TROUBLESOME PRIESTS

Six archbishops who suffered the ultimate bad day at the ecclesiastical office

Followers of English ecclesiastical affairs will know that the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is stepping down from his post in January, earlier than planned, after serious failings of Church governance on his watch. 

It has never been easy being an Archbishop, but it was considerably more perilous in the Middle Ages. I doubt this will be of the slightest consolation to Archbishop Welby, but had he lived, served and screwed up half a millennium and more earlier, things could have been even worse. 

Here, then, are six English archbishops who came to their reward in grisly fashion. Parental guidance: extreme violence. 

Oh, and shout out also to Adam Moleyns, bishop of Chichester and William Ayscough, bishop of Salisbury (both murdered by Jack Cade’s rebels in 1450). I’m keeping this one strictly archiepiscopal, but in other circumstances, they would have made the list. 

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Aelfheah, Archbishop of Canterbury (d.1012)

Aelfheah (aka Alphege) made his way to high office in the early eleventh century via a stint as an hermit and then an abbot. But his time at Canterbury, during the reign of Aethelred the Unready, coincided with a period of Viking raiding in Kent. In 1011 a Viking band led by Thorkell the Tall laid siege to Canterbury for nearly a month, and during the course of the fighting Archbishop Aelfheah was captured. He was more use to the Vikings alive than dead, and as a high-ranking churchman ought to have fetched a tidy ransom. But Aelfheah refused to be ransomed. In April 1012 therefore, a drunken band of Vikings brought him to Greenwich and, in the words of a near-contemporary chronicler: “they pelted him with bones and the heads of cattle; and one of them struck him on the head with the butt of an axe, so that with the blow he sank down and his holy blood fell on the earth, and sent forth his holy soul to God's kingdom.”

Thomas Becket (d.1170)