Miller - Frock A Cleric. Mutilating Ecclesiastical Vestments

Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233
Andrew G. Miller, ‘To “Frock” a Cleric: The Gendered Implications of Mutilating Ecclesiastical Vestments in Medieval England’
Gender & History, Vol.24 No.2 August 2012, pp. 271–291.
To ‘Frock’ a Cleric: The Gendered

Implications of Mutilating Ecclesiastical
Vestments in Medieval England
Andrew G. Miller
In March 1176, at the Council of Westminster, ‘a mighty contest’ between the arch-
bishops of Canterbury and York – to quote the contemporary Augustinian canon and
chronicler, William of Newburgh – unfolded over ecclesiastical primacy in the king-
dom. Specifically, the bishops sparred over which man ought to sit at the coveted right
hand of the visiting papal legate on such an important occasion.1 In his chronicle,
William chastised his fellow churchmen’s misguided desire for worldly majesty at the
expense of their flocks, stating that they, ‘laying aside pastoral solicitude, contend with
one another as obstinately and vainly for dignity, and almost all episcopal controversy
entirely relates to precedence in honours’. According to William, the conflict arose
when the archbishop of York, Roger de Pont l’Evêque (r.1154–1181), arrived at the
proceedings first and took the opportunity to seat himself prominently at the legate’s
right. When the archbishop of Canterbury, Richard of Dover (r.1173–1184), entered
the council he – ‘like a man who had sustained an injury’ – refused the lesser seat while
his attendants, ‘being more fiercely jealous of his dignity, proceeded from a simple
strife of words to a brawl’.2 No fewer than five other chroniclers record the incident. For
example, the dean of St Paul’s, London, Ralph de Diceto, describes how the supporters
of Canterbury ‘manfully assisted’ their archiepiscopal lord during the fracas. Another
contemporary, the monk Gervase of Canterbury, insists that Richard had arrived first
and that Roger spurned the lesser seat and instead tried to squeeze himself between the
two dignitaries. Neither man yielded, so that Roger wound up sitting in Richard’s lap
before the scandalised assembly, whereupon the partisans of Canterbury – a throng of
bishops, clerics and laymen – leapt up and hurled the archbishop of York to the ground,
trampled him underfoot and beat him sorely with staffs and fists.3
At some point during the violence, Roger of York’s capa (cope: an ecclesiastical,
hooded, sleeveless ceremonial garment, cut in a semicircular form and attached at the
neck with a sewn tab or brooch)4 was ‘foully torn asunder’ by Richard of Canterbury’s
men.5 This sartorial mutilation is significant not only because contemporary chroniclers
drew attention to it, but because clothing was a potent gendered symbol in medieval
society, especially in its ‘ritual functions’ as vestments.6 As this article will show, the

C 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
272 Gender & History
cope and cowl – caputium (a voluminous hood attached to an ecclesiastical cope or

habit) – donned by churchmen functioned as a symbol of clerical masculinity.7 This
was especially true following the papal reform movement of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, in which a cleric’s outward appearance became increasingly important and
his holiness came to be communicated via distinctive dress (the cope) and haircut
(the tonsure). An attack on these symbols, therefore, was a meaningful act intended
to convey the message of power, mastery and illegitimacy to the victim and audience
alike.
The papal reform movement affected not only clerical dress and coiffure, but also
the sex lives of priests. Chastity became the ideal for the clergy and played a major
role in distinguishing clerics from laymen; such a paradigm shift – or ‘ideological
struggle between celibate and married men’ over power – destabilised the medieval
gender system, as Jo Ann McNamara noted.8 This absence of marriage has led some
scholars to define the clergy as emasculine or even constituting a third gender.9 Sexual-
ity is not the defining feature of masculinity, however, nor did medieval people equate
chastity with emasculation. In the Middle Ages, masculinity was relational to one’s
position in society and association with sex, purity and power. As Jennifer Thibodeaux
states, ‘the clerical ideal of manliness, created by a reforming Church, focused on
more than celibacy; it operated in tandem with secular conceptions of manliness’.10
That is, if secular masculinity in the Middle Ages can be defined as siring children,
defending dependents and providing for one’s family,11 then clerical masculinity might
be defined similarly as marriage to the church, protecting dependents and providing
for one’s flock.12 While laymen might boast about their physical potency and mili-
tary or sexual conquests, clerics might emphasise their spiritual potency and moral
vigour in an impure world; the constant struggle to maintain purity made a man a
man.13 A cleric’s ability to free himself from worldly distractions – such as women –
was the ultimate expression of masculine self-control. A cleric demonstrated this man-
liness (virtus) when combating the devil or spiritually inferior laymen.14 Jacqueline
Murray explains this clerical ‘strategy’ as ‘the transformation of the chaste life into
the “battle for chastity”’. Through such a conceptualisation of masculinity churchmen
metaphorically vanquished the enemy of temptation and employed duly militaristic
language displaying masculine vigour without bearing arms or causing bloodshed.15 It
was precisely the great struggle that celibacy entailed that helped clerics to assert their
professed moral superiority over laymen, to correct them and to justify being held to a
wholly separate – purportedly purer – legal system.16 By virtue of their marriage to the
church and the dedication and spiritual fortitude that such a demanding relationship
required, clerics laid claim to being the greater men in medieval society.
So what, if anything, are we to make of the ‘tearing’ of the archbishop of York’s
capa at the council of Westminster in 1176? Was the whole affair merely an unfortunate
accident or did the partisans of Canterbury attack the archbishop of York’s ecclesiastical
power, authority and reputation – i.e. his clerical masculinity – via his clothing? To
slash or defile a churchman’s cope and cowl was apparently more than a simple
act of aggression; it was rather an attack on powerful (manly) symbols of clerical
masculinity. Evidently, the fact that numerous contemporary chroniclers – as well as
subsequent antiquarians and historians – chose to depict this notorious ‘tearing’ in
some detail reinforces the concept that publicly disfiguring a churchman’s clothing
was a meaningful act.

C 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Mutilating Ecclesiastical Vestments in Medieval England 273
This article explores the gendered implications of mutilating a cleric’s ceremonial

vestments in medieval England. This is not a particularly easy task, since descriptions
of medieval people disfiguring a cleric’s garments can be vague: for example in 1309,
a group of laymen assaulted a canon of the abbey of Bourne, threw him into a watery
pit and ‘tore his habit’.17 At the very least, deliberately tearing or slashing a cleric’s
cope or cowl during conflicts ought to be distinguished from people grabbing or
dragging him by these same garments.18 Other examples of this highly symbolic act
of sartorial violence from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries hint that both clerics and
laymen forcibly rented a churchman’s cope or cowl to shame, emasculate and ‘defrock’
or ‘refrock’ him during conflicts over power, authority and reputation. I propose that
mutilating a churchman’s ceremonial vestments in such a manner was comprehensible –
to the clerical victim, clerical or lay aggressor, and audience alike – as an act of public
insubordination, figurative impotency and symbolic illegitimacy.
Medieval chronicles, sermons and episcopal registers suggest that there was mal-
leability of the symbolism behind mutilating a cleric’s vestments. It appears that clerics
asserted that they were the ‘real men’ through sartorial and physical (sexual and mil-
itary) restraint, while knights and laymen had a different perspective regarding dress
and mores. Thus, clerics and their supporters seemingly ridiculed clerical adversaries
during conflicts within the church by targeting their opponents’ ceremonial garments
and ‘dagging’ them to mimic lay fashion; ‘dagging’ entailed slashing or shredding the
cloth to imitate knights returning frayed and tattered from battle.19 Laymen, on the
other hand, and particularly knights, largely embraced courtly lifestyle and fashions
and considered the art of combat, chasing women and dressing finely to be appropri-
ate, masculine behaviour, while dismissing a monastic or clerical lifestyle as unmanly.
Working from this perspective, knights targeted clerical clothing as symbols: for exam-
ple, they cut or slashed the ceremonial garments worn by clerics who endeavoured to
excommunicate them during local conflicts involving property and patronage in order
to demonstrate their own physical mastery over, and effrontery towards, the ecclesias-
tical body and to mock the clerics for daring to embrace worldly lay fashions while
professing spiritual and moral superiority over the knights.
Clerical deportment, masculinity and sumptuary transgressions

Historians of material culture, in the words of E. Jane Burns, see clothing as a driving
force of ‘cultural imaginations’ in which sartorial identity was paramount for maker,
wearer and viewer alike.20 Following the papal reform movement of the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, clerical deportment was governed by two principles. The first was
dress and demeanour, where ‘modesty and sobriety’ were to serve as an example to
all. Accordingly, when laymen began wearing shorter-hemmed garments during the
early Middle Ages, clerics continued to wear full-length (traditional) robes.21 The
second principle regarded the tonsure – a distinctive haircut or shaving that symbolised
obedience to an ecclesiastical lifestyle.22 Medieval churchmen considered this tradition
to be a badge of honour from the eighth century onwards and, throughout the Middle
Ages, being tonsured voluntarily was considered meritorious whereas shearing under
duress was perceived as shaming.23 Thus, by wilfully wearing traditional copes and
cowls and bearing the self-effacing tonsure, a cleric publicly affirmed his allegiance to
the church while turning his back on lay symbols of manliness.

Whereas the papal reform movement reemphasised – and even lionised – the re-
strained attire, grooming and demeanour of its clerics throughout Europe, from around
1100 in England and northern France it was fashionable for knights to wear their hair
long and curled outwards while donning a finely made bliaut, or tight fitting tunic
that swept to the ground, and shoes with long, pointy toes. According to Matthew
Bennett, by growing out his hair and sporting such fine clothes and phallic shoes the
courtier hoped to advertise his virility.24 Contemporary churchmen were not impressed
and vehemently condemned these new fashions and hairstyles for being showy and
effeminate. For example, the Norman monk Orderic Vitalis blamed Count Fulk of
Anjou for introducing to the court of William II (1087–1100) the fashion in which
men wore shoes with ‘pully toes’ and ‘grew long and luxurious locks like women’.25
Moreover, on Ash Wednesday, 1094, Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury refused to
offer ashes or give his blessing to any men who ‘grew their hair like girls’, while at
the Council of Rouen in 1096, the church declared ‘that no one should grow his hair
long but have it cut as a Christian’.26 Pauline Stafford argues persuasively that Anglo-
Norman ecclesiastical writers compared what they saw as effeminate foppery among
the courtiers of Duke Robert of Normandy (r.1087–1106) to the long haired, bearded –
and subsequently vanquished – Anglo Saxons, while likening themselves to the heroic
Norman conquerors – real men like William I (r.1066–1087) and, after 1105, Henry
I (r.1100–1135) – who shaved, wore their hair short and had God, the pope and righ-
teousness on their side.27 A similar tension existed during the Crusades (1096–1291)
between the traditionally masculine deportment of long-haired aristocratic warriors
and the monkish ‘soldiers of Christ’ envisioned by reform-minded churchmen.28
Despite (or because of) the church’s strict rules regarding appropriate deportment,
some medieval clerics fell prey to the lures of worldly symbols and ideals of masculinity
and chose instead to dress in the latest fashions, hide their tonsures, forsake their
religious calling and – in the eyes of the church – become emasculated like the ‘girlish’
courtiers of Duke Robert and William II. Notwithstanding the church’s attempt to
equate long hair, lengthy sleeves and stylish tunics with femininity, such clerics were,
in the words of Robert Mills, ‘ashamed’ of their tonsures and ‘embarrassed by their
vocation’.29 The competing notions of masculinity between churchmen and the laity –
in which clerics shunned fashion and sex to become manly while laymen embraced
finery and women to emphasise their own manliness – not only created tension between
these groups of men but also tempted clerics to succumb to lay symbols of maleness.
Many medieval clerics, and especially youths in the universities, perceived celibacy
and sobriety as emasculating. Consequently, some clerics tried to re-establish their
manhood by emulating an aristocratic lifestyle via dress, coiffure and even weaponry.30
Such men, whom Robert Rodes memorably calls ‘semi-clerical riff-raff’, gradually
tarnished the church’s image and repeatedly irked the laity by transgressing lay/clerical
boundaries, even as they asserted moral and legal superiority over the laity.31 A good
example of the tension – and good natured jibing – that could result from clerics
dressing and acting like ‘masculine’ laymen occurred in 1161. Thomas Becket was
recovering from an illness at the hospital at the church of St Gervais when an old
friend, the prior of the Augustinian abbey at Leicester, came to visit him on behalf of
Henry II. Becket happened to be playing the ‘military’ game of chess while dressed
in a cloak with sleeves, at which sight the prior joked, ‘What’s this? So you go in for
capes with sleeves now, just like fowlers when carrying hawks!’32

The repeated conciliar condemnations of sartorial transgressions by clerics sug-

gest that enforcing ecclesiastical sumptuary codes among the clergy was an ongoing
problem in medieval Europe following the papal reform movement. For example, the
Council of Toulouse decreed in 1191 that long-haired clerics ought to be excom-
municated until properly shorn. Similarly, the Council of Montpellier in 1195 forbade
clerics from stylishly ripping or slitting the hems of their robes. In 1215, too, the Fourth
Lateran Council passed legislation forbidding clerics from wearing pointy-toed shoes
or garments with sleeves, especially while in church, or otherwise altering their eccle-
siastical vestments to make them fashionable.33 Yet the problem persisted; members
of the clergy seemed determined to dress and groom like laymen, much to the chagrin
of the laity and reform-minded clerics alike. In 1237, the English national council,
held under the presidency of the Legate Otho, declared that laymen were scandalised
at the state of clerical dress which did not seem clerical, but more suited to knights.34
By 1268, during the English legatine canons of Ottobuono (future pope Adrian V),
the clear emphasis of the canons regarding ecclesiastical dress and deportment was to
distinguish clerics from laymen.35
In medieval England, numerous decrees were passed to correct ongoing clerical
indiscretions regarding tonsure and dress, most notably in 1281 and 1342.36 In 1281, the
archbishop of Canterbury declared in his statutes: ‘Oh shame! Many clerks, while they
feel shame in appearing as clerks, cover themselves with an apparel that they may please
fools, and hide their tonsure with coifs, and whenever they show themselves abroad,
they wear these coifs hanging down, except perhaps on a journey’.37 In 1342, another
archbishop of Canterbury bemoaned clerical transgressions in dress and hairstyles,
chastising wayward clerics for what he perceived as their desire to embrace effeminate
lay fashions:
The external costume often shows the internal character and condition of persons; and though the
behaviour of clerks ought to be an example and pattern of the laity, yet the abuse of clerks, which
has gained ground more than usually in these days in tonsures, in garments, in horse trappings . . .
has now generated an abominable scandal among the people, while [clerics] . . . scorn to wear the
crown . . . and, using the distinction of hair extended almost to the shoulders like effeminate persons,
walk about clothed in a military rather than a clerical outer habit, [namely] short, or notably scant,
and with excessively wide sleeves . . . and hoods with tippets [streamers] of wonderful length . . .
that little or no distinction appears of clerks from laymen, whereby they render themselves, through
their demerits, unworthy of the privilege of their order and profession.38
As Sarah-Grace Heller has demonstrated, medieval anxiety over maintaining these

categories of dress and social distinction is addressed prominently in the Roman de la
rose (c.1230).39 When the character Faux Semblant (False Seeming) argues his case for
being included in Love’s barony despite his uncertain lineage and bad repute, he boasts
that he is the sea-god Proteus, who is able to change his form from one thing to another.
Faux Semblant however, prefers a more medieval method for shifting identities: by
changing his clothes. Repeatedly undermining the audience’s confidence in clothing’s
ability to identify a man’s status with transparency and accuracy, Faux insists:
I am very good at changing my clothes, at donning one outfit and discarding another. At one moment
I am a knight, at another a prelate, now a canon, now a cleric, now a priest, now disciple, now
master, now lord of the manor, now forester; in short, I am of every calling. Again, I am prince one
moment, page the next, and I know all languages by heart.40

It was precisely because medieval people were so concerned about social transparency
that the act of depriving a cleric of his ecclesiastical signifiers – i.e. clothing and
haircut, by either ripping his cope to make him appear fashionable or by shearing off
the tip of his cowl to mock the tonsure – proved to be so meaningful and provocative.
With a sharp tear or cut clerics and knights alike could defame, feminise and ‘frock’ a
clerical opponent for all to see.
The rite of compulsory undressing, or defrocking, constituted a powerful cere-
mony of degradation and emasculation, for it unmade a masculine cleric – from the
church’s perspective – back into an everyman (who was now free to dress in effemi-
nate fashions and pollute himself with a woman’s touch). After all, this ecclesiastical
procedure worked ‘in tandem with secular conceptions of manliness’ for, according
to Dyan Elliott, the medieval rite of defrocking was ‘probably borrowed from parallel
demotions effected in the military’.41 Just as a disgraced knight was publicly deprived
of his spurs in the Middle Ages, a disobedient cleric unceremoniously lost his frock;
as a result both men were defamed and emasculated.42 While the ritual divestment of
churchmen has a long history, around 1300 a formal rite for deprivation arose. In the
same manner that a cleric donned his garments – layer upon layer – to perform his
spiritual functions, a cleric deprived of his orders was ritually stripped of the same
vestments – layer by layer – to negate his spiritual potency. The cleric’s hands were
then scraped with a piece of glass or a blade to eliminate his holy unction; finally,
his tonsure was ignominiously shaved off.43 Defrocked clerics, cast from ecclesia’s
bosom, were subject to secular law and its more severe punishments. The legal and
religious distinction was a significant one in medieval England, for this issue was cen-
tral in the fight between Thomas Becket and Henry II over religious and regal power
and authority; Becket died believing that even defrocked priests should not be subject
to secular law.44
‘Tearing’ a cleric’s capa: cleric versus cleric

Returning to the infamous dispute between the archbishops of Canterbury and York,
it seems clear that this political war between churchmen was serious business for both
parties involved. Recall that the conflict over who should sit at the papal legate’s right
hand began with posturing and sharp words and ended in physical violence and rit-
ualised shaming.45 Contemporary ecclesiastical chroniclers seem to have recognised
this manly competition for what it was. For example, both the Winchcombe Annals
and William of Newburgh use the word ‘contest’ to describe the affair; this noun
has militaristic connotations, for it can also be translated as ‘a fight’ or ‘strife (with
weapons or words)’.46 Similarly, William likened Richard of Canterbury’s reaction to
Roger of York’s seat-snatching in physical terms; Richard was ‘like a man who had
sustained an injury’. Moreover, Ralph de Diceto insists that the partisans of Canterbury
‘manfully assisted’ their archiepiscopal lord against his adversary. The word choice
is significant. As Maureen Miller has demonstrated, viriliter (‘in a manly fashion’)
is one of the keywords clerical reformers employed to lionise their own masculin-
ity during this period.47 I would add another keyword to her list, however: ‘boldly’
(audacter).48 According to a possible eyewitness, the archdeacon Gerald of Wales,
when the irate king, Henry II (r.1154–1189), demanded to know why Roger of York’s

‘whole cope was torn asunder there’, the bishop of Worcester ‘boldly burst forth’ with
an explanation for his incensed lord – a potentially perilous undertaking for any man.
The bishop rejoined that Richard of Canterbury’s men were just trying to help the
archbishop of York up and that, because Roger’s vestment was at least a decade old,
it was ‘no wonder it had been torn to pieces’ in the tumult since it could hardly hold
itself together.49 Henry II – famous as much for his sharp wit as for his fits of rage –
was ‘turned to laughter on account of such an eloquent and refined explanation’ (par-
ticularly because of Roger’s notable stinginess) and let the matter drop.50 What was so
funny?
Numerous accounts of the fracas at Westminster in 1176 survive, which suggests
that the ‘tearing’ of the archbishop of York’s cope was a noteworthy event. The
chroniclers describe, in greater and lesser detail, how Richard of Canterbury’s men
‘tore’, ‘rent’, or ‘cut’ Roger of York’s capa. For centuries scholars have translated the
remarkable tearing of the archbishop’s clothing, for example, ‘they tore his robes’,
‘they rent his cope’, ‘his cope was torn’, ‘his vestments [were] torn’, or they ‘tore to
rags his Episcopal vestments’.51 However, a closer examination of the noun and verb
combinations used by the chroniclers to describe what happened to the archbishop
of York’s cope implies that this ‘tearing’ or ‘cutting’ was more than an accident or
arbitrary ripping.52 Because the clerical victims (Roger, archbishop of York and others)
were carrying out official duties (for example, presiding at a council or performing the
sentence of excommunication) at the time of the respective attacks, context implies
that they would have been wearing ceremonial copes.53 It is remarkable, moreover, that
both Gervase of Canterbury and Gerald of Wales employed the verb discindo, which
means ‘to rend or tear’, to describe the sartorial violence. This term is noteworthy for
several reasons. Not only do both chroniclers describe the violence at Westminster or its
aftermath in considerably greater detail, but this word can pertain specifically to cloth,
either in retail or fashion; by 1188 in England decisus meant ‘“cut”, slashed, or tagged
(of cloth)’.54 Andrea Denny-Brown explains that the fashion of ‘dagging’, or slitting
and lacing the sides of a garment, appeared in England in the twelfth century, grew in
popularity in the fourteenth century and ‘uniquely captured the English imagination
. . . The phrase “cutted clothes” could refer either to specific styles – such as the new
short cut of male jackets or the slitting and dagging of garments – or it could be used
more generally to describe the new mode of fashions or a scantily-dressed person
wearing such clothing’. Regardless of the specific style, one constant is the fashion’s
‘perceived link to knightly attire’.55
The distinctive verbiage may help to explain why, according to the account pro-
vided by the possible eyewitness Gerald of Wales, Henry II found the bishop of
Worcester’s curious explanation of Roger of York’s torn cope so eloquent, refined and
hilarious. That is, when an incensed king demanded to know what exactly had tran-
spired at the council, he used the word discindo to describe the tearing of Roger’s capa:
‘his whole cope was torn asunder there’. In other words, while Henry II demanded an
explanation as to why the partisans of Canterbury had fashionably ‘dagged’ the arch-
bishop of York’s ecclesiastical vestments for all to see, the bishop of Worcester ‘boldly’
rejoined that any mutilation was inadvertent on account of the threadbare nature of
the miserly archbishop’s clothing. Notably, the bishop defended the rending by using
the verb dilacero, which means ‘to tear to pieces’ or ‘to tear apart’. Unlike the term

discindo, however, it does not specifically connote a stylish ‘slashing’ or ‘dagging’ of

clothes.56 It appears that Henry II found the bishop’s daring play on words especially
witty because the joke was at the archbishop’s expense due to his renowned stinginess,
and perhaps because the wily king recognised that some comic relief would help to
diffuse another (immediate) confrontation between York and Canterbury. While we
will probably never know precisely what Roger of York’s cope looked like following
this attack, or why exactly the king found such a scandalous event so amusing, it is
possible that the partisans of Canterbury had ripped off the bottom half of the garment’s
hem to mimic Henry II’s very own fashion revolution – the short cloak – which he had
introduced from his native Anjou when assuming the reins of power in England: hence
the king’s nickname, ‘Curtmantle’.57
There is another possibility, however. The partisans of Canterbury may have
torn open Roger of York’s capa in the vicinity of his buttocks. That is to say, the
assailants’ intention may have been to remind the (male) audience of accusations of
Roger’s alleged past sexual indiscretions by piling upon the pederast and ‘ripping’ his
clothes.58 In 1172, John of Salisbury, a biographer and supporter of Thomas Becket,
revived a scandalous – albeit dubious – report that Roger had entered into an illicit
homosexual relationship with a beautiful boy named Walter twenty years earlier. The
case – whether true or not – was especially notorious because, when the boy grew up
and began exposing their relationship, apparently Roger, through some unidentified
judicial process, had Walter’s eyes removed in an effort to silence him; after Walter
pursued the case further, Roger supposedly saw to it that he was executed on a gibbet.
Roger was eventually cleared of the offences, but great defamation resulted from the
scandal.59 Therefore, by throwing the archbishop of York to the ground and violently
tearing asunder his capa, the partisans of Canterbury may have intended to symbolically
sodomise their victim while simultaneously defaming, emasculating and defrocking
him before a distinguished assembly of his male peers.60 Charges – and reminders –
of sexually-deviant behaviour were particularly damning during this period. Scholars
such as John Boswell and Mathew Kuefler have identified how, during the mid- and
late twelfth century, ecclesiastical writers attempted to cast suspicion upon the bonds
between men as well as scandalise physical camaraderie within elite male culture
in an effort to redirect their loyalties to the centralising institutions of church and
state.61
Whatever the intended meaning behind the slashing was, it appears that the sup-
porters of Richard of Canterbury tore – in some performative style – the capa belonging
to Roger of York for several reasons.62 First, Canterbury’s supporters ‘manfully’ seized
upon the opportunity to teach the outnumbered partisans of York – and especially their
despised overlord – a rancorous lesson in humility and respect. Richard’s supporters
were apparently eager to avenge Becket’s murder, which they believed Roger of York
had helped to instigate. Second, there was a long history of discord between the two
sees over which – Canterbury or York – held primacy in England; the twelfth century
was an especially volatile period regarding this matter.63 Consequently, by publicly
targeting the archbishop of York’s ceremonial capa, the archbishop of Canterbury’s
men humiliated Roger for his insolence and may have intended to symbolically de-
frock the archbishop by transforming him into an effeminate, fashionable layman
(or sodomite) in order to demonstrate in a most provocative manner that Canterbury
was mightier – i.e. more manly – than York.

‘Tearing’ a cleric’s capa: knight versus cleric

Laymen, and particularly knights, also mutilated the ecclesiastical capa or caputium of
adversarial clerics for a couple of reasons. First, the sartorial violence was apparently
intended to symbolically tonsure the tip of the cleric’s cowl or hood and thereby
ridicule, or emasculate, him. Second, the lay assailants cut off or ‘dagged’ the illicitly
added sleeves of a cleric’s cope – lengthy trappings which should not have adorned
such vestments in the first place – perhaps to rebuke him for transgressing sumptuary
boundaries even as the laymen re-emphasised the victim’s ‘feminine’ ecclesiastical
nature by performatively refrocking the cleric and mocking his apparent attempts to
be fashionable in a ‘masculine’ lay sense. Finally, the evidence suggests that knights
executed this violent counter-performance when clerics attempted to excommunicate
the knights or their allies during local conflicts. In so doing, the laymen publicly
derided the tonsure and scorned ecclesiastical authority, called attention to the victims’
effeminate – from a layman’s perspective – clerical identity and rebuked the churchmen
for emulating masculine lay fashions while claiming spiritual superiority and authority
over the laymen.
There is some evidence for laymen targeting clerics’ copes and cowls since at
least the early thirteenth century. For instance, the celebrated French preacher Jacques
de Vitry relates a story (c.1220) of a knight and some other ‘minions of the devil’ who,
prior to a religious conversion, harassed a churchman by ‘tearing in pieces his cope or
cowl’.64 Two points are of interest here. First, Vitry’s incorporation of cope or cowl
defacement into his sermon indicates that Vitry’s audiences understood what the act of
violently tearing ecclesiastical vestments meant; otherwise this description would have
served more as a distraction than as an example of how not to treat clerics. Second,
Vitry specified that the wayward knight was also guilty of despoiling the cleric’s cowl.
That medieval knights specifically targeted a cleric’s great outer hood during these
‘tearing’ performances is corroborated by two episcopal registers from the last half
of the thirteenth century, from the dioceses of Exeter and Lincoln. Let us begin with
Exeter. In 1273, shortly after the new earl of Cornwall, Edmund (1272–1300), inherited
the vast earldom, members of his household – including the sheriff of Cornwall – vio-
lently invaded several deer-parks belonging to Bishop Walter Bronescombe of Exeter
(r.1258–1280).65 The bishop ordered some of his household clerics to go to a local
parish church and threaten members of the earl’s household with excommunication.
According to the episcopal records, however, the knights and other laymen prevented
the bishop’s clerics from executing the sentence by attacking them in the church, haul-
ing them into the churchyard and dragging them around behind their horses. The earl’s
men also employed symbolic humiliation, emasculation and enfeeblement against their
clerical adversaries. The bishop’s scribe recorded that the laymen ‘foully defiled the
priestly garments they were wearing by cutting off the tips of their cowls almost to the
midpoint and the upper parts of the hoods which they were wearing – in mockery of a
tonsure’. The earl’s men also mutilated a number of the clerics’ horses by cutting off
their ears, upper lips, tails, or altogether killed them.66
In 1293, and over 200 miles northeast of Cornwall, Bishop Oliver Sutton of
Lincoln (r.1280–1299) struggled to defend traditional patronage rights over the lucra-
tive church of Thame, located ten miles east of Oxford. During this dispute a promi-
nent household knight of Edward I (r.1272–1307), named Sir John St John, his son,

Edward (a king’s clerk), and other members of the royal household, forcibly seized the
church and continued to occupy it while the king turned a blind eye to the aggression
and dragged his feet in responding to the bishop’s repeated pleas for royal justice to
intervene.67 The bishop of Lincoln reacted to these provocative attacks by ordering his
clerics to visit the neighbouring parish church and a nearby abbey and to excommu-
nicate the malefactors. We learn from the bishop’s register, however, that the laymen
had chosen to conduct a counter-performance of their own. The knights and their allies
reportedly dragged the clerics out of the sanctuaries while they sang the psalms of the
morning service – tormenting them all the while with knives and swords – and attacked
other clerics discovered en route for performing the rite of anathema.68
As in Cornwall two decades earlier, moreover, Sir John St John’s knights phys-
ically violated and symbolically enfeebled members of the bishop’s household by
figuratively tonsuring, emasculating and refrocking them. Remarkably, the bishop of
Lincoln’s scribe recorded:
What more? In clear prejudice of ecclesiastical liberty and in contempt of episcopal authority those
sons of Belial outrageously cut off the tips of the cowls of the chaplains and clerics all the way to
the midpoint as it were and foully lopped off and tore asunder the long sleeves of the cloaks of the
same chaplains and clerics . . . in great danger of their souls and vehement scandal of others.69
It is worthwhile to examine the episcopal scribes’ descriptions of how the knights

and other laymen mutilated the clerics’ cowls in Cornwall and at Thame; after all,
the performative acts of violence – and their descriptions – are strikingly similar.
While neither episcopal register uses the noun capa to describe the clothing which the
clerics were wearing when molested by the laymen, it is still probable that the clerics
were dressed in formal ecclesiastical apparel. First, both registers state that the clerics
donned the ‘cowls’, which were attached to these formal copes. Second, in each case
the clerics were acting in an official capacity – excommunicating lay malefactors –
at the behest of their respective bishops and, presumably, would have dressed as
impressively as possible to conduct such a ceremonial, public performance.70
As for verbs, both registers use amputo, which means ‘to cut around, to cut
away or off, to lop off, prune’, to describe the violence committed against the clerics’
cowls.71 Remarkably, both sources also specify that the knights cut off ‘the tips of
their cowls’ almost ‘to the midpoint’. The bishop of Exeter’s scribe went even further,
stating distinctively that the laymen not only excised the tips of the clerics’ cowls but
even the ‘tips of their hoods’. He also insisted that the shearing was done – according to
the editor’s translation – ‘in mockery of a tonsure’.72 Although the bishop of Lincoln
or his scribe did not similarly suggest that mutilating the clerics’ cowls constituted
a symbolic haircut, per se, it is still intriguing that the scribe used the verb discindo
to depict how the laymen ‘tore asunder’ the clergymen’s sleeves after lopping them
off. Likewise, Henry of Huntingdon employed the same term when describing how
evildoers figuratively tore the Lord’s garments during Stephen’s anarchic rule. Perhaps,
then, a better translation of what transpired in the diocese of Lincoln in 1293 would
be: ‘those sons of Belial . . . cut off the tips of the cowls of the chaplains and clerics all
the way to the midpoint as it were and foully lopped off and “dagged” the long sleeves
of the cloaks of the same chaplains and clerics’.
Meaningfully tearing or ‘dagging’ a cleric’s cope or cowl was apparently an act
of public disparagement and emasculation comprehensible enough to find its way into

contemporary literature. The menacing humour of knights forcibly shearing a cleric’s

hood during a confrontation – e.g. in the dioceses of Exeter and Lincoln in 1273
and 1293 – is remarkably similar to an episode found in the early fourteenth-century
romance Bevis of Hampton, one which the editors define as ‘a grim and ironic joke
about the tonsure, the “close shave” that identified medieval clerics’.73 During the
course of his adventures, Bevis encounters a giant besieging a town. The giant, it so
happens, is the brother of King Grander, whose head Bevis had recently cut off and
whose horse, Trenchefis, he was now astride. The giant recognised his brother’s horse
and so he hollered:
You are a caught thief, I think:
Where did you steal the steed Trenchefis,
That you are riding astride here?
It was my brother’s, Grander!’
‘Grander,’ replied Bevis, ‘I gave a cap
And made him a broad crown;
Though he was next under my fist,
Well I know, I made him a priest,
And archdeacon I will make thee,
Before I ever from you leave!74
Though the giant accidentally kills his brother’s horse in the ensuing fight and wounds
his opponent, Bevis nevertheless prevails. Bevis, moreover, makes light of having be-
headed King Grander by likening the decapitation to a cutting, or tonsuring, of his
opponent. Bevis emphasises the ignominy and emasculation inherent in such a forcible
shearing by assigning an ecclesiastical status to the violence he had inflicted upon
Grander. If chopping off another’s head is equivalent to ordaining him a priest, then
making the second giant an archdeacon must confer even greater humiliation and im-
potency. The performative enfeeblement of an adversary in this manner, and especially
the accompanying bragging rights, would have presumably been understandable to the
knights and other laypeople to whom such a romance was directed. For, if shearing
an adversary’s pate did not encode understandable conventions of masculine power
and mastery in the Middle Ages, it is doubtful that the author would have risked
perplexing, boring, or alienating his audience by including such references in his
romance.75
Symbolic tonsuring: mocking and re frocking

So what, then, could people in the Middle Ages possibly have found amusing and
provocative about cutting off the tip of a cleric’s hood or cowl or threatening an op-
ponent with tonsuring his pate to resemble a cleric’s? While the joke, at its most
base form, appears to rely on the formula ‘head equals penis, hood equals fore-
skin’, the shearing performance may have contained deeper, multifaceted meanings
to aggressor, victim and audience alike. The knights seemingly cut the opponents’
cowls to mock the clerical tonsure, and perhaps even to parody the Jewish ritual
of circumcision and thereby to Judaise – i.e. feminise – the clerics. According to
Steven Kruger, medieval people believed that, ‘by virtue of circumcision, Jewish and
Muslim men displayed a lack of masculinity on their bodies’ and that ‘even when
literal castration or the mark of circumcision was not explicitly at issue, Western

European Christian discourses tended to construct Muslim and Jewish men as failing
to live up to “masculine” ideals in the public realm, and specifically in the realm of
warfare’.76 Just as a cleric who dressed in courtly, ‘dagged’ fashions might wish to
portray himself as manly in the eyes of the laity, he was – like a Jew – nonetheless
forbidden from bearing arms and thus acting like a true knight; he could become, in the
eyes of the laity, an effeminate poseur. Moreover, it appears that the aggrieved knights
symbolically tonsured the clerics and ripped off or slashed their illicitly attached
sleeves to punish them for transgressing sumptuary boundaries whilst they claimed
spiritual superiority and ecclesiastical authority over laymen. The knights, therefore,
would have derisively refrocked the clerics and subsequently returned the transgres-
sors to their properly feminised state – from the laity’s point of view – as men of the
church.
Despite the unsanctioned nature of such violence, manhandling a cleric in this
manner would have been an effective means by which to humiliate, render impotent and
illegitimate a churchman during heated disputes over power and authority in the Mid-
dle Ages, for medieval people may have made the association between a man’s hood
and his penis or foreskin. Laura Hodges argues convincingly that Geoffrey Chaucer,
in the Canterbury Tales (c.1400), effectively satirises his Friar’s hood by adorning
its tip with pins and knives to suggest to his audience that this lascivious character
employed these trinkets to prick and pry his way into women’s hearts and homes – and
wherever else he might go. Hodges even postulates that ‘a Freudian symbolic inter-
pretation would see knives and pins as not only phallic imagery, but also see the hood
as foreskin covering instrument of penetration, penis’.77 Moreover, in the fourteenth-
century anticlerical poem The Land of Cokaygne, we are told that ‘the monk that will
be stallion good / And can set aright his hood / He shall have without danger / Twelve
wives each year’ to pleasure himself.78 By William Shakespeare’s time, at least, the
word ‘hood’ was directly equated with ‘foreskin’.79 Medieval people also made the
association between a cleric’s compulsory tonsuring and symbolic castration. Robert
Mills argues compellingly that an association was made between the tonsure and phal-
lus since the early Middle Ages; for instance, forcibly shearing Merovingian kings –
whose moniker was the ‘long-haired kings’ – was ‘especially humiliating’ and acted
‘as a kind of figurative castration’.80 It would follow, therefore, that forcibly tonsuring
a man against his will served as symbolic castration; likewise, the knights may have
snipped off the tips of the clerics’ ‘hooded foreskins’ to convey a symbolic rite of cir-
cumcision to emasculate the clerics and thereby return them to their properly feminised
state.
It was not unheard of for laymen to target, mimic or scorn a cleric’s tonsure in
other contemptuous ways throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. In southern France,
for example, circa 1219, during a contentious game of dice, a Cathar (dualist heretic)
named Bernard of Quiries, ‘acting of his own volition, urinated on the tonsure of . . . an
acolyte in opprobrium and vituperation of the whole Catholic Church’.81 In medieval
Spain, moreover, forcibly tonsuring a man or grabbing the reins of his horse was
considered ‘disdainful of aristocratic and masculine prowess’.82 In England, during
the infamous St Scholastica’s Day Riot in Oxford (10 February 1355) between town
(laymen) and gown (clerics), bands of laymen murdered students, buried their corpses
in dunghills, and ‘the crowns of some chaplains, [namely] all the skin so far as the
tonsure went, these diabolical imps flayed off in scorn of their clergy’.83

Violently targeting a cleric’s masculine symbols, i.e. his vestments, haircut, or an-
imals – or symbolically effeminising a layperson by ‘tonsuring’ him – could serve as
an informal protocol that David Nirenberg calls ‘ritualized aggression’.84 For instance,
striking a man with the flat of your sword demonstrates the potential to act with still
greater violence. Alexandra Shepard has demonstrated that comprehensible violence,
which contained ‘precise meanings and was governed by elaborate rules of play’, of-
ten accompanied competition between men in early modern England; such aggression
served simultaneously ‘to confer authority on its perpetrators and to degrade its vic-
tims’ as well as ‘to articulate subtle status distinctions between men’.85 By means of
this violent etiquette, then, medieval as well as early modern Englishmen could figura-
tively attack an adversary’s dignity, authority and reputation (that is, his masculinity)
without suffering the severe legal penalties for having actually killed or maimed the
man himself. Thus, the knights and other laymen involved in disrupting the rites of
anathema in the dioceses of Exeter (1273) and Lincoln (1293) curbed excessively
injurious violence by observing certain rules of engagement that they, their victims
and the audience understood, sending a chilling message of violence, effeminacy and
dominance to the clerics and their bishop alike. These violent counter attacks appear to
have attracted audiences who witnessed not only the excommunication performance,
but also the knights humiliating the bishop’s clerics.86
By cutting away or ‘dagging’ the clerics’ sleeves the knights may have intended to
emphasise the ecclesiastical, as opposed to the lay, identity of their victims. The knights,
in effect, symbolically compelled their clerical victims to abide by the canonical rules
and regulations to which they were bound – and by which they were identified –
and hence not to use the sacred rite of excommunication for worldly affairs such
as protecting masculine status symbols such as deer parks (which clerics were not
supposed to possess in the first place because canon law forbade hunting and hawking
since the use of weapons and mode of exercise were considered ‘military’).87 Or,
perhaps the laymen intended to make fools of the clerics, for medieval artists also
made the correlation between ‘dagged’ clothing and fools.88 Regardless, that there
were sleeves to cut off or mutilate in the first place implies that the clerics were
transgressing canon law even while performing – or preparing to perform – the sacred
rite of excommunication.89 As such, these acts of humiliation speak to how laymen
communicated their own masculine identity while challenging, ridiculing and defining
clerical identity. Finally, other examples of the English laity expressing displeasure at
clerical transgressions of dress may be informative. They include a veritable mob of
laymen attacking the priory of St Faith, Horsham, in 1307. Not only did the assailants
lay waste to the priory’s lands and livestock and prevent the monks from coming or
going, but they threw one monk from his horse and notably ‘spoiled him of his habit
and shoes’ before imprisoning him.90 Clerics wearing fancy shoes, like fancy copes,
also irked laymen. Ostentatious footwear – particularly shoes with elongated toes
stuffed with wool or hay – became so outrageous that sumptuary legislation banned
excessively showy shoes in the 1360s.91 Such transgressions may help to explain why,
in 1384, when a band of laymen seized the church of Crediton and assaulted the bishop
of Exeter’s servant, they compelled him ‘under threat of death to eat the point of a shoe,
flourished the wool thereof with knives in his face’, and then chased him and other
episcopal servants through the town with knives and bows and arrows to the bishop’s
manor. During the same incident the assailants forced clerical messengers ‘to eat the

seals . . . and . . . a copy of certain mandates of the said bishop’.92 Just as the knights
at Thame refrocked the churchmen who dressed like the laity but cursed like clerics,
perhaps the laymen at the church of Crediton used the sartorial transgression itself – in
this case the tip of the phallic, pointy shoes – to silence the bishop’s messenger. That
is, the laymen emphasised this point by violently negating the episcopal decree and
making the clerical messenger eat the seals, since only a pure cleric, inside and out,
should be and act above them.
Notes
The author would like to thank Sharon Farmer, Ruth Mazo Karras, Tanya Stabler Miller, Hugh Thomas and
the anonymous readers at Gender & History for their valuable insight regarding this project and for their
many helpful suggestions concerning content and structure. All translations are the author’s unless otherwise
noted.
1. William of Newburgh, Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, ed. Richard Howlett,
4 vols (London: Longman, 1884–89), vol. 1, pp. 203–04. For the legation and the legatine Council of
Westminster, see M. Brett, Dorothy Whitelock and Christopher N. L. Brooke (eds), Councils and Synods
with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), vol. 1, pt. 2,
pp. 993–1010 (no. 169). For the history of the dispute and relevant sources, see Roy Haines, ‘Canterbury
Versus York: Fluctuating Fortunes in a Perennial Conflict’, in Roy Haines, Ecclesia Anglicana: Studies in
the English Church of the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), pp. ?–?, here
pp. 82–3, n. 132; Felix Makower, The Constitutional History and Constitution of the Church of England
(London: S. Sonnenschein, 1895), pp. 289–91, n. 22.
2. Newburgh, Chronicles, vol. 1, pp. 203–04. Stevenson’s translation: Joseph Stevenson, Church Historians
of England, 5 vols (London: Seeleys, 1853–58), vol. 4, pt. 2, p. 500.
3. Ralph de Diceto, Historical Works, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1876), vol. 1, pp. 405–
06; Gervase of Canterbury, Historical Works, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1870–80),
vol. 1, p. 258, vol. 2, p. 398; Roger of Hoveden, Chronica, ed. William Stubbs, 4 vols (London: Longman,
1868–71), vol. 2, pp. 92–3; Benedict of Peterborough, The Chronicle of the Reigns of Henry II and Richard
I, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1867), vol. 1, pp. 112–13. The Winchcombe Annals also
state that Richard of Canterbury sat first and that Roger of York ‘forced himself in between the legate and
Canterbury’. R. R. Darlington, ‘The Winchcombe Annals 1049–1181’, in Patricia Barnes and C. F. Slade
(eds), A Medieval Miscellany for Doris Mary Stenton (London: J. W. Ruddock, 1962), pp. 111–37, here
p. 136.
4. Frederick Lee, A Glossary of Liturgical and Ecclesiastical Terms (London: B. Quaritch, 1877), pp. 69–70.
5. ‘turpiter descissa’. Gervase of Canterbury, Historical Works, vol. 1, p. 258.
6. E. Jane Burns, ‘Why Textiles Make a Difference’, in E. Jane Burns (ed.), Medieval Fabrications: Dress,
Textiles, Cloth Work, and Other Cultural Imaginings (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 1–18,
here pp. 2–6.
7. Lee, Liturgical and Ecclesiastical Terms, pp. 69–70, 99; J. F. Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus:
A Medieval Latin-French/English Dictionary (Leiden: Brill, 1997), p. 141.
8. Jo Ann McNamara, ‘The Herrenfrage: The Reconstruction of the Gender System, 1050–1150’, in Clare
A. Lees (ed.), Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1994), pp. 3–29.
9. R. N. Swanson, ‘Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation’, in
D. M. Hadley (ed.), Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 160–77, here p. 162;
See also Jo Ann McNamara’s work on monasticism and the concept of a third gender: Jo Ann McNamara,
‘Chastity as a Third Gender in the History and Hagiography of Gregory of Tours’, in Kathleen Mitchell
and Ian Wood (eds), The World of Gregory of Tours (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 199–210, as well as Patricia
Cullum’s discussion of the practice of childhood oblation and clerical identity: Patricia H. Cullum, ‘Clergy,
Masculinity and Transgression in Late Medieval England’, in Hadley, Masculinity in Medieval Europe,
pp. 178–96, and Jacqueline Murray’s exploration of chastity and the concept of a third gender: Jacqueline
Murray, ‘One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?’, in Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (eds), Gender and
Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008),
pp. 34–51.

10. Jennifer D. Thibodeaux, ‘Introduction: Rethinking the Medieval Clergy and Masculinity’, in Jennifer D.
Thibodeaux (ed.), Negotiating Clerical Identities: Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 1–15, here p. 7.
11. Vern L. Bullough, ‘On Being Male in the Middle Ages’, in Lees, Medieval Masculinities, pp. 31–45, here
p. 34.
12. Andrew G. Miller, ‘Knights, Bishops and Deer Parks: Episcopal Identity, Emasculation and Clerical Space
in Medieval England’, in Thibodeaux (ed.), Negotiating Clerical Identities, pp. 204–37, here p. 206.
13. Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Thomas Aquinas’s Chastity Belt: Clerical Masculinity in Medieval Europe’, in Bitel
and Lifshitz, Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe, pp. 52–67.
14. Maureen Miller analyses how this fierce competition between clerics and laymen had a negative impact
on women by encouraging misogynist discourse: Maureen C. Miller, ‘Masculinity, Reform, and Clerical
Culture: Narratives of Episcopal Holiness in the Gregorian Era’, Church History 72 (2003), pp. 25–52.
15. Jacqueline Murray, ‘Masculinizing Religious Life: Sexual Prowess, the Battle for Chastity and Monastic
Identity’, in P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (eds), Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages
(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), pp. 24–42, here p. 27. See also Katherine Allen Smith, ‘Spiritual
Warriors in Citadels of Faith: Martial Rhetoric and Monastic Masculinity in the Long Twelfth Century’,
in Thibodeaux (ed.), Negotiating Clerical Identities, pp. 86–110; Kirsten A. Fenton, ‘Gendering the First
Crusade in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum’, in Cordelia Beattie and Kirsten Fenton
(eds), Intersections of Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011), pp. 125–39; Kirsten A. Fenton, Gender, Nation and Conquest in the Works of William of Malmesbury
(Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2008), esp. pp. 43–55.
16. Miller, ‘Knights, Bishops and Deer Parks’, pp. 222–6.
17. The National Archives Calendar of the Patent Rolls, 1307–1313 (Liechtenstein: Kraus reprint, 1971), p.
174. Hereafter called Cal. Pat. Rolls. Similarly, in 1250 another archbishop of Canterbury, Boniface of
Savoy – a combustive mixture of unpopular foreigner, king’s favourite and powerful churchman keen
to exercise visitation rights in London – ‘tore to pieces’ (dilaceravit) a precious cope belonging to the
sub prior in a chapel in the Priory of St Bartholomew: Matthew Paris, Matthaei Parisiensis, Monachi
Sancti Albani, Chronica Majora, ed. Henry Richards Luard, 7 vols (London: Longman, 1872–83), vol. 5,
pp. 121–2. Moreover, in 1435 the archdeacon of Bedford complained that Dean Macworth and a band of
men entered the choir of Lincoln Cathedral, dragged the chancellor out of his stall, ‘and tore his habit all to
pieces’. Henry Bradshaw, Christopher Wordsworth and Lincoln Cathedral, Statutes of Lincoln Cathedral,
3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897), vol. 2, pt. 2, p. clxxxviii, n. 1.
18. E.g. ‘Enquete faite par le chanter de Senlis et le bailli de Sens sur les injures et mauvais traitements dont
les clercs de l’abbe de Saint-Denis’, Bulletin Société archéologique de Sens 13 (1885), p. 176; Jacobi a
Voragine, Legenda Aurea: Vulgo Historia Lombardica Dicta, eds Johann Georg and Theodor Graesse,
3rd edn (Vratislaviae: G. Koebner, 1890), p. 474; Thomas Walsingham, Thomae Walsingham, Quondam
Monachi S. Albani, Historia Anglicana, ed. Henry T. Riley, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1863–64), vol. 1,
p. 460; Simeon of Durham, Symeonis Monachi Opera Omnia, ed. Thomas Arnold, 2 vols (Wiesbaden:
Kraus Reprint, 1965), vol. 1, p. 305; Roger Vaughan, The Life & Labours of S. Thomas of Aquin, 2 vols
(London: Longman, 1871–72), vol. 2, p. 425; Rosalind M. T. Hill, (ed.), The Rolls and Register of Bishop
Oliver Sutton, 1280–1299, 8 vols (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1948–1986), vol. 4, p. 82. Hereafter
called Reg. Sutton.
19. Andrea Denny-Brown, ‘Rips and Slits: The Torn Garment and the Medieval Self’, in Catherine Richard-
son (ed.), Clothing Culture, 1350–1650 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 223–39, here pp. 223–7; Ruth
Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 16–18 and index.
20. Burns, ‘Why Textiles Make a Difference’, pp. 2–6.
21. Robert E. Rodes, Ecclesiastical Administration in Medieval England: The Anglo-Saxons to the Reformation
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. 41.
22. Rodes, Ecclesiastical Administration in Medieval England, p. 41; Louis Trichet, La tonsure: vie et mort
d’une pratique ecclésiastique (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1990), pp. 53–68; P. H. Cullum, ‘Boy / Man into
Clerk / Priest: The Making of the Late Medieval Clergy’, in Nicola F. McDonald and W. M. Ormrod (eds),
Rites of Passage: Cultures of Transition in the Fourteenth Century (Rochester: Boydell Press, 2004), pp.
51–65, here pp. 56–9.
23. For instance, both the Franks and Anglo-Saxons used forcible tonsuring and sequestration in monastic
prisons as techniques for disposing of prominent adversaries: Simon Coates, ‘Scissors or Sword? The
Symbolism of a Medieval Haircut’, History Today 49 (1999), pp. 7–13, here p. 8; Joanna Story, Carolingian
Connections: Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Francia, c.750–870 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003),

p. 141. See also R. Bartlett, ‘Symbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages’, Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society, Sixth Series, 4 (1994), pp. 43–60. It was even possible to be forcibly tonsured in a
meritorious, corrective way: G. G. Coulton, From St Francis to Dante (London: Nutt, 1907), pp. 180–81.
See also the moral story in which a man, who found his wife with a priest, tonsured her: Jacques de Vitry,
The Exempla, ed. Thomas Crane (London: Nutt, 1890), p. 88, CCX.
24. M. Bennett, ‘Military Masculinity in England and Northern France c.1050–c.1225’, in Hadley, Masculinity
in Medieval Europe, pp. 71–99, here pp. 79–81.
25. Heller’s translation. Sarah-Grace Heller, Fashion in Medieval France (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007),
pp. 55–7; Bennett, ‘Military Masculinity in England and Northern France’, p. 80.
26. Coates’s translation. Coates, ‘Scissors or Sword?’, p. 10.
27. For instance, Stafford relates the story told by the monk William of Malmesbury of an English scout who
happens upon William of Normandy’s army and reported back that ‘almost everyone in William’s army
seemed to be priests, because their whole face, including both lips, were shaven’: Pauline Stafford, ‘The
Meanings of Hair in the Anglo-Norman World: Masculinity, Reform, and National Identity’, in Mathilde
van Dijk and Renée Nip (eds), Saints, Scholars, and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 153–71, esp. pp. 157–60, 163–8.
28. In the first half of the twelfth century Bernard of Clairvaux’s rule for the Knights Templar stated that they
ought to keep the hair of their head short while allowing for beards. Bennett, ‘Military Masculinity in
England and Northern France’, p. 80.
29. Robert Mills, ‘The Signification of the Tonsure’, in Cullum and Lewis, Holiness and Masculinity in the
Middle Ages, pp. 109–26, p. 119.
30. Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Sharing Wine, Women, and Song: Masculine Identity Formation in the Medieval
European Universities’, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (eds), Becoming Male in the Middle
Ages (New York: Garland Pub., 1997), pp. 187–202, here pp. 189–93. See also Ruth Mazo Karras, From
Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2003), pp. 67–108; Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (London: Constable, 1966), pp. 177–
213.
31. Rodes, Ecclesiastical Administration, pp. 41–2. Michelle Armstrong-Partida examines medieval Catalonia
and the antagonism caused by local churchmen using the shield of clerical privilege flagrantly to steal
from parishioners, carry weapons, engage in acts of violence or sexual misconduct in the parish and even
blackmail members of their flock by withholding the sacraments. Michelle Armstrong-Partida, ‘Conflict
in the Parish: Antagonistic Relations Between Clerics and Parishioners’, in Ronald J. Stansbury (ed.), A
Companion to Pastoral Care in the Late Middle Ages (1200–1500) (Boston: Brill, 2010), pp. 173–212.
32. Barlow’s translation. Frank Barlow, Thomas Becket (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp.
62–3. Furthermore, in the fourteenth-century anticlerical poem, ‘The Land of Cokaygne’, monks are
depicted as flying around like hawks, getting lift from ‘their sleeves and their hood’ before landing to
have sex with a maiden and drink their fill. Ann Haskell, (ed.) A Middle English Anthology (Garden City:
Anchor Books, 1969), p. 378, ll. 123–30.
33. Laura F. Hodges, Chaucer and Clothing: Clerical and Academic Costume in the General Prologue to
The Canterbury Tales (Rochester: D.S. Brewer, 2005), p. 24; Katherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law
in Italy, 1200–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 20; Joan Evans, Dress in Medieval France
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 76; Diane Owen Hughes, ‘Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in
Renaissance Italy’, in John Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 69–100, here p. 73; Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees
of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 1, Lateran IV,
Canon 16; Mary G. Houston, Medieval Costume in England and France (New York: Dover Publications,
1996), p. 155.
34. David Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, 4 vols (London: 1737), vol. 1, p. 692.
35. Rodes, Ecclesiastical Administration, p. 41.
36. Wilkins, Concilia, vol. 2, p. 4, pp. 59–60 and p. 703.
37. Wilkins, Concilia, vol. 2, pp. 59–60. Translation from Sussex Archaeological Society, Sussex Archaeolog-
ical Collections Relating to the History and Antiquities of the County (London: John Russell Smith, 1848),
vol. 1, pp. 183–4, n. 55. With regards to ‘dagged’ clothing and its association with medieval fools, see
note 88 below. Likewise, from the fourteenth century: ‘There ride up a priest and a monk with attendants.
Holy Mary, what dresses! The monk with bells on his horse’s bridle, his hood fastened with a great golden
pin, wrought at the head into a true-love knot, his hair growing so long as to hide his tonsure, his shoes
embroidered and cut lattice-wise. There was the priest with broad gold girdle, gown of green and red,
slashed after the newest mode, and a long sword and dagger, very truly militant. I marveled at the variety

and unction of the oaths they had at their service. The advantage of a theological training was very manifest
within.’ Robert A. Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics: A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion
(London: Gibbings, 1893), p. 154.
38. My emphasis. Cutts’s translation. Edward L. Cutts, Scenes & Characters of the Middle Ages (London:
Virtue, 1872), pp. 242–3. Similarly, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parson condemns laymen who, in ‘horrible dis-
ordinat scantnesse of clothynge’ wear ‘kutted slopes or haynselyns [cut coats or short jackets]’. Geoffrey
Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), Parson’s Tale,
pp. 300–01, ll. 420–24.
39. Sarah-Grace Heller, ‘Anxiety, Hierarchy, and Appearance in Thirteenth-Century Sumptuary Laws and the
Roman De La Rose’, French Historical Studies 27 (2004), pp. 311–48.
40. Heller’s translation. Heller, ‘Anxiety, Hierarchy, and Appearance’, p. 328, n. 48.
41. Dyan Elliott, ‘Dressing and Undressing the Clergy: Rites of Ordination and Degradation’, in Burns,
Medieval Fabrications, pp. 55–69, here p. 61.
42. Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 174–6; Maurice Keen, The Laws
of War in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), p. 173.
43. Elliott, ‘Dressing and Undressing the Clergy’, pp. 64–8. In late fourteenth-century Paris, two monks
accused of sorcery were defrocked, hands scrubbed and heads donned with paper hats before being
executed. Hunt Janin, Medieval Justice: Cases and Laws in France, England, and Germany, 500–1500
(Jefferson: McFarland, 2004), p. 119; Esther Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in late
Medieval France (New York: Brill, 1993), pp. 184–5, see also p. 198.
44. David Knowles, Thomas Becket (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), pp. 79–87.
45. For citations, see notes 1–3, above.
46. ‘contentio’. Charlton Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), p.
447. All Latin translations are from Lewis and Short unless otherwise specified.
47. Miller, ‘Masculinity, Reform, and Clerical Culture’, p. 28.
48. Not only does Gerald of Wales describe how the bishop of Worcester ‘boldly burst forth’ with a clever
explanation to cool a fuming king, but he uses the term elsewhere in his chronicle, e.g. to describe how
an archdeacon boldly fought off wolves. Gerald employs the word ‘valiantly; manfully’ (fortiter) in the
same sentence. Gerald of Wales, Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer et al., 7 vols (London: Longman, 1861), vol.
1, p. 168. Likewise, Gervase of Canterbury uses ‘audacter’ and ‘viriliter’ in a sentence concerning St
Thomas the Martyr. Gervase of Canterbury, Historical Works, vol. 1, p. 17. The two words could even be
paired directly by ecclesiastical authors, e.g. ‘tam audacter quam viriliter’. William Dugdale, Monasticon
Anglicanum, 6 vols (London: Longman, 1970), vol. 5, p. 379. In secular writing, too, the words were used
to complement one another: ‘scienter, audacter, viriliter, et veraciter’. James Gairdner, ed., The Paston
Letters, A. D. 1422–1509, 4 vols (London: Constable, 1904), vol. 3, p. 97.
49. ‘discissa’ and ‘dilacerate’. Gerald of Wales, Opera, vol. 7, p. 63. Mary Cheney recounts the bishop’s wry
explanation in her biography, concluding: ‘Outrageous words, but they had the desired effect; the king and
the bystanders laughed, and the archbishop was put to shame, for he was apparently a notorious miser’.
Mary G. Cheney, Roger, Bishop of Worcester, 1164–1179 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 2–3.
50. Gerald of Wales, Opera, vol. 7, p. 63. Gervase of Canterbury relates how the king ‘guffawed’ (cachinnos)
at the explanation. Gervase of Canterbury, Historical Works, vol. 1, p. 258. For the king’s anger and sense
of humour, see e.g. Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 48, 578.
51. Stevenson, Church Historians, vol. 5, pt. 1, p. 337; Haines, ‘Canterbury Versus York’, p. 82; John Mc-
Clintock, Clyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, 2 vols (New York: Harper
& Brothers, 1887), vol. 2, p. 910; George Bailey, ‘Painted Glass in Morley Church, Derbyshire’, Journal
of the Derbyshire Archaeological Society and Natural History 9 (1887), pp. 33–8, here pp. 35–6; Horace
Mann, The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, 18 vols (London: Kegan Paul, 1925–1932), vol.
10, p. 215.
52. The chroniclers Roger of Hoveden and Benedict of Peterborough describe the violence against Roger’s
capa with the verb frango, which means ‘to tear in pieces’. It is informative that both Roger and Benedict
employ the same noun and verb combination at another time to describe how, in 1191, a household knight
of the French king shredded Richard I’s (r.1189–1199) capa during an impromptu jousting match while in
Sicily on crusade and that the king was greatly offended as a result. Hoveden, Chronica, vol. 3, pp. 93–4;
Peterborough, Chronicle, vol. 2, pp. 155–6. Accordingly, Latham includes this example under category 1
of capa (see note 53, below). Ralph de Diceto described the violence at Westminster with the verb scindo,
which means ‘to lacerate’ or ‘to tear off one’s traveling cloak’. Furthermore, this verb is used commonly
in the Latin Vulgate Bible to describe people rending their own or another person’s clothing for reasons

of grief or anger (e.g. Genesis 37:30, Leviticus 10:6, 1 Esdras 9:3, Joel 2:13, Mark 14:63, Acts of the
Apostles 16:22). But, instead of using the noun capa, Ralph employed vestium, or ‘clothing’. This is an
important distinction because in medieval England pairing vestes with scisse specified clothing that had
been ornamentally ‘slashed’. R. E. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word List from British and Irish Sources
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 425, 510. In classical Latin combining vestes and scisse meant
‘to tear open’ one’s clothing. Likewise, William of Newburgh modified capa with conscindo, which means
‘to tear or rend to pieces’. In the Latin Vulgate, the verb is used at least once to describe rent clothing (2
Kings 1:2). In late twelfth-century England conscissio meant ‘cutting’. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin
Word List, p. 108. Moreover, when Gervase of Canterbury returns to the violence at Westminster, he omitted
the noun capa or vestium altogether and instead combined scindo with the verb caedo, which means ‘to
cut to pieces’.
53. R. E. Latham separates the noun capa into seven categories in the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British
Sources: (1) cape worn by laymen, (2) rain-cloak, (3) cape worn by clergy, (4) academic gown, (5) cope, rich
ceremonial vestment, ecclesiastical, worn by a dignitary, (6) headwear, or nightcap and (7) cover, or cap.
Latham includes the example of capa mutilation from the Council of Westminster in 1176 under category
5 – despite the fact that there is no modifier – i.e. context sufficed. R. E. Latham, Dictionary of Medieval
Latin from British Sources, 14 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1981), vol. 2, pp. 272–3. See also
Susan M. Carroll-Clark, ‘Bad Habits: Clothing and Textile References in the Register of Eudes Rigaud,
Archbishop of Rouen’, in Robin Netherton (ed.), Medieval Clothing and Textiles, 6 vols (Woodbridge, UK:
Boydell Press, 2005–10), vol. 1, pp. 81–103, here pp. 83–6; Wharton B. Marriott, Vestiarium Christianum:
The Origin and Gradual Development of the Dress of Holy Ministry in the Church (London: Rivingtons,
1868), pp. 167, 223–5.
54. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word List, p. 134. Also, ‘indumenta lintea in oblongos pannulos discindere’
translates as ‘to cut linen clothes into strips’. William Smith, A Copious and Critical English-Latin
Dictionary (New York: American Book Company, 1871), p. 806. Roman, late-antique, medieval and early
modern writers paired the verb discindo with clothing (vestes). For example, Apuleius (c.180) employs
the word combination ‘vestem discindere’ in his widely read Metamorphoses, which St Augustine called
The Golden Ass. Apuleius, The Golden Ass: Being the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, ed. William
Adlington (London: William Heinemann, 1915), p. 88. Moreover, Boethius (c.480–525) uses the phrase
‘vestem . . . disciderunt’ in a famous passage from his highly influential The Consolation of Philosophy.
Boethius, The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. Hugh Stuart (London: William
Heinemann, 1918), p. 138. Similarly, ‘veste discissus’ appears in an epilogue to the late-antique comedy
Querolus. Franz Buecheler, ed. Petronii Saturae et Liber Priapeorum (Berlin: Weidmann, 1895), pp. 239–
40. The association between discindo and clothing continued into the Middle Ages and beyond. For instance,
‘vestes . . . discisse’ is found in the records of a twelfth-century priory. Rev. James Wilson, The Register of
the Priory of St Bees (Durham: Andrews, 1915), p. 518, while Gerhohus Reicherspergensis (1132–1169)
employs a similar phrase – ‘mantus (cloak) discissus est’ – in his investigation of the antichrist. Martin
Bouquet, Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, 24 vols (Paris: Académie des inscriptions
et belles-lettres, 1806–1904), vol. 14, p. 404. Finally, it is important to note that the connection between
discindo and ‘dagged’ or fashionable clothing is implicitly made in a church council from 1571 – in
the section ‘Concerning the Life and Honesty of Clerics’ – in which statute two succinctly states: ‘Sit
habitus clericorum (sicut jure cavetur) honestus, et simplex: non discissus, aut acu pictus, aut militari
more affectatus: mundus tamen’. Johannes Schannat and Josef Hartzheim, Concilia Germaniae, 11 vols
(Cologne: Krakamp, 1759–90), vol. 8, p. 12.
55. Denny-Brown, ‘Rips and Slits’, pp. 223–7.
56. Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, p. 579; Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word List, pp. 146–7.
57. Gerald of Wales, Opera, vol. 8, p. 304; Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, pp. 542,
574. The king may also have found the incident droll because he himself was not a showy dresser in public
appearances; Henry II famously poked fun at Thomas Becket for wearing a flashy robe and then forcefully
pulled it off his back – while they were astride horses, no less – and gave it to a beggar on the street. Martin
Aurell, The Plantagenet Empire, 1154–1224, tr. David Crouch (Harlow: Longman, 2007), p. 132.
58. E.g. in the near contemporary romance the Roman d’Eneas, Lavine’s mother tries to persuade Lavine that
her lover Eneas prefers the company of boys to that of women. When Eneas leaves Lavine behind to join
his men on military campaign, the doubts planted by her mother only grow; Lavine laments how Eneas
‘loves none but male whores . . . He has enough boys with him, and loves the worst of them better than
me. He makes their clothes ripped . . . Many of them he has in his service, and their breeches are lowered:
thus they earn their wages’. My emphasis. Kuefler’s translation. Mathew Kuefler, ‘Male Friendship and the
Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in Sharon Farmer and Carol Pasternack (eds), Gender

and Difference in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 145–81, here
p. 152. See also Christopher Baswell, ‘Men in the Roman d’Eneas: The Construction of Empire’, in Lees,
Medieval Masculinities, pp. 149–68.
59. John of Salisbury, The Letters of John of Salisbury, eds W. J. Millor and Christopher N. L. Brooke, 2 vols
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), vol. 2, no. 307; Barlow, Thomas Becket, pp. 33–4.
60. According to Andrea Denny-Brown, fashionable ‘slits and dagges were situated within the greater trope
of the feminine body’s penetrability, a tradition that itself combines concepts of feminine sexual openness
– the vagina as an opening or a tear – and concepts of masculine sexual violence – the phallus-as-knife’.
Denny-Brown, ‘Rips and Slits’, p. 236.
61. Kuefler, ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy’, p. 152; John Boswell, Christianity, Social
Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 44, 243–4.
62. The specific language suggests another possibility: the partisans of Canterbury – calling upon biblical
images of ripping one’s clothes during mourning rituals – rent Roger of York’s vestments to force him to
lament Thomas Becket’s death in a public, penitential manner. Henry, archdeacon of Huntingdon (c.1080–
1160), employs such terminology when discussing the ruinous effects of King Stephen’s reign (1135–1154)
on the English church and the unwillingness of certain bishops to defend her: ‘they ought, indeed, to have
opposed these carnal men with the sword of the Spirit, which destroys the flesh . . . against the sons
of Belial, who plundered the church, and, tearing in pieces [diripientes] the garment of the Lord, left it
rent [laceram] and torn [discissam] and scattered everywhere’. Richard Clarke Sewell, Gesta Stephani:
regis Anglorum et ducis Normannorum (London: Sumptibus Societatis, 1846), p. 98. Forester’s translation.
Henry of Huntingdon, The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon, ed. Thomas Forester (London: Henry Bohn,
1853), pp. 401–02.
63. Haines, ‘Canterbury Versus York’, pp. 78–83.
64. ‘distrahebant’. Jacques de Vitry, ‘Vita Mariae Oigniacensis’, in Acta Sanctorum, Daniel Papebroeck ed.
(Antverpiae-Bruxellis-Tongerloe), 1643 ff. Junius IV (1707), pp. 636–66, Junius V (1867), pp. 547–72,
Liber II, Caput VI, Cap. III, pp. 650–52, here, Liber II, Caput VI, #60; Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplementum
ad vitam Mariae Oigniacensis, Junius IV (1707), pp. 666–76, Junius V (1867), pp. 572–81; Jacques de
Vitry, Margot H. King, The Life of Marie d’Oignies (Toronto: Peregrina, 1990), pp. 89–90 and n. 117.
65. Laura M. Midgley, ‘Edmund Earl of Cornwall and His Place in History’ (unpublished master’s thesis,
University of Manchester, 1930); Miller, ‘Knights, Bishops and Deer Parks’, pp. 205, 211–14, 223–4.
66. Robinson’s translation. The Register of Walter Bronescombe: Bishop of Exeter, 1258–1280, ed. O. F.
Robinson, 3 vols (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1995–2003), vol. 2, pp. 76–77, #1058, pp. 137–38,
#1429, vol. 3, pp. 46–48, #1429. Hereafter called Reg. Bronescombe.
67. The church of Thame was built sometime between 1235 and 1241. The violent dispute over the prebend
of Thame in the diocese of Lincoln took place primarily between 1292 and 1294 and appears throughout
several volumes of Bishop Oliver Sutton of Lincoln’s Register (Hill, Reg. Sutton). See Miller, ‘Knights,
Bishops and Deer Parks’, pp. 205–06, 214–20, 224–5, esp. n. 51.
68. Hill, Reg. Sutton, vol. 4, pp. 117–18.
69. ‘ . . . sumitatibus capitorum hujusmodi capellanorum et clericorum quasi usque ad medium enormiter
amputatis et manicis collobiorum eorundem capellanorum et clericorum detrunccatis turpiter et decisis . . . ’.
Hill, Reg. Sutton, vol. 4, pp. 117–18.
70. See note 53, above. The ritual of excommunication performed by the bishop, or by a trusted churchman,
was certainly dramatic; see the description found in Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and
Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 64.
71. In England, c.1291, ‘amputo bursam’ meant ‘to cut a purse’. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word List,
p. 19.
72. ‘ad modum rasilis corone’. Robinson, Reg. Bronescombe, vol. 2, pp. 137–8, #1429.
73. Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Dale and Eve Salisbury (eds), Four Romances of England: King Horn,
Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999),
p. 331.
74. Herzman, Four Romances of England, pp. 250–51, ll. 1864–74. Similarly, in the Roman van Walewein,
c.1230–1260, near the romance’s conclusion, Sir Walewein (Gawain) must rescue the damsel in distress,
Ysabele, from the Black Knight’s clutches. Walewein cries out: ‘It is futile for you to declare your love!
/ I shall this day ordain you a priest / And tonsure your pate with my sword!’ Johnson’s translation.
David Johnson and Geert H. M. Claassens (eds), Roman Van Walewein (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000),
pp. 436–9, ll. 9758–89. I would like to thank Richard Barber for his advice on this source.
75. Herzman, Four Romances of England, p. 6; Stephen D. White, ‘The Politics of Anger’, in Barbara
Rosenwein (ed.), Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1998), pp. 127–52, here p. 139. For another medieval example, see Jan M. Ziolkowski,
‘Ysengrim, the Wolf-Monk with a Name’, in Jan M. Ziolkowski, Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast
Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 198–234, here pp. 222–5.
76. Steven F. Kruger, ‘Becoming Christian, Becoming Male?’, in Cohen and Wheeler, Becoming Male in the
Middle Ages, pp. 21–41, here p. 21–2; Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms,
1350–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 131–2; Louise Mirrer, ‘Representing the
“Other” Men: Muslims, Jews, and Masculine Ideals in Medieval Castilian Epic and Ballad’, in Lees,
Medieval Masculinities, pp. 169–86, here pp. 169–74. See also Steven F. Kruger, ‘The Bodies of Jews
in the Late Middle Ages’, in James Dean and Christian Zacher (eds), The Idea of Medieval Literature
(London: Associated University Presses, 1992), pp. 301–23.
77. Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, General Prologue, p. 27, ll. 233–4; Hodges, Chaucer and Clothing, p.
143, n. 33.
78. Haskell, A Middle English Anthology, p. 378, ll. 167–72. While the sexual connotation of hood seems clear
in this case, the phrase can also be understood as ‘to set his cap’, or to cheat or make a fool out of someone.
Frederick Fairholt, Costume in England: A History of Dress (London: Chapman and Hall, 1846), p. 549;
Benson, The Riverside Chaucer, Miller’s Prologue, p. 67, l. 3143 and note.
79. Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature,
3 vols (London: Athlone Press, 1994), vol. 2, p. 677. An interesting comparison is found in renaissance
Italy. In 1494 in Florence the populo had just witnessed the public rejection of Piero de Medici by other
powerful Florentines (they shut the door to the palace in his face with insulting words): ‘On witnessing
this scene the populace began to riot, and, by way of proving their contempt for Piero, drove him off with
scornful cries and gestures, wagging the tips of their hoods at him, while the street boys assailed him with
hisses and volleys of stones’. My emphasis. Pasquale Villari, Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola, tr.
Linda Villari, 2 vols (London: T.F. Unwin, 1918), vol. 1, p. 220.
80. Mills, ‘Signification of the Tonsure’, p. 115. In the same way, the tonsured tip of a cleric’s head could also
signify lust and even sexual virility. Mills calls our attention to Chaucer’s ‘Shipman’s Tale’, in which the
monk John borrows money from a merchant and then promises the merchant’s wife gold in exchange for
sex; John ‘significantly’ arrives at the cuckold’s house ‘with crowne and berd al fresh and new yshave’.
Mills, ‘Signification of the Tonsure’, pp. 116–17.
81. Translation from Wakefield. Walter L. Wakefield, ‘Heretics and Inquisitors: The Case of Le Mas-Saintes-
Puelles’, The Catholic Historical Review 69 (1983), pp. 209–26, here pp. 216–17; Malcolm D. Lambert,
The Cathars (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), p. 152.
82. Heath Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100–1300 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 173 (<http://libro.uca.edu/dillard/daughters.htm>).
83. Translation from Headlam. Thorold Rogers, Oxford City Documents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891),
pp. 245–68; Cecil Headlam, The Story of Oxford (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1907), pp. 242–7; W. A.
Pantin, Oxford Life in Oxford Archives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 99–104.
84. David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 210.
85. These performative acts included but were not limited to: boxing another man’s ears, tweaking his nose,
forcing him to kneel in submission, spitting in his face, knocking off his hat, yanking on his hood or cloak or
pulling his beard; such gestures sought to degrade and humiliate their victims in the greatest way possible.
Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), pp. 140–51.
86. Some witnesses, testifying at the Court of Arches concerning the dispute at Thame, stated that the St
Johns’s violent attack and occupation of the church ‘is well known in the neighborhood of Thame’. Other
witnesses, testifying about earlier attacks against the church and episcopal liberties by the St Johns, stated
that such actions were ‘notorious around Thame’; it was also ‘public and notorious in and around Thame’
that the king’s clerk, Edward St John, had ‘commanded, ratified, and continued’ violent acts against
the episcopal household. Reginald ‘le Bolacer’, unlettered, witnessed a subsequent excommunication
ceremony performed by the bishop of Lincoln himself in response to the ‘tonsuring’ attacks against his
clerics. Another witness, Elias de Wycombe, also unlettered, attested that he did not know whom the
bishop had excommunicated, except that the speech had begun with the name or surname ‘John’. Norma
Adams and Charles Donahue (eds), Courts of Canterbury, c.1200–1301 (London: Selden Society, 1981),
pp. 581–98. Indeed, ‘John Attenok’ is the first name in the list of those excommunicated in the mandate
recorded in Bishop Sutton’s register. Hill, Reg. Sutton, vol. 4, pp. 150–52.
87. Not only was this prohibition widely evaded by great churchmen in medieval England, but clerics were
also guilty of poaching on occasion. Miller, ‘Knights, Bishops and Deer Parks,’ pp. 209–11.

88. Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art, vol. 1, pp. 16–18 and index.
89. When the knights attacked the church of Thame and later disrupted the sentences of excommunication
stemming from this attack, they ‘foully lopped off and dagged the long sleeves’ of the clerics’ vestments.
The bishop of Lincoln’s account of the sleeve tearing is corroborated by testimony given at the Court of
Canterbury when a household cleric of the bishop named Hugh de ‘Strafford’, lettered, testified that he had
been ‘stripped to the arms and beaten with swords’ in the church of Thame during the attack. Adams and
Donahue, Courts of Canterbury, pp. 596, 600.
90. Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1307–1313, p. 41.
91. Penelope Byrde, The Male Image: Men’s Fashion in Britain, 1300–1970 (London: B.T. Batsford, 1979),
pp. 193–4; Jean de Venette, The Chronicle of Jean De Venette, ed. Richard Newhall and tr. Jean Birdsall
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), pp. 136, 304.
92. Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1381–1385, p. 427. For more on this interesting subject, see Evelyn May Albright, ‘Eating
a Citation’, Modern Language Notes 30 (1915), pp. 201–06.


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Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233

To ‘Frock’ a Cleric: The Gendered

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This article explores the gendered implications of mutilating a cleric’s ceremonial

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The repeated conciliar condemnations of sartorial transgressions by clerics sug-

As Sarah-Grace Heller has demonstrated, medieval anxiety over maintaining these

‘Tearing’ a cleric’s capa: cleric versus cleric

discindo, however, it does not specifically connote a stylish ‘slashing’ or ‘dagging’ of

‘Tearing’ a cleric’s capa: knight versus cleric

It is worthwhile to examine the episcopal scribes’ descriptions of how the knights

contemporary literature. The menacing humour of knights forcibly shearing a cleric’s

Symbolic tonsuring: mocking and re frocking

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