ABSTRACT
The same forces that thrust many clergy into positions of military leadership led to a flowering of historical writing in England that was without precedent in scale and sophistication.1 The English in the early twelfth century were a nation struggling to make sense of the humiliation of conquest – conquest in which not only the hand of God but the institutional church had played an important role. Meanwhile, England’s religious houses sought to insulate themselves from the consequences of regime change, in particular a new and more predatory monarchy, and a rapacious, disorderly military class as troublesome in a prelate’s familia as they were essential to it, by burnishing the glory and antiquity of their claims and framing their (often forged) charters in flattering historical narratives. Later military campaigns, which also involved clerical participation, particularly those of the Anarchy and the wars of Henry II, prompted new waves of historical writing. Just as kings, popes, councils and canonists were confronted with the problem of fighting clergy, therefore, so too the historians of this period had to deal with examples of clerical involvement in war, both in their own day and in the remote past. The literary responses to clerical involvement in war represent some of the richest material available to this study, a body of editorial and commentary far greater in extent than that provided by any other kind of source. They have not, however, been the subject of any sustained examination by scholars. This chapter will explore the approaches taken by the authors of narrative texts to the incidents of clerical involvement in war that reached their notice, offering a typology of narrative depictions of militant clergy. It will then relate those strategies to the broader forms and objectives of the works in which they appear. Finally, it will consider the work of authors whose treatment of the problem contained notable tensions, focussing in particular on William of Malmesbury, the author with the most sustained and sophisticated approach to this issue, as a case study in the complexity that could characterise a single contemporary observer’s reactions to the problems of clerical involvement in war.
