Uncertain Refuge: Sanctuary in the Literature of Medieval England

By Elizabeth Allen

To seek sanctuary from persecution by entering a sacred space is an act of desperation, but also a symbolic endeavor: fugitives invoke divine presence to reach a precarious safe haven that imbues their lives with religious, social, or political significance. In medieval England, sanctuary was upheld under both canon and common law, and up to five hundred people sought sanctuary every year. What they found, however, was not so much a static refuge as a temporary respite from further action—confession and exile—or from further violence—jurisdictional conflict, harrying or starvation, a breaching of the sanctuary.

While sanctuary has usually been analyzed as part of legal history, in Uncertain Refuge Elizabeth Allen explores the symbolic consequences of sanctuary seeking in English literary works—miracle collections, chronicles, romances, and drama. She ponders the miracle of a stag's escape from the hunt into a churchyard as well as the account of a fallen political favorite who gains a sort of charisma as he takes sanctuary three times in succession; the figure of Sir Gawain, seeking refuge in a stark land far from the court and Robin Hood, hiding in his local forest refuge among his Merry Men. Her consideration of medieval sanctuary extends to its resonances in a seventeenth-century play about the early Tudor usurper Perkin Warbeck and even into modern America, with the case of a breach of sanctuary in southwest Georgia in 1963, when sheriffs took over a voter registration meeting in a local church.

Uncertain Refuge illuminates a fantasy of protection and its impermanence that animated late medieval literary culture, and one that remains poignantly alive, if no longer written into law, in today's troubled political world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Oct 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812298079

Elizabeth Allen

Liz is a Florida girl - born and raised in the Sunshine State. Her career path has spanned from physical to fiscal to literary starting in nutrition, then riding the roller coaster we call the stock market as a financial advisor and ultimately penning her first book at age 49. Before meeting her husband and marrying in 1992 Liz lived in New York City and Los Angeles. In 1995 she had a child but fear and impatience with unpredictable earthquakes in California motivated her to move back to Florida in 1999 - just in time for that y2k scare...Liz' debut novel "Who Got Liz Gardner" was published in April 2009 as the result of an international contest and is now enjoying tremendous popularity in book clubs around the world. Book Two in the "Liz" series - "Discovering Arugula" was released January of 2011. Liz's most recent release is the twisted dystopian tale "Ima Pigg" which has been described as "Charlotte's Web" meets "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". Available on Kindle.Currently, Liz is proud to be a contributing writer for "The Menopause Minute", the monthly newsletter on Redhotmamas.org - a national organization by and for women headed for or into "the change".Liz lives with her husband, daughter and Catahoula Leopard dog. Her unrealized dream is to ride horseback across the fields of Provence for one week. In the meantime, she rides dressage occasionally and goes to Epcot. She practices her high school French when she orders crepes.She will not ride Mission Space.

Book preview

Uncertain Refuge

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor

Edward Peters, Founding Editor

A complete list of books in the series

is available from the publisher.

UNCERTAIN REFUGE

Sanctuary in the Literature of Medieval England

Elizabeth Allen

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

LCCN: 2021011008

ISBN 978-0-8122-5344-3

For my mother, Sara Moody Allen, and my daughter, Ruby Moselle Danner

CONTENTS

Note on Translation

Introduction. Medieval Sanctuary: Legal History and Symbolic Action

Chapter 1. The Miracle of Cuthbert’s Stag

Chapter 2. The Flight of the King’s Man: Hubert de Burgh in the Chronica Majora

Chapter 3. Breaches at Westminster and the Making of a Sanctuary King

Chapter 4. The Dark Sanctuary of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Chapter 5. Robin Hood and the Limits of Sanctuary

Chapter 6. Kingship and the Politics of Pity in the Histories of Perkin Warbeck

Coda. Sanctuary in Southwest Georgia, 1962

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

NOTE ON TRANSLATION

Translations of Latin, French, and Middle English are my own unless otherwise noted. I have given the original language when it is not easily available, when there is no published modern translation, or when the argument requires it.

Uncertain Refuge

INTRODUCTION

Medieval Sanctuary

Legal History and Symbolic Action

In 1199, Bishop Hugh of Lincoln—later St. Hugh—was traveling through St. Albans on his way to Normandy to meet King Richard I, with whom he was in the midst of a dispute. According to his biographer, Adam of Eynsham, Hugh came upon a condemned thief headed to the gallows. The prisoner, in fetters, seeing the bishop as his hope for life and freedom, threw himself down on his knees almost under the horse’s hooves, uttering piteous cries and begging mercy. Hugh dismounted and took custody of the thief, freeing him and handing him over to his own almoner—much to the consternation of the local officials, who feared being blamed for letting the criminal go free. Hugh’s own advisors, too, worried that he was annulling a sentence tried in the king’s court and that this breach of royal jurisdiction amounted to treason. Hugh’s response to his advisors shifted the focus from jurisdictional dispute to the need for mercy: Is this all the courage and generosity that you are capable of? Hugh argued that the church protected all condemned people who seek refuge, and that wherever the bishop is, there is the church, so that it was his duty to accept the thief’s pleas.¹

This story at once typifies medieval sanctuary seeking and exceeds its legal conditions. In the late twelfth century, legal sanctuary applied to spaces, not to holy persons, and to criminals who were accused, not to those already condemned. In cases of felony, such as stealing or murder, sanctuary was a procedure designed to mitigate the severity of the punishment, which would have been mutilation or execution. Usually, a felon who fled to a church in the heat of the moment—perhaps under the hue and cry, with neighbors giving chase—would buy himself time, because he could stay inside the church for up to forty days. But such a fugitive also had a decision to make. He could exit the church and stand trial, or he could confess his crime to the coroner, give up all his belongings, and swear to go into exile forever (abjure).² The thief in this story has already stood trial and been convicted; perhaps he never made it to the church at all, or perhaps he believed he would be acquitted. Here, on his way to the gallows, he throws himself before the bishop’s passing entourage as a last resort. Hugh acknowledges and remedies the suffering of the thief, who changes from desperate to cheerful. Sanctuary provides a narrative by which the thief’s status is transformed.

Hugh of Lincoln, meanwhile, gains stature: he displays magnanimity in granting protection. The bishop could have refused to intervene, but such a refusal would have entailed a posture of submission to local officers or perhaps a stern endorsement of strict justice leading to execution.³ Instead, Hugh grabs an opportunity to demonstrate episcopal mercy. His act generates an awkward negotiation between institutions—local authorities, who are carrying out the secular court’s decision and the king’s justice, versus a bishop in an unfamiliar diocese, who is using the idea of sanctuary to produce a drama of miraculous rescue. Against the language of jurisdictional argument, he uses the language of divine mercy. His brazen jurisdictional claim adds fuel to the dispute between himself and the king—a wider conflict that was to go unresolved, since Richard would die before Hugh met with him. But when Hugh impersonates the church, asserting that his own body is essentially a sacred space, he puts to use an idea of sanctuary that plainly exceeds the usual legal procedure. Sanctuary enables a powerful performance even as the conditions of its legitimacy come under debate. Indeed, throughout the Middle Ages, sanctuary was often at its most transformative when it lent itself to such debates.

This book is about sanctuary seeking in the literature of medieval England between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries. The idea of divine protection in a sacred space did not owe its inception to Christianity; ideas of sacred protection existed in cultures as geographically varied as Hawaii, Morocco, and Japan and as ancient as biblical cities of refuge and Greek temples.⁴ From late antiquity, sanctuary developed into one of the most venerable roles of the Christian church.⁵ According to the English common law solidified in the twelfth century, felons could flee to sanctuary to avoid prosecution, though the precise conditions under which they could stay—or had to leave—varied across the Middle Ages. Early English law codes had articulated conditions of sanctuary and fines for its breach, and by the High Middle Ages, church sanctuary was regularly recorded in coroners’ rolls and described in common law treatises. Meanwhile, canon lawyers developed justifications for sanctuary that sometimes influenced debates about the privilege; but the records in England show that procedures were generally conducted in secular, not ecclesiastical courts. In the later Middle Ages, permanent sanctuary in great cathedrals and monasteries became increasingly common as abjuration diminished.⁶ Throughout the period, sanctuary seeking invoked a distinctive repertoire of devotional, social, and political consequences, which it is the task of this book to understand.

Sanctuary was grounded in sacred space. The word sanctuary, in the Middle Ages as now, refers most narrowly to a built thing, a space, an architecture: the sanctuary was the area around the altar.⁷ Under common law, sanctuary protection was available in any church, cathedral, or monastery. It extended to the porch and churchyard. But in miracles and romances, sanctuary could encompass natural spaces in which holiness inhered, like springs and caves inhabited by saints. Sometimes only minimal space was required: a simple wayside cross could provide sanctuary, as in an episode recounted by the twelfth-century monastic chronicler Orderic Vitalis. One Richer de Laigle and his knights raided a French village, and when the villagers followed their stolen animals, the soldiers turned on them. The villagers fled and flung themselves down before a wooden cross by the side of the road, and Richer, moved by fear of God, commanded his men to spare the peasants and turn back.⁸

Even as it required a spatial locus, sanctuary manifested the power of something that exceeded the built environment, a power perceived as coming from God. Its protections indicated that divinity inhabited the created world. This sacred core gave sanctuary its peculiar symbolic efficacy. In a world where law itself was understood to derive from God, legal sanctuary was a manifestation of divine mercy. Accordingly, in Western Europe from late antiquity and into the medieval period, the power of protection could be remarkably mobile, traveling with the body of a holy figure as we have just seen in the example of Bishop Hugh of Lincoln.⁹ The bishop bases his provision of sanctuary on his pastoral duty: if he can consecrate the space of a church, dedicating the inanimate stones to God’s service, and if through the sacraments he can sanctify the living stones of human souls, then offering sanctuary does more than protect a desperate criminal: it actively builds up the walls of God’s spiritual abode. Hugh’s protection demonstrates divine aegis. This demonstration can in turn sanctify both hosts and fugitives—legitimizing Hugh’s claim while also sanctifying the desperate thief himself, making him off-limits to the executioner.

Thus, sanctuary does not simply refer to a static place of refuge. The act of sanctuary seeking, then as now, consists in a verb: fleeing into sacred space.¹⁰ In the coroners’ rolls and other legal documents, the legal phrase is fugit ad ecclesiam (French: fuit a l’esglise), he fled to the church, which implies the minimal conditions of the practice: flight, refuge, and sacred space. This threefold articulation provides the structural basis—the plot—for all of the sanctuary narratives I examine here, medieval and beyond. Sanctuary narratives drew upon a varied but distinctive repertoire of symbolic actions: habitual crime, punishment, and penance; mercy, hospitality, and the king’s peace; sacrilege, breach, and sacrifice; desperation and exile. Such texts depict sanctuary as a dynamic practice with the capacity to reshape time, space, and its actors’ social roles.

If sacred space was essential to sanctuary practice, so too was the secular domain, which fugitives normally inhabited, to which they (often) returned, and which encompassed the constables, lawyers, coroners, lords, and kings responsible for the peace of the realm. The men who have Hugh’s thief in custody are concerned about the king’s response to the bishop’s jurisdictional transgression because royal jurisdiction was especially crucial to the practices of sanctuary throughout the Middle Ages. But despite coming primarily under the purview of common law (sometimes known as the king’s law), sanctuary straddled various jurisdictional regimes. Bishops defended it for reasons derived from both common and canon law, and the threat of excommunication could hang over cases of breach.¹¹ City officers might put up arguments against ecclesiastical liberties: for instance, the City of London engaged in a thirty-year battle with the ecclesiastical authorities who oversaw the sanctuary of St. Martin le Grand, in which the rights of sanctuary and other liberties, such as freedom from guild regulation, became conflated.¹² Indeed, the spatial practice of sanctuary very often reflected jurisdictional tensions between sacred and secular domains: battles could flare up between kings and their subjects, between cities and churches, and between human laws and divine power or sanction. In spite of such tensions, however, the right of sanctuary did not simply array itself against secular power. Instead, granting sanctuary could bolster lordly and monarchical power, sometimes paradoxically, by demonstrating the lord or king’s graciousness through his concession to divine aegis. At other times, sanctuary could be deployed as a check on royal or governmental power, calling to account tyrannical abuse and laying claim to a truer form of justice. By staging an array of institutional conflicts, sanctuary could unsettle jurisdictional definitions and balances of political power.

Sanctuary’s dynamism was built into its procedural operations. It disrupted prosecution and suspended judgment, so its outcome was by definition open-ended: the procedure was designed to stave off closure (that is, execution) by offering a new life to the fugitive. Legal sanctuary necessarily brought about next steps, perhaps a trial, but more often a public confession with abjuration, or registration as a sanctuary man or, less frequently, woman. Seeking sanctuary could allow time for garnering a pardon or for paying off debts. Abjuration involved ritual elements such as traveling barefoot, wearing a shift, and carrying a cross, as on pilgrimage; these elements were not liturgical or sacramental, and the fugitive’s purpose was neither atonement nor salvation but sheer earthly survival. Though exile might be exceedingly difficult, it could provide a fresh start.

Not infrequently, the next step was to find an exception to procedural rules; the possibility of exceptions was integral to sanctuary, as was temporal delay, which allowed tempers to cool and communities to adjust to circumstances. For example, in an early fourteenth-century case in Northamptonshire, two boys are playing shotput with rocks, and one boy hits his brother in the head; when the brother dies, the boy runs to sanctuary in alarm. Even after the coroner arrives, hears the confession, and assigns the boy a port, witnesses from the surrounding community come forward to declare that the brother has died of a paralysis immediately before being struck by the rock.¹³ Sanctuary allows time for the community to come up with an alternative to the usual legal options. As this instance shows, sanctuary was part of a larger legal landscape in which mercy played an important role and in which, therefore, individual contingencies mattered.¹⁴ Similarly, in the scene with Hugh of Lincoln, seeking sanctuary enables an exceptional response: the thief sets up a dramatic supplication that calls for immediate reaction, well after the usual procedure would have allowed it. The Northamptonshire jury and the Bishop of Lincoln each reshapes the narrative of a fugitive’s life.

The consequences of this dynamism could be brutal. Although sanctuary was designed to protect the life of the fugitive, refuge in the holy space could be surprisingly unsafe and could spark violence. The fugitive’s action might take shape as an individual story of survival—or the fugitive’s death might become a narrative of sacrifice or martyrdom. In Bristol in 1279, the bishop learned that one William de Lay had been dragged out of sanctuary by the local constable and his men and later executed: one of his pursuers had held William by the feet while the rest of his body was inside the churchyard. The bishop, who had become involved because of verses composed about William and miracles that were being attributed to him, ordered that the body be restored to the church for burial; he also ordered that William’s attackers do public penance. Later, though, he inquired as to whether the locals had venerated the body or claimed that de Lay was a martyr. The bishop sought to quell a burgeoning local cult by properly burying the violated fugitive, but clearly he was worried that his efforts would be outstripped by the man’s symbolic significance. Although both the nature of William’s crime and the precise reason for the emergence of his protocult are unknown, the fatal breach had made him a martyr.¹⁵ Even where sanctuary failed to protect the life of the fugitive, its range of symbolic associations could be marshaled to make death communally significant, sanctified, even sacrificial. Sanctuary seeking assigned meaning to violence. The sacrality of the space transferred to the body of the fugitive or, at other times, the clerical or kingly hosts. Violence did not always result in the immediate formation of a cult, but breaching the church’s protection could result in fines and sometimes excommunication and could reflect badly on the constables or kings who performed or endorsed it.

In all these ways, sanctuary seeking opened the door to narrative. The legal practice of sanctuary gave crime and desperate flight a narrative shape, that is, a specific order and causation: it began with the urgent movement from profane to sacred space; continued with delay and mitigation, bestowing a new significance upon fugitive and host alike; and ended (ideally) with human survival.¹⁶ Survival is not strongly teleological: in fact, survival and continuation ward off a more defined end, execution. For this reason, Uncertain Refuge is particularly attentive to the middle, where delay and mitigation open symbolic possibilities. Often enough, sanctuary’s initial drama meant that what followed acts of flight were varied, unforeseen, and unpredictable sequences of events, giving rise to new narratives of individual lives. In turn, these new narratives derive order and significance from a repertoire of symbolically resonant cultural narratives about jurisdiction, hospitality, mercy, sacrifice, and divine intercession. Sanctuary provides a stage for negotiation between unexpected or idiosyncratic happenings and the conventional expectations of a cultural repertoire. The procedure assigns significance, often by sacralizing the desperate fugitive or the equally desperate royal host. Sometimes these actions give way to a period of indecision, a series of arguments, or further actions whose import remains internally contradictory. Sanctuary can then fan the flames of smoldering social problems or resolve tensions that emerge in acts of flight and protection in the church. When sanctuary seeking opens the door to narrative, it performs distinctive, legally informed symbolic actions.

Uncertain Refuge is occupied with narratives about sanctuary seeking in genres that range from tract and chronicle to miracle and romance—relatively loquacious texts whose descriptive detail, dramatic dialogue, and repetition create densely symbolic narratives. In approaching this literature, I draw on rich scholarly conversations within medieval studies and beyond about the mutually enabling projects of law and literature.¹⁷ Scholars working in the broad field of law and literature have been exploring parallels between legal and literary texts for at least fifty years.¹⁸ Medievalists, in particular, have found that legal language is a fertile ground for theological metaphors; that poetry regularly uses legal vocabulary to ponder problems such as subjectivity, personhood, and communal obligation; and that legal documents actively shape literary forms in the period.¹⁹ In the magisterial A Crisis of Truth, Richard Firth Green writes of law and literature as parallel forms of discourse, each with its own conventions and traditions, suggesting that law can illuminate what the imaginative writer sometimes leaves unspoken or expresses only obliquely.²⁰ Uncertain Refuge takes particular interest in such oblique forms of reference: spatial ambiguities, temporal gaps, and awkward juxtapositions that suggest legal and symbolic complexity. The narratives that interest me do not simply recount what happened but also raise questions about how it happened by pointing toward extraprocedural and unrecorded actions, motives, and desires.²¹ They explore the religious and political consequences of flight to the church—consequences that often exceed the strictly legal, institutional parameters of sanctuary, emphasizing its cultural density and furthering its symbolic significance.

Uncertain Refuge explores the intersection of law, sacred space, and narrative that defined sanctuary seeking in the Middle Ages. My approach stands on the shoulders of legal historians, who have recently drawn a compelling new picture of the development of medieval sanctuary. After sketching this development below, I will turn to the symbolic workings of sanctuary narratives, laying out the conceptual dynamics of sacred space, the jurisdictional tensions that mark the practice, and the repertoire of symbolic associations that give rise to sanctuary’s narratives. I argue that these narratives are very often about the assignment of significance: the sacralization of the desperate fugitive, the celebration of the beleaguered saint, or the elevation of the royal protector.

The Legal Practices of Sanctuary

The legal culture of medieval England changed dramatically over the course of five centuries, and narratives of sanctuary shifted accordingly. The following brief history of sanctuary in medieval England indicates the main lines of sanctuary’s development and the historiographical arcs that have accrued to it.

Legal sanctuary did not simply provide an occasional last resort for the desperate; it was a fundamental feature of the medieval legal landscape. The legal historian Elizabeth Papp Kamali has recently described afresh the early common-law approach to felony adjudication by noting its strikingly high acquittal rate, reliance upon mitigations like abjuration and benefit of clergy, and lack of statutory development. Kamali aims to complicate present-day conceptions of the period’s brutal forms of justice. Her contention that criminal intent was taken into account by jurists helps to fill out a legal picture in which English law, far from upholding absolutes, actually allowed for individual, circumstantial, and varied actions to affect legal outcomes.²² Sanctuary was one among several mitigations that offered common recourse for accused felons. As such, the right of sanctuary marks an important characteristic of medieval English legal culture: it reflects a strong belief in the importance of due mercy. To live in a world where sanctuary is woven into the legal system, where it is integral and even normative, connects sanctuary laws to a familiar repertoire of ideas and social forms. Sanctuary is a legal expression of mercy; its enactments may be associated with martyrdom, rebellion, treason, and reconciliation—all conventional narratives that connect the legal procedure not only to a set of precedents but also to a cultural milieu.²³

The legal procedures surrounding sanctuary shifted in emphasis over time, but their broad outlines remained remarkably stable throughout the period. My study begins in the twelfth century, when King Henry II’s legal reforms expanded royal jurisdiction over all accusations of serious crime. With the establishment of the office of the coroner in 1194, cases of flight to the church, followed by abjuration, emerge with some frequency in the legal record.²⁴ As the king’s local representative, the coroner supervised and recorded in his rolls the process by which accused felons fled to the church and, usually, abjured. Felons, including those escaping from prison, could seek sanctuary in any church or churchyard for up to forty days, as we have seen. During this period, they were guarded by local officers or townspeople, allowed Necessaries for their Living, and [allowed to] go forth to empty their Belly.²⁵ They would then either submit to the king’s justice and go to trial, or confess their guilt before the coroner and other witnesses and solemnly swear to abjure England forever—or, refusing, they could be starved out of the church. Provided they did abjure (like the vast majority of sanctuary seekers), the coroner would then assign them a port from which to depart. They would cede all their belongings to the Crown, and they would proceed to the port dressed in only a shift, carrying a wooden cross, bare-headed and barefoot, and accompanied along the road by local constables from successive areas who oversaw the journey and, presumably, protected fugitives from harm. Arriving at the port, fugitives would take the first available ship; if they could not secure passage, they would walk into the sea every day as a token of their desire to cross it; if they were unsuccessful after forty days, they were to take sanctuary at the port.²⁶

Henry’s reforms led to the establishment of a legal procedure linking sanctuary to abjuration under a centralized royal law. Yet sanctuary could also play out on a far larger stage than the many parish churches to which desperate men fled under the hue and cry. The most famous case is Thomas Becket’s death in Canterbury Cathedral at the hands of Henry’s men. Thomas’s eyewitness biographer, Edward Grim, tells of Thomas’s reluctance to enter the cathedral both because he does not wish to flee from martyrdom and because, should his pursuers violate the space, his presence there would invite the altar’s desecration. The monks force him in, hoping to save him. When he is attacked instead, Grim calls him God’s sacrificial lamb and a living sacrifice, portraying him as willing to submit to his death for … the well-being of the Church.²⁷ Grim’s account creates a scene of martyrdom in sanctuary, thus calling into question the power of the angry king.

It would seem that, in the Becket conflict, the breach of sanctuary—and the symbolic significance attached to that breach—helped legitimize the church at the expense of the monarchy. The site of the murder—in the church, under divine aegis—shifted attention from an ongoing institutional conflict to Thomas’s martyrdom and sanctification. In turn, the king was defined by his men’s violation of the sacred imperatives of sanctuary. The murder so severely compromised Henry II’s authority that, within three years, in the midst of civil war, he famously performed public penance at Canterbury. He approached the cathedral barefoot, confessed at the site of Thomas’s death, received whippings at the hands of the bishops and each of the eighty monks of Canterbury, and spent the night at Becket’s tomb. Henry atoned for his political error by imitating the suffering of the sacrificial victim. The upshot, according to Grim, was Henry’s victory in the wars.²⁸ Over time, Becket’s death in sanctuary remained open-ended, immensely productive of further narrative and dramatic renditions, from accounts of his posthumous miracles and his rapid canonization to rewritings and retellings of his life, down to T. S. Eliot’s 1935 play Murder in the Cathedral.²⁹

Although historians have long cast the conflict between Becket and Henry II in terms of the jurisdictional polarities of church and state, the murder in sanctuary actually combined secular and sacred, political and spiritual significance.³⁰ The king’s religious atonement had political purposes and consequences. But his penance derived its effectiveness from the sacred space—indeed, from the breach of sanctuary itself, which the king’s ritual actions echoed and revised. The king, reconnecting to the desecrated space, staged the healing of division between church and state and, in turn, lent his authority to Thomas’s shrine.

This coordination of sacred and secular authority is characteristic of sanctuary. It is worth noting that before Becket’s death, as Henry II moved against clerical privilege and jurisdictional immunities, sanctuary protections were never an object of the king’s attack.³¹ Nor was sanctuary protection described legally as a check on royal power: Henry’s declarations of royal jurisdiction in the Assizes of Clarendon and Northampton (1166 and 1176, respectively) do not explicitly mention sanctuary at all, although they define abjuration’s conditions and length of time.³² The legal compilation Bracton (c. 1250) describes sanctuary as part of the king’s law: There are some who when they ought to be arrested flee to a church or other sacred or privileged place and maintain themselves there. They then have no alternative but to come to the king’s peace and stand trial … or to confess the crime because of which they remain there…. If after confessing the crime he chooses to abjure the realm, he must select some port from which he can cross to another land, beyond the realm of England. Bracton is not defining a check on royal power; church refuge does not entail a necessary conflict between church and king. On the contrary, the offer of sanctuary is a procedure designed to uphold the king’s peace.³³

It is a crucial supposition of this book that sanctuary protection is both integral to medieval legal procedure and supportive of royal authority.³⁴ Sanctuary seeking had long shown a complex coordination among law, royal power, and sacred space. Even before the twelfth century, early English law codes articulated the importance of the king’s grið, or protection, instituting fines for violating that protection and including churches among the spaces for such protection. Grið also encompassed houses, courts, and royal halls, but particularly at monasteries such as Beverley and Hexham, successively steeper fines were exacted for breaches that approached more closely to the altar.³⁵ Some churches had very wide areas, called banleucas, within which violence was subject to graduated fines. Church sanctuary was part of the development, by the tenth century, of an increasingly centralized royal policy for the control of disorder. In the context of feud violence, sanctuary provided a space and time to resolve conflict; it was integral to the processes of reconciliation that kings used to contain disorder. As such, sanctuary was an emblem of the strength of early English kings: in a range of law codes, sanctuary protections were articulated as extensions of personal lordly protection.³⁶ This early association meant that the procedures formalized in the twelfth century continued to be understood as an expression of monarchical power.

In exploring sanctuary’s connection to royal authority, I join a raft of recent scholars who have disputed the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiographical assumption that sanctuary was merely an outmoded religious practice, a hoary privilege of the medieval church.³⁷ Sanctuary seeking was viewed as extraneous to the general legal structure, a clerical add-on necessary because of the period’s brutal or backward laws: it was unnecessary in enlightened modernity with its state control and systematic rule of law. Sanctuary privileges were assumed to have been a threat to the operations of secular monarchy. Church refuge, then, was an instance of the larger, ongoing conflict between church and state, which was resolved by the centralizing (and secularizing) kings of early modern Europe. According to this secularist line of thought, the decline of sanctuary is … symptomatic of a double triumph of the modern secular state, respectively over primitive human passions and over priestly privilege.³⁸ Although historians have refuted the secularist narrative over the past forty years, nonspecialists and specialists alike continue to view sanctuary seeking as a legal outlier, an odd practice categorically different from anything in the modern, rational, secular world—one characterized during the later Middle Ages by a slow yet inevitable decline.³⁹

As we saw when considering the Becket crisis through the lens of sanctuary seeking, church refuge was a performance of mercy derived from cooperation between clerical and lay authorities; it did not simply compete against but grew from and expressed monarchical power. At the same time, because sanctuary seeking could involve different domains, the act of seeking and granting protection often produced jurisdictional strain. Nonetheless, disagreements about the proper extent of protection, ad hoc decisions about its boundaries, or even periodic violations of its terms do not necessarily imply the legal practice’s dysfunction, much less its gradual erosion.⁴⁰ The discourse and practice of sanctuary straddled a number of legal regimes: the canon law of the church, the law of the royal courts both criminal and civil, statute law, and local customary jurisdictions of manor, town, or city.⁴¹ Such overlap marked sanctuary seeking as a stage for working out the precise relations among different jurisdictions: a source of sociopolitical significance, rather than simply a static sacred refuge during violent times; a site of dynamic and continual adjustment, rather than an ancient rite falling into dysfunction and abuse. Inasmuch as sanctuary linked different jurisdictions, its workings complicate any simple narrative of historical movement from medieval religious mercy in a period of desperate social disorder to modern secular justice in a politically ordered Western democracy.

As tempting as it may be to understand historical changes through a secularizing lens, there is no single narrative that explains sanctuary’s changes across five hundred years. Developments in sanctuary procedure seem to have come about in ad hoc ways, for circumstantial rather than structural reasons. It is possible that the Becket crisis solidified the procedural link between church refuge and abjuration. The heyday of forty-day sanctuary with abjuration was in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, when the procedure became increasingly routine and not infrequent; one scholar estimates the number of abjurers—the majority of whom had first sought sanctuary—at about five hundred per year during this period.⁴² By the late fourteenth century, however, this procedural pairing seems to have come under new cultural pressure. In 1378, 1386, and 1394, notorious and fatal breaches of sanctuary in London triggered parliamentary arguments among clerics, royal officers, and powerful lords. John Wyclif wrote a tract against sanctuary protection, while monastic writers defended the privilege.⁴³ The ongoing public debate suggests that sanctuary’s conceptual basis may have become more variable and more precarious than it was in the High Middle Ages.

Such debate occurred in a context of multiple, intertwined changes in sanctuary’s legal context, including circumstantial changes in the legal routine of abjuration; the increasing prominence of permanent sanctuary at great cathedrals; and the longer term influence of canon law, which expressed conceptual suspicion about sanctuary as providing impunity from the law. Abjurers usually departed from Dover during this period, landing in Wissant on the coast of France. There they might involve themselves in further crime, seek pardon, or join immigrant labor gangs in France, among other fates.⁴⁴ The beginning of the Hundred Years’ War against France (1337) made wartime abjurations look like acts of aggression. Moreover, the war complicated jurisdictional matters, heightening the claim of the king of England to be king of France and complicating the meaning of exile to France. The fall of the unwalled city of Wissant in 1346 and the capture of the walled city of Calais made abjuration more difficult because walls made it harder for transients to disperse into the countryside.⁴⁵ The Black Death brought radical demographic changes as well. After 1400, abjurers used a wider variety of ports and sought sanctuary with less regularity.⁴⁶ At the same time, sanctuary seeking with abjuration remained available as a legal procedure through the fifteenth and into the sixteenth centuries, and it retained its crucial role as an expression of legal mercy through the reign of Henry VII and into that of Henry VIII. In 1531 a new law mandated abjuration to specific sanctuaries instead of abroad, a change that in a sense brought forty-day ecclesiastical sanctuary into closer relation with its cousin, permanent, or what earlier scholars called special sanctuary.⁴⁷

Permanent sanctuary in selected churches was a second form of sanctuary practice, possibly available alongside time-limited ecclesiastical sanctuary.⁴⁸ Shannon McSheffrey argues that, although clerical hosts claimed rights based on early charters, many were recopied or forged, and the rhetoric of ancient custom probably obscured a more recent origin in the late fourteenth century. These select sites of permanent sanctuary—usually monasteries or large cathedrals such as Westminster—have been referred to as special or chartered sanctuaries.⁴⁹ Chartered sanctuary may have developed, or come into increasing prominence, approximately when abjuration overseas diminished. It evolved out of a conflation of several types of jurisdictional immunity during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.⁵⁰ Starting in the early fourteenth century, debtors could evade their creditors’ lawsuits by entering certain liberties; such shelter for debt was not time limited and did not entail the legal procedures of confession and abjuration required in sanctuary for felony. Yet over time, debtors accrued some of the sacrality of fugitives seeking sanctuary.⁵¹

An episode from Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne, written in the early fourteenth century, provides an example of long-term sanctuary, with a conflation of debt and felony:

Þyr was a man, and hyght Rychere,

A ryche of pens and of powere;

hyt telleþ algate he hadde enmys,

Oþer for hys gode, or for folys;

Of hem hadde he swyche drede & eye,

he fled and woned yn an abbeye. (lines 8937–42)⁵²

(There was a man called Rychere,

Rich in money and in power;

It is said in particular that he had enemies,

Because of either his goods or his follies;

He had such dread and fear of them

That he fled and lived in an abbey.)

Rychere’s status as a man of power and money, the passage implies, makes him enemies: either debt or crime, goods or follies, could be the reason for Rychere’s flight to the abbey. Rychere also appears to be a longer-term resident, for he is given a chamber next to the church where he and hyse hadde here wonnyng (he and his [wife and children] had their dwelling, 8945). He and his wife go on to commit sacrilege, having sex too close to the abbey church, getting miraculously stuck together as punishment. Only when the monks discover and pray for them do they come apart. Rychere’s story mixes protection with sacrilege and a kind of public penance in a tale designed to affirm the space’s sacredness.⁵³

While it may come as no surprise that the clerical moralist Robert of Brunne should demonstrate the power of sacred space to stage both miracle and cure, his story may also reflect developments in canonists’ conceptions of sanctuary—changes also reflected in the fourteenth-century tracts attacking and defending the privilege. Although sanctuary cases fell under common law jurisdiction in England, canonists influenced the rhetoric around sanctuary, especially when jurisdictional disagreements arose. Late medieval attacks on abuse of sanctuary—by public thieves taking advantage of sanctuary to harry the neighborhood—stemmed largely from canon law.⁵⁴ Canon law differed from common law: it dictated no time limit for refuge in churches, whereas common law offered protection to a wider range of criminals. The canonists’ prominent concern was that, in protecting criminals from prosecution, sanctuary allowed them impunity and did not deter future criminal acts. With the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216) had come a new emphasis on deterrence in penal law. Although the canonists could potentially have framed the right of sanctuary as a path toward penance, they chose instead to emphasize its jurisdictional aspect, arguing that the church’s prerogatives must be respected.⁵⁵ This set up sanctuary as offering felons a dangerous impunity, playing down the vocabulary of sin and penance in favor of crime and punishment. As canon law increasingly privileged deterrence rather than penitence, the idea that sanctuary might allow criminals to evade punishment came into increasing tension with the idea of the church’s jurisdictional immunity.⁵⁶

Canonists developed a rhetoric of suspicion about sanctuary in two principle decretals: a letter of Pope Innocent III that excluded two classes of criminals, the public thief and the destroyer of fields by night; and a decretal of Pope Gregory IX that excluded those who had committed murder or mayhem within churches themselves or their churchyards.⁵⁷ These casus excepti (cases excluded) from the laws of sanctuary became, ironically, the stick with which to beat sanctuary, on the ground that it provided undeserved protection for repeat offenders and those committing sacrilege. By the time of the late fourteenth-century political debates, sanctuary was often characterized as a den of thieves (echoing Jesus’s cleansing of the temple in Mt. 21:13), and the protection of fugitives was portrayed as potentially sacrilegious and treasonous.⁵⁸ It was not simply lay officials who attacked sanctuary privileges while churchmen defended them; church and state each played various roles in sanctuary seeking, depending on the people and situations involved. Moreover, the precepts of canon law could be adapted to instances of common law sanctuary on an ad hoc basis, blending clerical with secular interests.

In the context of late fourteenth-century procedural instability, and with the growing influence of canonical suspicion about sanctuary as a den of thieves, the early fifteenth century saw a downturn in the frequency of flights to the church. Throughout the fifteenth century, both sanctuary with abjuration and chartered sanctuary produced jurisdictional argument. Final legal rulings on, say, the exact limits of St. Martin’s protection or the legitimacy of sanctuary in Hospitaller houses are somewhat hard to come by. Sanctuary law in the later Middle Ages did not develop by statute or precept but was an amalgam of ad hoc application … and strict adherence to arcane rules.⁵⁹ Such contingent development, far from suggesting a fading or weakening practice, shows the flexibility of sanctuary as a cultural form that was adaptable to new legal situations.

Indeed, later in the century, as the Tudors sought to bring the Wars of the Roses to an end and assert the power of royal justice, felony prosecution increased—and correspondingly, so did sanctuary seeking. Along with other mitigations, such as benefit of clergy and pardon, sanctuary both intensified the Crown’s prosecutorial power and allowed it to make exceptions for aristocrats and local judicial delegates. Chartered sanctuary was especially suited to the well-connected. The complex web of relationships among king and local gentry—who were also the local sheriffs and justices of the peace—gave communal protection, however corrupt, to those who might otherwise have been prosecuted for felony: There was often a thin line between the violence demanded by honour or necessitated by gentry conflicts and the authorized violence those same gentlemen meted out in the exercise of delegated royal power.⁶⁰ Chartered sanctuary did not carry the forty-day time limit, and it did not lead to abjuration; it could be short-term, long-term, or permanent. Fugitives were required to register and give the reason for their flight, swear an oath to obey all ordinances, and pay a fee. They were also to remain inside the boundaries of the sanctuary; if they left, they were vulnerable to the officials, creditors, or enemies whom they had escaped by entering. As a result, chartered sanctuary could be expensive. Registered sanctuary men had to pay rent and find ways to earn a living. The practice was therefore more accessible for elite men: rents were high, and paid work was difficult to find. Meanwhile, time-limited sanctuary with abjuration remained an option. Poorer people typically stayed in chartered sanctuary only for short amounts of time and