Regardless of the intellectual coherence of hierocratic theory and the pope’s formal status as head of the universal Catholic Church and lynchpin of its central administration, the practical reality of papal monarchy had to reconcile that curial centralism with the logistical impossibility of exercising and enforcing direct control over all of Catholic Europe. Configured by local variables and interests, the integration of regional churches and polities within the papal network rested insecurely on a delicate balance combining delegation of authority, administrative decentralization, and local acquiescence. Incomplete subjection left space for local agency to exploit the perceived benefits of papal authority and obstruct its unwelcome intrusions. Using England as a case study, this chapter considers various manifestation of those complex ties (the activities of papal emissaries, and responses to and exploitation of the legal, fiscal, and dispensatory claims and structures), emphasizing the bottom-up perspective on medieval papal monarchy.

The papal penitentiary was the highest office in the later medieval Church concerned with matters of conscience. It granted absolution in cases where this was reserved to the papacy, notably for grave sins such as assaults on clergy, and it issued other graces that were also a papal monopoly, such as dispensations, notably for marriages within the prohibited degrees of kinship, and special licences, especially to appoint a personal confessor. Laity and clergy across later medieval Europe petitioned the office for these favours. The papal penitentiary hence represented a significant point of contact between the papacy and individual Catholics. Its origins were obscure but partly lay in the long tradition of penitential pilgrimage to Rome. Minor penitentiaries heard confessions of penitent pilgrims at Rome’s major basilicas, including Saint Peter’s. By the early thirteenth century, the ‘major penitentiary’ in charge of the office was appointed by the pope from among the cardinals and received growing faculties to concede graces on the pope’s behalf. By the fifteenth century, the office that he headed was a major department of papal government and substantial source of revenue for the papacy.