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Canons of English Church Councils in the Early Decretal Collections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2016

C. N. L. Brooke
C. N. L. Brooke*
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Extract

Neither of the two general councils of the western Church held between the Second and Third Lateran (1139, 1179) produced a large body of legislation: the genuine canons of the Council of Rheims (1148) number eighteen; those of Tours (1163) about ten. But in the great collection of Mansi this meagre store is eked out by an equal weight of additional canons, sixteen for Rheims and ten for Tours. Mansi looked on them with no great favor, but offered no criterion by which their validity and value might be judged. The Rheims canons, so far as I am aware, have never been submitted to critical study. The Tours canons, on the other hand, were examined and shown to be spurious by Seckel in a valuable appendix to his article on the sources of the canons of the English council of 1175, which he published in the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Kirchenrecht in 1899.

Type
Institute of Research and Study In Medieval Canon Law: Bulletin for 1957
Information
Traditio , Volume 13 , 1957 , pp. 471 - 480
Copyright
Copyright © Fordham University Press 

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References

1 Mansi 21.714ff., 718ff. (Rheims); 1175ff., 1182ff. (Tours). Mansi prints twelve additional canons: but two of these are decrees of the Third Lateran Council added to Tours in the Collectio Abrincensis (for which see below, at n. 6). — For assistance in collecting material for this paper, I am much indebted to Dr. Charles Duggan; for help and advice, to Cheney, Professors C. R., Holtzmann, W. and Kuttner, S. Google Scholar

2 ‘ Canonistische Quellenstudien, I,’ Deutsche Zeitschrift für Kirchenrecht 3 9 (1899–1900) 159ff.; the appendix is on pp. 186–9.Google Scholar

3 Cf. Table B, below; and for full references, Seckel loc. cit. Google Scholar

4 We should either have to suppose that the fathers of Westminster used the Tours canons as their source, and alone of all their sources failed to record them; or else that the identical canons were arrived at by coincidence. Neither supposition is admissible. Google Scholar

5 Conveniently summarized by Holtzmann, W. in Nachrichten Akad. Göttingen 1945, pp. 15–36; Kuttner, S. in Traditio 6 (1948) 345–51.Google Scholar

6 ‘ Neue Beiträge über die Dekretalensammlungen …,’ Sb. Vienna 171.1 (1914); the conciliar passages are on pp. 177ff. (Sangermanensis) and 355ff. (Abrincensis).Google Scholar

7 For which see Wilkins, D., Concilia Magnae Britanniae I (Londorf 1737) 417–8 (sub anno 1138); and for its date, H. Böhmer, Kirche und Staat in England und in der Normandie (Leipzig 1899) 346 n.5. A revised text of the councils of 1143 and 1175 has been prepared for the new edition of Wilkins’ Concilia.Google Scholar

8 Thus Hereford Cathedral MS 0.2.vii contains canons of the First Lateran Council (1123) as well as the English councils of 1125 and 1127; and the chronicler Hoveden gives the text of the Third Lateran Council (1179) as well as those of the English councils of 1175, 1195 and 1200. — Apart from the councils of 1143 and 1175 which are discussed in the text, the canons of London 1151 are to be found in the decretal collection Roffensis (B.M. [= London, British Museum] Royal MS 10.C.iv, fol. 145r-v), and an abbreviated draft of Westminster 1175 in Claudiana (B.M. Cotton MS Claudius A.iv, fols. 191v-192). Google Scholar

9 For an illustration of the way in which the canons of the Third Lateran Council were shuffled, see the table in Juncker, J. 's analysis of the Collectio Berolinensis I, in Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte [= ZRG] Kan. Abt. 13 (1924) 408–9.Google Scholar

10 Oxford, Bodl. e Mus. MS 249 (27835), fols. 132–133v. This MS contains the letter collections of Gilbert Foliot, written by a number of hands, some of which can be identified as those of clerks in Foliot's familia. A large proportion of the material in the MS can be dated, and the canons of the Council of Westminster are the latest closely dateable document it contains. A full discussion of the origin and date of the MS will appear in the forthcoming edition of Gilbert Foliot's letters by Dom Adrian Morey and C.N.L. Brooke. Google Scholar

11 For full references, see the Analysis at the end of this paper. There are a number of single texts of canons which should be added to this list (of which the most interesting are the Sangermanensis and Abrincensis texts of no. 15, and the appearance of no. 19 in the Compilatio prima); and it is always possible that some of the texts in the later or foreign collections derive from independent use of a full text of the council. But in the main this was evidently not so, and the English family from which, for instance, the Bambergensis and its associates derived their texts is usually sufficiently clear, although the actual MS they used has, of course, disappeared. Google Scholar

12 The single exception is Parisiensis I c. 7 (ed. Friedberg, E., Die Canones-Sammlungen zwischen Gratian und Bernhard von Pavia [Leipzig 1897] 53), where a continuous text of Westminster nos. 2–5 is headed ‘Alexander III Gant, concilio’ (sic MS). The meaning of this gnomic heading is not clear, but it seems likely that it is a corruption of ‘archiepiscopus Cant. in concilio’ or the like.Google Scholar

13 It omits canon 11, which is, however, in the Fontanensis, a collection of the same group; and it omits a line in canon 5, which is in the other decretal collections which have the canon. Since this was written, a hitherto unknown text of the 1175 canons has been brought to my notice by Dr. Hunt, R. W. and Professor Cheney. It is in Oxford, MS Bodleian Lat. theol. d.29, fols. 76–78, added in a twelfth-century hand at the end of a collection of theological miscellanea. The text has many of the special features of the Belverensis, but includes canon 11, and is independent of Belverensis in its errors. A common parent could well be the immediate source from which the canons entered the decretal collections; but full texts of the Council of Westminster independent of the chronicler Hoveden (or the Gesta Henrici secundi, which is now taken to be a first draft of Hoveden's chronicle: cf. Stenton, D. M., English Historical Review 68 [1953] 574–82) are too rare for there to be certainty on this point. (The complete texts of the council will be analyzed in the new edition of Wilkins’ Concilia; meanwhile see Cheney, C. R., Engl. Hist. Rev. 50 [1935] 385–8.)Google Scholar

14 Cf. Traditio 6 (1948) 347–8 (S. Kuttner); 7 (1949–51) 284 (S. Kuttner and Rathbone, E.).Google Scholar

15 10 folios apart — see Table B. Google Scholar

16 The latest discussion of this is in Dr. Duggan, C.'s unpublished Cambridge Ph. D. thesis on Twelfth Century Decretal Collections, which he kindly gave me permission to read.Google Scholar

17 This analysis cannot claim to be exhaustive: I have studied all the early decretal collections analyzed in print, and all preserved in English MSS. Google Scholar

18 For the Bambergensis and related texts see now Deeters, W., Die Bambergensisgruppe der Dekretalensammlungen des 12. Jhdts (Bonn 1956).Google Scholar

19 For the Coll. Tanner see now Holtzmann, W., in Festschrift Akad. Göttingen (1951) 84–145.Google Scholar

20 For an explanation of this inscription see Kuttner, S., in Rivista di storia del diritto italiano 26 (1953) 43.Google Scholar

21 For an explanation see Kuttner, , art. cit. 45.Google Scholar

22 The numbering is that of Mansi 21.714ff.; cf. also Singer, in Sb. Vienna 171. 1 (1914) 125–8, 356–7. 23 The canon ‘Precipimus ut si qui clerici,’ of unknown provenance.Google Scholar

24 Cottoniana is fragmentary, and its reconstruction difficult.Google Scholar