Thomas Arundel of York: The Appellant Archbishop

Abstract

History in a very religious or ideologically inspired society is always liable to become a victim of propaganda. A concern for what is right takes precedence over what actually happens, and the justification of events replaces the accurate recording of them: there is what may be termed virtuous reality. In such a climate evidence has not only to be rigorously tested and questioned, but close attention has also to be given to what is not recorded or omitted. At no time in English history is this more true than the years around 1400, when justification of a new government required the condemnation of the reign that had gone before. It is well known that the domestic chronicles of the period are a striking example of Hobbes’s dictum that in an intolerant society ‘imagination and memory are but one thing’. Despite the long centuries of struggle within virtually all medieval kingdoms for supremacy between laity and clergy, the contest of regnum and sacerdotium, which reached a climax in England during the fourteenth century, the sources - and therefore modern historians -have concentrated upon an alternative, purely secular interpretation of events. The drama of the later 1390s, which saw the deposition of both Archbishop and King, is treated as if it were all a straightforward contest between absolute and limited kingship, in which a feudal aristocracy sought justice against a tyrannical ruler, and this has served to obscure the overriding significance of the crisis as a matter of ecclesiastical history.