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Ecclesiastical Reparations and the Soldiers of “The Anarchy”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Thomas Callahan Jr.
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Extract

In the English civil war of King Stephen's reign combatants frequently damaged church property. Some of this damage was accidental or malicious, but most was due to military exigency; commanders often took advantage of the strategic location of church properties by fortifying, attacking, or robbing them, either to get at the enemy, to deny him sustenance, or to reward their own men. Chroniclers and other clerics angrily decried this plundering and damage of church possessions. Some wrote of whole years “being consumed with depredations and oppressions of churches …,” and the author of the Gesta Stephani accused the Anglo-Norman barons of having “greedily assailed the property … of the church, which was the wonted and common practice of them all … .” In a famous passage from his Policraticus, John of Salisbury cried out “Where are now Geoffrey, Miles, Ranulf, Alan, Simon [and] Gilbert, men who were not so much counts of the kingdom as public enemies?” These men, the earls of Essex, Hereford, Chester, Cornwall, Northampton, and Lincoln, all made John's list of evil-doers because of their actions against the church during the civil war. There were frequent reports of whole towns having been burned with all their churches, and clerics feared assault and robbery on the highways. Undoubtedly many such stories were exaggerated, but the fact remains that during Stephen's reign the English church suffered material damages on a scale unknown for many generations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , Winter 1978 , pp. 300 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1978

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References

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