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September 2003

Parish History Episode 29

Crusading Echoes

Many changes had come to England and the lands of Western Europe as a consequence of the Crusades. We made mention of styles of architecture in last month’s “Signpost”, and before that we made reference to the Sockburn Faulchion, to windmills, and to leprosy; and also to the importation of the cult of Saint George the Dragon-Slayer from the East, a cult which was to displace the devotion which had formerly been offered to our own patron saint, Michael the Archangel.

In origin the Crusades represent an attempt by the knights of Western Europe to “free” the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem from “desecration” by the Turks, a race of “barbarians” from Central Asia, recent converts to Islam, who, in the later years of the Eleventh Century, had overrun the Arab lands of the Middle East, and who were tending to enforce the traditional disabilities imposed on Christian pilgrims and residents, by the Shariah Law of Islam, a lot more vigorously than did their Arab predecessors. The First Crusade, of 1096-1099, did indeed succeed in capturing Jerusalem, and the Crusaders held the city for nearly a century. The Second Crusade, of 1147-1149, succeeded in retaining Christian control of the city, but Jerusalem fell to the Kurdish warrior Saladin in 1187, and the Third Crusade of 1189-1192 failed to regain it. The Fourth Crusade of 1202-1204 was launched against the (Christian) Greeks, instead of the Kurds, and succeeded in destroying the Byzantine Empire, the most important Christian state in the East. The end result was that not only did the Crusaders succeed in doing a lot more damage to the Greeks than to the Arabs, Kurds or Turks, but, through the destruction of the Byzantine state, they helped to create a new and greater Turkish Empire, that of the Ottomans, which would threaten Europe for centuries to come.

Some Norman knights from England and Normandy joined the First Crusade, and others served in the Second Crusade. But the Third Crusade, called into being by outrage at the news of Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem, was to be led by the three most powerful monarchs of Western Europe : the Kaiser Friedrich I of Germany, King Philippe II of France, and King Richard I of England. Thousands of German, French and English knights followed them. One of them may well have been John Lambton, who, we may recall…
Young Lambton felt inclined to gan an’ fight in foreign warrs;
He joined a troop of knights that cared for neither wounds nor scars,
An’ off he went to Palestine where queer things him befell,
An’ he very soon forgot aboot the queer worrm in the well.

Fortunately, history records that…
The news of this most arrful worrm and its queer gannins on
Soon crossed the seas and reached the ears of brave and bold Sir John.
So hyem he cam, and catched the beast, and cut it in three halves,
And that soon stopped it eating bairns and lambs and sheeps and calves.

Brave and bold Sir John offered his sword for the Cause, and with it he put a stop to the Dreadful Lambton Worm, if not to Saladin, but wars are fought with money, as well as with swords, and King Richard and his fellow monarchs were hard put to it to raise the cash necessary to fight their crusades.

Bishop Hugh Puiset of Durham briefly succumbed to crusading fervour, and proposed to lead an army from Durham to Jerusalem, but King Richard persuaded him that cash would be more useful than press-ganged peasant soldiers, and so the good Bishop imposed a “Saladin Tax” on the Palatinate, whereby the people were meant to surrender a tenth of their wealth to the King. The King also transferred all of Yorkshire North of the Tees to the Prince-Bishopric (the already vast county of Yorkshire had, up to then, stretched across the Tees, to include the towns of Darlington, Stockton and Hartlepool), as a reward for Bishop Hugh’s generosity.

Bishop Hugh then raised more money by selling “Borough Rights” to certain communities within his jurisdiction. Newcastle had already been granted a Charter of Incorporation by King Henry I, but Bishop Hugh now granted charters to the towns of Durham, Gateshead and Wearmouth, and also to his new acquisition of Hartlepool. These charters granted the merchants of these new boroughs the right to govern themselves and to control their commerce, but they would have to pay an annual rent to the Bishop for this privilege. The people of these boroughs would also, through their charters, gain freedom from all sorts of servile fees which feudal custom imposed upon the not-quite-free: for instance, inability to inherit one’s father’s estate, without paying one’s lord a quit-rent, consisting usually of one domestic animal; or the payment of a special tax by bridegrooms (said, scandalously, and I hope incorrectly, to be paid before the lord would surrender his “right” to spend the “first night” with the bride).

The Borough of Wearmouth probably consisted of merely a limited area around what is now High Street East in Sunderland. The chief industry of this new Borough appears to have been fishing, and its main revenue came from a tax on fish landed.

An unintended effect of these municipal charters was that they gave an opportunity for new religious orders to infiltrate the Diocese of Durham. Though not all the Norman bishops had been Benedictine monks before their elevation, once installed at Durham they found themselves the Abbot of a Benedictine monastery, as well as the Bishop of an important See. Under the Bishop there was a Prior who was responsible for the monks of Durham, and for the conduct of worship in the Cathedral, and there were Priors in charge of the other Benedictine houses in the Diocese : the Benedictines were now reoccupying old Anglian sites, such as the abbeys of Monkwearmouth, Jarrow and Lindisfarne, and new sites such as Finchale Abbey, but they seem to have desired a monopoly of piety, and strove to keep other Orders out. But new religious orders took advantage of the new borough charters, and the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians and Carmelites all established themselves within Newcastle’s walls, while the Franciscans also established a house in Hartlepool, and rather cheekily tried to establish themselves in Durham itself.

When Bishop Hugh Puiset died in 1195 (of over-eating, it is said: all those eggs from Houghton, perhaps?), a man called Henry Puiset, one of only three illegitimate sons to survive their father the Bishop, attempted to found a house of Augustinian Canons at Haswell. Henry had been brought up to be a monk, but he seems to have rebelled against Benedictine discipline, and, when he found himself in possession of some money as a result of his father’s will, he left Durham and seems to have established this community with the intention that his canons would provide pastoral care to the many hamlets in that area South of Houghton and North of Easington and Pittington, in which there were at that time no churches. It is not known if this venture ever really got under way. The monks of Finchale complained that Henry’s Canons had established themselves on their rightful territory, and the establishment was first transferred to Baxterwood, closer to Durham, and then dissolved, and their property given to Finchale. Thus, the Black Monks, the Benedictines, maintained their monopoly, and Hetton-le-Hole and other hamlets had to wait until the Nineteenth Century before they possessed their own churches.

Meanwhile, the Crusades were proving an expensive luxury for the common people. Having imposed the Saladin Tithe to finance King Richard’s crusade, the King failed to defeat Saladin or to redeem Jerusalem. Then, unsuccessful, on his way back to England, he was seized by Duke Leopold V of Austria, who held him to ransom. Having paid one tithe to send their King out to the East, the English then had to pay another to allow the Austrians to let him go, and so bring their King back. Hardly had he landed in England, then he wanted more money (yet another tithe) to go and fight against his former ally, King Philippe II, for possession of some castles which he claimed were part of his Angevin inheritance (from his father, Henry II). He was killed fighting against Philippe, and then King Philippe despatched his son, Prince Louis, to invade England, by now ruled by Richard’s brother, King John, who died during his campaigns against the French, and was succeeded by Henry III, who bribed Louis to go away and return to France. As King John, while in flight from the French invaders, had managed to lose the Crown Jewels of England in the Wash (an arm of the sea - they were not lost at the laundry!), the money to pay off Prince Louis had to be obtained by raising yet another tithe from the tax-payers.

By this time, the English were rather fed up with crusades. They had also, a generation earlier, suffered a disappointment in Ireland. This had arisen when King Henry II had quarrelled with Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Some of the King’s knights, imagining themselves to be carrying out the King’s wishes, killed the Archbishop. When news of this reached Rome, the Pope was furious, and ordered the King to undergo severe penances. One of these penances was to go to Ireland and to undertake a crusade to convert that country. As Ireland was the country from which England had once, by way of Iona, received the Faith, this seemed a rather odd sort of crusade. Also, as King Henry was granted title to Ireland’s crown by Pope Adrian IV, who by an odd co-incidence was the one and only Englishman ever to be elected as Pope of Rome, there have been many who have suspected unspiritual motivation behind this crusade. King Henry’s invasion of Ireland did not, as it happened, bring much advantage to England. It did however lead to seven hundred and fifty years of warfare. The English paid a high price for the murder of Becket. The Irish paid an even higher price.