Seeking Sanctuary

Could a medieval church really protect a killer from the law? From the 40-day asylum of parish churches to the more permanent protections claimed by Westminster Abbey, sanctuary was never simply an escape route, it was a contested space where mercy and authority met. Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Professor Shannon McSheffrey to uncover the extraordinary history of a medieval institution that could save lives, provoke outrage and expose the uneasy balance between bloodshed, forgiveness and power. More: Excommunication in the Middle Ages Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/excommunication-in-the-middle-ages/id1564113746?i=1000677914752&uo=4&itscg=30200&ls=1&mttnsubad=6442463604&at=1000l3ctA&itsct=podfollow_podcasts&ct=gone-medieval-eplink Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/6xeJYGO0kik02vjRfdoaEp A Guide to Medieval Churches Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a-guide-to-medieval-churches/id1564113746?i=1000654162407&itscg=30200&ls=1&mttnsubad=6442463604&at=1000l3ctA&itsct=podfollow_podcasts&ct=gone-medieval-eplink Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/6uL2WMaHruAxVlwSNV8elP Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, plus early access ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Janiger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:42Eleanor Janega?

  Hello, I'm Dr Eleanor Janiger, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gob-smacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were, and how we got here.

• 1:17Eleanor Janega?

  The 30th of November, 1394. London. The King's Head Tavern near London Bridge is a hive of nighttime activity. Friends and strangers press shoulder to shoulder, carousing in the candlelight. Among them are three men: Herman Stockfish, Nicholas Clairbont, and Angelo Leteri, who is probably an Italian far from home. In an instant, the mood turns. A crust of bread flies across the room and strikes a woman in the face. It's a small insult, it's almost ridiculous. Until it isn't.

• 2:03Eleanor Janega?

  Angry words flash back and forth. Pride flares. Tempers break. Lutere lunges first, punching Clairbont in the throat. Bursting through the tavern doors, the fight spills out into the cold night. What happens next happens quickly. As the men grapple in the street, Herman Stockfish rushes after them. A flash of steel. He draws a dagger and plunges it into Clairbont's right side, so deep that it pierces his heart. Clairbont stumbles away through the maze of narrow streets, mortally wounded.

• 2:44Eleanor Janega?

  Step by painful step, he staggers as far as St. Mark and Orgre in Candlewick Street, where he collapses. And while Clairbont is breathing his last, Stockfish is already running. He doesn't run to the nearest church. He does not surrender. With the dagger still in his hand, he flees west through the city to Westminster Abbey, where stone walls and sacred privilege can stand between a killer and the law. There, he claims sanctuary, disappearing into a stronghold where royal justice stops at the threshold.

• 3:28Eleanor Janega?

  For months, he will remain there, untouchable. Then, in May 1395, Stockfish emerges and gives himself up to the king's bench, pleading not guilty to homicide. On the surface, it looks like a surrender, but in reality, it's a calculation. Before the case can truly begin, the king issues a pardon. By June, Stockfish is released without further delay.

• 4:08Eleanor Janega?

  No trial, no sentence, no reckoning. A man has died, and his killer is walking free.

• 4:21Eleanor Janega?

  Today's episode of Gone Medieval is more than the story of a tavern brawl which turned into murder. It's the story of a place at a time where the line between justice and mercy could be crossed by reaching the right holy ground. Because when Herman Stockfish fled to Westminster Abbey, he may have exposed something new emerging in England: a more powerful form of sanctuary, guarded not only by religion, but by privilege.

• 4:54Eleanor Janega?

  In the shadows of medieval London, one killing revealed a system in transformation, where bloodshed, law, and sacred refuge collided.

• 5:07Eleanor Janega?

  The subject of sanctuary has been asked for by three, count them, three listeners: Ally McKeachern, Ivan Gerling, and Claire Augburn. So, thank you very much for your suggestions, and have I got the right guests to talk about this subject. Professor Shannon McSheffery from Concordia University, Montreal, is the author of Seeking Sanctuary: Law, Mitigation, and Politics in English Courts, 1400-1550. And she's the brain behind the online project Sanctuary Seekers in England, 1394-1557.

• 5:49Eleanor Janega?

  Shannon, welcome to Gone Medieval.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Thank you, Eleanor. It's very good to be here.

• 5:56Eleanor Janega?

  I am absolutely delighted to have you here today, because I think sanctuary is one of these topics that everyone sort of thinks they know about. I suppose that it's almost a plot point in a lot of medievalisms, as it were. You know, this idea that one can sort of burst into a church, claim sanctuary, and that everything ought to be fine. And indeed, you know, there is a bit of thought of that in the medieval world. But of course, as all historians delight in saying, it's much more complicated than that.

• 6:28Eleanor Janega?

  If you could help us get to the bottom of it.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  That's our motto, yeah. It's more complicated than that, yeah.

• 6:33Eleanor Janega?

  So, yeah, if I had a house crest, that would be, that would be on it, I think.

• 6:39Eleanor Janega?

  So I suppose to start us off, as good a question as any, is can you explain how Roman law and earlier Christian ideals make churches violence-free zones? You know, this place that you can sort of go to for criminal mediation? I think that that's, you know, that's a huge question.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it probably goes back to pre-Christian Mediterranean, you know, ideas of the sacrality of religious spaces. There are ideas in pre-Christian Roman law about the violence-free nature of temples and things like that. And not surprisingly, given Christianity's, you know, ideas about peace and nonviolence, that their specific spaces would be seen as outside the normal kind of conduct of political

• 7:42Speaker 02

  life, I guess, which often involved violence. And so from early Christianity, and certainly by the the fifth and sixth centuries, when, you know, in a sense, we're getting the beginnings of medieval Christianity, I guess, that churches would be these places that were seen as islands of peace outside the sometimes chaotic, you know, environment outside of that. And so you see that clearly, you know, in various different kinds of sources, that when somebody has committed some kind of, often it's seen as a killing, like that's, you

• 8:23Speaker 02

  know, it's the most, well, for us certainly and for them as well, I think, the most extreme kind of wrongdoing is the taking of somebody else's life. The church's commitment to being a mediator

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Of violent situations and to prevent spiraling feuds, the idea was that the wrong doer would come into that sacral space and have this both place and moment of respite before somebody else comes and takes vengeance. And so in order to prevent the spiraling vengeance, the idea was that in the space of the church, then there would be mediation between factions, that there would be recompense made, where guilt would be negotiated and paid so that then the violence did not escalate. And so the church played that kind of mediating role from early on in Christianity.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  And that set the tone for the idea that church properties had a kind of immunity as the Latin immunitas was used.

• 9:30Eleanor Janega?

  That's really interesting to me because I think it also makes sense from a cultural standpoint. I mean, I think it's fairly obvious from a religious standpoint, why, you know, the church might say, let's, let's stop doing violence very quickly. But I think the church is such a good mediator for this because people who are quite high up, or indeed even your local clergy members, are sort of drawn from the same class of people who have a monopoly on violence, I suppose. You know, a lot of these people are coming from the noble classes. They're coming from these higher up levels of society where there is actually a fair amount of violence that is meted out one onto the other. So if you get someone like a priest who can come in and say,

• 10:12Eleanor Janega?

  oh, I know that you're sort of thinking about embarking on a journey of revenge, but maybe we can come and talk about it in the church. I suppose that that makes a lot of sense culturally.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it is a way also for those church members to exercise influence, you know, and you can look at that cynically, which I think is not unmerited in many cases. But also it is seen, you know, by those bishops and other high ranking church members as a way to further the influence of Christianity and that sort of thing. So it all kind of dovetails together into sort of creating this political and really is often a political role because the people who are getting that sanctuary are most often those high ranking members of society rather than the peasants, you know, if they...

• 11:03Speaker 02

  If they are committing these kinds of wrongs, then then they don't get that kind of access, which is actually a theme that is fairly that runs through, you know, late medieval manifestations of sanctuary as well.

• 11:17Eleanor Janega?

  We definitely see this this grow over over time as well, you know, these ideas, right? So can you tell us a little bit about what adaptations we see emerging on the idea of sanctuary by about the 12th century? Because by the High Middle Ages, I mean, especially in England, I think, we've really got a kind of snowball effect going with ideas of sanctuary, no?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think that it's, and I'm going to be mostly talking about England, because that's what I've studied. So in the 12th century, that is the point where you're really beginning the development of royal justice in a kind of very structural sort of way with systems of courts and and developments of the jury and all this sort of thing in order to make the king's justice workable on a local level. And it's also a period, of course, when the church in England and elsewhere in Europe is beginning to really organize itself and become a more powerful institution. And the negotiation between

• 12:22Speaker 02

  the crown and the church is on, you know, is it's ongoing through the period for centuries and in a sense to come. And so in that period where the law of felony is being developed and the structures for prosecuting crime are being developed, there also comes to be these customs that bring together the royal justice that is developing and these old ideas about the sacrality of church spaces and the immunity and the immunity is seen as being that the church spaces is, in a sense, kind of exempt from royal justice,

• 13:01Speaker 02

  especially in a situation where an action by a royal official is going to end in execution and the taking of a life. And that is something that is always emphasized is the idea of sanctuary as being something that is necessary to save a life. Because no wrongdoer is so wrong in Christian theology that he or she cannot be saved. Right? And so it is part of the Christian ideas of redemption and things like that. So in a case where somebody commits, say, again, I'm going to use the, you know, the, the highest level of crime of homicide.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  You flee to a church and then you are permitted to remain free from arrest from royal officials. But the variant that develops in England, so you see this all over Christian Europe in various different ways. Although it, the thing about England is that it becomes integrated with the development of royal justice. And in the sense that, um, first of all, there is a limit placed on how long a person is allowed to stay there, which is not part of canon law. Canon law says it's perpetual. But the, in England, the limit is 40 days. 40 days is, um, you know, one of those magic numbers in Christianity. It's the length of lint and they, um, so you're allowed to stay there for 40 days.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  And then you either can get arrested or you have to confess your sin. And this is very Christian, the idea of confession, um, confess your sin, but not to a priest, to a royal official, the coroner. And the coroner will then give you basically instructions and the means to go into exile. So you're banished from the land. This is known as abjuration, which literally means swearing off. So you swear off the realm, you leave the realm and you are never allowed to come back. So it's using banishment, which is a, um, a, a kind of punishment that was used all over Europe as, um, a punishment for crime.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  And in England, it was used in this specific kind of marrying together with the idea of secrality. You do see that also in other places in, in, in France, you can see similar sorts of things. But it really, the development of taking those abjurations, those confessions.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  As one of the the most important tasks of a coroner is something that really brings it into the system. And it becomes something that is adjudicated then by the royal courts. So it's not just a church thing, but it's something that kind of brings together Christianity into the English royal system in an in an integral way.

• 15:52Eleanor Janega?

  I find that fascinating because I think in a Holy Roman Imperial context, we see a little bit more pushback to this concept. Now, granted, it's, I think, partially to do with the fact that they don't have the forty day limitation to things, but there does tend to be, I suppose, probably because of the papal imperial rivalry, probably because of things of this nature. You know, the emperor really doesn't like giving up the idea that they can pursue felons, although often it's sort of allowed at a more ducal level. But I I do, I I'm also not surprised to hear that England has done this because England is so good

• 16:31Eleanor Janega?

  at developing these bureaucratic systems in a way that other parts of Europe simply aren't in the Middle Ages.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I mean, it has to do with, obviously, all sorts of things, but one of it really is that England is a small place. You know, obviously, the duchies in the Holy Roman Empire are also smaller, but but that that's kind of state building that takes place in England does so more intensely in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, partly simply because it is a compact nation in a way that some other parts, even France, is so much larger and so many more disparate interests. The crown can kind of really bring things together in a way in England that they can't in most other parts of Europe in that period.

• 17:20Eleanor Janega?

  We do see this very interesting thing within England as well, which is eventually an expansion. And we've been talking about the very worst of crimes, murder, that sort of a thing. But we do see statutes eventually expand out to also relate to debtors as well, don't we? Like, you know, so at what point in time does this come into English law?

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that seems to be a 14th century development mostly. And it's related, obviously, just to the expansion of commerce in Europe from 13th century. And so they, you know, even that kind of monetization of the society, I think, is part of what it is that creates this idea of debtors. And they're mostly merchants. It is possible, obviously, to be indebted, even if you're not a merchant. But the kinds of people who are looking for protection against their creditors are almost all merchants. So there are people who do have some power and standing and connections. And in the 14th century, we begin to see

• 18:31Speaker 02

  in various parts of England, but especially Westminster Abbey. Westminster Abbey is the most, probably the most powerful and wealthiest Abbey. You know, it might have rivals and Glastonbury and stuff, but it's obviously right near the major commercial center of England at the time, London. And so Westminster Abbey begins, it seems, it's a little murky, but it seems in the 14th century, they begin to conceptualize debtors as being wrongdoers who are in need of mercy, compassion, the same kind of rhetoric that underlies that

• 19:15Speaker 02

  old, old idea of, you know, of welcoming, I guess that is the word, the criminals into the church for some kind of mercy. And so Westminster Abbey begins to

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Use it, the idea of the separateness of church space of its property. It has a significant sized precinct, still has a significant sized precinct right next to the Parliament Buildings and it, the Parliament Buildings didn't exist then, but the Royal Palace did. And so, so the Westminster Abbey is a place where they begin to allow debtors to live with inside their precinct to remain safe from arrest from their creditors. A significant point here is that there's no bankruptcy law, so that if you owe money

• 20:11Speaker 02

  and you cannot pay it back, you are liable to be arrested and put into a prison. The prisons in England first began effectively as places to incarcerate debtors. There was no such thing as a jail sentence for a crime. You were held in a prison before trial, but there was no possible sentence of imprisonment for crime. It was only really for debt. And so to avoid being placed into a debtor's prison and having all of your things seized, you would go to Westminster and Westminster Abbey began in a kind of perhaps entrepreneurial fashion

• 20:51Speaker 02

  to use this as a way to demonstrate the separateness of their property, their immunity, their, their separateness from the jurisdictions of the towns that want to arrest these people and from the royal justice as well. So it becomes a kind of symbol. The ability to bring these people in and to keep them safe from these other kinds of officials is a symbol of their separateness and their jurisdictional power.

• 21:26Eleanor Janega?

  What's driving this particular surge in debt litigation, though, at the time? Is it just, hey, it's the 14th century? I know we've got kind of on the rise. You know, we, for example, we've got the Hanseatic League has come up. So we're, we've got more interesting trading partners around the North Sea, things of this nature. Is it just as simple as that? We've got more commercial trade?

• 21:48Speaker 02

  I think that it's, I mean, much of it is that simply the rise in commercial trade, but also the, you know, the economic disasters of the 14th century also mean that more people are falling into financial despair, you know, especially both before and after the Black Death, the collapse of the banking systems in the, in the 1330s is, you know, is one of those things. But you do see that kind of problem of indebtedness, you know, just, and also the court systems are becoming more elaborated. All of these things are coming together, even after the Black Death, when the population levels have plummeted.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Nonetheless, the business at the court, at the courts, in a broad sense, is mostly just increasing, you know, not right away after the Black Death, but, you know, that, that kind of the bureaucratic machines of both law and government are actually becoming more efficient and more broad ranging. And so that's part of all of this, is that these kind of remedies for things like debt and crime, you know, for the individuals who are being charged with them, is driven to a significant extent by the fact that the processes for going after people are becoming more efficient.

• 23:14Eleanor Janega?

  I mean, I suppose the people who we see who are claiming asylum, it makes sense to me that they would be doing it at Westminster, right? Because if you are a guild member in London and you've run yourself into debt, it's just an easy walk over there out of the city.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:29Eleanor Janega?

  And I imagine that's, that's who we're talking about. I cannot imagine that we're talking about poor peasantry who Or coming up from Suffolk or something. Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  No, no. And it's and it's partly, and this is again, a theme that runs right through until Sanctuary kind of collapses. That's the end of the story here, but that you cannot stay in Sanctuary unless you have means, because there really is not a good way to make a living when you are living in this precinct. And so in order to be able to stay there, you either have to have some fun squirreled away that your wife can bring to you or something like that in order to pay your rent, because you have to pay rent to stay in whatever accommodation you're going to stay in in the precinct. And there are, there's accommodation, there's sort of tenements

• 24:23Speaker 02

  that are built all the way around the precinct for these people. And and in order to to pay that, you need to have the money to pay it. So peasants basically can't. And similarly, you know, poor artisans or the underemployed laborers who make up actually a fair bit of the London population, you know. But but they're not worth suing for debt anyway, because they have no money. And so they're not as likely to be arrested for debt. They just, you know, they just move somewhere else when their credit runs out and somebody is coming after them. They just, they just move on somewhere else. Whereas if you're a merchant, you can't

• 25:04Speaker 02

  because your business is there. So you can't just escape, at least not as easily.

• 25:10Eleanor Janega?

  I suppose there's almost no difference between the debtors who are living in Westminster Abbey and the monks who are living there, right? You have to come from a family of means. No one's just going to take you on because you showed up at the door, right?

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:23Eleanor Janega?

  Can we talk a little bit about the expansion that we see in the King's Bench yearbooks in 1355? Because we have this new thing that comes up where we say that suddenly

• 25:37Eleanor Janega?

  These varying places have a reign over the impunity of limb and life, which I think is really interesting. And they kind of start pointing very far back to even pre-conquest charters to say, hey, this is something that we can do. But I bring this up because as you've mentioned before, really, it's not just that courts and jails exist in order to talk about debt, but I mean laws, if you're looking at early English law, it exists to talk about property. You know, everything is about charters, everything is about land boundaries. So I find it quite interesting that you point at things, you know, from, I don't know, let's say

• 26:18Eleanor Janega?

  the ninth century off the top of my head and say, oh, the, our ability to talk about charters also means that we are able to talk about felonies. How does that jump get made?

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Well, and I think that again, it, those things are all tied together into this knot where the, you know, a lot of the prosecution of crime is driven by property because of the forfeiture of the felon's goods to the crown. So, you know, another big job for a coroner, I mean, people think of coroners as having to do with inquests and dead bodies. But the coroner did a lot of things and amongst the things that they did, and there are others who were involved with this too. But that they had to assess the goods of the felon so that the king could take the goods of the felon.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  They were forfeit to the crown. And so a lot of this is, is driven by crown revenue, but it's also driven by the desires over these religious institutions to protect their income producing.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Qualities, I guess. And amongst those things are the idea that they can, you know, that they get rent from these people that, but it's also about making sure that their properties have, you know, certain kinds of exemptions that other sorts of properties do not because of their sacral nature. So it becomes this thing where God has given through the king, actually, through early kings, pre-conquest, and William the Conqueror is another one who who grants things to various sorts of abbeys, that they should have a certain

• 28:11Speaker 02

  independence from the lords who live around them, but also from certain elements of royal government, not all of them by any means. You know, they're not, you know, if a murder happens in sanctuary, it's not exempt from investigation by royal officials, but it's, but they're nonetheless, there is a lot of importance that the religious houses put on keeping those special rights and liberties is a word that they use a lot, that that make them separate from the various other kinds of powers around them. And so what ends up

• 28:52Speaker 02

  happening in the 14th century is that these ideas of being able to shelter debtors and keep them free from arrest is tied to the idea that they can help keep people's lives and limbs, you know, safety of life and limb, that they, that that is keeping them out of jail, out of the prisons, and that these things become all tied together. So the sacrality of the property is actually tied also to its economic independence and its political independence and its legal independence. And that's a pretty neat trick, to be honest, those Westminster

• 29:34Speaker 02

  guys who thought of this, I think, I mean, and I think it was probably like these ideas were kind of developed, I think, I mean, this is my guess, is there's, is we see it earliest at Westminster Abbey, that's why I'm making that guess, but it is part of a bid to kind of retain this independence, but they do tie it to royal grant.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  As being the the original underpinning of it. It's not something that is separate from the royal government, but a long ago, King gave us this. And the precedent before time immemorial

• 30:15Speaker 02

  is something that allows it that political valence in the 14th and 15th century. The idea of that kind of long tradition is something that is a legal, you know, legally, it ends up being legally binding. And that's one of the ways in which these English religious institutions are able to kind of make it work into the system because they are canny enough not to make it, we are independent from the King and don't have to listen to the King. It's no, this is what the King wants. And the Kings go along with it for various reasons, which I can talk about later if you want.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  But they, you know, it it works in that way because they pitch it in a way that is acceptable to the idea of royal authority still being supreme.

• 31:28Speaker 03

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• 32:20Eleanor Janega?

  I guess that makes perfect sense. And this is one of these legal arguments I'm very used to seeing in the later medieval period. You tend to see time immemorial as one of the justifications for laws, or also the old and customary law. That one comes up a lot. I think, you know, this idea that you're throwing back to something that we all know happened, and kind of trying to bring people into this idea of a custom, this idea of something that's already happened. And I mean, I've seen it happen also for things that don't even have charters. You know, because, well, we didn't bother to write it down. Everybody just knows this happens, right?

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And of course, we do get forgery of charters, you know, is the other thing. You know, you can just sort of see those monks of Westminster who are sitting there saying to themselves, you know, we know this happened. So it's actually not a sin to write a charter in which it is said to have happened. And, you know, there's, there's one kind of neat example of that in the 1440s, where there's another sanctuary within the city of London at St. Martin le Grand, which is just north of St. Paul's Cathedral. And so there's a collegiate church there, and which has had a dean. And the dean ended

• 33:39Speaker 02

  up having a squabble with the city of London about whether the precinct was an independent territory that was outside city jurisdiction and outside the capacity of the sheriffs of London to arrest people. And so he comes up with, and I think that, I mean, it's clear that this is a genuine charter. People have worked on this. The date's from 1067 or 68, I forget which, but obviously, right after the conquest. So charter from William the Conqueror. And, and it gives particular freedoms, liberties, and rights to the collegiate church of St. Martin le Grand. And it's in Old English.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  This charter.

• 34:24Eleanor Janega?

  Oh.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  So he's writing a kind of brief for consideration by legal authorities about the independence of his collegiate church. And he, he has this written in. But in the 15th century, people cannot read Old English anymore. The language has changed to such an extent that maybe it was more comprehensible to them than it is to those of us who are untrained, such as me. But it, but it evidently was not, you know, to the legal minds to, that were judging this case. Because what the dean was able to do is say,

• 35:04Speaker 02

  the charter says that the king grants us rights of sanctuary and the ability to accept felons and all this kind of thing. And of course, that's historically impossible because the concept of felony had not yet been developed in English law. So it's like it's, and it doesn't say that. It just, it does give broad jurisdictional powers. I mean, that it does do, but it does it in a 1060s kind of way, which, you know, there is not a royal justice system at that point that is clearly elaborated. It only starts in the reign of Henry the first, the sort of the, you know, usually seen as the birth of that.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  I mean, there are justice systems, but it's not, it, it does not give immunity for felons. But he says that it does. So it's kind of, that's why I find that one of the more interesting, you know, kind of little rhetorical tricks that these, that people are able to make in the arguments about sanctuary in, in the 15th century.

• 36:11Eleanor Janega?

  I love it. Felony isn't a concept, but if it was, we would have, we would have.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  If it had been.

• 36:18Eleanor Janega?

  I wanted to talk about another kind of exciting case in this. Can we talk a little bit about the Holly Shackle affair? This is, you know, one of those kind of sexy political clashes that happens.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So this was in 1378, and it's at a point where there evidently had been debtors in Westminster Abbey. There were not, it was right on the cusp as we would begin to see cases of felons going and asking for, and the difference is, yeah, I should explain this first, that the idea of going into a church when you had committed a felony and getting the 40-day temporary reprieve and, you know, confessing to a coroner and all that kind of stuff existed from at least the 13th century, perhaps back into the 12th.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  And there are various other sort of manifestations of it that go further back. But the difference in the 14th century that is about to develop is the idea that at certain religious houses, not just parish churches, but religious houses, that you could enter in and you could stay in perpetuity, that there was no limit on the sanctuary in those places because of their large powers that had been given to them by the king. That's the argument. That was just about, in a sense, to break out at Westminster Abbey. And it's tied, you know, to the idea of the debtors who are already there. So it's kind of like bringing

• 37:52Speaker 02

  felons under that umbrella as well. In 1378, there is this one case where there were two esquires of the king who were named Robert Holly and John Shackle, and they had taken custody of a prisoner of war in the Hundred Years' War. And they got into a dispute with John of Gaunt, who was at that point, the Duke of Lancaster, sorry, John Gaunt, who was the Duke of Lancaster and the king was the boy at that point, Richard the Second, who had just taken the throne in thirteen seventy seven. And so, so he was regent for his nephew. And Holly and Shackle were, because they were in dispute with

• 38:36Speaker 02

  this most powerful man of the land, were thrown into the Tower of London. Now, this was effectively a property case because the issue was custody of this prisoner of war who was going to be put for ransom. So really, it's about the ransom. So it's a property, it's a debt issue, property issue. So they're thrown into the Tower of London. But after about three months, they escaped from the Tower of London. Fascinating how many people escaped from the Tower of London. And they run from the Tower of London. You know, I think that's about a three kilometer run, you can do it. And they run to Westminster Abbey and they take sanctuary, or at least refuge,

• 39:18Speaker 02

  I guess. I mean, whether they called it sanctuary or not, it's hard to know. The constable of the Tower runs after them with a, you know, a retinue of armed men. And so they, you know, the two prisoners are ahead of them, they're running in. One of them, Shackle, gets gets arrested outside the church, but Holly has run into the church where the monks are saying mass. So it's in the middle of a mass. He runs into the church and this retinue, the constable and his retinue run in after him. And a melee ensues. There's, you know, blood on the floor. You know,

• 40:00Speaker 02

  this is a huge sacrilege, big controversy, not surprisingly. So Holly ends up getting killed, but also one of the abbey's servants, not, I think, not one of the monks, but a servant. So it creates this big controversy that then ensues a bunch of debates about what kind of powers Westminster Abbey has. The abbot kind of makes

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Something of it, not surprisingly, there are debates in Parliament. Wickliffe, interestingly, the about to be leader of a group of heretics weighs in. He's the, an important theologian at that time. He argues against the idea that, that the abbey should have any special powers. But the feeling of the, of most people involved with this, the parliamentarians and, and probably John of Gant himself, actually, are that Westminster Abbey's privileges need to have more safeguarding. And obviously, nobody is going to be able to argue that bloodshed in a church, which is just seen as the highest of sacrileges.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  Probably it would be today as well. I mean, you see that sometimes where there are, in religious sites, there are terrible things happening and, and the heightened kind of reaction to that. But in those days, I think it would be even more. And so what ends up happening is that there are statutes that come out at the end of the 1370s that give those, a certain ecclesiastical institutions, including Westminster Abbey and St. Martin de Grunt, that it gives them clear statutory underpinning to the idea that they could welcome debtors.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  And that ends up pretty quickly rolling into the idea of, again, anybody whose life or limb are in, in any kind of jeopardy through prosecution by the state in some way, could be welcomed into these spaces of immunity. And so by the 1380s and 90s, you're beginning to see in the records, felons running to sanctuary and being taken in, and that sanctuary being, in a sense, recognized.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  In the king's court that prosecute the crimes so that you cannot go in and arrest them. If you do that, if you are a sheriff and you go in and you arrest somebody inside an ecclesiastical precinct that has one of these recognized sanctuary rites, then the court will order the person to be put back into the sanctuary. That is one of the pleas you can give in a royal court. It's called a plea of sanctuary. I was in sanctuary, somebody came and arrested me and the court says, okay, yep, you've proven that you go back to sanctuary. You don't get hanged.

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• 44:17Eleanor Janega?

  It's a really interesting one, right? Because it's almost as though they couldn't have played into the hands of the members of the abbey if they tried to in a better way. Now, I'm not, not to be completely cynical about it. Obviously, nobody wanted anyone to die in this case. But by doing this horrible thing, it really does allow Westminster to say, well, you see what happens. This should never have happened. And then you can make this case for yourself, right? You know, it makes this big Yeah. move, I think.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:49Eleanor Janega?

  Do we tend to see that, so you're, we see this kind of established precedent in the 1370s. And it was, we move further in time. Do we see that this picks up a little bit more? I'm thinking sort of in the 16th century, we kind of tend to see a kind of

• 45:09Eleanor Janega?

  did, you know, increase, I guess, that when the Tudors kind of look at prosecuting felonies a bit more than, for example, the Lancastrians had done before. Does this do anything in order to challenge this idea of sanctuary at the time? Or, or is it, you know, a way of closing these workaround loopholes at all?

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that, I mean, one of the things about sanctuary is that there are always people who support it. There are people who support it because they want to use it. They don't want to be hanged. There are people who support it because it dovetails with the idea of, of Christian redemption and forgiveness of sins and the idea of the church as a, as a kind of giver of mercy and that sort of thing. And amongst the people who accord with that are actually the kings themselves, who want

• 46:12Speaker 02

  to brand themselves, if we want to use more cynical language, as themselves the fount of mercy. That is something that kings are really into is using pardons, for instance, as a way to demonstrate their godlike ability to forgive wrongdoing. And so, so there is, you know, the kings actually, in a rhetorical sense, always, up until the 1530s at least, support sanctuary as an aspect of their royal mercy, because they're, they're royal sanctu, I mean, they're royally granted sanctuaries, right? But what happens in especially the reign of the Tudors during the 15th century,

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Do see that although there are the beginnings of these ideas of Westminster Abbey, for instance, welcoming felons, sanctuary does not show up in the records very much until the 1450s or so. And that's partly because for various reasons to do with civil wars, with the early Lancastrians, especially Henry V, and the French war, which then leaks in obviously to, you know, through the reign of Henry VI as well, that there's actually a real downturn in the prosecution of felony. So there's less need for sanctuary. I mean, that this is a bit oversimplifying, but there's less need for sanctuary because relatively

• 47:44Speaker 02

  fewer people are being charged with felony. And also, the chances of being convicted go way down. So that even if you are coming up for trial, the chances are quite high, and I can't remember the statistics exactly, but way more than 50% are being acquitted. So, you know, you probably want to just take your chances and you go scot-free from things because it's not that likely a jury will convict you. So that's what happens in the early 15th century. But we see that the kings from especially Edward IV onwards, but even more so under Henry VII and Henry VIII, that the kings want to use the prosecution

• 48:29Speaker 02

  of crime as a way to really imprint the authority of the king and again, his position as the fount of justice, which has both a mercy side, but also a god, godlike punishment of wrongdoing too. Now, one of the groups that especially in the early 15th century, never virtually, of course, again, there are exceptions, but rarely were charged with felony, were aristocrats and gentry, that if you were a higher ranking gentleman or

• 49:11Speaker 02

  a noble, and you are involved in aristocratic feuds, which are ubiquitous.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  And somebody dies, the chances of you being charged, much less coming up for trial, are very small. And so that's another reason why sanctuary isn't much used because of course there is the idea that you have to have means in order to, for instance, go into Westminster Abbey. But one of the things that from Edward the Fourth, but again, especially Henry the Seventh and Henry the Eighth, they want to actually make a gulf between them and the aristocracy more generally. And they want, and one of the ways they do that is if you are an aristocrat and you commit a felony, you're still subject to the king and I'm still going to charge you.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  It's not very convenient for me, though, as Henry the Seventh, to execute you because I kind of need you. You are the linchpin between me and the rest of my subjects. I need you for my bureaucracy. I need you to serve as justice of the peace, all of these kinds of things. So it'd be inconvenient, actually, and that'd cause a lot of bad feeling if I executed you. So I'm looking to, let's just say, encourage mitigation, you know, ways of getting out of execution. And

• 50:45Speaker 02

  so you see the rate of pardons go up. You see the rate of, and there's sort of changes by the end of the 15th century in the idea of benefit of clergy, which was originally for actual, shall we call them, actual clergy priests who committed, who were moved over into the ecclesiastical system is the idea. But what ends up happening is that by the end of the 15th century, benefit of clergy has come to be attached not so much to being, or not at all, not necessarily to be in orders, I guess is the best way to put it, but rather that you have one of the attributes

• 51:26Speaker 02

  of being a clergy, which is that other idea of being a clerk, which means being literate.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  And so, again, that's totally class-based. Being literate is something that is, you know, higher status layman. And women cannot claim benefit of clergy because they cannot be clerics. And so they can't claim it until the, I think, the end of the 17th century. It becomes even more unmoored from, you know, from the idea of being a priest. But in this period, you have to be eligible to be a priest rather than to actually be in orders. And so, and so those are like, so pardons and benefit of clergy and then sanctuary.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  And is another way to get out of arrest and trial and execution for a felony. Again, an important background is that the only punishment that is available in the English legal system for felony is execution. There, there aren't alternatives at this point apart from the mitigations. So the mitigations really come into play and the, and they are supported by the, you know, the king and the royal courts. Because of the fact that they provide this kind of steam valve

• 52:50Speaker 02

  that allows the exceptions to be made when exceptions are merited. So if you are a low status man charged with murder, the chances of your being found guilty and the chances of your being executed are much higher because it's hard for you to take sanctuary. You could still do abjuration, that's still available and, and that does happen certainly. But going into a permanent sanctuary, you probably can't afford it. You can't buy a pardon because pardons are, don't necessarily come free. Often there's a little donation that is made to the king for it.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  And, and you can't take benefit of clergy because you can't read. So this is, you know, very much about people with privilege.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  Effectively agreeing that other people with privilege should be able to have these exceptions made. And sometimes the people who get the exceptions made when they are in their, you know, if they're in their twenties and they commit some kind of homicide in an aristocratic feud, you can often see those same men. So they go to sanctuary and often you bundle together different mitigations. You go to sanctuary, somebody on your behalf arranges for a pardon. So you, it takes a while. You don't want to be arrested because trials can happen very quickly and then you're immediately executed. You don't want that happening.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  So you go into sanctuary as a, as a kind of waiting room while somebody else on the outside arranges your pardon. Once you have your pardon in your hand, then you surrender to authorities, you go up for trial, you plead guilty, but I have a pardon.

• 54:41Eleanor Janega?

  Ah.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  Trial then, and then you get released and you go on with your life and you become a justice of the peace. You become somebody who in that capacity presides over murder cases. You know, so you become the other side of the bench and you are, because you're grateful to the crown, maybe, I mean, sometimes that doesn't work, but you end up being this loyal servant of the crown. Sometimes you become an MP. Some of the people who are, you know, presiding in parliament, sitting in parliament are former sanctuary seekers who managed to use these things to get through their own problems.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  And probably everybody knew people who had used those things, those, um, those different mechanisms.

• 55:35Eleanor Janega?

  So what makes the concept of sanctuary essentially collapse? Because I think by the 16th century, we don't really see it on the books anymore.

• 55:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, one of the interesting things that I found when I was doing my research, I was, you know, looking through all of the criminal records that I could find between 1400 and 1550, pretty much. And I was able to do that because actually lots of them don't survive. So looking through all of them and tracing the number of cases where people are claiming sanctuary, it actually is really functioning at its greatest extent in the 1520s up until about 1535.

• 56:17Eleanor Janega?

  Wow.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  That is the period where there are is the most, at least, evidence of resort to sanctuary. But then in 1532, 33, 34, we begin to get the beginnings of the English Reformation. And amongst the aspects of the English Reformation is the dissolution of religious houses of monasteries. And so there is this sort of functioning integral system in royal justice that involves sanctuary as as part of the process of mitigating, especially for high ranking people. But the site where this happens is in these religious houses.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  There aren't, there are probably somewhere around eight of these religious houses in the country. It's not every religious house. There are some religious houses that just don't get into it because honestly, there is evidence, for instance, of St. John's Abbey in Colchester, which there's some depositions about what's going on in there. And it is like a community of monks and

• 57:29Speaker 02

  There is this kind of community of felons living in the precinct. And those felons are shockingly not very well behaved and are getting into fights with one another. And then there ends up being homicides in the precinct as they get into fights and kill one another. And then they have to run to a different sanctuary because you can't stay in a sanctuary, in theory, at least if you've committed a crime inside it. And so, so it's obviously really chaotic and lots of monasteries don't want to get into it. But the, in a sense, the tying together that I talked about earlier of those ideas

• 58:12Speaker 02

  of the sacrality of space, that some religious houses who have decided to kind of use this sanctuary right as a, as one of the highest levels of demonstration of independence of their liberties, especially not so much from the crown, but rather from other governing institutions such as towns. And so a lot of these places are, are close to relatively major towns. I mean, there's Westminster and St. Martin-le-Grande in London, but there's St. Augustine's monastery in Bristol. There are various places that, and the Hospitallers

• 58:56Speaker 02

  are into it in various different places as well. And so they have an interest in it because it connects to things that they want, which is this, these certain independence from the town being able to enforce its will on the monastery. And when those monasteries get dissolved, there is literally no space, no precincts.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  For them. And it ends up happening. So what ends up happening in the, at the end of the, I think it's in fifteen forty, there's the statute that attempts, sort of kind of takes account, okay, well, now that we've gotten rid of all these things, we, we still need sanctuaries. It seems like that is the thought actually of the MPs in Parliament. And so there is a scheme devised, it undoubtedly has the buy-in of the King's Council and all that kind of stuff as well, and a scheme devised to create secular sanctuaries that are attached to particular towns. Westminster is one of them. Sorry, I've forgotten the

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  list of the different towns. And one of the reasons I've forgotten the list is because it never actually really gets going. The towns do not want it. They don't have an interest in this. They already have their protected rights and liberties. And what's in it for them to have an open prison effectively? It's like a very, you know, nimby kind of, I assume maybe that doesn't translate into UK speak, you know, I know you know it, Eleanor.

• 1:00:40Eleanor Janega?

  No, we use it, we use it.

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, okay, kind of idea. And so what ends up happening is that there really isn't anywhere for anybody to go. And the system just dissolves. Like, it's not actually, you know, my argument is that it isn't killed by the English Reformation. It's not that the English, that it was, you know, this church, this church institution that ends up getting killed by the reform. It's actually, I think, an accidental byproduct that if there had been a way for it to continue, I think it would have continued because it was clearly useful.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  As you know, the the parliaments that passed these things had several former sanctuary seekers amongst them. I mean, it doesn't mean that they would have carried the vote, but I think that there are so many aristocrats that are sitting, both in obviously the House of Lords, but also the House of Commons, that saw this as kind of part of the system that allowed them to get out of felony charges, but still keeping the system intact for them to prosecute the lower orders. It's, you know, again, a kind of class-based thing. Benefit of clergy does survive because it didn't need those kind of institutional,

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  infrastructural kind of things, like a place for the benefit of clergy people to go. You just, you know, the way that it developed by that point was that you just claimed benefit of clergy and you had a test and you had to read and that kind of thing. And then it was kind of like, you shouldn't do it again. You can't do it twice. You can't claim it twice.

• 1:02:26Eleanor Janega?

  Right.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  Um, and then you're let go. And so, so it didn't require anything, you know, that cost anything or that involved the necessity of people cooperating in the system because it was done individually.

• 1:02:43Eleanor Janega?

  So if someone today wanted to claim sanctuary, you know, you wanted to run into a church or something, is there anything that actually remains that gives them any form of legal protection?

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  I think that it obviously depends on the, on the place, right? Because it's, it's definitely, and you see this in all sorts of places. So in the UK, I don't know UK law, except for I, I know English law of the 15th century, but not, not now, that my understanding is that is same as it would be, say, in Canada, where it does not, there is no law that makes those spaces immune from governmental reach and arrest of wrongdoers and things like that. But there is still the association of the

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  Idea of a moral imperative that often makes authorities reluctant to break into the sacral space of a church, or sometimes a mosque, or sometimes, I don't know if I've seen Jewish synagogues being used, but but there's probably cases of that as well. There was a case in Canada of a Sikh temple that was used. And so so the idea of that the sacral space of a religious institution means that authorities have been usually reluctant to go in there and take people. And and so there's different manifestations of it that you can see

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  that often now it's about people who are whose immigration status makes them vulnerable, that they, you know, that they have a visa that has expired or whatever, that they're going to be seized. Often it's, you know, immigration officials who are, you know, going in. But then that creates these these sort of PR disasters, I guess, is is one way to put it. But it does remind us that, you know, back in the Middle Ages, it was not just about law. It was supported by the law and by the courts. It didn't become sanctuary for felony, did not actually become statutory until the 1530s.

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  Interestingly, just before it fell apart, there was an attempt to try to make it a little bit more institutionalized and and that kind of thing. And so, interestingly, for the first time, it became statutory. But then it fell apart when the the monasteries were dissolved. But it was also about that idea of the possibility of redemption. There was discomfort with a lot of people about how vicious, in a sense, royal justice was that that, you know, not everybody thought that felons should be hanged. But that was the only remedy that that was available in the English law for punishment.

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  And so so it's a lot of people felt that there was this, you know, that it was a necessary thing to have something that provided exceptions. And they were happy to have it in this explicitly kind of Christian framework as well.

• 1:06:04Eleanor Janega?

  I think that we can really see, as you say, the fact that this really does kind of come across to us culturally, if not legally anymore. There is still something inside us that really does feel that religious spaces ought to offer some form of sanctuary. So a great medieval idea, let's just say that, at the very least, if not a lasting legal precedent.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:29Eleanor Janega?

  Shannon, I cannot thank you enough for this. This has been absolutely fascinating.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  Well, thanks. It's good to get back to this stuff. I haven't worked on this very much over the last decade since I published the book, but it's good to kind of get back into all of these things.

• 1:06:49Eleanor Janega?

  My thanks again to Professor Shannon McSheffrey. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my series, Meet the Normans, as well as ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com/subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts. And tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.