Absolutions and Acts of Disobedience: Excommunication and Society in Fourteenth-Century Armagh

ABSOLUTIONS AND ACTS OF DISOBEDIENCE: EXCOMMUNICATION AND SOCIETY IN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ARMAGH By JAY GUNDACKER In the Bull of Promulgation of his 1234 Compilation of Decretals (commonly known as the Liber extra), Pope Gregory IX declared the goal of written law to be that "the human race is instructed that it should live honorably , should not injure another, and should accord to each person his own rights."1 Yet despite the proliferation of canon laws and ecclesiastical legal procedures, Archbishop MiIo Sweteman, metropolitan of the Irish province of Armagh from 1361 to 1380, could still complain about the futility of the church's ultimate legal measure, excommunication, against the many crimes of local malefactors.2 In 1366, he wrote to one of his officials: Very many times I have proceeded legally against Malachy O'Hanlon king of Oirthir as a destroyer of the clergy and people of the church, by excommunicating him and his henchmen in the proper form as despoilers, plunderers, and usurpers of church goods; and by placing an ecclesiastical interdict on the land to which they had fled in diverse moments. Nevertheless, because Malachy and some of his accomplices endured repeated correction, promised to make restitution, and even offered sworn oaths, in this way they obtained absolution and relaxations of the sentences of excommunication and interdict . And then they committed worse acts against the people and clergy of the church at Armagh than ever before.3 1 Robert Somerville and Bruce C. Brasington, trans., Prefaces to Canon Law Books in Latin Christianity: Selected Translations, 500-1245 (New Haven, 1998), 235; cf. G. Hugoni, ed., Corpus Juris Canonici (Leipzig, 1839), 1. 2 Sweteman was archbishop of the archdiocese of Armagh, which had its cathedral in the town of Armagh, and which was the metropolitan see of the ecclesiastical province of Armagh. In this paper, "Armagh" means the province unless otherwise specified. The suffragan dioceses of Armagh included Meath, Down, Connor, Dromore, Clonmacnois, Ardagh, Kilmore, Clogher, Derry, and Raphoe. Although focused on a later period, Aubrey Gwynn (The Medieval Province of Armagh, 1470-1545: An Account of Diocesan Life in the Northern Province of Armagh during the Late Medieval Period [Dundalke, 1946]) is the only comprehensive study of the ecclesiastical organization of the medieval province. 3 Brendan Smith, ed., The Register of MiIo Sweteman, Archbishop of Armagh, 1361-1380 (Dublin, 1996). Hereafter, RMS. Items in the register are cited by document number, not page number. RMS 133: "Nosque a tempore adventus nostri ad nostrum ecclesiam Ardmachanam contra Malachiam Ohanloyn regem de Erthir plures plures processus ecclesie fecissemus tanquam contra destructorem ecclesie cleri et populi eiusdem ipsum et suos malefactores et bonorum ecclesie usurpatores spoliatores et detentores excommunicando 184traditio Sweteman's complaint highlights the contradictory relationship between frontier conditions and excommunication in Armagh: the same widespread conflict and political decentralization which gave rise to behavior incurring excommunication also prevented enforcement and reduced the sanction's sting. Although Sweteman himself repeatedly lamented the weakness of excommunication (and other ecclesiastical sanctions) in maintaining the desired social order in Armagh, he nevertheless relied upon it extensively, particularly to quell the violence of Gaelic lay lords.4 Given the admitted weakness of the sanction against violent disorder, why did the archbishop promulgate it with such frequency? Moreover, if the sanction was ultimately ineffective against its targets, why did Malachy O'Hanlon invest energy in obtaining absolution, in Sweteman's words, "Very many times?" Indeed, why did many of the lay elite of Sweteman's Armagh engage extensively with excommunication — their own, their allies', and their rivals'? Relocating the questions of efficacy, order, and excommunication to encompass the perspective not only of the archbishop but also of a wider community of clergy and laity in Armagh, this paper makes a case for the centrality rather than the irrelevance of excommunication in shaping adversarial social relationships on the Irish frontier. To approach the canon law in this way contradicts the expectations of medieval canonists, who treated excommunication as a spiritual remedy that could only be applied by a limited number of experts in order to bring sinners into church discipline. Such an approach also departs from the main themes of the past century of scholarship on...