Letters as the Medium of Church Government

Talk of trust and praise for personal virtue saturates the archive of church administration.14 Our first step in understanding why this was so is to examine genre: the letter. Using letters as the means to convey what were, in effect, orders and commands was a conscious choice, and it committed bishops to certain conventions that had already been adopted by the papal chancery from around the mid-twelfth century.15 Besides the papal example these conventions were transmitted through instructional treatises on the “art of letter writing,” or ars dictaminis.16 But influence was never just in one direction. Patrick Zutschi and Barbara Bombi argue that a model of mutual borrowing between chanceries is a better reflection of how bureaucratic conventions spread and developed, as opposed to a single-source diffusion model.17 I would add that every letter written by a churchman could be a model for others he would write himself, and moreover, some clerics made collections of letters known as formularies, which they carried from job to job.18 It was the circulation of such letters (and the networks of scribes) that was the principle means by which the practices discussed here became so similar across dioceses.

Teachers of the art of letter writing said that a letter was the means to achieve a goal and that each of its sections had a purpose: the sender ought to pay close attention to the form of address (the greeting or salutatio), the body of the letter (but especially the opening or exordio) had to capture the goodwill of the recipient (benevolentia captatio), and the substance of the request (the petitio or narratio) had to be framed in such a way as to make it impossible to refuse.

To begin at the beginning: bishops and archbishops commonly addressed their equals as “dearest friend” (amico karissimo), the form suggested by most letter-writing treatises, though “dearest brother” or “venerable brother” were also common, and the two styles could be combined, as in one archbishop of York’s address to “his venerable brother in Christ, his most-trusted friend” the bishop of Durham.19 The implied equality of friends and brothers could be dispensed with when addressing subordinates, who were almost always called “beloved son” or “beloved son in Christ,” as in the letters from Bishops Martival and Hethe quoted previously.20 It was a style that indicated authority and paternal care as opposed to equality, though, as we shall see, the distinction between these two ideal-types of relationship was little respected in practice. However much they varied the form of address, bishops took care that the salutation should offer “honor and respect appropriate to the position of the recipient and conforming to his rank,” as one theorist, Transmundus, had advised.21

Following the salutation, but before moving on to the substance of their instruction or request, bishops’ letters generally made some remarks about the nature of the matter at hand and the burdens or duties of their office.22 These were intended to soften the reader up for the task the bishop had in mind, making him “receptive, well-disposed and attentive” (Transmundus again). In order to secure goodwill, letter writers were advised to explain the matter in such a way as to make action seem necessary, present themselves humbly, and recite the merits of the addressee “kindly” (Peter of Blois).23 Bene Florentini recommended using both qualitative and quantitative phrases, rhetorically asking “how great” a person’s virtues were and “how well” someone had acted in the past, as a prelude to issuing a request. The sender might also refer to the adversity that the addressee could help them overcome or the harm that might be averted by joint action.24

These are all elements found repeatedly in late medieval English bishops’ letters. For instance, humility before God and modesty regarding the task at hand characterize Bishop Grandisson of Exeter’s letter to a canon of his cathedral in 1327, stressing the importance of preserving the wealth of the diocese: “While it is only through divine support that we shall be able to achieve the restoration of even a single thing, we will nevertheless toil diligently towards it.”25 The arduousness of episcopal business was noted in the letter of a papal envoy to the bishop of Salisbury Simon of Ghent in 1313; the pope, it was said, admired the “unobtrusive hard work” with which Bishop Simon’s virtues had been directed toward many “important and difficult matters,” and as a result, he trusted him with new responsibilities. In 1420 Archbishop Chichele similarly alluded to “certain difficult tasks” that he was confident a new vicar-general could perform. It was also common for bishops to refer to the evils they wished to avoid, the “sourness of those longer-lasting and all-embracing grievances” that could cause tears and “heartfelt anguish.”26

Such emotive attempts to capture the goodwill of the clergy also begin to hint at a gendered understanding of church government. For example, when Bishop Grandisson appointed a cleric “in whose clear conscience, literacy, cleanliness of life and discreet industry” he trusted, to act as an additional confessor for the poor of Exeter diocese, he identified those in need of this service as the disabled, the old, the decrepit, and women. The challenge before this penitentiary was said to be heightened by the size and extent of the diocese, with its dangerous roads, floods and other risks. It is interesting that need was associated with women, while the strength to overcome danger was embodied in a man. The projection of masculinity, which is here a latent tendency, becomes much more explicit in what follows.

As in the letters of Bishops Martival and Hethe, the rhetorical strategy being pursued was to praise the subject of the letter as equal to the task delegated to him. Whether framed in the second person (“your merits are manifest” etc.) or the third person (“he in whose diligence we trust” etc.), it was a constant element in bishops’ letters. For historians of church governance, it is also a most revealing piece of evidence, giving us clues not only to the gendering of administrative work but about the operation of the whole institutional structure.

Praise for the qualities of the agent was typically folded into the petitio, or request, section of letters, and it was popularized by papal correspondence. Popes would habitually refer to their addressees as people “in whose discernment and prudence we hold a good trust” (de cujus discretione atque prudentia bonam fiduciam obtinemus).27 Many papal letters using such formulations were received by English bishops, and numerous letters of introduction circulated in the saddlebags of the pope’s tax collectors and nuncios, making them omnipresent and familiar.28 It was also a phrasing recommended by the masters of dictamen. The least ambiguous, and most pragmatic, writer in this tradition was Lawrence of Aquilegia (1249–c. 1304), who constructed multiple-choice tables from which letter writers could select appropriate virtues, to be followed by a phrase expressing reliance on the addressee. For example, a writer might say they valued qualities “in which I bear complete trust” (de qua gero fiduciam pleniorem) or “in which—after God—all my hope rests” (in qua post deum spes mea consistit). Only once these preliminaries had been set down should the writer proceed to make his request or deliver an instruction.29

A range of qualities was praised in the recipients of papal and episcopal commissions, and their frequent repetition means we can interpret them as embodying something of the social logic of church government. The primary merits to be praised were trust (fiducia), fidelity or loyalty (fidelitas), faith (fidem), assiduity (industria), discretion (circumspectio), prudence (prudentia), diligence (diligentia), attentiveness (sollicitudo), discernment (discretio), and “virtue” (virtus), the latter a word whose meaning was not so simple as one might first think. It is worth looking at these in some detail, to understand what shared meanings they perpetuated.

Virtus is one of those medieval Latin terms whose translation is hampered by a modern English “false friend,” in this case “virtue.” Its meaning requires closer attention. An example arising from the fevered reaction to the lollard heresy is particularly illustrative: in 1410 Bishop Bubwith of Bath and Wells issued a preaching license to Master John Gorewell “having a particular faith in the Lord as to the prudence and virtus of [his] soul.”30 In a Christian context it might be tempting to translate virtus as “virtue,” something to be contrasted with the sinfulness of heretics, but a fuller contemporary understanding would bring its meaning closer to “strength” or “vigor,” though the concept of moral worth is not absent. In addition to these senses virtus also carried an idea of manliness, and this was equally the heritage of classical and patristic Latin, as demonstrated in recent work by Chris Fletcher. So, when we are told of the “manifold gifts of virtus” possessed by a bishop’s penitentiary in fourteenth-century Lichfield, we ought to read this as “gifts of strength” or “of manhood.”31 Interestingly, virtus seems to have been given especial prominence in the fight against heresy. It appeared in a number of late thirteenth-century papal evocations of inquisitors “clothing [themselves] in manliness of spirit” (virtutem spiritus induentes).32 Gorewell’s particular suitability for combatting heresy seems, then, to have been connected with the manly steadfastness of his soul rather than his commendable piety. The bishop trusted that he was strong enough to resist seduction by the devil.

Perhaps the most notable linguistic feature of the two phrases quoted in the previous paragraph is that Bishops Bubwith and Northburgh placed their trust not in the addressee but in God. They had “complete trust in the Lord” (plenam in domino fiduciam) as to the qualities of the men they appointed.33 Would it not have been simpler and more direct to say they trusted the person in question? The key word here, fiducia, could mean trust or confidence, evoking for ancient and medieval authors legal trusteeship, the honoring of contracts, the integrity of public officials, and reliance on friends.34 During the early Middle Ages, bishops of Rome had been reluctant to place faith squarely in human beings, preferring to trust people only “after God” (post Deum) or to trust that their addressee feared God (quoniam fiduciam habemus quod Deum timetis).35 And for both St. Augustine and his twelfth-century inheritor, Aelred of Rievaulx, trust, love, and friendship were all directed at other human beings only through the mediation of God.36

The importance of such reticence is buttressed by the close association between fiduciam and fides. Despite enduring classical associations with trust and loyalty, in the Christian era fides acquired the additional meaning of faith in God. And while ecclesiastical letter writers were comfortable comparing their confidence in a person with their faith in God, they were sometimes uneasy about implying an equivalence.37 As St. Paul had said, humility required that one should place trust in the power of God, not in the wisdom of men (1 Corinthians 2:5). The relationship with God in medieval Christian thought was, furthermore, heavily influenced by classical models of friendship. St. Augustine had famously explained faith in God in terms of the fides one might feel toward a friend. He meant trust but also loyalty. This was how Cicero had used fides in his discussion of friendship: the loyalty through which friends could rely on each other. It was also the tone in which Thomas Corbridge, archbishop of York, wrote a letter of introduction for the rector of Rotherham to act on his behalf: “give him your complete attention and utmost trust [fidem], and, feeling love [amoris] toward us . . . give him a fair hearing, so that we are able to deal promptly with those things which you wish to bring before us.”38

Other words in the faith/trust lexicon appear frequently in bishops’ letters. Bishops appealed to their officials and diocesan clergy to carry out their instructions on account of “the loyalty [fidelitate] and trust [fidei] that you have for us and for God” or, in reverse, given “the complete trust [plenam fidem] which we have in your loyalty [fidelitate].” Loyalty or fidelity was familiar throughout medieval society, as a description of the obedience that servants or feudal vassals owed to their lord.39 Letters conveying instructions or mandates reached for it almost instinctively. The extent to which the trust of friends was quite compatible with the fidelity of servants is discussed at greater length later in this chapter, but at this point, we should note that all fides-related concepts were gendered masculine. The religious fides (faith, belief) of women was deemed more fickle than that of men, and female promises and evidence (both commonplace senses of fides) counted for less than those of men, while the ideal-type of loyalty was the feudal vassal or brother-in-arms.40

Besides circling the activities of governance as a masculine sphere, the language of fides is notable for the way it held certainty and uncertainty in the balance. Augustine had bequeathed to the Middle Ages the paradoxical idea that while humans could be unreliable, one ought to trust them in the same way that one trusted God, who was constancy itself.41 This resulted in some curious rhetoric. In a dispatch dated 1159, Pope Alexander III contrasted his fiducia in the archbishop of Genoa with uncertainty about his own abilities: “because we lack confidence in the quality of our own merits, yet maintain complete trust in your honor and dedication, we seek to be helped in our infirmities by your prayers and those of the universal church.”42 Even as they expressed their “complete trust,” popes and bishops knew that their agents were not as steadfast as God, and that whatever infirmities they might modestly ascribe to themselves, they must have been aware that these could also afflict any of their potential assistants. They were fallen humans, exercising free will. “Complete trust” was therefore necessitated by insatiable doubt.

Paradoxically though, within the ineffable logic of trusting, the very free will that made human beings unpredictable was also a prerequisite to placing confidence in them. Only the free could be trusted. One could not place fides in someone who was under the influence of another, because that person was not the master of their own actions, and so freedom—with all its risk and uncertainty—lay at the basis of trust. Freedom was also very closely associated with masculinity: it occupied the same semantic space as “manhood,” sharing the senses of independence and superiority within a hierarchy. Fletcher has discussed the ways in which manhood and freedom were mutually supporting discourses within political communication.43 Neither excluded women entirely (“exceptional” women could be manly or be free tenants), but they pointed to an exclusive gendered ideal.

The salience of these themes in the written instruments of government confirms the key structural characteristic of the institutional church: it relied on a host of free agents rather than a strict command hierarchy. Observe, for example, the extreme care taken by Bishop Grandisson to persuade other churchmen that his agents were trustworthy while he remained quite clear that whether they chose to trust was up to them: “you may care to treat Henry, our delegate, with unshakeable trust in the Lord [in domino . . . fidem inflexibilem] concerning those things that you tell him.” And elsewhere, he refers to a cleric “whom you may, if it pleases you [si placet], commit anything in your heart relating to us, with confidence.”44 All the time that he was asserting his confidence and firm faith, Grandisson accepted that his addressees were free to make their own decisions. He merely sought to influence them.

The quality most often paired with fidelity in episcopal letters was zeal or assiduity (industria).45 Many hundreds of diocesan officials and parish clergy received messages praising their fidelitate et industria while asking them to carry out some pastoral, judicial, or administrative task.46 Close synonyms, though less commonly used, included diligentia and sollicitudo.47 Hard work coupled with loyalty would certainly be appealing to the bishop hoping that a job would be done, and by praising his subordinates for possessing these qualities, a bishop sought to stimulate in them a desire to prove themselves worthy of his esteem. Sometimes the potential for a superior’s disappointment—should sufficient zeal not be forthcoming—was made explicit. Bishop Grandisson’s threatening overtures to the executor of his predecessor’s will are a case in point (he was a master of menacing good will): “be attentive and take care that your diligence and affection is recommended [to us] with good reason.”48

Industria was more than just a means to describe someone’s energy and activity. In the Roman Empire, industria and diligentia were associated with personal responsibilities to public bodies. Each was “a virtue of the male political elite,” particularly relating to concrete and specific achievements. Its pairing with fides and patronage was of similar antiquity. The civic values of the late Roman empire were incorporated into medieval conceptions of episcopal office and its clerical form of masculinity, and as the secular clergy became collaborators with bishops in worldly governance, such obligations and expectations were in turn passed on to them.49

Requiring them to work unsupervised, bishops placed particular emphasis on mental qualities that would mean their agents acted in a manner consistent with the goals of episcopal governance. Central to this was prudence, prudentia, one of the four moral virtues alongside justice, fortitude, and temperance. Prudence was said to perfect the exercise of reason (Thomas Aquinas) and to help one find balance (Bernard of Clairvaux). Christian writers naturally bent these public values to pious purposes. The volume Compendium on the Vices and Virtues, written by the thirteenth-century notary Guido Faba, who also composed a treatise on letter writing, said that prudence helps a person act in a manner acceptable to God. Others, such as the fourteenth-century English canon lawyer John de Burgh, maintained a distinction between prudentia divina and prudentia mundana, prudence in the achievement of worldly things, which could be read as synonymous with governance.50 This was the sense conveyed in the nomenclature of late medieval civic officeholders, where the prudehomme, or prudent man, was the epitome of lay virtue.51 Its function in episcopal letters was to remind clerics of the need to reflect on the ultimate ends of their instructions and to deliberate as to appropriate means. We see this particularly in the appointment of assistants for sick or elderly priests, known as coadjutors.52 Acting in place of another, bearing what today we would call power of attorney, they had to consider that person’s best interests, the interests of the church, and the optimal means for achieving both.

The deliberative quality of prudence was often amplified by bishops with references to the “purity of conscience,” skill (peritia), discretion (circumspectio), or discernment (discretio) of their agents, with the aim of cultivating a shared ethic of diocesan governance.53 Conscience had been key to Christian concepts of moral responsibility and action since Augustine reflected on his own conversion in the late fourth century. It represented both an inner voice of truth and the imagined sanction of public consensus.54 Like prudence, it was seen as exercising a beneficial restraint on zeal (industria), as in Bishop Fordham of Ely’s appointment of a penitentiary for the hundred of Wisbech in 1390. The skill born of experience (peritia) was generally associated with legal knowledge and advocacy and was commonly gendered masculine in the designation of “men learned in the law” (viris iurisperiti).55 Likewise, discernment (discretio) was usually a quality ascribed to learned and elite men in the church, particularly judges, but it could be used to flatter select members of the parish clergy as well. For example, “ability and discernment” were the qualities praised in a parochial rector charged with investigating financial abuses at a Worcestershire priory in 1319, while in the same county a century later, a tithe dispute was adjudicated by five discretis viris chosen from among the neighboring clergy.56 Discernment was associated with deciding difficult cases and detecting buried facts.

The qualities valued in church government were therefore a mixture of trustworthiness and ability: the sort of things that bishops hoped would ensure compliance with their instructions. It must be remembered that we cannot treat such flattery as an objective assessment of character in those to whom they were applied. Rather, we should think of it as revealing how bishops sought to identify and manage their collaborators. Although women possessed the skills and abilities he needed (for which see chapter 2), the bishop never regarded them as trustworthy partners in governance. Praise for the virtues of public office was gendered masculine, and women were excluded. But what sort of institution was this, where instructions looked like persuasion and where men were praised for qualities they might not have possessed? On what basis did bishops expect their subordinates to assist them?

Friendship and Authority

If one glances only at the compliments and flattery exuding from bishops’ letters, the overriding impression is that diocesan government was conducted by a small circle of close friends who did what was expected because they loved one another. For example, Bishop Grandisson of Exeter wrote to a potential patron whom he called “our dearest friend,” greeting him with the “continually growing fullness of love” (salutem et solidi amoris continuum incrementum) when he wished to recommend his proctor, William of Nassington, for a benefice. Nassington was praised as being worthy of the patron’s friendship, and Grandisson felt confident in making his request because he had trust (fiducia) in the patron’s own love and friendship (dileccionis et amicicie) for him.57 Letters were composed as if written to friends, and third parties were regularly described as friends.

Whether intimate friendships really existed between bishops and some of their clerics is likely to have changed over time. The letters between hyperliterate elite churchmen in the twelfth century are assumed to have combined business and political purposes with genuine feeling, but theirs was a small and rarified circle of men.58 Churchmen receiving episcopal commissions in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries may have met each other and their superiors at diocesan synods and councils, maintaining a certain impression of camaraderie. But as church government shifted from conciliar to household statute making from the 1350s onward, as outlined in the introduction, the atmosphere in which friendship was asserted became much more impersonal. There were simply too many men involved. This epistolary friendship should therefore be thought of as increasingly political and pragmatic. Letters were aimed less at the cultivation of genuinely amicable relationships among a small elite circle and more at fostering feelings of obligation, and thereby compliance, among the diocesan clergy. It was a ritualized—and masculine—friendship that combined flattery and camaraderie with orders, injunctions, mandates, and instructions. This apparent incongruity is what we must seek to understand.

The problem is cast in sharp relief if we consider for a moment the distinction between equals and subordinates drawn by the masters of the art of letter writing. Guido Faba, for instance, advised that in letters to equals one ought to ask, enquire, pray, or entreat, while in letters to subordinates, it would be more proper to give commands, saying “we mandate, we order, we decree,” and so on. It was widely agreed that subordinates should not be flattered.59 But as we have seen, such advice was completely ignored by the authors of administrative letters. Subordinates were routinely flattered, and they received requests, prayers, and entreaties in the very same missives that gave them orders and commands.

Clearly other assumptions and ideas were at work. For a start, flattery could be interpreted in different ways. Ranulf Higden, who wrote a Mirror for Curates in the mid-fourteenth century, explained that while flattery motivated by personal gain was a sin, flattery intended to provoke a person to goodness arose from the “virtue of friendship” (virtutem amicicie). Naturally, bishops would have liked to think that their flattery fell into the latter category, raising the broader question of how friendship was understood in the context of governance. Later medieval thought and practice built on a long tradition in which friendship was equated with public service and defined by the common bonds that united those involved. The strongest influence was from Cicero, whose treatise On Friendship (De amicitia, sometimes known as “Laelius”) recommended choosing as friends “men who are firm, steadfast and constant.” While women and the weak might seek the protection afforded by friendship, Cicero allowed, their implied neediness was incompatible with the independence that friendship demanded, a point that is pursued in chapter 2.60

When Cicero’s influence on medieval thought was complemented in the twelfth century by that of Aristotle, the gendering of public friendship was reinforced from another direction. As an element in the constitution of his ideal state, Aristotle conceptualized virtuous friendship as existing between “good” men who shared a concern for the well-being of the state. It was an exclusive bond, and masculine, but based on unanimity of purpose, equality of virtue, and the common interests of the citizen elite.61 When Christian writers adapted this classical inheritance, they added fidelity to God to the sense of common purpose. Thus, for Augustine (thinking with Cicero), concordia or oneness of heart between friends meant that they should willingly bear one another’s burdens while seeking to carry out God’s plan. And for Aquinas (thinking with Aristotle) concord between friends implied a duty to align human purposes with those of God.62

The independence so valued by Cicero presented a problem that later authors had to grapple with. Freedom was seen as conferring equality, but accepting orders implied subservience. This returns us to the tension between friendship and authority. Aristotle, however, whose views on amity and justice generated a vibrant tradition of commentary and discussion in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, indicated a resolution to the problem. He distinguished between equality of virtue or fellow feeling, on the one hand, and equality of means, on the other. Friendship, he said, was based on the former and could, therefore, traverse social boundaries. Indeed, his conception of the ideal state relied a great deal on friendship between citizens of widely different means. He was even relaxed about the influence of material need on friendship, emphasizing its invitation to cultivate generosity rather than seeing poverty in one party as something to undermine friendship.63

Later medieval commentators on Aristotle, such as Nicholas Oresme and the bishop of Lincoln Robert Grosseteste, followed him in saying that equality was the consequence of friendship, not the prior condition for its existence. They and others reflected on the capacity of friendship to fashion a “qualitative” equality despite the persistence of material inequality.64 In this light, it is possible to see how the messages of trust and friendship contained in bishops’ letters could have been interpreted as compatible with hierarchy and inequality within the church. Bishops and their clergy were certainly unequal in material and status terms, but friendship admitted an equality of virtue. Moreover, the cultivation of friendship did not simply rely on preexisting equality. It supposedly brought that equality into being.

But this leaves us with one further conceptual problem. Governance letters are not just casual exchanges between acquaintances of different means; they combine friendly requests with insistent commands. Bishops headed a hierarchy. They were responsible for the ordination of priests, their installation in benefices, and their appointment to special responsibilities. Could a servant be friends with his master?

In his commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, the philosopher Jean Buridan placed some people into the category of “servants by nature.” Suffering from a deficiency in the virtues of public office, discretio and industria, and unlike freemen possessing no prudentia, they were “unsuited for rule or for free and noble action.” There “ought to be” friendship and justice between such servants and noble men, but it was difficult to foster. By contrast, prelates and priests were described in a markedly different way. They were “servants through goodwill” (servi secundum benivolentiam), men (viri) who “wished to serve the good.” Among this group, Buridan wrote, justice and friendship existed “without a doubt.”65

It is impossible to be sure that the recipients of governance letters saw things in this rosy light. Their outlook is difficult to recover. But from the bishop’s perspective, the ideology of friendship was incredibly useful, whether or not it was deployed with sincerity. It did present him with one slight problem: asking for help implies that one is in need, and as Cicero had said, need is no basis for friendship. But requesting the free action of an equal, with whom one shares a common goal and purpose, is—by contrast—no humiliation at all. On the contrary, it is ennobling. Whereas a bishop might feel ashamed to ask his subordinates for help, by pretending they were friends he “conceals his embarrassment honorably” as Transmundus put it.66 In its generic conventions the letter therefore glossed over the bishop’s need for assistance, and permitted him to retain his position of superiority.

There was also potential for a positive reinforcement of episcopal authority. If he simply issued commands without the reliable means to supervise and enforce their execution, a bishop would raise the stakes of noncompliance. If his subordinate refused to carry out the instruction, the bishop’s only possible response would have been to treat him as a rebel, someone whose malfeasance was political.67 But if the superior wrote as a friend, then noncompliance could be presented as the moral failure of an equal. As a strategy of government, this had the beneficial effect of depoliticizing the limitations of institutional power.

A potential resolution of the tension between friendship and command emerged, therefore, in the elevation of subordinates to the level of friends, coupled with the abasement of superiors, as in the pope’s habit of calling himself the “servant of the servants of God.”68 However, when superiors addressed subordinates, humility was only part of the package. The intention was to foster what Olivier Guyotjeannin has called a “hierarchical rapport,” and even though they could not expect servility, bishops did hope for obedience.69 It is difficult to unravel this tangle of amity and obedience, but perhaps we should not try too hard to do so. Clearly hierarchical thinking was inescapable, but its claims could not be realized without such willingness and shared purpose as made sense only within the framework of a very pragmatic and ritualized friendship.

Church government was, after all, modeled on the spiritual leadership of Christ, and in Christ’s exposition of his relationship with his disciples, we find the same tension: “You are my friends if you do the things that I command you. I will not now call you servants, for the servant knows not what his lord does. But I have called you friends because all things, whatever I have heard from my Father, I have made known to you. You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and have appointed you, that you should go and should bring forth fruit. . . . These things I command you, that you love one another.” These words from the Gospel of John (15:14–17) appear to have been formative to the mentality of medieval church government. In them, Christ senses the need to reconcile command with comradeship, but his friendship was conditional. The disciples would be his friends if they did as he commanded. And his command was that they love each other. These apparent contradictions were resolved in the statement that the disciples would be called not servants but friends. Whereas servants were not privy to their master’s plans and were expected simply to obey, friends were taken into his confidence and the purposes of his instructions fully explained. This was precisely the model for episcopal letters: friendship, confidences, shared purpose, and a command.

Augustine picked up this tension to explain the psychology of political friendship thus: “Where charity is not present, the command of the authority is bitter. But where charity exists, the one who commands does so with sweetness, and charity makes the work seem almost no work at all for the one who is commanded, even though in truth he is bound to some task.” In saying this Augustine may have been drawing on Cicero’s recommendation that the superior person ought to “lower themselves” to the subordinate so that the latter “does not grieve that he is surpassed” by the former.70 There is a recognition here that hierarchy could be demeaning. It allows us to see that the syrupy language of friendship and trust was intended partly, as Klaus Oschema has put it, to “conceal factual submission.”71 No medieval writer gives quite such a candid interpretation of the “friendly command,” but the custom we have observed in bishops’ letters was somewhat preempted by the ancient Greek author pseudo-Demetrius. He explained that “frequently those in prominent positions are expected . . . to write in a friendly manner to their inferiors. . . . They do so . . . because they think no one will refuse them when they write in a friendly manner, but will rather submit and heed what they are writing.”72 Following this logic if not the particular textual exemplar, bishops found it extremely useful to be able to proffer friendship, trust, and equality while issuing commands.

It was also a convenient way of making thinly veiled threats. In his treatise on rhetoric, Peter of Blois had categorized certain episcopal letters as comminativa, “threatening,” although he did not say whether these should also be friendly.73 What we find in practice is that bishops were adept at combining tacit intimidation with explicit trust and friendship. Bishop Grandisson, who was the master of this genre, provides a number of examples. In 1328, he wrote to the heads of male religious houses in his diocese, requesting that they coordinate the collection of a tax for the fabric of the cathedral church. Noting that they were the first to be instructed, he told them “you will be glad to have been asked in advance” of others. In a similar vein, the formula repeated many times in his letters that “our trust in you, regarding those things that you are properly able to do, is undoubtedly bound to hold” leaves a heavily implied “unless” hanging in the air.74 The recipients of such instructions are left to ponder the potential consequences of noncompliance. Although the threat was hidden, it was obvious. Occasionally though, a bishop’s registrar might become lazy and let the mask slip a little, as in Bishop Bourgchier’s commission to two of his officials at Ely in 1446. He told them that he had “complete trust in the Lord as to [their] obedience [paritio] and discretion.”75 Saying he trusted their obedience was an admission that he thought of them as servants and not (quite) as friends.

Friendship and Masculinity: The Political Economy of Church Governance

The semantic and psychological strategy recommended by pseudo-Demetrius, Cicero, and Augustine was one of persuasion and manipulation. In following it, authorities who governed by letter sought to cultivate feelings of friendship, common purpose, equality, freedom, and choice but also of obligation and obedience to commands. From this, we can begin to understand much better the political economy of the institutional church.

Neither a command hierarchy nor simply a network of friends, the medieval church had a complex ecology of governance. Bishops could give orders, but most often these were wrapped inside requests. The formulae of episcopal “diplomatics” were not mindless repetitions but a recognition of the limits to power, an acknowledgment that most clergy were at least partially independent. Parish priests owed their position to the patron of their church, and unless this patron were the bishop, episcopal action against them would have been difficult. Some male heads of religious houses were the equals of bishops in terms of wealth and status, while the men holding formal dignities within the diocese, such as archdeacons, had some independence and were often socially on a par with bishops.76 They could not be talked down to.

Instead, talk of hierarchy and command was made palatable by leavening it with friendship, equality, and trust. This language was, as Gillian Knight has put it, “a kind of ideological coding,” and diocesan officers and parish priests must have been acutely aware they were part of a hierarchy.77 But faced with the limitations on their coercive power, bishops set to work on the feelings of their subordinates, nudging them toward compliance by drawing on their desire to reciprocate friendship, however pragmatically that was understood. The defining feature of the epistolary discourse I have been discussing is that it simultaneously threw a veil over and strenuously emphasized superior and inferior positions within economic and organizational hierarchies.

The tension between ritual friendship and ecclesiastical hierarchy must at times have created resentment and may not always have produced its desired compliance. But it persisted for a long time as the habitual language of government. That it did so can only be explained by zooming out and viewing the internal politics of the clergy within a broader context. The way that the clergy were addressed by bishops was a statement about who could govern, and we should read it in terms of its exclusions as well as its not entirely resolved inclusions.

The clergy were distinguished as a group in two important ways. They were distinct from laymen, and they were not women. These two inequalities allowed the secular clergy to occupy a conceptual space in which the manifest disparities between the bishop, who commanded, and the subordinate, who was expected to obey, could be made to seem as though they were resolved by the equality and common interest of friendship. We might say that clergy could pretend to be equal because of these other inequalities.

The eleventh- and twelfth-century drive to separate the clergy from the laity, and the battles that continued along these new social frontiers for several centuries, are well-established as important chapters in the history of the church.78 One of its effects was not only to elevate the clergy above the laity but also to make every beneficed clergyman a ruler or governor of his cure, be that a parish, an archdeaconry or a diocese. As collaborators in the governance, or pastoral care, of the church, clergymen were made distinct from the governed, the laity. In this sense the medieval clergy conform to an ideal type of governance described by the sociologist Ernest Gellner. Gellner proposed that government can be conducted only by those who trust one another and that such trust can arise only among those who are themselves ungoverned.79 Being subject to government makes one unfree, and this is an unsuitable condition for governors. Cicero would have agreed, though for him—and for the bishops’ clerks whose letters we have been considering—the language of friendship would have played a prominent role as well. However, since in practice government involves superior and inferior functionaries, a way must be found to maintain the balance between their freedom and their obedience.

Geoffrey Hawthorn, writing in the same influential volume of essays on trust as Gellner, provides the solution. A community based on status, which he calls generically an “aristocracy” but which would fit the medieval clergy very well, tends to model its impersonal relations on the ideals of personal friendship. The resulting “socially extensive trust” can be created between strangers only if “the relations are simplified, stylized, symbolized and given ritual expression: if, that is, they are coded in convention.” Membership of such a group is dependent on “the extent to which [members] observe this code.”80 The letters we have been examining in the present chapter were assiduously conventional, conforming to a ritualized friendship based on the repetition of stock phrases relating to virtue, character, trust, and common purpose.

What this ritualized friendship achieved was the enduring stability of an inherently fissile institutional sociology. The men commissioned to assist in the government of dioceses were conceptualized simultaneously as forming a command hierarchy and as being an equal community of governors. In view of the status and wealth differences that separated them, this was a remarkable balancing act. But neither conception should be regarded as a falsehood obscuring the truth of the other. The impossibility of teasing apart command from friendship simply reflects the cross-cutting realities of hierarchical governance enacted through a largely independent clergy. So common were letters of instruction and request that the ideology they conveyed would have been part of the mental furniture with which medieval clerics lived, shaping their world and the stories they told about themselves.

The evidence considered in this chapter has also revealed that these stories carried a degree of gender-based anxiety. Bishops’ letters ensured that everyone involved in the government of dioceses was aware that both masculine virtus, in the sense of strength and steadfastness, and masculine amicitia, with its attendant expectations of duty and trust, were deemed essential to the task. Unease about status was inseparable from unease about gender. As church government shifted from a conciliar to a household model, the circle of ritual friendship also became more impersonal, arguably adding to the status and gender anxiety among the male clergy. But any such masculine anxiety that governing clergy may have experienced was salved by the other inescapable message of governance letters: the bishop’s commissioners were men.

Equalities guaranteed by inequalities have ancient roots and modern manifestations. They can be discerned in Aristotle’s exclusion of slaves, women, and foreigners from citizenship, which allowed material differences to be transcended by civic friendship and in Carole Pateman’s analysis of the subordination of women being a necessary prior condition to modern declarations of equality among default-male citizens.81 Such exclusions were almost never remarked on in the letters by which bishops conducted the government of the medieval church, but they were essential to the creation of a conceptual space in which ritual friendship between clerics of vastly different wealth and power made some sort of sense. It is as if the celebration of clerical masculine friendship was psychological recompense for the challenge to their manly independence implied by obedience to the bishop’s command.

Concluding this opening examination of gender and authority, we must pause to consider conscious and unconscious goals. The more conscious aim of episcopal rhetoric was to paper over the cracks in their governing capabilities by appealing to a culture of male friendship, while the exclusion of women through default masculinity was arguably a side effect. However, the following chapter presents a case for the exclusion of women not being an entirely unconscious goal of governance letters. It shows that there was a “ghostly presence” of women who could have been involved in running dioceses but whose qualifications were described very differently from the manly virtus seen in the present chapter. Taken together, the two chapters suggest that the gender anxiety around diocesan government was stimulated not only by inequalities among men but also by the need of men to exclude women.