Medieval panorama : the English scene from conquest to Reformation / by G.G. Coulton.

  • George Gordon Coulton
Date:
1947
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Medieval panorama : the English scene from conquest to Reformation / by G.G. Coulton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    have weighty voices [ponderosas\. Zeal consists in feeling: that is, in the motives actuating the electors, whether it be kindred or friendship or bribery; whether they have accepted payment or have voted by reason of the elect’s merit. And, since zeal consists in feeling, it must be proved by presumption, since feeling admits of no other proof. It is said also that this sort of sanioritas consists not only in zeal but in facts and the operation itself. But operation concerns merit; for the party which elects a better candidate appears the sounder party; and that refers to the persons elected, considered from the point of view of morals, life, etc. It may also refer to the electors, if we consider that, being more honest, they have more merit, and that this renders their votes all the fatter ‘pinguiores]” What pettifogger could wish for a richer job than a awsuit in which the crucial question was that of greater age, earlier appointment, and higher orders, in a community in which it might happen that one-third were older and one-third senior by appointment (or, again, one-third bishops, one-third priests, one- third deacons); with no criterion whatever to decide whether age, seniority or rank was to be taken as the weightier consideration in case of conflict ? Or, again, consider this sy stem in which com¬ parative morality was supposed to be crucial, and in which lawyers might claim the morality of the elector as reflecting decisive light upon the fitness of the person elected or (to make confusion worse confounded) vice versa. Moreover, Panormitanus reveals to us these difficulties not merely in theory but in practice. He writes: “The gloss here.. .concludes that the sounder part, even though numerically less, ought to prevail. But [five of the greatest authorities] hold the contrary opinion here, saying that, since the two qualifications are copulatively required [major et sanior], therefore either, taken by itself, is insufficient.” As Esmein points out, although Innocent III prescribed a comparison of extreme delicacy (morals, etc.) yet “singularly, he had not prescribed who was to make this comparison, or the authority whose duty it was to proclaim the result of the voting”: and the exposition of Hostiensis, one of the earliest and greatest commentators on this decree of 1215, amounts to “mere anarchy”. St Bernard, whose piety and zeal and intellect and personal fearlessness and nobility of birth made him for a while the arbiter of Christendom, did indeed solve admirably that election disputed between Innocent II and Anacletus on the dubious point of sanior; but he cut the knot