•“to ‘frock’ a cleric: the gendered implications of mutilating ecclesiastical vestments in...

Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233Andrew G. Miller, ‘To “Frock” a Cleric: The Gendered Implications of Mutilating Ecclesiastical Vestments in Medieval England’Gender & History, Vol.24 No.2 August 2012, pp. 271–291.

To ‘Frock’ a Cleric: The GenderedImplications of Mutilating EcclesiasticalVestments in Medieval England

Andrew G. Miller

In March 1176, at the Council of Westminster, ‘a mighty contest’ between the arch-bishops of Canterbury and York – to quote the contemporary Augustinian canon andchronicler, William of Newburgh – unfolded over ecclesiastical primacy in the king-dom. Specifically, the bishops sparred over which man ought to sit at the coveted righthand of the visiting papal legate on such an important occasion.1 In his chronicle,William chastised his fellow churchmen’s misguided desire for worldly majesty at theexpense of their flocks, stating that they, ‘laying aside pastoral solicitude, contend withone another as obstinately and vainly for dignity, and almost all episcopal controversyentirely relates to precedence in honours’. According to William, the conflict arosewhen the archbishop of York, Roger de Pont l’Eveque (r.1154–1181), arrived at theproceedings first and took the opportunity to seat himself prominently at the legate’sright. When the archbishop of Canterbury, Richard of Dover (r.1173–1184), enteredthe council he – ‘like a man who had sustained an injury’ – refused the lesser seat whilehis attendants, ‘being more fiercely jealous of his dignity, proceeded from a simplestrife of words to a brawl’.2 No fewer than five other chroniclers record the incident. Forexample, the dean of St Paul’s, London, Ralph de Diceto, describes how the supportersof Canterbury ‘manfully assisted’ their archiepiscopal lord during the fracas. Anothercontemporary, the monk Gervase of Canterbury, insists that Richard had arrived firstand that Roger spurned the lesser seat and instead tried to squeeze himself between thetwo dignitaries. Neither man yielded, so that Roger wound up sitting in Richard’s lapbefore the scandalised assembly, whereupon the partisans of Canterbury – a throng ofbishops, clerics and laymen – leapt up and hurled the archbishop of York to the ground,trampled him underfoot and beat him sorely with staffs and fists.3

At some point during the violence, Roger of York’s capa (cope: an ecclesiastical,hooded, sleeveless ceremonial garment, cut in a semicircular form and attached at theneck with a sewn tab or brooch)4 was ‘foully torn asunder’ by Richard of Canterbury’smen.5 This sartorial mutilation is significant not only because contemporary chroniclersdrew attention to it, but because clothing was a potent gendered symbol in medievalsociety, especially in its ‘ritual functions’ as vestments.6 As this article will show, the

C© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

272 Gender & History

cope and cowl – caputium (a voluminous hood attached to an ecclesiastical cope orhabit) – donned by churchmen functioned as a symbol of clerical masculinity.7 Thiswas especially true following the papal reform movement of the eleventh and twelfthcenturies, in which a cleric’s outward appearance became increasingly important andhis holiness came to be communicated via distinctive dress (the cope) and haircut(the tonsure). An attack on these symbols, therefore, was a meaningful act intendedto convey the message of power, mastery and illegitimacy to the victim and audiencealike.

The papal reform movement affected not only clerical dress and coiffure, but alsothe sex lives of priests. Chastity became the ideal for the clergy and played a majorrole in distinguishing clerics from laymen; such a paradigm shift – or ‘ideologicalstruggle between celibate and married men’ over power – destabilised the medievalgender system, as Jo Ann McNamara noted.8 This absence of marriage has led somescholars to define the clergy as emasculine or even constituting a third gender.9 Sexual-ity is not the defining feature of masculinity, however, nor did medieval people equatechastity with emasculation. In the Middle Ages, masculinity was relational to one’sposition in society and association with sex, purity and power. As Jennifer Thibodeauxstates, ‘the clerical ideal of manliness, created by a reforming Church, focused onmore than celibacy; it operated in tandem with secular conceptions of manliness’.10

That is, if secular masculinity in the Middle Ages can be defined as siring children,defending dependents and providing for one’s family,11 then clerical masculinity mightbe defined similarly as marriage to the church, protecting dependents and providingfor one’s flock.12 While laymen might boast about their physical potency and mili-tary or sexual conquests, clerics might emphasise their spiritual potency and moralvigour in an impure world; the constant struggle to maintain purity made a man aman.13 A cleric’s ability to free himself from worldly distractions – such as women –was the ultimate expression of masculine self-control. A cleric demonstrated this man-liness (virtus) when combating the devil or spiritually inferior laymen.14 JacquelineMurray explains this clerical ‘strategy’ as ‘the transformation of the chaste life intothe “battle for chastity”’. Through such a conceptualisation of masculinity churchmenmetaphorically vanquished the enemy of temptation and employed duly militaristiclanguage displaying masculine vigour without bearing arms or causing bloodshed.15 Itwas precisely the great struggle that celibacy entailed that helped clerics to assert theirprofessed moral superiority over laymen, to correct them and to justify being held to awholly separate – purportedly purer – legal system.16 By virtue of their marriage to thechurch and the dedication and spiritual fortitude that such a demanding relationshiprequired, clerics laid claim to being the greater men in medieval society.

So what, if anything, are we to make of the ‘tearing’ of the archbishop of York’scapa at the council of Westminster in 1176? Was the whole affair merely an unfortunateaccident or did the partisans of Canterbury attack the archbishop of York’s ecclesiasticalpower, authority and reputation – i.e. his clerical masculinity – via his clothing? Toslash or defile a churchman’s cope and cowl was apparently more than a simpleact of aggression; it was rather an attack on powerful (manly) symbols of clericalmasculinity. Evidently, the fact that numerous contemporary chroniclers – as well assubsequent antiquarians and historians – chose to depict this notorious ‘tearing’ insome detail reinforces the concept that publicly disfiguring a churchman’s clothingwas a meaningful act.

C© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Mutilating Ecclesiastical Vestments in Medieval England 273

This article explores the gendered implications of mutilating a cleric’s ceremonialvestments in medieval England. This is not a particularly easy task, since descriptionsof medieval people disfiguring a cleric’s garments can be vague: for example in 1309,a group of laymen assaulted a canon of the abbey of Bourne, threw him into a waterypit and ‘tore his habit’.17 At the very least, deliberately tearing or slashing a cleric’scope or cowl during conflicts ought to be distinguished from people grabbing ordragging him by these same garments.18 Other examples of this highly symbolic actof sartorial violence from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries hint that both clerics andlaymen forcibly rented a churchman’s cope or cowl to shame, emasculate and ‘defrock’or ‘refrock’ him during conflicts over power, authority and reputation. I propose thatmutilating a churchman’s ceremonial vestments in such a manner was comprehensible –to the clerical victim, clerical or lay aggressor, and audience alike – as an act of publicinsubordination, figurative impotency and symbolic illegitimacy.

Medieval chronicles, sermons and episcopal registers suggest that there was mal-leability of the symbolism behind mutilating a cleric’s vestments. It appears that clericsasserted that they were the ‘real men’ through sartorial and physical (sexual and mil-itary) restraint, while knights and laymen had a different perspective regarding dressand mores. Thus, clerics and their supporters seemingly ridiculed clerical adversariesduring conflicts within the church by targeting their opponents’ ceremonial garmentsand ‘dagging’ them to mimic lay fashion; ‘dagging’ entailed slashing or shredding thecloth to imitate knights returning frayed and tattered from battle.19 Laymen, on theother hand, and particularly knights, largely embraced courtly lifestyle and fashionsand considered the art of combat, chasing women and dressing finely to be appropri-ate, masculine behaviour, while dismissing a monastic or clerical lifestyle as unmanly.Working from this perspective, knights targeted clerical clothing as symbols: for exam-ple, they cut or slashed the ceremonial garments worn by clerics who endeavoured toexcommunicate them during local conflicts involving property and patronage in orderto demonstrate their own physical mastery over, and effrontery towards, the ecclesias-tical body and to mock the clerics for daring to embrace worldly lay fashions whileprofessing spiritual and moral superiority over the knights.

Clerical deportment, masculinity and sumptuary transgressions

Historians of material culture, in the words of E. Jane Burns, see clothing as a drivingforce of ‘cultural imaginations’ in which sartorial identity was paramount for maker,wearer and viewer alike.20 Following the papal reform movement of the eleventh andtwelfth centuries, clerical deportment was governed by two principles. The first wasdress and demeanour, where ‘modesty and sobriety’ were to serve as an example toall. Accordingly, when laymen began wearing shorter-hemmed garments during theearly Middle Ages, clerics continued to wear full-length (traditional) robes.21 Thesecond principle regarded the tonsure – a distinctive haircut or shaving that symbolisedobedience to an ecclesiastical lifestyle.22 Medieval churchmen considered this traditionto be a badge of honour from the eighth century onwards and, throughout the MiddleAges, being tonsured voluntarily was considered meritorious whereas shearing underduress was perceived as shaming.23 Thus, by wilfully wearing traditional copes andcowls and bearing the self-effacing tonsure, a cleric publicly affirmed his allegiance tothe church while turning his back on lay symbols of manliness.



Whereas the papal reform movement reemphasised – and even lionised – the re-strained attire, grooming and demeanour of its clerics throughout Europe, from around1100 in England and northern France it was fashionable for knights to wear their hairlong and curled outwards while donning a finely made bliaut, or tight fitting tunicthat swept to the ground, and shoes with long, pointy toes. According to MatthewBennett, by growing out his hair and sporting such fine clothes and phallic shoes thecourtier hoped to advertise his virility.24 Contemporary churchmen were not impressedand vehemently condemned these new fashions and hairstyles for being showy andeffeminate. For example, the Norman monk Orderic Vitalis blamed Count Fulk ofAnjou for introducing to the court of William II (1087–1100) the fashion in whichmen wore shoes with ‘pully toes’ and ‘grew long and luxurious locks like women’.25

Moreover, on Ash Wednesday, 1094, Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury refused tooffer ashes or give his blessing to any men who ‘grew their hair like girls’, while atthe Council of Rouen in 1096, the church declared ‘that no one should grow his hairlong but have it cut as a Christian’.26 Pauline Stafford argues persuasively that Anglo-Norman ecclesiastical writers compared what they saw as effeminate foppery amongthe courtiers of Duke Robert of Normandy (r.1087–1106) to the long haired, bearded –and subsequently vanquished – Anglo Saxons, while likening themselves to the heroicNorman conquerors – real men like William I (r.1066–1087) and, after 1105, HenryI (r.1100–1135) – who shaved, wore their hair short and had God, the pope and righ-teousness on their side.27 A similar tension existed during the Crusades (1096–1291)between the traditionally masculine deportment of long-haired aristocratic warriorsand the monkish ‘soldiers of Christ’ envisioned by reform-minded churchmen.28

Despite (or because of) the church’s strict rules regarding appropriate deportment,some medieval clerics fell prey to the lures of worldly symbols and ideals of masculinityand chose instead to dress in the latest fashions, hide their tonsures, forsake theirreligious calling and – in the eyes of the church – become emasculated like the ‘girlish’courtiers of Duke Robert and William II. Notwithstanding the church’s attempt toequate long hair, lengthy sleeves and stylish tunics with femininity, such clerics were,in the words of Robert Mills, ‘ashamed’ of their tonsures and ‘embarrassed by theirvocation’.29 The competing notions of masculinity between churchmen and the laity –in which clerics shunned fashion and sex to become manly while laymen embracedfinery and women to emphasise their own manliness – not only created tension betweenthese groups of men but also tempted clerics to succumb to lay symbols of maleness.Many medieval clerics, and especially youths in the universities, perceived celibacyand sobriety as emasculating. Consequently, some clerics tried to re-establish theirmanhood by emulating an aristocratic lifestyle via dress, coiffure and even weaponry.30

Such men, whom Robert Rodes memorably calls ‘semi-clerical riff-raff’, graduallytarnished the church’s image and repeatedly irked the laity by transgressing lay/clericalboundaries, even as they asserted moral and legal superiority over the laity.31 A goodexample of the tension – and good natured jibing – that could result from clericsdressing and acting like ‘masculine’ laymen occurred in 1161. Thomas Becket wasrecovering from an illness at the hospital at the church of St Gervais when an oldfriend, the prior of the Augustinian abbey at Leicester, came to visit him on behalf ofHenry II. Becket happened to be playing the ‘military’ game of chess while dressedin a cloak with sleeves, at which sight the prior joked, ‘What’s this? So you go in forcapes with sleeves now, just like fowlers when carrying hawks!’32



The repeated conciliar condemnations of sartorial transgressions by clerics sug-gest that enforcing ecclesiastical sumptuary codes among the clergy was an ongoingproblem in medieval Europe following the papal reform movement. For example, theCouncil of Toulouse decreed in 1191 that long-haired clerics ought to be excom-municated until properly shorn. Similarly, the Council of Montpellier in 1195 forbadeclerics from stylishly ripping or slitting the hems of their robes. In 1215, too, the FourthLateran Council passed legislation forbidding clerics from wearing pointy-toed shoesor garments with sleeves, especially while in church, or otherwise altering their eccle-siastical vestments to make them fashionable.33 Yet the problem persisted; membersof the clergy seemed determined to dress and groom like laymen, much to the chagrinof the laity and reform-minded clerics alike. In 1237, the English national council,held under the presidency of the Legate Otho, declared that laymen were scandalisedat the state of clerical dress which did not seem clerical, but more suited to knights.34

By 1268, during the English legatine canons of Ottobuono (future pope Adrian V),the clear emphasis of the canons regarding ecclesiastical dress and deportment was todistinguish clerics from laymen.35

In medieval England, numerous decrees were passed to correct ongoing clericalindiscretions regarding tonsure and dress, most notably in 1281 and 1342.36 In 1281, thearchbishop of Canterbury declared in his statutes: ‘Oh shame! Many clerks, while theyfeel shame in appearing as clerks, cover themselves with an apparel that they may pleasefools, and hide their tonsure with coifs, and whenever they show themselves abroad,they wear these coifs hanging down, except perhaps on a journey’.37 In 1342, anotherarchbishop of Canterbury bemoaned clerical transgressions in dress and hairstyles,chastising wayward clerics for what he perceived as their desire to embrace effeminatelay fashions:

The external costume often shows the internal character and condition of persons; and though thebehaviour of clerks ought to be an example and pattern of the laity, yet the abuse of clerks, whichhas gained ground more than usually in these days in tonsures, in garments, in horse trappings . . .

has now generated an abominable scandal among the people, while [clerics] . . . scorn to wear thecrown . . . and, using the distinction of hair extended almost to the shoulders like effeminate persons,walk about clothed in a military rather than a clerical outer habit, [namely] short, or notably scant,and with excessively wide sleeves . . . and hoods with tippets [streamers] of wonderful length . . .

that little or no distinction appears of clerks from laymen, whereby they render themselves, throughtheir demerits, unworthy of the privilege of their order and profession.38

As Sarah-Grace Heller has demonstrated, medieval anxiety over maintaining thesecategories of dress and social distinction is addressed prominently in the Roman de larose (c.1230).39 When the character Faux Semblant (False Seeming) argues his case forbeing included in Love’s barony despite his uncertain lineage and bad repute, he boaststhat he is the sea-god Proteus, who is able to change his form from one thing to another.Faux Semblant however, prefers a more medieval method for shifting identities: bychanging his clothes. Repeatedly undermining the audience’s confidence in clothing’sability to identify a man’s status with transparency and accuracy, Faux insists:

I am very good at changing my clothes, at donning one outfit and discarding another. At one momentI am a knight, at another a prelate, now a canon, now a cleric, now a priest, now disciple, nowmaster, now lord of the manor, now forester; in short, I am of every calling. Again, I am prince onemoment, page the next, and I know all languages by heart.40



It was precisely because medieval people were so concerned about social transparencythat the act of depriving a cleric of his ecclesiastical signifiers – i.e. clothing andhaircut, by either ripping his cope to make him appear fashionable or by shearing offthe tip of his cowl to mock the tonsure – proved to be so meaningful and provocative.With a sharp tear or cut clerics and knights alike could defame, feminise and ‘frock’ aclerical opponent for all to see.

The rite of compulsory undressing, or defrocking, constituted a powerful cere-mony of degradation and emasculation, for it unmade a masculine cleric – from thechurch’s perspective – back into an everyman (who was now free to dress in effemi-nate fashions and pollute himself with a woman’s touch). After all, this ecclesiasticalprocedure worked ‘in tandem with secular conceptions of manliness’ for, accordingto Dyan Elliott, the medieval rite of defrocking was ‘probably borrowed from paralleldemotions effected in the military’.41 Just as a disgraced knight was publicly deprivedof his spurs in the Middle Ages, a disobedient cleric unceremoniously lost his frock;as a result both men were defamed and emasculated.42 While the ritual divestment ofchurchmen has a long history, around 1300 a formal rite for deprivation arose. In thesame manner that a cleric donned his garments – layer upon layer – to perform hisspiritual functions, a cleric deprived of his orders was ritually stripped of the samevestments – layer by layer – to negate his spiritual potency. The cleric’s hands werethen scraped with a piece of glass or a blade to eliminate his holy unction; finally,his tonsure was ignominiously shaved off.43 Defrocked clerics, cast from ecclesia’sbosom, were subject to secular law and its more severe punishments. The legal andreligious distinction was a significant one in medieval England, for this issue was cen-tral in the fight between Thomas Becket and Henry II over religious and regal powerand authority; Becket died believing that even defrocked priests should not be subjectto secular law.44

‘Tearing’ a cleric’s capa: cleric versus cleric

Returning to the infamous dispute between the archbishops of Canterbury and York,it seems clear that this political war between churchmen was serious business for bothparties involved. Recall that the conflict over who should sit at the papal legate’s righthand began with posturing and sharp words and ended in physical violence and rit-ualised shaming.45 Contemporary ecclesiastical chroniclers seem to have recognisedthis manly competition for what it was. For example, both the Winchcombe Annalsand William of Newburgh use the word ‘contest’ to describe the affair; this nounhas militaristic connotations, for it can also be translated as ‘a fight’ or ‘strife (withweapons or words)’.46 Similarly, William likened Richard of Canterbury’s reaction toRoger of York’s seat-snatching in physical terms; Richard was ‘like a man who hadsustained an injury’. Moreover, Ralph de Diceto insists that the partisans of Canterbury‘manfully assisted’ their archiepiscopal lord against his adversary. The word choiceis significant. As Maureen Miller has demonstrated, viriliter (‘in a manly fashion’)is one of the keywords clerical reformers employed to lionise their own masculin-ity during this period.47 I would add another keyword to her list, however: ‘boldly’(audacter).48 According to a possible eyewitness, the archdeacon Gerald of Wales,when the irate king, Henry II (r.1154–1189), demanded to know why Roger of York’s



‘whole cope was torn asunder there’, the bishop of Worcester ‘boldly burst forth’ withan explanation for his incensed lord – a potentially perilous undertaking for any man.The bishop rejoined that Richard of Canterbury’s men were just trying to help thearchbishop of York up and that, because Roger’s vestment was at least a decade old,it was ‘no wonder it had been torn to pieces’ in the tumult since it could hardly holditself together.49 Henry II – famous as much for his sharp wit as for his fits of rage –was ‘turned to laughter on account of such an eloquent and refined explanation’ (par-ticularly because of Roger’s notable stinginess) and let the matter drop.50 What was sofunny?

Numerous accounts of the fracas at Westminster in 1176 survive, which suggeststhat the ‘tearing’ of the archbishop of York’s cope was a noteworthy event. Thechroniclers describe, in greater and lesser detail, how Richard of Canterbury’s men‘tore’, ‘rent’, or ‘cut’ Roger of York’s capa. For centuries scholars have translated theremarkable tearing of the archbishop’s clothing, for example, ‘they tore his robes’,‘they rent his cope’, ‘his cope was torn’, ‘his vestments [were] torn’, or they ‘tore torags his Episcopal vestments’.51 However, a closer examination of the noun and verbcombinations used by the chroniclers to describe what happened to the archbishopof York’s cope implies that this ‘tearing’ or ‘cutting’ was more than an accident orarbitrary ripping.52 Because the clerical victims (Roger, archbishop of York and others)were carrying out official duties (for example, presiding at a council or performing thesentence of excommunication) at the time of the respective attacks, context impliesthat they would have been wearing ceremonial copes.53 It is remarkable, moreover, thatboth Gervase of Canterbury and Gerald of Wales employed the verb discindo, whichmeans ‘to rend or tear’, to describe the sartorial violence. This term is noteworthy forseveral reasons. Not only do both chroniclers describe the violence at Westminster or itsaftermath in considerably greater detail, but this word can pertain specifically to cloth,either in retail or fashion; by 1188 in England decisus meant ‘“cut”, slashed, or tagged(of cloth)’.54 Andrea Denny-Brown explains that the fashion of ‘dagging’, or slittingand lacing the sides of a garment, appeared in England in the twelfth century, grew inpopularity in the fourteenth century and ‘uniquely captured the English imagination. . . The phrase “cutted clothes” could refer either to specific styles – such as the newshort cut of male jackets or the slitting and dagging of garments – or it could be usedmore generally to describe the new mode of fashions or a scantily-dressed personwearing such clothing’. Regardless of the specific style, one constant is the fashion’s‘perceived link to knightly attire’.55

The distinctive verbiage may help to explain why, according to the account pro-vided by the possible eyewitness Gerald of Wales, Henry II found the bishop ofWorcester’s curious explanation of Roger of York’s torn cope so eloquent, refined andhilarious. That is, when an incensed king demanded to know what exactly had tran-spired at the council, he used the word discindo to describe the tearing of Roger’s capa:‘his whole cope was torn asunder there’. In other words, while Henry II demanded anexplanation as to why the partisans of Canterbury had fashionably ‘dagged’ the arch-bishop of York’s ecclesiastical vestments for all to see, the bishop of Worcester ‘boldly’rejoined that any mutilation was inadvertent on account of the threadbare nature ofthe miserly archbishop’s clothing. Notably, the bishop defended the rending by usingthe verb dilacero, which means ‘to tear to pieces’ or ‘to tear apart’. Unlike the term



discindo, however, it does not specifically connote a stylish ‘slashing’ or ‘dagging’ ofclothes.56 It appears that Henry II found the bishop’s daring play on words especiallywitty because the joke was at the archbishop’s expense due to his renowned stinginess,and perhaps because the wily king recognised that some comic relief would help todiffuse another (immediate) confrontation between York and Canterbury. While wewill probably never know precisely what Roger of York’s cope looked like followingthis attack, or why exactly the king found such a scandalous event so amusing, it ispossible that the partisans of Canterbury had ripped off the bottom half of the garment’shem to mimic Henry II’s very own fashion revolution – the short cloak – which he hadintroduced from his native Anjou when assuming the reins of power in England: hencethe king’s nickname, ‘Curtmantle’.57

There is another possibility, however. The partisans of Canterbury may havetorn open Roger of York’s capa in the vicinity of his buttocks. That is to say, theassailants’ intention may have been to remind the (male) audience of accusations ofRoger’s alleged past sexual indiscretions by piling upon the pederast and ‘ripping’ hisclothes.58 In 1172, John of Salisbury, a biographer and supporter of Thomas Becket,revived a scandalous – albeit dubious – report that Roger had entered into an illicithomosexual relationship with a beautiful boy named Walter twenty years earlier. Thecase – whether true or not – was especially notorious because, when the boy grew upand began exposing their relationship, apparently Roger, through some unidentifiedjudicial process, had Walter’s eyes removed in an effort to silence him; after Walterpursued the case further, Roger supposedly saw to it that he was executed on a gibbet.Roger was eventually cleared of the offences, but great defamation resulted from thescandal.59 Therefore, by throwing the archbishop of York to the ground and violentlytearing asunder his capa, the partisans of Canterbury may have intended to symbolicallysodomise their victim while simultaneously defaming, emasculating and defrockinghim before a distinguished assembly of his male peers.60 Charges – and reminders –of sexually-deviant behaviour were particularly damning during this period. Scholarssuch as John Boswell and Mathew Kuefler have identified how, during the mid- andlate twelfth century, ecclesiastical writers attempted to cast suspicion upon the bondsbetween men as well as scandalise physical camaraderie within elite male culturein an effort to redirect their loyalties to the centralising institutions of church andstate.61

Whatever the intended meaning behind the slashing was, it appears that the sup-porters of Richard of Canterbury tore – in some performative style – the capa belongingto Roger of York for several reasons.62 First, Canterbury’s supporters ‘manfully’ seizedupon the opportunity to teach the outnumbered partisans of York – and especially theirdespised overlord – a rancorous lesson in humility and respect. Richard’s supporterswere apparently eager to avenge Becket’s murder, which they believed Roger of Yorkhad helped to instigate. Second, there was a long history of discord between the twosees over which – Canterbury or York – held primacy in England; the twelfth centurywas an especially volatile period regarding this matter.63 Consequently, by publiclytargeting the archbishop of York’s ceremonial capa, the archbishop of Canterbury’smen humiliated Roger for his insolence and may have intended to symbolically de-frock the archbishop by transforming him into an effeminate, fashionable layman(or sodomite) in order to demonstrate in a most provocative manner that Canterburywas mightier – i.e. more manly – than York.



‘Tearing’ a cleric’s capa: knight versus cleric

Laymen, and particularly knights, also mutilated the ecclesiastical capa or caputium ofadversarial clerics for a couple of reasons. First, the sartorial violence was apparentlyintended to symbolically tonsure the tip of the cleric’s cowl or hood and therebyridicule, or emasculate, him. Second, the lay assailants cut off or ‘dagged’ the illicitlyadded sleeves of a cleric’s cope – lengthy trappings which should not have adornedsuch vestments in the first place – perhaps to rebuke him for transgressing sumptuaryboundaries even as the laymen re-emphasised the victim’s ‘feminine’ ecclesiasticalnature by performatively refrocking the cleric and mocking his apparent attempts tobe fashionable in a ‘masculine’ lay sense. Finally, the evidence suggests that knightsexecuted this violent counter-performance when clerics attempted to excommunicatethe knights or their allies during local conflicts. In so doing, the laymen publiclyderided the tonsure and scorned ecclesiastical authority, called attention to the victims’effeminate – from a layman’s perspective – clerical identity and rebuked the churchmenfor emulating masculine lay fashions while claiming spiritual superiority and authorityover the laymen.

There is some evidence for laymen targeting clerics’ copes and cowls since atleast the early thirteenth century. For instance, the celebrated French preacher Jacquesde Vitry relates a story (c.1220) of a knight and some other ‘minions of the devil’ who,prior to a religious conversion, harassed a churchman by ‘tearing in pieces his cope orcowl’.64 Two points are of interest here. First, Vitry’s incorporation of cope or cowldefacement into his sermon indicates that Vitry’s audiences understood what the act ofviolently tearing ecclesiastical vestments meant; otherwise this description would haveserved more as a distraction than as an example of how not to treat clerics. Second,Vitry specified that the wayward knight was also guilty of despoiling the cleric’s cowl.

That medieval knights specifically targeted a cleric’s great outer hood during these‘tearing’ performances is corroborated by two episcopal registers from the last halfof the thirteenth century, from the dioceses of Exeter and Lincoln. Let us begin withExeter. In 1273, shortly after the new earl of Cornwall, Edmund (1272–1300), inheritedthe vast earldom, members of his household – including the sheriff of Cornwall – vio-lently invaded several deer-parks belonging to Bishop Walter Bronescombe of Exeter(r.1258–1280).65 The bishop ordered some of his household clerics to go to a localparish church and threaten members of the earl’s household with excommunication.According to the episcopal records, however, the knights and other laymen preventedthe bishop’s clerics from executing the sentence by attacking them in the church, haul-ing them into the churchyard and dragging them around behind their horses. The earl’smen also employed symbolic humiliation, emasculation and enfeeblement against theirclerical adversaries. The bishop’s scribe recorded that the laymen ‘foully defiled thepriestly garments they were wearing by cutting off the tips of their cowls almost to themidpoint and the upper parts of the hoods which they were wearing – in mockery of atonsure’. The earl’s men also mutilated a number of the clerics’ horses by cutting offtheir ears, upper lips, tails, or altogether killed them.66

In 1293, and over 200 miles northeast of Cornwall, Bishop Oliver Sutton ofLincoln (r.1280–1299) struggled to defend traditional patronage rights over the lucra-tive church of Thame, located ten miles east of Oxford. During this dispute a promi-nent household knight of Edward I (r.1272–1307), named Sir John St John, his son,



Edward (a king’s clerk), and other members of the royal household, forcibly seized thechurch and continued to occupy it while the king turned a blind eye to the aggressionand dragged his feet in responding to the bishop’s repeated pleas for royal justice tointervene.67 The bishop of Lincoln reacted to these provocative attacks by ordering hisclerics to visit the neighbouring parish church and a nearby abbey and to excommu-nicate the malefactors. We learn from the bishop’s register, however, that the laymenhad chosen to conduct a counter-performance of their own. The knights and their alliesreportedly dragged the clerics out of the sanctuaries while they sang the psalms of themorning service – tormenting them all the while with knives and swords – and attackedother clerics discovered en route for performing the rite of anathema.68

As in Cornwall two decades earlier, moreover, Sir John St John’s knights phys-ically violated and symbolically enfeebled members of the bishop’s household byfiguratively tonsuring, emasculating and refrocking them. Remarkably, the bishop ofLincoln’s scribe recorded:

What more? In clear prejudice of ecclesiastical liberty and in contempt of episcopal authority thosesons of Belial outrageously cut off the tips of the cowls of the chaplains and clerics all the way tothe midpoint as it were and foully lopped off and tore asunder the long sleeves of the cloaks of thesame chaplains and clerics . . . in great danger of their souls and vehement scandal of others.69

It is worthwhile to examine the episcopal scribes’ descriptions of how the knightsand other laymen mutilated the clerics’ cowls in Cornwall and at Thame; after all,the performative acts of violence – and their descriptions – are strikingly similar.While neither episcopal register uses the noun capa to describe the clothing which theclerics were wearing when molested by the laymen, it is still probable that the clericswere dressed in formal ecclesiastical apparel. First, both registers state that the clericsdonned the ‘cowls’, which were attached to these formal copes. Second, in each casethe clerics were acting in an official capacity – excommunicating lay malefactors –at the behest of their respective bishops and, presumably, would have dressed asimpressively as possible to conduct such a ceremonial, public performance.70

As for verbs, both registers use amputo, which means ‘to cut around, to cutaway or off, to lop off, prune’, to describe the violence committed against the clerics’cowls.71 Remarkably, both sources also specify that the knights cut off ‘the tips oftheir cowls’ almost ‘to the midpoint’. The bishop of Exeter’s scribe went even further,stating distinctively that the laymen not only excised the tips of the clerics’ cowls buteven the ‘tips of their hoods’. He also insisted that the shearing was done – according tothe editor’s translation – ‘in mockery of a tonsure’.72 Although the bishop of Lincolnor his scribe did not similarly suggest that mutilating the clerics’ cowls constituteda symbolic haircut, per se, it is still intriguing that the scribe used the verb discindoto depict how the laymen ‘tore asunder’ the clergymen’s sleeves after lopping themoff. Likewise, Henry of Huntingdon employed the same term when describing howevildoers figuratively tore the Lord’s garments during Stephen’s anarchic rule. Perhaps,then, a better translation of what transpired in the diocese of Lincoln in 1293 wouldbe: ‘those sons of Belial . . . cut off the tips of the cowls of the chaplains and clerics allthe way to the midpoint as it were and foully lopped off and “dagged” the long sleevesof the cloaks of the same chaplains and clerics’.

Meaningfully tearing or ‘dagging’ a cleric’s cope or cowl was apparently an actof public disparagement and emasculation comprehensible enough to find its way into



contemporary literature. The menacing humour of knights forcibly shearing a cleric’shood during a confrontation – e.g. in the dioceses of Exeter and Lincoln in 1273and 1293 – is remarkably similar to an episode found in the early fourteenth-centuryromance Bevis of Hampton, one which the editors define as ‘a grim and ironic jokeabout the tonsure, the “close shave” that identified medieval clerics’.73 During thecourse of his adventures, Bevis encounters a giant besieging a town. The giant, it sohappens, is the brother of King Grander, whose head Bevis had recently cut off andwhose horse, Trenchefis, he was now astride. The giant recognised his brother’s horseand so he hollered:

You are a caught thief, I think:Where did you steal the steed Trenchefis,That you are riding astride here?It was my brother’s, Grander!’‘Grander,’ replied Bevis, ‘I gave a capAnd made him a broad crown;Though he was next under my fist,Well I know, I made him a priest,And archdeacon I will make thee,Before I ever from you leave!74

Though the giant accidentally kills his brother’s horse in the ensuing fight and woundshis opponent, Bevis nevertheless prevails. Bevis, moreover, makes light of having be-headed King Grander by likening the decapitation to a cutting, or tonsuring, of hisopponent. Bevis emphasises the ignominy and emasculation inherent in such a forcibleshearing by assigning an ecclesiastical status to the violence he had inflicted uponGrander. If chopping off another’s head is equivalent to ordaining him a priest, thenmaking the second giant an archdeacon must confer even greater humiliation and im-potency. The performative enfeeblement of an adversary in this manner, and especiallythe accompanying bragging rights, would have presumably been understandable to theknights and other laypeople to whom such a romance was directed. For, if shearingan adversary’s pate did not encode understandable conventions of masculine powerand mastery in the Middle Ages, it is doubtful that the author would have riskedperplexing, boring, or alienating his audience by including such references in hisromance.75

Symbolic tonsuring: mocking and refrocking

So what, then, could people in the Middle Ages possibly have found amusing andprovocative about cutting off the tip of a cleric’s hood or cowl or threatening an op-ponent with tonsuring his pate to resemble a cleric’s? While the joke, at its mostbase form, appears to rely on the formula ‘head equals penis, hood equals fore-skin’, the shearing performance may have contained deeper, multifaceted meaningsto aggressor, victim and audience alike. The knights seemingly cut the opponents’cowls to mock the clerical tonsure, and perhaps even to parody the Jewish ritualof circumcision and thereby to Judaise – i.e. feminise – the clerics. According toSteven Kruger, medieval people believed that, ‘by virtue of circumcision, Jewish andMuslim men displayed a lack of masculinity on their bodies’ and that ‘even whenliteral castration or the mark of circumcision was not explicitly at issue, Western



European Christian discourses tended to construct Muslim and Jewish men as failingto live up to “masculine” ideals in the public realm, and specifically in the realm ofwarfare’.76 Just as a cleric who dressed in courtly, ‘dagged’ fashions might wish toportray himself as manly in the eyes of the laity, he was – like a Jew – nonethelessforbidden from bearing arms and thus acting like a true knight; he could become, in theeyes of the laity, an effeminate poseur. Moreover, it appears that the aggrieved knightssymbolically tonsured the clerics and ripped off or slashed their illicitly attachedsleeves to punish them for transgressing sumptuary boundaries whilst they claimedspiritual superiority and ecclesiastical authority over laymen. The knights, therefore,would have derisively refrocked the clerics and subsequently returned the transgres-sors to their properly feminised state – from the laity’s point of view – as men of thechurch.

Despite the unsanctioned nature of such violence, manhandling a cleric in thismanner would have been an effective means by which to humiliate, render impotent andillegitimate a churchman during heated disputes over power and authority in the Mid-dle Ages, for medieval people may have made the association between a man’s hoodand his penis or foreskin. Laura Hodges argues convincingly that Geoffrey Chaucer,in the Canterbury Tales (c.1400), effectively satirises his Friar’s hood by adorningits tip with pins and knives to suggest to his audience that this lascivious characteremployed these trinkets to prick and pry his way into women’s hearts and homes – andwherever else he might go. Hodges even postulates that ‘a Freudian symbolic inter-pretation would see knives and pins as not only phallic imagery, but also see the hoodas foreskin covering instrument of penetration, penis’.77 Moreover, in the fourteenth-century anticlerical poem The Land of Cokaygne, we are told that ‘the monk that willbe stallion good / And can set aright his hood / He shall have without danger / Twelvewives each year’ to pleasure himself.78 By William Shakespeare’s time, at least, theword ‘hood’ was directly equated with ‘foreskin’.79 Medieval people also made theassociation between a cleric’s compulsory tonsuring and symbolic castration. RobertMills argues compellingly that an association was made between the tonsure and phal-lus since the early Middle Ages; for instance, forcibly shearing Merovingian kings –whose moniker was the ‘long-haired kings’ – was ‘especially humiliating’ and acted‘as a kind of figurative castration’.80 It would follow, therefore, that forcibly tonsuringa man against his will served as symbolic castration; likewise, the knights may havesnipped off the tips of the clerics’ ‘hooded foreskins’ to convey a symbolic rite of cir-cumcision to emasculate the clerics and thereby return them to their properly feminisedstate.

It was not unheard of for laymen to target, mimic or scorn a cleric’s tonsure inother contemptuous ways throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. In southern France,for example, circa 1219, during a contentious game of dice, a Cathar (dualist heretic)named Bernard of Quiries, ‘acting of his own volition, urinated on the tonsure of . . . anacolyte in opprobrium and vituperation of the whole Catholic Church’.81 In medievalSpain, moreover, forcibly tonsuring a man or grabbing the reins of his horse wasconsidered ‘disdainful of aristocratic and masculine prowess’.82 In England, duringthe infamous St Scholastica’s Day Riot in Oxford (10 February 1355) between town(laymen) and gown (clerics), bands of laymen murdered students, buried their corpsesin dunghills, and ‘the crowns of some chaplains, [namely] all the skin so far as thetonsure went, these diabolical imps flayed off in scorn of their clergy’.83



Violently targeting a cleric’s masculine symbols, i.e. his vestments, haircut, or an-imals – or symbolically effeminising a layperson by ‘tonsuring’ him – could serve asan informal protocol that David Nirenberg calls ‘ritualized aggression’.84 For instance,striking a man with the flat of your sword demonstrates the potential to act with stillgreater violence. Alexandra Shepard has demonstrated that comprehensible violence,which contained ‘precise meanings and was governed by elaborate rules of play’, of-ten accompanied competition between men in early modern England; such aggressionserved simultaneously ‘to confer authority on its perpetrators and to degrade its vic-tims’ as well as ‘to articulate subtle status distinctions between men’.85 By means ofthis violent etiquette, then, medieval as well as early modern Englishmen could figura-tively attack an adversary’s dignity, authority and reputation (that is, his masculinity)without suffering the severe legal penalties for having actually killed or maimed theman himself. Thus, the knights and other laymen involved in disrupting the rites ofanathema in the dioceses of Exeter (1273) and Lincoln (1293) curbed excessivelyinjurious violence by observing certain rules of engagement that they, their victimsand the audience understood, sending a chilling message of violence, effeminacy anddominance to the clerics and their bishop alike. These violent counter attacks appear tohave attracted audiences who witnessed not only the excommunication performance,but also the knights humiliating the bishop’s clerics.86

By cutting away or ‘dagging’ the clerics’ sleeves the knights may have intended toemphasise the ecclesiastical, as opposed to the lay, identity of their victims. The knights,in effect, symbolically compelled their clerical victims to abide by the canonical rulesand regulations to which they were bound – and by which they were identified –and hence not to use the sacred rite of excommunication for worldly affairs suchas protecting masculine status symbols such as deer parks (which clerics were notsupposed to possess in the first place because canon law forbade hunting and hawkingsince the use of weapons and mode of exercise were considered ‘military’).87 Or,perhaps the laymen intended to make fools of the clerics, for medieval artists alsomade the correlation between ‘dagged’ clothing and fools.88 Regardless, that therewere sleeves to cut off or mutilate in the first place implies that the clerics weretransgressing canon law even while performing – or preparing to perform – the sacredrite of excommunication.89 As such, these acts of humiliation speak to how laymencommunicated their own masculine identity while challenging, ridiculing and definingclerical identity. Finally, other examples of the English laity expressing displeasure atclerical transgressions of dress may be informative. They include a veritable mob oflaymen attacking the priory of St Faith, Horsham, in 1307. Not only did the assailantslay waste to the priory’s lands and livestock and prevent the monks from coming orgoing, but they threw one monk from his horse and notably ‘spoiled him of his habitand shoes’ before imprisoning him.90 Clerics wearing fancy shoes, like fancy copes,also irked laymen. Ostentatious footwear – particularly shoes with elongated toesstuffed with wool or hay – became so outrageous that sumptuary legislation bannedexcessively showy shoes in the 1360s.91 Such transgressions may help to explain why,in 1384, when a band of laymen seized the church of Crediton and assaulted the bishopof Exeter’s servant, they compelled him ‘under threat of death to eat the point of a shoe,flourished the wool thereof with knives in his face’, and then chased him and otherepiscopal servants through the town with knives and bows and arrows to the bishop’smanor. During the same incident the assailants forced clerical messengers ‘to eat the



seals . . . and . . . a copy of certain mandates of the said bishop’.92 Just as the knightsat Thame refrocked the churchmen who dressed like the laity but cursed like clerics,perhaps the laymen at the church of Crediton used the sartorial transgression itself – inthis case the tip of the phallic, pointy shoes – to silence the bishop’s messenger. Thatis, the laymen emphasised this point by violently negating the episcopal decree andmaking the clerical messenger eat the seals, since only a pure cleric, inside and out,should be and act above them.

NotesThe author would like to thank Sharon Farmer, Ruth Mazo Karras, Tanya Stabler Miller, Hugh Thomas andthe anonymous readers at Gender & History for their valuable insight regarding this project and for theirmany helpful suggestions concerning content and structure. All translations are the author’s unless otherwisenoted.

1. William of Newburgh, Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, ed. Richard Howlett,4 vols (London: Longman, 1884–89), vol. 1, pp. 203–04. For the legation and the legatine Council ofWestminster, see M. Brett, Dorothy Whitelock and Christopher N. L. Brooke (eds), Councils and Synodswith Other Documents Relating to the English Church, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), vol. 1, pt. 2,pp. 993–1010 (no. 169). For the history of the dispute and relevant sources, see Roy Haines, ‘CanterburyVersus York: Fluctuating Fortunes in a Perennial Conflict’, in Roy Haines, Ecclesia Anglicana: Studies inthe English Church of the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), pp. ?–?, herepp. 82–3, n. 132; Felix Makower, The Constitutional History and Constitution of the Church of England(London: S. Sonnenschein, 1895), pp. 289–91, n. 22.

2. Newburgh, Chronicles, vol. 1, pp. 203–04. Stevenson’s translation: Joseph Stevenson, Church Historiansof England, 5 vols (London: Seeleys, 1853–58), vol. 4, pt. 2, p. 500.

3. Ralph de Diceto, Historical Works, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1876), vol. 1, pp. 405–06; Gervase of Canterbury, Historical Works, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1870–80),vol. 1, p. 258, vol. 2, p. 398; Roger of Hoveden, Chronica, ed. William Stubbs, 4 vols (London: Longman,1868–71), vol. 2, pp. 92–3; Benedict of Peterborough, The Chronicle of the Reigns of Henry II and RichardI, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1867), vol. 1, pp. 112–13. The Winchcombe Annals alsostate that Richard of Canterbury sat first and that Roger of York ‘forced himself in between the legate andCanterbury’. R. R. Darlington, ‘The Winchcombe Annals 1049–1181’, in Patricia Barnes and C. F. Slade(eds), A Medieval Miscellany for Doris Mary Stenton (London: J. W. Ruddock, 1962), pp. 111–37, herep. 136.

4. Frederick Lee, A Glossary of Liturgical and Ecclesiastical Terms (London: B. Quaritch, 1877), pp. 69–70.5. ‘turpiter descissa’. Gervase of Canterbury, Historical Works, vol. 1, p. 258.6. E. Jane Burns, ‘Why Textiles Make a Difference’, in E. Jane Burns (ed.), Medieval Fabrications: Dress,

Textiles, Cloth Work, and Other Cultural Imaginings (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 1–18,here pp. 2–6.

7. Lee, Liturgical and Ecclesiastical Terms, pp. 69–70, 99; J. F. Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus:A Medieval Latin-French/English Dictionary (Leiden: Brill, 1997), p. 141.

8. Jo Ann McNamara, ‘The Herrenfrage: The Reconstruction of the Gender System, 1050–1150’, in ClareA. Lees (ed.), Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota, 1994), pp. 3–29.

9. R. N. Swanson, ‘Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation’, inD. M. Hadley (ed.), Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 160–77, here p. 162;See also Jo Ann McNamara’s work on monasticism and the concept of a third gender: Jo Ann McNamara,‘Chastity as a Third Gender in the History and Hagiography of Gregory of Tours’, in Kathleen Mitchelland Ian Wood (eds), The World of Gregory of Tours (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 199–210, as well as PatriciaCullum’s discussion of the practice of childhood oblation and clerical identity: Patricia H. Cullum, ‘Clergy,Masculinity and Transgression in Late Medieval England’, in Hadley, Masculinity in Medieval Europe,pp. 178–96, and Jacqueline Murray’s exploration of chastity and the concept of a third gender: JacquelineMurray, ‘One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?’, in Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (eds), Gender andChristianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008),pp. 34–51.



10. Jennifer D. Thibodeaux, ‘Introduction: Rethinking the Medieval Clergy and Masculinity’, in Jennifer D.Thibodeaux (ed.), Negotiating Clerical Identities: Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages (NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 1–15, here p. 7.

11. Vern L. Bullough, ‘On Being Male in the Middle Ages’, in Lees, Medieval Masculinities, pp. 31–45, herep. 34.

12. Andrew G. Miller, ‘Knights, Bishops and Deer Parks: Episcopal Identity, Emasculation and Clerical Spacein Medieval England’, in Thibodeaux (ed.), Negotiating Clerical Identities, pp. 204–37, here p. 206.

13. Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Thomas Aquinas’s Chastity Belt: Clerical Masculinity in Medieval Europe’, in Biteland Lifshitz, Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe, pp. 52–67.

14. Maureen Miller analyses how this fierce competition between clerics and laymen had a negative impacton women by encouraging misogynist discourse: Maureen C. Miller, ‘Masculinity, Reform, and ClericalCulture: Narratives of Episcopal Holiness in the Gregorian Era’, Church History 72 (2003), pp. 25–52.

15. Jacqueline Murray, ‘Masculinizing Religious Life: Sexual Prowess, the Battle for Chastity and MonasticIdentity’, in P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (eds), Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), pp. 24–42, here p. 27. See also Katherine Allen Smith, ‘SpiritualWarriors in Citadels of Faith: Martial Rhetoric and Monastic Masculinity in the Long Twelfth Century’,in Thibodeaux (ed.), Negotiating Clerical Identities, pp. 86–110; Kirsten A. Fenton, ‘Gendering the FirstCrusade in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum’, in Cordelia Beattie and Kirsten Fenton(eds), Intersections of Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2011), pp. 125–39; Kirsten A. Fenton, Gender, Nation and Conquest in the Works of William of Malmesbury(Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2008), esp. pp. 43–55.

16. Miller, ‘Knights, Bishops and Deer Parks’, pp. 222–6.17. The National Archives Calendar of the Patent Rolls, 1307–1313 (Liechtenstein: Kraus reprint, 1971), p.

174. Hereafter called Cal. Pat. Rolls. Similarly, in 1250 another archbishop of Canterbury, Boniface ofSavoy – a combustive mixture of unpopular foreigner, king’s favourite and powerful churchman keento exercise visitation rights in London – ‘tore to pieces’ (dilaceravit) a precious cope belonging to thesub prior in a chapel in the Priory of St Bartholomew: Matthew Paris, Matthaei Parisiensis, MonachiSancti Albani, Chronica Majora, ed. Henry Richards Luard, 7 vols (London: Longman, 1872–83), vol. 5,pp. 121–2. Moreover, in 1435 the archdeacon of Bedford complained that Dean Macworth and a band ofmen entered the choir of Lincoln Cathedral, dragged the chancellor out of his stall, ‘and tore his habit all topieces’. Henry Bradshaw, Christopher Wordsworth and Lincoln Cathedral, Statutes of Lincoln Cathedral,3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897), vol. 2, pt. 2, p. clxxxviii, n. 1.

18. E.g. ‘Enquete faite par le chanter de Senlis et le bailli de Sens sur les injures et mauvais traitements dontles clercs de l’abbe de Saint-Denis’, Bulletin Societe archeologique de Sens 13 (1885), p. 176; Jacobi aVoragine, Legenda Aurea: Vulgo Historia Lombardica Dicta, eds Johann Georg and Theodor Graesse,3rd edn (Vratislaviae: G. Koebner, 1890), p. 474; Thomas Walsingham, Thomae Walsingham, QuondamMonachi S. Albani, Historia Anglicana, ed. Henry T. Riley, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1863–64), vol. 1,p. 460; Simeon of Durham, Symeonis Monachi Opera Omnia, ed. Thomas Arnold, 2 vols (Wiesbaden:Kraus Reprint, 1965), vol. 1, p. 305; Roger Vaughan, The Life & Labours of S. Thomas of Aquin, 2 vols(London: Longman, 1871–72), vol. 2, p. 425; Rosalind M. T. Hill, (ed.), The Rolls and Register of BishopOliver Sutton, 1280–1299, 8 vols (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1948–1986), vol. 4, p. 82. Hereaftercalled Reg. Sutton.

19. Andrea Denny-Brown, ‘Rips and Slits: The Torn Garment and the Medieval Self’, in Catherine Richard-son (ed.), Clothing Culture, 1350–1650 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 223–39, here pp. 223–7; RuthMellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 16–18 and index.

20. Burns, ‘Why Textiles Make a Difference’, pp. 2–6.21. Robert E. Rodes, Ecclesiastical Administration in Medieval England: The Anglo-Saxons to the Reformation

(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. 41.22. Rodes, Ecclesiastical Administration in Medieval England, p. 41; Louis Trichet, La tonsure: vie et mort

d’une pratique ecclesiastique (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1990), pp. 53–68; P. H. Cullum, ‘Boy / Man intoClerk / Priest: The Making of the Late Medieval Clergy’, in Nicola F. McDonald and W. M. Ormrod (eds),Rites of Passage: Cultures of Transition in the Fourteenth Century (Rochester: Boydell Press, 2004), pp.51–65, here pp. 56–9.

23. For instance, both the Franks and Anglo-Saxons used forcible tonsuring and sequestration in monasticprisons as techniques for disposing of prominent adversaries: Simon Coates, ‘Scissors or Sword? TheSymbolism of a Medieval Haircut’, History Today 49 (1999), pp. 7–13, here p. 8; Joanna Story, CarolingianConnections: Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Francia, c.750–870 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003),



p. 141. See also R. Bartlett, ‘Symbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages’, Transactions of the RoyalHistorical Society, Sixth Series, 4 (1994), pp. 43–60. It was even possible to be forcibly tonsured in ameritorious, corrective way: G. G. Coulton, From St Francis to Dante (London: Nutt, 1907), pp. 180–81.See also the moral story in which a man, who found his wife with a priest, tonsured her: Jacques de Vitry,The Exempla, ed. Thomas Crane (London: Nutt, 1890), p. 88, CCX.

24. M. Bennett, ‘Military Masculinity in England and Northern France c.1050–c.1225’, in Hadley, Masculinityin Medieval Europe, pp. 71–99, here pp. 79–81.

25. Heller’s translation. Sarah-Grace Heller, Fashion in Medieval France (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007),pp. 55–7; Bennett, ‘Military Masculinity in England and Northern France’, p. 80.

26. Coates’s translation. Coates, ‘Scissors or Sword?’, p. 10.27. For instance, Stafford relates the story told by the monk William of Malmesbury of an English scout who

happens upon William of Normandy’s army and reported back that ‘almost everyone in William’s armyseemed to be priests, because their whole face, including both lips, were shaven’: Pauline Stafford, ‘TheMeanings of Hair in the Anglo-Norman World: Masculinity, Reform, and National Identity’, in Mathildevan Dijk and Renee Nip (eds), Saints, Scholars, and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies(Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 153–71, esp. pp. 157–60, 163–8.

28. In the first half of the twelfth century Bernard of Clairvaux’s rule for the Knights Templar stated that theyought to keep the hair of their head short while allowing for beards. Bennett, ‘Military Masculinity inEngland and Northern France’, p. 80.

29. Robert Mills, ‘The Signification of the Tonsure’, in Cullum and Lewis, Holiness and Masculinity in theMiddle Ages, pp. 109–26, p. 119.

30. Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Sharing Wine, Women, and Song: Masculine Identity Formation in the MedievalEuropean Universities’, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (eds), Becoming Male in the MiddleAges (New York: Garland Pub., 1997), pp. 187–202, here pp. 189–93. See also Ruth Mazo Karras, FromBoys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 2003), pp. 67–108; Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (London: Constable, 1966), pp. 177–213.

31. Rodes, Ecclesiastical Administration, pp. 41–2. Michelle Armstrong-Partida examines medieval Cataloniaand the antagonism caused by local churchmen using the shield of clerical privilege flagrantly to stealfrom parishioners, carry weapons, engage in acts of violence or sexual misconduct in the parish and evenblackmail members of their flock by withholding the sacraments. Michelle Armstrong-Partida, ‘Conflictin the Parish: Antagonistic Relations Between Clerics and Parishioners’, in Ronald J. Stansbury (ed.), ACompanion to Pastoral Care in the Late Middle Ages (1200–1500) (Boston: Brill, 2010), pp. 173–212.

32. Barlow’s translation. Frank Barlow, Thomas Becket (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp.62–3. Furthermore, in the fourteenth-century anticlerical poem, ‘The Land of Cokaygne’, monks aredepicted as flying around like hawks, getting lift from ‘their sleeves and their hood’ before landing tohave sex with a maiden and drink their fill. Ann Haskell, (ed.) A Middle English Anthology (Garden City:Anchor Books, 1969), p. 378, ll. 123–30.

33. Laura F. Hodges, Chaucer and Clothing: Clerical and Academic Costume in the General Prologue toThe Canterbury Tales (Rochester: D.S. Brewer, 2005), p. 24; Katherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Lawin Italy, 1200–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 20; Joan Evans, Dress in Medieval France(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 76; Diane Owen Hughes, ‘Sumptuary Law and Social Relations inRenaissance Italy’, in John Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 69–100, here p. 73; Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decreesof the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 1, Lateran IV,Canon 16; Mary G. Houston, Medieval Costume in England and France (New York: Dover Publications,1996), p. 155.

34. David Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, 4 vols (London: 1737), vol. 1, p. 692.35. Rodes, Ecclesiastical Administration, p. 41.36. Wilkins, Concilia, vol. 2, p. 4, pp. 59–60 and p. 703.37. Wilkins, Concilia, vol. 2, pp. 59–60. Translation from Sussex Archaeological Society, Sussex Archaeolog-

ical Collections Relating to the History and Antiquities of the County (London: John Russell Smith, 1848),vol. 1, pp. 183–4, n. 55. With regards to ‘dagged’ clothing and its association with medieval fools, seenote 88 below. Likewise, from the fourteenth century: ‘There ride up a priest and a monk with attendants.Holy Mary, what dresses! The monk with bells on his horse’s bridle, his hood fastened with a great goldenpin, wrought at the head into a true-love knot, his hair growing so long as to hide his tonsure, his shoesembroidered and cut lattice-wise. There was the priest with broad gold girdle, gown of green and red,slashed after the newest mode, and a long sword and dagger, very truly militant. I marveled at the variety



and unction of the oaths they had at their service. The advantage of a theological training was very manifestwithin.’ Robert A. Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics: A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion(London: Gibbings, 1893), p. 154.

38. My emphasis. Cutts’s translation. Edward L. Cutts, Scenes & Characters of the Middle Ages (London:Virtue, 1872), pp. 242–3. Similarly, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parson condemns laymen who, in ‘horrible dis-ordinat scantnesse of clothynge’ wear ‘kutted slopes or haynselyns [cut coats or short jackets]’. GeoffreyChaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), Parson’s Tale,pp. 300–01, ll. 420–24.

39. Sarah-Grace Heller, ‘Anxiety, Hierarchy, and Appearance in Thirteenth-Century Sumptuary Laws and theRoman De La Rose’, French Historical Studies 27 (2004), pp. 311–48.

40. Heller’s translation. Heller, ‘Anxiety, Hierarchy, and Appearance’, p. 328, n. 48.41. Dyan Elliott, ‘Dressing and Undressing the Clergy: Rites of Ordination and Degradation’, in Burns,

Medieval Fabrications, pp. 55–69, here p. 61.42. Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 174–6; Maurice Keen, The Laws

of War in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), p. 173.43. Elliott, ‘Dressing and Undressing the Clergy’, pp. 64–8. In late fourteenth-century Paris, two monks

accused of sorcery were defrocked, hands scrubbed and heads donned with paper hats before beingexecuted. Hunt Janin, Medieval Justice: Cases and Laws in France, England, and Germany, 500–1500(Jefferson: McFarland, 2004), p. 119; Esther Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in lateMedieval France (New York: Brill, 1993), pp. 184–5, see also p. 198.

44. David Knowles, Thomas Becket (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), pp. 79–87.45. For citations, see notes 1–3, above.46. ‘contentio’. Charlton Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), p.

447. All Latin translations are from Lewis and Short unless otherwise specified.47. Miller, ‘Masculinity, Reform, and Clerical Culture’, p. 28.48. Not only does Gerald of Wales describe how the bishop of Worcester ‘boldly burst forth’ with a clever

explanation to cool a fuming king, but he uses the term elsewhere in his chronicle, e.g. to describe howan archdeacon boldly fought off wolves. Gerald employs the word ‘valiantly; manfully’ (fortiter) in thesame sentence. Gerald of Wales, Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer et al., 7 vols (London: Longman, 1861), vol.1, p. 168. Likewise, Gervase of Canterbury uses ‘audacter’ and ‘viriliter’ in a sentence concerning StThomas the Martyr. Gervase of Canterbury, Historical Works, vol. 1, p. 17. The two words could even bepaired directly by ecclesiastical authors, e.g. ‘tam audacter quam viriliter’. William Dugdale, MonasticonAnglicanum, 6 vols (London: Longman, 1970), vol. 5, p. 379. In secular writing, too, the words were usedto complement one another: ‘scienter, audacter, viriliter, et veraciter’. James Gairdner, ed., The PastonLetters, A. D. 1422–1509, 4 vols (London: Constable, 1904), vol. 3, p. 97.

49. ‘discissa’ and ‘dilacerate’. Gerald of Wales, Opera, vol. 7, p. 63. Mary Cheney recounts the bishop’s wryexplanation in her biography, concluding: ‘Outrageous words, but they had the desired effect; the king andthe bystanders laughed, and the archbishop was put to shame, for he was apparently a notorious miser’.Mary G. Cheney, Roger, Bishop of Worcester, 1164–1179 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 2–3.

50. Gerald of Wales, Opera, vol. 7, p. 63. Gervase of Canterbury relates how the king ‘guffawed’ (cachinnos)at the explanation. Gervase of Canterbury, Historical Works, vol. 1, p. 258. For the king’s anger and senseof humour, see e.g. Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 48, 578.

51. Stevenson, Church Historians, vol. 5, pt. 1, p. 337; Haines, ‘Canterbury Versus York’, p. 82; John Mc-Clintock, Clyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, 2 vols (New York: Harper& Brothers, 1887), vol. 2, p. 910; George Bailey, ‘Painted Glass in Morley Church, Derbyshire’, Journalof the Derbyshire Archaeological Society and Natural History 9 (1887), pp. 33–8, here pp. 35–6; HoraceMann, The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, 18 vols (London: Kegan Paul, 1925–1932), vol.10, p. 215.

52. The chroniclers Roger of Hoveden and Benedict of Peterborough describe the violence against Roger’scapa with the verb frango, which means ‘to tear in pieces’. It is informative that both Roger and Benedictemploy the same noun and verb combination at another time to describe how, in 1191, a household knightof the French king shredded Richard I’s (r.1189–1199) capa during an impromptu jousting match while inSicily on crusade and that the king was greatly offended as a result. Hoveden, Chronica, vol. 3, pp. 93–4;Peterborough, Chronicle, vol. 2, pp. 155–6. Accordingly, Latham includes this example under category 1of capa (see note 53, below). Ralph de Diceto described the violence at Westminster with the verb scindo,which means ‘to lacerate’ or ‘to tear off one’s traveling cloak’. Furthermore, this verb is used commonlyin the Latin Vulgate Bible to describe people rending their own or another person’s clothing for reasons



of grief or anger (e.g. Genesis 37:30, Leviticus 10:6, 1 Esdras 9:3, Joel 2:13, Mark 14:63, Acts of theApostles 16:22). But, instead of using the noun capa, Ralph employed vestium, or ‘clothing’. This is animportant distinction because in medieval England pairing vestes with scisse specified clothing that hadbeen ornamentally ‘slashed’. R. E. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word List from British and Irish Sources(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 425, 510. In classical Latin combining vestes and scisse meant‘to tear open’ one’s clothing. Likewise, William of Newburgh modified capa with conscindo, which means‘to tear or rend to pieces’. In the Latin Vulgate, the verb is used at least once to describe rent clothing (2Kings 1:2). In late twelfth-century England conscissio meant ‘cutting’. Latham, Revised Medieval LatinWord List, p. 108. Moreover, when Gervase of Canterbury returns to the violence at Westminster, he omittedthe noun capa or vestium altogether and instead combined scindo with the verb caedo, which means ‘tocut to pieces’.

53. R. E. Latham separates the noun capa into seven categories in the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from BritishSources: (1) cape worn by laymen, (2) rain-cloak, (3) cape worn by clergy, (4) academic gown, (5) cope, richceremonial vestment, ecclesiastical, worn by a dignitary, (6) headwear, or nightcap and (7) cover, or cap.Latham includes the example of capa mutilation from the Council of Westminster in 1176 under category5 – despite the fact that there is no modifier – i.e. context sufficed. R. E. Latham, Dictionary of MedievalLatin from British Sources, 14 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1981), vol. 2, pp. 272–3. See alsoSusan M. Carroll-Clark, ‘Bad Habits: Clothing and Textile References in the Register of Eudes Rigaud,Archbishop of Rouen’, in Robin Netherton (ed.), Medieval Clothing and Textiles, 6 vols (Woodbridge, UK:Boydell Press, 2005–10), vol. 1, pp. 81–103, here pp. 83–6; Wharton B. Marriott, Vestiarium Christianum:The Origin and Gradual Development of the Dress of Holy Ministry in the Church (London: Rivingtons,1868), pp. 167, 223–5.

54. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word List, p. 134. Also, ‘indumenta lintea in oblongos pannulos discindere’translates as ‘to cut linen clothes into strips’. William Smith, A Copious and Critical English-LatinDictionary (New York: American Book Company, 1871), p. 806. Roman, late-antique, medieval and earlymodern writers paired the verb discindo with clothing (vestes). For example, Apuleius (c.180) employsthe word combination ‘vestem discindere’ in his widely read Metamorphoses, which St Augustine calledThe Golden Ass. Apuleius, The Golden Ass: Being the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, ed. WilliamAdlington (London: William Heinemann, 1915), p. 88. Moreover, Boethius (c.480–525) uses the phrase‘vestem . . . disciderunt’ in a famous passage from his highly influential The Consolation of Philosophy.Boethius, The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. Hugh Stuart (London: WilliamHeinemann, 1918), p. 138. Similarly, ‘veste discissus’ appears in an epilogue to the late-antique comedyQuerolus. Franz Buecheler, ed. Petronii Saturae et Liber Priapeorum (Berlin: Weidmann, 1895), pp. 239–40. The association between discindo and clothing continued into the Middle Ages and beyond. For instance,‘vestes . . . discisse’ is found in the records of a twelfth-century priory. Rev. James Wilson, The Register ofthe Priory of St Bees (Durham: Andrews, 1915), p. 518, while Gerhohus Reicherspergensis (1132–1169)employs a similar phrase – ‘mantus (cloak) discissus est’ – in his investigation of the antichrist. MartinBouquet, Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, 24 vols (Paris: Academie des inscriptionset belles-lettres, 1806–1904), vol. 14, p. 404. Finally, it is important to note that the connection betweendiscindo and ‘dagged’ or fashionable clothing is implicitly made in a church council from 1571 – inthe section ‘Concerning the Life and Honesty of Clerics’ – in which statute two succinctly states: ‘Sithabitus clericorum (sicut jure cavetur) honestus, et simplex: non discissus, aut acu pictus, aut militarimore affectatus: mundus tamen’. Johannes Schannat and Josef Hartzheim, Concilia Germaniae, 11 vols(Cologne: Krakamp, 1759–90), vol. 8, p. 12.

55. Denny-Brown, ‘Rips and Slits’, pp. 223–7.56. Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, p. 579; Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word List, pp. 146–7.57. Gerald of Wales, Opera, vol. 8, p. 304; Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, pp. 542,

574. The king may also have found the incident droll because he himself was not a showy dresser in publicappearances; Henry II famously poked fun at Thomas Becket for wearing a flashy robe and then forcefullypulled it off his back – while they were astride horses, no less – and gave it to a beggar on the street. MartinAurell, The Plantagenet Empire, 1154–1224, tr. David Crouch (Harlow: Longman, 2007), p. 132.

58. E.g. in the near contemporary romance the Roman d’Eneas, Lavine’s mother tries to persuade Lavine thather lover Eneas prefers the company of boys to that of women. When Eneas leaves Lavine behind to joinhis men on military campaign, the doubts planted by her mother only grow; Lavine laments how Eneas‘loves none but male whores . . . He has enough boys with him, and loves the worst of them better thanme. He makes their clothes ripped . . . Many of them he has in his service, and their breeches are lowered:thus they earn their wages’. My emphasis. Kuefler’s translation. Mathew Kuefler, ‘Male Friendship and theSuspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in Sharon Farmer and Carol Pasternack (eds), Gender



and Difference in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 145–81, herep. 152. See also Christopher Baswell, ‘Men in the Roman d’Eneas: The Construction of Empire’, in Lees,Medieval Masculinities, pp. 149–68.

59. John of Salisbury, The Letters of John of Salisbury, eds W. J. Millor and Christopher N. L. Brooke, 2 vols(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), vol. 2, no. 307; Barlow, Thomas Becket, pp. 33–4.

60. According to Andrea Denny-Brown, fashionable ‘slits and dagges were situated within the greater tropeof the feminine body’s penetrability, a tradition that itself combines concepts of feminine sexual openness– the vagina as an opening or a tear – and concepts of masculine sexual violence – the phallus-as-knife’.Denny-Brown, ‘Rips and Slits’, p. 236.

61. Kuefler, ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy’, p. 152; John Boswell, Christianity, SocialTolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 44, 243–4.

62. The specific language suggests another possibility: the partisans of Canterbury – calling upon biblicalimages of ripping one’s clothes during mourning rituals – rent Roger of York’s vestments to force him tolament Thomas Becket’s death in a public, penitential manner. Henry, archdeacon of Huntingdon (c.1080–1160), employs such terminology when discussing the ruinous effects of King Stephen’s reign (1135–1154)on the English church and the unwillingness of certain bishops to defend her: ‘they ought, indeed, to haveopposed these carnal men with the sword of the Spirit, which destroys the flesh . . . against the sonsof Belial, who plundered the church, and, tearing in pieces [diripientes] the garment of the Lord, left itrent [laceram] and torn [discissam] and scattered everywhere’. Richard Clarke Sewell, Gesta Stephani:regis Anglorum et ducis Normannorum (London: Sumptibus Societatis, 1846), p. 98. Forester’s translation.Henry of Huntingdon, The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon, ed. Thomas Forester (London: Henry Bohn,1853), pp. 401–02.

63. Haines, ‘Canterbury Versus York’, pp. 78–83.64. ‘distrahebant’. Jacques de Vitry, ‘Vita Mariae Oigniacensis’, in Acta Sanctorum, Daniel Papebroeck ed.

(Antverpiae-Bruxellis-Tongerloe), 1643 ff. Junius IV (1707), pp. 636–66, Junius V (1867), pp. 547–72,Liber II, Caput VI, Cap. III, pp. 650–52, here, Liber II, Caput VI, #60; Thomas de Cantimpre, Supplementumad vitam Mariae Oigniacensis, Junius IV (1707), pp. 666–76, Junius V (1867), pp. 572–81; Jacques deVitry, Margot H. King, The Life of Marie d’Oignies (Toronto: Peregrina, 1990), pp. 89–90 and n. 117.

65. Laura M. Midgley, ‘Edmund Earl of Cornwall and His Place in History’ (unpublished master’s thesis,University of Manchester, 1930); Miller, ‘Knights, Bishops and Deer Parks’, pp. 205, 211–14, 223–4.

66. Robinson’s translation. The Register of Walter Bronescombe: Bishop of Exeter, 1258–1280, ed. O. F.Robinson, 3 vols (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1995–2003), vol. 2, pp. 76–77, #1058, pp. 137–38,#1429, vol. 3, pp. 46–48, #1429. Hereafter called Reg. Bronescombe.

67. The church of Thame was built sometime between 1235 and 1241. The violent dispute over the prebendof Thame in the diocese of Lincoln took place primarily between 1292 and 1294 and appears throughoutseveral volumes of Bishop Oliver Sutton of Lincoln’s Register (Hill, Reg. Sutton). See Miller, ‘Knights,Bishops and Deer Parks’, pp. 205–06, 214–20, 224–5, esp. n. 51.

68. Hill, Reg. Sutton, vol. 4, pp. 117–18.69. ‘ . . . sumitatibus capitorum hujusmodi capellanorum et clericorum quasi usque ad medium enormiter

amputatis et manicis collobiorum eorundem capellanorum et clericorum detrunccatis turpiter et decisis . . . ’.Hill, Reg. Sutton, vol. 4, pp. 117–18.

70. See note 53, above. The ritual of excommunication performed by the bishop, or by a trusted churchman,was certainly dramatic; see the description found in Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, andDemonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 64.

71. In England, c.1291, ‘amputo bursam’ meant ‘to cut a purse’. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word List,p. 19.

72. ‘ad modum rasilis corone’. Robinson, Reg. Bronescombe, vol. 2, pp. 137–8, #1429.73. Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Dale and Eve Salisbury (eds), Four Romances of England: King Horn,

Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999),p. 331.

74. Herzman, Four Romances of England, pp. 250–51, ll. 1864–74. Similarly, in the Roman van Walewein,c.1230–1260, near the romance’s conclusion, Sir Walewein (Gawain) must rescue the damsel in distress,Ysabele, from the Black Knight’s clutches. Walewein cries out: ‘It is futile for you to declare your love!/ I shall this day ordain you a priest / And tonsure your pate with my sword!’ Johnson’s translation.David Johnson and Geert H. M. Claassens (eds), Roman Van Walewein (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000),pp. 436–9, ll. 9758–89. I would like to thank Richard Barber for his advice on this source.

75. Herzman, Four Romances of England, p. 6; Stephen D. White, ‘The Politics of Anger’, in BarbaraRosenwein (ed.), Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell



University Press, 1998), pp. 127–52, here p. 139. For another medieval example, see Jan M. Ziolkowski,‘Ysengrim, the Wolf-Monk with a Name’, in Jan M. Ziolkowski, Talking Animals: Medieval Latin BeastPoetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 198–234, here pp. 222–5.

76. Steven F. Kruger, ‘Becoming Christian, Becoming Male?’, in Cohen and Wheeler, Becoming Male in theMiddle Ages, pp. 21–41, here p. 21–2; Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms,1350–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 131–2; Louise Mirrer, ‘Representing the“Other” Men: Muslims, Jews, and Masculine Ideals in Medieval Castilian Epic and Ballad’, in Lees,Medieval Masculinities, pp. 169–86, here pp. 169–74. See also Steven F. Kruger, ‘The Bodies of Jewsin the Late Middle Ages’, in James Dean and Christian Zacher (eds), The Idea of Medieval Literature(London: Associated University Presses, 1992), pp. 301–23.

77. Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, General Prologue, p. 27, ll. 233–4; Hodges, Chaucer and Clothing, p.143, n. 33.

78. Haskell, A Middle English Anthology, p. 378, ll. 167–72. While the sexual connotation of hood seems clearin this case, the phrase can also be understood as ‘to set his cap’, or to cheat or make a fool out of someone.Frederick Fairholt, Costume in England: A History of Dress (London: Chapman and Hall, 1846), p. 549;Benson, The Riverside Chaucer, Miller’s Prologue, p. 67, l. 3143 and note.

79. Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature,3 vols (London: Athlone Press, 1994), vol. 2, p. 677. An interesting comparison is found in renaissanceItaly. In 1494 in Florence the populo had just witnessed the public rejection of Piero de Medici by otherpowerful Florentines (they shut the door to the palace in his face with insulting words): ‘On witnessingthis scene the populace began to riot, and, by way of proving their contempt for Piero, drove him off withscornful cries and gestures, wagging the tips of their hoods at him, while the street boys assailed him withhisses and volleys of stones’. My emphasis. Pasquale Villari, Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola, tr.Linda Villari, 2 vols (London: T.F. Unwin, 1918), vol. 1, p. 220.

80. Mills, ‘Signification of the Tonsure’, p. 115. In the same way, the tonsured tip of a cleric’s head could alsosignify lust and even sexual virility. Mills calls our attention to Chaucer’s ‘Shipman’s Tale’, in which themonk John borrows money from a merchant and then promises the merchant’s wife gold in exchange forsex; John ‘significantly’ arrives at the cuckold’s house ‘with crowne and berd al fresh and new yshave’.Mills, ‘Signification of the Tonsure’, pp. 116–17.

81. Translation from Wakefield. Walter L. Wakefield, ‘Heretics and Inquisitors: The Case of Le Mas-Saintes-Puelles’, The Catholic Historical Review 69 (1983), pp. 209–26, here pp. 216–17; Malcolm D. Lambert,The Cathars (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), p. 152.

82. Heath Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100–1300 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 173 (<http://libro.uca.edu/dillard/daughters.htm>).

83. Translation from Headlam. Thorold Rogers, Oxford City Documents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891),pp. 245–68; Cecil Headlam, The Story of Oxford (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1907), pp. 242–7; W. A.Pantin, Oxford Life in Oxford Archives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 99–104.

84. David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 210.

85. These performative acts included but were not limited to: boxing another man’s ears, tweaking his nose,forcing him to kneel in submission, spitting in his face, knocking off his hat, yanking on his hood or cloak orpulling his beard; such gestures sought to degrade and humiliate their victims in the greatest way possible.Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2003), pp. 140–51.

86. Some witnesses, testifying at the Court of Arches concerning the dispute at Thame, stated that the StJohns’s violent attack and occupation of the church ‘is well known in the neighborhood of Thame’. Otherwitnesses, testifying about earlier attacks against the church and episcopal liberties by the St Johns, statedthat such actions were ‘notorious around Thame’; it was also ‘public and notorious in and around Thame’that the king’s clerk, Edward St John, had ‘commanded, ratified, and continued’ violent acts againstthe episcopal household. Reginald ‘le Bolacer’, unlettered, witnessed a subsequent excommunicationceremony performed by the bishop of Lincoln himself in response to the ‘tonsuring’ attacks against hisclerics. Another witness, Elias de Wycombe, also unlettered, attested that he did not know whom thebishop had excommunicated, except that the speech had begun with the name or surname ‘John’. NormaAdams and Charles Donahue (eds), Courts of Canterbury, c.1200–1301 (London: Selden Society, 1981),pp. 581–98. Indeed, ‘John Attenok’ is the first name in the list of those excommunicated in the mandaterecorded in Bishop Sutton’s register. Hill, Reg. Sutton, vol. 4, pp. 150–52.

87. Not only was this prohibition widely evaded by great churchmen in medieval England, but clerics werealso guilty of poaching on occasion. Miller, ‘Knights, Bishops and Deer Parks,’ pp. 209–11.



88. Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art, vol. 1, pp. 16–18 and index.89. When the knights attacked the church of Thame and later disrupted the sentences of excommunication

stemming from this attack, they ‘foully lopped off and dagged the long sleeves’ of the clerics’ vestments.The bishop of Lincoln’s account of the sleeve tearing is corroborated by testimony given at the Court ofCanterbury when a household cleric of the bishop named Hugh de ‘Strafford’, lettered, testified that he hadbeen ‘stripped to the arms and beaten with swords’ in the church of Thame during the attack. Adams andDonahue, Courts of Canterbury, pp. 596, 600.

90. Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1307–1313, p. 41.91. Penelope Byrde, The Male Image: Men’s Fashion in Britain, 1300–1970 (London: B.T. Batsford, 1979),

pp. 193–4; Jean de Venette, The Chronicle of Jean De Venette, ed. Richard Newhall and tr. Jean Birdsall(New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), pp. 136, 304.

92. Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1381–1385, p. 427. For more on this interesting subject, see Evelyn May Albright, ‘Eatinga Citation’, Modern Language Notes 30 (1915), pp. 201–06.
