This volume contains the acta of three bishops of London: Richard of Ely, William de Ste. Mére-Église, and Eustace of Fauconberg. Both Richard and Eustace saw service as royal treasurer; indeed Richard wrote the handbook on Exchequer practice, the Dialogus de Scaccario. William on the other hand spearheaded the papal campaign against King John during the General Interdict.

Princes of the Church brings together the latest research exploring the importance of bishops’ palaces for social and political history, landscape history, architectural history and archaeology. It is the first book-length study of such sites since Michael Thompson’s Medieval Bishops’ Houses (1998), and the first work ever to adopt such a wide-ranging approach to them in terms of themes and geographical and chronological range. Including contributions from the late Antique period through to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it deals with bishops’ residences in England, Scotland, Wales, the Byzantine Empire, France, and Italy. It is structured in three sections: design and function, which considers how bishops’ palaces and houses differed from the palaces and houses of secular magnates, in their layout, design, furnishings, and functions; landscape and urban context, which considers the relationship between bishops’ palaces and houses and their political and cultural context, the landscapes and towns or cities in which they were set, and the parks, forests, and towns that were planned and designed around them; and architectural form, which considers the extent of shared features between bishops’ palaces and houses, and their relationship to the houses of other Church potentates and to the houses of secular magnates.

In 1214, King John issued a charter granting freedom of election to the English Church; henceforth, cathedral chapters were, theoretically, to be allowed to elect their own bishops, with minimal intervention by the crown. Innocent III confirmed this charter and, in the following year, the right to electoral freedom was restated at the Fourth Lateran Council. In consequence, under Henry III and Edward I the English Church enjoyed something of a golden age of electoral freedom, during which the king might influence elections, but ultimately could not control them. Then, during the reigns of Edward II and Edward III, papal control over appointments was increasingly asserted and from 1344 onwards all English bishops were provided by the pope. This book considers the theory and practice of free canonical election in its heyday under Henry III and Edward I, and the nature of and reasons for the subsequent transition to papal provision. An analysis of the theoretical evidence for this subject (including canon law, royal pronouncements and Lawrence of Somercote’s remarkable 1254 tract on episcopal elections) is combined with a consideration of the means by which bishops were created during the reigns of Henry III and the three Edwards. The changing roles of the various participants in the appointment process (including, but not limited to, the cathedral chapter, the king, the papacy, the archbishop and the candidate) are given particular emphasis. In addition, the English situation is placed within a European context, through a comparison of English episcopal appointments with those made in France, Scotland and Italy. Bishops were central figures in medieval society and the circumstances of their appointments are of great historical importance. As episcopal appointments were also touchstones of secular-ecclesiastical relations, this book therefore has significant implications for our understanding of church-state interactions during the thirteenth and fourteenth centu

A study of the personal religion of King John, presenting a more complex picture of his actions and attitude.

The secular clergy - priests and other clerics outside of monastic orders - were among the most influential and powerful groups in European society during the central Middle Ages. The secular clergy got their title from the Latin word for world, saeculum, and secular clerics kept the Church running in the world beyond the cloister wall, with responsibility for the bulk of pastoral care and ecclesiastical administration. This gave them enormous religious influence, although they were considered too worldly by many contemporary moralists - trying, for instance, to oppose the elimination of clerical marriage and concubinage. Although their worldliness created many tensions, it also gave the secular clergy much worldly influence. Contemporaries treated elite secular clerics as equivalent to knights, and some were as wealthy as minor barons. Secular clerics had a huge role in the rise of royal bureaucracy, one of the key historical developments of the period. They were instrumental to the intellectual and cultural flowering of the twelfth century, the rise of the schools, the creation of the book trade, and the invention of universities. They performed music, produced literature in a variety of genres and languages, and patronized art and architecture. Indeed, this volume argues that they contributed more than any other group to the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Yet the secular clergy as a group have received almost no attention from scholars, unlike monks, nuns, or secular nobles. In The Secular Clergy in England, 1066-1216, Hugh Thomas aims to correct this deficiency through a major study of the secular clergy below the level of bishop in England from 1066 to 1216.

Geoffrey, the illegitimate son of Henry II, was successively archdeacon and bishop-elect of Lincoln, royal chancellor, and (for 23 years) archbishop of York, finally dying in exile during the Interdict following his opposition to John's imposition of the 13th. His enduring loyalty to his father, which inspired the subsequent mistrust of his royal half brothers after Henry's death, placed him at the very centre of late twelfth and early thirteenth century politics, especially during John's rebellion during the early years of the Third crusade. Moreover, during most of his time as archbishop his turbulent personality brought him into direct opposition to his cathedral chapter at York, which in turn throws further light on the ecclesiastical politics of the period. He also endured two long periods of exile, and he remains one of the very few bishops in the medieval English church for whom even a partial contemporary biography survives. This edition collects together for the first time Geoffrey's acta as archbishop, and Dr Lovatt's introduction provides a much needed modern account of this intriguing character.

In the first quarter of the thirteenth century, an anonymous Flemish writer set in writing, in Old French, a chronicle of Normandy, England, Flanders and northern France. It ranged from the arrival of the Vikings in Normandy to the early years of the reign of King Henry III of England, ending with an account of the translation of the relics of St Thomas Becket to their magnificent new shrine in Canterbury Cathedral in 1220. Along the way, it adopted and formed part of a tradition of writing of the history of the dukes of Normandy and kings of England, a tradition which had developed in Latin in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and then continued in Old French. The work is famous for vibrant and informed description of the reign of King John, in particular the period of baronial reaction, Magna Carta, ensuing civil war and the nearly-successful invasion of England by Louis, heir to the kingdom of France. Flanders supplied troops to both sides, and this Flemish author sees these events in close detail, and from the Flemish, not the French or English, point of view. He may himself have been an eyewitness, directly involved, but if not he would have known many who had fought and died in this conflict. Janet Shirley’s translation of this chronicle, the first into English, brings the work of the Anonymous of Béthune to a new audience in this volume, accompanied by an introduction and historical notes by Paul Webster.