The Gatehouse — History for Humans

A companion to the Gatehouse scenario in Ecclesiastical Politics. The game itself doesn't use this essay. It's here for anyone who wants the history behind the game, before, during, or after playing it.

The short version

Hollinbeck never existed, and neither did Sir Ralph of Askholme. The problem the scenario hands its seven canons was real and ordinary. Religious houses lived on gifts of land, mills, and rents, and the heirs of the men who gave them sometimes wanted them back. When an heir simply took what his grandfather had given, the Church's strongest weapon was excommunication. And now and then an excommunicate died before he had made his peace, and the people around him had to decide what his last hours had meant.

The scenario sets that problem in December 1240, in a small house of Augustinian canons in the Pennine fells of what is now Cumbria. The law it turns on had been gathered into one authoritative book only six years before. The bishop of Carlisle was an old royal administrator, often away. The border with Scotland had lately been settled by treaty, and the snow on the fells did what it still does.

Canons regular

Canons regular were clergy who chose to live like monks. The movement grew out of the eleventh-century reform of the Church, which urged priests to give up private property and live in common, and by the twelfth century most such communities followed the Rule of St. Augustine: a short text drawn from Augustine's writings on common life, especially a letter of guidance to a community of women. Its brevity was its strength. Each house or congregation could add its own customs, and the rule fitted a community of five as well as one of fifty.

In England they were called Austin canons, or Black Canons from the black cloaks they wore over white linen. They spread quickly in the twelfth century, with King Henry I and his queen among their early patrons, and by the end of the Middle Ages England had about two hundred Augustinian houses. Many were small: a prior and a handful of canons, a few servants, a church that also served the neighborhood, and endowments that rarely felt like enough. A small house was usually a priory and its head a prior; only the larger ones were abbeys.

Canons regular are easy to confuse with the canons of a cathedral like the one in the Chapter House scenario, who were secular canons. Those kept their own incomes and houses. Canons regular took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, slept in a common dormitory, ate in a common refectory, and sang the whole round of the daily office together. The word regular is from regula, a rule.

A small house had a few officers. The prior governed, and the subprior stood in for him. The precentor ruled the choir and usually the books. The sacrist kept the church, its lights, vessels, and relics, and often the burial ground. The cellarer kept the food, the stores, and in practice much of the house's income.

The far north had several Augustinian houses, among them Hexham, Lanercost near Hadrian's Wall, and Cartmel on the edge of Morecambe Bay. Carlisle Cathedral itself was served by Augustinian canons, the only English cathedral that ever was.

The chapter and the dead

Every morning after Prime, the community met in the chapter house, which took its name from the chapter (capitulum) of the rule read aloud there. In most houses the meeting began with the martyrology, the saints commemorated that day, and then the necrology: the house's own dead, its founders and benefactors, and the brethren of other houses joined to it in confraternity, each read on the anniversary of his death. Then came the rule, the confession of faults, and the business of the house.

The necrology was a calendar with names entered against the days, added by many hands over many years. To be written in it was to be prayed for by the community on that day every year, for as long as the house stood, and benefactors gave land and money for exactly that. Houses in confraternity exchanged their dead. When a member died, a messenger might carry a long parchment roll from house to house, and each community added its promise of prayers.

All of this rested on the conviction that the prayers of the living help the dead. Masses were said for them, and the Office of the Dead was sung. St. Gregory the Great's Dialogues gave the period its most famous example: a monk named Justus, found at his death to have hidden three gold coins, was buried on the dungheap with them as a warning, then given thirty days of Masses, after which he appeared to his brother to say he had been released from torment. A set of thirty Masses for the dead came to be called a trental.

The great return a religious house gave for land was prayer. Land given in frankalmoign (free alms) owed no knight service or rent, only the prayers of the community for the giver and his kin. A founder was remembered with special solemnity on his anniversary, often buried before the high altar, and his heirs could inherit rights of their own: to be buried in the church, to be received as guests, to be consulted.

Mills, and the grandsons of benefactors

A watermill was one of the most valuable things a lord could own. Domesday Book records nearly six thousand in England in 1086. Tenants were commonly bound to grind their grain at their lord's mill and leave a share of it, the multure, as payment, so a mill brought both income and control. Mills were frequently given to religious houses, and just as frequently fought over: with heirs who wanted them back, with neighboring lords whose own mills lost business, and with tenants who tried to grind at home.

Heirs were the persistent problem. A gift in perpetual alms was meant to bind them, and donors often had their sons consent in the charter and promise to defend the gift. Even so, sons and grandsons challenged gifts made before they were born. They argued that the land had never been the giver's to give, that the terms had been broken, or that the gift had been for a lifetime only. The cartularies in which religious houses copied their title deeds are full of quitclaims, documents in which a donor's son or grandson renounced his claim, often after years of dispute and often for a payment or a promise of prayers.

Which court should hear such quarrels was a running contest in itself. Church courts claimed cases touching the Church's property; the king's justices claimed land, wherever it lay. Litigants used whichever forum promised the better result, and the other side tried to have the case stopped.

Excommunication

Excommunication cut a person off from the communion of the Church. In its lesser form it barred him from the sacraments. In its greater form it cut him off from the company of the faithful as well, and the canonists summed up what was forbidden in a verse: os, orare, vale, communio, mensa negatur, meaning no speech, prayer, greeting, communion, or shared table. A solemn sentence could be pronounced with bells rung and candles dashed to the ground, and sentences were published in parish churches so that neighbors would know whom to shun.

In principle it was medicine, not punishment: a sentence meant to bring a sinner to repentance. Whoever repented and made satisfaction was absolved, usually by the authority that had pronounced the sentence. Its commonest cause was contumacy, stubborn refusal to obey a church court. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) tried to restrain its use, requiring a warning first and a reasonable cause (canon 47).

It was also, unavoidably, a weapon in property disputes. A religious house had few other ways to make a powerful layman give back what he had seized, and excommunication was used against despoilers of church property constantly. Contemporaries complained that it was used too freely, and that sentences multiplied until they lost their force.

Excommunication in England

England backed the sentence with the power of the Crown. If an excommunicate stayed under sentence for forty days, the bishop could signify the fact to the king's Chancery, which then issued a writ ordering the sheriff to arrest him and hold him until he submitted. The writ was called de excommunicato capiendo, or significavit from its opening word. It was in use from at least the early thirteenth century and lasted for centuries. Sheriffs did not always hurry, especially against a powerful neighbor, but the threat was real.

An excommunicate was also shut out of the king's courts as a plaintiff: his opponent could plead the excommunication and stop the case. A man under sentence for long found his affairs slowly strangled, which is part of why so many eventually came to terms.

Dying under the sentence

Someone who died excommunicate was denied church burial: no grave in consecrated ground, no Office of the Dead, no Masses or public prayers. If he was buried in a churchyard by mistake, a decretal of Innocent III ruled that his bones were to be dug up and thrown out, if they could be told from the bones of the faithful; if they could not, the faithful were not to be disturbed for his sake.

The famous cases show how seriously this was taken:

Raymond's case was exactly the question the law had already tried to answer. In 1199, in a letter later placed in the Decretals, Innocent III ruled that a man who died excommunicate could not be prayed for, even if he had been contrite. But if his repentance while still alive was established by evident signs, he could be absolved after death by the one who could have absolved him living, and his heirs could be compelled to make satisfaction on his behalf. The whole matter became a question of evidence: what signs, seen by whom, and proved how.

That fitted an old principle of the canonists: Ecclesia de occultis non iudicat, the Church does not judge hidden things. What passed between a soul and God belonged to the confessional and to God; a court could rule only on what had been seen and proved. The Gatehouse follows the same rule. It shows the player what can be seen and sworn, and nothing more.

Proof had its own rules. The procedure of the church courts, adapted from Roman law, required two credible witnesses for full proof; a single witness made only half a proof, to be supported by documents, presumptions, or oaths. Witnesses were sworn, on the Gospels or on relics, and examined one by one. Their answers were written down in Latin by a notary, although nearly every witness in England spoke English or French, so every deposition that survives has passed through someone's translation.

Confession without a priest

The Fourth Lateran Council required every Christian to confess at least once a year to his own priest, and bound priests to absolute secrecy: a priest who revealed a confession was to be deposed and shut in a strict monastery for life (canon 21). But what of a man dying where no priest could reach him?

A treatise long attributed to St. Augustine, though written centuries after him, taught that confession was so powerful that if a priest was lacking, one should confess to a neighbor. Gratian and Peter Lombard repeated it, and it entered the schools. Theologians agreed that such a confession was not the sacrament and gave no absolution, but it showed the penitent's contrition and his desire for the sacrament. What the hearer then owed, and whether he was bound to keep silent, they argued about.

The bishop's official and the law

The law in force in 1240 was new in its book. Pope Gregory IX had commissioned the Dominican canonist St. Raymond of Peñafort to gather the scattered decretals of earlier popes into one collection, and in 1234 he promulgated it as the Decretals, often called the Liber Extra, and sent it to the law schools of Bologna and Paris. Its five books covered judges, procedure, clergy, marriage, and crime, and it remained at the heart of the Church's law until 1917. Both of Innocent III's rulings above are in it.

By then most English bishops had appointed an official (officialis) to run their courts, hearing cases of marriage, wills, tithes, defamation, and the misconduct of clergy. Officials were usually trained lawyers, often university men; Oxford had a law faculty, and the ambitious studied at Bologna. A bishop who spent much of his time at court relied heavily on his official and on special commissions, which was how a bishop's powers reached places he could not go himself.

The north in 1240

Carlisle was a frontier. William Rufus took it from the Scots in 1092, and Henry I founded its Augustinian priory and, in 1133, its diocese. The Scots held Carlisle again from 1136 to 1157, and King David I of Scotland died there in 1153. The diocese that emerged was small, poor, and remote, wedged between the Pennines and the Solway.

In 1237 the Treaty of York between Henry III and Alexander II of Scotland finally settled the border. Alexander gave up his family's claims to Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmorland, and received lands in Northumberland and Cumberland to hold of the English king. The frontier was quieter in 1240 than it had been in living memory, and would stay so for more than half a century.

The fells above the Eden valley rise to Cross Fell, at about 2,900 feet the highest point of the Pennines. Its western scarp breeds the Helm Wind, a fierce, roaring east wind that pours down off the tops, often under a bar of cloud over the summit, and is said to be the only named wind in Britain. Across the watershed lies Alston Moor, whose silver-bearing lead had been mined for the Crown since the twelfth century.

The country's place-names carry the Norse settlers who farmed it: fell for a hill, beck for a stream, dale for a valley, holme for a water-meadow or island. In 1240 its tenants spoke a northern English, its landholders and the king's officers French, and its choirs and courts Latin.

The people

Innocent III (pope 1198–1216). A trained canonist and the most forceful legislator of the medieval papacy, he summoned the Fourth Lateran Council. His letters on burial and on absolution after death became law through the Decretals.

Gregory IX (pope 1227–1241). Innocent's nephew, a friend of St. Francis, whom he canonized, and the pope who commissioned the Decretals. In December 1240 he was locked in his long struggle with the emperor Frederick II, and had summoned a general council to Rome for Easter 1241. Frederick's fleet captured many of the prelates at sea that spring, and Gregory died in August.

St. Raymond of Peñafort (about 1175–1275). A Catalan Dominican and canonist, he compiled the Decretals and wrote a widely used handbook for confessors. He served as master general of the Dominicans from 1238 and resigned in 1240.

Henry III (1207–1272). King of England from the age of nine. In 1240 he was thirty-three, nearly five years married to Eleanor of Provence, with a son, the future Edward I, born the year before.

Walter Mauclerk (died 1248). Bishop of Carlisle from 1223 and, at the same time, a busy servant of the Crown: sheriff of Cumberland, Treasurer of England from 1228 until he lost office in the court upheavals of 1233, and an envoy abroad more than once. He still put his diocese's finances in order. In 1246 he resigned the see and became a Dominican friar at Oxford, where he died.

Walter de Gray (archbishop of York 1215–1255). A former chancellor of England, and metropolitan over the diocese of Carlisle, so an appeal from Carlisle's courts went to him.

The saints in the scenario

St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Bishop and theologian, whose writings on common life gave the canons their rule.

St. Gregory the Great (pope 590–604). His Dialogues, a book of stories of Italian saints and of the life to come, were read aloud in refectories across Europe for centuries.

St. Lucy (died about 304). A virgin martyr of Syracuse, whose name was linked with light. Her feast falls on 13 December, and in the Julian calendar of the thirteenth century it fell within a day or so of the winter solstice, so her day was very nearly the shortest of the year.

St. Cuthbert (died 687). Monk and bishop of Lindisfarne, and the great saint of the English north. St. Bede tells that Cuthbert was at Carlisle in 685, being shown its Roman walls, when he perceived that King Ecgfrith had fallen in battle far to the north. His body, enshrined at Durham, was found incorrupt when it was moved in 1104, and his relics were among the most revered in England.

What the game invents

Hollinbeck is invented: the priory, its canons, its founder and customs, including the youngest speaking first and the four voices needed to carry a petition. So are the Askholmes, the mill and the quarrel over it, the shepherd Adam, Master Simon the official, and the relic of St. Cuthbert the house keeps. The particular case, a lord dead under sentence lying in a gatehouse while a snowbound chapter decides whether to petition, is invented, though each piece of it happened somewhere.

What is real: the Rule of St. Augustine and the life of a small priory, necrologies and prayer for the dead, frankalmoign and quitclaims, the law of excommunication and of absolution after death as the Decretals give it, the English writ for arresting excommunicates, the procedure of the church courts, the bishop of Carlisle and the archbishop of York, the Treaty of York, the Helm Wind, and the calendar of 1240.

Words you'll meet

Saying the names

Most of the names are English and say themselves. Hollinbeck is HOL-in-bek; hollin is the old northern word for holly. Askholme is ASK-hohm, roughly "ash-tree meadow." Uhtred is OOKH-tred, with the throaty sound of Scottish "loch," though OOT-red is common today. Gervase is JUR-vuss, Ivo EE-voh, Osbert OZ-burt, and Alston AWL-stun. Mauclerk is MOH-klerk, Peñafort pen-yah-FORT, and Ecgfrith EDGE-frith.