messenger at Viterbo, though it was more probable that he had found it in the papal chancery.
Shortly after this Becket himself, writing to the pope, complained that John Cumin, 'wandering over France and invading Burgundy', had reported in the houses of various nobles that the archbishop's overthrow was at hand, and that he could tell the very time and manner of it, but that he dared not reveal the papal secrets.[1] It would seem from all this that John Cumin had got on well with the pope, but had talked a little too freely on his way home. Trouble at any rate was in store for him. On 7 May 1167 the pope writes to William and Otto, his legates, to say that after they had started rumours had reached him that John of Oxford had given out that the legates were to condemn and depose Becket; and also that John Cumin had shown copies of the pope's letter to Guido de Crema the antipope: if this latter charge were found to be true, the culprit must be severely dealt with as a warning to others.[2] This charge of collusion with the schismatic pope is of interest, whether it be true or false, on account of John Cumin's earlier mission to the imperial court. It also helps us to interpret a strange phrase in a letter written about this time by John of Salisbury to the subprior of Canterbury. After warning the subprior against holding any intercourse with the excommunicate Balph de Broc, he adds 'If what I have written seems somewhat harsh in its tone, I know that I am speaking neither to the devil nor to the schismatic of Bath'.[3] Those who are familiar with John of Salisbury's allusive style, and also with the nicknames with which the opponents of Becket were decorated by his partisans, will possibly surmise that by 'the devil' is here meant Geoffrey Ridel, the archdeacon of Canterbury, whom his archbishop called not 'archidiaconus' but 'archidiabolus'. But who is 'the schismatic of Bath'?
No answer appears to be forthcoming to this question. Let us try what we can make of it. In a letter, which Jaffé conjecturally assigns to May 1168, Alexander the Third writes to John Cumin as follows:
We are greatly astonished, and we take it altogether amiss, that you have presumed, as we have now for some time been aware, to claim for yourself the archdeaconry of Bath on the ground of a lay appointment; and that you have not scrupled to take it away from our venerable brother the bishop of Worcester, in the person of Master Baldwin, to whom we had confirmed it by our formal writ while the bishop of Bath was still alive.
The pope commands him to resign it at once into the bishop of Worcester's hands: if he should fail to do so within twenty days of receiving this letter, the bishop has been charged to excommunicate him; and should the bishop be unwilling to act orders have been given to the archbishop of Canterbury to pronounce the sentence: the pope will further order his excommunication by all the bishops of England.[4]
