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Timeo Barones Et Donas Ferentes1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Emma Mason
Emma Mason*
Affiliation:
University of LondonBirkbeck College
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Extract

This sentiment might well have been voiced by any abbot contemplating the ambivalent relationship between his house and its patrons. They expected material, as well as spiritual returns on their investment, and these might well conflict with the best interests of the monastery. Ambivalence, though, was equally reflected in the attitude of religious houses towards their benefactors, as this brief survey of baronial patronage in England, between the late eleventh and the mid thirteenth centuries, indicates.

No real doubt seems to have been held by baronial patrons that benefactions were necessary to their wellbeing in the afterlife, but they were largely guided by the maxim that ‘it is the thought which counts’, judging from the limited extent of their grants, whether on their own behalf or for the souls of deceased kinsfolk. Could things have been otherwise? They were imbued from infancy with the concept that the integrity of the fief must prevail over all other considerations. Inevitably such conditioning was reflected in their response towards things spiritual as well as towards temporal claims on their loyalties.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 15: Religious Motivation Biographical and Sociological Problems for the Church Historian , 1978 , pp. 61 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1978

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Footnotes

1

I am grateful to Wendy Ransford and Rosamund Rocyn Jones for helpful discussions on certain aspects of this paper.

References

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9 See my introduction to Beauchamp.

10 Howell, Margaret, Regalian right in medieval England (London 1962)Google Scholar. Magnates, as much as the king, prized formal recognition of their rights over ‘their’ churches. On 16 August 1200, king John granted William Marshall licence to bestow the pastoral staff on successive abbots of Notley (MA 6, p 279, no 5). I am grateful to Margaret Hine for this and subsequent references to Notley abbey, on which she is now working.

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30 Wightman pp 109-10; Hereford p 9, no 76.

31 Wightman p 207.

32 Ibid pp 60-2, 82, 109-11, 182-3, 207, 237-8.

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41 Peter of Blois forcefully expressed the dilemma of the curialis in his poem Quod amicus suggeret‘, Ibid, pp 206-9.

42 See my ‘The Mauduits and their chamberlainship’, pp 21-3.

43 See my Beauchamp, introduction.

44 Westminster Abbey domesday (Muniment book 2), fol 292.

45 RR 2, no 903.

46 Sibton p 65.

47 Hereford nos 91, 94–5.

48 Ibid no 109.

49 Ibid p 2.

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61 Ibid pp xl, xlii.

62 Ibid p xliii.

63 Gloucester no 83.

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65 Wightman pp 109-10.

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68 Beauchamp no 78.

69 Christ Church College, Oxford, charter xxvi.

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72 Register of Godfrey Giffard 2, p 7.

73 Worcester Annals, Annales Monastici 4, p 537.Google Scholar The chronicler emphasised the role of the Franciscan confessor, stating that none of the earl’s kindred was at the deathbed.

74 Register of Godfrey Giffard 2, p 75. The earl’s father was associated with the Franciscans some years before his death (Beauchamp no 106), so that belief in their superior merits may well have been his overriding motive for attempting to break the traditional burial pattern.

75 Brett, M., The English Church under Henry I (Oxford 1975) p 227 Google Scholar. Greed to obtain burial dues might literally bring about the downfall of religious houses, as Harald Hardrada demonstrated, see Snorri Sturluson, King Harold’s Saga , transi Magnusson, M. and Palsson, H. (Harmondsworth 1966) p 57 Google Scholar.

76 Wightman p 184.

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80 Wightman p 78.