Relations between England and the papacy famously go back to the early beginnings of both the English nation and the English Church, at least as far as the official mythologising of each would have it. “Non angli,” quipped St Gregory the Great, “sed angeli.”
Those keen to build up their view of papal Rome’s interactions with England could do a lot worse than dipping into Benjamin Savill’s England and The Papacy in the Early Middle Ages. In this recent publication in the Oxford Historical Monographs series, Savill tells the story of Anglo-papal exchange from c AD 680 to shortly after the Norman Conquest through the medium of papal privileges.
Privileges, Savill explains, were documents from (or purportedly from) the pope, “granting or confirming some kind of special treatment to a particular named individual and/or institution”. Savill is keen to stress that privileges are not just dry, technical documents of interest to canonists. Instead, they can be read as a dramatic series of events, which reveal to us a great deal not only about Rome and the papacy, but about the English churchmen, monasteries and other institutions which sought them.
Privileges were explicitly sought after by petition to the Holy See. Savill is quick to disabuse his reader of anachronistically imagining the early medieval papacy as too similar to its later, much more interventionist model after the Gregorian reform of the 11th century. The earlier papacy was a more reactive institution, patterned after imperial Roman “rescript government”.
We learn from Savill how these documents not only resulted from petitions to the pope, but were the culmination of long journeys to Rome undertaken by saints and scholars, as much pilgrimages as diplomatic missions or legal trips to the papal court. Benedict Biscop, for example, received a privilege on his fourth visit to Rome, “besides such ‘spiritual wares’ as books, relics and a singing teacher”. The high points of such arduous, cross-continental trips were visits to the shrines of the Apostles and face-to-face audiences with the pope himself.
While the privileges are framed in the language of humble petition and gracious papal concession, Savill gives a flavour of the behind-the-scenes negotiations and drafting at the Roman court. He draws attention to Hans-Henning Körtum’s study of continental privileges, which noted that while the more formulaic sections of such documents were written in the standard Latin of the papal chancery, sections dealing with the nitty-gritty of local situations on the ground might often be written in a “more dialectic form peculiar to the beneficiary’s own region”. In other words, for all that petitioners might be pious pilgrims professing filial piety towards the pope, they must often have been willing to browbeat papal scribes, turning up at Rome with “pre-prepared drafts” or “older documents presented to the pope for confirmation”.
Savill further stresses that the grant of a privilege at Rome was only the beginning. In many respects, the real work was done on the petitioner’s return to England. After all, given the great distances involved, Rome was too far removed from England to supervise the reception or enforcement of the privileges she granted.
The crux of a privilege’s reception was often its recognition by local ecclesiastical and secular élites, in the royal councils of the Anglo-Saxon kings and the synods of their bishops. These were theatrical, even ritual receptions of the papal document: an 11th-century Life of Ecgwine portrays a privilege being received by a royal and episcopal council, a confirmatory document being drawn up by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and its subsequent deposit after Mass in the altar at Evesham church.
Some elements of Savill’s book are perhaps more technical than the general reader is likely to enjoy. The second chapter, for example, is an “annotated handlist” of all extant purported privileges in England during the period covered by the book. These are the necessary inner workings of an academic monograph.
The great majority of the book is, however, both scholarly and readable. Savill’s overview chapter is a detailed but digestible introduction to the privileges. Aided by some helpful and impressive photographs, he stresses the physically imposing nature of the privilege documents, written in a distinctively old-fashioned curialis script on long sheets of imported papyrus. This was a deliberately archaic and politically grandiose practice in the Middle Ages, recalling the documentary cultures of the old Roman empire, as well as the diplomatic documents of the extant imperial polity headquartered in Constantinople, and the caliphal chanceries of the Mediterranean’s southern, Islamic shores.
Reading Savill’s study of the privileges, one gets a glimpse both into the papal Rome of the early middle ages, and into the ecclesiastical institutions of the Anglo-Saxon societies which would gradually become a united and thoroughly Christianised England.
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