This is a close study of the conflict between the monks of Canterbury Cathedral and archbishops Baldwin of Forde and Hubert Walter in the later twelfth century, over plans to establish a college for 40–60 secular canons, dedicated to St Thomas Becket, initially at Hackington a mile from the cathedral. The college was intended to offer the archbishops a way of financing their increasingly vast clerical administration, yet the monks viewed it as a serious threat to their rights and liberties. The monks succeeded in preventing the foundation, and they compiled over 600 letters as a record of the affair (Lambeth Palace Library MS 415, edited by Stubbs in Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I: Volume 2 [London, 1865]). The letter collection, compiled c.1201–1205, was intended primarily for the use of future monks of Canterbury as an exemplar in case a similar dispute arose. Most of the included letters were written by the monks themselves, and the picture they painted is notably one-sided. Barnaby calendars the letters as an appendix, plus a further 43 relevant to the dispute. A further appendix gives useful short biographies of the main actors. Using the letters, the monk-chronicler Gervase created a lengthy narrative account, similarly for an internal audience. Following the inward-looking nature of the sources, previous historians have tended to dismiss the quarrel as a navel-gazing affair with little significance for the wider Church. While Barnaby uses the affair as a lens through which to view more general issues of royal and papal policy, and of medieval travel, the significance of the material lies mainly in the unusually detailed picture it offers of a typical squabble between an archbishop and their cathedral chapter.

The creation of a college of secular canons brought several long-standing concerns of the monks to a point. Some were common to most monastic cathedrals of the period, such as the control of their landed endowment and their independence from (and right to elect) the archbishop, as well as a general antipathy to the secular clergy. What gave the Canterbury dispute more edge than similar contemporary quarrels at Coventry and Rochester, however, was the agreement between the archbishop and king that the major new college was to sequester a quarter of the offerings at St Thomas’ shrines in the Cathedral for its own purposes. Indeed, the project was consistently framed by the archbishops as one which had initially been pursued by their sainted predecessors Anselm and Becket, whose wishes they were merely fulfilling. Barnaby argues that it was the potential threat to the monks of losing control over their newly martyred saint, who they feared would be translated to the new college, that gave the issue such potency. Yet Barnaby also goes on to argue that the monks’ fears were largely unfounded on all fronts, not least because Archbishop Baldwin was a Cistercian and continued to be one of the more pro-monastic voices in the English episcopacy. Even amongst the Canterbury monks themselves the archbishop’s project found some supporters. It must be wondered whether the letter collections and Gervase’s narrative were as much an attempt to persuade wavering minds in the contemporary community as they were an aid to future generations of monks.

The dispute mainly took place in the papal curia and involved both sides engaging in frequent and costly travel to Rome, a process made far more complicated by the fact that this 16-year period saw six different popes in office. Using the monks’ letters as a starting point, Barnaby offers a considered picture of cross-continental travel in the late twelfth century. For the most part, however, the book proceeds as a detailed chronological narrative of the back-and-forth, which largely consisted of the monks gaining the pope’s approval but the archbishop having far greater success on the ground in England. The monks were effectively locked into their precinct by the archbishop between January 1188 and August 1189, reliant upon supportive townsfolk for provisions. Barnaby calls this the ‘longest siege ever conducted in medieval England’ (p. 95), but it is clear from the narrative that the barricades must have been permeable, not least because the monks were communicating with their proctors in Rome throughout. Barnaby never quite settles the question of whether the histrionic tone in which many of the letters and Gervase’s chronicle were written was a reflection of the monks’ genuine fears or, as many historians may suspect, merely the form of the genre.

The issue was resolved in 1189 when King Richard ordered the closure and demolition of the part-built Hackington College. Archbishop Baldwin’s successor Hubert Walter briefly attempted to found something similar at Maidstone and Lambeth but fell foul of Innocent III’s long-standing support for the monks, and a similarly abortive attempt by Archbishop Edmund of Abingdon to revive the project was terminated by his death in 1240. The monks continued to litigate over their rights to various lands and churches connected with the dispute until the late 14th century, slowly but successfully claiming them all. Barnaby’s conclusion is, broadly, that the monks simply had more patience, acting as an institution, unlike the archbishops for whom the project was dependent on the enthusiasm and tenacity of the individual incumbent. The overall impression is that the monks were the only ones who maintained a dogged interest in the case, as all those dragged into it, including the king and archbishop, eventually threw their hands up in exasperation. For all its peripheral interest in terms of the involvement of some of the great ecclesiastical and political actors of the day, the core of this study is the window it offers into the mindset and policy of one of the wealthiest and most powerful cloistered cathedral chapters in the face of even the slightest perceived threat to their rights.