Twelfth-Century Interlude
FROM BECKET TO LANGTON. By C. R, Cheney. (Manchester University Press, 18s.) THE forty-odd years of English history between the murder of Archbishop Thomas and Magna Carta have in the past formed something of an interlunary period for historians of Church and Constitution. It is a period devoid of great controversies (though not of causes Mares) and of outstanding personalities; the generation between Becket, Gilbert Foliot and Henry of Win- chester on the one hand, and Langton and Grosseteste on the other; between Alexander III and Innocent III; between the age of the Cistercians and the age of the friars.
Latterly, however, along with other neglected periods, it has been receiving attention. Tout showed that it was the golden dawn of the Exchequer, and more recently Mr. Joliffe has pic- tured it as an age of personal initiative on the part of monarchs and administrators. Kindly hands have been washing the mud of the thirteenth century off King John. Now the turn of the Church has come, and Professor Cheney, in his Ford Lectures of 1955, shows persuasively and learnedly that here also administration, if nothing ;Ise, grew more regular and efficient, and that bishops, if no longer the colourful individualists of forty years earlier, were getting the machinery of government going in their dioceses, even if jerkily and slowly.
Much in these lectures is detailed and technical, not in the sense that it cannot be read and understood by the general reader, but to the extent that only a historian will appreciate its importance. Thus there is a thoughtful discussion on the clash of jurisdiction between papal and royal courts in which equal points go to the rivals: in some cases the royal justice was more expeditious and equitable, in some cases the papal. On the whole, perhaps, Professor Cheney tends to stress, if not to over-stress, the delays of canon law. On another question, that of vicarages, he is able to assert more emphatically than previous scholars that the number of vicarages ordained by bishops between 1170 and 1200 was very considerable. In general he shows that the twelfth century led by easy stages to the thirteenth, and that to regard the bishops of the latter period as a different race from those of the former is an over-simplification. Perhaps the most interest- ing pages in the book, and those written with the greatest warmth, are those (32 to 41) devoted to a rehabilitation of Archbishop Hubert Walter, 'a man of splendid talents and great energy' and one of the greatest of medieval administrators.'
almost invisible person, the twelfth-century layinan.' Perhaps this, after all, is where the Lateran Council of 1215 and the friars mark a real line of division, for from the days of St. Francis onwards we can watch the layfolk at their devotions as closely as we may wish.
DAVID KNOWLES
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