King John by Graham E. Seel

Author:Graham E. Seel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY/Europe/Great Britain
ISBN: 9780857282392
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: 2012-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

B) Interpretations

i) What was the Impact of the Interdict and John’s Excommunicate Status?

An appreciation of the nature of the impact of the interdict and excommunication upon laity and clergy alike is central to any assessment of John’s reign. The older interpretation is that their impact was negative and broadly felt, eventually forcing John’s submission in 1213.

Chroniclers such as Gervase of Canterbury and Roger of Wendover exclaim that the religious life in England was devastated by the interdict, not least because this was a land in which clerics were hounded and broken. Wendover, for instance, narrates that John, ‘being greatly enraged on account of the interdict, sent his sheriffs and other ministers of iniquity to all quarters of England, giving orders with dreadful threats to all priests…to depart the kingdom immediately… Religious men…when found travelling on the road, were dragged from their horses, robbed and basely ill-treated and no one would do them justice.’ Wendover proceeds to tell of a Welshman apprehended for the killing of a priest only to be let free because John asserts that ‘he has slain an enemy of mine’ (see Appendix, Documents 11 and 12). Yet detailed study of the record evidence casts doubt on such tales by indicating that John apparently sought to uphold the law as established (see Appendix, Document 28 and pages 126–7). Similarly, Wendover’s tale of John ordering the killing of Geoffrey, archdeacon of Norwich by having him crushed under a weight of lead in 1209 has not withstood close examination (see Appendix, Document 13). Indeed, it is now generally recognized that this same Geoffrey became bishop of Ely in 1225. W. L. Warren’s investigation of this incident led him to conclude that since Wendover ‘has the wrong year, the wrong cause, and the wrong man, the odds are heavily against his being right about the leaden cope’.40 H. G. Richardson considers it ‘a stupid fable’.41 In short, we are reminded to treat with caution the tales that are found in the chronicles.

Nevertheless, we should acknowledge that the interdict did in effect amount to an ecclesiastical strike. In what was an intensely religious age, this must have brought discomfort to many. In the eerie quiet that now enveloped England – the ringing of church bells was forbidden – it does seem as though there were scenes of real horror: bodies were buried in woods or roadside ditches and some sources relate how the dead were placed in coffins and then hung from a tree in a churchyard until they could be given a legitimate burial. With the church doors barred and bolted, sermons were preached in the churchyard. An effect of John’s excommunicate status from 1209 was that bishops went into exile. By 1211 only one of the seventeen sees – Winchester – had a bishop and it seems likely that such large-scale absenteeism had a deleterious effect on the religious life of the church. A. L. Poole concludes that ‘religiously minded life in these conditions can have been scarcely tolerable’.42 W.

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