Cooperation between the church and secular legal authority may lack the drama of church-state power contests or the intellectual excitement of theoretical conflicts of jurisdictions, yet investigation of normality and cooperation still has much to teach us, and can yield rich and surprising rewards.Footnote ¹ The interaction between English royal law courts and episcopal administrations in the long fourteenth century, moreover, is a subject with abundant sources; yet it has received comparatively little attention.Footnote ² The year 1300 is a good starting point for investigation because under Edward I there was a great leap forward in all aspects of crown record-keeping as clerks strove to make a copy of every letter they sent out, and to note every transaction they conducted. Bishops’ registrars followed suit, and in the early fourteenth century some at least recorded enthusiastically and extensively the letters their bishops received from the king. Bishop Roger Martival of Salisbury (1315–30) was one whose clerks tried to make copies of every writ he received. They recorded 875 from July 1315 to February 1330,Footnote ³ an average of nearly sixty a year. The writ register of his contemporary Henry Burghersh of the huge diocese of Lincoln (1320–40) remains unpublished, but sampling of writs of his first six years suggests he received about 145 a year.Footnote ⁴ The register of their contemporary Walter Stapeldon of Exeter (1308–26) contains a similarly rich collection.Footnote ⁵ By contrast, Walter Reynolds at the much smaller diocese of Worcester (1308–13) averaged about two dozen writs annually.Footnote ⁶

Writs issued by the royal courts were not, of course, the only commands sent to bishops by the crown; orders to attend parliament, organize prayers for national causes, provide lists of foreign benefice-holders, swear in local officials and even array their clergy for home defence all came to English bishops. In addition, they had to appoint the collectors of clerical taxes and to provide information about (sometimes distant) defaulters and to gather overdue sums. Those subjects lie outside the scope of this article. Writs commanded bishops to undertake many tasks on behalf of the king's courts, of Chancery, Exchequer, Common Pleas, King's Bench or Assize. Bishop Martival received forty-nine types of writ, not including writs of sicut alias or sicut pluries, that is, the reiterations of previous commands. By far the biggest class of business concerned debts, and came from the court of Common Pleas; these were generally writs of venire faciatis ordering the bishop to cause a defendant to answer one of several types of plea in cases of private debts owed by clerics. In executing these writs, bishops were, strictly speaking, violating canon law, which did not recognize lay jurisdiction over the clergy in civil matters. This, however, was widely disregarded.Footnote ⁷ The exchequer also issued writs of debt, but these were fieri faciatis, telling the bishop himself to raise money from clerics in debt to the crown, which might have resulted from their service as king's clerks.Footnote ⁸ The widespread use of clergy as executors also resulted in many actions for debt.Footnote ⁹ The King's Bench writs essentially told the bishop to make clerical defendants appear in court (venire faciatis and variations).Footnote ¹⁰ The pattern is similar in Burghersh's writ register: the overwhelming majority are Common Pleas writs about private debts owed by clerics. There is also an element, some ten per cent, of writs issued by the court of King's Bench concerning crimes of various kinds, including violent assault allegedly perpetrated by clerics. It looks as though the royal courts were using church administrations – accessed through the bishops – as debt collectors, gatherers of evidence and general enforcers. It should be said that using diocesan machinery for collecting money was often the courts’ second choice, since many writs included the information that a sheriff had made a return of ‘no lay fee’ in respect of clerical debtors.

There were, however, some questions to which only churchmen could supply an answer. A number of writs wanted information in connection with advowson disputes or disputes about the rights of, and financial burdens on, a benefice; these orders were writs of certiorari. These were Chancery writs, and a subgroup specifically ordered a bishop to consult registers. The wording is: mandamus quod scrutatis registris de eo quod inde inveneritis (‘look in the registers and tell us what you find’). Variations ordered the registers of the bishop's predecessors to be consulted, and sometimes the see's other archives as well.

How far back did these enquiries want to go? Demands addressed to Bishop Buckingham of Lincoln (1363–98) furnish some interesting examples.Footnote ¹¹ Most dramatic (or unreasonable) is a writ of 1386 concerning half the church of Milton Major and Collingtree, Northamptonshire, which wanted to know about the benefice from ‘the first year of the lord king H. father of the lord John formerly king of England’. This takes us back to 1154, and the wording is so deliberate that it can hardly be an error.Footnote ¹² Two other writs, one in 1372, the other in 1392, wanted information from Richard I's coronation, 3 September 1189, the limit of legal memory.Footnote ¹³ More realistic was the enquiry about incumbents of Marston Moretaine ‘since the coronation of Henry son of King John’.Footnote ¹⁴ In the return to another writ about the same Bedfordshire benefice, dated early in 1395, the bishop reported that he had caused the registers of his predecessors to be scrutinized from the time of Hugh II, that is, Hugh of Wells (1209–35), when Gilbert de W. [sic] was instituted, and he sent a full list of incumbents.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, Gilbert de Wyville's institution can be found in the rolls of Hugh of Wells. Footnote ¹⁶ Perhaps this return improved Chancery knowledge of Lincoln episcopal archives, because a flurry of writs, all from 1395, about several benefices, wanted information dating from the episcopate of Hugh of Wells; he was the first bishop of Lincoln to keep systematic records of his rule.Footnote ¹⁷

No later writ wanted information from so far back, and only two asked for data from the thirteenth century. One concerned Armston hospital, Northamptonshire, and wanted to know about the form of its foundation and ordination, ‘made in the time of Robert Grosseteste, it is said’. The return was: ‘We made diligent search among the register of Robert Grosseteste but could not find anything about the foundation of the hospital in his time. However, we did find an inspeximus of two charters, one of Hugh of Wells and the other of Lady Alice de Trublevile … and we send you their wording’. Hugh of Wells's charter remains at Boughton House, near Kettering, and the inspeximus of Alice's charter is in Grosseteste's rolls.Footnote ¹⁸ Clearly someone, either in Northamptonshire or in the royal Chancery, knew that Grosseteste's records would contain useful information.

The most remarkable command of this type ordered the bishop of Lincoln to send in his entire register to the royal Chancery. This came in June 1391 and was occasioned by a dispute over the archdeaconry of Buckingham.Footnote ¹⁹ Two writs in quick succession told the bishop to send ‘the complete register which you have had made since your consecration, in the care of some of your staff in whom you have confidence’. The return was: ‘We have scrutinized our register and send a full copy of the relevant matter, but we are not able to send our whole register’.Footnote ²⁰ Clearly compliance with the law's demands had its limitations, which were overstepped by this order. The bishop's return is not surprising, for not only was any current register a work in progress, to be consulted and constantly added to, but until the episcopate ended it was not a bound volume but remained a loose collection of parchment sheets.

Some writs directed a bishop to discover the true status of an individual, subjects which only church authorities could answer. Such queries had two points in common: they arose from property disputes being held in either Common Pleas or King's Bench, and all apparently arose late in the proceedings. It looks as though the party which was about to lose the case made the allegation of defective legal status as a way of deferring judgment in the hope that their opponent would die, abandon the case or agree to compromise.Footnote ²¹ Two such enquiries are especially interesting: ‘Is X a nun?’, and ‘Is Y legitimate or a bastard?’

It is perhaps not surprising that the question of whether a particular woman was a nun should arise, for many nunneries included residents who were neither professed, novices or conversae: girls being educated, widows as paying guests or even political prisoners. The problem of identifying nuns had occupied the English church since the primacy of Archbishop Lanfranc, and during the Angevin period a series of cases before the curia regis concerned the disputed religious status of a number of individuals, most, but not all, of whom were women.Footnote ²² At the root of the problem was the well-established doctrine of ‘civil death’, which prohibited the religious from pleading in lay courts, making wills or inheriting property, which thus passed to their next heirs as though they were already deceased.Footnote ²³ The result was that the taking of religious vows became entwined with the transmission of property, and sometimes with the wish to remove individual family members from the possibility of inheritance, and thus to benefit others. This certainly seems to have been the case with Alice de Everingham, from a landed family of Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire, who was caught up in a family dispute and was signified as a religious apostate from Haverholme Priory (Lincolnshire) in 1366 by William Prestwold, master of the Gilbertine order.Footnote ²⁴ The bishop's commission, convened in response to two Chancery writs the following year, examined Alice herself and the brothers and sisters of Haverholme, and reported that she was not a nun.Footnote ²⁵ This seems to have closed the case.Footnote ²⁶ Conversely, Maud Huntercombe apparently was a nun but Giles French, a king's serjeant, spotted an opportunity to gain some property from her Buckinghamshire gentry family after it suffered two key deaths in 1390 and 1391, so he abducted Maud from Burnham Abbey (Buckinghamshire). She too was signified as a religious apostate on 10 July 1391, by the abbess who described Maud as a vagabond in secular habit.Footnote ²⁷ By then two writs had already been sent to the bishop to enquire into her status, although stay of their execution was ordered that November.Footnote ²⁸ Soon a flurry of writs restarted the enquiry process,Footnote ²⁹ but Bishop Buckingham had already set up a commission of enquiry in the previous July, and returned its findings on 20 April 1393. Having made diligent enquiry, ‘at great trouble and expense’, as he grumbled, he concluded that Maud was indeed a nun, had been so for many years, and had entered religion at the age of discretion.Footnote ³⁰ She was to be returned to Burnham Abbey and the plaintiffs in the case, her aunts, were restored to their property.Footnote ³¹

Yet more complicated was the question, ‘Is X legitimate or a bastard?’ This might involve not only questions of marriage but also of divorce.Footnote ³² Problems here included the fact that canon law and common law had slightly different rules for making the judgment, and that common law, being case law, tended to change its definition.Footnote ³³ Whilst marriage law was church law, ‘there was some skirmishing at the edges’, as Helmholz puts it, over disputes about the inheritance of land.Footnote ³⁴ In every case discovered in the writ collections, the allegation of bastardy was rejected by episcopal enquiry. All involved property, mostly of small amounts, for example ‘an acre of land with appurtenances’ in Gloucestershire, in a case to Reynolds of Worcester in 1310.Footnote ³⁵ The cases coming to Martival were also comparatively modest: a messuage and two carucates of land in 1316 and an acre of land in 1327.Footnote ³⁶ The lands in question whose heirs’ status was in doubt under Stapeldon were similar. In November 1309 they concerned three messuages and four acres of land in Whitestone (Cornwall) and Nether Exe (Devon), and after some delay he reported that the plaintiff was legitimate and not a bastard.Footnote ³⁷ In 1312 a similar enquiry arose from a dispute over two acres of land in Shillingford (Devon), to which the return gave the details that the couple in question were Adam Pynde and Rose de Holerigge whose marriage had been publicly solemnized in the face of the church, and that they had subsequently lived together as man and wife.Footnote ³⁸

Much higher stakes occurred in a case which came to Buckingham of Lincoln. It concerned the first marriage of Sir Bernard Brocas, soldier, courtier, friend of William of Wykeham and long-serving master of the royal buckhounds.Footnote ³⁹ The Common Pleas writ of inquiratis de bastardia, dated 15 May 1385, concerned Sir Bernard's namesake and the son of his first marriage. This had taken place in 1344 or 1345, to Agnes Vavasour, heiress to five Yorkshire manors and one (Weekley) in Northamptonshire. The marriage was dissolved in 1360 but unusually both parties were given leave to remarry, which they did. Agnes married Henry Langfield, and the dispute was about her Northamptonshire land and was sparked by the felling of trees there. It looks as though Henry Langfield, following his wife's death in January 1385, was trying desperately to hold on to her Northamptonshire manor which had been inherited by his stepson, Bernard Brocas junior.Footnote ⁴⁰ This was also a complicated investigation for the bishop because the Brocas family was based in Hampshire and Sir Bernard's first marriage had taken place in Berkshire, but the long and detailed enquiry was held in London. There were four witnesses: one had been born in the year of the wedding, and two only echoed the second witness. He, however, compensated by his precise and detailed recollection of the marriage, the wedding liturgy and the names of the guests.Footnote ⁴¹

These examples showed crown-church or legal-canonical cooperation working effectively. But they were high-profile: Alice's case came before Chancery and Maud's before parliament,Footnote ⁴² while Brocas senior was a courtier and MP. When we ask how efficiently this cooperative mechanism usually worked, the answer is not clear-cut. In some episcopates, the rate of effective execution is impressive. Walter Reynolds at Worcester was able to execute, either wholly or in part, nearly half (sixty-five) the royal commands, although no return was recorded to a further twenty-five, while attempts to raise money were thwarted in seventeen other cases in which no buyer of the sequestered goods could be found. This was in a comparatively small diocese at a time of domestic peace. Yet the problems these writs posed are illustrated by a writ addressed to Reynolds in 1309. This exchequer fieri faciatis de bonis ecclesiasticis was against William de Persore, rector of Powick (Worcestershire), Reginald le Porter, rector of ‘Burghton’, and Adam de Herewynton, executors of Reginald le Porter ‘sometime sheriff of Worcestershire’. To this the return was: ‘Adam de H. is not beneficed in the diocese, William le P. is dead and nothing of his goods can be found; goods of the rector of B. to the value of 40s have been sequestered, but no buyer for them could be found’.Footnote ⁴³ In larger dioceses, the successful rate of return was much lower, and the answer to very many writs was that it had arrived too late for execution to take place by the date of its return to the issuing court.Footnote ⁴⁴ This was not surprising, given that bishops travelled widely within their sees and further afield, and must often have been elusive. Roger Martival of Salisbury, for example, would visit his family home of Noseley, in Leicestershire,Footnote ⁴⁵ as well as travelling to parliament at Lincoln in 1316,Footnote ⁴⁶ while Henry Burghersh of Lincoln spent long periods near York in the summer of 1322. As well as late arrival, other common returns were that property had been seized but no buyer could be found; there was no such person in the diocese,Footnote ⁴⁷ the person was unknown unless designated by his benefice,Footnote ⁴⁸ the wanted man had died,Footnote ⁴⁹ the debtor was not an executor of the will in question,Footnote ⁵⁰ there would be no money until after harvest,Footnote ⁵¹ or the harvest had been sold and the money already dispersed.Footnote ⁵² An unusual reply came in January 1408 from Bishop Repingdon of Lincoln: the rector of Clipston (Northamptonshire) could not be brought to the exchequer because he had departed for the Roman court.Footnote ⁵³ Attempts made by the royal courts to penalize bishops by making them responsible for debts were only partly successful. Debtors were made to swear that they would save their bishop unharmed by appearing in lay courts or paying debts, but did not always keep their word, and bishops complained when they suffered for the misdeeds of their clergy. It is usually impossible to detect the dividing line between incompetenceFootnote ⁵⁴ (on both sides) and obstructiveness.Footnote ⁵⁵ But obstructiveness on the part of bishops and their clerks there certainly was. An egregious example is the return to a Common Pleas fieri faciatis de bonis ecclesiasticis against Richard Ravenser for forty marks, to which the bishop of Lincoln replied: ‘We have made diligent enquiry in our diocese about the ecclesiastical goods of Richard de Ravenser, but we can find none by which the 40 marks can be distrained’, even though Ravenser was then archdeacon of Lincoln and prebendary of Empingham.Footnote ⁵⁶ This, however, should not necessarily be seen as an example of crown-church antagonism, more as the stuff of perpetual and continuing legal sparring.Footnote ⁵⁷ Responses to episcopal ineffectiveness included the issuing of writs of sicut alias (for the second time), sicut pluries (further orders), threats to the bishopFootnote ⁵⁸ and sometimes professions of astonishment at a bishop's previous failures to comply, with increasing irritation at episcopal inaction.Footnote ⁵⁹

Another obstacle to detecting efficiency is that enthusiasm for recording the writs waned in the course of the fourteenth century, as bishops’ chanceries became much more selective, and writs about private debt and crime were no longer copied. In dioceses where successive writ collections can be identified, such as Salisbury, Worcester and Lincoln, the rate of recording declined during the second half of the fourteenth century, although to some extent enthusiasm for recording writs depended upon individual bishops. Thus in Worcester diocese Adam de Ordeton's register (1327–33) contains seventeen scattered writs, or references, none arising from the types of cases discussed here, while the well-organized register of his successor Simon de Montacute (1332–7) has around fifty, with dates and places of receipt and details of returns meticulously entered. Montacute, young, aristocratic and a new-minted graduate, was a stickler for many aspects of his office.Footnote ⁶⁰ The trend was generally downwards, though, and all diocesan traditions of keeping writ sections disappeared during the second quarter of the fifteenth century.Footnote ⁶¹ It is likely that practicality, rather than principle, dictated the change, for the cost in time and materials of copying every writ was surely considerable. Moreover, as the fourteenth century progressed, the impact of warfare imposed new burdens on bishops, in particular the collection of current clerical taxes and the gathering of sometimes long-standing arrears. English bishops were thus more likely to respond to immediate pressures rather than to decisions in the distant papal court.Footnote ⁶²

This article has examined an area of crown-church cooperation in which pragmatism, rather than principle, prevailed. It was, of course, only one part of crown-church legal interaction, and one chronological segment, albeit one which lasted over a hundred years. Previously, the two great areas of legal friction had been the jurisdiction over disputes about the rights of patronage of ecclesiastical benefices, which the crown won (and so advowsons were a lay plea), and benefit of clergy, which the church won (at least in theory). In practice, the boundaries were often blurred; both clergy and laymen sometimes claimed (or denied) that a case belonged to one particular jurisdiction in order to have proceedings moved from, or into, church courts, while from the early fourteenth century examples can be found of obvious laymen successfully claiming benefit of clergy. At the national level, the clergy made a series of protests and complaints from the early thirteenth century and throughout the fourteenth about infringement of their rights, usually when the crown was weak or political tension high,Footnote ⁶³ and the laity in parliament on occasion made counter-claims.Footnote ⁶⁴ At the national, international and theoretical levels, therefore, high claims might be made on both sides of the ecclesiastical-secular power divide, but at the local level cooperation was much more evident, as this article has striven to show. Also, while the crown enlisted the church to exert the authority of the royal courts, ecclesiastical authorities, for their part, turned to the secular power in order to enforce discipline by imprisoning persistent excommunicates and capturing religious runaways.Footnote ⁶⁵ None of this is the stuff of heroics or drama, but in complying, however inefficiently, with commands from the crown's courts, the bishops of England during the long fourteenth century were going to considerable trouble. In acting as the crown's bailiffs, sheriffs and detective agencies they were expending time, money, ink and parchment in their cooperation with legal authority to ensure that rights were respected, fraud was unmasked and debts were paid, efforts which contributed towards making England a land where the rule of law, and laws, prevailed.