OCR Text |
Show persons are best punished by those who have intimate knowledge of the merits of the parties rebuked the Bishop of Chichester for appealing to Canterbury: ‘That disputes within your concerned’ He jurisdiction find their way to us is a sign of weakness or negligence. Everything depended, in fact, on whether the people concerned placed the creation of a harmonious society above the logical pursuit of rights. This was particularly true in the case of crimi nous clerks, over which the king and Becket came to grief. Everyone in positions of authority in society had an- interest in the preservation of law and order - the Church, perhaps, most of all, since it was most vulnerable to a general increase in lawlessness, of the kind which confronted Henry Il in the first few years of his reign. The clerical profession, if so it can be called, had expanded enormously in the previous century. Perhaps one in fifty people could make some claim to be considered in orders. And of these about one in six could expec t to get ‘Into trouble with the law. Many were not clergy in any but a legal sense. Often they took minor orders to get an education, and then entered the service of lay masters: they never intended to be ordained priest. Many Clerks in secular service lived like laymen, and then married. And the parish priests, even, often lived like peasants - ‘their houses and hovels', as Giraldus Cambrensis put it, ‘filled with bossy mistresses, creaking cradles, newborn babes and squawking brats’. Parsons often did week-work for the local lord, in exchange for their crofts; they usually had a double share in the communal holding, and maintained thy parish boar, bull, ram and stallion. ; At this level, a good deal of crime among clerics was inevitable. Why should they have the right to trial by a separate and much less severe legal system? It was a fact that the Church had been much more successful in asserting the rights claimed by the reformers, than in imposing the higher standards and discipline on the clergy. Indeed, the more ardent for the first, the more they tended to ignore the latter. Becket was a case in point. As archbishop he took no interest in pastoral work, and never showed much enthusiasm for the creation of a godly clergy. Efforts to force clerks to wear clerical dress, or to forswear marriage and concubines, were unsuccessful. The church courts worked badly in many ways, especially in serious cases, owing to what Archbishop Theodore called 'the subtlety of the laws and the canons’. Henry Il reluctantly allowed the Church to deal, for instance, with the case of Archdeacon Osbert of York, accused of poisoning his archbishop. He regretted it both in principle and in practice. After a year of delays and argument, no verdict was reached and the case was appealed to Rome. The archdeacon was eventually deprived and unfrocked, but otherwise unpunished and twenty years later he was still claiming the judgment was improper. So far as we can judge he was almost certainly guilty. The Becket episode really began when Henry arrived back in England in 1163 and was told that more than a hundred murders had been committed by clerks since his coronation on 1157. There were, too, vast numbers of cases of clerical theft and robbery with violence. Henry might have had more sympathy with Becket's absolutist claims if Becket had shown better sense in running the church courts. But often their verdicts seemed intolerable to a king dedicated to stamping out lawlessness. A canon of Bedford had killed a knight and then, in open court, furiously abused the judge, a local sheriff: the offence was doubly capital, yet Becket merely had the man banished. Again, a Worcestershire clerk had seduced a girl, then murdered her father; Becket had the clerk branded. This was open to four objections: it was inadequate: it was a sentence unknown to canon law; it was, indeed, a usurpation of royal authority; and it flatly contradicted Becket's own argument that clerks should not suffer mutilation, normal in royal courts, ‘lest in man the image of God be deformed’. At a conference with the king to discuss the whole problem of bringing justice to bear on Clerical offenders, Becket argued that degradation, deprivation of orders and loss of privileged status was enough. He put the case for a separate caste: 'The clergy, by reason of their orders and distinctive office. have Christ alone as King. . . . and since they are not under secular kings, but under their own king, the King of Heaven, they should be ruled by their own law; and if they are transgressors they should be punished by their own law, which had its own means of coercion.’ When the conflict became open, Becket took up a still 52 |