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The Clergy

Next to the crown, the most powerful institution in medieval England was the Church. The clergy belonged to a great international order which was highly conscious of its status and rights. Consequently, they formed an articulate and often highly critical force in politics. In a sense, of course, the ‘Church’ included all those who, through personal conviction or sheer inertia, conformed to the beliefs and practices of catholic Christianity. But contemporaries tended to define the Church as a select body of professional clergy whose vocation and status set them apart from the rest of society. It is with the latter group that we are presently concerned.

The numerical strength of the clergy under Edward III is difficult to judge. On the basis of the poll tax returns of 1377–81, it has been calculated that there were some 35,500 people in clerical and monastic orders, out of a total population of some two and a half to three million.¹ Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to tell what the numbers were like before the Black Death. The monasteries, which were already in a state of decline before 1350, probably never recovered from the shock.² The plague of 1348–9 also carried off large numbers of beneficed secular clergy: an average of 40 per cent in the dioceses of York, Lincoln and Coventry and Lichfield.³ On the other hand, there was a rush of vocations in the 1350s; and although the wage demands of chaplains suggest a slight decline in the number of unbeneficed seculars by the 1360s,⁴ the grand total probably did not alter very much between 1348 and 1377. On a very rough estimate, we may conclude that 1–1.5 per cent of the population – and perhaps as many as 3 per cent of all adult males – would have been classified as clergy in mid-fourteenth-century England.

The clergy were a diverse and disparate group, and a huge gulf separated the elite corps of seventeen English and four Welsh bishops from the great mass of unbeneficed clerks. Many ecclesiastics identified more easily with their counterparts in secular society: prelates with peers, and parish priests with peasants. On the other hand, the Church transcended social class and secular loyalties, and offered its professional servants many opportunities for collective action. Most important in this respect were the periodic meetings of the clergy in diocesan and provincial councils (which dealt with matters of discipline and doctrine) and convocations (which discussed more practical issues, such as taxation). As we shall see, these assemblies could make a considerable impression on the political life of the nation, debating royal policy, helping to fund the king’s wars, and securing statements on the legal and constitutional rights of the Church. The communitas cleri (community of the clergy) was indeed an active force in the medieval polity.⁵

THE KING AND THE CLERGY

For much of his reign, Edward III enjoyed an enviable reputation with the Church. Despite his occasional clashes with the English hierarchy and the papal court at Avignon, Edward was generally regarded as a pious man, and his wars as a kind of divine mission fought for the defence of true religion. Around 1350, clerical writers were drawing enthusiastic parallels with Judas Maccabeus and Solomon, with Arthur and Charlemagne. ⁶ By the end of the century, indeed, Thomas Walsingham was describing Edward III as a great Christian king, ‘outstanding in his devotion to God, often making pilgrimages, and venerating and honouring priests of the church’.⁷ Much of this later tradition arose from mere nostalgia, and did not necessarily reflect the reality of Church-state relations in the 1340s and 1350s. Nevertheless, Edward’s prodigious successes in France and Scotland impressed the clergy just as much, if not more, than they did the laity; and for most of the second half of his reign at least, the king had little difficulty in reconciling the English Church with his own political and military ambitions.

It had not always been thus. The clergy, like the rest of society, were deeply divided and disrupted by the events of the 1320s, and it took some years before the young Edward III won the confidence of the hierarchy.⁸ Certain bishops – notably Orleton of Worcester, Stratford of Winchester, Burghersh of Lincoln and Airmyn of Norwich – had backed the palace revolution of 1326–7. But Isabella and Mortimer had been incapable of sustaining this support, and personal quarrels had soon broken out within the episcopate. By 1328 Stratford, together with Bishop Gravesend of London and Archbishop Mepham of Canterbury, had become closely identified with the political opposition of Henry of Lancaster; and in 1330 both Gravesend and Archbishop Melton of York were implicated in the rebellion of the Earl of Kent. Although the bishops naturally rallied around the young king when he seized power late in 1330, Edward III did comparatively little to reduce underlying tensions. Particularly divisive were the king’s efforts to deprive William Zouche of the archbishopric of York and to set up his own man, William Kilsby, as northern metropolitan in 1340.⁹

The Church also suffered considerable hardships as a result of the collapse of law and order in the provinces. In 1327–8 there was a series of attacks on the great monastic houses of Abingdon, St Albans and Bury St Edmunds. ¹⁰ In 1336 the villeins of Darnhall and Over (Cheshire) rose in open rebellion against their lord, the Abbot of Vale Royal.¹¹ Bishop Grandisson of Exeter complained of the ransacking of ecclesiastical property in his diocese; and in 1333 the new Bishop of Carlisle, John Kirkby, was subjected to verbal and physical threats in his own city.¹² Failing to get satisfaction from the king, some members of the higher clergy themselves resorted to dubious or even criminal practices. Several monastic houses set up special funds with which to bribe judges and juries, while the canons of Lichfield Cathedral employed the notorious Coterel gang to carry out a campaign of intimidation against their rivals.¹³ Meanwhile, the king and his agents inflicted further material damage by flouting the Church’s theoretical immunity from purveyance and taking foodstuffs from ecclesiastical estates.¹⁴ In 1328 Edward was said to be riding around the country seizing the goods of churches, in direct contravention of his coronation oath and Magna Carta.¹⁵ The oppressions suffered on the Kent manors of Christ Church, Canterbury during the 1330s indicate the harsh reality behind such generalizations.¹⁶ Had Edward III been deposed in 1340–1 (as Archbishop Stratford at least thought possible)¹⁷ it is most unlikely that he would ever have been regarded as a friend of the Church.

Twenty years later, the king’s image was strikingly different. By a mixture of good luck and sound strategy, Edward had restored authority over the Church and respect within it. Political thought and public opinion were now virtually unanimous in seeing the monarch as the natural head of the Church within his lands. In the past, such an Erastian viewpoint had created considerable conflict: both Henry II and Edward I had provoked major constitutional crises in their attempts to take over the ecclesiastical courts and to exploit the financial resources of the Church. The reign of Edward III was certainly not without its conflicts: both John Stratford and John Thoresby made important stands on points of clerical privilege. But so long as Edward III continued to embody the ideals of militant Christianity, most of his clerical subjects were quite happy to accept the reality of royal sovereignty. The Church never ceased to be sensitive about the infringement of its liberties, and constantly grumbled about the weight of royal taxation. But the vast majority of the clergy had no hesitation in expressing their personal loyalty to the king and giving public support to his cause.

There were four particular ways in which the Church contributed to the regime of Edward III: it provided the king with a source of patronage; it gave administrative support to the state; it helped to promote the war effort; and it supplied revenue for the royal treasury. It may be instructive to examine each of these four areas before proceeding to a more general assessment of ecclesiastical politics in this eventful reign.

The Church was the single greatest source of patronage available to the crown in the Middle Ages. The king had a certain number of ecclesiastical offices directly in his gift, and many other appointments were influenced by him. Edward III’s predecessors had long appreciated that the best way of maintaining good relations with the Church was by controlling its personnel, and since the late thirteenth century the crown had deliberately set out to increase the number of benefices under its control.¹⁸ This campaign took a number of directions. To begin with, more use was now made of advowsons attached to the noble and ecclesiastical estates periodically falling into the king’s hands. The seizure of the alien priories during periods of war with France was of particular importance in this respect: indeed, the benefices normally under the control of these religious houses accounted for almost half the titles granted by Edward III between 1337 and 1360. In addition, the early years of the fourteenth century saw the development of a new principle whereby any benefice attached to a cathedral or monastic house and filled by the king during an episcopal or abbatial vacancy was thereafter deemed to be in the permanent gift of the crown. In order to uphold this often controversial claim, the government began to prosecute rival patrons in the common law courts, and not surprisingly secured favourable judgments even in the most dubious of cases.¹⁹ The cumulative effect of this aggressive policy was very striking. On average, Edward I had presented to about twenty-six benefices a year. But in the period 1307–37 the annual figure shot up to seventy, and by 1337–47 it stood still higher at a remarkable 123. It is small wonder that by the 1340s Edward III was being heralded as ‘patron paramount’ of the English church.²⁰

This achievement was all the more impressive given the efforts of contemporary popes to appropriate English benefices for their own use. John XXII granted a total of 630 provisions and expectancies to English benefices during his seven-year pontificate (1328–34).²¹ The number of papal provisions dropped under Benedict XII, but rose again sharply after the election of Clement VI, and averaged about 150 a year between 1342 and 1352.²² By the middle of Edward III’s reign, papal provisions had become a permanent reality in the Church and an increasingly important issue in ecclesiastical politics.

It would be easy to assume that the simultaneous development of royal and papal claims created competition and hostility. In fact, the consequences varied according to the offices in question. So far as bishoprics were concerned, there was no real clash of interests between Westminster and Avignon. The appointment of Ralph Stratford to the see of London in 1340 was the last occasion on which a bishop was elected and consecrated without formal authority from Avignon.²³ But far from threatening royal interests, papal provisions normally worked in the king’s favour, and Edward III usually had little difficulty in persuading the Curia to accept his own nominees for English sees. The real losers were the cathedral chapters, which greatly resented the infringement of their traditional right to elect bishops. The king’s attitude to this problem is extremely revealing. There were at least twenty-seven occasions in Edward III’s reign when a bishop was elected by the relevant chapter, only to be challenged by an alternative candidate holding a papal provision.24 In eight of these cases the king formally consented to the election, but withdrew without protest as soon as the papacy intervened.²⁵ And in five further cases he actively opposed the capitular candidates for the very good reason that the Pope already had royal servants lined up for the relevant bishoprics.²⁶ There were, admittedly, a number of occasions when the king had a struggle to get his own men in. Diplomatic tensions and genuine disquiet about the educational backgrounds of royal nominees made Urban V extremely reluctant to accept the appointment of John Buckingham to Lincoln in 1362–3 and of William Wykeham to Winchester in 1366–7.²⁷ In general, however, papal provisions rarely threatened the crown’s de facto control over the episcopate, and indeed did much to create a loyal and amenable bench of bishops.

Lower down in the Church the results of royal and papal patronage were rather more complicated. Both the crown and the papacy tended to concentrate on the prebendal stalls of secular cathedrals and collegiate churches. These were titular benefices which could be held in absentia and in plurality, and were therefore ideally suited to the needs of busy royal clerks and curial officials. It would probably have been possible for the two sides to co-operate here had it not been for the competing claims of other interested parties. Both king and Pope tended to ignore the rights of the original patrons of the benefices, who in the case of cathedral prebends were usually the relevant bishops. By the 1340s this situation was creating considerable dissatisfaction. If the king secured a legal judgment confirming his right to appoint to a contested benefice, the dispossessed patron and his protégé were forced to appeal to the Curia and secure a provision challenging the royal presentation. The bishops were well aware that this might simply allow the Pope to appropriate the disputed benefice for his own – or even the king’s – use. But they had no other means of redress. Consequently the 1340s witnessed a very notable increase both in the number of appeals registered at Avignon and in the number of English benefices being contested between royal clerks and papal provisors. ²⁸ Edward III was forced to admit that papal provisions might soon begin to threaten his influence over some of the most prized sinecures in the English Church.

What eventually drove the king to action were the anti-papal sentiments expressed in a series of parliamentary petitions between 1343 and 1351.²⁹ The commons believed – mistakenly – that the English Church was being filled with foreigners and that good English money was being drained into the pockets of a corrupt cardinalate and a Francophile Pope. In 1343–4 Edward III responded by imposing a ban on the admission of all aliens bearing provisions to English benefices and instigating inquiries into the number of foreign clergy resident in England. Finally, in 1351, he issued the Statute of Provisors, which theoretically prohibited the execution of all papal provisions within the English Church.³⁰

This legislation has often been dismissed as a publicity stunt intended to placate parliament and to put added pressure on the Pope at a difficult moment in the Anglo-French negotiations. There is certainly no sign that Edward III tried to implement its more far-reaching clauses. Papal provisions to bishoprics and prebends continued as before, and the king never actively used the right (claimed directly from the Pope) to appoint to all benefices left vacant by their patrons for six months. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to dismiss the statute as a mere irrelevance. The most significant clause was that which gave the crown the right to take action against dispossessed provisors who appealed to Avignon against the decisions of the royal courts. There was nothing particularly new about this procedure, or about the minor amendments made to it in the Statute of Praemunire of 1353.³¹ But the inclusion of these details in formal legislation enrolled on the statute roll may be seen as a public declaration of intent by the crown. Even as the Statute of Provisors was being formulated, the king was embroiled in a dispute with Bishop Grandisson over the appointment of a wardrobe official, Richard Eccleshall, to a church in the diocese of Exeter. When all the hyperbole is stripped away, the Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire can be seen as a wily attempt to seize still more benefices for the use of the crown and to eliminate all effective opposition to the king’s more controversial claims.

The results, however, were unsatisfactory. Edward had reckoned without the powerful opposition developing within the Church. In 1352 the clergy complained bitterly about the king’s arbitrary seizure of Bishop Grandisson’s temporalities, and his habit of searching ever further back into history for examples of cathedral prebends filled by the crown during episcopal vacancies.³² Edward was forced to step down, and agreed that he would no longer collate to benefices reserved by the crown prior to his own accession.³³The crisis therefore ended in a tactful truce. Indeed, Edward became notably more scrupulous in the years after 1352, and even revoked some of the more dubious presentations made earlier in his reign.³⁴ Consequently, by the time that the ban on proceedings in foreign courts was reiterated in the Statute of Praemunire, the number of appeals registered at Avignon against royal presentees was already declining.³⁵ The records of the 1350s leave the distinct impression that the crown, private patrons, and the papacy had reached a successful compromise which guaranteed to each party a portion of the available patronage in the English Church.

From the king’s point of view, there was much to be said for this new agreement. Between 1352 and 1359 the number of royal presentations to English benefices averaged 108 a year, a figure only slightly lower than in the 1340s.³⁶ Admittedly, the restoration of the alien priories during the truce of 1360–9 substantially reduced the available stock of patronage: during the regnal year 1364–5, for instance, the total number of royal presentations was only forty-nine.³⁷ But this alone does not explain the crown’s decision in 1365 to reissue the Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire. The real aggressor in the 1360s was the Pope. Urban V not only made numerous provisions to English benefices, he also issued a bull in 1364 denouncing and outlawing pluralism in the Church.³⁸ The English bishops were forced to make inquiries into the number of benefices held in plurality in their dioceses, and the returns made it quite obvious that royal civil servants stood to lose most from the ban.³⁹ The only way Edward could protect his clerks was by preventing papal providees from entering their benefices, and the statutes of 1351–3 were therefore put back into operation.⁴⁰ In 1375, however, Gregory XI formally gave up his predecessor’s attempts to reserve benefices resigned by or seized from pluralists and agreed to support the claims of certain English clerks currently in dispute with papal provisors. Finally, in February 1377, the crown agreed to a sort of amnesty on ecclesiastical appointments, stating that all benefices vacant before that date and not yet filled should be surrendered to their customary patrons.⁴¹ By the time of Edward III’s death, then, the crown and the papacy had realized that both their interests were probably best served by a return to the compromise of the 1350s.

The ecclesiastical patronage of the English crown is a large and complicated subject, and we have focused on only one aspect of it here. Undoubtedly the king’s main concern was to provide for the large and acquisitive group of clerks employed in his household and in the government departments. If he was unable to give them church offices he would be forced to pay them large salaries, and this would undoubtedly prove a severe financial strain on the crown. Apart from its more symbolic value, then, ecclesiastical patronage was of great practical importance. It also had a political dimension. Edward III’s ability to manipulate the system of papal provisions to English bishoprics and his successful appropriation of so many cathedral prebends ensured that amenable civil servants filled some of the greatest offices in the English Church. Contrary to contemporary assumptions, the hierarchy was never entirely staffed by the creatures of Edward III. But the decline of effective political opposition from the Church, to which we shall return, undoubtedly owed something to the king’s extraordinary influence over the higher clergy. All medieval kings enjoyed power in the Church; but few could match the achievement of Edward III.

The English crown inevitably looked to the clergy for support in the formidable task of running the country. Not only did the Church possess a sophisticated system of administration and justice, but many of its more powerful members also exercised secular jurisdiction delegated to them by the crown.⁴² The heads of some of the old-established monasteries, notably the East Anglian and fenland houses of Bury St Edmunds, Ely, Peterborough, Croyland and Ramsey, ruled over their own liberties, where they had the right to hold their own courts, to execute royal writs, and to receive some of the judicial penalties normally accruing to the king. The greatest of all the ecclesiastical liberty-holders was the Bishop of Durham, whose county palatine was run as an autonomous unit normally immune from the king’s judges, sheriffs and tax collectors. At many different levels, then, the Church was expected to represent the authority of the crown and to maintain the interests of the state.

During the early years of Edward III’s reign the government tried to win popularity by bestowing further secular power on members of the higher clergy. Mortimer and Isabella granted generous privileges to Bishop Beaumont of Durham and Archbishop Melton of York, and allowed the clergy of Lincoln Minster to run their cathedral close as an independent unit free from intervention by the city authorities.⁴³ Edward III seems to have agreed with this policy, for in 1335 he granted Archbishop Stratford additional rights of jurisdiction on the Canterbury estates.⁴⁴ In the 1340s and 1350s, however, official attitudes changed markedly. Stratford’s quarrel with the king and his refusal to accept trial in a royal court made the crown much more suspicious of the power of the prelates. Consequently, Edward’s government began to override some of the privileges claimed by ecclesiastical liberty-holders, particularly with regard to judicial penalties imposed by royal judges.⁴⁵ There were even efforts to challenge the bishopric of Durham’s immunity from national taxation and to force the laity of this region to contribute to direct subsidies in 1338, 1344, 1348 and 1371.⁴⁶

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that these initiatives represented a co-ordinated attack on ecclesiastical privileges. On the whole, Edward III concentrated less on challenging long-standing rights and more on building up the loyalty and co-operation of his prelates. According to the chroniclers, the king established close friendships with Abbot Thomas de la Mare of St Albans and with William Clowne, head of the great Augustinian house at Leicester.⁴⁷ His success in securing the promotion of two royal clerks, Richard Bury and Thomas Hatfield, to the bishopric of Durham was particularly important in guaranteeing sound government in the north. One tangible result was the agreement reached in 1341 whereby felons from the northern counties who attempted to evade justice by escaping into the palatinate of Durham were to be captured and delivered back to the relevant authorities for trial.⁴⁸ Edward also made good use of his powers as arbitrator to resolve a number of serious squabbles between high-ranking churchmen. In 1351, for instance, he appealed directly to Bishop Bateman of Norwich to end an acrimonious dispute with the Abbot of Bury St Edmunds which had been raging in the royal and papal courts for over six years.⁴⁹ The king’s character and reputation therefore did just as much as his government’s aggressive attitude to re-establish authority over the Church in the years following the Stratford crisis.

The bishops and abbots were most obviously involved in matters of government and high politics during their visits to the capital. Despite owning town houses, most of the members of the episcopate seem to have disliked spending long periods in London: apart from the chancellor and treasurer, indeed, the only prelates who usually attended meetings of the administrative council were the Archbishop of Canterbury (normally resident at Lambeth Palace) and the Bishop of London.⁵⁰ On the other hand, the episcopal bench always included a number of distinguished diplomats and former civil servants who were naturally called upon to give advice in plenary sessions or great councils. In the first half of Edward III’s reign this group was dominated by veterans of the previous regime: William Airmyn of Norwich (d.1336), Henry Burghersh of Lincoln (d.1340), Adam Orleton of Worcester, and subsequently of Winchester (d. 1345), and Roger Northborough of Coventry and Lichfield (d.1358). The only councillor-bishop of this period who had close personal links with the young king himself was Richard Bury of Durham (1333–45). Later, however, the old guard gave way to a collection of curialist bishops, all of whom owed their promotion directly to Edward III. These included Thomas Hatfield of Durham (1345–81), Adam Houghton of St David’s (1362–89), John Buckingham of Lincoln (1363–98) and Thomas Brantingham of Exeter (1370–94).⁵¹ In addition, there was usually a small number of bishops who did not travel regularly to the capital, but who were occasionally employed as royal envoys and whose particular connections or skills allowed them to be considered as royal councillors. The most important members of this category were Henry Gower of St David’s (1328–47), Simon Montagu of Worcester (1334–7) and Ely (1337–45), Ralph Shrewsbury of Bath and Wells (1329–63), William Bateman of Norwich (1344–55) and Robert Wyville, the former secretary of Queen Isabella and long-lived Bishop of Salisbury (1330–75).⁵² Although the total number of the higher clergy actively involved in politics at any one time was therefore comparatively small, it is probably fair to say that the hierarchy provided a regular source of expertise and advice for Edward III’s regime.

In theory at least, the higher clergy were also expected to fulfil their role as royal councillors during meetings of parliament. All the English and Welsh bishops, and certain abbots and priors, received personal summonses to the king’s parliaments. The writ sent to each bishop also included the so-called praemunientes clause, which required the attendance at parliament of representatives of his cathedral and diocesan clergy. This clause had been a source of much controversy when it was first introduced in 1295, for the clergy denied the king’s right to summon them before a secular court. Although the phrase was permanently incorporated into writs of summons after 1334, the crown made no attempt to enforce it after 1340, and while some clerical proctors continued to attend parliament in the later fourteenth century, their number and influence was negligible.⁵³ Consequently, any remaining ecclesiastical influence in these assemblies was maintained largely by the prelates.

Even the higher clergy, however, seem to have been very reluctant to accept their obligation to attend parliaments. In part, this was a point of principle. In 1341 a number of abbots secured exemptions from summons on the grounds that they did not hold their estates by barony, and several other religious were relieved of such responsibilities in Edward III’s later years.⁵⁴ Consequently, the number of heads of monastic houses summoned to parliament dropped from between thirty and thirty-three in the 1330s to an average of twenty-six in the years 1343–77. In any case, that figure considerably exceeded the number that actually turned up, for neither the abbots nor the bishops proved at all enthusiastic about the supposed honour of receiving a personal summons to parliament. Absenteeism was the norm. In the winter of 1332–3 only the Archbishop of York, the Bishops of Carlisle and Lincoln, and the Abbots of York and Selby bothered to attend an assembly at York; and the opening speech in the parliament of 1344 was heard by just four bishops and four abbots and priors.⁵⁵ The prelates covered themselves by appointing proxies: the scholar Thomas Bradwardine acted as representative for Bishop Bury of Durham in the parliament of 1344,⁵⁶ and in 1352 the Abbot of St Augustine’s, Canterbury employed the services of Michael Northborourgh, keeper of the privy seal and a close kinsman of the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield.⁵⁷ The government clearly disliked this practice, and sometimes issued supplementary letters requesting the personal attendance of the prelates.⁵⁸ In 1354 Edward III even provided ships to transport the victuals needed by Hatfield of Durham and his retinue during their stay at parliament.⁵⁹ But none of this had much effect. We are left with the distinct impression that participation in parliament was confined to a hard core of ‘political’ bishops, abbots and proctors.

The clergy themselves probably regarded this development as a modest constitutional achievement, since it showed that the crown was incapable of forcing clerics to attend secular courts. Ironically, however, it was to be highly damaging to the other ambitions of the Church, for it isolated the clergy from the rest of political society and hindered their efforts to obtain concessions from the crown. This situation, as we shall see, was already becoming evident after the 1350s, and was considerably to strengthen the crown’s position in relation to its clerical subjects during Edward III’s later years.

Despite their membership of an international order based on the precepts of Christian charity, the clergy came to be some of the most enthusiastic supporters of Edward III’s military adventures. For some at least, the war provided professional advancement. The acquisition of territory in France was particularly important in this respect, since the king needed able clerks to take on the administration of his new dominions. The treasurership of Calais, for instance, was filled by a succession of former wardrobe officials, William Shrewsbury (1348–50), Richard Eccleshall (1351–61), Thomas Brantingham (1361 –8) and William Gunthorpe (1368–73); while John Buckingham, a former keeper of the privy seal, became co-lieutenant of Brittany in 1358–9.⁶⁰ One of the Black Prince’s associates, John Harwell, did especially well in Gascony, moving from the office of constable of Bordeaux to become the first English chancellor of Aquitaine (1364–C1370).⁶¹

Churchmen were also much in demand for the king’s diplomatic service. The closest thing to an international lawyer in the fourteenth century was a graduate in civil or canon law, and Edward III showed a distinct preference for such men when selecting his advisers.⁶² Among the bishops who acted as royal ambassadors during this reign were Adam Orleton, William Airmyn, Henry Burghersh, Richard Bury, Richard Bentworth, John Stratford, John Thoresby and John Offord in the first half of the reign, and William Bateman, Simon Islip, Gilbert Welton, Adam Houghton, John Barnet and Simon Sudbury in the later years. ⁶³ At a lower level, there was a veritable army of university graduates and notaries who helped to organize negotiations and to compile the copious correspondence associated with international diplomacy. During the 1340s and 1350s, this group included John Carlton, William Loughborough, Henry Chaddesden, John Lecche, and Chancellor Offord’s brother Andrew, together with John Branketre, John Welwick and William Tirrington.⁶⁴ The Hundred Years War clearly provided an important outlet for the academic and administrative qualifications of a considerable number of English clerics.

The lure of war was such that some ecclesiastics even took up arms. The soldier clerk was still very much a reality in the fourteenth century. William Beauchamp, son of the Earl of Warwick, renounced his clergy and gave up a promising career in the Church in order to take part in the military exploits which delighted so many other members of his family.⁶⁵ The clerical contribution to the Scottish war was particularly important. The northern prelates had always been involved in the defence of the Scottish border, and the bishops of Carlisle were regularly appointed as wardens of the march during Edward III’s reign.⁶⁶ Archbishop Zouche of York, accompanied by John Kirkby of Carlisle, actually led the English forces at the battle of Neville’s Cross. The greatest of the warrior bishops, however, was Thomas Hatfield, who fought in the Crécy-Calais campaign and served in the king’s Scottish expedition during the winter of 1355–6. Away from the northern march, other high-ranking clergy were also expected to take on responsibility for military matters. Eleven bishops and five abbots were among those appointed to supervise the defence of the southern shires when war broke out in 1337.⁶⁷ In the late 1330s the doughty Abbot of Battle put together his own fighting force to protect the abbey and help guard the south coast from invasion.⁶⁸ The Church was officially exempt from arrays for local defence, but in 1369 the prelates of the southern province agreed in parliament that ecclesiastics should henceforth contribute to such levies. Consequently, in the 1370s the parish clergy became fully and actively involved in the medieval equivalent of a home guard.⁶⁹

For the great majority of churchmen, however, the war effort was concentrated not on the battlefield but in the pulpit. The Church provided one of the most effective means of broadcasting news and propaganda, and Edward III regularly called upon the clergy to advertise his military needs and the justice of his cause. After each of the great victories – Halidon Hill, Sluys, Crécy, Les Espagnols sur Mer, Poitiers, Nájera – the king wrote to the bishops requesting that thanks be offered to the Almighty for the deliverance of the realm.⁷⁰ They were apparently happy to respond. Successive bishops of Lincoln, for instance, offered forty days’ indulgence to all those attending masses and processions for war and peace, and regularly enjoined their clergy to supplement the liturgy with special wartime prayers in the vernacular.⁷¹ Some of the greatest preachers of the day also lent their support to Edward’s cause. After the battle of Crécy, Thomas Bradwardine preached before the king on the text ‘God who always leads us in triumph grants victory to those whom he wills, and he wills to grant victory to the virtuous’ (2 Corinthians ii: 14).⁷² When news of the same event reached London, the scholarly Richard FitzRalph found an even more promising hook on which to hang a tub-thumping sermon: ‘May they offer sacrifices of sweet savours unto the God of heaven, and pray for the life of the king and of his sons’ (Ezra vi:10).⁷³ With such attitudes prevailing among the clergy, it is no surprise to find that a strong sense of political nationalism and moral superiority developed in mid-fourteenth-century England.

This is not to say that the Church was a helpless instrument of royal propaganda. At some points in the reign, indeed, churchmen showed themselves fundamentally critical of the war and its effects. Much of the protest literature of the 1330s probably flowed from the quills of parish priests and friars well aware of the intense hardships suffered by the king’s ordinary subjects through oppressive taxation.⁷⁴ After Edward made his claim to the throne of France, and began by his victories to prove that he had God on his side, many a clerical conscience was eased. FitzRalph, for instance, though still troubled by the social consequences of fighting, did not hesitate to declare Edward’s French enterprise a just war.⁷⁵ Moreover, the clergy themselves were drawn more and more into the process of diplomacy. Royal envoys were sent to convocation to keep the Church well informed of the progress of negotiations; and in 1354 the bishops actually appointed proctors to attend the current round of talks with the French.⁷⁶ In this way the Church, like other sections of political society, became inextricably bound up in the king’s military and diplomatic ambitions, and had little choice but to give public support to his cause.

Later in the reign, when English fortunes declined, it was inevitable that some members of the clergy should again question both the practicality and the morality of war. Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester (1373–89), the most famous preacher of his day, believed in the essential rightness of Edward’s cause, but was highly critical of the new round of campaigns in France, seeing the English defeats as the punishment of God on an irreligious people.⁷⁷ By the late 1370s, John Wyclif and John Gower were beginning to question the whole idea of the just war, and by extension to condemn some forty years of military activity.⁷⁸ Nor were these sentiments confined to a few intellectuals and extremists. The activities of the clerical proletariat during the Peasants’ Revolt suggest considerable political disillusionment among the parish clergy in Edward’s declining years.⁷⁹ It would therefore be a great mistake to suppose that churchmen stood by meekly as the government requisitioned their pulpits for political service. But so long as Edward III lived, these rumbles of discontent did little to threaten the mutual support system built up between crown and Church. The majority of the clergy volunteered their services freely and gladly to promote the virtues of the war and the valour of their king. The political consequences were incalculable.

For all the administrative and moral support which it provided, the Church was most useful to Edward III as a source of supplies. The king spent much of his reign begging money from his subjects, and since the clergy controlled a significant proportion of landed property and movable wealth it was deemed only reasonable that they should contribute their share of the cost of war.⁸⁰ There were three ways by which the crown might tap such resources: by exploiting its feudal rights over the Church; by demanding loans; and by levying direct taxes. As money-making enterprises, the first two methods were much less successful than the last, but they deserve some brief mention before we proceed to a more detailed analysis of clerical taxation in the mid– fourteenth century.

The lands of the bishops and some of the great monastic houses were held in chief from the crown, and were therefore liable to be taken into the king’s hands on the death of an incumbent or as punishment for some serious offence.⁸¹ Earlier rulers had often left bishoprics empty for long periods in order to reap substantial profits from their estates. By the fourteenth century, however, vacancies were much shorter. Under Edward III, indeed, the gap between the death of one bishop and the delivery of lands to his successor was rarely more than twelve months.⁸² A statute of 1340 also allowed the relevant cathedral or monastic chapter the option of farming the vacant temporalities;⁸³ and although there were later to be some complaints about the unscrupulous actions of royal agents on Church lands,⁸⁴ this legislation seems to have proved effective in protecting the interests of the great ecclesiastical landholders.

The seizure of temporalities from contumacious bishops was a slightly different matter. This had a political as well as a financial dimension, and was therefore a more jealously guarded privilege. Early in his reign, Edward III had to tread warily, for some of his principal supporters (Bishops Burghersh, Orleton and Airmyn) had suffered arbitrary confiscations at the hands of the Despensers, and were likely to oppose any similar attacks on their colleagues.⁸⁵ In 1340, the king actually declared that ecclesiastical estates could not be seized without due cause.⁸⁶ The confiscation of Bishop Grandisson’s temporalities in 1350–1 also provoked controversy, and in 1352 the clergy demanded that a mere judgment for contempt should not be sufficient grounds for seizure.⁸⁷ The results can be seen in 1355, when the king took the side of his cousin, Lady Wake, in a dispute with the Bishop of Ely, and ordered the seizure of the temporalities pending a trial.⁸⁸ The royal councillors advised that this action would be contrary to the statute of 1340, and refused to carry out Edward’s instructions.⁸⁹ It was only when a judgment of felony was passed against Bishop Lisle in October 1356 that the ministers were prepared to co-operate and to take the episcopal estates into the king’s hands.⁹⁰ Edward successfully confiscated the Chichester temporalities in 1365, when Bishop Lynn contravened the recently reissued Statute of Praemunire.⁹¹ But in 1376–7 the crown once again excited controversy by its apparently arbitrary seizure of Bishop Wykeham’s estates.⁹² The king was certainly not indifferent to the financial advantages which such confiscations brought: the Ely estates alone provided him with an extra income of £2,000 a year between 1356 and 1362.⁹³ But the political repercussions, coupled with the problems of direct estate management after the Black Death,⁹⁴ persuaded him to use his regalian rights sparingly. Edward appreciated the symbolic importance of his feudal prerogatives, but he had other, more lucrative, ways of making money.

The king also seems to have made surprisingly little use of the clergy as a source of credit. Indeed, it has been calculated that of the £54,000 raised in royal loans between 1328 and 1331, only a few hundred pounds came from the Church.⁹⁵ In the mid- to late 1330s, some of the wealthier bishops and cathedral and monastic clergy were persuaded to invest more substantial sums in the Scottish and French wars. We know that Archbishop Melton of York loaned over £3,300 to Edward III, most of it between 1332 and 1340;⁹⁶ and in the summer of 1338 a number of religious houses made loans in cash or kind.⁹⁷ Archbishop Stratford also agreed to lend the king £1,000 for his first French campaign, although the sum was never actually handed over.⁹⁸ However, Edward’s first concerted attempt to get the Church to contribute loans ended in failure. The clergy, like all the king’s subjects, were made liable for the forced loans of wool raised in 1337–8. But in 1338, when these levies were commuted to a tax in wool, the clergy demanded exemption on the grounds that they were not liable to direct subsidies granted by the laity.⁹⁹ This principle was later applied to all forced loans, as well as taxes, authorized by secular assemblies. Thus, in March 1347, when a great council granted the king a loan of 20,000 sacks of wool, it was necessary for the government to write to all the monastic and cathedral churches asking for specific contributions before the levy could be extended beyond those bishops and abbots actually present in the relevant assembly.¹⁰⁰ The grumbles and refusals that came back hardly suggested a major financial breakthrough for the government.¹⁰¹

On the other hand, the later 1340s did see the first successful efforts to get the higher clergy to contribute cash loans for the upkeep of Edward III’s wars. Early in 1346 the king wrote to about 200 high-ranking ecclesiastics asking for loans amounting to nearly £14,000.¹⁰² The contributions were fixed unrealistically high, and most of the clergy consequently declined to provide assistance. But in the spring of 1347 another request went out, and loans amounting to just over £2,000 were collected.¹⁰³ Given Edward III’s popularity in the period immediately after Crécy and Calais, the government might well have followed up this modest success with further attempts to mobilize the cash reserves of the Church. In fact, however, the only other occasion in the reign when the king made a general appeal to the higher clergy came after the resumption of the French war in 1369.¹⁰⁴ As a result of this, loans amounting to nearly £10,000 were received from ecclesiastics between the spring of 1370 and the summer of 1371.¹⁰⁵ This figure is slightly less impressive, however, when we note that some of the largest advances came from civil servants, including a remarkable £3,000 from William Wykeham. ¹⁰⁶ Some bishops certainly became regular lenders in the 1370s: Thomas Hatfield, for instance, later claimed that he had advanced £2,666 13s 4d to the government between 1369 and 1375.¹⁰⁷ For the rest of the reign, however, the crown appears to have made no general appeals for clerical loans. We are left with the distinct impression that the Church played only a modest role in Edward III’s credit operations.

The crown’s major source of revenue from the Church was therefore direct taxation. Contemporary political theorists were all agreed that the clergy should contribute towards the defence of the realm; and by the end of Edward’s reign indeed, certain extremists were beginning to argue that the Church’s wealth should actually be turned over to the service of the state.¹⁰⁸ The general custom after 1327 was for the king to appeal to the convocations of Canterbury and York and to be granted a tenth of the value of ecclesiastical property. These successive subsidies were levied on the basis of a valuation originally carried out in 1291, and revised in 1318 in order to take account of the damage incurred by many northern churches during the Scottish raids. After 1327, the amount charged on the clergy for a tenth was somewhere between £18,700 and £19,000 (see Appendix 2). Both provinces granted Edward III twenty-three tenths, making a total value of approximately £421,000. In addition, the king was granted half the profits of the four papal tenths collected from the English clergy in 1330–4, which ought to have brought him about £35,500. In 1371 the Church also conceded a special subsidy of £50,000; and in 1377 it sanctioned the first clerical poll tax, though this proved only a very modest levy. On a rough estimate, we can calculate that the total value of the clerical subsidies granted in the course of this reign was some £507,000.

It is important to recognize that not all of this sum was actually raised. The first four tenths collected under Edward III (in 1327, 1334 and 1336^) yielded an average of £16,800, or about 88 per cent of the total charged. After 1337, however, the percentage dropped. One of the main reasons for this was the seizure of the alien priories on the outbreak of war with France, and the king’s decision to exempt them from taxation in return for the payment of regular fee farms.¹⁰⁹ The poverty of clerical taxpayers was also probably a factor.¹¹⁰ Thus the biennial tenth of 1351–3 – the first clerical tax to be collected after the Black Death – yielded only about £15,000 a year. When the clergy offered another tenth in 13 56, they actually made it a condition that those in need should be treated with compassion, and numerous requests for tax relief were received by the government.¹¹¹ The result seems to have been a slow but definite erosion in the profits from clerical tenths over the fifty years of Edward’s reign. Nevertheless, the sheer frequency of such taxes meant that an impressive amount of ecclesiastical wealth continued to pour into the royal coffers. Even on a conservative estimate, the clerical tenths, the allocations from the papal subsidy of 1330–4, and the profits from the special levies of 1371 and 1377 probably yielded over £435,000. Furthermore, the income from the farms of the alien priories, which stood at anything between £3,500 and £5,000 a year,¹¹² clearly compensated more than adequately for the shortfall in revenues from direct taxation.

The full significance of our figures becomes apparent when we compare them with the records of earlier kings and contemporary popes. In the course of his thirty-five-year reign, for instance, Edward I had imposed some of the most oppressive taxes ever experienced by the clergy, including one demand for half the entire value of the English Church.¹¹³ But the total assessment for all these subsidies and for the portions of papal taxes appropriated by the crown between 1272 and 1307 was some £342,000, of which about £285,000 was actually collected.¹¹⁴ A still more striking contrast is provided by the papacy’s efforts to tax the English clergy during Edward III’s time. Between 1327 and 1377 successive popes collected only about £58,000 in direct taxes from England, and some £15,000 of this sum actually found its way into the king’s pocket by way of a papal contribution to the ransom of John II.¹¹⁵ In financial terms at least, it is clear that Edward III enjoyed both unparalleled and unrivalled authority over the English Church.

THE CHURCH AND POLITICS

It would be quite wrong to suppose that the clergy stood by silently while the crown helped itself to their financial resources. Under Edward III, direct taxation was more frequent than ever before; and, like the commons, the clergy were anxious to find ways of opposing or limiting the more onerous fiscal demands. Although the parliamentary subsidies of this period have been closely analysed, very little attention has been given to the constitutional implications of clerical taxation.¹¹⁶ We may therefore conclude this survey of the Church’s place in the fourteenth-century polity by examining its response to the numerous tax demands made in the course of Edward III’s reign.

When the clergy were asked for a subsidy, they could respond in one of three ways: by making a free and unrestricted grant; by offering a tax under certain conditions; or by rejecting the demand altogether.¹¹⁷ The first course was rarely followed during this period, except in 1337, when the initial excitement over an impending war with France persuaded the convocations of Canterbury and York to make an unusually generous offer of three successive tenths.¹¹⁸ To refuse a request was also rare, and became progressively more difficult as Edward III began to exploit the plea of necessity and effectively obliged his subjects to contribute to the cost of war. Although there were important precedents for opposing the crown’s fiscal demands, particularly from the time of Archbishop Winchelsey (1293–1313),¹¹⁹ the only really acceptable reason for rejecting Edward III’s demands was if a papal subsidy was currently being collected from the English Church. There were two occasions during the reign – in 1330 and 1376 – when the clergy were able to use this situation to immunize themselves from royal taxation.¹²⁰ Otherwise, the only known refusal came in 1338, when the northern convocation declined to follow the lead set by the clergy of Canterbury and resisted the request for a further tenth on top of the triennial subsidy of 1337 on the grounds that they were seriously impoverished by the Scottish war.¹²¹

The great majority of requests for aid were therefore met positively, but on the proviso that the king would make certain concessions to clerical taxpayers. At the beginning of the reign, the conditions all concerned the way in which the tax was to be assessed and collected.¹²² The clergy of the northern province were particularly preoccupied with these matters, for they had long complained about the effects of Scottish depredations in the hope of securing reductions in their quotas. In 1327 they actually made it a condition of their grant that a new valuation be made of impoverished churches,¹²³ and in 1330 when the profits of the papal tenth were appropriated by the crown it was agreed that these lower assessments should still apply.¹²⁴ It was also standard practice for both convocations to request that tenths should cease to be collected in the event of the Pope imposing a subsidy or of the king making any other extraordinary charges on the clergy. Throughout the first half of Edward III’s reign, for instance, the northern dioceses tried to use this principle as a means of immunizing themselves from royal prises.¹²⁵ In 1347 the convocation of York also demanded that its taxes should be spent solely on the defence of the northern march, and that in the event of a truce with Scotland the subsidy should immediately cease.¹²⁶ Very similar restrictions were being placed on the expenditure and duration of lay fifteenths and tenths granted for the Scottish and French wars in the 1340s.¹²⁷ Unfortunately, the fragmentary nature of the evidence makes it difficult to decide whether parliament or convocation set such precedents. What is apparent is that these assemblies maintained close links during Edward III’s early years, and drew considerable strength from each other’s achievements.

This situation is most strikingly demonstrated by the presentation in parliament of a number of sets of clerical gravamina (grievances).¹²⁸ It must be remembered that meetings of the convocation of Canterbury were frequently timed to coincide with sessions of parliament, and it was comparatively easy for the bishops of the southern province to communicate between the assemblies meeting at St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Palace. The Church had presented its political demands in parliament before, and in 1327 the Canterbury clergy revived the custom by submitting a list of ten items, mostly concerning technical points of jurisdiction. These were used by the crown as a basis for formal legislation recorded on the statute roll. The gravamina were usually quite narrow in scope, but represented an important summary of the Church’s political concerns. Before 1327, however, they seem to have been quite distinct from the more specific demands about the application of royal taxes put in with grants of clerical tenths. In particular, there is no indication that the clergy had previously attempted to link grants of supply with redress of grievance and to make the payment of taxes conditional upon the issue of remedial legislation.¹²⁹ Nor was this vital link ever made during the first decade of Edward III’s personal rule.

By 1340, however, the situation had changed. In January of that year, as we have seen, the commons granted the king 30,000 sacks of wool on the understanding that he would receive and act upon their demands incorporated in a schedule of petitions.¹³⁰ This was the first time in the history of parliament that precise political conditions were set on the grant of a tax, and it created a very important precedent. The clergy were not slow to realize its significance. In February 1340 convocations of both provinces granted the king a new tax: a single tenth from the clergy of Canterbury and a double tenth from those of York. We know that the northern convocation set certain conditions on their grant (probably concerning the form of collection), for they subsequently requested a formal statement of the king’s willingness to abide by their requests.¹³¹ More important, however, is the possibility that the southern province presented a general list of grievances linked directly to the grant of supply. This would certainly explain the origins of the important new statute on ecclesiastical privilege drawn up by the legislative committee appointed in the Lent parliament of 1340.¹³² It would also explain why the northern clergy, when asked to grant an additional tenth in 1342, drew up a list of gravaminaand stated that unless formal replies were embodied in royal letters patent before Lent 1343, the tax would simply not be paid. ¹³³

These developments suggest that there was an unusually high level of communication between parliament and the two convocations during the troubled years around 1340. If that situation can be attributed to any one man, it was very probably Archbishop Stratford. Despite his association with the government, Stratford was highly critical of the general infringement of clerical liberties and the oppressive taxes being charged on the clergy in the late 1330s, and was consistently to champion the cause of the Church in parliaments, convocations and ecclesiastical councils during the early 1340s. It was he, as head of the legislative committee of 1340, who undoubtedly insisted on the inclusion of clerical demands in the new statutes.¹³⁴ This indeed says much for Stratford’s ability – demonstrated again in the crisis of 1341 – to unite disaffected political groups and exact major constitutional concessions from the crown.

For the next decade, the clergy successfully consolidated their gains. In 1341, 1344 and 1352 the gravamina of the southern convocation were not only delivered to the king in parliament but were transcribed on to the parliament rolls and used by the council to frame further remedial legislation.¹³⁵ Although the important concessions made to the clergy in 1341 were lost when the king revoked the legislation of that year, several of the points were revived in 1344 as the price of a triennial tenth. These included two important clauses confirming the exemption of bishops and ecclesiastical judges from liability to criminal proceedings before the king’s courts. When a biennial tenth was granted in 1346–7, the northern clergy actually declared, in direct imitation of parliament, that payment of the second year of the subsidy would depend on the observation of the attached conditions.¹³⁶ This threat was somewhat difficult to sustain. But it provided a useful bartering position, and was sufficient on a number of subsequent occasions to force the government into substantial concessions. In May 1351 both provinces made the payment of the second year of a new biennial tenth conditional upon the redress of grievances,¹³⁷ and they successfully held up the formal confirmation of the second year of the tax until the further demands registered by the southern province in the parliament of January 1352 were finally accepted and enacted by the crown in July of that year.¹³⁸

The hard bargaining between king and clergy reached its peak in 1356. When the representatives of the southern province assembled at St Paul’s in May, they were visited by a number of courtiers and civil servants who expounded to them the king’s case for demanding no fewer than six tenths. Long discussion followed, during which convocation expressed much disquiet about the crown’s failure to reform abuses and about the already considerable financial pressure imposed on a much impoverished Church. Eventually the clergy relented, but they offered only one tenth, and made the payment of the second half of this tax conditional upon the redress of grievances.¹³⁹ The convocation of York made similar stipulations when it authorized a tenth in June.¹⁴⁰ The Canterbury clergy had adopted notably dramatic language in order to press home their demands, declaring that ‘the keys of the church are despised in such a way that the catholic faith is imperilled and the greatest danger to souls is incurred’.¹⁴¹ But Edward III was not to be outdone at his own game. He countered with a well-timed appeal to the loyalty of the clergy and ordered special convocations in 1357 to discuss the defence of the Church and the realm. In response to the plea of necessity, both provinces were forced to concede the second half of the tenth and agreed to drop their earlier conditions, except those concerning the exemption of impoverished churches.¹⁴² The negotiations therefore ended in compromise. The king had been forced considerably to reduce the scale of his demands, and the clergy had acknowledged their obligation to pay free and unconditional taxes for the war effort.

At the time, it may well have seemed that Edward had made the greater concession. But as the reign wound on it became increasingly evident that the real loss had actually been sustained by the Church. Like the commons, the clergy discovered that it was extremely difficult to force the king to observe limitations on taxation or to be bound by statutes based on their political grievances. There is no evidence, for instance, that the northern clergy got the charters demanded in 1342; but Edward went ahead in any case and collected a subsidy from them. The constant repetition of the same issues in the clerical gravamina – the defence of ecclesiastical liberties, the freedom of the Church courts, the rights of episcopal and monastic churches during vacancies, clerical immunity from purveyance, and so on – indicates that the clergy found it almost impossible to secure the enforcement of legislation in which the crown had no active interest.

The real political weakness of the clergy, however, lay not in the fragile nature of the concessions won during the 1340s and early 1350s but in their failure to follow up on those achievements during the last years of Edward III’s reign. In particular, the Church appears to have stopped using parliament as a means of advancing its demands. No lists of clerical gravamina were recorded on the parliament rolls between 1352 and 1376, and the crown made no further statutory concessions to the Church until the very last parliament of the reign.¹⁴³ During the 1360s, when the king’s lay and clerical subjects were free from direct taxation, this political isolation mattered comparatively little. But with the renewal of the French war in 1369 and the imposition of extremely heavy fiscal charges on the Church, the clergy found themselves bereft of lay support and at the mercy of an increasingly oppressive regime. There were many reasons for this shift in political alignments. The breakdown of consensus during Edward III’s last years meant that very few groups were able to make much impression on government policy: witness the commons’ failure to secure any more than a handful of entries on the statute roll between 1369 and 1377.¹⁴⁴ After 1370, moreover, parliament became violently anti-clerical, and it was extremely unlikely that the clergy would make any headway in this hostile environment.¹⁴⁵ But anti-clericalism had been known before, particularly in the 1340s, when it certainly had not prevented the clergy from securing constitutional recognition. It is therefore difficult to escape the conclusion that the Church itself was in large measure responsible for its political demise during the later years of Edward III.

One symptom of this internal weakness was the growing tension between the northern and southern provinces. In 1371 the convocation of Canterbury gave its consent to a royal levy of £50,000. The northern clergy were more or less forced to accept the tax voted on them by their colleagues in the south, and an acrimonious debate ensued over the exact proportions of the sum to be paid by the dioceses of York, Durham and Carlisle.¹⁴⁶ But the greatest impediment to concerted political activity among the clergy was undoubtedly the attitude of the bishops. Historians have been at pains to point out that the later fourteenth-century episcopate was not simply packed with curialists and time-servers. ¹⁴⁷ But it is clear that the prelates of the 1370s were much more inclined than their predecessors to co-operate with the government. And this attitude increasingly isolated them from their own lesser clergy. There was a good deal of bad feeling, for instance, about the bishops’ decision in the parliament of 1369 to authorize arrays of the clergy, and in 1370 the convocation of York actually tried to secure immunity from this charge as a condition of the new triennial subsidy.¹⁴⁸ In the southern province, a difference of opinion was also developing over the level of financial support which the clergy ought to provide for the king’s wars. In 1370 Archbishop Whittlesey overrode the attempts of convocation to limit the duration of a new tax and ordered the collection of three successive tenths.¹⁴⁹ The conflict came to a head in 1373. Simon Sudbury, Bishop of London, was commissioned to put the king’s case to convocation; but on this occasion the lower orders stood firm, and were successful in limiting the grant to a single tenth. It is very striking that only one member of the episcopate, William Courtenay of Hereford, was apparently prepared to identify himself with the opposition movement, declaring that his diocese would not pay a single penny unless the king heard and redressed the grievances of the clergy.¹⁵⁰

It was only the exceptional political circumstances of 1376 which reestablished some semblance of unity between the higher and lower clergy. The southern convocation met while the Good Parliament was in session, and contrary to recent practice delivered a unanimous rejection of the government’s demand for further supplies.¹⁵¹ It also drew up a list of grievances, mostly concerning the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, and these were transcribed on to the parliament roll.¹⁵² Far from representing a return to the political co-operation of the 1340s, however, the Good Parliament merely disguised the considerable suspicion that now existed between secular and spiritual assemblies. It is particularly noticeable that the clerical gravamina put on to the parliament roll were carefully loaded with complaints against the papacy. Realizing their political isolation, the clergy had been forced to match the mood of the laity. Moreover, the knights and burgesses in this parliament were sufficiently suspicious of clerical motives to demand that ‘no statute or ordinance be made or granted on the petition of the clergy without the assent of the commons’.¹⁵³ Eventually, in February 1377, some of the clerical grievances presented in the Good Parliament were accepted by the crown and answered on the statute roll.¹⁵⁴ But by this point the conflicts within the Church had once again become evident, with Sudbury (now Archbishop of Canterbury) acting as the spokesman of the court and defending the king’s request for a poll tax, and Courtenay (recently translated to London) standing as the champion of clerical liberties.¹⁵⁵ The only issue that had really united the clergy was the seizure of Bishop Wykeham’s temporalities; and once the Winchester estates were restored in July 1377, clerical solidarity once more crumbled.

The collapse of unity within the hierarchy and the isolation of the clergy from other sections of the community was seriously to compromise the Church’s political standing in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. From the crown’s point of view, however, the implications were altogether more positive. In the 1340s, the clergy had been able to use the political legacy of Archbishop Stratford and to play on the king’s continued financial embarrassment in order to press their demands. By the 1370s this was no longer possible, and although the crown avoided a major offensive on ecclesiastical privilege, it undoubtedly used the Church’s political weakness as an excuse to extract very large sums of money in loans and taxes. What is most remarkable is that all of this aroused barely a murmur from the bishops. Such a situation would have been unthinkable in the time of Islip and Thoresby, let alone Winchelsey or Stratford.

The relations between Church and state under Edward III provide some interesting insights into royal policy, and obviously invite comparison with what was going on in secular politics at the same time. Edward III encountered little effective pressure from his clerical subjects until after the opening of the Hundred Years War, and it was only the precedents set by parliament and taken up by Archbishop Stratford that probably persuaded the clergy to seek legislative concessions in return for grants of taxation. Between 1340 and 1352 they won some notable victories which theoretically guaranteed their immunity from the royal courts, their exemption from purveyance and other prerogative levies, the limitation of regalian rights over the Church, and the restriction of the crown’s ecclesiastical patronage. On some matters – notably the question of appointments – the king was prepared to honour the new settlement and stood by his promises for most of the rest of the reign. But in 1356–7 he reasserted his authority over the Church by seizing the Bishop of Ely’s temporalities and by refusing the clergy the right to make conditions on the payment of taxation. This royal revanche caused considerable unease in clerical circles, and may even have precipitated Archbishop Thoresby’s resignation from the chancellorship. But in the end no political crisis occurred. And by the 1370s, when some of the lower clergy and at least one of the bishops began once more to question the king’s policies, the opportunity to advance their political programme had passed. The emptiness of so much of the ecclesiastical legislation passed during the middle years of the fourteenth century serves to remind us of the crown’s tendency to forget its former promises once the moment of conflict had passed. The inability of the lower clergy to forward their demands in the 1370s also provides an obvious parallel with the growing political frustration felt by the commons after the reopening of the French war. And the fact that these disaffected groups were increasingly antagonistic to each other possibly explains why the crisis of 1376 did not take place earlier. In its later stages, Edward III’s regime was maintained not so much by the strength of the monarchy as by the inability of its opponents to mount an effective opposition.

To conclude this chapter on such a negative point would be a great mistake. It should be remembered that for much of his long reign Edward III was able to mobilize the resources of the Church in the service of the state and to persuade the English clergy to give active and enthusiastic support to his foreign ambitions. The undercurrent of discontent, unmistakable though it was in the 1330s and the 1370s, never really threatened the king’s de facto sovereignty over the clergy. In the end, the quarrel with Archbishop Stratford did little to alter the balance of power between Church and state, and the very absence of similar controversies later in the reign served to emphasize the king’s growing authority over the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Edward III was able to manage the Church with an ease and an impunity that would indeed have been the envy of many a medieval king.