History of the English People, Volume II | Page 3

it had been
extorted by force and was without legal validity. "If you loved the King,
William," the Primate burst out in anger, "you would not throw a
stumbling-block in the way of the peace of the realm." The young king
was cowed by the Archbishop's wrath, and promised observance of the
Charter. But it may have been their consciousness of such a temper
among the royal councillors that made Langton and the baronage
demand two years later a fresh promulgation of the Charter as the price
of a subsidy, and Henry's assent established the principle, so fruitful of
constitutional results, that redress of wrongs precedes a grant to the
Crown.
[Sidenote: State of the Church]
These repeated sanctions of the Charter and the government of the
realm year after year in accordance with its provisions were gradually
bringing the new freedom home to the mass of Englishmen. But the
sense of liberty was at this time quickened and intensified by a
religious movement which stirred English society to its depths. Never
had the priesthood wielded such boundless power over Christendom as
in the days of Innocent the Third and his immediate successors. But its
religious hold on the people was loosening day by day. The old
reverence for the Papacy was fading away before the universal
resentment at its political ambition, its lavish use of interdict and
excommunication for purely secular ends, its degradation of the most
sacred sentences into means of financial extortion. In Italy the struggle

that was opening between Rome and Frederick the Second disclosed a
spirit of scepticism which among the Epicurean poets of Florence
denied the immortality of the soul and attacked the very foundations of
the faith itself. In Southern Gaul, Languedoc and Provence had
embraced the heresy of the Albigenses and thrown off all allegiance to
the Papacy. Even in England, though there were no signs as yet of
religious revolt, and though the political action of Rome had been in
the main on the side of freedom, there was a spirit of resistance to its
interference with national concerns which broke out in the struggle
against John. "The Pope has no part in secular matters," had been the
reply of London to the interdict of Innocent. And within the English
Church itself there was much to call for reform. Its attitude in the strife
for the Charter as well as the after work of the Primate had made it
more popular than ever; but its spiritual energy was less than its
political. The disuse of preaching, the decline of the monastic orders
into rich landowners, the non-residence and ignorance of the parish
priests, lowered the religious influence of the clergy. The abuses of the
time foiled even the energy of such men as Bishop Grosseteste of
Lincoln. His constitutions forbid the clergy to haunt taverns, to gamble,
to share in drinking bouts, to mix in the riot and debauchery of the life
of the baronage. But such prohibitions witness to the prevalence of the
evils they denounce. Bishops and deans were still withdrawn from their
ecclesiastical duties to act as ministers, judges, or ambassadors.
Benefices were heaped in hundreds at a time on royal favourites like
John Mansel. Abbeys absorbed the tithes of parishes and then served
them by half-starved vicars, while exemptions purchased from Rome
shielded the scandalous lives of canons and monks from all episcopal
discipline. And behind all this was a group of secular statesmen and
scholars, the successors of such critics as Walter Map, waging indeed
no open warfare with the Church, but noting with bitter sarcasm its
abuses and its faults.
[Sidenote: The Friars]
To bring the world back again within the pale of the Church was the
aim of two religious orders which sprang suddenly to life at the
opening of the thirteenth century. The zeal of the Spaniard Dominic

was roused at the sight of the lordly prelates who sought by fire and
sword to win the Albigensian heretics to the faith. "Zeal," he cried,
"must be met by zeal, lowliness by lowliness, false sanctity by real
sanctity, preaching lies by preaching truth." His fiery ardour and rigid
orthodoxy were seconded by the mystical piety, the imaginative
enthusiasm of Francis of Assisi. The life of Francis falls like a stream
of tender light across the darkness of the time. In the frescoes of Giotto
or the verse of Dante we see him take Poverty for his bride. He strips
himself of all, he flings his very clothes at his father's feet, that he may
be one with Nature and God. His passionate verse claims the moon for
his sister and the sun for his brother, he calls on his brother the Wind,
and his sister the Water. His last faint cry was a "Welcome, Sister
Death!"