• Home
• Project Information
• Fine Rolls
• Style Book
• Commentary
  • Introduction to Reign
  • Introduction to Rolls
  • Originalia Rolls
  • Technical Introduction
  • Heads and Headings
• News
• Help
• Fine of the Month
• Book Publication
• Blog
• Conference
• Podcasts
• Related Papers

1. King Henry III and Salisbury cathedral: how not to fulfil your promises?

Henry III was a renowned patron of the church. His support for the foundation of Westminster Abbey, after all, stretched his personal and his nation's finances to breaking point in his desire to honour his favourite saint. In this article, David Carpenter assesses the true extent of Henry's pious generosity and argues that all is not as it might seem. Henry felt few qualms in exploiting his relationship with Salisbury cathedral and at least one of its bishops for his own financial gain.

1.1. Introduction

⁋1King Henry III has always been regarded as a generous benefactor to the building of Salisbury cathedral. He laid (or so he said) the first stone of the new church, made many gifts to the fabric, and attended its consecration in 1258. This fine of the month presents a rather different picture. It shows Henry seeking to free himself from ‘all the promises which he had made to the fabric’ at no cost to himself and in a way which, on the face of it, verges on the dishonest.

⁋2The evidence for Henry’s conduct comes in an entry, hitherto unknown, which appears on the fine roll for his thirty-fifth regnal year. It has the marginal annotation ‘concerning £100 given to the church of Salisbury’ and runs as follows:

1.2. C 60/48 Fine Roll 35 Henry III (28 October 1250–27 October 1251), membrane 3

1.2.1. 1118

⁋1 Concerning £100 given to the fabric fund of the [cathedral] church of Salisbury. The king has given to the fabric [fund] of the [cathedral] church of St. Mary, Salisbury, those £100 at which Robert of Bingham, formerly bishop of Salisbury, was amerced before his justices who last itinerated to take the pleas of the forest in Berkshire for [default of] the common summons, and by this the king is quit from all the promises he has made to the fabric [fund] of the aforesaid church. Order to the barons of the Exchequer to cause the executors of the testament of the aforesaid bishop to be quit from the aforesaid £100. Witnessed by the king on 5 October [1251] at Westminster.

1.3. Henry and Salisbury

⁋1Before we look at the nature of this gift of £100 to the fabric, it may be helpful to say something about Henry’s general relations with the building of Salisbury. It might be natural to assume, indeed perhaps it has more or less been assumed, that Henry was closely connected with the work from its commencement in 1220 right through to its consecration in 1258. ¹ After all, from his palace of Clarendon, on the hill above, he was able to see the great church growing before his eyes. Yet a study of Henry’s itinerary, as revealed by the dating clauses of his letters, shows this was not exactly the case. ² Down to the end of 1223 those letters were attested by the heads of the minority government, and the location of Henry himself is often unknown. There is no evidence, however, that he was ever based at Clarendon. The minority government itself never visited Clarendon in the period between 1216 and the end of 1223, and was only once fleetingly at Salisbury, namely on 13 September 1220. If the king was there too, this may be the moment when he ‘placed the first stone in the foundation of the cathedral’, as he put it in a charter of 1227. ³ In actual fact, however, according to the account of the new church’s beginning by the dean of Salisbury, William de Waude, both Henry and his governors had missed the official foundation ceremony on 28 April 1220, much to the disappointment of the bishop, Richard le Poore, this because they had to go to Shrewsbury for a meeting with the Welsh. ⁴

⁋2From the end of 1223 Henry, now sixteen, attested royal letters himself with the result that we know his location on the great majority of days each year. His first visit to Clarendon was between 30 September and 2 October 1225. On 2 October, according to William de Waude, he came down to see the new church, heard mass ‘gloriously’ (presumably in the now dedicated eastern chapels) and offered 10 marks of silver and a silk cloth. Henry was back again at Clarendon between 27 and 30 December, this time visiting Salisbury on 28 December (Holy Innocent’s Day) when he offered a gold ring with a precious ruby stone, a silk cloth, and a gold cup weighing ten marks, an extremely valuable gift since ten marks of gold was worth 100 marks of silver. Having heard mass, Henry, with characteristic attention to detail, told Dean William he wished the ring with its ruby to be fixed into the gospel book which the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, had given the cathedral. ⁵ Proceedings ended with a great feast thrown by the bishop (as they had earlier in the year), something reflected in the low costs for the royal household’s food and drink on this day, which were little more than half those of the days either side. ⁶

⁋3One might have thought that Henry’s generous gifts and symbolic fixing of his ring to Salisbury’s gospel book would have sealed his relationship with the new cathedral and commitment to the work. But it was not to be. Henry did not return to Clarendon for over four years and made no recorded gift to the cathedral’s fabric between 1226 and 1233. Perhaps the grave illness he suffered having left Salisbury in December 1225 did not encourage a very positive view of the spiritual benefits of the new cathedral. ⁷ From 1230, however, a new pattern emerges. Apart from 1233 (when there was civil war), Henry came to Clarendon up to three times a year between 1230 and 1235, spending Easter there in 1231. ⁸ With his marriage in 1236, the connection strengthened again, this time decisively. Down to 1258, Henry continued to visit up to three times a year (he was absent, when not abroad, only in 1240 and 1257) but now his stays lasted much longer. Between 1230 and 1236, only one had been for as much as a week. Thereafter sojourns of more than a week, indeed of weeks, were usual. At the end of 1236, for example, Henry came to Clarendon on 28 December and stayed till 12 January. In 1239, he was there between 22 September and 2 October, and again between 22 November and 11 December; in 1251, the year of his liquidated promises, he was there from 7 to 25 June; and in 1252 from 29 June to 15 July, from 16 November to 2 December, and from 12 to 17 December. After 1236 they often lasted more than week, sometime several weeks. Thus in 1237 Henry was there from 1 to 12 January; in 1238 from 10-23 December; in 1251, the year of his liquidated promises, from 7 to 25 June; and in 1252 from 29 June to 15 July; from 16 November to 2 December; and from 12 to 17 December. It was, of course, in these years that Henry transformed Clarendon into a palace fit for a queen as well as a king. ⁹ Evidently both he and Eleanor delighted in staying there.

⁋4All this has major implications for Henry’s relationship with the great cathedral growing up beneath Clarendon’s hill. Doubtless, he still went down for the formal services and ceremonies we glimpse in the record of 1225, but he also now had time, plenty of time, to explore the building informally, climbing all over it to absorb its details and learn its lessons. It may be no accident that in 1246, when he was just beginning his own church at Westminster, Henry spent over a month at Clarendon (he was there from 20 June to 5 July, and from 25 November to 18 December), doubtless considering, on numerous visits to the cathedral, what his own great abbey might take from it.

⁋5When Henry made formal visits to the cathedral in this later period, he presumably continued to offer the kinds of cloths and jewels he had in 1225, although perhaps not often the equivalent of 1225’s great golden cup. ¹⁰ Between 1244 and 1251, with services in the new choir and presbytery beginning, Henry also made gifts of copes and a pyx to hang over the altar. ¹¹ One highly ornamented cope in 1249 was to be made and sent to the king so that he could offer it at the High Altar on his next coming. ¹² What, however, of Henry’s gifts specifically to the building works of the church? How were these affected by Henry’s growing familiarity with the structure? The answer is not apparently very much for those gifts seem to have been of the same limited type as before, namely gifts of timber from the royal forests. These can be briefly summarised: ¹³ in 1220, 40 good ‘chevrons’; in 1221, 50 dead trees for hearths ¹⁴ (both these gifts may have come as much from the minority government as from the king); in 1224, 100 oaks; in 1225, 30 long oaks to make cranes; ¹⁵ in 1234, 200 tree trunks; ¹⁶ in 1236, 20 oaks to make stalls in the cathedral; in 1237, 30 tree trunks for hearths; in 1252, 20 oaks to the bishop for timber; ¹⁷ in 1253, 20 oaks; in 1261, 18 oaks.

⁋6These gifts were clearly significant, and help explain why Matthew Paris praised Henry for supporting the works. ¹⁸ Yet his generosity only went so far. The timber he gave was insufficient, for much of that in the church actually came from Ireland, and not apparently from him. ¹⁹ What Henry did give, moreover, product of the royal forests, cost him nothing, or at least nothing in terms of actual cash, although cash was clearly what the works desperately needed. ²⁰ The amount of hard money Henry is known to have given to the fabric is actually tiny: £10 out of the issues of the vacant bishopric of Worcester in 1228, and 5 marks when a favourite household knight was buried in the cathedral in 1256; ²¹ some contrast to the over £40,000 Henry gave to the rebuilding of Westminster abbey. Have we then here the clue to Henry’s unfulfilled promises? Many of the gifts he did make were clearly prompted by visits to the cathedral, for the writs putting them into force were often issued from Clarendon, or soon after leaving Clarendon. ²² Can we likewise imagine him, during his long walks round the great cathedral making, in his expansive enthusiastic way, promises of cash contributions to its works? The fact that Henry’s way of fulfilling his promises in 1251 was precisely through a cash gift supports this suggestion, as does the way gifts of timber to the fabric continued after 1251. Clearly, Henry had no problem fulfilling promises of that kind.

⁋7If Henry had then made promises of cash to the church, what of the way in 1251 he eventually sought to fulfil them? It is difficult to see this, at least at first sight, as other than rather shameful. Again, Henry gave no actual money of his own. All he did was to divert to the fabric a debt of £100 owed him by the late bishop of Salisbury. Had that been a ‘good’ debt, really due and payable to the king, then Henry, fair enough, was effectively giving £100 of his own to the fabric. But the debt was the reverse of ‘good’. Whether the bishop should have owed it in the first place was highly questionable. Once he did owe it there was a strong presumption that it would never be paid to the king, either because Henry would simply pardon it or because, quite irrespective of his own promises, he would agree that it should be assigned to the fabric of the cathedral. In short, in order to fulfil his promises to Salisbury cathedral, Henry was using money of dubious origins, which he would have almost certainly assigned to the cathedral anyway!

⁋8According to the entry in the fine rolls, Henry gave to the fabric the £100 which Robert of Bingham, bishop of Salisbury, had been amerced before the justices of the forest in Berkshire ‘for the common summons’. The pipe roll for 1245–1246, shows that the eyre in question was headed by the notorious Robert Passelewe, while the amercement imposed on the bishop was ‘for default’. ²³ What Bingham had then neglected to do, was to answer the ‘common summons’ under which general eyre and forest justices ordered everyone subject to their jurisdiction to appear before them on the first day of their proceedings. Evidently Bingham had failed to secure the royal letter, which many influential people obtained, exempting them from this chore. Even so, to be amerced the large sum of £100 for what was a very minor offence seems utterly exorbitant. ²⁴ It gains an added piquancy from the fact that Passelewe had just been rejected as the new bishop of Chichester for too little learning whereas Bingham, great scholar that he was, had so much. This does not necessarily mean that Bingham was being particularly victimised. A penalty of £100 was sometimes imposed for such offences simply as a reflection of a great man’s wealth and status. When this happened, however, it was common for the king eventually to pardon the amount involved. Indeed, in the very next year, Bingham’s successor as bishop, William of York, before his election the senior judge at the court coram rege,was pardoned a similar £100 amercement for ‘the default he made’ before the justices in eyre in Dorset. ²⁵ Bingham had been elected in 1228 as a distinguished theologian rather than a royal servant, but he maintained perfectly reasonable relations with the king and must have had every expectation that a pardon would eventually be forthcoming. ²⁶

⁋9The most likely form of the pardon was always that the money would be assigned to the Salisbury fabric fund. Back in 1227, as the fine rolls show, Bishop Poore had offered the king 300 marks for a charter conceding him and his successors and ‘the church of St Mary new Sarum’ all the amercements levied by the king and his officials on their lands and men, as well as on the lands and men of Salisbury’s dean and canons. ²⁷ In 1236 Bishop Bingham, ‘wishing to convert the king’s grace to pious uses, as the king desires’, assigned to the fabric fund all the amercements connected with the dean and canons, which were incurred before the justices in eyre. As a testimony to his gift, in a striking ceremony, he placed one mark arising from such amercements on the great altar of the cathedral. His charter recording the assignment was immediately confirmed by the king. ²⁸ Now none of this meant strictly that amercements imposed on the bishop himself had to go to the fabric fund, but it certainly created an expectation that they might do so. ²⁹

⁋10The likelihood is, therefore, that neither Bingham, nor his executors, after he died in November 1246, ever thought they would actually have to pay the £100 amercement to the king, nor, of course, did they do so. Between 1246 and 1251, the debt remained obstinately unchanged on the pipe rolls. ³⁰ In eventually assigning it to Salisbury’s fabric, Henry III was doing no more than what he might always have been expected to do. Whether he thereby brought any benefit to the church is questionable, for one wonders whether the executors really increased by £100 what they were going anyway to give to the fabric. There was nothing in Henry’s act which absolved him fair and square from his own promises to the building. What then was going on?

⁋11The starting point here may well be Bishop Bingham’s will. It does not survive but we do have, as some kind of guide, the will of Richard of Wych, bishop of Chichester who died in 1253. ³¹ Wych left £40 to the fabric of his cathedral. He also asked his executors to demand the money which he claimed King Henry owed him. If they failed to get it, he would seek payment ‘in the court of the most High’. Is there a parallel here with the will of Bingham? He too surely made bequests to the fabric and ones probably worth far more than £40. Did he also command his executors to extract from Henry all the money which he had promised? This demand, if finally pressed in 1251, did not come at a good time, if there ever was a good time. Henry was saving hard for his crusade; he was having to find large sums to support Simon de Montfort in Gascony; and he was also funding Westminster abbey. We know he sometimes reacted badly to the material demands of churchmen, however good the cause. ‘Brother William, you used to speak to me spiritually. Now all you say is “give, give, give”’, he complained to the friar William of Nottingham. ³² Under these pressures, Henry found an easy way out. He remembered the £100 Bingham owed him, perhaps after investigation into the bishop’s debts, and simply assigned it to the executors in discharge of his promises. Even if he was aware, as he surely must have been, that he was hardly giving very much, he may still have had a surprisingly clear conscience. ³³ After all, he had given all that timber to the fabric, and, more recently, all those copes. Why should old undertakings made to Bingham in other circumstances be brought up against him? Was there a note of exasperation in Henry’s statement that he was now quit of all his promises? This was included in the letter to the exchequer informing it of his decision, but the real target was the executors themselves. ³⁴ Their demands had now been met. If the means of doing so were open to question, so were the demands in the first place.

⁋12The fact remains that Henry had made promises, or at least cash promises, to Salisbury which he had failed to meet. To understand how that had come about we need to go back to Henry’s general relations with Salisbury. He had laid what he called the first stone, perhaps in 1220, and from the first had given timber to the fabric. Yet until 1230, that is for the first fourteen years of his reign, he had rarely visited Clarendon and thus had not been at all close to the great cathedral growing up beside it. There are some parallels here to Henry’s relations with Westminster abbey, the foundation stone of whose Lady Chapel he had also laid in 1220. To be sure, Henry was often at Westminster but there is little sign he was close to the Abbey or contributed much to its fabric. Then, in the 1230s, everything changed and the paths of Salisbury and Westminster sharply diverged. The difference, of course, was the possession of a saint. Henry, thanks to the efforts of the Westminster monks, adopted Edward the Confessor as his patron and the rest is history. ³⁵ Salisbury had no such saint to put in the balance. Bishop Poore had wished to secure the canonisation of his Norman predecessor, Bishop Osmund, but had made little progress. Bishop Bingham himself evidently failed to interest Henry in the cause. In the event, Osmund was not canonised until 1457. After his marriage in 1236, Henry spent long periods of time at Clarendon, and came to know Salisbury cathedral better than any church built in his time apart from Westminster abbey. Yet for him it was a place of architectural beauty, rather than one of saintly power. Its appeal was strong enough to elicit promises from Henry to contribute money to the building, but not strong enough to secure their fulfilment other than in the questionable fashion discussed in this ‘fine of the month’. ³⁶