When Holy Church Is Under Foot is an evil-times complaint that vents a thirteenth-century writer’s distress over systemic greed and corruption among ecclesiastical and secular officials who degrade the Church’s sanctity. While overt political content is rare among the Jesus 29 lyrics, the poet’s outlook is similar to the religious, patriotic sentiments on Thomas of Canterbury expressed in the Antiphon of Saint Thomas the Martyr in English and On Serving Christ (arts. 17, 18).

The poet claims that simony (ecclesiastical greed and bribery) is rampant among the clergy, and in making this charge he indicts the papacy and the secular estates too. He claims that rapaciousness by powerful interests has forced the Church to fail its sacred mission, ordained by Christ himself. The poet extols six courageous defenders — three ancient popes, three recent English churchmen — who countered this corruption and reverently upheld the Church’s honor. The three popes are the apostle Peter (enjoined by Christ to be the “stone” (Latin petrus) upon which the Church is to be founded) and then Clement of Rome and Gregory the Great. Next, the poet names three Canterbury archbishops — Thomas Becket, Stephen Langton, and Edmund Rich, each one an English champion who gave all he could — but now sadly, despite theirs efforts, Holy Church is overcome.

Celebration of the three bishops as defenders of the Church’s long-held liberties follows a popular political trend in thirteenth-century England to “canonize” religious men seen to have stood righteously against royal overreach. As Eamon Duffy has noted, the thirteenth century “saw a revival in interest in the cult of the saint-bishop, stimulated perhaps by the reputation of Becket” (“Religious Belief,” p. 303). Josiah Cox Russell has dissected the cultural, specifically English, phenomenon of anti-royal leaders attracting postmortem honors as popular saints, with miracles reported in their names, cults rapidly developing, and even some official canonizations (“Canonization of Opposition”). Thomas, Stephen, and Edmund each attracted this kind of adulation. The phenomenon speaks to a social climate in which political saints could operate to neutralize royal power in the popular imagination, a notion promoted particularly by clerical writers who sought to maintain the Church’s privileges and glorify its reputed defenders. The trend is well reflected in the oeuvre of Matthew Paris (1200–1259), who honored each archbishop named in Holy Church, composing Latin hagiographies of Stephen Langton and Edmund Rich, and French verse lives of Thomas Becket and Edmund Rich (VLT, pp. 120–27).

Using gendered pronouns, the Holy Church poet deploys the ideology and metaphors of courtly romance and warfare to suggest that the feminine Church requires the defense of strong, honorable male champions — a chivalric corps — to keep her from subjugation and ruin. Men of the present day abuse their power by showing her malice and stealing wealth rather than protecting her. The formal complaint begins and ends by appealing to Christ, for love of his mother, to save her (lines 9–10, 34–36). Gendered language is thereby strategically managed, connecting Mary and Church as the nearest female relations of God (mother and daughter).

Inexplicably, this poem has been rarely featured among the political poems of medieval England. It belongs to the longstanding tradition of venality satire, a type of complaint poem found often in Anglo-Latin and Anglo-French verse, but appearing more rarely in Middle English. Prominent English specimens include The Simonie, Piers Plowman (the figure of Lady Meed), and London Lickpenny. On the tradition, see especially Yunck, The Lineage of Lady Meed; and Dean, ed., Medieval English Political Writings, pp. 179–242. As a venality poem written in defense of the Church during the reign of King Henry III, Holy Church has an important analogue in the Anglo-French Song of the Church, a lyric of grievance against how the female-gendered English Church is subject to oppressive fees and taxes: “chescun la defule” (each one tramples her under foot) (line 18; Aspin, ed. and trans., Anglo-Norman Political Songs, pp. 43, 46).

Holy Church must date after the canonization of Edmund Rich in 1246. Its probable date is ca. 1258–1261, a period that witnessed a series of ecclesiastical councils seeking guarantees of liberties in response to burdensome royal fees that were being exacted from the clergy — tallages sanctioned by Pope Alexander IV to fund Henry III’s debts and Sicilian ambitions (see Clanchy, England and Its Rulers, pp. 223–27; Hoskin, “The Church and the King,” pp. 197–208; and Fein, “When Holy Church Is Under Foot,” p. 17). The two surviving copies of Song of the Church illustrate, however, how tricky can be the dating of a medieval political poem: the earlier copy is likely dated ca. 1255, referring to conditions under Henry III; the later one seems to refer to conditions under Edward I, ca. 1276 or 1291. The general problem was a long-roiling political issue between English churchmen on one side, the king prodded by the pope on the other. For discussions of Song of the Church, see Scase, Literature and Complaint, pp. 19–22; and Somerset, “Complaining about the King,” pp. 84–97.

Morris prints this poem without stanza divisions, but laisses are indicated by the meter and by capitals in the manuscript. The thirty-six long lines are divided into seven groups by the insertion of colored initials. All groups are monorhyming except for the longest one, lines 25–32, which rhymes aaaabbcc7. The meter is similar to On Serving Christ (art. 18), but lacks the alliteration found in that poem.

[Fols. 181v–182r. NIMEV 4085. DIMEV 6528. Robbins, MWME, 5:1442–43, 1672 [96]. Quire: 4. Meter: 36 septenary lines, mainly in monorhyming 4- or 6-line laisses, aaaa(aa)7. Layout: Long lines with medial and end punctuation. A colored capital marks the opening of each laisse. Editions: Morris, p. 89; Kaiser, p. 321. Other MSS: None. Translations: ten Brink, History of English Literature, trans. Kennedy, 1:316–17; Adamson, trans., A Treasury of Middle English Verse, pp. 17–18. Anglo-French Analogue: Song of the Church (Wright, ed., Political Songs of England, pp. 42–44); Aspin, ed. and trans., Anglo-Norman Political Songs, pp. 36–48; Somerset, “Complaining about the King,” pp. 94–97).]