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From long lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me Matt Lewis, Dr. Elena Jarninger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life. Only on History Hit with your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
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Summer smells like salt in the air and warm sand. Restore your sense of place with Pura's new summer fragrance collection. Discover transportive clean scents@pura.com.
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Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Jennica and welcome to Gone Medieval From History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research. From the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to Popes to the Crusades, we delve into the rebellions, plots and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here. 30 November 1394 London the King's Head Tavern near London Bridge is a hive of nighttime activity. Friends and strangers press shoulder to shoulder, carousing in the candlelight. Among them are three men, Herman Stockfish, Nicholas Clairbont, and Angela Letterre, who is probably in Italian, far from home. In an instant, the mood turns. A crust of bread flies across the room and strikes a woman in the face. It's a small insult. It's almost ridiculous until it isn't. Angry words flash back and forth. Pride flares. Tempers break. Leterre lunges first, punching Clairbond in the throat, bursting through the tavern doors. The fight spills out into the cold night. What happens next happens quickly. As the men grapple in the street, Herman's stockfish rushes after them. A flash of steel. He draws a dagger and plunges it into Clairbont's right side, so deep that it pierces his heart. Clairbont stumbles away through the maze of narrow streets, mortally wounded. Step by painful step, he staggers as far as St. Mark and Orgar in Candlewick street, where he collapses. And while Clairbont is breathing his last sleep, Stockfish is already running. He doesn't run to the nearest church. He does not surrender. With the daggers still in his hand, he flees west through the city to Westminster Abbey, where stone walls and sacred privilege can stand between a killer and the law. There he claims sanctuary, disappearing into a stronghold where royal justice stops at the threshold. For months, he will remain there, untouchable. Then, in May 1395, stockfish emerges and gives himself up to the king's bench, pleading not guilty to homicide. On the surface, it looks like a surrender, but in reality, it's a calculation. Before the case can truly begin, the king issues a pardon. By June, Stockfish is released without further delay. No trial, no sentence, no reckoning. A man has died, and his killer is walking free. Today's episode of Gone Medieval is more than the story of a tavern brawl which turned into murder. It's the story of a place at a time where the line between justice and mercy could be crossed by reaching the right holy ground. Because when Herman Stockfish fled to Westminster Abbey, he may have exposed something new emerging in England, a more powerful form of sanctuary, guarded not only by religion, but by privilege. In the shadows of medieval London, one killing revealed a system in transformation where bloodshed, law and sacred refuge collided. The subject of sanctuary has been asked for by three Count Em3 listeners, Allie McEachern, Ivan Girling, and Claire Ogburn. So thank you very much for your suggestions and have I got the right guest to talk about this subject. Professor Shannon McSheffrey from Concordia University, Montreal, is the author of Seeking Law, Mitigation and Politics in English courts, 1400-1550, and she's the brain behind the online project Sanctuary seekers in England, 1394-1557. Shannon, welcome to Gone Medieval.
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Thank you, Eleanor. It's very good to be here.
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I am absolutely delighted to have you here today because I think sanctuary is one of these topics that everyone sort of thinks they know about. I suppose that it's almost a plot point in a lot of medievalisms, as it were. You know, this idea that one can sort of burst into a church, claim sanctuary, and that everything ought to be fine and. And indeed, you know, there is a bit of thought of that in the medieval world, but of course, as all historians delight in saying, it's much more complicated than that.
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Yes.
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You can help us get.
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B
That's our motto. Yeah, it's more complicated than that. Yeah.
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So, yeah, if I had a house crest, that would be. That would be on it, I think. But so I suppose to start us off, as good a question as any is can you explain how Roman law and earlier Christian ideals make churches violence free zones? You know, this place that you can sort of go to for criminal mediation? I think that that's, you know, that's a huge question. Yeah.
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And I mean, it. It probably goes back to pre Christian, Mediterranean you know, ideas of, of the sacrality of religious spaces. You know, there are ideas in pre Christian Roman law about the, the violence free nature of, of temples and things like that. And not surprisingly, given Christianity's, you know, ideas about, about peace and nonviolence, that, that their specific spaces would be seen as outside the normal kind of conduct of political life, I guess, which often involved violence. And so from early Christianity and certainly by the, the fifth and sixth centuries when you know, in a sense we're getting the beginnings of medieval Christianity, I guess that, that churches would be these places that were seen as islands of peace outside the sometimes chaotic environment, outside of that. And so you see that clearly in various different kinds of sources that when somebody has committed some kind of, often it's seen as a killing. Like that's, it's the most. Well, for us certainly and for them as well, I think the most extreme kind of wrongdoing is the taking of somebody else's life. The Church's commitment to being a mediator of violent situations and to prevent spiraling feuds. The idea was that the wrongdoer would come into that sacral space and have this both place and moment of respite before somebody else comes and takes vengeance. And so in order to prevent the spiraling vengeance, the idea was that in the space of the Church then there would be mediation between factions, that there would be recompense made where guild would be negotiated and paid so that then the violence did not escalate. And so the Church played that kind of mediating role from early on in Christianity. And that set the tone for the idea that church properties had a kind of immunity as the Latin immunitas was used.
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C
That's really interesting to me because I think it also makes sense from a cultural standpoint. I mean, I think it's, it's fairly obvious from a religious standpoint why, you know, the Church might say let's, let's stop doing violence very quickly. But I think the Church is such a good mediator for this because people who are quite high up or indeed even your local clergy members are sort of drawn from the same class of people who have a monopoly on violence. I suppose, you know, a lot of these people are coming from the noble classes, they're coming from these higher up levels of society where there is actually a fair amount of violence that is meted out one onto the other. So if you get someone like a priest who can come in and say, oh, I know that you're sort of thinking about embarking on a journey of revenge. But maybe we can come and talk about it in the church. I suppose that that makes a lot of sense culturally.
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Yeah. And it is a way also for those church members to exercise influence, you know, and you can look at that cynically, which I think is not unmerited in many cases. Also it is seen by those bishops and other high ranking church members as a way to further the influence of Christianity and that sort of thing. So it all kind of dovetails together into sort of creating this political. And really is often a political role, because the people who are getting that sanctuary are most often those high ranking members of society rather than the peasants. You know, if they, if they are committing these kinds of wrongs, then they don't get that kind of access, which is actually a theme that is fairly. That runs through late medieval manifestations of sanctuary as well.
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We definitely see this grow over time as well, these ideas. Can you tell us a little bit about what adaptations we see emerging on the idea of sanctuary by about the 12th century? Because by the high Middle Ages, I mean, especially in England, I think we've really got a kind of snowball effect going with ideas as sanctuary. No.
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B
Yeah. And I think that it's. And I'm going to be mostly talking about England because that's what I've studied. So in the 12th century, that is the point where you're really beginning the development of royal justice in a kind of very structural sort of way, with systems of courts and development, developments of the jury and all this sort of thing in order to make the King's justice workable on a local level. And it's also a period, of course, when the church in England and elsewhere in Europe is beginning to really organize itself and become a more powerful institution. And the negotiation between the Crown and the Church is on. You know, it's ongoing through the period for centuries in a sense to come. And so in that period where the law of felony is being developed and the structures for prosecuting crime are being developed, there also comes to be these customs that bring together the royal justice that is developing. And these old ideas about the sacrality of church spaces and the immunity. And the immunity is seen as being that the church space is in a sense kind of exempt from royal justice, especially in a situation where an action by a royal official is going to end in execution and the taking of a life. And that is something that is always emphasized is the idea of sanctuary as being something that is necessary to save a life, because no wrongdoer is so wrong in Christian Theology that he or she cannot be saved. Right. And so it is part of the Christian ideas of redemption and things like that. So in a case where somebody commits, say again, I'm going to use the, you know, the highest level of crime, of homicide, you flee to a church and then you are permitted to remain free from arrest from royal officials. But the variant that develops in England, so you see this all over Christian Europe in various different ways, although it's. The thing about England is that it becomes integrated with the development of royal justice in the sense that first of all, there is a limit placed on how long a person is allowed to stay there, which is not part of canon law. Canon law says it's perpetual, but in England the limit is 40 days. 40 days is one of those magic numbers. In Christianity it's the length of Lent. So you're allowed to stay there for 40 days and then you either can get arrested or you have to confess your sin. And this is very Christian, the idea of confession. Confess your sin, but not to a priest, to a royal official, the coroner. And the coroner will then give you basically instructions and the means to go into exile. So you're banished from the land. This is known as abjuration, which literally means swearing off. So you swear off the realm, you leave the realm and you are never allowed to come back. So it's using banishment, which is a kind of punishment that was used all over Europe as a punishment for crime. And in England it was used in this specific kind of marrying together with the idea of sacrality. You do see that also in other places in France you can see similar sorts of things, but it really, the development of taking those abjurations, those confessions, as one of the most important tasks of a coroner is something that really brings it into the system and it becomes something that is adjudicated then by the royal courts. So it's not just a church thing, but it's something that kind of brings together Christianity into the English royal system in an integral way.
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C
I find that fascinating because I think in a Holy Roman imperial context, we see a little bit more push back to this concept. Now granted, it's, I think, partially to do with the fact that they don't have the 40 day limitation to things, but there does tend to be, I suppose, probably because of the papal imperial rivalry, probably because of things of this nature. You know, the emperor really doesn't like giving up the idea that they can pursue felons, although often it's sort of allowed at a more ducal level. But I do. I'm also not surprised to hear that England has done this because England is so good at developing these bureaucratic systems in a way that other parts of Europe simply aren't in the Middle Ages.
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Yeah. And I mean, it has to do with obviously all sorts of things, but one of it really is that England is a small place. You know, obviously the duchies in the Holy Roman Empire are also smaller. But that kind of state building that takes place in England does so more intensely in the 12th and 13th centuries, partly simply because it is a compact nation in a way that some other parts, even France, is so much larger and so many more disparate interests. The crown can kind of really bring things together in a way in England that they can't in most other parts of Europe in that period.
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We do see this very interesting thing within England as well, which is eventually an expansion. And we've been talking about the very worst of crimes, you know, murder, that sort of a thing. But we do see statutes eventually expand out to also relate to debtors as well, don't we? Like, you know. So at what point in time does this come into English law?
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Yeah, that seems to be a 14th century development mostly. And it's related obviously just to the expansion of commerce in Europe from the 13th century. And so they, you know, even that kind of monetization of the society, I think, is part of what it is that creates this idea of debtors. And they're mostly merchants. It is possible obviously to be indebted even if you're not a merchant. But the kinds of people who are looking for protection against their creditors are almost all merchants. So they're people who do have some power and standing and connections. And in the 14th century, we begin to see in various parts of England, but especially Westminster Abbey. Westminster Abbey is the most, probably the most powerful and wealthiest abbey. You know, it might have rivals in Glastonbury and stuff, but it's obviously right near the major commercial centre of England at the time, London. And so Westminster Abbey begins. It seems. It's a little murky, but it seems in the 14th century they begin to conceptualize debtors as being wrongdoers who are in need of mercy, compassion. The same kind of rhetoric that underlies that old, old idea of welcome, you know, of welcoming, I guess that is the word. The criminals into the church for some kind of mercy. And so Westminster Abbey begins to use the idea of the separateness of church space, of its property. It has a significant sized precinct. Still has a significant sized precinct. Right next to the Parliament buildings. And it, the parliament buildings didn't exist then, but the Royal palace did. And so the Westminster Abbey is a place where they begin to allow debtors to live with inside their precinct, to remain safe from arrest from their creditors. A significant point here is that there's no bankruptcy law, so that if you owe money and you cannot pay it back, you are liable to be arrested and put into a prison. The prisons in England first began effectively as places to incarcerate debtors. There was no such thing as a jail sentence for a crime. You were held in a prison before trial, but there was no possible sentence of imprisonment for crime. It was only really for debt. And so to avoid being placed into a debtor's prison and having all of your things seized, you would go to Westminster. And Westminster Abbey began in a kind of perhaps entrepreneurial fashion, to use this as a way to demonstrate the separateness of their property, their immunity, their separateness from the jurisdictions of the towns that want to arrest these people and from the Royal justice as well. So it becomes a kind of symbol. The ability to bring these people in and to keep them safe from these other kinds of officials is a symbol of their separateness and their jurisdictional power.
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C
What's driving this particular surge in debt litigation though, at the time is it just, hey, it's the 14th century. I know we've, we've got kind of on the rise. You know, we, for example, we've got. The Hanseatic League has come up. So we're, we've got more interesting trading partners around the North Sea. Things of this nature. Is it just as simple as that? We've got more commercial trade.
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I think that it's, I mean, much of it is that simply the rise in commercial trade, but also the, you know, the economic disasters of the 14th century also mean that more people are falling into financial despair. You know, especially both before and after the Black Death. The collapse of the banking systems in the, in the 1330s is, you know, is one of those things. But you do see that kind of problem of indebtedness, you know, just. And also the court systems are becoming more elaborated. All of these things are coming together even after the Black Death, when the population levels have plummeted. Nonetheless, unless the business at the court, at the courts in a broad sense is mostly just increasing, you know, not right away after the Black Death, but, you know, that that kind of. The bureaucratic machines of both law and government are actually becoming more efficient and more broad ranging. And so that's part of all of this is that these kind of remedies for things like debt and crime, you know, for the individuals who are being charged with them, is driven to a significant extent by the fact that the processes for going after people are becoming more efficient.
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C
I mean, I suppose the people who we see who are claiming asylum, it makes sense to me that they would be doing it at Westminster. Right. Because if you are a guild member in London and you've run yourself into debt, it's just an easy walk over there out of the city. And I imagine that's. That's who we're talking about. I cannot imagine that we're talking about poor peasantry who are coming up from Suffolk or something.
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B
Yeah, no, no. And it's. And it's partly. And this is again, a theme that runs right through. Until sanctuary kind of collapses. That's the end of the story here. But that you cannot stay in sanctuary unless you have means. Because there really is not a good way to make a living when you are living in this precinct. And so in order to be able to stay there, you either have to have some fun squirreled away that your wife can bring to you or something like that in order to pay your rent, because you have to pay rent to stay in whatever accommodation you're going to stay in in the precinct. And there are. There's accommodation or sort of tenements that are built all the way around the precinct for these people. And in order to pay that, you need to have the money to pay it. So peasants basically can't. And similarly, you know, poor artisans or the underemployed laborers who make up actually a fair bit of the London population, you know, But. But they're not worth suing for debt anyway because they have no money. And so they're not as likely to be arrested for debt. They just, you know, they just move somewhere else when their credit runs out and somebody is coming after them, they just. They just move on somewhere else. Whereas if you're a merchant, you can't, because your business is there. So you can't just escape, at least not as easily.
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C
But I suppose there's almost no difference between the debtors who are living in Westminster Abbey and the monks who are living there. Right. You have to come from a family of means. No one's just going to take you on because you showed up at the door. Right, yeah, yeah. Can we talk a little bit about the expansion that we see in the King's Bench year books in 1355? Because we have this new thing that comes up where we say that suddenly these varying places have a reign over the impunity of limb and life, which I think is really interesting. And they kind of start pointing very far back to even pre conquest charters to say, hey, this is something that we could do. But I bring this up because, as you've mentioned before, really it's not just that courts and jails exist in order to talk about debt, but I mean, laws, if you're looking at early English law, it exists to talk about property. You know, everything is about charters, everything is about land boundaries. So I find it quite interesting that you point at things, you know, from, I don't know, let's say the 9th century off the top of my head and say, oh, the. Our ability to talk about charters also means that we are able to talk about felonies. How does that jump get made?
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B
Well, and I think that again, those things are all tied together into this knot where the, you know, a lot of the prosecution of crime is driven by property because of the forfeiture of the felon's goods to the Crown. So, you know, another big job for a coroner. I mean, people think of coroners as having to do with inquests and dead bodies, but the coroner did a lot of things, and amongst the things that they did, and there are others who were involved with this too, but that they had to assess the goods of the felon so that the king could take the goods of the felon. They were forfeit to the Crown. And so a lot of this is driven by Crown revenue, but it's also driven by the desires over these religious institutions to protect their income producing qualities, I guess. And amongst those things are the idea of that they can, you know, that they get rent from these people, but it's also about making sure that their properties have, you know, certain kinds of exemptions that other sorts of properties do not because of their sacral nature. So it becomes this thing where God has given through the king actually through early kings, pre conquest. And William the Conqueror is another one who grants things to various sorts of abbeys, that they should have a certain independence from the lords who live around them, but also from certain elements of royal government. Not all of them by any means. You know, they're not, you know, if a murder happens in sanctuary, it's not exempt from investigation by royal officials. But nonetheless there is a lot of importance that the religious houses put on. Keeping those special rights and liberties is a word that they use a lot that make them separate from the various other kinds of powers around them. And so what ends up happening in the 14th century is that these ideas of being able to shelter debtors and keep them free from arrest is tied to the idea that they can help keep people's lives and limbs, you know, safety of life and limb, that they, that that is keeping them out of jail, out of the prisons and that these things become all tied together. So the sacrality of the property is actually tied also to its economic independence and its political independence and its legal independence. And that's a pretty neat trick, to be honest. Those Westminster guys who thought of. I think, I mean, and I think it was probably like these ideas were kind of developed. I think, I mean this is my guess is there's is we see it earliest at Westminster Abbey. That's why I'm making that guess. But it is part of a bid to kind of retain this independence. But they do tie it to royal grant as being the original underpinning of it. It's not something that is separate from the royal government, but a long ago king gave us this. And the precedent before time immemorial is something that allows it that political valence in the 14th and 15th century. The idea of that kind of long tradition is something that is a legal, you know, legally. It ends up being legally binding. And that's one of the ways in which these English religious institutions are able to kind of make it work into the system because they are canny enough not to make it. We are independent from the king and don't have to listen to the king. It's no, this is what the king wants. And the kings go along with it for various reasons, which I can talk about later if you want. But they, you know, it works in that way because they pitch it in a way that is acceptable to the idea of royal authority still being supreme.
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A
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C
I guess that makes perfect sense. And this is one of these legal arguments I'm very used to seeing. In the later medieval period, you tend to see time immemorial as one of the justifications for laws or also the old and customary law. That one comes up a lot, I think. You know, this idea that you're throwing back to something that we all know happened and kind of trying to bring people into this idea of a custom, this idea of something that's already happened. And I mean, I've seen it happen also for things that don't even have charters, you know, because, well, we didn't bother to write it down. Everybody just knows this happens, right?
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Yeah. Yeah. And of course, we do get forgery of charters.
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C
Yeah.
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You know, is the other thing, you know, you can just sort of see those monks of Westminster who are sitting there saying to themselves, you know, we know this happened. So it's actually not a sin to write a charter in which it is said to have happened. And, you know, there's one kind of neat example of that in the 1440s where there's another sanctuary within the city of London at St Martin Le grand, which is just north of St Paul's Cathedral. And so there's a collegiate church there and which has had a dean. And the dean ended up having a squabble with the city of London about whether the the precinct was an independent territory that was outside city jurisdiction. And outside the capac of the sheriffs of London to arrest people. And so he comes up with. And I think that. I mean, it's clear that this is a genuine charter. People have worked on this. The dates from 1067 or 68, I forget which. But obviously right after the conquest. So charter from William the Conqueror, and it gives particular freedoms, liberties and rights to the collegiate church of St. Martin Le Grand. And it's in Old English, this charter.
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C
Oh.
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B
So he's writing a kind of brief for consideration by legal authorities about the independence of his collegiate church. And he has this written in. But in the 15th century, people cannot read Old English anymore. The language has changed to such an extent that maybe it was more comprehensible to them than it is to those of us who are untrained, such as me. But it. But it evidently was not, you know, to the legal minds to. That were judging this case. Because what the Dean was able to do is say, the charter says that the king grants us rights of sanctuary and the ability to accept felons and all this kind of thing. And of course, that's historically impossible because the concept of felony had not yet been developed in English law. So it's like it's. And it doesn't say that. It just. It does give broad jurisdictional powers. I mean, that it does do. But it does it in a 1060s kind of way, which, you know, there is not a royal justice system at that point that is clearly elaborated. It only starts in the reign of Henry I, the sort of the, you know, usually seen as the birth of that. I mean, there are justice systems, but it's not. It does not give immunity for felons. But he says that it does. So it's kind of. That's why I find that one of the more interesting, you know, kind of little rhetorical tricks that these. That people are able to make in the arguments about sanctuary in the 15th century.
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C
I love it. That felony isn't a concept, but if it was, we would have. We would have.
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B
Right. If it had been.
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C
I wanted to talk about another kind of exciting case in this. Can we talk a little bit about the Holly Shackle affair? This is, you know, one of those kind of sexy political clashes that happens.
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B
Exactly. So this was in 1378, and it's at a point where there evidently had been debtors in Westminster Abbey. There were not. It was right on the cusp as we would begin to see cases of felons going and asking for. And the difference is. Yeah, I should explain this first, that, that the idea of going into a church when you had committed a felony and getting the 40 day temporary reprieve and, you know, confessing to a coroner and all that kind of stuff existed from at least the 13th century, perhaps back into the 12th. And there are various other sort of manifestations of it that go further back. But the difference in the 14th century that is about to develop is the idea that at certain religious houses, not just parish churches, but religious houses that you could enter in and you could stay in perpetuity, that there was no limit on the sanctuary in those places because of their large powers that had been given to them by the King. That's the argument that was just about, in a sense, to break out at Westminster Abbey. And it's tied, you know, to the idea of the debtors who are already there. So it's kind of like bringing felons under that umbrella as well. In 1378, there is this one case where there were two esquires of the King who were named Robert Hawley and John Shackle. And they had taken custody of a prisoner of war in the Hundred Years War. And they got into a dispute with John of Gaunt, who was at that point the Duke of Lancaster, sorry, John Gaunt, who was the Duke of Lancaster, and the King was the boy at that point, Richard II, who had just taken the throne in 1377. And so he was regent for his nephew. And Hawley and Shackle were, because they were in dispute with this most powerful man of the land, were thrown into the Tower of London. Now this was effectively a property case because the issue was custody of this prisoner of war who was going to be put for ransom. So really it's about the ransom. So it's a property, it's a debt issue, property issue. So they're thrown into the Tower of London, but after about three months, they escaped from the Tower of London. So fascinating how many people escape from the Tower of London and they run from the Tower of London. You know, I think that's about a three kilometer run. You can do it. And they run to Westminster Abbey and they take sanctuary, or at least refuge, I guess. I mean, whether they called it sanctuary or not, it's hard to know. The constable of the Tower runs after them with a, you know, a retinue of armed men. And so the, you know, the two prisoners are ahead of them. They're running in one of them, Shackel gets, gets arrested outside the church. But Hawley has run into the church where the monks are saying mass. So it's in the middle of a Mass, he runs into the church and this retinue. The constable and his retinue run in after him and a melee ensues. There's blood on the floor. This is a huge sacrilege. Big controversy, not surprisingly. So Holly ends up getting killed, but also one of the abbey's servants. Not, I think, not one of the monks, but a servant. So it creates this big controversy that then ensues a bunch of debates about what kind of powers Westminster Abbey has. The abbot kind of makes something of it. Not surprisingly, there are debates in Parliament. Wycliffe, interestingly, the about to be leader of a group of heretics, weighs in. He's an important theologian at that time. He argues against the idea that the abbey should have any special powers. But the feeling of most people involved with this, the parliamentarians, and probably John of Gaunt himself actually, are that Westminster Abbey's privileges need to have more safeguarding. And obviously, nobody is going to be able to argue that bloodshed in a church, which is just seen as the highest of sacrileges, probably it would be today as well. I mean, you see that sometimes where there are in religious sites, there are terrible things happening and the heightened kind of reaction to that. But in those days, I think it would be even more. And so what ends up happening is that there are statutes that come. Come out at the end of the 1370s that give those certain ecclesiastical institutions, including Westminster Abbey and St Martin Le grand, that it gives them clear statutory underpinning to the idea that they could welcome debtors. And that ends up pretty quickly rolling into the idea of, again, anybody whose life or limb are in. In any kind of jeopardy through prosecution by the state in some way could be welcomed into these spaces of immunity. And so by the 1380s and 90s, you're beginning to see in the records felons running to sanctuary and being taken in. And that sanctuary being, in a sense, recognized in the king's court that prosecute the crimes so that you cannot go in and arrest them. If you do that, if you are a sheriff and you go in and you arrest somebody inside an ecclesiastical precinct that has one of these recognized sanctuary rights, then the court will order the person to be put back into the sanctuary. That is one of the pleas you can give in a royal court. It's called a plea of sanctuary. I was in sanctuary, somebody came and arrested me. And the court says, okay, yep, you've proven that. You go back to sanctuary, you don't get hanged. Summer smells like summer. Road trips ocean breezes and long evenings under the stars. It's a feeling you want to hold on to restore your sense of place With Pure Pura's new summer fragrance collection, we've captured the magic of the season in clean premium scents that transform your home into your favorite destination. Discover the art of sunscaping and bring the summer in. Visit pur.com to explore the collection.
- [45:34]
A
Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the poisoner's cup in renown Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen. Listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by historyhit. There are new episodes every week.
- [46:34]
C
That's a really interesting one. Right. Because it's almost as though they couldn't have played into the hands of the members of the abbey if they tried to in. In a better way. Now, I'm not, not to be completely cynical about it, obviously, nobody wanted anyone to die in this case, but by doing this horrible thing, it really does allow Westminster to say, well, you see what happens. This should never have happened. And then you can make this case for yourself. Right. You know, it, it makes this big.
- [47:03]
B
Yeah.
- [47:04]
C
Move, I think.
- [47:06]
B
Yeah. Do we tend to see the. Then.
- [47:08]
C
So you, you, you're. We're. We see this kind of establish a precedent in the 1370s, and it was. We move further in time. Do we see that this picks up a little bit more? I'm thinking sort of in the 16th century, we kind of tend to see a kind of. Did, you know, increase. I guess that when the tutors kind of look at. At prosecuting felonies a bit more than, for example, the Lancastrians had done before. Does this do anything in order to challenge this idea of sanctuary at the time, or. Or is it, you know, a way of closing these workaround loopholes at all?
- [47:49]
B
Yeah, I think that, I mean, one of the things about sanctuary is that there are always people who support it. There are people who support it because they want to use it. They don't want to be hanged. There are people who support it because it dovetails with the idea of Christian redemption and forgiveness of sins and the idea of the church as a kind of giver of Mercy and that sort of thing. And amongst the people who accord with that are actually the kings themselves, who want to brand themselves, if we want to use more cynical language, as themselves. The fount of mercy, that is something that kings are really into, is using pardons, for instance, as a way to demonstrate their godlike ability to forgive wrongdoing. And so there is, you know, the kings actually, in a rhetorical sense, always up until the 1530s at least, support sanctuary as an aspect of their royal mercy, because they're royal sanctuaries. I mean, they're royally granted sanctuaries. Right. But what happens in especially the reign of the tudors during the 15th century, you do see that although there are the beginnings of these ideas of Westminster Abbey, for instance, welcoming felons, sanctuary does not show up in the records very much until the 1450s or so. And that's partly because for various reasons to do with civil wars with the early Lancastrians, especially Henry V and the French war, which then leaks in obviously to, you know, through the reign of Henry VI as well, that there's actually a real downturn in the prosecution of felony. So there's less need for sanctuary. I mean, that this is a bit oversimplifying, but there's less need for sanctuary because relatively fewer people are being charged with felony. And also the chances of being convicted go way down. So that even if you are coming up for trial, the chances are quite high. And I can't remember the statistics exactly, but way more than 50% are being acquitted. So you probably want to just take your chances and you go scot free from things because it's not that likely a jury will convict you. So that's what happens in the early 15th century. But we see that the kings, from especially Edward IV onwards, but even more so under Henry VII and Henry viii, that the kings want to use the prosecution of crime as a way to really imprint the authority of the king and again his position as the fount of justice, which has both a mercy side but also a godlike punishment of wrongdoing too. Now, one of the groups that, especially in the early 15th century, never virtually, of course, again, there are exceptions, but rarely were charged with felony were aristocrats and gentry that if you were a higher ranking gentleman or a noble, and you are involved in aristocratic feuds which are ubiquitous, and somebody dies, the chances of you being charged, much less coming up for trial, are very small law. And so as another reason why sanctuary isn't much used, because of course there is the idea that you have to have means in order to, for instance, go into Westminster Abbey. But one of the things that, from Edward iv, but again, especially Henry VII and Henry viii, they want to actually make a gulf between them and the aristocracy more generally. And they want. And one of the ways they do that is if you are an aristocrat and you commit a felony, you're still subject to the King and I'm still going to charge you. It's not very convenient for me though, as Henry vii, to execute you, because I kind of need you. You are the linchpin between me and the rest of my subjects. I need you for my bureaucracy. I need you to serve as justice of the pe, all of these kinds of things. So it'd be inconvenient, actually, and then cause a lot of bad feeling if I executed you. So I'm looking to, let's just say, encourage mitigation, you know, ways of getting out of execution. And so you see the rate of pardons go up, you see the rate of. And there's sort of changes by the end of the 15th century in the idea of benefit of clergy, which was originally for are actual, shall we call them actual clergy? Priests who committed, who are moved over into the ecclesiastical system is the idea. But what ends up happening is that by the end of the 15th century, benefit of clergy has come to be attached not so much to being or not at all, not necessarily to be in orders, I guess is the best way to put it, but rather that you have one of the, the attributes of being a clergy, which is that other idea of being a clerk, which means being literate. And so again, that's totally class based. Being literate is something that is, you know, higher status. Laymen and women cannot claim benefit of clergy because they cannot be clerics. And so they, they can't claim it until the, I think the end of the 17th century. It becomes even more unmoored from, you know, from the idea of being a priest. But in this period you have to be eligible to be a priest rather than to actually be in orders. And so, and so those are like so pardons and benefit of clergy and then sanctuary and is another way to get out of arrest and trial and execution for a felony. Again, an important background is that the only punishment that is available in the English legal system for felony is execution. There aren't alternatives at this point apart from the mitigation. So the mitigations really come into play and they are supported by the King and the royal courts because of the fact that they provide this Kind of of steam valve that allows the exceptions to be made when exceptions are merited. So if you are a low status man charged with murder, the chances of your being found guilty and the chances of your being executed are much higher. Because it's hard for you to take sanctuary. You could still do abjuration, that's still available and, and that does happen, certainly. But going into a permanent sanctuary, you probably can't afford it. You can't buy a pardon because pardons don't necessarily come free. Often there's a little donation that is made to the King for it. And you can't take benefit of clergy because you can't read. So this is very much about people with privilege effectively agreeing that other people with privilege should be able to, to have these exceptions made. And sometimes the people who get the exceptions made when they are in their, you know, if they're in their 20s and they commit some kind of a homicide in an aristocratic feud, you can often see those same men, so they go to sanctuary and often you, you bundle together different mitigations. You go to sanctuary, somebody on your behalf arranges for a pardon. So you, it takes a while. You don't want to be arrested because trial can happen very quickly and then you're immediately executed. You don't want that happening. So you go into sanctuary as a, as a kind of waiting room while somebody else on the outside arranges your pardon. Once you have your pardon in your hand, then you surrender to authorities, you go up for trial, you plead guilty, but I have a pardon trial then. And then you get released and you go on with your life and you become justice of the Peace. You become somebody who in that capacity presides over murder cases, you know, so you become the other side of the bench and you are, because you're grateful to the Crown, maybe. I mean, sometimes that doesn't work, but you end up being this loyal servant of the Crown, sometimes you become an mp. Some of the people who are, you know, presiding in Parliament, sitting in Parliament, are former sanctuary seekers who managed to use these things to get through their own problems. And probably everybody knew people who had used those things, those different mechanisms.
- [57:52]
C
So what makes the concept of sanctuary essentially collapse? Because I think by the 16th century, we don't really see it on the books anymore.
- [58:02]
B
Yeah, I mean, one of the interesting things that I found when I was doing my research, I was looking through all of the, of the criminal records that I could find between 1400 and 1550, pretty much, and I was able to do that because actually Lots of them don't survive. So looking through all of them and tracing the number of cases where people are claiming sanctuary, it actually is really functioning at its greatest extent in the 1520s, up until about 1535.
- [58:34]
C
Wow.
- [58:35]
B
That is the period where there is the most at least evidence of resort to sanctuary. But then in 1532, 33, 34, we begin to get the beginnings of the English Reformation. And amongst the aspects of the English Reformation is the dissolution of religious houses of monasteries. And so there is this sort of functioning integral system in royal justice that involves sanctuary as part of the process of mitigating, especially for high ranking people. But the site where this happens is in these religious houses. There aren't. There are probably somewhere around 8 of these religious houses in the countries. Not every religious house. There are some religious houses that just don't get, get into it because honestly, there is evidence for instance of St. John's Abbey in Colchester, which there's some depositions about what's going on in there. And it is like a community of monks and there is this kind of community of felons living in the precinct and those felons are shockingly not very well behaved and are getting into fights with one another. And then there ends up being homicides in the precinct as they get into fights and kill one another and then they have to run to a different sanctuary because you can't stay in a sanctuary in theory at least, if you've committed a crime inside it. And so it's obviously really chaotic and lots of monasteries don't want to get into it. But, but in a sense, the tying together that I talked about earlier of those ideas of the sacrality of space that some religious houses who have decided to kind of use this sanctuary, right, as one of the highest levels of demonstration of independence of their liberties, especially not so much from the Crown, but rather from other governing institutions such as towns. And so a lot of these places are close to relatively major towns. I mean There's Westminster and St Martin Legrand in London, but there's St Augustine's Monastery in Bristol. There are various places that. And the Hospitallers are into it in various different places as well. And so they have an interest in it because. Because it connects to things that they want, which is these certain independence from the town being able to enforce its will on the monastery. And when those monasteries get dissolved, there is literally no space, no precincts for them. And it ends up happening. So what ends up happening at the end of the. I think it's in 1540. There's the statute that attempts so kind of takes account. Okay, well, now that we've gotten rid of all these things, we still need sanctuaries. It seems like that is the thought actually of the MPs in Parliament. And so there is a scheme devised. It undoubtedly has the buy in of the King's council and all that kind of stuff as well. And a scheme devised to create secular sanctuaries that are attached to particular towns. Westminster is one of them. Sorry, I've forgotten the list of the different towns. And one of the reasons I've forgotten the list is because it never actually really gets going. The towns do not want it. They don't have an interest in this. They already have their protected rights and liberties and what's in it for them to have, have an open prison, effectively. It's like a very, you know, nim, NIMBY kind of. I, I assume maybe that doesn't translate into UK speak, you know, I know you know it, Eleanor. No, we use it.
- [62:57]
A
We use it.
- [62:58]
C
We do, yeah.
- [62:58]
B
Okay, okay. Kind of idea. And so what ends up happening is that there really isn't anywhere for anybody to go and the system just dissolves. Like it's not, not actually, you know, my argument is that it isn't killed by the English Reformation. It's not that. The English reference that it was, you know, this church, this church institution that ends up getting killed by the reform is actually, I think an accidental byproduct that if there had been a way for it to continue, I think it would have continued because it was clearly useful as, you know, the parliaments that passed these things had several former sanctuary seekers amongst them. I mean, it doesn't mean that they would have carried the vote, but I think that there are so many aristocrats that are sitting both in, obviously the House of Lords, but also the House of Commons that saw this as kind of part of the system that allowed them to get out of felony charges, but still keeping the system intact for them to prosecute the lower orders. It's, you know, again, a kind of class based thing. Benefit of clergy does survive because it didn't need those kind of institutional, infrastructural kind of things like a place for the benefit of clergy people to go. You just, you know, the way that it developed by that point was that you just claimed benefit of clergy and you had a test and you had to read and that kind of thing. And then it was kind of like, you shouldn't do it again, you can't do it Twice. You can't claim it twice.
- [64:43]
C
Right.
- [64:44]
B
And then you're let go. And so, so it didn't require anything, you know, that cost anything or that involved the necessity of people cooperating in the system because it was done individually.
- [64:59]
C
So if someone today wanted to claim sanctuary, you know, you wanted to run into a church or something, is there anything that actually remains that gives them any form of legal protection?
- [65:12]
B
I think that it obviously depends on the. On the place. Right. Because it's. It's definitely. And you see this in all sorts of places. So in the uk, I don't know UK law except for I. I know English law of the 15th century, but not. Not now that My understanding is that as same as it would be, say, in Canada, where it does not. There is no law that makes those spaces immune from governmental reach and arrest of wrongdoers and things like that. But there is still the association of the idea of a moral imperative that often makes authorities reluctant to break into the sacral space of a church or sometimes a mosque or sometimes. I don't know if I've seen Jewish synagogues being used, but there's probably cases of that as well. There was a case in Canada of a Sikh temple that was used. And so the idea of that, the sacral space of a religious institution means that authorities have been usually reluctant to go in there and take people. And so there's different manifestations of it that you can see that often now it's about people who are. Whose immigration status makes them vulnerable, that they, you know, that they have a visa that has expired or whatever, that they're going to be seized. Often it's, you know, immigration officials who are, you know, going in. But then that creates these. These sort of PR disasters, I guess is. Is one way to put it. But it does remind us that, you know, back in the Middle Ages, it was not just about law. It was supported by the law and by the courts. It didn'. Sanctuary for felony did not actually become statutory until the 1530s. Interestingly, just before it fell apart, there was an attempt to try to make it a little bit more institutionalized and that kind of thing. And so, interestingly, for the first time, it became statutory, but then it fell apart when the monasteries were dissolved. But it was also about that idea of the possibility of redemption. There was discomfort with a lot of people about how vicious, in a sense, royal justice was that, you know, not everybody thought that felons should be hanged, but that was the only remedy that was available in the English law for punishment. And so it's a lot of people felt that there was this, you know, that it was a necessary thing to have something that provided exceptions, and they were happy to have it in this explicitly kind of Christian framework as well.
- [68:20]
C
I think that we can really see, you know, as you say, the fact that this really does kind of come across to us culturally, if not legally anymore. There is still something inside us that really does feel that religious spaces ought to offer some form of sanctuary. So. So, yeah, a great medieval idea. Let's just say that at the very least, if not a lasting legal precedent.
- [68:44]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [68:46]
C
Shannon, I cannot thank you enough for this. This has been absolutely fascinating.
- [68:51]
B
Well, thanks. It's good to get back to this stuff. I haven't worked on this very much over the last decade since I published the book, but. But it's good to kind of get back into all of these sinks.
- [69:05]
C
My thanks again to Professor Shannon McSheffrey. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award winning original TV documentaries, including my series Meet the Normans, as well as ad free podcasts by signing up@historyhit.com subscription. You can follow Gunman Evil on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval.
- [69:32]
B
Until next time,