Stephen Langton

“ He neither understood nor sympathised with Stephen Langton's zeal for the charters. A straightforward, limited, honourable man, he strove to carry out his rather old-fashioned conception of duty in the teeth of a thousand obstacles. He never had a free hand, and he never enjoyed the hearty support of any one section of his countrymen. Hated by the barons whom he kept away from power, he alienated the Londoners by his high-handed violence, and the tax-payers by his heavy exactions. ”

“ He was buried in his own cathedral where his effigy still remains.
After some disputes on the subject of election, the Pope, Innocent III., was appealed to and decided in favour of
Stephen Langton (1207-1228) who was an Englishman of spotless character and profound theological learning: he was consecrated at Peterborough by Innocent III. The “fury of King John knew no bounds,” he drove the monks of Canterbury to Flanders, and refused to allow Langton to set foot in England. ”

“ Stephen Langton was at once too true a churchman and too great a statesman, and held too lofty a conception of his proper constitutional functions as primate of all England, to identify himself with any party. The right and the duty of the archbishop of Canterbury was to be the partisan of neither king nor people, but the guide and monitor of both, so far as they would accept his223 guidance and listen to his admonitions, and the mediator between them whenever mediation was needed. ”

“ When Stephen Langton told the King as much, and read the list to him, he went half mad with rage. But that did him no more good than his afterward trying to pacify the Barons with lies. They called themselves and their followers, “The army of God and the Holy Church.” Marching through the country, with the people thronging to them every where (except at Northampton, where they failed in an attack upon the castle) , they at last triumphantly set up their banner in London itself, whither the whole land, tired of the tyrant, seemed to flock to join them. ”

“ The king and the archbishop met each other at Winchester, where they exchanged a kiss of amity, and Langton gave the king absolution for the injuries done to himself and his colleagues; John once more taking an oath to execute justice, and to preserve his fealty to the Pope. But Stephen Langton, one of the ablest [264] men who ever had filled the archiepiscopal chair, was not likely to place much confidence in the promises of the king; and John evidently regarded the archbishop with bitter hatred, as the cause of all his troubles.
JOHN DOING HOMAGE TO THE POPE'S LEGATE. (See p. 262.) ”

“ Inq. post mortem, i. 300) . He was the nephew of William Langton, dean of York; but there seems no reason for making him a kinsman to John Langton [q.v.] , bishop of Chichester and chancellor, his contemporary. Neither can any real connection be traced between him and Stephen Langton [q.v.] , archbishop of Canterbury (Hill, Hist. of Langton, p. 17) . He started life as a poor man (Hemingburgh, ii. 272) , and became a clerk of the king's chancery. ”

“ Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, died. He was a man of great abilities as a writer and a politician. He was nominated to the office of archbishop by the pope, 1207, which being considered as an usurpation of the rights of the king of England, lead to a quarrel between those dignitaries, which terminated disastrously to the king.
1386. Battle of Sempach, in the canton of Lucerne, which established the independence of Switzerland. Leopold II, duke of Austria, was killed in this battle.
1535. Anthony Duprat, a very eminent French statesman, died. ”

“ Annalists of the time noticed that younger men inclined to the side of the insurgents, while the older remained with the king. This fact in some cases divided families, as in the case of the Marshals, William the elder staying with John, while William the younger was with the barons. That one abode in the king's company does not indicate, however, that his sympathies in this struggle were on that side. Stephen Langton was in form with the king and acted as his representative in the negotiations, though it was universally known that he supported the reforms asked for. ”

“ Johnson, son of George Langton, by his wife Diana, daughter of Edmund Turner of Stoke Rochford, Lincolnshire, and descendant of the old family of the Langtons of Langton, near Spilsby in Lincolnshire, was born apparently in the early part of 1737. ”

“ The instinct, however, was a true one: it was Stephen Langton who was to give the first impulse to the work which was destined—though not till long after he had passed away—to make the rule of such a king as John impossible in England for evermore.
The archbishop was determined to be satisfied with nothing short of a literal fulfilment of the promise on which he had insisted as a condition of the king’s absolution, the promise that to “all men” their rights should be restored. He saw that this end could be gained only by the instrumentality 219of the barons ”

“ Langton, who was bishop of Winchester from 1493 till 1500, made him his amanuensis, and in due time sent him to study at that ‘nursery of arts,’ Padua. Wood thinks it probable that, before going abroad, he studied at Queen's College, Oxford, of which Langton had been provost. Pace passed from Padua to Ferrara, where Erasmus, writing in 1521, speaks of having met him (Ep. dlxxxix.) ; and he also spent some time at Bologna, where he was encouraged to continue his studies by a legacy of 10l. a year for seven years left him by his old patron (Kennett, Manuscript Collections, xlv. 102) . ”

“ As Anselm had withstood William the Red, as Theobald had withstood Stephen, so Langton prepared to withstand and rescue his country from the tyranny of John. He had already forced him to swear to observe the laws of Edward the Confessor, in other words the traditional liberties of the realm. When the baronage refused to sail for Poitou, saying that they owed service to him in England, but not in foreign lands, he compelled the king to deal with them not by arms, but by process of law. ”

“ Langres (10) , a French town, strongly fortified, near the sources of the Marne, rich in antiquities, and one of the oldest towns in France; has manufactures and a considerable trade.
Langton, Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury, born in England but educated in France; a man of ability and scholarly attainments; in 1206 visited Rome, was made Cardinal by Innocent III., presented to the Archbishopric, and consecrated at Viterbo in 1207; King John refused to acknowledge him, and the kingdom was put under an interdict, a quarrel which it took five years to settle ”

“ Langton and Hubert now seem (Shirley's Preface to Royal Letters, i. xxiv–xxvi) to have joined together to make Pandulf's position impossible. Langton, thwarted at home, went to Rome, where his great influence prevailed upon Honorius to promise that, so long as Langton lived, the legatine power should be discharged by the archbishop of Canterbury, and that no special legate a latere should be sent to England (Ann. Dunstaple, p. 74) . The pope must have written to Pandulf ordering him to resign his legation. ”

“ John did not venture to do violence to the papal envoys, and they safely returned to the continent. The only results of the mission were that some of the king's clerks returned with them to open up further negotiations with the pope (Ann. Margam, p. 31) , and that the interdict was slightly relaxed in the case of dying persons (Ann. Waverley, p. 271) . Pandulf now joined Stephen Langton and the exiled bishops in Flanders (Ann. Dunstable, p. 36) . He then returned to Rome (Ann. Osney, p. 55; Ann. Margam, p. 31) . Perhaps he accompanied Langton, who also went to Rome about the same time. ”

“ John met Langton’s consecration by seizing the estates of Canterbury, driving the chapter into exile, and proclaiming that anyone who acknowledged Stephen as archbishop should be accounted a public enemy. The remonstrances and warnings of the pope were disregarded, and in March, 1208, all England was laid under an interdict, and there was an end to the public ministrations of religion in the country for six years—to the bitter distress of the common people. ”

“ The authorities are mainly those for the reign of John. No contemporary biography has come down to us. Some letters, by Langton and others, relating to the quarrel over his election are preserved in a Canterbury Chronicle (ed. W. Stubbs in the “Rolls” edition of Gervase of Canterbury, vol. ii.) ”

“ Johnson left him a book, and Langton undertook to pay an annuity to Barber, Johnson's black servant, in consideration of a sum of 750/. left in his hands. Langton was famous for his Greek scholarship, but wrote nothing except some anecdotes about Johnson, published in 'Boswell under the year 1780.' Johnson and Boswell frequently discussed his incapacity for properly managing his estates. He was too indolent, it appears, to keep accounts, in spite of exhortations from his mentor. His gentle and amiable nature made him universally popular. ”

“ Bozzy remarked that he was a fine cat. "Why, yes, sir," said Johnson; "but I have had cats whom I liked better than this," and then, lest Hodge should be put out of countenance, he added, "but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed." He told Langton once of a young gentleman who, when last heard of, was "running about town shooting cats; but," he murmured in a kindly reverie, "Hodge shan't be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot!" Once, when Johnson was staying at a house in Wales, the gardener brought in a hare which had been caught in the potatoes. ”

“ At the parliament of April 1309 he refused to attend until the archbishop of York, disgusted at not being allowed to bear his cross, went back to the north. In his zeal for clerical privilege Winchelsea had even taken up the cause of his old enemy Langton, who was still imprisoned by royal authority alone. He refused to have any dealings with the king as long as Langton was unlawfully detained (Murimuth, p. 14) . In March 1310 Winchelsea was one of the lords ordainers, though in April Edward was still urging him to persuade convocation to make fresh grants from its spiritualities. ”

“ Langton himself did not get back from Rome until August.
The legate's abrupt retirement was smoothed over by his being sent by the king on a mission to Poitou to procure a prolongation of the truce (Ann. Dunstaple, p. 75) . From Poitou he went to Rome. There was no longer any reason for delaying his consecration to the bishopric to which he had been elected seven years before. On 29 May 1222 Pandulf was consecrated bishop of Norwich by Honorius III in person (Ann. Waverley, p. 296) . ”

“ He mainly occupied himself in sending help in men and munitions of war to the king, and the barons' anger turned to fury (Ann. Wav. ii. 281) . In the crisis ending in the granting of the Great Charter which followed John's return on 19 Oct., he acted throughout as the king's trusted servant. After Innocent III had annulled the Great Charter, Peter, the abbot of Reading, and the legate Pandulf joined in urging Langton to promulgate the papal sentence of excommunication against the barons, and, on Langton's refusal, suspended him (Rog. Wend. ii. 154–5) . ”

“ On vi Id. (10th) of July, 1359, Richard de Langton, clerk, was presented to the parish church of Wigan, then vacant, by Sir Robert Langton, knight, the true patron, and Stephen de Chetaston, Rector of Warrington, was appointed a special commissary for his institution, which took place in the chapel of the said Sir Robert, at Newton, in his presence, and he, the said Richard, made oath that he would pay an annual pension of £20 due to the cathedral of Lichfield by equal portions at Michaelmas and Easter. ”

“ I got nothin' against him."
"You'd better not have," said Langton, implacably. "Come here." He took him out into the doctor's front office and talked to him for some little time while I told the doctor of my adventure.
"Who is Langton when he is at home?" I asked him.
He chuckled. "He is the best man for you to have in this city if Coll McSheen is your enemy. He is a retainer of Mr. Leigh's."
Just then Langton and the thug came in.
"Say, I'm sorry I took a hand in that job," said the latter. "But that skunk that runned away, he put 't up, and he said 's another friend of his got him to do it." ”

“ And as she drank, the man's heart had beaten with a dull sense of pity, the while his baser nature called out, "Fool! it is HIS place, not yours, to suffer for her."
At daylight the boat was close in to the land, and Langton, in his cool, cynical fashion, told his wife and Enderby to finish up the last of the meat and biscuit—for if they capsized getting through into the lagoon, he said, they would never want any more. He had eaten all he wanted unknown to the others, and looked with an unmoved face at Enderby soaking some biscuit in the tin for his wife. ”

“ Langton entered Trinity College, Oxford, in 1757, at the age of sixteen. [46] The Doctor, who [176] had known him about three years, followed his career at the university with interest, writing to Langton’s tutor, then “dear Tom Warton,” just appointed to the professorship of poetry held by his father, and afterwards poet-laureate: “I see your pupil: his mind is as exalted as his stature,” and to Langton’s self the sweet generality: “I love, dear sir, to think of you.” He even paid his Freshman a visit, and swam sportively across a dangerous pool in the Isis, in the teeth of his warning ”

“ It follows that Langton must have found the thing out somewhere. I don't say for certain that he found it in a manuscript in the college library. I only say that, considering all the circumstances of the case, he's more likely to have found it there than anywhere else. That may not strike you as a very good hypothesis; but unless you have a better one to propose, it seems to me quite good enough to go on with. ”