Absolutions and Acts of Disobedience: Excommunication and Society in Fourteenth-Century Armagh

Abstract

In the Bull of Promulgation of his 1234 Compilation of Decretals (commonly known as theLiber extra), Pope Gregory IX declared the goal of written law to be that “the human race is instructed that it should live honorably, should not injure another, and should accord to each person his own rights.” Yet despite the proliferation of canon laws and ecclesiastical legal procedures, Archbishop Milo Sweteman, metropolitan of the Irish province of Armagh from 1361 to 1380, could still complain about the futility of the church's ultimate legal measure, excommunication, against the many crimes of local malefactors. In 1366, he wrote to one of his officials:Very many times I have proceeded legally against Malachy O'Hanlon king of Oirthir as a destroyer of the clergy and people of the church, by excommunicating him and his henchmen in the proper form as despoilers, plunderers, and usurpers of church goods; and by placing an ecclesiastical interdict on the land to which they had fled in diverse moments. Nevertheless, because Malachy and some of his accomplices endured repeated correction, promised to make restitution, and even offered sworn oaths, in this way they obtained absolution and relaxations of the sentences of excommunication and interdict. And then they committed worse acts against the people and clergy of the church at Armagh than ever before.