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 CONCILIARISM AND HERESY IN
F I F T E E N T H - C E N T U RY E N G L A N D

The general councils of the fifteenth century constituted a remarkable

political experiment, which used collective decision-making to tackle
important problems facing the Church. Such problems had hitherto
received rigid top-down management from Rome. However, at Con-
stance and Basle they were debated by delegates of different ranks from
across Europe and resolved through majority voting. Fusing the history
of political thought with the study of institutional practices, this innova-
tive study relates the procedural innovations of the general councils and
their anti-heretical activities to wider trends in corporate politics, intellec-
tual culture and pastoral reform. Alexander Russell argues that the accep-
tance of collective decision-making at the councils was predicated upon
the prevalence of group participation and deliberation in small-scale cor-
porate culture. Conciliarism and Heresy in Fifteenth-Century England offers a
fundamental reassessment of England’s relationship with the general coun-
cils, revealing how political thought, heresy, and collective politics were
connected.

a le xande r ru s se l l gained his doctorate from the University of

Oxford in 2011. In 2012–13 he was a Mellon Fellow at the Pontifical Insti-
tute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto and he has subsequently been a Lev-
erhulme Early Career Fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renais-
sance at the University of Warwick.
 Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought
Fourth Series

General Editor:
ro samond m c k it te ri c k
Emeritus Professor of Medieval History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College
Advisory Editors:
c h ri sti ne carpe nte r
Emeritus Professor of Medieval English History, University of Cambridge
m ag nu s ryan
University Lecturer in History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Peterhouse

The series Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought was inaugurated by G.G.
Coulton in 1921; Professor Rosamond McKitterick now acts as General Editor
of the Fourth Series, with Professor Christine Carpenter and Dr Magnus Ryan
as Advisory Editors. The series brings together outstanding work by medieval
scholars over a wide range of human endeavour extending from political econ-
omy to the history of ideas.

This is book 105 in the series, and a full list of titles in the series can be found at:
www.cambridge.org/medievallifeandthought
CONCILIARISM AND HERESY
I N F I F T E E N T H - C E N T U RY
ENGLAND
Collective Authority in the Age of the General Councils

A L E X A N D E R RU S S E L L
University of Warwick
 University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107172272
doi: 10.1017/9781316771570

C Alexander Russell 2017

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and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
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First published 2017
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accurate or appropriate.
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements page vi
List of Abbreviations viii

i nt roduc ti on 1
1. d i p lomac y and r e f orm at th e g e ne ral
c ounc i l s 10
2. th e c ounc i l s and l ay r e l i g i on 56
3. d e c i si on - m ak i ng at th e c ounc i l s and th e
wor l d of c ol le c tive pol iti c s 85
4. c onc i l i ari sm and h e re sy i n e ng land 116
5. r e p re se ntati on and i nte rp retative auth ority 148
c onc lu si on 184

Bibliography 197
Index 218

v
 AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S

Many people and institutions have contributed to the development of

this book. It is my great pleasure to thank them here. The doctoral thesis
from which the book derives was funded by the Arts and Humanities
Research Council and the Royal Historical Society. I am indebted to
both for their munificence, without which this book would never have
been written.
I thank my supervisors at Oxford, Felicity Heal and Ian Forrest, for
their faith in me. Extremely conscientious readers and critics, both caused
me to think harder about my arguments. Their guidance is indissolubly
bound up with my own work on this book and I hope that the final result
pleases them. Kantik Ghosh took me under his wing in the early phases
of my doctorate and has been a great inspiration. As I devoured his book
on the Wycliffite heresy, and as we later talked about the period, I realised
that the intellectual history of fifteenth-century England was worthy of
further attention.
During my postdoctoral studies, I profited enormously from a year
as a Mellon Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in
Toronto. PIMS provided a welcoming and stimulating institutional home
and I learned a great deal from its fellows. In particular, I would like
to thank James Carley, James Farge, Ann Hutchison, John Magee and
Martin Pickavé for their encouragement and advice. The PIMS Library
is an exceptional resource for medieval scholarship thanks to the range
of its collections and the helpfulness and knowledge of its staff. It was a
privilege and a great pleasure to be able to make use of it. I would also
like to thank the staff of the Bodleian Library, the British Library and the
Warburg Institute Library, in which the bulk of this book was researched
and written.
The book took its final shape within the University of Warwick. I
am grateful to the university and the Leverhulme Trust for making me
an Early Career Fellow at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance.
The Leverhulme Trust has been unstinting in its support, and the staff at
Warwick, particularly Ingrid De Smet, Beat Kümin, David Lines, Peter

vi
 Acknowledgements
Marshall and Penny Roberts, have provided valuable guidance. I am also
grateful to successive office-mates in the CSR, Eugenio Refini, Stephen
Bates and Máté Vince, for their companionship, and to Jayne Brown, the
secretary and mastermind of the Centre, for all her help.
I have incurred a debt of gratitude to the many medievalists I have
come to know in recent years. John Arnold, Mishtooni Bose, David
d’Avray, Serena Ferente, Miri Rubin, John Sabapathy and John Watts gen-
erously gave up their time to talk to me about my research; John Arnold
went beyond the call of duty in reading and commenting upon some of
the chapters. In the United States, John Van Engen was gracious enough
to comment on Chapter 2 and to offer his insights on fifteenth-century
religion to an unknown visitor. Magnus Ryan has long been a supporter
of my work and, most recently, a model academic reader, putting his unri-
valled knowledge of medieval law and political thought at my disposal. I
have profited from all these scholars’ insights, but it goes without saying
that none of them is responsible for the errors in fact and interpretation
to be found in the following pages: they are mine alone. Liz Friend-Smith
and Rebecca Taylor, my editors at Cambridge, have been a pleasure to
work with.
Tom Marsden and Dianne Mitchell selflessly read the entire book in
draft stage. I thank them for helping me to reframe my arguments and to
express myself more clearly, even when their efforts were greeted with
exasperation. And lastly, I thank my parents, who have supported me in
what,to South Africans,must seem a supremely quixotic enterprise.Their
love and support, along with Dianne’s, has helped me along an occasion-
ally precarious path. This book is for them.

vii
 A B B R E V I AT I O N S

BL The British Library

BRUO Emden, A.B., A Biographical Register of the University of
Oxford to A.D. 1500, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1957–9)
CUL Cambridge University Library
ODNB The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
PG J.-P. Migne (ed.), Patrologia Graeca, 161 vols. (Paris,
1857–66)
PL J.-P. Migne (ed.), Patrologia Latina, 222 vols. (Paris,
1844–65)
PROME The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, ed. C.
Given-Wilson et al., 16 vols. (Woodbridge, 2005)
Reg. Bekynton The Register of Thomas Bekynton, Bishop of Bath and
Wells, 1443–1465, ed. H.C. Maxwell-Lyte and M.C.B.
Dawes, 2 vols. (London, 1934)
Reg. Bubwith The Register of Nicholas Bubwith, Bishop of Bath and
Wells, 1407–1424, ed. T.S. Holmes, 2 vols. (London, 1914)
Reg. Chichele The Register of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury
1414–1443, ed. E.F. Jacob, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1937–47)
Reg. Lacy The Register of Edmund Lacy, Bishop of Exeter, 1420–1455,
ed. G.R. Dunstan, 5 vols. (Torquay, 1963–1972)
Reg. Langley The Register of Thomas Langley, 1406–1437, ed. R.L.
Storey, 6 vols. (Durham and London, 1949–1970)
Reg. Langton The Register of Thomas Langton, Bishop of Salisbury,
1485–93, ed. D.P. Wright (York, 1985)
Reg. Mascall The Register of Robert Mascall, Bishop of Hereford
1404–1416, ed. J.H. Parry (Hereford, 1916)
Reg. Repingdon The Register of Bishop Philip Repingdon, 1405–1419, ed.
M. Archer, 3 vols. (Hereford, 1963–1982)
Reg. Spofford Registrum Thome Spofford, Episcopi Herefordensis
1422–1448, ed. A.T. Bannister (London, 1919)
Reg. Stafford The Register of John Stafford, Bishop of Bath and Wells,
1425–1443, ed. T.S. Holmes, 2 vols. (London, 1915–1916)

viii
 List of Abbreviations
Reg. Trefnant Registrum Johannis Trefnant Episcopi Herefordensis, ed.
W.M. Capes (London, 1916)
TNA The National Archives
WA D. Martin Luthers Werke, ed. J.C.F Knaake (Weimar,
1883–)

ix
 I N T RO D U C T I O N

The dramatic events which took place at the general councils from 1409
to 1449, including the depositions of the rival Roman and Avignonese
popes and the burning of Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague,have understand-
ably preoccupied historians for centuries. The general councils consti-
tuted a remarkable political experiment which used collective decision-
making to tackle important problems facing the Church. Such problems
had hitherto received rigid top-down management from Rome. But at
Constance and Basle, they were debated by delegates of different ranks
from across Europe and were resolved through majority voting. This
experiment caused delegates to re-evaluate the political ideology which
underpinned Church government.
On a scale not hitherto attempted, this book relates the procedural
innovations of the general councils and their anti-heretical activities to
wider trends in collective politics, intellectual culture and pastoral reform.
This task is, of course, enormous, and in order to limit it to manageable
proportions this book will take England as a point of focus. It analyses
English developments as part of European trends. Far from being restric-
tive, this approach demonstrates just how far-reaching the councils’ ideas
and activities were. England has usually been taken as a hesitant partici-
pant in the conciliar movement. This book shows that, on the contrary,
the general councils were of great importance to the English. In so doing,
it will eschew a detailed narrative of events and an analysis of English per-
sonnel. For one thing, these tasks have already been accomplished in stud-
ies of the diplomatic history of the councils.1 Such histories have dwelt

1 A detailed narrative of English involvement at Pisa, Constance and Basle has already been provided
by three studies, two of which, regrettably, have not been fully published. M.M. Harvey, ‘English
views on the reforms to be undertaken in the General Councils (1400–1418) with special reference
to the proposals made by Richard Ullerston’ (Oxford Univ. DPhil. thesis, 1964); C.M.D. Crowder,
‘Some aspects of the English nation at the Council of Constance to the election of Martin V,
1414–17’ (Oxford Univ. DPhil. thesis, 1953); A.N.E.D. Schofield, ‘England and the Council of
Basel’, Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 5 (1973), 1–117.

1
 Introduction
at length on the political struggles between the papacy and the coun-
cils, and have been attentive to the jockeying for influence of various
regnal coalitions and interest groups within the councils. Although these
political processes will be analysed here in Chapter 1, they will not be
central to the analysis. The general council’s function as an arena for sec-
ular and ecclesiastical power struggles was transitory. This book contends
that the councils exercised a profounder influence than as a diplomatic
forum.
The plentiful attention given to political manoeuvres at the general
councils needs to be augmented with a consideration of the councils’
place within the fabric of contemporary society. The councils’ claim
to represent the universal congregation of the faithful served extremely
important social functions. The communitarian theories of the concil-
iarists were directed first and foremost against an interpretation of papal
power which excepted the pope from earthly judgement. It has not been
noticed, however, that the councils’ political claims were also used to
advance its attack on heresy. This brought the councils within a wider
arena of communitarian theory and praxis. It is usual to identify commu-
nitarian theories with processes of state building in late medieval politics.
Their role in the politics of exclusion and discipline has received less
attention.
This book diverges from two influential narratives regarding the gen-
eral councils.2 Some historians have written about the councils with the
subject of religious reform in mind. The Great Western Schism was a
dark chapter in the history of the Church as an institution, and the
Councils of Pisa and Constance have been presented as an opportu-
nity for the Church to put its house in order.3 Verdicts on the councils’
achievements have naturally been divided. Some commentators see the
fifteenth-century councils as a missed opportunity.4 The burning of Jan
Hus has been interpreted as a needless inflammation of religious tensions,
when a more pacific method to reintegrate basically orthodox religious
teachers into the fold would have been more appropriate.5 Philip Stump,

2 For a sense of the immense body of literature available on the Council of Constance alone, see A.
Frenken, ‘Die Erforschung des Konstanzer Konzils (1414–1418) in den letzten Jahren’, Annuarium
Historiae Conciliorum, 25 (1993), 1–512.
3 H. Jedin typifies this way of thinking. A History of the Council of Trent, trans. E. Graf, 2 vols. (London,
1957), I, pp. 29–31.
4 W. Brandmüller, Das Konzil von Konstanz 1414–1418, 2 vols. (Paderborn, 1997), I, pp. 427–9. This
school of thought is surveyed in P. Stump, The Reforms of the Council of Constance, 1414–1418 (Leiden,
1994), pp. 16–21.
5 P. de Vooght, L’hérésie de Jean Huss (Leuven, 1960); de Vooght, ‘La confrontation des thèses hussites
et romaines au concile de Bâle’, Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévale 37 (1970), 97–137;
254–91.

2
 Introduction
more recently, has argued that the reforms agreed upon at Constance did
lead to a reinvigoration of the fifteenth-century Church.6 In both cases,
the future struggles of the Reformation have not been far from scholars’
minds, whether or not they think the councils were responsible for later
frictions. While owing an enormous amount to the historiography on
Church reform, this book is not preoccupied with the theme as such.7
As Chapter 1 shows, the many different concepts of reform at this time
make it highly problematic to measure the successes or failures of the
councils according to any one yardstick. What is more, it is not entirely
legitimate to praise or berate the council fathers for failing to anticipate
criticisms that would be made almost a century later. Although it is not
feasible to argue that the failings of the councils made the Reformation
inevitable, we can show how scholars during the Reformation made use
of the ideas bequeathed to them by the conciliarists. This theme will be
handled briefly in the conclusion to the book.
The history of political thought is the second tradition in which the
general councils have long occupied a privileged position.8 The con-
ciliarists challenged the pope’s pretension to stand above human judge-
ment. By deposing the rival popes, the council fathers at Constance pro-
vided one of the starkest examples in the later middle ages of a divinely
ordained monarch being disciplined in the name of the community. The
origins of the twentieth century’s interest in the councils’ political legacy
can be found in the daunting oeuvre of Otto von Gierke.9 In Gierke’s
view, the councils were the manifestation of a ripening notion of popu-
lar sovereignty (Volkssouveränetät) in the fifteenth century. It was increas-
ingly common in this period, Gierke argued, to claim that temporal
authority derived from the political community as a whole.10 Political
agents and institutions thus competed to position themselves as represen-
tatives of communities.11 Thanks to legal concepts about corporations,the

6 Stump, Reforms, pp. 270–2.

7 Three excellent studies have explored the meaning of reform at the councils:J.Helmrath,‘Reform
als Thema der Konzilien des Spätmittelaters’ in G. Alberigo (ed.), Christian Unity: The Coun-
cil of Ferrara-Florence, 1438–1439 (Leuven, 1989), pp. 81–152; J. Miethke, ‘Kirchenreform auf den
Konzilien des 15. Jahrhunderts, Motive – Methoden – Wirkungen’ in J. Helmrath, H. Müller and
H. Wolff (eds.), Studien zum 15. Jahrhundert: Festschrift für Erich Meuthen, 2 vols. (Munich, 1994), I,
pp. 13–42; Stump, Reforms.
8 For the immense literature on conciliarism, see the discussion in Chapter 4.
9 For Gierke’s influence on Frederic Maitland, who in turn influenced subsequent English histori-
ans, see the comments by the editors of Maitland, State, Trust and Corporation, ed. D. Runciman and
M. Ryan (Cambridge, 2003), pp. xi–xiv. Further comments on Gierke’s influence on the history
of conciliarism can be found in F. Oakley, ‘On the Road from Constance to 1688: The Political
Thought of John Major and George Buchanan’, Journal of British Studies, 1 (1962), 1–31 at pp. 2–3.
10 O. von Gierke, Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1868–1913), III, p. 581.
11 Ibid., III, p. 595.

3
 Introduction
council fathers claimed that they completely and adequately represented
the totality of all the members of the Church.12 Such principles were
opposed to an idea of papal lordship as an absolute power which could
not be shared and which was timeless and inalterable.13 Gierke was con-
vinced that the emergence of legal concepts pertaining to corporations
provided the impetus for the formulation of conciliarist theories. This
thesis was powerfully substantiated by Brian Tierney, who demonstrated
that the conciliarists were reliant upon canonistic ideas regulating eccle-
siastical corporations.14 Decretals defining the relationship between head
and members in cathedral chapters and colleges provided a model which
the conciliarists applied to the relationship between the universal Church
and the pope.
The councils’ critique of the papal monarchy has received extensive
attention from historians of medieval politics. The general councils have
even been linked to ‘a crisis of monarchy’ in fifteenth-century Europe.15
Inside the assembly chambers at Constance and Basle, so the story goes,
the logic of community was bravely pitted against the logic of monar-
chy. From the point of view of the historian of the fifteenth century this
approach has entailed a number of limitations.First,as Susan Reynolds has
pointed out, it draws too artificial an opposition between communitarian
and hierarchical theories. Monarchs legitimised their rule with reference
to their people as well as to God.16 Walter Ullmann famously distin-
guished between ‘ascending’ theories of power, which described earthly
authority as a gift of God, and ‘descending’ theories, which conceived
authority as inhering in the political community.17 Even though this dis-
tinction is now thought to be too rigid, the categorisation of ‘ascending’
and ‘descending’ theories may still have its uses, as long as it is recog-
nised that these theories were not necessarily antipathetic.18 J.H. Burns
helpfully acknowledged that the conciliarists did not wish to question
monarchy’s superiority as a form of government. Instead they wanted to
qualify the way it was understood and refine the way it operated.19
The comparative analytic framework in these constitutional histories
(with the possible exception of Gierke’s) had monarchy at its centre.
‘Community’ and ‘monarchy’ have been opposed as the essential units
12 Ibid., III, pp. 581–92. 13 Ibid., III, p. 566.
14 B. Tierney, The Foundations of the Conciliar Theory: The Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from
Gratian to the Great Schism (Cambridge, 1955), pp. 106–53.
15 J.H. Burns, Lordship, Kingship and Empire: The Idea of Monarchy 1400–1525 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 1–15.
16 S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900–1300, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1997), p. 329.
17 Most forcefully expressed in W. Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought (Harmondsworth, 1979).
18 For a trenchant critique of Ullmann’s approach, F. Oakley, ‘Celestial Hierarchies Revisited: Walter
Ullmann’s Vision of Medieval Politics’, Past & Present, 60 (1973), 3–48.
19 Burns, Lordship, p. 127.

4
 Introduction
of fifteenth-century discourse. Whatever the merits or demerits of this
approach, this book wishes to bring related practices and languages of
community centre stage, not in order to elucidate conciliarism as a cri-
tique of monarchy,but to demonstrate its relevance to discourses of office-
holding and discipline more generally. In so doing, the book wishes to
question the exceptional status accorded to the councils by so many histo-
ries of political thought. The book will instead describe how the councils
were positioned within a dense matrix of medieval institutions.It is hoped
thereby to provide a fuller understanding of the interconnections within
fifteenth-century political consciousness. This book will show that the
procedures of decision-making and the standards of office-holding in the
councils were analogous to those in other institutions. The councils will
emerge as an outcome of general trends in collective politics in the fif-
teenth century, rather than as a special standard-bearer of communitarian
attacks on monarchical authority.
My approach, of course, builds upon the work of earlier scholars.
Gierke and Tierney argued that conciliarism’s legitimacy derived from
norms of office-holding and collective authority that were widespread
in small-scale corporations.20 This study takes these observations as
axiomatic, while at the same time modifying the terms of discussion. This
book wishes to put political practice on an equal footing with political
theory. It is striking that although a large number of studies have anal-
ysed the theoretical components of conciliarism, very few have given
the procedures of the councils equal attention. Yet the council fathers at
Constance and Basle adapted methods of decision-making from corpo-
rate settings at the same time as they borrowed concepts from the canon
law. This is most fully explored in Chapter 3. The joint transmission of
practices and ideas must be recognised, for in some respects it strengthens
the original thesis proposed by Gierke.
The time spent discussing corporate institutions should not be taken as
a sign of blindness towards other forms of collective activity. Corporate
structures will receive especial examination, for the simple reason that
they provided a special bridging function between small-scale collective
government and the world of the general councils. Most of the delegates
at the councils were university-trained clerics and it is likely that their
attitudes towards collective decision-making were strongly informed by
their experiences of life in cathedral chapters and university colleges. This
study differs from the Gierkean approach,however,in that it does not hold

20 Indeed, Gierke recognised that thinking about group activity in Germany was timeless and cer-
tainly preceded the medieval adoption of Roman law concepts. See D. Runciman, Pluralism and
the Personality of the State (Cambridge, 1997), p. 51.

5
 Introduction
that corporate government was necessarily a privileged venue of collec-
tive decision-making, serving as a special model for the rest of society. As
Susan Reynolds has pointed out, many kinds of collective activity were
carried out in communities with no strict corporate status.21 This point
is reflected in my analysis of parishes and guilds which were not always
incorporated at law.
The book constitutes, above all, a change of perspective which allows
us to trace different forms of ideological exchange. Previous work has
chiefly identified the councils as a resistance movement against ‘abso-
lutist’ papal monarchy. This study, by contrast, wishes to analyse how the
councils made use of their claim to represent the whole Christian com-
munity. I will pursue this at a theoretical level by asking just what the
claim meant and how it was defended, but I will also examine the prac-
tical implications of the claim in contexts other than papal government.
The most important of these contexts was the English anti-heresy cam-
paign.
Heresy is a thematic seam whose veins run throughout the book. The
English struggles with heresy shaped its engagement with the conciliar
cause. Anti-heretical activities will not be isolated and given separate ana-
lytic treatment, but will instead emerge in a consideration of a range of
themes.The drive against heresy influenced,among other things,attitudes
towards devotion, scholastic methodologies, tenets in political thought,
and programmes of practical Church reform.
The flaring up of heresy in England and Bohemia confronted the
council fathers of the fifteenth century with many dilemmas.The Church
establishment needed to foster lay devotional energies, but at the same
time had to keep potentially subversive enthusiasm in check. How was
this balance to be achieved? There were no easy answers. The anti-
heretical activities of the councils (and of the western Church as a whole)
did not amount to a self-contained exercise, attacking only deviants, but
leaving the solid core of the faithful untouched. As Alexander Patchovsky
has pointed out, a surprisingly large cast of characters was accused of
heresy in the late middle ages.22 The anxieties about the creeping of
heresy, led to attacks on revered figures, such as St Bridget of Sweden,
at the councils of Constance and Basle. Embodying, as she did, many
aspects of lay spirituality, Bridget’s trial at the councils amounted to a
trial of lay devotion tout court. An analysis of the council’s extension of

21 Reynolds, Kingdoms, p. 59.

22 A. Patschovsky, ‘Heresy and Society: On the Political Function of Heresy in the Medieval World’
in C. Bruschi and P. Biller (eds.), Texts and the Repression of Medieval Heresy (York, 2003), pp. 23–41
at 25–6.

6
 Introduction
the attack on heresy provides a revealing portrait of the clergy’s attitudes
towards popular devotion in this period.
Wyclif’s heresy had the effect of making European intellectuals pro-
foundly insecure about the emergence of a new political order. The
Oxford master’s emphasis on the conditional nature of temporal office
in the Church was extremely troubling and appeared to chime with the
demands of the popular rebels in 1381.23 This conjunction of ideas and
popular violence could not be ignored. Very similar theories about con-
ditional authority were invoked in the deposition of the popes at the
general councils. The disturbing coincidence between certain aspects of
conciliarist thought and heretical subversion goes a long way to explain-
ing the muted reaction to the political ideology of the councils in England
in the fifteenth century.
Yet if heresy explains the failure of the English to engage openly with
certain aspects of conciliarism, it also accounts for the deeper acceptance
of the council’s interpretative and judicial claims. The English anti-heresy
campaign relied heavily upon the collective action of local communities.
This book argues that the methods of collective deliberation used at the
councils lent credence to the councils’claims to represent the whole com-
munity of the faithful throughout western Europe. Similarly, the English
acceptance of collective decision-making at the councils was predicated
upon the prevalence of group participation and deliberation in English
government. The book explores these issues with reference to cathe-
dral chapters, university colleges, guilds and parishes. The employment of
communitarian ideology in conciliar pronouncements was useful to the
English anti-heresy campaign because it could be shown that the heretics
were an isolated minority which aligned itself against the judgements of
the whole Christian community. Thus, the work of the general coun-
cils dovetailed with patterns of state formation and local government in
England insofar as its anti-heretical activities were concerned.
Recent work has contended that the fifteenth century witnessed the
consolidation of regnal polities and their political structures (instruments
of justice, channels of public communication, means of fiscal exaction,
etc.).24 The political community was forged not only by top-down forces,
such as the demands of warfare and the extension of taxation (although
these were important), but by the participation of the people, who con-
stantly appealed to ‘la chose publique’, ‘common weal’, or analogous

23 M. Aston, ‘Lollardy and Sedition 1381–1431’, Past & Present 17 (1960), 1–44; Aston, ‘Corpus Christi
and Corpus Regni: Heresy and the Peasants’ Revolt’, Past & Present 143 (1994), 3–47.
24 J. Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge, 2009); G.L. Harriss, ‘Political Society
and the Growth of Government in Late Medieval England’, Past & Present, 138 (1993), 28–57.

7
 Introduction
vernacular terms in their interactions with central authorities.25 Signifi-
cantly, these political processes coincided with the anti-heresy campaign
and the strengthening of an already tight partnership between Church
and crown in England. This book will explore the development of an
ecclesiastical language of community which paralleled this secular dis-
course. This communitarian language reflected the participation of the
entire community in the detection and prosecution of heretics (as in many
other ecclesiastical activities).26 The general council featured prominently
here. The authorities relentlessly portrayed heretics as a minority whose
aberrant beliefs had to cede to the choices of the multitude. The general
councils, as institutions which represented the universal Church, were
invoked to lend force to this communitarian argument.
To help the reader locate the book’s contributions to the study of
heresy, communal politics and other themes, I will give a sequential syn-
opsis of each chapter. The first chapter challenges dismissive interpreta-
tions of English participation at the general councils, showing that the
councils could serve the needs of the English crown and various inter-
est groups within the Church. Chapter 2 shows that the struggle against
heresy in England and Bohemia strongly informed the council fathers’
attitudes to lay worship in general. Their conflicting impulses (alarm at
irregularities and a desire to foster lay enthusiasm) crystallised in debates
over the sanctity of St Bridget. Chapter 3 analyses decision-making at the
councils in the context of a ubiquitous collective culture. The delegates
at Constance came to accept the apparently revolutionary procedures at
the council because they were familiar with analogous forms of deliber-
ation and majority voting in cathedral chapters, university colleges and
guilds.Chapter 4 analyses the ways in which the Wycliffite heresy compli-
cated the English reception of the political ideas used to justify the coun-
cils’ supremacy over the popes. The final chapter examines the councils’
claims to represent the universal Church. It argues that the council was
often cited in the English anti-heresy campaign to stigmatise heretics as
an isolated minority who had set themselves against the judgement of the
majority of believers.The concepts of community used at the council had
an exclusionary edge: if one was not part of the ‘majority’ of believers,
whose beliefs possessed reliability, then one could be disciplined by the
representatives of the Christian community.

25 For the English context, see J.L. Watts, ‘The Pressure of the Public on Later Medieval Politics’
in The Fifteenth Century, vol. IV, ed. L. Clark and C. Carpenter (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 159–80.
For the role of popular political pressure in Florentine state building, see S.K. Cohn, Creating the
Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434 (Cambridge, 1999).
26 I. Forrest, The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2005).

8
 Introduction
Conciliar ideas and activities were extremely contentious and it should
not surprise us that they elicited appropriately complex and multifaceted
responses in England. The general councils acted to bring to a head cer-
tain tensions within fifteenth-century political attitudes. The councils
harmonised with the communitarian political ideologies of fifteenth-
century England, guaranteeing that they became an important theme in
the English literature and propaganda directed against the heretics. But
the councils also exposed the difficulties inherent in these concepts. The
conciliar movement brought thinkers throughout Europe to question the
validity of majority decisions per se, despite their significance in various
interpretative models. Observers questioned how the Christian commu-
nity was to be defined and who was to represent it. Could a represen-
tative body act with the infallibility granted by Christ to the Church?
This book will emphasise the dynamism of fifteenth-century political
culture – a dynamism which found its reflection in the innovative ideas
espoused by the defenders of the councils and their critics.

9
 Chapter 1

D I P L O M AC Y A N D R E F O R M AT T H E
GENERAL COUNCILS

The councils have featured most prominently in recent histories as sites

of intellectual ferment, where the concepts of representative politics and
reform were debated by delegates from across Europe. These ideas were,
of course, shaped and constrained by the alliances and rivalries of sec-
ular political agents and ecclesiastical orders. An appraisal of the gen-
eral councils’ lasting influence on medieval thought must, therefore, take
account of the unstable concatenation of political interests achieved at
the councils. The co-ordination of a bewildering array of voices was a
minimum condition of conciliar unity. Within these challenging con-
ditions, the English were enthusiastic and influential participants at the
general councils. Yet the leading works on the subject have reinforced
a number of mistaken assumptions about English motivations. E.F. Jacob
suggested that the English crown did not press for the reform of the cen-
tralised system of papal presentments, with its attendant fees and taxes,
because it already had significant control over episcopal appointments in
England. With heresy rife at home, ‘to English eyes unity and ortho-
doxy were of greater significance than reform’. This distinction between
a drive for ‘orthodoxy’ and a drive for ‘reform’ is highly questionable.
As we shall discuss, a desire for reform was seen as a mark of ortho-
doxy as well as a means of strengthening the Church against heresy. Jacob
admitted that the English delegates managed to extract not insignificant
concessions from Martin V at the Council of Constance, but he stated
that after Constance ‘reform [was] not a leading issue for the English’.1
In his work on the Council of Basle, A.N.E.D. Schofield has reinforced
the impression that the English were unenthusiastic participants at the
general council. England had no great interest in reform and its natural
conservatism made it loath to accept the Council of Basle’s indepen-
dence from papal command. ‘During the Council of Basel’, Schofield
argues, ‘England was strongly pro-papal. Supporters of the Council occa-
sionally claimed to have found sympathisers in England but convincing
1 E.F. Jacob, Essays in the Conciliar Epoch (Manchester, 1963), pp. 52–3.

10
 Diplomacy and Reform at the General Councils
evidence of this invariably escapes us today.’2 For Schofield, the English
crown had no reason to become heavily involved in the Council of Basle:
‘English interest in the Council was confined to the pursuit of specific
aims which, apart from that of furthering negotiations for peace, were
often of a negative nature; there is no evidence of English sympathy with
conciliarism and England’s fundamentally loyal relations with the papacy
were carefully safeguarded.’3 The fact that England produced no notable
conciliar theorist has been taken as an additional indication of England’s
ideological conservatism.4
The suspicion arises that these accounts have taken their hindsight for
granted. When the demise of the conciliar enterprise is assumed, the
English silence about conciliarism and the crown’s non-committal stance
towards Basle become all too explicable as the rejection of a doomed
enterprise. This interpretation obscures an important fact: the failure of
the conciliar movement would not have appeared an inevitable outcome
to those living in the first half of the fifteenth century. Adaptability to
changing diplomatic circumstances was essential: it precluded an inflex-
ible policy based solely on rigidly conservative principles. A degree of
confusion has also crept into the aforementioned studies as a result of their
conflation of the motives of the English government and the motives of
private parties or corporate groups in England. Thus, the very loose cat-
egory ‘the English’ is invoked constantly, as if the interests of the English
government and everyone else in the realm were identical. The English
crown’s rejection of Basle is thus read as a symptom of a general English
disillusionment with the general councils.
This chapter seeks to question these assumptions. It will argue that
there was a sense of possibility to England’s engagement with the gen-
eral councils until the collapse of the Council of Basle. Although the
English crown did have a large degree of control over episcopal appoint-
ments and could restrain papal fiscal demands, it was still keen to use
general councils (and the threat of conciliar intervention) to contain
the resurgence of the papacy after Constance. The argument that the
English crown was innately ‘conservative’ must be rejected: the ideologi-
cal content of its diplomatic announcements was adapted to circumstance;
the English government only rejected the conciliar enterprise when its
influence at the general councils was curtailed. Until then, however, it
had good reasons to make use of the councils. That said, the history of

2 Schofield, ‘England and the Council of Basel’, p. 4.

3 Schofield, ‘England, the Pope, and the Council of Basel 1435–1449’, Church History, 33 (1964),
248–78 at p. 252.
4 Jacob, Conciliar Epoch, p. 84.

11
 Diplomacy and Reform at the General Councils
England’s involvement with the general councils is not merely the story
of the crown’s motivations and of its gains and losses. It would be wrong
to assume that all the English delegates at the council, and all the inter-
ested parties at home, shared the aims of the crown. Although harmony
might often prevail, there was plenty of scope for English parties to pull in
different directions.5 The potential for conflict might be thought to have
weakened commitment to the councils. But an analysis of these compet-
ing interests will strengthen the observation that there were several par-
ties in England with a stake in conciliar business. When the dynamism
of England’s conciliar participation is taken into account, it becomes
increasingly puzzling that very few English authors defended the work
of the general councils on a theoretical level during the fifteenth cen-
tury. The discrepancy between thought and action at the general councils
will be the subject of Chapter 4. The failure of English writers to pro-
claim their approval of the conciliar enterprise will be explained not in
terms of a fundamental lack of sympathy, or an outcome of ingrained
conservatism, but as a result of their complicated engagement with
heresy.

p roble m s and po s si b i l iti e s of th e s ourc e s

The problem of generalising about English attitudes is, to a large extent,
a result of evidential difficulties. Many of the sources available to us
were produced by or addressed to the various organs of English govern-
ment. Hence it is natural that the interests of government should appear
omnipresent, and the views of independent parties obscure in accounts
of the period. The fact that independent groups generated fewer docu-
ments than government should not, however, be taken as a sign that they
lacked interest in the work of general councils.
The correspondence between the English crown and delegates pro-
vides the most reliable evidence of the intentions of the crown. Unfor-
tunately it survives only in part. John Prophet, secretary to Henry IV
and later Keeper of the Privy Seal, kept a record-book, containing royal
correspondence between 1400 and 1410.6 This is a very rich source of
information about the crown’s intentions regarding the Council of Pisa.
Unfortunately, nothing similar survives to shed light on the Council
of Constance. Thomas Hoccleve’s letter-book, although contemporary
with Constance, tells us nothing about the council, possibly because it

5 As recognised by M. Harvey, Solutions to the Schism: A Study of Some English Attitudes, 1378–1409 (St.
Ottilien, 1983), p. 176.
6 Ibid., pp. 117–18. Prophet’s record-book is now BL MS Harley 431.

12
 Problems and Possibilities of the Sources
coincided with a spate of his mental illness. In late-medieval England, the
crown would usually have dispatched day-to-day diplomatic instructions
through the offices of the Privy Seal and Signet.7
Unfortunately, record-keeping in the two small seals was lamentable
in comparison to Chancery and Exchequer. Government departments
would not have had much interest in preserving quotidian documents,
such as diplomatic instructions, once they had served their purpose. The
historian is, therefore, more or less dependent on the collation of diplo-
matic letters by contemporaries who wished to preserve them largely
as exemplars of style and etiquette. When letter-books do not help us,
as they do not for Constance, the array of extant diplomatic documents
is drastically reduced. Only nineteen letters sent to or by English dele-
gates at Constance survive. Perhaps, as Christopher Crowder conjectured,
many of the manuscripts relating to the English presence at Constance
were consumed by a fire in the seventeenth century, while Ben Jonson
was writing a history of the reign of Henry V.8 For the Council of Basle,
on the other hand, we are more fortunate in having several letter-books
of Thomas Beckington, who served the crown as a diplomat during the
peace negotiations with France in 1433. Many letters from the crown to
the English delegates at Basle are preserved in Beckington’s collection.
The surviving MS, Lambeth Library MS 211, is from the mid-fifteenth
century. It is possible that it was produced under the supervision of Beck-
ington himself.9 What is more, key episodes of the 1420s are elucidated
by another of Beckington’s letter books, which can be found in Bodleian
MS Ashmole 789.10
The records which shed light on the motives of the clergy are also
plentiful, but they present further interpretative difficulties. The records
of Convocation are one important indicator of clerical attitudes. The
problem is that the issues discussed by Convocation were often framed
by the crown. Although the Archbishops of Canterbury and York sum-
moned the Southern and Northern Convocations respectively, they usu-
ally did so partly at the king’s instigation so as to grant him a subsidy.11 The

7 P. Chaplais, English Diplomatic Practice in the Middle Ages (London, 2003), pp. 98–102; K. Plöger,
England and the Avignon Popes: The Practice of Diplomacy in Late Medieval Europe (London, 2005),
p. 180.
8 All the information here on the survival of diplomatic correspondence from Constance is taken
from C.M.D. Crowder, ‘Correspondence between England and the Council of Constance, 1414–
18’ in C.W. Dugmore & C. Duggan (eds.), Studies in Church History, Volume 1 (London, 1964),
pp. 184–206.
9 Official Correspondence of Thomas Bekynton, ed. G. Williams, 2 vols. (London, 1872), I, p. ix.
10 W.H. Black, A Descriptive, Analytical and Critical Catalogue of the Manuscripts bequeathed unto the
University of Oxford by Elias Ashmole (Oxford, 1845), pp. 412–13.
11 Records of Convocation, ed. G. Bray, 20 vols. (Woodbridge, 2005–6), XIX, p. 8.

13
 Diplomacy and Reform at the General Councils
records of Convocation rarely tell us much about the content of the dis-
cussions which took place in the assembly. The tendency is to emphasise
the dutiful service which the clergy offered to the king. The voices of dis-
senters do not usually enter the record. Sometimes one can read between
the lines. Resistance to the crown’s demand for a subsidy can, for exam-
ple, be inferred from a long delay in making a grant.12 Very occasionally,
recalcitrance could harden into a downright refusal to co-operate with
the crown and the higher prelates. In May 1438, the Southern Convoca-
tion refused the Archbishop of Canterbury’s proposal to grant a subsidy
for delegates to attend the Council of Ferrara-Florence, for example. But
the lower house did not initially account for its behaviour, or, if it did,
its reasons were not entered into the record.13 Later it pleaded poverty,
but it is possible that this excuse was designed to mask objections to the
direction of royal policy and that the real grounds for the lower house’s
obstinacy were filtered out by the record.
The proceedings of the general councils also allow us to test the com-
mitments of the English representatives, the great bulk of whom were
clerics. The council acta sometimes provide us with English delegates’
responses to proposals aired at general sessions of the councils. We are
presented with evidence of sermons delivered by English delegates, even
when the texts of these sermons have been lost. And we hear of private
parties making petitions to the councils which would otherwise have
been sent to the papal curia. The records also tell us which English del-
egates participated in the various committees of the general councils.
Unfortunately, the sources relating to the deliberations of the commit-
tees themselves generally do not survive.14 We are usually left in the dark
about the sentiments of particular English delegates towards various items
of conciliar business. It is also often difficult to determine the influence
of individual delegates. We know, for example, that Nicholas Bubwith
was a president of one of the reform committees at Constance, but it is
not certain exactly which one.15 This is less problematic for the charis-
matic leader of the English nacio at Constance, Robert Hallum, whose
motives are discussed by one of the diarists of the council, Cardinal Fil-
lastre. Richard Fleming, a major player at the Council of Pavia-Siena, was
also well enough known to have been commented upon by the diarist
John of Ragusa.

12 R.N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1989), p. 113.
13 Records of Convocation, V, pp. 380–1.
14 P.H. Stump, The Reforms of the Council of Constance 1414–1418 (Leiden, 1994), p. 27.
15 M. Harvey, ‘English views on the reforms to be undertaken in the General Councils (1400–1418)
with special reference to the proposals made by Richard Ullerston’ (Oxford Univ. DPhil thesis,
1964), p. 183.

14
 Problems and Possibilities of the Sources
Vital to an understanding of the clerical interests in conciliar reform
are the various reform petitions which were produced for use at the gen-
eral councils. The first of these was produced at the instigation of Robert
Hallum, bishop of Salisbury by Richard Ullerstone in preparation for the
Council of Pisa.16 The second set of petitions was drawn up by the Uni-
versity of Oxford at the request of the crown in 1414. The circumstances
under which these proposals were created is unclear. The royal letter of
summons is lost,and it is not clear whether Congregation or Convocation
was responsible for its authorship. Many of the items in the Constance
petitions are modelled upon Ullerstone’s earlier work,as Margaret Harvey
has shown.17 Lastly, a number of anonymous reform proposals were
assembled for the Council of Basle. The single manuscript exemplar of
these proposals gives no indication of their authorship.18 A later hand has
added the note ‘14 H VI’, i.e., 1435–6, but it is likely, as A.N.E.D Schofield
has argued, that the petition was composed to coincide with an earlier
period of sustained English involvement at the council.19 These petitions
give us a very clear picture of a set of abiding concerns about reform. As
will be discussed, the three petitions have much in common, and their
mutual hostility towards the regular orders of the Church suggest that
they were the work of secular clerics. It would be a mistake, therefore, to
take these proposals as a representative list of clerical grievances. Given
that at least two of them were produced in an academic setting, they may
provide a stronger indication of scholarly opinion.
The historian’s most personal contact with the English delegates comes
through their sermons; the texts of several delivered at the Council of
Constance survive and are a very exciting historical resource. They allow
us to relate the sentiments of their English authors to the concerns of the
Europe-wide reform movement. On the question of conciliar authority,
which is of especial interest here, they also demonstrate that the English
delegates were capable of holding a range of views. We should not for-
get, however, that the conciliar sermons present their own interpretative
difficulties. Their authors did not make their sermons simply as private
individuals; they delivered them also as representatives of various corpo-
rate groups, of the English Church and of the crown. As we shall see,
some of the delegates were nervous about discussing some controversial
questions regarding the government of the Church. This tentativeness
is understandable on the part of self-conscious defenders of England’s

16 H. von der Hardt, Magnum Oecumenicum Constantiense Concilium (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1700), I,
pp. 1126–7.
17 Harvey, ‘Ullerston’, pp. 158–9. 18 BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E III, fo. 72.
19 Schofield, ‘Basel’, p. 80.

15
 Diplomacy and Reform at the General Councils
reputation which had recently been tainted by the Wycliffite heresy. The
other interpretative difficulty lies in evaluating the extent to which these
sermons can be treated as statements of personal conviction as opposed
to formulaic contributions to a devotional genre.
The records of Convocation, the proceedings of the general councils
and the sermons of the English delegates are all indicators of clerical atti-
tudes. It will have been noticed, however, that the interests of the clergy
needed to be constantly reconciled with the dictates of royal policy; the
delegates at the councils, as well as the clergy assembled in Convocation,
were servants of the crown as well as the Church and English delegates
often reminded the general councils that they were acting on behalf of
their sovereign. The unusual number of delegates who claimed to be act-
ing as proctors of the English crown at the Council of Pisa may be a
sign of poor planning in England or an indication of the especially tight
bond between crown and Church in England, yet, as we shall see, the
representatives also had their own views on the reforming work which
needed to be carried out in the general councils.20 So too did other par-
ties who remained behind in England. An attempt needs to be made
to disentangle these separate sets of English interests. Before this can be
done, the motives of the English crown must be analysed. Without royal
support, it was difficult for private business and reforming activities to
be accomplished by English agents. The large official delegation at Con-
stance brought many independent representatives in its train, whereas the
waning royal presence at Basle was reflected in the scarcity of private
English representatives. Hence it seems fair to say that royal policy deter-
mined the scope for private action at the councils.

th e at titude of g ove rnm e nt

The attitude of the English crown towards the conciliar enterprise was
not static: the period under discussion was characterised by the instability
of ecclesiastical politics. After the Council of Constance, it was not clear
what role the general council would play in the life of the Church, and
whether it would act as a vehicle for secular sovereigns to consolidate
the privileges that they had won from the papacy. The English crown
needed to adjust its policy to the vagaries of international diplomacy. E.F.
Jacob and A.N.E.D. Schofield have argued that the crown was deeply
loyal to the papacy during this period. According to them, this loyalty
precluded an enthusiastic engagement with general councils, because the
councils aimed at the restraint of papal authority. These assumptions are
20 Harvey, Solutions, pp. 152–3.

16
 The First Phase: Ending the Schism
questionable. It has long been noticed that the English crown drove a
very hard bargain with the papacy over the admission of papal provisions
to English benefices; the papacy also had great difficulties in obtaining
subsidies from the English clergy.21 Whatever the English loyalty to the
papacy may have meant – and Schofield and Jacob do not dwell much on
the nature of the commitment – it clearly did not entail a slavish obedi-
ence to papal demands. There is no reason to assume, therefore, that the
English crown was deterred from conciliar participation on the basis of an
unchanging set of principled objections. The ideological tactics adopted
in the crown’s public statements were, after all, highly flexible and more
than once over the course of the century the crown broke its promises
towards the papacy. We therefore need to assess the nature of the crown’s
engagement with the general councils from a more practical perspective,
weighing the potential benefits and disadvantages that might accrue from
conciliar participation. This is not to say that ideas were not important
in the diplomacy of the period, but it is important to acknowledge that
ideological commitments could shift in accordance with the drift of inter-
national relations and the needs of royal policy. The shifts in the crown’s
attitudes towards the general councils are best explained in relation to
three broad diplomatic phases.

th e f i r st p hase : e ndi ng th e s c h i sm
The Great Schism (1387–1417) had,of course,divided the polities of west-
ern Europe along lines of allegiance to the rival papal claimants. Great
disruption had ensued. The flow of ordinations and the procedure of
ecclesiastical business became confused, as two rival command structures
vied for control.22 Britain was not immune from the conflict. Competi-
tion between kingdoms prompted antagonism in the ecclesiastical sphere.
While England remained loyal to the Roman line of popes, Scotland
pledged its fealty to Avignon.23 But it was the divisions within polities
which posed the greatest complications. Owain Glyn Dŵr realised that
the English domination of Wales was facilitated by the appointment of
English clerics to Welsh benefices. He decided, therefore, to transfer his
21 F.R.H. Du Boulay, ‘The Fifteenth Century’ in C.H. Lawrence (ed.), The English Church and the
Papacy in the Middle Ages (London, 1965), pp. 205–6; 219. R.G. Davies, ‘Martin V and the English
Episcopate’, English Historical Review, 92 (1977), 309–44. Swanson, Church and Society, p. 223.
22 For general studies of the Great Schism: W. Ullmann, The Origins of the Great Schism (London,
1948); R.N. Swanson, Universities, Academics and the Great Schism (Cambridge, 1979); H. Kaminsky,
Simon de Cramaud and the Great Schism (New Brunswick, NJ, 1983); J.B. Morrall, Gerson and the
Great Schism (Manchester, 1960).
23 D.E.R. Watt, ‘The Papacy and Scotland in the Fifteenth Century’ in R.B. Dobson (ed.), The
Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century (Gloucester, 1984), pp. 115–18.

17
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