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158 Chapter 3
could the rule be relaxed. Some of the documents to be discussed
later on point to further advantages.
Papal bulls to kings of France
The first document relating to this section (Document 3. 4) is
relevant to our investigation for a di·erent reason. It is a bull of
pope Alexander IV, a response to a request by King Louis IX.
To judge from the response, the request was uncontroversial: if
married clergy committed some dreadful crime and if they had
already been stripped of their clerical status for some other reason,
the prelates of France should not prevent the king’s men from
bringing these malefactors to justice. Even Thomas Becket would
not have minded this because the criminals were not being judged
twice for the same o·ence.
The bull is relevant because it uses the following formula: ‘clerics
who are bigamous and husbands of widows and also other married
clerics’. Assuming that the papal document echoes the original
request, as was normal, why did Louis IX not simply say ‘married
clergy’? That would have included the ‘bigamous and husbands of
widows’. Why mention them separately?
The following explanation, which does not claim to be more than
a hypothesis, is that he did so to give his request the most favourable
spin. Bigamous clergy and husbands of widows were marginal categories
whose right to ecclesiastical justice even for a first crime was,
as we shall see, questioned by influential canon lawyers. By listing
them first, the king would have softened any possible impression
of a Church–State conflict. The phrase (which may well have been
formulaic) put a ‘consensus spin’ on the request.
The other papal bulls edited in the documents section of this
chapter (Documents 3. 5–7) seem to do the same thing. (I continue
to assume that they too echo the wording of royal requests to which
they are responding.) They all say ‘married clerics whether bigamous
or monogamous’,where ‘married clerics’ would have suced.
Explicit mention of bigamous clerics subtly emphasized the unreasonableness
of objecting, even from a high ecclesiastical standpoint:
rather as if it were said today that ‘asylum-seekers who first entered
the country illegally or who declared themselves at an immigration
point should be obliged to carry an electronic tag’.
Gratian, Pars II, C. 27, q. 4, c. 29.
The original is now Paris, Archives Nationales J 709 no. 296.