The Crusade of Richard I: Two Canonical Quaestiones

Abstract

THE interdiction of Normandy in 11992 and the imprisonment in 1196 of Bishop Philip of Beauvais, King Richard's erstwhile jailer, are two episodes relating to the Third Crusade which are discussed in the unpublished Quaestiones Londinenses of the British Museum, MS. Royal 9 E VII,fol. 191 r-I 98v.lThe Quaestiones were listed in the Catalogue of 19911 as Cases in Canon Law,2 and the sigla of several of the masters were noted, but the first detailed discussion of the contents of this manuscript is found in Stephan Kuttner's magisterial Repertorium der Kanonistik, published in 1937.3 Stephan Kuttner established the English origin of the collection, listed the sigla of the various masters named in the disputations, and identified the episode of the interdiction of Normandy in 11991, thus establishing a terminus a quo for the collection. In his Maitland lectures at Cambridge in 1948 Walter Ullmann dealt with the Royal Quaestiones at some length and established a later terminus a quo in 1196 by his identification and analysis of the incident of the bishop of Beauvais.4 Kuttner again dealt with these disputations in an article published jointly by him and Eleanor Rathbone under the title, AngloNorman Canonists of the Twelfth Century: An Introductory Study.5 Here for the first time an identification of the masters who appear in the disputations was attempted: John of Kent, John of Tynemouth, Simon of Southwell, Nicolas de l'Aigle, and Simon of Derby emerged from their centuries of obscurity once more to take a place as Oxford masters in the world of scholars. In 1950 C. R. Cheney added some further items of biographical information concerning two of the masters of the Royal Quaestiones as a result of his studies of the documents produced in the chanceries of the twelfth-century English bishops.6 To date, however, none