Geoffrey (archbishop of York) - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

Geoffrey died while still in exile at Grandmont in Normandy on 12 December 1212. He was buried at a Grandmontine monastery near Rouen, where he had been living for a few years. His tomb was still extant in 1767, when the inscription on it was recorded by an antiquary. He may have become a monk before his death.

Although his archiepiscopate was mainly marked by the number of conflicts in which he engaged, Geoffrey also managed to institute some administrative reforms in his diocese, creating the office of chancellor. He also inspired loyalty from a number of his household members, many of whom witnessed his charters, and although he made enemies of a number of the suffragan bishops, clergy and religious houses in his diocese, he also secured the friendship and support of other clergy, including Pope Innocent III and Hugh of Lincoln. Although Walter Map declared that Geoffrey was "full of faults and devoid of character", he remained loyal to his father until Henry's death. A modern-day historian, Thomas Jones, summed up Geoffrey's character with the phrase "quarrelsome and undiplomatic". Another historian, J. C. Holt, stated that Geoffrey was through his career "a perpetual source of danger, quarrelling now with de Puiset, now with the Yorkshire sheriffs, ever ready to attack the judicial and fiscal superiority of the Crown."

Geoffrey's ambitions may have included becoming King of England, which may account for some of the harshness that his two legitimate half-brothers displayed towards him. His military abilities, displayed in the rebellion of 1173–1174, as well his custody of castles near Tours, would have also fed into Richard's disquiet over Geoffrey's possible intentions. Geoffrey was known to be ambitious, which led the historian D. L. Douie to call him a "formidable bastard". The historian Ralph Turner said of Geoffrey that "he sought power and wealth despite the handicap of his birth" and that he had "inherited the bad temper of the other Plantagenets".

Geoffrey was a patron of scholarship, and employed a number of scholars throughout his life, one of whom, Honorius of Kent, Geoffrey appointed Archdeacon of Richmond. Honorius was subsequently employed by Hubert Walter and wrote a legal work on canon law. The Leiden St Louis Psalter is a lavishly illuminated psalter made for the archbishop, probably in northern England in the 1190s, which passed into the hands of Blanche of Castile after Geoffrey's death, and, as religious manuscripts often were, was used to teach the future saint King Louis IX of France how to read, as a 14th-century inscription records. After the king's death it passed through a number of royal owners, regarded as a relic of the saint, before reaching the University Library at Leiden in 1741.