A series devoted to notable English civilians ought to make room for at least one student of the law whose subsequent career was spent outside the academy and outside the law courts. That attention is particularly appropriate if the candidate made regular use of his training in law. The life of the English church and nation has been touched in many ways by the contributions of law graduates who made ‘conventional’ careers – rising to become deans or bishops or serving in more humble positions. It is quite remarkable how many of them there have been over the centuries. Mediaeval lawyers seem actually to have formed the majority of the graduates who became deans, archdeacons and residentiary canons in English cathedrals, even in some of the smaller dioceses.Footnote 1 At Chichester, for example, the modern edition of Le Neve's Fasti shows that fully twenty-one of the twenty-nine university graduates who qualified as members of the cathedral chapter during the fifteenth century were lawyers by training.Footnote 2 At Salisbury Cathedral, a slightly larger establishment, the equivalent figure for the same period is fifty-three lawyers as against twenty-one theologians and others.Footnote 3 For the diocese of Hereford, from which the man whose career is the subject of this note came, during the same period fully twenty of the holders of dignities came to them equipped with a law degree, whereas only fourteen held degrees in theology or some other subject.Footnote 4
If the preponderance of lawyers in these numbers attracts the immediate interest of modern ecclesiastical lawyers, it cannot fully satisfy a natural curiosity about the careers of these men. We rarely know much about the details involved. Did they lose contact with the law, as modern graduates often lose touch with the subject they read at university? Or did they carry that learning into their careers, as many (though not all) modern law graduates do if they enter the world of commerce or manufacture? In other words, can we tell whether the graduates made use of the Church's law in performing duties outside strictly legal work? Did it matter?
Positive answers are suggested by the career of the man under consideration here: Richard Rudhale, Archdeacon of Hereford from 1446 to 1476. He was not a practising advocate or judge, and he left no treatise or other scholarly writing. However, the evidence shows that he brought legal knowledge to bear on several aspects of the religious life of the land, just as surely as a modern law graduate who spends his career in industry or commerce may contribute meaningfully to England's economy or political life.Footnote 5 As is often true today, the study of the law provided him with a leg up.
RUDHALE'S LIFE AND CAREER
Rudhale first appearance in the historical record comes from the same place in which he ended his life – Hereford Cathedral. From a local family resident near Ross-on-Wye, Rudhale was ordained acolyte by Bishop Thomas Spofford in December 1434.Footnote 6 At the time he was a student in the law faculty at Oxford, and he must already have been marked out for a successful career. He had received a degree as bachelor of canon and civil law by 1435,Footnote 7 having been created apostolic and imperial notary public the preceding year.Footnote 8 Rudhale then chose to take part in what was already something close to an English tradition, one that would only grow over the next two centuries: he crossed the Channel to continue academic study of law at the University of Padua.Footnote 9 There he incepted as Doctor of Decrees (that is, canon law) in 1443.Footnote 10 He returned to England and was admitted as an advocate in the Court of Arches in London later that same year, but this must have been more a matter of form and future choice only, for he was also installed as canon treasurer of Hereford Cathedral. He succeeded to the archdeaconry of Hereford in 1446.Footnote 11
He remained in that position for the rest of his life, all the while accumulating a succession of lucrative benefices and other offices which today seem bewildering in their amplitude but which were then quite normal parts of the career of a successful clergyman.Footnote 12 From 1458 until his death in 1476, for example, he served as a sub-collector of the papal camera, charged with administration of part of the revenues derived from English dioceses.Footnote 13 At the same time he acted as warden of St Mary's chantry in the church at Newton-in-the-Isle in the Diocese of Ely, and several times he acted as vicar-general in spirituals to his bishop, an office that brought him into contact with legal questions.Footnote 14
Rudhale advanced no further than the office of archdeacon, but for many years he led an obviously busy and apparently useful life in the diocese. Appropriately (and at his own request), he was buried in the cathedral church within the quire, although today the only physical monument left to preserve his memory is an impressive brass on the wall of the south-east transept.Footnote 15
RUDHALE'S LAW BOOKS
What sets Rudhale apart from many of his contemporaries is the collection of works on both canon and civil law that he annotated and ultimately gave to the cathedral library. The books – at least nine of them – are still there.Footnote 16 During his lifetime, he made regular use of them, and the annotations he made in them demonstrate the continuing utility of Roman and canon law for a career spent outside the consistory courts. They are not the notes of a student: he may have acquired some of these volumes as a student in Padua and brought them back home with him, but his notes are those of an archdeacon fully involved in the life of the church in Hereford. Four features of these books and his annotations in them are of particular interest for understanding the history of the profession of ecclesiastical law in England.
First, the books include a judicious selection of the old and the new, including both established works of authority and the most recent works from Rudhale's own time. One of the former is a thirteenth-century copy of the Summa Codicis by Azo of Bologna (c 1150–1230), purchased by Rudhale as a student in 1441.Footnote 17 Remembered by jurists through centuries from the tag ‘Chi non ha Azzo non vada al palazzo’ (roughly ‘Don't go to court without a copy of Azo’), and the likely source of some of the civilian learning found in the English treatise now known as Bracton,Footnote 18 Azo's commentary was just the sort of thing one might buy as a student and later carry into practice. It was a standard source of learning. One of the latter, the new type of juristic literature, is the Singularia in causis criminalibus of Ludovicus Pontanus (c 1409–1439), also known as Romanus.Footnote 19 The author was part of the later mediaeval movement which remained faithful to Bartolist traditions even while enlarging their scope. Their effort was designed to meet criticism that the jurists were somehow ‘out of touch’ with society's needs.Footnote 20 The work's title accurately describes the miscellaneous nature of the information found in it, but the many works written (and later published) under similar titles proved useful for raising and solving many practical legal problems not adequately covered in the older literature.Footnote 21 Rudhale was one among many such users.
Second, much of Rudhale's attention (at least as shown in his annotations) centred around matters that came his way as archdeacon. He was enough of a ‘theorist’ in them to take note that the kings of both France and England were not subject to the commands of the Roman emperor,Footnote 22 but most of his marginal comments concerned practical questions of ecclesiastical administration. He signalled the relevance of a treatment of the law of prescription in Innocent IV's commentary on the Decretals, for example, as being of particular relevance to the rights of archdeacons.Footnote 23 As he saw it, Innocent's treatment stood ‘pro iure archidiaconali’. In dealing with the related theme of custom's force in canon law it was probably no accident that another of his marginal notes made reference to the commentary of Guido de Baysio (d 1313), commonly known as ‘Archidiaconus’.Footnote 24 And many of the subjects about which Rudhale chose to comment were those that would naturally have come before an archdeacon, as, for example, the question of when a cleric could be deprived of his benefice for having committed a crime or other act of clerical irregularity.Footnote 25
Third, Rudhale's annotations give repeated evidence of that hardy though oft-lamented feature of English church life: discord within cathedral chapters. Legal argument often came into these quarrels. Since Rudhale was not a man to let an injury or slight to his position as Archdeacon of Hereford pass without protest, he used the canonical manuscripts he owned to buttress his position. In the margins of one of them we see him calling attention to the opinion of Innocent IV on a point of evidence law. It was, he recorded, useful ‘against Pede’, meaning Richard Pede, Dean of Hereford between 1463 and 1481.Footnote 26 In the margin of another manuscript, he cited the opinion of Johannes Monachus (1250–1313) on a text from the Liber sextus as standing ‘against Master Grene and for Richard Rudhale’.Footnote 27 Grene was his predecessor as prebendary of Bullinghope, and the dispute dealt with Grene's pretended right to alienate some part of the property rights attached to the prebend. Less self-interested perhaps, but no less combative in spirit, was Rudhale's notation, placed besides one of the texts in Justinian's Institutes, that this authority was directly opposed to one of the opinions of Richard Rotherham, the man who had held a canonry in the cathedral just prior to Rudhale's arrival to take up the same office.Footnote 28 Unfortunately, he did not record what specific interests were at stake.
Fourth, and more pleasant for a modern student of ecclesiastical law to contemplate, Rudhale's annotations show how well he had mastered one of the great techniques of the Schools, using it to good effect in administering his archdeaconry. This was the ability to take a text from either Roman or canon law and reason from a principle discerned within it in order to determine a question that could never have occurred to the author of the text. It was a technique taught in the Schools, and a necessary one if the ancient texts were to serve current needs. The texts in the Decretals and the Digest could not be changed, but the understanding of their potential application might be widened. One example among many must suffice. The question was whether an erroneous lifting of a sentence of excommunication was effective to relieve the person from attendant canonical penalties. It was not simply a theoretical question, because, even if it were unjust, reversing the absolution would ordinarily require having recourse to the judge who had granted it, and circumstances might make this difficult. Rudhale did not find the answer to his question within the title on excommunication in the Gregorian Decretals (X 5.39.1–60). He found it within the Roman law of precarium. A title in the Digest dealt with the subject – roughly speaking the revocable delivery of possession of a chattel – and one text within it (Dig 43.26.22) seemed to hold that, even if the delivery were made in error (but not through fraud), the possessor nevertheless held a legally recognised property right in the chattel, one entitling him to legal protection by interdict. The same underlying principle, it seemed to Rudhale, should apply to a grant of absolution from a previous sentence of excommunication.Footnote 29 The grant stood until reversed. Obviously, here was a man for whom legal training had not been a waste.
