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August 2004

Parish History Episode 40

Houghton and Avignon

1346. The Battle of Neville’s Cross had been fought and won. The King of Scotland was now a prisoner in London, where he would remain for eleven years. The survivors of his army retreated to Scotland.

This time Houghton had not been on the path of the armies, and as far as we know had not suffered any physical damage. Perhaps some of the nine men mustered by Prior Fossor for the campaign had been slain, but otherwise all seemed peaceful again.
Everything seemed back to normal. And that included the fact that the village still had no resident rector. Rector Manserus Marmeyon had, we may recall (“Signpost” of May, 2004), in 1335, after quarrelling with his parishioners (over tithes) and with Bishop Bury (over the validity of his appointment to Houghton parish), been granted indefinite leave of absence, on grounds of ill health, and no replacement had yet arrived. The parish would presumably have been served by curates during the Rector’s absence.

It proved difficult to get rid of Marmeyon. Bishop Bury’s investigations into the validity of his Induction as Rector of Houghton-le-Spring had presumably discovered nothing that could be used against the man. Marmeyon had, after all, been appointed by the Pope, after Cardinal Anibaldis had declined the offer of Houghton.

It may seem surprising that the Papacy had been in any way concerned with such an appointment as that of a parish priest to a relatively unimportant village in the North of England. It was not however concern for the spiritual welfare of the people of Houghton that had motivated Pope John XXII to appoint Marmeyon, but rather concern for his own revenues.

Bishop Bury, and his successor, Bishop Hatfield (1345-1381), were also concerned about their revenues, and their “rights”, both in respect to the clergy and laity of the Diocese, and to the Popes at Avignon, at that time the seat of the Papacy. They were well aware that the traditional powers of the Prince-Bishops were weakening, as lay lords rose to prominence in the Border lands.

The most prominent of these lay lords was of course Sir Ralph Neville, “The Wild Bull of the North”. It had been him who had saved Durham in 1346, when Bishop Hatfield had been away in France, campaigning with the King. It had been his men who had taken the King of Scotland captive, and held him hostage for his people, and thereby nullified for a time the perennial Scottish threat to England’s security. Hatfield was well aware of the debt he owed to the Lord of Raby. When Sir Ralph died, in 1367, permission was given, for the first time, for a layman to be buried in Durham Cathedral. His coffin was born in, on the shoulders of his knights, while men-at-arms lined the route taken from the North doorway of the Cathedral to the area which would later be known as the Neville tombs. His family and retainers, and even - to the despair of the vergers, one assumes - eight of his horses attended the funeral. Sir Ralph’s eldest son, Sir John Neville, who would later succeed him as the Fifth Lord Neville, would later give the Neville Screen (between the Chancel and the Shrine of Saint Cuthbert) as a memorial to his father.

Bishop Hatfield was not, it seemed, ungrateful for the sacrifices that the Nevilles had made for Durham. He erected a new Throne on which the Bishop is seated during Services. It still stands, high up in the Chancel - the highest Bishop’s Throne in Christendom, it is said - and on it are displayed the arms of the Percies and the Lumleys and the other families who fought with Neville. The French and English royal arms are also there, to remind pilgrims that, though Hatfield was absent from the field of Neville’s Cross, he was present at Crécy that same year, at King Edward’s victory over the French.

Hatfield seemed to accept that, in his day, the powers of the Prince-Bishops had weakened relative to those of lay families such as the Nevilles. He was also aware that the power of the Kings was now greater than it had been, as King Edward III amassed new armies for campaigns against the Scots and the French. The King also possessed more efficient Courts of Law than those of his predecessors, kept better accounts and records than they did, and summoned regular Parliaments, which might in theory have existed to inform him of his subjects’ grievances, but in practice were used so that the King could make his wishes known to all in the Kingdom.

The Law Courts had little jurisdiction as yet North of the Tees, for the Prince-Bishops had their own Courts, and Newcastle was the only town in North-Eastern England which was at this time represented in Parliament. But the trend was for the power of London to increase and that of Durham to decrease.

So, the Prince-Bishops were, at this time, finding their powers being eroded by the rise of new “estates”: some local, such as lords of the manor; and even, before the end of the century, churchwardens; some national (King and Parliament); and some international - the Popes of Rome, now resident at Avignon.

Increasingly, throughout the Eleventh, Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, the growing international authority and influence of the Roman Papacy, and the growing bureaucracy, usually known as the Papal Curia, needed to sustain the machinery of this international government, had required larger and larger sums of money. Some of this money had come from the Pope’s own estates in Italy, some had come voluntarily from the offerings of pilgrims coming to Rome, some had come in bribes to officials of the Curia for favours granted, some had been paid openly in exchange for indulgences needed to enable sinners to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, while more and more money needed to be raised through the levying of fees on all sorts of transactions. Soon, it seemed, a fee had to be paid, to Rome or later to Avignon, for every investiture of bishop or abbot or abbess, of prior or dean or archdeacon, of parish priest or chaplain, of monk or friar or nun.

Kings also became increasingly involved in clerical appointments, especially of bishops, though in their case the motive was not so much raising money, but rather ensuring that loyal subjects occupied positions of local power and influence. It is not surprising that the rights of cathedral chapters to elect their own bishops soon passed into abeyance (as still is the case: though the Chapter of Durham Cathedral still nominally has the power to elect whom it pleases to the leadership of the Diocese, in practice the Queen, or rather her ministers, appoints each new bishop as a vacancy occurs).

But, while kings may have become involved in episcopal appointments, they did not normally concern themselves with parochial affairs. It was a Pope at Avignon who had appointed Marmeyon to be Rector of Houghton, not a King of England. The reason why popes came to wield such authority was that people at that time believed that the Papacy possessed “the Keys of the Kingdom” (of Heaven), and it was accepted that money had to be paid in order to gain the benefits of Salvation. Preachers from Avignon implied that such benefits could come, and only come, from Avignon itself, where the Popes, they claimed, had the sole right to bind and to loose, to admit or to deny admittance, to the Kingdom of Heaven.

A new development in theology at this period was the doctrine of “A Treasury of Merit”, of superfluous merit, that is, of Works of Supererogation as they came to be called. These were “good deeds”, performed by the saints, over and above the minimum number needed to ensure the salvation of a soul. This doctrine became officially endorsed by Pope Clement VI in 1343, who declared that such a Treasury of Merit did indeed exist, and that it was held at Avignon, and was available, in exchange for moderate fees, for all needy sinners. The price he asked was not excessive. During the first six months of 1344 several hundred persons at least, in England alone, seem to have availed themselves of the opportunity of purchasing sufficient from this Treasury to remit their own sins, for a price of a few shillings each.

King Edward III was at this time urgently needing to raise money by taxation from his subjects, to pay for his wars against France and Scotland. He resented the difficulties he had in persuading people to pay taxes for wars, when these same people seemed eager to pay voluntary taxes to Avignon to obtain Salvation for themselves. He began to summon Parliaments, and to encourage them to pass statutes forbidding the payment of fees to Avignon for the purchase of ecclesiastical offices. But the Parliaments were reluctant to interfere with the trade in Pardons and Indulgences, that is in the benefits released by the sale of portions of the Treasury of Merit, as that would have condemned many citizens of substance to die with their sins unremitted.

These parliaments might well, however, have asked why it was that the Papacy seemed to need so much money. Why were there these continual demands for cash emanating from Avignon ? The Papacy had not seemed to be so greedy when it had been established at Rome.

But then it had been relatively easy for the Roman Popes to live, to a large extent, on the income arising from their Italian estates. That was now impossible. Almost the whole machinery of the Curia had been brought from Rome to Avignon at the time when the French kings had compelled the Papacy to migrate. But, though the Popes were still nominally in possession of the Patrimony of Saint Peter, and of vast estates in Central Italy, it had become almost impossible to collect any substantial revenue from them. Just as there had been a great expansion of castle-building along the Anglo-Scottish Borders, so every hill-top in Central Italy now seemed to be crowned with the castle of some robber-baron, and he took for himself from the peasants the taxes that should have gone to the Pope in distant Avignon.

Nor was it all that easy for the popes to obtain money from the kings of Western Europe, in the manner that King Henry III had been constantly prevailed on to provide money for Rome. Now, in England and in other constitutional monarchies, kings could defy the Papacy by claiming that their parliaments would not allow the payment of tax money out of the Kingdom.

King John of England had been excommunicated, and brought sharply to heel when he had attempted to defy Rome, but King Edward III allowed his parliaments to pass acts which forebade many of those transactions whereby the Popes had once milked the English Church of silver and gold. The Popes at Avignon did not feel sufficiently sure of themselves to pass sentences of excommunication, not just on one recalcitrant King, but on a whole Parliament consisting of hundreds of bishops, abbots, barons, knights and merchants: a body representing all the great men of the Kingdom.

They therefore came to depend on claiming the right to control ecclesiastical appointments, to collect rents from them during vacancies (and to pay out of those rents the curates to undertake the necessary duties), and to charge fees to those whom they eventually appointed.

There was certainly some very unattractive avarice in this system of compelling the payment of fees by local priests on their appointments to parishes; and they could only recoup their investment by enforcing more rigorously the payment of tithes by their parishioners. But, as we will discover next month, some attractive ideas did arise at this period, which might have made the parochial system more effective in the area of Houghton parish.