PAST CRIMESChurch law
In the late twelfth century, St Hugh, the Bishop of Lincoln, pronounced a
sentence of excommunication on the daughter of an Oxford burgess. The lady
was accused of adultery. St Hugh heard the case in a church and begged the
lady to make her peace with her husband and return home–she spat in her
husband’s face. She remained unrepentant and living separately from her
husband until, shortly after, she was‘strangled by the devil’and, as the record
rather gleefully reports, went to endure richly deserved perpetual torments. In
1222, just outside Oxford, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton,
heard the case of a young Oxford man who had fallen in love with a young
Jewess. To win her, he had taken the Jewish faith, going to the lengths of self
circumcision. The archbishop’s council excommunicated the young man for
apostasy, then handed him over to the men of the much feared Sheriff of
Oxford, Fawkes de Breaute. They went outside the bounds of the church
property and straight away burned the poor lad to death. Church courts could
not impose the death penalty, but they could call on the secular authorities to
act on their behalf.
Most of the cases that fell under the jurisdiction of medieval church law
would not be considered as crimes in today’s world. They are to do with the
contemporary and religious sense of morality, or the ritual demands of church
practice. Church law also, of course, dealt with cases of wrongdoing by clerics
themselves.
More cases of church courts are recorded in the register of Bishop Hamo, a
fourteenthcentury prelate who became Bishop of Rochester in Kent. Over a
period of nineteen months, his courts dealt with 124 cases relating to marriage
and morality. Many cases were accusations of fornication or clandestine
marriage. Marriage was a somewhat grey area–previously, it had been a civil
affair, which might be given a church blessing but did not necessarily need
this formal recognition. Weddings were conducted in the presence of a priest
at the church door; a bridal Mass might or might not follow, but the marriage
contract was otherwise valid if it had been witnessed. By Hamo’s time,
however, the church was insisting on formal marriage ceremonies, and quite a
number of people who had regarded themselves as married found themselves
brought to court.
The usual sentence was to be beaten in public, and to abjure from sex until
they had gone through a church rite. Banns now had to be published, to
prevent marriages between people too closely related to each other, or other
reasons that made the union unacceptable. Consanguinity (being too nearly
related) was a problem in small villages, and also among the aristocracy who