So, of a sudden, he completely altered the whole manner of his
life. He turned off all his brilliant followers, ate coarse food,
drank bitter water, wore next his skin sackcloth covered with dirt
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Dickens, Charles – A Child’s History of England
and vermin (for it was then thought very religious to be very
dirty), flogged his back to punish himself, lived chiefly in a
little cell, washed the feet of thirteen poor people every day, and
looked as miserable as he possibly could. If he had put twelve
hundred monkeys on horseback instead of twelve, and had gone in
procession with eight thousand waggons instead of eight, he could
not have half astonished the people so much as by this great
change. It soon caused him to be more talked about as an
Archbishop than he had been as a Chancellor.
The King was very angry; and was made still more so, when the new
Archbishop, claiming various estates from the nobles as being
rightfully Church property, required the King himself, for the same
reason, to give up Rochester Castle, and Rochester City too. Not
satisfied with this, he declared that no power but himself should
appoint a priest to any Church in the part of England over which he
was Archbishop; and when a certain gentleman of Kent made such an
appointment, as he claimed to have the right to do, Thomas a Becket
excommunicated him.
Excommunication was, next to the Interdict I told you of at the
close of the last chapter, the great weapon of the clergy. It
consisted in declaring the person who was excommunicated, an
outcast from the Church and from all religious offices; and in
cursing him all over, from the top of his head to the sole of his
foot, whether he was standing up, lying down, sitting, kneeling,
walking, running, hopping, jumping, gaping, coughing, sneezing, or
whatever else he was doing. This unchristian nonsense would of
course have made no sort of difference to the person cursed – who
could say his prayers at home if he were shut out of church, and
whom none but GOD could judge – but for the fears and superstitions
of the people, who avoided excommunicated persons, and made their
lives unhappy. So, the King said to the New Archbishop, ‘Take off
this Excommunication from this gentleman of Kent.’ To which the
Archbishop replied, ‘I shall do no such thing.’
The quarrel went on. A priest in Worcestershire committed a most
dreadful murder, that aroused the horror of the whole nation. The
King demanded to have this wretch delivered up, to be tried in the
same court and in the same way as any other murderer. The
Archbishop refused, and kept him in the Bishop’s prison. The King,
holding a solemn assembly in Westminster Hall, demanded that in
future all priests found guilty before their Bishops of crimes
against the law of the land should be considered priests no longer,
and should be delivered over to the law of the land for punishment.
The Archbishop again refused. The King required to know whether
the clergy would obey the ancient customs of the country? Every
priest there, but one, said, after Thomas a Becket, ‘Saving my
order.’ This really meant that they would only obey those customs
when they did not interfere with their own claims; and the King
went out of the Hall in great wrath.
Some of the clergy began to be afraid, now, that they were going
too far. Though Thomas a Becket was otherwise as unmoved as
Westminster Hall, they prevailed upon him, for the sake of their
fears, to go to the King at Woodstock, and promise to observe the
ancient customs of the country, without saying anything about his
order. The King received this submission favourably, and summoned
a great council of the clergy to meet at the Castle of Clarendon,
by Salisbury. But when the council met, the Archbishop again
insisted on the words ‘saying my order;’ and he still insisted,
though lords entreated him, and priests wept before him and knelt
to him, and an adjoining room was thrown open, filled with armed
soldiers of the King, to threaten him. At length he gave way, for