The History of the Renaissance World (23 page)

*
Vijay Sen is also written Vijayasena; his immediate successors, Ballal Sen and Lakshman Sen, are also known as Ballalsena and Lakshmanasena.

*
By the fifth century, Buddhism had divided into two main schools, known as Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. Theravada Buddhism emphasized reasoning and wisdom, downplayed the importance of rituals in favor of private meditation, and valued monasticism as the highest path; Mahayana Buddhism elevated compassion, laid great weight on the importance of ritual, and saw enlightenment as accessible to all (laypeople included). A useful introduction to the difference is found in Huston Smith and Philip Novak,
Buddhism: A Concise Introduction
(HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), pp. 63–73; see also Bauer,
The History of the Medieval World
, pp. 98ff. The Buddhism of the Palas tended towards the Theravada school but incorporated many other elements. “Classical Buddhism” is a shorthand phrase for those elements held in common by Theravada, Mahayana, and most other practitioners of Buddhism.

*
“Hinduism” is a term that covers a vast range of beliefs and practices which developed over five thousand years. Most forms of Hinduism share the following beliefs: one divine essence, that can, however, be manifested in multiple ways, so that the gods and goddesses of Hindu practice are to be understood as many faces of the one divine; life as a cycle that repeats again and again; humans as two-part beings, containing both an unchanging essence of the divine (the
atman
) and a personality (
jivatman
), which is made up of experience, character, and all those things that differentiate us from one another. In Hindu practice, the actions of the
jivatman
produce
karma
: good actions and intentions produce good karma, bad choices produce bad karma. The Hindu believer strives to produce good karma by living by
dharma
, what is good and right. A life lived by dharma produces good karma, with the result that the believer’s reincarnation in the next cycle of life will be as a higher and better being. Ultimately, the believer hopes that, after many reincarnations, he will perfect the ability to live by dharma; as a result, he will finally be freed from his
jivatman
, his personality, and consist only of
atman
, the essence of the divine. At that point, he will become one with the divine “like the river merges into the sea”—he will lose his distinctiveness as a single person and be freed from the cycle of reincarnation. Jeaneane D. Fowler’s
Hinduism: Beliefs and Practices
(Sussex Academic Press, 1997) is an excellent nontechnical introduction to the basics of Hinduism and its many variations.

*
“Caste” is an immensely complicated system, and the subject of too many detailed scholarly studies to list here. I have here taken the position of Bernard S. Cohn, who held that although caste has always been a essential element of Hindu culture, the British, in their attempts to understand a strange and foreign system, “reduced vastly complex codes and their associated meanings to a few metonyms.” See his
Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India
(Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 162. For our purposes, it is enough to note that, although Indian caste
was
less flexible than European socioeconomic categories, the move from peasant to landowner in the north of India was not much more difficult than, say, the move from peasant to knight in twelfth-century Germany.

Chapter Eighteen

Death of a Priest

In England, between 1154 and 1170,
Henry II establishes English criminal law,
and his archbishop is murdered

I
N
E
NGLAND
, Henry II was ruling over his barons and his people with little opposition. But the English church was a more difficult subject.

During the Anarchy, the church had gradually taken on more and more responsibility for administering justice. Like secular courts, church courts had judges, scribes, registrars, and summoners—all church officials. They had been in operation since 1072, when William the Conqueror had given the English church the right to deal internally with all matters involving either clergymen or violations of church law: in his own words, “any matter which concerns the rule of souls.” Cases tried in secular courts could be appealed to the king; if you were convicted in a church court, your last resort was the pope. The ultimate penalty in the church court was excommunication; in the secular court, death.
¹

“The rule of souls” was an ambiguous phrase, and by the end of the Anarchy, the church had drawn all cases involving oath breaking and sexual morality into its sphere, as well as matters of actual church administration. Even more drastic:
all
clergy accused of misdeeds—no matter what their crimes—were being tried in church courts, and in church courts alone. Rape and murder, punishable by the king’s courts with death, could be punished in church courts only with imprisonment.

As a result, the number of people claiming to be “clergy” ramped sharply upwards. Entrance into the service of the English church had not yet been formalized with a series of tests, oaths, and rituals. If you could read and write Latin, you could claim to be a clerk; if you shaved the top of your head (the “tonsure”), you could claim to have taken monastic vows. The claim itself instantly removed you from the king’s reach.
²

Early in his reign, Henry II was twice thwarted by church courts, once when he tried to convict an archdeacon of blackmail, and again when he attempted to prosecute another archdeacon for poisoning his superior. Both men (“criminous clerks,” in Henry’s words) were acquitted by church courts.
³
Henry had a low tolerance for being crossed in any situation, and as he reduced the power of the barons back within lawful limits, he found it particularly exasperating that an entire class of Englishmen lay beyond law’s reach.

To reduce the power of the church courts back within bounds, Henry needed a sympathetic Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1161, the aged archbishop Theobald of Bec (chosen by King Stephen back in 1138) died. To replace him, Henry chose a man he thought was his own: his royal chancellor, tutor of his son and heir, Thomas Becket.

Becket, then in his midforties and at the height of his political career, had not originally been educated for the church. He was the son of a merchant, but in his early twenties a family friend had procured him an interview with Theobald. The archbishop, says one contemporary account, “perceiving him to be intelligent of face, received him with favour and honour, and bade him stay on.” Despite his poor Latin and his nonexistent knowledge of canon law, Becket proved industrious, reliable, and quick. The archbishop gave him increasing responsibilities, remediated his education, and in 1154 made him the Archdeacon of Canterbury.
⁴

Formally, the archdeacon was the
oculi episcope
, the eyes of the bishop; less formally, the bishop’s watchdog. The archdeacon was an efficient executive who carried out the archbishop’s decrees. It was more of a middle-management job than a priestly vocation, and it suited Becket’s efficiency. Shortly afterwards, Henry II appointed Becket to be his chancellor, another executive role; he acted as the king’s chaplain, but his primary job was that of chief clerk, overseeing the score or so of lesser clerks who drew up the king’s decrees and wrote out his charters. It was an important position; the royal chancellor kept the king’s seal, attended all his councils, and was in the king’s confidence.

But it did not require, any more than the archdeaconry, much in the way of spiritual skill or theological conviction.

By necessity, Henry II spent a great deal of time in his chancellor’s company; and he discovered that he liked Becket. The two men hunted together, ate together, drank together. Thomas, well-off for perhaps the first time in his life, copied the king’s spending habits and supplied himself with lavish meals and clothes, even keeping a couple of exotic monkeys for pets and two wolves to act as hunting dogs. Henry had every reason to think that Becket was a loyal and (more importantly) pliable servant. The king nominated him to fill the vacant position, and on May 23, a month after Theobald’s death, the required assembly of bishops and barons obediently elected Becket, and the chancellor became archbishop.
⁵

With his elevation to the highest office of the church, Becket went through a startling and unexpected change. “As if transformed to another man,” writes one of his biographers, William of Canterbury, “he became more restrained, more watchful, more frequent in prayer, more attentive in preaching.” Although he had never taken monastic vows, he began to wear a monk’s hair shirt—a stiff, prickly, vermin-infested garment of goat hair, meant to mortify the flesh—beneath his ecclesiastical robes. He began to eat and drink sparingly, to pray late into the night, to condemn the luxury in which he had once lived: “Every day in his private cell on bended knees he would wash the feet of thirty paupers in memory of Christ,” remarks Herbert of Bosham, in awe.
⁶

Contemporary chroniclers chalk this metamorphosis up to a road-to-Damascus experience with God, an awakening to divine call. But it is not so out of line with Becket’s previous twenty years of service. He had always been efficient, conscientious, adaptable; and his new persona was exactly suited to the archbishop’s role. To be archbishop meant to hold a loyalty higher than that of archdeacon to bishop, or of chancellor to king.

At first, the change did not strike Henry as ominous. He began to carry out his planned reforms. He announced to his bishops that he would push for clergymen convicted in church trials to be automatically stripped of their titles, making them fair game to be retried in secular court; and then he drew up a document specifying exactly how far the “rule of souls” stretched, and placed it before Becket for his approval.

This document, the Constitutions of Clarendon (after the royal palace at Clarendon where it was composed), made the king’s authority supreme. Clergymen accused of crimes would be tried in the king’s courts and, if convicted, would be punished by secular law. Bishops, in return, were to stay out of the affairs of laymen. No royal official could be excommunicated unless he had first been convicted by a secular court of wrongdoing; quarrels between clergy and laymen were to be settled by secular, not church officials; anyone appealing the decision of a church court should come to the king, not bypass him and go to the pope. The Constitutions, if made church law, would have emptied the church courts of power.
⁷

But they could not become law without the archbishop’s seal; and Becket, knowing exactly where his new loyalties lay, refused to sign them.

Henry’s notorious temper flared. Suddenly afraid for his life, Becket fled from England in the middle of the night. He intended to appeal to the pope, but instead of traveling directly to Rome, he took shelter with Louis VII of France.

Louis, now on his third wife, was happy to disaccommodate Henry II; he provided the exiled archbishop with shelter, housing, and protection. A contentious three-way correspondence between king, archbishop, and pope was launched, and the long-distance quarrel dragged on for over five years. “I have waited for the Lord to look down on you so that you may change your ways,” Becket wrote to his king, two years into his exile. “You are the son of the Church, not its director; it becomes you to follow the priests in ecclesiastical matters, not to go before them. . . . You should humbly and speedily yield in those things which you are usurping against the divine ordinance. . . . For the Most High is drawing his bow to shoot openly at you who refuse to repent.”
⁸

Henry, unmoved by the threat of divine retribution, refused to give way.

18.1 The Kingdoms of France and England

Reforms to the secular laws proved simpler. Two years after Becket fled the country, Henry issued another set of decrees, this time making them public at the criminal court held at Clarendon in 1166. The act, known afterwards as the Assize of Clarendon, laid out exactly how criminals were to be tried in the king’s courts: by “twelve of the more lawful men . . . upon oath that they will speak the truth.”
⁹