3 - The Canterbury Forgeries Revisited

Summary

In his Historia novorum, Eadmer narrates Canterbury's failure to assert primacy over York before the royal court in 1120. Immediately following this episode, he describes the discovery of important documents by the monks of Christ Church after a diligent search of ‘the hidden places of ancient cupboards and ancient Gospel books, which had been looked on only as ornaments in the house of God’. Eadmer then inserts copies of ten papal bulls into his history. As we now know, these documents were forgeries. But nonetheless they were presented before the papal curia in 1123 and, according to Hugh the Chanter of York, they were literally laughed out of court:

[S]ome of the Romans asked the Canterbury party whether the privileges had bulls attached. But they said that they had left the originals with their bulls in their church and brought copies with them. And because privileges and charters are not valid evidence unless they have bulls or seals attached, they were asked whether they would swear that they had originals in their possession with bulls. They retired, and consulting together said among themselves that they had no bulls … They made up their minds to come back and say that the bulls had either perished or were lost. When they said this, some smiled, others turned up their noses, and others laughed aloud, making fun of them and saying that it was a miracle that lead should perish or be lost and parchment survive.

This humiliating failure at the papal curia is the end of the story of the ‘Canterbury forgeries’ this article recounts; but where did it begin? Where did these forgeries come from?

In 1902, Heinrich Böhmer identified these ten papal bulls concerning the primacy of Canterbury as wholly or partially forged. Böhmer attributed them to the machinations of Archbishop Lanfranc, who he believed was asserting novel claims to primacy in the wake of the Norman Conquest.