Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [277]
John had retaliated by confiscating Church property and retaining the income for himself; Innocent in reply excommunicated him and thereby released all his feudal vassals from their vows of loyalty to him. He had even threatened to depose the king. For Innocent was not a man to be trifled with. Finally, when he was threatened by an invasion by the French king with the pope’s blessing, John capitulated, resigned his kingdom to the pope and received it back from him as a vassal. The Church had triumphed: the new archbishop was installed; and the Church’s superior power, even over kings, had seemed to be established. It was a tremendous power, not to be lightly challenged, and Godefroi had good reason to be afraid of it.
The political victory was theoretical. Much more important to every man in England was the fact that Church and State could not live without one another: the king needed the Church’s moral authority; the Church with its huge holdings of land, needed the king’s and the laity’s protection. In England after the Interdict, a new spirit of cooperation developed, which brought great blessings to the State. When the disasters of John’s reign finally led to the rebellion of many of his barons and the contract of Magna Carta, it was Stephen Langton, the archbishop he had opposed, who counselled the barons to moderation and who finally drew up a charter with such wise and statesmanlike provisions, even protecting humble folk, that both kings and magnates referred to it for guidance for generations afterwards. Now it was the Church which supported England’s kings and people alike against feudal power-seekers and whose high moral authority helped to prevent any return to the chaos of Stephen’s reign.
This could not have happened either if the bishops themselves had not been men of stature, or if they had been out of sympathy with the state itself. Sometimes they were candidates proposed by the English Church, or by the pope; sometimes they were servants of the king; but in the island now a period of practical compromise had set in. Church leaders usually emerged through mutual agreement; the disputes between the Church and the lay authorities were normally settled in court. Unlike the terrible days when Bishop Roger had built his castles, the bishops of Salisbury in recent generations had been worthy and distinguished men, and the respect of a man like Godefroi for the present Bishop Bingham was high. The new city, with its stately cathedral and busy market town side by side, expressed the cooperative spirit of the new era.
And so, both through caution and genuine sympathy, when the canon invoked the authority of the Church, the knight had good reason to pause.
But he was still unwilling to give way.
A little crowd had now gathered.
From his place by the ditch, Osmund looked up at the two men and hardly knew himself which one he wanted to win.
But as he watched, he noticed a slight twitch in the canon’s eyebrow – it was a sign he had come to know well. And it meant a fresh and very different attack was coming. He stared, spellbound.
For Portehors was not just a stern disciplinarian. He represented a new and powerful force.
In recent years, a new movement had appeared in the English Church, led by the exacting and scholarly Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln. The duty of the Church, they reminded their colleagues, was the cure of souls, and nothing should interfere with that. Bishops and archdeacons had a duty to inspect the moral and spiritual condition not only of every priest in the diocese, but of the laity as well.
“It’s not that I object to Grosseteste in principle,” Godefroi had confided to the grey-haired Bingham. “It’s just that he encourages the most narrow-minded of the