[p.548] heretics in Yorkshire and had to be told that this was the text-books. As to the text writers, Glanvill has no word of heresy; Heresy in Bracton approves the fate of the apostate deacon3; Fleta holds English that apostates, sorcerers and the like' should be drawn and burnt, while Christians who marry with Jews should be buried alive'; Britton would burn renegades and miscreants, and so would his glossator"; the author of the Mirror, who is at times frantically orthodox, treats apostasy, heresy and sorcery as the crime of laesa maiestas divina, treason against the heavenly King; according to him the punishment of heresy is fourfold, excommunication, degradation, disherison, incineration. He holds too that heresy can be prosecuted by way of appeal in a temporal court and talks much nonsense about this matter. Britton admits an inquiry of sorcerers and sorceresses, of apostates and heretics' among the articles of the sheriff's turn; Fleta in this context speaks only of sorcerers and apostates". In other copies of the articles we find no such inquiry. All this suggests that lawyers, with an increasing horror, but no real experience, of heresy, think themselves at liberty to speculate about what ought to be done if heretics appear. According to the canon law the lay prince who determined a cause of heresy would be almost as guilty as would be he who refused to aid and complete the justice of the church. cases of We must carry our history a little further. In 1324 Richard Later Ledrede, a Franciscan friar who had become Bishop of Ossory, heresy. instituted a vigorous prosecution against certain sheep of his flock who were suspected of the heresy that consists of witchcraft. 1 Prynne, Records, ii. 475. 3 Bracton, f. 123 b, 124. 2 Rashdall, Universities, ii. 527. 4 Fleta, p. 54. His words are 'contrahentes vero cum Judaeis vel Judaeabus.' In 1236 a Jew who had sexual intercourse with a Christian woman had to abjure the realm, while she was put to penance and abjured the town of Bristol; Note Book, pl. 1179. 5 Britton, i. 42. 6 Mirror, pp. 59, 135. The comparison of heresy to treason is found in a decretal of Innocent III. of 1199; c. 10, X. 5, 7. 7 Britton, i. 179; Fleta, p. 113. 8 See Stat. Walliae (Statutes, i. 57); and the apocryphal statute De visu franciplegii (ibid. p. 246); The Court Baron, pp. 71, 93. 9 c. 18 in Sexto, 5. 2. against heretics'; it was mild; the voice of the universal church had not yet spoken in the Lateran Councils. Then we are told that in 1210 an Albigensian was burnt in London; we are told this and no more2. A better attested case follows. In 1222 Stephen Langton held a provincial council at Oxford, and there he degraded and handed over to the lay power a Ideacon who had turned Jew for the love of a Jewess. The apostate was delivered to the sheriff of Oxfordshire, who forthwith burnt him. That sheriff was the unruly Fawkes of Breauté, then at the height of his power. His prompt action seems to have surprised his contemporaries; but it was approved by Bracton, who however did not write until after the constitutions of the Emperor Frederick had received the approval of the Pope, and the church was deeply committed to the infliction of capital punishment. In the same council the cardinal archbishop condemned to 'immuration,' that is, to close and solitary imprisonment for life, two of the laity, a man who had given himself out to be the Saviour of men, a woman [p.347) who had called herself His Virgin Mother. All this seems to have been done in strict accordance with the continental procedure; the penitent fanatics were immured, the impenitent lover was burnt. In 1240 the Dominicans at Cambridge arrested a Carthusian who would not go to church, said that the devil was loose and reviled the pope. The sheriff was ordered to take him from the hands of the Preaching Friars and bring him to Westminster. He was brought before the legate Otto, among whose assessors we may see the Hostiensis of canonical fame. What became of this man we do not know; but he said some things about the holy father which made the legate blush and amused Matthew Paris". A little earlier the Dominicans were arresting 1 Lea, op. cit. i. 114. Already in 1157 a synod at Reims had threatened the heretics with branding and banishment: Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, ed. 2, v. 568. 2 Liber de Antiquis Legibus, p. 3: 'Hoc anno concrematus est quidam Ambigensis apud Londonias.' 3 Bracton, f. 123 b. 4 Maitland, The Canon Law in England, Essay vi. In 1240 a relapsed Jew was in prison at Oxford awaiting trial by the bishop: Prynne, Records, ii. 630. As to immuration,' see Tanon, op. cit. p. 485: Toutes ces prisons [the prisons in which heretics were confined] étaient désignées sous le nom particulier du mur, murus, la mure, la meure, et les prisonniers sous celui d'emmurés, immurati, en langue vulgaire emmurats.' See also Lea, op. cit. i. 486. 5 Prynne, Records, ii. 560; Mat. Par. Chron. Maj. iv. 32. p.548) heretics in Yorkshire and had to be told that this was the text-books. As to the text writers, Glanvill has no word of heresy; Heresy in Bracton approves the fate of the apostate deacon3; Fleta holds English that apostates, sorcerers and the like' should be drawn and burnt, while Christians who marry with Jews should be buried alive; Britton would burn renegades and miscreants, and so would his glossator; the author of the Mirror, who is at times frantically orthodox, treats apostasy, heresy and sorcery as the crime of laesa maiestas divina, treason against the heavenly King; according to him the punishment of heresy is fourfold, excommunication, degradation, disherison, incineration. He holds too that heresy can be prosecuted by way of appeal in a temporal court and talks much nonsense about this matter. Britton admits an inquiry of sorcerers and sorceresses, of apostates and heretics' among the articles of the sheriff's turn; Fleta in this context speaks only of sorcerers and apostates". In other copies of the articles we find no such inquiry. All this suggests that lawyers, with an increasing horror, but no real experience, of heresy, think themselves at liberty to speculate about what ought to be done if heretics appear. According to the canon law the lay prince who determined a cause of heresy would be almost as guilty as would be he who refused to aid and complete the justice of the church. cases of We must carry our history a little further. In 1324 Richard Later Ledrede, a Franciscan friar who had become Bishop of Ossory, heresy. instituted a vigorous prosecution against certain sheep of his flock who were suspected of the heresy that consists of witchcraft. 1 Prynne, Records, ii. 475. 3 Bracton, f. 123 b, 124. 2 Rashdall, Universities, ii. 527. Fleta, p. 54. His words are 'contrahentes vero cum Judaeis vel Judaeabus.' In 1236 a Jew who had sexual intercourse with a Christian woman had to abjure the realm, while she was put to penance and abjured the town of Bristol; Note Book, pl. 1179. * Britton, i. 42. * Mirror, pp. 59, 135. The comparison of heresy to treason is found in a decretal of Innocent III. of 1199; c. 10, X. 5, 7. 7 Britton, i. 179; Fleta, p. 113. See Stat. Walliae (Statutes, i. 57); and the apocryphal statute De visu franciplegii (ibid. p. 246); The Court Baron, pp. 71, 93. 9 c. 18 in Sexto, 5. 2. No English procedure apt for cases of heresy. The chief offenders eluded him; they were of kin to men very The chief lesson that we learn from Bishop Ledrede's 1 See Proceedings against Dame Alice Kyteler (Camden Society, ed. Wright); Lea, Hist. Inquis. i. 354; iii. 456; Dict. Nat. Biog. Lederede, Richard. On pp. 23, 27 of the Proceedings we see the bishop producing 'Extra de haereticis, Ut Inquisitionis,' that is to say, the decretal of Boniface VIII, which appears as c. 18 in Sexto, 5. 2. 2 Chron. de Melsa, ii. 323. The text may be corrupt; an execution in quadam sylva' would be very strange. See on this passage, Stubbs, Const. Hist. ii. 492, and compare Lea, op. cit. iii. 77. p550] devil-worship were told, they were not convicted and there was law and Such are the principal cases of heresy that we find before English the days of the Lollards. If now we ask what law about heresy heresy. was in force in England, we must in the first place answer that according to the law of the catholic church the man convicted by the bishop of his diocese as an impenitent or a relapsed heretic was to be delivered over to the secular power. We must add that the officer or the prince, who neglected to do what was implied in the bishop's sentence, was liable to excommunication, while if he persisted in his contumacy for a year, he himself was a heretic'. To ask what was the law of our temporal courts about this matter is to ask what would have been done in a case unprecedented or touched by very few precedents. The answer will vary from reign to reign, from pontificate to pontificate. If we ask it in the middle of the fourteenth century, when our parliaments were entering on a course of anti-Roman legislation, when statutes of Provisors and Praemunire were being passed, when the papacy in its Babylonish captivity had fallen from its high estate, when the theories of Ockham and Marsiglio were in the air, when England had repudiated her feudal dependence on Rome, when heresy no longer meant some strange, dualistic faith which rejected the Christian creeds, when Franciscans were heretics in the eyes of Dominicans, and Spirituals were heretics in the eyes of Conventuals, we may give a tolerant answer:-we see Wycliffe favoured at court and dying in peace at Lutterworth. But if we ask the same question at an earlier time, in Henry III.'s day, when the fate of the Counts of Toulouse was not forgotten, when the papacy was yet grand and terrible, when it could strike down an emperor the wonder of the world, when the flagrant heresy was Catharism, which to the popular mind implied devil-worship and nameless vices, when there were plausible and modern reasons for the doctrine that England was a papal fief, then we must say that the sheriff, the judge, the king, who neglected to enforce the church's law about this spiritual crime, would have been a bold man. writ for To the smaller, the technical, question whether there was The a writ de haeretico comburendo at common law?' we must reply burning that no one has yet produced any such writ older than that heretics. Lea, op. cit. iii. 298–301. 2 cc. 9. 13, X. 5. 7; c. 18 in Sexto, 5. 2. |