Becket versus Henry II: The Competition of Concurrent Jurisdictions
THE NORMAN CONQUEST of England was undertaken in 1066 -- nine years before the Dictatus of Pope Gregory VII -- partly in the name of reforming the English church by freeing it from local and feudal pressures and centralizing ecclesiastical authority in the hands of the king.
William the Conqueror had a commission from Pope Alexander II in this endeavor, which was seen as being in the spirit of the Cluniac Reform. In a famous decree of 1067 William asserted that the king (rather than local lords) has the power to determine whether or not a pope should be acknowledged by the church in Normandy and England; that the king makes canon law through church synods; and that the king has a veto power over ecclesiastical penalties imposed on his barons and officials.Eight years later, however, Pope Gregory VII was saying that he the pope, and not emperors or kings, was the head of the church; that the pope alone has the power to depose bishops -- and, indeed, emperors and kings as well; and that the pope, and not kings or emperors, determines whether actions taken by church synods may be considered canonical.
William and his two successors (his sons William II, 1087-1100, and Henry I, 1100-1135) successfully opposed papal claims to supremacy over the church in their dominions, although Henry I made some substantial compromises in the Concordat of Bec. In the reign of Stephen (1135-1154), however, which English historians have called "the anarchy of Stephen" because of the civil disorders that characterized it, the papal party in England made important gains in prestige and power. 1_New monastic orders, loyal to the pope, were founded; they received strong popular support, especially because they provided relief and welfare to the victims of civil strife. At a time when civil justice was often in abeyance, church synods continued to meet and law was administered in episcopal courts.
The canon law attracted adherents among both clergy and laity: Gratian's treatise of 1140 was soon being studied and dis- -255 cussed by educated Englishmen, who must have been impressed by its intellectual superiority over the almost entirely unwritten secular law, with its formalistic procedures of ordeals, trial by battle, and compurgation. 2 In a time of troubles, the church of Rome was the main pillar of order and justice, and when peace ultimately came in 1154 and a new dynasty was placed on the throne, it was partly as a result of the mediation of the political struggle by supporters of papal supremacy.Nevertheless, the new king, Henry II (1154-1189), reasserted royal supremacy over the church. In 1162 he appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury his close friend Thomas Becket, who already occupied the chancellorship, which was the highest office in the realm next to the kingship. Henry expected Thomas to continue as chancellor while he was archbishop, thus more effectively to carry out the policy of resistance to papal claims. Becket, however, resigned the chancellorship and, as archbishop, became an ardent supporter of the church's independence from royal control. When Henry issued the Constitutions of Clarendon in 1164, restoring much of the king's power over the church, Thomas denounced the new legislation as a usurpation. For six years a bitter political struggle continued between the two men, in which leading ecclesiastical and secular figures from many parts of Europe were involved. Finally in 1170, in response to Henry's words, "Will no one rid me of this pestilential priest," four of the king's men murdered the archbishop in his cathedral at Canterbury. That act, however, so shocked England, and indeed the whole of Christendom, that Henry did penance by walking barefoot to Canterbury (true, he only walked from the outskirts of the town), and -- more important -- in 1172 he submitted to a papal legate on the heights of Avranches and before its cathedral publicly renounced those portions of the Constitutions of Clarendon that were "offensive."