Stephen Langton

On July 15, 1207, King John of England expelled Canterbury monks for supporting Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton. An excerpt from the article:

"Stephen Langton (archbishop of Canterbury 1207-1228) was a famous scholar and leading figure in the Church, and is also one of the most important figures in the history of Magna Carta. He was born around 1150 to an English family in rural Lincolnshire and was probably educated in his local cathedral school. At the age of about fifteen Langton left home for Paris, the site of a burgeoning university. He studied the arts and then theology, for about fifteen years, and became a ‘master’ (the equivalent of a university professor today). He was a prolific and influential scholar, known particularly for his exegisis (that is, detailed analysis) of the Bible. Langton’s biblical scholarship included what we would now call ‘political thought’, because he looked to the Bible for guidance on how society in his own day should he ordered. Langton argued that God had not intended the world to be ruled by kings, who were predisposed to rule oppressively and with disregard for the law. Langton used examples from the Bible, as well as scenarios from his own world, in thought experiments designed to investigate whether subjects were obliged to obey a king who made unjust decisions. If a king condemns a man to death, but the prisoner has not been convicted by a court, is the executioner obliged to carry out the sentence? Although Langton was inclined to think that kings in his own day, like their Biblical predecessors, often behaved badly, he was no radical. He thought that in most circumstances subjects should obey their kings – at the most they could refuse to carry out an unlawful command.

Such questions were not just classroom exercises but real dilemmas for people ruled by kings, especially kings such as John of England, who often made important decisions and inflicted harsh punishments on his subjects without recourse to the law or troubling to obtain the agreement of his bishops and barons. In 1206, these became pressing issues for Langton too, when Pope Innocent III called him to Rome and made him a cardinal, before arranging for him to be appointed archbishop of Canterbury. King John refused to accept the pope’s choice of archbishop; he, like his predecessors, expected to influence the outcome of elections to English bishoprics, so that he could reward his servants and ensure that such important offices were held by men who were faithful to him. Both parties refused to back down and so the pope imposed an interdict on England, meaning that the Church’s sacraments (such as Confession and the Eucharist) were forbidden to everyone in the kingdom. Innocent also excommunicated the king (the Church’s equivalent of outlawry). Almost all of England’s bishops sided with the pope and left England to join Langton in exile in France. Eventually, the threat of rebellion in England and war with France forced King John to accept the pope’s terms, in order to secure the support of the Church. He agreed to become the pope’s vassal and to allow Langton to take up his appointment. The bishops, with Langton at their head, returned to England in the summer of 1213 and began the difficult task of trying to prevent a civil war between the king and his barons."