ABSTRACT
If it is accepted that clerical participation in warfare, particularly active campaigning by prelates, was less a matter of the smooth operation of a military machine based around servitium debitum than it was a feature of crisis, and that clerics were often significant figures in such crises, it follows that their activities impinged upon the interests of the king, sometimes powerfully so. Like popes and church councils, kings therefore were repeatedly placed in the position of how to react to clerical military leadership. Naturally, they sought to reward loyal service and to punish defiance, and this could take the form of either material benefits or career advancement. Four particular cases of prelates arrested for rebellion, Odo of Bayeux (1082), William of St Calais (1089), the ‘three bishops’ (1139) and Philip of Beauvais (1197), are well known. In each case, a king proceeded against a prelate by arguing that the prelate should be regarded legally as a secular baron. There are, however, a good many other examples that can be explored and which have been little discussed in the scholarship. Placed into this wider context, royal policy towards transgressive prelates appears far less ideologically consistent. It is difficult to discuss royal rewards for clerical support in war to the same degree of depth. While high-profile trials left detailed narrative descriptions, it is impossible to be certain that a particular example of royal largesse was tied to a particular incident of loyal service. It should be understood, however, that either rewarding or punishing clergy for involvement in warfare could bring kings into conflict with the wider church, and with the papacy and its legates in particular. Rewarding fighting clergy by assuring their preferment in the ecclesiastical hierarchy could easily be interpreted as simony. Punishing them for participation in rebellion, on the other hand, could seem a violation of the church’s jurisdictional autonomy. In short, it was not clerical participation in warfare per se that provoked conflicts between the hierarchy and royal power so much as the attempts by kings to formulate suitable responses to it.
