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Chapter  A Fresh Look at Medieval Sanctuary William Chester Jordan One meaning that attached to the word ‘‘sanctuary’’ in the thirteenth century was that of a refuge for criminals trying to avoid legitimate and illegitimate attempts at vengeance.1 For a thousand years ecclesiastics had been routinely claiming that churches, because of their holiness, should be recognized as such places. This tradition paralleled an even more ancient tradition among non-Christians that certain sites—temples or designated cities—should be considered sanctuaries. The various secular governments of the Middle Ages that recognized sanctuary developed, by the thirteenth century, an extraordinary body of law on the extent or, put differently, the limits of sanctuary. Indeed, it was in the thirteenth century that sanctuary really began to flourish. I have two aims in this chapter: first, to address, but unfortunately not to solve, the problem of the jurisdictional and territorial extent of the enforcement of the law of sanctuary in thirteenth-century Europe and, second, to describe a few aspects of the application of the law that raise troubling historical issues in the later Middle Ages as a whole, in particular, the general absence of criticism of sanctuary as a system (despite quibbles about details) and the discourse about sanctuary in the alleged attempts of late medieval rulers to establish their jurisdictional supremacy over the church. A brief conclusion points to areas of needed future research on the social implications of the existence of relatively large numbers of successful sanctuary seekers in parts of Europe. The Territorial Extent of Sanctuary Broadly speaking, the secular law or process of sanctuary and the ecclesiastical law and process, part of the ius commune of Catholic Europe, are distorted images of each other.2 Princes sometimes had more expansive and  William Chester Jordan sometimes less expansive understandings of sanctuary’s conceptual parameters than the canonists had. In the best studied case, thirteenth-century England, for example, rulers and churchmen in the kingdom enforced the law of sanctuary in a somewhat more liberal manner than that prescribed by the Church Universal.3 The principle, expressed in writ after writ from rulers to the enforcers of secular law, was that suspected felons (even including categories of men and women who would be denied sanctuary under ecclesiastical rules) could not be seized and taken into custody on holy ground: ut eum capiatis, ubicumque extra loca sacra. By convention, scholars distinguish two forms of sanctuary in Britain, one called general (the focus of this chapter) and the other known as special or chartered. General sanctuary was the privilege that attached to churches to receive suspected felons for a fixed interval (the establishment of a time limit was not required under canon law), during which the government determined whether they were legally entitled to the church’s protection. If they were and were willing to go into exile, the Crown forwent capital punishment . A chartered or special sanctuary, as the two names imply, on the contrary, was characterized by a charter issued by a prince giving the institution in control of a church additional privileges beyond those understood to pertain to its asylum for suspected felons. Chartered holy places therefore became special, in the sense of distinct from ordinary sites of sanctuary. Chartered or special sanctuaries were never very numerous: Westminster, Saint-Martin-Le-Grand (London), Durham, Beverley, all in England; Holyrood in Scotland; and contested Cistercian claims throughout the island. Each chartered sanctuary, the refuge of lesser offenders, tended to be geographically large, however, and by the thirteenth century they were well on their way to becoming little more than permanent debtors’ settlements, for there was no obligation to depart. The management and policing of these upscale counterparts of debtors’ prisons were at times annoying to churchmen , and their very existence was occasionally a cause for criticism from lay officials. Like debtors’ prisons, however, they served a useful economic purpose in the absence of bankruptcy laws, and, in any case, churchmen were unwilling to alienate their rights.4 If mainstream canon lawyers had had their way, every church in Catholic Europe and its political hinterland, like the Crusader States, would have enjoyed the privilege of general sanctuary in the thirteenth century, but this wish was hardly fulfilled even by the end of the century. The number of parish churches and consecrated churches and chapels in monasteries, leprosaria , hospitals, and almshouses in England and northern France, where, [18.119.125.7] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 06:25 GMT...

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