6 - Faith and allegiance

Summary

In an earlier chapter, I argued that the systematic ban on foreign clerical candidates' access to ecclesiastical benefices had to rely on an argument which has a number of features unprecedented in medieval jurisprudence. Moreover, we have seen that such a ban would actually infringe on the king's and his subjects' well-established patronage rights. This may have been one of the reasons why the attempted ban of 1383 was ineffective and quickly forgotten. Also, when lawful landholding claims of foreign religious houses were ignored and permanent removal of lands from those religious houses was declared in 1414, the ordinance was making an original claim which made reference to the ‘relief and support of the communities of the realm’. Some foreign abbots, as we saw, were not impressed by the novel argument, and kept bringing to the king's court their ‘lawful’ claims as tenants.

It is true, however, that the majority of foreign abbots acquiesced to the new argument and no serious attempt was made to recover their lands. The reason for this is not difficult to understand. Their lands had been in the hands of the English king intermittently for several decades by then. The foreign religious houses concerned most probably had given up the hope of recovering their lands. To hear that their long lost lands would not after all be returned to them was perhaps not painful enough to make them start a lengthy and expensive litigation to recover those lands.