William de St-Calais - Trial

Trial

St-Calais was brought before the king and royal court for trial on 2 November 1088, at Salisbury, before which the king seized his lands. At the trial, St-Calais held that as a bishop he could not be tried in a secular court, and refused to answer the accusations. Lanfranc presented the king's case, declaring that the confiscated lands had been held as fiefs, and thus St-Calais could be tried as a vassal, not as a bishop. St-Calais objected, and continued to refuse to answer the allegations. After numerous conferences and discussions, the court held that St-Calais could be tried as a vassal in a feudal court. St-Calais then asked for an appeal to Rome, which was rejected by the king and the judges. Those judging the case held that because St-Calais never answered the formal accusation, and because he appealed to Rome, his fief, or lands, was forfeit. Although St-Calais claimed to be defending the rights of clergy to be tried in clerical courts and to appeal to Rome, his fellow bishops believed otherwise. Lending support to their belief is the fact that St-Calais never pursued his appeal to Rome, and that later, in 1095, he took the side of the king against Anselm of Canterbury when Anselm tried to assert a right to appeal to Rome.

During the course of the trial, Lanfranc is said to have stated that the court was "trying you not in your capacity as bishop, but in regard to your fief; and in this way we judged the bishop of Bayeux in regard to his fief before the present king's father, and that king did not summon him to that plea as bishop but as brother and earl." Unlike the later case of Thomas Becket, St-Calais received little sympathy from his fellow bishops. Most of the bishops and barons that judged the case seem to have felt that the appeal to Rome was made to avoid having to answer an accusation that St-Calais knew was true. The final judgement was only reached after the king lost his temper and exclaimed: "Believe me, bishop, you're not going back to Durham, and your men aren't going to stay at Durham, and you're not going to go free, until you release the castle." The extant De Iniusta Vexacione Willelmi Episcopi Primi, or Of the Unjust Persecution of the Bishop William I, details the trial of St-Calais before the king. This work is the earliest surviving detailed contemporary report of an English state-trial; some have doubted its authenticity, however, claiming St-Calais would not have been as knowledgeable in canon law as the work portrays him. The historian Mark Philpott, however, argues that St-Calais was knowledgeable in canon law, since he owned a copy of the canon law, the False Decretals, which still survives.