Untitled

164 Chapter 3
discussed in the next chapter because they involve consummation.
It will be apparent already that the topics of bigamy and consummation
are closely related.
There is reason to think that the implications of the 1274 decision
extended beyond exemption from secular justice. We have already
noted that clerical status a·orded a spiritual defence against physical
attack, in that anyone who laid violent hands on a cleric could
only be absolved by the pope (except at point of death). In losing
that privilege, bigamous clerics, or ex-clerics as they would now
be, lost a lot in their violent society. Were there other privileges as
well? The matter has not been suciently studied, but some pieces
of evidence suggest that there may have been. Specimens of the
evidence will be discussed below, but there is an earlier decretal of
Honorius III that seems to anticipate their main message. It was
subsequently included in the Decretals of Gregory IX (X. 3. 3. 9),
in a truncated form, but it is the fuller form that concerns us here.
Interestingly, it is addressed to Berengaria, the widow of Richard I
of England, who appears to be living at or around Le Mans, on
lands received at her marriage.
Honorius is responding to a complaint that many literati, having
abandoned their clerical tonsure, entered into marriage, and
involved themselves in secular business, have then resumed their
tonsure and clerical status in order to avoid the customary justitiae
and the due obsequia. (Others never abandon their tonsure, for the
same reason.) The justitiae could simply be their subjection to the
secularcourts,butwhatdoesthewordobsequia refer to?
An obsequium can mean a service and also a payment. That
strongly suggests that the advantages of being a cleric extended
beyond legal exemption in the narrower sense of privilegium fori
(the right to be tried in an ecclesiastical rather than a secular tribunal).
si›ecle (2 vols.; Biblioth›eque de l’ ‹Ecole des hautes ‹etudes, Sciences religieuses, 35, 39;
Paris, 1921–4), i. 62–80.
Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici, i. 459; Regesta pontificum Romanorum inde ab
a. post Christum natum 1198 ad a. 1304, ed. A. Potthast, i (Berlin, 1874), no. 5755,
p. 506; E. Hallam, ‘Berengaria’, in H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison (eds.), The
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60 vols.; Oxford, 2004), v. 321–2; Regesta
Honorii Papae III, ed. P. Pressuti, i (Rome, 1888; repr. Hildesheim etc., 1978),
no. 1224, p. 202.