Langton had remained since the defeat of Louis in banishment. Honorius, in his usually paternal manner, had refused his first application for leave to return,' but after peace had been made between Louis and Henry, he had as usual been brought gradually to relent, and had been intending at the time of his death to concede to Henry's request the return of Simon.2 Gregory IX., therefore,3 readily consented to the demand, and Simon was received with honour in England, and appointed by his brother to the archdeaconry of Canterbury.4 This was probably one of the last public acts of Stephen's life; and on the 21st of July, 1228, he was at last taken away from the troubles which were soon to burst on the kingdom. I have spoken little during this biography of Stephen's literary work. Various books have been attributed to him by different chroniclers, e.g., a life of Mahomet, and a life of Thomas à Becket; and Higden states that he copied the part of 'Polychronicon' which relates to Richard I. from a life of that King by Langton. 1 Transcripts from Vatican MSS., Monumenta Britannica, vol. i. p. 203. 3 Ibid. 2 Ibid. vol. iii. p. 18. How much truth there may be in any of these stories, I cannot tell; but they serve to increase the impression which all the letters and chronicles of the time produce, that Langton was looked upon in his own time, by foreigners at any rate, chiefly as a man of letters. One writer even puts him high among the Anglo-Norman poets of his day; and a Latin poem of his has been preserved in the Lambeth library. Among these books, his theological works seem to have been the chief grounds of his literary reputation, and of these I gave some specimens in the second chapter. To us, however, and doubtless to the Englishmen and the Welsh Churchmen of his day, he is known mainly for his political work. At a time when constitutional freedom was hardly known, when insurrection seemed the only possible means of checking despotism, he organized and established a movement for freedom which, by every act and word of his life, he showed to be in opposition to mere anarchy. At a time when the clergy in England were keenly opposed to the laity, and considered the support of their privileges the only true religious cause, he refused to separate the freedom of the Church from the freedom of the lay part of the nation, and showed that the cause of the whole people alone was worthy to be considered the cause of God and the Holy Church.' In the reaction which followed the battle of Lincoln, when liberty seemed to be lost in anarchy, and the despotism of King and Pope the only hope for law, he insisted on maintaining the checks on the Royal power while sternly repressing disorder, and kept alive the idea of the freedom of the Church in the teeth of Popes and legates. The men with whom he was forced to work were often weak and foolish, sometimes unscrupulous, but he saw keenly the justice of their cause under all their mistakes, and throughout all the sins and errors of those times we are ever able to apply to Langton the lines which Shakespeare applied with less truth to Brutus : He only in a general honest thought, And common good to all, made one of them. APPENDIX. 'I HAVE seen,' says Dr. Parkins in his 'History of Norfolk,' an old pedigree whereby Walter de Langton is Isaid to have been descended from de Langton, who had lands at Eversden in Cambridgeshire, who married Wymara, daughter of Hugh de Berners (who lived in the time of the Conqueror), and had by her Stephen de Langton who was father of Simon de Langton, Archdeacon of Canterbury, of Stephen de Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal in the reign of King John, and of Roger de Langton, which Roger was father of Robert de Langton of Eversden, and from him descended this Walter, Bishop of Lichfield, who was his grandson.'' Vague as the opening words of this statement sound, they seem, when compared with other and clearer records, to have a strange probability about them. ' Bloomfield and Parkins' History of Norfolk, vol. v. p. 1339. The only difficulty in this pedigree is the name given to Langton's father. In the Cottonian MSS., Cleopatra E I, it is said that 'Henricus de Langton Archipræsulis Pater' fled the country at the time of John's persecution of the monks of Canterbury, ‘metuens ne occasione filii a publicâ potestate spiculum immineat.' Ignorant as all the contemporary writers are of the time and place of Langton's birth, they seem to have no doubt of these matters with regard to his less illustrious great-nephew. If, then, we may trust to local records, we can, I think, have little hesitation in fixing Church Langton, in Leicestershire, as the seat of Stephen's family. There are, indeed, two apparent difficulties in the way of this conclusion. Most of the ecclesiastical offices held by the Langton family in the thirteenth century seem to have been connected with the diocese of York. And it is this fact probably, strengthened no doubt by the greater independence and uniqueness of character which has distinguished Yorkshire, that has led Dr. Hook to claim the Archbishop as a Yorkshireman. The other piece of conflicting evidence to which I have alluded, is to be found in a notice of the Exeter Town Council, which was sent in 1691 to the author of 'The Worthies of Devon.' This, however, merely states that Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, 'was a native of this place,' a fact which may of course be perfectly consistent with the Leicestershire origin of his family. My reasons for considering the Yorkshire preferments to which I have alluded as evidence insufficient to justify the rejection of the Leicestershire records, are mainly two. The first and most important is that, though there seems to have been up to a late period a family of Langton in Yorkshire, yet I have been able to find no evidence which should connect this family with that of Stephen at all comparable in clearness to that which Prince Worthies of Devon, pp. 444-446. |