mam suam salvet’). It was substantially a recommendation to each clerk to make his own terms of submission.
Winchelsea's estates remained in the king's hands for more than five months (Anglia Sacra, i. 51), during which he depended on charity for subsistence. Royal agents seized his horses at Maidstone and compelled him to travel on foot (Flores Hist. iii. 293). On 27 Feb. the king seized Christ Church and sealed up its storehouses to prevent the monks giving him any help (Birchington, i. 14–15; Hist. MSS. Comm. 5th Rep. i. 433). But even the clerical partisans who hailed Winchelsea as a second St. Thomas admitted that his worst sufferings resulted not from Edward's direct orders but from the officious zeal of the royal underlings. The king's self-restraint made a reconciliation the more easy, and Edward's wrath was over when most individual clerks had made their voluntary offering, and the baronage had agreed to fight for him beyond sea. On 14 July the reconciliation of church and state was publicly brought home to Londoners in the affecting scene of farewell enacted outside Westminster Hall. Winchelsea burst into tears at the king's appeal to the emotions of his subjects, and promised that he would be faithful to him in future (Flores Hist. iii. 295). Two days (14 July) afterwards Winchelsea summoned another convocation to deliberate as to the means of obtaining the pope's permission to pay the king a grant. On 19 July his lands and goods were restored.
Winchelsea now exerted himself to persuade the earls of Norfolk and Hereford to make terms with the king. On 27 July he had personal colloquy with the earls' agents at Waltham, and next day took them with him to see the king at St. Albans. It was no fault of his if the two earls held aloof. On 31 July Edward received the clergy back to his protection, and before his embarkation wrote to the archbishop begging his prayers for the success of the army.
On 10 Aug. Winchelsea opened convocation at London by informing it that the king had promised to confirm the charters if the clergy would make an adequate grant for the French war. The assembly agreed, however, that no grant could be made without obtaining the pope's leave, but promised the king to apply to Boniface at once. Curiously enough the bull of 28 Feb. 1297, by which the pope excepted from his prohibition all voluntary gifts and sums raised for national defence, was referred to by neither party in the discussion. But on 20 Aug. Edward, without waiting for a grant, ordered the immediate collection of a third of the clerical temporalities. On 23 Aug. he sailed for Flanders. The reconciliation, after all, was not very deep.
Despite Edward's prohibition, Winchelsea excommunicated the infringers of the liberties of the church. Meanwhile the baronial opposition was obtaining from the regency the long-promised confirmation of the charters. Winchelsea, who was present at the tumultuous parliament which preceded the baronial triumph, was in full sympathy with their action, though not taking a leading part in it himself. A devastating Scottish foray now made odious the unpatriotic attitude of the clergy. On 28 Nov. a new convocation granted a tenth, raised by each diocesan through clerical machinery. As Edward had not asked for a tax, and as the money was for occasions recognised by the bull of explanation, Winchelsea felt himself secure both from the king and the pope. On the same day the charters, which Edward had confirmed in London, were recited publicly and handed over to the custody of Winchelsea. Thus peace was at last restored.
Winchelsea's vigorous and successful resistance to Edward gave him a great reputation among all lovers of high clerical authority. Boniface VIII called him ‘solus ecclesiæ Anglicanæ pugil invincibilis, inflexibilisque columna’ (Birchington, i. 16). Despite his preoccupation in politics, Winchelsea had found time for plenty of other work. He had numerous quarrels on his hands. A dispute with Gilbert de Clare, ninth earl of Gloucester [q. v.], which broke out before the archbishop's enthronement, could not be settled by arbitration, and was ultimately referred to the bishop of Durham (Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1297–1301, p. 152). He had a fierce controversy with the abbot and convent of St. Augustine's, Canterbury. In the course of it he was cited to Rome in 1299, and in 1300 Boniface VIII issued a bull exempting the abbey from all episcopal jurisdiction (Cal. Papal Letters, i. 585–6). But Winchelsea's strenuous remonstrances led the pope to issue in 1303 a further bull that minimised the privileges that he had previously granted (Literæ Cantuar. i. lxi–lxiii; Thorn in Twysden, Decem Scriptores, c. 2004–5, who is bitterly hostile to Winchelsea). The pope played Winchelsea even a worse trick when in 1297 he exempted the bishop of Winchester for life from all his archiepiscopal jurisdiction (Cal. Papal Letters, i. 569). Winchelsea strove to increase the number of monks and improve the discipline even in the faithful convent of Christ Church (Hist. MSS. Comm. 5th Rep. i. 446).
