intercede with God
for my soul, and give me leave to go to Him. For He will not pardon me that I
should not die Who would not pardon Himself that He should not die.’ Then he
addressed his last words to the queen who was sitting at his feet, in this
wise, ‘May God be gracious to this my wife for the zealous solicitude of her
service. For she has served me devotedly, and has always stood close to my side
like a beloved daughter. And so from the forgiving God may she obtain the
reward of eternal happiness.’ And stretching forth his hand to his governor,
his brother, Harold, he said, ‘I commend this woman and all the kingdom to your
protection. Serve and honour her with faithful obedience as your lady and
sister, which she is, and do not despoil her, as long as she lives, of any
honour she got from me. Likewise I also commend these men who have left their
native land for love of me, and have up till now served me faithfully. Take
from them an oath of fealty, if they should so wish, and protect and retain
them, or send them with your safe conduct safely across the Channel to their
own homes with all that they have acquired in my service. Let the grave for my
burial be prepared in the minster in the place which shall be assigned to you.
I ask that you do not conceal my death, but announce it promptly in all parts,
so that all the faithful can beseech the mercy of Almighty God on me, a
sinner.’ Now and then he also comforted the queen, who ceased not from
lamenting, to erase her natural grief. ‘Fear not,’ he said, ‘I shall not die
now, but by God’s mercy regain my strength.’ Nor did he mislead the attentive,
least of all himself, by these words, for he has not died, but has passed from
death to life, to live with Christ.
“And so, coming these and like words to his last hour, he took the
Viaticum from the table of heavenly life and gave up his spirit to God the
Creator on the fourth [more accurately: the fifth] of January… Then could be
seen in the dead body the glory of a soul departing to God. For the flesh of
his face blushed like a rose, the adjacent beard gleamed like a lily, his
hands, laid out straight, whitened, and were a sign that his whole body was
given not to death but to auspicious sleep. And so the funeral rites were
arranged at the royal cost and royal honour, as was proper, and amid the
boundless sorrow of all men. They bore his holy remains from his palace home
into the house of God, and offered up prayers and sighs and psalms all that day
and the following night. Meanwhile, when the day of the funeral ceremony
dawned, they blessed the office of the interment they were to conduct with the
singing of masses and the relief of the poor. And so, before the altar of St.
Peter the Apostle, the body, washed by his country’s tears, is laid up in the
sight of God. They also cause the whole of the thirtieth day following to be
observed with the celebration of masses and the chanting of psalms and expended
many pounds of gold for the redemption of his soul in the alleviation of
different classes of the poor. Having been revered as a saint while still
living in the world, as we wrote, at his tomb likewise merciful God reveals by
these signs that he lives with Him as a saint in heaven. For at the tomb
through him the blind receive their sight, the lame are made to walk, the sick
are healed, the sorrowing are refreshed by the comfort of God, and for the
faith of those who call upon Him, God, the King of kings, works the tokens of
His goodness.”[133]
2. MARTYR-KING HAROLD AND THE NORMAN CONQUEST
(1066-1070)
The rule of St. Edward brought peace and prosperity - but a drastic decline
in the moral condition of the people. Like Tsar-Martyr Nicholas of Russia, he
presided over an unprecedented expansion of the Church’s influence, which
spread from England to Scandinavia; and in 1066 there were probably over 10,000
churches and chapels for a population of 1.5 million, with 400 churches in Kent
alone.[134]
But, again like Tsar-Martyr Nicholas, his departure, betrayed by his subjects,
ushered in the fall of the nation and the triumph of the Antichrist.
Thus Edmer of Canterbury wrote of the monks of Christ Church,
Canterbury, just before the Conquest, that they lived "in all the glory of
the world, with gold and silver and various elegant clothes, and beds with
precious hangings. They had all sorts of musical instruments, which they liked
playing, and horses, dogs and hawks, with which they were wont to walk. They
lived, indeed, more like earls than monks."[135]
Again, "several years before the arrival of the Normans,"
wrote the Anglo-Norman historian William of Malmesbury, "love of
literature and religion had decayed. The clergy, content with little learning,
could scarcely stammer out the words of the sacraments; a person who understood
grammar was an object of wonder and astonishment. The monks mocked the Rule by
their fine clothes and wide variety of foods. The nobility, devoted to luxury
and lechery, did not go to church in the morning like Christians, but merely, a
casual manner, attended Mattins and the Liturgy, hurried through by some
priest, in their own chambers amidst the caresses of their wives. The common
people, left unprotected, were prey to the powerful, who amassed fortunes by
seizing their property or selling them to foreigners (although by nature this
people is more inclined to self-accumulation of wealth)... Drinking bouts were
a universal practice, occupying entire nights as well as days... The vices
attendant on drunkenness, which enervate the human mind, resulted."[136]
William mentions that there were some good clergy and laymen. Nevertheless,
even allowing for some exaggeration, the general picture of decline is clear.
If the curse of God on a sinful people was the ultimate cause of the
tragedy, the proximate causes are to be sought in the lust for power of
England's external enemies, and in particular Duke William and the Pope of
Rome. Duke William claimed that the kingdom of England had been bequeathed to
him by King Edward. As we have seen, it was to Earl Harold, not William, that
the king bequeathed the kingdom on his deathbed, and this election was confirmed
by the witan immediately after King Edward’s death. However, William
pointed to three facts in defence of his claim and in rejection of Harold’s.
First, there was the murder of Prince Alfred in 1036, which almost
everybody ascribed to Earl Godwin, the father of Harold. However, Harold could
not be blamed for the sin of his father, although that is precisely what
William of Poitiers did. And there is ample evidence that King Edward had
trusted Harold in a way that he had never trusted his father.
Secondly, there was the uncanonical
position of Archbishop Stigand, who had been banned by the Pope and who,
according to the Norman sources (but not according to the English) had crowned
and anointed Harold as king.[137]
William made out that the English Church, as well as being led by an
uncanonical archbishop, was in caesaropapist submission to a usurper king.
The irony is that William's own archbishop, Maurilius, had been
uncanonically appointed by the Duke, who exerted a more purely caesaropapist
control over his Church than any European ruler before him. But the Pope was
prepared to overlook this indiscretion (and the other indiscretion of his
uncanonical marriage) in exchange for his military support against the
Byzantine empire and England. Thus from 1059 the Normans were given the Pope's
blessing to conquer the Greek-speaking possessions of the empire in Southern
Italy in the name of St. Peter. And when that conquest was completed, they went
on to invade Greece (in the 1080s), and then, during the First Crusade, the
Near East, where they established the Norman kingdom of Antioch. For the
Normans were the Bolsheviks of eleventh-century Europe, the military right arm
of the totalitarian revolution that began in Rome in 1054.
Thirdly, and most seriously in the eyes of eleventh-century Europeans,
Harold had broken the oath of fealty that he had taken to William in 1064. Now
all the evidence suggests that this oath was taken under duress. Nevertheless –
and even if Harold had received absolution for breaking his oath – there can be
no doubt that this sin weakened his position probably more than any other
factor.
When Harold was crowned king, William sent a formal protest to him,
which was rejected.
Having won the support of his nobles and clergy, William turned to the
rest of Europe. Professor Douglas writes: “At some undetermined date within the
first eight months of 1066 he appealed to the papacy, and a mission was sent
under the leadership of Gilbert, archdeacon of Lisieux, to ask for judgement in
the duke’s favour from Alexander II. No records of the case as it was heard in
Rome have survived, nor is there any evidence that Harold Godwineson was ever
summoned to appear in his own defence. On the other hand, the arguments used by
the duke’s representatives may be confidently surmised. Foremost among them
must have been an insistence on Harold’s oath, and its violation when the earl
seized the throne.[138]
Something may also have been alleged against the house of Godwine by reference
to the murder of the atheling Alfred
in 1036, and to the counter-revolution of 1052. The duke could, moreover, point
to the recent and notable ecclesiastical revival in the province of Rouen, and
claim that he had done much to foster it. For these reasons, the reforming
papacy might legitimately look for some advantage in any victory which William
might obtain over Harold. Thus was the duke of Normandy enabled to appear as
the armed agent of ecclesiastical reform against a prince who through his
association with Stigand had identified himself with conditions which were
being denounced by the reforming party in the Church. Archdeacon Hildebrand,
therefore, came vigorously to the support of Duke William, and Alexander II was
led publicly to proclaim his approval of Duke William’s enterprise.”[139]
According to Frank McLynn, it was the argument concerning Stigand’s
uncanonicity “that most interested Alexander. William pitched his appeal to the
papacy largely on his putative role as the leader of the religious and
ecclesiastical reform movement in Normandy and as a man who could clean the
Augean stables of church corruption in England; this weighed heavily with
Alexander, who, as his joust with Harald Hardrada in 1061 demonstrated, thought
the churches of northern Europe far too remote from papal control. It was the
abiding dream of the new ‘reformist’ papacy to be universally accepted as the
arbiter of thrones and their succession; William’s homage therefore constituted
a valuable precedent. Not surprisingly, Alexander gave the proposed invasion of
England his blessing. It has sometimes been queried why Harold did not send his
own embassy to counter William’s arguments. Almost certainly, the answer is
that he thought it a waste of time on two grounds: the method of electing a
king in England had nothing to do with the pope and was not a proper area for
his intervention; and, in any case, the pope was now the creature of the
Normans in southern Italy and would ultimately do what they ordered him to do.
Harold was right: Alexander II blessed all the Norman marauding expeditions of
the 1060s.
“But although papal sanction for William’s ‘enterprise of England’ was
morally worthless, it was both a great propaganda and diplomatic triumph for
the Normans. It was a propaganda victory because it allowed William to pose as
the leader of crusaders in a holy war, obfuscating and mystifying the base,
materialistic motives of his followers and mercenaries. It also gave the
Normans a great psychological boost, for they could perceive themselves as
God’s elect, and it is significant that none of William’s inner circle
entertained doubts about the ultimate success of the English venture.
Normandy now seemed the spearhead of a confident Christianity, on the
offensive for the first time in centuries, whereas earlier [Western]
Christendom had been beleaguered by Vikings to the north, Hungarians to the
east and Islam to the south. It was no accident that, with Hungary and
Scandinavia recently Christianised, the Normans were the vanguard in the first
Crusade, properly so called, against the Islamic heathens in the Holy Land.
“Alexander’s fiat was a diplomatic triumph, too, as papal endorsement
for the Normans made it difficult for other powers to intervene on Harold’s
side. William also pre-empted one of the potential sources of support for the
Anglo-Saxons by sending an embassy to the [German] emperor Henry IV; this, too,
was notably successful, removing a possible barrier to a Europe-wide call for
volunteers in the ‘crusade’.”[140]
So at the beginning of 1066 Duke William began to gather a vast army
from all around Western Europe in preparation for what became, in effect, the
first crusade of the heretical Roman Papacy against the Orthodox Church. The
dramatic story of that fateful year was to decide the destiny of the Western
Christian peoples for centuries to come. For if the English had defeated the
Normans, it is likely that not only the Norman conquests in the rest of Europe
would never have taken place, but also the power of the "reformed"
papacy would have gone into sharp decline, enabling the forces of true Romanity
to recover.
But Divine Providence judged otherwise. For their sins, the Western
peoples were counted unworthy of the pearl beyond price, Holy Orthodoxy, which
they had bought with such self-sacrificial enthusiasm so many centuries before.
The new king is described by the anonymous biographer as handsome,
graceful and strong in body; and although he is implicitly critical of Harold’s
behaviour in 1065 during the Northumbrian rebellion (probably reflecting the
views of Queen Edith), he nevertheless calls him wise, patient, merciful,
courageous, temperate and prudent in character. That he was both strong and
courageous is witnessed not only by his highly successful military career but
also by his pulling two men out of the quicksand during his stay with William
in 1064. The fact that he was admired and trusted by most Englishmen is shown
by his ascending the throne without any opposition, although he was not the
strongest candidate by hereditary right. Only after his death did anyone put
forward the candidacy of Prince Edgar – and that only half-heartedly. Thus on
the English side there was general agreement that, in spite of his oath, he was
the best man to lead the country.
He was both hated and admired by the Normans. Thus William of Poitiers
admitted that he was warlike, courageous and eager for renown. Again, Ordericus
Vitalis, writing some 70 years after the conquest, says that Harold "was
much admired for his great stature and elegance, for his bodily strength, for
his quick-wittedness and verbal facility, his sense of humour and his honest
bearing."
Whatever his personal sins before he became king, he appears to have
tried hard to atone for them once he ascended the throne. Perhaps under the
influence of Bishop Wulfstan, he put away his mistress, the beautiful Edith
“Swan-neck”, and entered into lawful marriage with the sister of Earls Edwin
and Morcar, Alditha.[141]
Then, as Florence of Worcester writes, he "immediately began to abolish
unjust laws and to make good ones; to patronize churches and monasteries; to
pay particular reverence to bishops, abbots, monks and clerics; and to show
himself pious, humble and affable to all good men. But he treated malefactors
with great severity, and gave general orders to his earls, ealdormen, sheriffs
and thegns to imprison all thieves, robbers and disturbances of the kingdom. He
laboured in his own person by sea and by land for the protection of his
realm."[142]
Although there had been no open opposition to his consecration as king,
one source indicates that “the Northumbrians, a great and turbulent folk, were
not ready to submit”, just as they had not been ready to submit to King Edward.[143]
Harold needed to be sure that he had the support of the turbulent North. So
early in the year he enlisted the aid of Bishop Wulfstan on a peacemaking
mission to Northumbria.
“For the fame of [Wulfstan’s] holiness,” writes William of Malmesbury,
“had so found a way to the remotest tribes, that it was believed that he could
quell the most stubborn insolence. And so it came to pass. For those tribes,
untameable by the sword, and haughty from generation to generation, yet for the
reverence they bore to the Bishop, easily yielded allegiance to Harold. And
they would have continued in that way, had not Tostig, as I have said, turned
them aside from it. Wulfstan, good, gentle, and kindly though he was, spake not
smooth things to the sinners, but rebuked their vices, and threatened them with
evil to come. If they were still rebellious, he warned them plainly, they
should pay the penalty in suffering. Never did his human wisdom or his gift of
prophecy deceive him. Many things to come, both on that journey and at other
times, did he foretell. Moreover he spake plainly to Harold of the calamities
which should befall him and all England if he should not bethink himself to
correct their wicked ways. For in those days the English were for the most part
evil livers; and in peace and the abundance of pleasant things luxury
flourished.”[144]
In the spring and summer, as Halley's comet blazed across the sky, the
two armies massed on opposite sides of the Channel. While William built a vast
fleet to take his men across the Channel, King Harold kept his men under arms
and at a high degree of alert all along the southern English coast. By
September, William was ready; but adverse winds kept him in French ports. King
Harold, however, was forced to let his men go home to bring in the harvest. The
English coast was now dangerously exposed, and on September 27, taking
advantage of a change in the wind, William embarked his men.
As if that were not enough, Harold now suffered another reverse: King
Harald Hardrada of Norway, who had acquired a great reputation as a warrior in
the Byzantine emperor’s army, invaded Northumbria with the aid of the English
King Harold's exiled brother Tostig,. According to the medieval Icelandic
historian Snorri Sturluson, as the Norwegian Harald was preparing to invade
England, he dreamed that he was in Trondheim and met there his half-brother,
St. Olaf. And Olaf told him that he had won many victories and died in holiness
because he had stayed in Norway. But now he feared that he, Harald, would meet
his death, "and wolves will rend your body; God is not to blame."
Snorri wrote that "many other dreams and portents were reported at the
time, and most of them were ominous."[145]
After defeating Earls Edwin and Morcar at Gate Fulford on September 20,
the Norwegian king triumphantly entered York, whose citizens (mainly of
Scandinavian extraction) not only surrendered to him but agreed to march south
with him against the rest of England.[146] This
last betrayal, which took place in the same city in which, 760 years before,
the founder of Christian Rome, St. Constantine the Great, had been proclaimed
emperor by the Roman legions, was probably decisive in sealing the fate of
Orthodox England.
But on September 25, after an amazingly rapid forced march from London,
the English King Harold, went through York and seven miles on to Stamford
Bridge, where the Norwegians and rebel English and Flemish mercenaries were
encamped. After a long battle in which both sides suffered huge losses, the
Norwegian army was destroyed and both Harald Hardrada and Tostig were killed.
The 'C' manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ends on this high point;
but Divine Providence decreed that "the end was not yet".
On October 1, while he was celebrating his victory in York, King Harold
heard that William had landed at Pevensey on the south coast. Although, from a
military point of view, he would probably have done better to rest and gather
together a large force from all round the country while drawing William further
away from his base, thereby stretching his lines of communication, Harold
decided to employ the same tactics of forced marches and a lightning strike
that had worked so well against the Norwegians. So he marched his men back down
to London.
On the way he stopped at Waltham, a monastery he had founded and
generously endowed to house the greatest holy object of the English Church -
the Black Cross of Waltham. Several years before, this Cross had been
discovered in the earth in response to a Divine revelation to a humble priest
of Montacute in Somerset. It was placed on a cart drawn by oxen, but the oxen
refused to move until the name "Waltham" was pronounced. Then the
oxen moved, without any direction from men, straight towards Waltham, which was
many miles away on the other side of the country. On the way, 66 miracles of
healing were accomplished on sick people who venerated it, until it came to
rest at the spot where King Harold built his monastery.[147]
Only a few days before, on his way to York, King Harold had stopped at
the monastery and was praying in front of the Black Cross when he received a
cheering message from Abbot Ethelwine of Ramsey. King Edward the Confessor had
appeared to him that night, he said, and told him of his (Harold's) affliction
of both body and spirit - his anxiety for the safety of his kingdom, and the
violent pain which had suddenly seized his leg. Then he said that through his
intercession God had granted Harold the victory and healing from his pain.
Cheered by this message, Harold received the healing of his pain, and, as we
have seen, the victory.[148]
But it was a different story on the way back. Having decided to march
against the Normans without delay, Harold "went into the church of the
Holy Cross and placed the relics which he had in his capella on the
altar, and made a vow that if the Lord granted him success in the war he would
confer on the church a mass of treasures and a great number of clerics to serve
God there and that he himself would serve God as His bought slave. The clergy,
therefore, who accompanied him, together with a procession which went before,
came to the doors of the church where he was lying prostrate, his arms
outstretched in the form of a cross in front of the Holy Cross, praying to the
Crucified One.
“An extraordinary miracle then took place. For the image of the
Crucifixion, which before had been erect looking upward, when it saw the king
humble himself to the ground, lowered its face as if sad. The wood indeed knew
the future! The sacristan Turkill claimed that he himself had seen this and
intimated it to many while he was collecting and storing away the gifts which
the king had placed on the altar. I received this from his mouth, and from the
assertion of many bystanders who saw the head of the image erect. But no one
except Turkill saw its bending down. When they saw this bad omen, overcome with
great sorrow, they sent the senior and most distinguished brothers of the
church, Osegood Cnoppe and Ailric Childemaister, in the company to the battle,
so that when the outcome was known they might take care of the bodies of the
king and those of his men who were devoted to the Church, and, if the future
would have it so, bring back their corpses..."[149]
On October 5, Harold was back in London with his exhausted army. Common
sense dictated that he stay there until the levies he had summoned from
different parts of the country arrived; but instead, to the puzzlement of
commentators from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries, he pushed on by a
forced march of fifty to sixty miles south, after only a few days' rest and
without the much needed reinforcements. What was the reason for this crucial
tactical blunder?[150]
David Howarth has argued convincingly that the reason was that Harold
now, for the first time, heard (from an envoy of William's) that he and his
followers had been excommunicated by the Pope and that William was fighting
with the pope's blessing and under a papal banner, with a tooth of St. Peter
encrusted in gold around his neck. "This meant that he was not merely
defying William, he was defying the Pope. It was doubtful whether the Church,
the army and the people would support him in that defiance: at best, they would
be bewildered and half-hearted. Therefore, since a battle had to be fought, it
must be fought at once, without a day's delay, before the news leaked out.
After that, if the battle was won, would be time to debate the Pope's decision,
explain that the trial had been a travesty, query it, appeal against it, or
simply continue to defy it...
"... This had become a private matter of conscience. There was one
higher appeal, to the judgement of God Himself, and Harold could only surrender
himself to that judgement: 'May the Lord now decide between Harold and me'
[William had said]. He had been challenged to meet for the final decision and
he could not evade it; in order that God might declare His judgement, he was
obliged to accept the challenge in person.
"He left London in the evening of 12 October. A few friends with
him who knew what had happened and still believed in him: Gyrth and his brother
Leofwine, his nephew Hakon whom he had rescued from Normandy, two canons from
Waltham already nervous at the miracle they had seen, two aged and respected
abbots who carried chain mail above their habits, and - perhaps at a distance -
Edith Svanneshals, the mother of his sons. He led the army, who did not know,
the remains of his house-carls and whatever men of the fyrd had already
gathered in London. The northern earls had been expected with contingents, but
they had not come and he could not wait. He rode across London Bridge again and
this time down the Dover road to Rochester, and then by the minor Roman road
that plunged south through the Andredeswald - the forest now yellow with autumn
and the road already covered with fallen leaves. The men of Kent and Sussex
were summoned to meet at an ancient apple tree that stood at the junction of
the tracks outside the enclave of Hastings. Harold reached that meeting place
late on Friday 13, ready to face his judgement; and even while the army was
forming for battle, if one may further believe the Roman de Rou, the
terrible rumour was starting to spread that the King was excommuncated and the
same fate hung over any man who fought for him."[151]
The only military advantage Harold might have gained from his tactics -
that of surprise - was lost: William had been informed of his movements. And
so, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says, it was William who, early on the
morning of October 14, "came upon him unexpectedly before his army was set
in order. Nevertheless the king fought against him most resolutely with those
men who wished to stand by him, and there was great slaughter on both sides.
King Harold was slain, and Leofwine, his brother, and Earl Gurth, his brother,
and many good men. The French had possession of the place of slaughter, as God
granted them because of the nation's sins..."[152]
Why did the chronicler say: "with those men who wished to stand by
him"? Because many did not wish to
stay with him when they learned of the Pope's anathema. And yet many others
stayed, including several churchmen.
Why did they stay, knowing that they stood to lose, not only their
bodies, but also, if the anathema was true - their eternal souls? Very few
probably knew about the schism of 1054 between Rome and Constantinople or about
the theological arguments - over the Filioque, over unleavened bread at
the Liturgy, over the supposed universal jurisdiction of the Pope - that led to
the schism of 1054. Still fewer, if any, could have come to the firm conclusion
that Rome was wrong and Constantinople was right. That Harold had perjured
himself in coming to the throne was generally accepted - and yet they stayed
with him.
In following King Harold, the Englishmen who fought and died at Hastings
were following their hearts rather than their heads. Their hearts told them
that, whatever the sins of the king and the nation, he was still their king and
this was still their nation. Surely God would not want them to desert these at
the time of their greatest need, in a life-and-death struggle against a
merciless foreign invader? Perhaps they remembered the words of Archbishop Wulfstan
of York: "By what means shall peace and comfort come to God's servants and
God's poor, but through Christ and through a Christian king?"[153] Almost
certainly they were drawn by a grace-filled feeling of loyalty to the Lord's
Anointed; for the English were exceptional in their continuing veneration for
the monarchy, which in other parts had been destroyed by the papacy.[154]
The English might also have reflected that this day, October 14, was the
feast of St. Callistus, a third-century Pope who was considered by many Roman
Christians of his time (including St. Hippolytus) to be a schismatic anti-pope.
If that Pope could have been a schismatic, was there not much more reason to
believe that this one was schismatic, too, being under the anathema of the
Great Church of Constantinople and presuming as he did to dispose of kingdoms
as he did churches and blessing the armed invasion of peaceful Christian
countries by uninvited foreigners? And if so, then was it not they, the
Normans, who were the schismatics, while the true Christians were those who
refused to obey their false decrees and anathemas? In any case, after the
battle very few Englishman fled to Old Rome, the traditional refuge of English
exiles. They preferred, as we have seen, the Orthodox capitals of
Constantinople and Russia!
The Burial of
King Harold
After Hastings, William could claim that God had decided between him and
Harold in his favour. And yet even his Norman bishops were not so sure. Thus in
a conciliar enactment of 1070, which Sir Frank Stenton called "a
remarkable episode"[155], they
imposed penances on all of William's men who had taken part in the battle - in
spite of the fact that they had fought with the Pope's blessing!
William's actions just after the battle were unprecedentedly cruel and
impious. Thus he refused to give the body of King Harold, hideously mutilated
by the Normans, to his mother for burial, although she offered him the weight
of the body in gold. Eventually, the monks of Waltham, with the help of Harold's
former mistress, Edith "Swan-neck", found the body and buried it, as
was thought, in Waltham.
However, there is now compelling evidence that a mutilated body
discovered in a splendid coffin in Godwin's family church at Bosham on March 25
/ April 7, 1954 is in fact the body of the last Orthodox king of England. In
fact, two royal coffins were found on that date. One was found to contain the
bones of the daughter of a previous king of England, Canute, who had drowned at
a young age. The other, "magnificently furnished" coffin contained
the bones of a middle-aged man, but with no head and with several of the bones
fractured. It was supposed that these were the bones of Earl Godwin, the father
of King Harold.
For several years no further attention was paid to this discovery.
However, just recently a local historian, John Pollock, has re-examined all the
evidence relating to the bones in the second coffin and has come to the
conclusion that they belong to none other than King Harold himself.[156]
He points out, first, that they could not
belong to Earl Godwin, because, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
Godwin was buried in Winchester, not Bosham.
Secondly, the bones are in a severely mutilated state, which does not
accord with what we know about Godwin's death. However, this does accord with what we know about King
Harold's death, for he was savagely hacked to pieces by four knights on the
field of battle. As the earliest account of the battle that we have, by Guy,
Bishop of Amiens, says: "With the point of his lance the first (William)
pierced Harold's shield and then penetrated his chest, drenching the ground
with his blood, which poured out in torrents. With his sword the second
(Eustace) cut off his head, just below where his helmet protected him. The
third (Hugh) disembowelled him with his javelin. The fourth (Walter Giffard)
hacked off his leg at the thigh and hurled it far away. Struck down in this
way, the dead body lay on the ground." Moreover, the Bayeux Tapestry clearly
shows the sword of one of the knights cutting into the king's left thigh - and
one of the bones in the coffin is precisely a fractured left thigh bone.
Thirdly, although some sources say that Harold was buried in the
monastery he founded at Waltham, his body has never been found there or
anywhere else in spite of extensive searches. However, the most authoritative
of the sources, William of Poitiers, addresses the dead Harold thus: "Now
you lie there in your grave by the sea:
by generations yet unborn of English and Normans you will ever be
accursed..." The church at Bosham is both by the sea and not far from the
field of battle...[157]
Therefore it is eminently likely that the grieving monks who gathered up
the remains of King Harold's body buried them in his own, family church by the
sea at Bosham. But this was done in secret, because the Normans did not want
any public veneration of the king they hated so much, and the Church could not
tolerate pilgrimages to the grave of this, the last powerful enemy of the
"reformed Papacy" in the West. And so the rumour spread that Harold
had survived the battle and had become a secret hermit in the north - a rumour
that we can only now reject with certainty, thanks to the important research of
John Pollock.
After Hastings, William made slow, S-shaped progress through Kent,
Surrey, Hampshire and across the Thames at Wallingford to Berkhamstead north of
London.
As he was approaching London, near St. Alban's, the shrine of the
protomartyr of Britain, he found the road blocked, according to Matthew of
Paris, "by masses of great trees that had been felled and drawn across the
road. The Abbot of St. Albans was sent for to explain these demonstrations,
who, in answer to the king's questions, frankly and fearlessly said, 'I have
done the duty appertaining to my birth [he was of royal blood] and calling; and
if others of my rank and profession had performed the like, as they well could
and ought, it had not been in thy power to penetrate into the land so far.' Not
long after, that same Frederic was at the head of a confederacy, determined, if
possible, to compel William to reign like a Saxon prince, that is, according to
the ancient laws and customs, or to place... Edgar Atheling in his room. William
submitted for a time, and, in a great council at Berkhamstead, swore, upon all
the relics of the church of St. Albans, that he would keep the laws in
question, the oath being administered by Abbot Frederic. In the end, however,
the Conqueror grew strong to be coerced by any measures, however nationally
excellent or desirable, and he does not seem to have cared much about oath
breaking, unless it was he who had
enacted the oath, - the unhappy Harold, for instance, found that no light matter - and so William
became more oppressive than ever. St. Albans, as might have been anticipated,
suffered especially from his vengeance, he seized all its lands that lay
between Barnet and Londonstone, and was with difficulty prevented from utterly
ruining the monastery. As it was, the blow was enough for Frederic, who died of
grief in the monastery of Ely, whither he had been compelled to flee."[158]
In November the Conqueror stayed in Canterbury, from which Archbishop
Stigand had fled in order to join the national resistance in London. One night,
St. Dunstan was seen leaving the church by some of the brethren. When they
tried to detain him he said: "I cannot remain here on account of the filth
of your evil ways and crimes in the church."[159] The
first church of the kingdom did not long survive St. Dunstan's departure. On
December 6, 1067, it was burned to the ground...
William continued his march, systematically devastating the land as he
passed through it. Early in December he was in Southwark, burnt it, and drove
off Prince Edgar's troops at London Bridge. Important defections from the
English side began to take place. The first was Edith, King Edward's widow and
King Harold's sister, who gave him the key city of Winchester. Then Archbishop
Stigand submitted to him at Wallingford. And at Berkhamstead, according to the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, "he was met by Bishop Aldred [of York], Prince Edgar, Earl
Edwin, Earl Morcar, and all the best men from London, who submitted out of
necessity."
Finally, on Christmas Day - how fateful has that day been, both for good
and ill, in English history! - he was crowned king by Archbishop Aldred;
"and William gave a pledge on the Gospels, and swore an oath besides,
before Aldred would place the crown on his head, that he would govern this
nation according to the best practice of his predecessors if they would be
loyal to him."[160]
The Londoners also suffered from their new
master. During William's coronation service, Archbishop Aldred first asked the
English in English if it was their will that William be made king. They
assented. Then Geoffrey, bishop of Coutances, addressed the Normans in French
with the same question. When they, too, assented, those who were standing guard
outside the Abbey became alarmed because of the shouting, and started to set
fire to the city. Professor Allen Brown writes: "Orderic Vitalis, in a
vivid passage, describes how panic spread within the church as men and women of
all degrees pressed to the doors in flight, and only a few were left to complete
the coronation of King William, who, he says, was 'violently trembling'. For
William this must indeed have been the one terrifying moment of his life... He
believed implicitly in his right to England, and God had seemed to favour that
right and to deliver His judgement on the field of Hastings. And now, at the
supreme moment of anointing and sanctification at his coronation, when the
Grace of God should come upon him and make him king and priest, there came a
great noise, and the windows of the abbey church lit up with fire, and people
fled all about him. It must have seemed to him then that in spite of all
previous signs and portents he was wrong, unworthy, that his God had turned
against him and rejected both him and his cause, and it is no wonder that he
trembled until the awful moment had passed and the world came right
again."[161]
After the festivities, the Conqueror imposed "a very heavy
tax" on the people. Then, after giving instructions for the building of
castles all over the land, he returned to Normandy taking all the chief men of
England with him as hostages.
In December, 1067, he returned to England, and quickly put down
rebellions in Kent and Herfordshire. Then a more serious rebellion broke out in
Exeter. Thither he marched with a combined army of Normans and Englishmen, and
after a siege of eighteen days the city surrendered; which was followed by the
submission of the Celts of Cornwall, and the cities of Gloucester and Bristol.
Meanwhile, in the North resistance was gathering around Earl Morcar, who
had been allowed to return from Normandy; and there was a threat of
interventions by King Malcolm of Scotland, who was sheltering Prince Edgar and
had married his sister Margaret, and King Swein of Denmark. After spending
Pascha at Winchester, William marched swiftly north and built castles in
Warwick and York, where he received the submission of the local magnates and
secured a truce with the Scottish king. Then he turned southward to secure the
submission of Lincoln, Huntingdon and Cambridge.
But on January 28, 1069, the Norman whom William had appointed earl of
Northumbria north of the Tees was attacked in the streets of Durham and burnt
to death in the house of Bishop Ethelwine. This was followed by an uprising in
York, and Prince Edgar prepared to move from Scotland. William, however, moved
more swiftly, dispersing the besiegers of York castle, taking vengeance on the
rebels and appointing Gospatric as earl.
In early summer, 1069, he returned to Normandy; but almost immediately a
Danish fleet of about two hundred and forty ships sailed into the Humber.
Combining with Edgar, Gospatric and Waltheof, they destroyed the Norman
garrison at York, and then encamped on the southern shore of the Humber,
fortifying the Isle of Axholme. This was the signal for other uprisings in
Dorset and under Edric the Wild in the Welsh Borders.
The great French historian Thierry writes of this northern campaign:
"The conquering army, whose divisions covered a space of a hundred miles,
traversed this territory.. in all directions, and the traces of their passage
through it were deeply imprinted. The old historians relate that, from the
Humber to the Tyne, not a piece of cultivated land, not a single inhabited village
remained. The monasteries which had escaped the ravages of the Danish pagans,
that of St. Peter near Wear, and that of Whitby inhabited by women, were
profaned and burned. To the south of the Humber, according to the early
narrators, the ravage was no less dreadful. They say, in their passionate
language, that between York and the eastern sea, every living creature was put
to death, from man to beast, excepting only those who took refuge in the church
of St. John the archbishop [of York, +721], at Beverley. This John was a saint
of the English race; and, on the approach of the conquerors, a great number of
men and women flocked, with all that they had most valuable, round the church
dedicated to their blessed countryman, in order that, remembering in heaven
that he was a Saxon, he might protect them and their property from the fury of
the foreigner. The Norman camp was then seven miles from Beverley. It was
rumoured that the church of St. John was the refuge of the rich and depository
of the riches of the country. Some adventurous scouts, who by the contemporary
history are denominated knights, set out under the command of one Toustain, in
order to be the first to seize the prize. They entered Beverley without
resistance; marched to the church-yard, where the terrified crowd were
assembled; and passed its barriers, giving themselves not more concern about
the Saxon saint than about the Saxons who invoked him. Toustain, the chief of
the band, casting his eye over the groups of English, observed an old man richly
clad, with gold bracelets in the fashion of his nation. He galloped towards him
with his sword drawn, and the terrified old man fled to the church: Toustain
pursued him; but he had scarcely passed the gates, when, his horse's feet
slipping on the pavement, he was thrown off and stunned by the fall. At the
sight of their captain half dead, the rest of the Normans turned round; and
their imaginations being excited, hastened full of dread to relate this
terrible example of the power of John of Beverley. When the army passed
through, no one dared again to tempt the vengeance of the blessed saint; and..
the territory of his church alone remained covered with habitations and
produce, in the midst of the devastated country...
"... Famine, like a faithful companion of the conquest, followed
their footsteps. From the year 1067, it had been desolating some provinces,
which alone had then been conquered; but in 1069 it extended itself through the
whole of England and appeared in all its horror in the newly conquered
territories. The inhabitants of the province of York and the country to the
north, after feeding on the horses which the Norman army abandoned on the
roads, devoured human flesh. More than a hundred thousand people, of all ages,
died of want in these countries."[162]
In the wake of the secular armies came the ecclesiastical. Thus new
monasteries were founded by the Conqueror and peopled with Norman monks. Or the
monks of the old monasteries were simply slaughtered to make way for the new.
For example, at Stone near Stafford on the Trent, as Thierry writes,
"there was a small oratory, where two nuns and a priest passed their days
in praying in honour of a Saxon saint called Wolfed.[163] All
three were killed by one Enisant, a soldier of the conquering army, 'which
Enisant,' says the legend, 'killed the priest and the two nuns, that his sister
whom he had brought with him might have the church.'"[164]
Professor Douglas writes: "An eleventh-century campaign was
inevitably brutal, but the methods here displayed were widely regarded as
exceptional and beyond excuse, even by those who were otherwise fervent
admirers of the Norman king... 'I am more disposed to pity the sorrows and
sufferings of the wretched people than to undertake the hopeless task of screening
one who was guilty of such wholesale massacre by lying flatteries. I assert
moreover that such barbarous homicide should not pass unpunished.' Such was the
view of a monk in Normandy. A writer from northern England supplies more
precise details of the horrible incidents of the destruction, and recalls the
rotting and putrefying corpses which littered the highways of the afflicted
province. Pestilence inevitably ensued, and an annalist of Evesham tells how
refugees in the last state of destitution poured into the little town. Nor is
it possible to dismiss these accounts as rhetorical exaggeration, for twenty
years later Domesday Book shows the persisting effects of the terrible
visitation, and there is evidence that these endured until the reign of Stephen..."[165]
Archbishop Aldred of York died, broken-hearted, on September 11, 1069,
in the burnt-out shell of his metropolitan see - but not before he had gone to
William and publicly cursed him for breaking his coronation oath...
Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester meekly accepted the Conqueror's rule; and
he was now sent to pacify Chester, being the only bishop to whom the people of
that north-western province, the last to be conquered by the Normans, would be
likely to listen. His surrender, more than any other, signified the end of the
English resistance. For while bands of fugitives continued to struggle in
different parts of the country, particularly in the Fens under the famous
Hereward the Wake, Wulfstan was the last Englishman of nation-wide renown
around whom a national resistance could have formed.
Before leaving events in the north, we should not forget to mention the
influence of the greatest saint of the north, St. Cuthbert (+687). After the
violent death of William's appointee, Robert Comin, in Durhan, another
expedition was sent by William to restore order. But St. Cuthbert's power,
which had terrified unholy kings in the past, had not abandoned his people.
For the expedition, writes C.J. Stranks, "was turned back by a
thick mist, sent for the protection of his people by St. Cuthbert, when the
army reached Northallerton. Then the king himself came. The frightened monks
[led by Bishop Ethelwine of Durham] decided to take refuge at Lindisfarne and,
of course, to take the body of their saint with them. When they reached the
shore opposite to the island night had fallen and there was a storm raging. It
looked as if their way was blocked, for the sea covered the causeway. They were
tired and frightened and at their wits' end, when miraculously, as it seemed to
them, the sea withdrew and the path to the island lay open...
"Their stay was not long, for they were back in Durham by the
beginning of Lent, 1070. Two years later William the Conqueror himself felt the
saint's power. He was staying in Durham for a little while on his way home from
Scotland in order to begin building the castle there. Perhaps he had heard of
the flight to Lindisfarne, for he thought it necessary to take an oath of the
monks that St. Cuthbert's body was really at Durham. But he was still not
convinced, and ordered that the tomb should be opened on All Saints' Day,
threatening that if the body was not there he would execute all the officers of
the monastery. The day arrived. Mass was begun, when suddenly the king was
seized by a violent fever. It was obvious that the saint was angry at his
temerity. William left the church, mounted his horse and never looked back
until he had crossed the Tees and was safely out of the Patrimony of St.
Cuthbert..."[166]
Meanwhile, Bishop Ethelwine decided to flee Norman England. He tried to
set sail for Cologne, but adverse winds drove his ship to Scotland, where he
spent the winter. In 1071, however, he headed for Ely, where the English were
to make their last stand…
In 1071 the last remnants of the English resistance, led by Earls Edwin,
Morcar and Siward and Bishop Ethelwine of Durham, sought refuge in the island
monastery of Ely in East Anglia. There, under the leadership of Hereward the Wake,
they made frequent sallies against William's men. When William heard of this,
he invested the island and started to build a causeway towards it.
However, Hereward's men put up a strong resistance, and the "most
Christian" King William then resorted to a most infamous tactic - he
called in a witch, put her onto a
tower over the fens and ordered her to cast spells on the English. But this,
too, failed to work - the English launched a successful counter-attack, and the
witch fell from her tower and broke her neck. Finally, it was through the abbot
and monks (with the connivance of Early Morcar) that William conquered the
stronghold; for, considering it "their sacred duty," as the Book
of Ely put it, "to maintain their magnificent temple of God and St.
Etheldreda", they came to terms with William, and in exchange for promises
that their lands would be restored and confirmed, they guided the Normans
secretly into the rebel stronghold.[167]
Hereward and his men made their escape; but others were not so
fortunate. As Kightly writes, many must have wondered "whether surrender
had been such a good idea after all. 'The king caused all the defenders to be
brought before him, first the leaders and then anyone else of rank or fame.
Some he sent to perpetual imprisonment' - among them the deluded Morcar, Siward
and Bishop Aethelwine - 'others he condemned to lose their eyes, their hands or
their feet' - William rarely hanged men, preferring to give them time for
repentance - 'while most of the lesser folk he released unpunished.' Then, to
ensure that Ely would not trouble him again, he ordered that a castle be built
in the monastic precinct (where its mound still stands)..."[168]
"Next, going to the abbey, 'he stood as far as possible from the
tomb of the holy Etheldreda, and threw a gold piece to her altar: he dared not
go any closer, because he feared the judgement of God on the wrong he was doing
to her shrine.' And well he might, for though the monks kept their estates and
their English abbot, King William soon found an excuse to levy an immense fine
on them, so that they were forced to sell almost all the adornments of their
church: when their payment proved a few coins short, he increased his demands
still further, and they lost the few treasures that remained. 'But even after
all this,' mourns the Ely Book, 'no one believed that they would be left
in peace' - and nor were they."[169]
After further adventures, Hereward was eventually reconciled with
William. However, another English leader, Earl Waltheof, was not so fortunate.
He had joined a conspiracy of Normans and Saxons which was defeated in battle,
and was executed at Winchester on May 31, 1076, just as he finished praying:
"... and lead us not into temptation." “And then, goes the story, in
the hearing of all, the head, in a clear voice, finished the prayer, ‘But
deliver us from evil. Amen.’”[170] He was
buried at Crowland, and according to Abbot Wulfketyl of Crowland many miracles
took place at his tomb, including the rejoining of his head to his body.[171] However,
veneration of him as a saint was not permitted by the Norman authorities:
Wulketyl was tried for idolatry (!) before a council in London, defrocked, and
banished to Glastonbury...
3. DOOMSDAY (1070-1087)
And so we come to the last act of the tragic drama - the false Pope's
seal on the whole of what had gone before.
In the week after Pascha, writes Thierry, "there arrived in
England, pursuant to William's request, three legates from the apostolic see,
viz. Ermenfeni, Bishop of Sienna, and the cardinals John and Peter. The Norman
founded his great designs on the presence of these envoys from his ally the
pope; and kept them about him for a whole year, honouring them (says an old
historian) as if they had been angels of God. In the midst of the famine, which
in many places was destroying the Saxons by thousands, brilliant festivals were
celebrated in the fortified palace of Winchester; there the Roman priests,
placing the crown afresh on the head of the foreign king, effaced the vain
malediction which Eldred [Aldred], Archbishop of York had pronounced against
him.
"After the festivals, a great assembly of the Normans, laymen or
priests, enriched by the lands of the English, was held at Winchester. At this
assembly the Saxons were summoned to appear, in the name (of the authority) of
the Roman church, by circulars, the style of which might forewarn them of the
result of this great council (as it was called) to themselves. 'Although the church
of Rome,' said the envoys, 'has a right to watch the conduct of all Christians,
it more especially belongs to her to inquire into your morals and way of life -
you whom she formerly instructed in the faith of Christ - and to repair in you
the decay of that faith which you hold from her. In order to exercise over your
person this salutory inspection, we, ministers of blessed Peter the apostle,
and authorised representatives of our lord, Pope Alexander, have resolved to
hold a council with you, that we may inform ourselves of the bad things which
have sprung up in the vineyard of the Lord, and may plant in it things
profitable both for the body and for the soul.'
"The true sense of these mystical words was, that the conqueror, in
accordance with the pope, wished to strip the whole body of the higher clergy
of English origin; and the mission of the legates from Rome was to give the
colour of religion to a measure purely political. The prelate whom they first
struck was Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had dared to appear in arms
against the foreigner, and had refused to anoint him king. These were his real
crimes; but the sentence which degraded him was grounded on other causes - on
more honest pretexts (to use the
language of the old historians). Three ecclesiastical grievances were found
against him, which rendered his ordination null and void. He was turned out of
the episcopacy - first, for having taken the archbishopric during the life of
the Norman Archbishop Robert, whom the Saxons had driven away; secondly, for
having said mass in the pontifical habit or pallium worn by the said
Robert, and left by him at Canterbury; lastly, for having received his own
pallium from the hands of Benedict X, who had been degraded, and afterwards
excommunicated, by a victorious competitor. As soon as the friend of King
Harold and of his country was, according to the language of the time, struck by the canonical axe, his lands
were seized and divided between the Norman king, the Norman queen, and the
Bishop of Bayeux. The same blow was aimed at those English bishops who could
not be reproached with any violation of the canons. Alexander prelate of
Lincoln, Egelmar prelate of East Anglia, Egelric prelate of Sussex, several
other bishops, and the abbots of the principal monasteries, were degraded all
at once. When the sentence of degradation was pronounced against them, they
were compelled to swear on the Gospel that they considered themselves as
deprived of their dignities lawfully, and for ever; and that, whoever their
successors might be, they would not protest against them. They were then
conducted by an armed guard into some fortress or monastery, which became their
prison. Those who had formerly been monks were forcibly taken back to their old
cloisters, and it was officially published, that, disgusted with the world, it
had pleased them to go and revisit the friends of their youth. Thus it was that
foreign power mingled derision with violence. The members of the Saxon clergy
dared not to struggle against their fate: Stigand fled into Scotland; Egelsig,
an abbot of St. Augustine's, embarked for Denmark, and was demanded as a fugitif
du roi, by a rescript from the Conqueror. Only one bishop, Egelwin
[Ethelwine] of Durham, when on the point of departing into exile, solemnly
cursed the oppressors of his country; and declared them separated for ever from
the communion of Christians, according to the grave and gloomy formula in which
that separation was pronounced. But the sound of these words fell in vain on
the ear of the Norman: William had priests to give the lie to priests, as he
had swords to ward off swords..."[172]
Ethelwine, who, as we have seen, joined Hereward at Ely but was captured
and died of hunger in prison at Abingdon, was not the only bishop to defy the
papists. His brother Ethelric, who had retired as Bishop of Durham in 1056 to
make way for his brother, was brought from Peterborough, condemned for
"piracy" and imprisoned in Westminster Abbey. There he lived for two
more years "in voluntary poverty and a wealth of tears"[173], and
was never reconciled with William. He died on October 15, 1072, was buried in
the chapel of St. Nicholas, and was very soon considered a saint, miracles
being wrought at his tomb.[174] For
"those who had known him when living," writes William of Malmesbury,
"transmitted his memory to their children, and to this day [c. 1120]
neither visitors nor supplicants are wanting at his tomb."[175]
Having silenced the last true bishops, the papists now turned to the
monks. Few were those, like Frederic of St. Albans, who resisted them. Among
the few were three who occupied a dependency of Ely's at St. Neot's,
Huntingdonshire. When the Norman Gilbert of Clara came to expel them, they
refused to move, and could not be expelled either by hunger or the lash.
Finally, they were physically transported across the Channel to the Norman
monastery of Bec, where they remained in prison, as far as we can surmise, to
the end of their lives.[176]
In 1083 it was the turn of the most venerable of England's holy places,
Glastonbury, to suffer the ravages of the "Christian" pagans. The
occasion was an argument between the monks and their new Norman abbot,
Thurstan, who insisted on substituting a new form of chanting from Dijon for
the old-style Gregorian chanting to which the monks were accustomed. The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle records that "the monks made an amicable complaint to him
[Thurstan] about it, and asked him to rule them justly and have regard for
them, and in return they would be faithful and obedient to him. The abbot,
however, would have none of it, but treated them badly, threatening them with
worse. One day the abbot went into the chapter, and spoke against the monks,
and threatened to maltreat them. He sent for laymen, who entered the chapter
fully armed against the monks. Not knowing what they should do, the monks were
terrified and fled in all directions. Some ran into the church and locked the
doors against them, but their pursuers went after them into the monastic
church, determined to drag them out since they were afraid to leave. Moreover a
pitiful thing took place there that day, when the Frenchmen broke into the
choir and began pelting the monks in the direction of the altar where they
were. Some of the men-at-arms climbed up to the gallery, and shot arrows down
into the sanctuary, so that many arrows stuck in the cross which stood above
the altar. The wretched monks lay around the altar and some crept underneath,
crying aloud to God, desperately imploring His mercy when none was forthcoming
from men. What more can we find to say except to add that they showered arrows,
and their companions broke down the doors to force an entrance, and struck down
and killed some of the monks, wounding many therein, so that their blood ran
down from the altar on to the steps, and from the steps on to the floor. Three
of the monks were done to death, and eighteen wounded."[177]
William of Malmesbury adds that the Glastonbury monks refused to accept
the chant of William of Fecamp because "they had grown up in the practice
of the Roman Church". This shows that the Old English Church preserved the
old traditions of Orthodox Rome, which had now been superseded on the
continent.
Again, William writes that one of the arrows pierced an image of the
crucified Lord, which suddenly gushed blood. "At this sight the
perpetrator of the crime became unbearably confused and at once became mad, so
that when he got outside the church he fell to the ground, broke his neck and
died. As soon as the others saw this they hastened to leave the monastery lest
they should suffer similar punishments. But the rod of Divine justice did not
allow them to escape retribution since it knew that they had been accomplices
in the perpetration of evil. For some were affected internally and some
externally, either their minds or their bodies being rendered impotent, and
they paid a just penalty."[178]
Thus did the Normans dare to do what even the pagan Saxons and Danes had
not dared: to defile the oldest and holiest shrine of Britain, the meeting-place
in Christ of Jew and Greek, Roman and Celt, Saxon and Dane...
Even the holy relics of the English saints were subjected to
desecration. For, as Thierry writes, "the hatred which the clergy of the
conquest bore to the natives of England, extended to the saints of English
birth; and in different places their tombs were broken open and their bones
scattered about."[179] Thus
Archbishop Lanfranc refused to consider St. Alphege of Canterbury (+1012) a
hieromartyr, although the truth of his martyrdom was witnessed by his incorrupt
body; and he demoted St. Dunstan's day to the rank of a third-class feast, and
"reformed" certain other feasts of the English Church.
However, the English saints were not inactive in their own defence. In
1077, the monastery of Evesham passed into the control of a Norman abbot named
Walter, who, on the advice of Lanfranc, decided to subject the local saints'
relics to ordeal by fire. But not only did the holy relics not burn: the fire
even refused to touch them. Moreover, when Walter was carrying the skull of the
holy Martyr-Prince Wistan (+849), it suddenly fell from his hands and began
gushing out a river of sweat. And when they came to the relics of St. Credan,
an eighth-century abbot of Evesham, they were all terrified to see them shining
as gold.[180]
Then the monks of Evesham, heartened, went on the offensive: they took the
relics of their major saint, Bishop Egwin of Worcester (+709), on a
fund-raising tour of the country, during which miracles were reported as far
afield as Oxford, Dover, Winchester and the river Trent.[181]
Another such incident is recorded by John Hudson: “Possibly in the
middle of the 12th century, a writer at Abingdon, Berkshire,
described with great relish the fate of the monastery’s first new abbot after
the Conquest, Adelelm, a monk from Jumièges. The abbot displayed a
marked disrespect for pre-Conquest saints, notably planning to replace the
church built by St. Aethelwold. Once, while dining with his relatives and
friends, Adelelm was abusing Aethelwold, saying that the church of English
rustics should not stand but be destroyed. After the meal he left to relieve
himself, and there cried out. Those who came running found him dead. Clearly
the writer saw such a death as fitting.”[182]
In the decades that followed, the discoveries of the incorrupt relics of
several English saints proved the sanctity of the old traditions, leading to a
“restoration” of their veneration in the Anglo-Norman Church.[183] These
saints included St. Mildburga at Much Wenlock in 1079, St. Theodore at
Canterbury in 1091, St. Edmund at Bury St. Edmunds in 1095, St. Edward the
Confessor at Westminster in 1102, St. Cuthbert at Durham in 1104, St. Alphege
at Canterbury in 1105 and St. Etheldreda at Ely in 1106. Gradually, however, as
the pre-revolutionary days of Anglo-Saxon England receded - or rather, were
violently blotted out - from the popular memory, the old traditions were lost.
William of Malmesbury could still write, early in the twelfth century:
"Does not the whole island blaze with so many relics that you can scarcely
pass a village of any consequence without hearing the name of some new
saint?" But then he added: "And of how many have all records
perished?"[184]
But all this could have been borne if only
the English themselves had kept their faith, and their membership of the One
True Church. However, on August 29, 1070, the Day of the Beheading of St. John
the Forerunner and a strict fast day in the Orthodox Church, the first Roman
Catholic archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc of Bec, was consecrated in the
place of Stigand. Truly the forerunners of Christ, the preachers of repentance,
had fallen in England.
Immediately Lanfranc demanded, and eventually obtained, a profession of
obedience from the archbishop-elect of York, Thomas, in spite of the fact that
York had been a separate ecclesiastical province throughout the history of the
English Church. The Anglo-Saxon text of the Parker (A) text of the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle ends at this point, continuing in Latin. For truly, the whole of
the English Church had now become Latin both in language and in theology...
Lanfranc also set about reforming the canon law of the English Church to
bring it into line with the new code of the Roman papacy. In this he received the
full support of William, who said: "I have ordained that the episcopal
laws be amended, because before my time they were not properly administered in
England according to the precepts of the holy canons." These canons, which
had already been put into effect in Normandy and other parts of Western Europe,
concerned such matters as the respect due to the Roman see, simony, the
separation of secular and ecclesiastical courts, and the marriage of the
clergy.
It was the latter decree that caused the greatest disturbance, both on
the continent and in England; and sadly we find the English Bishop Wulfstan on
the side of the uncanonical onslaught on Holy Matrimony. Thus we read that
"the sin of incontinence he abhorred, and approved continence in all men,
and especially in clerks in holy orders. If he found one wholly given to
chastity he took him to himself and loved him as a son. Wedded priests he
brought under one edict, commanding them to renounce their fleshly desires or
their churches. If they loved chastity, they would remain and be welcome: if
they were the servants of bodily pleasures, they must go forth in disgrace.
Some there were who chose rather to go without their churches than their women:
and of these some wandered about till they starved; others sought and at last
found some other provision..."[185]
For his obedience to the king, and strict enactment of the papal
decrees, Wulfstan received great honour from the world's mighty ones, and by
the 1080s he was one of the very few bishops of English origin still in
possession of their sees. But we can only lament the fall of a great ascetic
and wonderworker, who was reduced to separating by force those whom God had
lawfully joined together. If only he had paid heed to the true canons accepted
by the Seven Ecumenical Councils on the marriage of the clergy.[186] If
only he had paid heed to the correspondence of the great eighth-century English
apostle of Germany, St. Boniface, in which he would have read that Pope
Zechariah, in a letter to Boniface, upheld the marriage of priests.[187]
And even if the English Church in its latest phase did at times declare
against the marriage of priests, as in Ethelred's code of 1008, at other times
it was explicitly permitted, as in Archbishop Wulfstan's Law of Northumbrian
Priests; and never were lawfully
married priests forced to separate from their wives in pre-Conquest England.
But there was an unbalanced streak in Wulfstan's asceticism which combined an
almost Manichean zeal for chastity with some surprising improprieties.[188] And he
had a papist understanding of obedience that ignored the word: "Neither is
a wicked king any longer a king, but a tyrant; nor is a bishop oppressed with
ignorance a bishop, but falsely so called."[189]
However, it must be said in Wulfstan's favour that once, during a synod
held at Westminster in the king's presence, he defied Lanfranc's order that he
give up his pastoral staff and ring on the grounds that he was supposedly
"an ignorant and unlearned man".
The story is told by Ailred of Rievaulx (in Cardinal Newman's
paraphrase) that he rose up and said that he would give up his staff only to
King Edward the Confessor, who had conferred it upon him. "With these
words he raised his hand a little, and drove the crosier into the stone which
covered the sacred body: 'Take this, my master,' he said, 'and deliver it to
whom thou will'; and descending from the altar, he laid aside his pontifical
dress, and took his seat, a simple monk, among the monks. But the staff, to the
wonder of all, remained fast embedded in the stone. They tried to draw it out,
but it was immovable. A murmur ran through the throne; they crowded round the
spot in astonishment, and you might see them in their surprise, approaching a
little, then stopping, stretching out their hands and withdrawing them, now
throwing themselves on the floor, to see how the spike was fastened in the
stone, now rising up and gathering into little groups to gaze. The news was
carried to where the synod was sitting. Lanfranc sent the Bishop of Rochester
to the tomb, to bring the staff; but was unable to withdraw it. The archbishop
in wonder, sent for the king, and went with him to the place; and after having
prayed, tried to move it, but in vain. The king cried out, and Lanfranc burst
into tears... When the archbishop had withdrawn his deposition, Wulfstan
withdrew the staff from the tomb...[190]
The Gregorian
Revolution
Who was the real ruler of the English Church at this time - William or
the Pope?
In order to answer that question we need to turn to the revolution in
Church-State relations that was taking place on the continent of Europe.
At almost the same time that the English autocracy was being destroyed,
the Byzantine Empire suffered a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Seljuk
Turks, Manzikert in 1071. Most of Anatolia, the heartland of Byzantine
strength, was conceded to the Turks. In the same year, the last Byzantine
stronghold in southern Italy, Bari, fell to the Normans, after which Byzantium
was never again able to exert significant influence on events in the West.
As Orthodox autocracy reeled under these hammer blows from East and
West, a new form of despotism, Christian in form but pagan in essence, entered
upon the scene.
Canning writes: “The impact of Gregory VII’s pontificate was enormous:
for the church nothing was to be the same again. From his active lifetime can
be traced the settling of the church in its long-term direction as a body of
power and coercion; the character of the papacy as a jurisdictional and
governmental institution… There arises the intrusive thought, out of bounds for
the historian: this was the moment of the great wrong direction taken by the
papacy, one which was to outlast the Middle Ages and survive into our own day.
From the time of Gregory can be dated the deliberate clericalisation of the
church based on the notion that the clergy, being morally purer, were superior
to the laity and constituted a church which was catholic, chaste and free.
There was a deep connection between power and a celibacy which helped
distinguish the clergy as a separate and superior caste, distanced in the most
profound psychological sense from the family concerns of the laity beneath
them. At the time of the reform papacy the church became stamped with
characteristics which have remained those of the Roman Catholic church: it
became papally centred, legalistic, coercive and clerical. The Roman church
was, in Gregory’s words, the ‘mother and mistress’ (mater et magistra)
of all churches.’”[191]
Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII, was a midget in physical size.[192] But
having been elected to the papacy “by the will of St. Peter” in 1073, he set
about ensuring that no ruler on earth would rival him in grandeur. Having
witnessed the Emperor Henry III’s deposition of Pope Gregory VI, with whom he
went into exile, he took the name Gregory VII in order to emphasise a unique
mission: as Peter de Rosa writes, “he had seen an emperor dethrone a pope; he
would dethrone an emperor regardless.
“Had he put an emperor in his place, he
would have been beyond reproach. He did far more. By introducing a mischievous
and heretical doctrine [of Church-State relations], he put himself in place of
the emperor… He claimed to be not only Bishop of bishops but King of kings. In
a parody of the gospels, the devil took him up to a very high mountain and
showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and Gregory VII exclaimed: These are
all mine.
“As that most objective of historians, Henry Charles Lea, wrote in The
Inquisition in the Middle Ages: ‘To the realization of this ideal [of papal
supremacy], he devoted his life with a fiery zeal and unshaken purpose that
shrank from no obstacle, and to it he was ready to sacrifice not only the men
who stood in his path but also the immutable principles of truth and justice.’
“… The Bishop of Trier saw the danger. He charged Gregory with
destroying the unity of the Church. The Bishop of Verdun said that the pope was
mistaken in his unheard-of arrogance. Belief belongs to one’s church, the heart
belongs to one’s country. The pope, he said, must not filch the heart’s
allegiance. This was precisely what Gregory did. He wanted all; he left
emperors and princes nothing. The papacy, as he fashioned it, by undermining
patriotism, undermined the authority of secular rulers; they felt threatened by
the Altar. At the Reformation, in England and elsewhere, rulers felt obliged to
exclude Catholicism from their lands in
order to feel secure…
“The changes Gregory brought about were
reflected in language. Before him, the pope’s traditional title was Vicar of
St. Peter. After him, it was Vicar of Christ. Only ‘Vicar of Christ’ could
justify his absolutist pretensions, which his successors inherited in reality
not from Peter or from Jesus but from him.”[193]
Gregory’s position was based on a forged collection of canons and a
false interpretation of two Gospel passages: Matthew 16.18-19 and John
21.15-17. According to the first passage, in Gregory’s interpretation, he was
the successor of Peter, upon whom the Church had been founded, and had plenary
power to bind and to loose. And according to the second, the flock of Peter
over which he had jurisdiction included all Christians, not excluding emperors.
As he wrote: “Perhaps [the supporters of the emperor] imagine that when God
commended His Church to Peter three times, saying, ‘Feed My sheep’, He made an
exception of kings? Why do they not consider, or rather confess with shame that
when God gave Peter, as the ruler, the power of binding and loosing in heaven
and on earth, he excepted no-one and withheld nothing from his power?”
For “who could doubt that the priests of Christ are considered the
fathers and masters of kings, princes and all the faithful?” This meant that he
had power both to excommunicate and depose the emperor. Nor did the emperor’s
anointing give him any authority in Gregory’s eyes. For “greater power is
conceded to an exorcist, when he is made a spiritual emperor for expelling
demons, than could be given to any layman for secular domination”. Indeed, “who
would not know that kings and dukes took their origin from those who, ignorant
of God, through pride, rapine, perfidy, murders and, finally, almost any kind
of crime, at the instigation of the devil, the prince of this world, sought
with blind desire and unbearable presumption to dominate their equals, namely
other men?”[194]
Hildebrand’s attitude to political power was almost Manichaean in its
negative intensity. Indeed, as de Rosa writes of a later Pope who faithfully
followed Hildebrand’s teaching, “this was Manicheeism applied to relations
between church and state. The church, spiritual, was good; the state, material,
was essentially the work of the devil. This naked political absolutism
undermined the authority of kings. Taken seriously, his theories would lead to
anarchy”.[195]
Of course, the idea that the priesthood was higher than the kingship was
not heretical, and could find support in the Holy Fathers. However, the Fathers
always allowed that emperors and kings had supremacy of jurisdiction in their
own sphere, and had always insisted that the power of secular rulers comes from
God and is worthy of the honour that befits every God-established institution.
What was new, shocking and completely unpatristic in Gregory’s words was his
disrespect for the kingship, his refusal to allow it any dignity or holiness –
still more, his proto-communist implication that rulers had no right to rule.
The corollary of this, of course, was that the only rightful ruler was the Pope. For “if the holy apostolic
see, through the princely power divinely conferred upon it, has jurisdiction
over spiritual things, why not also over secular things?” Thus to the secular
rulers of Spain Gregory wrote in 1077 that the kingdom of Spain belonged to St.
Peter and the Roman Church “in rightful ownership”. And to the secular rulers
of Sardinia he wrote in 1073 that the Roman Church exerted “a special and
individual care” over them – which meant, as a later letter of 1080
demonstrated, that they would face armed invasion if they did not submit to the
pope’s terms.
Again, in 1075 he threatened King Philip of France with excommunication,
having warned the French episcopate that if the king did not amend his ways he
would place France under interdict, adding: “Do not doubt that we shall, with
God’s help, make every possible effort to snatch the kingdom of France from his
possession.”[196]
But this kind of talk would have remained just words, and would not have had
the effect it in fact had – of turning the western world upside down – if
Gregory had not had the ability to compel submission. He demonstrated this
ability when wrote to one of King Philip’ vassals, Duke William of Aquitaine,
and invited him to threaten the king. The king backed down…
This power was demonstrated to an even
greater extent in his famous dispute with Emperor Henry IV of Germany. It began
with a quarrel between the pope and the emperor over who should succeed to the
see of Milan. This was the see, significantly, whose most famous bishop, St.
Ambrose, had excommunicated (but not deposed) an emperor, but had also declared
that Rome had only “a primacy of confession, not of honour”.[197]
Gregory expected Henry to back down as King Philip had done. But he did not, no
doubt because the see of Milan was of great importance politically in that its
lands and vassals gave it control of the Alpine passes and therefore of Henry’s
access to his Italian domains. Instead, in January, 1076, he convened a Synod
of Bishops at Worms which addressed Gregory as “brother Hildebrand”,
demonstrated that his depotism had introduced mob rule into the Church, and
refused all obedience to him: “since, as thou didst publicly proclaim, none of
us has been to thee a bishop, so henceforth thou shalt be Pope to none of us”.[198]
Gregory retaliated in a truly revolutionary way. In a Synod in Rome in
February he declared the emperor deposed. Addressing St. Peter, he said: “I
withdraw the whole kingdom of the Germans and of Italy from Henry the King, son
of Henry the Emperor. For he has risen up against thy Church with unheard of
arrogance. And I absolve all Christians from the bond of the oath which they
have made to him or shall make. And I forbid anyone to serve him as King…”[199] By
absolving subjects of their oath of allegiance to their king, Gregory
“effectively,” as Robinson writes, “sanctioned rebellion against the royal
power…”[200]
That Lent Gregory published Dictatus Papae, which left no doubt
about the revolutionary political significance of his actions, and which must
be counted as one of the most megalomaniac documents in history: "The Pope
can be judged by no one; the Roman church has never erred and never will err
till the end of time; the Roman Church was founded by Christ alone; the Pope alone
can depose bishops and restore bishops; he alone can make new laws, set up new
bishoprics, and divide old ones; he alone can translate bishops; he alone can
call general councils and authorize canon law; he alone can revise his own
judgements; he alone can use the imperial insignia; he can depose emperors; he
can absolve subjects from their allegiance; all princes should kiss his feet;
his legates, even though in inferior orders, have precedence over all bishops;
an appeal to the papal court inhibits judgement by all inferior courts; a duly
ordained Pope is undoubtedly made a saint by the merits of St. Peter."[201]
Robinson continues: “The confusion of the spiritual and the secular in
Gregory VII’s thinking is most marked in the terminology he used to describe
the laymen whom he recruited to further his political aims. His letters are
littered with the terms ‘the warfare of Christ’, ‘the service of St. Peter’,
‘the vassals of St. Peter’…, Military terminology is, of course, commonly found
in patristic writings.. St. Paul had evoked the image of the soldier of Christ
who waged an entirely spiritual war… [But] in the letters of Gregory VII, the
traditional metaphor shades into literal actuality… For Gregory, the ‘warfare
of Christ’ and the ‘warfare of St. Peter’ came to mean, not the spiritual
struggles of the faithful, nor the duties of the secular clergy, nor the
ceaseless devotions of the monks; but rather the armed clashes of feudal
knights on the battlefields of Christendom…”[202]
This was power politics under the guise of a anti-political
spirituality; but it worked. Although, at a Synod in Worms in 1076, some
bishops supported Henry, saying that the Pope had “introduced worldliness into
the Church”; “the bishops have been deprived of their divine authority”; “the
Church of God is in danger of destruction”[203] –
still Henry began to lose support, and in 1077 he with his wife and child was
forced to march across the Alps in deepest winter and do penance before
Gregory, standing for three days almost naked in the snow outside the castle of
Canossa. Gregory restored him to communion, but not to his kingship…
Soon rebellion began to stir in Germany as Rudolf, Duke of Swabia, was
elected anti-king. For a while Gregory hesitated. But then, in 1080, he
definitely deposed Henry, freed his subjects from their allegiance to him and
declared that the kingship was conceded to Rudolf. However, Henry recovered,
convened a Synod of bishops that declared Gregory deposed and then convened
another Synod that elected an anti-pope, Wibert of Ravenna. In October, 1080,
Rudolf died in battle. Then in 1083 Henry and Wibert marched on Rome. In 1084
Wibert was consecrated Pope Clement III and in turn crowned Henry as emperor.
Gregory fled from Rome with his Norman allies and died in Salerno in 1085.[204]
“I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity," he said;
"therefore I die in exile," said Gregory as he lay dying. But a monk
who waited on him replied: "In exile thou canst not be, for God hath given
thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth
for thy possession." This Scripture refers to Christ, not a simple man.
But then such distortion and blasphemy was becoming commonplace now; for,as
Archimandrite Justin Popovich put it: "Human history has had three main
falls: that of Adam, that of Judas, and that of the Pope... The fall of the
Pope consists in seeking to replace the God-man with man."[205]
Less spectacular than his struggle with Henry, but no less instructive,
was Gregory’s contest with King William I of England. As we have seen, William
had conquered England with Hildebrand’s blessing. And shortly after his bloody
pacification of the country he imposed the new canon law of the reformed papacy
upon the English Church. This pleased Gregory, who was therefore prepared to
overlook the fact that William considered that he owed his kingdom to his sword
and God alone: "The king of the English, although in certain matters he
does not comport himself as devoutly as we might hope, nevertheless in that he
has neither destroyed nor sold the Churches of God [!]; that he has taken pains
to govern his subjects in peace and justice [!!]; that he has refused his assent to anything detrimental to the apostolic see,
even when solicited by certain enemies of the cross of Christ; and that he has
compelled priests on oath to put away their wives and laity to forward the
tithes they were withholding from us - in all these respects he has shown
himself more worthy of approbation and honour than other kings..."
The "other kings" Gregory was referring to included, first of
all, the Emperor Henry IV of Germany, who, unlike William, did not support the
Pope's “reforms”. If William had acted like Henry, then there is no doubt that
Pope Gregory would have excommunicated him, too. And if William had refused to
co-operate with the papacy, then there is equally no doubt that the Pope would
have incited his subjects to wage a "holy war" against him, as he did
against Henry. For, as an anonymous monk of Hersfeld wrote: "[The
Gregorians] say that it is a matter of the faith and it is the duty of the
faithful in the Church to kill and to persecute those who communicate with, or
support the excommunicated King Henry and refuse to promote the efforts of [the
Gregorian] party."[206]
But William, by dint of brute force within and subtle diplomacy without,
managed to achieve the most complete control over both Church and State that
any English ruler ever achieved, while at the same time paradoxically managing
to remain on relatively good terms with the most autocratic Pope in history.
For totalitarian rulers only respect rivals of the same spirit. Thus did the
papocaesarist totalitarianism of Hildebrand beget the caesaropapist
totalitarianism of William the Bastard…
The absolute nature of William's control of the Church was vividly
expressed by Eadmer of Canterbury: "Now, it was the policy of King William
to maintain in England the usages and laws which he and his fathers before him
were accustomed to have in Normandy. Accordingly he made bishops, abbots and
other nobles throughout the whole country of persons of whom (since everyone
knew who they were, from what estate they had been raised and to what they had
been promoted) it would be considered shameful ingratitude if they did not
implicitly obey his laws, subordinating to this every other consideration; or
if any one of them presuming upon the power conferred by any temporal dignity
dared raise his head against him. Consequently, all things, spiritual and
temporal alike, waited upon the nod of the King... He would not, for instance,
allow anyone in all his dominion, except on his instructions, to recognize the
established Pontiff of the City of Rome or under any circumstance to accept any
letter from him, if it had not first been submitted to the King himself. Also
he would not let the primate of his kingdom, by which I mean the Archbishop of
Canterbury, otherwise Dobernia, if he were presiding over a general council of
bishops, lay down any ordinance or prohibition unless these were agreeable to
the King's wishes and had been first settled by him. Then again he would not
allow any one of his bishops, except on his express instructions, to proceed
against or excommunicate one of his barons or officers for incest or adultery
or any other cardinal offence, even when notoriously guilty, or to lay upon him
any punishment of ecclesiastical discipline."[207] Again,
in a letter to the Pope in reply to the latter's demand for fealty, William
wrote: "I have not consented to pay fealty, nor will I now, because I
never promised it, nor do I find that any of my predecessors ever paid it to
your predecessors."[208] And in
the same letter he pointedly called Archbishop Lanfranc "my vassal"
(i.e. not the Pope’!).
On the other hand, he agreed to the Pope's demand for the payment of
"Peter's Pence", the voluntary contribution of the English people to
Rome which had now become compulsory - for to squeeze the already impoverished
English meant no diminution in his personal power. The Popes therefore had to
wait until William's death before gradually asserting their personal control
over the English Church. In any case, William had already broken the back of
the English people both physically and spiritually; and the totalitarian
structure of Anglo-Norman government, combining secular and ecclesiastical
hierarchies under the king, needed only the man at the top to change to make it
a perfectly functioning cog in the ruthless machine of the "Vicar of
Christ".
We can express this another way by saying that as a result of the Norman
Conquest, England became a feudal monarchy. For R.H.C. Davies explains that
feudal monarchy was in fact “a New Leviathan, the medieval equivalent of a
socialist state. In a socialist state, the community owns, or should own, the
means of production. In a feudal monarchy, the king did own all the land –
which in the terms of medieval economy might fairly be equated with the means
of production.
“The best and simplest example of a feudal monarchy is to be found in
England after the Norman Conquest. When William the Conqueror defeated Harold
Godwineson at the battle of Hastings (1066), he claimed to have established his
legitimate right to succeed Edward the Confessor as King of England, but, owing
to Harold’s resistance, he was also able to claim that he had won the whole
country by right of conquest. Henceforward, every inch of land was to be his,
and he would dispose of it as he though fit. As is well known, he distributed
most of it to his Norman followers, but he did not give it to them in absolute
right… The Conqueror’s ownership of the land was firmly established in Domesday
Book,”[209]
which thereby became the record of the day of doom of the Orthodox Christian
autocracy in the West.
Professor Romanides sees William’s victory as the victory of the
“Franco-Latin” heretics of the French, German and North Italian lands over the
“West Roman” Orthodox of Rome itself and the British Isles. “The Franco-Latins
had just completed the expulsion of the Roman Orthodox from the Papacy in
1009/12-1046. This was followed by William the Conqueror’s capture of England
in 1066 and by his appointment of the Lombard Lanfranc as the first
Franco-Latin Archbishop of Canterbury with the blessing of the Lombard Pope
Alexander II in 1070. Lanfranc and his Franco-Latin bishops got their apostolic
succession by dismissing all their Celtic and Saxon predecessors en masse. They
condemned them as heretics and schismatics and sentenced them to prison for
life where they were tortured and starved to death. Lanfranc’s successor in
1093 was the Lombard Anselm of Canterbury who was the chief exponent of the
Franco-Latin positions at the [dialogue between the Franco-Latins and the Roman
Orthodox over the Filioque] at Bari [in 1098].”[210]
What influence did the Norman-Papist Conquest of England have on the
destiny of the neighbouring British Orthodox Churches? And what was the destiny
of those English Orthodox who fled beyond the seas?
Soon the Norman-Papist malaise spread to other parts of the British
Isles. Scotland welcomed many of the English exiles fleeing from William, but
it proved to be a temporary and illusory refuge. For King Malcolm's wife
Margaret, though a very pious woman and an English princess of the Old Wessex
dynasty, became a spiritual daughter of Lanfranc, and hence the chief
instrument of the normanization and papalization of the Scottish Church.
However, according to Lucy Menzies, “it was not till the time of David I, son
of Malcolm and Margaret, that the authority of the Church of Rome was fully
accepted in Scotland and the Celtic Church, as such, disappeared from the
mainland, the Culdees being driven out.”[211]
Wales did not fare much better. After William's "pilgrimage"
there in 1081, a struggle took place between the Gregorian and nationalist
parties whose outcome was easy to foresee. It seems likely that the last
independent Orthodox bishop in Britain was Rhyddmarch of St. Davids, son of
Sulien the Wise, who reposed in 1096 and of whom the Annals of St. Davids
say that he was "one without an equal or second, excepting his father, for
learning, wisdom, and piety. And after Rhyddmarch instruction for scholars
ceased at Menevia..."[212]
Early in the next century the Irish, too, suffered Papist
"reformation", and, in 1172 - a Norman invasion. Their reaction to
the news that their land had already been granted to the Normans by the English
Pope Adrian IV is not recorded. For in his Metalogicus of 1156 John of
Salisbury writes of Adrian: "At my solicitation he granted Ireland to
Henry II, the illustrious King of England, to hold by hereditary right, as his
letter to this day testifies. For all Ireland of ancient right, according to
the Donation of Constantine, was said to belong to the Roman Church which he
founded."[213]
Thus perished that Church which had been so important in the
evangelization of England, and which, in the person of St. Columbanus of
Luxeuil, had given a classic rebuke to a heretical Pope: "[If you err],
then those who have always kept the Orthodox Faith, whoever they may have been,
even if they seem to be your subordinates,.. shall be your judges.. And thus,
even as your honour is great in proportion to the dignity of your see, so great
care is needful for you, lest you lose your dignity through some mistake. For
power will be in your hands just so long as your principles remain sound; for
he is the appointed keybearer of the Kingdom of heaven, who opens by true
knowledge to the worthy and shuts to the unworthy; otherwise if he does the
opposite, he shall be able neither to open nor to shut..."[214]
Fr. Andrew Phillips writes that "Alsin, Abbot of St. Augustine's at
Canterbury, took refuge in Norway. Sweden, where English missionaries had long
been at work was another destination and perhaps Finland too, It was, however,
Denmark which proved to be the most popular destination. It was from here that
King Swein had thought to mount invasions in 1070 and 1075. These were
supported in England, especially in the North and the East where Danish
sympathies were strong...
"Many churchmen also fled abroad, their places taken by the feudal
warrior-bishops and clergy of the Normans, such as Odo of Bayeux, who fought at
Hastings. Scandinavia seems to have been their main destination.
"Other exiles went to the Continent, to Flanders, France and Italy.
King Harold's daughter, Gytha, moved further still. She was to marry the
Grand-Prince of Kiev, Vladimir, and lived in Kiev, then a great centre of
Christian civilization. Here, having been made welcome, she gave birth to
several children, of whom the eldest son was named Harold like his grandfather,
but also received the Slavic name, Mstislav.[215]
"Possibly the greatest emigration, however, was elsewhere; the Old
English were attracted above all by the almost mystical name of Constantinople,
fixed they believed, as Constantine had believed before them, at the middle of
the Earth, joining East and West (which Kipling wrongly said would never meet).
It is certain that from the Conquest on, and especially during the 1070's but
right on into the middle of the twelfth century, huge numbers of English
emigrated to the New Rome. Moreover, this emigration was an emigration of the
elite of the country. The great scholar Sir Frank Stenton has discovered that
several noble families simply disappeared after the Conquest and they were not
all killed at Hastings - they emigrated. It was particularly the young who left
to seek a better future elsewhere. In historical terms this emigration is
comparable only to the emigration of the Russian elite and nobility in 1917
when confronted by the Bolshevik terror. So great was this emigration,
especially it seems from the West Country, the Fens and East Anglia, and so
long did it continue, that we must assume that it occurred with the approval of
William I and his successors. It seems almost certain that it was their method
of ridding themselves of the rebellious Old English ruling class and their
supporters among the people. Exile, organised by the State, was after all a
bloodless elimination of those who opposed William and the new order. It is no
coincidence that the exodus continued right into the twelfth century. Why did
they choose Constantinople? First, because probably already in the Confessor's
reign (let us not forget that he was also half-Norman) discontented elements
seem already to have left for Constantinople where the Emperor needed men to
fight in his armies, especially against the Turks, who posed a threat in the
East. Secondly, many Danes and other Scandinavians (such as Harold Hardrada)
had formed the elite 'Varangian Guard' there and found fame and fortune; news
of this had certainly reached England. Thirdly, what was the future for a young
English noble in Norman England? We know that in 1070 a certain Ioannis
Rafailis, an Imperial agent or 'prospatharios' came to England recruiting for
the Imperial Army. Young Englishmen and Anglo-Danes, especially those of noble
birth, would certainly have been attracted. All the more so, since though the
Emperor faced the Turks in the East, in the West, especially in Southern Italy,
Sicily and Dalmatia, he faced the hated Normans; what better way for an
Englishman of avenging himself? Fourthly, there were those who did not like the
new order in the Church or in the State under the Normans. Spiritually they
could find refuge in Constantinople and the freedom to continue to live in the
ritual and the spirit of the Old English Church in the imperial Capital.
Perhaps unconsciously their instincts and feelings drew them to that City which
symbolised the unity of Christendom through the Old English period and which
had had so many connections with the Apostles of the English, Gregory and
Augustine..."[216]
In 1075, continues Phillips, "a fleet of 350 ships (according to
another source 235) left England for exile in 'Micklegarth', the Great City,
Constantinople. The commander of this fleet was one Siward (or Sigurd), called
Earl of Gloucester. It is not impossible that he is identical with Siward Barn
who had taken part in the Fenland uprising of 1071 with Hereward. With him
sailed two other earls and eight high-ranking nobles. If, at a conservative
estimate, we accept the figure of 235 ships and place forty people in each
ship, this would indicate an exodus of nearly 10,000 people, and this was only
one group - albeit by far the largest - which left these shores after 1066...
When they arrived in Constantinople they found the city under siege and, we are
told, thereupon relieved the inhabitants, scattering the Turks before them.
This 'relief', and it occurred, earned the gratitude of the Emperor and the
English were granted lodging and places in the Imperial Army. The English were
particularly valued since they were mostly young, many were of noble birth and
they all loathed the Normans. The elite showed such loyalty that they entered
the Imperial Household and formed the Emperor's bodyguard. Their exemplary
loyalty to the Emperor of the Romans echoed the loyalty of the Old English to
the Pre-Conquest Papacy, to St. Gregory the Great, Pope of the Romans.
"We read of English troops fighting at Dyrrachium (Durazzo) in
1081, where they suffered heavy losses against the Normans. Again in the 1080's
the Emperor granted the English land on the Gulf of Nicomedia, near Nicaea to
build a fortified town known as Civotus.[217] We are
told that from the great fleet of 1075 some 4,300 English settled in the City
itself, which at that time was the most populous, advanced and cosmopolitan
city in the world. Further we read that the English sent priests to Hungary,
which was then in close contact with Constantinople, for them to be consecrated
bishops, since the English preferred the Latin rite to the Greek rite of 'St.
Paul'. According to the sources, far more English than the 4,300 who settled in
the city went further still. With the blessing of Emperor Alexis, these went on
to recolonise territories lost by the Empire. It is said that they sailed on
from the city to the North and the East for six days. Then they arrived at 'the
beginning of the Scythian country'. Here they found a land called 'Domapia',
which they renamed New England. Here they founded towns and having driven out
the invaders, they reclaimed them for the Empire. Moreover, they renamed the towns
'London', 'York' and called others after the towns where they had come from...
"After painstaking research it has been discovered that medieval
maps… list no fewer than six towns with names suggesting English settlements.
These settlements on maps of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries are located
along the northern coast of the Black Sea. One of the names appears as
'Susaco', possibly from 'Saxon'. Another town, situated some 110 miles to the
east of the straits of Kerch near the Sea of Azov appears variously as
'Londia', 'Londin' and 'Londina'.[218] On the
twelfth century Syrian map the Sea of Azov itself is called the 'Varang' Sea,
the Sea of the Varangians, a name used for the English in Constantinople at
this period. It is known that in the thirteenth century a Christian people
called the 'Saxi' and speaking a language very similar to Old English inhabited
this area, and that troops of the 'Saxi' served in the Georgian army in the
twelfth century. There seem to be too many coincidences for us to think that
the Sea of Azov was not then the first 'New England'.
"The presence of the English in Constantinople and the Eastern Mediterranean, not to mention the Black Sea, is well attested in this period. In the 1090's a French Chronicler records a small fleet of some thirty English ships in the Eastern Mediterranean. In 1098 Edgar the Atheling, great nephew of Edward the Confessor and heir to the throne after him, visited Constantinople, ostensibly on his way to the Holy Land. And yet here too there is a strange coincidence. This looks too much like the visit of a royal exile, cheated of the throne, to those loyal to him. In the twelfth century there were further recruiting campaigns in England. Between 1101 and 1116 a certain Ulfric, a native of Lincoln, came from Constantinople to England as one of the recruiters. As regards the English troops in the City, we know that many endeavoured to defend it in 1204 against marauding Crusaders.[219] A chronicler of the period, the French Robert of Clair, records that these English soldiers had their own priests in Constantinople. S