Excommunication in

Thirteenth-Century England Felicity Hill

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Excommunication in Thirteenth-Century
England
Excommunication in Thirteenth-
Century England
Communities, Politics, and Publicity

F E L I C I TY H I L L
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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 Acknowledgements

The research for this book was made possible initially by doctoral
funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (via the
University of East Anglia), then by fourth-year funding from the
Scouloudi Foundation via the Institute of Historical Research. I was
able to begin the process of turning the PhD thesis into this book as
a Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. I am
enormously grateful to supervisors, colleagues, and friends from my
undergraduate degree at Manchester, my MA at University College
London, my PhD at UEA, my year at the Institute of Historical
Research, my postdoc in Cambridge, and finally now to my
colleagues at St Andrews. I have benefitted throughout from
encouragement and generosity without which I could never have
produced this book. John Sabapathy has provided invaluable advice
throughout the last decade, at each stage of this book’s
development. He generously read almost the entire manuscript; his
comments have improved the text in a great many places. I am
likewise grateful to John Hudson for reading a full draft and for his
comments. Ian Forrest, who has revealed that he was one of the
reviewers for OUP, provided me both with much appreciated
encouragement and with helpful suggestions for improvements. The
recommendations of the anonymous reviewers were also invaluable.
John Arnold kindly read some chapter drafts. I have benefitted a
great deal from John’s kindness and counsel in Cambridge and since.
I would further like to thank my PhD supervisor Nicholas Vincent,
who of course read the text in its earlier thesis form, for giving me
free rein as a doctoral student, and for his help and guidance since.
The process of turning the thesis into a book was greatly facilitated
by the suggestions of my examiners, Sarah Hamilton and Tom
Licence. Sarah has been generous with her time on numerous
occasions. Ben Savill honoured the writing pact. David d’Avray, who
piqued my interest in excommunication back in 2011, has been
consistently kind and supportive throughout my studies and beyond.
He helped a great deal with both appendices, providing editorial
assistance with the second.
I am grateful to a great many more people with whom I had
discussions, from whom I received advice, and who helped make the
process of researching and writing a PhD then a book enjoyable.
These include Sophie Ambler, Rob Bartlett, David Carpenter, Stephen
Church, Peter Clarke, Emily Corran, Caitlin Ellis, Will Eves, Caroline
Goodson, Julia King, Donald Logan, Stephen Mossman, Simon
Parsons, Danica Summerlin, Alice Taylor, Emily Ward, Sarah White,
the fellows of Corpus Christi College, and all my colleagues in the
Department of Medieval History at St Andrews. Emily, Lesley, and
Sam, as well as Caitlin, helped me to keep writing (about social
isolation) through lockdowns. In addition to various university
libraries, the IHR, Warburg Institute, and British library provided
indispensable resources. The estate of the late Jeffrey Denton kindly
gave me many of his books, which have been much appreciated and
used. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family, in
particular Gemma, my parents, and my grandmother, who sadly
never got to see the book completed.

December 2021
 Contents

Glossary of Automatic Excommunications referred to in the text

Introduction
Misuse, overuse, inefficacy?
The significance of excommunication
The purpose of excommunication
Ab homine sentences and latae sententiae
Layout of the book
Quantitative data

PART I. INDIVIDUALS

1. The Spiritual Effects of Excommunication: Instilling Fear

Excommunication as medicine and legal sanction
Excommunication in miracle tales
Anger and legal procedure
The rite of excommunication
Words of excommunication
‘Nisi’ clauses
Conclusions

2. Belief, Fear, and Conscience

Dying excommunicate
Unforced absolution
Wariness of excommunication
Divine retribution
Living as an excommunicate
 Conclusions

PART II. COMMUNITIES

3. Exclusion from the Community of the Faithful

Exclusion and contagion
Mitigations
Loss of legal rights
Exclusion from church
Pretext for mistreatment
Implications of a lack of evidence
Prelude to physical force
Conclusions

4. Apathy, Rejection, and Divided Loyalties

Problems with voluntary ostracism
Punishment of communicators
Unjust excommunications
Mouldable sentences: Latae sententiae
Royal interference
Conclusions

PART III. PUBLICITY

5. Publicity, Reputation, and Scandal

Audience
Public discords
Fulmination
Reputation, defamation, and denunciations
Absolution and penance
Excommunication and public unrest
Violence against clergy using excommunication
Conclusions
6. Violence, Excommunication, and Dispute Settlement: Thame,
1292–94

7. Ecclesiastical Broadcasting in the Thirteenth Century: The

Origins of the Great Curse
A new practice
Offences condemned
Publication provisions
Why publish latae sententiae?
Implementation
Reception
Conclusions

Conclusion

Appendix I: Ipso facto Excommunications Promulgated via

Thirteenth-Century English Ecclesiastical Legislation, with
Provisions for Their Regular Pronouncement
Appendix II: William of Pagula’s Oculus sacerdotis (c.1320),
Dextera Pars

Bibliography
Index
 Glossary of Automatic
Excommunications referred to in the
text

Clericis laicos (1296) Excommunicates clergy of any sort

who pay or promise to pay laymen taxes of any kind without
papal permission. Rulers of any condition, rank, or status
who impose or receive such payments, or who seize
ecclesiastical possessions, or those kept in church buildings,
or who order such offences or in any way support them are
likewise excommunicated.

Contempnunt exequi domini (1222, revised 1279)

[1222] Excommunicates all those who by reason of profit,
hatred, or otherwise maliciously, refuse to execute the
mandate of the lord king enacted against excommunicates
scorning the keys of the church. [1279] Adds those who
impede their capture or unjustly procure their liberation,
against the decree of ecclesiastical discipline.

Crimen imponunt alicui (1222) Excommunicates all those

who, by reason of hatred, profit, or favour, or any other
reason, maliciously impute a crime to someone, when they
were not infamous amongst good and serious men, so that
he must undergo purgation or is otherwise wronged.

Magna Carta sentence (1253) Excommunicates all those

who henceforth knowingly and maliciously deprive churches
of their liberties or who violate, infringe, diminish, or change
 the ancient approved customs of the realm, especially the
liberties and free customs which are contained in Magna
Carta and the Charter of the Forest, by any method or trick,
openly or secretly, by deed, word, or counsel, in any article;
likewise, all those who decree statutes against them, or who
obey statutes thus decreed. Also all those who presume to
disturb the peace of the king and the kingdom.

Quicumque abstrahunt violenter (1268, abridged 1279)

Excommunicates those who violently extract criminals who
have fled to a church, cemetery, or cloister for sanctuary, and
those who forbid them to be provided with necessary
provisions, and those who violently remove, or cause to be
removed, goods belonging to others deposited in those
places, or cause this to be done, or in any way support such
things.

Quicumque de domibus (1268, abridged 1279)

Excommunicates anyone who presumes to consume, remove,
or handle anything from houses, manors, granges or other
such places pertaining to archbishops, bishops, or other
ecclesiastical persons, without the will or permission of the
lords or their custodians. Satisfaction must be made before
absolution can be granted.

Qui malitiose ecclesias (1222, revised 1279 and 1281)

[1222] Excommunicates all those who maliciously presume to
deprive churches of their rights or through malice and
against justice strive to infringe or disturb their liberties.
[1281] This includes three types of men: those who deprive
churches of their rights; those who infringe ecclesiastical
liberties; and and those who disturb them. Understood to
include not only general liberties of the universal church, but
also particular liberties, both temporal and spiritual.
Especially includes those who use writs of prohibition in
cases that pertain to the church. Other infringements of
 ecclesiastical liberties are not approved; the
excommunication simply intends particularly to chastise the
above offenders with due rigour. Also excommunicates all
those who impede episcopal or archiepiscopal process with
false exemptions and those who avoid discipline.

Qui pacem et tranquillitatem (1222, revised 1279)

Excommunicates all those who presume injuriously to disturb
the peace and tranquillity of the lord king and realm, and
who strive unjustly to detain the rights of the lord king.
[1279] Understood to include not only those who rouse the
horror of wars, but equally all public thieves and plunderers
and anyone who presumptuously attacks the justice of the
realm.

Si quis suadente (1139) Anathematizes anyone who, at the

devil’s instigation, lays violent hands on a cleric or monk.
Absolution is reserved to the papacy.
 Introduction

Early in 1299, Adam le Warner sought absolution from

excommunication, the medieval church’s most severe sanction. His
reconciliation with the church was fairly swift, for Adam had been
excommunicated only a few weeks. 1 That of his contemporary,
Juliana Box, was less so. She made peace with the church a
fortnight before Adam, by which time she had been excommunicate
for around ten months. Moreover, her remorse was short lived, for
the following summer she was once again living under a sentence of
excommunication. 2 These two individuals are unusual because their
different attitudes and the events that prompted their absolutions
are relatively clear. Adam had fallen deathly ill and was afraid to die
excommunicate; Juliana had been captured and imprisoned by
secular authorities as a result of her sentence. It was not
excommunication itself that induced Juliana’s reconciliation;
absolution was her only way out of prison.
In the vast majority of cases, it is impossible to know why
excommunicates acted as they did. Why did John, Richard, and
Walter Irreby turn themselves in, seeking absolution from a sentence
that no churchman apparently knew they had incurred? 3 Why did
Sir Richard de Scholand die under his sentence rather than take
pains, as Adam le Warner had done, to avoid that fate? What made
John de Gravene and his wife Gunnora, who had been
excommunicated for ‘a long time’, finally decide to seek absolution in
1303? 4 These individuals all lived in England at the turn of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and they all reacted to
excommunication in different ways. To their number could be added
many more names of people who lived with excommunication for a
short while or for many years, who were excommunicated several
times or only once. Offences for which an excommunication was
imposed are not always known, and reasons for absolution—beyond
the excommunicate having a ‘change of heart’—are almost never
explained in the extant sources.
The intention of this book is to discuss and analyze such
experiences. What were the consequences for an excommunicate’s
soul, their social life, their reputation? In what ways was it damaging
and why were these injuries often not enough to prompt a quick
return to the bosom of the church? How did the use of
excommunication affect those who were expected to enforce
sentences, and society more broadly? This is, therefore, a qualitative
study that analyzes excommunication not only by looking at the
intentions of churchmen who used it and the reactions of those
sentenced, but also by considering excommunication’s effects upon
the wider population.
Excommunication was used often in the Middle Ages. A political
struggle without at least the threat of excommunication during its
course was a rare thing indeed. 5 It was also used routinely at lower
levels, for a multitude of offences. Excommunication is thus perhaps
overfamiliar to many medieval historians—ubiquitous to the point
that its consequences are not always given due consideration.
Moreover, there are many examples of high-profile figures treating
their sentences with contempt (in the thirteenth century, most
famously Emperor Frederick II), so it has become received wisdom
that excommunication was overused and thus ineffective.
Excommunication was far from an irrelevance, however. Its effects
were extensive, even when it did not achieve the desired outcome.
Excommunication has understandably attracted a lot of attention
from historians, producing a number of important and invaluable
works. In particular, Elisabeth Vodola’s 1986 monograph
Excommunication in the Middle Ages and various works by R. H.
Helmholz (from 1982 onwards) have illuminated the legal effects of
the sanction. 6 The present study rests upon their shoulders, for
they have made it possible to go beyond canon law, its
commentaries, and its implementation. An understanding of canon
law is fundamental to any study of an ecclesiastical sanction, but
there are limitations to an approach that focuses upon prescriptive
sources and legal procedures. 7 Popes, bishops, and canonists—and
indeed excommunicates—are only part of the story. A number of
other historians have illuminated specific aspects of
excommunication. Donald Logan’s 1968 study of the role of the
secular arm in arresting recalcitrant excommunicates in England
elucidates this aspect of the sanction (and provides an excellent
overview generally). Christian Jaser has recently (in 2013) produced
an in-depth exploration of the formulae of ritual excommunication. 8
The focus of Véronique Beaulande’s 2006 study of excommunication
in late medieval France is closer to that of this book. As in her Le
malheur d’être exclu?, excommunication is here approached from a
social and cultural perspective. Canon law is considered but is not
the focus. 9 Nonetheless, she places greater emphasis than here
upon the crimes for which excommunication was applied, and
focuses upon how it worked as a penalty rather than how it was
received. A plethora of excellent articles illuminate specific uses of
excommunication, but the most cited works on excommunication
tend either to focus upon one particular genre of evidence or to
cover several centuries and places. 10 In one sense, therefore, work
on excommunication has been surprisingly narrow. 11
This book thus provides a social, political, and cultural history of
excommunication, addressing how it was used in practice and how it
was received and perceived both by excommunicates and by the
wider lay community. I will not provide an in-depth exploration of
legal theory, procedures, or commentaries, or provide quantitative
data, but rather seek to illuminate the human experience of
excommunication. The book does this by focusing on one kingdom
in one century, and by bringing into dialogue sources that are not
usually considered together. The printed material available for
thirteenth-century England is extensive and rich; the analysis thus
relies upon edited texts, though it is occasionally supplemented with
manuscript material. Episcopal and papal registers, chronicles,
miracula and exempla, English ecclesiastical legislation, canon law,
liturgy, court records, and secular governmental records are here all
discussed alongside one another. They reveal a full picture of the
actions and attitudes that characterize excommunication at a
national and local level in this period.
The wealth of evidence is one reason to focus upon thirteenth-
century England. It enables comparison between these different
types of evidence to approach excommunication holistically,
providing a social as well as a religious history. Papal registers
survive continuously from the pontificate of Innocent III (1198-
1216), a watershed pontificate in many ways, not least regarding the
use of ecclesiastical sanctions. Episcopal registers containing
memoranda were kept from the middle of the century in England,
revealing attitudes and actions at the more local level. Governmental
records, which similarly proliferate from the late twelfth century,
provide another angle from which to approach the sanction. English
ecclesiastical legislation experienced a golden age during the
thirteenth century. 12 The thirteenth century is, moreover, often
considered a turning point when it comes to the ‘political’ use of
ecclesiastical sanctions. Innocent III is viewed as an innovator here,
excommunicating Philip Augustus of France, the Holy Roman
Emperor Otto IV, and King John of England. 13 This was then the
high point of the ‘papal monarchy’, before the Great Western Schism
irreparably altered papal authority. Canon law had expanded and
developed in the twelfth century; further councils and decretals in
the thirteenth century clarified and regulated excommunication.
Excommunication was also central to several of the thirteenth-
century English causes célèbres, notably Magna Carta and the mid-
century baronial rebellion. A somewhat limited geographical and
temporal scope is necessary to provide a detailed study of practice
rather than an overview of theory. Study of excommunication in
England in this period should provide a valuable point for
comparison, for the realm was free from (institutionally recognized)
heresy. Excommunication and heresy were deeply intertwined, and
there is much to be gained by studying them together. At the same
time, however, the ‘everyday’ nature of excommunication can be
occluded by these links; it is instructive to consider how Christians
responded to the sanction when heresy was unlikely to be in the
minds of either excommunicates or excommunicators. 14
The proliferation of documents no doubt reflects real changes in
society and practice. 15 Greater documentation and more systematic
administration altered aspects of how excommunications played out,
not least concerning publicity, which is a crucial theme in this book.
Nonetheless, the new or newly-surviving documents may also lead
to false assumptions about developments or indeed progress. To use
Sarah Hamilton’s phrase, there may be ‘a trick of the evidential light’
here. 16 Vodola, focusing on excommunication as a judicial sanction,
notes that court procedures were ‘divorced from their theological
origins’; her emphasis on law courts comes at the expense of extra-
judicial aspects of excommunication. 17 Amongst the many excellent
articles written by R. H. Helmholz, which have done so much to
clarify excommunication in the Middle Ages, one of his influential
arguments cannot be sustained. In 1994–5, Helmholz argued that in
a struggle between ‘judicial sanction’ and ‘powerful curse’, by the
end of the twelfth century the former had won a victory, albeit one
‘not immediate or unqualified’. 18 Excommunication was no longer
wielded as a weapon, but ‘had largely been “tamed” by acceptance
of the emerging canon law’s requirements’ that sought to restrict
how the sanction was used. 19 This ‘judicialization’ or ‘canonical leap
forward’, he argued, meant that by the thirteenth century
excommunication as a legal sanction had replaced excommunication
as curse. Judicial process and the ability to appeal to the papal court
had made excommunication more measured and procedural, so that
‘sudden and ex parte excommunications, issued without formal
citation or judicial process’ largely died out. 20
Helmholz undoubtedly overemphasized these developments. Most
importantly, judicial procedures were expected far earlier than he
allows, as Sarah Hamilton and Elaine Treharne have shown. Such
processes had long been a key part of excommunication; any
change was less drastic than Helmholz implies. 21 As Christian Jaser
has noted, rejecting Helmholz’s misrepresentation of earlier practice,
part of the problem lies in the narrative sources that Helmholz used.
Jaser observes that he did not look carefully enough at earlier
practice to draw such a bold line. Moreover, exempla and narrative
accounts look much the same in the later Middle Ages as the
‘dramatic accounts’ noted by Helmholz in the twelfth century. 22
Though Jaser acknowledges a turning point c.1200, he argues that
the changes were slow and far from absolute. He also critiques the
reliance of Alexander Murray—who likewise drew a (less absolute)
line here—on theoretical sources, namely theology. Jaser instead
argues that codification and systematization, rather than substantial
change, was the significant development. Moreover, maledictions
and solemn rituals continued to be used, albeit with somewhat
gentler curses. 23 Helmholz provided various caveats to his core
argument and acknowledged that certain abusive practices
continued. Nonetheless, the misleading impression left by his article,
and Vodola’s seminal monograph, is that by the thirteenth century
the sanction had become little more than a matter of procedure. As
many examples throughout the following chapters show, there
remained plenty of scope for dramatic sentences and for
excommunication to be used for personal ends. Ritual
excommunication, as Genevieve Steele Edwards and Jaser have
shown, continued to play a part. 24 Rules and restrictions did not
alter excommunication to the point that it became merely a dry legal
sanction. The undoubtedly significant developments in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries relating to legal developments, as well as
the proliferation of valuable legal documents that accompanied these
changes, have perhaps caused a neglect of social history in
thirteenth-century England. It is a time characterized by increased
systematization and judiciousness, but one that is fascinating from a
cultural perspective too.

Misuse, Overuse, Inefficacy?

Studies of excommunication have frequently—almost routinely—
reached the conclusion that the sanction was overused so that it
became ineffective. When Rosalind Hill asserted in 1957 that
excommunication ‘was imposed too freely so its impressiveness
diminished’, she made a crucial point. 25 The observation that it was
used commonly and not always respected thus remains important,
for it is necessary to dispel any sense that in this ‘age of faith’
excommunication must always have been taken very seriously. The
popular perception is often that excommunication must have been
treated with great reverence. By contrast, certain academics have
rather too enthusiastically embraced the idea that excommunication
was overused and therefore a damp squib. Hill’s comment implying
excommunication’s feebleness has been absorbed as the standard
view of excommunication in thirteenth-century England by those
who do not work on it. In 1982, Helmholz pointed out that historians
usually envisage a time in the past when the sanction ‘worked’, and
that the move from effective to ineffective through overuse always
mysteriously occurred in precisely the period under study. 26 His
sensible conclusion that ‘something is evidently wrong with a
method of analysis which produces such results’ has been too little
heeded. The by-now meaningless aphorism ‘ineffective through
overuse’ continues to be repeated, ad nauseam, in a way that risks
dismissing the effects of excommunication entirely. Ironically, its own
overuse means its usefulness to historical analysis has long since
expired. 27
There are many reasons why the maxim is reductive. Helmholz
was right to question the concept of a ‘golden age’ of
excommunication, as was Paul Dresch to similarly question the
assumption that outlawry lost key powers that it had possessed at
some hypothetical earlier time. 28 When, precisely, might this time
have been? Helmholz questions the idea by citing works that place
the ‘breakdown in respect for the sanction’ in the thirteenth,
fourteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 29 The
idea that excommunication was overused or misused (concepts that
are frequently conflated), with consequent diminishing of respect for
it, is extremely widespread. Crucially, comments to that effect were
made by contemporaries, who often made extreme statements such
as that almost everyone in the realm had been sentenced at some
stage (Abbo of Fleury, tenth century) or that half of all Christians
were excommunicated (Marini Sanuti, fourteenth century). 30 It has
been pointed out that Augustine worried about overuse undermining
the sanction. 31 In the Merovingian period, excommunication was
called ‘antiquated’; the common opinion was that the sanction had
lost its effect through excessive and unreasonable use. 32 There
were similar complaints under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. 33
The late eleventh and early twelfth centuries equally generated
criticisms of indiscriminate use of the sanction. 34 William of
Malmesbury complained that excommunication, frequently used,
failed to achieve much in twelfth-century England. 35 Gerald of
Wales condemned his contemporaries’ abuses. 36 French bishops in
the thirteenth century worried about the numbers of
excommunicates and how little people cared about their sentences.
37
In England, at the same time, bishops feared there were more
excommunicates than anywhere in the world. 38 The papal Council
of Vienne (1311–12) complained of increasing apathy as the penalty
was imposed too often. 39 The archbishop of Armagh complained
that excommunication was futile in the late fourteenth century. 40
Heretics and orthodox alike criticized use of the sanction in the late
Middle Ages. 41 Excommunication came in for particular vitriol during
the Reformation. 42 Yet Elizabethan reformers too complained of
trivial usage leading to ineffectiveness. 43 Accusations that excessive
use damaged excommunication’s efficacy are indeed not unique to
studies of the Christian ban. Precisely the same point has been made
about the Jewish herem in late medieval northern Europe,
Renaissance Italy, early modern Germany, and Poland-Lithuania,
while a ‘high number’ of excommunications has been observed in
early modern Amsterdam and Hamburg. 44 The only studies
concerned with spiritual sanctions that appear to buck this trend are
those on the Calvinists. Here historians are happy to state that
excommunication was not used a great deal, albeit often citing a
reaction to Catholic overuse as one cause for this restraint. 45 There
are undoubtedly a plethora of examples not here cited.
Historians have, therefore, merely been following the comments
and complaints of contemporaries. The first problem with both
‘overuse’ and related ‘abuse’ declarations is the simple human
tendency to grumble about things going downhill, implying a better
past. 46 The complaints should not be taken at face value. 47 Further,
as Frederik Keygnaert states, respect for excommunication is far less
likely to be recorded. 48 The second issue is the implicit value
judgments that surround use of ecclesiastical sanctions more
generally. Medieval clergy worried about overuse because they did
not want their most powerful weapon to be devalued, but also
because of the ties that excommunication had to cursing. Overuse
complaints are so prevalent that the thought that spiritual sanctions
will always be deemed overused, however frequently they are
employed, is unavoidable. As a spiritual sanction, excommunication
endangered souls; irresponsible usage was untenable. That was, of
course, at the root of the complaints of the Protestant Reformers.
Their criticisms continue to unduly influence perceptions of the
sanction. The ‘innate immorality’ of excommunication as a whole, as
Genevieve Edwards phrased it, still hangs over accusations of abuse.
49 The nineteenth-century historian H. C. Lea typifies the

condemnatory attitude. Though his study of excommunication

includes a great deal of valuable primary evidence (which clearly
shows the continuity of contemporaries’ worries about the sanction
losing its power), it is peppered with judgmental asides. The very
existence of a sanction that threatened eternal damnation ‘is an
exhibition of the worst and darkest side of human nature’. His final
assessment lamented the lack of Christian charity, deploring the
oppression, greed, abuse, and evil. 50 Catholic reformers shared
some of this rhetoric: when the papacy cancelled the yearly general
excommunication ceremony in 1770, the reason given was ‘now is
the time of kindness, not of anathemas’. 51 Protestant contempt and
Catholic embarrassment, ever since the early modern period, have
combined to imply that excommunication was never a justifiable
means of coercion. Thus while abuse is often alleged as a cause for
criticism, ‘correct’ usage becomes an illusory concept if the
sanction’s very existence is deemed antithetical to Christian morals.
52 Elsewhere (not least in informal conversations I have had with

academics) there is perhaps some snobbishness, a sense that

medieval clergymen were foolish. Did they not realise that they were
devaluing their sanction? They did, of course, which is why concern
was so often expressed in the Middle Ages.
It is clear that overuse as a concept bears little relation to actual
numbers. The amount that excommunication was used cannot have
been constant, yet the same conclusion is reached regardless of time
and place, or indeed religion. 53 Overuse assertions also imply that
there was such a thing as the correct frequency with which to
pronounce excommunications. This is a nonsense. Just as Helmholz
rejected any imagined golden age when excommunication was
effective, so too can we reject a ‘goldilocks’ hypothesis that it would
have worked if only it had been used just the right amount.
Certainly, it seems that use of excommunication did increase during
the later Middle Ages. Alexander Murray is right that there are too
many examples from the later period, even accounting for increased
source material, to deny it. He consequently rejects the suggestion
that contempt for excommunication remained steady; it surely
increased. 54 Perhaps he is right, but there can be no doubt that
simplistic claims that overuse and misuse devalued excommunication
stultify analysis of its role in society and the effects that it did have.
Excommunication’s impact was widespread and significant. It is
worth mentioning that if it had been used less it would have affected
far fewer people. Its prevalence makes it more, not less, worthy of
study. In addition, clergymen evidently did see its value, so the
modern tendency to discount its usefulness is a little puzzling. For all
their complaints, contemporaries did not dismiss it. Privileges sought
to be free from ecclesiastical sanctions, complaints about their
injurious nature and contemporary observers’ interest in sentences
pronounced all further indicate that excommunication was far from
worthless.
It must be stressed that studies of the sanction generally provide
nuanced analyses that acknowledge the prevalence of the received
wisdom about efficacy, endorsing it to an extent but also showing its
limitations. Beaulande, for instance, admits that by the end of the
Middle Ages the sanction was used very frequently. Yet she finishes
her book by emphasizing excommunication’s importance. 55 Brian
Pavlac has revealed both ineffective and effective uses of the
sanction. While he argues for overuse, he equally stresses that it
was often a successful tool and a useful weapon. 56 Rob Meens
points out that the fact that excommunication did not have the
envisioned results does not mean that it had no results at all. 57
Richard Barton has recently observed the ‘ubiquity’ of
excommunication in thirteenth-century Le Mans, but his analysis by
no means suggests that it was ineffective. Instead, he carefully
considers its consequences and how it functioned as a ‘tool of
lordship’. 58 Such balanced and careful analysis of how and to what
extent abuses limited efficacy, however, needs to filter through to
medieval historians more generally. At worst, those not focused on
excommunication take the ‘overuse so ineffective’ maxim as licence
to dismiss the sanction as insignificant. Excommunication should be
carefully considered in each case’s proper context, where its effects
could be various and important. Sometimes its effects will have been
negligible, but this must not be assumed. The exhausted phrase
must be retired, or at the very least end its reign as the only thing
that certain historians (think they) know about excommunication.

The Significance of Excommunication

Efficacy is central to any study of excommunication. However, while
assessing whether excommunication achieved precisely what
churchmen wished is an obvious starting point for study,
effectiveness should be approached from a broad perspective. 59 The
question of efficacy is complicated, just as would be any attempt to
answer whether the modern use of prisons, for instance, is effective.
60
There are a multitude of consequences, both positive and
negative. Here the focus will be upon practice, looking at the
sanction from the outside as well as from the perspective of those
who used it. Paul Töbelmann has perceptively argued that answering
‘Did it work?’ need not depend on the understandings of those who
were involved in a process. 61
A broader perspective illuminates consequences that were not
intended, not least how misguided uses affected respect for
ecclesiastical authorities. If excommunication achieved the opposite
of its intended consequences, this requires proper analysis. 62
Analyzing misuse, rather than emphasizing overuse, is especially
central to addressing this question, and it is dealt with at various
points in the following chapters. 63 Looking at practice also, however,
reveals that churchmen used excommunication for purposes that
were not discussed in canon law. In particular, excommunication was
valuable for its public nature, which could be especially useful in
political contexts. A sentence’s impact was not limited to whether an
individual sought immediate reconciliation with the church.
It is thus necessary to move study of excommunication away
from individuals. Excommunication did not simply affect an
excommunicate’s relationship with the church. How excommunicates
responded to their sanctions is important, but it is just as important
to consider the sanction from an institutional perspective. 64 How
everybody else reacted was just as crucial and affected relationships
between clergy and between clergy and laity. 65 Much more than an
individual’s soul was at stake. A focus on ‘spiritual terrors’
marginalizes the equally important social aspect of
excommunication; if ‘external’ pressure forced an absolution, this
was the sanction working, for it was always dependent upon
communal enforcement. Conversely, if a sentence failed to coerce a
sinner, it was because their compatriots did not enforce it, as much
as because the individual was not afraid. 66
Specific uses of and reactions to excommunication reveal a great
deal about attitudes and society. A key argument of the book,
advanced in Part III, is that excommunication’s public nature
requires emphasis. Part of excommunication’s importance is that it
involved a great deal of communication. Its impact on society was
thus profound, affecting individuals’ reputations of course, but also
communicating political events and much more down the social
strata of medieval society. As David d’Avray has shown in a different
way, mass communication did not begin in the early modern period.
67
This social and religious study of excommunication in thirteenth-
century England intends to provide a fresh discussion of many cross-
cutting themes that will be of interest to those who study a host of
other topics, periods, and areas. Excommunication is an important
subject; the study of it offers new perspectives on medieval piety
and beliefs, sin and penance, government and strategies of social
coercion, communities and solidarity, cursing, slander, and mass
communication.

The Purpose of Excommunication

The point of excommunication was ostensibly to force an offender to
make amends. It dealt primarily with public offences and scandals,
which had to be corrected in public (rather than in confession, for
example) so that those who set bad examples were not seen to go
unpunished. However, excommunication is complicated because it
sought to induce reconciliation in various ways. It provoked fear of
hell, it cut off social contact, it prompted shame, and it removed
legal rights. 68 It was ‘caught somewhere between canon law and
liturgy’. 69 ‘The purposes of the sanction were too complex’ even for
canonists to have imagined that it would immediately bring
excommunicates to obedience. 70 The following chapters will show
that there were also secondary motives, for instance to defame
individuals or to spread a certain political narrative. Social, political,
legal, and spiritual effects were all inextricably linked. If its ‘legal
meaning’ won, there were ‘always loose ends, ambiguities and
contradictions’. 71 Part of the complexity of excommunication is that
it was simultaneously medicine and the church’s ‘spiritual sword’. It
was both a weapon and a treatment. 72
Excommunication’s centrality to pastoral care is easily forgotten.
It requires emphasis here also because it is rarely in evidence in
specific cases against individuals. Excommunication had always been
central to the pastoral responsibility for souls, yet it is hardly what
springs to mind when historians think of the cure of souls (cura
animarum). 73 Vodola may have stated that the sanction’s ordinary
function was to enforce legal procedures and that it had only an
‘artificial’ link to sin, but the fact that it came under the umbrella of
the sacrament of penance should not be forgotten. 74 Correcting
sinners was a key duty for those with cure of souls. Certainly, legal
procedures intended to curb misuse meant that excommunication’s
use was restricted, so that it was not strictly a matter for the
penitential forum (except for sentences incurred automatically) but
required legal processes. The theory that excommunication was
imposed not for sin but for contumacy—refusing to be corrected by
ecclesiastical authorities—further broke the link. Yet the pastoral
need is clear. Clergy who did not fulfil their duty to use ecclesiastical
censures were to be punished. 75 Bishops expressed fear that they
would be accused of negligence for failing to correct subjects. 76 If
fear of God did not recall someone from evil, clergy had a duty to
chastise them. 77 There was great danger in leaving one crime
unpunished, for this might lead to more. 78 Moreover, it was hardly
an incentive to be obedient if those who were contemptuous were
not reprimanded. 79 The emphasis placed upon excommunication in
pastoral manuals in the later Middle Ages is also striking, and further
demonstrates the centrality of the spiritual sanction to the cura
animarum. 80
 The medicinal aspect of excommunication, the fact that it was not
supposed to be a punishment, must be borne in mind. The idea was
in practice certainly contravened, as will become clear in Chapter 1
and beyond, but the fact that the goal was redemption and not
punishment was central to its function. 81 It had important
implications for how and to what effect it could be employed.
Excommunication’s medicinal purpose meant that it was not
intended to be permanent, nor was it meant to be difficult to secure
absolution. This impermanence had a multitude of consequences. It
weakened the sanction in one sense, but also made it useful in
different ways. 82

Ab Homine Sentences and Latae Sententiae

Excommunication was divided into two types: major and minor. This
book deals predominantly with the former, which (in theory) entailed
complete exclusion from Christian society. Minor excommunication
was most commonly incurred by associating with someone
sentenced with major excommunication. It suspended someone
from reception of the sacraments and entry to churches but did not
separate them from all intercourse with their fellow Christians. Minor
excommunication was associated with interdict, which usually
suspended sacraments in a geographical area. 83 Major
excommunication had far more dire consequences, which are
explored thematically in the chapters below.
Sentences of major excommunication could be pronounced
against individuals by individuals. These sentences were ab homine.
Only higher clergy could excommunicate. A cleric must have
jurisdiction, so that a bishop, abbot, or dean could not
excommunicate someone unless he or she was under his care. 84
The pope alone could excommunicate anybody. 85 Women were
never permitted to excommunicate. 86 The question of who could
excommunicate was complicated by the fact that judges in
ecclesiastical cases could have jurisdiction even if they were not in
other circumstances able to excommunicate. Their power came not
from holy orders but from their position as judge, so that even a
layman might be able to excommunicate. More usually, the bishop’s
official or his archdeacons were delegated the authority to
pronounce sentences. A parish priest was not permitted to
excommunicate a person by name, nor to announce that someone
was excommunicated, without the permission of his superior. 87 He
could, however, pronounce minor excommunications. 88 Parish
priests may, of course, have sometimes broken this rule. 89
Absolution was supposed to be granted by the cleric who had
imposed a sentence, or his successor or superior, though any parish
priest could absolve if the excommunicate was in articulo mortis. 90
Appeals could only be lodged on the grounds that procedure had not
been followed—for instance if insufficient warning had been given or
the excommunicator did not have the right to sentence the individual
—and not on the grounds that the sentence was unjust. Since
excommunicates did not have legal rights they could not lodge
appeals, so those who wished to appeal were provisionally (ad
cautelam) absolved; they would revert to their excommunicate state
after a year, or if the appeal failed. 91
Latae sententiae were distinct from ab homine sentences in that
they were pronounced against ‘whoever’ committed a certain
offence. 92 The excommunicator was not an individual, as in ab
homine sentences, but the law; these sentences were thus de jure, a
jure, or ipso jure. Although the nature of these excommunications
has led to assumptions that lata means ‘broad’ or ‘concealed’, both
of which fit well with the niceties of these sentences, in fact lata
comes from fero, ferre, tuli, latum. 93 Used with the noun sententia,
ferre is the verb most often employed in relation to
excommunication (used far more than excommunicare by itself), and
in lata sententia the perfect passive participle of this standard verb is
used to distinguish it from sentences that should be pronounced
(ferendae sententiae, also known as dandae sententiae). It is
difficult to settle upon the best way to translate lata sententia, for
the verb has a plethora of meanings; thus it is best kept in the Latin
here rather than translated. Lata sententia literally means ‘sentence
that had been given’ (data sententia was occasionally used as a
synonym), but perhaps declared, established, decreed, issued, or
pronounced give a better sense. The crucial thing is that the
sentence had already been pronounced. A person could commit an
offence for which they were liable to be excommunicated—this
would be a ferenda sententia—or they could commit an offence for
which they were excommunicated, the moment they did it—a lata
sententia. The automatic nature of these sentences meant that
people were said ‘to incur’ a sentence (‘incurrere sententiam’) or ‘to
fall into’ it (‘incidere in sententiam’). These verbs emphasize that the
excommunicate was excommunicated as soon as they committed
the offence—ipso facto—without need for intervention from any
authority to confirm the sentence. A sentence could subsequently be
publicized, and in that sense confirmed by an authority, but the law
remained the legal excommunicator. Throughout this book, latae
sententiae will also be referred to as ipso facto and de jure
sentences—both medieval synonyms—and as automatic sentences.
Although there was initially some concern voiced by canonists and
decretalists about automatic excommunications and their absence of
warnings—Gratian was a notable dissenter—they quickly became an
accepted part of canon law. 94 They have been widely recognized
and discussed, but latae sententiae have sometimes been presented
as an oddity or as a special case, separate from the day-to-day
function of excommunication. Their value and importance have been
overlooked. Vodola, in particular, places automatic excommunication
in opposition to the sanction’s ‘ordinary’ function: ‘excommunication
latae sententiae was a very specialized application of
excommunication’. 95 This book will demonstrate, however, how
fundamental such sentences were to quotidian life in high and later
medieval England. Many individuals incurred these sentences;
offences that incurred them were constantly advertised to the laity.
Understanding how they worked—often a complicated task—is
important. 96 The absence of specific warning before an
excommunication took place, the fact that someone could be
excommunicated without anyone knowing about it, and many more
peculiarities related to this type of sentence, had important
implications. For instance, Thomas Becket suffered criticism from his
contemporaries for excommunicating without warning, notably at
Vézelay in 1166. Yet if he had acted in the same way a century later,
he would have been able to argue, quite reasonably, that he had
done nothing wrong. 97 The possessions and rights of his church of
Canterbury had been violated. 98 These rights were, from 1222,
protected by the ipso facto sentence Qui malitiose ecclesias. Becket
could have claimed that he was not himself excommunicating
anyone: the malefactors against whom he acted had been
excommunicated by the law—Becket himself was merely denouncing
them. In 1282, for instance, John Pecham declared that he had not
excommunicated anyone (the king had complained he had), but he
had pronounced a general sentence against those who infringed his
rights. Various people had then been denounced as falling into this
sentence: ‘Sir, take notice that denunciation does not
excommunicate anyone unless he is rightly excommunicated’. If they
were under the ban, they had been excommunicated a jure not ab
homine. The archbishop had only publicized the fact. 99 The
subtleties of these sentences, and the opportunities they provided
for clergy to use excommunication legally and yet without legal
process, are of great importance. The consequences, uses, and
value of understudied ipso facto sentences are under constant
scrutiny throughout the following chapters.
The best known and most frequently invoked lata sententia
protected ecclesiastical persons from attack, and is known by its
incipit, Si quis suadente. Though heresy had long been assumed to
incur automatic separation from the church, Si quis suadente was
the first official lata sententia, promulgated by the second Lateran
Council in 1139. Latae sententiae could be pronounced by the
papacy, but were also advertised in local legislation, applying to
particular ecclesiastical provinces or dioceses. There are a number of
important automatic sentences in English legislation. Because some
of them are frequently referred to in the following chapters, I have
assigned them titles based on their incipits, like Si quis suadente.
This was not medieval usage, but it seems preferable to referring to
a sentence as ‘1222 Council of Oxford, c. 1’ and so on, not least
because the sentences were adapted and expanded in later councils.
100 The Glossary provides these names and summaries of the

contents of these (select) sentences, while Appendix I includes many

more English ipso facto sentences. Archbishop Stephen Langton’s
1222 Provincial Council at Oxford was the most significant council
here. Not only did Langton provide a list of latae sententiae, the
remarkable aspect was its placement. He began his council with a
striking statement of ecclesiastical liberties in the form of automatic
sentences, which he ordered to be regularly publicized. 101 Top of his
‘most wanted’ list were those who infringed the liberties of churches.
102 The other significant councils for latae sententiae were the papal

legate Ottobuono’s 1268 council and two provincial councils held by

John Pecham in 1279 and 1281. The excommunications pronounced
at these councils were frequently invoked (to varying degrees).
 Layout of the Book
The chapters focus on what happened after a person had been
sentenced with excommunication and are arranged thematically. The
book is split into three sections, on individuals, communities, and
publicity. Chapter 1, using largely normative sources (unlike the
remaining chapters), discusses the implications of excommunication
for an individual’s soul, arguing that churchmen encouraged the
belief that hell was the ultimate destination for those who failed to
seek absolution. Ritual excommunication remained an important
aspect of the sanction. Chapter 2 attempts to answer the difficult
questions of whether this belief was accepted and how far fear of
damnation affected the actions of excommunicates. The ever-
present possibility of absolution, however, dampened the effect of
fear of hell. Chapter 3 begins Part II by setting out the requirements
for communal shunning of excommunicates, then analyses occasions
when shunning was performed. It finishes by considering extreme
consequences of excommunication, such as deposition of rulers and
political crusades. Chapter 4 then deals with the apparent fact that
communities did not routinely ostracize excommunicates. This
chapter makes comparisons with discussions of ostracism in other
contexts, as well as using thirteenth-century English material, to
explore the complex issues surrounding communal enforcement.
Part III develops the book’s central argument, which emphasizes
excommunication’s public nature. Chapter 5 discusses the impact it
had upon individuals’ reputations and its ability to provoke shame
and indignation, as well as the wider implications of broadcasting
both general and nominatim sentences so extensively. Chapter 6 is a
case study of a particularly well-documented and venomous dispute
over an ecclesiastical benefice in Thame. It looks at this case in
detail in order to illuminate the various mechanisms discussed in
earlier chapters. While a number of significant aspects of
excommunication are apparent here, the value of excommunication
for its publicity—as a motive in its own right—is especially clear.
Chapter 7 builds upon the role of excommunication as a means of
mass communication, discussing how the church used latae
sententiae to publicize which crimes it took most seriously. These
sentences were a form of ecclesiastical public broadcasting. Pastoral
care and canon law necessitated that they be explained to the
people in the vernacular, with important implications for the
knowledge of lay society and its perception of the church, as well as
for church-state relations.

Quantitative Data
The book’s focus on the aftereffects of excommunication makes it
necessary to provide some basic background information here. The
conflicts focused upon throughout the book are both national and
local, and the nature of excommunication—expecting communal
enforcement and well-publicized—means that the wider population is
part of the story even in ‘high political’ cases. The data provided
here are intended to give a flavour (rather than a complete picture)
of how and why excommunication was imposed, before the
remainder of the book focuses on its aftereffects. Although some of
my extrapolations are deliberately speculative, that speculation
provides a useful potential scale for giving a sense of the
phenomenon which this book analyzes. The following has been
mined solely from one of the fullest and best edited episcopal
registers. The memoranda of Oliver Sutton, bishop of Lincoln 1280-
99, survive in his register (edited by Rosalind Hill) from May 1290 to
April 1299.

Numbers of Excommunicates
I have already shown my doubts about putting too much emphasis
upon numbers of excommunicates, without claiming that how many
excommunicates there were is irrelevant. It is not, but unfortunately
the extant sources for thirteenth-century England provide no clear
answers. Most excommunications happened at administrative levels
for which records do not survive. It is also difficult to determine
whether numbers increased or decreased, because the better
records at the end of the century—episcopal registers—do not
survive from the earlier period. The following, using information
concerning the diocese of Lincoln (the biggest English diocese,
comprising c.2000 parishes), is intended to provide no more than a
rough idea. How great or small a proportion this is of the total
number of excommunicates in the years discussed is impossible to
say, but it is perhaps better than nothing. 103 Since the rest of the
book provides qualitative analysis, this provides a quantitative and
general empirical introduction.
In the period between May 1290 to April 1299, we can be sure
that a little under 200 individuals were excommunicated by name in
Oliver Sutton’s diocese. 104 The majority of these known
excommunicates appear in writs for capture (the process by which
the secular arm arrested and imprisoned those who had been
excommunicated for at least forty days): the bishop ordered 132
people to be arrested (these include names found on original writs
surviving in the National Archives). 105 A further five people
complained about or appealed their sentences, and one man had his
annulled. The remainder were noted as excommunicates in other
contexts, usually orders to publicize their sentences. Two orders to
release men imprisoned by the secular arm show that they too must
have been excommunicated by name.
It is remarkably rare that we are able to follow an individual
through the various statuses. Three men are mentioned in the
register as both excommunicated and absolved, though several of
the imprisoned excommunicates were to be released (or not
captured if they had not yet been attached) so were presumably
absolved. Only one man, Nicholas Miller, occurs as an
excommunicate in the register, and as someone to be arrested by
the secular arm, and as an absolvent. 106
In addition to excommunicates who we can be fairly sure were
sentenced by name, a further sixty individuals sought or received
absolution from excommunication (or, if clergy, asked for a
dispensation). Some of these had probably been judicially sentenced
by name, but others undoubtedly sought absolution from an
automatic sentence into which they had fallen. That fact was not
necessarily known to others. 107 We have, therefore, c.250 known
excommunicates in the Lincoln diocese during the last decade of the
thirteenth century. Yet some of the sixty absolvents were never
publicly denounced, and without official confirmation their sentences
would not have stood up in court. Though their souls were
imperilled, there would have been no obligation that others shun
them, nor would they be barred from legal acts and so on. Thus
these people, though excommunicated no less than those who had
been sentenced by name, are certainly a different category of
excommunicate.
That many more people were excommunicated than the surviving
sources reveal is implied by the fact that only three of the people
requested to be captured appear in the register as excommunicates
before any writ ordering their arrest was issued. Someone had to be
excommunicated by name, and to have remained in this state for at
least forty days, before the king’s help could be requested. Most
excommunicates did not suffer arrest by the secular arm, so the
bishop had no reason to note their excommunications. Consequently,
we do not know about them. The original excommunicator, noted in
the writs, was typically an archdeacon or his official. It was only
when it was deemed necessary to coerce the excommunicate by his
or her body that the bishop became involved, since only he could
issue the request. Occasions when the bishop intervened hint at
excommunicates unknown to us. For instance, the bishop stepped in
to suspend the dean of Gartree’s excommunication of the servants of
Sir William of Swineshead’s chaplain. 108 Presumably these servants
had been named as excommunicates, but because Oliver Sutton did
not here list them we cannot know how many there were. The point
is that the bishop only mentioned the case at all because he wished
their sentences to be relaxed while matters were settled. It is
possible that the bishop was notified about all excommunicates in
his diocese and that he and his administrators (as in other dioceses)
did not bother to add lists of excommunicates to the register.
Certainly lists exist elsewhere and were possibly kept on loose
sheets. 109 On the other hand there would have been no practical
reason to inform the bishop in most cases, so the bishop himself
may not have been aware of each excommunicate in his diocese. His
involvement was necessary in some cases: recalcitrant
excommunicates, appeals and accusations of misconduct, disputes
that escalated, runaway excommunicates, and cases that required
publication beyond a local area are the sorts of instances where
names make it into the records available to us.
While excommunicates that the bishop of Lincoln ordered to be
captured by the secular arm in this decade must be the tip of the
iceberg of total excommunicates, it seems likely that we do at least
have an almost complete list of these excommunicates. Writs for
capture were routinely kept by royal government. Since some
original writs were lost, it is more important to note that only two
individuals appear in original writs in the archives but not in Sutton’s
register. 110 It is clear, therefore, that the writs were typically
enregistered and that this is the more reliable source. Indeed, one of
the extant writs not in the register was revoked; this revocation was
enrolled by Sutton’s registrar and probably explains the absence of
the writ itself. As already noted, very few of these people appear
elsewhere in the register. This perhaps indicates that clergy did not
resort to the secular arm for most excommunicates, presumably (but
not necessarily) because they sought absolution before it seemed
necessary to coerce them physically. If we arbitrarily guessed that
around a tenth of excommunicates were ordered to be captured, we
would have c.1,300 excommunicates in the diocese of Lincoln during
the last decade of the thirteenth century. The diocese had c.2000
parishes, so this would amount to less than one excommunicate per
parish in these ten years (though because people were often
sentenced for the same crime together, if these figures are at all
correct—which I doubt—the spread would not be even). 111 Even a
surely excessively low estimation that the secular authorities were
called upon in only one hundredth of excommunication cases would
mean that there was less than one excommunicate per parish per
year. Writs for capture, unlike the register, allow some comparison to
be made with an earlier period. Across a similar extent of time forty
years earlier, no significant change in the number of
excommunicates/excommunicates-to-be-captured is indicated. The
extant writs 1240 to 1258 number seventy, containing c.167 names,
about seventeen of which are female. 112 Writs for the earlier part of
this period are irregular, indicating that survival may be patchy.
When they become more constant, there is far less of a difference to
the end of the century, especially considering (as noted above) that
the rate of attrition is higher in the archives than the register (which
did not yet exist mid-century). 113 From August 1246 to March 1256
there are c.120 names in fifty-two writs. August 1248 to August
1258 reveals 101 names in forty-six writs.
Though some of these numbers are seriously speculative, it is
worth noting that neither extreme quite corresponds with the
assumption that excommunication was overused so ineffective. If a
full ten per cent or more of excommunicates required coercion by
secular power, this would mean that the total number of
excommunicates was quite small. Rosalind Hill, who edited this
register, concluded that ‘the people who were excommunicated
formed a very small proportion of the inhabitants of the diocese’. 114
If, on the other hand, the number of excommunicates was far
greater, and only one per cent of them was ordered to be arrested,
then the sanction was more common, but must have been more
effective in its own right than is often assumed because the secular
arm was so rarely needed. One thing can be stated with certainty:
witnessing excommunication denunciations that publicized either
names of excommunicates or latae sententiae would have been a
common experience.
 Who and for How Long?
Twenty-nine of the 189 people known to have been judicially
sentenced in the last decade of Sutton’s episcopate were women
(fifteen in writs for capture) and two of the absolvents. Three of
these excommunicates and one of the absolvents were nuns.
Laymen and clergy at all levels alike were sentenced. A whole host
of rectors was excommunicated in 1296 for failing to pay the clerical
subsidy to the crown. Various monks and canons and many clergy,
several of them masters, were also subject to the ban. The
remainder were apparently laymen (there is one indecipherable
name on a damaged writ). The excommunicates appear to have
been from a range of social classes. Around ten men are designated
‘dominus’. Lady Isabella de Mortimer was apparently the only
noblewoman. Most of the remaining men are given some sort of
surname, often along with a place of origin. As ever, it is impossible
to say whether those with professional surnames worked in that
occupation. Vintner, Miller, Warenner, Apothecary, Butcher, Reeve,
and Fuller all appear. However, sometimes professions were
specifically noted, for instance, John of Cowley, tailor, Peter de
Marue, cook, Roger Sewall of Aylesbury, baker, and Walter, under-
bailiff of Oxford. Matilda of Wycombe was a burgess of Oxford. Many
were merely designated ‘of’ a place and sometimes ‘wife/widow of’
or son of a father (or, in the case of Hugh son of Emma of Stamford,
a mother). 115
Though the vast majority of people noted in the context of
excommunication are mentioned only once, a few individuals’
situations can be known in a little more detail. John of St Lys
persuaded the bishop to order John’s rector to stop molesting him,
unless the latter could prove that John indeed deserved the
excommunication pronounced against him for stealing the goods of
a late William of Houghton. The following year, however, John
admitted to embezzling goods worth 6d. from a will (whose is not
noted) and was absolved: the rector’s suspicions were probably well
founded. 116 John of Heyford had been absolved for fornicating with
a nun, Christina, but was re-excommunicated when he refused to
carry out the penance enjoined upon him (three beatings around the
marketplace). 117 Though there is no information about their
offences, there appear to have been some slippery characters.
Matilda of Wycombe was included in writs for capture no fewer than
four times between 1295 and 1299. It seems most likely that she
was absolved each time but reoffended. 118 Emma of Bradley was to
be captured as an excommunicate, appealed (presumably
unsuccessfully) and was later absolved, but was then re-
excommunicated and contumacious in October 1297. In May 1299
another captio was issued, this time claiming she had been obdurate
for over a year. 119
The case of Eustace de Bingham, in particular, introduces some of
the difficulties inherent in the church’s use of excommunication.
Eustace was excommunicated for failing to pay the executors of a
will 36s. belonging to the deceased man. Initially Eustace moved
parishes, allegedly to avoid the bishop’s coercion. He then pleaded
inability to pay and was absolved on the condition that he make
satisfaction when he was able. Having taken an oath to this effect,
when he failed to repay the money for two years he was again
excommunicated now for perjury as well as for his original offence.
Again he was absolved, then for the third time excommunicated
when once again he failed to meet the conditions. All this is relayed
in a letter of September 1292. In 1298 the situation was just the
same: a payment plan ‘amicably’ arranged so that instalments be
paid to the executors in 1296 and 1297 had not helped, and Eustace
was, for at least the fourth time, under a sentence of
excommunication. Judging by his behaviour, Eustace was keen to
avoid the consequences of excommunication, first trying to run
away, and subsequently seeking absolution. The churchmen who
had sentenced him had little choice but to absolve him. If he was
unable to pay, it would be cruel to leave him thus imperilled.
Moreover, Eustace might have argued fairly that he would never be
able to earn any money if everyone was forbidden to have contact
with him. An oath from Eustace was sufficient to allow him to be
absolved on the condition he did pay. Excommunication was, then,
an insufficient threat to force Eustace to repay the money, yet it was
sufficiently arduous that he did not want to live as an
excommunicate. The problem was that a sanction intended to be
medicinal and coercive rather than punitive could not be fairly
wielded against someone who promised he was trying to find the
money he owed. One wonders whether Eustace ever repaid the
patient executors. 120

Why?
Those excommunicated by name committed various offences. There
are far too many potential causes of excommunication to list here.
Peter Clarke groups causes of interdict into thirty-six categories in
his monograph. Aside from the first of these, which relates to
supporting major excommunicates (this would result in minor
excommunication), his categories could apply also to
excommunication. 121 Beaulande emphasizes violence and marriage
cases as the principal causes of excommunication in late medieval
France. 122 The variety will emerge as individual cases are discussed
in the chapters below, though the broad category of infringing
ecclesiastical liberties features heavily. In Sutton’s register, failing to
execute wills properly was the most common cause for sentences,
with five certain examples. Donald Logan noted that this was the
most common identifiable offence in writs for capture (until the
Reformation). 123 Apostasy of nuns, monks, and canons, if taken
together, have more cases—three nuns, one monk, two canons.
There are a small number of cases of theft, infringing rights or tithe
obligations, adultery, assaulting a cleric, and stealing items from
churches. Writs for capture rarely state the offence committed,
merely specifying contumacy and manifest offences. There are
occasional exceptions: many rectors failed to pay a moiety due to
the crown; Thomas Browning had not paid his tithes of fish. Two
writs, including that concerning Lady Isabella de Mortimer, mention
roles as executors of wills. Since this was a common cause of
excommunication, their failings as executors were probably the
cause of their sentences.
In addition to excommunications against individuals, Sutton’s
register contains a large number (c.210) of general
excommunications, where an offence had been committed but the
malefactors were unknown. Here, unlike sentences against
individuals, we probably have all or almost all the general sentences
pronounced in the diocese in these years. The bishop generally
reserved the right to pronounce general sentences and, since the
perpetrators were unknown, his officials would conduct an
investigation alongside the general denunciations. Some of these
alleged that an offence had been committed against which a lata
sententia had been pronounced; this allowed an excommunication to
be proclaimed even where names of the malefactors were not yet
known. In other cases, the denunciations initially merely threatened
excommunication if no amends were made. About a quarter of these
general sentences reacted to theft (usually, but not always, from
clergy), including poaching or killing another’s animals. Charters
were the most common item (seven instances of theft), hidden in
one instance, a whole box stolen in another. Finding a dropped
breviary and failing to return it was a reason to be threatened with
excommunication. Documents and records of debts and books also
feature, generally stolen but in one case forged. Animal theft was
frequent—horses, rabbits, swans, oxen, deer, and tithe-lambs all
appear. Trees are mentioned four times, as well as timber in another
entry. 124 Money, corpse-candles left after burial services, and
materials to repair a bridge were all also stolen. Wasting land,
burglary, and failing to return lost goods were also dealt with by
excommunication. The victims were usually clergymen of some sort,
but not invariably.
The next most common cause of general sentences was violence
against clerics (Si quis suadente), of which there are over thirty
cases. Failure to properly execute wills or related abuses also
resulted in over thirty general sentences. Sanctuary violations
account for six. Many general sentences related to the failure to pay
tithes or other church dues, or otherwise preventing their collection.
Disputes over ecclesiastical benefices were also often a cause for
offences incurring excommunication. In one case, miscreants had
been drinking in a vacant church and using it for other insalubrious
activities. 125 A particularly intriguing case is a general sentence
pronounced against those who had bought a baby boy and
rebaptized him in order to pass him off as someone else’s heir. The
parents, who had accepted the money because of poverty, had
admitted the crime but the excommunication sentence indicates the
affair had become a local scandal. As is so often the case, nothing
more about the case survives. 126
The victims of these offences were almost always clergy or
religious institutions, except in cases concerning execution of wills
and violation of sanctuary (where both the church and the fugitive
were harmed). Occasionally, however, a layperson was aided. When
Adam of Ferriby, a paralytic, was burgled, the bishop stepped in to
threaten the (unknown) thieves with excommunication. 127 Alan and
Emmicena of Holland, thrust into poverty by the killing of two oxen,
were helped in the same way. 128 Sutton was willing to
excommunicate the poachers who had taken beasts from the land of
Sir Ralph Pyrot and rabbits from the warren of Sir John Birthopre. 129
A widow, Petronilla Sutton, was unable to obtain her dower right
after a charter testifying to the purchase of seven and a half acres
was stolen; the evildoers were therefore threatened with
excommunication. 130 The law did not allow for the immediate
excommunication of these malefactors; because the victims were not
clergy, warnings had to be given beforehand. By contrast, in a
comparable case, following the theft of the goods of Hugh of St
Martin, vicar of All Saints Stamford—who was known to be insane—a
general sentence could immediately be publicized. 131
Those seeking absolution had most often injured a cleric and thus
incurred Si quis suadente. Others had drawn blood in a churchyard,
attacked a church, or extracted fugitives from sanctuary. Christina of
Heyford, a nun, had committed fornication with a married man. 132
John Garland was absolved from excommunication for fornicating
with Cecily Drayton, and Roger of Acre with Ivetta; both women
were nuns. 133 Clergy had the presumption to attend civil law
lectures at Oxford, and one to teach there after he had been
ordained. 134
Excommunication thus affected men and women throughout
society, who had committed a wide variety of offences and who
reacted to their sentences in different ways. It was familiar, whether
as a personal experience or as a spectacle, at all levels of society. Its
affects were wide-ranging in many different spheres. The rest of the
book will focus upon the aftereffects of excommunication.

Excommunication in Thirteenth-Century England: Communities, Politics, and

Publicity. Felicity Hill, Oxford University Press. © Felicity Hill 2022. DOI:
10.1093/oso/9780198840367.003.0001

1 Registrum Antiquissimum, ii, nos 499–500; Reg. Sutton, vi, 133–4. And
below, 62–3.
2 Reg. Winchelsey, i, 215–6, 230–1, 296, 390–1. And below, 145–6.
3 Reg. Swinfield, 408–9, 431–2.
4 Reg. Winchelsey, i, 458–9.
5 Cf. Edwards, ‘Ritual excommunication’, 3.
6 Vodola, Excommunication; A selection of Helmholz’s key works on
excommunication: ‘Excommunication as a legal sanction’; ‘Si quis suadente’; Spirit
of Classical Canon Law, 366–90.
7 Barton, in ‘Enquête, exaction and excommunication’, makes a comparable
point about enquêtes, considering them not as abstract principles but as providing
valuable insights into human relationships and power dynamics.
8 Jaser, Ecclesia maledicens.
9 Beaulande, Malheur, 19–20.
10 It is not possible to cite them all in a single footnote, but those that consider
the sanction within a specific context often work best. In addition to references
below, see the Bibliography.
11 Cf. Whalen, Two Powers, 244 n. 17: ‘English scholarship on medieval
excommunication and interdict is strangely limited, considering their importance.’
 12 As it did in France: Mazel, L’évêque et le territoire, 322–6.
13 E.g. Clarke, Interdict, 2.
14 For instance, living under a sentence of excommunication for a long period
elsewhere in this century would provoke assumptions of heresy: Mansfield,
Humiliation, 75.
15 Florian Mazel has emphasized that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
witnessed significant changes in episcopal administration and bureaucratization.
Episcopal control greatly increased (though bishops were ever more subject to the
papacy). L’évêque et le territoire, ch. 5.
16 Hamilton, Practice of Penance, 15.
17 Vodola, Excommunication, 36.
18 Helmholz, ‘Excommunication in twelfth century England’, 237.
19 Helmholz, ‘Excommunication in twelfth century England’, 242.
20 Helmholz, ‘Excommunication in twelfth century England’, and Spirit of
Classical Canon Law, 370–6. ‘Excommunication and the Angevin leap forward’ is
the same as ‘Excommunication in twelfth-century England’; the latter is cited
throughout.
21 Hamilton, ‘Remedies for “great transgressions”’; Hamilton, ‘Absoluimus uos’;
Treharne, ‘A unique Old English formula’. Even in the Life of St Hugh of Lincoln,
which Helmholz uses to show excommunication as a curse (the saint’s victims are
miraculously struck down as a result of his sentences), St Hugh’s
excommunications were in fact preceded by warnings. They thus included the
most crucial requirement for a valid judicial sentence, even if the excommunicates
subsequently suffered or died as a result of his sentences. It might be added that
a hagiography was intended to show miracles performed by the saint, in this case
to show the power of Hugh’s curse, not procedural niceties. Life of St Hugh, ed.
Douie and Farmer, ii, 31–32, 20–5.
22 Jaser, Ecclesia maledicens, 303–5.
23 Jaser, Ecclesia maledicens, 301–10; Murray, ‘Excommunication’.
24 Edwards, ‘Ritual excommunication’.
25 Hill, ‘Theory and practice’.
26 Accusations of overuse are deeply connected to abuse because the chief
abuse is typically ‘trivial’ use.
27 Helmholz, ‘Excommunication as a legal sanction’, 202–4. Beaulande noted
the fondness historians have for received ideas about excommunication: Malheur,
7.
28 Dresch, ‘Outlawry’, 122–4.
29 Helmholz, ‘Excommunication as a legal sanction’, nn. 2–6.
 30 Goebel, Felony and Misdemeanor, 308–9; Lea, Studies in Church History,
417.
31 Lea, Studies in Church History, 271–2.
32 Keygnaert, ‘Misbruik’.
33 Lea, Studies in Church History, 324–6, 331–5.
34 Huysmans, ‘Excommunication under discussion’.
35 Lewandowski, ‘Cultural expressions of episcopal power’, 78.
36 Helmholz, ‘Excommunication in twelfth-century England’, 243–4.
37 Jaser, Ecclesia maledicens, 320; Lea, Studies in Church History, 399–400.
38 C&S, 971.
39 Jørgensen, ‘Excommunication’, 65.
40 Gundacker, ‘Absolutions and acts of disobedience’, 183.
41 Forrest, ‘William Swinderby’, 249–50, 255–8; Beaulande, Malheur, 157, 185,
ch. 7, 257–8.
42 Lange, Excommunication for Debt, 227–39, 276; Thomas, Religion and the
Decline of Magic, 502–3.
43 Price, ‘Abuses of excommunication’, 111.
44 Woolf, Fabric of Religious Life, 71 n. 239; Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish
Communities, 72–5; Hertz, ‘Judaism in Germany’, 753; Guesnet, ‘Jews of medieval
Poland-Lithuania’, 807; Kaplan, ‘Discipline, dissent and communal authority’, 401;
Kaplan, Religion, Politics and Freedom of Conscience, 20.
45 E.g. Mentzer, ‘Marking the taboo’, 126–7; Todd, ‘None to haunt’; articles by
Chareyre, Murdock, and Bezzina in Mentzer, Moreil, and Chareyre (eds), Dire
l’interdit.
46 Beaulande also observes the wooliness of the idea of abusive
excommunication: Malheur, 20.
47 Jeffrey Denton similarly cautioned that contemporary complaints about
illiterate clergy, made in the context of reforms, and bound to be critical, can ‘be
taken all too easily as social characteristics of the age’: ‘Competence of the parish
clergy’, quotation 275.
48 Keygnaert, ‘Misbruik’, 33.
49 Edwards, ‘Ritual excommunication’, 5.
50 Lea, Studies in Church History, 239, 520–1. Many more examples could be
cited.
51 Jaser, ‘Ostensio exclusionis’, 358.
52 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 502–3.
Another random document with
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job. Perhaps I would return to the railroad. James Weldon Johnson
advised me to make a tour of the South and read my verses. But I
never anticipated with gusto the prospect of appearing as a poet
before admiring audiences.
I was often in the company of a dancer who was making a study of
African masks for choreographic purposes. One evening while he,
my friend, Gladys Wilson, and I were together in my diggings in
Fourteenth Street, a woman walked in to whom I had been married
seven years before. A little publicity, even for a poor poet, might be
an embarrassing thing. The dancer exclaimed in a shocked tone,
"Why, I never knew that you were married!" As if that should have
made any difference to him. I said that nobody knew, excepting the
witnesses, and that there were many more things about me that he
and others didn't know.
All my planning was upset. I had married when I thought that a
domestic partnership was possible to my existence. But I had
wandered far and away until I had grown into a truant by nature and
undomesticated in the blood. There were consequences of the
moment that I could not face. I desired to be footloose, and felt
impelled to start going again.
Where? Russia signaled. A vast upheaval and a grand experiment.
What could I understand there? What could I learn for my life, for my
work? Go and see, was the command. Escape from the pit of sex
and poverty, from domestic death, from the cul-de-sac of self-pity,
from the hot syncopated fascination of Harlem, from the suffocating
ghetto of color consciousness. Go, better than stand still, keep
going.

PART FOUR
THE MAGIC PILGRIMAGE
 XIV
The Dominant Urge
I WENT to Russia. Some thought I was invited by the Soviet
government; others, that I was sent by the Communist Party. But it
was not so easy to have the honor of an invitation or the privilege of
being sent. For I was not one of the radicals abroad, important to the
Soviet government; and I was not a member of the Communist
Party. All I had was the dominant urge to go, and that discovered the
way. Millions of ordinary human beings and thousands of writers
were stirred by the Russian thunder rolling round the world. And as a
social-minded being and a poet, I too was moved.
But money was necessary so that I could go to Russia. I had none. I
mentioned my object to James Weldon Johnson, then secretary of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He
suggested I might raise some money by selling special copies of my
book of poems with signed photographs. And very kindly he placed
at my disposal a select list of persons connected with the N.A.A.C.P.
In that way a small number of copies of Harlem Shadows was sold.
The price asked was five dollars. I remember that about six persons
sent checks for ten dollars. One check was signed by Mrs. Henry
Villard. Eugen Boissevain sent me one hundred dollars. Crystal
Eastman gave me a letter as one of the editors of The Liberator,
asking any radical who could to facilitate my getting to Russia. Just
before I sailed James Weldon Johnson gave me a little farewell party
at his residence in Harlem. A few of Harlem's élite came: Dr. DuBois,
Walter White, Jessie Fauset, Rosamond Johnson, and from among
downtown liberal intellectuals, Heywood Broun and F.P.A. of the New
York World, John Farrar, who was then editor of The Bookman, and
Ruth Hale. It was a pleasant evening and the first of the bohemian-
élite interracial parties in Harlem which became so popular during
the highly propagandized Negro renaissance period.
I signed on as a stoker on a slow freighter going to Liverpool. Just as
that time, Crystal Eastman also had booked passage on another
boat to go with her children to London to join her husband. We had
arranged to have a last meal together on the eve of my sailing. But I
waited until near midnight and she didn't appear. So I went out alone
in Harlem, visiting the speakeasies and cabarets and drinking a
farewell to the illegal bars.
In one joint I met Hubert Harrison and we had together a casual
drink. But I did not inform him or any of my few familiars that I was
sailing for Europe the next day. Sentimental adieux embarrass me. I
took a look in at Sanina's for a brief moment. Late that night, when I
got home with just enough liquor to fill me with a mellow mood for my
next adventure, I found a tiny scrap of paper thrust into my keyhole:

Claude dear:
I just dashed in to give you a hug and say goodbye—Bon
Voyage, dear child!
Crystal

I tucked the little note in a corner of my pocket book and have

carried it with me all these years, through many countries,
transferring it, when one pocket book was worn out, to another.
Six years later, when I was in Spain, I received a copy of The Nation
containing the announcement of beautiful Crystal Eastman's death. It
was sudden and shocking to me. I took her farewell note out of my
pocket book and read it and cried. Crystal Eastman was a great-
hearted woman whose life was big with primitive and exceptional
gestures. She never wrote that Book of Woman which was imprinted
on her mind. She was poor, and fettered with a family. She had a
grand idea for a group of us to go off to write in some quiet corner of
the world, where living was cheap and easy. But it couldn't be
realized. And so life was cheated of one contribution about women
that no other woman could write.

At Liverpool I left the freighter and went straight to London. There

was a reunion with a few intimates of the International Socialist Club.
Many of the members had left for Russia the year before to live there
permanently. Also a number of British Communists were preparing to
travel to Russia for the Fourth Congress of the Communist
International.
Arthur McManus, one of the Left labor men from the Clyde, was one
of them. I asked if he could assist me to go to Russia. He was not
enthusiastic, especially since I was once connected with the
Pankhurst group, which was now out of favor at Moscow. McManus
said that I should have been recommended by the American
Communist Party. The more difficult it seemed, the more determined
I was to make my way to Russia. One evening in a barroom, I heard
a group of English comrades facetiously discussing Edgar
Whitehead, the former secretary to the Pankhurst Group, saying that
he was always landing something good in the movement. I heard
them mention that Whitehead was in Berlin. He was liaison agent
and interpreter for the English-speaking radicals who were traveling
to Russia. Whitehead had studied German in Berlin when he was a
schoolmaster. He had been a leader of conscientious objectors
during the last war. He was also my friend, and I thought I'd take a
chance on his helping.
The next day I took the channel boat to Ostend. Arriving in Berlin, I
made inquiries and found Whitehead. He promised to get me
through to Russia. That I was not indorsed by any Communist party
did not matter to him. He was not a fanatic or dogmatist. In the days
of our association together in London we often waxed satirical about
Communist orthodoxy and we had often discussed the idea of a neo-
radical magazine in which nothing in the universe would be held
sacred.
Whitehead started working for me. The intervening time I spent
visiting the theaters. Expressionism was setting the pace. I saw the
revolving stage for the first time and admired it. Also I visited many of
the cabarets, which had sprung up like mushrooms under the
Socialist-Republican régime, some of which seemed to express the
ultimate in erotomania. The youngsters of both sexes, the hectic
pleasure-chasers of the Berlin of that epoch (before Poincaré
grabbed the Ruhr), were methodically exploiting the nudist colony
indoors, which was perhaps more exciting than the outdoor
experiments.
One evening Whitehead announced that all was ready. The next day
we drove in a taxicab to a rendezvous. We entered a house and
passed into a large room in which there was a group of men. Four of
them I identified as Russians. Whitehead introduced me as a
kamarad und neger dichter. One sitting at a table spoke with a kindly
smile. He asked a few questions in effortful English which I promptly
answered. I said that I was not a member of the American
Communist Party, but that I was in sympathy with the purpose of the
great Russian revolution. I said that it was primarily as a writer that I
was interested in Soviet Russia and that I intended to write about it
for the Negro press.
I received back my passport and Crystal Eastman's
recommendation, which I had consigned to Whitehead. A visa for
Russia was attached to the passport. I was told to prepare to travel
at once. The next day I traveled with an English-speaking German to
Stettin. There I slept that night at a hotel. The following morning I
was taken to a pier, whence I embarked for Leningrad.

Petrograd! Leningrad! When I think of that great city like a mighty

tree shaken to its roots by a hurricane, yet still standing erect, and
when I think of the proud equestrian statue of Peter the Great,
proclaiming that dictator's mighty achievement, I feel that the world
has lost the poetry and the color rising like a rainbow out of a
beautiful name since Petrograd was changed to Leningrad.
Lenin is mightier than Peter the Great. But there is no magic in the
name of Leningrad. There is magic in the name of Lenin, as there is
splendor in the word Moscow. And perhaps Lenin himself, whose life
was devoted to the idea of creating a glorious new world, might
have, in appreciation of the will of Peter the Great to remake a
nation, preferred Petrograd to remain Petrograd. Perhaps the spirit
of Lenin might have been more adequately expressed in the erection
of a brand-new city, rising out of that system to which he dedicated
his life. Lenin without any suffix—like a perfect ball of pure gold—a
city called Lenin.

I saw Petrograd! Like a great tree, shaken to its roots by a hurricane

and struck by lightning and somehow still standing. Petrograd, half
empty of its population and somewhat sad in the autumn. I saw the
monuments of czars and nobles tumbled in the dirt by the proletarian
masses. But intact and untouched they had left the beautifully proud
monument of Peter the Great, a mighty symbol of individual will and
majesty.
MOSCOW
Moscow for many loving her was dead ...
And yet I saw a bright Byzantine fair,
Of jewelled buildings, pillars, domes and spires
Of hues prismatic dazzling to the sight;
A glory painted on the Eastern air,
Of amorous sounding tones like passionate lyres;
All colors laughing richly their delight
And reigning over all the color red.

My memory bears engraved the strange Kremlin,

Of halls symbolic of the tiger will,
Of Czarist instruments of mindless law ...
And often now my nerves throb with the thrill
When, in that gilded place, I felt and saw
The simple voice and presence of Lenin.
I felt almost ashamed in those lean hungry years of 1922, when
Russia was just emerging from a great famine, that Moscow should
have stirred me in the way I have expressed it in this sonnet. Yes, I
will admit that my senses were stirred by the semi-oriental splendor
and movement of Moscow even before my intellect was touched by
the forces of the revolution.
After the war, the revolution and the famine, one's mind had created
a picture of a grim, harsh melancholy atmosphere. But it was all like
a miracle, all that Byzantine conglomeration of form and color,
shedding down its radiance upon the proletarian masses. It was like
an Arabian Nights dream transforming the bleak white face of an
Arctic waste.
And the crowds tramping and sleighing through the deep snow
spreading over all the land were really happier and friendlier than the
crowds of New York and London and Berlin. Yet the people in
Moscow were generally so poorly clad. There was so much of that
Oriental raggedness that one does not see in New York and London
and Berlin—at least not on the surface. The scenes were so
unexpected and strange that I even doubted at first whether they
were not created by Communist discipline and Bolshevik
propaganda. But when I mingled with the people I soon perceived
that many did not even comprehend the true nature of Communism.
Some of them could understand only that Lenin was in the place of
the Czar and that he was a greater Little Father.
I was soon brought down out of the romantic feeling of the
atmosphere to face the hard reality of the American Communist
delegation. Brazenly and bravely I had journeyed to Russia with
some members of the British group. But now the American
delegation had arrived with a Negroid delegate, a light mulatto. My
presence was resented. The American delegation did not want me
there. The delegation represented America, and as I had been
passed with other Communists as a visitor to the Fourth Communist
Congress, it was necessary that I should be indorsed by the
delegation as an unofficial visitor. This the chairman refused to do.
Instead, he desired that I should be sent out of Russia, back home.
A fight was raging inside of the American delegation. A minority led
by James Cannon wanted a legal American Communist party, to
carry on open propaganda among all the American workers. The
majority, led by the chairman, was fighting to keep the American
party illegal and underground.
Rose Pastor Stokes was the main prop of the chairman. When she
arrived in Moscow, still pretty and purring and sly as a puss, she
immediately engaged me in conversation and casually asked if I did
not think that an illegal Communist party was the best suited for
America. I answered no, emphatically. At the time I did not know that
the difference in the ranks of the American group was serious. Not
being a party member, I was unaware of what was going on inside of
the organization.
Rose Pastor Stokes was one of the delegates who had just escaped
from Bridgman, Michigan, during the police raid of August, 1922,
when the illegal Communist Party held its convention in the open
there in a beautiful romantic valley. Some of us of The Liberator
thought that the Communists, being tired of staying underground,
were feeling so pastoral and poetic that they couldn't do better than
hold their secret convention in the open air of the lovely Michigan
country.
Rose Pastor Stokes had said to me that it was necessary for
Communists to take to the woods in summer to escape the iron heel
of the capitalists. She was the wife of a millionaire, and perhaps
knew more about the iron heel than poor proletarians. She admired
that romantic novel of Jack London's, The Iron Heel, and once told
me that radicals could use it as a textbook of revolutionary
organization in America. She was shocked and hurt that a few of us
regarded the convention and the raid in Michigan as something like a
comic opera.
I remembered Mrs. Stokes's spy mania, when I was on The
Liberator. She was doing secret radical work. She used to tell me
stories of being followed by detectives, and of how she fooled them
by taking refuge in the Hotel Plaza and the Hotel Astor; because the
dicks wouldn't imagine that a guest of such places was red. She was
also working with a radical Negro group, and thought she was
followed by Negro detectives in Harlem. One night I was at the
apartment of my friend, Grace Campbell, when Mrs. Stokes came in
to attend a meeting. She was breathless, and sank into a chair,
exhausted. She asked for water, and Comrade Campbell hurried to
get a glassful. Then Mrs. Stokes explained that a colored man had
been watching her suspiciously while she was riding up on the
subway, and when she got off the train he had attempted to follow
her. She had hurried and dodged through the insouciant Harlem
crowd and gone round many blocks to evade the spy.
Said Comrade Campbell, "But Comrade Stokes, there aren't any
Negroes spying on radicals in Harlem. That colored man, maybe he
was attempting—kind of—to get friendly with you."
Mrs. Stokes jumped right up out of her exhaustion: "What,
Comrade? You shock me!" In her voice, and her manner, was the
most perfect bourgeois expression of the superior person. Comrade
Campbell said: "Why Comrade Stokes, I didn't mean to insinuate
anything, but any person is likely to be mistaken for something else."
So now in Moscow, before I was fixed in place as an unofficial
observer, Rose Pastor Stokes had got it from me that I was opposed
to the majority of the American delegation, and that was bad. Mrs.
Stokes really believed that we were living through the period of the
new Inquisition against radicals in America, and that those who did
not believe that were traitors to the cause. She hinted even that
there was something suspicious about my use of my real name in
Moscow. For all the American delegates had secret names. Mrs.
Stokes's own was Sasha. But some of us unorthodox comrade
sympathizers preferred to identify her as The Red Red Rose.
Meanwhile, the committee appointed to seat all delegates to the
Fourth Congress was sifting credentials. It was headed by a
repulsive type of strutting Prussian whose name is now forgotten,
lost in the radical scramble for place and the shuffling and cutting of
Communist cards—and Leninist purges. Greater Red names than
his have gone like the melted snows of yesterday.
I was soon aware that the Prussian person had his severe blue eye
fixed on me, as if I had been specially pointed out to him. I pretended
that I had not seen that evil eye, but soon I was being bedeviled. I
was thrown out of the Lux Hotel and found myself in a dilapidated
house in a sinister pereulok. My room was bare excepting for an
army cot, and cold like the steppes because of a broken window
pane through which poured a Siberian draught. My first thought was
to protect myself against pneumonia, and so I hurried to a store and
purchased two blankets and a pair of the cheap warm and
comfortable felt boots that reach to the thighs—the kind the Russian
peasants wear.
In the room next to mine there was a Russian couple. The man
spoke a little English. I complained about the state of my room and
he agreed that the window should be fixed; but, said he, "Thousands
of Russians are living in worse places." It was a quiet, gentle,
perhaps unintentional, rebuke, but immediately I felt confused and
altogether ashamed. I became aware of the implications of my
grievance, so petty in the eyes of the "thousands in worse places"
who had just come through an eight-year siege of war, revolution,
counter-revolution and famine, with fields and farms devastated,
factories wrecked, houses in ruins, no time and few funds for repairs.
I remembered breakfasting on the train in Germany a few weeks
previously. The countryside, misty brown in the early morning, was
peaceful and beautiful; the train ran precisely on time; the coaches
and dining car were in elegant shape, the passengers well dressed,
the waiters in neat uniform. The breakfast was fine, but the cream
that came with the coffee was barely whitened water. I had just come
from America, where cream with coffee is a commonplace. And so,
without thinking, I asked the waiter for cream. I said I would pay
extra for it.
The waiter said: "But Mister, we have no cream at all. They have
taken away all our cows from us, and what little milk we have we
must give to our babies." Then I remembered that I had read
somewhere that under the Treaty of Versailles the Germans had had
to give up thousands of heads of cattle to the Allies. But I had never
fully grasped the significance of that until I asked for cream with my
coffee in Germany. (We are, the majority of us, merely sentimental
about the suffering of others. Only when direct experience twists our
own guts out of place are we really able to understand. I remember
once hearing a nice comfortable bohemian noblewoman ecstatically
exclaim: "J'aime la souffrance! J'aime la souffrance!" Yes! She loved
vicariously the suffering of others.)
" ... Thousands in worse places." A good room was as much of a
luxury in Moscow in 1922 as a car is in America. A good room was
the chief non-political topic of conversation. People greeted one
another and said: "Do you have a good room?" in the same way we
say, "How is your health?" One of the tidbits of those times was the
joke that Mrs. Trotsky and Mrs. Zinoviev were at odds because one
had a better apartment in the Kremlin than the other.

Now my position was precarious. I wanted by all means to stay in

Moscow and to attend the meetings of the Fourth Congress of the
Communist International. But would-be delegates and visitors who
were unwanted and undesirable were being ruthlessly dealt with.
Some were accused as spies and counter-revolutionists. To the
Russians, spying was a real menace. It meant sabotage of
revolutionary property, attempted assassination of officials, and
working to overthrow the Soviets. They could not understand that
when an English or an American Communist accused certain
persons of being spies, his idea of spying was romantic and akin to
eavesdropping.
Aware of the way in which things were going against radical
dissidents, I acted quickly. I had a friend high up in Bolshevik circles
in the person of Sen Katayama. Sen Katayama was the Japanese
revolutionist. He had been a member of the Second International
and knew all the big men of the conservative British and continental
labor movement. He was an old friend of Lenin, Zinoviev, Bukharin
and Radek, and had gone over to the Third International at its
inception.
Sen Katayama had been a student at Fisk University, the southern
Negro school. He was small, dark-brown, with intensely purposeful
features which were nevertheless kindly. I met him when I was
working on The Liberator. He dropped in one day and introduced
himself. He took me to lunch at a Japanese restaurant, and at
another time to a Chinese, and introduced me to the Indian
rendezvous restaurant in the theatrical district. His personality was
friendly but abounding in curiosity—a sort of minute methodical
curiosity. He made me think of a fearless and faithful little hunting
dog. When he came up to my office, his little eyes, like brilliant
beads, darted rapidly over everything. And like a permanent surprise
he invaded my rooms at all hours and talked in his squeaky
grandmotherly voice about Negro problems. He demonstrated a vast
interest and sympathy for the Negro racialists and their
organizations. I liked Sen Katayama immensely. I was fascinated by
his friendly ferreting curiosity. I had associated with many Chinese at
home in the West Indies and in London, but Sen Katayama was my
first Japanese friend. It was exciting to contrast Chinese and
Japanese by the types I had known. Sen Katayama was eager and
extrovert, almost too much so, while the Chinese, however friendly,
seemed aloof and secret.
Sen Katayama was in his glory in Red Russia. He was an honorary
colonel of the Red army and always appeared at mass meetings in
his uniform. The crowds adored him and applauded frantically. He
appeared to me somewhat like a harbinger, a symbol of the far
eastern element in the new heart of Russia.
Sen Katayama warmly welcomed me in Moscow and invited me to
tea in his nice room in the Lux Hotel. He held an important post in
the Eastern Department of the Communist International and because
of his extensive traveling and his education and contact with
American Negroes he was regarded as an authority on all colored
peoples' affairs. He had more real inside and sympathetic knowledge
and understanding of American Negroes than many of the white
American Communists who were camping in Moscow.
When I explained to Sen Katayama how and why I had come to
Russia and of the difficulties I was encountering because of the
opposition of the American delegation, he said: "You leave
everything to me and we'll see if they can get you out of here and
prevent your attending the Congress. I'll talk to the Big Four[2] about
you."

FOOTNOTES:
 [2] Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Radek.

XV
An Individual Triumph
MEANWHILE, all the Russian folk unwittingly were doing their part
for me. Whenever I appeared in the street I was greeted by all of the
people with enthusiasm. At first I thought that this was merely
because of the curiosity which any strange and distinctive type
creates in any foreign environment, such as I had experienced in
Holland and Belgium and Germany. But no! I soon apprehended that
this Russian demonstration was a different thing. Just a spontaneous
upsurging of folk feeling.
The Bolsheviks had nothing at all to do with it. The public
manifestation for me took them unawares. But the Bolsheviks have
nerves subtly attuned to the currents of opinion and a sense of
propaganda values in which they are matched only by French
officialdom. So, as soon as they perceived the trend of the general
enthusiasm for me, they decided to use it. And I was not averse to
that. Never before had I experienced such an instinctive sentiment of
affectionate feeling compelling me to the bosom of any people, white
or colored. And I am certain I never will again. My response was as
sincere as the mass feeling was spontaneous. That miraculous
experience was so extraordinary that I have never been able to
understand it.
Even the Russian comrades, who have a perfect pat social-
economic explanation for all phenomena, were amazed. The
comrade who conducted me around (when I hadn't wandered off by
myself, which was often) was as intelligent as a fox and as keen and
cold as an icicle. Although a mere youth, he held important positions,
open and secret, and today, still young, he holds a most important
position in the Soviet government and in the Russian Communist
Party. This comrade said: "I don't quite understand. Some of the
Indian delegates are darker than you—quite black—yet the people
don't carry on about them that way. But there is something very
different in your features and that is what the people see."
Never in my life did I feel prouder of being an African, a black, and
no mistake about it. Unforgettable that first occasion upon which I
was physically uplifted. I had not yet seen it done to anybody, nor did
I know that it was a Russian custom. The Moscow streets were filled
with eager crowds before the Congress started. As I tried to get
through along the Tverskaya I was suddenly surrounded by a crowd,
tossed into the air, and caught a number of times and carried a block
on their friendly shoulders. The civilians started it The soldiers
imitated them. And the sailors followed the soldiers, tossing me
higher than ever.
From Moscow to Petrograd and from Petrograd to Moscow I went
triumphantly from surprise to surprise, extravagantly fêted on every
side. I was carried along on a crest of sweet excitement. I was like a
black ikon in the flesh. The famine had ended, the Nep was
flourishing, the people were simply happy. I was the first Negro to
arrive in Russia since the revolution, and perhaps I was generally
regarded as an omen of good luck! Yes, that was exactly what it was.
I was like a black ikon.
The attitude of the non-Bolshevist population was even more
interesting. I had been told to be careful about going places alone.
But bourgeois persons on the street implored me just to enter their
homes for a glass of tea. I went. I had no fear of even the "whitest"
Russians in Russia, although in Paris and Berlin I would not have
trusted them. The only persons that made me afraid in Russia were
the American Communists. Curiously, even Russian bourgeois
persons trusted me. They knew that I was in sympathy with the
Communists—was their guest. Yet some of them told me frankly and
naïvely that they did not like the Bolsheviks and didn't think their
régime would last. The women chattered like parrots, happy that the
shops were opened. They wanted to hear about the shops in New
York and London and Berlin. When I visited a college with an
interpreter, who was certainly a member of the O.G.P.U., one of the
language teachers explained the difficulties of working under the
new régime. She said she ought to travel abroad to keep up with the
languages she taught, and that was impossible now. She said the
proletarian students were dull and kept the brighter bourgeois
students back. She said that one of her brightest students was the
son of a former governor, and that she would not reveal his identity,
for if it were known, he could not stay in the college. She said, "I
can't let even you know who he is, for you might tell about him." But
before I left she introduced me to the lad, explaining that he had
specially asked for an introduction. In Petrograd, Chorny Chukovsky,
the popular author, introduced me to a princess and a countess who
were his friends, and to the intellectual élite, who were mainly anti-
Bolsheviks. But they crowded a hall to hear me read my poems. One
of the professors, who had studied in England and France, was so
excited that he invited me to the national library the next day. And
what did he do? There was a rare Pushkin book with a photograph of
him as a boy which clearly showed his Negroid strain. (The Negroid
strain is not so evident in the adult pictures of Pushkin.) I coveted the
book, and told the Professor so. He said he was sorry that he could
not make me a present of the volume. But he actually extracted that
photograph of Pushkin and gave it to me. Mark you, that professor
was no Bolshevik, contemptuous of bourgeois literature. He was an
old classic scholar who worshipped his books and was worried about
the future of literature and art under the Bolshevik régime. Yet he
committed that sacrilege for me: "To show my appreciation of you as
a poet," he said. "Our Pushkin was also a revolutionist." Like Crystal
Eastman's farewell note, that photograph of Pushkin is one of the
few treasures I have.

Oh, I remember that magnificent cartoon in colors, picturing me

sailing on a magic carpet over the African jungles to Moscow. The
artist made me a gift of the original. An imp swiped it. It was the
perfect interpretation of my adventure in Russia. An Arabian Nights
fantasy transformed into reality. I had been the despised brother,
unwelcome at the gorgeous fête in the palace of the great. In the
lonely night I went to bed in a cold bare room. But I awoke in the
morning to find myself the center of pageantry in the grand
Byzantine city. The photograph of my black face was everywhere
among the most highest Soviet rulers, in the principal streets,
adorning the walls of the city. I was whisked out of my unpleasant
abode and installed in one of the most comfortable and best-heated
hotels in Moscow. I was informed: "You may have wine and anything
extra you require, and at no cost to you." But what could I want for,
when I needed a thousand extra mouths and bellies for the
importunate invitations to feast? Wherever I wanted to go, there was
a car at my disposal. Whatever I wanted to do I did. And anything I
felt like saying I said. For the first time in my life I knew what it was to
be a highly privileged personage. And in the Fatherland of
Communism!
Didn't I enjoy it! The American comrades were just too funny with
envy and chagrin. The mulatto delegate who had previously high-
hatted me now began to cultivate my company. It was only by
sticking close to me that he could be identified as a Negroid.
I was photographed with the popular leaders of international
Communism: Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, Clara Zetkin, Sen
Katayama, Roy; with officers of the Soviet fleet, the army and the air
forces; with the Red cadets and the rank and file; with professors of
the academies; with the children of Moscow and of Petrograd; with
delegates from Egypt, India, Japan, China, Algeria.

XVI
The Pride and Pomp of Proletarian Power
THE Bolshoi Theater in Moscow presented a pageantry of simple
proletarian pride and power on the night of the opening of the
Congress of the Communist International. The absence of the
primitive appeal of gilded pomp made the manifestation even more
sublime and awe-inspiring.
I had received a pass to attend the great opening of the Congress.
When I succeeded in getting into the vast Bolshoi auditorium, Martin
Anderson Nexö, the author of Pelle, the Conqueror, waved to me to
come and sit beside him. He was seated in the center front of the
hall. But an usher grabbed me, and before I could realize where I
was going, I was being handed from usher to usher like an object
that was consigned to a special place. At first I thought I was going
to be conducted to the balcony, but instead I was ushered onto the
platform to a seat beside Max Eastman and just behind Zinoviev. It
seems as if the curious interest of the crowd focused upon me had
prompted Zinoviev to hoist me up there on the platform.
Zinoviev asked me to speak and I refused. Max Eastman pleaded:
"Do speak! See how the people are looking at you; they want to hear
you." I said that if they had given me notice beforehand I might have
prepared a few phrases, although speaking was not my specialty.
But I wouldn't stand up before the Bolshevik élite and that vast eager
crowd, without having something prepared to say. Eastman said:
"Just tell them you bring greetings from the Negro workers of
America."
"But," said I, "I have no mandate from any American Negro workers
to say that. There is an official mulatto delegate; perhaps he has a
message from the Negro workers."
I said to Eastman, "Why don't you speak?" He said he would like to if
they would ask him. Certainly the American Communists had in Max
Eastman the finest platform personality to present. Unlike me, he
was as pure a Marxist as any of them there and had given the best
of his intellect to serve the cause of Communism and extoll the
Soviets in America. But because of petty jealousy they cold-
shouldered Eastman in Moscow. Perhaps if they had been a little
diplomatic about him, he probably would be one of them instead of a
Trotskyist today.
I told Zinoviev that I came to Russia as a writer and not as an
agitator. When his messenger interpreted what I said, Zinoviev's
preacher face turned mean. He was most angry. But I did not mind.
My personal triumph had made me aware that the Russians wanted
a typical Negro at the Congress as much as I wanted to attend the
Congress. The mulatto delegate was a washout. He was too yellow. I
had mobilized my African features and won the masses of the
people. The Bolshevik leaders, to satisfy the desires of the people,
were using me for entertainment. So why should I worry about
Zinoviev's frown? Even though he was president of the great Third
International, I knew that there was no special gift I could get from
Zinoviev after the entertainment was over and ended. I could never
be a radical agitator. For that I was temperamentally unfit. And I
could never be a disciplined member of any Communist party, for I
was born to be a poet.
And now I was demanded everywhere. Sometimes I had to
participate in three different meetings in one day: factory meetings,
meetings of soviets, youth meetings, educational conferences in
colleges and schools, the meetings of poets and writers, and
theatrical performances. I was introduced to interesting sections of
the new social and cultural life of Moscow and Petrograd.
I was always asked to speak, and so I prepared a few phrases. The
Russians adore long speeches, which it did not interest me to make.
And so they lengthened mine by asking a lot of questions. I had
listened to the American delegates deliberately telling lies about
conditions in America, and I was disgusted. Not only the Communist
delegates, but radical American intellectuals really thought it was
right to buoy up the Russians with false pictures of the American
situation. All the speeches of the American delegates, the tall
rhetoric, the purple phrases, conveyed fundamentally a common
message, thus: "Greetings from America. The workers of America
are groaning under the capitalist terror. The revolutionary
organizations have been driven underground. But the American
Communist Party is secretly organizing the masses. In a few years
we will overthrow American capitalism and join our forces with the
Russian Communists. Long live the Revolution...." I heard the
chairman of the American delegation say: "In five years we will have
the American revolution."
The Russians from these speeches pictured the workers of America
as denied the right to organize and the rights of free assembly and
free speech, as denied representation in Congress, as ridden down
by American cossacks, banished in droves from their homes to the
Siberias of the Far West, with their imprisoned and exiled leaders
escaping to Canada and Mexico and working underground to
overthrow the capitalist system. Briefly, the American situation, as
they understood it, was similar to that of Russia under the Czarist
régime just before the revolution.
The police raid on the illegal Communist party meeting in the
beautiful woods of Michigan had been spread all over the Russian
newspapers. Everything about that funny raid was so Czarist-
Russian-like that the Russians really believed that it was typical of
American conditions.
Truly, I could not speak such lies. I knew that the American workers
in 1922 were generally better off than at the beginning of the World
War in 1914. I was aware, of course, that labor organization in this
country was far below the standard of labor organization in England,
Germany and France, that American labor was not organized as a
political weapon, that in some sections of the country and in certain
industries labor was even denied the right to organize, and that
radicals were always baited. But Leavenworth was not Siberia. And
by no stretch of the imagination could the United States be
compared to Czarist Russia.
How, then, could I stand before the gigantic achievement of the
Russian revolution and lie? What right had I to tell these people, who
had gone through a long death struggle to conquer their country for
themselves, that the American revolution was also in travail? What
could I presume to tell them? I told them that it was a great honor for
me to be there to behold the triumph of their great revolution. I told
them that I felt very insignificant and dumb before that wonderful
thing. I said that I had come to Russia to learn something, to see
with my own eyes and try to write a little of what I had seen.
Invariably I was questioned: "And what about the American
revolution?" When I replied I think it was a long way off, the
audiences did not like me to say that. I must admit that the Russians
in those days were eager to be deceived. I remember that I was
asked to attend a large and important meeting of Young
Communists. When I had finished talking the president got up and
said: "Comrade, we appreciate what you feel about our revolution,
but we want you to tell us about the American revolution. When will
there be the American revolution?"
It was a direct question and I answered directly. I said that I could not
prophesy about an American revolution; but that perhaps if the
American ruling class started a wholesale suppression of labor
organizations, if the people had to read radical literature in secret, if
the radicals had to hold all their meetings in secret, if the liberals and
radicals who agitated for more civil liberties and the rights of the
working class were deported to the Philippines, then possibly in ten
or fifteen years America might develop a situation similar to that in
Russia in 1905.
The interpreter, a comrade commander in the navy, asked if he
should translate me literally. I said "Word for word." And when he
had finished there was no sound of applause. That was the first time
that I was not applauded when I spoke, but I preferred that.
The young president of the Young Communists took the platform:
"Comrade," he said, "you are a defeatist. The American revolution
cannot be so far away. But if that is your opinion, we command you
at once to do your part and help make the revolution." I said to the
interpreter: "Tell the young comrade that I am a poet."
After the meeting my friend Comrade Venko said to me: "You should
have told them the American revolution is right around the corner.
That's what they want to hear." (He had lived many years in England
and had acquired some Anglicisms.) I said, "You know I read
somewhere that Lenin said that it is necessary to face facts and tell
the truth always."
"Yes, Comrade," said Venko, "but Lenin is Lenin and we are just
ordinary mortals."