Good morning! My name is @CallumAJamieson and I hope that you are all excited for Day 2 of my Twitter Takeover.

Today, I am going to cover 3 themes: reasons behind the increase in appeals to Rome; why litigants would want to appeal to papal justice; and how the delegated system operated.

So, why was there an explosion of judicial appeals to the papacy in the mid-twelfth century? Like so much in history, there is no simple answer!*

* This is a complex subject, and there is some excellent work on the nuances of this. This thread is largely based on I.S. Robinson’s very good and useful introduction to the transmission of papal claims to judicial supremacy in his magnificent ‘The Papacy: 1073-1198’ (1990).

The increase in appeals to Rome is largely due to result of the circulation of papal claims to judicial authority over the whole Church.

Articulation of the pope’s judicial supremacy was nothing new in the 12th century. Its origins are biblical, but one of first definitions of it can be found in a letter of Pope Gelasius I from 496.

Here, Gelasius stated that the Roman church had the right to judge every other church without them having the right to judge her back. Appeals were permissible from every part of the world and that the Roman church was the final court of appeal.

This letter was received in canon law texts of the papal reform era of the 11th century. It was also included in Gratian’s Decretum (remember, from yesterday), which received a large circulation across Europe. It is not only in canonical texts that this position was defended.

Vigorous statements of papal judicial supremacy were a feature of the reform papacy. They based their claims on the Gelasian, but also on the ‘Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals’, 9th century forgeries.

These claims were circulated across Europe via papal letters to numerous secular and ecclesiastical figures. Pope Paschal II defended the pope’s role as the final court of appeal in a 1115 letter to King Henry I of England (1100-1135).

So, to put it simply, the clergymen of Europe over the course of the 11th and 12th centuries had been exposed to numerous canonical texts and papal statements expressing the supremacy of the pope’s judicial authority.

These statements portray the pope as an extremely powerful judicial figure, so it is understandable that litigants wished to receive justice from such a powerful figure, especially those who thought they had been seriously wronged.

The chronicler Henry of Huntingdon asserted that appeals to Rome were ‘brutally introduced’ to England by Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester and brother of King Stephen, when he was the papal legate in the early 1140s.

There are several examples of English appeals to Rome before Henry of Blois’ legation, so Huntingdon’s statement may be taken as evidence of a noticeable increase of appeals to Rome during the reign of Stephen …

… most likely the result of the severe disruption caused by the civil war and the reception of papal statements and canonical texts on its judicial authority.

This brings an end to the first theme of the day. Join me later for an outline of the benefits of appeal and delegation for litigants. #churchhistory