Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Cantelupe, Thomas de
CANTELUPE, THOMAS de (1218?–1282), chancellor, bishop of Hereford, and saint, was born at his father's manor of Hambleden, near Great Marlow, Buckinghamshire, about 1218. His father, William de Cantelupe, second baron [q. v.], was seneschal to John. His mother, Millicent, was a daughter of Hugh de Gournay, a baron of Normandy, and the widow of Almeric de Montfort, count of Evreux, whose mother, Mabel, was one of the coheiresses of the great Gloucester earldom. His uncle was Walter of Cantelupe, bishop of Worcester [q. v.] He was one of four brothers, of whom the eldest, William, third baron Cantelupe [q. v.], acquired by marriage with the heiress of the Braoses the lordship of Brecon in addition to his hereditary possessions. Of the others, John and Nicholas became famous knights, and Hugh archdeacon of Gloucester. His three or four sisters all married into noble families.
Destined, with his brother Hugh, for a clerical career, Thomas naturally fell greatly under the influence of his uncle, Bishop Walter, who partially undertook the direction of his early education. After a possible sojourn at Oxford, where he entered, says Wood (Annals, i. 221, ed. Gutch), the same year (1237) as the famous feud between the students and the servants of the unpopular papal legate, Cardinal Otho, Thomas was sent to study arts at Paris, where his elder brother Hugh was already resident. The accounts which remain of their Paris life are singularly illustrative of the position of the noble and wealthy student at a mediæval university. At first the brothers lived together. Their extensive household included a chaplain, and a master of arts who acted as their director. At least two poor scholars were maintained at their expense, and from five to thirteen paupers were fed from the remnants of their table. St. Louis, who was then king, paid them a personal visit. In 1245 both brothers attended the council of Lyons, where they were made chaplains to Innocent IV, and Thomas received a dispensation which allowed him to hold benefices in plurality. The brothers, who had already completed their arts course, now parted company, and Thomas went to study civil law at Orleans, in which subject he attained such proficiency, that he often lectured in place of his master Guido. He next returned to Paris to devote himself to the study of canon law. Hugh was still there reading theology, but the brothers henceforward had different establishments. At last Thomas completed his long and laborious legal studies, and he returned to Oxford to teach canon law, with such success, that in 1262 he was elected chancellor of the university. His strong yet temperate action in this capacity was well illustrated by his success in stopping a most formidable riot between the ‘Boreales’ and ‘Australes.’
The dispute between Henry III and his barons was now approaching its crisis. Walter of Cantelupe was the intimate friend of Simon of Montfort, and Thomas was naturally drawn to the patriotic side. The strong attachment of the university to the popular party may at least partially be ascribed to the chancellor's influence. This feeling went so far, that in 1263 Edward, the king's eldest son, was refused admission within the town for fear of a conflict between his retinue and the students. At the end of the same year Thomas was appointed, no doubt through his uncle's influence, one of the commissioners to represent the barons at Amiens, where St. Louis had undertaken to arbitrate between them and King Henry (Appendix to Rishanger's Chronicle, Camden Society, pp. 122–3). Louis's judgment against the barons (23 Jan. 1264) was immediately followed by civil war. In March the king occupied Oxford, and turned out all the students. On 14 May the battle of Lewes put the government into the hands of the barons. The university was at once restored to Oxford, but its chancellor was promoted to the chancellorship of England. On 22 Feb. 1265 the king transferred the great seal to Thomas, who had already been nominated to it by the council of magnates by whom the royal power was now exercised (Rot. Claus. 49 H. III, m. 9; Rot. Pat. 49 H. III, m. 18, in Campbell's Chancellors, i. 153; and Blaauw's Barons' Wars, p. 257). Thomas was at least more acceptable to the king than many of his other ministers, and the declaration put into his mouth that he was pleased to admit him to the office is borne out by the light of later events. On 26 March a grant of 500 marks a year for the support of the chancellor and his clerks was issued, with exceptional declarations of the royal favour (Rot. Pat. as above). The almost immediate transference of the seal to Ralph of Sandwich and others suggests that Thomas, though remaining chancellor, was required by his party for other business (ib. m. 16). He must, however, have fulfilled some functions of his office, as his prudence, deliberation, and incorruptible honesty in the discharge of his judicial duties are especially commended.
On 4 Aug. the death of Montfort at Evesham brought the baronial power to an end. Thomas was immediately deprived of his post as chancellor, and his return to Paris probably indicates that his position in England was unsafe. Though restored to the king's favour in 1266 (Rot. Pat. 50 H. III, m. 3 in Dugdale's Baronage, p. 732), and never apparently deprived of the archdeaconry of Stafford, which was the highest ecclesiastical preferment he had as yet attained, Thomas remained abroad for several years.
Driven from active life by the collapse of the party with whose fortunes Thomas had been so intimately connected, he henceforth devoted his whole energies to theology. He lectured at Paris on the Epistles and the Apocalypse, and not later than 1272 returned to Oxford, where early in 1273 he became a regent and therefore a teacher in the same subject. His old master and confessor, Robert Kilwardby, had now become archbishop of Canterbury, and came up specially to Oxford to pronounce the usual eulogy on the newly made doctor, whom he declared to be untainted by mortal sin (Trivet, p. 305, Eng. Hist. Soc.; Rishanger, p. 102, Rolls Ser.). A few months later Thomas abandoned his lectures at Oxford to attend the second council of Lyons (7 May to 17 July 1274), which Gregory X had convoked with the object of ending the schism between the Eastern and Western churches. As in 1245, he again became a papal chaplain. At its conclusion he apparently returned to Oxford. It is about this time or earlier that his second tenure of the chancellorship of the university must be placed (Acta Sanctorum, October, i. 549 b; his name only appears once in the list of chancellors given by Wood and Le Neve, though Wood had a suspicion that he must have been chancellor in 1267, Antiquities of Oxford, ed. Gutch, Appendix, p. 327).
The permission to hold benefices in plurality which Thomas had obtained from Innocent IV thirty years earlier had been well used. Besides his archdeaconry of Stafford (1265) with the annexed prebend of Lichfield he became precentor and canon of York, canon of London, where he lived a good deal, and rector of several rich parishes. Yet Thomas satisfied the most scrupulous precisians by his anxiety in procuring good and sufficient vicars, able to preach and of good moral character. But he was not content with this. He regularly and frequently visited all his cures, celebrated mass, preached sermons, heard confessions, and availed himself of his great wealth—his church preferment brought him in 1,000 marks a year—to exercise a liberal hospitality to all classes, to bestow lavish alms on the poor, and to build, rebuild, or repair the edifices entrusted to his care. Even when absent he regularly sent doles of corn and delicacies to the poor and sick, while his great influence enabled him to strenuously defend the rights and liberties of all his churches in a grasping and lawless age. The poor round Oxford also found in him a liberal benefactor.
Family influence had already given Thomas several benefices on the southern Welsh border, when about 1273 John le Breton, bishop of Hereford, himself an eminent lawyer, appointed him to the prebend of Preston in Hereford Cathedral, apparently in the hope of thus securing him the succession to the bishopric. Unluckily the prebend was not really vacant, as the previous bishop Peter de Aquablanca, had already nominated a Burgundian fellow-countryman named Peter de Langona to the same stall. Le Breton, who was English, had turned Langona out for some unknown reason, and by appointing such distinguished men as Robert Burnell and Thomas of Cantelupe in succession sought to make his ejection secure. Langona commenced a suit against Cantelupe at Rome, but the slow movements of the papal curia prevented this from becoming an immediate cause of anxiety. In later years it assumed a very different aspect (Webb, Household Expenses of Bishop Swinfield, Camden Soc. ii. clxxviii sq.)
On 12 May 1275 Bishop le Breton died. On 15 June the chapter presented Thomas to the living as their chosen bishop. He had been elected ‘via compromissi’ on the second day of election, despite his weeping protestation of his unworthiness. The royal assent was forthwith bestowed (20 June). On 24 June Kilwardby confirmed his old pupil's election. On 26 June his temporalities were restored, and on 8 Sept. he was consecrated by Kilwardby at Canterbury (Le Neve (Hardy), i. 460; Ann. Wig., Ann. Winton., Ann. Wav., and Wykes in Ann. Mon., iv. 467, ii. 119, ii. 384, iv. 263; Ann. Lond. in Stubbs's Chron. of E. I and E. II, i. 85, Rolls Ser.) The only other bishops present were London and Rochester, and the archbishop was very indignant that the rest, and especially the neighbouring Welsh prelates, did not assemble to do honour to his pupil (Polistoire MSS. in Haddan and Stubbs's Councils, i. 506).
Thomas now became an active and trusted adviser of Edward I, and a regular attendant at his councils and parliaments. The bishop of a border diocese, he watched with special interest Edward's contest with Llewelyn of Wales, was present at the council in which the prince was condemned (Parl. Writs, i. 5), signed the monitory letter which the bishops addressed to the recusant chieftain (Rymer, Record edition, vol. i. pt. ii. p. 536), and twice sent his vassals into the field against him (in 1277 and 1282, Parl. Writs, i. 197, and i. 224). He was present on 29 Sept. 1278 when Alexander, king of Scots, performed homage in the Westminster Parliament (ib. i. 7), and again at Gloucester in the same year had the satisfaction of hearing the court declare against his enemy the Earl of Gloucester's claims to the castle and borough of Bristol (ib. i. 6). In the same year he and the Bishop of London seem to have specially supported Edward I's claim for a tenth from the clergy on condition of going on crusade (Rymer, vol. i. pt. ii. p. 563). On 27 April 1279 he was appointed with others as royal locum tenens during Edward's absence in France (ib. 568). Though on several occasions he put himself into decided opposition to Edward, he never lost his favour. When Edward desired to give a converted Jew the right of bearing witness against christian falsifiers of the coinage, Thomas with tears in his eyes implored the king to release him from the council rather than give a Jew power over christian men. His arguments induced Edward to waive the point and beg the bishop to continue his services. Thomas was always an inveterate enemy of the Jews. He obtained special permission from the king to preach to them, and rejected the large presents by which they vainly sought to propitiate him.
But Thomas's best energies were devoted to the active administration of his disordered see. He constantly traversed the diocese, preached frequently and fervently, heard the confessions of the poorest, displayed great zeal in confirmations, and celebrated mass with an ecstatic fervour that frequently found a relief in tears. Himself the pattern of sanctity, morality, and devotion, he was inexorable against offenders. He abhorred all simony and nepotism. Loose monks he expelled from his diocese. Powerful barons were compelled to perform open penance for sins they had long thought forgotten. All holders of pluralities without dispensations were deprived, including the precentor of Hereford, who had been a serious rival of Thomas for the bishopric. He rigorously excluded all women, however old and ugly, from his household, and mortally offended his sister Lady Tregoz by the severity which rejected even her affection (Acta SS.; cf. Webb's Household Expenses of Bishop Swinfield, ii. xxxviii).
Bishop Thomas's greatest exertions were directed to asserting and vindicating the rights of his church. Despite his real sanctity, he had no small share of the martial spirit of the fourteenth-century baron, while his legal training plunged him into legal warfare with the encroachers on his prerogatives. Earl Gilbert of Gloucester had usurped the right of hunting on the Herefordshire side of the Malvern hills. His powerful connections and haughty temper made the king himself afraid of the earl. But Thomas brought an action against Gloucester, and the tedious litigation was ended in March 1278 (Ann. Wigorn. in Ann. Mon. iv. 476), when a jury of the two shires was empanelled at an assize held at Malvern. The earl threatened violence, and defied all ‘clergiasters’ to rob him of his inheritance. But the judicial decision gave Cantelupe the victory. The deep trench which still marks the summit of the Malvern hills was dug by the defeated earl to separate his possessions from those of the triumphant bishop (Nott, History of Malvern Priory, pp. 52, 53).
Cantelupe also obtained from Peter, baron Corbet, the restitution of four hundred acres of land stolen from the bishopric near Lydbury (Eyton, Shropshire, xi. 199, from Cantelupe's Register). His solemn excommunication of the enemies of the see frightened into retreat the two thousand Welshmen whom Llewelyn had assembled to protect from the bishop's men the three rich manors near Montgomery that he had usurped from the bishops of Hereford, and the inhabitants of the manors themselves restored Thomas to the possession of them. A tedious suit in the papal court with Anian II of St. Asaph about the rights of the two sees over Gordwr was decided after Cantelupe's death in favour of Hereford. Despite the armed opposition of his nephew Baron Tregoz, Thomas insisted on consecrating the new church of the Cistercian abbey of Dore, jurisdiction over which had been claimed by Bishop Bek of St. David's.
In 1279 Kilwardby was succeeded at Canterbury by the Franciscan John Peckham, who although, like Kilwardby, an old teacher of Cantelupe's (Reg. Peck. ccxlvii), had little of the friendliness for him which his predecessor had always displayed. At the council of Reading Peckham took up a line of policy which was offensive to his suffragan bishops (July 1279). Bishop Thomas led the resistance to the Franciscan primate. The main points of difference were expressed in twenty-one articles drawn up in 1282 by the bishops (Wilkins, Concilia, ii. 75, and Reg. Peck. cclvii). But long before this stage had been attained special causes of quarrel were developed between Peckham and Cantelupe.
A matrimonial suit started before the subdean of Hereford was carried by the losing party straight to the official of Peckham, the intermediate stage before the bishop's court being omitted. Thomas naturally objected to his rights being thus ignored; Peckham would not give way, and so fierce did the strife become that Cantelupe withdrew for a considerable period into Normandy to avoid an interdict, and prosecute an appeal to Rome. How the case ended we are not informed. Early in 1282 Thomas was again in England; but another difference had arisen with Peckham. A certain Henry of Havekly, a clerk beneficed in several dioceses, had died, and Peckham claimed jurisdiction in testamentary questions connected with his estate. This his executor Nicholas, the vicar of Ross, and Robert of Gloucester, the official of Hereford, resisted. They were accordingly excommunicated by the archbishop. Cantelupe took up his official's cause and refused to issue the excommunication on the double ground that the offenders had appealed to Rome and that the archbishop had no jurisdiction. Fierce strife ensued. On 7 Feb. a meeting at Lambeth utterly failed to produce peace. Cantelupe was excommunicated, and, either before or after the sentence was pronounced, he appealed to the pope.
Affairs were now proceeding very badly. The tedious suit with Anian of St. Asaph was still dragging on slowly at the papal curia. Peter de Langona, whom Cantelupe refused to conciliate when he became bishop by reinstating him in his old prebend, had gone in person to Rome, and was pressing his suit with extreme vindictiveness and fair success. Already in 1281 Cantelupe had directed his agents to approach the powerful men in the curia with what were practically bribes (Webb, Expenses of Bishop Swinfield, ii. xcvii. All our information about Langona's suit is due to Mr. Webb's extracts from Cantelupe's register. The life in the ‘Acta Sanctorum,’ so copious on the other suits in which Thomas had more show of justice, is quite silent on this). The heavy expense, constant worry and danger of defeat and disgrace at last drove Cantelupe to the resolution to prosecute his cases in person before the papal court. Privately, secretly as Peckham boasts (Reg. Peck. ccl), Thomas withdrew from England a second time (end of March, ib.) He reached Italy in safety, and was well received at the court of Martin IV at Orvieto; this, as he came as an excommunicate, whose right to appeal was more than doubtful, was perhaps more than he could have hoped for. He retired to Montefiascona, a few miles from Orvieto, to await the progress of his suit. But he had long been in failing health. An Italian summer easily prostrated a frame emaciated by asceticism and worn with age and anxiety. He died on 25 Aug. 1282 at Orvieto, where he was buried in the monastery of Santo Severo; his funeral sermon was pronounced by the cardinal of Præneste, afterwards Nicholas IV. His servants, led by Richard of Swinfield, brought his heart and bones back with them to England. The heart he bequeathed to his friend Edmund, earl of Cornwall, who deposited it in the monastery of Ashridge. The bones found a resting-place in the cathedral of Hereford.
Peckham attempted to refuse christian burial to Thomas's remains, and availed himself of the vacancy of the see to hold a metropolitical visitation of the diocese of Hereford. But the election of Thomas's attached friend Richard of Swinfield as his successor showed that the sentiments of crown and chapter were equally adverse to the archbishop. In 1287 the bones of Thomas were translated in the presence of the king to the noble tomb in the north transept which they still occupy (Britton, Hereford Cath. pp. 56, 57). In the same year miracles were worked at his shrine. In 1290 Bishop Swinfield urgently besought Nicholas IV to admit him into the canon of saints. Nothing came of this, and again in 1299 the efforts were renewed with similar want of success. In 1305, Edward I, urged by the chapter of Hereford and by parliament (Kal. and Invent. of Exchequer, i. 83), wrote several letters to the pope and the cardinals, asking for Cantelupe's canonisation. In 1307 Clement V appointed a commission to investigate the question. A vast mass of testimony as to Thomas's life, character, and saintliness was collected, but it was not until 17 April 1320 that John XXII added him to the list of saints. Long before this his cultus had obtained a popularity second only, among recent English saints, to that of Thomas of Canterbury. Hundreds of miracles were performed at his shrine. The assumption by his successors of his family arms as the arms of the see shows how far he became identified with the later history of Hereford (Duncumb, Herefordshire, i. 470). His day was 2 Oct.
In personal appearance Thomas was fair but ruddy. His nose was large, and his red hair was in his later years streaked with grey. His face, his admirers thought, was as the face of an angel. In his private life he was pure and blameless, and austere even beyond mediæval standard. After he became bishop, he wore a hair shirt underneath his episcopal dress. He was remarkable for his charity to the poor and for his hospitality.
[The life of Thomas of Cantelupe can be told with a detail very unusual for his times from the copious and almost contemporary Processus Canonisation is preserved in the Vatican (Vat. MS. 4015), and which is the basis of the long life in the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum Octobris, tom. i. pp. 539–610 vita, 610–705 miracula; Capgrave (Nova Legenda, f. 282 b), Surius (De Probatis Sanctorum Vitis, 2 Oct. p. 16), the jesuit Strange in his Life and Gests of Thomas of Cantelupe (Gand 1674, reprinted London 1879), have all drawn from the same source or from each other, but are much inferior in accuracy to the Bollandist account. There are other manuscript authorities enumerated in Hardy's Descriptive Catalogue, iii. 217–20. Dugdale's Baronage, pp. 731–3, gives an account of his family; Wood's Annals of Oxford (ed. Gutch) speaks of his Oxford career; Lord Campbell's account, Lives of the Chancellors, i. 153–4, is inaccurate and meagre; Foss's sketch in Judges of England, ii. 287–9, is rather better; Hardy's Le Neve and Godwin's De Præsulibus are short summaries. Of original authorities, besides the depositions of the witnesses to his sanctity, something may be gleaned from Trivet (Eng. Hist. Soc.), the annals of Worcester, Waverley, Oseney, and Wykes in Luard's Annales Monastici, Rolls Series; Stubbs's Annals of Edward I and II, Rolls Series; the Close and Patent Rolls, the Parliamentary Writs, and the documents in Rymer's Fœdera; Martin's Registrum Epistolarum J. Peckham, Rolls Series, some of the documents in which are also printed in Wilkins's Concilia, vol. ii., and Webb's Introductions and Appendices to the Household Expenses of Bishop Swinfield (Camden Soc.), largely derived from Cantelupe's still existing Register, are both of the first importance for the history of his later years; the negotiations for his canonisation can be best traced from Rymer and Webb; the Bull of John XXII is in the Bullarium Romanum, i. 234 (Lugd. 1692).]Dictionary of National Biography, Errata (1904), p.52
N.B.— f.e. stands for from end and l.l. for last line
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