The Case of William of Merchingley

The accusation by Anabella, Adam Tucke’s sister-in-law, to appeal William, in other words to call for his prosecution, was compelled (the jury reports) by her husband, Henry, Adam’s brother or stepbrother. With the help and procuration of his mother, Henry and his friend Walter Tanner had been struggling for a while to have William removed from his post as vicar of St Andrew’s Church. The jurors reported that Henry and Walter’s dissatisfaction with William as vicar centered on his greed. After his installation, William raised the rents for the chapel’s tithes, representing it as debts due.Footnote ³ The removal of an undesirable chaplain was no easy task for a layman and this was complicated by the fact that William was from a family of repute. His father was Thomas of Merchingley, keeper of the king’s dies at the royal mint in Newcastle for much of the 1240s and 1250s, as well as bailiff of the city between 1240 and 1251.Footnote ⁴ Hugh of Merchingley, either a brother or a cousin to William, was also a city bailiff during the 1270s (1272–1274 and 1277–1279).Footnote ⁵ How do you oust a clergyman from one of the city’s elite families? Henry recognized an opportunity in the natural death of his brother: undoubtedly, the surest way to have William removed from the parish was to pin Adam’s “murder” on him.Footnote ⁶ Luck was on the side of the accusers. Since Magna Carta, no one was to be imprisoned on the appeal of a woman unless it was for the death of her husband; accordingly, both the sheriff and the jailer should have intervened to prevent William’s incarceration—the appellor was the victim’s sister-in-law, not wife—but they did not.Footnote ⁷

Whether this version of events is what actually transpired is unclear and unknowable. Records of medieval inquests, like modern trial records, contain countless self-serving, fabricated narratives designed to sway jurors’ opinions. There is rarely any means to ascertain their veracity, but at the very least we can expect that defendants designed their stories to sound credible to a sympathetic group of medieval jurors and justices. The surviving records tell us little about the inquest proceedings. Held at the New Gate jail in Newcastle, just down the road from St Andrew’s church, Annabella would not have had far to go to attend. But did authorities even notify her that the inquest was going to take place? Or did jurors base their judgment entirely on William’s side of the story? The sheriff forwarded on to the Crown the inquest’s verdict in William’s favor and on 9 January 1289 the king issued orders to release William on bail, after he had spent somewhere between two and three months incarcerated.Footnote ⁸

William’s story, if we are to believe its main outline, is not unique. Violence, in its many forms, functioned as a means of communication in which the laity expressed its discontent with the church and its vast army of clergy. Physical violence is how some parishioners articulated their resentment about the introduction of new traditions, or the violation of older ones, within their parishes. Assault signaled resistance to a court summons, or refusal to pay outstanding tithes or mortuaries. And when staged at the right time, violence might bring the church’s excommunication procedures to a grinding halt.Footnote ⁹ Violence might also be directed against land: laymen who feared ecclesiastical encroachment used riot and unjust disseisin (the unlawful dispossession of property) as a “symbolic assertion of lay rights over matters the Church claimed for its own.”Footnote ¹⁰ Nor were clerical symbols of masculinity exempt from violence: laymen ridiculed and emasculated their clerical rivals by the cutting of vestment sleeves, shaving of tonsures, and docking of their horses’ tails.Footnote ¹¹ What is surprising about William’s case, then, is the form in which violence was carried out: a lawsuit, whose intention was at the very least to remove the cleric from office, confine him, and subject him to bodily privation.

Historians have long recognized that men and women in medieval England used laws in ways that lawmakers never intended. Rather, as Shannon McSheffrey writes, individuals exploited “the power of governing authorities and their laws to negotiate their lives.”Footnote ¹² The willingness of laypeople to employ baseless lawsuits as a form of intimidation, often with the goal of forcing an out-of-court settlement, was a normal part of the legal landscape of thirteenth-century England.Footnote ¹³ Laypeople targeted other laypeople, but suing a member of the clergy not only seems brazen for a layperson, but one would think such a bold reversal of the social hierarchy would not easily be facilitated by the king’s judicial system. Even so, that is exactly what laypeople did in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Historians have regarded this phenomenon—laypeople using the law as a weapon against members of the clergy—as an outgrowth of the virulent anticlericalism that precipitated the Reformation. Admittedly, the model is not the same as what we see in the thirteenth century. Malicious accusations against clergy in that period conformed to a prototype: when the lax moral behavior of a local clergyman disturbed his community, they reported him to the authorities as a rapist (even if the relationship in which he was involved was emphatically consensual). Studies by Robin Storey, Edward Powell, and Caroline Dunn all draw this conclusion.Footnote ¹⁴ Their work builds on contemporary outrage. In its gravamina, the Canterbury Convocation of 1421 maintained that particular localities regularly accused clergymen of the rape of women (raptu mulierum) “often without any reason, but out of premeditated malice.” The prelates suspected the motivation was financial: grasping sheriffs and bailiffs charged clergymen inflated sums for bail because they knew the church would pay it.Footnote ¹⁵ In their statistical analyses, Storey, Powell, and Dunn discovered that clergymen accounted for anywhere between 30 to 70 percent of plaintiffs in rape indictments.Footnote ¹⁶ Of course, this finding is not entirely straightforward: during the fifteenth century, literate (or quasi-literate) laymen often claimed “benefit of clergy.” If they passed the reading test (to prove that they were members of the clergy), and were dutifully collected by an “ordinary”—a bishop’s official with powers to execute the law—they could be tried as “clergymen” in a church court for their crimes.Footnote ¹⁷ This influx of clerical “pretenders” falsely swelled the ranks of the clergy, making it impossible to gauge accurately the numbers of false accusations impelled by anticlericalism.

The malicious indictment of William of Merchingley undermines the traditional narrative that false suits against the clergy were a weapon only of the late medieval period and specifically a product of the era’s potent anticlericalism. Because studies of false accusations levied against clergymen cluster in the fifteenth century, it seems likely that they have been misinterpreted through the lens of the coming Reformation. What the evidence of the inquests de odio et atia reveals is a much longer history of lay-clerical disputes, in which discontented individuals and communities used malicious accusations as early as the thirteenth century. A false accusation of homicide was a much more powerful weapon than one of raptus because of the implications for pre-trial detention. Thirteenth-century English courts automatically denied bail to those accused of homicide; this was not true for those accused of raptus in the fifteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸ Even a clergyman’s protected status could not save him from pre-trial detention. Metaphorically speaking, a malicious accusation of homicide packed a much greater punch. As such, it also fulfilled a different purpose. Storey, Powell, and Dunn see that fabricating an accusation of raptus held a hypocritical clergyman accountable for his sexual misconduct and sent a forceful message to the church about the quality of the role models it installed in parish communities. Thirteenth-century sham accusations of homicide, on the other hand, seem to have been better suited to harass those who made lay lives difficult.

What changed in the thirteenth century to provoke this tension between laity and clergy? The early medieval church focused its disciplinary gaze principally upon the moral behavior of the regular clergy. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the church cast a broader salvatory net, leading to what Jo Ann McNamara has referred to as the “monasticization” of the clergy. This led to heightened expectations for lay morality, articulated in new guidelines for lay participation announced at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), and created the momentum behind the proliferation of confessors’ manuals and guides for parish priests.Footnote ¹⁹ In England, the development of both consistory courts and episcopal visitations over the course of the second half of the thirteenth century was part and parcel of this broader pastoral reform movement. For many, this intrusive presence and keen regulation was a new and unwelcome feature of their lives.Footnote ²⁰ As R. H. Helmholz has written, the emergent cadre of canon lawyers maintained that “the church had a right to correct all sinful behaviour—an Open Sesame for virtually unlimited ecclesiastical jurisdiction.” Predictably, “that claim was resisted virtually everywhere.”Footnote ²¹ Ex officio business—dealing chiefly with sexual transgressions—especially provoked defiance, as it exposed an individual’s “messy reality” for censure by the church courts and public scrutiny by one’s own community.Footnote ²² That some individuals chose to lash out against the clergy is not surprising. That they did so through malicious accusations of homicide requires further interrogation. If deciding to wield such a powerful weapon was a drastic response to an untenable situation, what were the circumstances that drove English laypeople to this course of action?

Inquests de odio et atia: Process and Records

A fictitious accusation of homicide was a formidable weapon and one that was open to manipulation. Medieval England’s criminal justice system maintained low evidentiary standards when it came to the accusation process.Footnote ²³ For an appeal, one of the victim’s kinsmen needed to lodge a formal accusation with the sheriff or the coroner, then proceed to reassert these charges, in the same format, in the same order, at a series of county courts before the formal trial at the eyre.Footnote ²⁴ The appellor was supposed to be an eyewitness to the homicide: as the legal treatise Bracton expresses it, “he must also speak of his own sight and hearing.”Footnote ²⁵ As a part of this process, the appellor might also have to provide sureties or an oath to generate confidence that he or she would continue to pursue the appeal until trial, as failure to appear at even one county court would derail the process. Showing up, rather than evidence, set the bar for success.Footnote ²⁶

The much easier, less financially risky, and abundantly more popular route for accusation was indictment, that is, prosecution at the king’s suit based on information concerning a homicide that had come to the ears of jurors of presentment, bailiffs, or sheriffs, and was pursued accordingly. How exactly that process proceeded once again is hidden in the extant records. Sometimes a coroner’s inquest supplied the necessary information. Presumably, victims or their families reported offenses to local elites or royal officials rather than appealing, relieving themselves of the burden of having to attend the county courts.Footnote ²⁷ The inquests de odio et atia offer little insight into this process; they merely describe instances in which one person “procured” the indictment of another (demonstrating that jurors recognized just how easy it was to do so). Otherwise, the process was identical to that of appeals: jurors of presentment had no defined burden of proof to meet before incarcerating the accused. Thus accusing someone of homicide and having that person removed from society until trial—a period that might last for four or five years—was a straightforward process. And because an inquest de odio et atia was open only to those with access to cash reserves, there was a good chance that the accused would remain in prison for the duration.

Given the ease of accusation, it is no wonder the Crown believed it vital to develop the inquest of hate and spite. This class of documents, housed in Chancery 144 at The National Archives, is voluminous: it includes forty boxes, mostly organized by year.Footnote ²⁸ The earliest writ dates to 1236, the latest to 1330, although the greatest concentration would seem to be for the years 1250 to 1300.Footnote ²⁹ Each case includes a writ and an inquest, penned on odds and ends of parchment sewn together, many of which cannot be read easily without digital assistance. The documents themselves are highly formulaic. Initially, inquest jurors spoke only to the nature of the “hate and spite” that provoked false accusations, but as early as 1240, justices came to expect that jurors also name the actual person responsible for the homicide.Footnote ³⁰ Sheriffs were responsible for assembling inquest juries, and the inquests themselves were held at the county court, in the presence also of the coroner.Footnote ³¹ Of course, the jury’s verdict, however confidently stated in the record of the inquest, was not definitive. A finding in favor of the defendant sent the individual home on bail until trial. The propensity of inquest juries to rule in favor of the defendant offers the distinct impression that the inquest was pro forma: inquest jurors may have believed defendants were owed bail because they had paid for an inquest. Regardless, the decision to grant bail had no bearing on the outcome of the trial.

As the above dates suggest, the inquest de odio et atia was a temporary measure, lasting roughly a century. During the early years of the fourteenth century, the exception de odio et atia, pleaded at arraignment after an appellee responded to the charges against him or her, came to be the normal process of dealing with the claim of hate and spite.Footnote ³² Pleading at bar was a more democratic process as it required no costly fees for writs or inquest. If jurors accepted the exception, the appellee was released sine die (meaning, adjournment without an appointed day to resume proceedings). If the jury rejected the exception, the appeal proceeded to trial.Footnote ³³ More important still, as Susanne Jenks observes, king’s bench plea rolls from the early fourteenth century show judges releasing those accused of homicide on bail, regardless of the statutes, suggesting that the inquest was no longer necessary.Footnote ³⁴

The records of inquests de odio et atia, then, provide a useful window into some instances in which the laity used homicide indictments as a tool of harassment against the clergy. Over the period 1255 to 1310, ninety-three of the surviving inquests named clergymen of various ranks, or their officials, as defendants in cases of homicide.Footnote ³⁵ This is obviously a modest number, roughly one or two a year. Of course, this figure cannot possibly represent total numbers of actual clergymen who suffered false accusations of homicide. Most homicide defendants could not afford the price of an inquest. Admittedly, there was no set fee. The defendant’s representative negotiated the cost of an inquest in Chancery: the price aligned with the defendant’s birth, livelihood, and access to resources. Defendants typically paid somewhere between a half mark or a mark; but Elsa de Haas has found instances in which the price of an inquest ran as high as 100s.Footnote ³⁶ If the complaints of the Canterbury Convocation are trustworthy, Chancery clerks may have seen a defendant’s clerical status as an opportunity for profit. Two scenarios seem likely in this instance: officials of the church simply refused to pay such extortionate rates for an inquest, preferring to leave accused clerics in prison until trial; or clergymen were reluctant to petition their ecclesiastical superiors because of the extortionate rates, but also because doing so would alert their superiors to their inability to manage tensions within the parish. An innocent clergyman might believe it easier to wait out the time until the next eyre, hoping to fly under the radar. Thus, we should not see malicious accusations against clergymen in the surviving inquests as the grand total, but rather as representative of the ways in which the laity transformed the law into a weapon in their conflicts with men of the cloth.

A false accusation of homicide might seem like playing with fire: even if Henry, his mother, and Walter despised William of Merchingley, surely they did not want him executed as a murderer? Yet there was little chance that would happen. At trial, William would assert his clerical status and claim benefit of clergy, thus initiating a transfer to a church court for trial and judgment. Because the church forbade clergymen from shedding blood, punishment within their courts did not include execution. Its judges preferred penitential practices grounded in the ascetic tradition: fasting, prayers, and lengthy periods of incarceration.Footnote ³⁷ Thus, even if convicted, William’s life was not in jeopardy. The one drawback is that the Crown insisted upon trial before handing a cleric over to the bishop’s ordinary, thus the accused’s status could not be used to shorten his time in pre-trial detention.Footnote ³⁸ The malicious appeal therefore extracted William both from his position and from society. If his influential family had not stepped in to assist him in the bail process, he might well have remained incarcerated until the Northumberland eyre of 1293, that is, five years later. One also suspects it unlikely he returned to his position as vicar of St Andrew’s in the interim, as being accused of murdering one’s parishioners (even if everyone suspects the accusation was bogus) makes for a tense atmosphere. Henry, his mother, and Walter were thus successful—if stripping William of his position as vicar was indeed their aim. Even if the court eventually acquitted William, it is hard to imagine that the archbishop restored him to the vicarage at St Andrew’s where he had suffered so much at the hands of the local parishioners.

Lay Uses of Homicide Accusations to Harass the Clergy

Of all church officials, summoners were the most widely despised by medieval laity. Also known as an apparitor, the summoner was not an ordained priest, but a minor member of the clergy who worked for a bishop’s or archdeacon’s court. He was also the first point of contact a sinner had with the authority of the church. His was the face of the disciplinary arm of the bishop or, as Ian Forrest describes it, he was a “highly visible manifestation of the judicial power of the church,” thus a strike against a summoner, one imagines, was a strike also against the bishop he represented.Footnote ³⁹ Not only did summoners demean sinners with their public announcements, but they helped to arrange episcopal visitations and supervised penances, including processing ahead of the half-naked, candle-bearing penitent while he or she was whipped in procession around church or marketplace.Footnote ⁴⁰ Brian Woodcock argues that to the subjects of the archbishop, summoners were “the ubiquitous symbols of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and their conduct and behaviour were no doubt largely responsible for the ill favour with which that jurisdiction came to be so frequently regarded.”Footnote ⁴¹

Physical violence against summoners in late medieval England was, as Forrest observes, “common, predictable, and organized.”Footnote ⁴² The records of inquests de odio et atia, however, demonstrate that violence might be more deliberate and insidious. In January of 1275, Henry le Somenor was arrested and detained in prison at Sherborne in Dorset for the homicide of John Guzch. At his inquest, jurors disclosed that Henry had been indicted vindictively and was not to blame for John’s murder. Of course, that does not mean they believed Henry le Somenor was entirely free of blame. His actual “crime” was doing his job. As summoner, Henry delivered court citations to those accused of sinful behavior; he also worked on behalf of plaintiffs in instance litigation, summoning defendants to court. He did this by reading the citation aloud first at the defendant’s home, and then, if necessary, up to twice more at his parish church. The church intended the process to be humiliating. As Forrest writes, “[t]he citation was meant to be heard so that it could be heeded, and summoners were often exhorted to make their pronouncements in a loud and intelligible voice when the largest number of people were present.”Footnote ⁴³ The summoner’s work thus broadcast a person’s sinful activities to a large swathe of the local population and made the sinner a subject of gossip. In Henry’s case, jurors noted that his defamers were upset at having been summoned for fornication. When John was murdered, and authorities were searching for a suspect, those who held a grudge against Henry seized the opportunity to retaliate.Footnote ⁴⁴ Luckily for Henry, his inquest was successful: he was eventually released on bail, although not until after he had spent at least three months in prison, surely with plenty of time to contemplate whether the job was worth the hassle.Footnote ⁴⁵

It is hard to imagine anything worse than having one’s sex life advertised to the entire community through public proceedings and then public penance, and yet sexual transgressions were the mainstay of the English consistory courts. An examination of one year’s proceedings from the diocese of Rochester makes the point. Of the seventy-five cases that came before the consistory court between June 1363 and May 1364, sixty-six centered on sexual indiscretions (forty-eight fornications, seventeen adulteries, and one case of brothel-keeping).Footnote ⁴⁶ Even more problematic, the church adhered to a different set of standards than did the laity. While some decretists (specialists in canon law) maintained that fornication was a crime “second in seriousness only to murder,” the laity remained dubious.Footnote ⁴⁷ Popular belief recognized the sinfulness of compound fornication (that is, sexual intercourse between an unmarried and a married partner), but held that simple fornication, in which both parties were unmarried, was “neither a sin nor a crime.” The belief was so enduring that the church took the step of formally classifying it as heresy in 1287.Footnote ⁴⁸ Summons to court was a potentially traumatic experience for medieval Christians. While rumors must already have been circulating in the community about their misbehavior, those involved surely did not want their relationship brought out into the open.

Not only did the job of summoners center on the embarrassment of individuals for momentary lapses in Christian morality, but they were also notoriously corrupt. Chaucer places popular suspicions of summoners into the mouth of the friar (the summoner’s story-telling rival), who declares: “That of a somonour may no good be sayd; … A somonour is a rennere up and doun/With mandementz [citations] for fornicacioun,/And is ybet [driven away] at every townes ende” (iii, 1281–85). The friar then proceeds to tell a tale in which a summoner threatens to have a poor and sickly widow excommunicated unless she pays him twelve pence (iii, 1573–1639). Chaucer’s summoner is a hypocrite: he is as “lecherous as a sparwe” (i, 626), who for a “quart of wyn [wine] … wolde suffer … A good felawe to have his concubyn” (i, 649–50)—even though he spends his days delivering citations to fornicators (the same kind of hypocrisy that led laymen to indict lecherous parish priests as rapists). His appearance is monstrous: his “scalled browes blake and piled berd” (i, 627), combined with a pimply, discolored face and swollen eyes, are so gruesome that children fear him. Chaucer wants us to know that the summoner is ugly inside and out. The stereotype of the summoner that appears in The Canterbury Tales is not altogether fictitious. Parishioners often suspected summoners of “inventing spiritual offences, concealing them in return for bribes, and preying upon the weakness of ordinary people.”Footnote ⁴⁹ All things considered, a malicious accusation of homicide might have seemed like the best counterattack to an unwelcome summons.

Henry le Somenor’s arrest fell in the same year as Robert le Summenur’s. Incarcerated at Oxford for the death of Henry Pynnock, Robert’s inquest of hate and spite took place in November of 1275. Inquest jurors singled out Thomas of Wilton, one of Robert’s servants, as having slain Henry. Under oath, they declared that an argument arose between the two and that Thomas took his spade and struck Henry in the back of his head, instantly killing him. Robert was not even present at the killing, yet the indicting jury chose to hold him responsible. They may have felt that because he was Thomas’s master, he bore part of the blame for not having sufficiently instructed his young charge in respectable Christian behavior. They may even have believed that Thomas was acting under Robert’s orders. Yet the inquest jury concluded that it was because Robert was the summoner for the county, and his community felt “burdened by his office,” that they chose to accuse him of the homicide.Footnote ⁵⁰

In the above situations, malicious accusations resulted from frustration over disciplinary actions. With the incarceration of Simon le Summenur of Rockland, we see the inverse: the community suspected that he had not done his job well enough when dealing with a known sex offender. Imprisoned at Norwich for the death of Andrew le Suur of Depham, Simon’s inquest held in May 1289 found that he was not guilty because Andrew had died a natural death. And yet Simon had been both appealed and indicted for his homicide. The jurors’ explanation for this double false accusation highlights how Simon’s status as a highly visible cleric may have made him a target for blackmail. After Andrew’s death, his brother Richard approached Simon and threatened to accuse him of having beaten his brother to death if he did not give him money. When Simon refused to pay up, Richard procured a malicious indictment. Simon’s clerical status was probably the impetus for the attempted extortion, based on the assumption that Simon had access to disposable cash, even though his position was one of low status and low pay: a summoner in the thirteenth century earned roughly one penny per day.Footnote ⁵¹ While Chaucer’s summoner dressed well and led a sumptuous lifestyle, in real life summoners were not good targets for get-rich-quick schemes. The jury reported that Simon was widely unpopular because of his position at Rockland Deanery where Thomas, brother of Hamo, parson of Attleburgh, had recently been indicted for multiple fornications and adulteries committed with diverse women. Thomas failed his purgation; but rather than subject him to a public spectacle of penance, Simon arranged for Thomas to donate to the church’s charitable projects. Incensed at what they perceived as favoritism and misjustice, two local men (one of whom was Richard) orchestrated the appeal: they arranged for Andrew’s wife, Maud, to appeal Simon of her husband’s “murder.”Footnote ⁵²

Summoners were not the only officers of the church who provoked malicious accusations by outraged parishioners. In 1327, when Andrew Matheu was indicted for the homicide of John Fouk, Jr, jurors claimed it was because his wife belonged to the Bloyou family. Henry Bloyou was a recent commissary for the bishop of Exeter; in this role he had convicted Baldwin of Acland of adultery. Knowing that the commissary was untouchable, Baldwin retaliated against him by procuring an indictment against Andrew, a member of his family.Footnote ⁵³ Something similar unraveled at the inquest into the 1284 death of Adam, vicar of Grinton. Brother Adam of Newsome, a lay brother at Bridlington Priory, was imprisoned at York for the homicide, although jurors confirmed that he was not responsible for the vicar’s death. They did not explain how Adam came to be accused, but they did detail the events leading up to the vicar’s death. A manservant named John Payne was furious with the vicar for having imposed penance upon him for theft and adulteries. While discussing the matter, their argument got heated, with the vicar calling John “thief” and “excommunicate,” leading to John striking Adam with a stake to the head, driving it into his brain so that he died.Footnote ⁵⁴ How this resulted in Brother Adam’s indictment remains a mystery. He may have been the vicar’s first finder (that is, the individual who discovered his corpse and raised the hue and cry). First finders were always suspect. John may have accused him of trying to cover up his own crime. In any case, the story told by the jurors clarifies just how contentious discipline could be within the parish.Footnote ⁵⁵

If indictments for fornication and adultery provoked strong reactions, so, too, did those cases revolving around marital litigation. The regulation of marriage in the post-Lateran IV period led to the courts attempting “to make some substantially intrusive inroads into the households and living arrangements of English men and women.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Conflict between an ecclesiastical vision of marriage grounded in mutual consent and marital affection, indissoluble, and sacramental in nature remained at odds with a secular perception of marriage as a business arrangement between families for the purposes of financial and dynastic security. Despite increasingly stringent supervision of matrimony, it was not in fact until after the Council of Trent (1545–63) that the church definitively won English Christians over to its perspective.Footnote ⁵⁷ The indictment of Robert of Newington, chaplain to St Mary in Bristol, in August of 1272 provides insight into communal antipathy to ecclesiastical interference in marriage. It is a stark reminder that some communities resented the church’s “heavy-handed” approach.Footnote ⁵⁸ Arrested and detained at Gloucester for the homicide of John, son of John Ayllard, Robert blamed malice for his indictment, a claim that jurors chose to uphold. Unexpectedly, inquest jurors declined to specify whose hate and spite led to the indictment, advancing the impression that the sentiment was widely held within the community. Jurors presented a history of bad feelings, dating back to the time when Robert was the deaconFootnote ⁵⁹ of Bristol and had impeded the nuptials between the victim’s unnamed parents by taking the father’s side.Footnote ⁶⁰ Exactly when this took place is unclear, although the sense that the grievance was still fresh (rather than long since forgotten and forgiven) implies that it may not have been long before 1268.Footnote ⁶¹ Presumably, John’s mother sued his father in the consistory court (at Worcester) to establish the existence of a valid marriage between them and Robert intervened. Failure of the suit would have left John’s mother single, working to support an illegitimate child, a burden to her family and community. The death of young John, as we are informed, from a bloody flux, may have reopened the wound, as the community sympathized with the grieving mother and sought revenge on her behalf.Footnote ⁶²

Reprisal against a clergyman for fulfilling the expectations of his job also led to the arrest and imprisonment of William of Newcastle at Lincoln in 1250, for not one but two deaths: Walter, son of Thomas, and Ralph Pudding. Their respective wives were responsible for the appeal. Jurors explained that William had acted as procuratorFootnote ⁶³ on behalf of Dame Ida de Oyry (also, d’Oyry and d’Oyly) in a nasty suit of divorce against her third husband, the knight Godfrey de Millers. Godfrey’s infidelity had become a national scandal, even chronicle-worthy. Matthew Paris tells us that in the year 1248, Godfrey:

Godfrey’s complaint to the king, his lord, led to a severe reprimand. As Trevor Dean writes, “it was decided that this ‘punishment squad’ had exceeded the bounds of acceptable reaction.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Henry III ordered the disinheritance and banishment of John the Briton, who then aligned himself with the king of France. John’s wife, Margery, and daughter, who had both taken part in “removing his testicles,” also fled to France. Years later, through the intercession of Philip of Nemours, chamberlain of France, the two women received a royal pardon for their involvement in Godfrey’s disgrace, and presumably were thus able to return to the kingdom.Footnote ⁶⁶ The whole experience elicited a sympathetic reaction from the king, who “ordered it to be proclaimed as a law by herald, that no one should presume to mutilate another for adultery except in the case of his wife.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Godfrey’s wife, Ida, responded to the news by demanding a divorce, although it is not clear on what grounds or whether “divorce” meant a judicial separation (divortium ad mensa et thoro) or an annulment (divortium ad vincula). During the lengthy proceedings, the king sided with Ida, demanding that Godfrey return the manor of Flete, part of her dowry from her marriage to her first husband, Geoffrey de Oyry, to support her financially for the duration of the suit.Footnote ⁶⁸

Given Godfrey’s recent castration, public humiliation, and (one can only assume) hostile divorce, it is no surprise that he was impatient for revenge. Of course, there was little Godfrey could do to his former wife; John the Briton and his family had fled to the safety of France; and the bishop was invincible, even for someone of Godfrey’s stature. That left the procurator who argued Ida’s case in court. Godfrey was so incensed that he convinced (presumably through bribery) the wives of two recently deceased men to appeal William of Newcastle for their homicides.Footnote ⁶⁹ The inquest found in William’s favor and a request issued to the sheriff of Lincoln for his release from prison.Footnote ⁷⁰

Lay Resistance to Ecclesiastical Coercion

No coercive measure provoked such vehement resentment from parishioners as did distraint, that is, the lawful seizure of goods in lieu of monies owed. Ownership of the goods did not dissipate with distraint; rather, the goods were held as surety for payment of the outstanding debt, providing the owner moved swiftly to redeem them. Because villagers had few movables in their possession, the “chattels” distrained were usually the livestock upon which their livelihoods depended. Distraint at the wrong time of year could be devastating: a draught horse or oxen distrained during ploughing season, for example, put a farmer in a difficult spot. Moreover, distraint of animals, rather than non-living material goods, aggravated the expense. Local authorities needed to feed and care for distrained animals; accordingly, they charged the owners a fee for upkeep, payable upon recovery. In Cornwall, for example, the fee was one penny per animal per day.Footnote ⁷¹ As a coercive measure, then, distraint inflicted maximum financial trauma to encourage a speedy resolution.

Distraint by ecclesiastical authorities might not have been so heartily resented had it not also been the tool most favored by lord and king. An onslaught of indignant complaints prompted a series of reform legislation by Parliament in the second half of the thirteenth century. For example, the 1267 Statute of Marlborough required that lords distrain only their own villeins, but not for services or for customs; distraint must be court-ordered (not upon one’s own authority); distraints must be reasonable in nature; and distrained animals must not be driven out of the county.Footnote ⁷² A statute from the early reign of Edward I further tightened the parameters: the animals’ owners must be permitted to feed them themselves during impoundment; distrained animals cannot be sold within a fortnight of their seizure; no one can be distrained by the “beasts that till his land, nor by his sheep, either by the king’s bailiffs or by other men, as long as other distress can be found.”Footnote ⁷³ The complaints and resulting legislation signal the sharp hostility felt by Englishmen and women towards the practice.

The church resorted to distraint when parishioners withheld taxes, usually tithes. As R. N. Swanson has noted, tithes were a “[flashpoint] … in the complex relations between clergy and laity.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Because tithes functioned as the “primary source of income” for parochial clergy, those who withheld them did so because they objected to the performance or behavior of their parish clergy, and as a result opposed paying them for their services.Footnote ⁷⁵ In many respects, this is what canon law encouraged parishioners to do. Referencing Hostiensis (d. 1271), the author of Dives and Pauper, an instructional dialogue between an affluent man and a pauper regarding the Ten Commandments, decries “withholders of tithes,” calling them “theuys” (thieves), but declares emphatically that when it comes to undeserving clerics, the laity should refuse to pay. The author writes, “To open lechoures or open malefactoures tithes shulde not be paied.” No one is bound to give tithes to a priest or curate who “mispende holy churche godes, or be a notorie lechoure.” Of course, the author was not ready to absolve the parishioner of tax-paying altogether: tithes owed to “euyl curatis” should instead be paid directly to bishops or religious houses.Footnote ⁷⁶

Granted, most parishioners paid their tithes without complaint.Footnote ⁷⁷ Some aggrieved parishioners grumbled and objected. Others found ways to undermine the system by paying with poor quality grain, or reclaiming grain that was not collected promptly.Footnote ⁷⁸ A small but regular minority went to the extreme of withholding tithes altogether, and when they did, church officials readily mobilized the law’s arsenal of weaponry to compel them to pay up. The church repeatedly initiated suits against parishioners who withheld tithes. Helmholz observes that they were “regular entries in most ex officio act books.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Distraint was the quicker route to forcing repayment.

John of Rickling, bailiff of the bishop of Ely, was just one of many incarcerated for homicide, not because he had killed anyone, but because the men of his community were tired of seeing their goods distrained. At his inquest in 1275/76, jurors remarked that Geoffrey Blakeman of Wells spearheaded the insurrection against John. Geoffrey and a group of his supporters beat and wounded John, such that he came close to dying. While he was recovering, Geoffrey threatened to have him indicted for the homicide of an unknown man, whose corpse had been recently discovered in the neighborhood, unless John paid him ten marks. The subsequent indictment, and inquest de odio et atia, implies that John refused to concede, even in the face of violence and blackmail.Footnote ⁸⁰ Jurors at other inquests recount disconcertingly comparable stories. In 1277, Thomas of Elmhurst procured an indictment against Robert le Fishacre of Wisborough, bailiff of the bishop of Chester, for the homicide of William Le Bloare. Jurors report that he did so because of the many distraints he had levied upon Thomas.Footnote ⁸¹ The sheriff of Norwich had Gilbert Pyngel and his wife Elfreda imprisoned in 1275 for the death of Robert of South Hetton. Gilbert had worked as hayward for the steward of Crowland Abbey. In this capacity, he had subjected the men of Shernborne to many fines. Troubled by the expenses, the inconveniences, and the distraints, the men of the vill (the administrative land unit) procured the indictment of Gilbert and his wife, even though Robert in fact had died a natural death.Footnote ⁸² William, son of William Woderone of Penge, hayward (that is, the manorial official responsible for a manor’s hedges, livestock, and crops) for Westminster Abbey, stood indicted and incarcerated for the death of Henry de Wolde in 1288–89. Jurors at his inquest explain that he was maliciously accused because of his involvement in collecting tithes and distraining villagers for transgressions in the forest of Penge.Footnote ⁸³

Other coercive measures on behalf of ecclesiastical authorities prompted similar responses. Disseisin (that is, the seizure of land belonging to someone else) is what led Thomas Bardolf, lord of Spixworth, to retaliate against the prior of Horsham St Faith in the county of Norfolk in 1274. The two had been arguing over possession of a hauberk (an armored shirt made of chainmail) when the prior “unjustly” disseized Thomas of lands, presumably to gain the upper hand in their dispute. In response, Thomas induced one of his serfs, Agnes Potekin, to appeal fifteen of the Benedictine monks living at the priory for the death of her son, Nicholas.Footnote ⁸⁴ Forest transgressions prompted the 1292 indictment of William Spakeman, bailiff of Monkton Farleigh Priory. He arrested John, son of Robert Dunninton, after he cut down a tree in the forest owned by the priory. William had John brought to court in fetters—the fact that the indictment mentioned this suggests it was a shameful experience that John did not take lightly—where he was gravely fined for his offense. Enraged and embarrassed, John responded by having William and two of his men indicted for the homicides of three local men.Footnote ⁸⁵

What we can learn from these examples is that both clergymen and those employed as officers of the church risked being malevolently indicted for homicide by parishioners who begrudged the church’s intrusion into their lives, and/or were unhappy with their parochial clergy. The records spotlight the public humiliation of moral discipline as the chief source of dissension, but distraint, disseisin, and punishment for a wide variety of transgressions might also beget false accusations. False accusations against bailiffs and haywards who worked for the church and were not members of the clergy themselves may seem unrelated; after all, these were laymen who simply worked for the church. However, if your goal was to withhold tithes, who better to remove from the picture than the tithe-collector? Manufacturing a false accusation of homicide against the prior of Monkton Farleigh was unlikely to land the prior, a person of importance within the church, in prison; going after his bailiff was another story entirely. For the disgruntled parishioner, eager to avoid paying taxes, targeting the middleman was the smarter strategy.