Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 32.djvu/132

Langton of the dictation to which she was at present subject from Pandulf. Honorius not only granted all three requests, but at once desired Pandulf to resign his office as legate (Cont. ann. 1221;  ann. 1221). Stephen did not return to England till August 1221, having stopped on the way in Paris, where he was commissioned by the pope to assist the bishops of Troyes and Lisieux in settling a dispute between the university and its diocesan (, Chart. Univ. Paris. pp. 98, 102). Early next year he met his fellow-primate of York on the borders of their respective provinces; they failed to settle the questions of privilege in debate between their sees; but in the hands of Stephen Langton and Walter de Grey [q.v.] the debate was a peaceful one, and fraught with no danger to either church or state. On Sunday, 17 April 1222, Stephen opened a church council at Osney which is to the ecclesiastical history of England what the assembly at Runnymede in June 1215 is to her secular history. Its decrees, known as the Constitutions of Stephen Langton, are 'the earliest provincial canons which are still recognised as binding in our ecclesiastical courts.'

From the establishment of ordered freedom in the church the archbishop turned again to the vindication of ordered freedom in the state. Already, in January 1222, he had had to summon a meeting of bishops in London to make peace among the counsellors who were quarrelling for mastery over the young king, in which he succeeded for the moment by threatening to excommunicate the troublers of the land. A week after Epiphany 1223 he acted as leader and spokesman of the barons who demanded of Henry III the confirmation of the charter. The shift with which William Brewer tried to put them off in the king's name—'the charter was extorted by violence, and is therefore invalid'—provoked the one angry outburst recorded of Stephen Langton: 'William, if you loved the king, you would not thus thwart the peace of his realm;' and the archbishop's unusual warmth startled Henry into promising a fresh inquiry into the ancient liberties of England. For this, however, Henry seems to have substituted an inquiry into the privileges of the crown as John had held them before the war (Fœdera, i. 168). It was probably in despair of getting rid by any other means of the foreigners who counselled or abetted such double dealing as this, that Stephen and the other English ministers of state suggested to the pope that the young king should be declared of age to rule for himself. A bull to that effect, issued in April, probably arrived while the primate was absent on a fruitless mission to France, in company with the bishops of London and Salisbury, to demand from Louis VIII, who had just (August) succeeded to the crown, the restoration of Normandy promised to Henry by the treaty of Lambeth. Some time in the autumn the bull was read in a council in London. The party of anarchy among the barons, headed by the Earl of Chester and Falkes de Breauté [q.v.], attempted to seize the Tower, and, failing, withdrew to Waltham. Stephen and the bishops persuaded them to return and make submission to the king, but they still refused to be reconciled with the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh [q.v.], and from the Christmas court at Northampton they withdrew in a body to Leicester. The archbishop again, on St. Stephen's day, excommunicated all 'disturbers of the realm,' and then wrote to the 'schismatics' at Leicester that unless they surrendered their castles to the king at once he would excommunicate every one of them by name; this 'communication and commination' brought them to submission 29 Dec. In June 1224, when a fresh outrage of Falkes compelled the king to proceed against him by force, the archbishop sanctioned the grant of an aid from the clergy to defray the cost of the expedition, accompanied Henry in person to the siege of Bedford Castle, and excommunicated the offender. He absolved him, indeed, soon after at the bidding of Pope Honorius, whose ear Falkes had contrived to gain; but by that time Falkes was on the eve of surrender, and when his wife appealed to the archbishop for protection against the claims of a husband to whom she had been married against her will, Stephen successfully maintained her cause, and that of England's peace, against both Falkes and Honorius. On 8 Oct. the archbishop was at Worcester, deciding a suit between the bishop of that see and the monks of his chapter. At Christmas he was at Westminster with the king, when Hubert de Burgh, in Henry's name, demanded a fifteenth from clergy and laity for the war in Poitou. Led by the primate, the bishops and barons granted the demand (2 Feb. 1225), on condition that the charter should be confirmed at once; and this time the condition was fulfilled. A fresh difficulty with Rome threatened to spring up at the close of the year, when a papal envoy, Otto, arrived with a demand that in every conventual or collegiate church the revenue of one prebend, or its yearly equivalent, should be devoted to the needs of the Roman court. Once more the difficulty was turned by the primate.