Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta (Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture) 0198847726, 9780198847724, 9780192586964

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Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta

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Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta JENNIFER JAHNER

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Jennifer Jahner 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019945662 ISBN 978–0–19–884772–4 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847724.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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OXFORD STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE AND CULTURE General Editors Ardis Butterfield and Christopher Cannon Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and promotes work that not only focuses on the whole array of subjects medievalists now pursue—in literature, theology, philosophy, social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science—but also work that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative and interdisciplinary studies of every kind, including but not limited to manuscript and book history, linguistics and literature, post-colonial and global studies, the digital humanities and media studies, performance studies, the history of affect and emotion, the theory and history of sexuality, ecocriticism and environmental studies, theories of the lyric, of aesthetics, of the practices of devotion, and ideas of medievalism.

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For my parents

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Table of Contents Acknowledgments A Note on Translations

Introduction: The Poetics of Jurisdiction Law as Instrument, Law as Ligature Periodizing Law and Poetry Jurisdictional Form Chapter Organization

xi xiii

1 8 12 14 18

1. The Grammar of Sacrifice: Thomas Becket, Learning, and Libertas Non attavis editus regibus: Becket and the Genealogies of Learning Satire and the Precincts of Learning Ordo and Office in the Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum From Security to Honor, Horace to Lucan Conclusion

22 27 33 38 50 56

2. Classroom Historicisms: Interdict and the Poetria nova Historical Poetry and the Jurisdictions of Grammar and Rhetoric The Poetria nova and the Arts of Occasion Interdict and the Poetria nova Requesting and Exhorting: Epistolary Persuasion and Embodied Policy Quasi quaedam praestigiatrix: Conjuring History through Poetry

60 63 68 75

3. Inventing Magna Carta Beyond the Whig Interpretation: Magna Carta and Historical Method Relics of the Law Mythographic History and Civic Autonomy in the Leges Anglorum Londoniis Collectae Theorizing Jurisdictional Power in the Interpolated Leges Edwardi Confessoris Remembering Normandy with Geoffrey of Vinsauf The Jurisdictional Poetics of Magna Carta

99

4. Jurisdictional Formalism: Robert Grosseteste and the Pastoral Model of Governance Oversight, Exemption, and the Pastoral Charge Watchman in the Lord’s Vineyard: Surveillance, Theophany, and the Fictions of Jurisdiction

87 95

101 104 111 113 119 125

138 141 145

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   Ruling in the Interim: Simon de Montfort, Margaret de Quincy, and the Jews of Leicester The Château d’Amour: Property, Law, and Salvation History Conclusion: Jurisdictional Harmonies and Dissonances

5. Conjuring England: Crusade, Violence, and Communitas The Grammar of Crusade The Jurisdictions of Crusade Verse Civil War as Holy War, 1263–4 Property, Violence, and the “The Song of the Barons” Austerity Measures: The Song of Lewes and the Form of Law Conclusion: After Crusade Coda: The Jurisdictions of Form Bibliography Index

153 161 173

175 181 189 196 201 205 212 217 229 267

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Acknowledgments This book bears the impress of the many people whose mentorship and insight have challenged, refined, and expanded my thinking over the course of its writing. My first thanks go to those who have taught me. I deem myself profoundly fortunate to have been a student of Rita Copeland, Emily Steiner, and David Wallace at the University of Pennsylvania. David Wallace encouraged me at an early and crucial stage to pursue the less charted course for my research, and I have followed that winding but fruitful path ever since. Emily Steiner remains my model for how to be a reader of literature and law, as well as how to be an academic. And Rita Copeland’s unalloyed intellectual generosity and integrity have shaped this book in more ways than I can enumerate. I would not be a medievalist were it not for a fateful decision to enter the Master’s program in English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Bruce Holsinger will recognize in these chapters the more substantial architecture of a project that saw its earliest beginnings in his classes. Elizabeth Robertson will recognize, I hope, the extent of my gratitude for her unwavering mentorship and friendship over the years. This book took shape at Caltech, where my colleagues in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences have proven immensely generous with their time and interest. Warren Brown and Kristine Haugen lent their expert judgment to multiple chapter drafts, and I am grateful for their thoughtful guidance at each stage. Conversations with Tracy Dennison, Maura Dykstra, Dehn Gilmore, Leah Klement, Benjamin Saltzman, and Nicolas Wey-Gomez have helped me clarify my intellectual parameters. Cathy Jurca and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal offered crucial support in the final months of revision. Above all, George “Mac” Pigman III has been an exceptional mentor and colleague. Core insights of this book emerged from years of reading Latin poetry with him, and his discerning eye has improved every chapter of the whole. Ardis Butterfield and Christopher Cannon saw what this book was and could be, and I am deeply appreciative of their support for its publication in the Oxford Series in Medieval Literature and Culture and the guidance they provided over the course of its revision. I owe a tremendous debt to Fiona Somerset and an anonymous press reader for their trenchant comments on the manuscript: this book has emerged clearer and more assured for having passed through their hands. Jacqueline Norton has championed this book through the editorial process, and I am ever grateful for her support and help. Many conversations with generous scholars from across disciplines and fields have enriched and honed this project. For their suggestions, encouragement,

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queries, and comments, I thank Elizabeth Allen, Sophie Ambler, Heather Blurton, Tekla Bude, Karen Bollermann, Cynthia Turner Camp, David Carpenter, Megan Cook, Rebecca Davis, Andrea Denny-Brown, A. S. G. Edwards, Matthew Fisher, Marisa Galvez, Paul Hyams, Michelle Karnes, Dorothy Kim, Seth Lerer, Leena Löfstedt, Cary Nederman, Ingrid Nelson, Thomas O’Donnell, Rosemary O’Neill, Julie Orlemanski, Kenneth Pennington, Andrew Prescott, Ellen Rentz, Jessica Rosenberg, Courtney Rydel, James Simpson, Arvind Thomas, Susanna Throop, Björn Weiler, and Bridget Whearty. Audiences at Aberystwyth University; Saint Louis University; Stanford University; University of Glasgow; University of California, Irvine; University of Montana; University of Pennsylvania; University of Victoria; and University of California, Los Angeles, and the participants the June 2018 Borchard colloquium (generously funded by the Borchard Foundation), have all contributed to my learning and thinking. Finally, I am grateful to the librarians who have made this book possible, first and foremost at my home institution of Caltech, and beyond that at the Bodleian Library; the British Library; Cambridge University Library; The Huntington Library; Jesus College, Cambridge; St John’s College, Cambridge; Special Collections at the University of Glasgow Library; and Special Collections at Princeton University Library. Chapter 2 of this book had its start in an article published in Thirteenth Century XV (2015), and I thank Janet Burton, Phillipp Schofield, and Björn Weiler for the invitation that served as the initial impetus to writing. Portions of Chapters 3 and 5 had their beginnings in an article published in English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 17 (2012), and I likewise thank Orietta Da Rold and Tony Edwards for their editorial guidance in that venture. Excerpts from these articles appear with the kind permission of Boydell & Brewer Publishers and The British Library. My friends and family have sustained me throughout this process. My gratitude goes to Tina Christie, Katie Comer, Patricia Dailey, Jerusha and Bert Emerson, Susanne Hall, Carla Mazzio, Michelle Parra, Elisa Piccio, Candace Rypisi, Stefanie Sobelle, Emily Takoudes, Julie and Cedric Tolliver, Susan Turner-Lowe, and Michele Vallisneri for their love and support; to my sister, Jessica, for being my lifelong inspiration and confidante; and to Everett, for sharing his mother with this book for as long as he can remember. My parents, Jan and Bob, taught me to care about language and to trust in my ability to craft it. This book is dedicated to them, with inexpressible thanks. Finally, through beginnings and endings, first thoughts and final revisions, Chris Hunter has been my constant. His equanimity, humor, and friendship have seen me through.

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A Note on Translations Translations throughout the book are my own unless otherwise noted. Biblical citations are taken from the Biblia Sacra Vulgata, editio quinta, edited by Robert Weber and Roger Gryson (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994). English translations of the Vulgate are from the Douay-Rheims Bible. In Latin quotations, I follow the conventions of the given edition, retaining i/j or u/v spelling according to the source.

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Introduction The Poetics of Jurisdiction

The general intention is to treat of law that the unskilled may be made expert, the expert more expert, the bad good and the good better, as well by the fear of punishment as by the hope of reward, according to this [verse]: Good men hate to err from love of virtue; The wicked from fear of pain.¹ It would have surprised few medieval readers to find the classical poet Horace cited in the preface of the thirteenth-century legal summa On the Laws and Customs of England. In two neatly parallel lines, this brief adaptation from the Epistles distills the governing rationale for compiling one of medieval England’s most consequential legal treatises.² Just as law cultivates virtue and eradicates vice, the author suggests, so, too, does the process of becoming subtilis, expert, in an art. To be “subtle” in law in this case means not simply gaining mastery of its minutiae, but also cultivating the ethical disposition that allows one to judge “in place of the king, as though in the place of Jesus Christ” [vice regis quasi vice Ihesu Christi].³ The notion that virtuous legal actors are necessary for the protection of the public good dates to well before Horace’s own time, but for medieval legists and clerics, it was the poetry and prose of the Latin classical authors that most powerfully symbolized the merger of ethics, learning, and legal acumen on display in projects such as On the Laws and Customs of England. This book illuminates a world in which the study of literature—its reading, writing, and interpretation— stood quite literally prefatory to the study of law, as the beginning point for Latin literacy and for the kinds of clerical careers that followed from it. It asks how this kind of foundational training in the literary arts shaped English legal and political

¹ [Henry de Bracton], On the Laws and Customs of England, Thorne, trans., II.20. “Item communis intentio est de iure scribere ut rudes efficiantur subtiles, subtiles subtiliores, et homines mali efficiantur boni et boni meliores, tum metu poenarum tum exhortatione praemiorum, iuxta illud, Oderunt peccare boni virtutis amore, Oderunt peccare mali formidine poenae.” ² See Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars poetica, Fairclough, trans., Epistles, I.16, ll. 52–3. The medieval distich is slightly altered from Horace: “Oderunt peccare boni virtutis amore, / tu nihil admittes in te formidine poenae.” ³ [Henry de Bracton], On the Laws and Customs of England, Thorne, trans., II.20. Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta. Jennifer Jahner, Oxford University Press (2019). © Jennifer Jahner. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847724.001.0001

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2          thought during the formative first century of the common law tradition and, in turn, how emergent forms of legal and political practice shaped a rapidly changing multilingual literary culture. The legal ambitions of thirteenth-century England find a fitting representative in On the Laws and Customs of England, often dubbed for economy’s sake Bracton, after the royal justice, Henry de Bracton (also called Henry de Bratton), whose name appears most frequently in its pages.⁴ Likely compiled by multiple hands over several decades of the mid-thirteenth century, this massive compendium attempts a systematic overview of English royal justice in theory and in practice, drawing its substance from the writs, actions, and precedents of common law procedure and its architecture from the great civil and canon law commentaries amassed in the preceding decades.⁵ From these contemporary summae Bracton borrowed not only an organizational structure but also a vocabulary for talking about the exercise and delegation of power. Indeed, it was from just such a commentator, the Bolognese jurist Azo (d. c. 1230), that the Bracton compiler copies his Horatian quip, along with many more consequential passages on the nature of kingship and royal authority.⁶ For nineteenth-century legal historians like F. W. Maitland, Bracton epitomized the precocity of medieval English law, its willingness to borrow from the systematizing spirit of “foreign” legal traditions while doggedly pursuing its own independent course.⁷ For its medieval users, it more likely reflected the heterogeneity of thirteenth-century English clerical culture, in which lawyers like Henry de Bracton navigated the jurisdictional arenas of common and canon law as they moved between roles as clerics and royal justices.⁸ The literary ambitions of thirteenth-century England are harder to symbolize in a single work. Early in the century, one might point to the massive English re-telling of Arthurian Brut history by the poet LaЗamon, “Lawman,” who drew his narrative from the French version by Wace, who in turn had drawn his version ⁴ Though earlier scholarship attributed authorship of the work solely to Henry de Bracton, or Bratton, more recent work has posited him as one of multiple contributors. See Brand, “The Age of Bracton;” ibid., “Date and authorship of Bracton;” and Vincent, “Henry de Bratton,” with a biographical overview at 20–6. I refer to the text subsequently as Bracton. ⁵ See Vincent, “Henry de Bratton,” 26–8. ⁶ Azo, Summa super Codice et Institutis, sig. a ii. For discussion of Bracton’s reliance on civil and canon law commentaries, see H. Kantorowicz, Bractonian Problems; Richardson, “Azo, Drogheda, and Bracton;” and Vincent, “Henry de Bratton,” 30–4. ⁷ See, for instance, Maitland’s comments in Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, I.135: “From time to time the more learned among [the king’s justices] will try to attain a foreign, an Italian, standard of accuracy and elegance; they will borrow terms and definitions, they will occasionally borrow rules; but there must be no dictation from without. The imperial laws as such have no rights in England; the canon law has its proper province and should know its place.” ⁸ William de Raleigh, through whose influence Bratton rose to prominence, offers a case in point, having parlayed his position as chief justice coram rege to elections as bishop of Norwich and of Winchester. Bratton himself held ecclesiastical benefices: as a rector of Gosberton in Lincolnshire, as a canon of Bosham (Sussex), and eventually as Chancellor of Exeter by his death in 1268. See Vincent, “Henry de Bratton,” 21–3.

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from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain.⁹ Or one might point to LaЗamon’s contemporary, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, whose Latin poetic compositional treatise, the Poetria nova (c. 1214), would go on to become the most important grammatical classroom text of the later Middle Ages.¹⁰ Other exemplary figures could include the St. Albans chronicler Matthew Paris (d. 1259), whose corpus of chronicles and saints’ lives, in Latin and Anglo-French, places him among the most “prolific writers of history in medieval Britain,” or Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln (d. 1253), who alongside his Aristotelian commentaries and translations produced Anglo-French pastoral works such as the Château d’Amour, destined for robust afterlives long into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.¹¹ One could point to patrons, such as Queen Eleanor of Provence (d. 1291) and Isabel, countess of Arundel (d. 1282), or to manuscript owners such as the Reading monk William of Winchester, whose literary and musical predilections contributed to the remarkable trilingual miscellany known as London, British Library, MS Harley 978 (after 1264).¹² The Hebrew poetry of Meir ben Elijah of Norwich (fl. c. 1260) could aptly epitomize the literary world of thirteenth-century England; so, too, could the virulently anti-Semitic AngloFrench ballad Hugues de Lincoln (after 1255).¹³ The complexity and variety of thirteenth-century literature has meant that there has never been a single story to tell about this period, with the result that many stories about the period remain to be told, or remain to be told in conjunction with each other. Literary studies centered in the thirteenth century have tended to organize themselves by language (Latin, Anglo-French, or Middle English) or by genre (romance, devotional literature, or plaint, for instance) or by discipline (“historical writing” versus “literary writing”), leading to a rather atomized field.¹⁴ If we turn to the legal historiography of thirteenth-century England, by contrast, we find a different situation. As the putative origin of statute law, parliament, and the “community of the realm,” this period has never lacked for grands récits, whether told by early modern antiquarians, Whig historians, or thirteenth-century chroniclers themselves. This book represents an effort to bring these literary and legal stories together, not according to the traditional hierarchies of “text and context,” in which literature is assumed simply to reflect or distort a ⁹ See LaЗamon, Brut, or Hystoria Brutonum, Barron and Weinberg, ed. and trans. ¹⁰ For further discussion, see Chapters 2 and 3. ¹¹ For an overview of Matthew Paris’s career, see Weiler, “Historical writing in medieval Britain: The case of Matthew Paris,” quoted here at 319, with further discussion in Chapter 3. For Grosseteste and the Château d’Amour, see Chapter 4. ¹² On the literary patronage of Eleanor of Provence, see Howell, Eleanor of Provence, 82–99; on Isabel of Arundel, see Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture. On William of Winchester, see Taylor, Textual Situations, 132–3, with further discussion of Harley 978 in this chapter and in Chapter 5. ¹³ On Meir ben Elijah of Norwich, see Einbinder, “Meir b. Elijah of Norwich.” On Hugues de Lincoln, see Heng, The Invention of Race, 81–4. ¹⁴ Ashe’s study, Conquest and Transformation, is a notable exception.

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4          truer historical world, but as mutually enabling projects—born, in many cases, from the same educational and social milieus. As the following chapters discuss, a number of thirteenth-century texts that modern scholarship conventionally reads as “literary” emerged from and found application within legal contexts: the geopolitical crisis of the English Interdict, for example, provided Geoffrey of Vinsauf his governing rhetorical framework for the Poetria nova, while the manumission procedures that freed bonded serfs provided Robert Grosseteste a means to allegorize salvation history in the Château d’Amour. Similarly, a conventionally legal text like Magna Carta has its own role to play in literary history, whether we look to the invented law codes that helped justify its drafting or to the multilingual poetic responses that helped promulgate its argument. By the close of the thirteenth century, we begin to see the lineaments of an “English literary tradition” take more familiar form, with increasing numbers of authors writing in English for audiences they increasingly identify as “English.” It is only by looking to the prior century of literary and legal upheaval, however, that we can begin to understand how these concepts of “English” writing and “English” politics achieve their salience. An early fourteenth-century copy of Bracton neatly brings together the central concerns of this study.¹⁵ In the final leaves of the manuscript, immediately following a copy of the 1225 version of Magna Carta, a scribe has included a pithy poetic distich: “Verses delight spirits and capture many things in few words. They preserve the things of the past. These three features are pleasing to the reader” [Metra iuuant animos; comprendunt plurima paucis / Pristina commemorant; hec tria sunt grata legenti].¹⁶ These lines derive from John of Garland’s Clavis compendii (1230s), the abbreviated “key” to his much longer verse grammar, the Compendium gramatice.¹⁷ Excerpted here in a legal treatise, the principle of poetic measure, metrum, celebrated in these verses takes on an expanded sense, encompassing not only the mnemonic, persuasive, and pleasurable aspects of poetry but the modulating function of the law, as it balances prerogatives and pursues justice.¹⁸ This book begins with the basic claim that one first learned the principle of measure, in verse as well as in law and in the self, by learning poetry. As the starting point for Latin literacy, in other words, poetic instruction inculcated constitutional lessons in grammatical guise. Preeminent among these was the importance of adhering to the “higher law” of Latin grammar itself. Magna Carta and John of Garland’s verse grammar encapsulate, in this way, two intertwined stories at the center of this book. One tells the story of the ever-shifting argument at the heart of English royal governance, as king and ¹⁵ San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 31911. ¹⁶ Fol. 267r. ¹⁷ They comprise ll. 12–14 of the work’s prologue. See John of Garland, La Clavis compendii de Jean de Garlande, Marguin-Hamon, ed. and trans. ¹⁸ On the principle of measure and its relationship to emerging theories of balance in this period, see Kaye, A History of Balance.

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communitas fought, at times literally, for their respective rights to define a law of the land. The other tells the story of the changing role of grammatical training for those clerical administrators who were tasked with understanding, communicating, and arguing that law. John of Garland’s Clavis compendii represents the outer chronological edge of a trend that began in the late twelfth century, as grammarians like Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and Alexander of Villa Dei produced treatises codifying the lessons of the Latin classroom. These lessons had venerable origins in Roman grammatical and rhetorical education, and the pagan panoply of Ovid, Lucan, Virgil, and Horace still comprised the core canon of the grammar classroom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But the recovery of an expanded Aristotelian corpus, together with the rise of dialectic centered at the University of Paris, meant that the cultural field of grammar was changing. Under pressure from the new, grammatical training increasingly evoked “old” models of learning and expression.¹⁹ The poet Henri d’Andeli captures this dynamic colorfully in his allegorical poem La bataille des VII ars (c. 1230s).²⁰ Pitting the forces of Paris against those of Orléans, he describes a pitched battle between Logic and Grammar. Riding on the side of Logic are the fashionable courses of study, embodied by Plato, Aristotle, law (both civil and canon), and medicine. Assembled under the banner of Grammar are “those good author knights” [Cil bon chevalier autoristre] (27), Homer, Claudian, Donatus, Priscian, and Persius. As Plato strikes Donatus with a sophism and Aristotle’s Topics wages war on Priscian, the outlook for “mother” Grammar (241) appears poor. She withdraws first to her castle in Orléans, then all the way to her birthplace, Egypt [ou ele fu née] (408), while “courteous” Poetry [Versefieres le cortois] (440) remains confined to his domains of Orléans and Blois, since students of the arts and canon law “no longer care for their [i.e., the grammarians’] jurisdiction” [N’ont mès que fere de lor gistre] (445). Despite the attacks from logicians and other moderni, grammar’s “jurisdiction” proved extensive in the period covered by this book.²¹ Twelfth-century allegorists like Alain de Lille and Bernardus Silvestris ensured that even nature’s best-hidden secrets lay within the domain of the versifier’s art, and Henri’s own choice of poetic language, French, reflects a concomitant expansion among the vernaculars across the course of the thirteenth century. In another sense, however, the metaphorical yoking of grammar and jurisdiction signals a fundamental tension between ¹⁹ On the defense of grammar as “old learning,” see Jaeger, Envy of Angels, and further discussion in Chapter 1. On the rise of the artes poetriae, see Copeland and Sluiter, eds., Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric; Kelly, The Arts of Poetry and Prose; and Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 135–93; as well as discussion in Chapter 2. ²⁰ I rely on the edition and translation of Paetow, ed., The Battle of the Seven Arts. Copeland and Sluiter also include Paetow’s translation in Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, 706–23, with discussion at 706–8. ²¹ On the use of “moderni” as a pejorative during this period, see Clanchy, “Moderni in government and education in England.”

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6          literature and law. In jurisprudential terms, that is, poetry had no jurisdiction: it was not law, and its judgments carried no probative force. But if poetry was not law, law proved nevertheless “poetic,” dependent both procedurally and theoretically on the flexible capacities of metaphor and fiction. As the work of Ernst Kantorowicz has made clear, medieval constitutional thinking represented law at its most literary. The establishment of legal corporate bodies like the “Church” or the “Crown” depended upon acts of metaphorical translation, the transference of one vocabulary (of corpus, universitas, or persona, for instance) to the domain of another.²² In this way, the humble lessons of the grammar classroom remained fundamentally integrated within the loftiest of political theories. Literary techniques imbued fictional bodies—be they city, realm, or Church—with legal reality. In doing so, they provided the crucial means of visualizing the relationships of obligation and mutual governance that became the hallmarks of constitutionalism in both its medieval and post-medieval forms.²³ The thirteenth century has long served as an era in which medieval and postmedieval constitutionalisms collide. From Edward Coke to William Blackstone to William Stubbs, generations of legists and historians have constructed legal and political origins stories from the tumult of this period.²⁴ They drew in no small part on the origin stories that thirteenth-century writers and political actors themselves constructed to make sense of decades of civil strife, economic instability, and territorial loss. By the close of the century, England had witnessed two civil wars, the loss of a major portion of its Continental territories, a general interdict, the brief deposition of its king, and the development of an increasingly complex jury-based system of justice. It had established a tradition of statute law that took Magna Carta as its model and instituted a formal parliamentary system. For the “good” of the communitas represented by such instruments and organs of the law, the king also marked the close of the thirteenth century, in 1290, by expelling all Jews from the realm. These seeming contradictions of constitutional thought—of community premised on expulsion and legal bodies forged through extra-legal violence—provide this book its central set of questions. The work of the legal theorist Robert Cover suggests that understanding this relationship between nativist violence and political idealism requires attending to the larger “normative world” of thirteenth-century England. By “normative,” he means not simply the precepts and rules established by the law but rather nomos in its more expansive sense as habitus, those “paradigms for dedication, acquiescence, contradiction, and resistance” that are shaped by prescription ²² See Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. For use of the concept of legal corporate personhood in literary analysis, see Fowler, “Civil death and the maiden.” ²³ On later medieval constitutional thought and poetry, see Giancarlo, “Troubling the new constitutionalism,” responding in part to Carpenter, “Introduction: Political culture, politics and cultural history.” See also Sobecki, Unwritten Verities, 70–101. ²⁴ For discussion, see Holt, Magna Carta, 33–48.

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and belief.²⁵ For Cover, discourse proves central to establishing both the punitive force of law and its potential for justice. “No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning,” he argues. “For every constitution there is an epic, for each decalogue a scripture.”²⁶ As the following chapters demonstrate, Magna Carta acquired its own epic counterparts over the course of the Middle Ages. In turn, it provided fodder to new epic (and elegiac) readings of English legal history. Indeed, one of the most important epic precursors to Magna Carta, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1138), shares space with the Charter in the same manuscript mentioned previously.²⁷ In the case of the Bracton volume, however, Geoffrey’s chronicle appears only in the form of a verse excerption, copied following the distich from John of Garland. The scribe has taken only fourteen verse lines from the longer prose work, but they are pivotal ones, in which Brutus asks the goddess Diana to reveal where he and his men should make their new home, and Diana in turn prophesies his founding of “another Troy” on a deserted island on the far side of Gallia.²⁸ That this famous origin story for the founding of Britain should follow as oblique commentary on two of the most important legal enterprises of the thirteenth century, Magna Carta and Bracton, demonstrates Cover’s point neatly. If law represents a “system of tension between reality and vision,” between the world that is and the world that law could make someday, then the History of the Kings of Britain occupies the space of the visionary, projecting onto the past the sweeping jurisdictional authority it hopes to bequeath to future English kings.²⁹ But in different ways, Magna Carta and Bracton also bridge reality and vision—making law, in the case of Magna Carta, and surveying law, in the case of Bracton, but in both cases imagining what it could and should be. Texts like the History of the Kings of Britain serve as repositories for what Peter Goodrich calls the “minor jurisprudences” of the law, those failed, forgotten, or repressed histories that lie outside of the law’s self-professed claims to mastery. “The study of minor jurisprudences,” Goodrich writes, “is . . . also a history of law’s residues, of imaginary and fictive laws, of ‘itinerancy’ and fiction as also of contingent

²⁵ Though Cover does not cite Bourdieu, his understanding of nomos approximates the latter’s theory of habitus as “systems of durable, transposable dispositions.” See Cover, “Nomos and narrative,” printed as Chapter 3 in Narrative, Violence, and the Law, here at 97; and Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 72. ²⁶ Cover, “Nomos and narrative,” 95–6. ²⁷ For further discussion of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s influence on Magna Carta, see Chapter 3, 111–12. ²⁸ For the original scene, in which Brutus performs sacrificial rites to the goddess and she appears to him to deliver the prophecy, see Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Historia regum Britannie, vol. 1, I.16.9. The lines also circulated together as part of a verse epitome of the Historia; it is not clear whether the scribe excerpted from the prose chronicle or the verse abbreviation. See Hammer, “Une version métrique de l’Historia Regum Britanniae de Geoffroy de Monmouth,” ll. 25–30 and n. 24. ²⁹ See Cover, “Nomos and narrative,” 101.

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Law as Instrument, Law as Ligature This project thinks about the “bounded” nature of the law in multiple ways—as a means of constraining or enjoining behavior, as a way of delimiting territorial and other jurisdictional limits, and as a process of binding people together within a shared set of obligations and ordinances. These overlapping definitions give rise to the two primary competing etymologies for the term lex in the Middle Ages. In Isidore of Seville, we find the first of these definitions: law is a “written statute” [constitutio scripta], and it takes its name “from reading (a legendo vocata), because it is written.”³¹ A commonplace of medieval legal prolegomena, this definition identifies lex with its instruments—the codes, statutes, charters, and writs that constituted the “artificial memory” of the law, in M. T. Clanchy’s words.³² The second etymology, lex from ligare, spoke to the coercive potential embodied by these documents, a potential enforced by writing but guaranteed by voluntary obedience. This etymology is introduced by early Christian exegesis, first in Cassiodorus’ Expositio psalmorum, where he parses lex as “named from the fact that it binds our spirits and holds them subject to its ordinances” [Lex enim dicitur ex eo quod animos nostros liget, suis que teneat obnoxios constitutis].³³ By the thirteenth century, the two etymologies appear together in Alexander of Hales’s Summa theologica: Lex uno modo dicitur a legendo, alio modo a ligando. Secundum quod dicitur a legendo, extenso nomine lectionis non solum ad lectionem temporalem, sed ad lectionem secundum quod legitur in mente, sic lex est in dispositione. Lex autem, prout est in promulgatione, dicitur a ligando. [Law in one way is said to derive from reading, in another way from binding. To the extent that it is said to come from reading—the name of reading having been extended not just to reading that happens aloud but also in one’s mind—thus is law in its arrangement. Law, however, as it is in its promulgation, is said to come from binding.]³⁴ ³⁰ Goodrich, Law in the Courts of Love, 3. ³¹ Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, V.iii, Barney, et al., trans., here at 117. ³² Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 42. ³³ Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, Psalm 1, l. 204. ³⁴ Alexander of Hales, Summa fratris Alexandri siue Summa uniuersae theologiae, Liber 3, pars 2, inquisitio 1.

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The derivation of lex from legere thus emphasized material acts of writing and recording, while the etymology from ligare spoke to the ethical bonds that compelled individuals to hold themselves together in contracts and communities.³⁵ It proved useful precisely because it offered a means of visualizing the immaterial aspects of the law: the intangible norms that govern individuals through coercion and mutual consent. The tension between these two understandings of law—as written instrument and as spiritual obligation—structures this book in different forms over the course of its chapters. I begin in Chapter 1 with the struggle between Thomas Becket and Henry II, which turned on the question of lay jurisdiction over criminal clerics. This unexpectedly fatal debate would position “ancient custom” against “ancient liberties,” royal prerogative against episcopal privilege. It would also generate new written law, in the form of the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164), and, with Becket’s death, elevate a model of specifically legalistic sacrifice that proved hugely influential in the decades to come. As subsequent chapters elaborate, these two phenomena intersect and shape each other in complex ways over the following century. Prelates like Stephen Langton (c. 1150–1228), Edmund Rich (c. 1174–1240), and Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170–1253) modeled themselves explicitly on Becket’s form, “binding” themselves to the higher law of God when royal or papal machinations demanded postures of refusal. Meanwhile, alongside the instruments of an increasingly routinized royal government, we see the emergence of documents that sought to bind royal power, limiting its exercise by tightening the ligatures, so to speak, that held ruler and realm together. The iconic document within this tradition is, of course, Magna Carta, and the third chapter of the book devotes itself to tracing the fortunes of the Charter across the thirteenth century. Magna Carta, however, represented but one iteration of a much larger and longer debate about the proper function and limits of royal power—one that predated the Norman Conquest and outlasted the Middle Ages by many centuries.³⁶ In the thirteenth century, this debate manifested in new programs of political reform, such as the Provisions of Oxford in 1258, and in rebellions, including the civil wars of 1216–1217 and 1263–1267. Its arguments punctuated monastic chronicles and sermons, theological commentaries and poetry. In Bracton, for instance, we see the written and spiritual genealogies of the law collide in one of the most textually contentious passages in the summa. Within the portion of the text devoted to “Acquiring the Dominion of Things,” the author discusses the status of royal charters, arguing that, since they represent the will of the ³⁵ On the history of this etymology in scholastic and common law commentary traditions, see Lio, O.F.M. “Annotazioni al testo riportato da S. Tommaso (S. Th. 1–2, qu. 90 a. 1) «Lex . . . Dicitur a Ligando»;” Lottin, “La définition classique de la loi (Commentaire de la 1st, 2ae Q. 90);” and Nanu, La Segunda Partida de Alfonso X el sabio y la tradición de los Specula principum, 187–9. ³⁶ The classic form of this argument is made in Holt, Magna Carta. See further discussion in Chapter 3.

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king himself, they remain exempt from interpretation by private persons or magistrates.³⁷ But the fact that no one may nullify the king’s charter does not mean that the king remains morally exempt from the law he issues. To the contrary, insofar as he remains capable of injuria, he lies within the scope of divine punishment and even, under certain circumstances, lay correction. For, as Bracton argues, “The king has a superior, namely, God. Also the law by which he is made king. Also his curia, namely, the earls and barons, because if he is without bridle, that is without law, they ought to put the bridle on him. [That is why the earls are called the partners, so to speak, of the king; he who has a partner has a master].”³⁸ The basic argument of this passage will be familiar to readers of William Langland, who, more than a century later in Piers Plowman, would deploy his supple and protean style of allegory to depict kingship in both its idealized and “injurious” forms.³⁹ Kings are superiors in their realms, both Langland and Bracton argue, but their position owes to their willing subjection to God and law: only through God do they receive the capacities and authority of their office. Those who surround the king, his curia, have in turn a moral obligation to correct him if he strays from righteousness; to do any less risks damnation. The metaphor of the “bridle” of law thus realizes the complexity of a hierarchical political order in which vectors of power emanate both downward from the seat of authority and upward from the seat of counsel. All those who comprise the realm, in Langland’s words, must “shopen,” or shape, themselves to “lawe and leaute.”⁴⁰ Well before Piers Plowman, a poet of the 1260s committed this same argument to Latin verse in the so-called Song of Lewes, penned hastily in defense and celebration of the 1264 Battle of Lewes, which succeeded in effectively, if temporarily, removing Henry III from power.⁴¹ In a tour de force demonstration of political philosophy set to meter, the poet advances both the royal and baronial ³⁷ [Henry de Bracton], On the Laws and Customs of England, II.109–10. ³⁸ I have retained Thorne’s brackets from his translation, which indicate interlinear changes and other additions to the manuscript tradition. Ibid., II.110: “Rex habet superiorem, deum scilicet. Item legem per quam factus est rex. Item curiam suam, videlicet comites et barones, quia comites dicuntur quasi socii regis, et qui socium habet, habet magistrum. Et ideo si rex fuerit sine fraeno, id est sine lege, debent ei fraenum apponere.” The controversy surrounding this passage and its authorship dates to Kantorowicz, Bractonian Problems. For responses, see McIlwain, “The present status of the problem of the Bracton text;” Schulz, “Bracton on kingship;” Lapsley, “Bracton and the authorship of the addicio de cartis;” Tierney, “Bracton on government;” Radding, “The origin of Bracton’s addicio de cartis;” Nederman, Lineages of European Political Thought, 81–98; and, most recently, Vincent, “Henry de Bratton.” ³⁹ As Langland puts it in the B-text of Piers Plowman, “Thanne kam ther a Kyng: Knyghthod hym ladde; / Might of the communes made hym to regne.” See Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, B Pr. 112–13. On this passage, and the dynamics of the so-called “Coronation” scene which it introduces, see Scanlon, “King, commons, and kind wit;” Somerset, “ ‘Al þe comonys with o voys atonys’: Multilingual Latin and vernacular voice in Piers Plowman;” and Steiner, Reading Piers Plowman, 7–8. ⁴⁰ Langland, Piers Plowman, B Pr. 122. ⁴¹ The Song of Lewes was edited and translated first by Wright in Political Songs, 72–124, as the “Battle of Lewes,” and later by Kingsford, ed., Song of Lewes. References to the poem are taken from Kingsford’s edition with my own translation, with line numbers following in the text. For further discussion, see Chapter 5.

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sides of the debate. Princes desire free, unconstrained power, not the servitude of a ruling council. How can a king be a king while remaining subject to another? To this point the poet answers that “not every restraint removes liberty nor does every restriction take away power” [Non omnis artacio priuat libertatem / Nec omnis districtio tollit potestatem] (667–8). Kings are bound [artari] by law so that they might increase their royal dignity and be shielded from sin. Those who keep the king from vice do not enslave him, but rather raise him up and deliver him from slavery: the truly free king rules according to law (680–700). At this moment, the Song incorporates a familiar legal etymology: “Lex is so called from ligando” [A ligando dicitur lex] (699). Political principle and poetry work in close conjunction in the Song of Lewes. Conceptually, the poet argues that royal power cannot stand exempt from communal correction; formally, he underscores his point in a rhyme scheme that links the lines not just once but twice per couplet—and not just by single but double syllables. In other words, a great deal of repetition occurs in the Song and not by accident, as the poet exemplifies at a prosodic level the jointure he commends at a political level: Si princeps amauerit, debet reamari; Si recte regnauerit, debet honorari; Si princeps errauerit, debet reuocari Ab hijs, quos grauauerit injuste, negari, Nisi uelit corrigi; si uult emendari, Debet ab hijs erigi simul et iuuari. (729–34) [If a prince loves, he should be loved in return; if he rules rightly, he should be honored. If a prince errs, he ought to be summoned by those whom he injured unjustly, and be denied—unless he is willing to be corrected. If he desires correction, he should be simultaneously raised up and aided by them.]

We can see how the poetry supports the basic argument, with repeated verb debere joining the two clauses of the first three lines. This debt, ideally grounded in love, operates in the both directions and, fittingly, mediates between them across the two sides of the caesura: mutual obligation ties the prince and his people, right up until the adverb injuste fills in the place of the verb in the fourth line. When the king thus acts unjustly, it falls to those who love and honor him to “raise him up and aid him”—in this case, through armed rebellion. But the relationship between literary and political thought worked in the other direction as well. Like law, poetry was thought to find its etymological origins in binding. In the Etymologies, Isidore of Seville takes from Varro the idea that poets may serve as “seers” [vates], a term he derives from their vis mentis, “force of mind,” or from their ability to “plait songs” [a viendis carminibus]—that is, to

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“turn” [viere] them or modulate them. Vates thus wrote either on account of a kind of prophetic madness [vesania], Isidore concludes, or “because they ‘link’ words in rhythms, with the ancients using the term viere,” he writes, “instead of vincire (‘bind’).”⁴² Chapters 1 and 2 discuss how the “binding” discipline of poetic study absorbed and recast the basic lessons of political theory, especially as they filtered into the medieval classroom from Roman sources. As the discipline that wrested children from the habits of a native language and trained them in the precepts of another, grammar served in this way as a vital tool of political subject formation, the “ground level,” as Christopher Cannon puts it, of professional discourse.⁴³ Its acquisition in turn supported forms of social hierarchy and critique, with the well-trained tongue proving a convenient synecdoche for the well-trained body and spirit.⁴⁴ In this way, grammar constituted both a “technology of power,” in Foucault’s terminology, and a “technology of the self.”⁴⁵ It heralded the entry of a free male subject into literacy, oratory, and juridical enfranchisement by making him subject to the rules of the acquired language of statecraft. The inverse reasoning also held: erroneous grammar became equated with “erroneous” bodies, improperly ruled in spirit no less than in speech.⁴⁶

Periodizing Law and Poetry The Song of Lewes represents a clear product of classroom training in the arts of medieval political “messaging.” It also constitutes a remarkable poetic feat in its own right. Our traditional ways of periodizing medieval English literature, however, have meant that this poem and many other thirteenth-century works have gone largely neglected in scholarship, both on account of their latinity and a longstanding tendency to orient our study around late Middle English sources.⁴⁷ Far from standing outside the traditional canon of English literature, however, the Song of Lewes resides at its heart, surviving as it does, rather unexpectedly, at the origins of the written Middle English lyric tradition. Its only extant version ⁴² Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum, VIII.8.3: “vel quod modis verba conecterent, viere antiquis pro vincire ponentibus.” Ibid., Etymologies, Barney, et al. trans., here at 180. ⁴³ Cannon, “Vernacular Latin,” 652. ⁴⁴ On the Roman tradition see, for instance, Winterbottom, “Quintilian and the vir bonus.” On medieval regimes of learning and social hierarchies, see Kerby-Fulton, “The clerical proletariat;” Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent; and Cornelius, “The rhetoric of advancement.” On the gendered implications of grammatical discipline, see Parker, “Virile style.” ⁴⁵ Cf. Foucault, “Technologies of the self,” in ibid., Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. ⁴⁶ Alain de Lille’s elaborate punning in De planctu Naturae is a key example. For discussion, see Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex; Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire, 137–40; and Schibanoff, “Sodomy’s mark.” ⁴⁷ Thomas Hahn observes that the thirteenth century was long thought “one of the dullest and least accessible intervals in standard literary history, an incoherent, intractable, impenetrable dark age scarcely redeemed by a handful of highlights.” See Hahn, “Early Middle English,” 61. For reassessments of this period, see Cannon, Grounds of English Literature; and Ashe, Conquest and Transformation.

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appears in London, British Library, MS Harley 978, a late thirteenth-century manuscript best known for preserving the most famous of the early Middle English lyrics, Sumer is icumen in, as well as the Lais and Fables of Marie de France in their most complete forms.⁴⁸ Our traditional ways of organizing the medieval literary past have had a difficult time accounting for these works together—a “late” survival of twelfth-century French poetry, an “early” example of Middle English song, and an eccentric specimen of Latin verse polemic. As recent studies in the fields of medieval multilingualism and book history show, however, these works form part of an integrated literary field in the thirteenth century, in which cross-linguistic interaction constitutes less the exception than the norm.⁴⁹ Rather than position a manuscript like Harley 978 at the beginnings of a national literary tradition—a position in which its contents will always seem, to some degree, “preparatory” to the rise of a canon—this book suggests ways in which we might view its contents as the culmination of a century’s worth of literary and political developments. Accordingly, I deliberately eschew reading the thirteenth century into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for several reasons. First, much fine work in the field has already done so. Most recently, Laura Ashe has offered a wide-ranging longue durée account of English political and spiritual literature from 1000 to 1350, while Matthew Giancarlo, David Matthews, and Wendy Scase have traced back the genealogies of later medieval political thought and literary plaint to the crucial decades of the 1250s, 1260s, and 1270s.⁵⁰ Like Matthews, and alongside the work of Christopher Cannon, Matthew Fisher, Susanna Fein, Dorothy Kim, and others, I aim in this book to “bring the century before Chaucer back into view.”⁵¹ But to see this period as something other than a prelude to the “rise of Middle English” requires one to cultivate a kind of tactical disregard for the long shadows of Chaucer and Langland. Since the beginnings of ⁴⁸ For a description of the contents of London, British Library, MS Harley 978, see Kingsford, ed., Song of Lewes, xi–xvii; and for analysis and attribution of the manuscript, Taylor, Textual Situations, 76–136. ⁴⁹ In this argument, I follow on the work of many others, focusing both within and beyond the thirteenth century. For recent surveys of the field and demonstration of its current imperatives, see the collected essays in Fenster and Collette, eds., The French of England; and the 2015 Speculum essay cluster, “Competing archives, competing histories: French and its cultural locations in late-medieval England,” with contributions by Baswell, Cannon, Wogan-Browne, and Kerby-Fulton. As Baswell notes in his introduction, the essays share a commitment to a “localized” and tactical sense of the vernacular—not as a single tongue but as “the most comfortably used language or dense lexis (such as ‘law French’) of a particular setting, be that setting textual or oral.” See Baswell, “Introduction,” 637. For multilingualism within manuscripts, see also Baswell, “Multilingualism on the page;” Butterfield, “Why medieval lyric?;” Lerer, “Medieval English literature and the idea of the anthology;” and Scahill, “Trilingualism in early Middle English miscellanies.” ⁵⁰ See Ashe, Conquest and Transformation; Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England; Scase, Literature and Complaint in England; and Matthews, Writing to the King. They are preceded by Turville-Petre, England the Nation. ⁵¹ See Matthews, Writing to the King, here at 5; Cannon, Grounds of English Literature; Fisher, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History; and Fein, ed. Studies in the Harley Manuscript. Kim has likewise argued for a more expansive, globalized early Middle English devotional culture; see “Rewriting liminal geographies.” Finally, at the foundation of my own work rests Salter’s English and International.

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the modern discipline of medieval studies, our stories about thirteenth-century poetry have proven inextricably conjoined with our stories about the rise of the constitutional nation-state.⁵² To posit these poems as the “origins” of a literary tradition cannot help but reproduce this narrative in some form. To this end, the following chapters examine the ways in which various literatures naturalize (and de-naturalize) ideas about English political community before 1300. But in doing so, I also argue for a more radical de-centering of the discussion, away from early Middle English as the primary measure of “national ethos” and towards Latin and Anglo-French as equally important contributors to formulations of justice, equity, popular consent, and communal boundaries.⁵³ In The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War, Ardis Butterfield charts a course for reconsidering England’s intertwined vernacular languages and literary traditions as uneasy intimates rather than agonistic successors. The question she poses in her introduction—“What happens to the story of English if we do not isolate it from French, England’s other vernacular?”— lies, too, at the heart of this book.⁵⁴ My own question takes a slightly different form, though. What happens to the story of nationhood, this study asks, if we do not make it primarily a story of language change? Indeed, what happens to the story of nationhood if we do not make the “nation” our governing conceit?

Jurisdictional Form In place of the vexed category of “nation,” I posit jurisdiction as an alternative way of mapping intersecting and conflicting legal and extra-legal identities—identities that do not reduce in any necessary way to language use, territorial location, or faith, but which rather are constructed multiply across the boundaries of cities, demesne lands, bishoprics, and royal dominions. Bradin Cormack, writing in an early modern context, argues for jurisdiction as a useful “disruption” to our standard literary approaches to sovereignty, since it “makes visible a governing and productive instability in the law,” an insight shared by Bruce Holsinger, who calls jurisdiction a “master category embracing numerous modes of social and institutional performance.”⁵⁵ As its component parts intimate, jurisdiction carries ⁵² On the conflation of early Middle English and early English “nationalism,” see Machan’s discussion of the Second Barons’ War in English in the Middle Ages, 20–69, discussed also by Matthews, Writing to the King, 22–8. On early Middle English as a marker for a “lapsed” English national and literary tradition, see Hahn, “Early Middle English;” and for the origins of Middle English scholarship among the antiquarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910. ⁵³ Somerset pursues related questions in “Complaining about the king.” See also Ashe, Conquest and Transformation, 357–429. ⁵⁴ Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, xxiv. ⁵⁵ See Cormack, A Power to Do Justice, 6; and Holsinger, “Vernacular legality: The English jurisdictions of the Owl and the Nightingale,” 156.

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in it an echo of the rhetorical: it demarcates the boundaries within which a particular law “speaks” and, in speaking, manifests its authority to govern.⁵⁶ I wish to take seriously this fundamental rhetoricity within the concept of jurisdiction, since it underscores what postcolonial theorists of cultural identity have long stressed—namely, that identities are, in the words of Stuart Hall, “never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices, and positions.”⁵⁷ Insofar as the law imagines identities, it does so through the force of jurisdictional recognition, exclusion, and enforcement. This sense of multiplicity and instability accrues, too, to the concept of a “nation,” both in its poststructuralist formulation as an “imagined community” and its medieval formulation as natio or gens.⁵⁸ As Susan Reynolds has argued of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, political communities in this period created the “myths of common origin” that in turn naturalized their statuses as politically agential bodies, capable of exerting pressure on governing powers. “It was no mere accident of the sources,” she adds, “that references to collective mythic ancestries should have proliferated at the very time when government was becoming more effective, and effective over areas to which the old myths could be made to apply.”⁵⁹ As the following chapters show, jurisdictional antagonisms—local and regnal, ecclesiastical and lay—gave rise to these kinds of narratives and to the emotionally charged rhetoric that we now call “nationalistic.” Thus, for instance, the poet of the Song of Lewes can borrow the tropes of crusading discourse to celebrate a liberated Anglia, comprised of uiri naturali who no longer fear the invasive threat posed by foreign brethren of the king and queen.⁶⁰ As both Tim William Machan and David Matthews emphasize, this nativism capitalizes on a preexisting rhetoric, utilized tactically in the 1250s and 1260s to argue that the local political community should be more “natural” to the king than his own kin.⁶¹ Such rhetoric would have real legal consequences, however, in the form of the Petitio baronum of 1263, which demanded that “the kingdom in future be ⁵⁶ On medieval jurisdiction, see Costa, Iurisdictio; Grossi, L’Ordine giuridico medievale; and, in an ecclesiastical context, Villemin, Pouvoir d’ordre et pouvoir de juridiction. For discussion, see also Cormack, A Power to Do Justice, 8–9; and, for jurisdiction as the “voice or idiom of law,” Dorsett and McVeigh, Jurisdiction, 5–6. On medieval jurisdictions as forms of “scaled” communities, see Sanok, New Legends of England, 6–10. ⁵⁷ See “Who needs ‘identity’?” in Hall and du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity, 4. ⁵⁸ “Imagined community” is, of course, Benedict Anderson’s influential phrase, which has been productively critiqued and extended within postcolonial and poststructuralist schools of thought. See, for instance, Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 139–70; and, more recently, Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism. Anderson’s alignment of nationalism with modernity, ushered in by print culture, has proven both problematic for medievalists and conceptually useful. See Davis, “National writing in the ninth century”; Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies, 1–17; and Lavezzo, “Nation.” On medieval ideas and practices of collective solidarity, see Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, esp. 250–6. ⁵⁹ Reynolds, “Medieval origines gentium and the community of the realm,” 381. ⁶⁰ For further discussion, see Chapter 5, and Matthews, Writing to the King, 33–51. ⁶¹ See Machan, English in the Middle Ages, 21–69; and Matthews, Writing to the King, 18–28.

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governed by native-born men, faithful and useful under the lord king, and not by others, as is done in common in all other kingdoms of the world.”⁶² What macro-level discussions of sovereignty tend to obscure, then, is the fact that jurisdiction is not just a mantle but a web—a complex map of intersecting, competing, and overlapping claims, all carrying their own histories and embedded in their own particularized practices.⁶³ Robert M. Stein makes a similar point: The nation as a combination of territory and sovereignty is an ideological simplification that masks a great diversity of experience that is contentious, conflictual and marked by divided and unreconcilable loyalties. This diversity of experience is smaller than the nation (local diversity is masked by the always ideological claim to the supremacy of the state apparatus) and at the same time much larger. It consists of networks of affinity, affiliation, alliance and kinship, to name only a few possibilities, that span “multi-national,” multi-ethnic and multilingual territories in crossing patterns rather than being confined to a material entity capable of being mapped and necessarily bordered.⁶⁴

From local disputes, however, arise the universalizing arguments that tend, in turn, to obscure the local as a site of contest. To return again to the example of Becket, his conflict with Henry II ended as the paradigmatic opposition of Church versus State, but it began as a series of local disputes and grievances: a clerk protected from royal justice after stealing a chalice from Becket’s boyhood church of St. Mary-le-Bow; a Worcester cleric kept from the royal courts after killing a man and raping his daughter; a Bedford canon punished under ecclesiastical law but saved from secular punishment after insulting the royal justice who reopened his homicide charge.⁶⁵ Behind the bare facts of these cases lie their stories, now lost to the historical record. Aggregated together and appealed up the chains of royal and ecclesiastical justice, however, they begin to represent larger legal principles— the prerogative of the king to punish secular crimes or the autonomy of the Church to protect its clerics from double indemnity. In this process of legal escalation, the emotions underlying the original charges do not disappear; instead, they reattach to the jurisdictions themselves. Thus, it is the Church threatened with violation and degradation by the king’s overreach; it is the royal dignity insulted and robbed of its due by the archbishop’s imperious pride. As we will see over the course of the following chapters, the rhetoric that surrounds these disputes proves endlessly mobile, attaching as easily to minor local grievances as to major geopolitical negotiations. Legal scholar Richard T. Ford helps us to see why this might be the case. Jurisdiction, he argues, “constructs legal statuses,” naturalizing ⁶² Cited in Carpenter, “King Henry III’s ‘statute’ against aliens: July 1263,” reprinted in Carpenter, The Reign of Henry III, at 266. ⁶³ Cormack makes a related point. See his introduction in A Power to Do Justice, 11–46. ⁶⁴ Stein, “Royaumes sans frontières,” 275. See also his Reality Fictions. ⁶⁵ See Barlow, Thomas Becket, 92–3.

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the legal proscriptions and permissions that become the “second nature” of our habitation within cities, states, and nations.⁶⁶ As we have seen, jurisdiction is also a discourse, and Ford suggests that it takes two broad forms. The rhetoric of “organic jurisdiction” assumes a jurisdiction that arises as “the natural outgrowth of circumstances, conditions and principles that, morally, preexist the state.” It conjures the language of community, nation, and people, and, when mobilized, argues on the basis of “matters of right and defend[s] against attack in terms of autonomy, selfdetermination and cultural preservation.”⁶⁷ Reynolds describes medieval “myths of common origins” as serving this purpose, representing “one aspect of a belief in the natural, given existence of collective groups with their own customs, laws and cultures.”⁶⁸ In contrast, synthetic jurisdictions are seen to represent the work of bureaucracies: “They do not define a prepolitical social group, but are instead imposed on groups of people from ‘outside’ or ‘above’.”⁶⁹ In any given jurisdictional dispute, Ford suggests, either side may marshal the rhetoric of organic or synthetic jurisdiction, positioning itself as an entity that preexists the regulatory force of law or one that instantiates and enforces the law. As Ford stresses, this opposition does not attach to the ontologically real, but neither is it purely fiction. “Instead,” he suggests, “it tells us what to look for, what to consider, how to organize our thinking. It constructs reality, not in the sense of creating an illusion, but in the sense of acting as a lens that sharpens certain features and blurs others.”⁷⁰ Ford considers these concepts of jurisdiction to emerge diachronically, reserving synthetic jurisdiction for the operations of the modern nation-state. But the medieval examples suggest that we might instead consider them to be complementary and mutually instantiating. Becket’s story, for example, proves so powerful for the later Middle Ages in part because he embodied both an “organic” claim to ecclesiastical liberty and a “synthetic” claim to the higher rationality of divine law. In doing so, he made juridical autonomy a principle worth dying for. In turn, his sacrificial exemption from royal bureaucracy—itself modeled on his predecessor, Anselm of Canterbury—traveled forward into the thirteenth century as an argument and a form, a way of performing a collective legal identity independent of the Crown. Thus, future archbishops of Canterbury like Stephen Langton and Edmund Rich would follow Becket’s example by choosing exile on the Continent during disputes with the king, while in 1256 Matthew Paris reports English prelates proclaiming that refusing to pay tax to the Crown “would be a clearer road to martyrdom than in the case of St. Thomas the Martyr.”⁷¹ Becket’s place of

⁶⁶ Ford, “Law’s territory,” 857–8. For discussion and critique of Ford’s focus on territorial jurisdiction, see Cormack, A Power to Do Justice, 24–5. ⁶⁷ Ibid., 859–60. ⁶⁸ Reynolds, “Medieval origines gentium and the community of the realm,” 38. Emphasis in original. ⁶⁹ Ford, “Law’s territory,” 860. ⁷⁰ Ibid., 863. ⁷¹ On the archbishops of Canterbury and the use of voluntary exile in political disputes, see Jordan, “The English holy men of Pontigny.” Matthew Paris is describing resistance to a tax requested in 1255–6 by the pope and king to aid the pope’s war against Manfred of Sicily. See Chronica majora, V.540: “Unde

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birth, London, claimed the saint as its patron and the guiding inspiration for its own governmental autonomy, a phenomenon that appears with keen urgency in the years surrounding Magna Carta, as I discuss at greater length in Chapter 3. Becket’s jurisdictional example migrates in complicated ways over the course of the thirteenth century from the realm of ecclesiastical privilege to the vexed business of royal administrative reform. As Chapter 5 discusses, his particular brand of ascetic reformism would provide a template to the reformist crusader Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, who translated Becket’s “zeal for the law” from the realm of Church liberty to communal liberties. The second half of the book shows how this particular brand of reformist discipline—equal parts idealistic and pietistic—entails violence as part of its project of enfranchisement. Despite his status as England’s first baronial “martyr,” Simon de Montfort was himself French, and his father the leader of the Albigensian Crusade. His famed rebellion resulted in the first representative parliamentary gathering in England, but also brought about catastrophic violence against Jewish communities. Chapter 5 explores how these phenomena are interrelated—how the expansion of communal protections and privileges emerged in tandem with acts of violence and exclusion.⁷²

Chapter Organization This book divides broadly into two parts, which pivot around a central third chapter on Magna Carta. The first part of the book takes its starting point in the grammar classroom, exploring how students learned to write and interpret Latin poetry and, in the process, to write about and interpret the political environments they inhabited. I begin in Chapter 1 by placing the Becket controversy in conversation with twelfth-century debates over the salience of traditional grammatical education as it had been practiced in the cathedral schools for centuries. John of Salisbury (c. 1115–80) provides the bridge between these worlds. A fierce defender of grammar and the virtues it sought to inculcate, John also positioned himself as magister to a young Thomas Becket as he entered royal service, dedicating all three of his major works—the Metalogicon (1159), the Policraticus (1159), and the Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum (c. 1155)—to the newly minted chancellor. I focus in particular in this chapter on the Entheticus, John’s longest surviving verse work, showing how its survey of knowledge, beginning with grammar, embeds lessons for navigating the treacherous paths of court service.

affirmabant, nec sine ratione, quod mori in hac causa via fuisset martirii manifestior, quam fuerit in causa beati Thomae martiris.” For further discussion, see Chapter 3, 130–1, and Chapter 5, 196. ⁷² Balibar traces this dynamic to the political theory of Aristotle and Plato. See Citizenship, 15–16.

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With the second chapter, we move from the Becket controversy to Canterbury’s next major crisis, the Interdict of 1208–14, and from debates over the “New Logic” to the rise of a new genre of classroom text, the ars poetriae manual. These treatises provided grammar instructors and their pupils with basic guidelines for verse and prose composition, from the discovery and arrangement of material to its adornment through various forms of figural manipulation. I focus in this chapter on the runaway bestseller of the genre, Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s Poetria nova. Surviving in more than 200 manuscripts, this hexameter treatise has long been recognized as a sourcebook for later writers like Chaucer. Rarely, however, has it been considered as a primer for political critique and even as a topical poem itself. This chapter shows how this staple text of the medieval classroom took shape against the backdrop of the English Interdict, providing subtle commentary on tensions between royal and papal power. Moving outward from the arts of poetry to the political verse shaped by such manuals, I consider more broadly the category of “occasional” or “historical” verse. As we will see, many of these poems have their roots in classroom pedagogy, and it is hence through the lens of rhetorical training, I suggest, that we might best understand their historicity. The first part of the book demonstrates how grammatical pedagogy embedded lessons in law and political theory; the second part shows how law itself absorbed and depended upon literary forms of thought. The third chapter connects these halves by focusing on the “invention” of Magna Carta over the course of the thirteenth century. Here, I draw on the broadest sense of the term invenire, meaning “to come upon or discover,” to argue that Magna Carta both found and made the law it came to embody. In rhetoric, invention denoted the finding of suitable topics of argument; in liturgy, it described the discovery of sacred objects or bodies; and in law, it carried the sense of finding by judgment or deliberation. All of these senses have bearing on the development of the “myth” of Magna Carta.⁷³ The document brokered in June 1215 proved famously ephemeral, lasting only months before it saw annulment by the pope. By the close of the thirteenth century, however, Magna Carta had become a permanent fixture of English common law, copied at the opening of hundreds of statute books and memorialized in chronicles and poetry. This chapter traces the fortunes of Magna Carta during its first century, showing how its multilingual distribution in turn encouraged multilingual poetic responses. At the close of this chapter, I discuss how multilingual poetry becomes a means of measuring the broad jurisdictional scope of Magna Carta. Chapters 4 and 5 explore the intersections of ecclesiastical and secular reform in the wake of Magna Carta and the Fourth Lateran Council. Both products of the

⁷³ On this “myth,” see Holt, Magna Carta.

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year 1215, these two legislative works grapple, in complex ways, with problems of jurisdictional delegation and the ethics of rule. I take as my centerpiece for this section of the book the friendship between Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, and Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester—the former an intellectual giant of the thirteenth century, translator of Aristotle and moral gadfly to the pope, and the latter an excommunicate crusader, condemned as a traitor and venerated as a saint for his leadership of the Second Barons’ War. Linked by familial connections and religious zeal, these figures epitomize an explosive collaboration between ecclesiastical and lay reform that yoked Aristotelian theories of governance with the logic of holy war. Chapter 4 approaches this collaboration through the lens of the ecclesiastical reformism that followed on Fourth Lateran, focusing in particular on Grosseteste’s theories of pastoral care and political hierarchy as they coalesced through his translations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and the neo-platonic theological corpus of Pseudo-Dionysius. Together, these two bodies of work provided the foundation for Grosseteste’s ethics of pastoral service, which he grounded in a notion of divine “superabundance,” borrowed from Pseudo-Dionysius, and friendship, borrowed from Aristotle. I explore how these models of hierarchy and horizontal affinity interact in Grosseteste’s estate management writings to women landholders, arguing that the kind of manorial authority aristocratic women wielded in households and on estates—authority over matters of law, accounting, and conduct—resides at the center of Grosseteste’s theories of justice and governance. My key texts for this chapter, however, also reveal how Grosseteste’s embrace of the lay estate as a model for pastoral hierarchy depends upon a theology and legal practice of Jewish “servitude.” As embodiments of the law that Grosseteste sees as fundamentally superseded by Christ, thirteenthcentury English Jews both reinforced and challenged his philosophy of delegated jurisdiction. The final chapter draws the threads of the previous chapters together as it turns its focus to Simon de Montfort and the Second Barons’ War of the 1260s. Lauded as a “second Becket,” de Montfort epitomizes the contradictions of thirteenthcentury reformism. A French aristocrat, he came to symbolize “native” English interests; a putative champion of justice, he led a revolt that left scores dead, including hundreds of English Jews; a traitor and excommunicate, he became the center of a robust and unofficial saint’s cult. To understand the relationship between the political ideals of just governance and political realities of warfare and religious persecution during this period, I explore a constitutive feature of baronial revolt in the thirteenth century—its status as crusade. Both the First and Second Barons’ Wars arrayed themselves as crusades, with rebels and royalists alike putatively fighting on the side of God. As I show in this final chapter, the history of crusading was bound from its beginning in complex ways with the disciplines of grammar and rhetoric. The first Frankish historians to narrate and

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“theologize” the First Crusade did so by drawing explicitly on their training in classical as well as biblical epic. Using the full force of Christian eloquentia, they constructed a powerful narrative of Christian jurisdictional right to the Holy Land. Moving from the early twelfth- to the thirteenth-century context, I demonstrate how this narrative—and the styles in which it took shape—came to underwrite the English baronial “defense” of native English rights. At its core, this book represents an effort to think about legal history and poetry not as disciplinary opponents, allied with objective truth on one side and literary license on the other, but as part of a shared cultural milieu in which the fictions of the law and poetry proved mutually enabling. Emily Steiner has argued for a late medieval “political aesthetic” emerging at the intersection of political theory and literary craft, in which ideas about representation find articulation “through radical experiments in form.”⁷⁴ In this book, I similarly accord literature a vital role in working through the implications of political ideas, though I somewhat invert the emphasis: I show, for an earlier period, how conventional poetic training helped defend and promulgate radical experiments in governance. The consequences of these thirteenth-century experiments proved profound, not only for fourteenth-century political actors and commentators but for us as literary medievalists, yoked almost inexorably to the “national” stories they tell. As a period boundary within literary medieval studies, the thirteenth century also speaks to the internal jurisdictions of our field: it marks the boundary between “early” and “late” Middle English and between a sparsely historicized period (for literary scholars, at least) and a richly historicized one. By tracing the interconnected worlds of poetic and political thought in this period, I join others who are working to rectify this imbalance, enriching our understanding of the era’s politics and literature alike. At the same time, I strive to highlight the thirteenth century’s own romanticizing gestures in an effort to show how the discourse of political constitutionalism traveled closely with expressions of political violence. The romance of constitutionalism—of Magna Carta, parliament, and a common political voice—finds its footings in this period. Its poetry and polemics in turn fueled reformist historiography for centuries to come, whether in the guise of antipapalism, ancient constitutionalism, literary antiquarianism, or New Historicism. The thirteenth century, in other words, underpins our theories of political agency and nationhood, even as—for reasons linguistic, aesthetic, and disciplinary—it has also stood marginal to our medieval literary canons. In its protean complexity, however, we see reflected the long story of medieval English studies itself.

⁷⁴ See Steiner, “Piers Plowman,” 2.

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1 The Grammar of Sacrifice Thomas Becket, Learning, and Libertas

The Becket conflict remains the paradigmatic jurisdictional drama of medieval English legal history. Its broad outlines are well known. In 1154, Thomas Becket, a native Londoner and son of Norman merchant immigrants, began his rapid professional ascent through the royal and ecclesiastical courts, first taking up the position of chancellor to the newly crowned Henry II, and then, in 1162, assuming the office of archbishop of Canterbury. If the king had hoped to find an ally in Canterbury, he found himself disappointed, however. Most famously, the former friends clashed over the fate of “criminous clerks”—offenders whose crimes, like murder or theft, fell within the auspices of royal justice but whose clerical status gave them immunity in secular courts. In 1164, humiliated by his capitulation to the Constitutions of Clarendon, Becket, along with the close members of his familia, took refuge across the Channel, beginning a protracted period of negotiation and argument that encompassed not just the English church and royal court but the pope, his curia, and King Louis VII of France. Becket’s return to England in 1170 proved brief. On December 29, four knights, acting on what they felt to be the king’s wishes, cut Becket down with swords in Canterbury Cathedral. His canonization followed swiftly, in 1173. The Becket story lends itself to grands récits, the grandest of which—a battle of “church” versus “state”—also proves the least helpful in illuminating its complexities. Rather, we can see the conflict as a skein of threads, intellectual, cultural, personal, and jurisprudential, which, woven together, tell a story about the ambitions of the twelfth century.¹ It is the story of the realization of a centuryold Gregorian reformist ideal: the enshrinement of Church liberty as the highest cause of ecclesiastical office. It is the story, too, of the growing explanatory power of legal instruments and processes, both secular and ecclesiastic. It was during Becket’s youth, possibly as he kept accounts for the London banker Osbert Huitdeniers in the mid-1140s, that the jurist known as Gratian completed work ¹ The periodization of the twelfth century and its cultural and intellectual milieu have generated vibrant scholarly debate since the publication of Charles Homer Haskins’s The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927). His thesis was revisited in Benson and Constable, eds., Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, and more recently in Noble and Van Engen, eds., European Transformations. See Noble “Introduction,” European Transformations 1–6, for an overview of the scholarly tradition. For a literary history of the period, see also Ashe, Conquest and Transformation. Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta. Jennifer Jahner, Oxford University Press (2019). © Jennifer Jahner. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847724.001.0001

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on his Concordia discordantium canonum, known more commonly as the Decretum. An attempt to harmonize a disparate and often conflicting body of local ecclesiastical customs into a coherent body of canon law, it drew inspiration from the Corpus iuris civilis, the rediscovery of which had sparked broad interest in Roman legal theory. In England, collections like the Quadripartitus, the Leges Henrici Primi, Leis Willelme, and the Leges Edwardi Confessoris translated, adapted, and at times invented legal codes from the past, constructing from their foundations the early scaffolding of a written common law tradition.² The source of Becket’s great shame, the Constitutions of Clarendon, plays a role in this story as well, foreshadowing developments in the assize and the writ of novel disseisin that would extend and sharpen the reach of royal jurisdiction over the course of Henry’s reign.³ But the Becket story is also a story of intellectual ambition, one set within the changing culture of the twelfth-century schools. As the work of Beryl Smalley, C. Stephen Jaeger, and Michael Staunton has illuminated, Becket counted among his advisers some of the most learned men in England.⁴ Most famous among this group of eruditi is John of Salisbury (d. 1180), whose major works— the Policraticus (1159), the Metalogicon (1159), and the Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum (c. 1155)—are all dedicated to Becket.⁵ John’s writings register the pedagogical shifts occurring in these decades before the formal establishment of the universities, when the centuries-old model of the cathedral school, with its emphasis on Ciceronian virtue ethics, encountered direct competition from a new crop of teachers promising mastery of more fashionable subjects, like law and dialectic, and more rapid advancement through the ecclesiastical and secular courts.⁶ According to John, this movement away from the trivium—that is, from grammar, rhetoric, and logic—portended the erosion of political ethics and ultimately law itself. It remains, in this way, a distinctive feature of the Becket conflict that many of the writers most vehement in their defense of ecclesiastical liberty were also those most vehement in their defense of the trivium as a training course in Ciceronian

² On Becket’s early years in London, see Barlow, Thomas Becket, 26–7. On Gratian’s Decretum, see Kuttner, Harmony from Dissonance; and Winroth, The Making of Gratian’s Decretum. For a discussion of these intersecting legal orders in the twelfth century, see Van Engen, “The twelfth century: Reading, reason, and revolt in a world of custom,” and O’Brien, “The Becket conflict and the invention of the myth of lex non scripta.” ³ For an overview, see Hudson, Land, Law, and Lordship, 258 and 268–71. ⁴ See Smalley, Becket Conflict; Jaeger, Envy of Angels; and Staunton, Thomas Becket and His Biographers. ⁵ On the life of John of Salisbury, see Nederman, John of Salisbury; Grellard and Lachaud, “Introduction,” in ibid., A Companion to John of Salisbury; J. P. Haseldine, “Introduction,” in John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 13–91; and, with particular focus on the twelfth-century schools, Giraud and Mews, “John of Salisbury and the schools of the 12th century.” On John’s relationship with Becket, complex and shifting over the course of their careers, see Duggan, “John of Salisbury and Thomas Becket;” Bollermann and Nederman, “John of Salisbury and Thomas Becket;” and Godman, Silent Masters, 173–90. ⁶ See Jaeger, Envy of Angels, and ibid., “John of Salisbury, a philosopher of the long eleventh century,” for discussion of the waning of cathedral school pedagogy in the twelfth century.

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ethics. My purpose in this chapter is to explore how these twin conservative impulses—to protect ancient liberties and preserve ancient learning—supported and shaped each other. I argue that literary training, and in particular the conventions of literary genre, played an important role in shaping Becket’s “juridical biography”: that is, in fashioning the contradictions of his life into a story of legal conscience and liberty. The two genres that serve as my focus in this chapter are satire and epic. As we will see, their idioms and concerns were important to advisers like John of Salisbury, as he differentiated freedom from coerced consent, and also aided Becket himself, as he differentiated royal favor from ecclesiastical obligation. Becket’s embrace of the ethics of “old learning,” grounded in idealized conceptions of a self-disciplined (and explicitly masculine) body, enabled his defense against Henry II’s “old law,” founded on the accretive principles of precedent and established custom.⁷ This chapter shows how a cultivated latinitas, honed by the curriculum of the grammar classroom, helped Becket to embody the jurisdictional autonomy of the Church. I suggest that it did so in part by teaching him to embody the rules of disciplined language. An example from William of Canterbury’s Miracula S. Thomae (1173–c. 1179) can help to illustrate how these threads intertwine.⁸ The first miracle story in this collection—one of the earliest and largest produced in the immediate aftermath of the murder—reports the experience of a cleric living in Orléans, a city renowned for its grammar instruction. One night in a dream, the cleric finds himself suddenly elevated to the role of magister.⁹ Arrayed before him are students, waiting for him to lecture on a staple epic of the medieval grammatical classroom, Lucan’s Pharsalia. The dreamer gamely proceeds with his task, explicating a passage from Book IX of the poem, in which Julius Caesar pursues the stoic hero Cato and his struggling Roman senatorial forces through the forbidding Libyan desert. As soon as the lecture concludes, however, another voice interrupts, this one belonging to the very teacher who had once taught him Lucan. “Return, master,” the speaker instructs, “and expound the two verses you passed over.”¹⁰ Suffused with shame, the cleric indeed finds a missed distich in his text: Sic vobis Scitici mors est ignota Catonis, In bellis didicit bella timere timor. [Thus is the Scythian Cato’s death unknown to you. In wars, fear learned to fear wars.]

⁷ “Old learning” is C. Stephen Jaeger’s formulation. See Envy of Angels and further subsequent discussion in this chapter. On gender as a means of constructing Becket’s legacy, see Thomas, “Shame, masculinity, and the death of Thomas Becket.” On tropes of masculinity and the construction of clerical identity more broadly, see Thibodeaux, The Manly Priest. ⁸ On the development of the Miracula S. Thomae and miracle collections associated with the Becket cult more generally, see Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate, esp. 145–58 and 221–4. ⁹ Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, I.139–41. Hereafter MTB. ¹⁰ MTB, I.140: “ ‘Revertere, magister, et duos quos praetermisisti versus expone.’ ”

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Jolted from his dream, the cleric commits the nonsensical verses to memory, thinking it a good story to share with friends. But his enigmatic dream takes on new significance with the news of Becket’s murder. Scythia, he realizes, was not an error but rather a prophetic allusion to England: a “new Scythia,” it now stands cold and remote in the aftermath of its archbishop’s death. Cato in turn signifies the precious martyr, who has died pro libertate just like his classical exemplar. This dream neatly demonstrates how training in Latin poetry—the bedrock of grammatical education in the twelfth century—also embedded training in the lessons of statecraft, self-discipline, and sacrifice. In this case, the “miracle” of this first story in William’s Miracula depends not upon the mediatory power of the saint, but rather upon the hermeneutic power of the grammar classroom, as it taught students to parse Latin poetry and, in the process, to translate the lessons of the pagan auctores to the problems of contemporary political life.¹¹ As a “second Cato,” Becket “carries over” the principle of libertas from Roman republicanism to Christian ecclesiology. Such lessons were not ancillary to but rather constitutive of the process of learning to read and write in Latin. The grammar classroom served as a crucial forum for thinking about the ethics and practice of governance, precisely because of its status as a beginning point for education—and hence for self-discipline more broadly. A young Latin pupil, for instance, learned the virtues of sacrificing for the patria from not just from the epics of Virgil and Lucan, but from the earliest instructional guide to the language, the Disticha Catonis, which included the trenchant imperative pugna pro patria alongside other moral commandments to love one’s parents, know the law, seek what is just, and temper anger.¹² This simple schoolroom axiom in turn played an outsized role among twelfth- and thirteenth-century canonists and legists, who regularly cited “Cato” (the Elder) when discussing just war, taxation, and other kinds of public sacrifice deemed necessary for the greater good.¹³ So, too, John of Salisbury, in his Metalogicon, would equate the study of Latin grammar with the habits of self-regulation critical to a well-governed polity.¹⁴ Despite—or, more accurately, because of—its associations with puerile learning, the grammar classroom proved central to changing concepts of the patria across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Ernst Kantorowicz argued that this period saw “the classical emotional values of ¹¹ On this kind of “political allegory,” see Smalley, Becket Conflict, 31–8. ¹² This text was attributed in the Middle Ages to Cato the Elder, occasionally confused with Cato the Younger, memorialized in Lucan’s Pharsalia. For an edition of the Disticha Catonis, see Chase, The Distichs of Cato. On the glossing and classroom use of the text as part the larger Liber Catonianus, see Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England, I.59–79. On its importance to later English literature, see Cannon, From Literacy to Literature, 60–84. ¹³ See Post, “Two notes on nationalism in the Middle Ages.” ¹⁴ On this point, see further subsequent discussion. References to the Metalogicon will be taken from John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, J. B. Hall, ed. and trans., and, for the Latin, ibid., Ioannis Saresberiensis Metalogicon, Hall and Keats-Rohan, eds.

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patria . . . [descend], so to speak, from heaven back to earth.”¹⁵ As the Orléans dream suggests, poetry provided an important avenue for this descent. The beginning point for Latin literacy, it embodied a set of values closely associated with the government of self and others. The appearance of Lucan’s civil war epic in the dream is likewise notable but not surprising. A recounting of the rebellion of the Roman Senate against Julius Caesar, the Pharsalia (65 ) provided medieval writers a rhetorically rich, if philosophically bleak, source for reflecting upon internecine conflict and the tensions of empire. Its popularity in medieval England accordingly reached its high point in the mid-twelfth century during Stephen of Blois’s reign (1135–54), as Angevin power threatened to collapse under its own internal divisions.¹⁶ In 1170, we can see that it helped to fashion a certain kind of juridical biography for Becket, one predicated on the postures of self-sacrifice and moral rigor. Cato’s death in service to the patria offered a ready analogue to Becket’s martyrdom on behalf of the jurisdictional integrity of the Church. The language and conventions of epic proved eminently well suited to the kind of disciplined, uncompromising stance Becket adopted in the latter years of the conflict, and I return to Lucan, and the Orléans dream episode, in the later portions of this chapter. Before Becket was a warrior for the libertas ecclesiae, however, he was chancellor to the king and a canny navigator of the courtier’s life. This sort of life—irreducibly a life of compromise and careful concealment— belonged not to the realms of epic, but rather satire, and it was to this genre that Becket’s supporters turned when they were obliged to talk about his life before his consecration as archbishop, when the future saint “hawked and hunted” at the side of the king. As the next sections discuss, the Roman satirist Horace (65  to 8 ) proved especially helpful in articulating what seemed an essential contradiction within the Becket biography—namely, the saint’s early intimacy with secular power. Like Becket, Horace was understood by medieval readers to be a “self-made man,” and his Odes, Satires, and Ars poetica spoke to the complexities of social mobility in ways that would prove useful to Becket’s advisers and hagiographers. The next sections of the chapter show how classical satire, and Horatian satire particularly, helped to frame Becket’s rise to power and theorize the possibilities for liberty of speech and conscience within the compromises of court life. As we will see, these questions of court ethics ultimately become questions of jurisdictional principle, especially following Becket’s consecration as archbishop. Even early in Becket’s career as chancellor, however, John of ¹⁵ Kantorowicz, “Pro patria mori in medieval political thought,” 477. This thesis receives extended treatment in The King’s Two Bodies, 232–72. ¹⁶ On the reception of Lucan in the Middle Ages, see Hiatt, “Lucan,” with a focus on the twelfth century on 212. On the Pharsalia as an intertext within medieval considerations of civil war, see Clarke, “Crossing the Rubicon;” ibid., “Signs and wonders;” ibid., “Writing civil war in Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum;” and Klement, Wars Among Friends.

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Salisbury tendered the jurisdictional protection of the Church as the crucial measure of ethical behavior, even in political environments that prevented one from acting publicly in its defense.

Non attavis editus regibus: Becket and the Genealogies of Learning Educational stories are always to some extent origin stories, and Becket’s is no exception. Born c. 1120 to Gilbert and Matilda Beket, he spent his youth in a busy and burgeoning London.¹⁷ His parents emigrated from Normandy and settled in Cheapside, where they lived as a well-off merchant family among others of “mayoral and aldermanic rank.”¹⁸ A native French speaker, Becket thus grew up as part of London’s “urban aristocracy” with an education that reflects the aspirations of this upwardly mobile segment of the London populace.¹⁹ Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence’s verse life, the Vie de Saint Thomas de Canterbury (c. 1174), summarizes his early education in compact terms: A escole fu mis asez de juefne eé, E aprés a gramaire, quant saltier ot finé, E enaprés as arz, quant alkes ot chanté. Durement aperneit e mult se aveit pené, Mes n’aveit pas lung tens les escoles hanté. (201–5) [Thomas was sent to school at a very young age, and when he had finished learning his psalter, he went on to Latin grammar and then, when he had finished song school, he studied the seven liberal arts. He was a conscientious pupil and worked extremely hard, but he did not stay for very long at the various schools.]²⁰

Information provided by other hagiographers fills out some of these details. He received his earliest education in letters from Matilda before boarding for a period of time at Merton Priory and then attending one of London’s grammar schools.²¹ Becket appears to have spent some period of time in Paris, but either family

¹⁷ The standard biography of Becket is Barlow, Thomas Becket. For further discussion of Becket’s learning, see Smalley, Becket Conflict, 109–37; and for re-evaluation of the vexed subject of Becket’s latinity— derided by his critics, excused by his supporters—see Duggan, ed. and trans., Correspondence, I.xxv. ¹⁸ Barlow, Thomas Becket, 13. ¹⁹ Ibid., 15–16. ²⁰ Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, La Vie de Saint Thomas de Canterbury, Thomas, ed. and trans., I.44. English translation here and following by Short, A Life of Thomas Becket in Verse, 28. Further references will simply include line numbers after the text. ²¹ The three best-known minster schools—St. Paul’s, St. Mary-le-Grand, and St. Mary-le-Bow—all stood within a half-mile of Becket’s parental home. See Barlow, Thomas Becket, 19. William FitzStephen, in his Life of Becket, depicts a scene at Merton Priory. See MTB, III.14.

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misfortune or personal predilection cut those studies short. Edward Grim describes a series of fires and unlucky events depleting the family fortunes, while Herbert of Bosham describes Becket “fleeing” the discipline of school and, with a phrase borrowed from Horace, “rejoic[ing] in horses and hounds and the grass of the sunny field” (Ars poetica 162).²² It was in part to compensate for Becket’s truncated studies that his biographers emphasized his excellent manners: John of Salisbury praises the young Becket as “tall, handsome, keen of wit, easy and pleasant in speech, and beloved for the elegance of his manners at a young age.”²³ William FitzStephen notes that even if Becket was “less lettered” [minus litteratus] than his fellow clerics in the court of Archbishop Theobald, he endeavored to strive towards morality and wisdom. Excelling in mores, he eventually also became literatissimus.²⁴ Becket’s own sizeable library suggests a fashionable and wide-ranging interest in contemporary Latin genres, including legal compendia, commentary volumes, and homiletic texts.²⁵ But when Herbert of Bosham describes Becket composing verse, he has to call upon divine intervention by way of explanation. In his Life, Herbert narrates how the archbishop, while resting during the period of his exile, heard a prophecy spoken to him in hexameter verse. Herbert proves the verse to be divinely sent on the basis of Becket’s own inability to versify: “even fully awake he would not have composed it, in as much as he had not even touched upon the art of versifying in school, or if so only briefly.”²⁶ What would it mean for Becket not to have known the ars versificandi, the art of versifying that would have stood as the upper end of achievement in a grammatical course of study? As Anne Duggan has stressed, it would not preclude the ability to read, write, or speak in Latin. Rather, this detail suggests that he lacked the kind of lettered rhetorical fluency honed in cathedral schools through close exposition and emulation of the pagan poets. Many in Becket’s close circle were products of this kind of “traditional” grammatical education, a process that in turn shaped how they understood the ethics of office holding as they took administrative roles within the ranks of the secular clergy.²⁷ Since the tenth century, as Jaeger has demonstrated, ²² See Edward Grim, MTB, II.359, and for Herbert of Bosham, MTB, III.165: “Gaudet equis canibusque et aprici gramine campi.” ²³ MTB, II.302: “statura procerus, decorus forma, ingenio perspicax, dulcis et jocundus eloquio, et venustate morum pro aetate amabilis.” On the ways that Becket’s biographers emphasize manners and mores, see Jaeger, Envy of Angels, 297–310. ²⁴ See MTB, III.16. ²⁵ For an overview of Becket’s book collection, see Duggan, ed. and trans., Correspondence, xxv–xxvi; James, The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover, 82–5; and de Hamel, The Glossed Books of the Bible, 38–52. On book collecting by the secular clergy generally, see Thomas, The Secular Clergy in England, 246–65. ²⁶ MTB, III.461: “nec arbitretur quis versum hunc quasi a dormitante aliquo casu compositum, quem etiam vigilanter vigilans non componeret, utpote qui versificandi nec etiam sub scholari disciplina artem attigisset, vel in modico.” For discussion, see Barlow, Thomas Becket, 22. ²⁷ On the secular clergy and Becket’s place within it, see Thomas, The Secular Clergy in England. He provides a working definition of the “secular cleric” at 10–16. See also Clanchy, “Moderni in

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these schools had undertaken the fundamentally Ciceronian project of integrating moral philosophy and rhetoric. The Roman rhetors provided a model for “the formation of men who would work well at court and in the episcopate and serve the utilitas ecclesiae et rei publicae,” and it was to this kind of institutional work that cathedral schools directed their instruction in poetry and rhetoric.²⁸ By the midtwelfth century, such a program—with its emphasis on eloquence and the cultivation of mores—faced an array of challenges, both from charismatic iconoclasts like Abelard and from the flourishing administrative cultures of the secular and ecclesiastical courts.²⁹ Becket becomes a flashpoint for these tensions, not only because his advisers and hagiographers—most notably John of Salisbury—positioned themselves as standard-bearers of the “old humanism” in its waning decades, but because Becket himself embodied so starkly the competing imperatives of courtly advancement and spiritual discipline. As Hugh Thomas argues, Becket “most clearly exhibited the potentially explosive nature of the tensions between service at the court and clerical ideals.”³⁰ These tensions emerge with particular clarity in a letter from the period of Becket’s estrangement from the king, when he and his court had fled England for the monasteries of northern France and Flanders. In June 1166, while he resided in exile at the Abbey of Pontigny, Becket received an angry letter from Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London (c. 1106–87), chiding him for threatening to excommunicate the king and place him under interdict. Foliot doubts the rumors that Becket has converted to the Cistercian life and, in a well-placed jab, manages to impugn his poverty and wealth at the same time, reminding him “how kind our lord the king was to you” and “to what renown he raised you up from poverty and received you into his intimate favour.”³¹ Becket’s response of a month later, in the letter Mirandum et uehementer stupendum, answers the terms of veiled satire with the terms of veiled epic, depicting himself as bearing the whole struggle for the government and education in England;” ibid., From Memory to Written Record; Lachaud, “La figure du clerc curial dans l’oeuvre de Jean de Salisbury;” Smalley, Becket Conflict; Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe; and Turner, Men Raised from the Dust. ²⁸ See Jaeger, Envy of Angels, 48, and, more broadly, 44–7, on the rise of the “courtier bishop.” See also ibid., 118–79, for discussion of philosophical study appended to the cultivation of virtue. ²⁹ This tension emerges most clearly in John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon and Entheticus, treated at greater length subsequently in this chapter. For further discussion, see Jaeger, Envy of Angels, esp. 278–91; ibid., “John of Salisbury, a philosopher of the long eleventh century;” Clanchy, “Moderni in government and education in England;” Keats-Rohan, “John of Salisbury and education in twelfth-century Paris;” Ward, “The date of the commentary on Cicero’s De inventione;” and Wei, Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris, 8–51. ³⁰ See Thomas, The Secular Clergy in England, 152. ³¹ Letter 93, issued c. June 24, 1166, addressed on behalf of the English clergy but drafted by Gilbert Foliot, appeals excommunications pronounced by Becket at Vézelay upon John of Oxford, Richard of Ilchester, Richard de Lucy, and Jocelin of Balliol. See Duggan, ed. and trans., Correspondence, I.372–83: “Insedit alte cunctorum mentibus, quam benignus uobis dominus rex noster extiterit, in quam uos gloriam ab exili prouexerit, et in familiarem gratiam tam lata uos mente susceperit” (376–7). The text can also be found in MTB, Letter CCV, V.408–13.

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freedom of the Church solely upon his shoulders.³² He calls upon his bishops to join him in following Christ’s sacrificial model and addresses, too, Foliot’s insinuations regarding his London origins: Dicitis me de exili sublimatum ab ipso in gloriam. Non sum reuera ‘attauis editus regibus’; malo tamen is esse in quo faciat sibi genus animi nobilitas, quam in quo nobilitas generis degeneret. Forte natus sum de paupere tugurio, sed cooperante diuina clemencia, que nouit facere misericordiam cum seruis suis, que eligit humiles ut confundat fortia, in exilitate mea antequam accederem ad eius obsequium, satis copiose, satis habundanter, satis honorifice, sicut ipsi nouistis, prout habundantius inter uicinos meos et notos, cuiuscumque conditionis fuerint, conuersatus sum. Et Dauid, de post fetantes assumptus, constitutus est ut regeret populum Dei, cui aucta est fortitudo et gloria quoniam ambulauit in uiis Domini, Petrus uero, de arte piscatoria electus, factus est ecclesie princeps; qui sanguine suo meruit pro nomine Christi in celis habere coronam, et in terris nomen et gloriam. Vtinam et nos similiter faciamus. [You say that he raised me up from poverty to honour. Indeed, I am not “sprung from an ancient line of kings;” nevertheless, I prefer to be one in whom nobility of mind creates its own lineage rather than one in whom nobility of lineage degenerates. Perhaps I was born in a humble cottage, but through the aid of divine mercy, which knows how to be merciful to its servants and chooses the humble to confound the strong, I lived in my poverty, as you yourselves know, before I entered into his service, just as wealthy, comfortable and honourable, and as richly endowed as any of my neighbours and acquaintances of whatever rank. Raised from the care of goats, David was appointed to rule the people of God and granted strength and renown, because he walked in the ways of the Lord. But Peter, who was chosen from the fisherman’s trade, was made prince of the Church; by shedding his blood for Christ he earned a crown in heaven and a name and glory on earth. If only we might do similarly.]³³

As with most all of the letters issued in Becket’s name, Letter 95 was composed not by the archbishop singly, but in collaboration with members of his household.³⁴ In

³² On the displaced violence of epistolary exchanges and legal disputes in the Becket conflict and their affiliations with epic conventions, see Peters, “An ecclesiastical epic: Garnier de Pont-SteMaxence’s ‘Vie de Saint Thomas le Martyr.’ ” ³³ See Duggan, ed. and trans., Correspondence, Letter 95, 389–425, here at 403–5, with a slightly modified translation. MTB, Letter CCXIII, V.490–512. ³⁴ On the authorship of the Becket letters, see Duggan, ed. and trans., Correspondence, xxiii–xxvii. Herbert of Bosham’s letter collection preserves three alternate versions of this letter, though the final version (no. 17) is not attributed to him specifically. Duggan considers this series of letters to the bishops and Foliot to be “almost certainly collective compositions, in the sense that the whole group of exiles participated in drafting what were recognized to be significant quasi-public statements of position.” See Duggan, “Classical quotations,” 14.

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this case, the author or authors neatly undercut Foliot’s condescension with a poetic allusion to the first line of the first lyric in Horace’s Odes.³⁵ Like Horace, Becket may not be “sprung from an ancient line of kings,” but he cultivates nobility of character in its place. A virtue at once pagan and Christian, this nobilitas allows Becket to claim kinship with David and Peter, who also rose from humble origins to lead the faithful.³⁶ The Anonymous I biographer would place the same quip in Becket’s mouth when he narrates the argument between the archbishop and the king preceding their famous confrontation over the Constitutions of Clarendon. Henry, frustrated at Becket’s seeming ingratitude, is reported to demand, “ ‘Were you not the son of some peasant of mine?’ ” Becket replies, as in Letter 95, that he indeed was not “ ‘sprung from an ancient line of kings,’ ” but neither was the “ ‘blessed prince of apostles, Peter, upon whom the Lord deigned to confer the keys of the kingdom of heaven and primacy of the entire Church.’ ”³⁷ In both of these instances, the recourse to Horace serves a double purpose, reclaiming moral virtue and religious integrity as the guarantors of political authority while also signaling a familiarity with the classical corpus that betokened formal education and its attainments. As Letter 95 indicates, the Becket drama played itself out in epistolary prose, legal argument, and diplomatic ritual rather than in verse. At the same time, poetry threaded its way through the controversy at every stage. Duggan, for instance, has counted more than eighty references to the classical auctores across the 329 letters that comprise the Becket correspondence.³⁸ Rarely are the quotations lengthy; more often, they constitute an apt turn of phrase that “any student passing through the basic Latin curriculum of the schools could have committed to memory.”³⁹ The classical allusions deployed by the Becket circle signal a shared foundation in the pagan authors, a foundation perceived to be quickly eroding in the mid-twelfth century as the traditional grammar curriculum ceded ground to new fashions.⁴⁰ The auctores thus bore a double valence in formal letters like these, embodying a learning perceived as both puerile and elevated: puerile, in the sense ³⁵ See Horace, Odes: “Maecenas atauis edite regibus / o et praesidium et dulce decus meum” (I.1.1–2). ³⁶ On the value of nobilitas in Roman and medieval cultural life with specific reference to this letter, see Duggan, “Introduction,” in ibid., ed., Nobles and Nobility in Medieval Europe. ³⁷ MTB, IV.28: “ ‘nonne tu filius fuisti cujusdam rustici mei?’ Et archiepiscopus, ‘Revera,’ inquit, ‘non sum’ “atavis editus regibus,” sicut nec beatus apostolorum princeps Petrus, cui Dominus claves regni caelorum et totius ecclesiae principatum conferre dignatus est.’ ” ³⁸ Duggan has provided a complete index of classical allusions appearing in the Becket letters as part of her edition and excavated their sources—largely from florilegia—in “Classical quotations.” In the case of the Becket correspondence, approximately sixty percent of the references to pagan authors can be traced to Heiric of Auxerre’s Collectanea (four citations) and the Florilegium Gallicum (forty-three citations). Both of these florilegia have affiliations with the Loire Valley of northern France, the Florilegium Gallicum perhaps originating in Orléans. On the Florilegium Gallicum, see Rouse, “Florilegia and the Latin classical authors in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Orléans” and ibid. and M. A. Rouse, “The Florilegium Angelicum.” See also Olsen, “Les classiques latins dans les florilèges médiévaux anterieurs au XIIIe siècle.” ⁴⁰ See n. 28, this chapter. ³⁹ Duggan, “Classical quotations,” 5.

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        

that pagan literature marked the entry point into Latin education, and elevated in the sense that this literature delimited a boundary between “traditional” and “professional” schooling and clerical and lay literacy. The difference between these registers of expression becomes visible in Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence’s Vie de Saint Thomas de Canterbury, which provides versified versions of the letters exchanged between Gilbert Foliot and Thomas Becket in 1166. The French rendering of the aforementioned passage places the same emphasis on nobility over parentage, here expressed as the difference between raison (3416) and parage (3415) or lignage (3410). Gone is the Horatian tag, but in its place, Becket offers a defense a guise d’enfant: “Les buntez que li reis m’a fait me mez devant: En halt m’a mis de poi e granment mis avant. A ço te respundrai cum a guise d’enfant: Jo n’iere pas si povre cum tu vas ci disant Quant li reis nostre sire me fist sun haut servant. ... E se tu vols parler de mun povre lignage Des citehains de Lundres fui nez en cel estage. En lur visnez senz plainte mestrent tut lur ëage, Ainc ne quistrent l’autrui, ne ne firent damage. Ne furent, cum tu diz, d’einsi tresbas parage.” (3401–15) [“You remind me of all the acts of kindness that the king has done for me, and that, from almost nothing, he has brought me to a high position of prominence. My answer to this is a simple, childish one: I was not as poor as you maintain when our lord king made me his high administrator. . . . And if you want to talk about my humble family origins, I was indeed born into a modest family of citizens of London who spent the whole of their lives in the same neighborhood without ever being the object of complaint, never coveting what belonged to other people, and doing no harm to anyone. They were not of such low birth as you say they were.”]

Guernes goes on to summarize the key moral lesson of this portion of the letter in the form of an aphorism: “it is better to come from humble origins, to be a moral person and to rise in the world, than to be of noble family and go to Hell” [Mielz vient de basse gent e bon ester e munter / Que de halte gente estre e en enfer aler] (3417–18). Stripped of its classical and biblical allusions, the letter takes on a more homiletic tone, one focused on horizontal relationships among neighbors and kin. To speak “childishly” in this context is not to recall one’s classroom Horace but rather the London neighborhood of one’s birth. Leena Löfstedt cautions, moreover, against assuming that Guernes’s versified letters represent vernacular translations from the Latin epistolary sources. Given their broad divergence in language

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and emphasis, she suggests instead the possibility that Guernes had access to alternate French versions of the 1166 letters, perhaps prepared within Becket’s French-speaking household in tandem with the polished Latin prose meant for official circulation.⁴¹ When the Mirandum letter claimed for Becket a nobilitas derived from intellect [animus] rather than birth, it thus tendered a distinction commonplace to Latin as well as vernacular moral writings.⁴² In Book VIII of the Policraticus, for instance, John of Salisbury commends precisely this elevation of moral virtue [honestas] over noble blood [clarus sanguis] and satirically deploys the same Horatian snippet in doing so.⁴³ In a legal conflict that centered, in part, on whether the customs of royal grandfathers could take precedence over the ancient liberties of the Church, such questions of lineage and origins mattered deeply. Within this conflict, Becket could claim multiple intersecting lines of filiation: parents, king, God, and his saintly and archiepiscopal predecessors. But nobilitas animi also presumed another line of descent, one that originated in the classroom, where the strictures of art first shaped tongue and mind. For its defenders, like John of Salisbury, training in the trivium also came to embody the principle of political order itself, which originated in the “path” of the letter and traveled outward to encompass those privileged few whose learning and self-discipline fit them for court life. As we will see in the next section, satire proved a useful genre for parsing these uncertainties of status and learning, but also for theorizing more broadly the compromises of political life.

Satire and the Precincts of Learning From the Roman schools, medieval classrooms inherited a twofold conception of grammar: “the knowledge of speaking correctly” [scientia recte loquendi] and “the interpretation of the poets” [enarratio poetarum].⁴⁴ When the dreamer from this chapter’s opening anecdote found himself lecturing on Lucan, he epitomized this second major task of the grammar master: to explain and clarify grammatical ⁴¹ See Löfstedt, “Becket’s letters from exile and their French text.” ⁴² For examples, see Lachaud, “L’idée de noblesse,” 9–11. ⁴³ John of Salisbury, Ioannis Saresberiensis Episcopi Carnotensis Policratici, Webb, ed., VIII.15.773a–d, 335–6. Hereafter referred to as Policraticus. See also Lachaud, “L’idée de noblesse,” 9. ⁴⁴ See Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, Butler, trans., I.4.2: “Haec igitur professio, cum brevissime in duas partes dividatur, recte loquendi scientiam et poetarum enarrationem.” Book I of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies devotes itself to grammar, which he calls the “origin and foundation of liberal letters” (I.5.2). On ideas of grammar as an origin of speech and culture, see Reynolds, Medieval Reading, 45–60; for a survey of major texts and traditions, see Copeland and Sluiter, “General introduction,” in Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric; and Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages. On enarratio poetarum as an instrument of medieval rhetorical training and interpretation, see Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation. On the influence of basic grammar pedagogy on the development of Middle English poetry, see Cannon, From Literacy to Literature.

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        

obscurities, figures and tropes, and factual information concerning geography, climate, and historical places and personages. Such basic parsing of a poem’s surface features comprised a key focus of cathedral school training: a focus on grammatica, and in particular on the classical auctores.⁴⁵ In his Metalogicon, John of Salisbury gives a well-known description of how Bernard of Chartres approached this method of instruction: Figuras grammaticae, colores rethoricos, cauillationes sophismatum, et qua parte sui propositae lectionis articulus respiciebat ad alias disciplinas, proponebat in medio. Ita tamen ut non in singulis uniuersa doceret, sed pro capacitate audientium dispensaret eis in tempore doctrinae mensuram. [He would set before his class the figures of grammar, the colours of rhetoric and the cavils of sophistry, showing in what respect a point in the text under discussion had reference to other disciplines, but without imparting all he knew in every lesson, dispensing rather a measure of his learning on each occasion as best suited the capacity of his audience.]⁴⁶

The evening declinatio, John continues, was “packed with such a wealth of grammar that if anyone spent a whole year attending those lectures, he would, unless he was on the dull side, have at his fingertips the principles of speech and writing, and possess a comprehensive knowledge of the signification of words in general use.”⁴⁷ The final part of the evening collatio set forth moral and ethical lessons. Compositional instruction happened by means of imitation. Boys were instructed to “follow closely in the steps” [uestigia imitari] of the auctores, while also not stitching on “a patch from somebody else’s work to add lustre to his own.”⁴⁸ Beginning students would learn techniques of abbreviation and amplification, “the right place for a spare, almost emaciated, form of expression, the moment when a copious style was commendable or excessive, and the point where all should be in moderation.”⁴⁹ In praeexercitamina, “boys were accustomed daily to compose prose and verse and to exercise one another by means of mutual comparison.”⁵⁰ Based on the memorization ⁴⁵ On the surface of the text and the politics of “elementary” education, see Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent, esp. 72–98. ⁴⁶ John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, Hall, trans., I.24, 175; ibid., Ioannis Saresberiensis Metalogicon, Hall and Keats-Rohan, eds., 52. ⁴⁷ Ibid., 176; ibid., 53: “Vespertinum exercitium quod declinatio dicebatur, tanta copiositate grammaticae refertum erat, ut siquis in eo per annum integrum uersaretur, rationem loquendi et scribendi si non esset hebetior, haberet ad manum, et significationem sermonum qui in communi usu uersantur ignorare non posset.” ⁴⁸ Ibid., 176; ibid., 53: “Siquis autem ad splendorem sui operis alienum pannum assuerat, deprehensum redarguebat furtum.” ⁴⁹ Ibid., 176; ibid., 53: “ubi tenuitas et quasi macies sermonis, ubi copia probabilis, ubi excedens, ubi omnium modus.” ⁵⁰ Ibid., 177; ibid., 54: “Et quia in toto praeexercitamine erudiendorum nihil utilius est quam ei quod fieri ex arte oportet assuescere, prosas et poemata cotidie scriptitabant, et se mutuis exercebant collationibus.” On praeexercitamina in the medieval classroom, see Chapter 2 of this book, as well as

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and imitation of classical models, compositional exercises transformed art into habit, with the end result, John explains, of eloquence: the “ability to say aptly what the mind wants to express.”⁵¹ As Rita Copeland has argued, the pedagogy of medieval enarratio melded prescriptive instruction in grammar with applied instruction in rhetoric. It fell within the purview of the grammarian not just to parse the text, but to identify its specific rhetorical devices and, more subtly, to remake the enarratio into a species of argumentation itself.⁵² John’s description of Bernard of Chartres’s lectures highlights both of these aspects, as he shows the master setting forth “the colours of rhetoric and the cavils of sophistry” and, at the same time, shaping his lectures to the variable needs of his audience. The ideal grammar classroom, according to John, is thus characterized by fidelity to text, process, and application— by a merger, that is, of grammar’s prescriptive rigor and rhetoric’s imitative adaptation. In the Metalogicon, this pedagogy stands in stark contrast to that of John’s rivals and foes, the so-called Cornificians, who purportedly favor the advantages of natural ability over the discipline of practice and as a result disdain the exposition of the “poets and historians” as wasted labor.⁵³ John of Salisbury, as John O. Ward has shown, did not originate such attacks so much as expand upon lines of critique already present in his own teachers.⁵⁴ In the prologue to his commentary on Cicero’s De inventione, Thierry of Chartres—who taught John rhetoric—segregates those who desire true wisdom from those who seek merely its appearance: Ut ait Petronius: nos magistri in scholis soli relinquemur nisi multos palpemus et insidias auribus fecerimus. Ego vero non ita. Nam medius fidius paucorum gratia multis mea prostitui. Sic tamen consilium meum contraxi, ut vulgus profanum et farraginem scholae petulcam excluderem. Nam simulatores ingenii exsecrando studium et professores domestici studii dissimulando magistrum, tum etiam scholasticae disputationis histriones inanium verborum pugnis armati, tales quidem mea castra sequuntur, sed extra palatium, quos sola nominis detulit aura mei, ut in partibus suis studio pellaciae Theodoricum mentiantur. [As Petronius said, “we masters will be left behind in the schools unless we flatter the masses and lay traps for the ears” {Satyricon 3}. But that is not my way. To be Krauss, “Progymnasmata and progymnasmatic exercises in the medieval classroom;” Woods, “The teaching of poetic composition in the later Middle Ages;” and ibid., “Weeping for Dido.” On John’s own grammar education under William of Conches, see Fredborg, “The grammar and rhetoric offered to John of Salisbury.” ⁵¹ John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, Hall, trans., I.7, 139, adjusted slightly. Ibid., Hall and Keats-Rohan, eds., 24: “Est enim eloquentia facultas dicendi commode quod sibi uult animus expediri.” ⁵² See Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, 63–5. ⁵³ See especially Metalogicon, I.1–4 for description. ⁵⁴ See Ward, “The date of the commentary on Cicero’s De inventione.”

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         sure, by God, I have prostituted my wares for the sake of the few. But I have also made good my intention to exclude the profane mob {Horace Odes 3.1.1} and the wanton hodgepodge of the schools. Those who imitate intelligence but abhor study, and those who profess private study but know no teacher, and even the play actors of scholastic disputation armed for the battles of empty words, such have been followers of my camp; but let those who are detained by nothing but the aura of my name, so that they might fabricate the petty fiction that Thierry is on their side, remain outside the palace.]⁵⁵

For Thierry, Ciceronian rhetoric constituted a threshold, one whose boundaries the satirists helped to guard.⁵⁶ Its precincts belonged not to the masses but to those who could be shaped by instruction and study. Such a transformation, of course, lay at the putative origins of rhetoric itself. According to Cicero’s famous account in De inventione, it was the eloquence of a “great man” that first drew brute humanity towards law and reason.⁵⁷ John of Salisbury draws, too, upon this origin story in the Metalogicon, adducing from the “marriage” of reason and speech all forms of organized political association: cities, kingdoms, and finally Christendom itself.⁵⁸ In the absence of eloquence, other forms of reciprocal association also collapse. “Take away shared utterance,” John inveighs, “and what contract will be properly concluded? What authoritative control will there be in matters of belief or morals? How will men’s wishes be complied with or made known?”⁵⁹ For John as for Thierry, satire helped to articulate, often in negative relief, the values of political discipline. For this reason, Ward has called the preface to De inventione the “ ‘magna carta’ of the humanists,” its origin story reflective of the aspirations of twelfth-century schoolmen as they sought influence in legal, scholastic, and administrative realms.⁶⁰ In Thierry’s preface to his De inventione commentary, satire serves as a mechanism for moral differentiation—sorting continent, self-disciplined bodies from their appetitive counterparts. Like epic, it privileges the self-regulated masculine will, but unlike epic, satire does not celebrate patriotic sacrifice as the highest

⁵⁵ The translation of the prologue is from Copeland and Sluiter, eds., Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, 411. For the Latin commentary in full, see Fredborg, ed., The Latin Rhetorical Commentaries of Thierry of Chartres, 49. ⁵⁶ For discussion of satire in this prologue, see also Godman, Silent Masters, 231–6. ⁵⁷ See De inventione, I.1.1–2.2. On Thierry’s use of Cicero’s origin story, see Copeland, “Thierry of Chartres and the causes of rhetoric,” at 89–95. ⁵⁸ On John of Salisbury’s use of Cicero, see Nederman, John of Salisbury, 53–61; and HermandSchebat, “John of Salisbury and classical antiquity,” at 195–202. On the ways that this political theory develops out of his immersion in Aristotle, see Wilks, “John of Salisbury and the tyranny of nonsense,” esp. 272–82. ⁵⁹ John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, Hall, trans., I.1, 126: “Quis enim contractus rite celebrabitur, quae fidei aut morum disciplina uigebit, quaenam erit obsecundatio aut communicatio uoluntatum, subtracto uerbi commercio?” (14). ⁶⁰ Ward, Ciceronian Rhetoric in Treatise, Scholion, and Commentary, 276.

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expression of that will. It dwells, rather, upon the complexities of social accommodation and aspiration. No writer more influentially captured these complexities than Horace, whose Ars poetica, Satires, and Epistles belonged to the core canon of the medieval grammatical classroom and whose own self-portrayal emphasized educational upward mobility. The first words of his accessus, the standard academic prologue to his corpus, identify him as non-noble, the “son of a freedman,” whose father sent him to Rome for an education on a minimal allowance. There, inborn talent [ingenium] allowed him to overcome his familial circumstances and rise to the rank of tribune, cultivating powerful friendships and patrons along the way.⁶¹ Horace was thought by medieval commentators to relate this story himself in his Sermones, or Satires, a work familiar to any medieval student hoping to convey literacy into a path to preferment.⁶² As a genre, satire is often arrayed in opposition to the more “integumental” designs of twelfth-century Chartrian allegory. Rather than clothing hidden truths with allegorical fictions, satire stands, in Suzanne Reynolds’s words, “naked, nude . . . unclothed. In hermeneutic terms, it is transparent.”⁶³ The Sermones, however, did not always announce its genre “nakedly” to the reader. According to the author of one accessus, the discursive style that Horace adopts in this work supposedly differed from satire precisely because it introduced an element of concealment: [E]t dicitur sermo quod { inter eum et ad minus inter duos seritur et ad presentem personam fit. unde et predicatio episcoporum recte dicitur sermo. et nota, quamuis reprehendat hic, quod conuenit satire, tamen non uocatur satira, cum satire sit sub certo nomine reprehendere, quod hic non fit. [The discourse (sermo) is so called because it is distributed between the writer and { at least between two persons, and is tailored to suit the character speaking. For this reason, too, the preaching of bishops is rightly called “a sermon” (sermo). Note this, that although he is criticizing here, which is one of the characteristics of satire, yet is not called satire, for it is a property of satire to reprehend someone by name, which does not happen here.]⁶⁴

What distinguishes Horace as a satirist, then, is not just his reproof of vices but his tactical calibration of critique to audience and circumstance—the marker of a poet ⁶¹ See Huygens, ed., Accessus ad auctores, 43: “Horatius Flaccus libertino patre natus in Apulia cum patre in Sabinos commeauit. quem cum pater Roman misisset in ludum literarum parcissimis impensis angustias patris uicit ingenio.” ⁶² On centrality of the Sermones to the medieval grammatical curriculum, see Reynolds, Medieval Reading. See Satires I.4 for Horace’s own account of his early education. ⁶³ Reynolds, Medieval Reading, 144–5. On satire’s literal sense, see also Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent, 79–80. ⁶⁴ Huygens, ed., Accessus ad auctores, 45. For discussion and translation, see Minnis, et al., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, 34, translation adjusted slightly.

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        

sensitive to social hierarchies and his own “self-made” status within them. The accessus suggests that medieval readers recognized the feigned casualness of the Sermones as its own form of concealment, with the dynamics of verbal exchange offering a cover to the writer disinclined to “name names.” In the next section, we see how satire’s deflective nature licensed John of Salisbury’s first effort at poetic instruction, the Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum, a 1,852-line poem composed for Thomas Becket as he assumed his duties as royal chancellor. The notion of learning as a course provides the Entheticus with its overarching metaphor: John sends his poem on a treacherous journey to court and back, in the process offering a tutorial in grammar, philosophy, and the arts of courtly prevarication. As John well knew, grammar itself was understood as a path: Priscian etymologized “letter” [litera] as deriving from the term “legitera,” “because it provides a path [iter] for reading [legendi].”⁶⁵ In the Entheticus, the path of the letter sets the course for the acquisition of right learning, just as the poem sets the course for the adoption of right behavior in the court of Henry II. In this case, however, the traveler’s freedom remains fundamentally constrained by the failure of law to protect his path through courtly service.

Ordo and Office in the Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum A heterogeneous mix of satire, philosophy, and instruction, the Entheticus has earned a reputation as a difficult poem.⁶⁶ Written in elegiacs, it likely took shape in stages, begun perhaps as early as John’s school years in Paris (c. 1140s) and reaching polished form no sooner than 1154, after Becket had assumed his duties as chancellor in the court of Henry II.⁶⁷ Large-scale additions and corrections made to its earliest manuscript witness, London, British Library, Royal MS 13 ⁶⁵ Priscian, Institutiones grammaticae, II.2.4, 6. Copeland and Sluiter, eds. and trans., Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, 171, with discussion at 18–19. Isidore of Seville would borrow from Priscian for his etymology. See Etymologies, I.3.39. For its use again in the Metalogicon, see I.13. ⁶⁶ Together with the so-called Entheticus minor, which prefaces the Policraticus, the Entheticus maior is John of Salisbury’s only surviving work of verse. It is copied in four manuscripts, the earliest of which—London, British Library, Royal MS 13 D IV—is contemporary with John and commissioned by his acquaintance Simon, Abbot of St. Albans from 1167–83. Multiple editions of the poem are available: Peterson, Iohannis Saresberiensis Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum; Elrington, John of Salisbury’s Entheticus de Dogmate Philosphorum: The Light It Throws on the Educational Background of the Twelfth Century; Sheerin, John’s Salisbury’s Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum: Critical Text and Introduction; Pepin, “The Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum: A critical text;” and Jan van Laarhoven, ed. and trans, Entheticus Maior et Minor. Descriptions of the manuscripts are provided most recently by van Laarhoven. See also Thomson, “What is the Entheticus?” ⁶⁷ On dating, see Pepin, “John of Salisbury as a writer,” 155–6; Nederman, John of Salisbury, 15–19; Nederman and Feldwick, “To the court and back again;” Thomson, “What is the Entheticus?” and Newman, “Satire between school and court.” Thomson speculates that it took shape over the course of years as “a series of private, partly random sets of verses” (296), which eventually found a proper object when Becket left the household of Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury to join Henry II’s court as royal chancellor in December 1154.

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D IV, suggest that John continued to adjust and edit the poem after its initial circulation.⁶⁸ A shorter version of the poem served as preface to the Policraticus, though my focus in this chapter rests on the longer, presumably earlier, text that circulated independently. The poem shares many central preoccupations with John’s more famous prose works, the Metalogicon and the Policraticus, including the demise of latinitas, the dangers of court life, and the relationship between selfregulation and the regulation of the body politic. But the commingling of themes has not generally helped its critical reputation. Deemed at its best “enigmatic” and, at its worst, a failed poetic first draft of the Policraticus and Metalogicon, the work has long confounded critics’ efforts to ascribe a unifying purpose or even a reliable terminus to its composition.⁶⁹ Combining the educational focus of the Metalogicon with the political focus of the Policraticus, the Entheticus is valuable not in spite but because of its sometimes inchoate efforts at integration, demonstrating the deep enmeshment of the domains of law, learning, and ethics in John’s imagination. Moreover, its status as verse—an unusual mode for this writer so well known for his prose—draws attention to grammatical learning as the formative crucible not only for eloquence but political order itself. As a long-form didactic poem concerned with systems of knowledge, the Entheticus belongs in the company of other twelfth-century works influenced by Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (c. 420–490) and Chartrian allegory, including Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia (1140s) and Alain de Lille’s De planctu Naturae (1160s).⁷⁰ Like these platonizing projects, the Entheticus seeks to integrate divine and worldly orders, to show how Christian grace can join with human intelligence [genius] to “unlock secrets and teach truths” [reserat abdita, vera docet] (234).⁷¹ The Entheticus also constitutes something of an ordo artium akin to Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon (1120s), as it surveys the liberal arts and the schools of pagan philosophy in an effort to advance an integrated and holistic theory of knowledge. Indeed, ordo—as the principle that organizes both the highest reaches of philosophy and the humblest dictates of grammar—constitutes a primary theme of the Entheticus. Philosophy prescribes ordo and modus to all things, including the order of the liberal arts themselves, such that rude beginners, if they follow the correct path of learning, may eventually achieve both an ordered mind and measured tongue. The opposite also ⁶⁸ For analysis of these corrections, arguing that the correcting hand is John’s, see Thomson, “What is the Entheticus?” ⁶⁹ In Thomson’s view, the poem did not successfully complete its transition from private verse to public verse manual. See “What is the Entheticus?,” 300. For an overview of critical opinions, see also Pepin, “John of Salisbury as a writer,” 151–2. ⁷⁰ On the tradition of Chartrian allegory, see Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century; for its use in classroom pedagogy and poetic composition, see Moser, Jr., A Cosmos of Desire. ⁷¹ Citations of the Entheticus maior are taken from the edition by van Laarhoven and will appear throughout with line numbers following the text. I have adopted my own translations with the helpful consultation of van Laarhoven. On the importance of ingenium to twelfth-century allegory, see Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century, 94–104.

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        

holds: while a prudent teacher dispenses doctrine according to order, law, and measure, “the nugifluus foolishly pours forth speech regardless of occasion” [Nugifluus verbum sine tempore fundit ineptus] (333).⁷² Like his teacher, Thierry, John wants his own work to serve as a synecdoche for the learning process itself, offering its regimen only to those already suited to instruction and self-correction. The antithesis of self-knowledge and restraint, his nugifluus recalls a frequent object of derision in Horace’s Sermones—the buffoon who “pours forth” poetry, thinking that prolixity equals skill—and neatly synthesizes into one neologism the charges levied both against the Cornificians in the Metalogicon and the courtiers in the Policraticus.⁷³ John’s own views on both poetry and mores more directly emulate Horace’s Ciceronian dictum in the Ars poetica: “Wisdom is the font and origin of writing well” [scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons].⁷⁴ The “good and prudent man,” according to Horace, appreciates vigorous and lucid poetry: he reproaches “sluggish” [inertes] and “harsh” [duros] verses alike, trims away excessive ornament, and clarifies obscurities. He will not permit a writer to offend a friend with nugis.⁷⁵ In the Ars poetica, Horace self-consciously positions himself as critic rather than poet, the vir bonus et prudens teaching the art and office to others. We can see John’s Entheticus as a related project, albeit with a different end in mind: rather than reforming verse according to the dictates of the good life, John aims to reform life—and in particular the courtier’s life—according to the dictates of good poetry. Editors of the Entheticus divide its contents variously, but several discrete thematic arcs provide the poem a general organization. Borrowing from Ovid’s Tristia, John begins with a short prosopopoetic address to his own work, sending it to court with trepidation and hopes that it will find an audience with “serious men” rather than scornful courtiers (ll. 1–20). The poem, still addressed in the second person, then begins a journey both geographical and educational, from Canterbury to the royal court and from ignorance to wisdom. Assisted by the allegorized sisters Alethia (Truth) and Phronesis (Practical Wisdom), the poem must learn first things first: “the origin, progress, and end of speaking and what discourse will be appropriate to each” [Hae tibi principium, cursum, finemque loquendi / monstrent, et sermo quis quibus aptus erit] (21–2). This path, of course, belongs not only to the poem but also the reader, who is implicitly included in the second-person address: teaching by its own example, the Entheticus thus maps a course through the liberal arts, from grammar through rhetoric and philosophy, leading finally to applied practice in the royal court. It has, on these grounds, been labeled both “a courtier’s handbook” and a “kind of courtly De officiis.”⁷⁶

⁷² This line also puns on tempus as grammatical tense, which is how van Laarhoven translates it. ⁷³ Cf. Horace, Satires, I.4 and I.10. ⁷⁴ See Horace, Epistles, Book II, Ars poetica (hereafter AP), l. 309. ⁷⁵ Horace, AP, ll. 445–52. ⁷⁶ See Newman, “Satire between court and school,” 128; Nederman and Feldwick, “To court and back again,” 130.

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As in the Metalogicon, John positions himself and his poem as lonely followers of the ancients in a world populated by blithe moderni. He laments that the schools have no patience for the “writings of the ancients” [veterum . . . scripta] (41) nor the training necessary to understand them. This view finds expression in a series of first-person voices. A “chattering crowd” [garrula turba] (40) alleges that “our youth has taught itself ” [docuit se nostra iuventus] (45) and refuses the burden of following the auctores. Among the masters, a novus auctor in residence at the Petit Pont in Paris—likely Adam of Petit Pont, whom John describes in the same terms in the Metalogicon—claims others’ discoveries as his own.⁷⁷ Meanwhile, a wouldbe corrector of Abelard dismisses the “well-worn coinage” [trita moneta] (58) of the past as worthless in the marketplace of new learning. He anticipates John’s nemesis in the Metalogicon, Cornificius, when he advocates talent over method: “Cum sit ab ingenio totum, non sit tibi curae, quid prius addiscas, posteriusve legas. Haec schola non curat, quid sit modus, ordove quid sit, quam teneant doctor discipulusque viam. Expedit ergo magis varias confundere linguas, quam veterum studiis insipienter agi.” (61–6) [“Since all things come from talent, you need not worry what you should learn first or read after. This school does not trouble itself with the meaning of modus, or ordo, or what path the teacher and pupil keep to. It is thus more expedient to mix various modes of speech than to be led foolishly in the study of the ancients.”]

A not-so-subtle target in these lines is Hugh of St. Victor’s comprehensive survey of the arts, the Didascalicon (1120s), which argued that every successful learner must possess both aptitude [ingenium] and memory [memoria]. Hugh describes aptitude as a “certain faculty naturally rooted in the mind and empowered from within” which “arises from nature, is improved by use, is blunted by excessive work, and is sharpened by temperate practice.”⁷⁸ John himself would absorb this definition of ingenium and its relationship to disciplina into his Metalogicon, but here invokes it indirectly through the language of its attackers.⁷⁹ Where Hugh ⁷⁷ In the Metalogicon, II.10 and III.3, Hall, trans., John describes Adam of Balsham as nouus auctor in arte, though uses kinder terms than the Entheticus: “a man of wide reading, who devoted himself pre-eminently to Aristotle” and “a close friend” but never a teacher. Still, Adam was “thought to suffer from the affliction of envy.” For discussion of John’s perhaps evolving views of this figure, see Ward, “The date of the commentary on Cicero’s De inventione,” 228 n. 20. ⁷⁸ Taylor, trans., The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor, III.7, 91. The Latin edition is from Hugonis de Sancto Victore Didascalicon: De studio legendi, Buttimer, ed., 57: “ingenium est vis quaedam naturaliter animo insita per se valens. ingenium a natura proficiscitur, usu iuvatur, immoderato labore retunditur, et temperato acuitur exercitio.” ⁷⁹ See John of Salisbury Metalogicon, Hall and Keats-Rohan, eds., I.11, 29–31, where John misattributes a citation first to Isidore and then identifies Hugh of St. Victor only as a “certain great man”: “Est autem ingenium ut Isidoro placet uis quaedam animo naturaliter insita, per se ualens. [ . . . ] Vnde

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        

identifies “order and method” as especially worthy of consideration in reading, our detractor advocates expediency, “mingling” tongues rather than identifying a proper sequence of reading and exposition.⁸⁰ Where Hugh commends the method of expounding a text according to “the letter, the sense, and the inner meaning” [litteram, sensum, sententiam],⁸¹ John’s critic derides grammarians who seek to join numbers or cases or tenses [Quos numeros, aut quos casus, aut tempora iungant, / gramatici quaerunt] (67); their “unhappy labor” brings them neither leisure nor profit but only misery. By divorcing natural aptitude from study, the teacher fails to impart what Hugh (and, following him, John) identifies as the essential meaning of disciplina, “leading a praiseworthy life” [vivens laudabiliter].⁸² John sketches the consequences of this separation in the lines that follow. Pupils now care nothing for Cicero, science, or literature: “only logic pleases” [logica sola placet] (114). Masters teach to enrich their purses and egos, while youth evades the “yoke” [iugum] (135) of right living and neglects the art of speaking. They prefer “sophisticated speech” [sermo rotundus], which John ascribes, by way of example, to a Norman who “dresses up” his own language to follow the French style and appear more urbane (138–9). As opposed to sermo frequens, perfected through practice, sermo rotundus is that which “no rule restricts and no people can rightly call its own” [quem regula nulla coartat, / quem gens nulla potest dicere iure suum] (143–4). The ancients, John declares, despised this manner of speech, since they both lived and spoke according to good laws (145–6).⁸³ This collocation of the legal and grammatical allows John to move from the schools to the secular court, in which such rounded speech flourishes in new contexts. In these lines, John directs his satire at the court of the king “Hircanus,” likely a pseudonym for Stephen of Blois.⁸⁴ Like the undisciplined pupils in their speech, this king considers himself bound by no law [qui reges falso nulla sub lege teneri . . . credidit] (149–50). His advisor, Mandrogerus, sets the tone for the court as a whole: he ensures that the trifles [nugae] of Mandrogerus seem to all the height of wisdom and that words of Mandrogerus will be the legal norm [formula iuris] (155–6).⁸⁵ Why, then, sweat uselessly to learn Latin when “blithe speech” obtains a faster and egregie sapiens quidam, cui dicti habeo gratiam, ait. Ingenium a natura proficiscitur, usu iuuatur, immoderato labore retunditur, et temporato acuitur exercitio.” ⁸⁰ Cf. Didascalicon, III.8, “De ordine legendi,” and III.9, “De modo legendi.” ⁸¹ Didascalicon, III.8. ⁸² Didascalicon, III.6. On the role of discliplina in education at the Abbey of St. Victor, see Jaeger, Envy of Angels, 256–8. ⁸³ On sermo rotundus, see Ward, “The date of the commentary on Cicero’s De inventione,” 227 n. 15, where he reviews the uses of sermo frequens and rotundus, with the latter suggesting “sophisticated” speech, prone to flattery and dissembling. ⁸⁴ For discussion of the pseudonym, see van Laarhoven, ed. and trans., Entheticus major, 377 n. 1301a. ⁸⁵ No definitive historical candidate has emerged as a source for Mandrogerus, though scholars have suggested several possibilities. For conjectures, see van Laarhoven, ed. and trans., Entheticus major, 382 n.

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better end to a lawsuit? John turns again to his poem for the answer, directing it to review the “rudiments of wisdom and eloquence” [elementa sciendi / et bene dicendi] (165–6). At this point John commences with the philosophical heart of his poem: a survey of pagan philosophers and schools, assessing their merits and shortcomings and concluding that wisdom requires both eloquence and the infusion of Christian grace (451–1274). Having delivered its doctrine, the Entheticus must then make its way from the royal court back to Canterbury, a journey that provides John a second opportunity to criticize courtly speech and practices. It is here that he introduces the work’s patron. Unnamed except via a pun on his office, cancellarius regis, this person alone can protect the poem from the derision of the court’s “wanton youth” [lasciva iuventus] (1287): Qui iubet, ut scribas, solet idem scripta fovere, quaeque semel recipit nomina, clara facit. Ille Theobaldus, qui Christi praesidet aulae, quam fidei matrem Cantia nostra colit, hunc successurum sibi sperat, et orat, ut idem praesulis officium muniat atque locum. Hic est, carnificum qui ius cancellat iniquum, quos habuit reges Anglia capta diu; esse putans reges, quos est perpessa tirannos, plus veneratur eos, qui nocuere magis. (1291–1300) [He who bids that you write is wont to nurture literary works; those names that he receives once, he makes illustrious. The famous Theobald, who presides over the court of Christ, which our Kent cherishes as the mother of the faith, hopes and prays that this man will succeed him so that he may fortify the office and place of bishop. It is he who annuls the unjust law of the executioners whom captive England had as kings for so long. Believing them kings whom she endured as tyrants, she gives more honor to those who did more harm.]

As the most direct hint of the poem’s occasion and ostensible patron, this passage has been crucial to the dating of the Entheticus, which must have taken its roughly final form after Becket became chancellor, in 1154, but before Archbishop Theobald died, in 1161.⁸⁶ As Jonathan Newman notes, moreover, satire makes

1363. The name itself is drawn from Querolus, a pseudo-Plautine comedy, in which the wily Mandrogerus attempts to swindle Querolus out of his inheritance. See Le Querolus. ⁸⁶ The uncertainties of the dating arise more from the identity of the poem’s unnamed tyrant than its recipient. If John completed the poem early in 1155, as Nederman and Feldwick suggest, we might

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        

questions of dating and intention especially difficult to discern, precisely because the genre encouraged pseudonymity, indirection, and the collapse of individuals into recognizable types.⁸⁷ Satire is “central to John of Salisbury’s rhetorical ethos,” Newman argues, not only because it openly reproves the vices of others, but because it divides its audience—the knowledgeable and learned—from the garrula turba.⁸⁸ This hierarchy, as discussed, already assumes a reader who recognizes disciplina as a worthy path, and it is on this shared ground that John licenses his own counsel of the king’s closest advisor. Indeed, John’s governing device of prosopopoeia allows his advice to the chancellor and his advice to his poem to merge, so that the personified text can thus mediate, Newman argues, “between the domains of schools and court . . . and between bishop’s curia and king’s court.”⁸⁹ In this way, poetry itself becomes a powerful model for how one governs oneself and others. As an expression of intellectual self-discipline, it crystallizes the Aristotelian “doctrine of the mean” that Cary Nederman has identified as central to John’s political philosophy.⁹⁰ In jurisprudential terms, we might say that John’s idealized “law” of grammar imitates an idealized jurisdictional order, in which each enfranchised body speaks freely and reasonably. Tyranny, by contrast, governs by license, “tearing away” [revellere] the old laws and customs (1301) even as it tears away the ordo and modus of right speech and living.⁹¹ A royal will unchecked by law or self-restraint brings only the appearance of peace, buttressed on all sides of the threat of violence and reprisal. Under this pax tirannorum, John explains, true liberty of speech and action becomes impossible: Libertas haec est populi dominante tiranno, ut, quod praecipitur, quilibet optet idem. Qui nimis optat opes aut cultum regis iniqui, in scelus omne ruit, pronus ad omne nefas. read it as a parting gift from Canterbury, an effort to shape policy at the royal court to the see’s advantage. In this case, Stephen of Blois provides the readiest template for the tyrant Hircanus, especially if the poem took early shape in 1140s, as Nederman and Feldwick suggest. See Nederman and Feldwick, “To court and back again,” 143. Van Laarhoven and Thomson, by contrast, take John’s banishment from Henry’s court in 1156–7 as the strongest motivation for his invective, making Hircanus a generalized amalgam of the current ruler and his predecessor. See Thomson, “What is the Entheticus?” and van Laarhoven, ed. and trans., “Introduction,” in Entheticus major. ⁸⁷ See Newman, “Satire between court and school,” 126–7. ⁸⁸ Ibid., 131. See also Martin, “Cicero’s jokes at the court of Henry II of England.” ⁸⁹ Newman, “Satire between court and school,” 126; on the use of prosopopoeia as a means of directing advice to Becket, see Nederman and Feldwick, “To court and back again,” 141. ⁹⁰ On John of Salisbury’s theories of liberty and tyranny, especially as they relate to the ideal of “measure,” see Nederman, “The Aristotelian doctrine of the mean;” ibid., “A duty to kill: John of Salisbury’s theory of tyrannicide;” ibid., “The liberty of the Church and the road to Runnymede;” and ibid., “John of Salisbury’s political theory.” ⁹¹ See Wilks, “John of Salisbury and the tyranny of nonsense,” 282, for a description of John’s tyrant as “either too natural or too divine”—i.e., too prone to “bestial” pleasure or too wedded to absolute power.

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Hostis censetur, quisquis sacra iura tuetur; praevenit officiis iussa fidelis amor. Perfidiae genus est, aliquid discernere iussum; et scelus est, aliquod pertimuisse scelus. (1347–54) [With a tyrant ruling, the liberty of a people is this: that anyone may desire the same as that which is ordered. The person who excessively desires power or the worship of an unjust king charges towards every wickedness, inclined towards every impiety. That person is decreed an enemy who protects sacred laws; faithful love comes before that which is commanded by duty. It is a form of treachery to examine anything that is ordered and a crime to fear any crime.]

As the office “conforms to the king” (1333), so, too, does the court. Mandrogerus, the adviser, considers himself “father of the laws of the realm” [legum regni . . . patrem] (1364) and his faction “equates what is permissible with what is pleasing” [Factio Mandrogeri licitum libitumque coaequat] (1375). This passage gives sharp expression to the dangers of the “wilful” ruler, who does not make but rather destroys law in the process of fulfilling his pleasure. At stake in this passage is a problem intrinsic to medieval law itself—the question of whether law issues from royal authority or, alternately, serves to constitute the grounds of that authority. The Roman law maxim “What has pleased the prince has the force of law” [Quod principi placuit, legis habet vigorem] captures the problem neatly.⁹² In the century after the Entheticus, England’s two major legal summae, Glanvill and Bracton, would both cite the maxim within larger discussions of the king’s jurisdictional power, tempering its absolutist possibilities by emphasizing the importance of counsel and approved custom.⁹³ Here, John likewise stresses that royal will must be tempered by law, but not necessarily the law of the land. If customary law stands inimical to the tenets of ⁹² Attributed to Ulpian, the maxim appears twice in the Corpus iuris civilis, in longer form than is generally excerpted. Cf. Inst I.2.6: “Sed et quod principi placuit, legis habet vigorem, cum lege regia, quae de imperio eius lata est, populus ei et in eum omne suum imperium et potestatem concessit.” It appears again with slight variations at Dig. I.4.1. On the utility of translating “placere” in a more technical legal sense, as “what the ruler decides,” see Schulz, “Bracton on kingship,” 154, and Lewis, “King above law?,” 243 n. 14. ⁹³ The prologue to Glanvill adapts Ulpian to explain why even unwritten laws [leges non scriptas] deserve to be called laws: because they “have been promulgated about problems settled in council on the advice of the magnates and with the supporting authority of the prince—for this also is a law, that ‘what pleases the prince has the force of law.’ ” See Glanvill, Hall, ed. and trans., 2: “Leges autem Anglicanas licet non scriptas leges appellari non uideatur absurdum, cum hoc ipsum lex sit ‘quod principi placet, legis habet uigorem,’ eas scilicet quas super / dubiis in concilio diffiniendis, procerum quidem consilio et principis accedente auctoritate, constat esse promulgatas.” Bracton in turns draws on Glanvill when it incorporates the maxim into a discussion of the king’s “ordinary jurisdiction.” See On the Laws and Customs of England, II.305, with further discussion in the introduction to this book, 9. The passage in Bracton has prompted much analysis. See Schulz, “Bracton on kingship,” esp. 153–6; Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 143–64; Tierney, “Bracton on government,” esp. 296–9; and Lewis, “King above law?.”

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        

justice—and, more particularly, to the liberty of the Church—then it falls to the cancellarius regis to “cancel” the unjust laws of England’s kings. The Entheticus in this way presciently anticipates the legal predicament that enmeshed Becket ten years later, when he sought unsuccessfully to exempt the Church from the Constitutions of Clarendon. Becket famously failed to “cancel” the Constitutions, but the Entheticus provides a philosophical justification for why he should have tried, as it seeks to merge the Aristotelian ideal of the mean with the Christian imperative towards conscientious action. As Nederman argues, John considered both liberty and tyranny expressions of individual moral will—the former adhering to a virtuous moderation that acts in accordance with reason, the latter foregoing moderation in pursuit of its own ends. Virtuous liberty on the part of the ruler thus engenders liberty on the part of his subjects; tyranny by contrast compels a mere formal obedience.⁹⁴ As we will see in the next section, this definition of liberty under tyranny finds its way into glosses on Lucan’s Pharsalia, in which Becket appears as a type for Cato, the embodiment of virtue in the text. In the Entheticus, however, the “true liberty” of patriotic sacrifice is not available as a remedy to the compromises of political life. The courtier must instead practice a form of virtuous deceit. But what possible form of virtue is left to the just actor, in a court which values only fraud? This pressing question leads John to turn to the Roman legal concept of the dolus bonus, “the good deceit,” specially reserved for actions taken against an enemy or a thief.⁹⁵ Marsha Colish has shown that this notion received new salience in the wake of the production of the Glossa ordinaria, as Christian theologians and legists sought to understand the figurative dissimulations of the Bible itself as a form of “licensed deceit.”⁹⁶ John borrows from both the civil law and theological traditions when he advises Becket how behave when the “enemy” happens also to be the ruler: Tristior haec cernit iuris defensor, et artem, qua ferat auxilium consiliumque, parat. Ut furor illorum mitescat, dissimulare multa solet, simulat, quod sit et ipse furens; omnibus omnia fit; specie tenus induit hostem, ut paribus studiis discat amare Deum. Ille dolus bonus est, qui proficit utilitati, quo procurantur gaudia, vita, salus. (1435–42) ⁹⁴ See Nederman, “Aristotelian doctrine of the mean,” esp. 138. ⁹⁵ Cf. Corpus iuris civilis, Dig.,4.3.1.3–4: “Non fuit autem contentus praetor dolum dicere, sed adiecit malum, quoniam veteres dolum etiam bonum dicebant et pro sollertia hoc nomen accipiebant, maxime si adversus hostem latronemve quis machinetur.” ⁹⁶ See Colish, “Rethinking lying in the twelfth century,” with special attention to the Ethenticus at 171–3.

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[Quite sadly the defender of law discerns this, and prepares an art by which to bring aid and counsel. So that their madness might subside, he is accustomed to dissimulating many things; he feigns that he himself is also mad. He becomes all things to all people. In appearance only, he assumes the guise of the enemy in order to learn to love God with equal zeal. That fraud is good which brings about advantages and procures joy, life, and health.]

Under the guise of a licensed deceit, or dolus bonus, courtly office itself becomes a kind of literary trope—an “integumentary self-performance,” in Newman’s words, that trades on the privileges of satire to conceal critique from its objects.⁹⁷ As a species of counsel, it also emblematizes the role of the rhetor in shaping body and speech to the needs of an audience, and John goes on to list a number of examples of this pia ars: the babbling nurse who fashions the speech of her charge and prudently [cauta] drives away true pain with her pretense (1443–6); the military commander who dons full armor in battle in order to inspire his troops to greater bravery (1449–52); and the teacher who molds his affect in order to best reach his students (1453–6). In all of these cases, the dolus bonus effects a kind of therapy through mimicry, allowing the appearance of similarity to conceal the medicinal lesson. The notion of the dolus bonus had origins both in Roman law and Roman rhetoric and, earlier still, in Greek military strategy.⁹⁸ According to Ulpian, ancient jurists distinguished the dolus bonus from the malus by virtue of its “cleverness” (sollertia) in cases of necessity against an enemy.⁹⁹ As Gaines Post argues, the revival of civil law in the twelfth century enshrined this good deceit as “a lawful principle of government,” a means of justifying actions on behalf of “the realm” or “the Church” as collective entities.¹⁰⁰ But prior to its renewed legal salience, rhetoric had already enshrined it as a central principle of political counsel. The Rhetorica ad Herennium, for example, identifies two advantages [utilitates] to deliberative rhetoric: what is honorable [honestam] or what is secure [tutam].¹⁰¹ From the Roman perspective, honor was preferable to safety, but in cases of imminent danger, the advantage of security presented the rhetor with two possible argumentative strategies—either the counsel of force [vis] or craft [dolus],

⁹⁷ See Newman, “Satire between court and school,” 140. ⁹⁸ On the history of the language of stratagem in Greek and Latin, see Wheeler, Stratagem and the Vocabulary of Military Trickery, esp. 92–110. The concept appears in Ulpian’s commentary on the Digest to distinguish the “good trick”—a clever outwitting of a foe—from legally actionable cases of fraud and deception. Grammarians identified dolus as a vox media, a neutral word, that could be shaded for either positive or negative connotations. ⁹⁹ For discussion of the dolus bonus in literary contexts, see Abbot, “The Aeneid and the concept of ‘dolus bonus.’ ” ¹⁰⁰ See Post, “Law and politics in the Middle Ages: The medieval state as a work of art,” 69. ¹⁰¹ See Rhetorica ad Herennium, III.2.3. Translations here and later are Caplan’s. For discussion, see Wheeler, Stratagem and the Vocabulary of Military Trickery, 97.

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also called, when speaking “more honorably,” consilium (III.2.8).¹⁰² The Rhetorica summarizes the differences between the two advantages as such: Sed si acciderit ut in consultatione alteri ab tuta ratione, alteri ab honesta sententia sit, ut in deliberatione eorum qui a Poeno circumsessi deliberant quid agant, qui tutam rationem sequi suadebit his locis utetur: Nullam rem utiliorem esse incolumitate; virtutibus uti neminem posse qui suas rationes in tuto non conlocarit; ne deos quidem esse auxilio iis qui se inconsulto in periculum mittant; honestum nihil oportere existimari quod non salutem pariat. Qui tutae rei praeponet rationem honestam his locis utetur: Virtutem nullo tempore relinquendam; vel dolorem, si is timeatur, vel mortem, si ea formidetur, dedecore et infamia leviorem esse; considerare quae sit turpitudo consecutura—at non immortalitatem neque aeternam incolumitatem consequi, nec esse exploratum illo vitato periculo nullum in aliud periculum venturum; virtuti vel ultra mortem proficisci esse praeclarum; fortitudini fortunam quoque esse adiumento solere; eum tute vivere qui honeste vivat, non qui in praesentia incolumis, et eum qui turpiter vivat incolumem in perpetuum esse non posse. [But if it happens that in a deliberation the counsel of one side is based on the consideration of security and that of the other on honour, as in the case of those who, surrounded by Carthaginians, deliberate on a course of action, then the speaker who advocates security will use the following topics: Nothing is more useful than safety; no one can make use of his virtues if he has not based his plans upon safety; not even the gods help those who thoughtlessly commit themselves to danger; nothing ought to be deemed honourable which does not produce safety. One who prefers the considerations of honour to security will use the following topics: Virtue ought never to be renounced; either pain, if that is feared, or death, if that is dreaded, is more tolerable than disgrace and infamy; one must consider the shame which will ensue—indeed neither immortality nor a life everlasting is achieved, nor is it proved that, once this peril is avoided, another will not be encountered; virtue finds it noble to go even beyond death; fortune, too, habitually favours the brave; not he who is safe in the present, but he who lives honourably, lives safely—whereas he who lives shamefully cannot be secure for ever.]¹⁰³

We can see the Entheticus as a form of deliberative counsel that tacks uneasily between these two options. To both his poem and his patron, John’s overwhelming advice is caution. Innumerable traps and snares await the person who speaks truthfully, so one should “either keep utterly silent or speak little at court” [Aut taceas prorsus, aut pauca loquaris in aula] (1509). Precisely by guarding his ¹⁰² On dolus bonus as a form of political counsel, see Vaughn, “Robert of Meulan,” 364–5. ¹⁰³ Rhetorica ad Herennium, III.5.9.

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tongue, the defender of true liberty [vindex verae . . . libertatis] (1357) keeps the poem “safe in the cloister, safe in the court, safe in ambushes, and safe everywhere” [Hoc duce tutus eris in claustro, tutus in aula, / tutus in insidiis, undique tutus eris] (1359–60). This defensive posture extends to the larger Church whose wishes the poem bears: the patron also deals harshly with Mandrogerus—or so John hopes—in the protection of Church liberty. Ecclesiastical liberty thus represents the “true liberty” that licenses courtly deceit, and it is to the freedom (equated here with the safety) of Canterbury that the poem returns in its concluding lines. On its way, however, it must pass through a no less treacherous array of hostels, where many a perfidious host lies in wait, ready to catch the unsuspecting traveler in a moment of incaution. Canterbury alone offers a refuge in which “the great punishment is to lack a book” [et quibus est grandis poena carere libro] (1646). It is only upon withdrawing from his court patron, “safe and sound” [sospes . . . et tutus] (1514), that the poem can whisper in the protector’s ear a more radical law, one that anticipates the stance Becket would adopt in later years as archbishop: “Lex divina bonis vivendi sola magistra, non veterum ritus, qui ratione carent. Pervigil hanc studeas cura servare perenni, nam servatores servat et ipsa suos. Lex humana, Dei si sit contraria legi, auctorem damnat, quo pereunte perit.” (1517–22) [“To good people, divine law is the sole instructor of life—not the customs of the ancients, which lack reason. May you strive vigilantly, with constant attention, to guard this law, for divine law protects her own protectors. Human law, if it contradicts God’s law, condemns its author and perishes with him.”]

In these lines, John echoes a canon law tenet, based in Pauline and Augustinian theology, that “we ought to follow truth more than custom, for reason and truth always preclude custom.”¹⁰⁴ In the context of the Entheticus, these customs, the ritus veterum, could suggest both the errors of the pagan philosophers and the laws of royal forefathers, both subordinated to divine law at various points in the poem. Here, however, as the truth of lex divina imparts itself with a feigned privacy, the meaning of safety and its analogous terms—care, protection, vigilance—subtly shifts: the poem does not simply advocate a defensive stance against secular harm, but endorses an active campaign on behalf of the eternal ¹⁰⁴ See Corpus iuris canonici, VIII.c6. “magis ueritatem quam consuetudinem sequi debemus, quia consuetudinem ratio et ueritas semper excludit.” For discussion of this axiom in the context of contemporary debates over papal power, see Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 29–31.

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Church. In the terms of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, we might say that the deliberative strategy shifts from security to honor. This shift in emphasis also entails a shift in the registers of generic allusion. If satire, as Newman suggests, allows John to embrace a kind of poetic dolus bonus, speaking truth from behind the veil of prosopopoeia, it ultimately condones only a limited form of freedom, acquiescent (at least in outer form) to the wills and whims of the powerful. To speak about the Church as a corporate entity, as a patria demanding truer liberty, one needs the tools of epic. And, indeed, it was to the Pharsalia that John turned with frequency when he wanted to talk about problems of state, both ecclesiastical and secular. In the next and final section, we turn to Becket’s tenure as archbishop and the violence that attended his embrace of vera libertas. For John, as we have seen, ethical politics rests on the narrow fulcrum that balances necessary, conscientious engagement with civic life and ascetic withdrawal from its compromises. Transferred from the realm of individual to institutional action, and from ethics to law, John’s theories of “fictitious” and “true” liberty can in turn help us to see how arguments for jurisdictional privilege emerge within the rhetoric of sacrificial martyrdom so central to the Becket controversy.

From Security to Honor, Horace to Lucan The Entheticus bears witness to a fundamental tension between individual and corporate liberty, or between “liberty and liberties,” as Nederman puts it.¹⁰⁵ How does an individual, constrained in personal liberty by threat of lèse majesté, advocate institutional liberties inimical to the king? John returns to this question in the Policraticus, where, in an echo of the Entheticus, he defines liberty as “judg[ing] everything in accordance with one’s individual judgment [arbitrium].”¹⁰⁶ This definition echoes Augustine, who accords genuine liberty [vera libertas] only to those who conform to divine law, differentiating this liberty from the more mitigated freedom available under temporal law, in the forms of citizenship or manumission.¹⁰⁷ “Our freedom is this,” Augustine tells his interlocutor Evodius in De libero arbitrio, “to submit to truth, which is our God Who set us free from death—that is, from the state of sin. . . . The soul does not enjoy anything with freedom unless it enjoys it with security.”¹⁰⁸ Because all temporal goods can be lost against one’s will, ¹⁰⁵ See Nederman, “The liberty of the Church and the road to Runnymede,” 459. ¹⁰⁶ John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Webb, ed., VII.25, 705a: “Libertas ergo de singulis pro arbitrio iudicat.” For discussion, see Nederman, “Aristotelian doctrine of the mean,” 138–9. ¹⁰⁷ See Augustine De libero arbitrio, I.15.32, 109. ¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 2.13.37, 143. Translation is from Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, King, trans., 59. For the Latin, Patrilogia Latina, Migne, ed., 32.1261: “Haec est libertas nostra, cum isti subdimur veritati: et ipse est Deus noster qui nos liberat a morte, id est a conditione peccati . . . Nulla enim re fruitur anima cum libertate, nisi qua fruitur cum securitate.”

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they are not, by definition, secure; only the eternity of divine wisdom guarantees security and, through security, freedom. John transfers this theology of the will to the realm of ethical political practice, combining it with a Ciceronian emphasis on public duty. Freedom, John asserts in the Policraticus, stands as the precondition to virtue, since the degree of a person’s freedom “determines what his virtues can accomplish” [eatenus uirtutibus pollet] especially in public contexts where good counsel is paramount.¹⁰⁹ As we saw in the Entheticus, the tyrannous court inhibits both the free exercise of virtue and the free expression of judgment, due to what John, following Augustine, would classify as its spiritual slavery: the person enslaved to pleasure, “aspires to a kind of fictitious liberty, vainly imagining that he can live without fear and do with impunity whatsoever pleases him.”¹¹⁰ In the Entheticus, the enslavement of the court to license and corruption necessitates a whole series of “good tricks,” rhetorical and philosophical, but in the Policraticus John is more forthright, albeit only under the pretext of Saturnalia’s “December liberty,” which granted even Roman slaves the right to speak freely. Under this license, he feels it permissible to criticize “what both you [Becket] and I find objectionable.”¹¹¹ If the Entheticus explored the limits of free speaking under conditions of security, the Policraticus in turn examines the consequences of abandoning security in favor of honor, a theme that brings the text repeatedly back to the Roman civil wars and Lucan in particular. In his famous discussion of tyranny in Book VIII, for example, John draws repeatedly from the Pharsalia to illustrate the difference between coerced and voluntary obedience. Indeed, he identifies in Lucan’s portrayal of the wicked counselor Photinus the quintessential expression of tyranny’s cynicism: “‘Let him leave the court who wishes to be honorable,’” Photinus advises. “‘Virtue does not accord with the heights of power. He who is abashed by cruelties will always be afraid.’”¹¹² And although not directly cited, Lucan also provides a succinct articulation of John’s notion of fictitious liberty when, in Book III, Lucius Aurelius Cotta argues for submission to Caesar rather than resistance by force: “‘The liberty . . . of a people whom royal powers repress perishes by that liberty. But you will have safeguarded a shadow of it if you desire whatever you are commanded.’”¹¹³ ¹⁰⁹ John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Webb, ed., VII.25, 705c. Ibid., The Statesman’s Book, Dickinson, trans., 323. See also Nederman, “Aristotelian doctrine of the mean,” 137–42. ¹¹⁰ John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Webb, ed., VII.17, 675c: “fictitiam quandam affectat libertatem ut possit uiuere sine metu et impune quod uoluerit facere.” Ibid., The Statesman’s Book, Dickinson, trans., 282. For discussion, see also Bollermann and Nederman, “Epicureanism,” 9–10; Nederman, “John of Salisbury’s political theory,” 268–9; and ibid., “Aristotelian doctrine of the mean,” 139. ¹¹¹ John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Webb, ed., VII.25.709b: “Vtor ergo libertate Decembri, et iussis tuis obtemperans, quod me et te urit beneficio iuris communi fidenter arguo.” Ibid., The Statesman’s Book, Dickinson, trans., 331. John is perhaps subtly criticizing rather than commending Becket here. See Bollermann and Nederman, “Epicureanism.” ¹¹² References to the Pharsalia are from Lucan, The Civil War, Duff, trans. See Pharsalia, VIII.493–5: “Exeat aula / qui uult esse pius; uirtus et summa potestas / non coeunt; semper metuet quem saeua pudebunt.” Cf. Policraticus, VIII.17, 778d. Translation in this case is my own. ¹¹³ Lucan, Pharsalia, III.145–7: “ ‘Libertas,’ inquit ‘populi, quem regna coercent, / Libertate perit; cuius servaveris umbram, / Si, quidquid iubeare, velis.’ ” Translation is my own.

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The negative connotations associated with the terms rex and regnum within Roman republican thought prove both useful and complicating to John’s discussion, and they required some additional parsing for his medieval audiences.¹¹⁴ “One is not to be troubled,” he advises his readers, “that I am appearing to have associated kings with tyranny, since, although it is said that ‘king’ [rex] is derived from the ‘right’ [rectus], which befits a prince, yet this name, through misuse [abusu], still falls to the tyrant.”¹¹⁵ The noun abusus—misuse or abuse—carries a legal sense of malpractice but also accords closely with the rhetorical trope of abusio, or catachresis, the “inexact use of a like and kindred word in place of the precise and proper one.”¹¹⁶ Here, the meanings converge. Tyranny constitutes legal malpractice—an abuse of royal authority—but it also enacts a kind of political catachresis, improperly transferring the “appellation” of king to a debased form of rule. It is at this point in the discussion that we can return to the miraculous dream discussed at the opening of the chapter, in which the young cleric dreams of lecturing on Cato’s hardships in Book IX of the Pharsalia. As Beryl Smalley first recognized, this dream episode bears all the marks of a plausible story, since a surviving commentary on Lucan, written in Orléans, attests to a tradition of glossing Cato with references to Becket at precisely the moment in the Pharsalia— that is, Book IX—represented by the dream.¹¹⁷ In his Glosule super Lucanum, Arnulf of Orléans offers the following gloss on IX.566–84, as Cato takes control of Pompey’s beleaguered forces:¹¹⁸ [S]i uirtuosus honestum incipit et bene succedit ei in illo perficiendo, non ideo magis honestum est quam si non possit perficere. Verbi gratia, dominus Cantariensis rigorem iusticie contra Anglicum tenere incepit, morte occupatus ab illo

¹¹⁴ On the relationship between Roman and early medieval understandings of kingship, see Wolfram, “The shaping of the early medieval kingdom.” ¹¹⁵ John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Webb, ed., VIII.17, 778b: “Nec moueat quod reges tirannis uisus sum sociasse, quia, licet rex dicatur a recto quod principem decet, tamen appellatio eius abusu cadit in tirannum.” Translation is from ibid., Policraticus, Nederman, trans., 191, with my own adjustments. ¹¹⁶ Rhetorica ad Herennium, Caplan, trans., IV.33: “Abusio est quae verbo simili et propinquo pro certo et proprio abutitur.” ¹¹⁷ Beryl Smalley discusses this episode in Becket Conflict, 200–1. Geoffrey of Vinsauf describes Orléans education in Poetria nova, ll. 1008–12. The Latin text can be found in Faral, Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècles, 228: “ . . . In causis Bononia legibus armat / Nudos. Parisius dispensat in artibus illos / Panes unde cibat robustos. Aurelianis / Educat in cunis auctorum lacte tenellos.” For grammatical education at Orléans, see Delisle, “Les écoles d’Orléans au XIIe et au XIIIe siècle”; Paetow, The Arts Course at Medieval Universities; and Arnulf of Orléans, Arnulfi Aurelianensis Glosule super Lucanum, Marti, ed., xv–xxix. The “war” between grammatical education at Orléans and logic in Paris finds vivid description in Henri d’Andeli’s early thirteenth-century poem La Bataille des VII. Ars. See Paetow, ed. and trans., The Battle of the Seven Arts, the English translation of which is reprinted with new commentary by Copeland and Sluiter, eds., in Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, 706–23, with further discussion in the introduction to this book, 5. ¹¹⁸ For discussion of Arnulf ’s works and biography and reputation in the eyes of his competitors, Matthew of Vendôme and Hugh Primas, see Arnulf of Orléans, Glosule super Lucanum, xvii–xxix.

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honesto defecit, non ideo tamen honestas decreuit que nec maior fuisset si totum perfecisset archiepiscopus. [If a virtuous man undertakes a worthy task and successfully completes it, the task is not, for that reason, worthier than if he had not been able to complete it. The lord archbishop of Canterbury, for instance, began to uphold strict justice against the Englishman [Henry II]. Death prevented him from completing that worthy task; but its worth would have been no greater had he accomplished it in full.]¹¹⁹

The impetus for this gloss stems from a speech that Cato delivers as he marches Pompey’s army across the snake-infested Libyan desert. Cato’s weary compatriots beg him to consult an oracle, to discern what kind of future might follow from civil war, or, at the least, to know “whether virtue never becomes more virtuous by success” [numquam successu crescat honestum] (IX.571). Cato refuses. “I draw my assurance from no oracle but from the sureness of my death” [me non oraculum certum / sed mors certa facit] (IX.582–3), he concludes tersely. At this moment in the gloss, Becket and Cato both epitomize virtue in the face of political failure. In Cato’s case, this failure lay in the inability of civil war to secure the freedom of republican Rome. In Becket’s case, his “failure” owes only to the probable date at which Arnulf finished his gloss. As Smalley notes, the Glosule, in making no mention of Becket’s “blessed” status, appears to antedate Becket’s elevation to sainthood. It thus likely saw completion sometime between December 1170 and his canonization in February 1173, the same period during which the dreamer re-interpreted his enigmatic anxiety dream.¹²⁰ For a few short years, then, both Becket and Cato exemplified loyalty to lost causes. But precisely as “failures,” they also epitomized the highest form of political idealism: their commitment to liberty, that is, inhered not in an outcome but in a personal ethics. This lesson stands at the heart of Book IX of the Pharsalia, which, Tim Stover argues, dramatizes a crucial shift in the telos of the poem. With Pompey dead at Pharsalus, Cato must convince his soldiers that they struggle for something larger than their personal loyalty to the deceased general—namely, that they struggle for Roman liberty itself. In refusing to consult external oracles, Stover suggests, Cato assumes at this moment the role of vatic truth-teller, positing libertas as the highest expression of individual and collective moral conscience.¹²¹ Cato’s suicide ¹¹⁹ See Smalley, Becket Conflict, 201. The translation is by Smalley, with my own adjustments. The Latin is found in Arnulf of Orléans, Glosule super Lucanum, IX.566–84, 466–7. This reference to Becket as archbishop rather than saint led Smalley to move back the putative dating of Arnulf’s Glosule to sometime before Becket’s canonization date of February 21, 1173. ¹²⁰ Smalley suggests that “[t]he miracle had its origin in a lecture, which was antedated to become prophecy. At Orleans, then, the martyr was celebrated as a new Cato, resisting tyranny according to the classical virtue of honestas.” See Becket Conflict, 201. ¹²¹ Stover, “Cato and the intended scope of Lucan’s Bellum civile.” Of Cato, he writes, “Cato will join Pompey’s side [in Book II], but he enters the fight not in order to support Pompey’s autocratic agenda,

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looms on the horizon of the unfinished Pharsalia, and Julius Caesar’s victory robs his idealism of any political futurity. This decidedly pessimistic, anti-triumphalist vision of political conflict, Catherine Clarke suggests, fit uncomfortably alongside Christian providential schemes of history.¹²² The dream from William of Canterbury’s Miracula offers one solution to this problem: in its miraculous moment of classroom enarratio, it recuperates classical libertas as the foreshadow of ecclesiastical jurisdictional autonomy. John of Salisbury’s discussion of the distinction between true and shadow liberty also echoes in Arnulf’s Glosule. Glossing Book III of the Pharsalia, Arnulf explains why tyranny engenders only the pretense of loyalty among subjects. Liberty under absolute rulers amounts to a “shadow liberty,” he suggests, since those under the dominion of another can only freely desire what the ruler desires: [U]era libertas est ius uiuendi ad arbitrium proprie uoluntatis et hanc non habent qui sub regibus sunt, non enim quod placet sibi faciunt sed quod placet regibus; sed cum fingunt sibi placere quod reges imponunt, tunc ad arbitrium proprie uoluntatis uidentur facere et ita ueram uidentur habere libertatem. Sed non habent, immo tantum umbram libertatis; hanc etiam sepe amittunt dum ad ueram uenire nituntur, ut Boethius qui umbratilem habens libertatem sub Theodorico, parens uoluntati eius, cum uellet ad ueram uenire libertatem perdidit utramque simul, dum captus sui perdidit potestatem. [True freedom is the right [ius] of living according to the judgment of one’s own will, and those who live under kings do not have it, since they do not do what pleases themselves but rather what pleases their rulers; when they pretend that what kings command pleases them, then they seem to act according to the judgment of their own will and thus to possess genuine freedom. But they do not possess it; on the contrary, they possess but a pretense of liberty. Yet even this they often lose when they struggle to reach true freedom, as Boethius, who having a semblance of freedom under Theodoric and obedient to his will, when he wished to come to genuine freedom lost both and, at the same time, while captive, his own self-determination.]¹²³

In place of Boethius and Theodoric, the copyist of one later thirteenth-century manuscript of the Glosule—Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS 411—has written in Thomas Becket and Henry II.¹²⁴ The substitution would have seemed a natural

like all the others. Rather, he enters the fray in order to defend the ideal of libertas against anyone who would assault its foundations” (574). ¹²² Clarke, “Crossing the Rubicon,” 82–3. ¹²³ See Arnulf of Orléans, Gosule super Lucanum, III.147, 168. ¹²⁴ MS Bern 411 (Marti’s MS B) is a late thirteenth-century school text including, alongside Arnulf ’s Glosule, commentaries on the Virgil’s Aeneid and Sallust and glosses on Terence, Statius, and Ovid. For a description of the manuscript, see Hagen, Catalogus Codicum Bernensium, no. 411, 369–70. For

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one by the close of the twelfth century, for the reasons this chapter has elaborated. The “true liberty” commended by this passage is the liberty of the martyr: its end is death, tendered in service to absolute freedom. “Fictive liberty,” however, belongs to the politician: its end is survival, and, as we have seen, it was this shadow freedom that John of Salisbury would appropriate for Becket as a tactic for surviving the dangers of royal service. Arnulf of Orléans thus incorporates a discussion of true and fictitious liberty in the Glosule super Lucanum that strongly echoes John’s own in the Policraticus and Entheticus. Parsing the term libertas at III.145, Arnulf explains that “[i]f some people has a lord [dominus], the freedom of that lord destroys the freedom of the people, because the people does not do what it wants but what the lord wants.”¹²⁵ This slippage of terminology, from rex to dominus, marks again a kind of catachresis, transferring the tyranny latent in kingship to the broader category of lordship. Epic enarratio, in this way, licenses a fairly sweeping condemnation of secular rulership by assuming that the “free” lord will always act by license rather than virtue. Arnulf goes on to explain that the phrase “perish by liberty” means to perish in order to acquire “genuine liberty” [id est adquirendo ueram libertatem]— that freedom, in other words, which Augustine associates with eternal truths and divine security.¹²⁶ As we have seen, Boethius and Theodoric—and, in a later manuscript, Becket and Henry—serve to illustrate this sacrificial principle in Stoic and Christological terms, respectively. In an echo of Saint Paul, they refuse the shadow in favor of the light. For Becket’s supporters and biographers, the telos of vera libertas served to resolve the contradictions and compromises of his rise to power: nearly seduced by the pleasures of court life, he bravely cast off his “shadow liberty” under the king in favor of the martyr’s stark and unbearable freedom. This redemptive narrative arc was not fully available to Arnulf as he finished the Glosule shortly after Becket’s death, nor, of course, to John of Salisbury as he marked off the narrow path of virtue in the Entheticus and leveled his criticisms in the Policraticus. But we can see its theological and political foundation already set in this early text and articulated through the concept of disciplina—of submission to language, God, and just law. The “genuine” liberty of the Church, however, stands in vexed relationship with the brand of Ciceronian statecraft that John commends for Becket in these earlier works: its logic works by exemption rather than persuasion, and hence tends to refuse rhetoric (and politics itself) as a species of

discussion of this manuscript and its interpolations, see Marti’s introduction to Arnulf of Orléans, Glosule super Lucanum, lxiv–lxv. ¹²⁵ Arnulf of Orléans, Glosule super Lucanum, III.145, 168: “Si aliquis populus habeat dominum, libertas illius domini destruit libertatem illius populi, quia populus non facit quod uult sed quod dominus.” ¹²⁶ Ibid.

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fiction. In the conclusion to this chapter, I consider what form of eloquentia Becket embodies once he comes to represent the libertas ecclesiae.

Conclusion Some ten years after John of Salisbury urged Becket to seek spiritual safety from a “dangerous” court, Becket—now archbishop—sought literal safety in France, fleeing from the disastrous Council of Northampton in 1164 to take refuge at the Cistercian foundation of Pontigny.¹²⁷ Becket’s biographers typically frame his period of immersion in Cistercian monasticism in terms of penitence and conversion, the secular cleric shedding his outer worldliness to discover the “inner man” he previously had to conceal. Edward Grim describes Becket suffering illnesses and terrible visions, while Herbert of Bosham narrates a time of prayer and austerity, of self-flagellation and fasting so severe that his concerned household urged him to moderate his rigor.¹²⁸ Becket’s austerity translates to the discipline of study as well. Herbert wonders at Becket’s diligence with the sacred books and canons, which scarcely leave his hands over the course of a day. Chiefly, he attends to the Psalter and the Epistles; one teaches ethics in its entirety, the other philosophy [theoriam], and through intensive reading Becket comes to understand the “knottiest” of scriptural difficulties on his own.¹²⁹ Herbert’s depiction shows Becket following, at least initially, the advice of John of Salisbury, who, in 1165, not long after the flight from England, writes to Becket advising that he turn away from the study of canon and civil law in favor of scripture: Siquidem non tam deuotionem excitant quam curiositatem. . . . Quis a lectione legum aut etiam canonum conpunctus surgit? Plus dico; scolaris exercitatio interdum scientiam auget ad tumorem, sed deuotionem aut raro aut nunquam inflammat. Mallem uos Psalmos ruminare et beati Gregorii morales libros reuoluere, quam scolastico more philosophari. Expedit conferre de moribus cum aliquo spirituali, cuius exemplo accendamini, quam inspicere et discutere litigiosos articulos secularium litterarum. [They rouse not so much devotion as idle curiosity. . . . Who ever rises contrite from the study of civil or even canon law? And further: scholarship sometimes swells learning into a tumour, but never or scarcely ever inflames devotion. I would rather have you ponder the Psalms and turn over the moral writings

¹²⁷ On Becket’s trial at the Council of Northampton and his subsequent flight, see Barlow, Thomas Becket, 107–16. ¹²⁸ MTB, II.413; III.357–8, and 377–9. ¹²⁹ MTB, III.379. On Becket’s reading practices at Pontigny, see Smalley, Becket Conflict, 70–9.

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of St Gregory than philosophize scholastically. It is better to discuss your manner of life with a man of the Spirit whose example fires you than to discuss disputed points in secular authors.]¹³⁰

As Edward Peters has noted, this letter represents something of a last salvo in John’s defence of old learning against “curiosities” both scholastic and juridical, since from this point forward the conflict turns intractably and increasingly legalistic.¹³¹ As we saw earlier in the chapter, lengthy letters, dense with canon law citation, would volley across the Channel in 1166, as Foliot and Becket disputed whether the archbishop had abandoned his flock or the flock its shepherd. Foliot, we recall, accuses Becket of hypocrisy, since he claims to follow a life of “reading and prayers” while in actuality escalating hostilities with the king. In response, Becket alleges persecution, aligning his own exilic plight with that of an abandoned Church, “torn to pieces, made lifeless by oppression.”¹³² These letters demonstrate the effort that Becket’s household took in finding a rhetoric appropriate to exile, one which allowed Becket to deploy the force of canonical legal citation while maintaining the outward forms of austerity and devotional simplicity that elevated his struggle above mere legal squabbling. The notion of the libertas ecclesiae provided this conceptual means. It allowed one to argue law on the basis of exemption from law—and, by extension, to embrace an eloquence exempt from the compromises of security. Its rhetorical power, in this way, derived not from its canonical precision, but rather from the inverse: it subsumed a mass of procedural and jurisdictional privileges under the single, emotionally fraught category of freedom, the very articulation of which also summoned forth the opposing category, slavery. From its earliest patristic articulations, Lester Field shows, the liberty of the Church was integrally tied with acts of ascesis and martyrdom. The testimony of the early martyrs inhered in the “simplicity” with which they confronted tyranny through their own bodies, their voluntary renunciation of the world consecrating an eternal freedom with God. With the institutional consolidation of the Church, the freedom of the martyr migrated to the office of the bishop, whose pastoral and legal responsibilities now expressed the “negative liberty” once purchased in bodily form by Christ and the martyrs.¹³³ The power of Becket’s example derives in no small part from his

¹³⁰ See Duggan, ed. and trans., Correspondence, Letter 42, I.170–7, at 172–3. ¹³¹ Peters, “The archbishop and the hedgehog.” ¹³² See, for instance, Becket’s dramatic use of anaphora to align his own persecution with the Church’s: “Expectaui, non est qui ascendat; sustinui, non est qui se opponat; silui, non est qui loquatur; dissimulaui ego, non est qui uel simulatione certet. Reposita est michi de reliquo querele actio, ut merito clamare habeam, ‘Exurge, Deus, iudica causam tuam;’ uindica sanguinem ecclesie, que euiscerata est, que facta est oppressio exanimis.” Duggan, ed. and trans., Correspondence, I.390–1. ¹³³ See Field, Liberty, Dominion, and the Two Swords. The notion of negative liberty as freedom from interference is elucidated by Berlin, “Two concepts of liberty,” in Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty.

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unexpected role in bringing together these two expressions of Church liberty: the martyr’s sacrifice and bishop’s oversight. The meditational type of reading Herbert of Bosham ascribes to Becket at Pontigny represents the culmination of an educational narrative that began in the Entheticus with lessons in good speaking and living. Divine wisdom perfects what pagan learning established, and Becket emerges from this course of study simplex and purus, free in speech and pure of conscience. In this form, he receives another opportunity to replay the confrontation in England with Henry that had cost him and Canterbury so much. In 1167, Becket and his party met a papal delegation at a location between Gisors and Trie, where legates attempted to persuade Becket to find a peaceful compromise with the king regarding the Constitutions of Clarendon, to which Becket had famously, and shamefully, acceded. A report of the occasion, possibly written by John of Salisbury, narrates his reply. In response to efforts by papal officials to “break his spirit by rousing fear or to stir him to anger,” Dominus uero Cantuariensis in omni humilitate et mansuetudine spiritus, sereno uultu, radiantibus oculis et rosea facie, lingua latina facundissime et disertissime primum gratias egit domino pape de caritate et sollicitudine quam habebat erga se et coexules suos; mirante omni multitudine que aderat super prudentia et responsis eius. Ad singula enim que illi proposuerant seriatim et eodem ordine respondit, rationibus ueris et probabilibus querelas regis euacuans et iniurias ecclesie et damna intolerabilia patenter exponens. [the archbishop of Canterbury, in all humbleness and calmness of spirit, with a clear countenance, sparkling eyes and rosy face, spoke out with eloquent skill in the Latin tongue, first giving thanks to the Pope for his affection and the careful thought he showed for himself and his fellow exiles; and the whole throng which was gathered there wondered at his wisdom and answers. To every point they had put forward, one by one and in the same order, he gave answer; on genuine grounds which could be established he annulled the king’s complaints and expounded plainly the Church’s injuries and insupportable losses.]¹³⁴

In 1164 at Clarendon, Becket had hesitated and prevaricated. Faced with the king’s unexpected demand to confirm the Constitutions in writing, Becket acquiesced— and then claimed to have not. The Gisors-Trie conference allowed Becket’s supporters to rewrite this crucial scene of interrogation and defeat in more favorable terms, with verbal fluency—ordo and modus—retroactively answering the force of written legislation.¹³⁵ Bruce R. O’Brien has argued that the notion of leges non scriptae gained currency during the conflict in part as a counter to the ¹³⁴ Duggan, ed. and trans. Correspondence, Letter 144, I.665–77, here at 666–7. ¹³⁵ See also Godman, Silent Masters, 175.

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textualism of Becket’s supporters; we can see in the Gisors-Trie report an equally powerful counterargument being made on the part of the eruditi against unwritten custom—namely, that eloquence bears its own kind of unwritten authority.¹³⁶ Though the cardinals ask if Becket might agree to “dissemble and tolerate” the customs for a time, he has fully abandoned the courtier’s securitas: “I choose rather to stay in exile for ever, to be an outlaw and even, if God has planned it so, to die for justice’s defense, than to accept the peace to which you persuade me to the danger of my soul and the damage of the cause of Church liberty.”¹³⁷ I have argued over the course of this chapter that Latin poetic training—its texts, its habits of thought and expression, and the intellectual privilege it denoted—played a subtle but vital role in shaping the meaning of Becket’s life and death. By the time of his murder, Becket and his supporters had marshaled their considerable rhetorical powers to represent him as a living symbol of ecclesiastical jurisdictional integrity. This integrity emerged not just as a product of religious conviction but as the result of a pedagogical process that began at the very start of his court career, when John of Salisbury wrote the Entheticus and Policraticus for his instruction. As we have seen, John “begins at the beginning” in the Entheticus, with grammar. He did so, I would suggest, because grammar provided every learner his or her first introduction to law in its broadest sense— as a set of systematic rules that governs behaviors. To master language was to master the self; to master the self was to fit oneself for the obligations of governance. These ideas did not fade with the fading of “old learning.” As subsequent chapters demonstrate, they animate the constitutional debates of the following century. But ideas about Latin poetry did change. Chapter 2 considers the next major shift in Latin poetic instruction in the Middle Ages: the development of compositional manuals known collectively as the artes poetriae. The earliest example of the form, Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versificatoria, dates to before 1175, roughly contemporary with Becket’s death, while the most popular example, Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova, sees its development during Canterbury’s next major conflict with the Crown, the English Interdict. As we will see, the arts of poetry provide a wealth of insight into the arts of governance. Designed to teach basic figures and tropes to future court clerics, they reveal how poetic training facilitates the work of political persuasion and propaganda.

¹³⁶ See O’Brien, “The Becket conflict and the invention of the myth of lex non scripta.” ¹³⁷ Duggan, ed. and trans., Correspondence, I.670–1: “ ‘magis eligo exulare perpetuo, proscribi etiam et, si disposuerit ita Dominus, pro iusticie defensione mori, quam in salutis mee dispendium et preiudicium cause ecclesiastice libertatis hanc quam uos persuadetis inire pacem.’ ”

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2 Classroom Historicisms Interdict and the Poetria nova

Chapter 1 traced Thomas Becket’s evolution from royal courtier to standard-bearer of Church liberty, showing how this transformation coincided with a certain nostalgia among his supporters for what seemed a bygone era of literary instruction— one in which the rigors of Latin grammar could produce a concomitantly rigorous ethics. This chapter similarly arrays poetic pedagogy alongside a story of jurisdictional conflict, in this case focusing on Canterbury’s next defining crisis, the Interdict of 1208–14. This conflict arose when King John refused to accept Pope Innocent III’s candidate for archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, leading to an escalating series of papal reprisals, culminating in the excommunication of the king in 1209. Resolved only when John yielded temporal lordship of England to Innocent, the Interdict crisis tested the boundaries of ecclesiastical and territorial affiliation. What did it mean for a cleric to write as or for the Church? Or to write as a member of the English clergy, dually bound to ecclesiastical and lay power? The Interdict made these kinds of questions especially pressing, since its purpose lay in fracturing local allegiances in order to exert the collective force of Rome.¹ For clergy, this edict also carried immediate consequences for daily communal life, since it proscribed all but the most essential of liturgical duties. The decades following Becket’s death also witnessed the rise of a new literary genre: the artes poetriae, compositional manuals that enjoyed immense popularity in the first half of the thirteenth century. The earliest example of this genre, Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versificatoria (before 1175) saw completion perhaps as early as Becket’s lifetime and inspired a number of subsequent manuals in prose and verse, including Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s sensationally popular Poetria nova (completed c. 1215), his Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi (after 1213), Gervase of Melkley’s Ars versificaria (c. 1215), John of Garland’s Parisiana poetria (after 1229), and Eberhard the German’s Laborintus (after 1215,

¹ See C. R. Cheney, Innocent III and England, esp. 294–325; ibid., “King John and the papal interdict,” and ibid., “King John’s reaction to the Interdict on England,” rpt. in The Papacy in England 12th–14th Centuries; and the edited letter collections: Cheney and Cheney, eds., The Letters of Pope Innocent III; Cheney and Semple, eds. and trans., Selected Letters. On interdict more broadly, see also Clarke, The Interdict in the Thirteenth Century. Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta. Jennifer Jahner, Oxford University Press (2019). © Jennifer Jahner. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847724.001.0001

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before 1280).² Directed at students of grammar and rhetoric and their instructors, these manuals taught what Douglas Kelly describes as a “functional rather than theoretical art”: how to compose in verse and prose, and how to ornament writing stylishly and appropriately for a given context.³ In this way, they built upon the didactic program of Horace’s Ars poetica and its commentary tradition by augmenting his more generalized poetic advice with practical techniques and examples drawn from the classical and medieval poetic canons and the teachers’ own “personal” [domesticum] verse set pieces.⁴ Though not considered an especially “political” genre, the arts of poetry taught an essential political art: how to transform events into arguments. From the death of kings to petty academic rivalries, the “real world” provided the classroom a wealth of material for compositional invention. In turn, the classroom provided politics its poetry: not simply verses as such, though “political verse” proved a natural exponent of this kind of training, but the emotive coloring and argumentative ratiocination that could shape events to particular ends. This ability to adjust the scale of an event by adjusting the language that described it—dilating or abbreviating, elevating or diminishing—lay at the heart of centuries’ worth of medieval compositional pedagogy and political statecraft. The purpose of this chapter is to examine how these spheres intersected at one particular stage in the development of the arts curriculum and English legal thought. Studies of the Interdict period and the artes poetriae have largely traveled on separate scholarly tracks, cordoned off as political history and literary history, respectively. As this chapter shows, however, these two phenomena intersect explicitly in the most popular poetic manual of the Middle Ages, Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s Poetria nova. Surviving in more than 200 manuscripts, the Poetria nova grew to become a truly international text, used, as Marjorie Curry Woods has shown, in hundreds of classrooms all across Europe well into the early modern period.⁵ A late medieval poet like Chaucer needed only to refer to “Gaufred, deere maister sovereyn” to conjure the world of Latin rhetorical and poetic training for which the Poetria nova served as metonym.⁶ Claimed as a “new poetics” (in a title that may or may not have been Geoffrey’s own), the Poetria nova gestured to an ² Many of these works were first edited by Faral in Les arts poétiques. For an overview of the tradition, see Kelly, The Arts of Poetry and Prose; ibid., “The scope of the treatment of composition;” Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages; Copeland and Sluiter, eds., Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric; Woods, “The teaching of poetic composition;” and ibid., “Some techniques of teaching rhetorical poetics.” ³ Kelly, The Arts of Poetry and Prose, 37. ⁴ On the influence of the Ars poetica upon the arts of poetry, see Copeland and Sluiter, eds., Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, 547–8 and 551–8. On the Horatian commentary tradition as a bridge between the Ars poetica and the Ars versificatoria, see Friis-Jensen, “The Ars poetica in twelfthcentury France.” ⁵ See Woods, Classroom Commentaries, especially Chapter 1, “Why was the Poetria nova so popular?,” 1–49. ⁶ See Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, VII.3347.

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earlier canon of compositional instruction. Like Horace’s Ars poetica, known simply as the Poetria to its medieval readers, it used the medium of verse to model best practices in verse composition. And, like the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, known in the Middle Ages as the Rhetorica nova, it surveyed tropes and figures and their appropriate application.⁷ The success of the Poetria nova owes in no small part to the efficiency of this composite form, which interweaves monitory advice, prescriptive example, and verbal showmanship into an integrated didactic whole. The Poetria nova and its companion manuals taught a fundamentally applied art, inculcating habits of thought and expression designed for adaptation to any potential circumstance a writer might encounter. To this end, they tend to resist “historicist” readings. Designed to be appropriate to all writers, they most readily invite formal rather than political analysis. At the same time, what we think of as “history”—and what medieval grammarians would have considered “current events”—played an important role in the medieval classroom. The artes poetriae themselves provide the key evidence for this assertion. As I discuss in the following sections, poetics manuals of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries abound in examples taken “from life,” often to demonstrate the genres of encomium or elegy, but just as frequently to exemplify a type of metaphor or an especially clever piece of wordplay. The verses I discuss in this chapter emerge at this meeting point of literary convention and historical aberration, as the materia of past and present events found their way into literary form. As Ruth Morse suggests, such formalism never stood divorced from history in the medieval classroom; rather, the “acquisition of certain well-defined basic rhetorical skills” ensured that “[h]istorical poetry was possible, [and] so was poetical history.”⁸ No manual undertakes the task of melding poetic instruction and political influence more ambitiously than the Poetria nova. Geoffrey stages the whole of the work, in fact, as an exercise in papal address, dedicating the work to Innocent III with an effusive paean to the pontiff’s learning, eloquence, wisdom, and governance. He returns to Innocent again in the closing lines of the work, beseeching him to look forgivingly upon King John, who has recently become “the soldier of the cross and of Christ, and sword of the entire church” [Et Crucis est factus et Christi miles et ensis / Totius Ecclesiae] (2090–1).⁹ This reference helps

⁷ On the title of Poetria nova and its debts to classical antecedents, see Woods, Classroom Commentaries, 13–14. ⁸ Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages, 9. The foundational study of classical conventions and medieval literature is Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. See also Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History, and, on the categories of fiction and history within the arts of poetry, see Mehtonen, Old Concepts and New Poetics. ⁹ Latin references to the Poetria nova (hereafter PN in notes) will be taken from the Faral edition, with the English translation from The Poetria Nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Nims, ed. and trans., revised with a new introduction by Camargo. Instances where I change the translation based on alternative manuscript readings are noted in the footnotes. Line numbers follow the text in subsequent references.

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date the completion of the Poetria nova to sometime soon after the Interdict ended, c. 1215 or 1216.¹⁰ But it also points to one vital employment of such grammatical and rhetorical training—the advisement of one’s superiors. As the dedication and closing address suggest—and as this chapter will discuss in more detail—the Poetria nova expends considerable energy contemplating the authority of Rome and its power to correct lay princes. This “topicality,” moreover, emerges not as an accidental effect, but rather as a direct product, of its efforts to teach applied rhetoric. The Poetria nova, that is, models one of rhetoric’s most important purposes: encouraging sovereign power towards the ends of justice and mercy. This chapter, like Chapter 1, thus seeks to integrate questions of law and poetics. During the Interdict period, no single law determined whether king or pope had jurisdictional prerogative over the Canterbury election, and this very ambiguity contributed to the protracted nature of the conflict. In place of clear precedent, both sides had to turn to alternative means of pressure—fiscal, military, spiritual, and rhetorical—to assert their jurisdictional authority. It is in this last realm, the rhetorical, that we see most clearly the role of classroom grammatical training in the conflict. Not only did poetic and rhetorical training shape how representatives of the king and the pope crafted their arguments, it also embedded, at the grammatical level, basic lessons about governance, corrective authority, and the delegation of power. To explore these issues, the chapter is broadly divided into two parts. The first examines the pedagogy of the “occasional” or “historical” poem—the poem, that is, that finds its matter in recent or contemporary events rather than in fictional or temporally distant ones. I argue that such poetry reflects classroom exercises in adaptation and imitation and carries with it important consequences for practices of political critique and persuasion. The second part then turns to the case example of the Interdict, showing how its central concerns with spiritual and territorial jurisdiction, delegated responsibility and collective punishment, depend centrally upon the power of rhetoric to enforce obedience.

Historical Poetry and the Jurisdictions of Grammar and Rhetoric “Historical poetry” is an inexact term for a category of verse that had no precise generic classification in the Middle Ages and still does not today. Early editors of medieval English poetry tended to categorize as “historical” or “miscellaneous” verses that seemed to respond to the world around them, to have at least one foot in the “real world” of public affairs.¹¹ Rarely do such verses make it into modern ¹⁰ On John’s vow in 1215, see Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 134, and further discussion to follow. ¹¹ For the early tradition of editing the “reliques” of English historical verse, see Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765); Ritson, A Select Collection of English Songs (1783), ibid., Ancient Songs

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literary canons: “monuments of popular and temporary feeling,” as one early editor would call them, they most often survive in medieval manuscripts as ephemera, vulnerable to archival loss and destined for quick cultural obsolescence.¹² They likewise resist formalist interpretation. Allied to public events and persons, they do not so much “confess” their feelings, as John Stuart Mill’s influential definition of lyric would have it, as they declare those feelings in argumentative form.¹³ The following section traces the roots of this tension between the “poem” and the “world,” aesthetics and politics, to the uncertain territory that divided grammar, the teaching of language, from rhetoric, the teaching of persuasive expression. As we will see, this is precisely the territory that the medieval artes poetriae claimed as their own, as they taught students to begin to wield literary language as a tool of political influence. Even in the classical period, the division between grammar and rhetoric was a contested one. In theory, grammar restricted itself to correct usage, to the ars recte loquendi and the enarratio poetarum discussed in Chapter 1. Its province was boyhood and its curriculum began with the Aesopian fables and exercises of simple paraphrase, progressing through more sophisticated poets and compositions until the pupil had reached sufficient facility that he passed into the domain of rhetoric. There, ideally, he learned to manipulate language and voice in service of the res publica. In practice, the passage from grammar to rhetoric appears to have been a good bit murkier, both because of the considerable territory shared by the teachers of grammar and rhetoric and because of the individual quality and predilections of instructors themselves.¹⁴ In the Institutio oratoria, Quintilian thus chides grammar for having “usurped the study of practically all the highest departments of knowledge” [prope omnium maximarum artium scientiam amplexa sit] and rhetoric for ceding too many of its duties to grammar.¹⁵ Over the course of the Middle Ages, as rhetoric shifted from an art of oratory to written composition, what James Murphy calls the “jurisdictional claim” of grammar accordingly broadened to include not only the nature of language but its “particular purposive uses.”¹⁶ By the thirteenth century, he argues, grammar “laid claim to jurisdiction over all uses of language: the grammarians produced preceptive doctrine for poets, for

from the Time of King Henry the Third to the Revolution (1790), and ibid., Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry (1791); Wright, Political Songs of England (1839); and ibid. and James Orchard Halliwell, eds., Reliquiae Antiquae (1841–3). For discussion, see Matthews, The Making of Middle English. ¹² Wright, Political Songs of England, lxix. ¹³ J. S. Mill, “What is Poetry?” (1833), in Sharpless, ed., Essays on Poetry by John Stuart Mill, 12. On the significance of Mill to the modern genealogies of the lyric, see Jackson and Prins, “General introduction” to The Lyric Theory Reader, 3–4, and for a theorization of lyric within the sphere of the political, Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 297–348. On the relationship between medieval lyric and rhetoric, see Nelson, Lyric Tactics, 35–44. ¹⁴ See Viljamaa, “From grammar to rhetoric.” ¹⁵ Quintilian, Inst., II.1.4, 206–7, Butler, trans. ¹⁶ Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 191.

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prose-writers, and for preachers, and even (through the analysis of significatio) encroached upon the chosen domain of the logicians.”¹⁷ The artes poetriae of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries testify to this expanded role for grammar instruction. Chapter 1 discussed John of Salisbury’s idealizing portrait of the grammar classroom of Bernard of Chartres, in which boys learned correct usage and style through “preparatory exercises [praeexercitamina] in the imitation of the prose writers or poets.”¹⁸ These exercises owe a distant debt to the praeexercitamina or progymnasmata described by Quintilian in the Institutio oratoria—progressively tiered, formal compositional tasks in, for instance, narration, maxim construction, encomium, vituperation, ethopoeia, and description, designed for students moving from the cusp of grammatical to rhetorical training.¹⁹ This formal program did not survive wholly intact to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, though its architecture remains visible in medieval genres and compositional prescriptions.²⁰ Woods, for example, has shown the important role that ethopoeia, speech delivered in character, played in training young pupils to write.²¹ Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versificatoria marks the first new treatise (as opposed to Horatian or Ciceronian commentary) designed for use during this “transitional period” of grammatical instruction, as elementary pupils moved from learning the rules of Latin to creating their own imitative compositions.²² A contemporary of Arnulf of Orléans (who is likely the “Rufinus” excoriated in the work’s prologue), Matthew wrote the Ars versificatoria during his years teaching in Orléans.²³ Matthew explicitly intends his manual to help with the instruction of “the less advanced” student [instructio minus provectorum] who is just beginning to write in verse.²⁴ Its focus thus rests squarely on techniques of versification and style: inventio, the finding of topics, and dispositio, the arrangement of material, do not factor in this treatise.²⁵ The influence of Horace’s Ars poetica, Cicero’s De inventione, and the Rhetorica ad Herennium likewise

¹⁷ Ibid., 193. ¹⁸ John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, Hall, trans., I.24, 176. See Chapter 1, 33–5, for further discussion. ¹⁹ See Kraus, “Progymnasmata and progymnasmatic exercises;” and also Lanham, “Freshman composition in the early Middle Ages;” Woods, “The teaching of poetic composition in the later Middle Ages;” and ibid., “Weeping for Dido.” ²⁰ See Kraus, “Progymnasmata and progymnasmatic exercises,” 184–9, and Woods, “The teaching of poetic composition,” 126. ²¹ See Woods, “Weeping for Dido,” 286. ²² On the place of Ars versificatoria in the history of the artes poetriae, see Kelly, “Scope of the treatment of composition;” Gallo, “Matthew of Vendôme;” and Murphy, Rhetoric in the Medieval Ages, 163–8. ²³ For further discussion of Arnulf of Orléans, see Chapter 1. ²⁴ References to the Ars versificatoria are from Matthew of Vendôme, Mathei Vindocinensis Opera, Munari, ed., here at III.1.4, 41. Unless otherwise noted, English translations are from ibid. The Art of Versification, Galyon, trans., here at 25–6. A Latin edition of the Ars versificatoria may also be found in Faral, Les arts poétiques, 106–93, and English translations in Gallo, “Matthew of Vendôme,” and Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria: The Art of the Versemaker, Parr, trans. ²⁵ See Kelly, “Scope of the treatment of composition,” 263.

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        

loom large: the work surveys a broad array of figures and tropes taken from the Rhetorica in an effort to demonstrate Horace’s dictum that metaphors should suit their matter.²⁶ What Horace prescribed axiomatically, however, Matthew demonstrates through a profusion of examples that seek to bring together principles of poetics—how to compose and ornament verse—with principles of rhetoric, in particular Cicero’s “attributes of persons,” those qualities of nature and station that define a person’s circumstances.²⁷ The resulting technique, descriptio, constitutes, in Matthew’s view, the “chief exercise” [precipuum . . . exercitium] of the versifier’s craft.²⁸ Descriptio also provides a ready opportunity to compose from “real world” examples, as the Ars versificatoria attests. Early on in the treatise, Matthew assembles a group of sample descriptiones, beginning with three encomia—to a pope, Caesar, and Ulysses—which are followed by an invective, against Davus, and contrasting descriptions of women from the classical canon: Marcia, Helen, and Beroë.²⁹ As the first and only non-classical figure in this list, the pope enjoys a prominent place in the Ars versificatoria, one likely borrowed from contemporary dictaminal treatises, which typically present their model epistolary salutations in hierarchical order, beginning with the pope and descending downward to the emperor, higher clergy, lay nobility, and then teachers, pupils, parents, and children.³⁰ In the Ars versificatoria, the imperative to describe papal attributes, however, means that Matthew must also describe the nature of papal power. This subject belonged most naturally to the purview of the medieval decretalists, who would elaborate over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries an increasingly robust doctrine of papal jurisdictional supremacy, premised on the logic that “all are subject to [the pope] by divine right” [omnes subsunt ei jure divino] because he “has no equal on earth” [parem non habet super terram].³¹ Matthew makes this theory of papal jurisdictional authority the governing conceit of his description. If military strength marks the defining quality of Caesar, and eloquence of Ulysses, Matthew’s pope embodies the principle of just order— of a law that radiates outward from God into the world through the mediating ²⁶ See Kelly, “Scope of the treatment of composition,” 264–6; and Copeland and Sluiter, eds., Medieval Rhetoric and Grammar, 560. ²⁷ Cf. Cicero, De inventione, I.24–5. ²⁸ Matthew of Vendôme, Mathei Vindocinensis Opera, Munari, ed., I.1.73, 94, translation mine. On descriptio in the Ars versificatoria, see Gallo, “Matthew of Vendôme,” 55; and Woods, “The teaching of poetic composition,” 130–4. ²⁹ Matthew of Vendôme, Mathei Vindocinensis Opera, Munari, ed., I.1.50–8, 64–88. For discussion of Matthew’s description of Beroë within the tradition of depicting “demonic” Saracen women, see de Weever, Sheba’s Daughters, 70. ³⁰ For salutations in the Rationes dictandi, see Murphy, Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts, 11–16. I return to the ars dictaminis later, at 87–8. ³¹ This idea would find its most expansive articulation in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in the work of Giles of Rome and James of Viterbo. See James of Viterbo, De regimine Christiano, 176, discussed in Ullmann, Medieval Papalism, 77. On the broader evolution of theories of papal jurisdiction, see Tierney, Origin of Papal Infallibility.

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form of his vicar, the apex orbis. It is he who “rules rulers, as their lord asserts his lordship; He commands harsh princes to command by a fixed law” [Papa regit reges, dominis dominatur, acerbis / Principibus stabili iure iubere iubet] (33–4).³² In a dramatically compressed set of metaphors, Matthew praises the pope as father, shepherd, and head of the larger Christian body: “He watches over us: his children, his sheep, the limbs of his body, as the head / over bodily members, the father children, the shepherd sheep” [Nos proles, nos eius oves, nos menbra: tuetur / Menbra capud, genitor pignora, pastor oves] (17–18). At the grammatical level, this passage teaches basic forms of poetic ornamentation. The placement of the verb tuetur at the midpoint of the distich serves to teach conjunctio, a figure in which a single verb governs the meaning of multiple separate clauses. Anaphora appears in the repetition of nos, while the notion of a Christian “flock” or “body” illustrates metonymy. The whole of the Ars versificatoria in turn teaches elegiac versification. At the rhetorical level, however, this set-piece description suggests that its audience of pre-adolescent boys was not too young for an early lesson in the doctrine of papal plenitude of power. Indeed, if we consider that the Ars versificatoria saw completion during the decades-long battle between Frederick Barbarossa and Pope Alexander III, Matthew’s reminder that the pope “holds the spiritual scepter” [sceptrum spirituale tenet] (14) takes on a potentially political edge.³³ As Matthew himself informs his readers, effective descriptio represents more than a simple assembly of qualities. It makes an argument about the nature of the person it describes based on the qualities that a writer attributes or fails to attribute to their subject.³⁴ In the case of the passage just discussed, the “nature” of papal power finds compact proof in the poetry itself: like the operative verb that governs the clauses, the pope, as the figure that binds heaven and Earth, distributes his protective power across ecclesiastical and lay arenas, while also embodying, metonymically, God’s power on Earth. Matthew’s “Orbis ad exemplum papae procedit” does not constitute a historical or topical poem in the way that modern editors have typically understood the category—as addressed to or arising from some specific event in the world. If anything, its portrait of a generic pope seems studiously to avoid historical entanglement, offering conventional praise that serves the ends of grammatical instruction rather than political influence. However, with a few minor adjustments—the addition of proper names, a new manuscript context—this poem would resemble

³² Matthew of Vendôme, Mathei Vindocinensis Opera, Munari, ed., I.1.50, 66. Galyon, trans., here and in subsequent references. ³³ On Matthew of Vendôme’s set-piece within the larger tradition of papal poetry, see Haye, Päpste und Poeten, 39 and 93–7. ³⁴ Cf. Matthew of Vendôme, Mathei Vindocinensis Opera, Munari, ed., I.1.76, 96: “Hic enim nichil aliud est «argumentum», sive «locus a nomine vel a natura», nisi per interpretationem nominis et per naturales proprietates de persona aliquid probare vel improbare, personam propriare vel impropriare.”

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        

many other Latin verses dubbed topical in nature. As critics, we would accordingly shift our lens of analysis: no longer a “grammatical” poem, in service to language as such, it would become a “rhetorical” poem, in service to a particular social or political agenda. No such divide, of course, existed in the medieval classroom, and the innovation of Matthew’s manual resides in part in its embrace of this reality. The Ars versificatoria codified the uncertain middle ground between grammar and rhetoric and elementary and advanced grammatical training. As we will see when we turn to Geoffrey of Vinsauf, this territory proves generative for all varieties of topical poetry. As a transitional genre itself, historical poetry becomes preparatory training for the pupil’s transition into more professional forms of literacy.

The Poetria nova and the Arts of Occasion As we have seen, the Ars versificatoria restricts its lessons to the verse line: its remit does not extend to the ordering of those lines into a larger composition. By contrast, the Poetria nova aims for a more comprehensive approach, treating not only issues of style but also the architectonics of form. Taking the Rhetorica ad Herennium as its model, the Poetria nova spans all five canons of classical rhetoric, from invention to arrangement, style, and (less comprehensively) memory and delivery.³⁵ It does so, moreover, in approximately 2,000 hexameter lines that cleverly model the tropes and techniques they also teach. Like the Ars versificatoria, the Poetria nova also uses the elevated status of the papacy as a source of instruction, and a comparison of their respective approaches illuminates key innovations of the later manual. We saw in the previous section how a lesson in the logic of descriptio could secondarily offer a lesson in the nature of papal power, its capacity to “bind and loosen souls” [animas ligat et solvit] (15), in Matthew’s words. Geoffrey of Vinsauf borrows the same conceit for the Poetria nova, but strips away the pedagogical frame, instead using his preface to dedicate the whole of the work to the living pope, Innocent III: Papa stupor mundi, si dixero Papa Nocenti, Acephatum nomen tribuam; sed, si caput addam, Hostis erit metri. Nomen tibi vult similari: Nec nomen metro, nec vult tua maxima virtus Claudi mensura. Nihil est quo metiar illam: Transit mensuras hominum. Sed divide nomen,

³⁵ See Kelly, “Scope of the treatment of composition,” 276–7; Woods, Classroom Commentaries, 39–44; and Camargo, “Introduction to the revised edition,” in Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, Nims, ed. and trans., 12–13. Portions of the following sections of this chapter appeared previously in Jahner, “Verse diplomacy and the English Interdict.”

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Divide sic nomen: “In” praefer, et adde “nocenti,” Efficiturque comes metri. Sic et tua virtus Pluribus aequatur divisa, sed integra nulli. (1–9) [Holy Father, wonder of the world, if I say Pope Nocent I shall give you a name without a head; but if I add the head, your name shall be at odds with the metre. That name seeks to resemble you: it will no more be confined by metre than your great virtue by the shackles of measure. There is no standard by which I may measure your virtue; it transcends the measures of men. But divide the name—divide the name thus: set down first “In,” then add “nocent,” and it will be in friendly accord with the metre. In the same way your excellence, if it is divided up, is equalled by many, but taken in its wholeness is equalled by none.]

As ever in the Poetria nova, the lessons in this passage are multiple.³⁶ Exemplifying the best advice of the ars dictaminis, the art of letter writing, Geoffrey first captures the goodwill of his addressee [captatio benevolentiae] by praising Innocent with the epithet “stupor mundi.” A phrase later borrowed by Matthew Paris to eulogize both Innocent and his imperial counterpart, Frederick II, stupor mundi carries—as Woods notes—a double-edged sensibility, connoting both majesty and the potential for stupefaction. The ambiguity extends to the dedication as a whole, as it praises Innocent as a paragon [innocens] who also holds the power to injure [nocere].³⁷ With equal subtlety, Geoffrey makes a potential nod to Priscian and Donatus by beginning his treatise where they begin their grammars: with the noun and its constituent syllabic parts. As Priscian relates in the Institutiones grammaticae, semantic meaning depends upon the proper ordering of the parts of language, from letter, to syllable, to noun, and then verb. All of “the most learned authors of grammars,” Priscian contends, “put the noun first, the verb second, obviously because no sentence is complete without them.”³⁸ Geoffrey thus begins the Poetria nova at its two “heads,” one lofty and the other humble, as he parses the nomen of he who is the “general light of the world” [Lux publica mundi] (33). If the Ars versificatoria taught its students that the vocabularies of lex, iusticia, ratio, and ordo suited an ecclesiastical addressee, the Poetria nova wryly (and

³⁶ On the significance of Innocent III to the opening and closing dedications of the Poetria nova, see also discussions by Woods, Classroom Commentaries, 1–5 and 37–9; ibid., “Innocent III as rhetorical figure;” and Haye, Päpste und Poeten, 98–9 and 177–82. ³⁷ See Woods, Classroom Commentaries, 4–5. The reference to Frederick II appears in Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, V.196, and to Innocent III (“qui vere stupor mundi erat”) in the Historia Anglorum, II.215. ³⁸ Priscian, Institutiones grammaticae, 17.12, from Keil, ed., Grammatici latini, III:116: “sicut igitur apta ordinatione perfecta redditur oratio, sic ordinatione apta traditae sunt a doctissimis artium scriptoribus partes orationis, cum primo loco nomen, secondo verbum posuerunt, quippe cum nulla oratio sine iis completur.” Copeland and Sluiter, eds. and trans., Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, 180.

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        

flatteringly) posits a more radical claim: not that qualities determine their subject but that the subject, in this case, determines language itself. The name “wishes” [vult] to resemble its referent. Though metrically inconvenient, the name Innocentius also affords Geoffrey an opportunity to perorate on the relationship between form and content, crystallized neatly in the term mensura, which binds the verse line but not the jurisdictional authority of its subject, who transcends all measure. Though unmeasured and unmeasurable, the pope’s power nevertheless finds reflection in the constituent parts of his name, Innocentius, which holds the potential for harm but in its totality embodies virtue. This kind of verbal dexterity makes it easy to overlook the most obvious feature of this preface, which is its sheer ambition. Even as a pedagogical fiction, the dedication to Innocent III announces the Poetria nova as a treatise worthy of attention from the most powerful figure in Christendom. The contrast to Matthew of Vendôme’s preface, alternately apologizing for the elementary level of its advice and sniping at Rufinus, could not be more striking. Whether we understand this preface as a pedagogical pretense or a sincere dedication or a mixture of the two, it effectively elevates the Poetria nova as a coherent work in its own right, worthy of the extensive commentary tradition it ultimately attracted.³⁹ It also allowed Geoffrey to be read as something of a political theorist. As Walter Ullmann suggests, it was not the poet who borrowed from the canonists but rather the canonists who borrowed from the poet when they came to refer to the pope as the “stupor mundi.”⁴⁰ Across his oeuvre, Geoffrey shows a penchant for contemporary high politics matched in his cohort of authors only by John of Garland.⁴¹ This interest dates to his earliest-known poems—verses composed on the death of Becket and on the victory in 1174 of Henry II over the rebellion led by his sons and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine.⁴² It characterizes, too, his most popular piece of verse apart from the Poetria nova, the lament composed in the wake of King Richard I’s death in 1199.⁴³ Incorporated into the Poetria nova as an example of apostrophe, it achieved its own independent circulation and reputation, most notably reflected

³⁹ Woods analyzes this commentary tradition in Classroom Commentaries. ⁴⁰ Ullmann, Medieval Papalism, 153. In his glosses on the Constitutiones of Clement V (1317), the canonist Ioannes Andreae notes in the proem s. v. papa that “Papa stupor mundi . . . Nec Deus est nec homo, quasi neuter est inter utrumque.” See Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory, 200. ⁴¹ Cf. John’s eight-book epic on the Albigensian Crusade, De triumphis ecclesiae. ⁴² These verses are found copied amidst Geoffrey’s known works in Glasgow, Hunterian Library, MS V.8.14 (511), a schoolroom anthology compiling the major ars poetriae treatises (Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versificatoria; Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s Summa de coloribus rhetoricis, Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi, and Poetria nova; and Gervase of Melkley’s treatise on dictamen and Ars versificaria) together with more than forty poems on a range of themes taken both from classical literature and recent English historical events. For editions, see Faral, “Le manuscrit 511,” and, more recently, Harbert, ed., A Thirteenth-Century Anthology of Rhetorical Poems. For discussion of the collection, see also Camargo, “What Goes with Geoffrey of Vinsauf?,” 149; ibid., “Liber uersuum;” and ibid., “Memorial verses.” For the manuscript, see also Moser, Jr., A Cosmos of Desire, 157–73. ⁴³ PN 368–430.

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in Geoffrey Chaucer’s admiring parody in the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale.”⁴⁴ As Martin Camargo has argued, these individual set-piece verses comprise the foundation of the Poetria nova: Geoffrey, that is, did not write new poems to illustrate his pedagogical frame, but rather devised a frame that would integrate his personal anthology of teaching examples, his liber uersuum, into a synthetic whole.⁴⁵ This insight carries consequences for how we understand the relationship between grammatical pedagogy and political topicality in the Poetria nova. Camargo’s study of Geoffrey’s larger corpus shows that he worked and reworked materials continuously over the course of his career, composing—as in the case of the early occasional poems on Henry II and Becket—multiple closely related versions of poems that could then serve to illustrate different methods of ornamentation. Key lines and even entire poems thus appear in different guises across the span of his career, from his early occasional poems; to his first pedagogical treatise, the Summa de coloribus rhetoricis; to the Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi; to the Poetria nova, likely assembled contemporaneously with the Documentum.⁴⁶ Indeed, Camargo suggests that the independent popularity of Geoffrey’s “hit poems,” such as the laments for Becket and Richard I, might have provided the initial impetus for the creation of the Poetria nova.⁴⁷ Certainly, the dedication to Innocent III suggests that Geoffrey sensed a winning formula, as it effectively transforms the whole of the treatise into an occasional poem. “Occasional poetry,” however, does not quite describe the deeper connecting thread across these examples, which I would classify as “jurisdictional” rather than occasional—concerned, that is, with the exercise of spiritual and geopolitical power. This concern defines Geoffrey’s earliest attributable verses on Henry II and Becket, and characteristically finds expression in the workings of language itself. The lament on the death of Becket, likely dating to the 1170s, when Geoffrey worked as a grammar master in Northampton, provides a case in point. Like Matthew of Vendôme in his papal set piece, Geoffrey turns to the figure of distributio to exemplify the operations of ecclesiastical power, here succinctly expressed in one version of the poem’s opening lines:⁴⁸ ⁴⁴ See Young, “Chaucer and Geoffrey of Vinsauf;” Murphy, “A new look at Chaucer and the rhetoricians;” and Woods, Classroom Commentaries, 23–6. Early excerpted versions can be found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Add. A. 44; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 656; Cambridge, CUL, MS Ff.1.25.4; and London, British Library, Add. MS 14252. On this last manuscript, with further discussion of the lament, see Chapter 3, 120–2. ⁴⁵ See Camargo, “Liber uersuum,” with an overview of the chronology of Geoffrey’s surviving work on 3–4. ⁴⁶ Ibid. See also ibid., “Memorial verses;” “Tria sunt;” and the “Introduction to the revised edition,” 4–12. ⁴⁷ See “Liber uersuum,” 16. ⁴⁸ This poem survives in two slightly different versions, one in MS Hunterian V.8.14 (511), copied between the Summa de coloribus rhetoricis and the Documentum de modo arte dictandi et versificandi on fols. 45v–46r, and the other, with seven additional distichs, in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Add.

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         Rex, miles, presul, edictis, ense, cruore, Inpugnat, uiolat, protegit ecclesiam. Rex ira, miles gladio, presul prece pugnat. In patrem, matrem, rex, eques inuehitur; Pro populo presul, pro multis stat, cadit unus, Pro genetrice pater, pro grege pastor obit. (1–6)

[The king, the knight, the bishop, with his edicts, with his sword, with his blood, assails, defiles, protects the church. The king fights with wrath, the knight with a sword, the bishop with prayer; the king attacks his father, the knight his mother. For the people, for the many, the bishop stands; one man, he falls. The father dies for his mother; the shepherd for his flock.]

Defined by John of Garland as the figure that “assigns to each what is its own” [attribuit vnicuique quod suum est], distributio proves a useful device for thinking through the implications of the classic Roman law definition of justice: “the constant and unfailing will to render to each his right.”⁴⁹ In this case, the careful balancing of the clauses presents a perverse portrait of the “just” distribution of lay and ecclesiastical responsibility, as the bishop alone performs his duties on behalf of others, while the king and knight act out their violent retributions for their own purposes. The tricolonic structure gradually reduces to a parallel set of contrasts that finally leaves one [unus] to fall as a sacrifice for the many. The emotional culmination of these verses comes at the conclusion of the poem in the version that appears in Glasgow, Hunterian Library, MS V.8.14. Here, the personifications of England, Rome, and Law, all weeping for their champion, amplify the affective appeal of the poem: Anglia primate, legato Roma, patrono Ius, duce clerus, inops patre iacente fleat. Corpus adit, fama perfundit, spiritus ornat, Ima soli, mundi climata, summa poli. (17–20)

A 44 (fols. 235v–236r). Editors and scribes divide the distichs variously, leading to an ongoing debate about whether they should be understood as a single poem, two poems, or even three. Faral edited the Hunterian version as no. 9 in “Le manuscrit 511,” 25–6; Harbert edited it again as item 9 in A Thirteenth-Century Anthology of Rhetorical Verse, 17–18; Kingsford edited the Bodleian version in “Some political poems of the twelfth century,” 324; Wilmart discussed the verses in “Le Florilège mixte de Thomas Bekynton,” 82; and Camargo provides a new edition and translation in “Memorial verses,” 83–7. The following lines begin the Bodleian MS Add. A 44 version. I follow Camargo’s edition and translation, with minor adjustments. ⁴⁹ John of Garland, Parisiana poetria, Lawler, trans., 128–9. See Corpus iuris civilis, Dig., I.1.10: “Iusticia est constans et perpetua uoluntas ius suum cuique tribuendi.”

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 :     

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[Let England weep for her archbishop, Rome for her legate, the law for its advocate, the clergy for its leader, the destitute for their father who lies dead. His body goes to the depths of the earth, his fame spreads over the regions of the world, his spirit adorns the heights of heaven.]

Distributio works in these lines not to differentiate hostile powers but to coordinate adjunct ones: Rome and England, clergy and laity, together weep for their fallen bishop, whose spirit ascends and fame spreads even as his body goes to ground. Geoffrey would return to these themes in the most famous set-piece poems in the Poetria nova, the lamentations on the death of King Richard I. Included to exemplify techniques of apostrophe, the two poems approach the occasion of Richard I’s sudden death in 1199 from contrasting temporal perspectives.⁵⁰ Geoffrey sets the first poem in a time before the event, offering it as an example of verse written in a “time of auspicious fortune” to “presage a grief to come” [jocundi tempore fati . . . luctus praesaga futuri] (324–5). It presents a single apostrophe, to Anglia, “queen of kingdoms while Richard lives” [Anglia, regnorum regina, superstite rege] (326). The king is the mirror that reflects England’s dominion, the star whose radiance illumines her. But, Geoffrey warns, the realm should not trust in good fortune: Omina laeta vale tibi sunt dictura: quiescis, Sudabis; rides, flebis; ditescis, egebis; Flores, marcebis; es, vix eris . . . (345–8) [Happy omens are about to bid you farewell; you are at ease now, soon you will toil; now you laugh, you will weep; you are wealthy, you will be in need; now you are flourishing, soon you will wither; you have being now, you will scarcely even have that.]

As the verbs compress to a staccato list of antitheses, the passage transforms a crisis of dominion into a crisis of political ontology. What is Anglia without Richard? Writing as the ominous harbinger of a future he already inhabits, Geoffrey casts his poem as a familiar lesson on fortune: “You can foreknow this one thing: that no power can be lasting” [Hoc unum praescire potes (quod) nulla potestas / Esse morosa potest] (357–8). He ends with examples from the past—Athens, Troy, Carthage, Rome—promising England’s own fall lies no farther than night does from day. One line later, the Poetria nova steps into this woeful post-Ricardian future in the form of Geoffrey’s second and best-known lament. Here, it is Normandy rather than England that is conjured by the opening apostrophe:

⁵⁰ On the circumstances of Richard’s death, see Gillingham, “The unromantic death of Richard I,” with further discussion of the laments and their occasion in Chapter 3, 120–2.

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         Neustria, sub clypeo regis defensa Ricardi, Indefensa modo, planctu testare dolorem; Exudent oculi lacrimas; exterminet ora Pallor; connodet digitos tortura; cruentet Interiora dolor; et verberet aethera clamor. Tota peris in morte sua: mors non fuit ejus Sed tua. . . . (368–74)

[Once defended by King Richard’s shield, now undefended, O Normandy, demonstrate your grief through plaint. Let your eyes flood with tears, and pale grief waste your features. Let writhing anguish twist your fingers, and woe make your heart within bleed. Let your cry strike the heavens. Your whole being dies in his death; the death was not his but yours.]⁵¹

The apostrophe to Normandy lends an exhortative mood to the whole, which Geoffrey famously amplifies by embedding five further apostrophes over the course of the poem: to the “tearful day” on which Richard died, to the soldier who killed him, to death which stole him away, to Nature who took back her gift, and finally to God who permitted the murder. The poem alternates between commands—as in the imperative that England “demonstrate [testare] her grief through plaint”—and interrogatives, demanding of Nature, for instance, why she would expend such effort in creation only to destroy her most perfect specimen. The sheer repetition of language and ideas over the course of the poem invites parody, as Chaucer recognized in his own humorous paean to this piece in The Canterbury Tales. But these techniques also reveal how lament works as a tool for public persuasion. The evocation of shared grief—whether at the death of a king or a bishop—assumes collective participation in a commonweal. As Geoffrey’s setpiece apostrophes also make clear, however, commonweals remain easier to conjure in the abstract than to govern in concrete reality. Allegiances prove multiple and conflicting, rulers die or lose on the battlefield, and remote seats of power must compete with more proximate claims on loyalty. These kinds of jurisdictional uncertainties form the backdrop for the assembly of the Poetria nova over the course of the first decade and a half of the thirteenth century, as King John lost control of Richard’s domains in Normandy and Anjou, faced baronial revolt and French invasion, launched a diplomatic war with Innocent III over Stephen Langton, and ultimately ceded overlordship of England to the pope to save his crown. The next section situates the Poetria nova within this larger context of diplomatic entreaty and retaliation. As we will see, the treatise provides a ⁵¹ Nims translates Neustria as England, following the preference of some scribes after the events of 1204. I retain Normandy here for accuracy and have adjusted the translation slightly. For further discussion, see Chapter 3.

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 :     

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kind of rhetorical toolkit for writers faced with the “occasion” of mollifying and admonishing powerful rulers, modeling the forms of plaint, critique, and intercession that dominated official negotiations during the Interdict years.

Interdict and the Poetria nova This chapter began by exploring the generic and interpretive difficulties posed by poetry we classify variously as “topical,” “historical,” “political,” or “occasional”— all inexact terms for verses that arise from or attempt to shape world events. Though frequently minor, even nonce, contributions to literary history, these verses, I have argued, illuminate a fundamental tension within literary history between grammar and rhetoric, between the figurative possibilities of language and its instrumental uses. We can trace the locus classicus for this tension to the grammar classroom, where all verses proved to some degree occasional: whether prompted by an event from the classical canon or from the contemporary moment, they were compeled by external causes and shaped to external purposes. The Poetria nova owes its success in no small part to its embrace of topicality as the engine of poetic composition. In characteristic fashion, it frames itself as an exercise in papal address, occasioned, it belatedly suggests, by the conflict between Innocent and John. As we have seen, this kind of political drama—especially the high drama of papal and lay imperium—proved central to Geoffrey’s project. The independent success of his laments for Becket and Richard I underscores the broad European audience for his occasional works, both within and beyond pedagogical settings. Geoffrey’s proclivity towards “nationalizing” topics and forms of address seems to have increased rather than limited the international appeal of his poetry. The present section shifts to consider how the poetic and rhetorical advice offered in the Poetria nova intersected with the legal, jurisdictional questions at the heart of the Interdict conflict. Fought largely by means of letters, the Interdict constituted a quintessentially rhetorical war, with liturgical proscriptions and property confiscations its primary weapons and communal religious life its primary victim. Jurisdictionally, it turned on the fraught question of royal prerogative over the church elections, a long-standing and unsettled dispute that would make its way into Magna Carta as the first clause, protecting Church liberty, just as the Poetria nova was achieving its final form around 1215.⁵² But calls for the defense of “Church liberty” did not resonate as they had during the Becket dispute a generation earlier, due largely to the weapons of interdiction and excommunication wielded by Innocent III to “persuade” John away from intransigence. In this case, lay and religious communities suffered while king ⁵² For further discussion, see Chapter 3.

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        

and pope argued their respective territorial and spiritual rights. The cause of Church liberty, in this case, lost some of the moral clarity of martyrdom gained in Becket’s death.⁵³ The complexities of this debate provide the Poetria nova its ostensible occasion, a readymade test case for demonstrating the importance of compositional skills to an audience of future royal and ecclesiastical clerks. We have already seen how Geoffrey uses the dedicatory preface to praise the pontif’s learning, eloquence, wisdom, and governance. “You alone are like the world’s sun,” Geoffrey writes, and Rome like the heavens: “England sent me to Rome as from earth to heaven; it sent me to you as from darkness to light” [Tu solus mundo quasi sol . . . / Roma quasi caelum. Me transtulit Anglia Romam / Tanquam de terris ad caelum, transtulit ad vos / De tenebris velut ad lucem] (30–3). But Geoffrey includes another papal address in the Poetria nova that speaks more forcefully to the theological and jurisdictional quandaries at stake in the Interdict crisis. In the longest and most ambitious of the treatise’s set pieces, he offers a tour de force display of all nineteen of the “figures of thought” contained in the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Its working occasion, however, is not praise but rather delicate admonition, as Geoffrey suggests to a now unnamed pope that he has neglected his duty to judge and punish his fellow clergy: Est papae leges sacras dictare, minorum Praescriptam juris formam servare. Sed errant Quamplures, quorum te, papa, redarguit error. Parcis, non punis, enormia lucra sequentes; Illicitum vendunt et emunt, sine vindice culpae. Papa potens, cujus non est breve posse, memento Vindictae. Mansuete pater, quandoque mucrones Exime. Si dormit vindicta, vagabitur errans, Ut lupus insultans aut ut vulpecula dammae Insidians. (1280–9) [To proclaim sacred laws is the pope’s prerogative; to observe the form of law prescribed is the part of lesser men. But very many go astray, and that straying judges you, holy Father. You spare, and do not punish, those who seek shameful gain. They buy and sell what is illicit, with no one to punish their guilt. Powerful Father, you whose power is by no means brief, be mindful of vengeance. Gentle Father, unsheathe at some time the sword’s point. If vengeance sleeps, the straying will range like a springing wolf, or a fox lurking in wait for the doe.] ⁵³ This did not prevent Langton, Innocent III, and other supporters from actively reviving the Becket controversy. For discussion, see Webster, “Church versus Crown after Becket,” and further discussion following.

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 :     

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Crafted to showcase the rhetorical figures of distributio, licentia, diminutio, and descriptio, these lines follow an order and script elaborated in Book IV of the Rhetorica.⁵⁴ Geoffrey employs distributio to elaborate the pope’s duties, licentia to challenge him respectfully but frankly, diminutio to undercut the harsh truths he has just set forth, and descriptio to address, finally, the matter at hand. That matter is simony, an offense that—as Geoffrey makes clear—indicts the entire Church hierarchy, beginning with its head. The poem goes on to remind its addressee that the prudent pope sets his will to the suppression of wickedness (1302–3). To illustrate the figure of sermocinatio, or dialogue, Geoffrey then imagines the pope in inner conversation with himself, wondering at the marvelousness of the deity who has given him, a young man, “the keys of the heavenly kingdom and authority over the world” [claves regni caelestis et orbis / Imperium] (1311–12). Since God alone has made him the “sole wonder of the world” [stupor unicus orbis] (1315), he recognizes that his power represents only an extension of God’s own: Jam cor et os et posse meum sic extulit et sic Praetulit hoc aliis, ut sim stupor unicus orbis. Istud opus non est humanum, gratia Summi Me fecit summum; mihi nec laus inde, sed illi Grates, de cujus dono suscepimus omnes. Unde magis teneor et strictius obligor illi Ponere quod poni disponit, tollere tolli Quod statuit, velle quod vult, odisse quod odit. Et cupio, quia sic astringor. (1314–22) [Now he has so raised up my heart and my lips and my power, and so placed them in his office above others, that I am the world’s sole wonder. This is not the doing of man; the grace of the Highest has set me highest; no praise is due me in this, but thanks is due him from whose fullness we have received all things. Hence I am bound more firmly, and more strictly obliged to him to put down what he wills to put down, to raise up what he wills to raise, to wish what he wishes, to hate what he hates. And I desire to be so bound.]

This poem goes on to state its central argument directly: the pope who fails to enact God’s just punishment “is his own enemy and the public enemy” [nam pariter suus est et publicus hostis] (1334). The remaining lines then turn their focus to the exemplar for all prelates, Christ, as they summarize salvation history and the doctrine of Redemption, all while progressing through the remaining figures of thought from the Rhetorica ad Herennium. ⁵⁴ Rhetorica ad Herennium, Caplan, trans., IV.xxxv–lv. For discussion of this passage, see Woods, Classroom Commentaries, 80–4, whose investigation of PN commentaries suggests it may have helped teach the ars praedicandi. See also Haye, Päpste und Poeten, 99–100.

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        

As we will see in Chapter 4, Bishop Robert Grosseteste would present a strikingly similar argument before the papal curia (now headed by Pope Innocent IV) in 1250, when he contended in more incendiary fashion that the pope who refused to punish the sins of his shepherds bore the full weight of those sins and worse, effectively abdicating the name and office of papa when he abdicates responsibility for a sinful Church.⁵⁵ In the case of the Poetria nova, this example of “ornatus facilis,” easy ornamentation, embeds a similarly difficult message, albeit doubly softened by its pedagogical frame and its anonymous addressee. Returning to the epithet of the stupor mundi, the poem subtly qualifies its opening dedication, as it presents the necessary counterpart to the praise of a sovereign—namely, corrective counsel. It seems reasonable to think that Geoffrey had Innocent specifically in mind with this encouragingly positive portrayal of a young pope who welcomes the strictures of divine law as he receives the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Innocent was indeed a youthful thirty-seven years old—and not even yet a consecrated priest—when he ascended to the papacy in 1198.⁵⁶ In the sermon he preached on the occasion of his consecration, he commits himself to precisely the strictures that Geoffrey attributes to his papal subject in the Poetria nova: “It is to the great praise of the powerful Lord,” Innocent affirms, “that he does his will through a vile servant, so that nothing is ascribed to human virtue but everything is attributed to divine power. For who am I, or what was the house of my father, that I should sit above kings and occupy the throne of glory?”⁵⁷ The two scholars may indeed have even crossed paths in Bologna. If Geoffrey of Vinsauf is the “Maestro Goffredo” credited with producing an ars dictaminis manual in Bologna in 1188, then both men would have been at the university in the same years as Innocent (then Lotario dei Conti di Segni) studied law.⁵⁸ The Poetria nova thus begins by praising papal power as that which transcends human measure. It then adds nuance to that grant of jurisdictional license when it suggests in the later set piece that the pope must bind himself willingly to God’s law in order to enact divine justice on Earth.⁵⁹ In the closing lines of the treatise,

⁵⁵ See Chapter 4, 148–9. ⁵⁶ For an account, see Moore, Pope Innocent III, 1–2 and 25–9, and for Innocent’s career before the papacy, Peters, “Lotario dei Conti di Segni becomes Pope Innocent III.” ⁵⁷ Sermon 4:2, Patrologia Latina, 217: 653–60, col. 657c–d: “Verum ad magnam potentis Domini laudem accedit, quod per vilem servum suum beneplacitum operatur, ut nihil ascribatur humanae virtuti, sed totum attribuatur divinae potentiae. Quis autem sum ego, aut quae domus patris mei, ut sedeam excellentior regibus et solium gloriae teneam?” Cited in Moore, Pope Innocent III, 28, translation his. ⁵⁸ The attribution remains uncertain, though the incorporation of verse introductions to each of the segments of the manual strengthens the case for Geoffrey’s authorship. For discussion and an edition of the Summa de arte dictandi, see Licitra, “La Summa de arte dictandi;” and, for discussion in relation to Geoffrey’s other dictaminal writings, Camargo, “Toward a comprehensive art.” ⁵⁹ On the tension between the pope’s unequivocal legal authority as judge and his personal fallibility with regard to scripture, see the discussion in Tierney, Origin of Papal Infallibility, 14–57.

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 :     

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Geoffrey again returns to these same jurisprudential questions to make one more direct address to Innocent. It is here that Geoffrey models what dictaminal writers would call the petitio of a formal letter—the request proffered after the sender has captured the goodwill of the addressee and narrated the circumstances of the particular cause. Geoffrey begs his petition on behalf of King John, asking the pope to look forgivingly upon this newly pledged “soldier of the cross and of Christ, and sword of the entire church” [Et Crucis est factus et Christi miles et ensis / Totius Ecclesiae] (2090–1). The reference to the Cross suggests an allusion to John’s crusading vow, taken in March 1215 after he had reconciled with Innocent; if correct, this reference pushes the potential completion of the Poetria nova to sometime soon after the Interdict ended.⁶⁰ With John now amenable to papal correction, Geoffrey—in a reversal of his address regarding simony—counsels clemency in the closing section of the work: Imperialis apex, cui servit poplite flexo Roma caput mundi, qui plenus nectare dulci Musarum redoles conditus aromate morum, Pace tua loquar, et paucis. Cum plurima possis, Posse modum servare velis. Memor imprime menti: Quando nocere potes, noli: satis est nocuisse Posse nocere. Nihil facias quod postmodo velles Non fieri, sed mens sit cauta praeambula facti. (2081–8) [Crown of the empire, you whom Rome, capitol of the world, serves with bent knee; you who, rich in the sweet nectar of the muses, give forth fragrance tempered with the perfume of your manners, with your leave I shall speak, and briefly. Although you are able to do most things, be pleased to retain only the power to do them. Take care to imprint on your mind: although you can inflict injury, do not; the power to injure is already injury enough. Do nothing which you would afterwards wish undone, but let deliberation be the cautious prelude to action.]

In asking Innocent to refrain from injuring England, Geoffrey once again subtly returns the Poetria nova to its dedication. There, as we saw, he makes a pun on the pontiff’s name, observing that, by the rules of hexameter verse, he would rightly have to address him as “Papa Nocenti” and thus give him an “acephalous name” [Acephatum nomen tribuam] (1–2). Deprived of its exonerative prefix, the title of

⁶⁰ An account of John’s taking of the cross is given in the Barnwell Chronicle. See Walter of Coventry, II.219. On John’s vow, see Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 134, and Cheney, “Eve of Magna Carta,” 313. As Cheney notes, John’s pledge effectively secured his possessions under Innocent’s protection, a “master-stroke of diplomacy” at a time when he faced increasingly intense baronial opposition. For a poem that narrates events of this same period, see Chapter 3, 126–7.

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        

“Papa Nocenti” bears a sharp edge—one that the Poetria nova as a whole has sought alternately to direct and to blunt. For reasons pedagogical and, perhaps, political, Geoffrey of Vinsauf decided to make the Interdict and its aftermath the “occasion” for the Poetria nova—that is, the working pretext for poetic composition. As Camargo notes, this decision was almost certainly a belated one.⁶¹ The closing address begging clemency for King John seems to have been added to a manual that was already largely complete by 1215. Its absence from a number of Poetria nova manuscripts likewise suggests a somewhat tenuous connection to the work as whole, one easily severed by scribes who did not share a similar sense of urgency regarding the fate of the English king.⁶² Taken together, however, the three “papal” components of the Poetria nova resemble in broad outline the parts of a formal medieval epistle. It begins with a lavish captatio benevolentiae, progresses through the narration of the matter of concern (the address to the unnamed pope), and ends with a petition and conclusion (begging clemency for King John). Evidence from Geoffrey’s own dictaminal instruction strengthens this assertion. Leaving aside the Bolognese Summa de arte dictandi, which may or may not be Geoffrey’s, he treats the subject of letter writing most explicitly in the long version of his Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi.⁶³ Composed at the same time as the Poetria nova, it argues that a letter should take the form of an “extended rhetorical syllogism,” which begins in the exordium with a general proverb or exemplum.⁶⁴ This opening, keyed to the particulars of the addressee’s station and character, furthermore should contain “two verbs or a verb and a participle” [duo verba vel vnum verbum et vnum participium] from which the writer can then adduce the argument to be set forth in the narratio and petitio.⁶⁵ The conclusio completes the enthymeme by resolving and returning to the terms broached in the exordium. Though the comparison is not exact, the rhetorical syllogism proposed across these sections of the Poetria nova turns on the component parts of the name Innocentius: as we have seen, Geoffrey plays with the tension between the power to do harm [nocere] and the status of one who remains innocens, free of harmful intent. Geoffrey captures the goodwill of his addressee by appealing to this latter identity, before reminding him that he has an obligation to “unsheathe the sword’s point” against those who harm others. He then returns to that key concept in the petitio, when he reminds Innocent that “the power to injure is already injury ⁶¹ See “Liber uersuum,” 15. ⁶² As Nims notes, these lines are missing from a number of manuscripts. See Poetria nova, 95. Woods also shows that commentators regularly misread the king in question as Richard I rather than John. See Classroom Commentaries, 37–9. ⁶³ For discussion, and an edition of the concluding portion of the long Documentum, see Camargo, “Toward a comprehensive art.” On the relationship between the short and long version of the Documentum, see ibid., “Tria sunt.” ⁶⁴ The phrase is Camargo’s, “Toward a comprehensive art,” with discussion at 177 and following. ⁶⁵ Ibid. Text is taken from “Toward a comprehensive art,” 186.

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enough” [satis est nocuisse / Posse nocere] (2086–7). As ever in Geoffrey’s work, the line between the historically specific and conventionally generic proves thin. As he will tell his readers in the long Documentum, a letter addressing an ecclesiastic should stress that he “ought to be bound by justice, nor should he seem to stray towards tyranny out of the rigor of justice. His epithet—that is, what is proper to him—is to spare the downtrodden and castigate the prideful.”⁶⁶ This is precisely the message that Geoffrey sends to Innocent in the final lines of the Poetria nova, as John now faces him in the role of supplex, suppliant, rather than as one of the superbi who require correction. In this way, as the next sections show, the Poetria nova neatly summarizes the key jurisprudential premises underlying the imposition of interdict and related papal “correctives”: first that the pope, as stupor mundi, holds the spiritual authority to punish lay rulers as necessary, and, moreover, that he is spiritually obliged to do so as the representative of God’s law on Earth. But it is Geoffrey’s final lesson, urging the pontiff to be flexilis towards John despite his right and capacity to do harm, that proves most consequential in the context of the English Interdict. Ultimately, Geoffrey suggests, it is not simply the universality of the pope’s jurisdiction, but also his willingness to check its vengeance, that measures his fitness as a ruler. Before Innocent could demonstrate clemency in the case of the English king, however, he first had to establish his power to inflict corrective harm, and it is to the logic of this “necessary” collective punishment—that is, interdict—that we turn next. Following the death of Hubert Walter in 1205, the monks of Christ Church Canterbury elected three different archbishops in the space of two years. The first choice—their sub-prior, Reginald—traveled to Rome and received the pope’s approval in November 1205, even as the second choice—John de Grey, bishop of Norwich (and apparent patron of Gervase of Melkley, another author of an ars poetriae manual)—enjoyed the king’s support back in England. Canterbury elected him, too, in December 1205, without revealing the occurrence of the previous election, and it was this legal miasma that Innocent resolved by annulling the two irregular elections and postulating his own candidate, Stephen Langton, then cardinal-priest of St. Chrysogonus in Rome and formerly an eminent Paris theologian.⁶⁷ Consecrated by Innocent in 1207 over the king’s objections, Langton would only set foot in England six years into his tenure, at the conclusion of the long

⁶⁶ Ibid., 189: “In iusticia siquidem debet constringi, ne ex rigore iusticie eccleiasticus videatur in tirannidem emigrare. Eius enim epitetum, id est, proprium est parcere subiectis et castigare superbos.” ⁶⁷ Key chronicle accounts of the Interdict appear in Roger of Wendover, copied in Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, II.492–552; Gervase of Canterbury, II.98–101; the Barnwell annals, copied as part of Walter of Coventry, II.199–215; and an anonymous Canterbury chronicle account edited by Stubbs in the front matter to Gervase of Canterbury, II.liv-cxv. For analysis of the elections, see Knowles, “The Canterbury election of 1205–6;” Cheney, Innocent III, 147–54; and ibid., “A neglected record of the Canterbury election of 1205–6.”

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period of general interdict that kept him, many fellow English ecclesiastics, and much of the Christ Church Canterbury community in France and Flanders. Innocent employed the general interdict, and its more serious cousin, major excommunication, as a series of escalated threats directed at John. Like excommunication, interdict operated as a form of ecclesiastical sanction, a “compulsion by . . . passive resistance,” in Edward Krehbiel’s terms, in which “the church withdraws from public service until society ‘plays fair.’ ”⁶⁸ As a punitive measure, interdict most often functioned territorially in the form of a general local interdict, which arrested liturgical ceremonies in a particular region until offending parties made amends with the Church.⁶⁹ It was this kind of sanction that Innocent III placed upon England on March 23, 1208, when he commanded the bishops of London, Ely, and Worcester to lay a sentence banning all liturgical services and sacraments save baptism and last rites.⁷⁰ Even before its official pronouncement, however, the general interdict circulated in England as a threat, a memory, and an idea—a tactic wielded not just to exhort compliance from the king but to marshal ecclesiastical resistance to royal power. As a threat, interdict worked as a blunt instrument; in theory, it was meant to galvanize popular opinion against a recalcitrant sovereign and thereby persuade him to make amends with Church and commons.⁷¹ As an idea, interdict rested on subtler legal and theological grounds. As Peter Clarke describes, the practice found its basic canonical justification in the logic of Exodus 20:5, which decreed that the sins of fathers may be visited upon their sons to the third and fourth generations.⁷² Even those who had no direct participation in a sovereign’s malfeasance, in other words, might pay the price of the sin. The question of who deserved punishment for a sin thus also begged the question of who constituted the “innocent,” especially in the case of a family, people, or polity, where the sin of the patriarch potentially implicated all those who, by explicit cooperation or tacit acceptance, witnessed or benefited from it.⁷³

⁶⁸ Krehbiel, The Interdict, 12. More recent, in-depth studies have been conducted by Clarke, The Interdict in the Thirteenth Century; and Cheney, “A recent view of the general interdict in England;” see also Howland, “The origin of the local interdict.” ⁶⁹ See Krehbiel, The Interdict, 7–9. Less frequently, a pope might impose a particular local interdict, banning services at a specific chapel or cathedral, or a personal interdict, which closely resembled a minor excommunication, proscribing access to sacraments but not spiritually excluding an individual from the community of the faithful. See Clarke, The Interdict in the Thirteenth Century, 59–85. ⁷⁰ See Cheney and Semple, eds. and trans., Selected Letters, no. 34, 102–3. ⁷¹ See Cheney, “King John and the Papal Interdict,” 297; rpt. in The Papacy in England 12th–14th Centuries. ⁷² See Clarke, The Interdict in the Thirteenth Century, 14–16. “Thou shalt not adore them, nor serve them: I am the Lord thy God, mighty, jealous, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” [Non adorabis ea, neque coles: ego sum Dominus Deus tuus fortis, zelotes, visitans iniquitatem patrum in filios, in tertiam et quartam generationem eorum qui oderunt me]. ⁷³ See Clarke’s introduction to The Interdict in the Thirteenth Century, 14–58, as well as ibid., “Innocent III, canon law and the punishment of the guiltless;” ibid., “Peter the Chanter, Innocent III

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These questions of innocence and guilt, authority and consent, proved to be central concerns of the Parisian intellectual circles in which both Innocent III and Langton had circulated prior to assuming ecclesiastical office.⁷⁴ Peter the Chanter, for instance, argued on the basis of 2 Kings 24 that subjects who consent to the sins of their leaders are sinners themselves: God punished the people of Israel for David’s murder of Uriah “because [they] did not resist David when he killed Uriah or because they conspired with him” [quia non resistit David interficienti Uriam vel quia ei consensit].⁷⁵ As Clarke demonstrates, this line of argumentation had direct application to interdict situations. Early in his papacy, Innocent III would employ 2 Kings 24 in his decretal Etsi necesse (1199) when he affirmed the interdict laid upon the kingdom of Léon. Langton also used the example of King David’s sin and repentance to examine the justness of interdict in his commentary on Chronicles.⁷⁶ In both of these cases, interdict presupposed what Clarke calls the “collective guilt” of the larger community, even as it required different responses from various constituencies within that community. To the willful pride of the sovereign belonged the remedies of humility, contrition, and repentance; to the timidity and silence of his subjects belonged the correctives of militant courage and conscientious resistance. Interdict thus summoned the logic of collective moral reciprocity even as it fractured that collectivity along lines of conscience. It therefore ran the risk—as Innocent himself would experience in the case of England—of reinforcing the very communal allegiances that it had intended to weaken, rallying support around a beleaguered sovereign while fostering resentment toward the interfering outsider.⁷⁷

and theological views of collective guilt and punishment;” and ibid., “Innocent III, the interdict, and medieval theories of popular resistance.” ⁷⁴ On Parisian moral theology at the end of the twelfth century and its bearing on theories of government, see Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 249–54; Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants; and Buc, L’ambiguïté du livre. On Innocent III’s intellectual formation, see Peters, “Lotario dei Conti di Segni becomes Pope Innocent III.” On Langton’s period of study in Paris, see Powicke, Stephen Langton, 23–48, and the essays collected in Bataillon, et al., eds., Étienne Langton: Prédicateur, Bibliste, Théologien. ⁷⁵ David’s anguished question of God—why punish the people of Israel for the fault of their king— would provide Peter the Chanter, and following him Langton, ample support for the argument that subjects have a duty to prevent rulers from committing misdeeds. See Buc, L’ambiguïté du livre, 356–7; Clarke, The Interdict in the Thirteenth Century, 39–41, esp. 40 n. 90; and ibid., “Innocent III, the interdict, and medieval theories of popular resistance,” 84–5. ⁷⁶ Patrologia Latina 204, col. 613b. For discussion, see Clarke, The Interdict in the Thirteenth Century, 41, and “Innocent III, the interdict, and medieval theories of popular resistance,” 93–4. Langton considers 1 Chronicles 21, in which David undertakes a forbidden census and the Lord in turn punishes Israel with pestilence, in his commentary on Paralipomenon: “Percussit Israel. Sed quare, cum non peccaverit? Solutio: Gregorius innuit quod ex peccato populi fuit quod Dominus permisit David ita temptari ut numeraret populum, et ita uterque peccavit, et rex et populus. Vel—rege peccante, sepe punitur populus. Unde rege peccante, terra ejus ponitur sub interdicto. Et nota quod David peccavit in multitudine populi et ideo punitus est in diminutione.” See Langton, Commentary on the Book of Chronicles, 128. ⁷⁷ See Clarke, “Innocent III, the Interdict, and medieval theories of popular resistance,” 80, and Cheney, Innocent III and England, 311–4.

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Interdict necessarily originated from afar: it represented the universal authority of the pope over matters of Christian practice and sought to prioritize membership in the corpus Christianorum over other more local claims and prerogatives, including the “local prerogatives” of the king. It thus demanded messengers— ecclesiastical representatives who could communicate the sanctions and, in doing so, exemplify the obedience those sanctions demanded. As we will see later in this chapter, these dual roles—to persuade compliance and to embody that compliance— converge in the written record of the English Interdict, and particularly in the letters that traveled between England and Rome during the critical years of 1207 to 1208, as Innocent first threatened and then levied sanctions. The opening and closing lines of the Poetria nova suggest that Geoffrey of Vinsauf followed these developments closely. In the opening dedication, we recall, Geoffrey states that “England sent me to Rome” [Me transtulit Anglia Romam] as from Earth to the heavens. He returns to this itinerary in the closing lines of the manual when he prepares to send the completed book to the pope in his stead. The final dedicatory lines of the manual, however, address themselves not to Innocent directly but to an intermediary—a certain “William,” whom Geoffrey gifts with the “little book I have written for the pope” [Quod papae scripsi munus speciale libelli / Accipe] (2099–100). In a passage dense with plays on the language of giving and patronage, Geoffrey identifies William as the “flower of the kingdom” [flos regni] (2100) and the “jewel of donors” [gemma datorum] (2106), richly bestowed with God’s gifts and generous in offering them in service of the kingdom: Quod papae scripsi munus speciale libelli Accipe, flos regni. Primo potiaris honore Hujus secreti; nec id unum sume, sed una Do tibi me totum, Wilhelme, vir auree: totus Sum tuus ad votum, cujus cor in omnibus amplum Non capitur minimis, sed semper anhelat in altum. Nobilitas dandi, quam non novere moderni, Est innata tibi, qui solus, gemma datorum, Das ita, ne qua manus sit dando latior, aut mens Laetior au morula brevior. Tu solus es ille Cui Deus infudit quidquid decet, utpote pectus Magni consilii, quo pectore pectora regum Se fulcire solent tractando negotia regni. [Magnus es in dando, prudens in agendo, modestus In gestu, rigidus in jure, fidelis in omni Re, semperque tuos divina praembula virtus Urget successus], et semper in ardua crescis.

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Sed, licet omnis apex tibi crescat honoris honore, Crescere non poteris, quantum de jure mereris. (2099–18)⁷⁸ [Accept, O flower of the kingdom, this special gift of a little book which I have written for the pope. Receive the highest honour this private work offers. And take not the book alone, William, man of gold, but with it I give you all that I am; I am wholly yours as a votive offering. Your heart, generous in all things, is not ensnared by trifles, but ever aspires on high. Nobility in giving, which men of this age do not know, is inborn in you, jewel of donors, who alone so give that in giving no hand is more lavish, no mind happier, no hesitation so brief. You alone are a man upon whom God has bestowed every fitting gift, and a mind for great counsel, by which the minds of kings are accustomed to support themselves in carrying on the affairs of the kingdom. You are great in giving, prudent in doing, modest in bearing, inflexible in law, in everything faithful; and divine power, going before you, ever fosters your success, and you ever rise towards the heights. But if every peak of honour should rise higher for you, you could not rise higher in honour as much as you justly deserve.]

A Trinity College Cambridge manuscript (MS R.14.22) identifies this figure as a central one in the Interdict controversy: William de Ste Mère-Église, bishop of London from 1199–1224.⁷⁹ Though the attribution remains uncertain, it seems eminently possible, especially when we consider that William’s career tracks broadly with Geoffrey’s poetic interests beginning in the 1170s. William was “clerk of the chamber” to Henry II, a role he also held for Richard I, accompanying the king on crusade in 1190 and later visiting him in captivity in Germany in 1193.⁸⁰ He helped raise the ransom for Richard, and in the years following served as circuit judge and one of first justices of the Jews, responsible for collecting king’s poll tax in 1194.⁸¹ His loyal service to Richard earned his nomination to the bishopric of London in 1199, and he continued to be closely allied to Richard’s brother, undertaking diplomatic missions for John to Germany and Scotland. He also performed service for Innocent III, acting at various points as a papal ⁷⁸ The three lines added in brackets were relegated to the apparatus in Faral’s addition. I have included them here and adjusted the line numbering accordingly. Translation has been slightly adjusted from Nims. ⁷⁹ Nims, in her notes to the Poetria nova, 95, identifies two possible candidates for “William,” both attested in manuscripts. A copy of the treatise in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 406 identifies the recipient as William of Wrotham, archdeacon of Taunton and keeper of the king’s navies and tin mines. By contrast, the Trinity manuscript adds a gloss, in mid-thirteenth-century hand, explaining “Hic dirigit auctor sermonem ad Willmum episcopum Londonionsem [sic] ut eius favore adepta hoc opus in maiori teneatur auctoritate.” I consider William de Ste Mère-Église to be the stronger candidate for reasons explained later in this chapter. ⁸⁰ For William’s biography, see Turner, Men Raised from the Dust, 20–34. ⁸¹ Ibid., 23. On William’s role in developing the Jewish Exchequer, see Stacey, “The massacres of 1189–90,” 115–17.

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judge-delegate.⁸² Having ascended—not unlike Thomas Becket—from relatively humble Norman beginnings to a position of significant administrative power, William fits, in Ralph Turner’s words, “squarely into the category of those curiales who rose to episcopal rank through their services to the Angevin monarchy . . . capable of filling the need for men skilled in record-keeping and finances.”⁸³ William’s exemplary service to both king and pope, however, placed him in a difficult position when the two rulers parted ways over the Canterbury see. Together with the bishops of Ely and Worcester, William was tasked in 1207 with persuading John to relent in his opposition to Stephen Langton. When months of strenuous effort on that front failed, the three bishops had responsibility for laying and enforcing the Interdict before fleeing to France as exiles. Only with the threat of French invasion did John relent in his position against Langton, taking the cross in a ceremony officiated by William, at St. Paul’s, in 1215.⁸⁴ The conclusion of the Poetria nova suggests an intimate familiarity with these affairs and especially with the prelate burdened with brokering the peace between a confidently expansionist pope and a defiantly weakened king. If William de Ste Mère-Église served as patron to Geoffrey of Vinsauf, his influence might indeed extend not only to this closing section of Poetria nova but to Geoffrey’s earlier topical verses as well: as one of Richard’s closest advisers, William would make an obvious recipient for the laments on the king’s death.⁸⁵ Nor would William constitute the only patron-bishop of an artes poetriae author in this period: Gervase of Melkley composed a lavish encomium in praise of John de Grey, the king’s preferred choice for archbishop of Canterbury, lines from which appear in excerpted form throughout his Ars versificaria.⁸⁶ Whether we posit William as Geoffrey’s patron or simply a beneficiary of his poetics manual, he epitomizes the administrative virtues that grammatical education in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries sought to inculcate: “great in giving, prudent in doing, modest in bearing, inflexible in law, in everything faithful.” As the next section shows, these virtues came under severe strain during the Interdict years, as William and his companion bishops sought to remain “inflexible in law” while encouraging the king in the opposite direction.

⁸² Turner, Men Raised from the Dust, 29. ⁸³ Ibid., 33–4. ⁸⁴ As Turner notes, John “does not appear to have borne William any ill will for his part in the Canterbury succession crisis,” gifting him with does and stags from the royal forest and awarding him free warren (i.e., hunting rights) at his royal manor, Clacton, in Essex. See Men Raised from the Dust, 31. ⁸⁵ The lament for Richard circulated independently in London c. 1215, a fact attested by the space preserved for it in the Leges Anglorum, copied in the vicinity of St. Paul’s. For further discussion, see Chapter 3, 110–11. ⁸⁶ Like Geoffrey’s topical verse, the poem survives in Glasgow, Hunterian Library, MS V.8.14. See Harbert, Thirteenth-Century Anthology of Rhetorical Verse, 47–52, no. 40, for a text of the poem. For the Latin edition, see Gervase of Melkley, Gervais von Melkley Ars Poetica, Gräbener, ed., and for an English translation, ibid., Gervais of Melkley’s Treatise on the Art of Versifying and the Method of Composing in Prose, Giles, trans. For further discussion and an excerpted translation, see also Copeland and Sluiter, eds., Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, 607–13.

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Requesting and Exhorting: Epistolary Persuasion and Embodied Policy This chapter has already broached in passing the relationship between the traditions of the ars poetriae and the ars dictaminis. I asserted that Matthew of Vendôme, for example, borrowed from earlier twelfth-century dictaminal manuals when he composed sample descriptions of a pope and emperor—arrayed in the traditional hierarchy used for formulas of epistolary salutation—and we have seen in the previous sections how Geoffrey borrows from his own teaching on epistolary prose to craft his papal addresses in the Poetria nova. This section explores the intersection between these arts in a more focused way, as it turns to consider the role of letters during the Interdict crisis. As James Murphy notes, the ars dictaminis represents “a truly medieval invention.”⁸⁷ A distinctive offshoot of grammatical and rhetorical instruction, the art of letter writing sought to realize the skills of classical oratory in textual form. The earliest manuals treating letter composition, Alberic of Monte Cassino’s Dictaminum radii and Breviarum de dictamine (c. 1087), establish the basic form that later authors would imitate and adapt. Alberic identifies the component parts of a letter and, in good Ciceronian fashion, explains how the letter writer can render the reader well-disposed to the argument through the use of appropriate figures and tropes. By the early twelfth century, dictaminal teaching had concentrated itself in northern Italy and especially in Bologna, where the study of law and prose letter composition proved natural allies.⁸⁸ This early generation of Bolognese teachers, including Hugh of Bologna and Adalbert of Samaria, debated the degree to which the ars dictaminis belonged to the broader art of rhetoric, but by the late twelfth century, the connection between letter composition and the trivial disciplines proved inextricable.⁸⁹ As the Italian manuals crossed over to the French cathedral schools of the Loire Valley—and Orléans, in particular—the ars dictaminis witnessed an attendant “grammaticalization,” as a new generation of grammar teachers embraced epistolary forms as yet one more means of demonstrating techniques of effective style and argumentation. As Martin Carmargo notes, “it can hardly be coincidence that these artes uersificandi . . . began to appear at precisely the moment when the Italian artes dictandi began to be remade (probably by the very same teachers) in the image of the author-based instruction prevalent in central France. Rather, the Italian manuals provided a powerful model that enabled French teachers to formalize a well-established but implicit (and largely oral) pedagogy into an explicit

⁸⁷ Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 194, with an overview of the ars dictaminis at 192–268; Camargo, Ars Dictaminis, Ars Dictandi; ibid., Medieval Rhetorics of Prose Composition, 1–33; and Richardson, “The ars dictaminis, the formulary, and medieval epistolary practice.” ⁸⁸ See Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 209–27. ⁸⁹ Ibid.

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and systematic art and to distill that art into written treatises.”⁹⁰ Matthew of Vendôme’s seemingly unprecedented leap into the “new” genre of ars poetriae thus appears less novel when viewed in light of the dictaminal tradition, which had been schematizing compositional precepts for nearly a century. Whether under the influence of French or Italian schools, dictaminal instruction necessarily contended with the distinctive nature of the formal medieval letter, which sought to transmute speech into writing and then “re-voice” it for its recipient. As Michael Clanchy describes, the work of composing, delivering, and receiving letters was primarily oral and aural in nature. A skill more properly of “the mouth rather than the hand,” the writing of a physical letter served to authenticate two distant oral performances: the dictated words of the initial composer and the public oral delivery of the letter by the courier to its recipient.⁹¹ As both a material object and an occasion for performance, a letter therefore always assumed a certain exhortative quality, a desire to realize a speaker’s intention even if the sender could not vocalize it personally. The Bolognese master of rhetoric Guido Faba signals this distance in his etymology of epistola “from epi, which is ‘beyond,’ and stola or stolon, which is ‘sending,’ because it makes the sender’s desire clear ‘beyond’ a messenger’s capacity to expound it” [ab epi, quod est supra, et stola vel stolon, quod est missio, quod supra id quod nuntius posset mittentis affectum declarat].⁹² Correspondence from the early months of the Interdict controversy highlights the diplomatic formality of epistolary exchanges. In May 1207, for example, Innocent wrote to John—not for the first time—urging him to grant his consent to Langton’s election. In previous missives, Innocent had written “meekly and kindly, requesting and exhorting” [humiliter et benigne, rogando et exhortando], he explains, while John had responded “insolently and impudently as though threatening and reproaching” [contumaciter et proterve, quasi comminando et exprobrando].⁹³ The pope goes on to express surprise that John professed not to know who Langton was, when, not a year before, the king had written to Langton to congratulate him on his promotion. Innocent is moreover skeptical of the king’s ⁹⁰ Camargo, “Toward a comprehensive art,” 174. ⁹¹ Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 270–1, at 271. As Bene of Florence summarizes in his early thirteenth-century ars dictandi the Candelabrum, the task of the dictator, or letter writer, “is to make his hearers understand what he says, believe what they have understood, and consent to what they have believed” [que tria multum expediunt dictatori, quia suum est facere ut ea que dicit intelligant auditores, intellecta credant et creditis acquiescant]. See Bene Florentini Candelabrum, I.4.3–6, cited in Camargo, “Special delivery,” 177. On the technologies of the letter, see also Camargo, “Special delivery,” 175, and ibid., “Where’s the brief ?,” 3. ⁹² Cited Carmargo, “Where’s the brief ?,” 2 and 15. See Guido Faba, “Guidonis Fabe Summa dictaminis,” Gaudenzi, ed., 296–7. ⁹³ Cheney and Cheney, Calendar, no. 756; Cheney and Semple, eds. and trans., Selected Letters, no. 29, 86–90, at 86, translation adjusted slightly. Copies of the letter survive in London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra E.1, fol. 143v; Cambridge, CCC, MS 450, 100; and Durham Cathedral Library, MS C iv 24, fol. 97r. See also Gervase of Canterbury, II.lxxii; Roger of Wendover, in Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, II.517.

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claims that he could not consent to the consecration because he never received the letter instructing him how to do so. Such a letter had been delivered into the hands of royal envoys by the pope’s own courier, Innocent assures him. Given these good faith efforts, the pope concludes that he no longer needs to delay the consecration further, and he closes with a warning for John: “To fight against God and the Church in this cause for which St. Thomas, that glorious martyr and archbishop, recently shed his blood, would be dangerous for you—the more so, as your father and brother of illustrious memory . . . abjured that evil custom at the hands of the Apostolic See.”⁹⁴ Innocent’s letter hints at the kinds of ceremonial and diplomatic machinations that attended the exchange of formal correspondence in the thirteenth century. As with all papal correspondence, this letter derived from the papal chancery, perhaps with Innocent’s personal involvement but just as likely not.⁹⁵ Innocent’s “voice” in this letter may be a notarial fiction, but the letter’s status as an embodiment of the papal will remains real and tangible—so much so that John apparently went to great lengths to avoid publicly acknowledging it. Letters, in this way, represent Ciceronian rhetoric at its most applied: in their legal and administrative capacities, they exist to persuade, enjoin, plead, or castigate, all with the larger purpose of influencing the recipient’s behaviors.⁹⁶ Innocent’s letters make a point of emphasizing their therapeutic intentions, as they begin by “meekly and kindly” exhorting the king, only to turn to harsher medicine when those gentler approaches failed. Such diplomatic psychologizing comprised an important component of dictaminal instruction. In his long Documentum, for instance, Geoffrey of Vinsauf includes a model letter in the voice of the imprisoned Arthur of Brittany, seeking clemency from his uncle and captor, King John.⁹⁷ Included to showcase the “grave and plain” style appropriate to begging freedom from one’s own kin, the letter appeals to John’s mercy and avuncular duty. Inadvertently, however, it also exemplifies the limits of epistolary persuasion: though Arthur deploys all the best loci by which “the spirit of the listener may be moved to mercy” [quibus ad misericordiam moueatur animus auditoris], as Geoffrey puts it, history bears out the failure of this effort. John remained decidedly unmoved by his nephew’s plight—unsurprisingly, since he himself was responsible for it.⁹⁸ ⁹⁴ Cheney and Semple, eds. and trans., Selected Letters, no. 29, 89–90: “non esset tibi tutum in hac causa deo et ecclesie repugnare pro qua beatus Thomas martyr et pontifex gloriosus sanguinem suum recenter effudit, presertim ex quo pater et frater tui clare memorie . . . in manibus legatorum apostolice sedis illam pravam consuetudinem abiurarunt.” On Innocent’s use of Thomas Becket in this letter and others sent during the crisis, see Webster, “Crown versus Church after Becket,” esp. 160–6. ⁹⁵ As Cheney and Semple suggest, many of Innocent’s letters reveal his distinctive theological and juridical perspectives, though “we must squarely face the facts that there is no positive proof of the pope’s drafting any particular letter.” See Selected Letters, xxii, and also Poole, Lectures on the History of the Papal Chancery. ⁹⁶ Murphy calls the ars dictaminis the “rare example of applied rhetoric.” See Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 268. ⁹⁷ See Camargo, “Toward a comprehensive art,” 191–2. ⁹⁸ Ibid., 192.

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        

Not unlike the “hard case” of Arthur of Brittany, the Interdict crisis presented the pope and his bishop-executors with an especially complex rhetorical challenge. A tool to punish disobedience, interdict demanded obedience to enforce its aims, and it thus needed to be argued for, not simply enacted. According to the theological underpinnings of the policy, moreover, the task of persuading a ruler back into a right relationship with God fell to the whole community of the realm: insofar as the “guilt of the father” may be visited upon his sons, those sons have an obligation to correct their erring father. This is the message that Innocent and Langton sent to England in a coordinated set of letters issued in August 1207.⁹⁹ Addressed to the bishop-executors, on Innocent’s part, and the larger community of the realm, on Langton’s, the letters emphasize Canterbury’s history as a wellspring of ecclesiastical resistance, while also passing the burden of persuasion to those local bishops with direct access to the king. Thus, Innocent directs the bishops of London, Ely, and Worcester to “respectfully exhort [John] as king, and diligently persuade him as a son . . . to submit to wise counsels” [reverenter ut regem hortemini et diligenter ut filium inducatis . . . sanis consiliis acquiescat].¹⁰⁰ Langton’s letter of the same day addresses a wider audience: all “his most beloved brothers in Christ” in England. Like Innocent, Langton makes Canterbury, and Becket above all, a locus for collective identification and resistance. But even as he seeks to link Becket’s plight with his own, Langton recognizes a fundamental tension within the policy of interdiction: namely, that his exiled position exempts him from the very sanctions he levies. He assures his audience that he remains loyal to his native land, despite a professional career spent abroad. He has carried a “natural love” of the realm “from tender years,” he tells them, and thus feels in his own spirit the burden of the punishment that he places on them.¹⁰¹ Nevertheless, those who remain in England have a moral responsibility to flee sin and counsel others to do the same. To do otherwise, Langton warns, constitutes consent to the sin or even active rejoicing in that sin. Only those who follow their king in disobedience need to fear the Interdict, Langton advises in closing; those who refuse to consent find merit with God. Langton’s arguments in this letter bear witness to his years as part of the Paris theological milieu organized

⁹⁹ See Powicke, Stephen Langton, 75–6. On the papal court of Viterbo in the summer of 1207, see Moore, Pope Innocent III, 171–2. For discussion of his correspondence with John in August as part of a larger series of letters advising European leaders, see ibid., 173–5. ¹⁰⁰ Cheney and Cheney, Letters of Innocent III, no. 763; Cheney and Semple, eds. and trans., Selected Letters, no. 30, 93–4. Copies of the letters survive in the Regesta Vaticana, 7a, fol. 24r; London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra E.1, fol. 144r; Cambridge, CCC, MS 450, 101; and Durham Cathedral Library, MS C iv 24, fol. 97v. See also Gervase of Canterbury, II.lxxvi; Potthast, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, no. 3167. ¹⁰¹ Gervase of Canterbury, II.lxxvi: “Ab annis enim teneris tam tenere regnum nostrum amore dileximus naturali, quod per compassionem portavimus casus regni prosperos et adversos. Nunc etiam tam intime vobis condolemus, et compatimur, quod poenam, quam vobis infligimus, animo sustenimus, acsi socii fuissemus in culpa.”

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around Peter the Chanter.¹⁰² At its heart, the letter seeks to implicate all of England in the “collective guilt” of Interdict, while also implicating all of England in a collective remedy: good counsel and obedient resistance to sin.¹⁰³ The command to obey through a stance of principled resistance stands at the heart of two subsequent letters Innocent wrote in November 1207, one to the bishops of England and Wales and another to the nobles of England. Reiterating his own martyr-like adherence to the faith, Innocent enjoins similar obedience from his clerics, chastising those who object to the dictates of the Interdict. As the prophet Samuel once admonished Saul, so Innocent admonishes his bishops that “it is like the sin of witchcraft, to rebel: and like the crime of idolatry, to refuse to obey” (1 Kings 15:23). Though not yet compelled to do so through special mandate, they have an obligation to defend ecclesiastical liberty and oppose themselves “as a wall for the house of God against the enemy.”¹⁰⁴ In his letter to the magnates dated several days later, Innocent employs a different set of examples to similar ends. He warns that they do well not to “serve two masters,” as the scriptures say, but rather should risk the anger of the king by bringing him back under the right rule of God. Though John may not appreciate their well-meaning counsel now, Innocent acknowledges, such conduct will “benefit you in time by winning his love” [tandem proficiet ad amorem].¹⁰⁵ This is an optimistic promise to say the least, and, as if recognizing the need for stronger medicine, Innocent closes his letter on a more threatening note, warning that the king who injures ecclesiastical rights may find his kingdom seized as the biblical King Belshazzar’s was, “by the judgment of the hand that wrote ‘Mane, Tekel, Peres.’ ”¹⁰⁶ In inviting both ¹⁰² See Smalley, The Study of the Bible; Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants; and Buc, L’Ambiguïté du livre. ¹⁰³ See Clarke, The Interdict in the Thirteenth Century, 42. ¹⁰⁴ Cheney and Cheney, Letters of Innocent III, no. 769; Potthast, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, no. 3226; Gervase of Canterbury, II.lxxxv–vi: “Quia quasi peccatum ariolandi est repugnare, et quasi scelus idololatriae adquiescere nolle. . . . sed pro debito pastoralis officii voluntarii defendere tenemini ecclesiasticam libertatem, et ‘murum pro domo Domini’ [cf. Ez. 13:5] vos opponere ascendentibus ex adverso.” ¹⁰⁵ Cheney and Semple, eds. and trans., Selected Letters, no. 32, 98. ¹⁰⁶ Ibid. Selected Letters, no. 32, 98–9: monemus attentius et propensius exhortamur . . . quatinus apud eumdem regem fidelibus persuasionibus et salubribus consiliis insistatis, ut per viam Roboam minime incedendo, consilia maturiora non spernat . . . ad ecclesiastica iura manum temere mittere non presumat; ne qui regnum Baltasar iudicio manus scribentis: “Mane, thecel, pharez” inopinabiliter occupari permisit a Persis, ei propter ecclesiam suam quam inaniter humiliare disponit, graviter indignetur. [we earnestly admonish you and zealously exhort you . . . to urge the king by honest reasoning and sound advice not to walk in the path of Rehoboam nor forsake the counsel of the older men . . . let him not presume rashly to put out his hand against ecclesiastical rights, lest the Lord, who by the judgment of the hand that wrote “Mane, Tekel, Peres” allowed Belshazzar’s kingdom to be unexpectedly seized by the Persians, should be gravely angry on account of His church which the king vainly plans to humiliate.]. See also Gervase of Canterbury, II.lxxxviii. For discussion of Innocent’s use of Daniel 5:25–31, see Webster, “Crown versus Church after Becket,” 162–3.

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clergy and laity to undertake the project of royal correction, these letters seek to do more than elicit compliance from their audience: they look to transform the collective identity of that audience, aligning “Englishness” with the spiritual prerogatives of the Church rather than the territorial prerogatives of the king. Becket’s model, in this case, expands to include not just the ecclesiastical community but the broader lay community as well, compeled to choose between temporal and spiritual “masters.” This hortatory agenda took multiple forms, as is indicated by the survival of a Latin plaint that recapitulates many of the key arguments of the pope and archbishop’s letters, including the biblical allusions Saul and Belshazzar.¹⁰⁷ It begins by exhorting all of England to join Canterbury in lamenting Langton’s delay to the see: Complange tui, Anglia, Melos suspendens organi; Et maxime tu, Cantia, De mora tui Stephani. Thomam habes sed alterum, Secundum habes iterum Stephanum, qui trans hominem Induens fortitudinem Signa facit in populo. (1–9) [Lament together, England, suspending the melody of your song, and above all you, Canterbury, for the delay of your Stephen. But you have another Thomas; you have again a second Stephen, who donning superhuman fortitude performs signs among the people.]

Subsequent strophes castigate the three key bishops allied with John throughout the Interdict—Jocelyn of Wells, John de Grey, and Peter des Roches—using the commonplaces of anticlerical satire to criticize their close ties to the royal exchequer.¹⁰⁸

¹⁰⁷ Wright, Political Songs of England, 6–9. The poem takes its title, Planctus super episcopis, from its first editor, Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Varia doctorum piorumque (1557). For a detailed discussion of the relationship between this verse and the Interdict letters, see Jahner, “Verse diplomacy and the English Interdict.” For other discussions of the poem, see Robinson, “Bishop Jocelin and the Interdict,” 155; Vincent, Peter des Roches, 56–7 and 76–7; and Cheney, Innocent III and England, 313. The poem survives in London, British Library, MS Royal 7 F V and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 24862, which provide numerous variant readings to Wright’s text. Translations are mine. For further discussion of this poem, see Chapter 5, 193. ¹⁰⁸ The poet describes Jocelyn of Wells, for instance, as learned in the Decalogue of the Exchequer (counting sums by tens), but “blind to the form of the canons” [Caecus in forma canonis] (81). John de Grey rose and fell by the “treachery of Simon” [dolum Simonis] (90), and Peter des Roches is “energetic at reckoning and lazy at the Gospel.” Thus “lucre overcomes Luke, and he weighs a mark heavier than Mark” [Ad computandum impiger / Piger ad Evangelium. . . . . Sic lucrum Lucam superat, / Marco marcam praeponderat] (93–7).

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As we recall from the previous discussion, William de Ste Mère-Église was also no stranger to the king’s favor, though for the purposes of propagandistic clarity he becomes in the Planctus super episcopis a faithful warrior on the model of Noah, David, and Daniel, standing as “a wall for the house of the Lord” [Murum pro domo Domini] (116). In the final strophe, the poet sends his liber parvule to Rome, asking that the pope decide who demands judgment and who remains free of sin: I Romam, liber parvule, Nec remeare differas, Saluta quosque sedule, Et Papae salve differas. Dic quid de tribus sentiam. Ipse promat sententiam, Utrum suo judicio Sint liberi a vitio; Et michi detur venia. (153–60) [Go to Rome, little book, and do not put off returning. Greet everyone assiduously and present salutations to the pope. Relate what I think of the three {bishops}. Let the pope himself offer judgment whether, in his belief, they have been free of wrongdoing. And may favor be given to me.]

Like the Poetria nova, the Planctus attempts to bridge distance with rhetoric. Here, however, the poet sends back to Rome the very argument Rome had been sending to England, suggesting a subtle effort to reverse the direction of influence: soliciting voluntary obedience from its audience, the Planctus chooses to portray the Interdict as a homegrown response to royal abuse rather than the externally imposed edict that it most certainly was. This strenuous effort to recast liturgical deprivation as heroic sacrifice already suggests the depth of resistance the policy encountered, especially from religious orders like the Cistercians, who enjoyed a robust set of privileges and exemptions in other areas.¹⁰⁹ The Cistercian John of Ford, for instance, devotes Sermon 41 of his commentary on the Song of Songs to the Interdict, lamenting that restrictions on Eucharistic celebrations and other rites drive the laity, in particular, from the faith:

¹⁰⁹ The Cistercians argued strenuously for an exemption from Interdict restrictions, resulting in firm correction from the pope. See Innocent’s letter of November 1207, ordering the bishop-executors to reaffirm the terms of the sentence, “lest anyone on the pretext of any liberty or privilege whatsoever should refuse to observe the sentence of interdict” [Ne pretextu libertatis seu etiam privilegii cuiuscunque sententiam interdicti quisquam observare recuset]. Cheney and Semple, eds. and trans., Selected Letters, no. 31, 96. Accounts of the Cistercians refusing the interdict terms also appear in Wendover, copied in Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, II.524; Gervase of Canterbury, II.cviii–cvix; and the Barnwell Chronicle, Walter of Coventry, II.199. For further discussion of interdict immunities extended to various parties and orders, see Clarke, The Interdict in the Thirteenth Century, 121–5.

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         Paucis quippe nostrum modica miserante Deo relicta est uiuifici panis refocillatio, sed turba absque omni sacramentorum participatione iam ferme per biennium ieiuna expectat. Nec dubiam quin deficiant in uia patriaeque suae desinant penitus reminisci, si fames diuturnior inualuerit. [Of course, for a few of us, God in his mercy has some crumbs of the bread of life for our refreshment, but for the crowd, there is nothing. For nearly two years now, the people {turba} have waited fasting, cut off from all share of the sacraments. It is all too obvious that they will faint on the way, and, if their hunger goes on increasing much longer, their hearts will forget all about their homeland.] ¹¹⁰

Langton personally confronted the general resentment at the Interdict in July 1213, when he returned to London to lift the king’s excommunication. Though Innocent had gained the upper hand in the conflict, Langton kept interdict restrictions in place until the king made full restitution of confiscated Church properties. In August, in a sermon preached before a crowd at St. Paul’s, Langton sought to explain his rationale, taking his text from Ps. 27:7: “The Lord is my helper and my protector: in him hath my heart confided, and I have been helped. And my flesh hath flourished again, and with my will I give praise to him.”¹¹¹ According to the Waverley annalist, however, Langton had only just begun his sermon when a man interrupted, shouting, “ ‘You lie. Your heart has never hoped in God, nor has your flesh flourished again’ ” [“mentiris, nunquam cor tuum speravit in Deo, nec refloruit caro tua.”].¹¹² When Langton resumes his oration, he uses the psalmic image of caro, body or flesh, to elaborate an extended metaphor of the body politic. He voices what he imagines to be the criticisms of his audience—namely, that he and his fellow exiles have escaped the punishment they themselves mete out—then asks them to picture their mother Holy Church as a body.¹¹³ She appoints kings and princes to be her

¹¹⁰ John of Ford, Ioannis de Forda super extremam partem Cantici Canticorum Sermones CXX, Sermon 41, I.303. Translation from John of Ford, Sermons on the Final Verses of the Song of Songs, Beckett, trans. III.144, with slight modification. On John of Ford, see Cheney, “King John,” 301, rpt. in The Papacy in England 12th–14th Centuries; Holdsworth, “John of Ford and English Cistercian writing 1167–1214;” and ibid., “John of Ford and the Interdict.” ¹¹¹ Sermon 2 in Roberts, ed., Selected Sermons of Stephen Langton, 37–51 at 37: “In Deo sperauit cor meum, et adiutus sum, et refloruit caro mea; et ex uoluntate mea confitebor illi.” For discussion of this sermon in relation to Langton’s political theory, see Baldwin, “Master Stephen Langton, future archbishop of Canterbury,” esp. 825–7. For discussion of this episode within Langton’s larger biography, see Powicke, Stephen Langton, 102–3; and, more recently, Vincent, “Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury;” and Ashe, Conquest and Transformation, 370–2. ¹¹² Annales Monastici, II.277. ¹¹³ Roberts, ed. Selected Sermons of Stephen Langton, 47. Langton ventriloquizes the thoughts of his audience: “ ‘Lord archbishop and you bishops, you trust in God and are helped. We trust in God but are not helped. Why have you come to England and the Church remains silent? Why have you come back and not opened its doors? You curse us and speak evil about us.’ ” [‘Domine archiepiscope, et uos episcopi, uos speratis in Deo et adiuti estis; nos sperauimus in Deo nec sumus adiuti. Quare in Angliam

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arms and fend off enemies, but if an arm is injured or broken, it requires care and immobilization in order to regain full strength: “In similar fashion as the lord king, who initially showed anger towards the Church now appears mild and restrained and thus has softened his harshness bit by bit, so the arm of the Church has recovered some small quantity of health.”¹¹⁴ Full health, however, would require making full restitution of confiscated properties, and on this point both Innocent and Langton remain inflexible. The “entire world,” Langton tells his audience, “could be converted to a mass of gold or emeralds or rubies and offered to me to end the Interdict, and I cannot see how an article could be relaxed to the honor of the Church unless first that which grieves her has been taken away by means of full restitution.”¹¹⁵ We can see how Langton’s arguments in 1213 stand in tension with Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s request at the end of the Poetria nova. There, he had pleaded with the pope to refrain from further injuring the king and rather to view him in light of his “true qualities,” now that he has committed himself to the Cross and to Holy Church. Geoffrey’s address to Innocent ends with a simple yet powerful entreaty: “I plead for our prince. I am the least of men; you are greatest; yet be receptive, and let him fare better in his role of suppliant” [Pro principe nostro / Supplico. Sum minimus: es maximus; attamen esto / Flexilis, et sit ei melius ratione petentis] (2096–8). Against the larger backdrop of Langton’s sermon, we can now see why Geoffrey might be making this request. After six years of suffering under Interdict restrictions, English clergy and laity alike welcomed the promise of a relaxation of penalties, only to find that it was the pope and archbishop who now remained inflexible. Given the tendency towards intransigence on all sides, it is perhaps fitting that Geoffrey should conclude by entrusting his work to William de Ste Mère-Église, the rare figure who had gained the trust of both rulers.

Quasi quaedam praestigiatrix: Conjuring History through Poetry This chapter has used the genre of the Latin occasional poem, fairly humble on its own terms, to open up a larger set of questions about the intersections between uenistis et silet ecclesia; quare accessistis et ostia non aperuistis ecclesie? Maledictis nobis et de nobis malum dicitis.’] Translation mine, here and following. ¹¹⁴ Ibid., 48–9: “Scitis quod ecclesia non potest per se salua consistere nisi habeat defensorem. Iccirco reges et principes constituit ecclesia tanquam sua brachia. Brachiis se defendit cum eam infestat impetus inimici. . . . A simili dominus rex, qui primo ecclesie apparuit iracundus, iam apparet mitis et mansuetus et sic paulatim suam duriciam emolliuit, sicque brachium ecclesie aliquantulum sanitatem recepit.” ¹¹⁵ Ibid., 48: “Sciatis autem uniuersi quod si totus mundus in auream massam uel in smaragdum conuerteretur aut rubeum et mihi offerretur ut interdicti sententia solueretur, uidere non possum articulum qualiter possit ad honorem ecclesie relaxari, nisi prius omnibus restitutis que sibi dolet fuisse ablata.”

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grammatical and rhetorical training and political events and legal theory. As we have seen, the grammar classroom furnished writers with a flexible array of techniques for converting conventional rhetorical forms to historically specific uses and back again. In characteristic fashion, Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova embeds this process in its own creation, locating the treatise in a historically specific moment as a means of teaching students how to translate its lessons to their own historically significant moments. We have also seen how rhetorical conventions, developed to address hierarchies of power, themselves become sources of political theory, a language for talking about the distribution of legal roles and authority. The years that followed the Interdict crisis and the completion of the Poetria nova saw Geoffrey’s occasional poetry absorbed not only into the core canon of compositional instruction but into literate practice more broadly. Chapter 3 explores a London legal manuscript that draws excerpts from the Poetria nova to advance an argument about strong kingship, but a variety of other thirteencentury manuscripts also attest to the work’s immediate utility to historically and legally minded projects. In a mid-thirteenth-century manuscript devoted to crusade history, for instance, we find copied a pastiche of verses from the Poetria nova, fashioned together to praise Richard I, whose exploits had just been narrated in the manuscript’s previous item, the Itinerarium peregrinorum et gesta regis Ricardi.¹¹⁶ Around the same time, at the Cistercian monastery of Rievaulx, a manuscript preserves a record of the Interdict crisis in the form of four “Interdict” poems, built from poetic tools furnished by the Poetria nova.¹¹⁷ These poems make a fitting conclusion to this chapter, epitomizing as they do the close affiliations between pedagogical instruction and communal political advocacy. Copied amongst encomia to bishops and abbots and model verse letters, the poems may have been the work of the abbey’s precentor and grammar master, Matthew of Rievaulx, as he demonstrated to students how to deploy the language and occasion of the Poetria nova to new ends. In keeping with their source, the poems showcase a range of responses to papal power, from awe to excoriation,

¹¹⁶ Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.1.25.4, fols. 63v–65r. The section begins with a description of the marvelous entertainments that accompany a royal banquet (PN 625–65) and ends with Geoffrey’s two well-known apostrophes to England and Normandy, here copied as a single poem. A description of the manuscript and accompanying digital facsimile can be found at https://cudl.lib. cam.ac.uk/view/MS-FF-00001-00025-00004/1. See also Hardy, Descriptive Catalogue. For discussion, see Faral, “Le manuscrit 511,” 28; and Camargo, “Memorial verses,” 89–92. ¹¹⁷ They survive uniquely in Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 15157, fols. 46v–48r. Though in the hands of the Victorines by the fifteenth century, the manuscript began as an English Cistercian production. Wilmart attributed the poetic collection as a whole to Matthew of Rievaulx, precentor and grammar instructor at the abbey until his death c. 1218. The four interdict poems, however, show such a strong debt to the Poetria nova that Faral and, more tentatively, Camargo have assigned them to Geoffrey of Vinsauf. For a description of the manuscript, see Ouy, Les manuscrits de l’Abbaye de SaintVictor. On questions of authorship, see Wilmart, “Les mélanges de Mathieu Préchantre de Rievaulx;” Faral, Les arts poétiques, 24–7; and Camargo, “Memorial verses,” 106–8.

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suggesting less a single point of view than an exercise in cultivating different rhetorical responses to the consequences of Innocent’s papal overlordship of England.¹¹⁸ Each poem tactically incorporates lines from the Poetria nova that speak to the respective jurisdictional authority of pope and prince. The first poem, for example, takes its theme from the opening dedication of the Poetria nova, praising Innocent as the “the wonder of the world but also the knight and sword of Christ” [Papa stupor mundi sed Christi miles et ensis] in its opening line.¹¹⁹ It celebrates his crusading victories and ability to bring emperors like Otto IV, “head of the world and the empire” [Orbis et imperii caput] (15), to heel with a command. In a wry echo of the Poetria nova, the poet observes that no one should wonder if “Our king serves and obeys him with bended knee” [Seruit, obedit ei rex noster poplite flexo] (17): John’s proffered “flexibility” in the Poetria nova becomes here the subjection of vassalage. Beginning at the apex of papal power, the poems end by lamenting the servitude of royal tribute, with the final piece presenting a bleak assessment of England’s prospects in the wake of John’s homage to Innocent. In a line borrowed from the closing address of the Poetria nova, the poet asks his audience if they have noted the “truth” of the king—namely, that “he is not what he was in time gone by” [Non est quod fuerat transacti temporis euo] (2). Begun with promise, his reign draws to its close in catastrophe: “The royal court of justice does not care for the laws. / Nowadays there is room for envy, but a shortage of virtue. / One is deceived, one is accused, and all integrity perishes” [Regia justicie non curat curia leges. / Est hodie locus inuidie, uirtutis egestas. / Decipitur, arguitur, perit omnis honestas] (6–8). The poems in the Rievaulx manuscript unfold in chiastic symmetry, the first two written in sympathy with the spiritual sword of the papacy and the latter two with the temporal sword of lay power. This series of four poems makes no attempt to resolve the jurisdictional contradiction it illustrates to such emotional effect, and this dialectical structure, testing one position against another, perhaps most closely aligns the sequence with the spirit and structure of the Poetria nova. Whether we attribute these poems to Geoffrey of Vinsauf, to Matthew of Rievaulx, or to another unnamed poet, they do more than simply reflect the political perceptions of their creator. In their echoes and repetitions, as well as in their points of contrast, they test out arguments about governance—its theory, practice, and effects. This ability to transform political realities by transforming language—to turn joy to grief, admiration to contempt—speaks to the power of grammatical training itself. It was with this power in mind that Geoffrey of Vinsauf called poetic art a “conjurer” [praestigiatrix]: ¹¹⁸ See Camargo, “Memorial verses,” 115–16. ¹¹⁹ I use Camargo’s edited texts and translations for these four poems. See “Memorial verses,” 108–15. For an alternative edition, see also Faral, Les arts poétiques, 24–7.

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         . . . Trahit ars ab utroque facetum Principium, ludit quasi quaedam praestigiatrix, Et facit ut fiat res postera prima, futura Praesens, transversa directa, remota propinqua; Rustica sic fiunt urbana, vetusta novella, Publica privata, nigra candida, vilia cara. (120–6)

[It causes what follows to be first, the future to be present, the oblique to be straight, the remote to be near; what is rustic becomes urbane, what is old becomes new, public things are made private, black things white, and worthless things are made precious.]¹²⁰

The verbal arts, in other words, court the power to change nature itself, re-ordering time and reversing oppositions. This power to alter perceived realities by changing their effects stands as rhetoric’s special province, and in this dimension it shares important qualities with medieval law. Chapter 3 demonstrates how questions of legal history, in particular those questions concerning the “ancient customs of the realm,” become material for political and poetic manipulation. Particularly in the case of Magna Carta, as we will see, law also constituted an “art of invention”—an art, that is, of finding and re-making England’s legal past. The Poetria nova plays a role in the story of Magna Carta as well. Chapter 3 shows that the “Lament for Richard I” circulated independently of the Poetria nova in London in the same years that barons and bishops were “conjuring” rebellion against the king. Poetic examples of this sort did not shape the formation of a common law directly, but they did shape the ways that people remembered and spoke about the attributes of good and bad kingship. We have seen, for instance, in the poetry copied at Rievaulx that the specific details of John’s homage to Innocent shaded quite readily into a generalized lament that “all integrity perishes.” In the case of Magna Carta, this kind of poetic remembrance proved integral to the creation of its totemic status as the embodiment of “good law.” The “poetics” of Magna Carta—and the poetry that accompanied its creation and promulgation over the course of the thirteenth century—serve as the focus of Chapter 3.

¹²⁰ I have slightly adjusted the translation. On the “plastic nature” of Geoffrey’s art, see also Cannon, “Form.”

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3 Inventing Magna Carta Between 1844 and 1846, the pioneering photographer William Henry Fox Talbot published The Pencil of Nature, a demonstration of his new method for fixing photographic images in print.¹ With a process he called calotype, Talbot captured ephemeral moments for the page: the afternoon sun cutting across the shutters that line the Rue de la Paix in Paris, the delicate tracery of a lace cutting, a straw broom propped against an open doorway. Talbot would also turn his camera towards the enduring architecture of his ancestral home, Lacock Abbey. Founded by Ela, countess of Salisbury (d. 1261), in 1230, the abbey had thrived as an Augustinian nunnery until the Dissolution, when it became the property of William Sharington and eventually passed to the Talbot family by inheritance.² It was almost certainly Ela, widow of William Longespée and sheriff of Wiltshire upon his death, who oversaw the transfer to Lacock Abbey of the document that would become one of its principal treasures—a 1225 engrossment of Magna Carta. Sent for proclamation in Wiltshire, where the earl, and following his death, the countess of Salisbury served as county sheriff, this well-preserved charter is one of four surviving copies of the 1225 reissue. It served as the base text for William Blackstone when he published his edition of Magna Carta and the Forest Charter in 1759.³ For Talbot, however, the Lacock Abbey Magna Carta represented more than a piece of the medieval political past. It constituted a family inheritance, and its history marked him strongly: he named his oldest daughter Ela, presumably in honor of Lacock’s founder, and dedicated several plates in the Pencil of Nature to its architecture and treasures.⁴ A photograph of the abbey tower provides him an ¹ Talbot, The Pencil of Nature. On calotype, see Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot. ² See Ward, “Ela, de iure countess of Salisbury (b. in or after 1190, d. 1261),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Wilkinson, “Women as sheriffs in early thirteenth century England;” and, on the Talbots, Bowles and Nichols, Annals and Antiquities of Lacock Abbey. ³ The Lacock Abbey Magna Carta remained in the abbey muniments room, eventually as part of the Talbot family library, until the twentieth century, when it was bequeathed to the British Museum. In 1946, this copy of the charter traveled to the United States on a two-year loan as a symbol of the AngloAmerican allegiance during World War II. See Collins, “The Lacock Abbey Magna Carta;” and Vincent, Magna Carta: Origins and Legacy, 136–7, with a description of the charter, now in London, British Library, Add. MS 46144, on 226. Blackstone uses the Lacock Abbey Charter for his commentary, The Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest (1759). ⁴ On the Fox Talbot family, see Schaaf, “William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Talbot mentions Magna Carta in his letters, which are edited by Schaaf and Thorp, The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot, www.foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk. Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta. Jennifer Jahner, Oxford University Press (2019). © Jennifer Jahner. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847724.001.0001

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opportunity to tell its story alongside other romantic episodes from the building’s past. From the same tower that preserves the Talbots’ “perfectly clear and legible” Magna Carta, a young Olive Sharington supposedly leapt into the arms of her waiting lover, John Talbot, and rendered him “for a time . . . lifeless, while the lady only wounded or broke her finger.” Talbot suspects that this story borrows from a still older one, perhaps dating to the abbey’s pre-Reformation past, when “the spectre of a nun with a bleeding long finger long haunted the precincts of the abbey.”⁵ Talbot’s meditation on the layered architecture of his family seat interweaves women’s religious devotion, romance, and rumor with the documentary survival of Magna Carta. Indeed, this particular copy of the Charter owes its longevity to a long line of archivally minded women, beginning with the countess of Salisbury, whose daughter, Ela Longespée, countess of Warwick, would also show a strong documentary bent: her grants from religious benefactions survive as a roll of six parchment lengths, a highly unusual instance of a women’s private archive copied and confirmed by episcopal authority.⁶ Seven centuries later, in 1945, Mathilda Theresa Talbot would prove the last of Lacock’s women to oversee the survival of the document. Having buried the charter in a metal box beneath the abbey floors for the duration of World War II, she bequeathed it to the British Museum and the Lacock estate itself to the National Trust. The Secretary of the National Trust, James Lees-Milne, described Talbot as living “like an anchorite.”⁷ Like Lacock Abbey, Magna Carta encompasses a layered and sedimented history, interwoven with its own share of religious devotion, romance, and rumor. The 1225 version of the charter bears the distinction of finalizing the language of Magna Carta, but it was far from the first or last time the document would require confirmation. Three versions of Magna Carta preceded it: the original text sealed at Runnymede in 1215 lasted mere months before Pope Innocent III annulled it, while the versions of 1216 and 1217 served as tools of royal rather than baronial negotiation, fostering allegiances during the regency government of the new boy king, Henry III. Numerous reconfirmations also followed upon the 1225 Magna Carta: when the king needed the financial support of the realm, Magna Carta came to symbolize his continued allegiance to the liberties of the Church and “free men” of the realm.⁸ From its beginnings, then, Magna Carta was not simply a statement of law but a statement about law—about the origins of royal and communal authority and the nature of a just political order. Even by 1220, Nicholas Vincent writes, Magna Carta had “begun to acquire totemic status as a touchstone of communal liberties, ⁵ Talbot, Pencil of Nature, plate XIX. ⁶ See Amt, “Ela Longespee’s roll of benefits.” ⁷ Cited in Vincent, Magna Carta: Origins and Legacy, 137. ⁸ The octocentennial anniversary of Magna Carta prompted the reissue of a classic history and the publication of two new histories of the charter: Holt’s Magna Carta in its third edition, with a new introduction by Garnett and Hudson; Vincent’s catalogue and textual and cultural history of Magna Carta, published by the Bodleian Library as Magna Carta: Origins and Legacy; and Carpenter, Magna Carta. Subsequent references to Holt’s Magna Carta are taken from the third edition.

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guaranteeing the king’s free subjects against any revival of royal tyranny.”⁹ My purpose in this chapter is to consider how literary practices and modes of thought contributed to Magna Carta’s “totemic status,” and how the Charter, in turn, shaped the history of political complaint poetry in Latin and the vernaculars. Like Talbot’s history of Lacock Tower, the history of Magna Carta ultimately proves a spectral one, built as much upon fiction as fact. But the recourse to invention, this chapter suggests, is precisely what has assured Magna Carta its success and longevity. Magna Carta turned 800 years old in 2015, and as the events surrounding that anniversary bear witness, its significance has not diminished. Indeed, Magna Carta has survived and thrived politically because—in varying ways and to various degrees—it has always functioned metaphorically, standing for a set of principles, or a set of methods, that make the past meaningful within the present. As a working legal document, political symbol, and historical shibboleth, Magna Carta embodies the myriad ways that law tells stories about the past—as well as the myriad ways that historians tell stories about the law. This chapter will trace these stories by examining three important sites in the production of the “idea” of Magna Carta. The first part of the chapter anchors itself in the monastic chronicling traditions of St. Albans Abbey, where the historians Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris provided medieval and modern readers with a working constitutional theory of the document. The chapter then moves back in time to consider the London milieu in which Magna Carta found its theoretical and historical justifications. I focus on the evidence provided by the Leges Anglorum Londoniis Collectae, a compilation of law codes, chronicle excerpts, and London civic ephemera that demonstrates an active effort to shape the legal past for future legislative use. Finally, the chapter examines the poetry that proliferated at the margins of chronicles and legal manuscripts. As we will see, poetry proves especially adept at expressing the “collective memory” of legal reform—a memory defined as much by the failures of documents like Magna Carta as by their promise. Before we turn to Magna Carta’s thirteenthcentury beginnings, however, it will be useful to survey the historiographic legacy that has shaped our understanding of those beginnings. Like Magna Carta, this debate turns on the contested role of invention—that is, of discovery and distortion—in the discipline of history itself.

Beyond the Whig Interpretation: Magna Carta and Historical Method In 1965, 750 years after Runnymede, James Holt published his groundbreaking Magna Carta, the first major study devoted to Magna Carta since W. S. McKechnie’s 1905

⁹ Vincent, Magna Carta: Origins and Legacy, 76.

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commentary, revised in 1914.¹⁰ Reflecting on the example of his predecessor, Holt distinguished his book as “the work of a historian not a lawyer.”¹¹ By this, he meant that he approached the document not as a “true” statement of law that generations of historians had distorted for their own purposes, but as a cultural document, as much a product of medieval distortions of the past as modern ones. “[I]t is quite invalid to treat Magna Carta as a kind of datum from which all subsequent departure was unjustified,” Holt asserted, contending instead that Magna Carta “was simply a stage in an argument” and, as such, “bore all the characteristic features of the argument—the erection of interests into law, the selection and interpretation of convenient precedent, the readiness to assert custom where none existed. It was not only law,” he continued, “but also propaganda.”¹² As argument and propaganda, in other words, Magna Carta belonged to the domain of rhetoric as well as law. Its mechanisms of persuasion, however, inhered not just in the language of the charter but in what that language symbolized once inscribed on parchment and ratified with the royal seal: historical continuity, Church liberty, and royal obligation to law. It followed on the examples of previous royal charters, which appeased political tensions by promising fidelity to a supposedly better past. And upon the foundations of the “good old law” of earlier kings, it added specific legal remedies aimed at a wide range of contemporary royal abuses. Part charter, part statute, this “hybrid document,” as Holt called it, looked both to the past and the future. It deployed terms that “had their roots deep in the past,” like iustitia, ius, lex, libertas, and the liber homo, and these terms in turn extended to readers “an open invitation to gloss and interpret.”¹³ Even as it conjured a legal past that resided somewhere between fact and fiction, however, the document remained insistently forward looking, bent on the promise of reform. It was this Janus-like quality—at once antiquarian and future-oriented—that, centuries later, made Magna Carta a potent symbol in debates over historiographical method. Holt alluded to these debates when he distinguished between the historian and the lawyer, the one concerned with tracing the changing social worlds in which Magna Carta took shape, the other concerned with recovering its original meaning at the time of its drafting. At stake for Holt in this distinction was the broader question of how to contend with medieval constitutional thought in the wake of World War II. Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) had taken special aim at the cherished grands récits of Victorian-era historiography, especially the triumphal stories of parliamentary development so central to constitutionalism in its heyday. Magna Carta proved integral to this story, residing at the ¹⁰ McKechnie, Magna Carta, a Commentary on the Great Charter of King John. ¹¹ Holt, Magna Carta, xvi. ¹² Ibid., 48, and, for a broader discussion of Magna Carta in relation to Whig historiography, 34–9, and ibid., “The St Albans chroniclers and Magna Carta.” ¹³ Holt Magna Carta, 279. See also ibid., “The origins of the constitutional tradition in England,” in Magna Carta and Medieval Government, 1–22, at 19.

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origins of an organicist theory of nationalist development. In William Stubbs’s estimation, it marked the “first distinct expression” of the “nation becom[ing] one and realis[ing] its oneness.”¹⁴ Butterfield famously deemed this kind of teleological argument the “Whig interpretation of history.” Its chief characteristics included the tendency to see “the present in the past” and “to impose a certain form upon the whole historical story.”¹⁵ More often than not, that “certain form” favored a Protestant reading of history in which liberty and the parliamentary nation-state marked the end point of progress. It was not just the romantically minded historian who could fall victim to the “Whig interpretation,” however. Butterfield judged it a potential fault of any researcher attempting to create coherent meaning from the rich “entanglements” of historical fact.¹⁶ Deep, engaged study of the past should lead the researcher not towards simplicity but further complexity. As Butterfield argued, “the fallacy of the whig historian lies in the way he takes his short cut through this complexity,” abridging history for the sake of a neat argument.¹⁷ The historiography of Magna Carta exemplifies this tension between “familiarizing” and “defamiliarizing” modes of interpretation—that is, between seeing the past as precursor to the present and treating the past in its discontinuous particularity. If Stubbs exemplified the first tendency, McKechnie’s Magna Carta commentary illustrated the second, and Butterfield indirectly praises it in the The Whig Interpretation: for the chief aim of the historian is the elucidation of the unlikeness between past and present and his chief function is to act in this way to destroy those very analogies which we had imagined to exist. When he shows us that Magna Charta is a feudal document in a feudal setting, with implications different from those we had taken for granted, he is disillusioning us concerning something in the past which we had assumed to be too like something in the present.¹⁸

By “disillusioning” us of our assumptions about Magna Carta, McKechnie’s commentary re-establishes the charter in its medieval particularity. But in its positivism, such a view also fails to account for the document’s own historical sensibilities and distortive proclivities. It was this divided field that Holt’s Magna Carta sought to unify by showing that the “distortions” ascribed to constitutional historiography—the tendency to read the past in terms of the present, to jettison precision in favor of “plot”—in fact inhered in the medieval documents themselves. “Distortion,” Holt writes, ¹⁴ Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England, I.545. ¹⁵ Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, 12. ¹⁶ Ibid., 19. ¹⁷ Ibid., 17. On the ways Butterfield’s interest in historical fiction influenced his notion of the Whig interpretation, see Sewell, Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History, 16–29. ¹⁸ Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, 10–11. On Butterfield’s admiration for McKechnie, see Sewell, Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History, 75–6 n. 59.

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“was inherent in the Charter itself and in the whole debate.”¹⁹ When Sir Edward Coke used Magna Carta early in the seventeenth century to argue for the “ancient liberties” of the realm against royal prerogative, he simply echoed a historical thought process already essential to the document from its drafting, when barons looked to the Coronation Charter of Henry I and the fictional laws of Edward the Confessor for corroboration of their liberties and powers of counsel.²⁰ Pressed far enough, in other words, all constitutional histories become ghost stories, and, like Lacock Abbey’s unquiet nun, they proliferate precisely at those moments when the common law traces back its own origins. Holt calls this literary dimension to constitutional thought “distortion.” I prefer to call it invention. The term’s etymological roots lie in the Latin invenire, to come upon or discover, and its semantic range in the Middle Ages spanned rhetoric, where it denoted the finding of suitable topics of argument, to liturgy, where it described the discovery of sacred objects or bodies, to law, where it bore the sense of finding by judgment or deliberation.²¹ All of these senses come to bear on the invention of Magna Carta over the course of the thirteenth century, and they interact in complex ways with our more modern sense of invention, as the process of “making things up.” Perhaps nowhere do these senses coalesce as powerfully as at St. Albans Abbey, where the chroniclers Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris applied their considerable literary skills to its support and establishment. The following section examines how modes of liturgical invention—the finding of holy relics—inform the origin stories that develop around Magna Carta and its founding precedents.

Relics of the Law In his Flores historiarum, Roger of Wendover relays an attractive rumor about the origins of Magna Carta. Like all good tales, it has a protagonist—in this case, Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton—an antagonist, King John, and a surprise discovery: the Coronation Charter of Henry I. The plot comes together in climactic fashion on August 25, 1213. As we saw in Chapter 2, this day found Langton at St. Paul’s Cathedral, preaching his first sermon there as archbishop. Taking as his theme Psalm 27:7, “In Deo speravit cor meum,” he defended the obligation of Church leaders to correct wayward lay princes, even when it meant temporary collateral harm to the body politic.²² According to Roger, Langton had further pressing business on the subject of England’s recalcitrant king, who had ¹⁹ Holt, Magna Carta, 47. ²⁰ Ibid. ²¹ Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s. v. inventio. On tropes of invention in medieval British chronicling, see Otter, Inventiones. ²² See Chapter 2, 94–5, for discussion of this sermon. The sermon text has been edited in Roberts, ed., Selected Sermons of Stephen Langton, 37–51.

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reconciled with the Church only one month prior. “As rumor has it,” he reports, Langton pulled aside several nobles after the sermon and asked if they had heard about his absolution of John the month prior in Winchester.²³ There, John had sworn that he would love and protect Holy Church and bring back the good old laws of his ancestors, especially those of Edward the Confessor. He promised to annul iniquitous laws, judge his subjects according to just law, and “render to each his rights” [singulis redderet jura sua], before finally tendering homage to the pope.²⁴ Langton tells the barons gathered at St. Paul’s that, in addition, “ ‘a certain charter of Henry I, king of England, has now been found [inventa], by which you could, should you wish, return your long-lost liberties to their original state.’ ”²⁵ Langton then brandishes the charter itself, which is read aloud to the audience. The unidentified barons like what they hear: Cum autem haec carta perlecta et baronibus audientibus intellecta fuisset, gavisi sunt gaudio magno valde; et juraverunt omnes in praesentia archiepiscopi saepe dicti, quod viso tempore congruo pro his libertatibus, si necesse fuerit, decertabunt usque ad mortem. Archiepiscopus vero promisit eis fidelissimum auxilium suum pro posse suo, et sic confoederatione facta inter eos, colloquium solutum est. [When this charter had been read through and understood by the listening barons, they greatly rejoiced, and all swore in the presence of the oft-mentioned archbishop that, if a fitting occasion arose, they would fight for their liberties—if necessary, to the death. The archbishop promised them his most loyal aid as far as he was able, and their covenant thus made, the meeting dissolved.]²⁶

In this scene of confederacy and conspiracy, Roger of Wendover sets the stage for Magna Carta. A portion of John’s barons would indeed conjure themselves against the king in the months leading up to June 1215, swearing to withdraw their fealty unless the king issued a charter that reaffirmed the liberties set forth in 1100 by Henry I.²⁷ Pressing war in the spring of 1215, they eventually succeeded in their

²³ The account of Roger of Wendover is preserved in Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, II.552–4. On the relationship between the two chroniclers, see Galbraith, Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris; Holt, “The St Albans chroniclers;” and Weiler, “Matthew Paris and the writing of history.” ²⁴ Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, II.552: “ ‘Audistis,’ inquit, ‘quomodo tempore [quo] apud Wintoniam regem absolvi, ipsum jurare compulerim quod leges iniquas destrueret, et leges bonas, videlicet leges regis Eadwardi, revocaret et in regno faceret ab omnibus observari.’ ” ²⁵ Ibid., II.550 and 552: “ ‘Inventa est quoque nunc carta quaedam Henrici primi regis Angliae, per quam, si volueritis, libertates diu amissas poteritis ad statum pristinum revocare.’ ” ²⁶ Ibid., II.554. ²⁷ By January 1215, a coniuratio, a formal body sworn by oath, confronted the king in London with demands to confirm the Coronation Charter of Henry I. For accounts, see the Barnwell Chronicle, Walter of Coventry, II.218; Ralph of Coggeshall’s Chronicon Anglicanum, 171–2; and Matthew Paris,

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task, extracting from John the series of pledges and promises that eventually traveled under the name of the “Great Charter.” Roger’s account bears the familiar marks of historiographic embellishment: the direct speech, the dramatic production of a newly found ancient document, and the high-minded pledges to die for a cause all hint at a story too good to be completely true. Holt established the scholarly consensus when he deemed it “best shelved” as a reliable recounting of events. Its valorization of Langton’s role, in particular, found little corroboration in other accounts and seemed tainted by Roger’s well-known “taste for the dramatic.”²⁸ More recently, John Baldwin argued for its broader plausibility, citing Langton’s Parisian theological interest in questions of regnum and sacerdotium and the prominence of Church liberty in the first clause of Magna Carta as evidence for his shaping role in early conversations around reform.²⁹ Lacking additional corroboration, Roger’s rumor seems likely to remain precisely that—a story that circulates in place of known facts. As a potentially embellished, or “invented,” narrative, however, it highlights the importance of invention itself to the mutual formation of laws and communities. We can see this process of historical invention, or finding, at work in the many scenes of backward-looking discovery narrated at St. Paul’s: first, as Langton recalls for his listeners John’s absolution at Winchester, where John himself affirmed the “good laws of his ancestors;” next, in the presentation of the centuryold Coronation Charter; and finally in the promise of a return to an original or prior state, where liberties survived whole and entire rather than trampled and forgotten. By the end of this recitation of past covenants, the barony has shaped itself on the model of episcopacy, swearing to die in the defense of its liberties. In staging the “discovery” of the Coronation Charter in this way, Roger of Wendover presents it as a kind of legal inventio—that is, as a narrative of relic discovery. This liturgical genre proved especially popular in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries in England, as abbeys like St. Albans sought to affirm their origins and protect their jurisdictional interests across the years of conquest and civil war.³⁰ Though often rich with local contextual detail, inventiones share a

Chronica majora, II.584–9. Discussion of the meetings of December and January can be found in Holt, Magna Carta, 199–204. ²⁸ Holt, Magna Carta, 202. Carpenter concurs in Magna Carta, 313: “Probably Wendover knew no more than that the 1100 charter came onto the agenda at some point before 1215, and decided to pin it on Langton and the 1213 council. One cannot rule out the possibility that Langton drew attention to the 1100 charter but his doing so was neither as dramatic nor as decisive as Wendover makes out.” ²⁹ Baldwin, “Master Stephen Langton, future archbishop of Canterbury.” For further discussion of how Langton’s university background potentially influenced Magna Carta, see ibid., Masters, Princes, and Merchants, I.166–70; d’Avray, “«Magna Carta»: Its background in Stephen Langton’s academic biblical exegesis;” Carpenter, “Archbishop Langton and Magna Carta;” and Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, 4–8 and 48. Garnett and Hudson revisit the controversy, siding with Holt, in their introduction to the third edition of Magna Carta, 10–15. ³⁰ For background on the genre, see Otter, Inventiones, 21–3, and on the tradition at St. Albans, 24–6.

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consistent set of narrative elements: a miraculous revelation pointing to a concealed set of relics, a process of physically unearthing the relics, the interpretation and witnessing of the relics by an audience, and finally the translation of the relics to their proper home.³¹ Such elements structured the life of St. Albans’s founding saint and were told multiple times from the late twelfth through the mid-thirteenth centuries. Under the abbacy of Simon (1163–83), a monk named William composed the Passio Sancti Albani, likely in order to commemorate the 1178 inventio and relic translation of Amphibalus, the Welsh pilgrim said to have converted the fifth-century Alban to Christianity (and subsequently to have died a martyr himself ).³² Shortly after, Ralph of Dunstable rendered the life in Latin elegiacs.³³ Later, in the 1230s, Matthew Paris used the prose Passio as his source for a French verse Vie de Seint Auban, an illustrated autograph copy of which survives in Dublin, Trinity College, MS 177 (E i. 40). In these narratives, the discovery of the body of the saint enacts a form of historical excavation. In Monika Otter’s words, inventiones “seek and find, unearth and open up the historical past,” and, in doing so, “both describe and are the originary moment of their textual communities’ self-understanding.”³⁴ These origin stories can inhere in bones and books alike. Matthew Paris relates in the Gesta abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani the story of a marvelously preserved cache of books and rolls, discovered in a wall opened up during new construction on the abbey under Abbot Eadmer. Written in “the language of the ancient Britons,” the texts prove legible to only one monk, named Unwona. The monks consign the writings on pagan rites and prognostications to the fire, but they preserve one book, a life of St. Alban, which Unwona translates into Latin. As soon as the text has been rendered into Latin and expounded, however, “the ancient, original exemplar, marvelous to say, at once dissolved irretrievably to dust and fell to pieces obliterated.”³⁵ Like saintly remains, this book exemplifies the logic of providential history; it awaits its discovery and translation, only to then erase its origins.

³¹ See Otter, Inventiones, 28–9; and Heinzelmann, Translationsberichte und andere Quellen des Reliquienkultes. ³² The Passio Sancti Albani by William of St. Albans was edited as part of the Acta sanctorum, Iunii, IV:149–59, and served as the basis for Matthew Paris’s French verse Vie de Seint Auban; they survive together in Dublin, Trinity College, MS 177 (E. i. 40), fols. 20r–50r. See also Vie de Seint Auban, Harden, ed. The life has been edited and translated more recently, with William’s Passio, by Wogan-Browne, Fenster, O’Donnell, and Lamont, eds. and trans., The Life of Saint Alban, with the Passion of Saint Alban. On Sts. Alban and Amphibalus in the St. Albans historiographical tradition, see McCullough, “Saints Alban and Amphibalus in the works of Matthew Paris;” and Vaughan, Matthew Paris, 195–7. ³³ Ralph of Dunstable’s verse life is also based on the prose Passio and was copied immediately prior to it in the Dublin manuscript (fols. 3r–20r). ³⁴ Otter, Inventiones, 57. ³⁵ Thomas of Walsingham, Matthew Paris, Gesta abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani, I.27: “Cum autem conscripta historia in Latino pluribus, ut jam dictum est, innotuisset, exemplar primitivum ac originale—quod mirum est dictu—irrestaurabiliter in pulverem subito redactum, cecidit annullatum.” For discussion of this scene, see also Otter, Inventiones, 55. On the Gesta abbatum, see Vaughan, Matthew Paris, 182–9.

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Inventiones tend to provoke skepticism among historically minded modern readers: their proofs of origin appear to us often as convenient fictions. But as Otter argues, the nature of their fictionality can tell us much about the historical imaginations and desires of the communities that composed them. “Inventio narratives,” she writes, “are in themselves authenticating narratives, not only true but told in order to lend truth to something else: the genuineness of the bones they go with and the antiquity and prestige of the monasteries that produced them.”³⁶ Both Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris produced inventio narratives for St. Albans, and we can see their constitutional narratives as engaging a similar process of discovery and authentication, with the royal charter taking on the testamentary role of holy relics—or, perhaps more aptly, resembling Matthew Paris’s marvelously preserved ancient book. In key ways, the Coronation Charter did work similar to the remains of the saints. Henry I’s charter inscribed the freedom of the Church as its first order of business, and the document thus attested, as saintly relics did, to the continuity of ecclesiastical liberty over time. Inventio narratives, however, tended to defend local jurisdictional integrity: the invention of St. Alban, for instance, bolstered the abbey’s claim to his relics over the rival claims of Ely Cathedral.³⁷ In the case of the Coronation Charter, however, this liberty did not apply specifically to St. Albans, or to Ely, or to Bury St. Edmunds, where Roger of Wendover reports Langton staging a similar demonstration of the Coronation Charter.³⁸ It pertained to the English Church as a whole. In assuring the realm that Henry I would “cause God’s church to be free” [sanctam dei ecclesiam in primis liberam facio], the charter thus extended its protections to the English Church as a corporate entity.³⁹ It is this lesson that Roger of Wendover has Langton translate for his baronial audience: they, too, can use the power of textual memory to constitute themselves as a collective body. They, too, can draw on the powerful rhetoric of sacrifice to claim forms of legal franchise. The Coronation Charter lent itself to this kind of symbolic repurposing because it also made imaginative use of a quasi-sacral legal past. Like Magna Carta, the Coronation Charter emerged as a token of conciliation from a king in pressing need of support—in this case, it bolstered Henry I’s claim to the English crown against that of his older brother, Duke Robert Curthose of Normandy.⁴⁰ As a means of publicizing his hasty coronation and shoring up ecclesiastical and baronial support, Henry distributed this charter to counties and religious

³⁶ Otter, Inventiones, 36. ³⁷ Ibid., 23–4. ³⁸ Cf. Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, II.582–3. The sole source for this performance being, again, Roger of Wendover, it remains subject to the same concerns of veracity. See Holt, Magna Carta, 335–8. ³⁹ The 1100 Coronation Charter has been edited most recently by Sharpe, “Charter of liberties and royal proclamations,” 7–70; and prior to that by Liebermann, “The text of Henry I’s Coronation Charter.” ⁴⁰ See Hollister, Henry I, 106–9, and Garnett, Conquered England, 105–20.

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foundations, recapitulating in more specific terms the promises he made during his coronation ordo. As his father William I had at the time of the Norman Conquest, Henry explicitly signaled continuity with Anglo-Saxon law.⁴¹ The charter drew the substance of its clauses from the Old English I-II Cnut (1018), itself likely authored by Archbishop Wulfstan.⁴² Among more particular commitments to reform dower, military service, and forest boundaries, the king also made one tantalizingly broad promise: “The law of King Edward I restore to you together with the improvements by which my father improved it by the counsel of his barons.”⁴³ This restored law—the charter uses the Old English laga in place of lex—stands as a symbol of continuity across conquest and the unpopular reign of William Rufus. Its utility derived in no small part from the fact that Edward the Confessor never issued a law code in his own name: his “law,” therefore, could stand for the principle of established precedent itself.⁴⁴ Despite its propitious rediscovery around 1213, the Coronation Charter had never been truly forgotten, having circulated for the previous century in legal collections and chronicle accounts. During Henry I’s reign, the compiler of Quadripartitus, the earliest Latin translation of the Anglo-Saxon law codes, includes the Coronation Charter together with his own treatise, the Leges Henrici Primi, as part of a longer narrative tracing the history of Anglo-Saxon, and then Anglo-Norman, law-giving.⁴⁵ By the early thirteenth century, the Coronation Charter still accompanied Quadripartitus, but alongside a larger corpus of twelfth-century legal productions, including the Leis Wilelme and the Leges Edwardi Confessoris, themselves “legal fictions” that attributed their authorship to earlier kings.⁴⁶ Separately from larger-scale legal compilations, the Coronation Charter also circulated in a form more suited to the kind of recitation that Roger of Wendover describes happening at St. Paul’s. Around 1215, for instance, a version of Henry’s Coronation Charter was copied as an unbound bifolium, now London, British Library, MS Harley 458. Henry’s charter appears on the recto, followed on the dorse by The Coronation Charters of Stephen and Henry II, and, after these, Anglo-French translations of the same documents. Seemingly ⁴¹ Hollister, Henry I, 112–3; Foreville, “Le sacre des rois anglo-normands et angevins et le serment du sacre (XIe–XIIe siècles);” Stafford, “The laws of Cnut and the history of Anglo-Saxon royal promises;” and Stephen Yeager, From Lawmen to Plowmen, 60–98. ⁴² Wulfstan’s authorship was established by Whitelock, “Wulfstan and the laws of Cnut.” For an edition, see Liebermann, ed., Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I.278–371. ⁴³ Sharpe, ed. and trans., “Charter of liberties,” 66: “Lagam regis Eadwardi uobis reddo cum illis emendationibus quibus pater meus eam emendauit consilio baronum suorum.” ⁴⁴ See Maddicott, “Edward the Confessor’s return to England in 1041.” ⁴⁵ Quadripartitus has been edited by Liebermann in Quadripartitus, and included in his Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I.529–36. For discussion of the manuscripts and context, see Wormald, “Quadripartitus,” ibid., The Making of English Law, 236–44; Sharpe, “The prefaces of Quadripartitus,” 148–72; ibid., “The dating of Quadripartitus again,” 81–93; and Karn, “Quadripartitus, Leges Henrici Primi and the scholarship of English law.” On the relationship between Quadripartitus and the Leges Henrici Primi, proposed by Liebermann and Wormald as the work of a single author, see Leges Henrici Primi, Downer, ed. ⁴⁶ See O’Brien, God’s Peace and King’s Peace.

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copied for oral delivery, Harley 458 may represent what Holt called a “preparatory document” towards a coniuratio, establishing a set of precedents upon which future reforms could draw.⁴⁷ Roger of Wendover’s legal inventio, like all inventiones, discovers the historical evidence it needs to prove a conclusion it has already made. The scene of Langton brandishing the Coronation Charter in St. Paul’s thus condenses and dramatizes an archival practice long in evidence in chronicles, cartularies, and legal compendia. But if the scene itself shows signs of fictional augmentation, its discrete elements— the importance of the London cathedral to reformist agendas, the circulation of documents prior to revolt, and the allegiance of clerical and lay interests—are all separately true. London served as a stronghold for rebel barons in the years leading up to and following Magna Carta, and St. Paul’s in particular served as a meeting point for clerical and lay interests. George Garnett and John Hudson have called it a “hotbed of learned clerical radicals,” whose theological training, like Langton’s, provided a moral case for correcting—and even deposing—immoral kings.⁴⁸ To take a prominent example, Gervase of Howbridge, chancellor of St. Paul’s, was briefly exiled in 1212 along with the leader of the rebel barons, Robert fitz Walter, for conspiring to install Simon de Montfort, leader of the Albigensian Crusade, on the English throne.⁴⁹ Fitz Walter’s dramatic selfappointed title, Marshal of the Army of God and Holy Church, “has clerical fingerprints on it,” Garnett and Hudson suggest, and speaks to a broader field of reformist ecclesiastical propagandizing, in which crusading rhetoric worked to radicalize lay and clerical populaces alike to the “sacred” cause of reform.⁵⁰ But the Cathedral also symbolized the civic jurisdictional power of London. Around 1220, the citizens of the City of London forged a new seal: on one side stood St. Paul, towering above the spire of his namesake cathedral; on the other, atop London Bridge, stood Thomas Becket, whose jubilee celebrations and translation at Canterbury provided the occasion for the seal’s manufacture.⁵¹ Spanning the distance between these landmarks, as Derek Keene and Vanessa Harding note, is the ⁴⁷ The Harley bifolium is one of several Anglo-French translations of documents relevant to 1215 that circulated in the months prior to and following Runnymede, including an Anglo-Norman translation of Magna Carta. See Holt, “A vernacular-French text of Magna Carta 1215;” and, for a canon law perspective, Pennington, “Reform in 1215: Magna Carta and the Fourth Lateran Council.” Holt discusses the translation of the Coronation Charters in Magna Carta, 399–401, here at 401. See also Garnett and Hudson’s discussion in the introduction to Holt, Magna Carta, 24–5; Sharpe, “Charter of liberties,” 46–7; and further subsequent discussion in this chapter. ⁴⁸ See Garnett and Hudson, Introduction to Holt, Magna Carta, 20–1; Carpenter, Magna Carta, 278; Baldwin, “Master Stephen Langton, future archbishop of Canterbury,” 843–4; and Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, 32–60. ⁴⁹ Carpenter, Magna Carta, 278. ⁵⁰ Garnett and Hudson, Introduction to Holt, Magna Carta, 23, and for further discussion, Chapter 5. ⁵¹ On the creation of his seal and the relationship between London and Becket more generally, see Keene and Harding, “St. Mary Colechurch 105/18.” See also Keene, “Text, visualisation, and politics,” esp. 77.

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length of Cheapside, the commercial hub of medieval London, which was bounded by St. Paul’s Cathedral at its western edge and, at its eastern edge, by the Church of St. Thomas, built at the site of the Becket family home.⁵² In the later Middle Ages, this arterial served as a processional route for London mayors, sheriffs, and aldermen. On the day of the mayor’s oath-taking, for instance, the assembled company would hear mass at St. Thomas’s before processing to St. Paul’s to make offerings at the graves of the saint’s parents.⁵³ For Londoners, then, Becket represented more than a famous native son; he embodied the autonomy of London’s merchant citizenry and the centrality of trade to the city as a whole.

Mythographic History and Civic Autonomy in the Leges Anglorum Londoniis Collectae We have seen in the case of Roger of Wendover’s narrative how the logic of hagiographic invention could lend sacral power to the foundational documents of royal administration. Previous chapters have likewise traced the usefulness of Becket’s example to communities seeking jurisdictional independence. In this section, I examine a legal collection that integrates these concerns, as it amasses a comprehensive history of royal lawmaking that ultimately affirms London’s own civic autonomy. Known as the Leges Anglorum Londoniis Collectae (hereafter, the London Collection), this compilation has been linked since the nineteenth century with the origins of Magna Carta. Its first (and, to date, only) editor, Felix Liebermann, dated its initial production to c. 1215, suggesting it as “an early contemporary of Magna Carta.”⁵⁴ As Liebermann first suggested and later scholars have since argued, Magna Carta and the London Collection represent complementary projects, drafted in close proximity to each other in the vicinity of St. Paul’s. London’s liberties likewise feature prominently in both: clause 13 of Magna Carta confirms that “the city of London is to have all its ancient liberties and free customs both by land and water” [civitas Londoniarum habeat omnes antiquas libertates et liberas consuetudines suas, tam per terras quam per aquas]. As we will see, the London Collection also makes an argument for the city’s jurisdictional autonomy, pieced together from law codes, chronicle excerpts, and civic ordinances.⁵⁵ ⁵² Keene and Harding, “St. Mary Colechurch 105/18.” ⁵³ Ibid.; and Williams, Medieval London, 30. ⁵⁴ See Liebermann, Über die Leges Anglorum, and ibid., “A contemporary manuscript of the ‘Leges Anglorum Londoniis Collectae,’ ” quoted at 733. On city chamberlain Andrew Horn, who copied the Leges Anglorum in the early fourteenth century, see Catto, “Andrew Horn: Law and history in fourteenth-century England;” Hanna, London Literature, 67–74; Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 60–75; and Jahner, “The Mirror of Justices and the art of archival invention.” ⁵⁵ References here and following to the 1215 text of Magna Carta are from Holt’s edition and translation in Magna Carta, Appendix 6.

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The London Collection is first and foremost a history of law-making. It consists of two manuscripts—Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Lat. 155 (Rs) and London, British Library, Add. MS 14252 (Ai)—which begin with the Anglo-Saxon law codes, translated as part of Quadripartitus, and move forward in time to include twelfth-century legal treatises like the Leges Henrici Primi and the Leges Edwardi Confessoris, working legal tracts like Glanvill, and the Coronation Charters of the Angevin kings. The Collection concludes with London civic ordinances of the early thirteenth century. But the London Collection is also fundamentally a literary enterprise. The papal historian Walter Ullmann first brought attention to the surprising prominence of Arthurian material in the London Collection, drawn from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain.⁵⁶ Appearing within a series of interpolations to the Leges Edwardi, Arthur enters the London Collection as its ideal ruler, a conqueror at the height of his power who nonetheless submits to the wisdom of his council. He makes a fitting analogue to another romance king appearing the Collection, Prester John, whose famous letter is copied just as the manuscript shifts its focus from royal legislation to civic governance. Such romance content, as Hanna argues, is far from alien to twelfthand thirteenth-century legal collections. The most complete extant version of Quadripartitus, found in a manuscript contemporary to the London Collection, includes Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain and the Letter of Prester John alongside a history of Alexander the Great.⁵⁷ These manuscripts exhibit what Hanna, borrowing from Anne Middleton, aptly terms “visionary legislation”: in their commitment to amassing precedents and delineating jurisdictions, they work in conjunction with the aims of literary romance, corroborating claims to familial and institutional liberties.⁵⁸ The London Collection draws on such visionary legislation to make a strong claim to London’s jurisdictional authority: the city’s history of civic self-regulation, that is, becomes the crucible in which a heterogeneous realm articulates the terms of its independence from royal power. The total effect, Keene writes, is to recast “the providential sweep of British history” in such a way that London civic liberties and practices become the pinnacle expression of an ancient tradition of common counsel.⁵⁹

⁵⁶ Ullmann, “On the influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth in English history.” For further discussion of the Collection’s intrinsic literariness, see Hanna, London Literature, 88–90; and Keene, “Text, visualisation, and politics.” ⁵⁷ This manuscript is now London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus A xvii. By the fifteenth century, the manuscript was in the library at St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, and may have been produced there. For discussion, see Crick, The Historia regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth: A Summary Catalogue of the Manuscripts, 158; Hill, “Epitaphia Alexandri in English medieval manuscripts;” Hanna, London Literature, 82–9; and Keene, “Text, visualisation, and politics,” 86–7. ⁵⁸ Hanna, London Literature, 70, referring to the phrase by Middleton in “Acts of vagrancy.” On the dynastic claims of thirteenth-century romance, see Crane, Insular Romance. ⁵⁹ Keene, “Text, visualisation, and politics,” 83.

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Theorizing Jurisdictional Power in the Interpolated Leges Edwardi Confessoris In his appraisal of the Galfridian material in the London Collection, Ullmann quipped that “[f ]iction and legend stood at the cradle of some important constitutional principles.”⁶⁰ Nowhere is this conjunction more readily apparent than in the Collection’s much-altered version of the Leges Edwardi Confessoris, a text that purports to record an assembly called by William I in 1070 to affirm the customs of his pre-Conquest predecessor. The Leges Edwardi represents a genre Bruce O’Brien has termed legal “imposture”—texts that invent or embellish a historical code of conduct to reflect or guide contemporary practice.⁶¹ O’Brien surmises that the Leges Edwardi took shape in an episcopal household, likely in the turbulent 1130s, and posits Lincoln as a leading candidate for its production.⁶² If the Leges Edwardi indeed sees its origins in the household of Alexander, bishop of Lincoln (1123–48), then the text would have developed within the same literary milieu as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain.⁶³ Alexander was the dedicatee of Geoffrey’s Prophecies of Merlin, and Walter of Oxford, his archdeacon, has the credit of providing the “very ancient book in the British language” that Geoffrey cites as his authority for the History. Some eighty years after the initial composition of the Leges Edwardi, the compiler of the London Collection appears to have brought these two Lincoln-based ventures together, expanding the law code at several discrete points to include material largely indebted to the Galfridian tradition. As we will see, it is in these invented passages, lodged within an invented law code, that the London Collection most explicitly articulates its political theory. In essence, this theory sacralizes law-centered kingship: it argues that royal authority rests on the bedrock of divine authority, which undergirds the king’s jurisdictional power even as it should humble his will. In the interpolated Leges Edwardi, good kings invariably seek counsel, either from popes or from their lay advisers, and the interpolated material attempts to locate an origin for this tradition of common counsel in the very earliest iterations of Christian kingship. In the first of the interpolations (Rs, fol. 57r), for instance, the scribe aligns the origins of Carolingian sacral kingship with British sacral kingship. In both cases, a lay ruler turns to papal authority for guidance concerning his secular legal authority, and papal authority responds by anchoring royal power in Christian

⁶⁰ Ullmann, “On the influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth,” 263. ⁶¹ See O’Brien, God’s Peace and King’s Peace, 28. ⁶² Ibid., 44–61. On the larger phenomenon of ecclesiastically produced legal codes in the 1130s and 1140s, see O’Brien, “Legal treatises as perceptions of law in Stephen’s reign.” ⁶³ For discussion, see O’Brien, God’s Peace and King’s Peace, 57, and, with specific attention to the version of the Leges Edwardi in the London Collection, ibid., “Forgers of law and their readers.”

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moral discipline and the counsel of the realm.⁶⁴ The interpolator first recounts a well-known apocryphal exchange between Pippin the Short (714–768), father of Charlemagne, and Pope Zacharias (d. 752) on the question of whether Pippin had the right to depose his weak Merovingian rival. Does the title of king more aptly belong to the person who wields the power of kingship but lacks the name of king, Pippin asks, or to the person who possesses the name of king but wields no power? The interpolator includes the pope’s supposed reply to Pippin’s query: “They are fittingly called kings who vigilantly defend and rule God’s church and people, having imitated the royal psalmist who says, ‘He that worketh pride shall not dwell in the midst of my house [Ps. 100:7].’ ”⁶⁵ With this papal blessing and the accord of his nobles, Pippin claims the right to rule. Though almost certainly an invention of Frankish royal annalists, this exchange between Pippin and Zacharias advanced an important “fiction of power,” in Rosamond McKitterick’s words: it argued that moral and political authority, not legal title alone, made a king.⁶⁶ Included as part of the original Leges Edwardi in the 1130s, the story was reworked in the London Collection, as John’s critics sought new ways to remind him of his sacred duty to “cherish and rule and defend his earthly realm and the people of God and above all his holy church” (fol. 57r).⁶⁷ Following the story of Pippin and Zacharias, the London Collection interpolator includes another invented exchange, this between the British King Lucius and Pope Eleutherius (d. 187). The connection between the second-century king and the Roman pontiff comes from Bede, who in turn derived it from a misreading of the Liber pontificalis.⁶⁸ According to Bede, Lucius wrote to Eleutherius requesting conversion to Christianity. The pope obliged, marking the beginning of the religion in Britain.⁶⁹ This legend found its way into Nennius and, much later, William of Malmesbury. But it would be Geoffrey of Monmouth who characteristically expanded its imaginative potential.⁷⁰ He describes Eleutherius sending ⁶⁴ For a discussion of this portion of the interpolated Leges Edwardi Confessoris which resonates with my own, see Har, “The Leges Edwardi Confessoris,” online at http://magnacartaresearch.org/read/ feature_of_the_month/Sep_2015. ⁶⁵ “Illos decet uocari reges qui uigilanter defendunt et regunt ecclesiam dei et populum eius. Imitati regem psalmigraphum dicentem, Non habitabit in medio domus mee qui facit superbam et cetera.” Throughout the following discussion, the Latin is transcribed directly from the manuscripts with punctuation silently emended. For an edition of the Leges Edwardi Confessoris, with the interpolations from Rs and Ai, see also Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I.627–72, here at I.635. O’Brien discusses this passage in God’s Peace and King’s Peace, 272 n. 58–9. For discussion of Pippin’s usurpation, see McKitterick, “The illusion of royal power in the Carolingian annals.” On the development of a papal vocabulary for ecclesiastical correction of lay rulers, see Peters, The Shadow King, 33–46. ⁶⁶ McKitterick, “The illusion of royal power in the Carolingian annals,” 18. ⁶⁷ “Rex autem . . . ad hoc est constitutus ut regnum terrenum et populum domini et super omnia sanctam eius ueneretur ecclesiam et regat et ab iniuriosis defendat.” See also Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I.635. ⁶⁸ See Smith, “Lucius of Britain.” ⁶⁹ See Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, I.4.24–5. ⁷⁰ Cf. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Historia Regum Brittanie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, I: Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS 568, I.46–7, § 72.

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back to Britain two legates, Fagan and Duvanius, who in turn “obliterated paganism from nearly the entire island” [per totam fere insulam paganismum deleuissent], converting priests, rededicating temples, and establishing the archiepiscopal sees of London, York, and Caerleon-on-Usk.⁷¹ This mythographic history imprinted itself on London’s ecclesiastical institutions: St. Paul’s itself purported to hold a wooden transept dating to the time of King Lucius, and St. Peter upon Cornhill proclaimed him its founder.⁷² The London Collection adds to this story by elaborating the content of Eleutherius’ letter back to King Lucius, though in doing so subtly shifts the pretext of the exchange. As in previous examples, good kingship assumes imperium as its foundation. When Eleutherius converted Britain to Christianity, the interpolator writes, all of the lands and islands as far as Norway and Denmark belonged to the dignity of the king, and it is against this backdrop of heterogeneous but unified lay dominion that the writer then enumerates the obligations of a Christian ruler. Kings ought to judge according to right and law, to fear God and protect his Church. “Ius and justice ought to reign in a realm rather than a corrupt will,” the interpolator writes; “law is always what ius makes; personal will and violence and force are not ius.”⁷³ The king ought to “raise up good laws and approved customs, and pull down and expunge wicked ones entirely from the realm. He ought to enact right judgment in the realm and preserve justice through the counsel of his nobles.”⁷⁴ Though indirectly framed as papal advice to a new Christian king, this series of directives does not announce itself as coming from Eleutherius himself. The pope’s own words instead appear in a missive that immediately follows, which addresses the separate question of what law a Christian king should use to govern his people. Eleutherius rejects the tradition of learned law in favor of divine law and royal humility: “Petistis a nobis leges romanas et cesaris uobis transmitti quibus in regno britannie uti uoluistis. Leges romanas et cesaris semper reprobare possumus. Legem dei nequaquam. Suscepistis enim nuper miseratione diuina in regno britannie legem et fidem Christi. Habetis penes uos in regno utramque paginam ex illis dei gratia per consilium regni uestri sume legem. Et per illam dei patientia uestrum rege britannie regnum. Uicarius uero dei estis in regno, iuxta psalmistam ⁷¹ Ibid. ⁷² See Smith, “Lucius of Britain,” 31, and, on St. Peter upon Cornhill, Har, “The Leges Edwardi Confessoris.” ⁷³ “Debet enim ius et iusticia magis regnare in regno: quam uoluntas praua. Lex est semper quod ius facit. uoluntas enim et uiolentia et uis: non est ius” (fol. 57v). Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I.635. ⁷⁴ “Debet etiam bonas legas et consuetudines approbatas erigere: prauas autem delere. et omnino a regno deponere. Debet iudicium rectum in regno facere. et iusticiam per consilium procerum regni sui tenere” (fol. 57v). Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I.636.

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regem: ‘Domini est terra et plenitudo eius: orbis terrarum et uniuersi qui habitant in eo.’ . . . Gentes uero regni britannie et populi pulli uestri sunt quos diuisos debetis in unum ad concordiam et pacem et ad fidem et legem Christi et ad sanctam ecclesiam congregare, reuocare, fouere, manutenere, protegere, et regere, et ab iniuriosis, et malificis, et inimicis semper defendere. ‘Ue regno cuius rex puer est, et cuius principes mane comedunt.’ Non uoco regem [puerum] propter paruam et minimam etatem, set propter stultitiam et iniquitatem et insanitatem. Iuxta psalmistam regem: ‘Uiri sanguinum et dolosi non dimidiabunt dies suos et cetera.’ . . . Rex dicitur a regendo non a regno. Rex eris dum bene regis; quod nisi feceris, nec nomen regis [non] in te constabit, et nomen regis perdes quod absit. Det uobis omnipotens deus regnum britannie sic regere ut possitis cum eo regnare in eternum, cuius uicarius estis in regno predicto.” [“You asked us to send to you the laws of Rome and Caesar, which you wished to use in Britain. The laws of Rome and Caesar we can always reprove; the law of God, never. Indeed, you have very recently, through divine mercy, taken up in Britain the law and belief of Christ. You have in your realm at your disposal both pages: by the grace of God and with the counsel of your realm take your law from these pages, and by that law, as long as God permits it, rule your kingdom of Britain. To be sure, you are the vicar of God in your realm, according to the royal psalmist: ‘The earth is Lord’s and the fullness thereof: the world, and all they that dwell therein’ {Ps. 23:1} . . . Truly, the gentes and people of the realm of Britain are your chicks {cf. Matt. 23:37}, which, when divided, you ought to gather, recall, foster, sustain, protect, and rule them all together towards concord and peace and the faith and law of Christ and Holy Church, and defend them always from injurious and wicked people and enemies. ‘Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child and when the princes eat in the morning’ {Eccl. 10:16}. I do not call a king a child on account of his minor age, but on account of his folly and iniquity and madness, according to the royal psalmist: ‘Bloody and deceitful men will not live out half their days, etc.’ {Ps. 54:24}. . . . A king is so called from ruling, not from having power over the realm. A king you will be while you rule well. But if you do not, the name of king will not remain to you and you will lose it, God forbid! May God grant that you rule Britain in such a way that you may reign in eternity with Him whose vicar you are in the aforementioned kingdom.”]⁷⁵

The tone of this letter is at once monitory, homiletic, and polemical. In rejecting Roman jurisprudence, Eleutherius instead invests the consilium regni with the sacral power to shape secular rule, making Britain’s conciliar legal tradition coextensive with its status as a converted Christian territory. Like Zacharias, ⁷⁵ Rs, fols. 58r–v. I have followed Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I.636–7, and provided my own translation, but Har provides a new edition and translation as well in “The Leges Edwardi Confessoris.”

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he affirms kingship as a conditional state, its power dependent on the moral constitution of the ruler. This potent blend of legalistic and sermonic discourse has a long history in England, embodied most visibly in the pre-Conquest period by Archbishop Wulfstan, whose formal impress on Anglo-Saxon legal style may be seen in the law codes of Cnut.⁷⁶ Underlying this homiletic style, Björn Weiler shows, is the political distinctiveness of the Anglo-Saxon bishops, whose license to chide and correct kings lent moral exigency to questions of political counsel and consent. Their pastoral zeal in turn provided post-Conquest ecclesiastics, like Becket, useful models for their own battles with powerful Angevin kings.⁷⁷ Eleutherius’ letter to Lucius represents an extension of this same tradition, in which biblical learning and homiletic moralizing combine to furnish a general theory of royal authority. Defining kingship from outside the structure of secular governance, the letter elevates the role of the lay ruler precisely to emphasize his ultimate subjection to God and divine wisdom. As the supposed first Christian king of Britain, Lucius helps to illustrate the importance of external moral counsel to the just administration of royal power. Though Eleutherius refrains from sending a foreign written law to the newly converted king, he does give permission to find (and found) a “native” law derived from the Bible and authorized by means of the clergy and the optimates of the realm. Lucius thus provides an origin story for customary law, one constructed upon the moral foundations of divine law. It is King Arthur, however, who formalizes mechanisms of political counsel and, in the process, polices the boundaries of the community of the realm. When the interpolator introduces Arthur, within the thirty-second chapter of the Leges Edwardi, he does so in order to posit an origin for the folkmoot, London’s traditional aldermanic council that gathered at St. Paul’s Cross.⁷⁸ It was here each year, the writer contends, that all the people swore “to join together and consolidate as sworn brothers in defense of the realm against aliens and other enemies” and pledged loyalty to the king before the bishops.⁷⁹ “Arthur contrived [invenit] this law,” the interpolator explains. “[T]he most renowned king of the Britons . . . thus consolidated and confederated the entire realm of Britain forever into one, [and] by the authority of this law the aforesaid Arthur expelled Saracens and enemies from the realm.”⁸⁰

⁷⁶ On Wulfstan’s style, see Yeager, From Lawmen to Plowmen, 6–7 and 74–96. ⁷⁷ Weiler, “Bishops and kings in England.” See 185–7, on Wulfstan, and 194–204, on Becket. ⁷⁸ The folkmoot was established as a thrice-annual meeting at St. Paul’s Cross, mandatory for all free men of the city. Its importance gradually eroded over the course the thirteenth century, until it lost its site at St. Paul’s in 1285. See Williams, Medieval London, 35–6. ⁷⁹ “confederare et consolidare sicut coniurati fratres ad defendendum regnum contra alienigenas et contra inimicos” (fol. 67r). See Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I.655. ⁸⁰ “Hanc legem inuenit arturus qui quondam fuit inclissimus [sic] Rex Britonum. Et ita consolidauit et confederauit regnum britannie uniuersum semper in unum. Huius legis auctoritate expulit arturus predictus saracenos et inimicos a regno” (fol. 67r). See Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I.655.

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The idealized origin of common counsel, of a consolidated and confederated realm, thus carries within it a simultaneous movement towards the expulsion of hostile others, religious and political. Formal efforts to expel aliens attached both to Magna Carta in 1215 (caps. 50 and 51) and the Provisions of Oxford in 1258.⁸¹ The London Collection posits an origin for such efforts in the reign of the king who, by legendary account, conquered all of northern Europe to the edge of Russia.⁸² Arthur’s provision for annual councils, the interpolator writes, lay “sleeping and buried” until King Edgar “roused it and brought up to the light” and reinstituted it for the realm.⁸³ Like Roger of Wendover’s story of the Coronation Charter, the story of Arthur’s original folkmoot lends sacral power to the idea of a unified realm, one in which collective moral counsel also assumes the purgative ability to determine who does and does not belong within the community. The interpolated Leges Edwardi imagines how this process might have worked legislatively in the pre-Conquest past as it names the populations that ought to be “received and protected as our sworn brothers and proper citizens of this realm”: the Armoricans of Brittany, the Guti (perhaps referring to Scandinavians), and the Saxons.⁸⁴ This policy assumes a limited form of heterogeneity in which historical “blood ties” to the British or English [de sanguine Britonum or de sanguine Anglorum] become the basis for inclusion as part of the sworn [coniurati] body of the realm. To understand why these jurisdictional origin stories would have resonance for an early thirteenth-century London audience, it is necessary to turn to the other “good king” idealized in the Collection: Richard I. Like Lucius, Arthur, and Prester John, Richard I emerges in the London Collection as an “imperial king,” one who successfully maintained his territorial dominion and, as a crusader, fought to expand the Church’s dominion as well. All of these strong rulers, Ullmann and Keene have argued, serve as implicit commentary on King John, whose forfeiture of Normandy in 1204 looms as the obvious and unmentionable example of imperial failure lying just prior to the Collection’s production.⁸⁵ As in the previous examples, literary techniques and invention impinge on the text at precisely those ⁸¹ Cf. Carpenter, Magna Carta, caps. 50 and 51, agreeing to “remove completely from their bailiwicks” the kin of Gerard d’Athée, listed by name, and promising to “remove from the kingdom all alien knights, cross-bowmen, serjeants, mercenaries, who have come with horses and arms to harm the kingdom.” Carpenter discusses these in Magna Carta, 230–1. On alien expulsions in the 1260s, see Carpenter, “King Henry III’s ‘statute’ against aliens;” Ridgeway, “Foreign favourites and Henry III’s problems of patronage;” and further discussion in Chapter 5. ⁸² fol. 70v. See Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I.659. ⁸³ “Lex enim ista diu sopita fuit et sepulta donec edgarus rex anglorum qui fuit auus eadwardi regis propinqui uestri illam excitauit et in lucem erexit” (fol. 67r). See Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I.655. ⁸⁴ “suscipi debent et protegi in regno isto sicut coniurati fratres nostri et sicut proprii ciues regni huius” (fol. 69r). See Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I.658. ⁸⁵ See Ullmann, “On the influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth in English history,” 260–3; and Keene, “Text, visualisation, and politics,” 83–7; both draw on the initial observations of Liebermann. See “A contemporary manuscript of the ‘Leges Anglorum Londoniis Collectae,’ ” 732–4.

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moments when the compiler wishes to elevate royal status. In this case, it is Geoffrey of Vinsauf, discussed as well in Chapter 2, who provides the London Collection its vocabulary for mourning imperial loss.

Remembering Normandy with Geoffrey of Vinsauf The term imperium—denoting in medieval Latin both the power of a king or emperor to rule as well as the lands and people subject to that rule—tends to mask the jurisdictional complexities that inhere in territories comprised of distinct histories, languages, and possessory claims.⁸⁶ This is certainly true of the Angevin Empire in the early years of the thirteenth century. The realm that John inherited from his brother Richard, and which his wife Isabella of Angoulême helped solidify, stretched from Normandy and Anjou in the north to Poitou, Gascony, and Toulouse in the south. Comprised of a complex patchwork of territories, some held as king, some as suzerain, John’s realm was by no means as unified as his title—King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, Count of Anjou—purported.⁸⁷ From the powerful Thouars and Lusignan families in Poitou to Philip Augustus of France, who held overlordship of the Norman lands, John’s Angevin inheritance depended on a shifting and volatile set of allegiances.⁸⁸ In 1202, Philip revealed his ambition to lay full claim to Normandy, Anjou, and Poitou, and by 1204 had succeeded, seizing the Norman capital of Rouen.⁸⁹ Though John would claim back Poitou and retain Gascony, these northern territories never returned to the suzerainty of the English kings. Both John and Henry III would expend considerable political and material capital in the effort to regain them, however.⁹⁰ Economic historians typically date England’s first public tax—that is, the first large-scale subsidy levied for reasons of “state necessity”—to 1207, as John sought to reclaim the territories he had lost in 1204.⁹¹ Together with the typical array of aids and reliefs, this broad tax on ecclesiastical and lay revenues yielded substantial sums of money, albeit at the cost of whatever meager political good will remained to the king. The fracture of empire and the ⁸⁶ Dictionary of Medieval Latin in British Sources, s.v. imperium. ⁸⁷ See Powicke, The Loss of Normandy; Turner, King John, 59–86; and Church, King John and the Road to Magna Carta, 74–5 and 102–3. ⁸⁸ See Church, King John and the Road to Magna Carta, 102–3; on the administration of the Angevin empire in Anjou and Poitou, see Power, The Norman Frontier. ⁸⁹ As the poet of the History of William Marshal tells it, Peter de Préaux informed John that “if he did not come to save his lands, / then he would lose the lot of them” [s’il ne secoreit sa terre, / Qu’il la perdreit trestot a net]. History of William Marshal, Holden, et al., ed. and trans., II.12908–9. See also Powicke, The Loss of Normandy, 383–7; Church, King John and the Road to Magna Carta, 123–4; Power, The Norman Frontier, 423–45; and Moore, “The loss of Normandy and the invention of terre Normannorum, 1204.” ⁹⁰ On the consequences of these efforts for Henry III, see Chapter 5. ⁹¹ See Carpenter, Magna Carta, 210–11, and Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance, 3–26.

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failed efforts to regain it proved, in David Carpenter’s words, “the single most important cause of Magna Carta.”⁹² Compiled in this first tumultuous decade after 1204, the London Collection represents, on one level, an effort to reassemble English imperium by means of legal historiography.⁹³ This effort begins with the first items in the Rylands manuscript, the Tribal Hidage and the Burghal Hidage (Rs, fols. 3r–4r). Originally Anglo-Saxon administrative lists, they enumerate the numbers of “provinces, lands, counties, and isles” [prouinciarum et patriarum et comitatuum et insularum] (fol. 3r) that belong within the legal purview of the regnum britannie.⁹⁴ The author notes that Britain, on account of Mercian, West Saxon, and Danelaw territories, more fittingly deserves the title of imperium rather than regnum (fol. 3r), since its dominion contains multiple independent realms. This preoccupation with imperium continues across the whole of the Collection’s two volumes, culminating with the king whose death loomed large in the wake of John’s losses in Normandy. Richard I did not produce significant legislation—indeed, spent little of his ten-year reign in England at all—but his reputation as a crusading hero and imperially minded king offset the lack of any consequential law making. The London Collection compiler accordingly uses him as a model for the kind of militarized power that holds far-flung territories together. Lacking coronation charters or law codes belonging to Richard, the London Collection illustrates his reign by means of encomium. Its short capsule history lavishes praise upon the ruler. He was “a vigorous man, a noble knight, fierce, courageous, valiant, great, the strongest of men, eloquent, knowledgeable, daring beyond measure, attractive, witty and lavish, kind, humble, gentle, wise, prudent, and moderate” (Ai, fol. 86v).⁹⁵ The text rehearses the extent of the Angevin realm under his lordship, which stretched from Hispania at its southern limit to Norway in the north. Richard “ruled and controlled and subjugated to himself ” [rexitque . . . dominauit et sibi subiugauit] (fol. 86v) all of these lands, and upon his death commanded his heart rest in Rouen, the ducal seat of Normandy, which he loved best of all: “He hoped that the French, for fear of his heart, would not invade that city through some reckless daring, nor, for fear of his heart, oppress the Normans in any manner” (fol. 87r).⁹⁶ By 1204, this hope had proven a vain one,

⁹² Carpenter, Magna Carta, 70. ⁹³ See Keene, “Text, visualisation, and politics.” Hanna also discusses the contents at length in London Literature, 56–90. ⁹⁴ On the Tribal and Burghal Hidages, see Dumville, “The Tribal Hidage;” and Hill and Rumble, The Defense of Wessex. ⁹⁵ “Erat enim uir strenuus, miles optimus, bellicosus, animosus, probus, magnus, hominum fortissimus, gnarus, facundus, audax supra modum, pulcher, facetus et largus, benignus, humilis, mansuetus, sapiens et prudens, moderatus.” An edited text may be found in Liebermann, Über die Leges Anglorum, 81. ⁹⁶ “Sperauit enim gallos cordis sui timore praedictam ciuitatem ausu temerario non inuadere, nec normannos ullo modo metu cordis sui in aliquo grauare.” Liebermann, Über die Leges Anglorum, 82.

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with Richard’s defensive fortress, Château-Gaillard, falling to Philip’s siege. Rouen fell shortly thereafter.⁹⁷ This recent history provides the compiler of the London Collection his most trenchant line of critique against the unnamed king who has forfeited Richard’s literal “heartland.” The metonym—Richard’s heart standing for Rouen, Rouen for the king—already signals a certain poetic sensibility to the description. Indeed, it is the poetry of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, clearly already circulating in London clerical and legal circles c. 1213, that most markedly shapes the depiction of Richard I.⁹⁸ Allusions to and borrowings from Geoffrey’s Poetria nova proliferate in the short account.⁹⁹ To affirm Richard’s steadfast lordship, the compiler suggests he “did not suffer any eclipse” in his own times, a metaphor taken from first of the two apostrophes on Richard I that Geoffrey includes in the Poetria nova.¹⁰⁰ When he alludes to the hope that Richard’s heart would strike fear in his enemies, he recalls a line from Geoffrey’s second apostrophe, the lament discussed in Chapter 2, which claimed that the king “terrified” his enemies in the Holy Land during his lifetime so that he might still terrify them when dead.¹⁰¹ For the compiler of the London Collection, the Poetria nova thus proves useful both as a source for historical information about Richard and as a rhetorical primer for writing the kind of “amplified” history appropriate to such a figure. But in his apostrophe on Richard’s death, Geoffrey of Vinsauf also provides the compiler a poetic means to represent the relationship between lordship and land. As discussed in Chapter 2, the “Lament for Richard I” addresses itself to Neustria, which Geoffrey worries now lies undefended (PN 369) in the wake of Richard’s death: “Once defended by King Richard’s shield, now undefended, O Normandy, demonstrate your grief through plaint” [Neustria, sub clypeo regis defensa Ricardi, / Indefensa modo, planctu testare dolorem] (368–9).¹⁰² Though the London Collection compiler carries over the sense of loss and political anxiety in these lines, the meaning of Neustria has changed in the years since 1199. For Geoffrey, writing after Richard’s passing, Neustria represents a land made vulnerable by the death of its king. For the London Collection compiler, writing after 1204, Neustria represents the forfeited “heart” of a now much smaller Angevin realm.

⁹⁷ On the fall of Château-Gaillard and “disunity” among the Norman barony, see Power, “King John and the Norman aristocracy.” ⁹⁸ See Camargo, “Liber uersuum,” and discussion in Chapter 2 of this book. ⁹⁹ Liebermann notes several of these references in Über die Leges Anglorum, 81–2. ¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 81. Cf. Poetria nova, ll. 341–2: “sidus patietur eclipsim / A quo fulges.” References throughout are from the Latin edition by Faral, Les arts poétiques, and the translation by Nims, Poetria nova. Line numbers follow the cited text in subsequent references. ¹⁰¹ Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, ll, 416–17: “et crucis hostes, / Quos omnes vivus sic terruit, ut timeatur / mortuus.” Translation by Nims has been slightly adjusted. ¹⁰² I have elected to follow the majority manuscript reading of Neustria in the translation rather Anglia as Nims does. See discussion to follow, n. 105.

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In asserting that Richard’s heart acts as a defense against Normandy’s enemies, the compiler recalls the king’s literal burial wishes. But he may also refer more subtly to another set-piece poem from the Poetria nova. As an illustration of prosopopoeia, Geoffrey includes a short verse written in the voice of a brash Norman castle.¹⁰³ It taunts the French as “womanish rabble” [Femineum vulgus] (521) better suited to the distaff than the sword, and jeers at their threats and pride. “Let other foes rise, any number you please,” the castle boasts. “They are not equal to me; I am rather a cause of fear to them, I who am fashioned to the model of King Richard’s heart” [ . . . surgant alii quantumlibet hostes; / Non mihi sunt aequi, sed eis sum causa doloris, / Cordis ad exemplar regis formata Ricardi] (524–6). This castle is almost certainly Château-Gaillard, personifying its titular adjective, gaillard, meaning “robust” and “forceful.” Erected over the course of 1196–8 precisely to protect upper Normandy at the boundary with the Vexin, the castle served as a literal defense of Richard’s patrimony until 1204.¹⁰⁴ In metonymically describing it as Richard’s “heart,” Geoffrey plays with overlapping literary and topographical topoi, the literal heart in Rouen and the metonymic heart perched above the Seine both manifesting the “shield” [clypeus] of Richard’s protective lordship. Appropriately, given his debt to the Poetria nova, the London Collection compiler concludes his survey of English royal legislation by copying in the actual text of Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s “Lament for Richard I”—or, at least, appears to have intended to do so. Promising praise of the king “written by Master Geoffrey of Vinsauf,” the bottom half of fol. 87r remains blank, awaiting a poem never copied. Only the decorated initial N of Neustria and a marginal note providing the first line of the poem suggest the intended final item. The reasons for its exclusion have been lost to history, but the truncation of Neustria on the page presents a stark illustration of the severed familial and economic ties that followed in the wake of 1204. In years to come, scribes copying Poetria nova manuscripts would subtly mark this change in other ways, substituting Neustria with a new dactyl, Anglia.¹⁰⁵ From here onward, the London Collection becomes more local in its focus, but no less global in its concerns. Following several leaves after the “Lament for Richard I” is The Letter of Prester John (Ai, fols. 92r–97v), itself a fiction of a

¹⁰³ Geoffrey included an earlier version of this poem written in elegiacs, again illustrating the device of prosopopoeia, in his Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi (c. 1213), revising it into hexameters for the Poetria nova. Camargo surmises that this poem, along with the “Lament for Richard I,” formed part of a compilation of classroom poems Geoffrey devised as teaching aids. For discussion, see “Liber uersuum,” 9–12. See also Chapter 2, 71–5. ¹⁰⁴ On Château-Gaillard, see Powicke, The Loss of Normandy, 285–91, who calls it “a turning point in the history of western fortification,” its construction influenced by the fortifications Richard encountered during his years crusading in Syria (289). He draws on the study by Dieulafoy, “Le Château-Gaillard et l’architecture militaire au XIIIe siècle.” See also Gillingham, Richard I, 301–6. ¹⁰⁵ Nim renders Neustria as Anglia in her translation, though the majority of manuscripts preserve Neustria. In Faral’s apparatus, Wolfenbüttel, Hertzog August Bibliothek, MS Gude 4591 attests to the variant reading.

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strong empire held together by a shared adherence to faith and militarism.¹⁰⁶ After the letter, the scribe, now writing now in Anglo-Norman, shifts abruptly from this distant king to the far more proximate realm of London civic governance, the operations of which comprise much of the remainder of the Collection. As Keene shows, these London-specific texts evince a special interest in ordinances regulating trade with foreign merchants, in preserving triannual folkmoots, and in protecting London’s interests against the king.¹⁰⁷ What emerges across the Collection is a theory of London civic identity that finds its mirror in Britain’s historical identity as imperium, complex and multitudinous in its parts but coherent as an idea and identity. This civic identity, as both Keene and Hanna stress, found powerful symbolic representation in Becket, a native son of the city turned fierce defender of the principle of jurisdictional autonomy.¹⁰⁸ Copied on fol. 110r, for instance, appears an oath sworn by twenty-four London councilors tasked by the king with investigating abuses in 1205–6. The formula promises to do the work of royal justice salva libertate civitatis—a direct echo of Becket’s famous refrain, “saving my order.”¹⁰⁹ For the compiler of the London Collection, in other words, London’s legal authority rested on two inextricable foundations: a theory of territorial dominion exemplified by the likes of Richard I and Prester John and a theory of jurisdictional autonomy exemplified by Becket. The legal and linguistic heterogeneity of the London Collection provides a window onto the heterogeneous concerns that Magna Carta sought, initially in a rather provisional and piecemeal way, to resolve. We can see in the Collection how grand unifying concepts, like imperium, or Britannia, or ius, abutted the particularities of local custom and concern—the power of the Lorraine merchants, for instance, or the procedures of the Hustings court. Magna Carta similarly reflects a tension between a theory of law and the pragmatics of legal remedy. It advances broad statements about the nature of royal justice, as in cap. 40, which promises ¹⁰⁶ See Brewer, ed. and trans., Prester John. ¹⁰⁷ See “Text, visualisation, and politics.” The items contend with debt and other procedures in the Husting court (fols. 98r–99v), with the regulation of Lorraine merchants (fols. 99v–100v), and with the obligations of the three annual folkmoots (fols. 100v–101r). A new scribe takes over to copy the Libertas Londoniensis (fol. 104v–105v), alongside other materials pertinent to London’s internal governance and prominent families, especially the Cornhills and fitz Ailwins. See Hanna, London Literature, 86–7; and Keene, “Text, visualisation, and politics,” 86. On the significance of these families in the London Collection, see Keene, ibid., 89. ¹⁰⁸ See Keene and Harding, “St. Mary Colechurch 105/18;” Keene, “Text, visualisation, and politics,” 76–7; and Hanna, London Literature, 86–7. For discussion of St. Thomas’s importance to later thirteenth-century London civic politics, and especially the chronicler Arnold fitz Thedmar, see Stone, “Arnold Fitz Thedmar.” ¹⁰⁹ Since J. H. Round’s study in 1899, scholars have attempted to connect the confederation of these twenty-four councilors in London to the number of barons (“the twenty-five”) given supervisory powers in the security clause of the 1215 Magna Carta. Vincent has most recently determined that the 1205–6 London council was summoned by King John himself to correct government mismanagement of tallages. See Round, The Commune of London, 237–42; Bateson, “A London municipal collection from the reign of King John;” and, most recently, Vincent, “The twenty-five barons of Magna Carta,” 239–40.

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that “to no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice” [Nulli vendemus, nulli negabimus, aut differemus, rectum aut justiciam].¹¹⁰ But the question of how to enforce such promises presented an enduring difficulty. The 1215 Magna Carta accorded enforcement to a group of twenty-five barons, who had the power to “distrain and distress us in every way they can” [distringent et gravabunt nos modis omnibus quibus poterunt] if the king failed to uphold his terms.¹¹¹ But this so-called “security clause” did not last beyond 1215—nor, indeed, did Magna Carta seem destined to last either. Holt famously called this first version of Magna Carta a “failure.” Designed to keep peace, it prompted war; promising liberties in perpetuity, it met with quick annulment by the pope.¹¹² What revived Magna Carta, imaginatively and legislatively, was its transfer in 1225 into the custodianship of the English church, when Stephen Langton oversaw the “translation” of Magna Carta from the domain of royal to episcopal authority.¹¹³ Unlike its previous reissue in 1217, this confirmation of the Charter took place under Langton’s supervision, with the archbishop presiding over a general sentence of excommunication levied against anyone who contravened its terms.¹¹⁴ 1225 thus marked the beginning of a new tradition for the Charter, in which any controversial taxation effort on the part of the king required reconfirmation of Magna Carta and, with it, a solemn ritual consecrating its terms. The concluding section of the chapter traces Magna Carta’s change in fortunes from a failed peace treaty to a symbol of the mutual adherence of king and commons to the rule of law. As we will see, this change owes to the power of ecclesiastical ritual, as prelates continued to oversee the king’s symbolic recommitment to the idea of the document as much as to its individual clauses. By the reign of Edward I, Magna Carta embodied a legal origin story in its own right. The 1225 version stood as the first item in hundreds of legal statute books, secure in its place as the “originary” royal charter. As an idea, then, Magna Carta represented not only the power of Church and commons to correct the ruler, but the recursive nature of such reform efforts—their tendency to return to the same problems and prosecute the same arguments over the course of years. The examples of legal plaint that emerge in this period reflect this awareness. As we will see, they find formal means to signal problems of legal fracture and repetition. Whether through the recursiveness of rhyme or the macaronic juxtaposition of

¹¹⁰ See Holt, Magna Carta, Appendix 6. ¹¹¹ Ibid., cap. 61. ¹¹² Ibid., 33. ¹¹³ See ibid., 327–8; and Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, 5–11. ¹¹⁴ The text is given in Powicke and Cheney, eds., Councils and Synods, II.137–8. See also Gray, “The Church and Magna Carta in the century after Runnymede.” Copies of the 1253 excommunication oath are found in a number of English statute collections. For discussion, see Hill, “Magna Carta, canon law, and pastoral care.” On Langton’s role see d’Avray, “«Magna Carta»: Its background in Stephen Langton’s academic biblical exegesis;” Baldwin, “Master Stephen Langton, future archbishop of Canterbury,” and Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community. On the ways Langton’s theology shaped his political theory, see also Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants, esp. I.209–10, and Buc, L’ambiguïté du livre.

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languages, thirteenth-century complaint poetry demonstrates both the promise of Magna Carta and its disappointments.

The Jurisdictional Poetics of Magna Carta Magna Carta was a multilingual document formulated through a multilingual process of negotiation. As I will discuss over the course of this section, its promulgation also occurred in multiple languages, demanding a legal linguistic competency that in turn fostered experiments in vernacular complaint poetry.¹¹⁵ I call this process of experimentation the “jurisdictional poetics” of Magna Carta. Characterized by a flexible approach to poetic form and language, the verses that emerge at the margins of the law both attest and contribute to the increasing importance of Magna Carta in this era. We have already seen how the draft materials for Magna Carta—the Coronation Charters of the Angevin kings and the Articles of the Barons—circulated in Anglo-French in unbound form c. 1215.¹¹⁶ It seems reasonable, then, to call Magna Carta’s “first language” French, as it was likely in French that the king, barons, and prelates negotiated and drafted its terms before clerics rendered the document into official Latin. Certainly, its translation back into French dates to the earliest copies distributed to shires in 1215. A Norman cartulary attests to the immediacy of this effort. It preserves a French version of the 1215 document, accompanied by a writ, also in French, directing the Hampshire sheriff and his knights to seize the land and chattels of anyone who refuses to swear an oath to the twenty-five barons listed in the security clause.¹¹⁷ Translation thus lies at the very origins of Magna Carta, with French versions of the Charter appearing simultaneously alongside the official Latin engrossments that were dispersed across England in the weeks following Runnymede. As Holt notes in his appraisal of these documents, the dual nature of Magna Carta—as a negotiated set of peace terms and a royal charter granting liberties—demanded use of the vernacular: in order for it to apply to all the “free men” in the realm, it

¹¹⁵ The scholarship on thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century complaint poetry is rich. For a definition of complaint poetry in relation to legal plaint procedures, see Scase, Literature and Complaint, 5–41; for multilingualism and ideas of “nation,” see Matthews, Writing to the King, 7–28; and Ashe, Conquest and Transformation, 376–9. For an overview of the tradition, see Coss, “Introduction to the 1996 Edition,” in Wright, Political Songs of England; and Turville-Petre, “Political lyrics.” ¹¹⁶ See previously, 109–10, n. 47. ¹¹⁷ It is found in Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS Y 200, a cartulary for the leper hospital of St. Giles at Pont-Audemer, Normandy. For discussion and an edition of the text, see Holt, “A vernacular-French text of Magna Carta 1215,” 356–64, with further discussion in ibid., Magna Carta, 399–401; and Carpenter, Magna Carta, 377–8. Clanchy notes that the letter to the Hampshire sheriff constitutes the “oldest authentically dated royal letter in French.” See From Memory to Written Record, 219–20. On the Rouen manuscript, see also Pennington, “Reform in 1215: Magna Carta and the Fourth Lateran Council.”

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needed to be understood by those men.¹¹⁸ This demand shapes the history of Magna Carta over the thirteenth century, as well as texts like the formula for excommunication that circulated with it. In 1254, for instance, the Dean of Lincoln ordered the excommunication sentence to be “published clearly and lucidly both in the English and French tongue whenever and wherever it may seem expedient.”¹¹⁹ Four years later, Henry III famously announced his adherence to the Provisions of Oxford by means of letters written in Latin, French, and—for the first time—Middle English.¹²⁰ By the close of the thirteenth century, it is clear that public proclamations of Magna Carta happened in all three of England’s major languages: in 1300, Edward I commanded the charter be read at Westminster “first according to the letter and then according to native tongue” [prius litteraliter, deinde patria lingua].¹²¹ The poetry that proliferates at the margins of these documents reflects the multilingual character of the debates that generated them. Early examples of poems referring to events surrounding Magna Carta and the First Barons’ War survive in Latin, representative of the monastic and clerical networks that tended to circulate written accounts of events. One of the rare historical accounts of negotiations at Runnymede, for instance, comes by way of a poem copied into the annals of Melrose Abbey.¹²² In the rhyming, thirteen-syllable line of goliardic verse, the poet rehearses a set of arguments familiar from John of Salisbury’s Policraticus and the political philosophy of the London Collection: Ordinem praeposterum Anglia sanxivit, Mirum dictu dicitur, tale quis audivit? Nam praeesse capiti corpus concupivit, Regem suum regere populus quesivit. ¹¹⁸ See ibid., “A vernacular-French text of Magna Carta 1215,” 350, and also Magna Carta, 400–1. ¹¹⁹ Cited in Holt, “A vernacular-French text of Magna Carta 1215,” 349, from the Annals of Burton, Annales Monastici, I.322: “mandamus firmiter injungentes, quatenus sententiam praedictam, modo quo praediximus, publicetis et per alios publicari faciatis distincte et dilucide, in lingua Anglicana et Gallicana, ubicumque et quandocumque videritis expedire.” See also Carpenter, Magna Carta, 378, and Hill, “Magna Carta, canon law, and pastoral care,” 364. ¹²⁰ See further discussion in this chapter. ¹²¹ Cited in Holt, “A vernacular-French text of Magna Carta 1215,” 346, from Rishanger, Chronica et Annales, 405: “Ibi convocato clero et primatibus totius potestatis suae, statum regni pace et lege confirmavit; Magnam Chartam, diu concupitam, cum omnibus articulis, legi coram omnibus qui aderant iussit, prius litteraliter, deinde patria lingua.” ¹²² London, British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B.ix (fol. 31v), with a later version appearing in the Augustinian Lanercost chronicle, which absorbed much of a now-lost chronicle by the Franciscan Richard of Durham. References to the poem will be from Chronica de Mailros, Stevenson, ed., 117–19, translations mine. For the textual history of the Melrose Chronicle, see Broun and Harrison, The Chronicle of Melrose Abbey. See also Chronicon de Lanercost, Stevenson, ed., with a translation by Maxwell, The Chronicle of Lanercost. For discussion of Richard of Durham and the creation of the Lanercost Chronicle, see Little, “The authorship of the Lanercost Chronicle;” and Gransden, Historical Writing in England, c. 550–1307, 495–501. The poem’s popularity in the north survived into the eighteenth century when the Whig pamphleteer, classicist, and lawyer Thomas Gordon cited it in his tract, “A letter to a leading great man.” See Trenchard and Gordon, A Collection of Tracts, 296.

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Causa tamen multiplex illud exigebat, Nam rex mores optimos regni pervertebat, Jura, leges; subditos recte non regebat, Quidquid erat placitum summum jus credebat. (1–8) [England has sanctioned an inverted order. Who has heard of such a thing, strange as it is to say? The body indeed desired to control the head and the people to rule their king. But a complex set of reasons compelled it. For the king had perverted the noble customs of the realm, its laws and rights; he was not ruling his subjects properly. Whatever was most pleasing to him he believed to be ius.]

The poet goes on to rehearse the key complaints against John: he has excessively oppressed his own subjects and elevated foreign mercenaries in their place, ruined legitimate heirs and hostages and given their lands to foreign possession. In its ambivalent summary of the general argument for revolt, we can see the poet balancing anxiety at the prospect of an “inverted order”—royal deposition—and frustration with the prevailing disorder created by John’s poor governance. Subsequent lines go on to narrate the events that preceded Magna Carta, loosely describing the escalation of the crisis from late April to May 1215, when the rebels swore their allegiance as the Army of God and marched on the king, presenting John with a list of demands drawn from the Coronation Charter of Henry I and the Leges Edwardi.¹²³ For a poem ostensibly “about” Magna Carta, or at least about the events that preceded and followed upon its drafting, the text remains surprisingly oblique on the main subject. Indeed, it is precisely when the poet narrates the events most pertinent to modern historians—Magna Carta and its copying—that the sequence becomes, in Holt’s words, “confused.”¹²⁴ Narrating the events in June 1215, the poet describes the rebels “thirsting finally after the former laws of the realm” [Leges tandem pristinas regni sicientes] (35), but not wanting to send forces against the king. They thus arrange for a forma pacis, to which John reluctantly agrees. The whole agreement having been “reduced” [reducere] (43) to writing, the barons wish John to affix his seal. But the king prevaricates, making promises rather than law, and finally calls everyone to Oxford, a reference presumably to the Oxford Council of July 16–23.¹²⁵ There, according to the poet, the king opposes the ¹²³ On April 27, according to the account of Roger of Wendover, the rebel barons assembled near Northampton, where they met with emissaries of the king demanding to know their terms. As Holt and Carpenter both note, no copy of these demands exists, though they presumably resembled the other documents preliminary to Magna Carta and formulated around this same time—that is, the Unknown Charter and the Articles of the Barons. See Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, II.585–6, and, for discussion, Holt, Magna Carta, 204–11, and Carpenter, Magna Carta, 295–301. ¹²⁴ Holt, Magna Carta, 411. ¹²⁵ This poem constitutes one of only four historical sources for this meeting. On the July Oxford Council, see Holt, Magna Carta, 407–11, and Carpenter, Magna Carta, 390–4.

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articles of peace, and both sides withdraw cum rancore. The poem ends on a pessimistic note, with language borrowed from the Gospel of Matthew 27:16: “Thus this last error became worse than the first” [Error sic posterior pejor fit priore] (50).¹²⁶ As poetry, this piece of versified chronicle narration seems on its face fairly unambitious, its rhyming pattern largely accomplished by ending nearly every line with a verb. Copied as prose in the Melrose Chronicle, it barely announces itself as poetry and eschews mentioning Magna Carta at all, beyond the rather oblique reference to the ordo praeposterus of the opening line. But as a piece of heightened historical narration, it speaks to the complexity of rendering events in poetic terms. From a historical point of view, we can understand the poet’s seeming lack of interest in the ratification of the “Great Charter”: in the few short months before its annulment by Pope Innocent III, the charter seemed destined to have little future beyond the summer of 1215.¹²⁷ From a poetic point of view, on the other hand, we can see a writer preoccupied with inverted orders both political and compositional. John of Salisbury, as Chapter 1 discussed, had decried the abandonment of grammatical ordo and modus as the beginning point for the destruction of law and custom. Here, the poet draws on a similar vocabulary and argumentative logic, lamenting an ordo praeposterus in the first line which finds its biblical echo in the error posterior of the final line. Indeed, it is through means of a licensed poetic “disorder” that the complaints in the poem find their rhetorical power. In the Poetria nova, Geoffrey of Vinsauf taught that a composition could be ordered according to either the paths of art or nature (PN 88–90). Natural order narrated events in chronological sequence, while artificial order “presents first what was later in time, and defers the appearance of what was actually earlier” [praelocet . . . / Posteriora prius, vel detrahat ipsa priora / Posterius] (91–3).¹²⁸ At its most artful, this technique—which Geoffrey also calls “praeposterus ordo” (100)— “inverts things in such a way that it does not pervert them” [res ita vertit / Ut non pervertat] (97–8).¹²⁹ The poet, too, inverts his order, announcing the ratification of a “preposterous” political order before turning to narrate the sequence of perverse actions and events that precipitated it. The verse in this way wrestles with questions of historical causation and sequence, using what the grammar masters called the more “elegant” [civilior] (99) arrangement of material to lambast the seeming “incivility” of its present political moment. The Melrose Chronicle poem suggests why Magna Carta disappeared from view in the weeks after its initial distribution to counties and cathedral archives. ¹²⁶ The Barnwell Chronicle makes this same biblical allusion in regard to the dissolution of peace terms, suggesting a shared source across the two texts. See Walter of Coventry, II.222. ¹²⁷ The language of the poem broadly echoes the language of the 1215 security clause. For discussion, see Carpenter, Magna Carta, 326. Holt discusses it in relation to the Oxford Council of July 16–23 in Magna Carta, 411. ¹²⁸ Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, Nims, trans. ¹²⁹ Ibid.

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Having failed to prevent war, it also failed to convince writers like the previously mentioned poet that its order was a fitting one. The Charter’s fortunes changed radically in 1225, however, when it emerged as a preeminent symbolic bargaining chip in taxation arguments between the king and the barons and prelates of his realm. In the Westminster Parliament of 1253, for example, Henry III successfully obtained a clerical tenth to help fund a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but only on the condition that he uphold free Church elections. Henry was made to swear to this agreement upon Magna Carta and the Forest Charter; then, as Matthew Paris tells it, the king and ecclesiastical establishment gathered with lighted candles as bishops pronounced a sentence of excommunication upon any who “knowingly and wickedly deprive or despoil the churches of their rights; also all those who by whatever art or device rashly violate, diminish, or alter, secretly or openly, by deed, word, or counsel, the liberties of the Church, or the ancient and approved customs of the kingdom, and especially the liberties and free customs which are contained in the charters of the common liberties of England and of the forest.”¹³⁰ With the pronouncement of the sentence, all the assembled struck out their candles simultaneously. The 1253 formula of excommunication quickly became the central means by which Magna Carta, as law and as symbol, reached the attention of lay audiences. According to Matthew Paris, for example, Robert Grosseteste ordered the sentence pronounced in every parochial church in his diocese, such that “the sentence could tingle the ears of listeners [cf. I Kings 3:11] and awe their hearts to no small degree.”¹³¹ Within a year, as we have seen, the dean of Lincoln would require this pronouncement read in French and English, and legal collections reflect this effort, with French translations of the excommunication sentence accompanying French translations of Magna Carta and the Forest Charter.¹³² As Felicity Hill neatly summarizes, “Magna Carta was not being promulgated in its own right, but rather as a gloss on the sentence which covered it.”¹³³ Like Magna Carta, then, the pronouncement of the sententia lata—the sentence of automatic excommunication—did more than convey legal content; it made a crucial argument for the translatability of the early common law, for its power to transcend linguistic and regional boundaries, knitting king and realm together under a shared set of obligations.¹³⁴ ¹³⁰ Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, V.376: “ ‘omnes illos qui amodo scienter et malitiose ecclesias privaverint vel spoliaverint suo jure. Item, omnes illos qui ecclesiasticas libertates vel antiquas regni consuetudines probatas, et praecipue libertates et liberas consuetudines, quae in cartis communium libertatum Angliae et de foresta continentur . . . qualicunque arte vel ingenio temere violaverint, diminuerint, seu immutaverint, clam vel palam, facto, verbo, vel consilio.’ ” On this confirmation, see Carpenter, “Magna Carta 1253;” and also Hill, “Magna Carta, canon law, and pastoral care.” ¹³¹ Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, V.378: “quae sententia potuit aures audientium tinnire, et corda non mediocriter formidare.” For discussion, see also Ashe, Conquest and Transformation, 374. ¹³² Cf. London, British Library, Add. MS 38821, fols. 85v–89v. ¹³³ Hill, “Magna Carta, canon law, and pastoral care,” 641. ¹³⁴ For discussion of the translatability of legal principle in this era, see also Ashe, Conquest and Transformation, 356–429.

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But if Magna Carta represented a symbol of constitutional possibility, it also represented the realities of fiscal and political antagonism. Born of political crisis, it never detached itself from crisis over the course of the thirteenth century, demanding new confirmations whenever negotiations among barons, bishops, and king became especially intractable. These jurisdictional differences find expression in a diverse array of poetic examples that share a focus on legal argumentation as well as the work of translation. A St. Albans historical miscellany dating to the mid-thirteenth century, for example, includes an Anglo-French poem commenting upon the so-called “Sicilian Business” of 1255–6, when Henry III requested thousands of pounds from the realm in an ill-fated quest to gain the kingdoms of Sicily and Apulia for his second son, Edmund.¹³⁵ Composed, according to its rubric, “on the desolation of the English Church” in the year 1256, the poem likens the corporate body of the clergy to the widowed Jerusalem of Lamentations 1:1, “now without marriage and placed under tribute” [ore est sanz mariage / E mis en tailage] (6–7).¹³⁶ The author bemoans a Church brought to shame, “enslaved, greatly despised and cast down” [enservie, / E trop envilie, / E abatus jus] (25–6), by the ruthless pecuniary demands of pope and king: “The king and the pope think of nothing other than how to deprive the clergy of their gold and silver” [Li rois ne l’aspostoloie / Ne pensent altrement, / Mes coment au clers tolent / Lur or e lur argent] (31–4). This French song functions as a kind of quasi-liturgical response to political events, translating the Latin of Lamentations into French while also translating its emotional tenor from corporate Christendom to the more particular woes of the English clergy. Its vocabularies of freedom and slavery echo the dramatic rhetoric of Matthew Paris, who in the Chronica majora would argue that the Sicilian tax constituted the “utmost slavery” [ultimum servitum] for the Church.¹³⁷ Indeed, the song initially seems closely tied to St. Albans: the manuscript in which it survives includes excerpts from another St. Albans chronicler, John of Wallingford, as well artwork and a map attributed to Paris himself.¹³⁸ Doubly

¹³⁵ London, British Library, MS Cotton Julius D.vii. Henry III and Pope Alexander IV sought in these years an exacting burden of taxes and tithes from the regular and secular orders, meant to fund a continental Holy War designed to oust Alexander’s Hohenstaufen enemies from the kingdoms of Sicily and Apulia. “The Sicilian Business,” as it came to be known, proved deeply contentious and contributed to the hostile political climate for Henry in years to come. For further discussion, see Chapter 5, 196–7. ¹³⁶ Text is taken from Aspin, ed. and trans., Anglo-Norman Political Songs (hereafter ANPS), 42–4, with discussion of the manuscripts at 36–41. For other editions, see also Wright, ed. and trans., Political Songs of England, 42–4, and Somerset, “Complaining about the king.” Translations are mine with helpful consultation of these other editions. Line numbers follow the text throughout. For discussion of the poem’s use of tallage and its associations with peasant taxes, see Scase, Literature and Complaint, 17–21, esp. 18. For further discussion of this poem, see Chapter 5, 193–4. ¹³⁷ Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, V:600. ¹³⁸ On the manuscript, see Vaughan, “The chronicle of John of Wallingford.” On Matthew Paris’s art in the manuscript, see Lewis, Art of Matthew Paris, 138 and 364–7, and Aspin, ANPS, 36. See also Meyer, “Mélanges de poésie anglo-normande,” 395–7.

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marked by its language and by its status as “song” [canticum], this verse stands deliberately marginal to the larger collection in which it was copied: indeed, the chronicle entry for the year 1256 directs the reader to the end of the volume to locate the “song composed in French” on the same topic.¹³⁹ But the larger Latin historiographical context that enfolds this piece of French verse ephemera also enables its survival. As vernacular plaint, it supplements the legal and historical materials that surround it by adding emotional life to jurisdictional abstractions, transforming the widowed Jerusalem of Lamentations into a compelling embodiment of the Church’s economic prerogatives. French constitutes an especially appropriate language for such legal allegorization: its status as a language of law as well as devotion made it especially well suited to the plights of noble widows, be they allegorical or actual. By 1258, then, when Henry III affirmed his commitment to the Provisions of Oxford in “Latine, Gallice, et Anglice,” reformist legislation and vernacular translation had been linked for more than forty years.¹⁴⁰ These letters, issued as affirmation of the king’s acquiescence to conciliar oversight, have long held fascination as a seemingly precocious incursion of written Middle English into law.¹⁴¹ But they become perhaps less surprising—and less “nationalizing” in character—when viewed against the backdrop of Magna Carta and its dissemination over the course of the century. A reformist effort modeled on Magna Carta, the Provisions of Oxford borrowed, too, from the Charter’s mechanisms of publication. In the days after the Westminster Parliament of October 1258, royal letters were sent to all the shires, promising the king’s commitment to reform and instructing “treowe” men (feaus et leaus, in French) to hold to the statutes made by the council. The king’s liberate rolls may also hint at the person who translated these letters into English and French for dispersal to the shire courts: a certain Robert of Fulham (or Foleham), constable to the Exchequer and later a justice of the Jews, earned fifty shillings for his labors “in composing and writing certain charters in English and French.”¹⁴² “A prime

¹³⁹ “In fine libri inuenies canticum lvi anno gallice compositum super desolacione ecclesie anglicane” (fol. 105v). “Istud canticum factum fuit anno gracie Mo CCo LVIo super desolacione ecclesie anglicane” (fol. 133v). ¹⁴⁰ Annales Monastici, I.453. For further discussion, see Chapter 5, 197–8. ¹⁴¹ The Burton annalist reports that Henry sent letters in all three languages in the wake of the Oxford Parliament. No example of the Latin version survives. Editions of the French letters can be found in Treharne and Sanders, eds. and trans., Documents of the Baronial Movement, 116–22, and in the Burton chronicle, Annales Monastici, I.453–5 and 455–6. Editions of the Middle English can be found in Ellis, “On the only English proclamation of Henry III;” Skeat, “The Oxford MS. of the only English proclamation of Henry III;” and Rothwell, ed., English Historical Documents, 367–70. For detailed discussion, see Machan, English in the Middle Ages, 21–69; briefer mention is made by Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 221–3. Matthews discusses Henry’s letters in the context of political poetry in Writing to the King, 18–28. ¹⁴² The entry for November 7, 1258 records that “Robert of Foleham, clerk of the Exchequer” received “50s. reward for his labour in composing and writing certain charters in English and French made by ordinance of the magnates of the king’s council, which are being sent through all the counties of England.” See Calendar of the Liberate Rolls, IV.440. Clanchy argues that these charters refer to the

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example,” in Michael Clanchy’s words, “of the multilingual competence of English administrators at the time,” Robert’s fluency in Latin, French, and English— with presumably some familiarity in Hebrew as well—coalesced around his work in law.¹⁴³ The Middle English letters of 1258 thus form part of a larger textual ecology in the mid- and later thirteenth century, in which vernacular literary and legal literacy proved closely imbricated. Early in the thirteenth century, likely contemporaneously with the compilation of the London Collection, the poet known only as LaЗamon, “Lawman,” built his massive Middle English Brut on the foundations of Wace and Geoffrey of Monmouth.¹⁴⁴ Like those clerics, legists, and barons finding precedents for Magna Carta in a past they at least partially invented for the purpose, so LaЗamon, Christopher Cannon argues, “saw the law as immanent, a set of principles which were not so much laid down by kings and peoples as discovered by them.”¹⁴⁵ By the last quarter of the century, the 1164 Constitutions of Clarendon had found their way into Middle English verse as well, this time by way of the South English Legendary’s Life of Thomas Becket. Not content simply to narrate the scene at Clarendon in which Henry II ordered a “transcrit” (541) taken of the customs of the realm, the poet includes the Constitutions themselves, transmuting the Latin ordinances into vernacular rhyme.¹⁴⁶ In manuscripts, literary texts of this sort share close company with more explicitly legal ones. A second later witness to the “Song of the Church,” for example, survives as ephemera in a legal collection likely intended for a Berkshire lawyer, its complaint about taxation updated to speak to the political circumstances of the 1290s.¹⁴⁷ A contemporary legal collection from Lincolnshire similarly provides the sole witness to a clever piece of macaronic composition. Surviving with a single stave of music, “Vulneratur karitas” alternates between Latin and French quatrains, the latter translating the former: Vulneratur karitas, amor aegrotatur, Regnat et perfidia, livor generatur, Fraus primatum optinet, pax subpeditatur, October letters, but Machan is less certain. See From Memory to Written Record, 221–2, and English in the Middle Ages, 24 n.3. ¹⁴³ See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 222. ¹⁴⁴ See LaЗamon, Brut, or Hystoria Brutonum, Barron and Weinberg, eds. ¹⁴⁵ Cannon, Grounds of Middle English Literature, 55. ¹⁴⁶ See South English Legendary, II.628–30, ll. 541–620, D’Evelyn and Mill, eds. ¹⁴⁷ Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 137. This legal manuscript is companion to MS Douce 132, which contains Anglo-French romances and devotional works. The “Song of the Church” appears upon the final leaf of the fourth booklet. For description of these two manuscripts, see Robinson, “The ‘Booklet;’ ” and for contextual discussion, Taylor, Textual Situations, 95–6; Hanna, London Literature, 47 and 84, and Somerset, “Complaining to the King.” On the textual difficulties of the two versions, see Aspin, ed. and trans., ANPS, 38–40, and Meyer, “Mélanges de poésie anglo-normande,” 395–7.

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Fides vincta carcere nimis desolatur. Amur gist en maladie, charité est nafré, Ore regne tricherie, hayne est engendré, Boidie ad seignurie, pes est mise suz pé, Fei n’ad ki lui guie, en prison est lié. (1–8) [Caritas is wounded, love sickened, and treachery reigns while spite is born. Fraud holds supremacy. Peace is cast underfoot. Bound in prison, faith is utterly forsaken (in French: has no one to guide her).]¹⁴⁸

Likely composed as a contrafactum, these two verse forms interact closely. The thirteen-syllable Latin goliardic line, with its natural break falling between the seventh and eight syllables, is echoed but precisely not replicated in the double rhymes of the French quatrain. This kind of linguistic and formal facility suggests a versifier with a background perhaps similar to Robert of Fulham’s—knowledgeable in law and hence adept at moving between its primary languages. By these later decades of the thirteenth century, the “Great Charter” had become, in the words of the Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, the “old chartre”—an enduring model of legal reform and a continuously threatened ideal, in constant need of reaffirmation. In many ways, of course, Magna Carta had always been an “old charter,” the antiquity of its claims being central to its argument even in its earliest and most provisional forms. Thus, when the Metrical Chronicle looks back upon the ratification of the Provisions of Oxford, it sees not a novel experiment in conciliar governance but rather an old story, consecrated by a familiar ritual: & to graunti gode lawes & þe olde chartre al so þat so ofte was igraunted er & so ofte vndo Her of was þe chartre imad & aceled vaste þere Of þe king & oþere heye men þat þer were Þo nome tende taperes þe bissops in hor hond & þe king him sulf & oþere heyemen of þe lond þe bissops amansede alle þat þer a3en were & euerest vndude þe lawes þat iloked were þere Mid berninde taperes & suþþe atte laste þe king & oþere sede amen & hor taperes adoun caste To confermi þe mansinge & þo þoute it stable ynou (11018–28) ¹⁴⁸ London, British Library, MS Harley 746, fols. 103v–104r, with musical stave and first seven words recopied on fol. 107. Edition from ANPS, 149–56; translation mine. Wright also edited it for Political Songs of England, 133–6. For discussion, see also Matthews, Writing to the King, 6–7.

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        

[And to grant good laws and the old charter also, that was so often granted and so often undone, a charter was made and sealed fast by the king and the other high men that were there. Then the bishops and the king himself and other nobles of the land took burning tapers in their hands, and the bishops excommunicated all who were against or ever undid the laws locked there. And at last, with tapers aflame, the king and the others said amen and cast down their tapers to confirm the excommunication, and they thought it stable enough.]¹⁴⁹

Reform is a reiterative process, always returning to a central set of questions as it adjusts the balance points between prerogative and common interest. What I have described in this section as “jurisdictional poetics” gives formal shape to that process. When the poet-chronicler of the Metrical Chronicle imagines a charter “so ofte . . . igraunted er & so ofte vndo,” he ascribes a form to England’s legal history, one signaled poetically in this case by the anaphoric “so ofte.” As often confirmed as it is contravened, Magna Carta becomes of a sign of repetition and its discontents. One final example serves to draw the chapter to a close. Like the “Song of the Church,” this verse survives in two different versions, the earlier appearing in an early fourteenth-century preaching miscellany and the later in the ambitious London compilation known as the Auchinleck Manuscript.¹⁵⁰ Though its copying postdates the events of 1258 by a half-century, the verse in the earlier of the two manuscripts bears a scribal title “De Provisione Oxonie,” suggesting an imaginative link to this earlier reformist moment. As in the Metrical Chronicle, it uses the ritual performance of the excommunication sentence to signal both the ideal of a “common” law and the reality of jurisdictional fracture. In this case, however, a macaronic French and English verse form displaces Latin as the source language of law:

¹⁴⁹ Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, II.734, translation mine. For discussion of this passage, see also Jahner, “The poetry of the Second Barons’ War,” and on the Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, Shaw, “The composition of the Metrical Chronicle attributed to Robert of Gloucester.” ¹⁵⁰ Cambridge, St. John’s College, MS E. 9 (112), fol. 400r, devoted mainly to the Distinctiones of the Dominican preacher Nicholas of Gorran (or Gorham, d. c. 1295); and Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 19.2.1 (fol. 105r), as the opening stanzas of the “The sayings of the four philosophers.” Both versions of the poems are edited by Aspin in ANPS, 58–62, with the Auchinleck version also edited by Wright, Political Songs of England, 253–8. I have followed Aspin’s edition, but have reproduced the lines according to their copying in Cambridge, St. John’s College, MS E.9. Translations are my own, but see also those provided by Aspin, Wright, and Somerset, “Complaining to the king,” 97–9. For discussion of the two versions in conjunction, see Kendrick, “On reading medieval political verse;” Scattergood, “Political context, date and composition of the The Sayings of the Four Philosophers;” Matthews, Writing to the King, 118–19; Jahner, “The poetry of the Second Barons’ War;” Somerset, “Complaining to the king;” and Ashe, Conquest and Transformation, 419–21. On the “Sayings of the Four Philosophers” within the larger context of the Auchinleck Manuscript, see Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 105–54, esp. 137–8. On the Auchinleck Manuscript more generally, see Hanna, London Literature, 104–47; Fisher, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History, 146–87; and the essays collected in Fein, ed., The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives.

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Rome poet fere et defere, si fet ele trop souent; þat nis noþer wel ne veyre; for þi is holy cherche ysend. Merewele est de Deu vykere, ki a tel conseil consent. þe man nis na3t worþ þre eyre þat wel doþ and suþþe went. Nostre roy de Engletere, par le conseil de sa gent, Wolde a nywe laghe arere, and makede a muchel parlement. Tuz y vindrent, les evekes e les baruns ensement. And all iswore þat þer were, and hulde taperes ytent. La purveance est de cyre, jo l’enteng e byn le say, And is hyolde to ne3 þe fyre, and is ymolten al away. Joe ne say mes ke dyre, mes tot y va tribolay Curt and laghe hundred a[nd] syre; al it god a duvele vay. [Rome can do and undo; she acts thus full often. That is neither good nor becoming, for by this Holy Church is put to shame. Merewell, who agrees to such counsel, is a vicar of God. The man is not worth three eggs who does right and afterward changes. Our king of England, on the advice of his people, would set up a new law, and summoned a great parliament. All came there, the bishops and the barons likewise, and all who were there took an oath and held lighted tapers. The provision is made of wax, I understand it and know it well, and it has been held too near the fire and has melted all away. I no longer know what to say, but all goes out of joint, court and law, hundred and shire, all goes the way of the devil.]

“De Provisione Oxonie” demonstrates a keen formal accomplishment, both in its elegant blending of Middle English and Anglo-French and its smart metonymic depiction of parliamentary legislation solemnized and dissolved through the melting of a wax charter seal. The poem draws clear attention to its own linguistic cleverness, efficiently coupling Anglo-French and Middle English both in the rhymes, which work across the languages, and in the meter, which attempts to marry a syllabic French and accentual English line. Reproduced here according to the earlier of the manuscripts, which copies two lines together divided by a punctus, the equivalency of two languages is made apparent. Impressively, the entire poem contains only four rhymes: the “-ere” and “-yre” endings in the arhyme and the “-ent” and “-ay” endings in the b-rhyme.¹⁵¹ In structuring stanzas around a repeated single sound, “De Provisione Oxonie” accomplishes the virtuosic feat of integrating Middle English within the constraints of the rhyming pattern. As we have seen, such experimentation was not unusual among contemporary medieval English complaint poems, indeed was characteristic. What becomes notable in this case is the confidence with which the poet joins languages. The Middle English in “De Provisione Oxonie” bears important weight, not ¹⁵¹ The exception is the corrupt “evekes.” Aspin notes that the rhyme would work with vikeres.

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glossing or translating the French but balancing it grammatically and conceptually.¹⁵² The internal bilingual rhyme “cyre” and “fyre” captures the central dilemma of the reformist tradition that claimed Magna Carta as its origin: namely, that it remains to some degree always provisional, a perpetual project of becoming and a continual lost cause. Importantly, we come to recognize this historical phenomenon through the poem’s engagement with the material details of the solemnization rites. The line, “La purueance est de cyre,” the provision is of wax, entertains a number of possible readings. It evokes the king’s wax seal—that element of an official charter that renders it enforceable even as it proves most vulnerable to loss and damage. The grammatical ambiguity of the line extends these qualities of the seal to the document as a whole and, beyond that, to the document’s legal ideals, easily melted in the heat of political expediency. Fire and wax both show themselves under the right conditions to be surprisingly ephemeral, easily snuffed out, easily melted away. In this way, they distill the properties of the poem itself, which takes its historical occasions and transforms them, compressing, attenuating, and inventing anew. This metaphoric distillation poses a problem for dating and contextualizing the poem. The scribal title looks back to the 1250s and 1260s, but the poem—or at least this version—probably dates to the early fourteenth century.¹⁵³ But if the controversies surrounding Edward II give this poem its particular occasion, its pertains with no less aptness to 1297, 1258, 1253, and 1215—all moments of political crisis when the king’s oath proved no more binding than the candle flame that solemnized it. In compressing these ritual occasions, the poem suggests a kind of locus classicus for legislative reform and the documents that symbolize its goals. This origin depends upon the establishment of a genealogy that begins with Magna Carta and incorporates subsequent reforms under its sign. In summoning this origin, however, the poem also evades the very historical precision it invites. Gesturing back here becomes a way of evoking a continually “new” present moment for the poem. As this chapter as shown, Magna Carta also evades the historical precision it invites. Tirelessly analyzed over its 800-year history, it still tenders “an open invitation to gloss and interpret,” as Holt puts it, and still remains sufficiently opaque to reward new historical scrutiny. I have argued over the course of this chapter that Magna Carta carries with it a certain intrinsic literariness, born of its inventive relationship to the legal past and its susceptibility to symbolic repurposing. ¹⁵² For a differing view, see Matthews, Writing to the King, 8–9. ¹⁵³ Scholars have identified “at least two papal actions” condensed in the poem’s early lines: a papal absolution in 1305, which freed Edward I from his promise to Magna Carta, as well as a bull issued in 1309, reversing the excommunication of Piers Gaveston, Edward II’s ill-fortuned favorite. See Kendrick, “On reading medieval political verse,” at 184–6, and, for further discussion, Somerset, “Complaining to the king.”

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In turn, it helped to foster experiments in legal and literary translation, as those clerks and scribes best versed in promulgating its clauses came to test their linguistic competencies through novel experiments in poetry. I have also gestured towards the role that the clergy played in “inventing” Magna Carta, from the initial drafting phase of the document through to the later protection of its terms by means of excommunication. Chapter 4 broaches these related enterprises of political and pastoral reform in more detail, focusing on thirteenth-century England’s great polymath, Robert Grosseteste. Scientist, philosopher, bishop, and ecclesiastical reformer, Grosseteste played a vital role in the political program of the 1250s, and his influence persisted posthumously into the civil war of the 1260s. Chapter 4, however, first explores Grosseteste’s political theory from the ground up, as it were, looking in particular at his writings for lay women. As we will see, the letters, manuals, and poetry that address issues of estate governance to femmes soles offer a useful window onto the central principles of Grosseteste’s theory of delegated jurisdiction.

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4 Jurisdictional Formalism Robert Grosseteste and the Pastoral Model of Governance

Three broad claims have structured the previous chapters. First, I have argued for the importance of the “scholar-bishop” to discourses of both secular and ecclesiastical reform. Celebrated equally for learning and piety, this clerical ideal saw its high point in the thirteenth century, as reform-minded bishops won canonization in substantial numbers in Becket’s wake. St. Hugh of Avalon, bishop of Lincoln (d. 1200, can. 1220); St. Edmund of Abingdon, archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1240, can. 1247); St. Richard de Wyche, bishop of Chichester (d. 1253, can. 1262); and St. Thomas Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford (d. 1282, can. 1320) all attest to the archbishop’s powerful influence upon forms of male sanctity in the century and a half following his death.¹ Stephen Langton, Robert Grosseteste, and Walter Cantilupe, bishop of Worcester (d. 1266), though never canonized, likewise deserve inclusion among their number, exemplifying as they do the most prominent virtues of this field of learned, rigorous ecclesiastics: humility, frugality, equanimity, self-restraint, and, above all, a fierce devotion to the imperatives of the pastoral office. In Becket, Langton, and now Grosseteste, we thus encounter a clerical model in which classroom regimes of learning and discipline produce an administrative ethics grounded in obedience and clarity of conscience. This ideal, I have suggested secondly, promotes an especially potent concept of libertas, in which arguments claiming a privilege or exemption from external legal norms work to “personify” a given community, lending emotional texture to its collective interests by aligning those interests with histories of encroachment and loss. The final claim, a literary one, underlies the previous two. It is simply that literary language conjures legal community. It does so in multiple ways: by conjuring a “useable past” as well as a useful enemy; by generating personal identity from the groundwork of collective identity; and by providing emotional language to the project of collective governance. My use of the term “conjure” is deliberate here and gestures

¹ On the canonization of thirteenth-century English bishops and their debt to Becket’s model, see Binski, Becket’s Crown, esp. Chapter 6. See also Creamer, “St. Edmund of Canterbury and Henry III in the shadow of Becket;” and Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, 21–31. Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta. Jennifer Jahner, Oxford University Press (2019). © Jennifer Jahner. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847724.001.0001

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towards its Latin root, coniuratio, which refers to an act of collective “swearing together” that could connote both conscientious allegiance to a higher cause and treasonous conspiracy against a sovereign.² As we have seen, Magna Carta came about through precisely such “conjuring acts,” in which sworn allegiances among vassals produced legal transformations that redefined the responsibilities of the ruler. By our own parlance, to conjure is also to create, to summon a set of effects that so closely approximates reality that it stands in for reality itself. Chapters 4 and 5 examine Anglia as a “conjured” idea—that is, as an effect of rhetoric and law and their interaction. As in previous chapters, this exploration centers on the interactions between lay and ecclesiastical communities, though the second half of the book takes its starting point from one specific relationship: the friendship between Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln (d. 1253), and Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester (d. 1265). The connections between the polymath Grosseteste and the crusading reformer de Montfort extended from the time of de Montfort’s first arrival in England in the 1230s to the bishop’s death in 1253.³ We know, for example, that Grosseteste’s political tract, De regno et tyrannide, replete with glosses from his recently completed translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, passed through the hands of the Earl of Leicester in 1249. De Montfort sent it back to Grosseteste via the Oxford Franciscan Adam Marsh, with wishes, too, that his eldest son be returned to “your fatherly care, so that while he is of a tender age he may progress in learning letters and be trained in good manners.”⁴ This circuit of intellectual transmission—from episcopal to baronial court and back via Oxford—is one that repeats, on different scales and in different formations, across the next two chapters, as they examine how theories of pastoral governance and royal governance collide, often through the mediation of centers of learning and book production, like Oxford. Insofar as De regno et tyrannide attests to the simultaneous absorption of the Nicomachean Ethics into the overlapping traditions of state and Church reform, it indeed marks an extraordinary moment in intellectual and political history—a moment when “bookish” ideas about political community effectively changed laws, fomented revolution, and toppled a king. But if these theories spoke to the highest echelons of Church and royal government, they also spoke to a more diffuse and diverse array of relations

² Dictionary of Medieval Latin in British Sources, s.v. conjuratio. ³ On the contours of this friendship, see Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 94–8, with discussion of his arrival in England on 8–9; on the intersection of Grossetestian and Montfortian reformism, see Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community. ⁴ See Letter 25 in The Letters of Adam Marsh, Lawrence, ed. and trans., I.56–9: “ad uestram remittere paternitatem, ut dum etas est ei tenerior . . . proficiat per tempus aliquantum, quoad fieri poterit, in doctrina litterarum et morum disciplina.” An edition of De regno and tyrannide is found in Gieben, “Robert Grosseteste at the Papal Curia, Lyons, 1250,” 377–80. For discussion, see Goering, “Robert Grosseteste at the Papal Curia;” Ambler, “On kingship and tyranny;” and ibid., Bishops and the Political Community, 39–41 and 131–2.

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thought to bind together homes and communities: hierarchical bonds such as those between lords and tenants, husbands and wives, and parents and children as well as horizontal bonds, such as those between peers, neighbors, and friends. Such “domestic economies”—based in property and its management and protection—constitute a vital undercurrent within Grosseteste’s influential understanding of pastoral care and Church governance. Attending to the domestic in this way also allows us to attend to those bodies whose liminal status under the law generated jurisdictional conflict, and hence also political theorization.⁵ Indeed, Grosseteste and de Montfort’s relationship begins with precisely such a conflict, when de Montfort, in one of his first legal acts as earl, expelled the Jews of Leicester from the precincts of the city. His actions in turn prompted Grosseteste to offer domestic counsel and admonition to a widow—de Montfort’s great-aunt—who accepted the displaced community onto her lands. The second half of this chapter explores how these two liminal legal statuses—the femme sole and the “royal captive” Jew—reside at the heart of Grosseteste’s political-theological order. Before reading against the grain of Grosseteste’s thought, however, I first read with it. As we will see, Grosseteste’s philosophy very much encourages this kind of “cooperative” interpretation. Profoundly synthetic in method and aims, it weaves together the celestial and material worlds, “Old” Law and “New,” in a single coherent eschatology, with Christ at its center. The first half of the chapter thus examines what we might call Grosseteste’s legal metaphysics—that is, how he understands the fluid dynamics of authority, as it flows through and stabilizes hierarchical systems, both divine and worldly. The second half of the chapter then re-examines these same dynamics from the ground up—in this case literally, as it approaches Grossetestian political theology through the lens of property and inheritance law, examining how the language of secular estate governance helps structure his French verse theological summa, the Château d’Amour. Questions of freedom and servitude within the common law provide Grosseteste grounds for illustrating his vision of freedom under the “New Law” of Christ, a vision which necessarily informs his understanding of Jewish-Christian interactions in his own day. As he seeks to resolve intractable theological and legal conflicts within his larger conception of pastoral service, jurisdiction takes on a formal aspect, transforming contiguous and competing spheres of authority into vertical hierarchical arrays, from which power emanates like light from the sun. Formalized in such a way, Grosseteste’s jurisdictional thought generates a compelling model of governance based on pastoral service. As we will see, however, this model also naturalizes its own latent violence against English Jews.

⁵ On the ways that the “hard cases” of the law spur poetic innovation, see Steiner, Reading Piers Plowman, 124–31.

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Oversight, Exemption, and the Pastoral Charge In the initial leaves of a late thirteenth-century English psalter resides one of two known copies of a Latin verse life of Grosseteste.⁶ The author, one “Frater Hubertus,” seems to have composed his vita not long after the bishop’s death in 1253; it serves first and foremost as a lament. The opening lines present an extended metaphor that likens Grosseteste to the sun, which, having set, now deprives the world of its illumination. Hubert implores Grosseteste’s bishropric, Lincoln; his spiritual sons, the “holy brothers” of the mendicant orders; and his country, Britannia, to mourn the loss of their father, their pastor, and their guiding light: Solis in occasu Lincolnia plange; sepulto Lumine sub tenebris obtenebrata dole. Sancta cohors fratrum doleat de morte parentis, Mortem deplorent opilionis oves. Tanto patrono viduata Britannia plange, Plange tibi solis occubuisse iubar. Mortis caligo lucem subtraxit, obumbrat Eclipsis solem morte, Roberte, tua. (3–10) [Mourn, Lincoln, at the setting of the sun. Grieve, since you have been shrouded under darkness by the burial of light. Let the holy cohort of brothers mourn the death of their parent; let the sheep cry for the death of their shepherd. Mourn, Britain, bereft of such a protector. Mourn that the source of your light has set in death. The gloom of death carried away the light; with your death, Robert, an eclipse overshadows the sun.]

His verse elegy suggests that Brother Hubert knew his poetry manuals well. He directly echoes Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s “Lament for Richard I,” discussed already in Chapters 2 and 3, when he wonders why “savage Death, wicked Death, merciless Death” has “seized such a one from the world.” [Mors fera, mors nequam, mors impia cur rapuisti / Talem de mundo?] (25–6).⁷ Furthermore, he borrows from Matthew of Vendôme’s model description of Ulysses in the Ars versificatoria when he praises the bishop as a “Plato in reason, a Ptolemy in celestial knowledge, a Ulysses in eloquence, a Nestor in knowledge, and a Cato in severity” [Hic ratione Plato, stellis Tholomeus, Ulixes / Eloquio, Nestor mente, rigore Cato] (68–9).⁸ ⁶ Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. liturg. d. 41. The text is from Hunt, “Verses on the life of Robert Grosseteste,” with my own translation. Another partial copy of the poem survives in Hamburg, Staatsund Universitätsbibliothek, MS. Cod. Theol. 2207. See Mantello, “Cod. Theol. 2207 of Hamburg’s Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek: The Thomson Facsimiles.” ⁷ Cf. Poetria nova, Nims, trans., 385–90 and discussion in Chapters 2 and 3. ⁸ Cf. Ars versificatoria, I.1.52.61–2, with further discussion in Chapter 2, 66.

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Hubert, in this way, fashions Grosseteste to the template of the grammar classroom. As Chapters 1 and 2 discussed, poetic training had served as a primary conduit for instruction in administrative ethics since the time of the Ottonian cathedral schools, and the portrait that Hubert paints of Grosseteste “nourishing” young pupils with instruction in “sacred mores” [moribus . . . sacris] and Latin and Greek letters thus harkens back to a pedagogical ideal already considered “old” a hundred years earlier, when John of Salisbury looked with nostalgia on his own grammatical upbringing.⁹ But if Grosseteste’s talents as a teacher sustained this ancient ideal—at least in elegiac verse—his scholarly accomplishments speak to a world of learning and inquiry that had changed markedly since John of Salisbury’s time. That world now included the fully chartered universities of Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge and an expanded Aristotelian corpus. It saw Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas seeking to harmonize a world of Aristotelian particularity with a cosmos ordered by divine rationality, and it witnessed the establishment of the mendicant orders, whose combined zeal for learning and proselytizing drove scholarly production in Latin and the vernaculars. Hubert’s guiding metaphor of the sun cannily gestures to this larger world and, in doing so, enfolds the many disparate aspects of Grosseteste’s career as a scholar and bishop.¹⁰ Grosseteste’s staggering bibliography encompasses some 120 attributed works, not counting sermons, letters, and dicta.¹¹ Highlights of this corpus include a new translation of the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus; the first complete translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics; one of the first commentaries on the Posterior Analytics; commentaries on the Psalms and Pauline epistles; scientific treatises on comets, tides, light, and the heavens; popular works of pastoral theology in Latin and French; a treatise on the seven liberal arts; a treatment of the status of the Old Law under the New; and his Hexaemeron, a narration of the six days of Creation. One of the great enigmas in thirteenth-century intellectual biography, Grosseteste leaves few firm clues to his early education. He held a position in the household of William de Vere, bishop of Hereford, which ended in 1198 with the bishop’s death, and records suggest that Grosseteste remained affiliated with the Hereford diocese into the early decades of the thirteenth century, a period that may have also had him following the general clerical exodus to Paris during the years of the Interdict.¹² By 1225, Grosseteste had gained his first preferment, as ⁹ See Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 36–52, and further discussion in Chapter 1, 28–9. ¹⁰ The standard biography remains Southern, Robert Grosseteste. For specific analysis of Grosseteste’s philosophical and scientific interests, see McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste. ¹¹ The indispensable starting point for Grosseteste’s bibliography remains Thomson, The Writings of Robert Grosseteste, reprinted in 2013. For revised attribution and dating, see McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste, Appendix A. ¹² Grosseteste’s life records begin with his service in the households of Hugh of Avalon, bishop of Lincoln (1186–1200) and William de Vere, bishop of Hereford (1186–1198). Some scholars place him Paris by the early thirteenth century; others, like Southern, argue that he obtained all his necessary

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rector of Abbotsley, in Huntingdonshire, and began lecturing at Oxford. In 1229, Grosseteste was appointed archdeacon of Leicester and likely assumed the responsibilities, if not the title, of chancellor of Oxford.¹³ He relinquished his archdeaconry around 1231 to join the Oxford Franciscans as their lector, a role he held until 1235, when he was elected as bishop of Lincoln. What can be said with certainty is that this period at Oxford from 1231–5, when Grosseteste was immersed in a community that shared his commitment to the apostolic ideals of the Church, proved immensely influential.¹⁴ His commentaries on the Pauline epistles, the Hexaemeron, and De cessatione legalium all date reliably to this period, and the early study of Greek that would underwrite his translation efforts—Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus—likely began in these years before he assumed his bishopric.¹⁵ With his elevation to bishop of Lincoln in 1235, Grosseteste set to the work of integrating his ecclesiastical responsibilities with the theology and natural philosophy he taught and studied in Oxford.¹⁶ Like his fellow English bishops who assumed their offices in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and the Oxford Council of 1222, Grosseteste addressed pastoral duties through a range of written genres. The constitutions, confessional aids, and didactic treatises he produced in prose and verse all form part of the large corpus of pastoralia that burgeoned in England in the wake of Lateran IV, as prelates sought to institute the Council’s articles governing confession and other pastoral responsibilities while also using its reformist mandate to introduce innovations of their own.¹⁷ In Grosseteste’s constitutions for Lincoln diocese, pastoral care and Church liberty proved inextricably connected: the moral health of a diocese depended not

training in England. For discussion, see Callus, “Robert Grosseteste as scholar,” esp. 5–9; Southern, Robert Grosseteste; McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste, 4–12; Schulman, “Husband, father, bishop? Grosseteste in Paris;” and Goering, “When and where did Grosseteste study theology?” ¹³ According to later thirteenth-century accounts, Grosseteste was officially named Master of the Schools [Magister Scholarum] in lieu of being named chancellor, an appointment that could only be conferred by the bishop of Lincoln, then Hugh of Wells. For discussion, see Southern, “From schools to university,” 27–36; ibid., Robert Grosseteste, 70–5; and McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste, 8–9. ¹⁴ Thomas Eccleston praises Grosseteste’s tenure at the Oxford school as a period of rapid and expansive learning. See De adventu fratrum minorum in Angliam, 60–1. For further discussion, see Little, The Franciscan School at Oxford in the Thirteenth Century, esp. 7–10; Gieben, “Robert Grosseteste and the evolution of the Franciscan order;” O’Carroll, “Robert Grosseteste, the English friars and Lateran IV;” and Robson, “Robert Grosseteste and the Greyfriars in the diocese of Lincoln.” ¹⁵ On the dating of these works, see Smalley, “The biblical scholar;” Southern, Robert Grosseteste, 111–40; and McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste, Appendix A. ¹⁶ As Southern notes, Grosseteste became upon episcopal consecration “ruler of about one-fifth of the whole population of England” and a “landlord of baronial rank and wealth.” See Robert Grosseteste, 237. ¹⁷ On the genre of pastoralia generally, see Boyle, “The Fourth Lateran Council and the manuals of popular theology;” and ibid., “Robert Grosseteste and the pastoral care.” On the pastoral manuals of other English bishops, see Goering and Taylor, “The Summulae of Bishops Walter de Cantilupe (1240) and Peter Quinel (1287).”

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just upon religious education in the faith but upon the jurisdictional integrity of the bishop to act on behalf of his flock’s best interests. Article 16 of his 1238  1239 constitutions, for instance, forbade clerics from becoming sheriffs or secular justiciars or from holding “bailiwicks that would make them accountable for those bailiwicks to lay authorities” [ballivas teneant, unde laicis potestatibus obligentur ad ratiocinia de ballivas eisdem reddenda].¹⁸ In prohibiting such employment, Grosseteste reiterated a measure previously validated by the Third Lateran Council (cap. 12), the Fourth Lateran Council (cap. 18), and the Council of Oxford in 1222 (caps. 12–13), while also legislating on an issue that had incensed him in the years prior.¹⁹ In 1236, Grosseteste objected vehemently to an attempt by Henry III to appoint the abbot of Ramsey as a royal justiciar. In a letter to Archbishop Edmund Rich, Grosseteste argued that the mandate—or “persecution,” in his words—contravened canon law and conciliar decree and carried dire consequences for God’s servants and the Church as a whole. Clerics “impair the Church’s liberty” [libertati ecclesiae derogant] by falling under secular jurisdiction, Grosseteste contends, and those prelates who “at the king’s command compel them to answer in a secular law court” are even worse, condemning to death “those for whom we should courageously die.”²⁰ Two overlapping traditions guide Grosseteste’s argument in this letter. One, crystallized powerfully—and, in the 1230s, not so distantly—in the Becket controversy was the issue of clerical exemption from secular legal authority. The other, which makes lax bishops responsible for any breach of this separation, found expression in a canon law dictum that Grosseteste cites for Rich: “Any error not contradicted is commended.”²¹ These two imperatives—to preserve the freedom of the Church and to assume responsibility for its harm—form a central premise in Grosseteste’s theory of pastoral care. The shepherd does not just nurture his flock but protects it from wolves, and, to the extent that he fails in either regard, is as guilty for their deaths as the more immediate perpetrator. As Grosseteste’s dramatic rhetoric to Rich indicates, this bureaucratic project remained for him insistently personal, each decision concerning the administration of Church affairs carrying consequences for that central and highest task of the religious vocation, the salvation of souls. Grosseteste regularly flouted attempts at influencing preferments, rejecting all candidates to Lincoln benefices

¹⁸ Citations from Grosseteste’s letters are from The Letters of Robert Grosseteste, Mantello and Goering, ed. and trans., here at Letter 52*, 186. The Latin epistles appear in Roberti Grosseteste Episcopi quondam Lincolniensis Epistolae, Luard, ed., here at 158. Hereafter cited as Epistolae. ¹⁹ On these previous councils, see Powicke and Cheney, eds., Councils and Synods, II.119 and 248. ²⁰ Letters, Letter 28, 138–9; Epistolae, 112: “nos praelati qui ad mandatum regium compellimus eos super delicto accusatos in foro laicali respondere, non solum trepide fugiendo, eosdem a lupo crudeliter occidi damnabiliter permittimus, sed magis ipsimet, pro quibus fortiter mori debemus, in mortem atrocissime detrudimus.” ²¹ Letters, Letter 27, 134; Epistolae, 107: “ ‘Error cui non contradicitur, approbatur.’ ” Cf. Decretum Gratiani, dist. 83, cap. 3 in the Corpus iuris canonici, Frieberg, ed.

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who lacked the training or character required for the salvation of souls.²² Towards the end of his lifetime, his rejection of the pope’s nephew for the post of canon of Lincoln Cathedral would incite his best-known statement of principled refusal: “I disobey, I oppose, and I rebel” [non obedio, contradico, et rebello].²³ Jurisdictional conflict, in this way, generated Grosseteste’s most ambitious and impassioned writings on hierarchy.²⁴ The following section examines two well-known instances, the first occurring in 1245, when Grosseteste appealed to the papal curia for his right as bishop to visit and oversee the Lincoln Cathedral chapter, and the second in 1250, when Grosseteste, by then in his eighties, traveled in person to the papal court in Lyons to protest the costly visitations of the archbishop of Canterbury. These disputes reveal a profoundly naturalized vision of pastoral responsibility, one modeled simultaneously on the hierarchical structures of the agricultural estate, governed by the just lord, and the cosmological order of the larger universe, governed by God. In Grosseteste’s view, jurisdiction properly exercised manifested the divine plan in its most capacious sense; by extension, the abdication of one’s pastoral obligations to judge, correct, and educate contravened the central compact between God and humanity.

Watchman in the Lord’s Vineyard: Surveillance, Theophany, and the Fictions of Jurisdiction Grosseteste’s commitment to pastoral supervision led to his most significant and controversial innovation as bishop: the claim to regular visitation rights of all religious communities, secular as well as regular, in his diocese, an inquiry process he modeled, at least theoretically, on the procedures of itinerant royal justice.²⁵ While not everyone welcomed this newfound jurisdictional remit, no community objected as strenuously as the dean and chapter of Lincoln Cathedral. In 1245, the dispute between bishop and chapter eventually made its way before the papal curia. In his lengthy Letter 127, Grosseteste responded to protests of jurisdictional overreach by aligning his episcopal mission with the original charge given to Moses,

²² In Grosseteste’s first year as bishop, for instance, a certain W. of Grana failed to gain a position due to being “a minor and not sufficiently educated, still a boy, in fact, who thinks Ovid the greatest letter-writer!” See Letters, Letter 17, 95; Epistolae, 63: “quod ipse est minoris aetatis et literaturae minus sufficientis, puer videlicet adhuc ad Ovidium epistolarum palmam porrigens.” ²³ Letters, Letter 128, 446; Epistolae, 436–7. For the importance of this declaration to Grosseteste’s later reputation as a Wycliffite avant la lettre, see McEvoy, “Robertus Grossatesta Lincolniensis: An essay in historiography, medieval and modern.” ²⁴ In 1235, Grosseteste had a similarly passionate exchange over the Church’s ability to legitimize children born out of wedlock, this time with William de Raleigh, one of several legists credited with authorship of Bracton. See Southern, Robert Grosseteste, 252–7; and Vincent, “Henry de Bratton,” 38. ²⁵ Southern describes Grosseteste’s visitation philosophy as a “a mixture of royal eyre, sheriff ’s tourn, and itinerant preaching mission.” See Robert Grosseteste, 257–60, quoted here at 259.

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“to judge, correct, and reform the whole people, as well as the individuals.”²⁶ Just as Moses could not alone maintain God’s law among a whole people, he states, so a pope or bishop cannot alone administer the business of a whole Church or diocese. Moses therefore “associated with himself helpers who would share his responsibilities” [alios sibi adscivit in partem suae solicitudinis coadjutores].²⁷ Whatever those helpers do, he goes on to suggest, they do by virtue of Moses’ power rather than their own; and those who in turn rebel against their superiors, insofar as those superiors embody and transmit a power founded in God’s law, rebel against themselves.²⁸ The letter goes on to illustrate this principle of natural hierarchy through a series of analogies defending Grosseteste’s right to visit and correct the cathedral chapter: the bishop is a spiritual father with a natural right to correct his children; a husband with natural authority over his wife; a craftsman in the “art of arts,” who must know his metals if he is to discern the best for forging; a spiritual physician, applying remedies to sick souls; and a fortified city, walling off the soul from its enemies. He is also a watchman in the Lord’s vineyard, keeping the foxes from the vines. In order to supervise all parts of the field, Grosseteste continues, the bishop-watchman erects a pyramidal tower in the middle of the field and employs helpers, positioned below him, to look north, south, east, and west. “Since the bishop,” Grosseteste argues, “is the watchman who has the highest place in such a watchtower, and the rulers of souls appointed as his deputies are the ones with the lower positions, it is obvious that the bishop’s duty is to keep a close watch on his entire diocese through careful and frequent visitation, his goal being to catch or chase away spiritual foxes everywhere. In this he will harm no one, but will instead do good.”²⁹ In its mix of panopticism and pragmatism, this exemplum distills the essence of Grosseteste’s theory of hierarchy as it relates to pastoral ²⁶ Letters, 376. Epistolae, 358: “manifeste ostenditur quod ipsius erat plenitudo potestatis omnem populum et singulos de populo judicandi, corrigendi, et reformandi.” In this analogy, Grosseteste models his own authority on the established authority of the papal office, which had long arrogated to itself special powers of jurisdiction and administration. For broader discussion, see Tierney, Origin of Papal Infallibility, esp. 31–9. ²⁷ Ibid. ²⁸ “For what is more unnatural than for someone to rebel against himself, or to impede or diminish himself, or even to remove himself?” Grosseteste asks. “This is doubtless what happens when an inferior power opposes a superior’s power or strives to annul it, since, as mentioned previously, the power of an inferior is nothing but that of his superior.” Letters, 378; Epistolae, 361: “Quid enim monstruosius quam idem sibi ipsi rebellare et se ipsum impedire vel imminuere aut etiam de medio auferre? quod proculdubio fit cum inferior potestas superioris potestati contradicit aut eam adnullare contendit, cum, ut supradictum est, ipsa nihil est nisi superioris.” For further discussion of these passages within Grosseteste’s larger ecclesiology, see Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, 36–42 and 48–9. Grosseteste’s argument would be repeated almost verbatim by the Franciscan Thomas of York in 1256, here defending the power of pope against that of the secular masters at Paris. See Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 66. ²⁹ Letters, 410; Epistolae, 402: “Cum igitur, ut praedictum est, episcopus sit ille speculator qui in hujusmodi specula superiorem locum obtinet, et rectores animarum sub eo constituti qui loca obtinent inferiora, patet quod episcopi est per diligentis et frequentis visitationis officium totum speculari episcopatum, ut spirituales vulpeculas ubique capiat vel abigat; nec erit in hoc cuiquam injuriosus sed magis beneficus.”

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responsibility. While the bishop retains the full authority of his office to oversee not only the field but the subordinates helping him, he also remains fundamentally a servant himself, his power deriving from Christ and operative only insofar as he follows Christ. In their rejoinder, however, the dean and chapter of Lincoln Cathedral present a crucial counterargument to this vertical model. Taking their metaphors not from the heavens but the human form, they contend that communal bodies have customary (if not juridical) power to correct their heads: just as deans can correct sinful members of their chapters, so “it is the custom of cathedral churches of England for the chapter as a whole, formally assembled as a body, to correct the dean.”³⁰ The letter expands on this point, arguing that Grosseteste’s preemptive corrective visitations undermine the authority of the community to regulate itself: Item, quod totum capitulum preter decanum corrigat decanum racioni consonum est, quia si statuat decanus aliquid per se racioni non consonum, totum capitulum istud in irritum reuocare potest. Ergo eodem modo, si peccet decanus, totum capitulum illum de iure corrigere potes. Item, simile est de inordinato facto regis, quod corrigi potest per omnes de regno. Item, dicunt iurisperiti quod totum capitulum preter decanum maius est decano, non tantum magnitudine quantitatiua sed potestaiua. [Likewise, {in the case of a dean’s misbehavior} it conforms to reason for the whole chapter—excluding the dean—to correct him, because if the dean were to decide something that did not in itself conform to reason, the whole chapter has the power to invalidate it. Similarly, then, if the dean were to sin, the whole chapter has the power lawfully to correct him. Likewise, the same principle prevails with respect to any unlawful deed of the king, which can be corrected by all the people of the realm. Likewise, legal experts say that the whole chapter, not counting the dean, is greater than he is, not only from the point of view of size, but also in terms of the extent of its power.]³¹

The Lincoln Cathedral chapter thus marshals an argument tendered on behalf of Magna Carta—i.e., that the community of the realm holds the power to correct misbehaving kings—to suggest that its own jurisdictional authority supersedes that of the bishop’s. Grosseteste could have agreed in principle that collective bodies have a moral obligation to correct their heads. He would have objected strenuously, however, to the secondary premise that the chapter thus holds more power than the dean. His cosmological model concentrated power at an origin ³⁰ Letters, 436. The Latin edition has been edited by Mantello, “Bishop Grosseteste and his cathedral chapter,” here at 375, translation mine, here and following: “Si uero decanus peccet, ex consuetudine ecclesiarum cathedralium Anglie, capitulum totum, ita ut sumatur capitulum collectiue et formaliter, corrigat decanum.” ³¹ Ibid. Mantello, “Bishop Grosseteste and his cathedral chapter,” 376.

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point—God—and understood that power to then radiate outward, like the sun, towards the temporal realm. Though a servant had a moral duty to dissent when a lord’s activities necessitated it, that duty did not by extension invest him with more power than his lord.³² Grosseteste found himself in precisely the position of the dissenting servant five years later, in 1250, when he visited the papal curia to lodge his complaints against the archbishop of Canterbury on behalf of his fellow English bishops. Over the course of his several-day audience before the curia, the bishop delivered eight different addresses—some read aloud, some circulated for silent reading—that together outlined a sweeping vision of the Church, its hierarchy, and its first, last, and most important mission, the cure of souls.³³ Grosseteste’s opening address, the longest of the documents, summarizes his vision of pastoral responsibility. He reminds his audience that the type for the bonus pastor is Christ, whose sacrifice radiates outward and forward in time to embrace the whole of the Church Militant: first the apostles, who evangelized the gospels, and then the pastors, who, on the example of Moses, established the priesthood to help bear the “onus of the pastoral office” [onus pastoralis officii].³⁴ In its perfect form, this hierarchical model looks not to itself but to Christ for its directive to “carry off the sins of the world and save souls” [tollere videlicet peccata mundi et animas salvare].³⁵ In its present form, however, the Church presides over a world in which the majority of people languished in nonbelief, while the supposedly Christian territories cultivated schism, heresy, and sin. The Church itself is to blame for the sins it nourishes, Grosseteste chides. Those pastors who should be “the light and sun of the world, illuminating and vivifying it” are instead “pouring forth, in place of light, the densest darkness and in place of vital heat a ruinous and deadly cold.”³⁶ Grosseteste expresses trepidation at identifying the “fons et origo” of the Church’s troubles but does so anyway: the first fault lies with the curia itself. To explain why this is the case, he draws on the hierarchical models he translated and analyzed in his commentaries on Pseudo-Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy and Ecclesiastical Hierarchy.³⁷ As a mirror of the Church Triumphant, the Church ³² On this point, see Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, 39–40. On Grosseteste’s theory of kingship as it relates to natural law, see also McEvoy, “Grosseteste’s reflections on Aristotelian friendship.” ³³ The complete dossier of addresses is edited by Gieben in “Edition of the documents,” with analysis of their use and distribution by Goering, “Grosseteste at the papal curia.” ³⁴ Gieben, “Edition of the documents,” 351, translation mine, here and following. ³⁵ Ibid., 352. ³⁶ Ibid., 355: “Ipsi itaque pastores, ex officio lux et sol mundi ipsum illuminans et vivificans, econtrario autem opere facientes, pro luce densissimas tenebras effudentes et pro calore vitali frigus corrumpens et mortificans.” ³⁷ Grosseteste translated and commented upon the entirety of the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus, including The Celestial Hierarchy, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, The Mystical Theology, and The Divine Names, between approximately 1240 and 1243. For editions, see McEvoy, ed., Mystical Theology: The Glosses by Thomas Gallus and the Commentary of Robert Grosseteste on De Mystica Theologia, with further discussion in ibid., The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste, 68–123; Hogan, Robert Grosseteste,

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Militant exists through the power of divine love and for the purpose of augmenting and practicing that love in the world. Each level of the hierarchy, by acting in accordance with the divine example, illuminates the level below it, so that it can, in turn, act to its full capacity, or virtus.³⁸ In this way, nothing in the hierarchy is “naturally inferior on account of itself” [nulla est inferioris a suo naturaliter] if it participates to the full extent of its given power. Once again, Grosseteste finds a ready analogy in natural philosophy: Haec sedes sacratissima tronus Dei est et sicut sol mundi totius in conspectu eius. Unde, sicut causaliter est in sole tota huius mundi illuminatio, vegetatio et vitae sensibilis nutritio, augmentatio, consummatio, conservatio, pulchritudo, decor et venustas, et ipse haec omnia in hunc mundum sensibilem semper influit et sic efficit et conservat hunc mundum sensibilem perfectum, sic oportet hanc sedem sacratissimam haec omnia spiritualiter intellecta in se causaliter habere et in mundum spiritualem universum, cuius est sol spiritualis, eadem omnia incessanter influere et sic mundum spiritualem salvare. [This most sacred {i. e., papal} seat is the throne of God and, like the sun, holds all of the world in its gaze. Whence, just as all the illumination, growth and nourishment of sensible life, increase, perfection, preservation, beauty, grace, and charm of this world derive causally from the sun, which makes all these things flow continually into the sensible world and thus brings about and maintains the perfection of this sensible world, so it behooves this most sacred seat to hold in itself causally all those things which are understood spiritually and make them flow unceasingly into the entire spiritual world—of which it is the spiritual sun—and so to save the spiritual world.]³⁹

Just as any diminishment in power by the visible sun soon destroys the sensible world, so the darkening of the world’s spiritual sun, the curia, dooms human salvation. Across his writings, Grosseteste shows a preference for cosmological analogies— the sun, in particular—as a way of describing how power flows through an

Pseudo-Dionysius, and Hierarchy, with discussion in ibid., “Pseudo-Dionysius and the ecclesiology of Robert Grosseteste.” Grosseteste’s commentary on The Celestial Hierarchy appears in Roberti Grosseteste Episcopi Lincolniensis, Versio Caelestis Hierarchiae Psevdo-Dionysii Areopagitae, Lawell, et al., eds. As Southern suggests, “The idea of hierarchy gave Grosseteste’s thinking its strong unitary drive: it stamped his science, his theology, and finally his practical administration with zeal for the subordination of the visible event to the invisible source of its being.” See Robert Grosseteste, 244. ³⁸ Gieben, “Edition of the documents,” 360. On the influence of Pseudo-Dionysius upon Grosseteste’s ecclesiology, see Ginther, “The ecclesiology of Robert Grosseteste,” 37–43; and Hogan, “Pseudo-Dionysius and the ecclesiology of Robert Grosseteste.” For Bonaventure’s adaptation of the Pseudo-Dionysian model, see Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 82–6. ³⁹ Ibid., 361–2.

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institutional hierarchy.⁴⁰ These analogies are not simply metaphors for Grosseteste; they help describe how divinity orders the universe. In De luce, Grosseteste posits light as “the first corporeal form” [formam primam corporalem], multiplying itself infinitely in every direction and suffusing all of creation, lower bodies as well as higher bodies, according to their participation in the heavenly spheres.⁴¹ As the first “created form,” light divided order from chaos and generated the angelic intelligences that would reflect divine illumination back to its origin.⁴² Following Augustine, Grosseteste accords light spiritual significance—as a sign of the soul’s communication with God—but also maintains its physical reality: light constitutes “a bodily substance which is very subtle and close to non-bodiliness, a substance which is by nature self-generative.”⁴³ Images of light likewise saturate his translations and commentaries upon the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus, in which it comes to embody both an intellective experience—participation in the superabundance of divine reason—as well as an affective one: the “warmth” and “fire” that PseudoDionysius accords symbolically to the highest angelic order in The Celestial Hierarchy, Grosseteste, in his commentary, would associate in turn with love.⁴⁴ This ideal of a hierarchy stabilized by love also shapes Grosseteste’s depiction of secular monarchical rule. Following Aristotle’s praise of monarchy in the Nicomachean Ethics, Grosseteste contends in his tract De regno et tyrannide that ecclesiastical orders should emulate the best characteristics of kingly rule. Circulated between Adam Marsh and Simon de Montfort in 1249, this tract found a papal audience in the following year as part of the dossier. Excerpting passages from his recently translated Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics, the bishop asserts to the curia that “the friendship of a king toward his subjects consists in the superabundance of his benefaction; for the king benefits his subjects. If indeed he is being a good man, he takes care of them, so that they may act well” [Regis quidem ad subditos est amicitia in superabundantia beneficii: benefacit enim subditis; siquidem bonus ens curam habet ipsorum, ut bene operentur].⁴⁵ Monarchy, ⁴⁰ See Ambler, “On kingship and tyranny;” and Bishops in the Political Community, 56–7. ⁴¹ Grosseteste, “Robert Grosseteste’s On Light,” Lewis, trans., 239. Latin editions are found in ibid., Philosophischen Werke, Baur, ed., VII.51–69, and, more recently, Panti, “Robert Grosseteste’s De Luce,” here at 226. On the significance of light, and especially Pseudo-Dionysian celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies, to Grosseteste’s political thought, see Hogan, “Pseudo-Dionysius and the ecclesiology of Robert Grosseteste;” McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste, 31–2 and 124–40; Ginther, “Ecclesiology of Robert Grosseteste;” and Panti, “Robert Grosseteste’s cosmology of light and lightmetaphors.” ⁴² McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste, surveys Grosseteste’s light metaphysics. See also Gieben, “Grosseteste and universal science;” and, in relation to his collaborations with Adam Marsh, ibid., “Grosseteste and Adam Marsh on light.” ⁴³ Robert Grosseteste, On the Six Days of Creation, Martin, trans., II.10.2, 98. Ibid., Hexaëmeron, Dales and Gieben, eds., II.10.2, 99: “substanciam corpoream subtilissimam et incorporalitati proximam, naturaliter sui ipsius generativam.” ⁴⁴ See McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste, 102, 367–8, and ibid. “Robert Grosseteste on educative love.” ⁴⁵ Gieben, “Edition of the Documents,” 378. Grosseteste draws from his commentary on the Nichomachean Ethics in this tract. See Aristotle, The Greek Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics of

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Grosseteste summarizes, comprises a friendship based upon “superabundance;” it constitutes a radically unequal hierarchy in this respect, but remains nevertheless proportionate, since the superabundant friendship of the king is repaid in the love and fealty of his subjects.⁴⁶ Temporal rule acts as typus et figura for spiritual rule, the bishop continues, and ecclesiastics thus have an even greater responsibility to act as “fathers” to their flocks. Paternal love [paternus affectus] entails “storing up not for oneself but for [one’s sons], and watching anxiously lest he oppress any of them” [non sibi sed ipsis thesaurizans, et sollicite circumspiciens ne quemquam illorum gravet].⁴⁷ When prelates act only in their own interest, defending their actions by recourse to civil law [ius commune] rather than natural and divine law [ius naturale et divinum], then they fail in the most basic moral functions of their office—love of others and sacrifice on their behalf.⁴⁸ A political hierarchy founded on paternal-filial love, on the one hand, and theophanic cosmology, on the other hand, thus allowed Grosseteste to advocate positions of moral dissent as well as command. In his letter to the dean and chapter of Lincoln Cathedral, he argued that insubordination diminished the “light” of the good prelate, who acts as the sun, illuminating the lesser body of the moon. “When an inferior power,” he chides, “strives to diminish or take away that of his superior, despite the fact that his power is nothing but that which comes from the superior power, what else does such a lesser power do but attempt, like a madman, to behead or destroy himself ?”⁴⁹ According to Grosseteste’s political metaphysics, vertical relationships of power sustain themselves, or bind themselves, through participation in the same shared truth, the same illumination. To forsake one’s status as a subordinate and refuse obedience, whether as king or subject, effectively denies this truth in favor of short-lived liberty. In Chapter 5, we will see how this political theory informed secular legal reform, its central metaphors still operative in the anonymous, likely Franciscan-authored, poem known as the Song of Lewes. In lines that seem at least distantly indebted to this thinking, this poet opines that it should not be “properly named liberty which permits fools to rule ignorantly. Rather, liberty should be bounded by the limits of law, and error imputed, if those limits have been spurned” [Nec libertas proprie debet nominari / Que permitiit inscie stultos dominari / Set libertas finibus iuris Aristotle in the Latin Translation of Robert Grosseteste, Vol. III, Mercken, ed. For discussion, see also McEvoy, “Grosseteste’s reflections on Aristotelian friendship;” Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 94–5; Ambler, “On kingship and tyranny;” and ibid., Bishops in the Political Community, 40–1. On Grosseteste’s glosses on the Ethics, see also Ashe, Conquest and Transformation, 371–2. ⁴⁶ Cf. NE VIII 13 1161a11–13. See McEvoy, “Grosseteste’s reflections on Aristotelian friendship,” 157, for a comparison of the kinds of natural bonds that link king and people and kinship relations, particularly husband and wife. ⁴⁷ Gieben, “Edition of the documents,” 378. ⁴⁸ Ibid., 378–9. ⁴⁹ Letters, 378; Epistolae, 361: “Praeterea cum inferior potestas contendit superiorem imminuere aut tollere, cum ipsa nihil sit nisi de superiore, quid aliud facit quam insanientis more seipsam conatur detruncare aut perimere?” See also Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, 36–42 and 48–9.

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limitetur / Spretisque limitibus error reputetur] (833–6).⁵⁰ “Otherwise,” the poet goes on, “you would call a madman free, though all prosperity be inimical to him . . . since anyone who is subject is ruled by someone greater” [Alioquin liberum dices furiosum / Quamuis omne prosperum illi sit exosum / . . . Dum quiuis, qui subditur, maiore domatur] (837–42). In the second part of this chapter, I examine the overlap between this spiritual understanding of liberty as a freedom of will, fulfilled according to Christian theology by Christ’s death and resurrection, and liberty as it was understood under thirteenth-century English common law—as free status and as franchise, the right to use land or resources either temporarily or in perpetuity. In his doctrinal and pastoral works, Grosseteste moves fluidly between these sacred and secular notions of libertas to illustrate an ethics of stewardship and obedience under the New Dispensation, in which spiritual freedom is made possible through voluntary subjection to God. As we will see, the status of Jewish and female Christian bodies—both “covered” by the law in different ways—become crucial to this typological economy, representing, in the first instance, what “remains to be converted” at the Final Judgment and, in the latter, what remains to be perfected in the meantime of Christian temporal dominion. This section has argued that Grosseteste imagines jurisdiction as a natural, and even aesthetic, phenomenon, in which human power relations ideally mirror the hierarchies of a divinely ordered universe. It constitutes a supreme example, in this regard, of what Barbara Newman calls “medieval crossover,” a phrase she uses to describe the interplay between secular and sacred idioms so characteristic of medieval romance, satire, and devotional writing.⁵¹ We have already encountered numerous examples of such crossover—between the discourses of ecclesiastical and royal reform and canon and common law—and the remainder of the chapter extends these insights to think about the connections between pastoral care and property management. Newman’s model, however, also reveals the potential violence that underpins such totalizing and synthesizing visions of legal order. “[S]ometimes,” she writes, “the sacred and the secular flow together like oil and water, layered but stubbornly distinct. At other times they merge like water and wine, an image dear to mystical writers, producing a blend that may or not be inebriating.”⁵² “Stubborn” refusal proved, of course, one of the key ways that Christian writers, including Grosseteste, characterized Judaism, while dissolution, as Newman notes, captured the ideal of mystical union with God—a union Grosseteste contemplated intensively through his engagement with the PseudoDionysian corpus.

⁵⁰ Song of Lewes, Kingsford, ed., translation mine, with line numbers following in the text. For further discussion, see Introduction, 10–11, and Chapter 5, 205–12. ⁵¹ Newman, Medieval Crossover. ⁵² Ibid., 7.

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The following sections suggest that these two models are implicated with each other—that Grosseteste’s cosmological understanding of Christian divinity as light, animating the whole of the world from the moment of Creation, depends upon Judaism remaining “unincorporated,” lacking jurisdictional claim within Christian time. Stephen Nichols argues that Grosseteste’s metaphysics of light represents, in this way, “the consummate gesture of theological fictionality.” By this, he means that it enables a story of Creation and human history, which— always already Christian—provides theology a profound ability to shape experiences of the “real,” since it also claims motive power over the most basic principles of ontology and temporality.⁵³ The next sections explore how theological fiction and legal reality collapse in Grosseteste’s writings, first as he advises the countess of Winchester on how she should appropriately “accommodate” Jewish tenants on her lands, and next as he unspools the relationship between time and law in his French soteriological summa, the Château d’Amour.⁵⁴

Ruling in the Interim: Simon de Montfort, Margaret de Quincy, and the Jews of Leicester It remains, as Joseph Goering notes, a remarkable “accident of history” that a young Simon de Montfort, newly vested with his inheritance in England, would encounter as a local archdeacon Robert Grosseteste, then just on the eve of trading pastoral work for theological lectures to the Oxford Franciscans.⁵⁵ A letter among Grosseteste’s correspondence attests to their early relationship, an allegiance that, from the first, rested on a volatile mix of salvific theology and legal decree. The historical pretext underlying Letter 5 is well known: in 1231 or 1232, de Montfort sealed a charter ordering the expulsion of the Leicester Jewish community from the precincts of the borough, citing his own salvation and the well-being of the Leicester burgesses as cause.⁵⁶ The charter survives in the Leicester Public Records Office, while evidence for its aftermath survives in a letter sent by Grosseteste to Margaret de Quincy, countess of Winchester, who opened up lands she held in ⁵³ Nichols, “Political grail,” at S166n7. On the ways that Grosseteste’s theology underwrites medieval anti-Semitisms, see Nisse, “ ‘Your name will no longer be Aseneth,’ ” 737–9, and the related discussion in ibid., Jacob’s Shipwreck, 111–12. For further discussion, see also Chapter 5. ⁵⁴ On the ways that Christian attitudes towards Judaism coalesced around built structures and property ownership, see Lavezzo, The Accommodated Jew, and further discussion in Chapter 5. On settlement patterns in townships and processes of making legal “faith” between Jews and Christians, see Hyams, “Faith, fealty and Jewish ‘infideles’ in twelfth-century England.” ⁵⁵ See Goering, “Robert Grosseteste and the Jews of Leicester,” 182. ⁵⁶ For an overview of the act, see Goering, ibid.; Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 15–7; Harris, “Jews, Jurats, and the Jewry wall;” Vincent, “Simon de Montfort’s first quarrel with Henry III;” and Watt, “Grosseteste and the Jews.” See also, Nisse, Jacob’s Shipwreck, 112; Abulafia, “Notions of Jewish service in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England,” 210–12; and Strickland, “Edward I, Exodus, and England on the Hereford World Map,” 465–6.

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St. Margaret’s parish, in the eastern suburb of Leicester, to the displaced families. Grosseteste stages his letter as a beneficium, a kindness or favor, offered as inadequate repayment for the abundant generosity she has already extended to him. “I have been informed,” he writes, “that your excellency has decided to welcome onto your land the Jews whom the lord of Leicester expelled from his town, to prevent their further pitiless exploitation through usury of the Christians who live there. If this is indeed your decision, please first consider carefully how Christian princes should welcome and protect Jews.”⁵⁷ De Montfort’s expulsion order stands in contrast to the activity of his eventual brother-in-law, Henry III, who around the same time, in 1232, founded his Domus Conversorum in London as a residence for Jewish converts.⁵⁸ However different in tactic, expulsion and conversion belonged to the same trajectory of increasingly tenuous conditions for thirteenth-century English Jews, whose traditional legal protection by the Crown also made them doubly vulnerable to violent reprisal, both as targets of religious bias and as representatives of royal power.⁵⁹ In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council forbade Jews from collecting “oppressive and immoderate interest” from Christians and decreed they be held financially responsible for garnished debts that Christians could not then tithe to their churches (cap. 67).⁶⁰ Canon 68 banned Jews and Muslims from appearing in public during Holy Week and required they distinguish themselves in dress from Christians.⁶¹ In 1218, an eleven-year-old Henry III formalized this injunction with a charter that declared English Jews “should wear on their chest, on their outer garments two emblems in the form of white tablets made of linen cloth, or parchment,” a decree, John Tolan argues, meant to reestablish royal power over the Exchequer of the Jews after the period of civil war while also giving tangible force to Canon 68 through a badge clearly meant to evoke the two tablets of Mosaic law.⁶² When Stephen Langton called the Oxford Council of 1222 to institute the Fourth Lateran reforms, ⁵⁷ Letters, 66; Epistolae, 33–4: “Intimatum namque est mihi, quod Judaeos, quos dominus Leircestriensis de municipio suo expulit, ne Christianos in eodem manentes amplius usuris immisericorditer opprimerent, vestra disposuit excellentia super terram vestram recolligere. Quod si disponitis, qualiter a Christianis principibus recolligi debeant et tueri, prius diligenter attendatis.” ⁵⁸ On the foundation of the Domus Conversorum, see Stacey, “The conversion of Jews to Christianity in thirteenth-century England;” Nisse, Jacob’s Shipwreck, 110–12; and Heng, The Invention of Race, 73–5. Leicester may have preceded London in founding its own Domus Conversorum earlier in the thirteenth century. See Lewis, “Tractatus contra Iudaeos in the Gulbenkian Apocalypse,” 553. ⁵⁹ See Langmuir, “The Jews and the archives of Angevin England;” Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution, 54–8; Stacey, “The English Jews under Henry III;” Abulafia, “Notions of Jewish service in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England; Heng, The Invention of Race, 55–109; Watt, “The Jews, the law, and the Church;” and Meyer, “Making sense of Christian excommunication of Jews.” For a reassessment of the rhetoric of Jewish service in light of common law procedures that recognized Jewish rights to self-representation, see Mell, “Hybridity in a medieval key.” ⁶⁰ Goering, “Robert Grosseteste and the Jews of Leicester,” 184–5. ⁶¹ See Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils, 236–96; and Goering, “Robert Grosseteste and the Jews of Leicester,” 185. ⁶² Tolan, “The first imposition of a badge on European Jews,” quoted at 145. See also Vincent, “Two papal letters on the wearing of the Jewish badge, 1221 and 1229;” and Heng, The Invention of Race, 74.

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he expanded the remit of canons 67 and 68, forbidding construction of new synagogues in areas not already settled and banning “excessive noise while worshipping,” eating or buying meat during Lent, and employing Christian women as servants.⁶³ These legal restrictions found their grounding in a tradition of Christian exegesis that also forms the backdrop for Grosseteste’s letter to Margaret de Quincy. Grosseteste had precedents for this type of monitory epistle—in particular, Innocent III’s letters to King Philip Augustus of France (1205) and the Count of Nevers (1208) on the question of Jewish moneylending. As in these exemplars, Grosseteste begins with biblical interpretation, presenting a legal narratio indicting Jews for their role in the Crucifixion.⁶⁴ Citing the Gospel of John [11:48], Grosseteste suggests that they lost their “place and nation,” locum et gentem, in their disavowal of Christ. With the conquest of Titus and Vespasian, the Jewish nation was “then scattered as captives throughout all lands and peoples”—a condition only to be rectified by the end of time when “the whole of Israel, that is to say, the Jewish people, will be saved through the same faith in Christ, and restored from captivity to true freedom.”⁶⁵ Having established Jewish captivity as a poena justa for refusing Christian nationhood, Grosseteste devotes the substance of the letter to the pragmatics of ruling Jewish exiles in the “meantime” [interim] before Judgment. “It is the duty of the princes who hold them captive,” he informs the countess, “to protect them from being killed, and at the same time to prohibit them most strictly from oppressing Christians with usury, and to ensure that they are able to gain their own livelihood by the lawful labour of their hands.”⁶⁶ Grosseteste intends these injunctions in literal terms. Jews survive only on account of God’s mercy and Christians’ charity and primarily as symbolic reminders of the conquest of faith itself: citing Augustine, he argues for their protection as “ ‘the bearers of our books’ ” and “witnesses to the Christian faith against the unbelief of pagans.”⁶⁷ As captive vassals, moreover, their labor belongs first to their rulers, “tilling the ground to the advantage of those princes and for some sort of support of their unhappy lives.”⁶⁸ ⁶³ See Powicke and Cheney, eds., Councils and Synods, II.120–1, and an overview provided by Edwards, “The Church and the Jews in medieval England,” 91. ⁶⁴ See Goering, “Robert Grosseteste and the Jews of Leicester,” 185, and, for the text and translation of the letters, Synan, The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages, 219–29. For a reading of this letter within the concept of Jewish “serfdom,” see Watt, “The Church, the law, and the Jews,” 166–71. ⁶⁵ Letters, 67; Epistolae, 34: “tunc omnis Israel, id est, populus Judaeorum, per eandem Christi fidem salvus fiet, et ad veram libertatem de captivitate redibit.” ⁶⁶ Ibid.: “Debentque principes qui eos tenent captivos, ne occidantur defendere, et insimul, ne Christianos usuris opprimant, severissime prohibere; et ut de licitis manuum suarum laboribus victum sibi acquirant, providere.” ⁶⁷ Letters, 68; Epistolae, 35: “testatur beatus Augustinus, adicitque causam quare non sunt occidendi, videlicet quia ‘portant codices nostros, de quibus prophetatus et promissus est nobis Christus.’ Ac per hoc sunt testes fidei Christianiae contra infidelitatem Paganorum.” ⁶⁸ Ibid.; ibid., 36: “terram laboriose operentur, in principum utiliatem, et suae infelicis vitae qualemcunque sustentationem.” Translation adjusted slightly.

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Grosseteste appears to mean this labor literally: manual work, the letter suggests, serves as a “just” solution to the dangers presented by usury. His language speaks presciently to later acta in England and France, including Louis IX’s ordinance in 1254 that Jews “live by the labour of their own hands or by commerce” [vivent . . . des labeurs de leur mains, ou des autres besoignes] and Edward I’s 1275 Estatuz de la Jewerie, banning Jewish moneylending in any form.⁶⁹ And it is to this problem of usury and seigniorial profit that Grosseteste turns next. In permitting usury, he continues, Christian princes ignore God’s sentence of punishment upon the Jewish people, exalting those who should rightly be castigated and reaping the rewards themselves. Moreover, they remain as complicit in the sin of usury as the usurers themselves, since, according to the Glossa ordinaria, “those who have the power to prevent something and do not do so are to be understood as consenting to it.”⁷⁰ Grosseteste cautions Margaret against “being defiled” by activity that allows her to behave like those shameful princes—to “live by robbery and mercilessly eat, drink, and clothe themselves in the blood of those whom they were obliged to protect.”⁷¹ Grosseteste had more than a passing canonical interest in the status of Jews in Christian territories. His knowledge of Hebrew proved sufficient to produce a commentary on the Psalms, and he translated from Greek to Latin the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a project that Ruth Nisse has situated within a broader mid-thirteenth-century strain of apocalypticism, in which anxieties about a Mongol invasion merged with fears of anti-Christian Jewish conspiracy.⁷² Christian typological hermeneutics likewise served as the foundation of Grosseteste’s soteriology, his understanding that Christ, as the “God-man,” constitutes the “unifying principle” of the cosmos, its beginning and end.⁷³ Grosseteste’s most extensive thinking on the relationship between Jewish and Christian law occurs in De cessatione legalium, a treatise also dating to the early 1230s, likely during his tenure with the Oxford Franciscans.⁷⁴ In it, Grosseteste argues that the ritual laws of the Torah ceased to obtain with the birth of Christ, ⁶⁹ Watt, “Grosseteste and the Jews,” 216, and ibid., “The Jews, the law, and the Church,” 159–61. For the ordinance, see de Laurière, Ordonnances des roys de France de la troisième race, I.75. For discussion, see also Heng, The Invention of Race, 65–6. ⁷⁰ The comment glosses a passage from Romans 1:32, which Grosseteste includes immediately preceding this quote: “they who do such things, are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them” [quoniam qui talia agunt digni sunt morte non solum ea qui faciunt sed et qui consentiunt facientibus]. See Letters, 68; Epistolae, 36: “Et sicut dicunt sancti expositores omnes, reputantur consentientes, qui cum possint impedire, et non impediunt.” ⁷¹ Letters, 69; Epistolae, 36: “de rapina vivunt, et sanguinem eorum quos tueri deberent, sine misericordia comedunt, bibunt, et induunt.” ⁷² See Nisse, Jacob’s Shipwreck, 127–47. On the Testaments, see also de Jonge, “Robert Grosseteste and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.” ⁷³ Cf. De cessatione legalium, III.1.25; hereafter DCL. Latin references to the text are from Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, Dales and King, eds. I have used the English translation of Hildebrand, On the Cessation of the Laws. ⁷⁴ On the dating, see Hildebrand, On the Cessation of the Laws, 15–16.

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having served beforehand only as “testimonies witnessing to the Incarnation.”⁷⁵ As the next section discusses, Grosseteste would reprise this theory of legal supersession in his theological “romance,” the Château d’Amour, which imagines Adam and Eve in legal default of Paradise. In De cessatione legalium, he offers a slightly simpler analogy to argue for the superfluity of Jewish law.⁷⁶ Imagine a man has fallen into “a deep and dark pit,” he suggests. Unable to rescue himself through his own power, the man could escape his capture only through the aid of a single individual with the power to lower down a lamp and a ladder. That man will love the rescuer all the more for having rescued him, but he will likewise realize that he cannot be rescued without working towards his own salvation. Grosseteste thus allegorizes the Fall as a literal “fall,” in part to explain the purpose of the single positive legal injunction in Paradise against eating the fruit of the tree. Positive law exists not for a purpose unto itself but as a supplement to natural law; “indifferent” in content, it serves simply to teach obedience. The rungs of the ladder that Christ, as rescuer, lowers to captive humanity represent natural and positive law. The man could theoretically escape using only the rungs provided by natural law, but the intermediate steps of positive law make his climb towards obedience and liberation easier. With the rescue—which is to say, the Passion—completed, the “intermediate” steps of Jewish ritual law become superfluous in Grosseteste’s schema. Insofar as the Laws served as “witnesses and signs, shadow and prophecy” to the Incarnation, they “ceased and, as it were, lost their life” with the death of Christ.⁷⁷ In Grosseteste’s letter to Margaret de Quincy, the theological fiction of Jewish captivity, still refusing the “ladder” of salvation, merges with a legal reality in which Jewish property—and lives—remained subject to forfeiture under Christian dominion. If de Montfort’s charter thus represents the absolutism of Christian law tendered in defense of its salvation, Margaret de Quincy’s counter-gesture represents the uncertainties of co-habitation in the “meantime” of unfolding history. In this way, Margaret’s widowhood complicates and enriches this letter in ways often overlooked. In its opening preoccupation with locum et gentem, that is, Letter 5 engages with questions of territory, inheritance, and succession also integral to the relationship between Margaret de Quincy and her great-nephew, de Montfort. Legal records suggest that this relationship was a vexed one. In June 1232, Margaret brought a case against her great-nephew, complaining that he had been attempting to disseise her of rents since entering into his lordship the year before. The case would find its way before the Leicestershire eyre, then the ⁷⁵ DCL, I.10.16, 58: “Potest quoque et ex iam dictis videri quod illi actus cerimoniales populi Israelitici fuerunt testimonia testificantia incarnacionem Filii Dei.” ⁷⁶ DCL, I.8.6–12. ⁷⁷ DCL, IV.3.1, 164: “Cum igitur legalia in quantum legalia testimonia fuerunt et signa et umbra et prophetia consummacionis in morte Christi perfecte, ipsum momentum mortis Christi tempus est signatum et determinatum quo legalia desierunt, et quasi vitam suam, funditus moriendo perdiderunt.”

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Westminster Bench, and finally the king himself before disappearing from the record unresolved.⁷⁸ The legal grounds for the dispute arose from the fact that Margaret and her sister, Amicia de Beaumont, had jointly inherited the Leicestershire lands in 1207.⁷⁹ Amicia’s share, the larger, brought with it the title of Earl of Leicester and the office of steward of England, positions that passed to her husband, Simon de Montfort II, upon their marriage. It was thus through Amicia de Beaumont that Simon de Montfort IV could claim ancestral rights in England—though only after his older brother, Amaury, failed to claim them.⁸⁰ But by 1232, Margaret, vested with her late husband’s title of earl of Winchester, also wielded considerable clout in the precincts of Leicester. Her status undoubtedly lent visibility to her complaint that de Montfort was encroaching on her seigneurial rights. That this rare contribution to Margaret de Quincy’s otherwise sparse historical record should come by way of a property dispute is not surprising. As a widow, she could bring suits that would have otherwise been handled by her husband, and such legal activity proved a major occupation of countless women, whose entitled “fair share”—up to a third of the deceased spouse’s property—often met with delay, encroachment, and wrongful seizure along the winding judicial road to rightful possession. The law was not insensitive to the plights of widows. The 1215 text of Magna Carta included two clauses specifically designed to aid femmes soles, the first (cap. 7) guaranteeing that widows would receive their marriage portions and inheritances without payment and the second (cap. 8) protecting them from compulsory future marriages.⁸¹ As Janet Senderowitz Loengard argues, such protections for women, as imperfect and prone to exploitation as they were, represented a “theoretical anomaly” within a feudal inheritance structure premised on male primogeniture: “It meant that holdings carefully concentrated in one man would be divided at least for the life of his mother—or stepmother or sister-in-law or even more distant relative—and it meant the woman’s claim would take precedence over a man’s rights as purchaser or heir. In short, dower turned the accepted conventions and the rules based on them inside out.”⁸²

⁷⁸ Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 16. ⁷⁹ Fox provides an overview of the partition of the honor of Leicester in “The honor and earldom of Leicester: Origin and descent, 1066–1399.” See also Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 1–10. ⁸⁰ The Leicestershire honor descended to de Montfort only through his grandfather’s marriage to Margaret’s sister; Simon’s own father had seen the inheritance escheated to King John as terra Normannorum—land taken over by the king after the loss of Normandy—making it for decades a lordship in name only. See Vincent, “Simon de Montfort’s first quarrel with Henry III.” Amaury was rejected by Henry III as Earl of Leicester and responded by ceding his rights to Simon in exchange for the latter’s French lands. See Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 8. ⁸¹ These clauses would expand in the 1217 and 1225 reissues; nine years later, the 1236 Statute of Merton provided additional support by stipulating the first legal redress for wrongfully disseised widows. For discussion of Magna Carta in relation to widows’ legal rights, see Loengard, “Rationabilis Dos: Magna Carta and the widow’s ‘fair share.’ ” ⁸² Ibid., 60.

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Letter 5 in part results from this anomalous structure, in which dower delayed, often for decades, the transfers of estates to male heirs.⁸³ While her motives for accepting the Leicester Jewish community onto her lands will likely always remain obscure, Margaret’s role in the controversy sheds light on this structural tension between the rights of heirs and widows. For Simon de Montfort, the expulsion of the Leicester Jews represented an act of piety and of lordship, “a favour from the new ruler of Leicester to his people” which allowed burgesses a monopoly on trade in the city.⁸⁴ As the language of the charter suggests, this enactment of religious feeling and mercantile magnanimity rested on its lord’s ability to shape futurity through his will, his voluntas as well as his legal testamentum. De Montfort does not seek to expel the Jews of Leicester from the city for the duration of his time, but for all time—or more precisely, for all the lifetimes of his heirs until the end of the world: Simon de Montefort filius Comitis Simonis de Montefort, Dominus Leycestrie, omnibus Christi fidelibus, presentem paginam visuris et audituris, salutem in Domino. Noverit universitas vestra, me pro salute anime mee et antecessorum et successorum meorum, concessisse, et presenti carta mea confirmasse, de me et heredibus meis in perpetuum burgensibus meis Leycestrie et eorum heredibus, quod nullus Judeus neque Judea in tempore meo, sive in tempore alicuius heredum meorum usque in finem mundi, infra libertatem ville Leycestrie habitabit neque manebit nec residenciam obtinebit. Volo etiam et precipio quod heredes mei post me istam libertatem, integram et illesam burgensibus prenominatis observent et in perpetuum warrentizent. Et in hujus rei testimonium presentem cartam sigillo meo munivi. [Simon de Montfort, son of Earl Simon de Montfort, Lord of Leicester, to all the faithful in Christ, who may see and hear the present page, health in the Lord. Know all of you that I, for the good of my soul, and the souls of my ancestors and successors, have granted, and by this my present charter have confirmed, on behalf of me and my heirs for ever, to my burgesses of Leicester and their heirs, that no Jew or Jewess, in my time or in the time of any of my heirs to the end of the world, shall within the liberty of the town of Leicester, inhabit or stay temporarily or maintain a residence. I also wish and command that my heirs after me observe and warrant for ever that liberty entire and inviolate to the aforesaid burgesses. In testimony of this I have confirmed the present charter with my seal.]⁸⁵

⁸³ Margaret’s own son would not succeed to the title of Earl of Winchester until his mother’s death in 1235, sixteen years after his father, Saer de Quincy, had died. See Oram, “Quincy, Saer de, earl of Winchester (d. 1219),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Wilkinson discusses Margaret’s daughter, Hawise, in Women in Thirteenth-Century Lincolnshire, 27–44. ⁸⁴ Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 15. ⁸⁵ Levy, “Notes on the Leicester Jewry,” 39, for the English translation, and 41, for the Latin transcription. Translation Levy’s, with slight adjustments.

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The charter summons lineage—past, present, and future—as the ultimate guarantor of the grantor’s power. It also ensures its salience for both Christian and Jewish readers by echoing, in the phrase “usque in finem mundi,” the language of Jewish starrs, acquittances of debt.⁸⁶ Thus, even as the charter looks to establish the antiquity of de Montfort’s family line, the clause witnesses the new lord’s relatively fragile hold on English soil: the younger son of a father who had only nominal claim to the land after the loss of Normandy, he owed the legitimacy of his inheritance to Margaret’s sister, rather than to his own family line. Clearly, de Montfort’s grant of a perpetual liberty for the good of his own soul and those of his ancestors and heirs attempts to mitigate this tenuous status by assuring “all who may see or hear” of his family’s longevity and right to the title. But it may, too, have provoked Margaret’s response. Her admittance of the Leicester Jewish community offers a pointed reminder that he shared the county with her and her heirs and, moreover, owed his fortunes in England to the longevity of her family line, the Beaumonts, not his. Widowhood, in this case, complicates the charter’s declaration of seigniorial will by reminding its author that the historical model of uninterrupted patrilineal descent—of perpetuity founded on male primogeniture—exists side by side with women’s claims on property, through inheritance and dower.⁸⁷ Margaret de Quincy’s legal contest with her nephew thus underscores the degree to which female landholding could also delay and disrupt the operations of male inheritance. Viewed in conjunction, de Montfort’s charter and Grosseteste’s Letter 5 put forward related but distinct models of pious rule, the one transforming inhospitality into a gift, the other offering hospitality as a punishment. At the center of both of these actions rests the “perpetuity” of Christian lordship, the certainties of which were tested by Jewish claims over Christian property debt and women’s claims over male primogeniture. As the next section shows, these legal complexities of estate governance and inheritance—emblematized in the figure of the female domina as mother and manager of her estate—prove foundational to Grosseteste’s conception of good governance. Grosseteste’s own demanding vision of pastoral work rested on a model of the estate in which aristocratic women’s work proved central, as property-holders, political actors, and Christian penitents. In this final section of the chapter, I examine the Château d’Amour as a “theological fictionalization,” borrowing Nichols’s formulation, of the argument ⁸⁶ The Documents of Early England Data Set (DEEDS) Project shows that use of the phrase pro salute anime mee et antecessorum et successorum meorum peaks between 1230 and 1260, i.e., right at the period of de Montfort’s inheritance. See Gervers, “The dating of medieval English private charters of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,” esp. 462 and 465. For examples of starrs quitting debts “from the creation to the end of the world,” see Select Pleas, Starrs, and Other Records from the Exchequer of the Jews, .. 1220–1284, Rigg, ed. and trans. I am grateful to Paul Hyams for drawing my attention to this phrase and its potential origins. ⁸⁷ On the “family politics” underwriting the use of private charters in the thirteenth century, see Hyams, “The charter as a source for the early common law.”

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he put forward in De cessatione legalium. In this case, however, Grosseteste recasts the “death and restoration” of the Law in the terms of English property law.

The Château d’Amour: Property, Law, and Salvation History A little more than a decade after Grosseteste wrote his letter to Margaret de Quincy, he composed a treatise for her granddaughter, Margaret de Lacy, following the death of her second husband, Walter Marshal, in 1245.⁸⁸ Composed in Anglo-French, the Reules represents the earliest extant guide to estate management intended explicitly for a lay audience and aptly illustrates Jocelyn Wogan-Browne’s point that “Anglo-Norman noblewomen who achieved long widowhoods” proved themselves some of England’s most influential cultural patrons.⁸⁹ By the end of the century, the Reules would circulate in legal compilations and literary miscellanies with other bestsellers of the genre, including Walter of Henley and the Seneschaucy. At the time of its composition, however, it bore closer resemblance to the pastoral statutes that Grosseteste and his fellow bishops circulated for their dioceses. Like these kindred texts, the Reules embraces a complex union of idealism and pragmatism, its guidelines helping to imagine an estate in which all members perform their allotted duties, all crops produce their expected yields, and all records render full accounts. Though the Reules earns its reputation as a highly practical text, filled with quotidian details about “how many quarters of corn you will be likely to use weekly in livery of bread and how many in alms,”⁹⁰ this kind of quantitative information dwarfs the space dedicated to theorizing the art of management itself. The Reules, in other words, is a treatise about ruling—about knowing the boundaries of one’s jurisdiction, inquiring into its health, and commanding others to do one’s will in preserving and improving it. As baronial landholders, the countess of Lincoln and bishop of Lincoln shared this type of work, and the Reules indeed appears modeled on a set of Latin Statuta Grosseteste composed for his own household.⁹¹ They contain a number of articles in common, beginning with the ⁸⁸ Margaret de Lacy survived two husbands before spending her remaining years a widow. Wilkinson shows via internal textual evidence that the Reules can be definitely dated to Margaret’s second period of widowhood. See “The Rules of Robert Grosseteste reconsidered,” 299–300. ⁸⁹ See Wilkinson, “The Rules of Robert Grosseteste reconsidered,” 294; and Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture, esp. Chapter 5, 151–88, quoted here at 153. On women’s patronage of French household literature, see also ibid., “ ‘Our steward, St Jerome;’ ” and ibid., “How to marry your wife with chastity, honour, and fin’ amor.” On estate management literature and discourses of moral accounting, see O’Neill, Accounting for Salvation in Middle English Literature, 56–64. ⁹⁰ Oschinsky, ed. and trans., Walter of Henley and other Treatises on Estate Management and Accounting, here at 392–3: “Quaunt quarters de ble vus volez despendre la semeyne en payn dispensable, cumben en aumone.” ⁹¹ See Oschinsky, Walter of Henley, xiii–xx, xxiv.

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first of the interior rules, which instructs the lady to “admonish all your household often that all those who serve you should endeavour to serve God and to serve you loyally and diligently, and in order to do the will of God they ought to do your will and pleasure in all things; in all things, that is, that are not against God.”⁹² These “general instructions” [generals comaundemenz] repeat in the next article, which advises telling “high and low . . . that they ought to execute all your orders that are not against God, fully, quickly, and willingly and without grumbling or contradiction.”⁹³ Both the Latin and French texts suggest that in obeying the will of one’s lord or lady, one obeys the will of God, an essential component of Grosseteste’s pastoral hierarchy, as we have seen. This imbrication of the worlds of pastoral and political governance also served as the imaginative groundwork for Grosseteste’s bestknown literary work, the Château d’Amour, a salvation history that extends from the Expulsion to the Last Judgment. In deference to one of its key readerships, the Château d’Amour positions women prominently. Composed in French, it serves as a source for the allegory of the Four Daughters of God, adapted to lyrical effect in Piers Plowman, and features an inventive depiction of the Virgin Mary as the “castle” of refuge for Christ and humanity.⁹⁴ We also know it to have survived among women’s literary effects. As Evelyn Mackie notes, three of the eighteen manuscripts containing the Château d’Amour were explicitly made for women: Princeton, Princeton University Library, Taylor Medieval MS 1, made for Joan Tateshal; Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS McClean 123, otherwise known as the Nuneaton Codex; and Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale Albert 1er, MS 9030–37, assembled in the fifteenth century for Margaret of York. Others show evidence of female readership and more still circulated among women in Middle English translation.⁹⁵ Described by Richard Southern as “the nearest [Grosseteste] came to a Summa Theologiae” the Château d’Amour has long puzzled scholars with its blending of philosophy and popular allegory.⁹⁶ Written in octosyllabic couplets, the poem explicitly aims itself at those who have “ne lettreüre ne clergie” (28) narrating

⁹² Ibid., 398–9: “Amonestez trestute vostre maysnee meynte feyth ke tuz iceus ki vus servunt entendaunt servir a deu, e servir vus lealment e peniblement, e pur la volente deu parfere en tute choses, parfacent vostre volent e vostre pleysir en tute choses ke ne sunt pas encuntre deu.” ⁹³ Ibid.: “petiz e graunz e co sovent ke plenerement, prestement, e volenters, saunz grucer, e contredit facent trestuz voz comaundementz ke ne sunt encontre deu.” ⁹⁴ For discussion of the relationship between Piers Plowman and the Château d’Amour, see Davis, Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature, 113–19; and Watson, “William Langland reads Robert Grosseteste.” ⁹⁵ See Mackie, “Scribal intervention and the question of audience;” and ibid., “Robert Grosseteste’s Anglo-Norman treatise on the loss and restoration of Creation.” A complete list of Anglo-Norman and Middle English copies of the text is provided in Appendix 4 of Marx, The Devil’s Rights. On Taylor MS 1, notable for including portraits of Grosseteste and Joan Tateshal together, see Bennett, “A book designed for a noblewoman.” On the portrait, see also Thomson, “Two early portraits of Robert Grosseteste.” ⁹⁶ Southern, Robert Grosseteste, 224–5.

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for them the story of the creation, loss, and restoration of Paradise and the redemption of humankind.⁹⁷ Evelyn Mackie has proposed as a possible initial audience the Franciscan convent at Oxford, making its composition, if this proved the case, more or less contemporaneous with De cessatione legalium. Comprised of those aiming for higher study as well as “not a few knights,” this audience would prove “eminently suited” to the mix of allegory and high theology encompassed in the poem.⁹⁸ We might also include among its possible audiences Simon and Eleanor de Montfort and their children: Grosseteste tutored the de Montfort sons in Latin and Greek in his household, and although Legge’s assertion that Grosseteste composed the poem for the boys’ education seems unlikely, the probability that the de Montforts knew the poem is a good deal higher.⁹⁹ As John Maddicott shows, Simon de Montfort’s friendships with Grosseteste and Adam Marsh, as well as his own strongly ascetic tendencies, situated him at the center of Franciscan moral and intellectual life in the mid-thirteenth century. He owned a copy of William Peraldus’ Summa de vitiis et de virtutibus and was noted among chroniclers for his “knowledge of letters.”¹⁰⁰ Eleanor showed a religious fervor equal to her husband’s. She patronized both mendicant and Cistercian orders and maintained a similarly close correspondence with Grosseteste and Marsh. She moreover took charge of the household and estates, assisting “in the day-to-day maintenance” of properties to such an extent that she “almost seemed to cut a semiautonomous figure within their marriage,” according to Louise Wilkinson.¹⁰¹ In its use of Anglo-French—a language equally of lay devotion and the common law in thirteenth-century England—the Château d’Amour directs itself at an audience like the de Montforts: aristocratic, lettered, and eager to translate the lessons of lay lordship into lessons for salvation.¹⁰² In the Château d’Amour, this process occurs by transforming Adam and Eve’s original dominion in Paradise into a free tenancy, which they hold by virtue of the Lord:

⁹⁷ Citations to the Château d’Amour are taken from Jessie Murray’s edition, Le Chateau d’Amour de Robert Grosseteste, with line numbers following the cited text. The translations are mine, though I have found Mackie’s modern English prose translation helpful. Middle English translations of the poem abound in the fourteenth century. For editions of the versions and an overview of the tradition, see Sajavaara, The Middle English Translations of Robert Grosseteste’s Chateau d’Amour. ⁹⁸ For an overview of the audience question and arguments favoring the period of time Grosseteste was lecturing in Oxford, see Mackie, “Scribal intervention and the question of audience,” and ibid., “Robert Grosseteste’s Anglo-Norman treatise on the loss and restoration of Creation,” 155–6. ⁹⁹ Marsh alludes Grosseteste’s tutelage in the letter that also returns his copy of De regno et tyrannide. See n.4, previously. On the de Montfort sons as an audience for the poem, see Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background, 223; Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 95; and Mackie, “Scribal intervention and the question of audience,” 65. ¹⁰⁰ Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 84–8. On knightly literacy more generally, see Aurell, The Lettered Knight, 45–97. ¹⁰¹ See Wilkinson, Eleanor de Montfort, 82–91, quoted at 87. ¹⁰² On the use of French in thirteenth-century pleading, see Brand, “The languages of the law in later medieval England;” and Hyams, “Thinking English law in French.”

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         De tut le mund la seignurie, E tuz jurs sans murir la vie, E paraïs en heritage, E vivre desk’ icel estage, Tut sanz peine e sanz dolur, Deskes venist itel jur, Ke de eus issu en fussent Tant ke acomplir peüssent, Par numbre tant de compaignie, Cum furent ceus ki par folie E par orgoil del ciel chaïrent, E pus en enfern descendirent. (89–100)

[And he granted him lordship of the entire world and gave him eternal life. God granted Paradise as an inheritance with the right to live in that estate, without pain or hardship, until that day when, from their issue, heirs would make up a number to equal the company that had, through error and pride, fallen from heaven and descended into hell.]

In constructing the original salvific contract using the conventions of a thirteenthcentury property conveyance, Grosseteste takes the explicit legalism of Anselm’s theology of the Atonement and literalizes it for his audience of confessors and land-holders.¹⁰³ Humanity’s natural freedom is allegorized through the terms of God’s grant to Adam and Eve, which stipulates a donor, a donee, the type of gift (a heritable estate, in this case), and a promise to have and hold it libere et quiete, without strife or harm, for the life of the donees and their heirs.¹⁰⁴ From God’s first enfeoffment, the Château thus deploys the logic of property law and the legal capacities of its key actors, the lord and vassal, to explain the necessity of salvation. Attached to God’s original gift, the poem goes on to explain, are two laws: one, “la natureus,” encompasses the natural obedience Adam owes to God’s command (114–7). The other, “la positive,” encompasses the command itself: do not eat of the fruit of the tree. Like the aristocratic landholder imagined

¹⁰³ Grosseteste’s theory of the Redemption owes much to Anselm. See McEvoy, “Robert Grosseteste’s use of the argument of Saint Anselm;” and Robson, “Saint Anselm, Robert Grosseteste and the Franciscan tradition.” On Anselm’s revisions to the “Devil’s rights” explanation for the Redemption—which Grosseteste revisits in lines 1003–114 of the Château d’Amour—see Marx, The Devil’s Rights, 17–24, with discussion of the Château d’Amour on 65–79. ¹⁰⁴ Bracton includes this formula as part of the basic language of property conveyance. See [Henry de Bracton], On the Laws and Customs of England, II.111–2. As Kaye notes, Bracton parses libere to mean “that the land given was to be free from ‘servitudes’, that is third-party rights,” and quiete to mean “that the grantee was to hold the land peacefully without disturbance by the grantor or his heirs.” See Medieval English Conveyances, 86–7. For discussion of Bracton’s example charter in literary contexts, see Steiner, Documentary Culture, 23–5.

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in the Reules, Adam and Eve thus initially enjoy dominion of Paradise. Its bounty is theirs to tend and keep, provided they live according to the single rule of the land. By tasting the forbidden fruit, however, Adam and Eve disobey both natural and positive law (136–7), and their transgression spells the loss of their seisin: “engeté” from Paradise and “desherité” of their demesne, Adam and Eve now must work “en suur,” by their own sweat (141–4). Continuing his analogy, Grosseteste suggests that Adam and Eve have been cast into servitude through their own “defaute” (156), a term that denotes error in general, but also, within royal justice, failure to appear before a judge when summoned. Grosseteste thus combines the traditional Augustinian notion of vitium as an absence of good with a common law procedure whereby a demandant can claim back a property if a defendant persistently fails to appear in court.¹⁰⁵ According to Bracton, if the tenant “fails to make his law [by repeated absences before the judge], he will then lose seisin and the demandant will recover seisin and the tenant will be in mercy.”¹⁰⁶ Grosseteste allegorizes this principle to explain humanity’s concomitant fall from grace into a state of “mercy”: Deu ne fist chose si haute, Ki n’abessast par sa defaute. Ke ke terriene chose fust, Chescune chose sun dreit eust, Ne fust pechié ke tant grieve. Pechié, a parole brieve, Ceo est defaute apertement. Defaute e peché en un s’estent. Par defaute out tant de perte, Kar defaute fist aperte. Defaute après defaute e fine, Fet par dreit perdre seisine, E encore a la curt la rei, Use l’em incele lei. (155–68)

¹⁰⁵ On Augustine’s notion of original sin as contra naturam, a detraction from good rather than an ontologically real opposition to good, see City of God, XIV.12–15. In the king’s courts, default stipulated a failure to appear before the judges and could result in the temporary or permanent seizure of property. Bracton deems the person “contumacious” who, “whether he goes into hiding or not, if after having been summoned to court he does not make himself available and has no excuse” [sive reus latitet sive non si ad iudicium summonitus sui copiam non fecerit neque defensus fuerit]. See [Henry de Bracton], On the Laws and Customs of England, IV:147–90, cited here at 147. For discussion, see also Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law, II.590–2. ¹⁰⁶ [Henry de Bracton], On the Laws and Customs of England, IV.152: “Si autem in lege defecerit tenens, tunc amittet seisinam et petens seisinam recuperabit et tenens in misericordia.”

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[God did not make anything so high that it was not abased by his {Adam’s} fault. Every earthly thing received its proper due. Never was a sin so grave. Sin, in a word, is manifestly default. Default and sin are one and the same. Through default comes great loss, because Adam openly defaulted/sinned. Default after default brings a fine and causes one by rights to lose seisin. The king’s court still uses this same law.]

Adam’s default does more than lose him seisin in Paradise, however. It strips him of his free status and renders him a serf, meaning that he has no legal recourse to recover freedom or property unless someone of “franche nacion” (185) pleads for him before the judge.¹⁰⁷ This advocate must be “of his lineage” [de sun lignage] (188) but also freeborn, a legal crux that provides Grosseteste his entry point into his reading of the doctrine of Redemption, according to which Christ took on the “lineage” of humanity so that he might liberate it from the servitude of “defaute” or sin.¹⁰⁸ The shift in focus also entails a shift in the poem’s allegory. Grosseteste now asks his audience to envision the court of a “powerful king” [Uns reis . . . de grant poer] (205). He has a son, with whom he is “of one knowledge, one substance, one will, and one power” [De un saver, d’une substance, / De un voleir, d’une puissance] (211–12), and four daughters: Justice, Mercy, Truth, and Peace. The poem recasts Adam as an unnamed servant of this king. Because of an offence against his lord (the devil, according to this allegory), he finds himself placed in a terrible prison [grief prison] (244) and beset by enemies. Mercy, taking pity on his plight, begs her father to forgive his crime, but Justice and Truth argue against leniency. With the four sisters at an impasse, Peace summarizes the debate in legal terms: in a case where the judges cannot come to a unanimous verdict, “the judgment will have not record” [Jugement ne avra record] (413).¹⁰⁹ The only remedy left to the servant in this case is an older form of exoneration, trial by combat, whereby a champion can adopt the cause in his stead.¹¹⁰ The son volunteers to “take on the livery of the serf ” [Del serf prendrai la vesteüre] (449), freeing him from prison and reconciling his sisters. Having followed the reasoning and procedures of common law litigation to explain how Christ took on the burden of humanity’s sin, the second part of the ¹⁰⁷ Differences between freemen and bondsmen are outlined in [Henry de Bracton], On the Laws and Customs of England, II.30–8; for discussion, see also Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, I.412– 32; Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, 43–88; and Hyams, King, Lords and Peasants, esp. 82–124. ¹⁰⁸ For discussion of the centrality of the material charter instrument to forms of penitential lyric address, see Steiner, Documentary Culture, 61–90. ¹⁰⁹ It is ambiguous whether the daughters play the roles of judges or jury here. On the requirement of unanimous jury verdicts, see Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, II.625–6, and on the rarity of the non-unanimous jury, ibid., 654. ¹¹⁰ The development of the jury system begins under Henry II as an alternative to trial by combat in land disputes; with the banning of ordeals by the Fourth Lateran Council, the jury system expands and eventually replaces proof by combat. See Hyams, “Trial by ordeal;” Donahue, “Biology and origins of the English jury;” and Groot, “The early thirteenth-century criminal jury.”

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poem surveys salvation history from the birth of the Savior to the Last Judgment. Grosseteste borrows his structure for this remainder of the poem from Isaiah 9:6, which prophesies the Messiah as “Wonderful, Counsellor, God the Mighty, the Father to the world to come, the Prince of Peace” [Admirabilis, Consiliarius, Deus, Fortis, Pater futuri saeculi, Princeps pacis]. Each name serves in the Château d’Amour as an entry point into a different moment in salvation history: “Wonderful” allows Grosseteste to mediate on the Annunciation though an elaborate allegory of the Virgin Mary as the “castle of love,” an unimpeachable, pure refuge of Christ and the Church. “Counsellor” introduces a dramatization of the Harrowing of Hell, with Christ and Satan disputing the “Devil’s rights” theory of the Redemption.¹¹¹ “Father to the world to come” encompasses the Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Last Judgment, and the poem then concludes with a vision of heaven and praise for the Prince of Peace who leads all his faithful children to its “many mansions.” The formality and technicality of the common law thus allows Grosseteste to represent the divine contract of salvation history in terms of legal disability, using the figure of the unfree serf to explain why humanity lacks the power of salvation on its own terms. The salvific arc of the Château d’Amour—from an “old law” of strict punishment to a “new law” of merciful liberation—suggests, moreover, the poem’s affinities with De cessatione legalium. In general terms, both texts elaborate Grosseteste’s theology of the Incarnation. But they also share a number of specific examples, including the emphasis given to Isaiah 9:6.¹¹² The “deep and dark pit” of the Latin treatise becomes, in the French poem, the expulsion from Paradise and the “hard prison” into which humanity is cast. The rungs of the ladder, symbolizing positive and natural law, become the terms of the charter with which God enfeoffs Adam and Eve.¹¹³ Grosseteste, in this way, transforms the scholastic argument of De cessatione legalium into a French didactic narrative, a generic shift which in turn allows him to figure incarnational theology in time, as a period of tenancy or enfeoffment that bears upon humanity’s inheritance in the world to come. The ability to limit or extend the duration of property rights constitutes, in Frederic Maitland’s judgment, “the most salient trait” of English land law from the thirteenth century onward: “Proprietary rights in land are, we may say, projected upon the plane of time. The category of quantity, of duration, is applied to them. The life-tenant’s rights are a finite quantity; the fee-tenant’s rights are an infinite,

¹¹¹ For detailed discussion of this debate and its relationship to Grosseteste’s Dictum 10, see Marx, Devil’s Rights, 67–71. ¹¹² See DCL, II.2.3–5 ¹¹³ DCL, I.5.1–6. For discussion of Grosseteste’s understanding of divine natural law, see McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste, 419–22. He describes Grosseteste’s natural law as an “obligation” placed upon the world by God: “It is known by reason, is acquired, therefore, rather than innate; it comprehends the entirety of precepts that are just in themselves and are not simply imposed by decree” (419).

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or potentially infinite, quantity.”¹¹⁴ Grosseteste, I suggest, similarly projects God’s compact with humanity “upon the plane of time,” using the temporal sensitivity of property law to demonstrate not just the terms that bind Creator and Creation, but the ways that those terms initiate salvation history. As we have seen, the capacity to possess “futurity” under the law depends upon one’s recognition under that law, and Grosseteste characteristically exploits an ambiguous legal vocabulary to explain why Christians alone will inherit the kingdom of heaven. In Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the language of inheritance defines the community of the faithful: “And if sons, heirs also; heirs indeed of God, and joint heirs with Christ” [Si autem filii, et haeredes: haeredes, quidem Dei, cohaeredes autem Christi] (Rom. 8:17). So, too, in the Château d’Amour, Grosseteste plays with the most literal and contemporaneous applications of this maxim in English common law, where the key differences between the freeman and the bondsman lie in the ability to possess, will, and recover property under the law. The law of persons, governing relations between domini and servi, constitutes an area where English legal theory borrows with particular directness from Roman law.¹¹⁵ Following Roman tradition, for instance, Bracton would argue with binaristic clarity that “all individuals are either free or bond.”¹¹⁶ As Paul Hyams has shown in his study of manumissions, however, legal status in thirteenth-century England proved a good deal more fluid in practice. His survey of 221 English charters of manumission from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries shows that lords freed villeins and their families with more regularity than previously thought.¹¹⁷ These charters moreover indicate a striking pattern: in nearly every case, the transaction requires a third party, in which the lord manumits the villein, and the villein in turn grants a silver penny or two, furnished by a third party. The most common figure to serve as a third party in these charters was “a prelate or other churchman,” who, secured as a patron, “could block any attempt of their former lord (or an heir) to recall [the ex-villein] to servitude.”¹¹⁸ Hyams posits a direct connection between these rituals of manumission and the narratives that churchman like Anselm developed to explain the central quandary of the Incarnation—namely, why Christ’s humanity proved the necessary “third party” in the dispute between God and his fallen servant.¹¹⁹ We can see Grosseteste embrace not just the theological reasoning behind this manumission ritual but ¹¹⁴ See Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, II.10. ¹¹⁵ Ibid., I.412–3, and for an assessment Maitland’s reading of the sources, Hyams, “A threecornered dynamic of redemption,” 2–3. ¹¹⁶ [Henry de Bracton], On the Laws and Customs of England, II.29: “omnes homines aut liberi sunt aut servi.” Here Bracton borrows heavily from the Institutes and Azo’s commentary upon them. ¹¹⁷ See Hyams, “A three-cornered dynamic of redemption,” as well as ibid., “La joie de la liberté et la prix de la respectabilité.” ¹¹⁸ Hyams, “A three-cornered dynamic of redemption,” 3. ¹¹⁹ Ibid., 10–12. He provocatively suggests that the dynamic reflected in manumission charters did not trickle down from the theologians to the lay practitioners but rather, perhaps, “trickled up”: “early medieval theologians have to have found at least some of their images and ideas from the thought-

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also its legal particulars. Indeed, it is easy to imagine that he would have presided in his capacity as rector, archdeacon, or bishop over just such ceremonies. But if Grosseteste understood villein status as redeemable, both in practical and theological terms, he retained a concept of spiritual serfdom that applied specifically to his Jewish contemporaries. Having declined the “freedom” of abandoning their faith, they might do well to work “by the sweat of their brows,” Grosseteste suggests to Margaret de Quincy. In De cessatione legalium, Grosseteste strives to erase this asynchrony within Christian history—of an “Old Law” persisting alongside the “New”—by explaining Christ’s hypostatic nature as “God-man,” simultaneously divine and embodied. Such a union of the divine and human nature may seem fantastical, he argues, “less able to exist than that a person be both man and lion” [minus videtur posse esse quam quod una persona sit homo et leo].¹²⁰ But its very impossibility renders it all the more important as an article of faith. He makes the same argument, using a more romance-appropriate beast, in the Château d’Amour, where he urges his listeners to imagine how marvelous it would be if one could embody the whole and perfect nature of a man and also the whole and perfect nature of a horse (539–4). Such a marvel is impossible, he affirms, but a thousand times more marvelous is Christ: “He is truly man and truly God. He lacks nothing of humanity, but is wholly divine, as we plainly see” [K’est verrais hom e verrai Dé. / D’humanité ne il faut rien; / K’il est plein Deu, ce veum bien] (550–2). This meditation on the miracle of Christ’s nature—wholly man and wholly God—leads Grosseteste to the central allegory of the poem: the Virgin as the perfect dwelling, or castle, for the deified humanity of the Savior. As the iconic symbol of aristocratic lordship, here embodied in female form, this allegory offers a compelling point of intersection for the various lines of argument I have been following in this second part of the chapter. As Christiania Whitehead has suggested, this depiction of Mary radically effaces her virgin body at the very moment when its physicality becomes most pressing for the poem. As the pure “herberger” for the infant Christ, Mary’s womb is militarized, schematized, and abstracted into the image of a castle, defended from sin outside and overflowing with grace within.¹²¹ The shelter boasts all the best innovations of thirteenthcentury castle architecture. It rests high on a rock foundation, surrounded by a deep moat. Four turrets rise above and three baileys ring it, with seven barbicans offering protection. Its edifice is painted in three colors: green at the foundation, indigo above, and crimson at the battlements. Inside radiates with a brilliant white, and in the tallest turret flows a fountain, filling the moat outside. An

world, emotional community, and material culture within which they operated, monks included” (12). Grosseteste certainly proves this point for a later period. ¹²⁰ DCL, I.8.18.

¹²¹ Whitehead, “A fortress and a shield.”

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ivory throne, approached by seven steps, sits to the side of the fountain, surrounded by all the colors of the rainbow (611–34). Grosseteste goes on to parse the allegory. The rock represents Mary’s heart, set always against evil in defense of her virginity. The green foundation signifies the Virgin’s faith, blue her gentleness and humility, and red her holy charity. The four turrets are the cardinal virtues; the seven barbicans represent the seven virtues, guarding against the seven vices. The fountain of grace both protects and replenishes the world (675–704). Built along the Marches [En la marche est assis] (575), the castle constitutes a border stronghold and Mary, by extension, a refuge linking the divine and human.¹²² As Christopher Cannon and Dorothy Kim have shown, this geography has more than strictly allegorical significance in contemporary thirteenthcentury anchoritic literature. Cannon argues that the author of the Ancrene Wisse employs the contested Welsh-English borderlands as grounds for a “defensive” model of devotional spirituality, on constant guard against sudden attacks by sin and temptation. In her own discussion of Ancrene Wisse, Kim adds to that “liminal geography” England’s other border: “the Latin kingdoms and crusader territories in the eastern Mediterranean.”¹²³ Grosseteste adopts a similarly territorial logic to position Mary as the mediator between God and humanity, the body and the world, and the Church and its enemies, as she offers sanctuary to the penitent sinner, pursued by the world, the flesh, and the devil: Franche Pucele Reïne, De refui forte fermine, A tei est ma alme venue Ki a ta porche huche e hue, Hue e huche, e hue e crie, Duce Dame, aïe, aïe, Reïne Dame, ovrez, ovrez. (789–95) [Noble Virgin Queen, strong fortress of refuge, to you my soul is come, who at your gate clamors and calls, calls and clamors, and raises hue and cry. Sweet lady, help, help! Royal mistress, open, open!]

At once a refuge and citadel, Mary presents a mediating architecture between the hospitality of divine grace and the abjection of the sinful supplicant. A fortified

¹²² Ibid., 116. ¹²³ Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature, 139–71, and Kim, “Rewriting liminal geographies,” here at 58. For a consideration of the Ancrene Wisse with a view towards women’s gendered experience of militarized geographies, see McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms, esp. Chapter 5, “Mapping the anchorhold,” 147–77.

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stronghold, she embodies a complicated mix of the technological and organic. In this way, the allegorical Castle of Love serves as counterpoint to the naturally bountiful fiefdom Adam and Eve first receive in Paradise. A synthesis of human and divine, it remains also a combination of nature and technology, a creating and created thing. As Grosseteste goes on to suggest, Christ epitomizes the highest potentiality of this synthesis of divine grace and human ethical effort. Here, as throughout the poem, he makes his argument using the relational logic of law. Both the castle allegory and the opening parable of the lord and thrall, that is, illustrate forms of dominion—not just God’s sovereign dominion over all creation but the more circumscribed privileges of seigniorial power, which remain at once modeled on sovereign authority and at same time limited by nature and territory to a smaller ambit. Marian devotion, in celebrating the mother of God as regina or intercessor to the divine, indeed emphasized precisely this mediatory level of authority. Bonaventure would argue, for example, that Mary’s authority constituted “the dominion of praesidentia, such as is accorded to the governor of a province, not an authority of majesty and omnipotence.”¹²⁴ As this chapter has shown, this supervisory dominion, stationed between the omnipotence of God and the needs of his flock, stands at the heart of Grosseteste’s pastoral ethics. But the “dominion of praesidentia,” embodied in Mary and represented allegorically in the Marcher castle, serves as more than an endlessly iterative structure of participatory power. It also works to introduce Grosseteste’s central theological argument about Christ’s humanity. Grosseteste parted ways with Anselm in one key aspect of soteriology: whereas Anselm held that Christ became man in order to redeem original sin, Grosseteste believed that he “takes the nature of our humanity” [prist la nature / De la nostre humanité] (560–1) in order to perfect God’s highest creation—in effect, to “deify” humanity and, in doing so, to complete the work begun in the first six days of Creation. Christ’s entry into the world, therefore, did not constitute a contingent event, dependent upon man’s sin, but rather a necessary event, part of God’s providential plan.¹²⁵ As Richard Southern describes, Grosseteste saw the human form as a microcosm of creation, participating through the vegetative soul with all plant life, through the sensitive soul with other animals, and through the rational soul with God.¹²⁶ As we have seen in Adam and Eve, however, it is precisely the parts of the soul that humans share with “lower” nature that led them to disobedience. Left to its own devices, humanity does not unify the rational, sensitive, and vegetative souls so much as cast them into endless struggle. That unifying role, Grosseteste argues, belongs instead to Christ, whose Incarnation as “Man-God” [homo Deus] served as “the necessary conclusion to the work of Creation.”¹²⁷ ¹²⁴ Cited in Whitehead, “A fortress and a shield,” 116. ¹²⁵ Southern, Robert Grosseteste, 219–25. ¹²⁶ Ibid., 222.

¹²⁷ Ibid.

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“This was Grosseteste’s most original theological idea,” Southern argues, and it finds especially detailed elaboration in the Château d’Amour, as he joins the legal language of heritability and free status to this theological conception of human nature “perfected” in Christ: Mult est nature enbelie, Kant nature naturante A nature est ioygnante;¹²⁸ Ke nature naturee Lores est nature puree, Cent tant plus ke einz ne esteit Einz ke Adam forfet aveit. Icesti est de grant puissance E si est de franche neissance. Icest poet bien pur nus pleider E nos dreitures dereigner. (868–76) [Nature was much embellished when natura naturans {God} was joined with natura naturata {Nature}. Then was nature made a hundred times purer than when Adam forfeited. This one is very powerful and free born. He can ably plead for us and restore our rights.]

Natura naturans and natura naturata translate roughly to mean “creating nature,” or God, and “created nature,” his world. As Brian Tierney traces, the terms emerged in canon law glosses to distinguish between the conflicting laws of nature alluded to previously—the idea, on the one hand, that God is the sum of his creation and, on that other, that humans and animals follow a law of nature subordinate to the perfection of divine law but nonetheless “natural.”¹²⁹ Grosseteste’s use of them here indicates his intellectual ambitions for his text, but also underscores their utility as a means to express the work of divine “perfecting.” This account of Creation, that is, essentially extends God’s creative work over time, making it a motive force across history and not just in the inception of the world. As in the previous sections of the poem, the language of lineage and rights helps represent this history as “necessary,” put in motion by humanity’s original sin but governed by the broader law of God’s lordship. Property law offers an especially useful conceptual category for figuring relationships between time, obligation, and obedience, since it allows for productive slippage between moral agency and legal agency: to be a good Christian is to remain bound in service to God, but bound ¹²⁸ Murray, or a scribe, misread this word as “ignorante.” I have corrected it in the passage from Southern’s transcription of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 399. See Robert Grosseteste, 227 n. 35. ¹²⁹ For discussion of these terms, see Tierney, “ ‘Natura, id est Deus;’ ” Pick, “Michael Scot in Toledo;” Southern, Robert Grosseteste, 227–8; and, in the context of the Château d’Amour and Piers Plowman, Davis, Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature, 113–9.

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through a service freely rendered and amply rewarded. In coupling the ethical obligations of service to God with the legal guarantees of hereditary rights, this representation of Adam and Eve links natural and positive law in a way that resonates powerfully with Grosseteste’s legal hermeneutics. By acting according to God’s positive law, that is, Christians guarantee their “natural” right to heavenly reward. At the same time, we can see how the image of the aristocratic Marian body, militarized against its own sins and those of others, becomes an uneasy figure for Grosseteste’s dual impulses to preserve and demonize English Jewish communities. The Château d’Amour, that is, concretizes the defining “break” in Christian soteriological history—the Annunciation—by reimaging the body of the Virgin herself as a fortress, one that protects its free heirs and wards off its bonded enemies with equal severity. As Adrienne Williams Boyarin has shown, Mary’s power to embody Christian difference in the Middle Ages depended upon her status as the consummate Jewish convert, the woman whose immediate assent to Christ’s coming in turn casts all future Jews under the sign of refusal. “This vacillation,” she argues, “between the biblical moment of Jewish assent and post-biblical Jewish denial, and the encouragement to view Mary as the ‘correct’ Jew, effects an insidious assimilation. Such narratives of self-identification simultaneously disconnect Christian narratives about Jews from living Jews—they are about Christian doubt and self-definition—and establish, at worst, violent fantasies about Jews that have demonstrably real and tragic consequences.”¹³⁰ Both the Château d’Amour and Letter 5 (likely separated in composition by no more than a few years) demonstrate in this way the larger project of Christian theological and legal “enfranchisement” in the thirteenth century, in which the discourses of conversion and expulsion moved fluidly between allegory and legal act.

Conclusion: Jurisdictional Harmonies and Dissonances In his tract De artibus liberalibus, Grosseteste describes learning as a process of purgation and integration, through which the intellective and affective faculties are aligned in fitting harmony with each other. The process begins with grammar, whose duty it is to “understand correctly and to form correctly those properly understood things that must be correctly expressed to another” [recte intelligere et recte intellecta recte enuntiando apud alterum recte formare].¹³¹ Logic in turn takes what has been correctly formed in the intellect through grammar and judges it ¹³⁰ See Boyarin, “Desire for religion,” at 28–9. See also her study of Marian legends and their intertwinement with anti-Semitism, Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England. On the ways antiJewish rhetoric and theology shaped the cult of the Virgin within Anglo-Norman Benedictine reform, see Ihnat, Mother of Mercy, Bane of the Jews; and, on the ways that depictions of the Virgin dramatized Jewish “violence” against Christian belief, see Bale, Feeling Persecuted, 90–117. ¹³¹ De artibus liberalibus, in Grosseteste, Philosophischen Werke, Baur, ed., 1.

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dialectically. Finally, rhetoric moves the affect [affectus] with its power to “rouse the lethargic, restrain the unruly, bolster the timid, and soften the truculent” [torpentes excitare, effrenos modificare, timidos animare, truces mitigare].¹³² In Grosseteste’s view, the natural and moral sciences, properly taught, lead one collectively towards divine truth—they are the “ministers” of God’s plan for his created world, honing away the dissonance of error and revealing the beauty of nature’s intrinsic order.¹³³ This chapter has shown how Grosseteste’s theory of jurisdictional form fits within this larger cosmology and, more foundationally, assures its proper function. Such formalism, however, arose precisely from the dissonances of quotidian pastoral oversight: from the parishioner like Margaret de Quincy, whose acceptance of Jewish tenants on her lands demanded a theological rationalization of Christian claims to their property and bodies; from a cleric like the abbot of Ramsey, whose charge to administer the king’s justice generated a defense of ecclesiastical autonomy; or from the objections of the dean and chapter of Lincoln, whose claim to local rights of self-governance prompted a complex allegorization of the bishop as the “watchman in the Lord’s vineyard.” These instances underscore the subtlety and comprehensiveness of Grosseteste’s intellectual vision. They also demonstrate the importance of language to the articulation of this vision. The rightness of grammar, the judgment of logic, and the sway of rhetoric do not provide the elementary gateway to higher, “truer” disciplines for Grosseteste: they comprise an integral part of the harmony of the sciences. Though Grosseteste necessarily saw the trivium as a reflection of God’s created order and illuminated by divine truth, we might, from a literary standpoint, also see it as the creative force behind this order, generating rational form from the complexities of legal, economic, and theological competition. Buttressed by the power of similitude and allegory, the abstractions of jurisdictional form betray a beauty that would also enable violence, justifying acts of legal “purgation” against those whose dissent from the prevailing order rang as dissonance. Chapter 5 examines what happens when certain key components of Grossetestian legal and pastoral thought make their way into secular legal reform, in the Provisions of Oxford and the civil war that dominated the 1260s. I take my starting point for this next chapter in the history and doctrine of crusade. Examining the collision of reformist thought and crusading rhetoric, I demonstrate how the ascetic clerical ideal embodied in figures like Becket and Grosseteste helped to generate a notion of an “autonomous” English community, whose protection in turn underwrote anti-Jewish violence and, eventually, expulsion.

¹³² Ibid., 2. ¹³³ Unusually, Grosseteste posits music as the “modificatrix,” the mediator or minister, between the various liberal arts, animating the divine concord between the trivium and quadrivium. For discussion, see Loewen, Music in Early Franciscan Thought, 121–6.

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5 Conjuring England Crusade, Violence, and Communitas

On May 14, 1264, two armies met in battle outside the east Sussex market town of Lewes. One side arrayed itself under banner of the king, Henry III; the other donned the crusader’s white cross.¹ On the night before the battle, according to chronicle accounts, the rebel army prostrated itself in prayer, while the bishop of Worcester, Walter Cantilupe, offered remission of sins to all “who fought manfully in the struggle” [qui viriliter in agone decertassent].² The next morning, their leader, Simon de Montfort, sent them into battle with a call to fight “ ‘for the state of the kingdom of England and for the honor of God, the Virgin Mary, all the saints, and Mother Church.’ ” So stirred were the listeners by de Montfort’s eloquence that they immediately fell to the ground, their arms outstretched towards the cross.³ The Dover Chronicle tells us that even Thomas Becket shared in the fervor.⁴ Rising from his shrine in Canterbury to join the fray, Becket makes a mysterious appearance at Lewes alongside St. George, who reprises a role he played in the First Crusade, when chroniclers record his miraculous intervention at the Battle of Antioch in 1098.⁵ There, George and a troop of fellow warrior-saints came to the aid of the outnumbered Christian forces, a “countless host of men on white horses, whose banners were all white.”⁶ Dramatized on the eve of the Third Crusade in the French epic the Chanson d’Antioche, the story proved popular among England’s

¹ The practice of donning the insignia of the white cross on crusade dates to Richard I. John adopted it when he took the cross in 1215. See Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 134, with a discussion of the Second Barons’ War at 144–51. ² Rishanger, The Chronicle of the Barons’ War, 30. ³ The Chronicle of St. Benet’s at Holme records de Montfort’s supposed address: “ ‘Fratres mei dilectissimi pares ac subditi bellum hodie pro statu regni Angliae, ad honorem Dei et beatae Mariae, omniumque sanctorum ac matris ecclesiae, unaque pro fide nostra observanda sumus intraturi.’ ” See Chronica Johannis de Oxenedes, 222. For discussion of this scene, see Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, 134–5. ⁴ See Gervase of Canterbury, II.238. ⁵ On St. George’s association with crusading, see MacGregor, “Negotiating knightly piety,” with discussion of Antioch at 324–32. On the origins of the cult in England, see de Laborderie, “Richard the Lionheart and the birth of a national cult of St George in England;” and Good, The Cult of Saint George in Medieval England, 52–60. ⁶ Gesta Francorum, Hill, ed. and trans., 69: “Exibant quoque de montaneis innumerabiles exercitus, habentes equos albos, quorum uexilla omnia erant alba.” Cited also in MacGregor, “Negotiating knightly piety,” 324. Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta. Jennifer Jahner, Oxford University Press (2019). © Jennifer Jahner. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847724.001.0001

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royal family in the thirteenth century: Henry III commissioned “Antioch chambers,” depicting scenes from the chanson de geste, for his palaces at Westminster, Clarendon, and the Tower of London, while Queen Eleanor of Provence received a loaned copy of the Chanson d’Antioche in 1250.⁷ Becket had also acquired a crusading pedigree in the century since his death. By the first quarter of the thirteenth century, his boyhood home in Cheapside had been purchased as the foundation for the Order of St. Thomas of Acre, with its sister foundation in Acre converted into a military order in the 1220s.⁸ Becket gained a new romance-inflected genealogy as well, one that depicted his father, Gilbert, as a crusader and transformed his mother, Matilda, into a Saracen emir’s daughter, drawn to London and Christianity through love of Gilbert.⁹ As at Antioch, saintly intercession delivered an improbable victory to the smaller party. The crusade that enlisted the service of these two saints, however, sought not the recovery of the Holy Land from “infidels” but the recovery of English royal government from a different kind of infidelity—perceived mismanagement of the realm. The Battle of Lewes ended with Henry III and Edward in captivity and the king’s brother, Richard of Cornwall, seeking refuge in a windmill. Simon de Montfort, by contrast, found himself affirmed as de facto ruler of England, a position he held for just over a year, until the Battle of Evesham in August 1265 ended his life. The period from 1258, when Henry III submitted (temporarily) to a ruling council established by the Provisions of Oxford, to 1266, when the Dictum of Kenilworth set terms for disinherited rebel knights to return to the king’s good graces, has played a foundational role in both political and literary histories of England.¹⁰ The parliament that de Montfort called in January 1265, summoning knights from each county and citizens from the major boroughs, has traditionally stood as the precursor to the House of Commons, the first representative parliamentary gathering in English history.¹¹ Likewise, the letters that Henry sent in ⁷ None of these rooms survive, though Paul Binski has recreated the Painted Chamber at Westminster from surviving evidence. See Binski, The Painted Chamber at Westminster, and, for contextualization of these scenes within thirteenth-century political theory, ibid., “The Painted Chamber at Westminster, the fall of tyrants, and the English literary model of governance.” See also Hyams, “What did King Henry III of England think in bed and in French about kingship and anger?” On the commissions for chambers depicting scenes from the Chanson d’Antioche, see Meuwese, “Antioch and the crusaders in Western art,” 350–2; and Borenius, “The cycle of images in the palaces and castles of Henry III.” On Eleanor of Provence’s interest in this chanson de geste, see Howell, Eleanor of Provence, 60 and 72. ⁸ See Forey, “The military order of St. Thomas of Acre,” 487. On the development of Becket’s cult post-1170, see Duggan, “The cult of St. Thomas Becket in the thirteenth century.” ⁹ This origin story is recounted in the earliest Middle English Life of Becket, told in the South English Legendary, D’Evelyn and Mill, eds., II.610–15. For discussion of this addition to the Life, see R. Mills, “Invisible translation,” and ibid., “Conversion, translation, and Becket’s ‘heathen’ mother.” ¹⁰ The crucial documents of this period have been edited and translated in Treharne and Sanders, eds., Documents of the Baronial Movement of Reform and Rebellion. Hereafter cited as DBM. ¹¹ For discussion of this parliament and its intellectual and political antecedents, see Maddicott, The Origins of the English Parliament, 927–1327, 251–61; Ambler, “Magna Carta: Its confirmation and Simon de Montfort’s parliament of 1265;” and ibid., Bishops in the Political Community, 178–83.

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1258, announcing his adherence to the Provisions of Oxford, attest to the first surviving royal diplomatic use of Middle English.¹² By the close of the century, the events of this period make their way into a burgeoning corpus of long-form works in Middle English, including the Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester and the South English Legendary. Since Thomas Wright first tied the poetry of the Second Barons’ War to the rise of the commons and its “more active part on the stage of history,” the political upheaval of the 1250s and 1260s has been credited as well with exerting an ambiguous motive force upon the development of the late medieval English literary vernacular.¹³ In 1996, Thorlac Turville-Petre reprised a version of Wright’s argument when he suggested that the “nationalist” rhetoric of baronial supporters bolstered the confidence of English writers, resulting in a new outpouring of work for the “lewed” as well as the “lerned.” “Once again,” Turville-Petre summarizes, “nationalism became a prominent voice in a time of national insecurity, and by the 1290s . . . the association between language and nation was well established, so that writers could adopt the powerful position of using the language that was distinctive to the English people and a demonstration of their common Anglo-Saxon heritage.”¹⁴ In the years since Turville-Petre’s England the Nation, scholars have amended and countered this thesis variously. Tim William Machan, for example, has stressed “the rhetorical and strategic as well as ideological” deployment of the categories of Englishness and foreignness in the dispute, a position qualified in turn by David Matthews, who argues that the “illusory” nature of the English community in this period remains nevertheless “national” in character.¹⁵ In her assessment of the poetry of the Second Barons’ War, Laura Ashe suggests that Engletere in this period “is not chiefly a geographical notion of space, nor an ethnic idea of a people; and it is certainly not circumscribed by language. Rather it is a long-familiar, abstract idea: that of a nation, shaped and defined by peace and justice, la pees e la dreyture.”¹⁶ These studies all suggest that while the idea of the “nation” has become more illusory over the last several decades of scholarship, it still remains a primary scholarly heuristic organizing the juncture of politics, language, and poetic practice in the late thirteenth century. This chapter excavates the reasons why this language of “nation”—of natives and aliens, martyrs and traitors—proved so volatile and influential in the years surrounding the Second Barons’ War. I do so by approaching this conflict according to the terms by which it was defended among its participants—as a crusade. The political reform movements of the thirteenth century were saturated with the language, rituals, and imagery of crusade. The First Barons’ War had pitted the rebel-led “Army of God” against ¹² ¹³ ¹⁴ ¹⁵ ¹⁶

For further discussion, see Chapter 3, 125–6, 131–2. Wright, ed. and trans., Political Songs of England, viii. Turville-Petre, England the Nation, 9. Machan, English in the Middle Ages, 51; and Matthews, Writing to the King, 18–28. Ashe, Conquest and Transformation, 365.

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the royalist “Soldiers of Christ.”¹⁷ In 1264, as we saw in the opening of this chapter, the army of Simon de Montfort followed the same precedent, entering the Battle of Lewes as crusaders, their sins ostensibly remitted in the service of God. By the Battle of Evesham, in 1265, both sides would don the crusader’s cross—de Montfort’s followers using the traditional white cross of the Christian holy warrior and the royalist forces adopting, likely for reasons of differentiation in combat, the red cross that would become the official symbol of English troops during the Hundred Years War and thereafter.¹⁸ The recourse to crusade rhetoric and rituals in a secular political conflict such as this one has obvious self-justificatory advantages: both sides, as Christopher Tyerman notes, can claim “to be fighting for church and people” while at the same time, if supported by the papacy, avail themselves of crusading privileges.¹⁹ But the use of crusading imagery during these conflicts represents more than a military typology, deployed to elevate the status of an otherwise unsavory civil rebellion. It also did vital work in binding political actors to legal principles. As I explore over the course of the following chapter, the crusades placed exceptional pressure on the power of language itself. Beginning in 1095, when Urban II famously called the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont, the story of the crusades has been a story, in part, of the force of language to remake a world in its image.²⁰ Worlds are most easily remade in retrospect, and such is the case with Urban II’s Clermont sermon: all of the most influential surviving versions of the speech are the product of monastic historians working a decade after the fall of Jerusalem.²¹ In creating an origin for the First Crusade, these writers brought not only a set of doctrines and geopolitical goals to the task but the full force of their grammatical and rhetorical training. This training helped create the “story” of the First Crusade as well as establish the quasi-legal grounds upon which its participants laid claim to the Holy Land. Language also fostered commitment: through liturgy, poetry, song, and preaching, the genres of crusading culture sought to bind participants to a sacral form of military service that bequeathed to them a shared territorial inheritance in Outremer. This background proves instructive to the later English context in part because it helps explain why crusading rhetoric lent itself so readily to “nationalistic” ideas. ¹⁷ For discussion, see Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 133–44. ¹⁸ Ibid., 149. ¹⁹ Ibid., 140. ²⁰ The wealth of scholarship on crusading and propaganda bears out this observation. Key studies of the twelfth-century context include Morris, “Propaganda for war;” Aurell, Convaincre et persuader; Powell, “Myth, legend, propaganda, history;” Albu, The Normans in Their Histories; Flori, Chroniqueurs et propagandistes; Paul, “A warlord’s wisdom;” and Rubenstein, “The Deeds of Bohemond.” ²¹ Five accounts of the sermon survive, with only one of them—Robert of Reims’s—written by a witness to the Council, and this a decade after the event. The accounts are provided in the Gesta Francorum, Guibert of Nogent’s Dei gesta per Francos, Robert of Reims’s Historia Iherosolimitana, Baldric of Bourgueil’s Historia Jerosolimitana, and Fulcher of Chartres’s Historia Hierosolymitana. Translations of the sermon accounts have been edited by Krey, The First Crusade; and Peters, The First Crusade.

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It also helps explain the pattern of surviving textual evidence from the baronial conflicts and other political skirmishes over the course of the thirteenth century. From its earliest instantiations, the project of holy war generated a massive outpouring of multilingual poetic, liturgical, and prose chronicle accounts, originating from centers of Latinate cultural production as well as from secular courts and military camps. As Carol Symes and M. Cecilia Gaposchkin have recently stressed in different contexts, the crusades abounded not just in official histories but in myriad forms of “popular literacy”—in eyewitness reports that traversed the distance from oral retelling to song to chronicle; in documentary conveyances created under the exigencies of battle and travel; and in liturgical commemorations that “bubbled up from local devotion and enthusiasm, fanned by stories of the crusader successes in Antioch and the capture of Jerusalem.”²² Within this highly variegated and unstable textual landscape, we see nevertheless a set of resonant themes emerge: a model of lay militarism purged, in Gregorian reformist fashion, of its vices through ascetic self-discipline and sacrifice for the freedom of the Church; a concomitant transformation of the perceived “enemies” of the faith—Jews and Saracens—into targets for legitimized vengeance; and a sacralization of territorial rights based on Christ’s patrimonial bequest of Jerusalem to its Christian conquerors. Carried forward into the thirteenth century, these themes bear important consequences for English legal and political reforms, which emerged in partial response to the financial obligations of crusading and, as we have seen, adapted the military and spiritual logic of crusading to various strategic ends. Attending to the centrality of crusade in the baronial civil wars allows us to situate England’s constitutional struggles within this larger international arena. It also counters the tendency to extricate the constitutional outcomes of the struggle from the antiJewish violence that underlies them. Both the First and Second Barons’ Wars sparked pogroms against Anglo-Jewish communities that resulted in catastrophic loss of life and widespread property destruction. Anti-Jewish violence had attended the crusades since their beginnings, with the massacres and forced conversions in the Rhineland in 1096.²³ In England, attacks against Jewish communities began later, in 1189–90, during the organization of the Third Crusade, and for the next century remained intimately bound not only with anti-Semitic religious sentiment but with expectations about royal governance and its protections.²⁴ As Robert Stacey has shown, the dependence of English kings on Jewish ²² See Symes, “Popular literacies;” and Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, quoted here at 166. ²³ See Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade; ibid., God Humanity, and History; for translated portions of the Hebrew chronicles, see Eidelberg, ed. and trans., The Jews and the Crusaders. ²⁴ The foundational study of the York massacres is Dobson, The Jews of Medieval York and Massacre of March 1190, followed by ibid., “The medieval York Jewry reconsidered.” See also Stacey, “Crusades, martyrdoms, and the Jews of Norman England, 1096–1190.” For the current state of the field, see the essays collected in Rees Jones and Watson, eds., Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts.

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revenues, as well as their reluctance to forgive crusaders their Jewish-held debts, ensured that Anglo-Jewish communities remained convenient targets of the “just vengeance” meted out by crusading activity.²⁵ If, in 1189, this vengeance occurred ostensibly in the name of Christ’s suffering, by the thirteenth century, it increasingly happened in the name of England’s suffering.²⁶ The terminus for this cycle of legal reform and anti-Jewish violence is the expulsion edict of 1290. This was a product not of royal fiat but rather the kind of parliamentary negotiation that thirteenth-century barons fought to enact. In a “grand bargain” between king and commons, Edward I gained a tax to settle the Crown’s debts. In exchange, he conceded to the commons the complete expulsion of all Jews from the realm.²⁷ As Stacey has stressed, the negotiations that ended with the Jewish expulsion were instigated by the king’s unpopular efforts to expand his jurisdictional authority over lay and ecclesiastical property holding. That same year had seen Edward testing the Crown’s power with the quo warranto proceedings, which confiscated to the king any privileges and franchises that could not be shown to belong to their holders through clear and uninterrupted warrant.²⁸ The parliamentary sessions that brokered the Jewish expulsion in this way also created the legal fiction of “time out of mind,” establishing the ascension of Richard I, in September 1189, as the limit point beyond which the Crown ceded warrants to their holders.²⁹ The protection of property interests and the exercise of anti-Jewish legislation and violence thus prove inseparable in thirteenth-century England. Literature, as we will see, registers this relationship but also, in subtle ways, works to forget it, cultivating a vision of England as Christian since “time out of mind.” My purposes in this final chapter are threefold. First, in keeping with the focus of previous chapters, I seek to uncover how classroom regimes of learning and discipline shaped political identities, and especially the identity of the rightsbearing legal subject, here exemplified in the figure of the crusader. As the first section details, the crusading ideal, even from its earliest instantiations, was bound in complicated ways with concerns about rhetorical style and the power of language to conjure spiritual commitment. To understand the beginnings of this ²⁵ See Stacey, “Crusader, martyrdom, and the Jews of Norman England,” with a further reconsideration in ibid., “The massacres of 1189–90 and the origins of the Jewish exchequer, 1186–1226.” On the logic of vengeance as a motivation to crusade, see Throop, Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, esp. 64–70. ²⁶ On the convergence of anti-Jewish legislation and the development of medieval state bureaucracy, see Baron, “Medieval nationalism and Jewish serfdom;” Stacey, “Anti-Semitism and the medieval English state;” and Heng, The Invention of Race, 58–72. ²⁷ See Stacey, “Parliamentary negotiation and the Jewish expulsion of 1290,” and, for further discussion, Heng, The Invention of Race, 61–2, where she calls the parliamentary process of the expulsion “racialized redress in its logical extremity.” ²⁸ On the quo warranto proceedings, see Sutherland, Quo Warranto in the Reign of Edward I, 1278–94. ²⁹ See Brand, “ ‘Time out of mind;’ ” Clanchy, “Remembering the past and the good old law;” and ibid., From Memory to Written Record, 3.

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relationship, the chapter begins with the early historians of the First Crusade, examining how they understood the spiritual imperatives of their task in literary terms. As we will see, these early chronicles do not just shape the story of the First Crusade; they also develop the style that would characterize crusading literature for centuries to come. As the second section explores, these histories of the First Crusade move fluidly between verse and prose composition, suggesting the influence of both classical poetics and liturgical composition. The verses that emerge from these contexts, I argue, exemplify “jurisdictional poetics” in its most powerful form, as they seek to create affective connection to a territory, the Holy Land, that impels not just Christian pilgrimage but possession. With this background in place, I turn in the second half of the chapter to the events of the 1250s and 1260s and to the poetry that circulated in defense of the baronial rebellion. Here, we see how the figure of the crusader, pledged to the liberation of “holy land,” proves integral not just to the propagandistic defense of revolt but to the logic of administrative reform itself.

The Grammar of Crusade According to one telling, we might begin the story of the First Crusade not in 1095 at the Council of Clermont, but some years earlier in the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Germer-de-Fly, where a young oblate, Guibert of Nogent, struggled to conquer his love for pagan poetry. In his own version of Augustine’s Confessions, the Monodiae (c. 1115), Guibert narrates how adolescence brought problematic “life” to his young body. The culprit, he explains, was verse-making, the seductions of which led him away from the sacred page and towards the likes of Ovid and “the pastoral poets”: Oblita igitur mens debiti rigoris, et professionis monasticae pudore rejecto, talibus virulentae hujus licentiae lenociniis laetabatur, hoc solum trutinans, si poetae cuipiam comportari poterat quod curialiter dicebatur, nullatenus vero pensitans quantopere sacri ordinis, de ea quae desiderabatur industria, propositam ledebatur. Nimirum utrobique raptabar, dum non solum verborum dulcium, quae a poetis acceperam, sed et quae ego profunderam lasciviis irretirer, verum etiam per horum et his similium revolutiones immodica aliquotiens carnis meae titillatione tenerer. Quoniam haec terebat volubilis et totius severitatis infrequens animus, alius profecto non poterat, quam quem cogitatio suggesserat, e labiis procedere sonus. [Forgetting the proper rigor of the monastic calling and casting away its modesty, my mind became so enraptured by the seductions of this contagious indulgence that I valued one thing only: that what I was saying in courtly terms might be attributed to some poet. I failed to realize how much harm my industrious

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pursuit was doing to my intention of taking sacred orders. In point of fact, I was doubly chained, for I was enmeshed not only by the sweet words I had taken from the poets but also by the lascivious ones I had poured forth myself. Moreover, by repeating these poetic expressions, I was sometimes prone to immodest stirrings of the flesh; and although my fickle spirit, chafing under discipline, meditated on these matters, no sound could issue from my lips than what my thoughts could suggest.]³⁰

In the midst of making “little poems . . . shorn of all decency” [literulas . . . totius honestatis nescias], Guibert experiences a vision in which a white-haired man demands he give account of his writings. Shamed into recommitting to his vows, Guibert turns away from poetry with help from his mentor, Anselm of Bec, who “[w]ith great attention . . . set about teaching me how I was to conduct the inner self and how I was to use the laws of reason to govern my little body” [qualiter interiorem meum hominem agerem, qualiter super regimine corpusculi rationis jura consulerem, multa me docere intentione proposuit].³¹ Clearly modeled on Augustine’s own valiant rejection of Dido in the Confessions, Guibert’s account anticipates a conversion similar to that explored in Chapter 1, when, nearly a century later, Thomas Becket rejected the courtier’s pleasures for the cleric’s inner governance.³² Anselm provided crucial assistance in this case, too, albeit from beyond the grave, modeling an ideal of archiepiscopal virtue that Becket would repay by bringing his predecessor’s canonization dossier before the papal court.³³ Pagan poetry, as we have seen over the course of this book, occupied a fraught and formative place in clerical development, opening up an elite world of selfexpression that balanced precariously between pleasure and self-abnegation. Guibert’s youthful struggles with Ovid could pass unremarked in crusading history were it not for the fact that he also belonged to the early generation of monastic writers credited with “refining”—and, in thus refining, creating—the theological ideal of crusade itself.³⁴ My purpose in the first half of this chapter is show how the struggles to shape a rhetoric appropriate to crusade in turn shaped the meaning of crusading at a formative moment. Though seemingly distant from the internecine struggles of thirteenth-century England, this period forges an alliance between rhetoric, theology, and jurisdictional principle that will prove foundational to the reformist aspirations of de Montfort and his supporters many ³⁰ Guibert of Nogent, A Monk’s Confession, Archambault, trans., 58–9. The Latin edition is edited in Guibert de Nogent, Autobiographie, Labande, ed. and trans., 134. ³¹ Ibid., A Monk’s Confession, 61; ibid., Autobiographie, 140. On the ways that the Monodiae restages Anselm’s threefold theory of mind, triangulated between Reason, Will, and Appetite, see Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent, 38–86. ³² Cf. Augustine, Confessions, I.31.21. On Augustine’s relationship to Virgil, see Woods, “Weeping for Dido.” For further discussion of Becket, see Chapter 1. ³³ See Kemp, “Pope Alexander III and the canonization of the saints,” 17–18. ³⁴ See Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of the Crusading, 2 and 135–52.

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years later. It also alerts us to the fluid textual environments in which crusade discourse circulated, as recent events encountered simultaneous interpretation in chronicle prose, preaching, and liturgical commemoration. In the first decade after the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, news filtered back from the Holy Land not in the guise of a coherent story but as fragments of information, retold through letters, conveyed in song and rumor, memorialized in charters, and committed to parchment in various provisional ways. Symes has termed the explosion of reportage arising out of the events of the First Crusade a “documentary revolution,” one that did not confine itself to clerical circles but rather took shape within an expanding “documentary public sphere that was open even to those without the technical ability to read or write, accessible via the social, performative, and material media through which texts were negotiated, created, and published.”³⁵ Among the earliest of the Latin accounts to circulate in this milieu was the Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum (c. 1100/1101). An anonymous and unadorned account, possibly written by a layman in the army of Bohemond of Taranto (d. 1111), the Gesta Francorum served as a base text, either directly or mediately, to a number of subsequent, more stylized histories.³⁶ The appeal of the Gesta Francorum owed both to its structure and its style: an unusual “event-driven” history in an era more prone to universal chronicles, it narrated the major battles, betrayals, and strategy of the campaign in an unpretentious and straightforward way.³⁷ This lack of pretention also seems to have inspired the first wave of Benedictine revisions to the Gesta Francorum, among them Guibert of Nogent’s Dei gesta per Francos (c. 1108/1109). Cast as a deliberate rhetorical improvement on his unnamed source text, the Dei gesta sought to provide the unprecedented miracle of the First Crusade a history worthy of its deeds, which meant a history whose language, in good Horatian fashion, suited the nobility of the subject matter. The account which Guibert already had on hand would not suffice: “woven out of excessively simple words, often violating grammatical rules,” it was almost certain ³⁵ Symes, “Popular literacies,” 40. On the ways vernacular poetry shaped Latin crusade narratives, see Sweetenham, “Reflecting and refracting reality.” ³⁶ The literature on the relationship between the Gesta Francorum and subsequent histories of the First Crusade is extensive. For an overview of the text and its unknown author, see the introduction by Hill, ed. and trans., Gesta Francorum, xvi–xvii. Rubenstein has counted twelve prose Latin histories of the First Crusade emerging in its immediate aftermath, most of which owe at least partial structure and details to the Gesta Francorum, and Symes has suggested this number be revised considerably higher to account for those lost and redacted narratives that circulated in ephemeral forms. See Rubenstein, “What is the Gesta Francorum?,” 179; and Symes, “Popular literacies,” 47. For a summary of the argument that Bohemond of Taranto, during a tour raising support for a new crusade against the Turks, circulated the Gesta Francorum among Frankish monasteries, leading to new versions like Guibert’s, see Rubenstein, “The Deeds of Bohemond.” Paul provides a contrasting view in “A warlord’s wisdom.” Symes is skeptical that the version of the Gesta Francorum circulating in the early twelfth century would be in the same form as that of the earliest surviving manuscript, which dates to the late twelfth century. ³⁷ Rubenstein calls the Gesta “revolutionary” in this regard. See “What is the Gesta Francorum?,” 180.

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to “bore the reader with the stale, flat quality of its language.”³⁸ Its style “slithers along the ground” [humi serpens eloquium], Guibert explains to his dedicatee, Bishop Lysiard of Soissons, and if his own grammar seems to deviate on occasion from the common path, it is only because “it is proper and permissible to ornament history with the crafted elegance of words” [decet enim licetque prorsus operosa Historiam verborum elegantia coornari].³⁹ Guibert was not the only monastic writer to turn his rhetorical facility to the project of the First Crusade in these years. Both Baldric of Bourgueil, archbishop of Dol, and Robert of Reims would produce prose histories contemporary with the Dei gesta per Francos that similarly sought to improve on the “rusticity” of their historical source material. In the prologue to his Historia Jerosolimitana (c. 1105), Baldric excuses himself for writing a history of events that he has not seen personally on the grounds that the “uncultured little book” [libellum . . . rusticanum] he consulted should not go unread simply on account of its “lack of urbanity” [propter inurbanitatem codicis].⁴⁰ Robert of Reims’s Historia Iherosolimitana (c. 1110)—by far the most popular of these three Frankish histories, with more than eighty surviving manuscripts—came about because Robert could provide eyewitness testimony to an event only tersely recounted in the Gesta Francorum, the Council of Clermont.⁴¹ In a prefatory apologeticus sermo, Robert explains how a certain Abbot B. requested that he augment the Gesta according his own knowledge of Urban II’s sermon while also improving on the book’s “uncouth” [inculta] style. Compelled by obedience to accept the task, Robert apologizes for the fact that he not only had to dictate the work but act as his own scribe: sic quod continuatim paruit menti manus, et manui penna, et penne pagina. Et fidem satis prestare potest et levitas carminis et minime phalerata compositio dictionis. Unde si cui academicis studiis innutrito displicet hec nostro editio, ob forsitan quia pedestri sermone incedentes plus iusto in ea rusticaverimus, notificare ei volumus quia apud nos probabilius est abscondita rusticando elucidare quam aperta philosophando obnubilare. [And so my hand obeyed my mind uninterruptedly, the pen obeyed my hand, and the page the pen, as is plain from the slightness of the poem and unadorned

³⁸ Guibert of Nogent, The Deeds of God through the Franks, Levine, trans., 24, and ibid., Dei gesta per Francos et cinq autres textes, Huygens, ed., 79: “Erat siquidem eadem Historia; sed verbis contexta plus equo simplicibus et quae multotiens grammaticae naturas excederet lectoremque vapidi insipiditate sermonis sepius exanimare valeret.” ³⁹ Ibid., Levine, trans., 23; Huygens, ed., 78. ⁴⁰ Baldric of Bourgueil, The Historia Ierosolimitana of Baldric of Bourgueil, Biddlecombe, ed., 4. ⁴¹ See Kempf and Bull, eds., in Robert of Reims, The Historia Iherosolimitana of Robert the Monk, x, on the surviving manuscripts. They survey the possibilities for dating and authorship, xvii–xli. Regarding the identity of the author, see also the introduction in ibid., Robert the Monk’s History of the First Crusade, Sweetenham, trans., 1–4. Translations are from the Sweetenham edition.

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nature of the style. As a result, if this work of mine irritates anybody with a better academic grounding, perhaps because the plain style I have chosen to use means I have simplified more than I should, let me tell him that I thought it more appropriate to clarify obscure things by simplifying than to cloud over the obvious by philosophising.]⁴²

Robert’s striking reference the “slightness of the poem” [levitas carminis] underscores the fact that a number of these early prose crusade histories actually take prosimetric form.⁴³ Robert incorporates some ninety hexameter lines into his history, many bearing close resemblance to a separate verse treatment of First Crusade, the Historia Vie Hierosolimitane of Gilo of Paris (c. 1110–20).⁴⁴ Guibert, too, shifts to meter at strategic moments throughout his work.⁴⁵ For his part, Baldric of Bourgueil is perhaps best known to modern scholars not for his history writing but his poetry: his polished, classicizing verse circulated among members of the Anglo-Norman clerical and aristocratic elite, including the daughters of Matilda of Flanders and William the Conqueror.⁴⁶ These writers accomplished what we might call a “grammaticalization” of the First Crusade that would have profound consequences for the movement going forward. As Jonathan Riley-Smith first noted, the ideal promulgated by these writers was a deeply monastic one, informed both by a providential understanding of history and a preference for ascetic forms of penance and self-castigation.⁴⁷ As lay knights became “soldiers of Christ,” they found a place within a divine schema ⁴² Ibid., 3; ibid., 76. ⁴³ See Sweetenham, “Reflecting and refracting reality,” on the influence of vernacular verse genres specifically. ⁴⁴ This verse history, composed by the Cluniac monk Gilo of Paris is roughly contemporaneous with the histories of Robert of Reims, Baldric of Bourgueil, and Guibert of Nogent. Though the editors of the Historia Vie Hierosolimitane, as well as Sweetenham, posit a shared source with Robert of Reims, Kempf and Bull argue that Robert was more likely the source for Gilo. Within a few years of its completion, the Historia was substantially augmented by an anonymous versifier, possibly for grammar teaching purposes. See Grocock and Siberry, eds. and trans., in Gilo of Paris, The Historia Vie Hierosolimitane, lii–lxiv, for discussion of the relationship between Robert and Gilo’s texts, and xxiii–iv for the suggestion that the continuator was a teacher, based on the one manuscript that witnesses the continuation, Charleville-Mézières, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 97. On Gilo’s biography, see ibid., xviii–xxii. See also Sweetenham, Robert the Monk’s History, 29–35; and Kempf and Bull, eds., The Historia Iherosolimitana of Robert the Monk, xii–xiii, dismissing the notion of a shared source. ⁴⁵ For an analysis of the various meters deployed throughout the Dei Gesta per Francos and their relationship to events in the history, see Leclercq, “Vers et prose, le jeu de la forme mêlée dans les Dei gesta per Francos.” ⁴⁶ The best known of these works is the 1,369-line poem Baldric composed for Adela of Blois, in which he imagines her bedchamber as a mappa mundi, its walls covered floor to ceiling in tapestries that weave together the seven liberal arts, the events of biblical and classical antiquity, and the narrative of her father’s own conquest of England. He also sent classicizing poems to the elder daughter, Cecilia, a member of the nunnery of the Holy Trinity at Caen, founded by Matilda. For discussion, see Tyler, England in Europe, 278–94. Baldric’s poetry has been edited and translated by Tillette in Baudri de Bourgueil, Carmina. For a translation and discussion of the mappa mundi poem, see Otter, “Baudri of Bourgueil, ‘To Countess Adela.’ ” ⁴⁷ See Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading, 135–52.

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in which their actions, in Guibert’s words, outdid “all the histories of Jewish warfare” [omnes belli Iudaici Historias].⁴⁸ Their physical suffering became their penance, earning them reward in heaven. And the recapture of their shared inheritance, Jerusalem, constituted them all as favored sons of God. Equally foundational to this ideal, at least for the writers who first cast it in “curial” style, were the lessons and privileges of latinitas.⁴⁹ For Robert of Reims, Baldric of Bourgueil, and Guibert of Nogent, the matter of Christian victory in the Holy Land proved inseparable from the style in which that victory deserved to be remembered. For this task, the grammatical training that these writers received in their youth proved central, as it offered a model of Roman imperial virtue readily arrogated to the project of Christian militarism.⁵⁰ Even more foundationally, classroom habits of composition gave the First Crusade its origin story, as each writer expended his best talents on the speech that, by their own telling, set the business of holy war in motion. In creating his own version of Urban II’s consequential sermon at Clermont, each of the three writers transfers his own rhetorical facility to the pope. Robert, the only chronicler to have been at the Council personally, describes the pope as “aiming to win [the audience] over with every rhetorical persuasion at his command” [hac suadela rhetorice dulcedinis generaliter ad omnes in hec verba prorupit].⁵¹ Guibert, characteristically more voluble, suggests that it was only through the force of the pope’s own “literary knowledge” [scientiae litterali] that he cut through the “clouds” [nebulis] of competing business to win supporters for his Holy Land project.⁵² Like any good orator, Urban likewise transforms the emotional disposition of his audience. Baldric of Bourgueil reports that at the conclusion of Urban’s sermon “the eyes of some were bathed in tears; some trembled, and yet others discussed the matter” [alii suffundebantur lacrimis ora, alii trepidabant, alii super hac re disceptabant].⁵³ Robert famously reported that when “Pope Urban had eloquently [urbano] spoken these words and many other ⁴⁸ Guibert of Nogent, Deeds of God through the Franks, Levine, trans., 25; Dei gesta per Francos, Huygens, ed., 81. Guibert habitually casts the feats of the warriors in the First Crusade as superior to those of the Maccabees. For discussion of this tendency as an expression of Guibert’s larger antiSemitism, see Lapina, “Anti-Jewish rhetoric in Guibert of Nogent’s Dei gesta per Francos.” On the use of Maccabees in crusade writing generally see Morton, “The defense of the Holy Land and the memory of the Maccabees;” Keen, Chivalry, 53; and Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 251. ⁴⁹ Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading, 139. ⁵⁰ Huygens suggests Sallust as a primary influence on Guibert; see Dei gesta per Francos, 14–15. On Robert’s use of “scenic analogues” as a form of classical allusion, see Kempf and Bull, eds., in The Historia Iherosolimitana of Robert the Monk, lix–lxiv. On Baldric’s use of Lucan and other auctores, see Biddlecombe, ed., The Historia Ierosolimitana of Baldric of Bourgueil, xxii–xxiii. On the adoption of Roman imperialism for the cause of Christendom, see also Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 232–72. ⁵¹ Robert of Reims, Robert the Monk’s History, Sweetenham, trans., 79; ibid., The Historia Iherosolimitana of Robert the Monk, Kempf and Bull, eds., 5. ⁵² Guibert of Nogent, Deeds of God through the Franks, Levine, trans., 42; ibid., Dei gesta per Francos, Huygens, ed., 111. ⁵³ Krey, trans., The First Crusade, 36; Baldric of Bourgueil, The Historia Ierosolimitana of Baldric of Bourgueil, Biddlecombe, ed., 10.

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things of the same kind, all present were so moved that they united as one and shouted ‘God wills it! God wills it!’ ”⁵⁴ Urban’s eloquence—and that of his early chroniclers—gave shape not only to a new ideal of lay martyrdom but to a concept of collective territorial inheritance centered on Jerusalem. Gregory VII had already raised the possibility of a Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1074, and since the tenth century, apocalyptic writings had prophesied the arrival of a Last Roman Emperor whose rule of Jerusalem would presage the arrival of Antichrist.⁵⁵ As Sylvia Schein has argued, however, the intellectual work of justifying the Christian claim to Jerusalem began in earnest only after it had fallen to crusaders in 1099.⁵⁶ This justification rested centrally on the idea that Jerusalem represented “Christ’s personal possession and His inheritance.”⁵⁷ As such, its capture found retrospective justification on the grounds of a “blood” connection between those Christian warriors dying in defense of Christendom and the physical suffering that Christ endured in the Crucifixion. In their accounts of Urban II’s sermon, each of the three writers stresses the necessity of “liberating” Jerusalem from Muslim seizure as an act of Christian solidarity with, and vengeance for, Christ’s suffering.⁵⁸ Robert of Reims has Urban praise Jerusalem as a vulnerable, feminized city, “now held captive by her enemies and enslaved by those who know nothing of the ways of the people of God.”⁵⁹ In his rendering of the sermon, Guibert of Nogent suggests that the Christian possession of Jerusalem enacts the typological fulfillment and supersession of Jewish claims on the city. “If this land is the inheritance of God, and his holy temple, even before the Lord walked and suffered there,” Guibert argues, “then what additional sanctity and reverence did it gain then, when the God of majesty took flesh upon himself there?”⁶⁰ Urging his audience to become new and better Maccabees by “taking up arms to defend the freedom of your patria” [armorum studio libertatem patriae defendatis], Guibert stages crusade as an act of

⁵⁴ Robert of Reims, Robert the Monk’s History, Sweetenham, trans., 81; ibid., The Historia Iherosolimitana of Robert the Monk, Kempf and Bull, eds., 7: “Hec et id genus plurima ubi papa Urbanus urbano sermone peroravit, ita omnium qui aderant affectus in unum conciliavit, ut adclamarent: ‘Deus vult! Deus vult!’ ” ⁵⁵ See Schein, Gateway to the Heavenly City, 35–6. On the theory of the Last Roman Emperor and its connections to Christian apocalypticism, see Wolf, “Back to the future: Constantine and the Last Roman Emperor.” On crusading apocalypticism, see Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven. ⁵⁶ Schein, Gateway to the Heavenly City, 36. ⁵⁷ Ibid., 37. ⁵⁸ See Throop, Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, 44–60. ⁵⁹ Robert of Reims, Robert the Monk’s History, Sweetenham, trans., 81; ibid., The Historia Iherosolimitana of Robert the Monk, Kempf and Bull, eds., 6–7: “nunc a suis hostibus captiva tenetur, et ab ignorantibus Deum ritui gentium ancillatur.” ⁶⁰ Guibert of Nogent, Deeds of God through the Franks, Levine, trans., 42; ibid., Dei gesta per Francos, Huygens, ed., 112: “Si enim et terra dei hereditas et templum sanctum antequam ibi obambularet ac pateretur dominus in sacris et propheticis paginis legitur, quid sanctitatis, quid reverentiae obtinuisse tunc creditur, cum deus maiestatis ibidem incorporatur . . . ?”

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purification “to cleanse the holiness of the city and the glory of the tomb, which has been polluted by a thick crowd of pagans.”⁶¹ Baldric of Bourgueil likewise decries the “pollution of paganism” in the Holy City and asks his audience to call to mind their “own blood-brothers” in those places where “Christian blood . . . has been shed, and Christian flesh . . . has been subjected to unspeakable degradation and servitude.”⁶² Intertwining typological hermeneutics, a rhetoric of purification and pollution, and affective calls to familial loyalty and defense, these sermon accounts laid the groundwork for the Christian jurisdictional right to Jerusalem. In important ways, this jurisdictional argument emerged out of the educational backgrounds of its authors. Deep familiarity with Roman writers enabled Guibert’s call to take up arms pro publica re, for the “commonwealth” of Christendom.⁶³ It infuses the speeches that Baldric imparts to Bohemond and the other crusade leaders as they rally soldiers against difficult odds, and it provided Robert of Reims a readymade language for feminine suffering, as when he models the speech of a grieving Christian widow on the example of Ovid’s Niobe.⁶⁴ As we have seen, these rhetorical touches announce their authors’ ideas about genre: a triumphal history of Antioch and Jerusalem deserved a triumphal style worthy of the biblical and Roman epics. Coupled with the theological premise that Christ’s death bequeathed Jerusalem to Christians, these “generic touches” begin to take on quasi-legal force, helping create the narratives that authorized the Christian defense of the Holy Land going forward. As the next section discusses, these prose chronicles did not develop in isolation, nor did they exert unidirectional influence on their surroundings. They belong, rather, to a more fluid liturgical and commemorative environment, in which the boundaries between prose and verse, poetry and song, were easily crossed. As we will see, crusade verse, whether copied in chronicles or composed for the liturgy, exemplified a particularly potent form of “jurisdictional poetics.” Conjuring the sacral topography of the Holy Land, it ⁶¹ Guibert of Nogent, Deeds of God through the Franks, Levine, trans., 43; ibid., Dei gesta per Francos, Huygens, ed., 112: fratres karissimi, vobis elaborandum est ut sanctitas civitatis ac sepulchri gloria, quae gentilium frequentatione, quantum in ipsis est, crebro polluitur, si ad auctorem illius sanctitatis et gloriae aspiratis, si ea quae in terra sunt vestigiorum eius signa diligitis, si expetitis, deo vos preunte, deo prio vobis preliante mundetur. ⁶² Krey, trans., The First Crusade, 33. Baldric of Bourgueil, The Historia Ierosolimitana of Baldric of Bourgueil, Biddlecombe, ed., 6–7: “Effunditur sanguis Christianus . . . et caro Christiana . . . nefandis ineptiis et seruitutibus nefariis mancipatur.” ⁶³ See Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading, 144. ⁶⁴ See Biddlecombe, ed., The Historia Ierosolimitana of Baldric of Bourgueil, xxxv–xxxviii, for examples of Baldric’s speeches modeled on classical precedents. Both Robert of Reims and Gilo of Paris dramatize a scene in which Humberga, wife of Gualo II of Chaumont-en-Vexin, laments her husband’s death in Ovidian style. Robert takes his model from Niobe in Metamorphoses VI.303–12, Gilo from a mix of heroines in the Heroides, most prominently Ariadne. See Grocock and Siberry, eds. and trans., The Historia Vie Hierosolimitane, 127 n. 4; and Sweetenham, trans., Robert the Monk’s History, 140 n. 13. For discussion, see Grocock, “Ovid the Crusader.”

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asked its audiences to participate in an act of collective territorial imagination in which possession could only ever take absolute form, either as a divinely warranted liberation or as an experience of tyrannical subjugation.

The Jurisdictions of Crusade Verse As we have seen, poetry wove its way through the early invention of crusade, both as a juvenile classroom practice that must be set aside for more mature styles and as a means of amplifying and heightening the emotional appeal of the history itself. Verse forms, whether embedded within prose chronicles or composed as part of liturgical celebration, reshaped the tempo of crusade events, reinforcing for audiences the idea that the capture of Jerusalem functioned both diachronically, as the fulfillment of an eschatological promise long foretold by the Hebrew Bible, and synchronically, as a continual reenactment of Christ’s foundational sacrifice. Indeed, the boundaries between chronicle history and paraliturgical composition become quite thin in the context of crusade. For example, when Ralph of Caen, in his prosimetric Gesta Tancredi (c. 1118), narrates Tancred’s first glimpse of Jerusalem from the distant hills, he shifts from prose into hymnic couplets. With his eyes to heaven, Tancred kneels before the sight of the city. The verse bids the reader participate in his devotion with an opening line of “Salve Hierusalem, gloria mundi,” then goes on to describe the city as the place of “our salvation” [nostra salus], made possible through the Passion and despite the scorn of “shameful Jews” [probris judiacis].⁶⁵ Ralph of Caen’s verse interlude hints at a close interplay between chronicle writing and liturgical ceremony, not only in the Latin East, where Ralph resided, but in Europe as well, where Frankish monasteries at the heart of crusading recruitment instituted a formal feast day for the “liberation of Jerusalem” on July 15.⁶⁶ Surviving sequences imagine Jerusalem as not just a conquered but a conquering space, a locus for global Christian rulership. A sequence preserved at Laon, for instance, praises the liberation of the “glorious city of Jerusalem” from the oppression of “Saracens.” Now liberated, she properly rules as queen, with

⁶⁵ The Latin edition is found in Recueil des historiens des croisades: Historiens occidentaux, III.684. For the English translation, used here, see Ralph of Caen, The Gesta Tancredi of Ralph of Caen, Bachrach and Bachrach, trans., 128. ⁶⁶ On the July 15 liturgy, instituted in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, see Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, 131–64. One version of this office drew from Fulcher of Chartres’s Historia Hierosolymitana for its lections, specifically at the point in the chronicle where he provides a detailed description of Jerusalem. Like Ralph of Caen, Fulcher situates this topographical survey immediately before the siege commences. See Fulcher of Chartres, Historia Hierosolymitana, I.xxvi.281–92. For discussion, see Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, 167.

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France, Italy, Greece, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Africa all offering gifts and tribute.⁶⁷ As Gaposchkin notes, Laon’s liturgy took shape only miles from where Guibert of Nogent was writing his chronicle, and, like Ralph of Caen, he would insert a hymnic verse in praise of Jerusalem into his Dei gesta per Francos. In an echo of the Laon sequence, Guibert proclaims, “O city made blessed by this capture, / from now on you should rule, drawing to you Christian kingdoms” [hac o beata captione civitas, / hinc promerens ut imperare debeas, / ad teque regna christiana contrahas].⁶⁸ A manuscript produced farther to the south, in the Catalan monastery of Ripoll, suggests that such hymnic composition worked in close conjunction with preaching.⁶⁹ In this context, a hymn, Letare Iherusalem, follows a prose account of the capture of the city and a series of sermonic exhortations, first to an audience of “karissimi,” urging them to contemplate the exemplary sacrifices of the crusaders as they departed their homes to reclaim the Christian patrimony; then to a hypothetical audience of “wretched Jews,” deriding them for nurturing their “vain hope” [spem uanam] of returning to Jerusalem; and finally to the crusaders themselves, the “flower of the knighthood,” who have “avenged [their] kingdom” [uindicastis regem uestrum] and now may see with their own eyes the monumenta of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.⁷⁰ The hymn immediately follows, compressing the main themes of the prose exhortations into a compact set of assertions: God commands the capture of Jerusalem as a joyous exercise, protected under the sign of the Cross; his warriors need not fear, for their rewards are assured in heaven; the terrestrial Jerusalem marks the “beginning” [principium] of the heavenly Jerusalem; and when rivers of blood flow through its streets, then the “people of error” [gens erroris] will perish.⁷¹ Copied alongside and literally within these early prose accounts of the First Crusade, such paraliturgical material played a vital role in cultivating collective, affective identification with a place whose liberation validated Christian identity and whose defense motivated further action. Though not composed specifically for the divine office, such hymns, in Gaposchkin’s assessment, nevertheless

⁶⁷ Analecta Hymnica, 10:59–60, no. 73. See discussion in Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, 176–7. ⁶⁸ Guibert of Nogent, Deeds of God through the Franks, Levine, trans., 135; ibid., Dei gesta per Francos, Huygens, ed., 289–90, ll. 612–13. See also discussion in Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, 177, and Leclercq, “Le jeu de la forme mêlée dans les Dei gesta per Francos.” ⁶⁹ The manuscript is Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 5132. It contains the Carmen Campidoctoris, which is the earliest narrative of El Cid, and the Gesta comitum Barcinonesium et regum Aragoniae in addition to the anonymous account of the capture of Jerusalem and the exhortations and hymns discussed here. For discussion, see France, “The text of the account of the capture of Jerusalem;” and Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, 182–5. References to the text are taken from the edition by France, with my own translation. ⁷⁰ Fols. 19v–21r. France, “The text of the account of the capture of Jerusalem,” 651–4. ⁷¹ See France, “The text of the account of the capture of Jerusalem,” 654–57, discussed by Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, 182–5. France bases his edition of the hymn on Du Méril, Poésies populaires latine du Moyen Âge, 255–60.

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“borrowed sacred legitimacy from liturgical practice” and may well have found broader audiences when used in preaching and processionals.⁷² As we have also seen, these forms of historical, sacral commemoration circulated the key tropes of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim rhetoric present in more expansive form in the chronicle accounts. With the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 to Saladin, such triumphalism—already undermined by the disappointments of the Second Crusade—gave way to a rhetoric of penitential atonement, sharpened by the new urgency of “tyrannical” Saracen rule in Jerusalem. Gregory VIII’s papal bull, Audita tremendi, set the tone, taking its theme from Psalm 78:1–2: “O God, the gentiles have invaded your inheritance, they have sullied your holy temple, they have laid waste Jerusalem; they have left the dead bodies of your saints as meat for the beasts of the earth and food for the birds of the air.”⁷³ Urging Christians to following the example of the Maccabees, “afire with the divine zeal of the law” [zelo divinae legis accensi], Gregory VIII cast the Third Crusade not only as a cleansing of Jerusalem of those “thirsting for the blood of Christians” [Christianorum sanguinem sitiente] but a cleansing of Christendom itself from its own burden of sin.⁷⁴ In his Chronica, the English chronicler Roger of Howden (d. 1201) gives a sense for the ubiquity of crusading prayer and preaching in the wake of Gregory’s bull. In 1188, according to his report, the pope ordered “that prayers should be put up to the Lord by the Church Universal, without intermission, for the peace and deliverance of the land of Jerusalem and of the Christian captives who were confined in chains by the Saracens.”⁷⁵ Accordingly, a mass was performed at St. Paul’s daily, accompanied by an antiphon celebrating God as “over all peoples” [super omnes gentes] and a set of psalms that rotated according to the day of the week.⁷⁶ Roger also provides evidence for the use of hymnic verses in crusade ⁷² Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, 180. On the concomitant role of vernacular crusade song in promulgating and critiquing crusading endeavors, see Paterson, Singing the Crusades. ⁷³ “Deus, venerunt gentes in haereditatem tuam; polluerunt templum sanctum tuum; posuerunt Jerusalem in pomorum custodiam. Posuerunt morticina servorum tuorum escas volatilibus caeli, carnes sanctorum tuorum bestiis terrae.” The Latin text of the bull is found Patrologia Latina 202, col. 1539–42; for a translation, see Bird, Peters, and Powell, eds., Crusade and Christendom, 5–9, here at 5–6. For discussion of Audita tremendi, see also Schein, Gateway to the Heavenly City, 159–93; and Cole, Preaching of the Crusades, 63–79. For discussion of Psalm 78 in crusade contexts, see Cole, “ ‘O God, the heathen have come into your inheritance;’ ” and Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, 193–5. As Gaposhkin notes, Psalm 78 proved crucial to establishing crusade “clamor”—“the insertion into the regular daily mass of special supplications and prayers.” See discussion 194–8, quoted here at 195. ⁷⁴ Patrologia Latina 202, col. 1539 and 1541; Bird, Peters, and Powell, eds., Crusade and Christendom, 6 and 8. ⁷⁵ Roger of Howden, Chronica, II.359: “quod ab universali ecclesia fieret sine intermissione oratio ad Dominum pro pace et liberatione terrae Jerusalem, et Christianorum captivorum qui in vinculis Sarracenorum detinebantur.” Translation from Annals of Roger de Hoveden, Riley, trans., II.103. For discussion of this liturgy, see Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, 198. As Staunton notes, the Third Crusade was the first of the campaigns to be “claimed by English knights, and by English historians.” See Historians of Angevin England, 216. Roger himself accompanied Richard on the Third Crusade. For a review of his activities and assessment of their impact on his history writing, see ibid., 215–35. ⁷⁶ Roger of Howden, Chronica, II.359.

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exhortations. He describes “a certain clerk named Master Berther, a native of Orléans, who aroused the spirits of many to assume the cross” [quidam clericus dictus magister Berterus Aurelianensis, qui ad crucem accipiendam multorum animos excitavit] by reciting a sermon that took the form of a rhymed lament.⁷⁷ The song begins with an echo of Lamentations 1:4, “The ways of Sion mourn, because there are none that come to the solemn feast” [Viae Sion lugent, eo quod non sint qui veniant ad solemnitatem]: Juxta threnos Jeremiae, Vere lugent Syon viae; Quod solemni non sit die Qui sepulcrum visitet, Vel casum resuscitet Hujus prophetiae. [As in the lamentations of Jeremiah, truly the ways of Syon mourn that none should visit the Sepulchre on the solemn feast day nor revive the fate of that prophecy.]⁷⁸

Following each strophe, a refrain meditates on the cross as a sign of Christian militarism going forward: “The wood of the cross, / the standard of the leaders, / battle follows / which has never ceased, / but rather excelled / through the power of the Holy Spirit” [Lignum crucis, / Signum ducis, / Sequitur exercitus, / Quod non cessit, / Sed praecessit / In vi Sancti Spiritus].⁷⁹ Like the content of much crusade preaching, the verse compositions that must have regularly accompanied exhortations to the cross are largely lost to the historical record. Those that do make their way into chronicles, songbooks, and the fly leaves of manuscripts can only hint at the wide spectrum of possible performances.⁸⁰ Such is the case with the Anglo-Norman crusade song, “Parti de mal,” which is preserved in the final leaves of an early thirteenth-century manuscript of Benoît of Saint Maure’s Chronique des ducs de Normandie with its accompanying musical notation.⁸¹ Ascribed by Anna Radaelli to the chancery ⁷⁷ Roger of Howden, Chronica, II.330; ibid., Annals, Riley, trans., II.75. ⁷⁸ The text of the verse is given in Roger of Howden, Chronica, II.330–2; Annals, Riley, trans., II.75–6; translation here is my own. The verse also appears in Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta regis Henrici secundi, II.26–8. See discussion by Staunton, Historians of Angevin England, 222. On Berter of Orléans, see Williams, “William of the White Hands and men of letters,” 372–7. If we identify him with the Berterus of Orléans mentioned in a gloss to a thirteenth-century copy of Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis, he is credited, infamously, with the origins of Walter’s poem. See Walter of Châtillon, The Alexandreis, Townsend, trans., 12–14. ⁷⁹ Roger of Howden, Chronica, II.330–2; Annals, Riley, trans., II.75–6 ⁸⁰ On the paucity of surviving crusade sermons, outside of those circulated as models, see Cole, The Preaching of the Crusades, and Maier, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology. On the genre of the crusade song, and enumerations of surviving examples, see Bédier and Aubry, eds., Chansons de croisade; Dijkstra, La Chanson de croisade; and Paterson, Singing the Crusades. ⁸¹ London, British Library, MS Harley 1717, fol. 251v. For recent editions, see Bédier and Aubry, eds., Chansons de croisade, 65–73; Deeming, ed. and trans., Songs in British Sources, nos. 30, 50, and

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of Henry II, the song echoes themes present both in Audita tremendi and Berter of Orléans.⁸² The composer states that he wishes “to make the people hear my song” [voil ma chançun a la gent fere oïr] (2). No “prosdome” ought to fail the Lord who has redeemed him, and no great man, even a king or prince, should forget that the grave awaits him, too. The composer worries that “we have delayed too long in going to God to seize the land from which the Turks have exiled and banished Him because of our sins, which we should profoundly hate” [trop avons demuré / d’aler a Deu pur la terre seisir / dunt li Turc l’unt eissiellié e geté / pur noz pechiez ke trops devons haïr] (29–32). He reminds his audience that true treasure lies in the conquest of Paradise, but that noble action on behalf of God can also win him earthly renown in the meantime: “He whom God grants that he may return will be greatly honoured in this world” [Mult iert celui en cest siècle honuré / ki Deus donrat ke il puisse revenir] (36–7). Attentive to the preoccupations of its audience of prosdomes, “Parti de mal” performs a maneuver familiar to vernacular crusade songs, substituting the rewards and punishments of secular vassalage with those of divine service. As one earlier twelfth-century song opined, “He ought to be condemned who abandons his lord at a time of need” [Cil doit bien estre forjugiés / Ki a besoing son seignor lait].⁸³ These examples of Latin and vernacular verse, keyed to the juridical and liturgical exigencies of crusade, allow us to view some of the poetry discussed in earlier chapters of this book from a fresh perspective. In Chapter 2, we examined a verse arising out of the Interdict crisis, the Planctus super episcopis, which cast the three bishops tasked with executing the Interdict in the guise of crusaders, praising them as types of Noah, David, and Daniel, while castigating those who refuse to “shed blood for the sake of justice” [effundere / sanguinem pro justicia].⁸⁴ Though the blood shed in the Interdict was largely metaphorical, we can see this verse drawing upon a familiar stock of crusading images, including, prominently, the exhortation to collectively lament “those cunningly driven out” [dolose quos ejiciunt] of their metropolis.⁸⁵ Like Berter of Orléans’s lamentation, the Planctus may well have served as a supplement to preaching, calling communities to the “sacrifice” of interdiction in a mode long familiar from crusade campaigns. So, too, the “Song of the Church,” discussed in Chapter 3, gains additional resonance within the broader context of vernacular crusade songs. This verse, we recall, survives in its earliest version in the final leaves of a St. Albans historical 180–1, and discussion and translation by Radaelli, “ ‘Voil ma chançun a la gent fere oïr.’ ” I follow Radaelli’s edition and translation here. For further discussion, see Dijkstra, La Chanson de croisade, 143; and Paterson, Singing the Crusades, 54–5. ⁸² On the potential authorship and dating, see Radaelli, “ ‘Voil ma chançun a la gent fere oïr,’ ” 113–22. ⁸³ “Vos qui ameis de vraie amor,” ll. 11–12. See Bédier and Aubry, eds. and trans., Chansons des croisades, no. 2, 19–24. ⁸⁴ Wright, ed., Political Songs of England, 9. See Chapter 2, 92–3. ⁸⁵ Ibid., 7.

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miscellany, where it serves to criticize the king and pope for diverting tax revenues away from Jerusalem and towards dynastic ambitions in southern Italy.⁸⁶ Using the familiar image from Lamentations of the weeping domina gentium, the song cleverly merges exhortations to recapture Jerusalem with the figure of the widowed Church, abandoned by her protectors. If this lyric represents a contrafactum, equipping an established melody with new words, we can imagine an additional layer of irony, as the music of crusade propaganda is remade to rebuke the failures of its leaders. The “Song of the Church” brings us back to the mid-thirteenth century, which will serve as the focus for the remainder of this chapter. The previous two sections, however, allow us to adduce some observations that help shed light on the Second Barons’ War and the centrality of crusade to its key actors. First, as discussed, crusade acts the vehicle par excellence for the kind of jurisdictional poetics this book has sought to elucidate. It organized collective identity around a specific, sacral territory and posited an enemy whose “polluting” presence demanded expulsion from that territory. As the earliest crusade histories indicate, moreover, the initial jurisdictional claims to that territory rested not on an intrinsic legal right but on the power of rhetoric to supply that right in the aftermath of military victory. The result is an especially close interplay between language and military action that, in conjunction, created a theory of Christian jurisdiction over the Holy Land. Second, we can see that crusade acted as an exceptionally robust engine of discursive production from the early twelfth century onward, driving Latin and vernacular experiments in history writing, poetry, and song, liturgical as well as popular. The status and power of rhetoric shaped this tradition from the start. For a writer like Guibert of Nogent, the unprecedented nature of the First Crusade allowed him a literary license he otherwise sharply disciplined in his exegetical writings. Within this first generation of historians, themselves contributing to and drawing from contemporaneous liturgical production, we thus see develop a distinctive “crusading style,” one that used the full powers of the grammar classroom to recast recent military events in the guise of eschatological epic. Finally, the nature of crusade exhortation—its dependence on preaching, song, and other kinds of oral and aural media—leaves a distinct archival imprint. Alongside long-form works of history and chanson de geste, we find a wealth of ephemera: verses copied in fly leaves or embedded in chronicles, songs absent their musical settings, references to sermons whose content we can only surmise. Symes has posited the libellus—the unbound booklet—as the quintessential medium of crusade literacy. Easily transported but also easily lost or recycled, it served to transmit precisely the sorts of short-form verse and prose that best condensed the news of recent events.⁸⁷ Such libelli almost certainly underlie the ⁸⁶ For further discussion, see Chapter 3, 130–1, as well as Siberry, Criticism of Crusading, 4. ⁸⁷ See Symes, “Popular literacies,” 57–62.

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transmission of the texts that I discuss in the following sections, and in one notable instance we will see that the ephemeral medium of transmission actually outlasted the Middle Ages. In general, though, we must assume the loss of a vast array of “intermediate forms of documentation” that served, in particular, to circulate political news and propaganda.⁸⁸ The next section places us in a very different crusading context than that of Guibert of Nogent and his contemporaries. As we have seen, the loss of Jerusalem in 1187 dealt a near-fatal blow to the triumphalism that had characterized their early interpretation of events. So, too, the ambitions of Innocent III early in the thirteenth century dramatically expanded the territorial possibilities for crusading action, with the Livonian campaign, executed in the Christian frontier territories of the Baltic, and the Albigensian Crusade, called against fellow Christians in the heart of the Midi, suggesting that crusade might not only be used to reorganize power in the eastern Mediterranean but on the Continent as well.⁸⁹ Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, grew up in the shadow of such Continental crusading. As the son of the famously zealous leader of the Albigensian Crusade, Simon de Montfort III, and his equally fervent wife, Alice de Montmorency, the younger Simon proved quite literally a child of crusade: likely born in 1208, the year before Innocent III officially launched the Albigensian venture, his entire childhood took shape against its backdrop.⁹⁰ This background proves significant to what we might call the “style” of de Montfort’s reformism. Modeled on the austerity of the scholar-bishops who acted as his mentors and exemplars, it harkened back to a crusader ideal first promulgated in the early twelfth century.⁹¹ As we have seen, this ideal coupled rigorous self-discipline with a sacrificial commitment to the liberation of the Church. By marshaling this ideal for the “liberation” of England, ⁸⁸ The phrase is Symes’s. Ibid., 57. ⁸⁹ On the Livonian campaign, see Brundage, “The thirteenth-century Livonian Crusade;” and Tamm, “How to justify a crusade?” ⁹⁰ On de Montfort’s date of birth and the crusading fervor of his parents, see Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 4–6. Simon de Montfort III was the object of both poetic praise and excoriation for his role in the Albigensian Crusade. Remembered as the “Lord’s brave knight,” in the words of his chronicler, Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay, he was also castigated as a merciless killer of fellow Christians. See Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay, The History of the Albigensian Crusade, § 612; and on Pierre’s epitaph, Kurpiewski, “Writing beneath the shadow of heresy,” 26. The anonymous continuator of Guilhem de Tudela’s Canso de la Crozada calls de Montfort a slaughterer of women and children and a destroyer of paratage. See La Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise, III.228. On the effect of the Albigensian Crusade on troubadour poetry, see Huot, “The political implications of poetic discourse in The Song of the Albigensian Crusade;” Paden, “The troubadours and the Albigensian Crusade;” and Puckett, “ ‘Reconmenciez novele estoire.’ ” Alice de Montmorency is remembered as an active participant in the crusade. See Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 15; Zerner provides a comprehensive overview of Alice de Montmorency’s career in “L’épouse de Simon de Montfort et la Croisade Albigeoise.” The Early South English Legendary makes mention of both the elder and younger de Montfort in its Life of St. Dominic, suggesting a lineage based on warfare, pious self-sacrifice, and the elimination of “[s]wuch manere false bi-leue” as “[m]en cleopeden heresie.” See Horstmann, ed., The Early South-English Legendary, 279, l. 36. ⁹¹ Maddicott surveys these relationships and their influence on the earl’s religious practice in Simon de Montfort, 77–105.

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de Montfort’s reformist movement in turn inspired the full complement of crusading genres: histories, sermons, liturgies, ornate Latin poetry, vernacular songs, and quasi-hagiographies.

Civil War as Holy War, 1263–4 The origins of the Second Barons’ War lie in part in the broader European politics of thirteenth-century crusading. In the case of England, these politics were deeply intertwined with the aspirations of English kings to gain back Continental territories after the loss of Normandy. Military campaigns to defend and regain territories across the Channel demanded considerable expenditure, and vows to undertake a Holy Land crusade provided one of the more easily defensible means of raising money. Matthew Paris, for instance, greeted Henry III’s vow in 1250 to initiate an expedition to Jerusalem with intense skepticism, and his concern that ecclesiastical revenues intended for Jerusalem would be diverted to other military purposes proved prescient.⁹² In 1255, Henry joined Pope Alexander IV in a proposed joint venture to oust Alexander’s Hohenstaufen enemies from the kingdoms of Sicily and Apulia. “The Sicilian Business,” as it came to be known, bound the pope and English king in an ambitious—and, for Henry, politically disastrous—commitment to empire building.⁹³ In exchange for the vast sum of 135,541 marks, not to mention hard-won military success in southern Italy, Henry would gain the crowns of Sicily and Apulia for his second son, Prince Edmund. Should he fail to garner the designated amount, he would face personal excommunication and an interdict upon the English Church. We have already seen that the redirection of money pledged for Jerusalem to this Continental “holy war” elicited fierce resistance. The “Song of the Church” illustrates one prominent strain of ecclesiastical opinion—namely, that “The king and pope / think of nothing other / than how to grab from the clergy / their gold and their silver” [Li rois ne l’apostoloie / Ne pensent altrement / Mes coment au clers tolent / Lur or e lur argent] (31–4). Matthew Paris complains similarly in the Chronica majora that “[a]lways the laity were accustomed to pay tithes to prelates, but now the prelates were forced to pay tithes to the laity. The tithe was granted in

⁹² On the 1250 crusade vow and the possible reasons for Henry’s deferral, see Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 111–23. ⁹³ On the ways the Hohenstaufen empire shaped Henry III’s policy abroad, see Weiler, Henry III of England and the Staufen Empire, with discussion of the Sicilian Business at 147–71. See also Powicke, Henry III and the Lord Edward, 343–75; and, for a competing perspective on its long-term influence on the reformist movement and particularly the drafting of the Provisions of Oxford, see Carpenter, “What happened in 1258?” reprinted in The Reign of Henry III, 183–98. See also Clanchy, England and Its Rulers, 223–7.

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aid of the Holy Land; we were compelled to transfer it to the aid of Apulia against Christians.”⁹⁴ By the midpoint of his reign, Henry faced opposition from all sides. Prelates resented his taxation of clerical incomes; barons resented the influence of foreign royal family and their retainers in the court. Both Henry and Eleanor of Provence awarded benefices, wardships, and marriages to relatives and other nobles from their familial lands in Poitou and Savoy, a practice that held clear benefits to England’s ambitions on the Continent but which undermined the couple’s popularity at home.⁹⁵ In the case of Eleanor’s powerful Savoyard kin, these gifts and preferments cemented alliances in Burgundy and Flanders and provided a “guaranteed entrée” to the papal curia.⁹⁶ Henry’s Poitevin relatives, however, proved less of a political boon, with his half-brothers, William and Aymer de Valence and Geoffrey de Lusignan, provoking such ire that their expulsion from the kingdom became a condition of reform during the Oxford Parliament of 1258.⁹⁷ Henry’s leniency toward his brethren and the magnate class generally also came at the expense of local justice. The 1258 Provisions of Oxford made as their first order of business the reform of the office of sheriff, a position rife with corruption, as oversight of the eyre courts had languished under a king who turned a blind eye to abuses of power by his barony.⁹⁸ The 1258 Oxford Parliament thus aggregated the grievances of a broad social spectrum: a prelacy angered by taxes they deemed both cynical and unlawful, a barony offended by royal favoritism and a failure to seek counsel, and a larger populace of gentry, freeholders, and peasants oppressed without recourse by powerful lords. The Oxford gathering essentially represented a no-confidence vote in Henry’s rule; its decrees, published as the Provisions of Oxford, forced the king to abide by the decisions of a council of twenty-four bishops and barons—twelve chosen by the king and twelve by the opposition. The Provisions also heralded the type of anti-alien sentiment that would prove characteristic of the movement at its height in the 1260s, demanding, along with the expulsion of the Lusignans, that all royal castles, particularly those situated at harbors, be entrusted to “faithful men . . . born in the English realm” [fideles . . . de regno Anglie natos] and that marriages to men who are not de natione regni Anglie be refused as

⁹⁴ Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, V.536: “Consueverunt semper laici praelatis decimare, nunc praelati laicis decimare coguntur. Concessa fuit decima in subsidium Terrae Sanctae, cogimur transferre eam in subsidium Apuliae contra Christianos.” ⁹⁵ As Huw Ridgeway points out, the practice of offering lucrative gifts to one’s allies and family abroad was by no means a novel practice in England and made practical political sense for Henry, as he tried to hold onto England’s dominion of Gascony and gain back the lands lost under his father. See Ridgeway, “Henry III and the ‘aliens.’ ” ⁹⁶ Ibid, 82. For the importance of her Savoyard uncles to establishing Eleanor’s base of power in England, see Howell, Eleanor of Provence, 29–30. ⁹⁷ See Carpenter, “What happened in 1258?,” 183–98. ⁹⁸ See Carpenter, “King, magnates, and Society: The personal rule of Henry III, 1234–1258,” reprinted in The Reign of Henry III, 75–106.

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disparaging to English noblewomen.⁹⁹ The Provisions proved a dramatic but short-lived triumph for the reformers. The baronial allegiance fractured over the course of the next two years, with Henry gradually regaining the power he lost to the ruling council. In 1261, Alexander IV finally absolved him from his oath entirely, restoring his full sovereignty but prompting widespread outrage that would spill over into violence by 1263. It was at the behest of English barons that de Montfort returned to England in 1263 to reinstitute, forcibly if necessary, the Provisions of Oxford.¹⁰⁰ When he did so, he returned in the guise of the crusader. The chronicle of St. Benet Holme has him proclaiming himself a crucesignatus as early as spring 1263, declaring that he “was as gladly willing to die fighting among wicked Christians for the liberty of England and Holy Church as among pagans.”¹⁰¹ Evidence suggests that baronial rebels followed his lead, with the Flores historiarum reporting that the troops who attacked the bishop of Hereford’s castle in April or May of 1263 purportedly tonsured themselves before the raid.¹⁰² Likewise, in December 1263, finding his army trapped outside the London gates at Southwark, de Montfort is said to have “had all his men marked front and back with the sign of the Holy Cross” [omnesque armatos suos ante et retro signo sanctae crucis signari fecit].¹⁰³ The Dunstable annalist has him more expansively refusing to turn himself over to “perjurers and apostates” [perjuris et apostatis] before signing his army with the cross, taking communion, and pledging “to fight for truth against [their adversaries]” [pro veritate contra ipsos dimicare].¹⁰⁴ According to the Opusculum de nobili Simone de Monteforti, a hagiographic quasi-vita preserved in the Melrose Chronicle, de Montfort began shaping himself on the model of the crusader even earlier, in 1258: following his original vow to the Provisions of Oxford, he began a new monastic regime, the vita reports, spending entire nights in meditation, as he “knew by heart the primer, the psalter, and other prayers” [Sciebat . . . corde tenus Primarium, sciebat et Psalterium et alias orationes].¹⁰⁵ These crusading postures are not solely literary conventions. They point to deeper structural principles ⁹⁹ For the Petitio baronum, circulated in May 1258 prior to the parliament, see DBM, 8 80–1. For the relationship between the “alien clauses” represented here and the activities at the parliament itself, see Carpenter, “Henry III’s ‘statute’ against aliens,” reprinted in The Reign of Henry III, 261–80; and Machan, English in the Middle Ages, 44–5. ¹⁰⁰ See Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 233–42. ¹⁰¹ See Chronica Johannis de Oxenedes, 226: “et tam libenter velle mori inter malos Christianos pugnando pro libertate terrae et sanctae ecclesiae quam inter Paganos.” Cited also in Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 146; I have adjusted his translation slightly. ¹⁰² Flores historiarum, III.256; see also Tyerman, 146. ¹⁰³ Gervase of Canterbury, II.231. For discussion, see also Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, 134; and Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 247. ¹⁰⁴ Annales Monastici, III.226. See also Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 247. ¹⁰⁵ See A Mediaeval Chronicle of Scotland, Stevenson, trans., 113. For the Latin, Chronica de Mailros, Stevenson, ed., 208. The depiction is also certainly meant to evoke the model of Becket, who famously concealed an inner hermit beneath the garb of a worldly cleric. See Barlow, Thomas Becket, 74–6; and, on de Montfort’s vigils, Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 87–91.

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within the reform movement itself, especially as it committed to tactics of armed rebellion beginning in 1263. To array the “liberty of England and Holy Church” against pagans was not “mere” rhetoric at the advent of the civil war. Such rhetoric carried legal, material, and mortal consequences for English communities. These consequences show themselves first in the renewed version of the Provisions of Oxford, achieved in July 1263 through the capitulation of the king. As David Carpenter has demonstrated, the most marked feature of this forma pacis was an expansion of the original 1258 pledge to keep the governance of the realm in the hands of “native-born men.” In 1263, the Provisions expanded this article considerably, now demanding the general expulsion from the realm of all “alienigenae,” never to return.¹⁰⁶ As Carpenter notes, this “call for the ejection of all foreigners was to move from the realm of practicalities into that of propaganda.”¹⁰⁷ Impractical and unenforceable, such “emotive” language, as Carpenter puts it, achieved its tactical political ends by drawing from the deep well of crusade ideology, in which the liberation of a sacred place demanded not capitulation but purification. The Dunstable annalist makes this latent idea explicit when he summarizes the forma pacis as demanding that Henry and Eleanor “cleanse England entirely of foreigners” [Angliam ab alienigenis ex toto mundarent].¹⁰⁸ So, too, does the logic of crusade assert itself in the baronial violence directed at Jewish communities during this period. Anti-Jewish violence had coincided with English crusading since the 1189–90 massacres, occurring in the wake of Richard I’s departure on the Third Crusade.¹⁰⁹ It had also proven a constitutive feature of baronial reform since the time of the First Barons’ War. In May 1215, for instance, an assault on London by rebels confederated as the “Army of God” left the Jewry devastated, with the stones from destroyed buildings used to rebuild the City walls.¹¹⁰ The first version of Magna Carta, sealed one month later, would include two clauses severely limiting the ability of lenders to collect interest from encumbered estates after the debtor had died.¹¹¹ Removed for the 1217 reconfirmation, these tenth and eleventh clauses looked ahead to future English measures restricting lending activity. They also gesture outward to a larger European movement, driven by the papacy, aimed at the cancellation of interest on crusader debt. Papal instructions to abolish loan interest for crucesignati date to the Second ¹⁰⁶ See Carpenter, “Henry III’s ‘statute’ against aliens.” ¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 277–73. ¹⁰⁸ Annales monastici, III.224. Carpenter, “Henry III’s ‘statute’ against aliens,” 273. ¹⁰⁹ See Dobson, The Jews of Medieval York; Rees Jones and Watson, eds., Christians and Jews in Angevin England; and, for particular attention to the attacks that occurred outside of York, Hillaby, “Prelude and postscript to the York Massacre.” ¹¹⁰ See Roth, The History of the Jews in England, 35; Vincent, “Two papal letters on the wearing of the Jewish badge;” Hillaby, “ ‘Beth miqdash me at’: The synagogues of medieval England;” Stacey, “The English Jews under Henry III,” 43–4; and Meyer, “Making sense of Christian excommunication of Jews,” 627. ¹¹¹ The articles stipulate that no interest could accrue on the debts of the deceased until the heir had reached majority (10) and that widows and heirs may receive their full dowers and inheritances before paying toward the outstanding loan (11). See Holt, Magna Carta, 452–5.

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Crusade. By 1215, when Innocent III attached Ad liberandum to the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, thus calling the Fifth Crusade, they specifically targeted Jewish-held debt. As Stacey notes, the papacy had no direct jurisdictional authority over such debt; it fell to secular authorities to enforce this provision. In England, where kings exercised a “jurisdictional monopoly” over Jewish communities “unique among contemporary European monarchies,” the Crown’s dependence on Jewish taxation to fund crusades and other military ventures, coupled with a reluctance to forgive crusader loans, contributed to a redirected form of crusading vengeance against those communities perceived as responsible for “Christian suffering,” economic and otherwise.¹¹² By the time of the Second Barons’ War, as Chapter 4 discussed, the Crown had been experimenting with various forms of anti-Jewish legislation for decades.¹¹³ Indeed, de Montfort’s arrival in England coincided with the period, from 1231 to 1234, when English secular authorities attempted for the first time to adapt the anti-Jewish decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council into royal policy, with Henry III following a legislative playbook already at work in Capetian France.¹¹⁴ By 1258, Jewish debt reform constituted a major platform of baronial reformers, with the Petitio baronum charging that “magnates and other powerful persons in the kingdom” take advantage of Jewish debt transfers in order to “enter the lands of minores.”¹¹⁵ This clause of the Petitio refers to the practice of accruing property holdings by buying up Jewish bonds in indebted lands, a method pioneered by England’s great abbeys, which would often record as “donations” those encumbered properties they had redeemed from lenders.¹¹⁶ Walter de Merton, whose incomes from these types of ventures would eventually found and fund Merton College, Oxford, represents one prominent beneficiary of this so-called “crisis of the knightly class.”¹¹⁷ Others would populate the Montfortian ranks and find celebration in a remarkable surviving example of Anglo-Norman verse, considered in the next section of this chapter. Recasting rebellion in the language of romance, the song offers a window onto the textual circulation of political verse propaganda and the kinds of violence it seeks to explain and justify.

¹¹² A translation of Ad liberandum is provided in Bird, Peters, and Powell, eds., Crusade and Christendom. A Latin edition is found in Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, I.227–71. For discussion, see Stacey, “The massacres of 1189–90,” quoted here at 106; see also ibid., “Crusades, martyrdoms, and the Jews of Norman England, 1096–1190,” 242. ¹¹³ See Chapter 4, 154–5. ¹¹⁴ See Vincent, “Jews, Poitevins and the bishop of Winchester,” 126. See also ibid., “Two papal letters on the wearing of the Jewish badge;” Tolan, “The first imposition of a badge on European Jews;” and Heng, The Invention of Race, 74. ¹¹⁵ For the Petitio baronum, clause 25, see DBM, 86–7, and for discussion, Coss, “Sir Geoffrey de Langley,” 29. ¹¹⁶ Richardson, The English Jewry under the Angevin Kings, 100 and 102–3. ¹¹⁷ See Coss, “Sir Geoffrey de Langley.”

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Property, Violence, and the “The Song of the Barons” Copied on a roll measuring a compact fifty-six by eight centimeters, the “Song of the Barons” exemplifies the kind of transitory literate practice that Symes has associated with crusade contexts.¹¹⁸ Small, ephemeral, and designed for convenient movement between households, it epitomizes what we can imagine to be an exceedingly common means of circulating political news, namely as household entertainment.¹¹⁹ The linguistic and generic expansiveness of such entertainment is nicely illustrated by the object itself. On the dorse, copied several decades later in the fourteenth century, can be found the earliest extant Middle English dramatic fabliau, the Interludium de clerico et puella.¹²⁰ The “Song of the Barons” follows events during the spring of 1263, when de Montfort and his supporters marched across England, targeting their royalist enemies.¹²¹ In keeping with the tradition of the crusade song, the Monfortians appear as chivalric heroes: John Giffard is “tested and wise and enterprising and of great renown” [Pruse et sages et pernant / E de grant renomee] (11–12); John d’Ayvile “never had love for treason or guile” [onques ni ama trayson ne gile] (14); Peter de Montfort possesses “grant seignurie” (18); and Roger de Clifford “exercised great justice” [fu de grant justice] on behalf of the “petit” no less than the “grant” (21–2).¹²² The rehearsal of knightly prowess culminates in the sixth strophe with a paean to the baronial leader, based upon an “interpretison” of de Montfort’s name. Punning etymologically, the poet explains that de Montfort is “of the world” [Il est el mond] and “strong” [fort] (38). He embodies “grant chevalerie” (39), loving right [dreit] and hating wrong [tort], and will gain “la mestrie,” a term meaning in Anglo-French variously authority, dominion, rule, mastery, office, and force or violence.¹²³ Next to the mention of de Montfort,

¹¹⁸ London, British Library, Add. MS 23986, now available as London, British Library, M 2026. The roll went missing in the British Library collections sometime after 1971—fortunately late enough to leave behind a microfilm, to which my own and other recent scholarship is indebted. On the Lincolnshire provenance of the roll, see Aspin, ed. and trans., Anglo-Norman Political Songs (hereafter ANPS), 13. Portions of the following discussion are drawn from Jahner, “The Poetry of the Second Barons’ War.” ¹¹⁹ Taylor posits this roll as a rare English example of a “minstrel manuscript.” See ibid., “The myth of the minstrel manuscript,” esp. 68–9. ¹²⁰ The Interludium, called “the oldest extant secular drama in Middle English,” belongs to same generic family as Dame Siriþ, found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86. For an introduction and critical edition, see Salisbury, ed., The Trials and Joys of Marriage. On the Interludium de clerico et puella and the genre of the interludium more broadly, see Lundeen, “The earliest Middle English interludes.” ¹²¹ The baronial coalition named in the song consists of John de Warenne, John Giffard, John d’Ayvile, Roger de Clifford, Roger de Leybourne, and de Montfort. Their foes are Peter Aigueblanche, bishop of Hereford; Simon Walton, bishop of Norwich; Geoffrey de Langley; Matthew de Besile; John de Gray; and William de Latimer. ¹²² All references to the “Song of the Barons” are taken from ANPS, 16–19. Translations are my own. ¹²³ Anglo-Norman Online Dictionary, s. v. “mestrie,” defs. 1–4. The term can also mean “skill, talent, science;” “wonder, prodigy;” “interpretation;” and “trick.”

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a different hand, more difficult to decipher, has copied an allusion to John 1:6, “fuit homo a deo missus nomen erat Iohannes” [There was a man sent from God {whose} name was John]. The citation refers to the coming of John the Baptist, “who came for a witness, to give testimony of the light, that all men might believe through him” [hic venit in testimonium ut testimonium perhiberet de lumine ut omnes crederent per illum] (John 1:7). In claiming de Montfort as “another John,” the annotator imbues the earl with an apocalyptic urgency: the herald of the coming of the Lord, he serves as witness to Christ’s imminent return. But if Christ emblematized the ideal of “sacrificial” rule, in which the ruler bridles his unlimited power for the good of the collective, the “Song of the Barons” celebrates a more earthbound form of dominion, in which the confiscation and destruction of goods seek to “balance accounts” with one’s enemies. The song documents various acts of destruction visited upon the king’s friends in 1263, many of whom had made their fortunes in precisely the kinds of debt transfers excoriated in the Petitio baronum. The “Song of the Barons” captures the vitriol directed at these figures and delights in their dishonor, recording, for example, how Roger de Clifford carried off all of Geoffrey de Langley’s belongings, desiring “that nothing remain” [que rien remeine] (66), and punning that the royal servant Matthew de Besile likewise had all his goods “stolen” [besilé] (70) in a “trick without guile” [treget sanz gile] (72). In celebrating the confiscation of property, the second half of the song presents a mirror to the first; just as the first eight strophes worked to equate knightly prowess with the accrual of “richesse,” so the last six cast the loss of goods as a matter of “honte,” shame, and remedial justice. The more telling—and likely unintended—lesson of the verse, however, may be that the two sides have more in common than not. De Montfort, despite his family’s pedigree, represented something of a “new man” in England, owing much of his notoriety to royal favor. His tenure in England was itself granted—“loee” (45), in the words of the song—and much of his wealth contingent on his wife Eleanor’s dower.¹²⁴ Members of his cadre occupied similarly uneasy economic positions. Roger de Leybourne, for instance, is described by chroniclers in 1263 as vagus et profugus, a fugitive and exile, seeking his fortune and prompting rumors of war.¹²⁵ The outbreak of civil war thus answered the uncertainty of economic hardship with the chaos of civil war. There was little that could be called “noble” in such destruction, according to the Osney Chronicle: “all was filled with slaughter and plunder, and everywhere was lamentation, everywhere clamor, everywhere

¹²⁴ De Montfort’s clandestine marriage to Henry’s sister surprised the court, and the years-long effort to regain Eleanor’s dower lands proved an ongoing point of conflict between de Montfort and Henry. See Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 10, and Wilkinson, Eleanor de Montfort, 61–72, 98–100, and 103–7. On de Montfort’s arrival in England, see also Chapter 4, 157–8. ¹²⁵ The reference is to Genesis 4:12, describing Cain’s exile following his fratricide. See Gervase of Canterbury, II.220.

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desolation” [caedibus et rapinis omnia replebantur, ubique luctus, ubique clamor, ubique desolatio].¹²⁶ The desolation visited upon Jewish communities by Simon de Montfort, Roger de Leybourne, and their compatriots remains unspoken in the song, but the nature of Jewish property holding stands central to its opposition between chivalric “richesse” and the realities of thirteenth-century knighthood. The bond market in land crystallized this tension in stark terms. Residing, as H. G. Richardson argues, “beyond the frontiers of the common law” and outside the explicit sanction of ecclesiastical law, the trade in bonded land depended on the anomalous nature of Jewish property-holding. “Creditors of no other class,” he notes, “were incapable of acquiring a freehold interest in land while acquiring the right to dispose of land. This circumstance—and their predominance for a time as private moneylenders, cause the Jews to become the vehicle—though not, of course, by any means the sole vehicle—for the transfer of land.”¹²⁷ This status likewise made them targets of attack when civil war flared again in the 1260s. The confiscation or destruction of archae containing debt records marked the first order of business in every town taken by baronial forces, an aggression that took direct aim at the Exchequer of the Jews and the administrative memory it preserved and enforced. In this way, anti-Jewish violence merged with anti-royal violence: as agents of the Crown and representatives of its bureaucracy, Jewish creditors also represented, for a strained knightly class, the ephemeral but crucial difference between owning and occupying land, a difference registered as debt and inscribed on the chirographs stored in individual archae. As Robin Mundill emphasizes, the destruction of debt records constituted more than a symbolic injury; it quite literally abolished the record of a loan, making it impossible for a creditor to collect on outstanding money and thereby wreaking havoc on Jewish finances for years after fighting concluded.¹²⁸ Coincident with this economic destruction was the kind of wholesale murder that found fuel in religious hatred and suspicion. The Augustinian canon Thomas Wykes, a rare royalist sympathizer among his fellow chroniclers, describes the brutality of the Palm Sunday massacre in London in 1264, as baronial supporters acted “not through a zeal for law but a lust for taking fine things” [non zelo legis sed cupiditate commodi temporalis allecti] when they killed over four hundred Jewish residents, including the most prominent member of the community, Kok f. Abraham, and forced conversion on many others.¹²⁹ “Even though they were not marked with character of our faith,” Wykes

¹²⁶ See Annales Monastici, IV.134–6. ¹²⁷ Richardson, The English Jewry, 108. See further discussion in Heng, The Invention of Race, 65–72. ¹²⁸ Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution, 41–3. ¹²⁹ Annales Monastici, IV.141. See also Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution, 41–2; Roth, History of the Jews in England, 60–2. Nisse and Stacey both discuss Wykes in the context of forced conversions. See Nisse, “ ‘Your name will no longer be Aseneth,’ ” 742–3, and ibid., Jacob’s Shipwreck, 115; and Stacey, “The conversion of the Jews to Christianity,” 272; as well as Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book, 36–7.

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remarks, “it seemed inhuman and impious to kill them without cause.”¹³⁰ Plunder from this London pogrom served to equip the baronial army, and similar attacks followed throughout England, including in Winchester, Canterbury, Worcester, Lincoln, Bristol, Kingston, Northampton, and Nottingham.¹³¹ Against this backdrop, the lines from Meir b. Elijah of Norwich’s poem, “Put a Curse on My Enemy,” resonate with special clarity: “They make our yoke heavier, they are finishing us off. / They continually say of us, let us despoil them until the morning light” (13–14).¹³² This history of anti-Jewish violence remains bound with the discourse of idealized lordship articulated in the “Song of the Barons,” not simply as the “real history” that contradicts its laudatory rhetoric but as a crucial element of its argument concerning consent, property, and political community. As Anthony Bale notes, numerous chroniclers, including Thomas Wykes cited above, were preoccupied with the fate of English Jews during the Barons’ War. In medieval English historiography, he argues, “the Jews are linked, implicitly, to the political and economic crises affecting England.” They thus “function as a kind of lens through which the nation is projected. The ‘collective order’ necessary for the installation of nationalism—‘a polity (actual or potential) that is experienced by its members as if it were a community of kin’—here finds its anterior in the Jew, a synecdoche into which the various attributes of anti-nationalism can be placed.”¹³³ In the “Song of the Barons,” the language of nobility and valor serves to organize the commune in the terms of conjured kinship. If this membership has no love for “trayson ne gile” (14), then its anti-national other becomes a complex collection of persons considered treasonous, guileful, and “foreign” on account of their places of origin, their political loyalties, and their methods of gaining wealth. With their separate legal status and involvement in the royal exchequer and the debt markets, English Jews constitute a portion of this foreign body, one that lacks, above all, a perceived claim to “native” English rights in land. In this way, their legal exclusion from property ownership plays a key, if unspoken, role in the “Song of the Barons,” enabling the song’s moral opposition of “native” and “foreign” economies. One of the poem’s most powerful fantasies rests on the hope that the English polity might indeed constitute such a dualist formulation, that an old “chevalerie” can outstrip new wealth and influence in a “treget sanz gile,” a conjuring trick ¹³⁰ Annales Monastici. IV.141: “Et licet fidei nostrae charactere insigniti non essent, inhumanum videbatur et impium eos interficere sine causa.” ¹³¹ The same economic conditions fed attacks on Jewries into subsequent decades. See Meyer, “Making sense of Christian excommunication of Jews,” 622–7, for the destruction of the Bristol Jewry in 1275. ¹³² See Einbinder, “Meir b. Elijah of Norwich,” for a text, translation, and discussion of this poem, likely dating to the 1270s. ¹³³ Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book, 37. He cites Canovan, “ ‘Breathes there the man, with soul so dead.’ ” 181. For a related argument, see also Heng, The Invention of Race, 96.

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without trickery. Such communal fantasies prove integral, Geraldine Heng argues, to ideas of English justice at the close of the thirteenth century, in which antiJewish violence enables the fiction of “a naturalized Christian community acting in concert.”¹³⁴ In the next section, we turn to the most famous poetic exponent of the Second Barons’ War, the Song of Lewes, to consider how the forms of ascesis and sacrifice associated with crusade intersect with the political theory circulating in intellectual centers like Oxford. Transforming the crusader’s body into a synecdoche for the law, the Song of Lewes concomitantly transforms rebellion into holy war.

Austerity Measures: The Song of Lewes and the Form of Law Sometime not long after the Battle of Lewes in May 1264, a writer publicized the “miracle” of the baronial victory in the form of the 968-line Latin poem. Like the crusade chroniclers examined in the first half of the chapter, he begins selfconsciously, aware that events demand hasty composition: Calamus uelociter scribe sic scribentis Lingua, laudabiliter te benedicentis, Dei patris dextera, domine uirtutum, Qui das tuis prospera quando uis ad nutum; In te iam confidere discant uniuersi, Quos uolebant perdere qui nunc sunt dispersi. Quorum caput capitur, membra captiuantur; Gens elata labitur, fideles letantur. Iam respirat anglia sperans libertatem; Cui dei gracia det prosperitatem! Comparati canibus angli uiluerunt, Set nunc uictis hostibus caput extulerunt. (1–13) [His tongue is the pen of a scribe thus writing quickly, justly praising you, the right hand of God the Father, Lord of Hosts, who gives prosperity to your own when you wish, at your command. Let all people learn now to trust in you; those who wished to lay waste now have been dispersed, their head captured, members captive; the people who were raised up fall; the faithful rejoice. Already England breathes again, anticipating liberty; may God’s grace grant them prosperity. The English were reviled as dogs, but now, their enemies conquered, they have raised their head.]¹³⁵

¹³⁴ Heng, The Invention of Race, 96. ¹³⁵ References to the Song of Lewes are from Kingsford, ed., Song of Lewes. Translations are mine.

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The poet’s method announces itself in the opening lines, which begin by adapting Psalm 44:2: “My heart hath uttered a good word; I speak my works to the king; My tongue is the pen of scrivener that writeth quickly” [Eructavit cor meum verbum bonum; dico ego opera mea regi. Lingua mea calamus scribae velociter scribentis]. Taking literally the opening imperative to “write quickly,” the writer translates the spiritual urgency of his source materials into a reportorial urgency to capture the events at Lewes. An adept attempt at versified political theory, the Song of Lewes presents, too, a considerable formal achievement, maintaining a remarkably dense rhyme scheme across nearly 1,000 lines. The poem’s standard thirteen-syllable line uses both medial and end feminine rhymes, usually in couplet form but occasionally in runs of up to thirteen lines (cf. 573–86).¹³⁶ In the Introduction to this book, I suggested that this form reduplicates the argument of the Song of Lewes more broadly: namely, that good kings bind themselves to the law, and, through the law, to the larger community.¹³⁷ Here, I want to place the Song of Lewes within a longer trajectory of crusading literature, in which questions of rhetorical style and poetic form prove intricately but foundationally important to the legalistic claims posited by the literature itself. As we saw in the context of the First Crusade, the miraculous victories in the Holy Land generated a particular style of jurisdictional poetics, oriented around the exceptional topography of Jerusalem and the histories of loss and recovery it evoked. The hero of this genre was the crusader: an amalgam of Roman stoicism, monastic asceticism, and knightly athleticism, he could not only emulate the physical pain of Christ’s suffering but also exact suffering on Christ’s enemies. We can see the Song of Lewes as an extension of this tradition, returning to the triumphalism of First Crusade rhetoric as it, too, attempted to make hasty sense of an unexpected victory. Like the lines themselves, the argument of the poem divides neatly into two logical halves. The first 484 lines describe the miraculous circumstances surrounding the victory at Lewes, as a small and underequipped force of Davidic rebels defeated the Goliath-like strength of the royal army. The second half contends with the problem of ruling after a successful revolution. These latter 484 lines divide yet again, staging a debate over the competing prerogatives of the ruler and the communitas regni. The first half of the poem adopts the language of crusade song, as it celebrates the “liberation” of England from its oppression by foreign aliens; the second half stages an academic disputation, as it offers a justification for the conciliar government instituted by the Montfortian regime. In the Song of Lewes, we see the various threads of this chapter, and the larger book, converge. In the century since John of Salisbury had argued in the Policraticus that virtuous kingship must rule itself first, and Becket had established the ¹³⁶ On the meter, see Kingsford, ed., Song of Lewes, xxxiii–xxxvi. ¹³⁷ See the Introduction, 11.

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form of “modern” martyrdom, the paths of clerical reform and secular reform had crossed and re-crossed, with both violence and legislative innovation following in their wake. We see also across this period the gradual migration of a clerical ideal of liberty from Church to realm, with the consequence that England, by 1264, had become its own kind of affective jurisdiction, capable of bearing the same heavy rhetorical weight as the Holy Land. The Song of Lewes reminds us that poetry was not incidental to this intellectual history. At once sermonic and disputational, emotive and philosophically abstruse, the text distills both a theory of polity and a history of literary craft. Its author almost certainly belonged to the ecclesiastical milieu that supported the Montfortian rebellion. The best candidate for its composition seems to be a member of the household of Stephen Bersted of Chichester, the only bishop to receive explicit mention in the poem.¹³⁸ Ambler has suggested that de Montfort’s parliament of early 1265, where he reconfirmed Magna Carta, would have presented an optimal moment to circulate a learned, partisan tract explicating the principles of conciliar governance.¹³⁹ In its defense of the rebellion and its leaders, the Song presents a radical extension of the role of the bishop in secular governance.¹⁴⁰ Within its idealized political-theological order, the spiritual sword does not just advise the temporal sword, offering moral chastisement on the model of Grosseteste, but rather explicitly impinges upon it, shaping the business of secular administration according to the letter of sacred text. The poet accordingly has de Montfort declare that only the “best men” should be chosen to negotiate the peace of the realm, those in whom “ ‘faith lives, who have read the decretals and appropriately taught theology and sacred wisdom, and know how to rule the Christian faith’ ” [‘Optimos eligite, quorum fides uiuit, / Qui decreta legerint, uel theologiam / Decenter docuerint sacramque sophiam, / Et qui sciant regere fidem christianam’] (198–201). Cementing this alliance of oratores and bellatores is a shared commitment to the vows that stood at the heart of the Provisions of Oxford. In 1258, the king had been compelled to publicize his pledge to conciliar guidance in the form of letters sent to all the shires of the realm in all the major languages of the realm.¹⁴¹ So, too, were sheriffs, castellans, and chancellor required to make promises to conduct themselves according to the tenets of their offices. For its part, the barony wanted “all people to know that we have sworn on the Holy Gospels, and by that oath are bound together, and promise in good faith, that each of us and all together will help each other and our people, against all men, that we will do justice and take nothing without doing wrong,

¹³⁸ See Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, 129; and Hoskin, “Holy bishops and political exiles,” 25–6. ¹³⁹ Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, 169–73. ¹⁴⁰ On this point, see Ambler, ibid. ¹⁴¹ For further discussion of these letters, see Chapter 3.

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saving our fealty to the king and to the crown.”¹⁴² The king’s willingness to extricate himself from these promises stands as a central complaint in the Song of Lewes. The poet chastises those who “swear easily” [ facile iurantes] (207) only to withdraw from their oath to God. Such perjurers ought to look instead upon the model of he who “flees neither pain nor death on account of his oath,” but rather acts “for the reformation of the fallen condition of the English” [nec tormentum / Neque mortem fugere propter iusiurandum, / . . . set ad reformandum / Statum qui deciderat anglicane gentis] (212–15). The poet draws from crusading vocabularies to illustrate de Montfort’s exceptional commitment to his vow, and by extension to the liberation of England from its enemies. It is in this binding promise that the rituals of crusade and political reform converge. The vow constituted the canonically binding force behind the crusading movement. Solemnized by liturgical ceremony and commutable only under exceptional circumstances, it transformed the lay Christian into the crusader.¹⁴³ In the earliest Latin verse treatment of the crusades, the Historia Vie Hierosolimitane, Gilo of Paris depicts the crusaders riding out from France “conjured” [conjurauerunt] against the enemy Turks.¹⁴⁴ Earlier in the thirteenth century, during the First Barons’ War, a royalist propaganda poem would imagine “Utility, Piety, and Faith swear[ing] to . . . sign everyone with the seal of the Cross” [Utilitas, pietasque, fides . . . / Conjurant cunctos[que] crucis signare sigillo].¹⁴⁵ The poet of the Song of Lewes follows in this tradition, depicting the oaths to the Provisions of Oxford as akin to crusade vows: Nam comes prestiterat prius iuramentum, Quod quicquid prouiderat zelus sapientum Ad honoris regij reformacionem, Et erroris devij declinacionem, Partibus oxonie firmiter seruaret, Huiusque sentencie legem non mutaret; Sciens tam canonicas constituciones Atque tam catholicas ordinaciones Ad regni pacificam conseruacionem, Propter quas non modicam persecucionem Prius sustinuerat, non esse sperandas;

¹⁴² See DBM, 100–1: Nus, tels et tels, fesum a sauer a tute genz, ke nus auum iure sur seintes Euangeles, e sumus tenuz ensemble par tel serment, e premettuns en bone fei, ke chescun de nus a tuz ensemble nus entre eiderums, e nus e les nos cuntre tute genz, dreit fesant, e rens pernant ke nus ne purrum sanz mes fere, salue la fei de le rei et da la corune. ¹⁴³ See Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader, 30–65 ¹⁴⁴ Gilo of Paris, The Historia Vie Hierosolimitane, IV/I. ll. 6–10. ¹⁴⁵ Wright, ed., Political Songs of England, 22–3; translation is my own.

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Et quia iurauerat, fortiter tenendas, Nisi perfectissimi fidei doctores Dicerent, quod eximi possent iuratores, Qui tale prestiterant prius iusiurandum, Et id quod iurauerant non esse curandum. (227–42) [For the earl had earlier sworn at Oxford that whatever the zeal of wise men furnished for the reformation of the royal honor and the avoidance of wayward errors, he would firmly protect, nor would he change the law of this agreement, knowing how much these canonical constitutions and universal ordinances for the preservation of the peace of the realm—for which he had previously suffered no small amount of persecution—were not to be spurned. And because he had sworn, they must be kept strenuously unless doctors of the most perfect faith should say that those who had sworn such an oath were able to be released and that what they had sworn no longer warranted concern.]

In elevating the oath as the quintessential sign of political faith, the poet also transforms the chivalric body into a synecdoche for the conservation of law. In an echo of Isaiah 28:16 and Psalm 117:22, as well as Stephen Langton’s own liturgical lessons for the Translation of Thomas Becket, he describes de Montfort as the lapis angularis, the cornerstone, of England: the stone which the enemy rejected has become the new cornerstone of England, the poet announces, making the realm “whole” [integras] again through faith and fidelity (261–8).¹⁴⁶ The poet shapes de Montfort for martyrdom before any such death has occurred, and in doing so translates the martyr’s suffering for the faith into the political subject’s suffering for the law. A similar translation effort had occurred in the First Crusade, when Urban II promised salvation to those who would suffer the penance of warfare for the sake of territorial liberation. In adapting this model to an insular salvation project, the poet also adapts its standard tropes and typologies. De Montfort is described as a type for the patriarch of the Maccabees, a “new Mattathias,” and the English as akin to “the Israelites under Pharaoh, groaning under tyrannical devastation” [Vt israelitica plebs sub pharaone, / Gemens sub

¹⁴⁶ The Gospel writers, and Christian exegetes in their wake, took the references to the “cornerstone” in Isaiah 28 and Psalm 117 as prophesying Christ; cf. Matthew 21:42; Mark 12:10; and Luke 20:17. For an overview of the exegetical tradition, see Ladner, “The symbolism of the biblical corner stone.” The poet here may also draw on lections composed by Stephen Langton for the Translation of Thomas Becket at Canterbury in 1220. The fourth lection reads, “Just as the corner stone joins together as one two walls coming from separate directions, so the glorious martyr, through his passion, brought regnum et sacerdotium from a kind of opposition into harmony” [sicut lapis angularis duos parietes ex diverso venientes conjungit in unum, sic gloriosus martir regnum et sacerdotium quasi veniens ex adverso, per passionem suam consentire fecit in unum]. See Reames, “Reconstructing and interpreting a thirteenth-century office,” 166. On the importance of the 1220 translation generally upon the Becket cult, see Duggan, “The cult of St. Thomas Becket.”

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tirannica deuastacione] (73–4). He also evinces “zeal,” the emotional quality, Susanna Throop has argued, most consistently associated with crusading from the twelfth century onward. Connoting a sense of ardor or fervency, it conveyed an exceptional, or jealous, love for God and helped justify vengeful or violent action done in the name of that love.¹⁴⁷ “Zealous in his zeal for the law” [zelans zelum legis] (77), de Montfort epitomizes the crusader’s idealized fervor, but again redirects it towards the salvation of the “the law of the land.” This language serves as a propagandistic gloss on the rebels’ victory at Lewes, adapting a familiar model to help make sense of a deeply unfamiliar political reality. But the logic of crusade also shapes the poem’s understanding of law and polity in a more foundational sense by serving to delineate who is “natural” to the realm. From its earliest iterations, as we have seen, the papacy posited its rights to the Holy Land based on divine affinity: Christ’s body became the marker of territorial jurisdiction, bequeathing an inheritance that could lay unclaimed for centuries before manifesting in Christian victory. So, too, Christian suffering, even in places where Christ and the apostles never tread, could militate crusading action.¹⁴⁸ By this logic, Christians become native to a land even if they have had no historical rights within that land because their liberation assumes a deeper, consanguineous claim to enfranchisement. In the Song of Lewes, “native” English rights find their authority in a royal law that has been remade on the model of divine law. The second half of the poem elaborates this political theology by establishing “foreigners” as the central threat to English justice and prosperity. Aduenae, newcomers, threaten to exile [exulare] the English in their own home, the poet complains (285–6). They sow dissension in the realm by insinuating themselves into the king’s favor, devouring up warships and escheats until they “have supplanted natural subjects” [supplantauerint uiros naturales] (304). The answer to this invasive threat is twofold: first, a sacrificial obedience to law in which the martyr’s body protects against the “destruction of property” [dampna rerum] (217) with the same zeal that it upholds the faith, and, second, a theory of law that sacralizes communal jurisdiction over English territory. In articulating this second principle, the poem takes a metaphysical turn, shifting from the agricultural metaphors of “stock” and “kin” to the cosmological language of light. “We believe law to be light,” the poet argues, since “the law by which the world and the kingdoms of the world is described as fire” [nam credimus esse legem lucem, / . . . Lex, qua mundus regitur atque regna mundi, / Ignea describatur] (849–51). In summoning a “fiery law” that governs the kingdoms of the world, the poet embeds an allusion to Deuteronomy 33, in which

¹⁴⁷ Throop, Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, 145–71. ¹⁴⁸ As Tamm argues, the fact that Christ and the apostles had left no physical imprint on the Baltic territories necessitated a “legal fiction” justifying the crusade on other grounds. See “How to justify a crusade?”

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Moses describes the Lord coming from Sinai with ignea lex in his right hand (Deut. 33:2). Promising that “Israel shall dwell in safety, and alone” [Habitabit Israel confidenter, et solus] (Deut. 33:28), the verse praises righteous battle on behalf of the Lord, its speaker confident that the enemies of Israel shall fall.¹⁴⁹ Adapted to the context of English secular governance, this “fiery law” seeks to vanquish an enemy abiding not simply beyond England’s borders but within the exercise of royal power itself. Its overthrow, therefore, must come about by means of a superior jurisdictional authority—namely, God, and through God, the community of the realm. To explicate this logic, the poet extends the light metaphor originally adapted from Deuteronomy: Lucens uetat deuium, contra frigus ualet, Purgat, & incinerat, quedam dura mollit, Et quod crudum fuerat, ignis coquit, tollit Torporem, & alia multa facit bona. Sancta lex similia prestat regi dona. (854–8) [Shining, {fire} prevents straying; it prevails against cold. It purges and burns to ashes and softens hard things; what was raw, fire cooks. It carries away torpor and does many other good things. Holy law furnishes similar gifts to the king.]

The gift of divine law is rectitude, the stable rule that “no king will alter” [nullus rex mutabit] (867). In purifying and refining royal power, this fiery law, in apostolic fashion, also ignites the zeal of those who believe in its protection.¹⁵⁰ “Truth and love and zeal for salvation: this is the whole of law, the rule of virtue” [Veritas et caritas zelusque salutis / Legis est integritas, regimen uirtutis] (873–4), the poet explains. The king who possesses the crusader’s zeal for the law thus embodies the “whole of the law,” not by wielding it for personal gain but by subjecting himself to it for the good of the community. In a passage bearing a distinctly Grossetestian stamp, the poet concludes his lengthy peroration on law and light by positing caritas as the “indissoluble bond” linking king and community: Namque uera caritas est proprietati Quasi contrarietas, et communitati Fedus insolubile; conflans uelud ignis ¹⁴⁹ Deuteronomy 33 had natural utility within crusade contexts. For its use in a model sermon by Eudes de Châteauroux, see Maier, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology, 148–9. Eudes would preach the funeral oration for one of the Montfortian bishops, John of Gervase. For discussion, see Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, 191–5. ¹⁵⁰ Throop notes that zeal was often described as “fiery,” perhaps in connection with the flame of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2:1–4. See Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, 156.

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         Omne quod est habile, sicut fit in lignis, Que dant igni crescere paciens actiuo, Subtracta decrescere modo recitiuo. Ergo si feruuerit princeps caritate, Quantumcunque poterit, de communitate, Sic sollicitabitur quod recte regatur, Et nunquam letabitur si destituatur. (911–20)

[For true charity is, as it were, the contrary of personal interest and the indissoluble bond of community, kindling like fire all that is suitable, just as happens in wood which they give to increase the fire, the passive to the active, and, having been taken away, to decrease the flame in a contrary manner. Therefore if the prince shall be fervent in charity towards the community, however much he is able, then he will be concerned that it be ruled rightly, and never rejoice if it is forsaken.]

As we saw in the previous chapter, Grosseteste argued in his Commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy that the superabundant “fire” of divine love heated and purified the lower orders of creation.¹⁵¹ So, here, royal caritas serves as the energy animating a just political order. Love is active fuel to the “flame” of shared political participation, at once conservative—insofar as it seeks to preserve the interests of the universitatem—and distributive, to the same end. Crucially, however, the poet does not argue that the king has exclusive claim to this zealous form of caritas. In this cosmology, the person with the greatest zeal for the law possesses the jurisdiction of that law. As the poet quips, “It is commonly said that as the king wishes, so the law goes. But truth wishes otherwise: for law stands, while the king falls” [Dicitur uulgariter: ut rex uult, lex uadit / Veritas uult aliter: nam lex stat, rex cadit] (871–2).

Conclusion: After Crusade The Song of Lewes embodies a theory of secular law both conservative in its nature and revolutionary in its outcomes. Though rule by communitas did not last long— with the Battle of Evesham, in 1265, Henry regained power and de Montfort lost his life—the sacralization of legal franchise it accomplished would have a long afterlife. The rhetoric of the poem proves crucial to this process of sacralization, as it couples political-philosophical argument with an emotive vocabulary drawn from the worlds of biblical and classical epic as well as secular love poetry and religious song. The poem’s rhetoricity, however, stands in basic tension with the

¹⁵¹ See Chapter 4, 149–52.

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spiritual austerity it celebrates. As this chapter has demonstrated, this tension dates to the earliest crusade poetry and histories, as the writers and poets who sought a literary register appropriate to the crusades also worried about potential excesses of form. Thus Guibert of Nogent allows himself the license of ornament in his history, even though he otherwise hews to “ecclesiastical plainness” in his exegesis. Gilo of Paris would use an appropriately weighty and ornate meter— leonine hexameters—for much of his verse history, until, in the final book, he confesses that “my childish writing . . . clouds the noble story, and its very weight is a burden to my flimsy verses” [Obscurat, fateor, puerilis pagina grandem / Historiam, uersusque leues onus aggrauat ipsum] (IX/V.2–3).¹⁵² Adopting instead unrhymed hexameters, Gilo pledges that he “shall pursue the sense of the story, not the fine-sounding words; I shall not allow the verse-endings to respond to one another by turns, and the charm of the poetry shall tickle no one’s ears” [sensumque sequar, non uerba sonora, / Nec patiar caudas sibi respondere uicissim, / Pruriet et nulli modulatio carminis auri] (10–12). Five hundred years before John Milton set aside the “troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming” for the blank verse of Paradise Lost, Gilo of Paris expresses concern that the very poetic effects that announce his work as appropriately “high style” in fact detract from its important message.¹⁵³ If the author of the Song of Lewes shared any similar concerns, he gives no indication. To the contrary, the embrace of formal excess in this poem speaks to its classroom origins taken in the broad sense; it arose within a clerical milieu trained in the persuasive power of latinitas. Crusading—even insular political crusading—demanded the full range of these powers, and we can assume, following Ambler’s suggestion, that the Song of Lewes distills the preaching themes of pro-Montfortian clerics during the years of the rebellion.¹⁵⁴ It likely circulated in libellus form in the vicinity of Oxford, where it would have been readily available to the nascent book trade that Andrew Taylor has identified as the origin for its sole surviving manuscript witness, London, British Library, MS Harley 978.¹⁵⁵ In this way, the Song of Lewes moves from the realm of “crusading literacy,” urgently keyed to the dynamics of recent events, into the different temporal framework of a manuscript compilation, where it finds company both with the Latin satirical poetry of Walter of Châtillon and Hugh Primas, copied in earlier folios, as well as the Becket-related materials scattered ¹⁵² On this point, see Grocock, “Ovid the Crusader,” 64, with a broader discussion of the meter in Gilo of Paris, The Historia Vie Hierosolimitane, Grocock and Siberry, eds. and trans., xxviii–xxxviii. ¹⁵³ Milton, Paradise Lost, in John Milton: The Major Works, 355. ¹⁵⁴ See Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, 173–80. ¹⁵⁵ For a description of the contents of London, British Library, MS Harley 978, see Kingsford, ed., Song of Lewes, xi–xvii, and for analysis, including of the Oxford book trade, see Taylor, Textual Situations, 76–136; and Hohler, “Reflections on some manuscripts.” For a discussion of the manuscript within the larger Reading Abbey manuscript tradition, see Coates, English Medieval Books. The Song of Lewes (fols. 107r–114v) appears at the end of the section of Latin poetry, before Marie de France’s Lais. The final leaves, fols. 160v–161r, preserve the name of other Reading monks, including “W. de Win [tonia],” a possible owner. Taylor, See Textual Situations, 132–3.

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across the volume.¹⁵⁶ Decades later, the scribe of London, British Library, MS Harley 2253 would similarly anthologize the verse ephemera of the Second Barons’ War, coupling a Middle English sirventes mocking the royalist army at Lewes with an Anglo-French lament for de Montfort.¹⁵⁷ A half-century removed from the drama that they commemorate, these poems now epitomized the cyclicality of political change, as time brings all great ambitions to the same end.¹⁵⁸ As in the case of the First Crusade, however, professionally copied manuscripts provide only a narrow window onto a much wider world of popular song, liturgical celebration, and orally transmitted news and literature. Despite the royal dictum in 1266 forbidding “that Simon, earl of Leicester, be considered to be holy or just” and proscribing “the vain and fatuous miracles told of him by others,” a popular cult ensured that the literature of the Second Barons’ War proved richest in its aftermath.¹⁵⁹ Veneration of de Montfort’s cult generated a wealth of quasi-liturgical verse and prose, including a collection of nearly 200 miracles, several extant liturgical offices, and a variety of French and Latin verses.¹⁶⁰ The miracle collection preserves this battle between official condemnation and popular support in the manuscript itself: the first leaf of the quire is nearly entirely erased, but subsequent contents remain untouched, including the fragment of a liturgical motet, Salve Symon, and a prayer marking the collection’s conclusion.¹⁶¹ This literature trades in a common stock of imagery, familiar from

¹⁵⁶ Deeming argues that the one theme holding together the disparate items of the manuscript is an “interest in good poetry, especially in Latin.” See Deeming, “An English monastic miscellany,” 138. Many of the Latin poems in Harley 978 were first edited by Wright in Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets and have since been reedited. See, in particular, Walter of Châtillon, The Shorter Poems, Traill, ed. and trans.; and Adcock, ed. and trans., Hugh Primas and the Archpoet. On the various items related to Becket, see Taylor, Textual Situations, 112–15. ¹⁵⁷ The Middle English poem, known by various titles including “Richard of Almaigne” and “A Song of Lewes” survives on fols. 58v–59r in Harley 2253, its only extant manuscript witness. The AngloNorman lament, “Chaunter m’estoit,” immediately follows on fols. 59r–v. It also appears in Dublin, Trinity College, MS 347. Editions of “Richard of Almaigne” may be found in Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry; Wright, ed., Political Songs of England, 68–71; Brown, ed., English Lyrics, 131–2 and 222–4; and Fein, et al., The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, 86–9. “Chanter m’estoit” was edited by Wright, Political Songs of England, 125–7; ANPS, 32–3; and Fein, et al., ed. and trans., The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, 90–2. For discussion of these lyrics, see Matthews, Writing to the King, 35–6; John Scattergood, “Authority and resistance;” Revard, “Oppositional thematics and metanarrative;” Maddicott, “Poems of social protest;” and Ashe, Conquest and Transformation, 357–78. For further discussion of “Richard of Almaigne,” see the Coda of the present book. ¹⁵⁸ See Revard, “Oppositional thematics and metanarrative.” ¹⁵⁹ See DBM, 322–3: “ne S. comes Leycestrie a quocumque pro sancto uel iusto reputetur . . . et mirabilia de eo uana et fatua ab aliquibus relata nullis unquam labiis proferantur.” ¹⁶⁰ For discussion of the antiphons and motets that celebrated the earl, as well as the broader cult, see Lefferts, “Two English motets on Simon de Montfort;” Valente, “Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, and the utility of sanctity;” Heffernan, “ ‘God hathe schewed for him grete miracules;’ ” and Maitland, “A song on the death of Simon de Montfort.” ¹⁶¹ London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian A.vi, fol. 162r, for erasure, and fol. 183r for Salve Symon. Peter Lefferts discovered an additional polyphonic setting for this song in Cambridge, Jesus College, MS  5, item 7, Lbl A VI. See “Two English motets on Simon de Montfort,” where he also provides an edition.

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the crusading contexts discussed above.¹⁶² The motet Miles Christi gloriose exhorts the cives Anglie to mourn “the nobility of Leicester, who, fighting for justice, was struck down in England” [magnanimum Leicestrie / qui bellans pro iusticia / prostratus est in Anglia], while Salve Symon lauds him as the “flower of all knighthood” [totius flos milicie] for having suffered “the harsh punishments of death for the condition of the English people” [duras penas passus mortis / pro statu gentis Anglie].¹⁶³ Similar language structures the Anglo-Norman “Chaunter m’estoit,” found among the Harley Lyrics. Singing in “un dure langage,” the poet mourns a gentle baronage [duz baronage] who sacrificed their bodies “to save England” [Pur salver Engletere] (3–12); the refrain singles out de Montfort as “the flower of renown” [la flur de pris] (14) who, “like the martyr / of Canterbury” [Come ly martyr / De Caunterbyr] (40–1), died for the integrity of the Church.¹⁶⁴ Separated by a century, Becket and de Montfort come to symbolize in their deaths the power of corporate jurisdictional identity, of community forged through the articulation of legal privilege. As we have seen over the course of this chapter and the larger book, poetry and other kinds of heightened expression prove crucial to transforming these complex historical figures into symbols, sheering away contradictions in service to the higher ideals of Church and polity. Though we might assume, for this reason, that literature takes us away from the “true” matter of history, this book has argued the contrary: that literary modes of thought are bound inextricably within that history, not only in the service of propagandistic messaging, but as the groundwork of commonal legal fictions. It was in histories, law codes, letters, and plaints that the lessons of literature found application in the “real world” of political affairs. But the very proximity of political and literary thought has meant that the realities of historical action have long found meaning in the inventions of rhetoric. As this chapter has shown, the fictions of law were precisely where literary skill proved most consequential. Literature, in this way, both glossed and shaped the legal vocabularies of the thirteenth century. As satire, romance, epic, and history, it proliferated at the interstices of jurisdictional conflict. As grammar, it supplied law its voice, authority, and interpretive potential.

¹⁶² Aspin first noted the commonalities among Montfortian verses. See ANPS, 27, and Lefferts, “Two English motets on Simon de Montfort,” 214–15. ¹⁶³ References are both from Lefferts, “Two English motets on Simon de Montfort,” 223, with slight adjustments to the translations. ¹⁶⁴ I have used the edition in Fein et al., ed. and trans., The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, art. 24.

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Coda The Jurisdictions of Form

Jurisdiction is sometimes changed from one jurisdiction to another because of a change in the name of things. [Mutatur quandoque iurisdictio de iurisdictione in iurisdictionem mutatis rerum nominibus.] On the Laws and Customs of England ¹ And just consider how all these things provide new images for poetry, so needful if the Epic of America shall be written; and without an epic,  empire crumbles. Even, perhaps,  one. Carter Revard, from “Starring America”² In customary laconic style, the legal summa known as Bracton reveals a basic truth about legal jurisdiction: namely, that it is not a “thing” itself so much as a structure developed to determine what things and people mean under the law. When lay chattel is “made spiritual” [fiat spirituale] through tithing or other kinds of donation, the author explains, the goods themselves change in nature with their translation to the purview of canon law.³ If those goods are then sold, they transform back into lay chattel and their legal identity transforms in turn. In typical fashion, however, Bracton immediately complicates its own simple formulation. What about the bequest of a house or lands? Can those be made res spiritualis over the objections of an heir? What about matrimonial donations and promises? Does property in these cases fall within the remit of canon or common law? These questions emerge from the complex jurisdictional landscape of thirteenth-century England, across which royal authority, ecclesiastical law, customary law, manorial courts, and civic ordinances all laid claim to the power to

¹ [Henry de Bracton], On the Laws and Customs of England, IV.282. ² Revard, How the Songs Come Down, 133–42, here at 139. Subsequent references to the poem will be to page numbers, included after the cited lines. All references to How the Songs Come Down are reproduced with permission of Salt Publishing Limited through PLSclear. ³ [Henry de Bracton], On the Laws and Customs of England, IV.282. Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta. Jennifer Jahner, Oxford University Press (2019). © Jennifer Jahner. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847724.001.0001

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determine the “names of things” and, hence, their juridical meaning. This study has posited jurisdictional poetics as an alternative to the more familiar generic, linguistic, or nationalized approaches we typically apply to the literature of the thirteenth century. To map thirteenth-century literature jurisdictionally means looking beyond the architectonic oppositions of Church and state, England and France, Christian and Jew, native and alien, Latin and vernacular, to the web of complex and competing legal identities that organized the lives and livelihoods of those under the broad ambit of English royal authority. Exceptions and challenges to that authority abounded, and in these negotiations—as well as in myriad smaller and more local negotiations of privileges and rights—we see take shape a body of literature that is as innovative as it is intractably difficult to categorize. As the discussion in Bracton makes clear, legal meaning proved as labile as language itself. As the power that allowed a particular law to “speak,” jurisdiction thus constituted the law’s essential grammar, the rules that governed its use.⁴ As in the case of grammar, moreover, the nature of any particular jurisdictional rule becomes most visible in moments of conflict and contradiction. This book began in Chapter 1 with a fatal contest between royal and archiepiscopal power; it ended with another fatal contest, this one between royal authority and “the community of the realm.” I have traced over the course of the previous chapters a set of political and legal developments that drew these two struggles together. Separated by a century, the Becket conflict and the Second Barons’ War share a basic animating concern with the privileges of corporate legal identity and the power those privileges could exert upon the reach of royal jurisdiction. As we saw in Chapter 5, it was the cause of the rebel barons, not that of their king, that roused Becket’s ghost in 1264. I conclude the book by considering jurisdictional poetics from a contemporary vantage and then using that lens to cast one last look back to the thirteenth century. I focus first on a poem by Carter Revard, the renowned Osage poet and medievalist, whose oeuvre makes a fitting capstone to this book. As a practicing poet, he uses the prismatic capacities of language to distill competing registers of time and knowledge into what Seamus Heaney called poetic “technique”: “[t]hat whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resources to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form.”⁵ As a scholar of medieval poetry, moreover, he has substantially expanded our understanding of the textual and communal milieus of medieval English verse, including poetry discussed in the previous chapters of this book.⁶ It was Revard, in the 1970s, who unearthed in the Shropshire Records and Research Centre the dozens of legal conveyances

⁴ For further discussion, see the Introduction, 14–18. ⁵ Heaney, “Feelings into Words,” in Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 47. ⁶ For a survey of Revard’s career through these two lenses, see Fein, “Trail-tracking the Ludlow Scribe.”

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written in the hand of the so-called “Harley Scribe,” responsible as well for copying the famous Harley Lyrics of London, British Library, MS Harley 2253.⁷ From this trove of documents, he adduced a schematic biography of this clerk and copyist: trained up in letter writing and accounts, his numeracy and trilingual literacy earned him patronage with local Shropshire families, among them the possible commissioners of Harley 2253, the Ludlows of Stokesay.⁸ Revard’s work on the Harley Lyrics reminds us that poetry, however cosmological in its orientation, however “political” in its aims, remains always a local practice, answering to the environments in which it was made, copied, and performed. One can discern a similar commitment in his poem “Starring America,” divided across the landscapes of New York City and the Osage Reservation of Oklahoma, where Revard grew up. Knitting together his identities as a medievalist, poet, and member of the Osage tribe, Revard juxtaposes journeys through two seemingly opposed worlds: the glittering capitol of late imperial America, New York, to which he flies for the pleasures of opera at Lincoln Center, and rural Oklahoma, through which he drives on a cold, clear March night “towards / the old home” (138). The poet casts his descent into New York’s LaGuardia Airport as a kind of modern epic, as “we princes of / the middle air look at headlights like / souls gliding in Dante’s Paradiso” (133). From above, the brilliance of the city’s lights beckon, concealing their “[m]essages / of want or violence” (134). The nighttime sky of the Reservation evokes a different set of images—of the “quilting” of generator lights in the darkness; of “oil men, service stationers, builders of dams / and nuclear plants” (138); of Revard’s boyhood town of Pawhuska, once a “boomtown ablaze with oil and honkytonks and / swindlers” (139), now studded with vacant lots. Remembering the dismantled hospital in which he and his siblings had been born, Revard follows his memory back through his own family to the origins of the Osage Reservation, wondering what it was like “when / we bought this Reservation back from / the Cherokees, persuaded that the whites would never / covet these scrub-oak hills and rocky prairies, only / a hundred and twenty years ago?” (140–1). The landscapes of New York and the Osage Reservation are not oppositional in “Starring America,” but rather connected by the longer and enduring legacies of settler colonialism and capitalism. Oil pipelines “fan out grandly with natural gas and oil from here to / New York City” (140), while laws of a century prior determined how “earth / would be allotted, measured, sold” (141).⁹ So, too, Revard’s own poetic purview is self-consciously enabled by the Dantean ease ⁷ This evidence was presented in the landmark essay, “Scribe and provenance.” ⁸ See Revard, “Scribe and provenance,” 65–6. For more recent work on the Harley Scribe, see also Nelson, Lyric Tactics, 31–58; Fisher, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England, 100–45; and Birkholz, “Harley lyrics and Hereford clerics.” ⁹ See McAdams, “Carter Revard’s angled mirrors,” for discussion of Revard’s “revisionary cartography.”

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with which he flies “across / this continent where less and less / is dark and ‘empty’ ” (ibid.). What draws these geographies together, Revard writes, is Empire: under its aegis, “all / our stories turn to , all the old / Republic’s cities into one great city, waiting for that Vergil from / the distant provinces who’ll lead / Columbia’s heroes up to the Stars” (ibid.). As the epic poets knew well, the glittering accomplishments of empire always welcome their own celebration in verse. But Revard’s work points as well to another vital purpose of poetry: to remember, create, and cultivate communities that are not reducible to the eschatology of empire. The lineaments of such past medieval communities emerge in the contents of multilingual miscellanies such as Harley 2253, in which political poetry reveals not just a generalized interest in “law” or “politics” but very local investments in the economic impacts of war and taxation and familial histories told through property rights and lineage. These poems, in other words, parse the identities of their patrons and collectors in jurisdictional terms. In key ways, then, research into the networks of legal practice and literary patronage underlying the Harley Lyrics has laid the foundation for this book, which has traced those networks back another century and a half to an earlier phase of clerical education and legal thought. As Revard’s work also makes clear, moreover, practices of poetic composition and compilation ensure that certain ideas, texts, and political forms recur.¹⁰ Such is the case with the final set of texts I discuss in this book, the Middle English satire known as “Richard of Almaigne” and two French satires composed contemporaneously with it. Like New York City and Pawhuska, Oklahoma in “Starring America,” these English and French texts reflect less an oppositional geography than a contested and deeply interwoven one, drawn together by the forces of territorial acquisition and the dynamics of literary and cultural exchange.¹¹ Copied adjacent the AngloFrench lament for the death of Simon de Montfort discussed in Chapter 5, “Richard of Almaigne” celebrates the baronial victory at the Battle of Lewes by satirizing the royalist side.¹² Its main target is the king’s brother, Richard of Cornwall, who reportedly took shelter in a windmill during the ignominious Lewes defeat. The poem delights in his discomfiture, each stanza ending with the refrain, “Richard, þa þou be euer trichard, tricchen shalt þou neuermore!”¹³ “Richard of Almaigne” does not hide much in the way of hermeneutical depth, but as satire it does encompass a broader set of concerns with political signification, territory, and the obligations of lordship, in this case emblematized in the clash of ¹⁰ See Revard, “Oppositional thematics and metanarrative.” ¹¹ Ardis Butterfield makes this argument in The Familiar Enemy. For further discussion, see Introduction, 14. ¹² MS Harley 2253, fols. 58v–59r. As it shares an opening line with other poems in the manuscript (“Sitteth all stille ant herkneth to me”), I will be using the title given by Thomas Percy in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. ¹³ Throughout, I follow the edition provided by Fein et al., eds. and trans., The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, 86–9. Lines numbers follow the text in subsequent citations.

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domains, aristocratic and agricultural. In a Quixote-esque deflation of military prowess, Richard seizes “þe mulne for a castel” (18), mistaking the miller’s domain for the knight’s: The Kyng of Alemaigne wende do ful wel, He saisede the mulne for a castel, With hare sharpe swerdes he grounde the stel. He wende that the sayles were mangonel To helpe Wyndesore. (17–21)

As steel “grinds” in place of wheat and the windmill sails churn in place of “mangonels,” or siege engines, the poem builds on the image of empty turning. The debasement of the tokens of chivalric and royal honor extends to other stanzas. Richard spends “al is tresour opon swyuyng” (10) and has to show for his honor of Wallingford not one “ferlying.” Let him have as he brews, the poet argues: “bale,” or misfortune. To the poem’s earliest editor, Thomas Percy, “Richard of Almaigne” constituted a decidedly English poem, a specimen “of [English] in its most early state, almost as soon as it ceased to be S.”¹⁴ When Thomas Wright edited it for the Political Songs of England a generation later, however, its geographic and linguistic contexts expanded: he placed it between a French satire on the English, known as the Pais aus Englois, discussed subsequently, and the Latin Song of Lewes, treated in Chapter 5.¹⁵ Wright’s anthology in this way gestured to the larger multilingual and cross-Channel environment that served as the backdrop to England’s political and territorial ambitions in the thirteenth century. The medieval verse genre that spoke most directly to these interests was the sirventes, for which “Richard of Almaigne” is often credited as the first Middle English example.¹⁶ Occitan in origin, it describes a song composed in “servile” fashion using a preexisted meter and written as if sung by a sirven, a soldier, addressing the concerns of his lord.¹⁷ Frequently vituperative or satirical in ¹⁴ Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, II.5. On English language development and the political uses of “ancient poetry,” see Connell, “British identities and the politics of ancient poetry,” and Matthews, The Making of Middle English, xxvi–xxxv. On the genesis and publication of the Reliques, see Groom, Making of Percy’s Reliques. ¹⁵ See Wright, ed. and trans., Political Songs of England, 68–71, where it is titled “Song against the King of Almaigne.” For discussion of the Song of Lewes, see Introduction, 10–11, and Chapter 5, 205–12. ¹⁶ See Fein et al., eds. and trans., The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, 382; and Brown, ed., English Lyrics, 222–4; Coss, “Introduction to the 1996 Edition,” in Wright, ed. and trans., Political Songs of England, xxiv; Matthews, Writing to the King, 35–6 and 45–50; and Scattergood, “Authority and resistance,” 182–3. ¹⁷ See Léglu, “Moral and satirical poetry,” 55. On the legal force of sirventes invective, see ibid., “Defamation in the troubadour sirventes.” See also Aurell, La vielle et l’épée; and Klein, A Partisan Voice.

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content, the sirventes praises military prowess, castigates failure and inaction, and deals in historical specifics. Its verses abound with proper names, places, and events. The genre occupied a central place in troubadour lyric production during the thirteenth century, attesting in compact and often opaque terms to the tensions that fueled the Albigensian Crusade and the broader shifts in territorial power across what is now southern France. As we have seen in previous chapters of this book, England proved deeply implicated in these shifts, and English kings consequently proved ready targets of sirventes invective. In 1206, for instance, the troubadour Bertran de Born the Younger composed “Quan vei lo temps renovelar” for King John, berating him for the loss of Normandy two years earlier. Bertran accuses John of abandoning the legacy of his ancestors. “All Guyenne mourns King Richard,” who spent so much gold and silver defending his territories. John, by contrast, Mais ama·l bordir e·l chassar e bracs e lebriers et austors e·l sojorn, per que·lh falh honors, e·s laissa vius deseretar; mal sembla d’ardimen Galvahn. (17–21) [prefers jousting and hunting and pointers and greyhounds and hawks and leisure, through which he diminishes his honor and disinherits himself while still living. He little resembles the valor of Gawain.]¹⁸

Henry III likewise saw castigation in 1242 by the troubadour Bernart de Rovenac for his failure to prevent Louis IX of France from annexing Poitou.¹⁹ In “Ja no vuelh do ni esmenda,” for example, Bernart accuses Henry of squandering his meager reputation through timidity: “he is so limp and confused that he seems to be fast asleep, for the French king is entirely unopposed in robbing him of Tours and Angers, Normans and Bretons” [qu’ans es tan flacx et marritz / que par que sia adurmitz, / que·l rey frances li tolh en plas perdos / Tors e Angieu e Normans e Bretos] (13–16).²⁰ ¹⁸ For an edition of the lyric and short biography of Bertran de Born lo Filhs, see de Riquer, ed. and trans., Los Trovadores: Historia literaria y textos, 951–4, no. 187. Translation is my own. ¹⁹ For discussion of the various sirventes directed at Henry III, see Coss, “Introduction to the 1996 Edition,” in Wright, ed. and trans., Political Songs of England, xix–xxii; Jeanroy, “Le soulèvement de 1242 dans la poésie des troubadours;” and Paterson, Singing the Crusades, 179–84. ²⁰ On Bernart de Rovenac, see Bosdorff, “Bernard von Rouvenac, ein provenzalischer Trobador des XIII. Jahrhunderts;” and also de Riquer, Los Trovadores, 1370–4. The Lyric Responses to the Crusades in Medieval France and Occitania project, based online at University of Warwick, provides editions, translations, and commentary for both of Bernart’s lyrics discussed here. (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/ arts/modernlanguages/research/french/crusades) I have used Linda Paterson’s translation in this example. See also Wright, ed. and trans., Political Songs of England, 26–42, and, for discussion, Paterson, Singing the Crusades, 183–4.

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As in the poetry of Bertran de Born the Younger and Bernart de Rovenac, the central conceit of “Richard of Almaigne” rests on the disjuncture between title and power, here expressed most trenchantly in Richard’s moniker, “King of the Germans.” As David Matthews notes, “Richard of Almaigne” is a multilingual poem.²¹ Its central rhyme rests on a pun on the French “tricheur,” trickster, and the poem is likewise peppered with words shared by both languages: “mangonel” (from the French mangonneau), “maugre,” and, perhaps most evocatively, “alemaigne.” This last word complicates the French-English binary otherwise structuring the song’s verses, gesturing beyond cross-Channel rivalries to an adjacent sphere of influence, the Rhineland. It was here that Richard of Cornwall, a decade earlier, had pursued successful election as the king of the Germans, making him next in line as Holy Roman Emperor. The poet’s derisive evocation of Richard as “the kyng of alemaigne” both summons this nominal title and empties it of any jurisdictional force: he might as well make a “castel of a mulne post” (21) for all the good his kingship does him in battle. King of the Germans was an elected title, and in 1256 Richard had made an expensive and coordinated push to convince electors to name him as successor to William of Holland. The position came with no land, however, and entailed significant personal expense. Beyond the thousands of marks Richard paid to “encourage” his own election, he would also be expected to supply armies and money from his own wealth to pursue imperial agendas. The title was thus, in very real ways, just that: Richard cast a new seal, issued charters, and oversaw disputes, but spent little actual time in the Rhineland.²² This “empty jurisdiction,” however, provided critics ample opportunity for satire. The Melrose Chronicle, for example, reports Richard’s enemies pursuing him to the windmill at Lewes, calling out, “Come down, come down, wretched miller! Come out, come out, unlucky master of the mill!” What a great misfortune it is, they mock, that he should become a miller, who wished to be called no less than Rex Romanorum and Semper Augusti.²³ This disjuncture between office and power would also provide fodder for French satirists, who proved no less skilled at skewering the failed ambitions of English magnates. Across the Channel, however, dialect proved a special target for scorn. Two pieces attest to the negotiations between the French and English kings during the Barons’ War, both surviving adjacent to each other in Paris,

²¹ See Matthew, Writing to the King, 10. ²² On Richard of Cornwall’s machinations to attain this title, see Denholm-Young, Richard of Cornwall, 86–97. ²³ See A Mediaeval Chronicle of Scotland, Stevenson, trans., 128; and Chronica de Mailros, Stevenson, ed., 196: “ ‘descende, descende, pessime molendarie! Egredere, egredere, molendini magister infauste!’ ” According to an early modern annotation, the mill was “call’d King Harry’s mill to this day.” See Rishanger, 135. For further sources, see also Denholm-Young, Richard of Cornwall, Appendix 6.

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Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 837 (fols. 219v–220r).²⁴ In the first of two pieces, the Pais aus Englois, the French poet takes on the voice of an English narrator whose efforts to report on the imagined meeting between Henry and his barons are undermined by linguistic ineptitude. Using through-rhymed quatrains, the poem begins in a pastoral mode. It is May; the rose blooms; the nightingale sings; and the poet has found something in his heart he wishes to say—except in place of “heart” (coer), he finds his matter in his cul, anus: Or vint la tens de may que ce ros panirra Que ce tens serra beles, roxinol chanterra Ces prez il serra verdes, ces gardons florrirra. J’ai trova a ma cul .I. chos que je dirra. (1–4) [Now comes the time of May when the rose blooms, the weather is fair, the nightingale sings, the meadows are green, and the gardens blossom. I have found in my anus something I will say.]

The passage abounds in humorous misfires between English and French: anglicizations like gardon, a type of fish in French, standing in for the French jardin; verb misconjugations (i.e., je dirra); and case and gender disagreement (i.e., Ces prez il serra verdes). This type of humor sets the tone for the rest of the poem. The king of England possesses not a good boat [navire] but a good turnip [naviau] (5), with which he plans his conquest of Normandy and even Paris. The narrator then reports on a “grant plaidement” in which the king and his barons debate their campaign: Sinor, tendez a mai; ne devez pas rier. Ce navel que je port doit tout le mont crier. L’autrier je fi a Londres une grosse concier: Ja ne movra baron, la meilleur ne la pier, Que tout ne fout venez a ce grant plaidement. (13–17) [Lords, listen to me. You ought not laugh. This news that I bring should be proclaimed to the entire world. The other day I saw in London a great assembly; from the best to the worst, there is not a baron who will travel who was not coming to this great parliament.] ²⁴ Faral edited the two pieces—the Pais aus Englois and the Chartre de la pais aus Englois—as part of his doctoral thesis, published as Mime français du XIIIe siècle, 41–51. Wright also printed the Pais aus Englois in Political Songs as “The song of the peace with England,” 63–8. For discussion in the context of the Treaty of Paris (1259), see Power, “The Treaty of Paris (1259),” 141–58 at 158 n. 91; and for an overview of their playfulness with morphology and syntax, see Shepherd, Tradition and Re-creation, 107–9. See also Salter, English and International, 35–6. Translations are my own, with line numbers following the text. On the manuscript see Symes, “The appearance of early vernacular plays.”

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Again, linguistic humor intervenes between intention and expression. The narrator does not see in London a great council, un graunt conseil, but rather suggests that he makes in London a “grosse concier,” very close to the verb conchier, to defecate. Breaking the syntax of the final clause across two stanzas, the poet mixes up the present-tense expletive foutre with the past tense of être, violating formal as well as linguistic decorum. The humor continues in a similar vein, using broad dialectical caricature to undermine the grandiose aspirations of the English. The king and council move that “le Glaise” (25) shall invade France: Le bon rai d’Ingleter se trama a .I. part. Li et Trichart, sa frer, irrous comme lipart. Il suspire de cul, si se claima a l’art: Hui! Diex, com puis je voir de Normandi ma part? (29–32) [The good king of England draws himself to one side. He and Richard, his brother, angry as a leopard. He sighs from his ass, and cries dramatically, “Alas, God! How can I have/see my part of Normandy?”]

Sighing not from his heart but from his backside, Henry is unmanned in his imperial desires by language.²⁵ In the same moment, we see the identical pun on Richard—as Trichard, traitor—found in “Richard of Almaigne.” The two poems trade in the same deflationary brand of humor central to the genre of the fabliau, using superficial lexical similarity to measure the difference between political ambition and political power.²⁶ The Pais aus Englois reveals English claims to the terre Normannorum as no more authoritative than their claims to speaking French properly. Bolstered by his advisers, Henry decides he can take Normandy, Poitou, and Paris, promising to haul Louis’s beloved Sainte-Chappelle back to London on a cart. Only Simon de Montfort expresses skepticism, exclaiming to the king, “ ‘By the body of Saint Anel, let this business be. The Frenchman n’est mi anel’ ” [A dit a rai Inglais: “Par le cors saint Anel. / Lessiez or cesti chos: François n’est mi anel”] (55–6). In mistaking the French aignel, lamb, for asnel, a small ass, the Pais aus Englois shares a joke with another French fabliau, Des deus Anglois et de l’anel. In this latter text, an Englishman traveling in France requests that his friend go to a butcher and buy a leg of lamb for dinner.²⁷ The friend returns with something ²⁵ See Shepherd, Tradition and Re-creation, 107, on the ways errors in grammatical gender undermine Henry’s speech. ²⁶ On fabliaux as a genre specializing in “slippages, tautologies, misunderstandings, substitutions, and complete disjunctions,” see Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux, 17. ²⁷ This fabliau survives in a single copy in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 19152 and has been edited by Reid, Twelve Fabliaux. For discussion, see Livingston, “The fabliau Des Deux Anglois et de l’Anel;” Keith Busby, “Plus ça change . . . a case of medieval interlanguage;” and Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy, 78–92.

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much larger: the leg of an ass, which they proceed to enjoy before realizing they have consumed an entirely different animal than the one requested. The Pais aus Englois ends with Henry promising to throw a “grosse fest” (81) when his son Edward is crowned king of France. “ ‘May Godelamit let it be,’ ” Roger Bigod cries in the final couplet, “ ‘by his culmandement, that you do this thing gloriously!’ ” [“Or doint Godelamit par son culmandement, / Que tu fais cestui chos bien gloriousement!”] (85–9). “Godelamit” may be a Francophone rendering of the Middle English “almiЗty,” while “culmandement,” as a pun on commandement, neatly crystallizes the central joke of the Pais aus Englois: ignorant of the extent of their own ignorance, the English king and his barons can only, figuratively, “speak from their asses.” Immediately following the Pais aus Englois in BnF fr. 837 is La chartre de la pais aus Englois, a mock legal document attesting to peace terms between “ce rai Hari d’Ingleter, et ce riche home Loys a Parris.”²⁸ Written in a similarly parodic version of Anglo-Norman, the charter cedes overlordship of Normandy to Louis in exchange for two sets of gold spurs for Henry and Edward, so that when they ride across their lands, they look “plus minet,” more attractively effeminate, to their subjects.²⁹ At the end of the charter, the first-person voice of Henry III declares these terms as binding: “And because I wish this thing should become manure in a stable [fiens en estable for ferme et estable], I wish to hang my seal [saiele] from this cul on the reverse, with the seal of my barons of England” [Et por ce que je veele que ce chos fout fiens en estable, je veele pendez ma saiele a ce cul par derrier, avoecques la saiele a mi barons d’Ingleter].³⁰ Henry has made a poor deal for himself and his son, trading Normandy for gold spurs—and not even the intended esperons dorés but rather porons sorés, dried-up leeks. Limp and desiccated, the king’s gift accompanies him back to England. As Bracton quips, jurisdictions change with a change in the names of things. So, too, jurisdictions alter the natures of the people and objects and places within their remit. As an art form built from the tools of language, poetry exerts an analogous influence over the worlds it conjures. This book has attempted to trace out some these points of continuity between poetry and law, articulated throughout as a relationship between forms of legal thought and, borrowing from Heaney, the jurisdictions of poetic form. It began, in Chapter 1, by considering the relationship between epic and satire—the former a genre that disciplines the masculine body into a synecdoche for the state and the latter one that derides those bodies that fail to meet the same norms. It has concluded with a return to these genres, as the territorial ambitions of the English kings—and the conciliar ambitions of rebel barons—both meet similar ends, disarmed by language no less than military defeat. I have suggested that our point of entry into the poetic archive of the

²⁸ Faral, Mimes français du XIIIe siècle, 48.

²⁹ Ibid., 49.

³⁰ Ibid.

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thirteenth century might begin not with the macro-category of genre, nor with the confines of a particular language, but rather in a shared set of legal and grammatical vocabularies. For many of the clerics who, like the Harley Scribe, would go on to copy law books, attest charters, and compose verse in the blank parchment of their manuscripts, these vocabularies were forged initially in the grammar classroom. Poetry in this way provides law its language, while law, in all its manifold imperfections, supplies an inexhaustible reservoir of inspiration in return.

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Bibliography Abbreviations EETS EHR ELH JEGP MLN MLQ PL PMLA TRHS

Early English Text Society English Historical Review English Literary History Journal of English and Germanic Philology Modern Language Notes Modern Language Quarterly Patrologiae Cursus Completus. Series Latina, edited by J.-P. Migne. 221 vols. Paris: D’Amboise, 1844–1864. Proceedings of the Modern Language Association Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

Primary Sources Manuscripts Only manuscripts that are mentioned in the text and have been directly consulted by the author are listed below. Reference to other manuscripts cited in the book can be found in the index. Cambridge, Jesus College, MS  5 Cambridge, St John’s College, MS E. 9 (112) Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.1.25.4 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 19.2.1 Glasgow, Hunterian Library, MS V.8.14 (511) London, British Library, Additional MS 14252 London, British Library, Additional MS 23986 London, British Library, Additional MS 38821 London, British Library, MS Harley 458 London, British Library, MS Harley 746 London, British Library, MS Harley 978 London, British Library, MS Harley 2253 London, British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B.ix London, British Library, MS Cotton Julius D.vii London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian A.vi London, British Library, Royal MS 7 F V Manchester, John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester, MS Lat. 155 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Add. A 44 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 132 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 137 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 837

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Woods, Marjorie Curry. “Some techniques of teaching rhetorical poetics in the schools of medieval Europe.” In Learning from the Histories of Rhetoric: Essays in Honor of Winifred Bryan Horner, edited by Theresa Enos, 91–113. Carbondale: South Illinois University Press, 1993. Woods, Marjorie Curry. “The teaching of poetic composition in the later Middle Ages.” In A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Modern America, edited by James J. Murphy, 123–43. Mahwah: Hermagoras Press, 2001. Woods, Marjorie Curry. “Weeping for Dido: Epilogue on a premodern rhetorical exercise in the postmodern classroom.” In Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: From Classical Theory to Medieval Practice, edited by Carol D. Lanham, 284–94. London: Continuum, 2002. Wormald, Patrick. The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1999. Wormald, Patrick. “Quadripartitus.” In Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy: Essays in Honour of Sir James Holt, edited by George Garnett and John Hudson, 111–47. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge: University Press, 1994. Yeager, Stephen. From Lawmen to Plowmen: Anglo-Saxon Legal Tradition and the School of Langland. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Young, Karl. “Chaucer and Geoffrey of Vinsauf.” Modern Philology 41 (1944): 172–82. Zerner, Monique. “L’épouse de Simon de Montfort et la croisade Albigeoise.” In Femmes— mariages—lignages, XIIe–XIVe siècles. Mélanges offerts à Georges Duby edited by J. Dufournet, A. Joris, and P. Toubert, 449–70. Brussels: De Boeck University, 1992. Ziolkowski, Jan. Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to a TwelfthCentury Intellectual. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1985.

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Index accessus ad auctores. See also auctores 36–8 Abbey of Saint-Victor 42n.82 Abelard, Peter 28–9, 41 Acre 175–6 Adalbert of Samaria 87–8 Adam of Petit Pont 41 Alain de Lille 5–6 De planctu Naturae 34n.46, 39–40 Alberic of Monte Cassino 87 Albigensian Crusade. See also Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester (d. 1218) 18, 70n.41, 110, 195–6, 221 Alice de Montmorency 195–6 aliens 15–16, 117–18, 177–8, 197–9, 206, 210 Alexander III, pope 67 Alexander, bishop of Lincoln 113 Alexander of Hales 8 Alexander of Villa Dei 4–5 Alexander the Great 112 allegory 5–6, 9–10, 37, 39–40, 130–1 in Robert Grosseteste’s Château d’Amour 162–73 Ambler, S. T. 207, 213–14 ancient constitutionalism. See constitutionalism Ancrene Wisse 170 Anderson, Benedict 36n.58 Angevin Empire 26, 119–22, 130, 196–8 Anglo-French 2–5, 14, 130, 134–6, 161–2, 164, 167, 201–2, 213–15 as legal language 109–10, 125–6, 131–3 Anglo-Norman. See Anglo-French Anglo-Saxon law. See also Quadripartitus 108–10, 112, 117, 120 Anjou 74–5, 119–20 Anonymous I. See also Becket, Thomas 30–1 Anselm of Canterbury 164, 168–9, 171, 182 Antioch chambers 175–6 antiquarians. See also Wright, Thomas 3–4, 21, 35n.52, 63–4, 221 anti-Semitism. See also Jews in England 6, 18, 20–1, 140, 153–7, 159–61, 169, 173, 178–80, 185–91, 199–200, 203–5 apocalypticism 154n.58, 156, 187

apostrophe. See poetics, figures and tropes Apulia 130, 196–7 Aristotle. See also Grosseteste, Robert, works 2–5, 19–20, 36n.58, 40n.72, 41n.77, 44, 46, 142–3, 150–1 Arnulf of Orléans 52–6, 65–6 ars poetriae manuals 4–5, 19, 59, 60–88 ars dictaminis. See also letter writing 66, 69, 78–81, 87–9 Ars poetica. See Horace Arthur of Brittany 89–90 Arthur, fictional king. See also Geoffrey of Monmouth 2–3, 112, 117–19 Articles of the Barons. See also Magna Carta 125, 127n.123 Ashe, Laura 177 Auchinleck Manuscript. See manuscripts auctores 4–5, 25, 28–9, 31–8, 41, 181–2, 188–9 Audita tremendi. See also Gregory VIII; Third Crusade 190–3 Augustine 49–51, 55, 149–50, 155, 165, 181–2 Augustinian order 99, 112n.57, 126n.122, 203–4 Azo 23–4, 168n.116 Baldric of Bourgueil, archbishop of Dol 178n.21, 184–9 Baldwin, John 106 Bale, Anthony 204 Barnwell Chronicle 79n.60, 81n.67, 93n.109, 105n.27, 128n.126 baronial rebellions. See First Barons’ War; Second Barons’ War Baswell, Christopher 34n.49 Battle of Evesham (1265). See Second Barons’ War Battle of Lewes (1264). See Second Barons’ War Becket, Thomas 9, 16–18, 22–3, 26–7, 38–9, 50–6, 60–1, 85–6, 117, 132, 138–9, 144, 175–6, 182, 198n.104, 206–7, 209, 213–15, 218 advisers 23–4, 28–9 and Geoffrey of Vinsauf 70–3 and London 110–11, 122–3

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Becket, Thomas (cont.) and the Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum 43–4, 46, 49 and the Interdict 75–6, 88–92 correspondence 29–33 education 27–9, 38 in exile 56–9 miracles of 24–5 Bede, Venerable 114–15 Belshazzar, biblical king 91–2 Benedict of Peterborough 192n.77 Bene of Florence 119n.91 Benoît of Saint Maure, Chronique de ducs de Normandie 192–3 Bernard of Chartres 33–5, 65 Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia 39–40 Bernart de Rovenac, “Ja no vuelh do ni esmenda” 222–3 Beroë 66 Bersted, Stephen, bishop of Chichester 207 Berther of Orléans 191–2 Bertran de Born the Younger, “Quan vei lo temps renovelar” 222–3 Blackstone, William 6, 99 body politic 38–9, 66–7, 94–5, 104–5, 108, 118, 126–7, 130–1, 147–8, 209–12, 226–7 Boethius 54–5 Bohemond of Taranto 183, 188–9 Boyarin, Adrienne Williams 173 Bracton. See Henry de Bracton Brittany 118 Brut history. See also Brutus; Geoffrey of Monmouth; LaЗamon 2–3, 7–8, 112–13, 132 Brutus 7 Burton annals 126n.119, 131n.141 Bury St. Edmunds 108 Butterfield, Ardis 14, 220n.11 Butterfield, Herbert, Whig Interpretation of History 102–3 canon law 2, 5, 22–3, 25–6, 49–50, 56–8, 70, 82–4, 110n.47, 143–5, 152, 172, 208–9, 217 Cannon, Christopher 11–14, 132, 170 Canterbury Cathedral 22, 110–11, 175–6, 209 Canterbury Tales. See Chaucer, Geoffrey Cantilupe, Thomas, bishop of Hereford 138 Cantilupe, Walter, bishop of Worcester 138, 143n.17, 175 Carpenter, D. A. 106n.28, 118n.81, 119–20, 127n.123, 199 Cassiodorus 8 cathedral schools. See also grammar, medieval teaching of 18, 23, 28–9, 33–7, 87–8, 142

Cato (the Elder). See also Disticha Catonis 25–6 Cato (the Younger). See also Lucan, Pharsalia 24–6, 46, 52–4, 141 Chanson d’Antioche 175–6 Chanson de la croisade albigeoise 195n.90 chansons de geste 175–6, 194–5 Charlemagne 113–14 Chartre de la pais aus Englois. See also Pais aus Englois 224n.24, 226 Château-Gaillard. See also Richard I, king of England 120–2 Chaucer, Geoffrey 12–14, 19 and Geoffrey of Vinsauf 61–2, 70–1, 74–5 Christ Church, Canterbury 81–2 Chronica majora. See Matthew Paris Cicero 23–4, 28–9, 35–7, 40, 42, 50–1, 55–6, 65–6, 87, 89 Cistercian order 29–30, 56, 93–4, 96–7 civil law 2, 5, 22–3, 45–8, 56–7, 98, 150–1, 168–9 Clanchy, M. T. 8, 88, 125n.117, 131–2 Clarke, Catherine A. M. 53–4 Clarke, Peter 82–4 Coke, Edward 6, 103–4 commons 82, 124–5, 176–7, 180 community of the realm (communitas regni) 3–6, 15–16, 90–2, 117–18, 147–8, 204–6, 211–12, 218 confession 143 conjuration (coniuratio) 98, 105–6, 109–10, 117–18, 138–9, 208 constitutionalism 5–7, 12–14, 21, 179–80 and grammar 4 and the Leges Anglorum Londoniis Collectae 113–19 and Magna Carta 101–4 and St. Albans Abbey 104–8 Constitutions of Clarendon 19, 22–3, 30–1, 46, 58–9, 132 contrafactum 133, 194–5 Copeland, Rita 35 Cormack, Bradin 14–15 cornerstone (lapis angularis) 209 Cornificians 35, 40–1 coronation charters 112, 120–1, 125, 127 of Henry I 103–11, 118 Corpus iuris canonici. See also canon law 49n.104, 144n.21 Corpus iuris civilis. See also civil law 22–3, 45–8, 72, 115–17, 168–9 counsel of courtiers 38–51 of the king 9–11, 90–2, 103–4, 108–9, 112–19, 128–9, 131–6, 176–7, 197–8 of the pope 76–80, 148–9 of women landholders 140, 153–63

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 Cover, Robert 6–7 Creation, theological concept 142, 149–50, 153, 160n.86, 162–3, 167, 171–3 Crucifixion. See Jesus Christ crusade. See also individual crusades 18, 20–1, 70n.41, 76, 85–6, 96, 110, 118–19, 139, 170, 175–215, 221 See also First Crusade; Second Crusade, Third Crusade, Fifth Crusade and anti-Jewish violence 179–81, 199–205 and literacy 176–7, 183, 194–5, 201–2, 206–7, 213–15 and nationalism 15–16, 177–81, 194 in liturgy 189–92 rhetoric 178–81, 183–9 vows 79, 208–12 crusade song 189–95, 221–2 Curthose, Robert, duke of Normandy 108–9 customary law 9, 22–4, 33, 44–6, 49–50, 58–9, 88–9, 98, 101–2, 105–11, 113, 115, 117, 123–4, 126–9, 132, 147, 217–18 Danelaw 120 Daniel, biblical figure 91–3, 193–4 David, biblical king 30–1, 83, 92–3, 193–4, 206 d’Ayvile, John 201–2 Decretum. See Gratian Des deus Anglois et l’anel 225–6 Devil’s rights theory of the Redemption 164n.103, 166–7 Dictum of Kenilworth (1266). See also Second Barons’ War 176–7 dolus bonus 46–9 dominion (dominium) 9–10, 14–15, 54–5, 73, 115–20, 123–4, 151–2, 157–8, 163–9, 171, 201–2 Domus Conversorum. See also Jews in England 154–5 Donatus 5, 69 Dover Chronicle 175–6 dower 108–9, 158–9 Disticha Catonis 25–6 Duggan, Anne J. 28–32 Dunstable annals 198–9 early Middle English. See Middle English. Eberhard the German, Laborintus 60–1 Edgar, king of England 118 Edmund of Abingdon, archbishop of Canterbury 9, 19, 138, 143–4 Edward I, king of England 124–6, 136n.153, 156, 176, 180, 226

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Edward II, king of England 136 Edward the Confessor, king of England. See also Leges Edwardi Confessoris 108–9 Eleanor de Montfort, countess of Leicester. See also Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester 162–3, 182 Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of England 70–1 Eleanor of Provence, queen of England 2–3, 175–6, 196–7, 199 elections, Church 63, 75–6, 81–2, 88–9 Eleutherius, pope (d. 187) 114–17 enarratio poetarum. See also grammar 33–5, 53–5, 64–5 encomium 62, 65–6, 86, 96–7, 120–1 English Interdict. See interdict; Innocent III, pope; John, king of England; Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum. See John of Salisbury epic. See also Lucan, Pharsalia 6–7, 20–1, 24–7, 29–30, 36–7, 50, 52–6, 175–6, 188–9, 194, 212–15, 217, 219–20, 226–7 estate management 20, 144–7, 160–3 ethopoeia. See also grammar and rhetoric 65 excommunication 19–21, 29–30, 75–6, 82, 94, 123–4, 196 1253 formula of excommunication 124n.114, 125–6, 128–30, 133–7 Eudes de Châteauroux 211n.149 Faba, Guido 88 fabliaux 201, 225–6 Fein, Susanna 12–14 femmes soles. See widows Fifth Crusade 199–200 figura. See typology First Barons’ War 9–10, 20–1, 110, 126–8, 177–8, 199–200, 208 First Crusade 21, 175–6, 178, 180–91, 194, 206, 209–10, 214–15 Fisher, Matthew 12–14 FitzStephen, William 27–8 fitz Thedmar, Arnald 123n.108 fitz Walter, Robert 110 florilegium, florilegia 31n.38 Foliot, Gilbert, bishop of London 29–32, 57 Ford, Richard T. See also jurisdiction 16–18 Forest Charter 99, 128–9 Foucault, Michel 11–12 Four Daughters of God. See also Grosseteste, Robert, Château d’Amour 162, 166 Fourth Lateran Council 19–20, 110n.47, 143–4, 154–5, 166n.110, 199–200

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Franciscans 126n.122, 141–2, 146n.28, 151–2 in Oxford 139–40, 142–3, 153–4, 156–7, 162–3 Frederick Barbarossa, emperor 67 free status. See also villein status 166–73 Fulcher of Chartres, Historia Hierosolymitana 178n.21, 190n.66 Gaposchkin, M. Cecilia 178–9, 189–90 Garnett, George 106n.29, 110 Gascony 119–20, 197n.95 Geoffrey de Langley 201–2 Geoffrey of Monmouth 7–8, 24, 112–13, 115, 117–19, 132 Geoffrey of Vinsauf and ars dictaminis 89–90 occasional poems 71–3 Poetria nova 2–5, 19, 52n.117, 60–3, 68–71, 73–86, 93, 95–8, 118–19, 121–2, 128, 141 Gervase of Howbridge 110 Gervase of Melkley 60–1, 70n.42, 81–2, 86 Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum 175n.6, 178n.21, 183–4 Giancarlo, Matthew 12–14 Gilo of Paris, Historia Vie Hierosolimitane 185, 189n.64, 208, 212–14 Glanvill 45–6, 112 Glossa ordinaria 46, 156 Goering, Joseph 153–4 grammar and crusade literatures 178, 181–9, 194, 213–14 and the ars dictaminis 87–8 and the artes poetriae 60–3, 65–75, 86, 95–8, 141–2 and law 4–6, 11–12, 20–1, 23, 128, 226–7 classical teaching of 64–5 depicted in John of Salisbury’s Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum 39–44 medieval teaching of 2–3, 18–19, 23–9, 31–8, 52–6, 59 Robert Grosseteste’s view of 173–4 Gratian, Decretum (Concordia discordantium canonum). See also canon law 22–3, 144n.21 Gregorian reform 22–3, 178–9 Gregory VII, pope 187 Gregory VIII, pope 190–1 Grim, Edward 27–8, 56 Grosseteste, Robert 2–4, 9, 19–20, 78, 129, 136–74, 207, 212 works: De artibus liberalibus 173–4

De cessatione legalium 143, 156–7, 160–3, 167–9 De luce 149–50 De regno et tyrannide 139–40, 150–1, 163n.99 Château d’Amour 2–4, 156–7, 161–73 commentary on and translation of Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 20, 142–3, 150–1 commentary on and translation of PseudoDionysian corpus 148–51, 212 Hexaemeron 142–3, 149–50 Letter 5. See also Margaret de Quincy, countess of Winchester 153–61 Letter 127 145–7 pastoralia 143–4 Reules. See also Margaret de Lacy, countess of Lincoln 161–2 translation of the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs 142–3, 156 Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, Vie de Saint Thomas de Canterbury 27, 32–3 Guibert of Nogent Monodiae 181–2 Dei gesta per Francos 178n.21, 183–91, 194, 212–13 Hall, Stuart 14–15 Hanna III, Ralph 112, 122–3 Harding, Vanessa 110–11 Harley Lyrics. See manuscripts, London British Library, MS Harley 2253 Harrowing of Hell 166 Haskins, Charles Homer 22n.1 Heng, Geraldine 204–5 Henry I, king of England. See coronation charters, of Henry I Henry II, king of England 9, 16, 22–4, 29–33, 38–9, 52–5, 58–9, 70–1, 85–6, 110, 192–3 Henry III, king of England 15–16, 100, 119–20, 125–6, 128–36, 143–4, 154–5, 157–8, 175–8, 196–212, 222–6 Henry de Bracton (alias Henry de Bratton), On the Laws and Customs of England (De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae) 1–2, 4, 7, 9–10, 45–6, 145n.24, 164n.104, 165, 168–9, 217–18, 226–7 Herbert of Bosham 8n.34, 27–8, 56, 58 Hidage, Tribal and Burghal 120 Hill, Felicity 129 historical verse. See also crusade song; lament (genre); satire and political commentary 10–12, 19, 75–81, 84–6, 92–3, 100–1, 126–36, 205–12, 220–6

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 as a genre 3–4, 12–14, 21, 63–4 in chronicles 121–2, 126–8, 130–1, 133–4, 189–96 classroom instruction in 19, 62–8, 70–5, 96–8, 141–2 editorial history of 21, 63–4, 177–9, 221 manuscript preservation 101, 126–36, 201–5, 212–15 History of the Kings of Britain (Historia regum Brittanie). See Geoffrey of Monmouth History of William Marshal 119n.89 Holsinger, Bruce 14–15 Holt, James 101–4, 106, 109–10, 123–8, 136–7 Holy Land. See also Jerusalem 20–1, 121, 170, 175–6, 178, 180–1, 183–97, 206–7, 210 Horace. See also auctores; satire 1–2, 4–5, 26–8, 30–3, 35–8, 40, 60–2, 65–6 Horn, Andrew. See also Leges Anglorum Londoniis Collectae 111n.54 Hundred Years War 178 Hudson, John 110 Hughes de Lincoln. See also anti-Semitism 3–4 Hugh of Avalon, bishop of Lincoln 138, 142n.12 Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon 39–42 Hyams, Paul R. 168–9 imperium 45–6, 75, 77–80, 96–7, 115, 118–24 Innocent III, pope. See also papacy, nature of authority and crusade 195–6, 199–200 and Magna Carta 100, 128 and the English Interdict 60, 74–6, 81–4, 88–92, 94–8 and the Poetria nova 62–3, 68–71, 76–81, 84–6 on Jewish moneylending 155 Innocent IV, pope 78, 144–5, 148–51 interdict. See also Innocent III, pope theological basis for 81–3 Interludium de clerico et puella 201–2 invention (inventio). See also rhetoric 36–7, 61–2, 65–6, 68 and Magna Carta 19, 98, 100–1, 104–8, 132, 136–7 invented law codes 110–19 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 8, 11–12, 33n.44, 38n.65, 41n.79 Isabel, countess of Arundel 2–3 Isabella of Angoulême, queen of England 119–20 Itinerarium peregrinorum et gesta regis Ricardi 96 Jaeger, F. Stephen 23–4, 28–9 Jerusalem 128–31, 178–9, 183, 185, 187–97, 206

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Jesus Christ 1–2, 29–31, 57–8, 77, 140, 146–50, 155–7, 162, 166–73, 178–80, 187–90, 201–2, 206, 210 Jews in England 1290 expulsion 6, 180 and Grossetestian theology 20, 140, 151–3, 155–8, 169, 173 and royal power 179–80, 203–5 Estatuz de la Jewerie (1275) 156 Jewish exchequer 85–6, 131–2 legal restrictions upon 154–5, 199–200 Leicester expulsion (1231x1232) 140, 153–61 violence against 18, 20–1, 178–80, 199–200, 202–5 Jocelyn of Wells, bishop of Bath 92–3 John de Grey, bishop of Norwich 81–2, 86, 92–3 John of Ford 93–4 John of Garland 4–5, 7, 60–1, 70–2 John of Gervase, bishop of Winchester 211n.149 John of Salisbury 18, 23–4, 26–9, 56–9, 142 Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum 23, 38–51, 55–6, 59, 128 Metalogicon 23, 25–6, 33–7, 39–41, 59, 65 Policraticus 23, 33, 39–40, 50–2, 54–6, 126–8, 206–7 John of Wallingford 130–1 John, king of England and Magna Carta 75, 104–6, 114–15, 126–8 and Normandy 74–5, 118–20 and the English Interdict 60–3, 74–86, 88–95 in the Poetria nova 62–3, 74–86, 96–7 jurisdiction across canon and common law 2, 9, 22–3, 217–18 across literature and law 5–6, 21, 217–20, 226–7 and political hierarchy 20, 140, 144–53 and crusade rhetoric 20–1, 44, 187–9, 206–12 as alternative to “nation” 14–18, 217–18 civic 110–12, 118–19, 122–4 ecclesiastical 23–4, 26–7, 50, 53–4, 57–60, 63, 66–7, 69–70, 75–80, 107–8, 143–53 “jurisdictional poetics” 71, 75–80, 96–7, 121–2, 124–36, 180–1, 189–96, 201–15, 218–27 histories of concept 15–18 manorial 153–4, 157–73 of grammar 5, 64–5, 218 royal 7, 19–20, 45–6, 113–25, 180 jury 6, 166 Kantorowicz, Ernst 5–6, 25–6 Keene, Derek 110–12 Kelly, Douglas 60–1

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kingship, nature of authority See also counsel, tyranny 1–2, 4–12, 16, 42–6, 52, 54–5, 63, 71–6, 100–1, 113–19, 147–8, 150–1, 180, 197–8, 206–12, 222–6 Kim, Dorothy 12–14, 170 King of the Germans. See Richard of Cornwall Krehbiel, Edward 82 Lacock Abbey 99–101, 103–4 lament (genre). See also historical verse 70–5, 86, 92–4, 96–8, 121–2, 126–8, 130–6, 141, 188–9, 191–2, 213–14, 220–1 Lamentations 130–1, 191–4 Lanercost Chronicle 126n.122 Langland, William. See Piers Plowman Langton, Stephen and the English Interdict 60, 81–3, 85–6, 88–95 and the Oxford Council of 1222 154–5 and Thomas Becket 138–9, 209 role in Magna Carta 104–10, 123–4 Last Judgment 151–2, 155, 162, 166–7 Lateran IV. See Fourth Lateran Council latinity (latinitas) 4n.17, 12–14, 23–4, 31–9, 181–7 Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. See Holy Land law. See canon law; civil law; common law; customary law; natural law; positive law LaЗamon. See also Brut history 2–3, 132 Leges Anglorum Londoniis Collectae (London Collection) 86n.85, 101, 111–25 Leges Edwardi Confessoris 23, 110, 112–19, 127 Leges Henrici Primi 22–3, 109–10, 112 Leis Willelme 22–3, 109–10 letter writing. See also ars dictaminis during the Becket controversy 29–33, 56–9 during the English Interdict 75–6, 84, 88–93 epistolary form 69, 78–81, 87–8 in the Leges Anglorum Londoniis Collectae 112, 114–17, 122–3 of Robert Grosseteste. See also Grosseteste, Robert 143–61 promulgating the 1258 Provisions of Oxford 125–6, 131–2, 176–7, 207–8 lex non scripta. See customary law liberty. See also free status; tyranny communal liberties 100–8, 112, 122–6, 128–9, 159–60 ecclesiastical 9, 17–18, 22–4, 29–30, 33, 42–6, 48–60, 75–6, 91–2, 101–2, 108, 128–9, 143–4 of a ruler 10–11, 44–56 of speech 44–51, 53–9

rhetoric of 56–9, 138–9, 181, 187–96, 198–200, 205–12 within Christian theology 151–2, 156–8, 163–73 Liebermann, Felix 111 liturgy and crusade 178–9, 182–3, 188–96, 208–9, 214–15 and the English Interdict 60, 75–6, 82, 92–5 inventiones 104, 106–8 para-liturgical song 92, 130–1 Lincoln Cathedral, dean and chapter. See also Grosseteste, Robert 105–9, 114–15, 125–6, 129 Livonian Crusade 195–6 Loengard, Janet Senderowitz 158 Löfstedt, Leena 32–3 logic 5–6, 19, 23, 41–2, 52n.117, 64–5 London and baronial revolt 198–200, 203–4, 225–6 and Thomas Becket 17–18, 22–3, 27–33, 122–3, 176 Jewish community 154–5, 199–200, 203–4 legal ordinances. See also Leges Anglorum Londoniis Collectae 86n.85, 96, 101, 110–24, 126 St. Paul’s Cathedral 94–5, 104–7, 110, 114–15, 117, 191–2 London Collection. See Leges Anglorum Londoniis Collectae Longespée, Ela, countess of Salisbury (d. 1261) 99–100 Longespée, Ela, countess of Warwick (d. 1298) 100 Longespée, William, earl of Salisbury (d. 1226) 99 Lotario dei Conti di Segni. See Innocent III, pope. Louis VII, king of France 1 Louis IX, king of France 156, 222–6 Lucan, Pharsalia 5, 24–7, 33–4, 46, 51–6, 186n.50 Lucius, king of Britain 114–15, 117–19 lyric. See crusade song; historical verse; lament (genre) macaronic poetry. See poetics, meters and forms. See also multilingualism Maccabees 186n.47, 187–8, 190–1, 209–10 Machan, Tim William 15–16, 131nn.141–2, 177 Maddicott, John 162–3 Maitland, Frederic William 2, 167–8 Magna Carta 3–10, 19, 21, 75–6, 99–136, 138–9, 147–8, 158, 199–200, 207 1215 engrossment 100, 125–9 1216 reconfirmation 100

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 1217 reconfirmation 100, 123–4 1225 reconfirmation 99–100, 123–5 1253 reconfirmation 128–9 1265 reconfirmation 207 and ancient constitutionalism 101–4, 106–11 and jurisdictional poetics 125–36 and St. Paul’s Cathedral 104–6, 110–11 and taxation 119–20, 128–31 annulment by Pope Innocent III 100, 123–4, 128 cap. 1 (1215 and 1225) 75–6 cap. 7 (1215) 158 cap. 8 (1215) 158 cap. 10 (1215) 199–200 cap. 11 (1215) 199–200 cap. 13 (1215) 111 cap. 40 (1215) 123–4 cap. 50 (1215) 118 cap. 51 (1215) 118 cap. 61 (1215) 123–4 commentaries on 101–4 octocentennial anniversary 101 vernacular proclamations of 125–6, 131–2 role of Church in promulgating 123–4, 128–9, 133–6 security clause 123–4, 128n.127 manuscripts Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS 411 54–5 Brussels, Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er, MS 9030–37 162 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.1.25.4 71n.44, 96 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 406 85n.79 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 450 88n.93, 90n.100 Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS McClean 123 162 Cambridge, Jesus College, MS  5 215n.161 Cambridge, St. John’s College, MS E.9 (112) 134n.150 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.14.22 85–6 Dublin, Trinity College, MS 177 (E i. 40) 106–7 Dublin, Trinity College, MS 347 214n.157 Durham, Durham Cathedral Library, MS C iv 24 88n.93, 90n.100 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 19.2.1 (the Auchinleck Manuscript) 134 Glasgow, Hunterian Library, MS V.8.14 (511) 71–3, 86n.86

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Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, MS Cod. Theol. 2207 141n.6 London, British Library, Add. MS 14252 71n.44, 120–4 London, British Library, Add. MS 23986 201n.118 London, British Library, Add. MS 38821 129n.132 London, British Library, Add. MS 46144 99n.3 London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra E.1 88n.93, 90n.100 London, British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B.ix 126–9 London, British Library, MS Cotton Julius D. vii 130–1 London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus A. xvii 112n.57 London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian A.vi 215n.161 London, British Library, MS Harley 458 109–10 London, British Library, MS Harley 746 132–3 London, British Library, MS Harley 978 2–3, 12–14, 213–14 London, British Library, MS Harley 1717 193n.81 London, British Library, MS Harley 2253 213–15, 218–23 London, British Library, Royal MS 7 F V 92–3 London, British Library, Royal MS 13 D IV 38–9 Manchester, John Rylands University Library, MS Lat. 155 112–20 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Add. A. 44 71n.44 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 656 71n.44 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 132 132n.147 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 137 132–3 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. liturg. d. 41 141n.6 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 837 223–6 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 19152 225n.27 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 24862 92–3 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 5132 190n.69

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manuscripts (cont.) Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 15157 96n.117 Princeton, Princeton University Library, Taylor Medieval MS 1 162 Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS Y 200 125n.117 San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 31911 4, 7 Wolfenbüttel, Hertzog August Bibliothek, MS Gude 4591 122n.105 Margaret de Lacy, countess of Lincoln 161–2 Margaret de Quincy, countess of Winchester 153–61, 169, 174 Marie de France 12–14, 214n.155 Marsh, Adam 139, 150–1, 162–3 Marshal, William. See History of William Marshal Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii 39–40 martyrdom 17–18, 25–6, 54–8, 77, 88–9, 91–2, 106–7, 177–8, 187, 206–7, 209–10, 214–15 Matilda of Flanders 185 Matthew de Besile 201n.121, 202 Matthew of Rievaulx 96–7 Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria Matthew Paris. See also St. Albans Abbey 2–3, 17–18, 69, 101, 104–8, 118–20, 128–31 Matthews, David 12–16, 177, 223 McKechnie, W. S., Magna Carta, a Commentary on the Great Charter of King John 101–3 McKitterick, Rosamond 114–15 measure, principle of 4, 23–34, 39–40, 44n.90, 68–70, 78–9 Meir ben Elijah 3–4, 203–4 Melrose Chronicle 126–9, 198–9, 223 Metalogicon. See John of Salisbury Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester 133–4 Middle English. See also multilingualism 3–6, 12–14, 21, 33n.44, 131–6, 162, 176–7, 176n.9, 201, 213–14, 220–1, 226 Middleton, Anne 112 Milton, John, Paradise Lost 213–14 Mongols 156 Morse, Ruth 62 multilingualism 2–4, 9–10, 12–14, 16, 19, 130–6, 162–3, 177–9, 192–5, 201, 213–14, 220–7 Mundill, Robin 78–9 Murphy, James 64–5, 87 nation and jurisdiction 14–18, 217–18 and periodization 12–14, 21

medieval formulations of 15–17, 75, 155, 197–8 modern nation-state 103 nationalism. See also nation 3n.13, 131–2, 175n.5, 178–9, 204–5 and poetry 177–8 natural law 148–51, 156–7, 164–5, 167, 171–4 natura naturans 172 natura naturata 172 New Historicism 21 Newman, Barbara 152 Newman, Jonathan 43–4, 47, 50 Nichols, Stephen 153, 160–1 Nisse, Ruth 156 Norman Conquest 9–10, 108–9 Normandy 27, 73–5, 96n.116, 108–9, 118–22, 125n.117, 158n.80, 160, 196, 222, 224–6 occasional poetry. See historical verse Occitan 221–2 On the Laws and Customs of England (De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae). See Henry de Bracton Opusculum de nobili Simone de Monteforti. See also Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester (d. 1265) 198–9 Order of St. Thomas of Acre. See also Acre; Becket, Thomas 175–6 original sin. See Paradise, expulsion from Orléans 5, 24–7, 31n.38, 52–6, 65–6, 87–8, 191–2 Osney Chronicle 202–3 Otter, Monika 107–8 Oxford Council (1215) 127–8 Oxford Council (1222) 143, 154–5 Oxford Franciscans. See Franciscans, Oxford; Grosseteste, Robert; Marsh, Adam Oxford University. See universities Outremer. See Holy Land Ovid 4–5, 40, 54n.124, 145n.22, 181–3, 188–9 pagan authors. See auctores Painted Chamber, Westminster 175–6 Pais aus Englois. See also Chartre de la pais aus Englois 221, 223–6 papacy, nature of authority 66–70, 75–84, 96–7, 113–17, 145–53, 195–7 Paradise, expulsion from. See also Grosseteste, Robert, Château d’Amour 156–7, 162–73 Paris, University of. See universities parliament 3–4, 6, 18, 21, 102–3, 128–9, 131–2, 134–6, 176–7, 180, 196–8, 207, 224–5 “Parti de mal.” See also crusade song 192–3

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 pastoral care. See also Grosseteste, Robert 138, 140–53, 160–2 patria 25–6, 50, 187–8 Peraldus, William, Summa de vitiis et virtutibus 162–3 Percy, Thomas 63n.11, 214n.157, 220n.12, 221 Peter Aigueblanche, bishop of Hereford 198–9, 201n.121 Peter de Roches, bishop of Winchester 92–3 Peter the Chanter 83, 90–1 Petitio baronum 15–16, 200, 202 Philip Augustus, king of France 119–20, 155 Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay, History of the Albigensian Crusade 195n.90 Piers Plowman 9–11, 162, 172n.129 plaint. See historical verse; lament (genre) Planctus super episcopis 92–3, 193–4 Plato. See platonism platonism 39–40 and allegory 37, 39–40 and Pseudo-Dionysian corpus 20, 148–52 Poetria nova. See Geoffrey of Vinsauf poetics figures and tropes: abusio (catachresis) 52 amplification 74 anaphora 57n.132, 67, 134 apostrophe 70–1, 73–5, 96n.116 coniuntio 67 descriptio 65–8, 77, 87, 141 diminutio 77 distributio 71–3, 77, 95–6 licentia 77 metonymy 67, 121–2, 135–6 prosopopoeia 40, 43–4, 50, 122 sermocinatio 77 synecdoche 32, 40, 204–5, 209 meters and forms: accentual 134–6 dactylic hexameters 19, 28, 68, 79–80, 185, 212–13 elegiacs 38–9, 66–7, 107, 122n.103, 141–2 goliardic 11, 126–7, 133, 205–6 leonines 212–13 macaronic poetry 132–6 octosyllabic couplets 163–73 prosimetrum 185, 189–92 quatrains 132–3, 223–5 rhyme 11, 126–8, 132–6, 192, 205–6 Poitou 119–20, 222, 225–6 Policraticus. See John of Salisbury Pontigny, Abbey of 29–30, 56–9 political poetry. See historical verse; lament (genre) positive law 156–7, 164–5, 172–3

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praeexercitamina. See grammar prosopopoeia. See poetics, figures and tropes Prester John 112, 118–19, 122–3 Priscian 5, 38, 69 Provisions of Oxford (1258) 9–10, 118, 125–6, 131–6, 196–9, 207–9 Pseudo-Dionysius. See Grosseteste, Robert Quadripartitus 22–3, 109–10, 112 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 33n.44, 64–5 quo warranto 180 Radaelli, Anna 192–3 Ralph of Caen, Gesta Tancredi 189–90 Ralph of Dunstable, Life of St. Alban 106–7 rhetoric, discipline of. See also grammar 4–5, 19–21, 23, 28–9, 33–8, 40, 47–8, 60–8, 74–7, 87–8, 173–4, 188–9, 194 Rhetorica ad Herennium 47–50, 52n.116, 61–2, 65–6, 68, 76–7 Rhineland 210, 223 Rich, Edmund. See Edmund of Abingdon, archbishop of Canterbury Richard of Cornwall 176, 220, 223 Richard I, king of England as crusader 96, 175n.1, 191n.75, 199–200, 222 coronation 180 Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s lamentation for 70–1, 73–5, 85–6, 141 in the Leges Anglorum Londoniis Collectae 118–24 Richard de Wyche, bishop of Chichester 138 “Richard of Almaigne” 220–3 Richardson, H. G. 203 Riley-Smith, Jonathan 185–6 Ripoll Monastery 189–90 Revard, Carter 217–21 Reynolds, Susan 15–17 Reynolds, Suzanne 37 Rievaulx Abbey. See Matthew of Rievaulx Robert of Fulham (or Foleham) 131–2 Robert of Gloucester. See Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester Robert of Reims, Historia Iherosolimitana 178n.21, 184–9 Roger de Clifford 201–2 Roger de Leybourne 202–3 Roger of Howden (alias Hoveden) 191–2 Roger of Wendover 81n.67, 101, 104–8, 110–11, 118, 127n.123 romance 3–4, 21, 100, 112, 152, 156–7, 169, 175–6, 200, 215 Roman law. See civil law Roman republic 24–6, 52–4, 188–9

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Rouen. See also Normandy 119–22 Runnymede 100–2, 110n.47, 125–8 Saint-Germer-de-Fly Abbey 181 Saladin 190–1 sanctuary 170 Santa Maria de Ripoll Monastery. See Ripoll Monastery Saracens, representation of 66n.29, 117, 178–9, 189–94 satire 23–4, 26–7, 29–30, 33, 35–9, 42–50, 92–3, 152, 213–14, 220–7 Saul, biblical king 91–2 “The Sayings of the Four Philosophers” (also “De Provisione Oxonie”) 135–6 Scase, Wendy 12–14 Second Barons’ War 10–16, 19–21, 175–81, 196–215, 218, 220–6 Second Crusade 190–1, 199–200 Seneschausy 161 serfs. See villein status Sharington, Olive 99–100 Sharington, William 99 Sicilian Business 130–1, 196–7 Simon, abbot of St. Albans Abbey (d. 1183) 38n.66, 106–7 Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester (d. 1218). See also Albigensian Crusade 110, 195–6 Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester (d. 1265) 18–21, 139–40, 150–1, 153–5, 157–63, 175–8, 182–3, 195–6, 198–215, 220–1, 225–6 simony 77–9 sirventes. See also satire; troubadours 212–13, 221–3 Smalley, Beryl 23, 52–3 Song of Lewes 11–16, 151–2, 204–14, 221 “Song of the Barons” 201–5 “Song of the Church.” See also lament (genre) 130–2, 193–4, 196–7 South English Legendary 132, 176–7, 176n.9, 195n.90 Southern, Richard 148n.37, 162–3, 171–2 Stacey, Robert 179–80, 199–200 St. Alban 106–8 St. Albans Abbey. See Matthew Paris; Roger of Wendover St. Amphibalus 106–7 St. Benet, Holme, chronicle of 175n.3, 198–9 statute books 19, 124–5 Statute of Merton (1236) 158n.81 Stein, Robert M. 16 Stephen of Blois, king of England 26, 42–3, 43n.86, 109–10 St. George 175–6

St. Paul’s Cathedral. See London Stubbs, William 102–3 Symes, Carol 178–9, 183, 194–5, 201 Talbot, Mathilda Theresa 100 Talbot, William Henry Fox 99–100 Tancred 189 Taylor, Andrew 3n.12, 213–14 Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. See Grosseteste, Robert Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury 28, 38n.67, 43–4 Thierry of Chartres 35–7, 40 Third Crusade 85–6, 96, 175–6, 179–80, 190–3, 195–6, 199–200 Third Lateran Council 143–4 Thomas, Hugh 28–9 Throop, Susanna 209–10 Tierney, Brian 172 time out of mind 180 Toulouse 119–20 trial by combat 166 troubadours 195n.90, 221–2 Turner, Ralph 85–6 Turville-Petre, Thorlac 177 typology 24–5, 46, 150–2, 156, 178, 187–9, 193–4, 209–10 tyranny. See also kingship, nature of authority; liberty 43–6, 50–8, 80–1, 139–40, 150–1, 189–91, 209–10 Ullman, Walter 70, 112–13, 118–19 Ulpian. See also civil law; Corpus iuris civilis 45nn.92–3, 47–8 Ulysses 66–7, 141 universities 23, 106n.29 Bologna 78, 87–8 Cambridge 139–40 Oxford 139–40, 142–3, 200, 204–5 Paris 9, 38–9, 41, 52n.117, 83, 90–1, 139–40, 142–3, 146n.28 Urban II, pope. See also First Crusade 178, 184–9, 209–10 usury 153–6 Vie de Saint Thomas de Canterbury. See Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence Vincent, Nicholas 100–1, 123n.109 villein status. See also free status 168–9 Virgil 4–5, 25–6, 54n.124, 182n.32 Virgin Mary 162, 166–7, 169–73, 175 “Vulneratur karitas, amor aegrotatur” 132–3 Wace 2–3, 132 Walter, Hubert, archbishop of Canterbury 81–2

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 Walter of Châtillon 192n.78, 213–14 Walter of Henley 161 Walter of Oxford, archdeacon of Lincoln 113 Ward, John. O. 35–6 Waverley annals 94 Welsh Marches 170–1 Whig historiography. See also constitutionalism 3–4, 101–4, 126n.122 Whitehead, Christiania 169–70 widows 99, 130–1, 140, 157–61, 188–9, 200n.111 Wilkinson, Louise 162–3 William I, king of England 108–9, 113, 185 William II, king of England 108–9 William de Vere, bishop of Hereford 142–3 William de Raleigh 24n.8, 145n.24 William de Ste Mère-Église, bishop of London 84–6, 92–3, 95

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William of Canterbury, Miracula S. Thomae 24–6, 53–4 William of Conches 34n.50 William of St. Albans, Passio Sancti Albani 106–7 William of Winchester 2–3 William of Wrotham 85n.79 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn 161 Woods, Marjorie Curry 61–2, 65, 69 World War II 99n.3, 100, 102–3 Wright, Thomas. See also antiquarians 63–4, 177, 221 Wulfstan, archbishop of York (d. 1023) 108–9, 117 Wykes, Thomas 203–4 Zacharias, pope (d. 752). See also Leges Anglorum Londoniis Collectae 113–17 zeal 190–1, 195–6, 203–4, 208–12