How Do You Punish a King Who Fears Nothing? Close Every Church

The measure shut down most public religious life across a defined area, typically a kingdom, a city or a lord's territory. Churches closed their doors, bells fell silent, and the mass was not celebrated publicly. Marriages could not be solemnised in church. The dead were denied burial in consecrated ground and were put into ditches and unblessed plots instead. Certain exceptions were usually preserved, most consistently baptism of infants and confession for the dying, on the reasoning that the measure was meant to pressure the living rather than to condemn souls. Clergy who defied it faced punishment themselves.

The logic rested on how the population understood what was being withheld:

• •The rites were believed necessary for salvation, not optional comforts
• •Unconsecrated burial was a genuine terror for ordinary families
• •The penalty fell on everybody, not on the ruler alone
• •Pressure therefore came upwards from the ruler's own subjects
• •Nobles gained a religious justification for withdrawing support
• •It could be lifted immediately once the ruler submitted

England was placed under the measure in 1208 after King John refused to accept the pope's choice for archbishop of Canterbury, and it lasted more than six years, which is among the longest anywhere. John's response was not submission but profit, since he seized the revenues of the church across the country and ran them for the crown, and the treasury did well out of it. Personal excommunication followed in 1209 and he continued regardless. What eventually moved him was political, with rebellion at home and a French invasion threatened, and in 1213 he submitted, accepted the archbishop, and went further by surrendering the kingdom to the pope and receiving it back as a fief.

The two penalties are constantly confused and worked in quite different ways. Excommunication was directed at a named individual, cutting them off from the rites and, in its severe form, requiring others to avoid their company, which made a ruler isolated but left everybody else untouched. The measure discussed here was territorial, falling on a place regardless of who lived there and regardless of what any individual had done, which is what made it effective and what made it morally contestable even at the time. Canon lawyers argued about the justice of punishing the innocent for a ruler's fault, and the usual answer was that the community bore responsibility for the ruler it obeyed.

The weapon depended entirely on shared belief and on the absence of alternatives, and both eroded. Rulers learned that revenue could be extracted from a closed church, which turned a punishment into an opportunity. Repeated use reduced the shock, and by the later Middle Ages the measure was being imposed over quarrels that looked local and political rather than spiritual, which invited the response that it was a tool of Italian politics. Clergy frequently ignored it or found exceptions. The Reformation removed the possibility entirely for much of northern Europe, since a ruler could simply reject the authority imposing it. The measure survives in canon law in a much narrower form aimed at individuals.

Suspending public worship, church marriage and consecrated burial across a whole territory was designed to make a ruler's own subjects force him to give way, since the penalty fell on them. England endured more than six years of it from 1208, and King John profited by seizing church revenues until politics rather than piety made him submit in 1213. The weapon failed once rulers found it profitable and belief in its necessity weakened.