Michael Wilks’s best-known contribution to historical scholarship is The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1963). This is an exploration of the political ideas of Augustinus Triumphus of Ancona (c. 1270-1328) and his contemporary publicists on the nature of sovereignty—or supreme authority—and its location within society. Like most medieval thinkers Augustinus saw society as the universal Church, the body of Christ, a single corporate entity which embraced all Christians, and within which all were united in pursuit of the common aim of salvation. Most thinkers would have agreed, too, that in theory society itself was the possessor of sovereignty. The ‘problem’ arose in trying to decide how and by whom sovereignty should be wielded in practice. There were various solutions. At one extreme the pope, as the vicar of Christ, was thought to represent Christ’s mystical body, the Church, on earth. He thus became the physical embodiment of sovereignty, and, as such, the sole source of power within society.

Since King Alfred, and before, Gregory’s Pastoral Rule has been understood to apply to rulers as well as to bishops. A rich repertory of moral and spiritual qualities, as well as of duties and responsibilities, was thus made available for sketching an ideal that kings no less than bishops could be measured against. The question of whether this ambiguity in its reference had been intended by its author, or foisted upon it by subsequent generations who were less able to distinguish between the various offices, whose occupants might be referred to as rectores, has never been satisfactorily resolved. There is an important piece of evidence which might be expected to help to clarify this puzzle, Gregory’s Commentary on I Kings. It has not, however, been widely utilized, as the authenticity of the work has, until recent years, been in doubt.

The Christian Church’s institutional autonomy, and wealth, were firmly grounded in the law and authority of the Later Roman Empire. The sixteenth book of the Theodosian Code was an ecclesiastical Magna Carta. The great popes of the fifth and sixth centuries knew that the Church existed within the Empire, dependent like all other privileged bodies on imperial government for its sustenance.

Gregory VII’s pontificate is acknowledged as the starting-point for, as Professor Wilks has termed it, ‘the vigorous expression and application of hierocratic principles’, the foundation stone of the medieval papal monarchy and its sovereignty. Gregory revived once and for all, as earlier leaders had succeeded in doing only temporarily, the imperial concept of sovereign legislative authority. Though deeply aware of the limitations imposed by tradition, Gregory raised the pope’s power of lawmaking to a unique sovereign act: ‘He alone can compose new laws to meet the needs of the times’, as it was expressed in the Dictatuspapae, the twenty-seven declarations on papal power that were entered into the papal register in March 1075.

‘From the era of its first foundation, this has been the venue for the royal consecration, the burial place of kings, and the repository of the royal insignia, and deservedly named from ancient times as the (spiritual) head of England and the diadem of the realm.’ This claim, made on behalf of Westminster Abbey by the fifteenth-century monk John Flete, is examined here with reference to its history between the reign of Edward the Confessor and that of John.

The election of Bishop Bernard of Osma, former prior of Osma, took place not later than 15 February 1174. But the validity of his election was subsequently challenged on grounds of simony, and he was deposed sometime after mid-July 1176. A decretal of Alexander III to Archbishop Cerebruno of Toledo, Consuluit nos, dealt in its opening section with the question of appeals where manifest crimes were involved, or frustratory tactics employed, and in its second part with the charges raised against the election of Bernard, quondam bishop of Osma. The letter was received into the canonical collections from 1179 onwards, and ultimately into the official Decretales of 1234. There is no ambiguity about the provenance of this letter.

The English chronicler, Roger of Howden, gives a particularly interesting contemporary insight into events in Rome in the last months of the pontificate of the sick and ailing nonagenarian Celestine III (1191-8). If he is to be believed, we have a description of the attempt by a wily old pope to extend his influence beyond the grave. The man he wanted to succeed him was John of S. Paolo, Cardinal Priest of S. Prisca whom ‘he loved for his wisdom, sanctity and justice beyond all the other cardinals.’ As proof of this love and respect, he had already allowed him to act in his own place, undertaking every duty save that of consecrating bishops. In an extraordinary offer, according to Roger of Howden, Celestine even went so far as to express his willingness to abdicate so that the cardinals could appoint John of S. Paolo before his death. All the cardinals, however, ‘with one voice, made answer that they would not be willing to elect him on such conditions and alleged that it was a thing unheard of for the Supreme Pontiff to abdicate.’ In attempting this, Celestine was making a far-reaching claim for papal sovereignty, prefiguring the later suggestion of Augustinus Triumphus, in the early fourteenth century, that the pope had a right to choose his own successor. It was unthinkable that the College of Cardinals in the last years of the twelfth century would so relinquish their right to vote. Any such designation by Celestine would have represented a direct challenge to the position of the cardinals as electors of the pope.

My debt to Michael Wilks is great indeed. A valued family friendship for over twenty years has survived interminable power-struggles played out on the Monopoly board, his two sons taking the lead. One other event involving his two sons forms part of Bolton family folklore when, following a barbecue in St Albans, a hedge suddenly went up in flames. Michael Wilks was soon to the fore in quelling the conflagration. Our friendship still survived! I have always been grateful for his wise advice and constant support in academic matters as in other ways. Since April 1985, we have shared a Special Subject on ‘The Pontificate of Innocent III’, each respecting the other’s opinions where they differed. This divergence was always grasped by our students, who have teasingly played us off against each other to the great enjoyment of all. My contribution to his Festschrift contains much that he will recognize. Here were two other sons, whose fire needed to be doused if the hedge of the Lord’s Vineyard was not to be destroyed. But more time for action was needed in Rome at the turn of the twelfth century than in St Albans in 1975!

At the moment of Innocent Ill’s accession, the papacy faced both problems and opportunities in Italy, many of them the result of the unexpected death of the Emperor Henry VI in 1197 and the subsequent abeyance of imperial rule. The new pope at once showed his determination to realize the projects of his predecessors and to secure the position of the Holy See by establishing a papal governmental structure in central Italy and, in due course, by obtaining the election of an obedient and faithful emperor. These policies had repercussions on city-state regimes which had for many years now shown their own determination to achieve the most extensive authority possible, both within their walls and in their surrounding territories. Their quest for autonomy was often accompanied by measures hostile to the property and jurisdiction of the Church; it was sometimes also accompanied by the more or less overt toleration of heresy, even within the ranks of a city’s rulers. Attacks on clerical immunities, however, came to the papacy’s notice more frequently than instances of outright heresy, and Innocent at least was well aware how both anticlericalism and heresy proper were fuelled by the manifest inadequacies of the clergy.

The concept of Jewish serfdom has always figured prominently in interpretations of the medieval Jewish European past. It has seemed at once to hold the key to the understanding of Jewish status at both civil and ecclesiastical law and to mark in an especially dramatic way the degraded position (to some historians, a legal condition of rightlessness) forced on Jews in the period that witnessed a marked deterioration in their position in Christendom. ‘Crucial for an understanding of the entire Jewish position in the medieval world’, Salo Baron has written, summarizing a long-established interpretation, ‘is the institution of “Jewish serfdom”.’ And Gavin Langmuir sees the concept as dominating present historiography about the legal status of medieval Jews. This dominance, however, he has challenged: ‘To speak of Jews as royal serfs or “serfs” only obscures legal realities… Neither Jewish status in canon law nor Jewish status in secular law are accurately described as Jewish serfdom.’

THE idea of papal sovereignty was foreign to the Byzantines. They had trouble enough trying to understand the Western interpretation of papal primacy. Papal ‘sovereignty’ was beyond them, unintelligible, unreasonable, and unhistorical. It is true that the East Roman Christians, whom for convenience we call Byzantines, did not all live in one generation. Their cultural and political roots were in Constantinople, the ancient Byzantium; and their empire endured in one form or another for 1,100 years, from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries. In so long a span their ideas naturally evolved and changed, as did their society. But their concept of the order of the Christian world remained stable. It was based upon the formula devised by the first Christian historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, in the fourth century. The formula was an amalgam of pre-Christian, Hellenistic notions of monarchy, with Old and New Testament elements. The Christian Roman Emperor was the elect of God and, as God’s vice-gerent on earth, he ruled over what was the terrestrial reflection, albeit a poor copy, of the Kingdom of Heaven. His patriarchs or supreme bishops of the Christian Empire, especially the Patriarch of Constantinople, his capital city, were the spiritual heads of the Christian world, acting in harmony with him. Church and State were therefore one, indissoluble and interdependent.

The Dominican John of Paris (d. 1306) wrote a tract De potestate regia et papali which would later influence fifteenth-century conciliarists and seventeenth-century republicans. But the manuscript tradition shows no widespread diffusion of the work in its own times, and, according to Leclercq, the Depotestate does not figure amongst the works attributed to John of Paris in ancient Dominican catalogues of Dominican authors. It has long been thought that it should be dated c. 13023 as a contribution to the debate between Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair of France. John has been judged a major advocate of the royal position and his treatise has been taken to be a principal literary weapon in Philip’s arsenal against the Pope. It has also been judged by many to be a single-issue treatise of great coherence.

François de Meyronnes, of the Order of St Francis, has long been respected as an important figure in the history of later medieval philosophy and theology, but Père de Lapparent, in 1940-2, first revealed in full the vigour and the extent to which François also devoted himself, in his teaching and publishing and in his other activities, to the cause of the Angevin Kingdom of Naples. François was born in Angevin territory, at Meyronnes, near Barcelonnette, in the valley of the Ubaye in Provence. He studied under Duns Scotus in Paris and taught there alongside Pierre Roger, later Pope Clement VI. On 24 May 1323 Pope John XXII wrote to the Chancellor of the University, at the request of Robert, King of Sicily (1309-43), to ask for the licentia docendi to be bestowed upon François, who was then Bachelor of Theology. John XXII also sought François’ opinion on the question of the poverty of Christ and of the Apostles before publishing the Bull Quia quorundam (19 November 1324), and in the same year, 1324, he sent François to Gascony with instructions to negotiate peace between King Charles the Fair and King Edward II of England.

One of the ‘Problems of Sovereignty’ addressed by Michael Wilks in his magisterial study is whether the pope can appoint his own successor.’ It was, of course, a particularly pressing problem for any prince who had no natural heir, either because of his own deliberate celibacy, or, if he had children, because there was no established rule of hereditary succession. In the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes saw the right to appoint a successor, and thus to perpetuate what he calls the ‘artificial eternity’ of the commonwealth, as an essential attribute of sovereignty: There is no perfect form of government, where the disposing of the succession is not in the present sovereign. For if it be in any other particular man or private assembly, it is in a person subject, and may be assumed by the sovereign at his pleasure; and consequently the right is in himself.’ He also pinpointed the problems which would arise without this attribute: ‘If it be known who have the power to give the sovereignty after his [the ruler’s] death it is known also that the sovereignty was in them before; for none have right to give that which they have not right to possess, and keep to themselves, if they think good.’ Moreover, if the sovereign cannot appoint his successor ‘then is the commonwealth dissolved; and the right is in him that can get it.’

In the fourteenth century, and notably under Cardinal Albornoz, the papal patrimony began its uneven development into a form of early modern state. As Paolo Prodi has pointed out, these early stages, although interrupted by retrogression caused by the Great Schism, served as the foundations for the construction of the state of the Renaissance papacy. In reality, the popes exercised sovereignty in a state whose origin and nature were essentially temporal: to this extent their regnum was no different from those of secular monarchs. There was, however, a problem impeding the perception of the true nature of the growth of papal state power: a certain ambiguity hung over the papal lands in that the papacy justified its rule both by hierocratic arguments and by reference to grants of jurisdiction from emperors and kings. The spiritual office of the popes could obscure the fact of the kind of state of which they were the sovereign. In the works of the fourteenth-century Commentators on the Roman law, however, there gradually emerged a clear recognition of the direction which the papacy was taking: that the Patrimony of St Peter was no more and no less than a state created by human institution.

IN his treatise on civil lordship, written a few years before the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, Wyclif raises, incidentally, but in a particularly challenging way, the central problem of political philosophy. The problem is to work out a consistent idea of authority and subordination as reciprocal—in the biblically extreme terms of WycliPs formulation, a consistent idea of reciprocal lordship and servitude or mastery and slavery. It is unclear what part, if any, his brief discussion of reciprocity plays in the rest of Wyclif s thought. There are echoes, but nothing like the elaboration the idea might seem to deserve, and authoritative recent studies raise doubts even about the echoes. Still, if we are willing to interpret Wycliffian reciprocity for ourselves, the idea may prove a fruitful one.