Authorities: Letters of Robert Grosseteste, edited by Luard; Monumenta Franciscana; Letters of Adam of March and Eccleston on the coming of the Friars, edited by Brewer; Annales Monastici—Burton and Dunstable; Matthew Paris (Rolls’ Series); Samuel Pegge—Life of Robert Grosseteste, 1793; F. S. Stevenson, M.P.—Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln; M. M. C. Calthrop—Victoria County History—Lincolnshire; Gasquet—Henry III. and the Church.
The story of Robert Grosseteste’s bishophood is the record of eighteen years’ unflinching battle with abuses in Church and State. From his enthronement as Bishop of Lincoln in 1235 till his death in 1253 Grosseteste is conspicuous as a reformer. Now it is the slackness of the clergy he is combatting, enforcing discipline on men and women who, vowed to religion, preferred an easier way of life. At another time he is maintaining the laws and liberties of the nation against Henry III., who with all his piety knew neither honesty nor truth in his sovereignty. Right on till the last year of his life Grosseteste is as vigorous in resisting papal encroachments on the English Church as he is in dealing with his clergy or with the king. As a reformer his work is threefold:—(1) The correction of current abuses in the Church. (2) Maintenance of justice under the misrule of Henry III. (3) Resistance to the aggressive claims of the papacy. With all this work, fighting enemies of England at home and abroad, Grosseteste is busy administering his enormous diocese of Lincoln—then the largest in the country, including as it did the counties of Lincoln, Leicester, Buckingham, Huntingdon, Northampton, Oxford and Bedford (Oxford and Peterborough were afterwards carved out of Lincoln)—and is found writing to and advising all manner of men, kings, nobles and peasants.
Here is the character of Bishop Grosseteste as his contemporary, Matthew Paris, saw it, and Matthew was a monk, and the champion of the monks, and hated Grosseteste’s stern interference with monastic life:—
“He was an open confuter of both pope and king, the corrector of monks, the director of priests, the instructor of clerks, the support of scholars, a preacher to the people, a persecutor of the incontinent, the tireless student of the Scriptures, the hammer and despiser of the Romans. At the table of bodily refreshment he was hospitable, eloquent, courteous, pleasant and affable. At the spiritual table devout, tearful and contrite. In his episcopal office he was sedulous, venerable and indefatigable.”
Six hundred years later the whirligig of time leaves this verdict of old Matthew Paris unreversed, and finds Grosseteste’s reputation enhanced.
“There is scarcely a character in English history whose fame has been more constant, both during and after his life, than Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 to 1253. As we find his advice sought universally during his lifetime, and his example spoken of as that which almost all the other prelates of his day followed, so was it also after his death. If threats from Rome and excommunications from Canterbury fell harmlessly upon him while alive, his example nerved others in subsequent years—as in the case of Sewal, Archbishop of York—to bear even worse attacks without giving way. And probably no one has had a greater influence upon English thought and English literature for the two centuries which followed his time; few books will be found that do not contain some quotations from Lincolniensis, ‘the great clerk, Grostest.’”33
A Suffolk man was Grosseteste, and born of humble parents. Sent to Oxford by his friends he becomes master of the schools and chancellor of the university—the foremost scholar of his day—receives various ecclesiastical preferments, and at the age of sixty is freely elected by the chapter of Lincoln as their bishop. If the canons of Lincoln believed that Grosseteste’s age would ensure comparative quiet for the diocese and a continuance of the loose order of his immediate predecessors, they were speedily undeceived.
Grosseteste brought into Lincoln an energy for religion that disturbed the easy-going monks, with their comfortable common-room life, and altogether upset the secular clergy with their illegal marriages and their parochial revellings. In the first year of his authority Grosseteste’s letter to his archdeacons, followed by his diocesan constitutions, shows the hand of the reformer. He calls attention to the neglect of the canonical hours of prayer—certain clergy “fearing not God nor regarding man, either do not say the canonical hours or say them in mutilated fashion, and that without any sign of devotion, or at an hour more suitable to their own desires than convenient to their parishioners”—to the private marriages of many priests, to the strife and bloodshed and desecration caused by the miracle plays in churchyards, and to the drunkenness and gluttony attendant on funeral feasts. Grosseteste also complains that the parochial clergy oppose the preaching friars, “maliciously hindering the people from hearing the sermons of the friars, and permitting those to preach who make a trade of it, and who only preach such things as may draw money.” Incidentally, and with a curiously modern touch, Grosseteste urges his archdeacons to warn mothers and nurses against overlaying their children at night, for it seems many infants were suffocated in this way.
Grosseteste relied on the friars, Franciscan and Dominican, to revive religion in his diocese. From their first coming to England he had befriended the little brothers of St. Francis and St. Dominic’s order of preachers, and at Oxford had been conspicuously their rector. He writes to Pope Gregory IX. in the highest praise of the Franciscans: “Inestimable benefits have been wrought in my diocese by the friars. They enlighten our whole land with the bright light of their preaching and learning.”
The secular clergy and the monks generally by no means shared Grosseteste’s appreciation of the preachers of poverty, and when the Bishop of Lincoln began to rout up the monasteries in his diocese with visitations and enquiries the dismay was considerable. The Benedictine monks in England were good, easy men in the thirteenth century—Grosseteste finds no grave faults against morality to rebuke in them—fond of their pleasant social life, and enjoying the comfort of an existence that had few temporal cares beyond finding money for pope and king. At the worst their sloth was culpable. Grosseteste charged upon them with his preaching friars, calling for amendment and the fulfilment of duties, attacking old abuses sanctioned by custom, and showing no tolerant sympathy for the infirmities and shortcomings of middle-aged clerks.34 Respect him they must, for the learning and high character of the bishop were conspicuous in the land, but the dislike of all this strenuous exhortation was not concealed. The very chapter of Lincoln, which had elected him bishop, refused to admit Grosseteste as their visitor, or to acknowledge his jurisdiction over their proceedings, and only after six years of controversy and litigation was the case finally decided at Rome (1245) wholly in the bishop’s favour. A sentence of excommunication pronounced upon him by the monks at Canterbury during the vacancy of the see was of course entirely ignored by Grosseteste. If the clergy resented Grosseteste’s call to arms, it is to be remembered that they had suffered considerably from the tyranny of the times, and had been reduced under the general oppression to a feeble and sluggish timidity. The old “Song of the Church”35 tells how low they had fallen:
To check the rapacity of the king, and to stop the seizure of Church revenues for Italian clerics, and thereby to raise the English clergy from their state of sluggish despondency was Grosseteste’s work for England. We find him conspicuous at the council summoned by the king to meet at Westminster in 1244. In vain Henry III. appealed for money, bishops and nobles reminded him that the money so frequently granted had done no good either to the king or the country, and that a justiciar and chancellor must be appointed for the strengthening of the state. Henry demurred, tried postponements and delays, and these failing, summoned the bishops alone, and confronted them with a letter from Pope Innocent IV. exhorting them to give liberally to the king. Even this failed to move the prelates. After much discussion, however, some were for “a mild answer,” for many of the prelates “fearing the king’s instability and the pusillanimity of the royal counsellors,” were unwilling to deny the pope’s request. Grosseteste clinched the matter by declaring they must all stand together with the barons:36 “We may not be divided from the common counsel. For it is written if we be divided we shall all perish forthwith,” The next day Henry tried to get at each of the bishops separately—an old device. “But they with wary heed would not be so entrapped, and by departing early in the morning escaped the net in which they had once been caught; and so the council broke up to the king’s discontent.” (Matthew Paris.)
Again in 1252 Henry summoned the bishops, and tried to coerce them into giving him money by producing a papal mandate, authorising the payment of a full tithe of all Church revenues to the king for the space of three years. To make matters worse, “payment was not to be made on the old assessment, but on a new assessment conducted with strict inquiry, at the will and judgment of the royal agents and extortioners, who would seek their own profit before the king’s.” The excuse was that the king was about to start on a pilgrimage. Grosseteste was then an old man, but he blazed out at this monstrous demand, especially when the king’s messengers went on to explain that the tithe for two years might be paid at once, and that the third year’s tithe could also be raised before the king actually started. “By our Lady,” said the sturdy bishop of Lincoln, “what does all this mean? You assume that we shall agree to this damnable levy, and go on arguing from premises that have not been admitted. God forbid that we should thus bend our knee to Baal.”
The king’s half-brother, Ethelmar, bishop-elect of Winchester, deprecated resistance to the will of pope and king, and urged that the French had consented to pay a similar demand. “Yes,” said the Bishop of Ely, “and it brought their king no good.” “For the very reason the French have yielded must we resist,” replied Grosseteste. “To do a thing twice makes it a custom, and if we pay too, we shall have no peace. For my own part, I say plainly that I will not pay this evil demand, lest the king himself as well as us should incur the heavy wrath of God.” The other bishops followed Grosseteste’s lead, and the old man went on to advise them to pray the king to think of his eternal salvation, and to restrain his rash impulses. Henry naturally declined to send an independent remonstrance to the pope against the mandate, and the bishops decided they could do nothing in the way of granting this special tithe. But they were hard put to it, “between the pulling of the king and the pushing of the pope.”
All Grosseteste’s dealings with the king show the same firm resolution to stop the royal extortion, and to insist on the fulfilment of the charters of liberties obtained from the crown. He carries on the work of Stephen Langton, always backing up the unsuccessful efforts of the good St. Edmund Rich (Archbishop of Canterbury, 1234–1240) to keep Henry faithful to his word, and prepares the way for the great campaign of his friend Simon of Montfort.37 The very worst period of Henry’s long reign is covered by Grosseteste’s episcopal life. Hubert de Burgh’s wise rule was over by 1232, and Peter des Roches and the horde of aliens were fleecing the country for the next twenty years. It is not till after Grosseteste’s death that the barons dealt with Henry’s misrule to any purpose.
At the great council held in London in 1248, at which Grosseteste was present, a full list of the national grievances is given: the lavish waste of the wealth of the country on foreigners, the ruin of trade by the arbitrary seizure of goods by the king and his agents, the robbery of poor fishermen by royal authority, “so that they think it safer to trust themselves to the stormy waves and seek a further shore,” and the keeping bishoprics and abbacies vacant so that the crown may enjoy the revenues therefrom, are the chief causes of complaint. They were not new grievances, for the most part, and they were not to die with Henry III., all charters and royal promises notwithstanding.
Added to the common wrongs of Henry’s wretched misrule were the papal extortions, directly encouraged by the king. In return for papal mandates directing churchmen to supply the king with money, what could Henry—himself the most devoted servant of the papacy—do but help the pope to get what he could out of England? The wealth of England was held to be of fabulous amount at Rome, and popes beset by fierce ungodly emperors naturally turned to it in their need as to a treasury.
But the thing was intolerable to Grosseteste. He had studied in Paris, he welcomed Dominican and Franciscan friars from the continent as no other prelate did, and had no objection to foreigners per se. But the pope claimed the revenues of church livings for boys and presented illiterates to benefices—to the obvious degradation of the Church in England. Grosseteste was always willing enough to raise what money he could for the holy see, but appoint unworthy and incompetent clerks to livings in his diocese, that he would not do—not for any pope.
The country groaned under the biting avarice of the Roman see, as it bled under the vampire politics of Peter des Roches and his needy, greedy crew of Bretons and Poitevins.
What it all meant to England Matthew Paris has told us in his description of things in 1237:
“Now was simony practised without shame and usurers on various pleas openly extorted money from the common people and lesser folk; charity expired, the liberty of the Church withered away, religion was trampled to the dust. Daily did illiterate persons of the lowest class, armed with bulls from Rome, burst forth into threats; and, in spite of the privileges handed down to us from good men of old, they feared not to plunder the revenues consecrated by our holy forefathers for the service of religion, the support of the poor, and the nourishment of strangers, but thundering out their excommunications they quickly and violently carried off what they demanded. And if those who were wronged and robbed sought refuge by appealing or pleading their privileges, they were at once suspended and excommunicated by a papal writ. Thus mourning and lamentation were heard on all sides, and many exclaimed with heart-rending sobs, ‘It were better to die than to behold the sufferings of our country and its saints. Woe to England, once the chief of provinces, the mistress of nations, the mirror of the Church, the exemplar of religion, and now brought under tribute,—trampled on by worthless men, and the prey of men of low degree.’”
The arrival of Otho, in 1237, a papal legate (on the request of Henry), far from remedying, increased the contemporary distress. For though Otho was a discreet man, he was more eager to get money for Rome than to deal with the oppression that plagued England, and when he did give advice it was spurned by those who saw his grasping hands. Archbishop Edmund was particularly vexed at having a papal legate set over him, and what with one disappointment and another finally gave up in despair the task of guiding the English Church, and in 1240 went to die at Pontigny, where his predecessors Anselm and Thomas had lived in exile.
Grosseteste stuck to his post, and the Franciscans and Dominicans, whom he aided, poured in oil and wine on the wounds of the Church folk, and revived religion in the country.
Grosseteste fought the extortionate papal demands for Church revenues all the time. In 1239, with his fellow bishops, he tells Otho plainly that the Church is drained dry by the grasping importunity of Rome. Otho left in 1241, and that same year saw Boniface of Savoy, a handsome, soldierly man appointed to Canterbury as St. Edmund’s successor. The following year came a new extortioner from Rome, named Martin, an altogether inferior person to Otho, but with all the legate’s powers of suspension and excommunication. His confiscations and rapacity provoked a remonstrance to the pope even from Henry. Martin at last, in 1245, had to fly for his life from England, and when Grosseteste subsequently had a calculation made of the English Church revenues enjoyed by foreigners, it was found that the incomes of foreign clerks appointed by Pope Innocent IV. amounted to more than 70,000 marks—more than treble the king’s income. And all this was done in spite of refusals by Grosseteste to appoint illiterates or allow boys to hold benefices.
The barons sided with the Church against Martin, and drew up a long protest which they sent to the pope at the council of Lyons in 1245. In this they complained:—That the pope, not content with Peter’s Pence, which had been paid cheerfully from old times, wrung money from the Church against the law of the realm, without the king’s permission; and that the pope wrongfully put ignorant, covetous, or absentee Italians into English livings notwithstanding his own promises, the rights of patrons, and the privileges of the English clergy. A year later the protest was repeated with another item objecting to the pope’s claim to recall former charters.
Innocent IV.’s answer to this was to threaten to dethrone Henry as he had dethroned his brother-in-law, the Emperor Frederick. The king weakly said no more, the barons, without a leader, were equally silent, and the Church continued “to sate the greed of Rome.”
But in Grosseteste there was no spirit of surrender. In 1253, the very last year of his life, he was called upon by the pope to provide a nephew of his with a canonry at Lincoln, and the bishop’s letter of refusal is, perhaps, the only well remembered thing of all Grosseteste’s writings. This letter was not, as commonly stated, sent to the pope but to his representative who was also named Innocent.38 “The pope has power to build up,” wrote Grosseteste, “but not to pull down. These appointments tend to destruction, not edification, being of man’s device and not according to the words of the Apostles or the will of Christ. By my very love and obedience to the Holy See I must refuse obedience in things altogether opposed to the sanctity of the Apostolic See and contrary to Catholic unity. As a son and a servant I decline to obey, and this refusal must not be taken as rebellion, for it is done in reverence to divine commands.”
(This letter is quoted by Matthew Paris and in the Burton Annals. It can be read in full in the Epistles, No. 128.)
When the pope heard of this answer he talked angrily of “the old madman” who dared to sit in judgment on him, and blustered about the king of England being his vassal. The cardinals, however, said frankly that Grosseteste had spoken the truth, and that he was far too good a man to be condemned. “He is Catholic,” they declared, “and of deepest holiness. More religious, and more saintly than we are, and of better life. They say that among all the bishops there is no one his equal, still less his superior. All the clergy of France and England know this. Besides, he is considered a great philosopher, thoroughly learned in Latin and Greek; and he is zealous for justice, and a man who deals in theology, a preacher to the people, a lover of chastity, and a persecutor of those who practise simony.” So they extolled him. And it is to the everlasting credit of the cardinals of the Roman See in that year 1253 that they could discern the sincerity and the great qualities of the brave old bishop who defied the pope’s unrighteous commands. There was no question at Rome of any disloyalty on Grosseteste’s part to the Holy See, no suggestion of any failing as a good Catholic.39 And Pope Innocent IV. wisely let the matter drop, when the cardinals assured him it would never do to interfere with Grosseteste.
Before he died Grosseteste made a last appeal “to the nobles of England, the citizens of London and the community of the whole realm” on behalf of the Rights of the English Church, making a careful list of the ills to be redressed. He also solemnly charged his friend Simon of Montfort, never, as he valued his immortal soul, to forsake the cause of the English people, but to stand up even to the death, if needs be, for a true and just government, and with prophetic foresight spoke of the heavier troubles coming on the land.
On October 9th, 1253, the long life and the magnificent battling with odds were over, and the great bishop passed away. He was buried in Lincoln Cathedral, and in 1307, King Edward I. and the dean and chapter of St. Paul’s made application for his canonization, but without success. Fifty years later and Edward III.’s Statutes of Provisors, 1351, and Praemunire, 1353, by their prohibition of papal bulls and of the appointment of papal nominees to English benefices, may be accepted as the real acknowledgment of Grosseteste’s political work.
“I confidently assert (wrote Matthew Paris) that his virtues pleased God more than his failings displeased Him.”