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Monarchy and Church
Monarchy and Church; Part 5

Monarchy and Church; Part 5

The provocation was not long in coming. Becket became Archbishop in 1162. In 1163 a cleric committed a particularly atrocious murder, but had been dismissed from an ecclesiastical court almost unpunished (He was ordered to abstain from the Sacrament for two years). Henry, angry at this gross failure of justice, required that the clergy should obey the "customs of the realm". To this Becket verbally agreed, but as the "customs" were not very certain, a commission was appointed to draw them up. This commission produced the celebrated Constitutions of Clarendon. Some old rules were repeated; clerics were not.to leave the king's realm without his leave, and appeals were not to be taken to Rome, but to be heard before the king: the agreement made between Henry I and Anselm about investitures and homage was re-enacted: a new order was made that villeins might not enter the service of the Church without leave of their lords. But the gist of the matter was that clerics who had committed crimes - "criminous clerks" - having been tried in the ecclesiastical courts and degraded from their orders (as they would be, if found guilty), should be then handed over to the king's courts for sentence. There was no idea of the king's courts sentencing a clerk; having been degraded he would be no longer a clerk but a layman.

We might think this of small consequence; we wonder why clerics should object to the royal justice, and why the king should distrust Church courts; we presume that the number of clerics who commit crimes would be very small. Such notions are misleading.

The king was in no way hostile to the Church courts as such. All he was striving for was to bring all criminals alike under the ordinary law, and to destroy all exemptions. But there was strong reason why the Church courts should not deal with crimes. They had no power of life and death. Their punishments were limited to ordering penances, which, however severe, could not meet cases of murder. The result was an inequality of justice. A layman who murdered was hanged; a cleric was merely degraded and put to penance. Again, we are led to wonder why churchmen, who at this time especially were anxious to purify and raise their order, should desire to protect their guilty members. The explanation lies in the same desire which we have noticed before: to sever their order from the lay world, and exalt it by the severance. If a cleric were degraded from his orders, this, they held, should be punishment enough. If he were submitted to the ordinary courts, it would be an admission that he was no better than an ordinary man, and he would be punished twice for the same offence.

Monarchy and Church; Part 5

Chronology