The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West

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THE PROPRIETARY CHURCH IN THE MEDIEVAL WEST

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THE PROPRIETARY CHURCH IN THE MEDIEVAL WEST SUSAN WOOD

AC

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Susan Wood 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Antony Rowe Ltd., Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 0–19–820697–6 978–0–19–820697–2 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To Charles, Lucy, and Silas, and in memory of Oscar


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe to the late Rodney Hilton the idea of writing a book on this subject; but that was to have been a short introductory work of synthesis (for a projected series), and I was soon convinced of the need for more extended research and re-thinking. The outcome, however, is far longer—even after much cutting— than I then foresaw; I hope that its length may be forgiven in view of its range in time and terrain. I have worked on the book over almost four decades, while I was a Fellow and Tutor of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and later living in Herefordshire. To St Hugh’s I am indebted for practical support and for spells of sabbatical leave; I am especially grateful to my history colleagues there for their patience and encouragement. To the Leverhulme Trust I owe two invaluable extra terms of leave. Several friends and colleagues have read and commented on substantial stretches of the book at different stages, guided me in unfamiliar country, corrected some of my errors, and discussed problems: in particular John Blair, who also allowed me to read his masterly book in advance of publication; Christopher Brooke; James Campbell; Thomas Charles-Edwards; Roger Collins; Henry MayrHarting; Susan Reynolds; and Chris Wickham, who besides great generosity over several years with time, thought, and even book-lending, eventually read the whole book. Many others have taken trouble to answer particular questions, or have given me references, transcripts, or offprints: Patrick Amory, Eric Christiansen, Howard Colvin, Barbara Cornford, John Cowdrey, Anne Duggan, Jean Dunbabin, George Garnett, Barbara Harvey, Roger Highfield, Maria Hillebrandt, Philip Jones, Simon Keynes, Benjamin Thompson, and the late Patrick Wormald. Rebecca Posner and Olive Sayce have helped me to translate passages in medieval Portuguese and German. Others have acted as general readers of sample sections, providing both reassurance and an eye for obscurities or infelicities; or have guided me on the internet, or lent me books (or have done several of these things): Cecily Bennett, Roy Fenn, John Fyler (who read the whole of Part I), Geoffrey Treasure, and Lucy Wood; while too many friends to list, most notably Barbara Mitchell, have given me hospitality. Belinda Blunt and Silas Wood selflessly provided different forms of last-minute practical rescue.

viii

Acknowledgments

In recent years Christine Appel, Emily O’Brien, and crucially—in the final stages—Andrew Hudson, have in succession provided skilful and enthusiastic help in checking or pursuing references, sometimes long mislaid or muddled by me, or sorting out bibliographical puzzles. Bob Ellis looked after and updated my computer and rescued me promptly and kindly from computer crises. The staff of the Bodleian have been unfailingly helpful and friendly. At the OUP, some years ago, Tony Morris was friendlily disposed to the book; later, Ruth Parr and Anne Gelling encouraged and guided me with great kindness and forbearance; more recently I had indispensable help from Kay Rogers, while Jeff New as copyeditor was both meticulous and accommodating. Finally I must thank Samantha Skyrme, with Amanda Greenley and Kate Williams, for valiant efforts to keep the book up to schedule in 2006. For permission to reproduce the images on the jacket I am grateful to the Scala Picture Library, Florence.

CONTENTS xiii 1

Map Prologue PART I. BEGINNINGS 1. The Roman Empire and post-Roman kingdoms i. Churches acquire their own property ii. Roman founders’ claims iii. The kingdoms of the sixth and seventh centuries

9 9 11 16

2. A new stage: Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy, mid-eighth to mid-ninth century i. Bavaria and Alemania ii. Lombard Italy

33 33 48

3. The converging of private and parish churches i. Gaul: private churches get parochial rights ii. Gaul: parish churches become objects of property iii. Other regions iv. Italy

66 67 74 79 86

4. The question of origins

92

5. Early monasteries: their founders and abbots i. The position of external founders ii. Family monasteries or abbots’ monasteries? iii. The abbot’s heir

109 111 118 127

6. Some non-Frankish patterns of family interest in monasteries i. Ireland ii. Galicia iii. England iv. Bavaria v. Italy

140 140 147 152 161 166

x

Contents 7. Transition to outside lordship of monasteries i. Were early founder families losing hold or letting go? ii. The conditions for lasting outside lordship

176 176 181

8. The emergence of bishops’ lordship over monasteries i. Bishops’ claims to authority, sixth to eighth century ii. The bases of bishops’ lordship, seventh and eighth centuries

191 191 199

9. The emergence of lay rulers’ lordship over monasteries i. The consequences of secularization in Francia ii. The explicit bases of royal lordship in Francia iii. Royal defence in Francia iv. Rulers in Lombard Italy and pre-Viking England

211 211 221 230 235

PART II. LORDSHIP OVER HIGHER CHURCHES, NINTH TO ELEVENTH CENTURY 10. Kings and princes i. Higher churches as benefices ii. Carolingian immunity-defence iii. Proprietary dealings with higher churches iv. Services owed by higher churches v. Germany after the Carolingians, and some contemporary states vi. Were bishoprics ever ‘proprietary’?

280 292

11. Nobles other than founders’ heirs i. Lay abbots ii. Advocates

312 312 328

12. Noble founders and their heirs i. Ninth-century Carolingian realms north of the Alps ii. Ottonian and Salian Germany iii. Late Carolingian and Capetian France and Burgundy-Provence iv. Italy, tenth and eleventh centuries v. England, tenth and eleventh centuries

339 339 355 372 393 408

13. Great churches as lords of monasteries i. The lordship of monasteries over monasteries ii. The lordship of bishoprics over monasteries

413 413 418

247 247 251 260 269

Contents

xi

PART III. LOWER CHURCHES AS PROPERTY, NINTH TO TWELFTH CENTURY 14. Lesser churches’ resources in lands and other possessions i. Endowments ii. Lords’ interest in their churches’ possessions

437 437 444

15. Lesser churches’ resources in tithes and offerings i. Allocation of tithes and offerings between churches ii. Offerings: seigneurial power or choice from below? iii. Lords’ enjoyment of tithes and offerings: its beginnings, and development mainly in France iv. Lords’ enjoyment of tithes and offerings in other countries v. Was there a standard ‘lord’s share’?

459 459 478 486 501 512

16. Proprietors’ arrangements with their priests i. The priests’ appointment and status ii. The priest as tenant of church, land, and revenue: Germany, Burgundy, France iii. The priest as tenant: Spain, Italy, England iv. The tenant priest’s rent or service v. The priest with partial tenure, allowance, or wage vi. The priest’s living in monks’ churches

530 541 555 560 575

17. Lay proprietors i. Rulers, nobles, and knights ii. Families and partnerships with common property iii. Dealings in fractions iv. Lay lords’ livelihoods and family arrangements v. Townsmen and merchants, mainly in England vi. ‘Community’ churches?

584 584 601 627 637 645 651

18. Priests as proprietors

659

19. Higher churches as proprietors i. Monasteries, collegiate churches, chapters ii. Bishops and bishoprics

681 681 689

20. Some proprietary elements in a bishop’s authority i. Altaria ii. The bishop’s customs

696 697 711

519 519

xii

Contents PART IV. IDEAS, OPINION, CHANGE

21. The juridical condition of churches i. The church as person and as thing ii. Grants of churches to individuals: loans and gifts iii. Donations, sales, exchanges, mortgages iv. Litigation

729 729 739 754 776

22. Legislation and reforming opinion i. The eighth and ninth centuries ii. Hincmar of Rheims’s defence of lay lordship iii. The tenth century, to Abbo of Fleury iv. Old themes in the eleventh century

789 789 804 812 824

23. Monastic reform: lordship and liberty i. Reform and lordship ii. Monastic liberty

830 830 839

24. Gregorian reform and the proprietary church i. The Investiture Dispute and its polemic ii. Donations of churches and the impact of Gregorian ideas

851 851 864

25. Towards a bureaucratic Church i. The emergence of the canon law of patronage ii. Change on the ground in the twelfth century

883 883 904

26. The longer term

922

Bibliography Sources and Abbreviations Secondary Works Index

934 934 951 981

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Brabant Picardy Hainault NORMANDY

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BRITTANY

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Sicily

Map to show regions, provinces, and principalities (regardless of period), with some cities and monasteries.


PROLOGUE This book is about churches being treated as items of property. The term ‘proprietary church’ is the established though clumsy equivalent in English of the German word Eigenkirche, coined in 1894 by Ulrich Stutz to denote a church that was some person’s or group’s ‘own’ (eigen): a possession comprising not only the church building with its contents but its land, buildings, and stock, its tithes, dues, and offerings, and the appointment of its priest. That many churches in the early Middle Ages were treated as private property was well known, but Stutz made it a major element in the history of church law and of relations between Church and State, in work spread over more than forty years.1 In his and his pupils’ classic view, the proprietary church system—the Eigenkirchenwesen—crippled the diocesan bishops’ control of clergy, churches, and church property over some five centuries, spread eventually to higher churches, and almost engulfed the church of Rome itself. In the mid-eleventh century it provoked papal resistance, and so underlay the subsequent conflict between Empire and Papacy; but was finally tamed by the law of patronage worked out in twelfth-century canon law, which reduced ownership to patronage and re-emphasized in the priest’s or prelate’s position the character of a spiritual office. Much of this has now to be questioned or rejected, especially its application to bishoprics and great monasteries and its centrality in the Gregorian reform; its exemplifying a supposed dominance of ‘Germanic’ over ‘Roman’ ideas; and the tendency to reify it as a system or institution. I have aimed in this book to present it as a fluid set of attitudes and practices taking shape as customary law, to show how this worked in practice, and to discuss the interests, values, and ideas behind it and how these changed over time, until the patronage system—which was indeed a system—largely superseded it. But beyond this, the whole concept of the ‘proprietary church’ has been challenged while this book was being written, not only by Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier in 1974 for the province of Narbonne (discussed below in several contexts), but more sweepingly in 1994 by Susan Reynolds.2 So something needs to be said here in defence of recognizing ‘property’ in churches. 1 Inaugural lecture, Basel, 23 Oct. 1894: Die Eigenkirche als Element des mittelalterlich-germanischen Kirchenrechts; his only book, Die Geschichte des kirchlichen Benefizialwesens, I (1895), much wider in scope than its formal thesis, but never completed; and see the bibliography (1938) and obituary (by A. Schultze, 2 1939) in ZSSKA 58–9. Fiefs and Vassals, esp. 61, 418–19.

2

Prologue

It depends of course on what we mean by property; and on whether we are looking for what we would recognize as property in our own time, or for what we think medieval westerners saw as property. The two are certainly different, partly because early medieval rights in land—themselves differing regionally— were limited by the claims of kin and often blurred by the claims of lords above or tenants below. As Susan Reynolds has herself most skilfully argued,3 this need not prevent us from calling these rights ‘property’; property always carries obligations and restrictions, in other words is a matter of degree; differences in the restrictions on property past and present do not prevent both being describable as property. Nor need we search for a single overarching idea common to us and them. Rather we can recognize overlapping clusters of ideas: such as that an acknowledged owner or proprietor either has the direct possession and use of the thing or could if he chose; that he has it with some degree of security, independence, and permanence even if not in absolute perpetuity; that he has some kind of title to it which he can defend at law, such as having inherited it or bought it; and that he can dispose of it—give, sell, or bequeath it—even if not freely. I hope in the course of the book to show that this common cluster of ideas applies in the early Middle Ages to ordinary churches as well as to manors, mills, or vineyards, so that if it makes sense to speak of property at all it makes sense for churches. It is true that a lord would have less than full property in a church where the priest was secure for life and held the whole endowment and income; but often the priest held only part, or a mere allowance or wage. The first case is like an estate granted to a lay tenant for life, the second like an estate kept in the landlord’s hands but with an employed cottager on it; even in the first case it would be pedantic not to call it the lord’s property as long as he can choose successive priests (which is actually more likely than free choice of successive lay tenants). This is not to deny that property in churches was in principle limited, at least in the eyes of educated churchmen, in ways peculiar to churches. Leaving aside the owner’s piety, these limitations arose chiefly from the decisions of church councils, enforced if at all by bishops with whatever backing they had from rulers. A lord or family was not supposed to occupy the church or change its use, exploit its lands and serfs, or tap its pastoral revenues; or to grant these things away; or to have unrestricted choice of priest or prelate. That these restraints were ever even patchily or partially effective was determined partly by different regional pressures, partly by shifts of thought and sentiment; but also, anywhere and in any period, by the property’s special value which depended on its functioning as a church. Related to this is another significant difference from other property: the 3

Ibid. 55–7.

Prologue

3

church was itself the focus of property belonging at one level of thought and sentiment to it and its patron saint and God. But the idea of church property was fraught with paradox, and did not exclude the idea of churches being property themselves. A separate difficulty is that medieval property was closely linked to authority. Probably all property deserving the name (above the level of unfree peasants’ holdings) included an element of authority over persons, while all authority was tinged with proprietary attitudes. But this does not mean that they were the same thing; we are not faced with a single undifferentiated mix, but with a continuum, one end of which it is reasonable to call authority and the other end property. Kings, for instance, had rights over subjects such as no one else had; they also had such landlordly rights to the produce of land and the labour of men as thousands of other landlords had. Bishops had jurisdiction and pastoral care over everyone in every parish in their diocese; they also had landlordship over estates, some within and some without the diocese. These were distinctions that contemporaries recognized, whether about men, lands, or churches, and that their vocabulary reflected: auctoritas, jurisdictio at one end of the scale, possessio, proprietas, alodium at the other; all but the last translatable by modern English derivatives, provided we do not expect the meanings to coincide exactly. Other words were intermediate, and varied in meaning with the context: ditio is hard to translate; so, more importantly, is dominium, a word used variously for rule over subjects, superiority over tenants or dependants, and direct exploitation of land, while still capable of carrying its Roman-law meaning of property or ownership. Potestas is always ‘power’, by itself ambiguous; but often it is the power of doing this or that: at its maximum, ‘having, possessing, ruling, giving, selling . . . and doing with it whatever he wishes’: a clear description of full property. Susan Reynolds emphasizes (it is crucial to her thesis about ‘feudalism’) that expressions such as in proprium (‘as his own’) or in iure suo (‘in his right’), and the nouns proprietas and alodium, signify full property (as contemporaries saw it) when applied to land; but for churches she argues that apparent claims to property are really only claims to protective government. This seems unnecessary, and in some contexts more than awkward (for instance where a church is controlled and disposed of by its serving priest, or by a family group including its priest). We can reasonably regard a church as ‘property’ if it is not only so called at the time (‘my alod’, ‘a thing of my property’) but is inherited whole or in shares, alienated by gift, sale, or lease, or made the matter of lawsuits. Lesser churches—chapels, parish churches, small monasteries and collegiate churches—were regularly spoken of and dealt with in these ways. Great churches are another matter. I shall argue that these were not normally subject to any

4

Prologue

outsider’s property-right, but to a lordship (typically the ruler’s) nearer to the ‘authority’ end of the scale, its proprietary traits limited both by the live propertyowning capacity of a great church’s community and by the lordly status of its head; nonetheless a lordship much more focused and intermittently proprietary than the ruler’s overall protective charge of the Church. This book attempts a broad survey with varying degrees of intensity. Most attention is paid to the Carolingian empire and its successor states both sides of the Alps, above all France (the evidence being thickest there); but the focus sometimes shifts to southern Italy, Spain, England, and occasionally to Wales. Little is said about Ireland because the records, in Irish, are beyond my reach; or about Scotland or Scandinavia because of the shortage or lateness of records and (for Scandinavia) for linguistic reasons again; and nothing about the most easterly Catholic countries (Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary). No attempt is made at any statistical treatment of the material. Over the long period covered there is so much change that the names of political units cannot refer consistently to the same geographical areas. By ‘Lotharingia’, for instance, I mean whatever the dukes at a given time were recognized as ruling; by ‘France’ and ‘Burgundy’, unqualified, the kingdoms of the time (unless the context makes ‘Burgundy’ obviously the French duchy or modern province). To ‘Languedoc’ I give its broadest possible meaning (see Petit Larousse Illustre´, 1983), to include the departments of Tarn and Haute-Garonne as well as Arie`ge, Aude, Pyreńeés-Orientales, He´rault, Gard, and Loze`re; roughly the cis-Pyrenean part of the ecclesiastical province of Narbonne (the field of Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier’s study). I have located places broadly, by still-used names of provinces, regions, or counties. Personal names are given in the standard English equivalent if any; names of churches usually in their local modern form. The mass of potentially relevant printed sources is such that I have used hardly anything not in print. For undated charters I have normally reproduced the editors’ dates, although the value of these, as of the editions generally (many of them from the nineteenth century), varies greatly. In general my footnotes refer to document number or to numbered clauses or chapters, but where the numbering is complex or the chapters very long, page references to the edition used are given instead. Translations from Latin are my own unless otherwise stated; for my purposes they need to be fairly literal, even at the cost of elegance. I render proprietas as ‘property’, ius as ‘right’; dominium as ‘lordship’, or left untranslated; potestas usually so left. I have tried to keep dare and donare distinct, as ‘give’ and ‘donate’;

Prologue

5

tradere I have rendered as ‘convey’, or—where it is most obviously a physical act—as ‘deliver’ or ‘hand over’. There is no commonly used word in the sources that can be regularly rendered as ‘owner’ or ‘proprietor’ (only twelfth-century Iceland, in normative contexts, has phrases translating as ‘the man who owns the church’ or ‘holds’ or ‘governs’ it;4 but that does not make the words inadmissible in description or analysis. Charters dealing with churches did not normally need a common noun to designate their authors, unless sometimes ‘donor’ or ‘vendor’. A notice or other bit of narrative, or a bishop’s record of a consecration, might however need such a word, normally dominus, occasionally heres, heir. Dominus can usually be translated as ‘lord’ (without prejudice to his dominium being property); but there are occasional contexts where ‘owner’ or ‘proprietor’ seems more appropriate, for instance where a priest has founded or inherited the church that he serves; while ‘lord’ is often needed for the more personal senior. How to refer to sums of money over this long period presents a problem, when librae were either weighed pounds or counted piles of denarii of varying silver content, while the solidus began as a gold coin variously deteriorating, but became a term of account for 12 denarii at 240 denarii to the £. I have usually put ‘pounds’ for librae and spelt out solidi and denarii, but have rendered them as £, s., and d. where the period or context seems to allow this. 4

Ve´steinsson, The Christianization of Iceland, 109–10.


Part I

Beginnings


1 The Roman Empire and post-Roman kingdoms

1.i. Churches acquire their own property We need to begin with churches themselves having property. At first it was churches in the original sense—communities of Christians, each with its bishop— that came into possession of buildings and land. Even before the end of persecutions, some Christian communities had what looks like corporate property in practice—a cemetery, a clergy-house, a building for worship; and under Christian emperors church property received special treatment in the law, so that something like civil personality, or property-owning capacity, was attributed to the church of each city.1 The bishop as its head administered its property.2 By law this was inalienable,3 and as time passed it increased greatly; at Rome it was soon enormous. Emperors financed magnificent buildings; Christians in general gave not only bread and wine for the Eucharist, wax and oil for lights, and food or money for the clergy and the poor, but treasures of plate and precious stones; and not only things but land. Land flowed in from gifts and legacies, including the clergy’s private property; it came to be taken for granted that the livelihood of bishop and clergy, help for the poor, and upkeep of church buildings were paid for partly by income from land. The collapse of order in the fifth century did not stop the flow of land, 1

On the relevant late Roman law, R. Dannenbring, Roman Private Law, 3rd edn. (Pretoria, 1980), 93–7 (based on M. Kaser, Das ro¨mische Privatrecht, 2nd edn. 1971–5); Duff, Personality in Roman Private Law, esp. 169–77 (pre-Justinian). On early church property, useful summaries in Lesne, Hist. de la proprie´te´ eccle´siastique, I. 1–20; Gaudemet, L’E´glise dans l’Empire romain, 299–302. More broadly on the Christianizing of the Roman Empire, Brown, Rise of Western Christendom, esp. 18–40; A. Cameron, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, AD 395–600 (London, 1993), esp. c. 3. 2 On the legal basis for this see Duff, Personality, 175–7. 3 The history of this ancient principle is outlined by Mary Cheney, ‘Inalienability in Mid-TwelfthCentury England: Enforcement and Consequences’, Monumenta Iuris Canonici, series C Subsidia 7 (1985), 468–9 and nn. 3–5.

10

Beginnings

which was perhaps relatively easy to give away when labour was scarce and communications breaking down; and the idea that good works consisted in giving up real property to the Church, that this was what ‘laying up treasure in Heaven’ meant, began its long career about this time.4 Meanwhile, from the fourth century onwards in cities of any size other churches were built besides the mother church (the meaning of ecclesia shifting meanwhile towards the building itself);5 but most offerings made in them went into the central treasury and their expenses came out of it. And as Christianity spread into the country, remoter parts began to be served by country churches with visiting or resident clergy; but here too at first any offerings in money, kind, or land were part of the diocesan property administered by the bishop. So in principle all clergy were cathedral clergy paid by the bishop out of diocesan income.6 In Rome and those Italian and Sicilian bishoprics that were subject to the pope as metropolitan, the attempt was made from the later fifth century to divide this income into four parts, for the bishop’s use, the poor, the clergy, and the fabric of churches; in Spain a little later there was a threefold division, leaving the poor as a charge on the bishop and clergy. But even where these divisions took effect,7 allotting the shares was at the bishop’s will, though customary stipends for the clergy might be established here and there, or leases of church land be given them by the bishop. In fact, it seems that the bishops of the disintegrating western empire and the new barbarian kingdoms largely kept their autocratic control of diocesan property and of their clergy’s pay, a system still in full force in the Roman dioceses under Gregory the Great. But this diocesan property was becoming an ever smaller proportion of all existing church property, while the clergy supported by it became only some among the whole clergy. All over the West almost every church in town or country would soon have its own land from which produce and rents were drawn, its own slaves and tenants, and its own income in offerings; while the diocesan patrimony survived as simply the property of the cathedral church (the collegiate idea of the body of Christians having faded anyhow as Christians multiplied). How this happened is fairly obscure.8 It seems likely that some diocesan property had simply been let slip.9 But more important than this was the rise of new churches and the new acquisition of property by existing churches. 4 Its most rigorous proponent was Salvian of Marseilles (Schultze, Augustin und der Seelteil, 184–91; 5 Lesne, Proprie´te´, I. 23–9). See Fuchs, Ordinationstitel, 138–51. 6 For this and what follows, Stutz, Benef., 12–52, 64–8, 71–88; Lesne, Propr., I. 60–9; Feine, Kirchliche 7 See below, at note 12. Rechtsgeschichte, 131–3. 8 Stutz, op. cit., 297–317; on the regional timing (mostly 5th c.), Gaudemet’s summary, L’E´glise, 302. 9 Precarial leases to clergy could remain with their successors; land managed by an outlying church could become its property (councils of Orleans 511 c. 23, 541 cc. 18 and 34, Epaonense 517 c. 7, Clichy 626–7 c. 2 (Concilia Galliae 511–695, 11, 140, 26, 292).

Roman Empire and post-Roman kingdoms

11

Most subordinate churches had long had, from gifts and legacies, some property in land that was legally their own.10 In Roman and sub-Roman times this usually supported only specific burdens such as lights and almsgiving, and its administration was closely supervised by the bishop’s treasury.11 Later, however, not only did this supervision slacken, at least for country churches, but the flow of further gifts might make a church economically independent, its clergy no longer in need of the bishop’s stipend. In early sixth-century Gaul and later in Spain the idea appears that in country churches only the bishop’s third part of offerings was his to administer and distribute: the rest was the absolute right of the individual church. And the bishop might well not be able to get his third at all, or might be discouraged from taking it.12 This growing independence of old rural churches left, for some time, a number of them to be maintained and staffed at the bishop’s expense. But by the eighth century virtually every old parish church both sides of the Alps and in the remnant of Christian Spain was a self-supporting property-owning church, its wealth having come perhaps in some small degree from diocesan property, but mostly from other sources, including its own priests.13 In town churches the bishop’s control of revenue was more practicable and more accepted,14 but the same tendency to accumulate wealth to the point of independence was at work. More than anything, however, it was the multiplication of new churches and monasteries, each with its own property from the start, that reduced the centralized property of the mother church to an ever smaller proportion of ecclesiastical wealth. This is both background and symptom of the proprietary church; economic separation from the diocese made churches desirable objects of private property; treating them as property promoted this separation.15

1.ii. Roman founders’ claims In the classic German view the proprietary church was brought in by the barbarians and had little or no basis in late Roman society. But Roman landowners founded churches, and certainly had proprietary attitudes towards them, whether or not they had legal rights in them.1 The private domestic chapel is not in 10

Late Roman law was vague or elastic enough to allow for this (see Duff, Personality, 171–2, on the 313 11 edict). Stutz, Benef., 42–7. 12 Carpentras 527 (Conc. Gall. 511–695, 48), Toledo IV (633) c. 33, Me´rida (666) c. 16, Toledo XVI (693) c. 5 (Concilios Visigoticos, 204, 336, 501–2). See Lesne, Propr., I. 65, 348; Garcıá Gallo, Coyanza, 482–5 and n. 447. 13 Stutz, op. cit., 307–10 and n. 46; Feine, KRG 133. 14 Orleans 511 cc. 14 and 15, 538 c. 5 (Conc. Gall. 511–695, 9, 116). 15 Lesne, Propr., I. 69; Stutz, op. cit., 304–19, 326–69 (complementary rather than opposite). 1 See below, pp. 95–6.

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question here; if a rich man maintained an oratory in his town house or country villa, this was likely enough structurally part of the house and subject to the same property-right as the rest of the house. It would not itself have property; its owner would repair, decorate, and equip it, and feed and pay any chaplain, out of his own purse. It would probably not be authorized for celebrating mass.2 It was a different matter, however, when an oratory or basilica was built and endowed as a separate entity,3 perhaps by a testamentary act, binding one’s heirs not merely to honour and sustain the church but also to respect an endowment in land. Such a church—founded for any combination of piety and prestige, often as a memorial and burial-place4—might be a shrine for relics, its foundation not merely an act in honour of a saint but a gift to him or her.5 Sometimes it was made responsible for what can be seen as a charitable foundation.6 In any case its founder would want it consecrated,7 and would know that only the bishop had the sacramental power to do this. The bishop could not consecrate it unconditionally or without inquiry. He would need to be sure that its chaplain was orthodox and properly ordained and its relics not bogus. In the East, imperial legislation required that the bishop’s consent to the building be sought and publicly signified, and that he ensure that the church be not left half-built or under-endowed.8 The founder on his side would want to safeguard the church’s property not only against his heirs and its future priests, but also against the bishop: to be sure, in fact, that his endowment was the outright property of the new church, not a mere contribution to the general mass of church property. We have as evidence of this in the West the charter of foundation of what must have been a large and rich church on an estate near Tivoli, by a Catholic Goth named Valila, in 471: a time when successful barbarians were already setting up as landowners in Italy. Valila endowed his church with its own site and surroundings, where the clergy were to have their houses and gardens; with treasure, vestments, and books; and with revenue-producing land (described as estates of his own creation, probably to make clear that it was not family land but entirely his own) to support clergy, lights, repairs, and other expenses, and some further 2

Bondroit, De capacitate possidendi ecclesiae, I. 177; Fuchs, Ordinationstitel, 154–8. This is not to say that private places of worship are easily classifiable; an oratory built as part of a country house might later be enlarged, endowed, and consecrated. 4 Or for family devotions, or even Christianization of peasants (below, p. 105). 5 In the East, late 5th c., the emperor Zeno gave legal recognition to such gifts (Justinian, Codex 1. 2. 15). 6 Developed from pagan Roman testamentary arrangements endowing, and making trustees (typically freed slaves) responsible for, some philanthropic work (e.g. an orphanage), or a monument and ritual feasts at the testator’s grave, or both (in German a Stiftung; no equivalent English term): Bruck, ‘Stiftungen’, 57–61, 70–93. 7 For the early history of this see N. Herrmann-Mascard, Reliques, 143–5. 8 Justinian, Novellae 5. 1; 67. 1, 2; 131. 7, 10. See P. Thomas, Droit des laı¨ques, 9. 3


13

land of which he kept the usufruct for life. The bishop was to oversee the observance of the founder’s wishes, to allocate revenue between lights and fabric, and have accounts rendered by the clergy; but neither bishop nor clergy could alienate any property, present or to come, nor transfer any vessel or ornament to another church. If these conditions were broken, Valila or his heirs or successors would take everything back ‘to their own right and property’.9 This may have been intended as a ‘foundation’,10 making the bishop a trustee and restricting his power as diocesan for that reason only. In any case, Valila as a Goth may have expected more independence for his church than a Roman neighbour would have done, and been given his way as reward for not being an Arian.11 But imperial legislation in the East about founders’ and bishops’ rights and duties suggests that any private church-building might raise problems.12 In the West the matter fell in practice to the local bishops or metropolitans, and in Italy it was taken up by pope Gelasius I (492–6) early in the reign of Theoderic the Ostrogoth. In a letter to three of the more distant bishops of his metropolitan area—Sicily, Bruttium, and Lucania—Gelasius touched briefly on the conditions on which a bishop should consecrate new churches: he should seek the pope’s consent (as metropolitan), and not allow a dedication in the name of any dead person who might be ‘not even a believer’ (such as, perhaps, the founder’s father or mother).13 Pressure from the powerful might presumably be dodged by appeal to the rule requiring approval from Rome. Other letters of Gelasius show the terms on which he gave this approval, and the formulae that he initiated are found in use under his successors.14 The founder has reported that he (sometimes she) has built an oratory or basilica in his own property at his own cost, and intends to provide for the upkeep of lights and the support of priests; he wants it consecrated in honour of such-and-such a saint; he asks for an order to the bishop to consecrate it, perhaps also an order authorizing the transfer of relics to it; and crucially, he promises to claim no right in the church other than that access to worship ‘which is due to all Christians in common’. In response to this, the bishop is ordered to check the facts, see to the adequacy of the endowment, enlighten 9

Duchesne (ed.), Liber pontificalis, I (Rome 1884), p. cxlvi. See Stutz, Benef., 53–5; Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 1–3. As above, note 6; proposed by Borgolte, ‘Der churra¨tische Bischofstaat’, 97 n. 60. But see below, note 19. 11 Stutz saw it so. The charter does not self-evidently exclude any claim by the founders, but neither does it imply that the church will remain Valila’s property (as Torres Lopez, ‘Origen’, 154–5); one may believe it would, but on grounds external to the charter. 12 Probably because what was built on anyone’s property became his property: see Fuchs, Ordinationstitel, 154–8 (simple property, not a special ‘founder’s right’). 13 Epist. Romanorum Pontificum genuinae, I, Gelasius I no. 14 cc. 4, 25. On pre-Christian dedications of this kind see Ward-Perkins, From Classical Antiquity, 10 and n. 25. 14 Epist. Rom. Pontif. genuinae, I, Gelasius I nos. 33, 34, 35; Epist. Pont. Rom. ineditae, Gelasius no. 2; Pelagii I Papae Epist., nos. 44 (from ‘His autem querimoniis . . . ’), 86, 89; Gregorii I Registri, ix nos. 58, 71, 165. 10

14

Beginnings

the founder about his foregoing of rights, and finally, before he consecrates the church, to accept the ‘donation’ of the endowment.15 This last could be taken as meaning that the endowment was given to the episcopal church itself; but in view of other evidence that individual churches were capable of owning property, it must mean that the bishop receives the property on behalf of the new church, though subject to his administration.16 The emphasis is anyhow not on the legal status of the property but on the founder’s renunciation. Just what he renounced has been a matter of elaborate and technical dispute, turning on whether current Roman law in the West recognized private ownership of privately founded churches, rather than seeing churches as unownable like the pagan ‘sacred thing’ (res sacra or res divini iuris); and whether, if so, the Gelasian formula left any glimmer of property-right or doused it completely.17 We cannot expect precise answers to these questions, when law was becoming vaguer on matters of principle and more reflective of common attitudes. It seems in any case that in pagan Rome the legal status of res sacra as something incapable of being owned was not accepted in everyday life; family tombs were in practice treated as family property, enclosed by the rich in elaborate buildings with revenue-producing property attached to cover their costs.18 Such a mausoleum, with its attendants and its sacral feasts, was not unlike a private church where Christian Romans buried their parents and looked to be buried themselves; and if the one occupied a twilight between legal theory and social practice, so might the other.19 As for what was left of any such property-right by the Gelasian rules, Stutz and his contemporaries tended to conclude that a bare ownership could have survived, a dominium nudum without value or practical consequence.20 But this seems unrealistic. The need for such rules shows that Italian founders, and the occasional Catholic Goth, were likely to keep a hold on the churches they built, to regard them as family possessions, to use or take away their property, in 15 By Gregory I’s time the bishop was also to ascertain that no body was already buried there, and (normally) to allow no baptistry and no ‘cardinal priest’ (priest with authority over other priests). Cf. Liber diurnus, formulae nos. V. 10, 11, 23, 24, 29, 30. See Stutz, Benef., 56–61; Thomas, Droit, 14–18. 16 See Stutz, op. cit., 61 and nn. 96, 97; Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 5. Cf. Justinian’s decree (Novellae 67. 2) requiring a donatio of the proposed endowments, similarly not stating to whom or what. 17 Galante, La condizione giuridica delle cose sacre, 60–5; Geńestal, ‘Origines du droit eccl.’, 538–40. The relevant Roman-law texts are usefully brought together by Torres Lopez, ‘Origen’, 147–65. 18 J. A. Crook, Law and Life of Rome (London 1967), 133–8; C. Thomas, Christianity in Roman Britain, 30–1. 19 Even when endowments were testated to trustees the legal implications were hazy (Bruck, ‘Stiftungen’, 70–7, 84–8); the law on charities, etc. (piae causae) was not elaborated before Justinian (Duff, Personality, 178–205), so not for the West (see Gaudemet, L’E´glise, 303–4). Since neither Stiftung nor Eigenkirche was a clear-cut legal institution, they should not be seen as incompatible alternatives (as by Borgolte, esp. ‘Bischofsstaat’, 96–103). Gelasius’s and later popes’ rulings do not distinguish modes of foundation. 20 Stutz, Benef., 63 n. 102 (but see his review of Galante in Go¨ttingischen gelehrten Anzeigen (1904), 43 n. 3, 75–80); Thomas, Droit, 2–5, 18 n. 1; more recently Feine, KRG 161; Fuchs, Ordinationstitel, 167–8.


15

short to treat them as their own.21 So it all depends on how effective the Gelasian rules were, even in the relatively small area where they applied (the metropolitan area of Rome). Gelasius had to authorize a bishop’s temporary closure of a church because the landowner (possessionis dominus) had been taking its offerings, leaving nothing to support the clergy. This landowner did then make proper arrangements.22 But Roman Gauls and Spaniards will have had the same inclinations with less organized restraint. In 511 the bishops assembled at Orleans needed to declare that all churches ‘that have been built and are being built every day by various people’ ought ‘to stay in the power of the bishop in whose territory they are sited’;23 at Le´rida in 546 the bishops of the province of Tarragona had to legislate against any lay founder wanting his church consecrated while trying to keep its possessions out of episcopal power by falsely representing it as a monastery.24 This suggests at least a proprietary interest, and perhaps a straightforward claim to ownership.25 Any founder would want to choose his own clergy, and probably normally did, although in church law it was for the bishop to send visiting priests or appoint one to the charge of a new church.26 Justinian in the East accepted the fact that church-owners did choose their priests, by insisting on their seeking the patriarch’s consent.27 In the West, earlier, it was as a favour that Gelasius allowed a noblewoman Placidia to have a particular priest in what he called ‘her church’, justifying this by the man having been her slave, ordained without her leave: only in this way could she retain his services.28 Half a century earlier, however, a right to choose the clergy had been recognized in a special case by a church council in Provence. In 441 the council of Orange discussed the case of a bishop wishing to build a church in another bishop’s diocese, ‘either for the business of his estates’— perhaps a chapel for himself or his agents on their visits—‘or for ecclesiastical advantage, or for any other convenience of his’. He must not be refused permission; and though he is not to presume to dedicate the church himself, there is reserved to him ‘this grace, that whatever clerks he wishes to see in his property 21

See Geńestal, ‘Origines’, 541–2; Torres, ‘Origen’, 167–70. Epist. Rom. Pont. genuinae, I. 495–6 (fragment 21), informing the bishop that the church can be reopened. For possessio in such contexts meaning a landowner’s estate see Wickham, ‘Fall’, esp. 47–52. 23 Orleans I c. 17 (Conc. Gall. 511–695, 9). 24 Le´rida c. 3 (Conc. Visig., 56); see Bidagor, La iglesia propia, 54–7. Garcıá Villada (Hist. eclesiastica, II. 226–7) took ea a diocesano lege . . . segregare to mean removing the church itself from episcopal control (cf. Knight, End of Antiquity, 127); but ea must refer to the endowments (res), not the church. He saw sub monasterii specie as an ‘enigmatic phrase’; but it reads straightforwardly as ‘under the appearance of a monastery’, putting its endowments outside diocesan control. There need not have been many cases of this particular fraud, but the ambition behind it is important. 25 See Stutz, Benef., 104–5, and in review article (above, note 20), 57–8; Gaudemet, op. cit., 304–5. 26 Stutz, Benef., 62; Feine, KRG 129–30. In Liber diurnus, no. 10, a founder wanting masses celebrated must ask the bishop for a priest; cf. Gregory the Great, Registrum, ix. 58, 165. 27 Novellae 57. 2, 123. 18, 131. 10; not graciously conceding a ‘right of presentation’, but facing the facts 28 (Fuchs, Ordinationstitel, 156–8). Epist. Rom. Pontif. genuinae, I no. 21. 22

Beginnings

16

(in re sua), he whose diocese (territorium) it is shall ordain them or (if they are already ordained) agree to have them’.29 The government of the church was to belong to the diocesan bishop; but a version of the canon in a private collection made not long afterwards added that anything given by the founder to his church was not to be taken away by the diocesan.30 The phrasing of Orange c. 9 treats the founder-bishop essentially as a churchowner. Stutz thought otherwise—that it was purely a matter of sorting out episcopal jurisdiction between the bishops;31 but the council clearly sees the bishop as building the church in his capacity as a landowner, and as wishing to have clerks of his choice ‘in his property’.32 And the clause goes straight on to deal with lay founders: ‘if any of the laity builds a church and thinks of inviting anyone to dedicate it other than him in whose diocese he builds it’, he is not to be gratified. Evidently lay founders had their own ambitions for control of property or clergy, which a poaching bishop might condone. One thing important for the future is already clear: that the need for a church to be consecrated and for clergy to be ordained are the two great levers for the diocesan bishop, provided they can be reserved to him.

1.iii. The kingdoms of the sixth and seventh centuries Roman landowners who founded self-sufficient churches while the empire in the West disintegrated were inclined to treat them as their own. But at the beginning of the fifth century churches were still few: most large towns had several, but vast stretches of countryside were served by a single cathedral or parish church, and only the occasional private estate had its own chapel. Most of the country people and some of the landlord class were still pagan; Christianity only became the prevailing religion over roughly the same long period as the Germanic barbarians gained power in the West and were converted from Arian heresy or from 29

Stutz (Benef., 341 n. 33) took this to mean that if (at the time of the council) a priest had already been appointed by the builder-bishop, the diocesan should allow him to carry on. Alternatively it meant (as Hincmar in the 9th c. took it, below, p. 808 note 31) that if the builder’s candidate is already a priest he will only need the diocesan’s formal consent. 30 Orange c. 9; ‘Arles II’ c. 36 (Conc. Gall. 314–506, 80–1, 121). See Griffe, ‘Paroisses rurales’, 38–9, for a relevant dispute between bishops of Marseilles and Arles in 417. 31 Stutz, Benef., 69–70, and in review article (above, note 20) 46–9; cf. Imbart, Origines, 178–81. But see Fuchs, Ordinationstitel, 161–6, especially on the improbability of a 5th-c. bishop’s jurisdiction within his territory being negotiable. 32 Indeed Fuchs (preceding note) sees the bishop-builder as limited to what any builder would have, taking it as implicit that lay builders could already choose their clergy with episcopal approval. This is not a necessary inference, and would reduce the bishop’s gratia to a mere presumption that the clerk would not be rejected.


17

paganism.1 It was under barbarian rule that churches multiplied fast, and by the initiative largely of barbarian founders; they were the new rich who could best afford it. At the same time, the barbarians brought in their own customs and attitudes which must have coloured their reasons for building churches and their dealings with them afterwards. Of their pagan beliefs (overlaid, for some, by Arian Christianity) we know very little; leaving gods aside, we can see that they believed in the power and holiness of special places and things, especially of their ancestors’ burial-places; but so did their new neighbours and subjects. They probably came loosely and chancily linked by kinship, more strongly and consistently as families small enough to stick together in the migrations or be quickly renewed a generation down. Property in land (or initially in tax-entitlement)2 came to them by treaty, or by their own purchase or conquest, or by gift or loan from a conquering king; landing them often with neighbours or dependants who lived by Roman law, while they themselves were bound by their own norms of right dealing within the family, which surface patchily in their own written laws (themselves much influenced by late Roman vulgar law).3 Property passed by various inheritance customs, usually to all sons or all children, who would divide it sooner or later; the head of a household was probably not free to dispose of inherited property, although in other respects he had power over persons and things.4 How far proprietary dealings with churches spread for reasons inherent in this Germanic background, rather than simply because churches themselves were multiplying in circumstances that made their founders’ ownership seem natural, must be discussed later: the first thing is to show that it happened. Whether ‘own’ is an appropriate word is another matter again.5 The nature of the barbarian settlers’ rights in land is still so controversial, and the possible answers so different for those established as hospites in a still-functioning Roman province and for those who turned themselves from raiders to lords in lands long ungoverned, that ordinary words may be misleading. But if we are willing for convenience to speak 1

On the complex process that ‘converted’ has to cover (and on the need to re-Christianize the most battered parts of Gaul) see Fletcher, Conversion; in the immediate context pp. 34–65, 97–110, 130–59. 2 Well argued by Goffart, Barbarians and Romans; see however Wickham, ‘Fall’, 46 n. 4; id., Land, 24 n. 21, 41 n. 21 (though Goffart’s picture involves bureaucratic decline and collapse rather than improbable ‘fiscal and administrative continuities’). 3 Helpfully defined by Roger Collins: ‘a kind of common law that regulated the mundane workings of society . . . different in character and subject-matter from the statute law of the imperial edicts and rescripts’ (Early Medieval Spain, 28). See Levy, West Roman Vulgar Law; Classen, ‘Fortleben und Wandel’, 18–36; Wormald, Making of English Law, 36–40. 4 On the relevant family property law see Schultze, Seelteil, esp. pp. v–vi, 6–27; useful summary (and pre-1988 references) in Hartung, ‘Adel, Erbrecht’, 419–21. On Merovingian Gaul, Reynolds, Fiefs, 75–6 perhaps underestimates the strength of sons’ expectations. For fathers’ disposable shares see below, at 5 notes 34–7. See Prologue, above.

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of ‘landowners’, ‘church-owners’ makes no less sense. And it is the new barbarian kingdoms in Spain and Gaul—Suevi, Visigoths, Franks, and Burgundians—that provide the first clear evidence of churches being treated as a kind of property accreting customary law around it. There is an early sixth-century letter from Avitus bishop of Vienne advising against reconsecration for Catholic worship of the ‘private oratories and little basilicas’ of Burgundian converts from Arianism.6 But most of the early evidence is church legislation.7 In sixth-century Gaul, when the Franks had become Christians and were extending their power over Burgundians and Visigoths who were themselves converting from Arianism, the Gallo-Roman bishops went on holding councils through most of the century,8 some provincial, some for all Gaul; in the seventh century there were still intermittent efforts to legislate. Meanwhile in Spain, following a pause after 546, legislation began again after the conversion from Arianism of the Suevi, and of the Visigothic rulers by 587;9 this, combined with their conquest of the Suevi in 585, set the stage for Visigothic kings and their bishops to legislate for most of the peninsula in councils at Toledo.10 In Spain the episcopacy deliberately came to grips, and finally to terms, with the claims of church founders, working from a considerable knowledge of earlier church law. A major concern still was to ensure the bishop’s control of new churches and their property. The third council of Toledo, in 589, complained that ‘many . . . demand to have the churches they have built consecrated in such a way that they consider the endowment they have conferred on the church does not belong to the bishop’s government (ordinatio)’11—apparently meaning that they try to get the bishop to agree to this at the time of consecration, like those Spaniards who earlier in the century had tried to have their churches treated as 6 To Victor bp. of Grenoble (MGH Auctores antiqu., VI. 2. 35–9). Stutz took Avitus to mean that reconsecrated churches would legally have to be taken away from their owners, causing intolerable offence (Benef., 109–11). But Avitus’s argument is that for the king to transfer to Catholic use churches built by his father for Arians would smack of persecution and risk reversal later: better leave them unused like deserted workshops. Avitus evidently saw Burgundian ‘private’ churches as normal in his sub-Roman world (see Scha¨ferdiek, ‘Das Heilige in Laienhand’, 133–5). (In general, reconsecration of Arian churches was allowed or encouraged: Stutz, Benef., 110 n. 15; Schubert, Staat und Kirche, 25–30). 7 Neither the archaeological evidence for villa-oratories nor the literary evidence for private foundations (chiefly Gregory of Tours; see Knight, End of Antiquity, 126–7) reveals anything of the churches’ legal status. 8 About thirty, from Agde 506 to Maˆcon 585, legislating at first for Gallo-Romans under barbarian kings but soon also for Franks (or Septimanian Visigoths). See Wallace-Hadrill, Frankish Church, 94–104. 9 Valencia and Le´rida, 546, for Hispano-Romans; Braga, 561 and 572 (see E. A. Thompson, ‘Conversion of the Spanish Suevi to Catholicism’, in James (ed.), Visigothic Spain, 77–92); Toledo III, 589 (many Visigoths—Arians and Catholics—probably already having churches of their own; see Collins, op. cit., 55–6). On Braga’s and Toledo III’s application to barbarians see Sotomayor and Gonza´lez in Iglesia en la Espanã (ed. Garcıá-Villoslada), I. 390–6, 408–13. 10 Toledo III–XVI (with other councils), 589–693; most conveniently in Concilios Visigo´ticos e Hispano11 Romanos, ed. Vives. c. 19 (ibid. 131).


19

monasteries.12 This is forbidden, and ‘everything shall belong to the bishop’s government and power (potestas)’. Clearer still was Toledo IV in 633: ‘builders of churches should know that they have no power over the things they have given to those churches, but . . . just as the church does, so does its endowment belong to the bishop’s government.’13 The need to fend off the founders is clear: what is ambiguous is whether the endowment should go into the centralized diocesan property, or be the property of the individual church but subject to the bishop’s administration.14 The word potestas could be used to mean the control of property; but here, used alternately with ordinatio, it sounds more like the potestas that the council of Chalcedon (451) had claimed for bishops over monasteries in their dioceses, not property-right but public authority.15 Even the council of Braga of 572, which laid down that a bishop was not to dedicate a church ‘until he has previously received its endowment and its obedience, confirmed by the giving of a charter’, probably meant (like its Gelasian model) that the bishop accepts the endowment on behalf of the new church.16 In any case the tendency of legislation was to attribute the endowment firmly to the individual church; and by the seventh century some legislation, both Spanish and Gaulish, is intended to safeguard the founders’ intentions and prevent exploitation by the bishops. In this it further weakened the idea of diocesan property-right, opening the door for the founder to be commonly recognized as proprietor.17 The first stage was simply to insist, as in Italy earlier, that founders should provide adequate support for church and clergy. Braga II (572) used the term dos for the first time in this sense, of the basic original endowment without which no church should be dedicated: ‘for it is no slight boldness that a church should be consecrated without lights or without sustenance for those who are to serve there, as if it were a private house.’18 The dos is a dowry given to the church as bride of Christ,19 this mystical analogy being now applied to the individual rural church. So far, except perhaps by the very word dos, this does not insist on the independent property-rights of the church; but in Visigothic legislation this soon follows, implied and finally stated in rulings to protect donors’ interests and 12

13 See index: Le´rida. c. 33 (again, ordinatio; Conc. Visig. 204). Found ambiguous by 9th-c. Frankish churchmen (below, pp. 800–11). 15 Below, pp. 191–3; see Schwarz, ‘Jurisdicio’, 45. Semmler, ‘Mission und Pfarrorganisation’, 847–8, takes the equivalent Gaulish legislation (below, notes 68–70) as obliging founders to convey the church, with its dos, to the diocesan bishopric; but see below, p. 200 note 5. 16 c. 5 (Conc. Visig., 83). See Martıńez Dıéz, El patrimonio eclesiastico, 49–51. 17 Martıńez Dıéz argued that founders merely wanted their churches freed from the bishop’s third (ibid. 72, 157–8), but see below, at notes 21–2. 18 c. 5 (Conc. Visig., 83); Stutz, Benef., 98–102. In Gaul cf. Epaonense (517, after Burgundians’ conversion), 19 See below, pp. 735–6. c. 25; Orleans 541 c. 33 (Conc. Gall. 511–695, 30, 140). 14

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Beginnings

prevent abuse by the bishop. The 597 council at Toledo instructed the bishop to see that whatever a nobleman (munificus) who built a church had given it ‘as his heir’ the priest serving there was to have (though it also envisaged the endowment being too small to support a priest and being used for a deacon, or at least a doorkeeper to tend the lights).20 The fourth (general) council of Toledo, in 633, said that ‘many . . . of the faithful . . . build churches and ascribe offerings to them, and the bishops take these away and apply them to their own uses’, so that ministers were unpaid and collapsing churches unrepaired; the bishops were reminded that they were entitled only to one-third of offerings; founders or their heirs could appeal against them to the council. Toledo VI in 638 insisted that whatever princes or anyone else gave to churches must remain inalienably in those churches’ ius; Toledo IX in 655 reiterated that no bishop was to take away and ‘attach to his own ius’, or to his cathedral, anything given to a church.21 The provincial council of Me´rida, in 666, went further: declaring that ‘divine grace has well ordained that whatever was given by the faithful to each particular church, it should have’, it decreed (for parish churches) that in future even the bishop’s third be used for the repair of the church concerned.22 Meanwhile the idea of the defrauded benefactor made its appearance at Toledo IX. If the donor’s pious intentions were frustrated he was wickedly defrauded, and the ‘worthy sons or grandsons and honourable kinsmen of him who built and endowed the church’ could complain (in the last resort to the king) of any misappropriation.23 Twenty years later an ordinance of King Wamba put founders’ heirs first in a list of persons (including dukes and counts) with the right and duty to complain of churches being despoiled.24 All this suggests, in the background, not just family feeling but something emerging in customary law as family property. This is not to say that the church and its endowment were admitted by Spanish kings and bishops to be the founder’s hereditary property.25 Indeed at Toledo in both 633 and 655 the safeguarding of the founder’s intentions is followed by a warning, in 655 particularly explicit: ‘but it shall not be lawful for these heirs’—the sons and grandsons—‘to claim for themselves any power, as if by propertyright,26 in these possessions, nor to exert any rapine, fraud, or violence on them.’27 But the warning itself shows that founders’ heirs did sometimes claim 20

Toledo 597 (provinces of Toledo, Me´rida, and Narbonne) c. 2 (Conc. Visig., 156). IV c. 33; VI c. 15; IX c. 1 (ibid. 204, 243, 297–8). See Thompson, Goths in Spain, 45, 298–301. c. 16 (Conc. Visig., 336). In general see Stutz, Benef., 105–7; Bidagor, op. cit., 70–6; Garcıá Gallo, Coyanza, 482–5. 23 c. 1 (Conc. Visig., 297–8). ‘Worthy’ (condigni) probably means legally qualified; honestiores were 24 nobles. Leges Visig., iv. 5. 6 (MGH Leges, I 202–5). 25 See Bidagor, op. cit., 72 n. 28; Martıńez Dıéz, Patrimonio, 72–7. 26 quasi in iuris proprii potestatem praeferre. 27 Toledo IV c. 33 (above, note 13), IX c. 1 (Conc. Visig., 204, 217–18). 21

22


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some property-right. On the face of it their claim would be to the endowment rather than to the church itself, and the legislation might reflect a straightforward competition, moral and economic, between laymen and bishops (most of them, by now, Visigothic noblemen themselves); bishops protecting churches against impious heirs, heirs against avaricious bishops.28 However, the ‘rapine, fraud, and violence’ of Toledo IX may not be a simple matter of heirs taking back what their ancestors had given, but reflect a claim to own and exploit the church itself and anything anyone gave it. That this could be so—and be fully intended by the founder—is shown much earlier at the 572 council of Braga in the Suevic kingdom. This required the bishop not only to secure an adequate dos for a new church but also to refuse consecration where the founder’s motives were mercenary and he meant to share the offerings with the clergy.29 This might mean merely a free supply of wax and oil and some poultry and eggs for one’s household, but might include money,30 which could be accumulated; or the revenues of land given by other people. The council describes such a church as founded not under the protection of a saint but sub tributaria condicione, which seems to mean that no true outright gift has been made to a patron saint, or commendation into his protection, but instead the church or its clergy have been put in the position of tribute-paying coloni (condicio meaning something like ‘subjection’).31 This sounds like a church treated simply as part of an estate, probably with a slave-priest to serve in it. Twenty-five years later, at Toledo in 597, a different kind of foundation is envisaged, and with approval: building a church and making it one’s heir.32 This idea, later widely deployed in the West, has been regarded as self-evidently excluding any proprietary claim over the church.33 But perhaps the church as ‘heir’ was not always the heir—probably of a childless man—appointed by testament in the Roman fashion. It might be a co-heir along with the founder’s children, endowed not only with acquisitions but with his free share—the share of inherited property that, among some barbarian peoples, a father could by now dispose of for his soul’s salvation,34 by what he might have been taught to see as making Christ his heir and his children’s brother.35 The practical starting-point for 28

See King, Law and Society, 150, 155–6. 30 Braga II c. 6 (Conc. Visig., 83); see Stutz, Benef., 95–7. See Martıńez Dıéz, Patrimonio, 19–23. 31 See Stutz, Benef., 97 nn. 14, 15; for condicio, Schwarz, ‘Jurisdicio’, 41. 32 33 Above, note 20. e.g. Galante, Condizione, 132; but cf. Voigt, Ko¨nigl. Eigenklo¨ster, 7. 34 See Schultze, Augustin und der Seelteil; Valdeavellano, ‘Cuota’, 133–7, usefully summarizes his argument. The free share was not invariably for pious donations (Burgundian Lex Gundobada 1. 1; 24. 5; 51. 1: MGH Leges, II. i, 41, 63, 82–3). 35 Schultze, Seelteil, 184–90 (see below, p. 734). Schultze saw Western practice as dominated by Augustine’s formula for ‘making Christ one’s heir’ to an extra son’s portion (so safeguarding one’s children’s rights); Bruck thought this dominant only for the Lombards, others giving a minimum regardless of family size (Kirchenva¨ter und soziales Erbrecht, 76–104, 147–67). On either view (and even on 29

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Beginnings

this was probably that partitions were often made in the father’s lifetime, leaving him with a portion to live on (usually equal to each son’s). The crucial development—whether decreed or simply happening—was that he could give this away (rather than its reverting to the family); and even do so before partition, giving a share in the strict sense.36 Among the Visigoths this disposable share was perhaps already established as a fifth, the quinta.37 Using this share to endow a church would indeed make it an heir; but it would also incorporate it into the founder’s family along with his children, under his paternal rule, and probably that of his mortal heirs collectively as long as they remain together after his death. This pattern can be documented for Lombard Italy a century later; for Visigothic Spain it must be speculative because of the almost total absence of charters.38 A group of co-heirs, probably brothers, is recorded in an inscription dated 573 in Galicia (the country of the Suevi): ‘Hereditas nostra Eufrarii, Eugani, Quinedi, Eati, Flavi recuperatorum V, Vitimero episcopo. Era DCXI.’39 It is not clear what this means: perhaps, after conversion from Arianism, they gave family land to re-endow a ruined and disused Catholic church, and put the endowment into the bishop’s hands as the previous year’s council of Braga had required; perhaps the church itself was their inheritance, and they had it reconsecrated for Catholic use and put under the bishop’s authority (which would not prevent them still treating it as their own); or perhaps they gave it outright to the bishop’s church (implying that it was theirs to give).40 It seems just possible that the bishops at Braga, insisting on a dos for a new church,41 were making a counter-suggestion in terms of family property: to suggest that founding a church involved not its incorporation into the family but a partition, a removal of property from the family like giving a marriage-portion to a daughter. And the rather puzzling comparison of an unendowed church with a private house perhaps means that a church should not have to rely for its lights and its clergy’s board on an unseparated and undefined share of common family Beyerle’s more sceptical assessment, reviewing Schultze in ZSSGA 50 (1930), 398–402) the Church promotes or makes use of the development of a ‘free share’ (Bruck, op. cit., 142–4, 153–4). 36 Burgundian law (above, note 34); Bavarian law, 1. 1 (MGH Leges, V. ii. 268); Schultze, Seelteil, 27–9. On ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ shares (the former better called ‘portions’) see below, pp. 603, 628. 37 Perhaps implied in a law of Leovigild (d. 586), but first stated by Chindasuinth, 642–53: Leges Visig., iv. 2. 19, iv. 5. 1, v. 2. 4 (MGH Leges, I. 188–9, 195–7, 211–12). See Schultze, Seelteil, 9–12, 160–5; Valdeavellano, ‘Cuota’, 138–44. Chindasuinth in iv. 5. 1 declares ‘abrogated’ a law favouring freedom of disposition (see King, Law and Society, 246 n. 2, 247 n. 1; id., ‘King Chindaswind and the First Territorial Law-code of the Visigothic Kingdom’, in James (ed.), Visigothic Spain, esp. 152–3); suggesting pressure from the Visigoths to preserve customary inheritance rights. On the quinta’s persistence for centuries, almost always pro anima, Valdeavellano, ‘Cuota’, 143–57. 38 There are fragments, and a formulary (not even certainly Visigothic) with forms for pious donations and a royal foundation (ed. Juan Gil, Miscellanea Wisigothica (Seville, 1972), 71–112, nos. 7–10). 39 At San Pedro de Rocas; as reconstructed and punctuated by Fidel Fita in Boletin de la Real Academia de 40 If so, almost certainly a voluntary pious donation. la Historia, 41 (1902), 504. 41 Above, note 16.


23

income—being treated as part of ordinary housekeeping costs—any more than offerings to it should be contributions to the housekeeping. When a partition of the family land was finally made, and the sons hived off to form their own households, it is not clear what the status of the church and its now separated share would be. But it need not pass right out of the family orbit, any more than did the newly formed household of a young married man, with brothers and their children in the background: perhaps even less, because of a church’s special position (not unlike a woman’s) of being unable to look after itself and needing a guardian to rule it. By analogy with what we know of Bavarians and Lombards later,42 it seems likely that one of the heirs would rule it as priest or abbot (or the widow as abbess), or as a lay owner with an appointed priest. But how this worked, and any increase in flexibility or security that might come from having a family church or a church in the family, must be a matter of conjecture. Even without these last suggestions, the whole picture here inferred from the legislation runs counter to the tendency of some mid-twentieth-century Spanish scholarship to see public law as so strong in Visigothic Spain that proprietary churches barely existed.43 This view rests partly on taking the legislation as evidence for what it enacted, rather than for at least some instances of what it condemned.44 And there is other evidence. In the Common Rule of Fructuosus’s monastic federation we encounter what look like both family-owned and priestowned churches in the mid-seventh century. The first chapter condemns irregular monasteries consisting of whole families in their own houses, bound together by oath. This must be discussed later;45 here it may be suggested that the ‘mingling in common’ of their property (over which they later quarrel for their shares) represents not a subsequently regretted renunciation of private property,46 but rather the establishment of a new and artificial house community, its shares once divided but now pooled.47 The second chapter goes on to condemn priests who simulate sanctity and found so-called monasteries, ‘because they fear to lose their tithes or to relinquish other profits’ and are avaricious for others’ alms rather than almsgiving themselves.48 This sounds like representing a new or existing church as a monastery to evade the bishop’s economic control, as long since described at 42

See Chapter 2, below. e.g. Bidagor, Iglesia, 37–9; Martıńez Dıéz, Patrimonio, 69–79; to some extent Garcıá Villada, Hist. ecles., II. i. 217–22. As late as 1979, Gonza´lez in La Iglesia en la Espanã (I. 597) cites the aspirational Toledo III c. 19 (note 11, above) as evidence for the proprietary church’s virtual non-existence. 44 Martıńez Dıéz’s strongest argument is the bishops’ responsibility for imposing duties of daily mass and prayers for builders and benefactors on priests serving several impoverished churches (666, Me´rida c. 19, Conc. Visig., 338–9), an intervention hardly needed for proprietary churches. But poor churches 45 might have been abandoned by their founders’ heirs. Below, pp. 147–51. 46 47 As Martıńez Dıéz held (op. cit., 157, 165). See below, pp. 603–3. 48 Cf. Isidore on ‘Sarabaites’, De eccl. officiis II. xvi (PL 83. 799); see P. H. Blair, World of Bede, 133. 43

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Beginnings

Le´rida;49 or at least to escape the bishop’s third. It seems clear that what the priest uses to found a ‘monastery’ is a church, and his own. The priests we hear of in the acts of the councils, however, are not ownerpriests (plentiful in the peninsula later)50 but appointed, often slaves or freed slaves. Clerical slaves of the royal fisc were expected to remain there,51 presumably serving a church of the king’s. They could, however, be sufficiently wellto-do to found churches; whether they then owned them in some limited sense is another matter.52 There is literary evidence for a church-owner’s appointed priest, in this case evidently a free man. Valerius, living a freelance hermit’s life in the mountainous north-west, relates how a certain Ricemir, ‘lord of the land’, began to build a church for him, intending to put him in as priest; but after Ricemir’s death ‘they’—presumably his heirs—put in an unworthy priest Justus,53 whose sole recommendation was that he entertained them with scurrilous songs and jokes.54 So the Spanish bishops had to reckon with the founder’s claim, if not to be, then to put in his own priest. This was in part allowed by Toledo IX: founders could choose suitable rectors and present them to the bishop for him to appoint;55 if they failed to find anyone suitable the bishop should appoint with their consent; a bishop’s appointment made without this consent was invalid; the founders could then put in rectors of their own choice. This was conceded only to the actual founder in his lifetime, and justified by his right to care for the church and its possessions against possible neglect or abuse by the bishop.56 Martıńez Dıéz saw Valerius’s story as falling squarely within these terms: Ricemir would have exercised only a once-for-all right of presentation, which quite properly fell to his heirs since it was they who finished the church; even the unworthiness of their choice should not be accepted without question.57 And yet the tone of the story suggests the normality of lords appointing priests and the nonentity of the bishop in the matter; legalizing choice for the founder alone was probably a concession 49

See index: Le´rida. Below, pp. 669–74. However, the priest of a well-endowed church who ought to raise clergy from his own familia (Me´rida c. 19, Conc. Visig., 338–9) might be an owner-priest. 51 Toledo III c. 8 (ibid. 134). The Church’s own slaves could be freed, ordained, and put into parish churches (Thompson, Goths in Spain, 305–6). 52 Toledo III c. 15 (Conc. Visig., 135): ‘if slaves of the fisc make churches and endow them out of their paupertas’ the bishop should ask the king to confirm it. 53 Valerius in both places uses the verb ordinare; see index: ordinare. 54 Valerii Narrationes (PL 87. 441–3; late 7th c.). I have not seen the better edition by Ramoń Fernańdez 55 ordinare. Pousa (Madrid, 1942). 56 Toledo IX c. 2 (Conc. Visig. 298–9), perhaps knowing Justinian’s rulings. 57 Martıńez Dıéz, Patrimonio, 78–9. For a more realistic (if somewhat literal) interpretation see I. Arenillas, ‘La autobiografia de S. Valerio como fuente para el conocimento de la organizacion eclesiastica visigotica’, AHDE 11 (1934), 468–78; but for its didactic purpose see Collins, ‘The ‘‘Autobiographical’’ Works of Valerius of Bierzo’ (Law, Structure, and Regionalism), on the narrative’s form as a legal case against the Devil. 50


25

(consistent with the essentials of church law) to actual practices that were far more unregulated. The same may be true of the 633 canon that allowed founders and their children to be supported out of the church’s revenues if they fell into poverty:58 perhaps a spontaneous acknowledgment of a moral obligation,59 but more likely an attempt to limit and rationalize owners’ claims to live off their churches. Whatever the scale of the problem (a council might be stating the principles for settling no more than a single case), the Visigothic church had reached a useful compromise, in theory;60 its canons passed into the collections and were used much later in building the ius patronatus of twelfth-century canon law. But conditions for any practical enforcement of them must have been swept away by the Arab conquest; the church of the remnants of Christian Spain was probably as ridden by proprietary practices as anywhere else;61 and for its own time the legislation is evidence of what a bishop might have to reckon with in practice. In Gaul there was a similar insistence on the interests of individual churches against the bishop, while the idea of the bishop’s portion was weaker from the start.62 But the legislation shows only kings as putting pressure on the bishops to respect their foundations’ independent property; and in the sixth century this might still need special declaration, especially for city churches.63 One of these declarations was followed by a general warning to donors’ heirs not to take away what had been given to churches by their kinsmen, great or small.64 But the moral emphasis in Gaulish legislation is not usually on the church’s propertyrights nor on the donors’ intentions,65 but rather on the defrauded poor.66 However, both urban and rural churches were in fact establishing themselves as independent property-owning entities; and two themes running through Gaulish legislation reveal the companion fact that they were treated as bits of property. One is a recurring preoccupation (hardly found in Spain) with the personal dependence of the clergy on ‘powerful men of the world’, which threatened both their basic standards and their obedience to the bishop. Hence 58

59 Toledo IV c. 38 (Conc. Visig., 205–6). Martıńez Dıéz, op. cit., 44–5, 74. Stutz, Benef., 108; unconvincingly disputed by Bidagor (Iglesia, 30–5, 74; see Wohlhaupter’s review, ZSSKA 23 (1935), 372–4) and Martıńez Dıéz (op. cit., 72–6). 61 Or more so, in the Reconquista. Bidagor (pp. 88–90, 98–111, 122) disputes this, chiefly because of the survival of the bishop’s third; but see below, p. 82. 62 527, Carpentras (province of Arles) c. 2 (Conc. Gall. 511–695, 48); 538, Orleans III c. 5 (ibid. 116). 63 Orleans V c. 15 (549, from all three Merovingian kingdoms), for king Childebert’s xenodochium at Lyons; Valence (583 or 585), for king Guntram’s grants to Saint-Marcel (Chalon-sur-Saoˆne), SaintSymphorien (Autun), and any other holy places (Conc. Gall. 511–695, 153, 234–5); see Schwarz, ‘Jurisdicio’, 64 46–7; Scho¨nfeld, ‘Xenodochien’, 31–2. 549, for Lyons. 65 Exceptions include Vaison 442 c. 4, Agde 506 c. 6 (Conc. Gall. 314–506, 97–8, 194–5). 66 The offender is a necator pauperum or egentium (killer of the poor): e.g. Conc. Gall. 511–695, 153–4, 224, 235, 277, 295–6). 60

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Beginnings

legislation against clerks evading the bishop’s authority by seeking a lay lord’s protection67 (not necessarily to be put by him into a private church). More specifically, the council of Orleans in 541 laid down ‘that landlords should not introduce strange clerks into their oratories’ against the diocesan bishop’s wish, and that the clergy of churches sited on the property of powerful men were not to be prevented from obeying the archdeacon.68 This council was drawn from predominantly Gallo-Roman provinces. But a century later the potentes were mostly Franks, or felt themselves so; and now, with renewed efforts by the bishops,69 the facts broke surface at the council of Chalon-sur-Saoˆne (between 647 and 653), drawn from Neustria and Burgundy. Bishops had complained: that when oratories have long been built in the estates of the powerful, and properties granted to them, those to whom the estates belong contradict the bishop and will not allow the clerks who serve in the oratories to be coerced by the archdeacon; this must be set right, so that both as regards the ordaining of clerks and as regards the property granted there, how the divine office may be performed and the sacred elements consecrated at those oratories should be in the power of the bishop.70

Alongside this runs a second problem by the seventh century: laymen gaining possession of parish churches and their property (and the power of appointing assistant clergy) by getting themselves made archpriests or rectors;71 an indication that even churches not privately founded were now open to exploitation as private property. The last decree touching this problem comes from a Burgundian council of 673–5, whose other decrees suggest a desperate attempt to retrieve basic standards in a deteriorating situation.72 It is not until the high Carolingian period that legislation again provides evidence about the proprietary church.73 But before the early Frankish legislation fades out, charters and testaments have begun to mention churches as heritable and negotiable property.74 In 573 the aristocratic Gallo-Roman cleric Aredius and his mother Pelagia dispose by testament of property—mainly to St Martin of Tours and to Aredius’s own monastery set under St Martin’s protection—which includes ‘a house and oratory’ of 67 Arles 524 c. 4; Auvergne 535 c. 4; Maˆcon 581/3 c. 10; or by pleading his service: Paris 614 c. 5 (ibid. 43–4, 106, 225, 276). 68 Orleans IV (541) cc. 7, 26 (ibid. 133, 139). See Imbart, Origines, 185–6; Schubert, Staat, 12–14; Scha¨ferdiek, ‘Heilige’, 133. For other relevant Gaulish legislation see below, pp. 66, 74–5; for a thorough 69 survey, Scha¨ferdiek, op. cit., 127–33, 135–6. See Fouracre, ‘Work of Audoenus’, 78–9. 70 Chalon c. 14 (Conc. Gall. 511–695, 306). De Clercq gives inplere and consecrare in the active, but passive makes better sense (Mansi X. 1192). This c. does not require founders to convey churches into the bishopric’s property, as claimed by Semmler (‘Mission’, 847 n. 9). See Scha¨ferdiek, op. cit., 136–8. 71 Below, pp. 74–5. For archpriests, Griffe, ‘Paroisses’, 57. 72 Saint-Jean de Losne c. 9 (Conc. Gall. 511–695, 315–16). 73 But see below, p. 790, on Frankish church and magnates seeking papal guidance on the matter, 746–7. 74 For the increasing use of written records of property transactions see McKitterick, Carolingians and the Written Word, 62–9, and for the Franks especially, 69–75.


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St Hilary, ‘with other buildings, lands, woods, meadows, pastures, and arable, with all its property, as it is possessed by us at this time’.75 But it is not until the late seventh century that churches begin to be regularly listed among the pertinences of villae, along with woods, mills, and fisheries. In 694 the abbot of Saint-Denis acquired part of the villa of Hodenc, ‘along with the churches built there’, in return for paying a large fine for the donor’s father Ibbo;76 and in 680, away in the south-west, the monks of Moissac acquired for a large sum of gold a mass of property in the Cahors and Toulouse regions from Nicetius and his wife Irmintrude, including six churches belonging to villae or vilari (one of them bought by the donors from another proprietor, perhaps to round off the estate).77 Other proprietary churches in the seventh century were not pertinences of large estates but substantial estates in themselves, like Aredius’s oratory earlier. An instance from central France in the 630s is Eustadiola’s church of SainteLizaigne, which she gave with its pertinences of free and serf men and women, millers, meadows, vineyards, and arable, to the monastery she had built in Bourges.78 But the best-known example comes from the Saar valley, where the immensely rich deacon Adalgesil or Grimo, from a leading Austrasian noble family,79 left in his testament of 634 extensive lands and vineyards to the bishopric of Verdun, including the castrum of Tholey ‘where I have built places of saints’—a church or group of churches (evidently including a baptistry), close to the centre of what may have once been a large Roman estate.80 This, ‘with the clerks serving there, with all its property as possessed by me at this time’,81 was to become the property (in suo iure et dominatione) of Verdun.82 Verdun was not to be asked for any census by the bishop of Trier on the grounds of his having dedicated ‘those holy places . . . at my request’, except in payment for baptismal chrism (though for that, thirty-one gold coins).83 Grimo had not only limited the diocesan bishop’s claims on Tholey to the rock-bottom one of providing chrism, but may, 75 Pardessus no. 180. It reads as if their whole share here (Sisciac) had been used to endow the oratory, which itself had remained theirs. See Nonn, ‘Testamente’, 27–8; Debus, ‘Studien’, 12–13 and no. 18. If the 572 donation by Aredius and his mother to the monastery of Vigeois is authentic (loc. cit. and no. 19) they could dispose of six other churches along with other possessions de rebus propriis. 76 DMerov. no. 143: ChLA XIV no. 578 (Hodenc-l’Eveˆque, dept. Oise). 77 Pardessus no. 393 or (better) HL II Pr. 4 (preserved in a 10th-c. copy, in the archives of dept. Tarn-et78 Garonne at Montauban). See index: Eustadiola. 79 Much discussed; see esp. S. Corsten, ‘Rheinische Adelherrschaft im ersten Jahrtausend’, Rheinische Vierteljahrsbuch, 28 (1963), at 107–12; M. Werner, Lu¨tticher Raum, 37–59. 80 Initially a collegiate parish church, not (as later) Benedictine (Heinemeyer, Erzbistum, 126, 129–30). Remains of Grimo’s church have been found under the present one, on the site of the Roman villa’s baths (ibid. 121–6 and plan 127). 81 Grimo as a deacon may have ruled the church and clergy himself, but not necessarily supporting it from his own resources without having endowed it (as Heinemeyer, op. cit., 128, 129). 82 Grimo was almost certainly a member of the Verdun clergy (Werner, Lu¨tticher Raum, 36–7; generally on the testament, 31–7). 83 Levison, [‘Testament’, in] Aus rheinischer Fru¨hzeit, 124–36 (text); 121, 136–8 (authenticity).

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by inviting that bishop to consecrate it, have determined its being in the diocese of Trier at all.84 Bishops themselves, by now largely Frankish or Burgundian nobles, had their own churches by inheritance or private foundation. In 696 Ansbert bishop of Autun distributed most of his property between his cathedral church and the basilica of Saint-Symphorien, including in what he gave the latter an oratory of Saint-Leger (his own chosen burial-place) with extensive property that he had given it. Most of this is carefully specified as having been given to him or acquired by him—he is free to give it because it is not part of common family property. One villa, however, was part of his inherited ‘alod’: here he cleared his way to giving it by exchanging his share of another villa against his brother’s share of this one. These shares were evidently entirely at his disposal, presumably because he was childless. He had, however, an unmarried sister, an ancilla Dei, one of those women who took the religious habit but stayed in their own homes,85 with a claim to maintenance by her family or to a temporary allocation of family property. What Ansbert chose to give her was not only what remained of his own inheritance, with free disposal of it for any pious purpose, but also the use for life of everything he had given to the two great churches, including the oratory of Saint-Leger, making her responsible for its lights, masses, and alms.86 Giving his property to God did not prevent him from using it to do his family duty, indeed probably made it easier. It will already be evident that most of the record evidence for lesser churches being treated as private property comes from the act of giving them away; and from this time on to the twelfth century, in swelling numbers and over most of western Europe, countless charters make donations of lesser churches or shares in them exactly as they do of estates in land. Typically a preamble, short or long, sets out the general reasons and scriptural support for making such benefactions— awareness of past sin, the fleetingness of this life, hope set on laying up treasure in Heaven; then comes the disposition: ‘I, so-and-so’ (or ‘we’), ‘wishing to give something of my own’ (or ‘of my inheritance’ or ‘of our own goods’), ‘donate, transfer and grant’ to God, a saint or saints and a great church, ‘for the remedy of my soul’ (and whatever other souls the donor has at heart, or needs to take into account), ‘a church of my property’ or ‘of my inheritance’, or ‘my alod, namely a 84 Ibid. 120; Heinemeyer, op. cit., 131–4. Semmler’s view (‘Mission’, 848–9) that Grimo’s donation to Verdun rested on the Orange ruling for bishops’ extradiocesan churches (above, pp. 15–16) is overlegalistic. On Tholey as the first known Frankish Eigenkirche and Grimo as a paradigm of the great Frankish landlord as church-owner, see Scha¨ferdiek, ‘Heilige’, 139–40. 85 See Paris (614) c. 15; Edict of Clothair II c. 18 (Conc. Gall. 511–695, 279, 285). 86 St-Symphorien, 5–9 (with introd. p. xlviii): extracted for Saint-Symphorien from something just short of a Roman testament (Chevrier, ‘Dećlin’, 9 and nn. 4, 9); an early instance of women’s role in family memoria.


29

church’ (identified by dedication and place), ‘with all its pertinences’ (the kinds variously listed); ‘in entirety, from my right into your right and dominium’; often reserving usufruct for life, or (what comes to the same thing) giving the church after the donor’s death or that of his wife or a son; finally anathematizing any of his heirs or anyone else who tries, quod absit, to remove any of the donation. With regional variations, these are the same terms as are used for recording gifts of villae, curtes, mansi, mills, or vineyards; and often a church is given along with these things, or as itself a pertinence of a villa. There is nothing in the Frankish charters to invite speculation about churches as simultaneously co-heirs and objects of possession; these churches appear simply as the latter.87 The donations do not mean that founders thought they ought to hand them over to ecclesiastics. Often it is clear that the donors are not the original founders but have inherited the church or their share in it. The powerful Gundoin and Chrodoin families and their connections were early benefactors of the monastery of Wissembourg,88 and what they gave it in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, out of their growing wealth as colonizers between Saar, Moselle, and Rhine, included several churches and shares of churches built by their ancestors.89 To one of these, Nordulf in 714 gave his third of the villa in which it lay90 (transforming the church from a pertinence of the villa to a part-owner of it); at the same time he gave his moiety of the church thus newly endowed to Wissembourg, putting it into the monastery’s mundeburdium or defence, and laying down the conditions that the monastery should provide chrism and a priest, and that no outsider should baptize or celebrate mass there without the abbot’s and monks’ leave:91 the bishop is not mentioned at all.92 In 717–18 Chrodoin confirmed to the monastery extensive possessions including two churches with whatever he or his ancestors had given them (including lesser churches ‘and the clerks serving there’, along with ‘lands, holdings, houses, fields, meadows . . . mills, woods, bondsmen, waters, and water-courses’), all of which he got back in usufruct 87 That a church could be a co-heir in Frankish law appears in the 818–19 capitula ‘to be added to the Leges’ (i.e. to Lex Salica and Lex Ribuaria, see Wormald, Making, 47–8), c. 6 (Capit. no. 139). Broadly, should the donor pro anima of possessions to a church die before he and his co-heirs have divided their inheritance, the co-heirs are to do this, treating the church as one of themselves (the difficult passage that follows is taken by Schultze, Seelteil, 52–7, as belated evidence for a Frankish free share); but this donor is not envisaged as the church’s founder (reference to the property entering the church’s ‘immunity’ indicates an existing great church). Meanwhile for the childless, a substantial church could be its founder’s appointed heir in a Roman-type testament. 88 Ewig, Trier, 122. On these groups see Halsall, Settlement, 14, 50–3. 89 From 699 (Wissembourg no. 223). This cartulary is exceptional in its coverage of early donations. For the Frankish background—a widespread nobility in extensive kindreds, establishing lordship over local settlements, and not yet hierarchized under more powerful nobles—see Le Jan, Famille, 9–11, 109–16. Giving churches away may reflect changes (ibid. 48) and associated political tensions. 90 91 Probably Edesheim, near Landau. Loosely modelled on monastic privileges. 92 Wissembourg no. 41. Semmler (‘Mission’, 859) suggests that monasteries such as Wissembourg, capable of overseeing pastoral work, could almost displace bishops.

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for life.93 A few years earlier, in separate but almost identical charters, two brothers, Samuel and Benedict, gave each his portion of two churches inherited from their father Chroccus, one of them built by their grandfather Chramnoald.94 Other Austrasian Franks had churches to dispose of by this time. Among the dozen ‘noble Franks’ who gave archbishop Willibrord the possessions that he eventually bestowed on Echternach, two laymen and a cleric each gave him a church with its pertinences, in the old Frankish region of Toxandria near the mouth of the Rhine.95 The church at Flonheim in Rheinhessen, given to the new monastery of Lorsch in the 760s, may have belonged to the Frankish donor’s ancestors almost from the time of their conversion, since it overlay ten richly furnished burials going back to perhaps 500.96 An important difference (not always clear-cut or obvious), touched on already, is that between what may be called ‘estate’ churches and independent or selfsufficient ones. The churches handled in Merovingian charters seem mostly to be of this latter kind, whereas estate churches are mentioned only now and again as pertinences. But by about 800 estate churches will appear as commonplace items of the fisc in Charlemagne’s Capitulare de villis, and soon in staggering numbers in the land registers of Frankish monasteries;97 while Carolingian legislation is geared mainly to such churches, built for existing villae, modestly endowed if at all, and served by a dependent priest, perhaps a serf.98 Even in Merovingian times these were probably always more numerous in old Gaul than churches that we see individually more clearly, given away with their endowments as landlordly entities in themselves.99 The church-owners of Merovingian Gaul included members of the senatorial aristocracy, from Aredius before the Franks were fully in the picture, to Nicetius a century later with his Frankish- or Visigothic-named wife.100 In England however 93

Wissembourg nos. 194, 196, 227. His donation was disputed (or renewed tenure claimed) by two of his sons or nephews, who on conceding it got part of it back in benefice (ibid., nos. 196a, 197, 257). Such transactions undermine Dette’s argument that the omission of churches from cc. 1–25 of Wissembourg’s Liber possessionum (ed. Dette, 20–1, 79–80) implies their having no economic value for their lords, as he claims was the case before the 818–19 legislation (basing on this his terminus ante quem for these cc.). 94 Wissembourg nos. 234 and 237 (712. The donors’ names look monastic; for another monk part-owning a church cf. Gundoin’s son Ermbert, no. 205). Other early proprietary churches, inferred from later charters, are Milz, founded by an ancestor of Emhilt who founded the nunnery (Gockel, ‘Verwandtschaft’, 48–53); St Lambert’s, Mainz, held c.800 in at least seven shares, one having itself eight co-owners (Lorsch nos. 1966–74). 95 Echternach no. 39 (Willibrord’s ‘testament’, 726); cf. nos. 1, 34. On these donors see M. Werner, Lu¨tticher Raum, 139–58; Costambeys, ‘Aristocratic Community’, 39–62. 96 Lorsch no. 940 (765–7); Heinemeyer, Erzbistum, I 66–73, based on H. Ament, Fra¨nkische Adelsgra¨ber von Flonheim in Rheinhessen (Berlin, 1970); on the regional context Innes, State, 33–4. For other early churches associated with rich burials, see below, pp. 104–5 for an inscription naming the evidently 7th-c. founder, Crodoald, of a stone church at Glons, Werner, Lu¨tticher Raum, 94–7. 97 98 See esp. Pol. Irminonis, passim. Below, pp. 439, 464, 466, 519–20, 530–1. 99 100 Estate oratories are the chief matter of relevant Gaulish legislation. Above, note 77.


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there was, so far as we know, little or no survival of Roman-British landlords and not much of the Church;101 but there is some sparse evidence of Anglo-Saxon nobles before the end of the seventh century building what could be modest oratories for their families and dependants102 (one step up from the ‘habit of the Saxon people’ of setting up a field cross on nobles’ landed estates, to pray at or be buried near, perhaps under some kind of shelter like the roof of an open barn).103 Bede describes miracles performed by John bishop of Hexham on two separate occasions when ‘called to dedicate a church’ by landholding nobles, Puch and Addi;104 what rights in land such a noble would have is problematic,105 but whatever he had in land, house, and barns he could have had in a church of his own building. Theodore’s Penitentials envisage the abuses of pagan burials at Christian churches, probably founders burying their parents or relations; and of the timber of churches being reused for secular purposes such as barns or sheds, probably by someone who regards it as his property.106 Later, legislation was necessary to try to enforce the diocesan bishop’s authority over rural churches, and even his right to consecrate them rather than some wandering bishop invited by the builder.107 There is a lack of relevant charter evidence in seventh-century England; although charters appear in the last third of the century they are royal only, and they do not make or record gifts of existing churches or estates with churches.108 By contrast, in south-east Wales, with no Germanic settlement to dilute or overlay its Roman past, the charters extricated by Wendy Davies from the murky depths of the Book of Llandaff, perhaps going back into the sixth century,109 convey churches like any other property to what must have been the greater monasteries of the region;110 and although these too are all kings’ charters until c.700, this is likely to be due to the difficulty (however explained) of others besides rulers making alienations of land,111 rather than to their not having churches that were in some sense their own. Already about 660 a church was given by a king ‘with the consent and gift’ of a named ‘heir’ or holder, a land- or church-holder 101 For Christian survival see C. Thomas, Christianity in Roman Britain; Bassett, ‘Church in the W. Midlands’, 13–28; J. Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, 10–34. 102 Blair, Church, 70–1, 75, 118–20. See also Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity, 246–7 (literary evidence for private oratories but not for local priests); R. K. Morris, ‘Church in the Countryside’, 47–55 (small, flimsy, local churches perhaps numerous quite early). 103 Vita Willibaldi c. 1 (MGH SS. XV. i. 88). See Addleshaw, Pastoral Organisation, 11. 104 Bede, HE V. 4 and 5. See Blair, op. cit., 119–20; Mayr-Harting, Coming, 246. 105 See below, pp. 154–6. A dependent question is in what sense lords could endow their churches. 106 Penitentials, II. i cc. 3, 4, 5; other canons, c. 5 (C&ED III. 190–1, 211). 107 Chelsea (816) cc. 2 and 11 (C&ED 580, 584). See Bo¨hmer, ‘Eigenkirchentum in England’, 336–7. 108 Also lacking is archaeological evidence for ‘founder burials’ as in 7th-c. Francia (note 96, above). 109 But on the 6th-c. dating see Sims-Williams, review article, JEH 33 (1982), 126. 110 Including the bishoprics (Davies, Early Welsh Microcosm, 139–44, 154). 111 Ibid. 50–2, 62–4; ead., ‘Land and Power’, 10–21.

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with hereditary right;112 and in the eighth century kings’ grants are outnumbered by those of other laymen, giving churches like any other property.113 Most were given with a king’s consent or guarantee; one of these was first bought from a king for two horses, a hawk, and a hound, valued between them at thirty cows—a transaction such as is found for some non-ecclesiastical estates, evidently with a view to having something capable of being given away.114 Most were given by single individuals; but that family property-rights are in the background is suggested by one donation of a church made by four brothers together, and another with the consent not of the king but of ‘Ceredig and Iddig the sons of Rhydderch, and their kindred’.115 The churches given are variously called ecclesia or podum (a cell, a small monastic settlement) or by a Llan- name: so-and-so’s holy place.116 Almost all are given ‘with their land’ or ‘with land round about’, amounting to a small or middling lordly estate;117 suggesting churches self-sufficient rather than serving a landlord’s estate (these begin to appear later: a villa or a castellum ‘with its church’).118 Saints’ Lives, place-names, inscribed stones related to early Christian sites,119 can all suggest more about early Christianity among postRoman Britons than these brief charters from one corner of Wales; but only charters can tell us, here as elsewhere, that laymen and others could already dispose of their churches as property.

112

Ead., Microcosm, 44 (and Calendar no. 143); ead., Llandaff Charters, no. 143. Ead., Microcosm, 58–9; Llandaff Charters, nos. 175, 180b, 186b, 187, 199a, 200, 201, 206, 211b. See also Huw Pryce, ‘Pastoral Care’, 58–9: density of churches in S.E. Wales suggests exceptionally ‘early 114 fragmentation of territorial units’ into estates. Davies, Microcosm, 51–2. 115 Ibid. 54–5, citing Llandaff Charters, no. 205 (c.708); ibid. 199a (c.750). 116 Ead., Microcosm, 37–8, 58–9, 122–3. Davies perhaps distinguishes too firmly between ‘churches’ and ‘monasteries’ (pp. 134–8), attributing too much significance to the title abbas (pp. 125–6). 117 Ibid. 32–4. 118 Ibid. 122–3. 119 See esp. C. Thomas, And Shall These Mute Stones Speak? Post-Roman Inscriptions in Western Britain (Cardiff, 1994). 113

2 A new stage: Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy, mid-eighth to mid-ninth century

In the course of the eighth century, when charter evidence for dealings with churches is still sparse for Francia and England, it becomes abundant and sharply detailed for the Lombards and the Bavarians, before and after they came under Frankish rule, and for the Alemans, neighbours to the Bavarians, already under it. Different as were the Bavarians and Alemans from the Lombards, they had in common that their gradual and patchy conversion from paganism or Arianism was quite recently more or less completed, and that they lived in societies with strands of strong late-Roman tradition including the recording of transactions in writing.1 Both sides of the Alps, what emerges most clearly (leaving monasteries aside) is the family- or priest-owned church whose endowment constituted a selfsufficient estate.

2.i. Bavaria and Alemania By the time St Boniface established organized bishoprics in Bavaria there were already many rural churches, belonging variously to the Agilolfing dukes and to greater or lesser nobles. Most were probably simple wooden buildings with only a stone altar; some were built beside earlier burial-grounds or over an individual grave.2 The Agilolfings had large numbers of churches to give to the new cathedral church of Salzburg; duke Odilo endowed the new monastery of 1 On written record as characteristic of late Roman Vulgar law, and increasingly preserved by the beneficiary (6th c. onwards), see Classen, ‘Fortleben’, 16–54; McKitterick, Carolingians, 62–9. 2 See below, pp. 104–5.

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Niederaltaich, in 741, with ‘the chapel in the villa Walhinesdorf with nine mansi . . . the chapel in the villa Elirespach with seven mansi’.3 These look like estate churches (though well-endowed ones), in the hands of a large-scale landlord. But alongside them and more fully documented, above all in donations to Freising,4 are churches that individual priests, laymen, or women built and endowed with land that was at their disposal.5 For such foundations there is also place-name evidence:6 not only were churches often named after a founder or owner (Bernwin’s church, Walter’s church),7 but the village itself is often named after such a church (Walpertskirchen, Rappoldskirchen), perhaps because the whole settlement belonged to the church or grew up after it was built—suggesting that it was not an estate church but one endowed with a tract of newly cleared forest, its building an important step in a colonizing enterprise.8 Some of these founders were dependants of the duke’s who needed his leave to use their land in this way; ranging perhaps from holders of ordinary benefices to people with some informal proprietary right in ducal forest land.9 But most Bavarian church founders were noble or fully free owners of alodial property.10 The same is true of the closely related Alemans, revealed as church-owners by their donations to St Gall.11 What they gave to the churches they built was wealth and power at a landlord level: houses, barns, serfs, tenants, arable, pasture, meadows, woodland, orchards, watercourses, cattle. Sometimes it is described simply as so many serfs, which probably includes the land they occupied; it might include land waiting to be cleared and settled, but much was already developed and under landlord exploitation.12 3

Notitia Arnonis and Breves Notitiae, ed. Losˇek (or in UB. Salzburg, I. 1–52), summaries of ducal gifts to Salzburg, composed c.790 and c.799. 4 Die Traditionen des Hochstifts Freising, ed. Bitterauf. See Geary, Phantoms, 87–8, 93–6, on Cosroh’s work as copyist. 5 The documents normally speak of building and endowing (here ‘founding’ for brevity). 6 Stutz, ‘EKvermo¨gen’, 1233–4; Bauerreiss, KG. Bayerns, I. 87; Sto¨rmer, Fru¨her Adel, 68–9 (referring to work of K. Puchner, 1960–1). 7 For Alemania cf. ‘Hupold’s cell’, ‘Wisirich’s cell’ (below, at notes 27, 30). 8 Cf. the rival churches at the villa Albina (Oberalm), founded before mid-8th c. by bp. Virgil of Salzburg and by the priest Ursus; Virgil’s evidently used for collecting revenues from a developing settlement, Ursus’s built to defend his competing claim to these (see index: Oberalm). See Wolfram, ‘Libellus Virgilii’, 197–8; H. Bachmann, ‘Studien zur Entstehung der in der Notitia Arnonis genannten Kirchen Tirols’, MIO¨G 81 and 82 (1973–4) for linkage of Eigenkirche and settlement. 9 The homines fiscalini who had given three churches to Chiemsee, distinguished from a fourth church given by noblemen (Freising no. 193a, account of 804 dispute), might be free, land-possessing inhabitants of fiscal forest (see Wickham, Land and Power, 162–7 on central Italian gualdi). Cf. Bavarian councils of 800–3, c. xxx/25 (MG Conc., I. 211) on churches belonging to Charlemagne’s tributales. For benefices (e.g. Freising no. 13, 759) see Stutz, Benef., 198; Sto¨rmer, Adel, 16–22. 10 On noble and free (overlapping, not identical) see Sto¨rmer, Adel, 13–23. 11 Citations from Wartmann’s UB St Gallen follow Borgolte’s revised dates, Subsidia Sangallensis, I. 323– 459. On St Gall’s records, unique because the monks preserved hundreds of originals instead of making cartularies, see McKitterick, Carolingians, 79–126; ChLA II, p. vii. 12 Freising and St Gallen, passim, for characteristic lists of pertinences. See Fastlinger, Wirtschaftliche Bedeutung, 30–2; Gutmann, ‘Soziale Gliederung’, 88, 159–72, 178–83, 185–209; Sto¨rmer, Adel, 118–25, 136–40.

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

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Most of these nobles, even if not individually great men, seem to have belonged to powerful families with widely spread possessions.13 When a noble (priest or layman) endows his church with ‘all his property’ (not merely all of it in a particular place), or gives a church away as ‘all his property’, it may be only his share of a much larger family property belonging to his brothers and cousins; or only what has already been allotted him (leaving him still with a share in other as yet undivided property); and of that, if he has sons, probably only his own free share.14 Nonetheless such a church and its endowments may be the greater part of the livelihood of a priest who both owns and serves it, or of a pair of brothers (one or both a priest), or an uncle and his deacon nephew. Early in the ninth century two priests, Albune and his nephew Engilfrid,15 gave to the monastery of Scha¨ftlarn ‘everything they had’ that their fathers Werinpreht and Reginpreht (father and son presumably) had left them: that is, the church at Reginprehtshusen with its house and other buildings, serfs, tenants, lands, and stock.16 Long before this, in duke Tassilo’s time, Albune had tonsured Engilfrid—presumably making him his assistant in the church—and had ‘given him his (Albune’s) own inheritance’, though he still appears as co-owner; perhaps he had made Engilfrid his heir and restored common property in what had once been divided between himself and Engilfrid’s father. The church was not in fact all that they had: there was other property at Reginprehtshusen, of which each gave his part not to Scha¨ftlarn but to Freising.17 But Engilfrid gave his part (eight serfs and ‘other land’) only post obitum, and was given Albune’s earlier donation in benefice; his livelihood seems to have been concentrated in this place and its church. In 842 the priest Oato’s ‘whole inheritance’, inventoried when he gave it to Freising, consisted of a basilica with its vestments, plate, bells, and books, its courtyard, house, and barns, tenanted arable, meadow, and wood, the tithes from nine villae, and another church without tithes.18 In both cases, as almost always, we hear of the church at the moment when it was given away.19 Such gifts, especially to the bishoprics, were often made at the foundation of the church; it was consecrated, endowed,20 and given there and 13 Founders were not as narrowly drawn as Fastlinger held (Bedeutung, 10–20), i.e. mainly from the five kindreds or genealogiae singled out for higher wergilds (see Sto¨rmer, Adelsgruppen, 90–163; id., Adel, 46–51, 90–1); but probably few or none were of ‘small’ noble families (ibid. 24, 128–30). This conclusion stands whether the genealogiae were clans or inheritance communities (as Murray, Germanic Kinship Structure, 99–108). 14 See above, pp. 21–2; Lex Baiwariorum i. 1 (MGH Leges, V. ii. 268–9). On ‘whole inheritance’ as misleading see Sto¨rmer, Adel, 128–30, 372–3. 15 16 Nepos here is probably ‘nephew’ rather than ‘grandson’. Scha¨ftlarn no. 13 (c.800–20). 17 Freising no. 508 (824). 18 Ibid. nos. 652–4 (Bergkirchen). For Alemanian owner-priests, St Gallen nos. 20 (757), 362 (?837), 365 (837). 19 On the documents see Fichtenau, ‘Carta et Notitia en Bavie`re’, Moyen Aˆge, 69 (1963), 112–20; id., Urkundenwesen; on a wider front, Classen, ‘Fortleben’, 36–40. 20 Or in reverse order (Stutz, ‘EKvermo¨gen’ 1206–9, 1216–21).

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Beginnings

then to the bishop for his cathedral church. But the founder almost always retained possession for life, either by making the conveyance take effect at his death, a gift post obitum reserving use and potestas (full control of the property),21 or by reserving usufruct, or by getting the bishop to grant it back as a benefice (a loan or temporary gift, such as could be made of any landed property).22 Some foundations were made by a group, pooling resources or reassembling divided family property, often with the explicit intention that one priestly member should serve in the church and live by it, even when it was given to the bishopric. A church built by Adalfrid (a priest), Rihheri, and an unnamed ‘religious woman’ received its site from Rihheri and its endowment from the woman (one-third of her alod immediately, the rest at her death). After its consecration all three gave it to Freising, and the bishop commended it to Adalfrid.23 Adalfrid’s own contribution (unless it was plate or vestments) may have been towards the building: timber, or serfs’ labour, or even his own. Oazo built a church at Rottbach with his wife and daughter; he and his daughter, an ancilla Dei, made the altar with their own hands (either building it with stones, leaving a hollow for relics, or shaping and moving a single stone).24 But it was his son Meiol who about 791 joined with him in giving all their joint inheritance to the new church and giving the church post obitum to Freising, with a reservation for any one of their kinsmen who might be in priest’s orders. Another kinsman, the priest Tutilo, added to the endowment a chalice, paten, and sacramentary, more serfs, all his acquisitions of land, and his own share of his paternal inheritance—or what remained of it; for Tutilo, Oazo, and Tutilo’s brother Cozzilo had already endowed another family church, at Rettenbach, with all their own inheritance there (in Oazo’s case explicitly his free share: ‘after I have divided with my son Meiol’).25 It need not however be a priest to whom such a church was reserved or re-granted, though it might be a future priest: in 772 a young clerk Sindilo gave to Freising an oratory at a place called Sindilinhusir (Sindlhausen), founded by himself, his grandmother, his mother, and his ‘master’ or teacher, reserving food and clothing for himself and the right, should he live to be ordained priest, to serve there under the bishop’s authority. In 774 Onolf and his wife, whose only non-celibate son had been killed by robbers, gave their inheritance to a church they had built and the church to Freising, but reserved its usufruct for their own lifetimes and that of their clerical son Hrodoin; should Hrodoin become a priest 21

22 e.g. Passau no. 19 (the priest Alto, 788–9). Below, pp. 531–3, 744–5. Freising no. 80 (776–8). Cf. Passau no. 39 (791–804, two brothers). 24 Cf. the priest Hunperht who ‘cut out an altar of stone’ at Biberbach (note 100, below); and the couple founding the church at Enknach (note 45, below) who ‘made it with their serfs’. 25 Freising nos. 144, 143 (c.791); see below at n. 63. On the two churches’ founders see Stahleder, ‘Bischo¨fliche und adelige EKn des Bistums Freising’, I. 156–7. 23


37

he should ‘possess the aforesaid patrimony and pray there for his father, mother, and brother, but subject to the episcopal potestas’. A nobleman Ortlaip was a monk (probably a widower) who had kept his private property: having founded a church before 748, he gave it with his abbot’s consent to Freising in 772, reserving usufruct for himself and if necessary his daughter.26 In the same way Alemans giving churches to St Gall often kept possession for more than one life (paying a small census meanwhile), and without insisting on the next holder’s priesthood. The priest Dancharat in 802 reserved his church after his death to a kinsman of his choice, then to a further kinsman of his successor’s choice. By 855 the priest Hupold could give his church of Hupoldescella reserving possession to his sister, his brothers’ sons, and all their male descent as long as it lasted.27 Other donors kept for their dependants not usufruct but some claim to support: a supply of wheat and oats for a niece, in 817; a generation earlier, a count’s widow’s request that two nuns, ‘whom I have fed and who have diligently served about me’, might continue to live there in God’s service and the monks’.28 This widow Waldrata, who gave her church (or perhaps only a widow’s share in it) with her sons’ consent,29 had probably lived a quasi-monastic life there. The same may be true of Wiserich, evidently a layman but with his own cell Wisericella to give, and without heirs or dependants. He kept (in 817) for his own life not only usufruct but the right to grant the church to someone else in return for feeding him (presumably someone who would work the land or get it worked); alternatively he might decide to enter St Gall, but even then he was to keep ‘free power’ (libera potestas).30 Yet another condition sometimes found is that the church should never be granted in benefice, on pain of being claimed back by the donor’s nearest heirs.31 Where the church belonged to laymen, or women lay or religious, they would need to put in a priest; and in Bavaria the appointed priest is certainly found as well as the owning or benefice-holding priest. The three founders of a church at Furholzen ‘endowed it with their inheritance and then with the bishop’s counsel put in the first priest’.32 The church might then be given away over his head: in 775 a clerk and his wife gave their church, ‘which the priest Heripalt holds’, to 26

Freising nos. 51, 65, 50 (for Ortlaip’s abbot see Stahleder, ‘EKn’, I. 137). St Gallen no. 169 (fragmentary); no. 474 (with no. 470). Hupold’s sister was to pay only 4d. p.a., his brothers’ sons 1s. See Schwarzmaier, Ko¨nigtum, 28 n. 82. 28 St Gallen no. 225 (the donors themselves kept usufruct); no. 85 (778–82). 29 One son, Waldpert, also participated in the traditio of ‘whatever we seem to have in that place’, keeping his own share by precaria. On the family see McKitterick, Carolingians, 102–3. 30 St Gallen no. 222 (817). 31 Ibid. nos. 155 (?799), 311 (826–7), 365 (837). The object may have been to keep it accessible to requests by the family, or simply protective, to forestall exploitation by the Frankish conquerors (or later the bishop of Constance). On the background in Alemania see Sprandel, St Gallen, 17–27, 31, 46–52. 32 Freising no. 286 (notes on the church’s history. See Stutz, ‘EKvermo¨gen’, 1233, 1241). 27

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Freising; the widow Kepahilt, who gave her oratory to Freising in 769 and took it back as a benefice for life, presumably had a priest in it, though—having founded it (with her son’s consent) with all her personal property—she probably lived off it herself.33 Occasionally a priest is in some sense given with a church.34 But such allusions are rare compared with those to noble and often rich priests who appear to be serving their own or their family’s churches. In Alemania, St Peter’s Fischingen belonged in 722 to two laymen and was served by a dependent priest Macanradus, who gave to the church and its lords all his own acquisitions— perhaps received as offerings—in lands, vineyards, serfs, and cattle; but by c.800 its priest Wolfpot was a partner in it, able to give his quarter share to St Gall.35 In several of the Freising records from bishop Arbeo’s time (764–83) phrases are used which claim that the church was put into the bishop’s potestas or ditio to conform with the canons: ‘lest I seem to reject the canons’ or ‘as the authority of elders declares’;36 and very occasionally the site or the whole dos of a new church was given explicitly to the bishop for his cathedral rather than to the altar of the new church.37 It seems that of the bishops of Freising, Arbeo at least had a notion of conforming with the Gaulish and Spanish legislation about the bishop’s potestas and perhaps with the Gelasian rule about the bishop receiving the donatio: rules which had been pressed on the Franks by pope Zacharias38 at the time of Boniface’s influence in Bavaria would be known to Frankish-influenced bishops through canon-law collections,39 and had been somewhat vaguely echoed by their own council of Aschheim (756).40 But for a Bavarian bishop of the eighth century the only real potestas over a church was property-right, and ‘conforming with the canons’ required, in practice, that particular private churches be given to him and his church by traditio (handing over; conveyance).41 The normal procedure for giving away a church at its consecration was to ‘hand over’ its endowment to its altar and then to ‘hand 33

Freising no. 69 (cf. Scha¨ftlarn no. 4); no. 30. It is sometimes unclear (e.g. in Freising no. 234a; Notitia Arnonis vi) whether this was a personal commendation or the transfer, with a church, of its appointed priest. 35 St Gallen nos. 68, 162 (with no. 241). 36 Freising nos. 28 (768), 50 (772); cf. nos. 51 (772, canonica ut declarat norma; 65 (774, similar. We may note that Cosroh says he was instructed not to change anything apart from correcting scribal errors). 37 Freising no. 80 (776–7). See Stutz, ‘EKvermo¨gen’, 1206; Nottarp, Bistumserrichtung, 169. Cf. Meginhart’s traditio of his inheritance simultaneously to St Stephen’s Passau and to the oratory he had built, which he called his ‘heir’ while evidently giving it to Passau with its endowments (791 or 796, Passau 38 no. 34). Below, p. 790. 39 Hispana or Dionysus Exiguus: but not including Gelasius’s rule that founders renounce all rights. 40 c. 3 (Conc., I. no. 10). Cf. bp. Virgil’s conditions for consecrating a new monastery at Otting (see index: Otting). Virgil (749–84) and Arn (785–821), bps. of Salzburg, have been seen as confronting the nobility over Eigenkirchen and Eigenklo¨stern (Wolfram, ‘Libellus’, 204–5), but arguably most disputes were over particular churches to which Salzburg had a proprietary claim. 41 See Hartmann, ‘Zustand’, 417–19 (suggesting also that bishops encouraged church-building). 34


39

over’ the new church and its possessions to the cathedral (often by putting the altar-cloth or bell-rope into the bishop’s hand),42 a pattern already emerging in the 750s.43 The whole transaction implies that the church is a piece of property from the first,44 its founder’s to give away; and often the gift was made only after a generation or more of private ownership.45 The Freising documents allow the donors to speak consistently of ‘our church’, ‘a church of our inheritance’ or ‘property’;46 and when in 821 bishop Hitto tried unsuccessfully to get Friduperht and his seven co-heirs to give him their new church before its consecration, it was for ‘their shares’, their eighths of the church that he asked.47 Any ‘campaign against the Eigenkirche’48 as bishop Hitto’s motive for having the Freising traditiones copied by Cosroh is highly implausible.49 Cosroh said simply that Hitto wished to preserve the memory of the cathedral’s benefactors (memoria in the rich liturgical sense)50 and to safeguard the cathedral against loss or theft of its charters.51 Many recorded gifts to the bishopric reserving usufruct were not of churches at all; while churches were given as readily to monasteries as to bishoprics.52 That a church is at its founder’s disposal does not entitle him to dismantle its property; he has formally endowed it with property which is inalienable by church law, and by his dotatio has committed himself to keeping this intact. But to endow a church is not to alienate property from the family; the property may indeed be kept (if the church itself is kept) more firmly than would otherwise be possible. Its sacred quality protects it against predatory outsiders; its dedication to a particular end, the maintenance of a church and its functions, protects it against partition—not against being owned in shares, but against actual partition with its tendency towards estates too small for efficient exploitation.53 The Aleman Vurmher, for instance, his brother having died, held in 799 his father Hufo’s separated inheritance of everything except the family church, in which he had 42

Stutz, ‘EKvermo¨gen’, 1199–1206, 1222–4. Freising no. 7 (754, earliest surviving record of a Bavarian private foundation): ‘I Timo . . . have built a church’, endowed it, and given ‘whatever belongs to that place’ to Freising; ibid. no. 13 (759), Adalunc’s foundation of an oratory where what is given is explicitly the oratory itself. Cf. Scha¨ftlarn no. 11 (785). 44 See Stutz, ‘EKvermo¨gen’, 1221–30, 1238–40. Bishops’ litigation with laymen about churches has the same implication. 45 e.g. St Mary’s, Enknach, founded 739 by nobles whose descendants gave it to Passau only in 803 (Passau nos. 2, 57a, 57b). Cf. ibid. no. 39 (791–804); and Ortlaip’s church (above, at note 26). See Sto¨rmer, Adel, 370–1; Stutz, ‘EKvermo¨gen’, 1204, 1230–3. 46 Ibid. 1234–6. Oato’s basilica (above, at note 18) is the first item in the inventory of his proprietas. 47 Freising no. 442 (they did jointly give the church after its consecration). 48 As Ratzinger, Forschungen, 504–5. 49 Hitto himself shows more concern to secure a minimum dos for new churches (below, p. 440) than to get them given to Freising: his pressure on Friduperht and his co-heirs seems exceptional. 50 This was an important purpose of cartularies (Johanek, ‘Rechtliche Function’, 145–52; Molitor, ‘Das 51 Traditionsbuch’, AfD 36 (1990), 82–6; Geary, Phantoms, c. 3). Freising, I. 1. 52 e.g. Scha¨ftlarn nos. 4, 11, 13; Mondsee nos. 58, 85, 110; Freising no. 336 (see Sto¨rmer, Adel, 372); and see 53 See Gutmann, op. cit., 174–6. below, pp. 80–1. 43

40

Beginnings

Hufo’s share: ‘whatever his father Hufo had received as his share from his consortes and left to his own heirs to share.’54 Vurmher gave it to St Gall for his dead brother’s soul; but some Alemans gave property to the monastery expressly excluding their church or church lands:55 this might be what they most wished to keep (and not merely for its economic integrity). The cost of attaching land to a church was that some at least of its rents and produce must be used to maintain the building, lights and equipment, assistant clergy, and priest. Fabric and lights are genuine expenses;56 but the priest is often the very member of the family whom the estate is intended to support, while his deacon may be a nephew and intended successor.57 And their ordination as deacon and priest gives them a personal status and security corresponding to that of the property; the priest’s ordination might have been made to the ‘title’ of his family church.58 So the church might be used to endow not so much a branch of the family as a stream, trickling down from one priest among a group of brothers or cousins to his nephew or cousin in the next generation; though for evidence of this happening over several generations we have to turn to the Lombards. But if, as with almost all the Bavarian churches whose history survives,59 the church is sooner or later given to a monastery or cathedral, the security and livelihood of a son could still be secured, probably even more firmly.60 For if the intention is that the estate should remain intact in one hand, it may well be more secure against pressures from brothers, nephews, or cousins if it is not alodial property but held as a benefice, or kept in usufruct having been given post obitum. The estate is managed and exploited exactly as before; only the legal title to it is different, a small census is perhaps due from it, and any ban on the holder’s alienation or waste comes from outside and may be explicit,61 instead of depending on the family’s respect for its own church’s endowment. At the same time the priest’s status may be strengthened by his association with the cathedral clergy; even his consecration as priest could have been contemporaneous with, perhaps conditional on, the traditio of his church. At the end of the eighth century the priest Tutilo held in benefice the church of Rettenbach which his kinsmen had founded and given to Freising; some of his co-heirs ‘wished to expel him’, but were ‘unable to do so because he had been confirmed and appointed62 by 54

55 St Gallen no. 155. Ibid. nos. 94 (781), 117 (788), 189 (806 or 884). These churches would not have the immunity that might pay for lighting in a more important church (Fouracre, ‘Eternal light’, 68–72). 57 See Stutz, ‘EKvermo¨gen’, 1237 n. 4; Fastlinger, Bedeutung, 37–8. 58 Gutmann, ‘Gliederung’, 243; see below, p. 520. 59 An exception may be Auuicozeshusir (below, at notes 96, 99). 60 See Gutmann, op. cit., 177–9, 242–4. 61 e.g. Freising no. 11: ad augendum et emeliorandum, non in nullo comminuendum. 62 ordinatus: as usual in this period, not meaning simply ordained to priest’s orders though normally including this. 56


41

canonical authority and with the consent of his kinsmen’; royal missi gave judgment ‘that Tutilo should have potestas in everything concerning the oratory and whatever belongs to it as was originally decided, and after his death it shall remain firmly with the cathedral’.63 An earlier foundation and gift of a church were explicitly made out of concern for the founder’s young son: in 758 Haholt, badly wounded and fearing for his life, called on bishop Joseph for advice ‘for the consolation of my soul and the benefit of my son Arn’; on this advice he built a church, got the bishop to dedicate it, and gave it, along with all his own inheritance there, to Freising, with the consent and participation (‘putting their hands to it’) of Arn and other kinsmen, provided that Arn could keep it in benefice for the rest of his life.64 It is not clear whether this foundation took the whole property including Arn’s share, making him totally dependent on his benefice, or whether it took only Haholt’s free share or only his property at that particular place, so that Arn would still have something to inherit.65 But the former seems to be implied in Haholt’s later confirmation when he made an ‘offering’ of his son to the cathedral and with him ‘the whole of our inheritance . . . whatever belongs to us now and whatever we may accumulate or acquire . . . for our souls’ salvation’.66 To the ‘offering’ of Arn by his father corresponds the occasional self-surrender of an adult—the traditio of himself and his property to a church; a formula combining in varying degrees a personal submission to service and a search for security.67 A priest Helmker in 784 had ‘built a house of God . . . outside the villa called Munninpah in my own and my fathers’ inheritance, and I have handed myself over to it to the service of God—myself and with me everything that was my property’, except six serfs (kept possibly to be freed for his soul’s sake). Here is a kind of symbiosis: Helmker owns the church and so is able to give it post obitum to Freising, but the church symbolically owns him.68 To give oneself to one’s own church seems, however, very rare.69 It is less unusual to give oneself with one’s church (or other property)70 to a cathedral or monastery, as the priest Engilhart gave to Salzburg ‘himself and his church with everything he had’ at two places, presumably becoming one of the cathedral clergy and as such serving his church,71 just as Haholt meant his oblate son to do. 63

Freising no. 143. Ibid. no. 11; see Stutz, ‘EKvermo¨gen’, 1195–6. This Arn is the future abp. of Salzburg. 65 Propria hereditas or res can mean the free share (Schultze, Augustin und der Seelteil, 31, 45–6, 53; Gutmann, ‘Gliederung’, 174–5) but is sometimes clearly distinguished from it, as in Freising no. 19 (below, 66 p. 162). Freising no. 11 (from postea . . . ). 67 See Fastlinger, Bedeutung, 38–40; Bitterauf (ed.), Freising I pp. lxv-viii; more generally Orlandis, Estudios, 219–26. 68 Freising nos. 118, 119. Munninpah is Singenbach (Sto¨rmer, Adel, 129–30). 69 See below, pp. 51–9, for Lombard examples. 70 e.g. Scha¨ftlarn no. 20 (806); Freising, II, index, tradere seipsum. 71 Breves Notitiae xviii. 8; cf. Mon. Boica, VIII. 363–4; Passau, no. 19 (788–9). 64

Beginnings

42

In a wider context ‘conveying oneself ’ could be anything from formulaic piety to a starving man selling himself into serfdom; sometimes it was a surrender of independence, made for security and clerical status, such as the self-offering in 818 of a 20-year-old clerk Isanhart, along with everything his father had left him— three serfs and their holdings—because his brothers had kept him out of his share.72 Nobles with a church to dispose of, like Engilhart or Helmker, were a long way from the edge of destitution: Helmker’s church had houses, lands, and serfs in four different settlements, and these must have represented only his portion after dividing with his son.73 But both in founding a church and in giving it to the bishopric, even a rich man might be hoping to obviate for a while the dangers of partible inheritance that had sunk smaller men; and the occasional selfsurrender formula might help to clinch this by stabilizing his relationship to the church he held and served. Even magnates might in a crisis take cover not from economic risks but from confiscation, by giving themselves, their lands, and churches to a great church; as did the Aleman Beata and her son Landpert during the Frankish conquest of 744–5.74 None of this means that either founding a church or giving it away would be done without believing, at both stages, that one was giving up earthly possessions and laying up treasure in Heaven. The legitimating quid pro quo for such gifts was the redemption of one’s soul; and the occasional implication that donors had had to be persuaded of this (by bishop Arbeo in the 770s or Hitto fifty years later)75 does not seem to be merely formulaic. But it was possible to have the best of both worlds. In 860 the Aleman priest Hupold, giving his church and other property to St Gall while reserving usufruct, explains himself as ‘wishing to preserve my possessions and desirous of obtaining from them present benefits and, still more, of buying with them future and eternal rewards’.76 A noble could found a church and give it away as an act of both piety and prudence, with a view to security for himself and his wife or a celibate son or daughter; or he could, presumably, found it and keep it, with rather less security, for his own or his brothers’ descendants. But to choose the former was not in practice to give up all prospect of the latter (indeed later it might not be necessary even to choose: Hupold in 860 could reserve possession for all his brothers’ male descendants). A benefice could be renewed for the next generation or for collaterals. A priest Minigo who had given his church to Freising in bishop Atto’s time came in old age to bishop Hitto, both to renew his gift and to get it in benefice for his nephew and namesake;77 and two brothers called off a plea 72 73 75 77

Freising no. 403 (818); it may have been this transaction that made him a clerk. 74 See Sto¨rmer, Adel, 129–31. Below, p. 116. See Sprandel, St Gallen, 18–21, 28–33, 41–2. 76 Above, pp. 38, 39. St Gallen no. 470 (see above, at note 27). Freising no. 477 (822); and see below, pp. 532–3.


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against Hitto for the church their father and brother had given, when the bishop gave it them as a benefice.78 So the cathedral on its side could not be sure of ultimate possession without getting the gift renewed or confirmed, ‘since the mind is ephemeral, light, and inconstant’.79 Hitto had the traditiones copied expressly to preserve the knowledge of them when the originals were lost or stolen—stolen sometimes by the cathedral’s own clergy,80 perhaps holding churches given by their fathers. Adalun, holding an episcopal church in Hitto’s time, could plausibly (though unsuccessfully) claim that it was not the bishop’s but ‘his own inheritance as to half, and a beneficium dominicum (benefice from the fisc) as regards the other half ’.81 So benefice or usufruct could slip back into hereditary possession, and it might be the benefice-holder who undermined his father’s, uncle’s, or grandfather’s gift of it to the cathedral. But it was more likely to be other heirs, excluded from enjoyment of it by the founder’s arrangements, who disputed either the endowment of the church or its traditio.82 It is not that a man could actually disinherit his sons by his pious donations. Probably all he could give on his own was his acquisitions, or his portion after his sons had taken their portions.83 A gift of the whole family property to God was probably made only by a childless couple, or a couple whose only child was committed to celibacy (like Onolf’s surviving son Hrodoin).84 The rights of sons who might be born in the future could be—perhaps would have to be—safeguarded: Ellanmar founded an oratory and gave it post mortem to bishop Hitto provided that he and his wife had no son in the meanwhile.85 About 843 the magnate Adalhart built a church of St Verena at Strassberg, endowed it with almost all his property inherited or acquired, in Alemania and further down the Rhine in Francia, and gave it to St Gall with careful solicitude for the church’s future and the continuance there of God’s praises and of prayers for the dead. However, he kept not only possession (for a 78 Freising no. 364 (816); cf. no. 358 (816, two brothers had claimed partial potestas in a church as being 79 ‘partly built on their inheritance’). Ibid. no. 105a. 80 81 Ibid. I. 1–2 (Cosroh’s foreword). Ibid. no. 466 (822). 82 Perhaps only wanting credit for an ancestor’s gift; but in 849 (ibid. nos. 703a/b) a priest Erchanfrid (of the Huosi) renewed a traditio made by himself in 836 (ibid. no. 609) and subsequently denied (see below, p. 779) note 16. 83 Or a father and one celibate son might give their shares before partition, leaving the rest to the others. The father’s share was probably equal to each son’s (as with the Lombards). Dingolfing (c.770) c. 6 (Conc. II. 95), that any noble could give inherited land to a church if he wished, probably assumes that he gives only what is fully his own; as above, note 14, and perhaps Lex Alemannorum i. 1, 2, ii. 1, 2 (MGH Leges, V. 1, 63–7; 8th c. with 7th-c. origins, Wormald, Making, 35). The Lex Alem. was however perhaps asserting total freedom to give to the Church, in the face of initial resistance even to the free share, by heirs expecting the father’s share to revert at his death. See Schultze, Seelteil 28–32; Hartung, ‘Adel, Erbrecht’, 424–7. 84 Above, at note 26; cf. Passau no. 34. But even a childless couple’s gift might disappoint remoter kin. 85 Freising no. 391 (818). Cf. reservation of shares for unborn sons in endowing the monastery of Scharnitz (below, p. 162).

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Beginnings

small census) but the right to buy back the property, for himself (within nine years) and for any legitimate sons or daughters living to be 12 years old. The redemption was to be made out of the seven holdings (hobae) he had kept back: two to redeem the traditio of St Verena’s to St Gall, three to redeem the endowment of St Verena’s itself.86 The rights of heirs who had gone abroad, but might return to claim their patrimony, could also be reserved. Bishop Hitto and his sister Cotesdiu built a church, endowed it with their evidently undivided inheritance at Haholfeshusir, and in 815 gave it to Freising; Cotesdiu’s daughter Heilrat (who had a clerical son)87 took part in the common traditio; but Cotesdiu had already, separately, given her dead son Kernand’s share for his soul’s remedy, provided that if any child of Kernand’s came back from Italy and claimed it he should have it without question.88 Co-heirs in a large family might, however, be content that a church founded with a father’s free share be used to provide for one celibate son or daughter if this left more for the others; while if it was relied on to provide for one family member after another indefinitely, intact and undivided, the others could make the most of their alods, their land-clearance, any benefices they could get, and perhaps adventures abroad in Carolingian service; a family could simultaneously consolidate and expand. But such a church might well come to be owned in shares even if for a generation or two it had constituted one son’s share; or shares might result from a joint foundation, either pooling property formerly divided or giving an as yet undivided estate, as Friduperht and his seven co-heirs may have done to create their shares in their new church.89 Such shares could in turn be united for the benefit of a single owner; thus around 780 several kinsmen pooled their shares in an existing church for one of them to make a post obitum gift of it to Passau: ‘I . . . Cundalpereth, priest, and my brothers and other kinsmen Kerfirid, Hrodhelm, and Husito, have given the church of St George into my hand’ (as one of the partners he himself takes part in the pooling); ‘and I with them have given that church to the altar of St Stephen’ (they still have background rights and must take part in the traditio); ‘and it shall be in my hand while I live, and after my death shall be firm to the altar of St Stephen.’90 Some single founders, on the other hand, evidently hoped by not using any inherited land to obviate any possible claim by their kinsmen: the priest Tarchnat’s oratory at Swindahha was endowed in 775 with whatever land of his 86

St Gallen no. 386. See Borgolte, ‘Gedenkstiftung’, 596–7, on St Verena’s role in keeping the family’s memoria, with St Gall to safeguard this. 87 Named Hitto and educated at Freising; the church was destined for him after his grandmother’s death if he did well and took priest’s orders, as agreed by bp. Erchanbert in 845 (Freising no. 674). 88 Ibid. no. 352 (815). 89 Above, at note 47 (Friduperht himself, however, gave a mansus vestitus, presumably his own). 90 Passau no. 8 (774–88).


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own he had won (presumably by land-clearance) or bought.91 For wherever family lands had been used there was room for dispute or doubt. Certainly the foundation or the gift to cathedral or monastery might have been for the economic good of the immediate family, by relieving pressure on its other resources. But it might also represent an escape from the larger family by the smaller—an attempt to benefit oneself or one’s son at the expense of one’s nephews and greatnephews; or even among sons to favour one.92 The excluded heirs might sooner or later claim shares in the church and so dispute its traditio to the bishop, or its sole enjoyment by their kinsman, or both. The ‘men called the Mohingara’ whose ancestors had (probably) given shares in the church of Biberbach to Freising ‘wanted to remove it from episcopal power . . . and tried to get it as their own inheritance’ (around 807); a religious woman and her layman brother claimed as their paternal inheritance a church in fact given long ago (as the missi adjudge in 802) to the bishop by a nobleman; the priest Tutilo’s co-heirs tried to expel him from the church of their foundation which he held in benefice from the bishop.93 It could happen that the legitimate possessors of the church were laymen or women whose rights were challenged by a priest kinsman: the religious woman Engelburc and her mother complained to bishop Hitto in 828 that they were being pushed out of their inheritance, a church that they had given to Freising, by their nephew, the priest Wicher; the bishop confirmed it to them for life for a very small census (three denarii) and ordered Wicher ‘not to pray in that church without their licence’,94 in effect only as their appointed or invited priest, not as owner nor even co-heir. A bishop might need to inquire into the likelihood of an endowment or a traditio being disputed by kinsmen; in 819 Hitto inquired of the founders of an oratory whether anyone else had any claim ‘or even dominatio’ in it.95 The possession of a church not given away might be disputed within a family, perhaps because it was not always clear whether a priest held it on behalf of his consortes as undivided family property, or as his own inheritance after partition. Or this doubt might arise a generation further down, between a priest and his brothers on the one hand, claiming the church as having been their father’s, and their cousins claiming shares in it as having been common property since their grandfather built it. In 791 there was a dispute within the great Huosi clan about St Martin’s church at Auuicozeshusir, where two of the co-heirs, Hiltiport and Egilolf, had tried ‘to get the church into their dominion, throwing out their 91

Freising no. 68 (Schwindau or Schwindach). Cf. ibid. no. 262. See Hartung, ‘Adel’, 424–6 on the breakthrough that made this possible through pious donations, 93 and on resulting disputes. Freising nos. 235 (see note 100, below); 183; 143 (above, at note 63). 94 Ibid. no. 562. 95 Ibid. no. 421 (819); see Stutz, ‘EKvermo¨gen’, 1210. Cf. no. 634 (839), bishop’s inquiry whether a donor was competent (potenter potuisset) to give his property anywhere pro remedio animae. 92

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co-heirs’, who were Ejo the priest, his brothers Isangram and Erchanpercht, and Cunzo and his sons (with other kinsmen on their side in the background). A family council failed to reach agreement; Ejo was sent to consult the bishop, who sent them all before royal missi. After three days’ dispute, sentence was given that Hiltiport and Egilolf must return the church (where they had probably set up their own priest) to Ejo (as serving priest) and his co-heirs, and return also two-thirds of its property, that is, renounce two-thirds since their own legitimate share was only one-third; ‘and the other conmarcani on the other side did the same’, that is, presumably, renounced any claim to the others’ third. Finally they all assembled at the church and carried this out, Egilolf and Hiltiport accepting Ejo as priest ‘for the third part’—that is, as far as their own share was concerned.96 What the charters show us in all this is plans made for individuals by their parents or other close kin, and resulting tensions between individuals and their relations, or between smaller and larger family groups. Is there room in the background for noble kindreds or genealogiae with a common interest lasting for generations in a church sited at the heart of their lands, hallowing or perhaps hallowed by their ancestors’ graves, and intimately bound up with their status as nobles? Something of the kind is suggested by the complex unearthed at Epolding-Mu¨hlthal, with its three successive burial-grounds near the church, single burial under it, and hole for a tall, free-standing pole nearby.97 Only a few of the numerous rural churches of Bavaria could have this significance for a large kindred; but many others may have mattered to its local branches, for burial and memoria.98 That even a genealogia could have a live common interest in a church is clear from the Huosi’s consultations about St Martin’s at Auuicozeshusir; but it was only half-a-dozen of them (with their sons) who had negotiable and litigable rights in it.99 Only with ‘the men called the Mohingara’ do we encounter what sounds like a kindred or an extended family collectively claiming a church; but the phrase may be Cosroh’s 96 Freising no. 142. See Stutz, ‘EKvermo¨gen’, 1231–2, and Benef., 200; Stahleder, ‘EKn’, I. 131 and 165–6 (no. 111 and note), rejecting the identification as Haushausen. 97 Sto¨rmer, Adel, 112–14, 366–8, from Dannheimer, Epolding-Mu¨hlthal: Siedlung, Friedhofe und Kirche des fru¨hen Mittelalters (Munich, 1968). Two of the graveyards are earlier than the (early 8th-c.) church; so probably was the pole, which Sto¨rmer suggests was the object called a handgemal (ibid. 98–105, 115); but see index: handgemal. The church being of stone suggests its importance to a powerful family; yet the priest Waltrich could give it to his foundation (Scha¨ftlarn no. 1a) which then superseded it as the family centre. 98 In 793–4 two brothers gave meadowland to St Lawrence, Maisach, because their father was buried ‘in the church’ (Freising no. 167); the church is not described as theirs, but perhaps he founded it and gave it to Freising. Otherwise there is little or no record evidence of founders’ burials (Sto¨rmer’s idea, Adel, 143, 152, of deliberate dispersal of a great family’s burials among numerous Eigenkirchen is entirely speculative). 99 Above, at note 96. In Alemania, Borgolte (‘Gedenkstiftungen’, 599–600) sees the church of Marchtal as founded by a Sippe, the Alaholfings; but those completing the foundation and giving it to St Gall (776, St Gallen no. 81) were only the founder’s two sons, with wives and children, and two nepotes (probably sons of deceased sons).


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shorthand for several individual brothers and cousins.100 It may be true that there was a misfit between the individualist Roman legal language available for writing charters and the assumptions of those who wanted them written; but this language itself could adapt, often oddly but usefully;101 and the misfit cannot have been severe, or no donations would have been made, no benefices accepted, no lawsuits pursued. In fact, these individual or small-family donations of lesser churches were part of an extraordinary flow of property to great churches in this region and period,102 such that a case has been made for an overall ‘structural’ explanation of it. Wolfgang Hartung proposes that the dangers of partible inheritance had reached a critical point, threatening not just prosperity but noble status itself; that giving property to the Church pro anima and getting it back in usufruct was the only way (quite recently made available) to avoid its partition and to favour one heir while excluding others; and that remedium animae was therefore ‘only a secondary motive’.103 Taking the whole range of things given to the Church—lands to churches, lesser churches to greater—over a short period, this conclusion might seem to be justified by sheer volume. But it exaggerates the ‘dangers’ of partible inheritance (as distinct from the need for flexibility), while artificially separating remedium animae from family needs and social relationships. Looking in detail at dealings with churches suggests more varied and complex interests,104 and motives as usual far too mixed to be rankable. For Freising at least, the flow of churches ended earlier than that of other property (itself suggesting different considerations at work).105 Donations—as distinct from exchanges—of churches came to a virtual end after 825;106 donations of other things gave way to sales only after about 850.107 This is a question within the larger problem of cycles of gift-giving and the dropping after two or three generations of related strategies for stabilizing family property.108 In Bavaria this phase may have ended both because of new economic opportunities (as Hartung argues), and because the associated liturgical and social needs had for the time 100

St Martin’s Biberbach (above, at note 93). The noticia (Freising no. 235) is headed ‘Agreement between bishop Atto and the men called the Mohingara’, perhaps an instance of the genealogia as an inheritance community (above, note 13); but the notice itself refers only to ‘those who had endowed it’ contesting and conceding the bishop’s possession. Two more recent individual donors were probably Mohingara, including the priest Hunperht (ibid. nos. 234a and b). See Sto¨rmer, Adel, 49–50 (also 47–9 on 101 Fagana and Feringa). See Classen, ‘Fortleben’, 26–8. 102 Churches constitute about a fifth of all donations (and certainly a higher proportion of their total value), 744–830 (Hartmann, ‘Zustand’, 417: larger proportion at first, smaller later). 103 Hartung, ‘Adel’, 421–32, 435–8; cf. Jahn, ‘Tradere’, 411–16. 104 For instance the thesis sits uncomfortably with the reservation of property (not just a prospect of usufruct) for unborn or absent sons (above, at notes 85–8), implying that something of value has been, 105 otherwise, renounced. Hartung and Jahn do not distinguish churches from other possessions. 106 Only two more, in 830. 107 Hartmann, ‘Zustand’, 417–19; cf. Passau, Regensburg, and (less markedly) St Gall (Sto¨rmer, Adel, 108 374–7, 380). See Wickham, ‘Rural Society’, 532–3, and for 11th-c. Italy id., Mountains, c. 7.

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being largely been met (as argued by Matthew Innes for the middle Rhineland).109 But this leaves unexplained the different timing for churches. A possible explanation in Innes’s terms might be that the strongest of those needs, eliciting the earliest response, had been the transfer of responsibility for memoria from lesser churches to great monasteries (among which, in Bavaria, were the cathedrals such as Freising); or, more simply, that those who took the lead in giving were those rich enough to have churches to give. Hartmann suggests that churches ceased to be given because of changing ideas, responding to recent Carolingian and papal recognition of the Eigenkirche;110 but this assumes a previous uneasiness about owning churches, of which there is no hint among donors and no convincing evidence for bishops. Bishops may however have become less zealous about maintaining their own stock of churches, being willing to alienate as well as acquire them by exchange; and this could bring churches back to the laity, as in 845, at the beginning of the run of Freising exchanges, when bishop Erchanbert gave to a layman Hitto, in return for property elsewhere, a church and all its large endowment ‘for his own’.111

2.ii. Lombard Italy The richest evidence comes from the Lombard kingdom in Italy, especially Tuscany.1 By the early eighth century the Lombards were Catholics, and the restored bishoprics had begun to have churches given to them;2 so it is mostly from cathedral archives that we learn of the existence of numerous private churches, mostly new, some perhaps built by Arian families now Catholic.3 Because Lombard churches often brought to their final owners not merely a donation charter but a series of charters from the past, we learn more than in Bavaria of their history in private hands; and more too of their founders’ declared intentions, often both more explicitly (if formulaically) religious and more overtly 109

Hartung, ‘Adel’, 436–8; Innes, State and Society, 40–50 (part of an excellent multifaceted explanation of the flood of property to the Church); see below, p. 180. 110 Hartmann, loc. cit.; for the legislation see index: Aachen, legislation 818–19; Rome, council 825. 111 Freising no. 671. 1 Pre-Carolingian kingdom (to 774): CDL I and II; royal diplomas, III. Duchies of Spoleto and Benevento (to 787): ducal diplomas, IV. i and ii, private charters, V. For post-774 the two largest collections are the Lucca Memorie (hereafter Mem. Lucc.) IV and V, and the Farfa Regesto. Most examples in this chapter are Tuscan (and those mostly from Lucca). 2 An early example may be a monk Gauderis’s subjection of his foundation at Lucedio to Vercelli, confirmed by Aripert II, 707: see Schneider’s proposed reconstruction, ‘U¨ber eine langobardische Ko¨nigsurkunde’, NA 46 (1926), 8–10. But removing a further interpolation identified by Bru¨hl (CDL III no. 8) would eliminate any actual donation. 3 Feine’s work, ‘Studien zum langobardisch-italischen Eigenkirchenrecht’, I–III, is indispensable.


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geared to the family. There were oratories or oracula served by a single priest; churches perhaps barely larger but with a few clerks living a more or less common life; little domestic nunneries, perhaps a widow and her daughters in their own house; or mixed households, varying with family circumstances.4 A clerk Guntelm founded a church in 771 to be served by one priest, if possible a son of his, while ‘if my daughter Rachiperga wants to live in the sacristy by the right wall of the church, she may be allowed to’.5 Any clerical or religious household might be casually called a monasterium.6 It might have a xenodochium to look after, dispensing alms to the poor and hospitality to pilgrims, especially in Lucca on the route to Rome.7 It might grow into a substantial monastery living under a Rule, though it was more likely to remain small or shrink to a single priest; Lombard founders sometimes made arrangements for the future that turned on whether or not the monastery were to grow.8 Some founders were important nobles or rich merchants.9 Many however were middling or obscure: members of the kind of ‘village e´lite’ explored and evoked by Chris Wickham, or town-dwellers who were rural landowners;10 and many private churches were in towns or suburbs, while endowed with agricultural land and dependants. Of country churches some, especially in Latium and in the north, were landlords’ estate churches, pertinences of new or old curtes or of castles;11 many of these were built by rulers or other great landlords; some may have survived from Roman times. But most private churches, in town or country, were separate economic entities, small estates in themselves, providing a gentlemanly livelihood (with a surplus for alms and hospitality) for a priestly owner and his family, or for an appointed priest. The Lombard church-owner, like the Bavarian, is often himself a priest, and more explicitly than the Bavarian expects his future heirs to be priests or to have priests among them; if not, he appoints the priest—‘ordains’ him, in the sense of putting him into an office.12

4 e.g. Regnolf’s, Ursus’s, and Ratpert’s foundations, below, at notes 24, 45, 53. On the smallness of 6th- and 7th-c. churches in Italian towns see Ward-Perkins, From Classical Antiquity, 58–61; on the modest wealth (by Frankish standards) of most landowners, Wickham, ‘Aristocratic Power’, 160–1. 5 6 CDL II no. 254; cf. no. 178. See Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 12, 19–20, 42; Nanni, Parochia, 11–12. 7 e.g. S. Silvestro, 720; S. Columbano, 729 (CDL I nos. 24, 48). See Schwarzmaier, Lucca, 33–4. 8 e.g. a domestic foundation by two sisters in Verona (745, CDL I no. 83; cf. Mem. Lucc., IV. i no. 92; V. ii no. 231. 9 e.g. the founders of S. Columbano, Lucca (note 7, above; see Wickham, ‘Aristocratic power’, 164–5); Fridulus the merchant founder of S. Dalmazio (776; Mem. Lucc., IV. i no. 83). 10 Wickham, Mountains, c. 2, esp. 40–51, 56–8. Founders were not necessarily ethnically Lombards (on ‘fusion of Lombard and Roman’ see id., Italy, 64–71). 11 Toubert, Structures, esp. 857–9; Settia, ‘Pievi’; below, p. 90. For an exceptionally welldocumented middling landlord in Lombardy see Ross Balzaretti (Ph.D. thesis, UCL, 1989; now The Lands of St Ambrose) on Toto of Campione, who seems in founding a xenodochium to have transformed his oratory of S. Zeno from a modest pertinence of his central estate into a massive beneficiary of its olive-oil 12 production and arguably title-holder of all his property (see below, n. 35). See index: ordinare.

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This ordinatio by laymen appears in the records of the 715 dispute between the sees of Siena and Arezzo, referring back into the seventh century.13 Lombard foundation formulae often adhere to Roman forms for conveying property (both the endowment and the altar-site itself ) to an institution capable of owning it (‘I give, donate, and convey to you, church of St N.’, perhaps with a symbolic placing of the foundation charter on the new church’s altar).14 And yet, in varying degrees, they reserve dominium or potestas to the founders and their heirs (at its most explicit, ‘we wish that church with all its possessions to be always in our and our heirs’ power of possessing, governing, enjoying the usufruct, defending, and ordaining a priest to offer masses and maintain the lights’),15 or convey such power to the cathedral church. If there is a difficulty here,16 it may be partly resolved by seeing the church as one of its founder’s heirs, among the Lombards sometimes endowed with the disposable share, the share of an extra son:17 the church owns its own share but within the framework of common family property under paternal authority. It may be kept indefinitely under the potestas of the founder’s human heirs collectively, or of one of them; or if given away, this is like the separation of a son’s share by partition (with the difference that a church will probably be put under some other potestas). To part with a church in this way might be seen as a natural hiving-off of a new household, as natural as the departure of a son when he marries; as opposed to the other, perhaps powerful inclination to hope that the church will remain a core of inalienable and undivided family property. However, if such ideas—fusing or confusing the church’s position as one of the family with its condition as family property—may sometimes underlie the documents, they do not usually break surface: the notarial language of the documents can slip smoothly between treating a church as a property-owning person and implying that it was and would remain a piece of property. S. Agata at Lucca was built by a priest Flavipert on a site that he had acquired himself 13 A priest Mattichis testifies that ‘Ursus the founder ordained me in that church’; Semeris was ‘ordained’ by Willerat and Zotto as priest of their church ‘because I was their serf’ (CDL I no. 19 at 70–1, 14 61–2). e.g. CDL I no. 42 (728); and Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 19 n. 50. 15 Mem. Lucc., IV. i no. 125 (800); cf. ibid., nos. 24 (795), 119 (798), IV. ii. 1 no. 11 (810); less explicit, CDL. I no. 100 (750). 16 See below, pp. 731–2, on Stutz’s and Feine’s view that formulae implying the church’s civil personality either rule out its being its founders’ property or are meaningless. This assumption underlies Borgolte’s legalistic view (‘Bischofsstaat’, 97–100) that many of Feine’s examples were Stiftungen, sharply distinct from Eigenkirchen (see index: Stiftung). 17 Inferred from charters where both the fraction given and the number of sons are known (see below, at notes 81–4); much later, explicit in prince Guaifer’s charter (c.865) making S. Massimo, Salerno, one of his heirs with talem portionem . . . quale unus de meis filiis (below, p. 404). A free share is arguably implicit in Liutprand 6 (713; MGH Leges in folio, IV. 109), allowing a sick Lombard, even bed-ridden (provided he can speak), the potestas of giving pro anima ‘what and how he wishes de rebus suis’, meaning what his children had no right to (see the Liber Paviensis commentator, ibid. 407; cf. 439 and 455 on Liutprand 73 and 113). See Schultze, Seelteil, 41–7.


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(therefore free of family claims). In 750 he gave it its endowment: lands that ‘I give, grant, convey, and offer . . . to God and to you, church of St Agatha . . . founded by me on my own land’. But the church was still his: he kept his power over it, not only of usufruct but of ‘ordaining and doing with it whatever I wish’; he made his brother, the priest Auripert, his ‘heir’ in the church, with the power to dispose of it afterwards in any way consistent with the good of Flavipert’s soul.18 Auripert eleven years later chose to give it to the cathedral of Lucca, excluding any possible claim by his heirs or consortes except access for prayer ‘like any other outsider’ (an echo of the old Gelasian formula);19 but reserving its rule and usufruct for himself and any rector he might meanwhile put in.20 In 768 a layman Alipert and his priest son endowed the church they had built with all their property and with ‘themselves’;21 but it was still ‘our church’, which they gave to the cathedral reserving usufruct and the right to live there for themselves and a clerical nephew.22 Even closer to making the church a person is the 759 charter of a lay founder, Gregory son of Maurice, offering ‘to God and to you’—the church he had built at Asulari—‘myself and all my property’, at the same time making the church his heir (probably sole heir for lack of sons). But he reserved free disposal of some of the land; usufruct, power of almsgiving, power to ‘ordain’ a priest; after his own death this priest to be ‘lord and rector’ for life, and to live there without a woman and feed four pilgrims one day a week; while a boy freed by Gregory was to be admitted to the monastery (here casually so called). Subject to all these conditions, the church was to become the cathedral’s property after the first priest’s death.23 Close linkage of family and church could be made without ‘conveying oneself’. In 765 an ‘abbot’ Regnolf and his son the priest Rixolf founded a church in Lucca with the whole of their substantial property, reserving to Rixolf and his mother and three sisters the powers of usufruct and of ‘living and serving there righteously and chastely’, but not of destruction or alienation. Rixolf undertook to live there with his mother and sisters and rule the church; he kept the disposal of 250 solidi in alms and twelve men to free for his own and his mother’s souls, and the power to appoint a rector after his mother’s and sisters’ deaths. Only when all the family partners were dead was the bishop to have control.24 Another grant of a church to the bishopric not only reserved the church and its endowment for the founder’s son (a priest) and anyone he might choose to succeed him from his 18

Other brothers or nephews could enter to live a regular life, but no women. 20 Above, pp. 13–14. CDL I–II nos. 100, 156. 21 For self-conveyance in Bavaria (but rarely to one’s own foundation) see above, pp. 41–2. 22 23 CDL II no. 222. Ibid. no. 140. 24 Ibid. no. 194. The bishop’s delayed control carried substantial xenodochium obligations (feeding 24 poor men for three days every week). 19

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brothers and cousins, but restricted the bishop subsequently to putting in the founder’s kin if any could be found fit for priesthood; another allowed the bishop no more proprietary right than that of receiving an annual rent of one gold solidus from the founder, his nephews, and their heirs, indefinitely.25 In fact, churches were being given to the bishopric just as any other property might be, retaining usufruct or even hereditary tenure at a rent. There seems to be no such idea in eighth-century Tuscany as some Bavarian bishops apparently had, that getting churches into their hands was a way of implementing the canon law.26 For bishops here, with their diocesan clergy and rich baptismal churches, the gift of a little oratory or household monastery was a fairly peripheral gain,27 and they were willing to consecrate such churches without pressing for their surrender.28 In any case, churches might equally well be given not to the bishopric but to one of the great pievi (parishes),29 or to a substantial monastery.30 At Pistoia at least four local churches were given to S. Bartolomeo at or near its foundation in the 760s.31 One of these, S. Pietro, had been meant never to be subjected to any mother church; but its founder Ratpert changed his mind, perhaps making the best of the fact that recruits and endowments were flowing to the newer and grander foundation, and his own would now never grow. Both prestige and salvation could come from this association: Ratpert not only subjected S. Pietro with its half of his property to S. Bartolomeo, but (having no son and only celibate daughters) gave it another quarter of his property and entrusted its abbot with disposing of the remaining quarter for his soul—a spectacular piece of memorial almsgiving.32 The intention in giving a church away might be to safeguard its own future33 or the functioning of a xenodochium—perhaps in the absence of heirs, or of any but 25 Ibid. no. 179 (764), 285 (773). Cf. S. Dalmazio, Lucca, an old family church given to the bishopric by 816, the donor retaining potestas of ‘ordaining’ his successors, subject to a census of 1 gold solidus (below, note 105). 26 In 800, however, bp. John of Lucca said of a church whose six founders had ‘kept no potestas there for their heirs’, that it had come later into his cathedral’s potestas ‘according to the statutes of the holy canons . . . and Roman law’ (Mem. Lucc., V. ii no. 291, with CDL II no. 258, of 771). 27 Bishops themselves had family churches (see below, notes 30, 97–8; Schwarzmaier, Lucca, 74–87). 28 Founders say ‘I brought bishop John to dedicate it’, ‘I have had it dedicated by bishop James’ (795, 810; Mem Lucc., IV. i no. 24, IV. ii. no. 11). 29 e.g. CDL II nos. 181, 231, 246. This would normally bring it into the bishop’s control, however. 30 Esp. to Farfa (mainly in the duchy of Spoleto). In Lucca bp. Peredeus gave his inherited shares of two churches to the cathedral, but the third church (founded by him on inherited property) to the xenodochium of S. Columbano (below, at notes 97–8). 31 Gaidoald’s foundation charter, 767 (CDL II no. 203); donations by an owner-priest Aiuald and by Guinifrid and his three sons (ibid. nos. 180, 206). 32 For Ratpert’s foundation (748) see below, at notes 53, 58, 81. His extremely complicated final dispositions were recited in a lawsuit, 806 (Manaresi no. 19). 33 Of the two Asulari foundations in 759 (above, at note 23; below, at note 103), presumably competitive, one was given to the cathedral and the other not (CDL II nos. 140, 138): the former may have fared better.


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celibate heirs;34 or to keep it out of the hands of non-priestly or exploiting heirs (a variant was merely to seek the bishop’s or a powerful abbot’s defence).35 But it might be meant simply as a gift to a famous saint, provisions for good government and almsgiving36 being conditions of the gift rather than reasons for it. And finally it might be designed—like any other grant of property—to secure for the donor or his family some immediate security or income;37 but apart from the obvious case of celibate daughters (who might well be safer under a great monastery, with the life usufruct which is all they need), such motives are difficult to establish.38 The piety of the childless or some short-term insecurity, or both, must underlie the surrender to Farfa by Goderisius and his wife of their many possessions in Spoleto including their share of a church, receiving it back as a lease; for he later tried unsuccessfully to reclaim it because he had since ‘made sons’ and they had—he claimed—nothing to live on.39 More complex motives are suggested when a layman Theuderacius left his church to the lifetime potestas of a clerical son, for usufruct and improvement but not to alienate, and afterwards to Farfa and its appointed custodes, who were to maintain worship, give alms, receive pilgrims, pray for the donor, and commemorate an ancestor who gave him the church.40 He provided separately for his wife and daughters (the widow and one daughter ten years later gave themselves and all their property, including two more churches, to Farfa).41 A donor who reserved tenure of a church for his heirs, under a bishop’s or monastery’s lordship, might leave them well placed for many generations; as it seems did the rich priest Gunduald who bought up land in the hill village of Campori and with his two brothers founded a church there, thus marking his family’s dominance in the village;42 he was clinching this dominance, not abandoning it, when he gave the church to the bishopric and later endowed it further, reserving tenure for his nephews and their heirs.43 And even if a founder and 34

Toto of Campione who left his oratory, xenodochium, and property to the abp. of Milan and basilica of St Ambrose (777, Natale I no. 25), retaining his own potestas for life and dying c.810 (Balzaretti, as above, note 11), evidently had no heir. 35 e.g. Gunduald, 780 (below, note 43). But the meaning of defence is not straightforward. 36 e.g. Aiuald, 764 (CDL II no. 180), or Theuderacius, 768 (below, at notes 40–1). 37 In 802 two brothers gave property to Farfa, including shares in two churches, should they not return from a journey to Benevento (Farfa, II nos. 157–8): probably security for a loan for their travel expenses (they were in debt to Farfa in 804, ibid., no. 175). 38 See Wickham, ‘Aristocratic Power’, 164–9: the pattern of donations to particular churches (including the cathedral) points to donors seeking the patronage of the receiving church’s owner (or the bishop); not necessarily indicating increased insecurity as Schwarzmaier (Lucca, 370–2) and Zielinski (Spolet. Pri39 vatsurkunden, 120–1) argue; see Wickham, ‘Institutions’ 24–5). Farfa, II. 153 (792), 154. 40 Unnamed (oddly). 41 CDL V. i nos. 52 (768), 84 (778). Cf. the clerk Hilderic, giving S. Agata, Rieti, to Farfa (786) after partition with his sons, reserving life usufruct for his wife and her daughters, but also burial rights (or obligations: volo ut . . . sepulturas sibi faciant) for his heirs indefinitely (ibid., nos. 101–2). 42 See Wickham, Mountains, 40–4. 43 CDL II no. 285 (773), Mem. Lucc., V. ii no. 179 (780). For the future see index: Campori.

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donor reserved no long-term usufruct or hereditary tenure, his or her name might be perpetuated as at S. Pietro Somaldi and S. Maria Ursimanni in Lucca, S. Maria Senatoris and S. Maria Theodata in Pavia.44 In many of these charters the conveyance (land to a church, or one church to another) seems designed to take effect gradually, the founder’s rights being tapered off. Potestas could be qualified as the power of doing this but not that, of ‘enjoying the usufruct, governing, possessing . . . but not of selling or alienating’; and whether or not he gave his church away, the founder’s power was often meant to be more comprehensive than his successors’. His intentions could begin and end at different points on a long scale. In 722 Ursus founded a domestic nunnery at Lucca for his two daughters, five freedwomen, and servants, his daughters to be successive abbesses, with free election afterwards; he himself kept potestas gubernandi, but his son and heir was excluded from all power except prayer and good works.45 Further along the scale, Gaidoin in 767 founded a church to be as explicitly as possible his outright property in his lifetime, ‘to make ordinatio, and . . . dispose of property and men . . . and do whatever I want with them again’; like some other Lombard donors he kicked against the irrevocability of gifts to the church,46 perhaps seeing its endowment as like a provisional arrangement for a son’s or daughter’s maintenance out of as yet undivided property. But after his death it was to go to any of his heirs who would ‘offer himself with all his property entire to that church’ and be tonsured and serve God there,47 otherwise to a suitable priest put in by the heirs; they could not, as he could, take anything away; the bishop was to supervise their rule.48 Three years earlier Anspald delayed endowing the church he had built (in his portion of a family house in Lucca) until after his death, keeping for himself, like Gaidoin, the power of alienating or reallocating the property supporting it;49 but afterwards the church was to have all that had been his—its site and courtyard, well, gardens, vineyards, fields, meadows, woods, and tenants’ holdings—and his kinswoman Rattruda (ancilla Dei) was to have the power, more restricted than his, of rule, usufruct, and ordaining a rector. The future rector in turn could ordain his successor with the bishop’s consent; after that the bishop alone should ordain and there were provisions against claims by heirs or consortes.50 See Bullough, ‘Urban Change in Early Medieval Italy: The Example of Pavia’, Papers . . . British School at Rome, 34 (1966), 99–100, 114, 123; Ward-Perkins, From Classical Antiquity, 77. 45 CDL I no. 30 (S. Maria, Lucca); but see below, note 56, for its actual future. 46 e.g. Geifrid, 782 (below, p. 56); Goderisius, 791–2 (above, p. 53). See Leicht, Diritto, 294–5. Conversely some donors who might have made revocable wills renounced revocability, undertaking not to nolle quod voluit (below, p. 394 note 7). 47 Here, offering one’s self and possessions means entering monastic life with an entry gift (cf. CDL V. i 48 CDL II no. 204. no. 98), rather than being purely symbolical (see index: self). 49 For actual alienation of some of a church’s possessions by its founder or owner see CDL II nos. 164 50 and 254 (both, however, by exchange). CDL. II no. 246 (770). 44


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Not all these examples of dwindling potestas in a church involved its conveyance, even delayed, to bishopric or monastery. Churches could be founded with provisions against exploitation or alienation by heirs, claims by collaterals, or family partitions, without any plan for ultimate ownership by a great church;51 even positively forbidding it. This might be expressed in terms of the church remaining in iure suo, belonging to itself. Trasoald in 728 used a similar expression in restricting his own and his descendants’ power to alienate;52 but such restriction need not be aimed against the family at all. In 748 Ratpert’s S. Pietro at Pistoia was intended to ‘remain in its own right’; but this meant being under the dominion of himself, his wife, daughter, mother, sister, and their appointed abbot, or of any son he might have who was willing to live a religious life53 (when after all he subjected his church to S. Bartolomeo, up to twenty years later, he must have given up hope of a son).54 Even where the sons’ or heirs’ potestas is meant to be whittled away, in favour of the church’s personality or a freely elected head,55 this may in practice leave a vacuum to be filled by a greater church or by descendants.56 So if as was usual the formulae of dotatio were used, if the church was made its founder’s heir or given some appearance of civil personality, or even if the founder notionally gave himself to it, all this is consistent with the endowed church remaining a piece of private property—part of the property of a family of laymen, or the self-contained patrimony of a clerical family, or the livelihood of a line of priests winding down the generations. Which of these things it was is not always clear, nor was it at the time. The succession could be from father to son: the insistence of some founders on future rectors’ celibacy implies what the sources in any case show, that many priests were married and could hand on their churches to a priest son.57 Yet the one downright assertion of the principle that a son ought to have his father’s church, in Ratpert’s charter for S. Pietro Pistoia—‘if I have a male child he should be my heir according to the law of our people, and he or whoever is ordained here by him should have the xenodochium in his power’—is so qualified as apparently to block any further succession of a son: for the hypothetical son’s succession is conditional on his abandoning the world, presumably adopting the religious and celibate life. Otherwise ‘let him take his portion’, evidently that half of the 51

The documents, however, survive because great churches acquired the titles. sed semper eius ecclesie sit potestatem (CDL I no. 42). This church descended in shares until 859 when a priest having the whole gave it to Lucca (Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 38). 53 CDL I no. 96 (see Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 23–4). Cf. Mem. Lucc., IV. ii. 1 no. 13 (817). 54 55 See above, note 32. As Ursus intended for S. Maria, Lucca (above, at note 45). 56 S. Maria, Lucca, was at Ursus’s great-grandson’s disposal in 800 (Mem. Lucc., V. ii. no. 290). 57 e.g. CDL II nos. 127, 186; Manaresi no. 15. On the variety of attitudes to this see Wickham, ‘Institutions’, 24. 52

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property not used to endow the church, ‘and not be able to exercise any authority in the monastery nor to put in any abbots’.58 There is an implied distinction between the son’s right as a natural heir to his share of the family property, and his claim—on which his father can set conditions—to be ordained as a chosen heir to the control of his father’s foundation. It is not, then, a simple matter of hereditary right. The legal mode of succession to churches was often the appointment of a successor by each successive ownerrector, from the founder onwards: ordinatio by a written transaction, a cartula. This is set out in the clerk Geifrid’s foundation of his church at Brancoli in 782; he ordains one of his three sons, the priest George—‘by this cartula I choose you . . . as rector’; any willing and qualified son or grandson shall be ordained to succeed George with the same powers; ‘and this ordinatio, by this cartula, shall always go on from rector to rector’.59 It was mainly such transactions by ownerpriests that created the series of documents that a church might accumulate before it came into the hands of a bishop or monastery.60 To conserve the record was vital: a priest Deusdona could hope to wipe out his grant of a church to a priest Deusdedit by getting the charter stolen and burnt—stolen by a clerk in Deusdedit’s household who hoped for the church as his reward, and burnt by an obliging Welsh pilgrim who would soon be out of the way. Deusdedit could vindicate his right only by producing the notary and the witnesses.61 By this kind of transfer the church might pass from brother to brother, celibate uncle to nephew, or even to a prospective son-in-law;62 and might well pass to a non-kinsman, or be given to a greater church or a ruler.63 But the pressure of family claims would often be enough to keep it in the family; and sometimes the founder restricted his heir to ordaining sons, nephews, or grandsons.64 The ordinatio of one who was not a natural heir might be seen as the adoption of a son: a priest Bonichis made a clerk Austripert his ‘adoptive son and heir and successor’ (whereas Austripert made his real son his successor).65 A church at Asulari was given by its founder to a priest Adoald, who intended it for his son the 58

CDL no. 96 (748). When he later gave S. Pietro to S. Bartolomeo (Manaresi, no. 19), two daughters ‘who by the laws might succeed him’ were to live in a nunnery subject to S. Bartolomeo, taking with them a quarter of his property (perhaps the quarter given to S. Bartolomeo, seen as satisfying the daughters’ claims). 59 Mem. Lucc., IV. i no. 89 (see below, at notes 67–9). Cf. Crispin’s foundation for himself and son, survivor to have potestas ordinandi (CDL II no. 179); S. Agata, Lucca, above, at note 18. 60 When Magniprand undertook to repay Adeltruda’s 700s. if ever the church came back to him (below, at notes 118–20), he specified also the return of the foundation charter, his predecessor’s cartula to him (Mem. Lucc., IV. i no. 83), his own cartula to Adeltruda (ibid. V. ii no. 186), and the present document (ibid. V. ii no. 187). 61 Manaresi no. 7 (786); see Wickham, ‘Land Disputes’, 116–17 (Deusdona was probably deranged). 62 See below, note 87. 63 S. Pietro Somaldi came somehow from its founder Sumuald to king Aistulf, who gave it to Auripert the painter, he to his brother Ermipert, and Ermipert to the bishopric (CDL II no. 170). 64 65 e.g. Geifrid, Crispin (above, note 59). Mem. Lucc., V. ii no. 189.


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priest Fortes; but Fortes died, which Adoald ‘could not think of without tears’; and in 765 he arranged that the church should go to Fortes’s young child Atripert, in the hope that he would live to be a priest and be able to ordain his successor; failing this, to a nephew already a priest. Adoald died during his grandson’s childhood; the church came somehow into the defence of the bishop, who— probably because of a scandal about Atripert’s mother living with his clerical ‘governor’—turned them all out, but had to restore the boy and the clerk to their use of the church-house and property, while providing a serving priest to live with them.66 Such an ordinatio of a minor was unusual; the nephew priest might well have expected to succeed. Geifrid’s church at Brancoli67 has been traced over an unusually long period as it passed by cartula down the generations.68 A century after its foundation, from the evidence of a family dispute, we learn that Achiprand, a great-grandson of Geifrid’s, had the church, from whom it went to two successive brothers of his, then through two successive nephews to a deacon Luccio and a priest Achiprand. When this Achiprand died, Luccio gave it to two priests, Ursus and Fredianus, binding his heirs not to dispute this. Over fifty years later, in 996, half of the church belonged to a decrepit priest Angalpert, who gave it to another Ursus and another Angalpert; these two (now both priests) were still in possession in 1010 (when a layman sued them for a sixth).69 There was evidently recurring tension at Brancoli between wider family claims and the free transference from rector to rector. This was where problems began.70 If a man with one son or none used his whole property to found a church, he might have brothers or cousins in the background who, if they could not dispute the foundation,71 might claim a say in how it should pass.72 And if a man founded a church for one of several sons, it might later be unclear whether the church had been allotted exclusively to that son and his appointed heirs, or whether it remained common to him and his brothers and all their descendants. Some founders certainly intended collective ordinatio by the natural heirs; foundation charters often make this clear by restricting the rector to rule and usufruct,73 66

CDL II nos. 186 (765), 255 (771, bp. Peredeus’s judicatum; the king had intervened for the family on the 67 Above, at note 59. strength of their charters from Peredeus himself). 68 Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 46, 76–9; Nanni, Parrocchia, 77–8; Violante, ‘Caracte´ristiques’ 90–1, 128–9. 69 Manaresi no. 305. The church came eventually to the bishopric. 70 Cf. S. Martino, Florence, in 10th and 11th cs. (see in index). 71 At Pavia in 762 Alpert disputed his late brother Auripert’s foundation at Pisa because they had agreed to designate each other as heir in the absence of sons. This agreement was judged invalid because not made by the proper formalities, whereas Auripert’s donation pro remedium animae was valid (CDL II no. 163). 72 Guinifrid’s sons explained their alienation of the church they had founded by their having no near kinsmen, not just no sons (above, note 31). 73 e.g. CDL II nos. 145, 165, 204; more emphatic (usufructuare tantum) in Mem. Lucc., IV. i no. 24, V. ii no. 266.

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while conversely the lay heirs may by implication be excluded from usufruct, having only the potestas ordinandi and perhaps defence. But there was often some ambiguity.74 A founder might lay down that the church should always go to any one of his heirs who wished to serve in it, chaste and tonsured—that such a one ‘should have potestas . . . and be dominus’75—but that failing this the heirs were to appoint a priest collectively.76 The founder seems to expect the rector to be almost self-selected. But family decisions must often have had to be made, as to which boy should become a priest, or which of several priestly cousins have the church. Founders seldom provided rules for this (though Gaidoin made it turn on seniority).77 So there was room for doubt and dispute. Brothers or cousins might move in on what was meant to be one priestly heir’s own property; or equally might lose rights they were meant to have, in the face of a long-lived priest—perhaps a married priest, among whose sons the same problems might be reproduced. No doubt to avoid such trouble, a founder Sichimund in 801 made careful arrangements to keep the property in the hands of a single heir, not necessarily himself a priest but able to appoint one. In his own lifetime the church was ‘to be in my potestas, to govern it through a priest and . . . dispose as I wish’; then in the power of his son, a bishop Sichelm, then of his younger son Richimund, a clerk, then of a successor chosen by Richimund. The priest too was to be of the family: Richimund was to ‘ordain’ as priest one of the founder’s grandsons, and Richimund’s chosen successor was to have potestas ordinandi from among ‘our heirs and kinsmen’.78 And so ‘that church of God shall always remain in the potestas of my heirs’, evidently at both levels (lord and priest) and only one of each at a time. These various plans and vicissitudes may arise in part from fundamental problems about gifts to the church. Founders with several sons who built a church for one of them must have used land that they could dispose of without disinheriting their other children—sometimes acquisitions,79 sometimes the extra son’s share.80 Ato having five sons endowed his church with a sixth of all his property, Teutprand with quarters of specified estates (probably his as yet undivided share with three sons); Ratpert used a half, and apparently assumed he would have one son if any; Geifrid, having three sons, used a quarter.81 In this 74

Teutprand’s charter (764; CDL II no. 178) is ambiguous as to the potestas of heirs single or plural, and silent about the future; Guntelm’s (771, above, note 5) specifies common ordinatio but without qualifying 75 the priest-heir’s potestas. Ato founding S. Michele, Colognora, 760 (CDL II no. 145). 76 Explicit in Ato’s charter (preceding note); Guntelm’s, 771 (ibid. no. 254); clearly intended in Gaidoin’s, 767 (ibid. no. 204), and Toto’s, 795 and 798 (Mem. Lucc., IV. i no. 24, V. ii no. 266. On this Toto of Vitoio see Wickham, Mountains, 56). 77 CDL II no. 204. A founder in 817 allowed for ‘one or two’ (Mem. Lucc., IV. ii. 1 no. 13). Sometimes an unlimited number of clerical nephews or grandsons were to be admitted (ibid. IV. i no. 119), but then they 78 would need a head. Muratori, Antiqu. Ital., I. 669–72 (Sta Maria in Vico Alais). 79 80 81 e.g. Guntelm (771, CDL II no. 254). See above, note 17. Above, notes 75, 74, 58, 59.


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way the extra share is made available for one heir—sometimes not yet chosen, sometimes named—in addition, probably, to that heir’s own share, which may itself be added to the church’s endowment. The earliest known case of a church founded on a father’s portion (unusually, divided from his sons’ property in his lifetime) is that founded in 713 at Cassiana by Fortunatus and one of his five sons, the priest Bonoald. Father and son gave themselves and all their inheritance to the church they had built, and made it their heir82—incorporating it into the family, as a public act with the duke’s and bishop’s approval and the other four sons’ consent. What they gave was two distinct kinds of property. Fortunatus specifies what he is giving as certain lands lying near the church, his ‘small portion’ which has been allotted him by agreement with his sons and which he now ‘offers to God and the church of St Peter for the reward and salvation of my soul’; evidently he and his sons have divided the family estates, and his portion consists of identified fields with defined boundaries; this part of the church’s endowment would be separated from the family property like the estate of a man with his own household. But his son Bonoald, presumably childless, gives the whole of his inheritance, his ‘fifth part’ of the remaining property;83 he gives this as a share, because he and his brothers have not yet divided their property among themselves; he describes it as a share of everything except the land ‘that we have renounced into the power of our father Fortunatus’. So part of the new church’s property will consist of a share in the rents and produce of common fraternal property, which it holds in place of one of the sons. After all this has been written down they remember an outlying olive plantation overlooked in defining the father’s portion, and without dividing this both father and sons give their shares of it to the church.84 This church was intended to become a real monastery under an elected abbot, with rights for sons and grandsons of membership but not (supposedly) ownership. But other founders evidently expected their church to be ruled by one son as abbot or rector. In such an arrangement (like Ato’s or Geifrid’s)85 the father’s free share was being used to provide for one son, either in addition to that son’s share (improving his lot by melioratio)86 or releasing it for the others. It might similarly provide for an otherwise ill-endowed daughter, whether for her lifetime income as a celibate or as her marriage portion87—though a daughter who brought her 82

Indifferently ‘the church’ or ‘St Peter’. What Fortunatus had taken out probably represented a sixth of the whole (cf. Auderisius and his five sons, below, note 96). 84 CDL I no. 16. See Schultze, Seelteil, 47–9; Stutz, Benef., 118–19; Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 20–1. 85 Above, notes 75–6, and at note 59; cf. Ratpert’s original intentions (above, at notes 53–4, 58). 86 Schultze, Seelteil, 37. 87 In 801 a priest Aunarus defended his occupation of a church on the grounds that an earlier owner had given it to his prospective son-in-law on condition of marrying his daughter; Aunarus was their son (Manaresi no. 15). Cf. below, at note 113. 83

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father’s church to her husband might in fact be the sole heir. Or founding a church could be combined with providing for a widow, as Cleomnia’s husband gave one-third of his property for her to found a church and live on its usufruct.88 On the face of it such a founder has not meant to incorporate the church permanently into family property. The new church may be expected sooner or later to have its own property separated.89 It needs to be set under the control of a living guardian, a rector; but this control is something the founder can dispose of at will, or at least under his own conditions,90 to a chosen or designated heir (to whom he may or may not give the power of doing likewise). This heir may be named, or may be selected in the future by his own willingness to serve in the church: perhaps this alone picks him out as a specially favoured son deserving of melioratio. So the father’s disposable property may be used at one and the same time pro remedium animae and to endow a deserving child.91 But doing both at once may be not only getting the best of both worlds but also keeping on the safe side of the law, or respecting potentially conflicting norms: protecting a family arrangement by making it a gift pro anima, and protecting a religious foundation by making it serve a family purpose. It is not known when nor for what purpose the extra share first came to be thought of as available,92 nor just how freely available it was, nor how it was related to the principle that family land could only be alienated by thinx (public adoption) or by launegild (exchange or countergift). The grant pro remedium animae, which could be valid without these formalities,93 was perhaps a new, third possibility justified by being in the spirit of the others (adopting Christ or the church as an heir; receiving salvation or prayers in exchange). Fortunatus’s endowment in 713 comes within a few months of Liutprand’s edict about deathbed donations, which suggests that that edict made it possible;94 and yet Fortunatus (doubtless sensibly) sought ducal and family consent.95 Perhaps several possible and overlapping requirements for the 88 CDL I no. 120 (755); she gave up half the usufruct and one-third of her own morgincap to support the priest. Schiaparelli (CDL I. 361) took her to be not Ostripert’s widow but his ancilla (on the strength of Liutprand 95, MGH Leges in folio, IV. 146, on a dominus devoting his ancilla to religious life); but her son named Ostrifusus sounds like Ostripert’s son. 89 On the father’s share becoming disposable even before partition see Schultze, Seelteil, 50–2. 90 As implied by Ratpert (above, note 85). 91 In 806 Cunipert of Hoile at Pulicciano made a post-obitum donation of a campus with a half-built church to Agiprand, the clerk among his three illegitimate sons, in addition to his future portion, as melioratio, with choice of his own heir (Monte Amiato I no. 57); the land and church were probably Cunipert’s own share (he kept usufruct for life). By 812 Agiprand (now a priest) had finished the building and presumably had it consecrated (ibid. no. 72). 92 Its use for melioratio was made explicit (Liutprand 113; cf. Aistulf 13, for daughters in absence of sons) 93 before its use pro anima; but see above, note 17, on Liutprand 6. See Liutprand 6 and 73. 94 See Wickham, Italy, 43, and ‘Institutions’, 16, 18–20, on the evident desire for some freedom to make pious donations. 95 As if to a thinx. See F. Sinatti d’Amico, ‘L’applicazione dell’ edictum regum Langobardum in Tuscia. Considerazioni minimi’, Centro Ital. Cong., 59 (Spoleto, 1973), 755–7.


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alienation of family land were met when, for a start, only the free share was used; when it was used both for remedium animae and for a family arrangement; when the church itself became one of the family; and perhaps when the only or the favoured son merged his rights with the church’s by giving himself to it. However, some foundations created family property more straightforwardly, by agreement between brothers or between father and sons.96 In this case the church itself may be explicitly owned (or given away) in shares from the start; while in more ambiguous foundations this will be the outcome sooner or later, for the founder’s or a later rector’s descendants. Bishop Peredeus might well, as the only priestly heir,97 have treated his father’s two churches as his own; but in his testament he refers consistently to his shares in them, as if his earlier partition with his nephew Sunderad had left them undivided; while he mentions that he has moved one of them ‘to another place, so that . . . that property should be my own portion’, probably extricating it from common property by siting it on land of his own.98 In a shared church the owners are unlikely to intend any actual partition of the land; but each enjoys his share of revenues, or uses it perhaps for his own priest among two or three; and he can dispose of his rights independently,99 so that the halves or quarters of a church may have different legal histories.100 A church at Castiglione in the Garfagnana was founded in 723 by two Lucchese brothers, Aurinand and Gudifrid; as early as 747 Aurinand’s half share had gone to a third brother, Donni, who disposed of it independently, selling it to an important Lucchese who sold it to a married priest Anucard. Anucard somehow got the other half too, for in 768 he gave the whole church to S. Columbano, Lucca, keeping usufruct for himself and his wife (Auriperta presbitera mea).101 The founders had hardly envisaged such a history; their charter has them intend to found a small monastic community where their own sons were to serve, and where later the monks would elect themselves an abbot. Other founders of such churches not only restricted the succession to sons willing to be 96 e.g. CDL II nos. 222, 194 (above, at notes 21–2, 24), and esp. 206 (Guinifrid and his sons, above, note 31). In CDL V. i no. 36 (763), Auderisius seems to count his oratory as shared by himself and his fifth son (giving it, with that son, to Farfa) and as constituting their two-sixths of his whole property, leaving the rest in quarters to his other sons. 97 His father’s foundation of S. Michele (720) had been intended for a son in religious life (CDL I no. 28). 98 Mem. Lucc., IV. i no. 86 (778). Members of the family, perhaps Sunderad’s heirs, still held a share in S. Michele, Cipriano, in the 9th c. 99 e.g. single shares of churches, or of possessions including churches, given to Farfa, late 8th and early 9th cs. (CDL V. i nos. 55, 98; Farfa nos. 151, 158, 193). 100 e.g. Farfa nos. 92, 151, 1223 (‘Grisio’s portion’). Although normally only a great church would collect shares of churches, in Abruzzo three successive lay lords of Ocretano gradually acquired undefined shares in the church there (late 8th to mid-9th c.), eventually (873) conveying the whole estate and church to the monastery of Casauria (Feller, Les Abruzzes, 807–8 and app. 1, drawn from Casauria’s unpublished cartulary). Feller’s doubt whether the lords had acquired the whole church seems unnecessary (app. 1 no. 28: curtis and church both in integro). 101 CDL I nos. 31, 89, II no. 219 (see Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 34–6; Wickham, Mountains, 57–8). Auriperta’s name suggests membership of the founder-family.

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tonsured and live a monastic life, but also insisted on permanent common ownership and government ‘by common counsel’,102 or negatively forbade partition or ‘disruption’ by their heirs. These provisos were typically made by joint founders who, not being near kinsmen, pooled their resources to found a church under the common ownership of themselves and their successors; sometimes as an artificial kinship or brotherhood. In 759 a church at Asulari was founded by two brothers (priest and clerk) and another clerk with his son. They bound themselves to live there and govern it ‘by common counsel, like good germane brothers all begotten of one seed’; there was to be no partition of church or property, nor anything taken away by them or their heirs.103 Or a joint ownership could be created later: S. Dalmazio in Lucca was founded by Fridulus for two sons, Roffulo and Rachifrid; but Roffulo left and Rachifrid brought in another clerk Magniprand to rule with him ‘like two actual brothers’, the survivor to have full potestas.104 Much later, in 816, the same church was handed on by its holder Rachiprand to two successors to rule without any partition, ‘by common counsel’ and as ‘good brothers’, clearly copying the earlier charter.105 Alternatively the members of such a consortium could agree to make collective appointments of successive single rectors from among their kinsmen. In 757 three priests, Sicherad, Filerad, and Alapert, founding a church in Lucca, arranged that Sicherad should rule it first, but that subsequent ordinatio be made communiter et per unum consilio, and not to any outsider or public person but to one of their own sons or heirs, while anyone taking anything away from the church was to lose his share in it.106 But another possibility for a consortium of founders was to hand unqualified potestas over to one priest rector, leaving to him the appointment of his successor without any overt reservation to themselves or their heirs. A striking early instance is the church built about 700 at San Miniato, near where the great road south from Lucca crossed the Arno, by seventeen men, probably all citizens of Lucca, who put in a priest Nandolf (not one of themselves) as custos and rector; it seems to have become simply the property of the successive priests, passing by cartula to chosen heirs.107 This was perhaps even more likely where the first priest was one of the founders, the others being laymen.108 102

103 See below, pp. 168, 170. CDL II no. 138. Mem. Lucc., IV. i no. 83 (776; with CDL II no. 256, a. 769). On Magniprand’s dealings see below, at notes 118–20. 105 Mem. Lucc., IV. ii. 1 no. 12 (on Rachiprand’s position see above, note 25). In such charters ‘no division’ probably includes no separate dealings in shares. 106 CDL II no. 127. The consortes faded out or lost hold: Sicherad’s successor and brother (an acolyte) alienated the church to the bishopric, end of 8th c. (Mem. Lucc., V. ii no. 278). The consent of two-thirds of the founders might do, e.g. at S. Silvestro, Lucca (CDL I no. 24). 107 Mem. Lucc., V. ii no. 189 (783), bishop’s confirmation (unusual; Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 86–7) for the present priest (son of his predecessor), listing three preceding priests. 108 e.g. S. Angelo, Monticunule, founded by three laymen (brothers) and its first rector, given to S. Bartolomeo, Pistoia, by a later rector (CDL II no. 180). 104


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Where the founder’s (or a married priest’s) lay heirs did keep control from one occasion to the next, they normally allowed their appointed priest a limited potestas,109 much the same power of rule, usufruct, and almsgiving as might be kept by someone giving his own church to a greater one. By the ninth century and sometimes earlier this could be embodied in a lease of whatever kind prevailed locally for landed property: in Tuscany a libellus lease.110 Those we know of were almost all granted by bishops or abbots, but at least one eighth-century layman did the same,111 and it is possible that the laity were doing it first. Normally such a lease gave the priest life tenure, lacking only the powers of alienation and of ordaining his successor. But it might be renewed for a priest’s son or nephew until it verged on creating a hereditary priest’s church (though not so easily by mere inadvertence as did the unwritten benefice grants of Bavaria).112 In 785 a clerk Agiprand, rector of a Lucca episcopal church, claimed that he did not hold it by the bishop’s libellus but by inheritance through his mother from her father, the priest Damian; the bishop won his case and Agiprand had to restore the gold, silver, and (significantly) documents that he had taken from the church.113 Similar problems could arise where a donation reserving usufruct left a donor or his heir as the bishop’s or abbot’s tenant; in this case the tenant might not be a priest but have the power of appointing one. A clerk Homulus, whose father had founded a church and given it to the plebs of S. Martino of Gello in the Pisan hills, had notwithstanding this donation ‘done as he liked about the priest’ for thirty years, and the charter had perished; in 770 he renewed the gift, provided that he and his heirs could keep usufruct, rule, and appointment of the priest, surrendering only the power of selling or alienating the church or its immovable property.114 This charter had to be produced in 807 to get a similar acknowledgment out of Homulus’s grandson.115 In such cases there may be no formal lease but only repeated recognition of an heir’s tenure. But in Viterbo in 767 a priest’s son Theodore, neither priest nor clerk but an illiterate vir devotus, was allowed an explicitly hereditary lease, for a substantial rent in wheat, wine, and hay, of an oratory and land that his father and stepmother had given to Farfa.116 Nothing is said here about maintaining the oratory. But a church could be given to a layman for life on the understanding that he had a priest there, as in 757 the bishop of Pisa granted a church ‘with its monastery and fields, meadows, woods, vineyards, orchards, pastures, marshes, and springs’ to Atto for his loyal service, 109 It seems that few priests of Lombard private churches were serfs; examples are Semeris, late 7th c. 110 (above, note 13); Guetichis, mid-8th c. (below, pp. 86–7). See below, pp. 544–5. 111 CDL II no. 213 (768), Aimo inhabitant of Viterbo for the priest Gumbert (below, p. 543). 112 113 114 115 Below, pp. 532–3. Manaresi no. 6. CDL II no. 246. Manaresi no. 20. 116 Reg. Farfa no. 41 (767).

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‘for having, dominating, possessing, ordaining’, for Atto’s life and that of his priest.117 Although it was to the bishoprics and great abbeys that many private churches came in the end, some came into the hands of lay magnates. The clerk Magniprand who owned S. Dalmazio at Lucca in 782 arranged to sell it (in effect) for 700 solidi to a daughter of the English king ‘Adelwaldus’.118 Why a Northumbrian princess (her father must be Aethelwold Moll)119 should want a church in Lucca, and at such a high price, is mysterious: one might speculate that she meant to found a hospital for English pilgrims to Rome, perhaps for women.120 But there are more straightforward examples of magnate interest in these churches.121 A well-endowed family church was not a despicable property for a Lombard or Frankish king or duke, being well worth giving or leasing to a dependant or follower, clerical or lay.122 Many such churches did drift into the hands of the great; but not to the point of any petering out of family- or priestowned churches. In Spoleto the dukes had an overlordship over certain private churches (founded by ducal dependants on what they held in the fisc, or on gifts out of the fisc) and used them to enrich Farfa,123 though there were independent family foundations as well.124 For Benevento most of the scanty evidence for lesser churches comes from two great ducal foundations, S. Sofia at Benevento and S. Vincenzo at Volturno,125 and concerns churches given to them, mostly founded by the dukes on their exceptionally large fisc or by their dependants on ducal gifts;126 but some of those who subjected their churches to the palace after the mid-eighth century had endowed them with land more evidently their own.127 It seems, then, that the same kind of private or family churches existed 117 CDL I no. 124. Bishops of Lucca twice allowed life tenure of a church (S. Quirico) in return for work done on it or property given it (724, CDL I no. 35; 764, ibid. II no. 181). 118 Mem. Lucc., V. ii nos. 186–7; on the transaction see below, p. 775 note 146. 119 Aethelwold Moll might well have a daughter named—like his wife—Aethelthryth (here ‘Adeltruda’). She could have come in Alcuin’s train on his way to Rome, 780 (Schwarzmaier, Lucca, 32). There is no evidence that she settled in Lucca; Rachiprand who had it in 816 must be a kinsman of Rachifrid and Magniprand (above, at notes 104–5). 120 Boniface’s remarks a generation earlier suggest a need (see Levison, England, 38–9). 121 e.g. monasterium at Apuniaco given to duke Walpert’s son Walprand and his heirs, 728 (CDL I no. 40); S. Pietro Somaldi acquired by king Aistulf (above, note 63); S. Salvatore, Montione leased to the Frankish duke Wicheram to restore, 808 (Mem. Lucc., V. ii no. 291; see Schwarzmeier, Lucca, 40–1, 168–70, 364–7). 122 e.g. a church acquired from a priest by Charlemagne’s son Pippin, later held by a priest from Lothar 123 CDL IV. i nos. 7, 14 (see Stutz, Benef., 125 n. 67), 29, 35. I ex nostra munificentia (DLothI no. 28). 124 Goderisius’s (above, at note 39), Hilderic’s (above, note 41). 125 Beneventan ducal charters, CDL IV. ii; three non-ducal charters in CDL V (part 2). 126 Below, pp. 86–7 (Magnus’s foundation), p. 236 (abbot Zacharias’s). 127 Churches built by a famula Domini (cf. ancilla Dei) Felicity, before 752–6 (CDL IV. ii nos. 42, 72) and by an abbot Garoin before 769 (ibid. no. 49). Trasemund sculdahis (a minor official) founded a church and gave it direct to S. Sofia, Benevento, 785 (CDL V (ii) no. 15).


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in the duchies as in the kingdom but more overshadowed by the power of the ruler.128 This teeming life of family churches in eighth-century Italy sets the pattern for the ninth century, and for parts of Italy not hitherto in the picture. Lombard property law was dominant throughout Italy for centuries, and the main lines of its application to churches were clearly fixed in the pre-Carolingian north. 128

See also below, pp. 197, 236–7.

3 The converging of private and parish churches

In the early sixth century there was a sharp distinction, in Gaul at least, between the old public or baptismal churches and the emerging private oratories. In the cities, all baptisms took place in the cathedral or an attendant baptistry; further basilicas, closely tied to the cathedral, might be built to house and honour relics; others might mark burial-places—often of a revered bishop—outside the walls; only a handful of small oratories, clustering round a basilica or baptistry, might be privately owned.1 In the country, the parish church serving a large area was normally in a vicus, a substantial rural settlement, often a pre-Christian cultcentre;2 it had probably been built on the bishop’s or count’s orders, and was staffed and maintained by the bishop, though tending to acquire its own property and live off it.3 A private oratory, on the other hand, was usually built more recently, by a landlord on his villa, probably for his own and his household’s convenience rather than for his tenants. Even if grand enough to be called a ‘basilica’, its rights are strictly limited. The lord’s household is by now allowed to attend mass at his oratory on Sundays and lesser feast days, but must go to the cathedral or parish church for the great Feasts (when his priest too must attend the bishop in the city),4 and almost certainly for baptism. At this stage the word parochia still meant primarily the bishop’s territory, or a large, loosely defined region within it served by what was almost a subsidiary cathedral. In the six centuries that followed, until canon lawyers worked out new 1

See Brooke, Churches and Churchmen, 98–106; Musset, ‘Villes e´piscopales’, 6–14, esp. 14 n. 41. Seston, ‘Note sur les origines’, 243–9. For what follows see also Imbart, Origines, 27–37; Beck, Pastoral Care, 71–7; Griffe, ‘Paroisses rurales’, 44–8. 3 See Lemarignier, ‘Organisation’, 453–8; Knight, End of Antiquity, 123–7. Vicus churches might have separate baptistries; see G. Fournier, Peuplement, 402–9, 427 (grouped churches in Auvergne: parochial church, baptistry, and often one for a local cult); cf. Aubrun, Limoges, 294–7, 345 n. 3. 4 Agde (506) c. 21, Orleans (511) c. 25, Clermont (535) c. 15 (Conc. Gall. 314–506 and 511–695, 11). See Scha¨ferdiek, ‘Heilige’, 128–30. 2

Private and parish churches

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definitions and imposed a new order, the word itself had no single unambiguous meaning. But from the first it was shifting towards its modern meaning, and behind this lies enormous change, not only in the northern and eastern extensions of Christendom (where the early structures were wider and looser) but in its first western strongholds and especially in Gaul. Between the poles of great baptismal church and private oratory a continuum would form, of churches and chapels varying in antiquity, prestige, wealth, rank, and rights, their total number multiplied many times over. Functions and revenues once reserved to a few major churches drifted to many lesser ones, most of which would eventually rank as parish churches;5 while proprietary attitudes and concepts once restricted to private oratories came to be applied to major, ancient, and once public churches. This is so long a process that, although it needs to be picked up early, it has to be followed through in outline to the Carolingian period and beyond, touching along the way on matters such as tithe-rights which are considered more fully later in this book.

3.i. Gaul: private churches get parochial rights Even in sixth century Gaul a private church might move towards becoming a parish church for the inhabitants of an estate, or be founded as such from the first. Whereas the council of Agde in 506 spoke of ‘anyone who wants to have an oratory on his land, apart from the parish churches in which the lawful and ordinary congregation takes place’, the council of Orleans in 541 spoke of ‘parishes (parrociae) constituted in the houses of powerful men’, and of ‘anyone having or asking to have a parish (diocesim) in his land’.6 This must mean something taken out of the public parish. It was relatively easy for a bishop to create a new parish out of his own private or episcopal estates; but kings and other lay lords could get baptismal rights from the bishops, for new or existing churches on their lands.7 The result could be a villa-parish as extensive as the ancient public parishes8 (until like them it was divided, perhaps as the great estate itself fragmented). However, an aristocrat or magnate who builds a new baptismal church may not be ‘founding’ it for his own villa, but rather contributing handsomely to the costs of 5

See Addleshaw, Beginnings, 4–11, and Development, 3–4 (brief lucid introductions); Gaudemet, ‘La Paroisse du Moyen Aˆge: E´tat des questions’, RHEF 59 (1973), 5–21; Brooke, Churches, 76–81. On France, Becquet, ‘La Paroisse en France’, 203–7; and esp. G. Fournier, ‘La Mise en place’, 499–563. 6 Agde c. 21; Orleans IV cc. 26, 33 (Conc. Gall. 314–506 and 511–695). On parochia and diocesis see Seston, ‘Note’, 251–3; Scha¨ferdiek, ‘Heilige’, 131–2 and n. 33. 7 Griffe, ‘Paroisses’, 51–3; Aubrun, Limoges, 294–9, 301–43. 8 e.g. Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Cocon (see index: Cocon).

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a public, unowned church for a vicus. Sulpicius Severus’s church-building at Primuliacus at the beginning of the fifth century, of two basilicas joined by a baptistry,9 should perhaps be seen in this light,10 as almost a century later should the building of the parish church of Saint-Germain-Lembron in the Auvergne by Victorius, a dux of the Visigothic king. At Brioude however the same magnate rebuilt and perhaps could treat as his own the oratory of St Julian, which soon surpassed the original parish church in splendour and finally superseded or swallowed it.11 Later and further from the heart of Roman Gaul,12 what one can reasonably describe as privately founded and owned parish churches—their parishes founded from scratch, not carved out of old ones—were increasingly normal. In northern and eastern Francia the earliest known baptismal churches included important ones founded by bishops, but also landlords’ churches like Grimo’s or Nordulf’s,13 and monasteries’ churches, founded as cells for a few monks on their own lands in missionary country, or pre-existing on large estates given by lay nobles14 (perhaps originally royal fiscs).15 Meanwhile, wherever new private churches sprang up within old parishes or on their fringes, bit by bit they drew away pastoral functions from the mother churches: sometimes baptism itself;16 more easily, burials (never in canon law, though often in custom, the mother church’s monopoly); and the Sunday mass, not only for a lord’s household but for a wider congregation.17 We cannot assume—and certainly not from the use of the word villa18—that this congregation consisted exclusively of the lord’s own tenants or dependants, and thus that an embryonic small parish (any more than a great one) would coincide with his estate.19 But wherever most peasants had landlords and landlords’ estates had some geographical coherence, it would be odd if a lord’s church with a more than domestic role were not meant primarily to serve and be supported by his peasants: descendants of housed slaves, or of coloni, or of freemen who had slipped into dependence. The different needs that a Roman provincial landlord might have met by a room in his country house, and an early English noble or abbot by 9

Paulinus of Nola’s letters, nos. 31–2 (PL 61. 325, 330). Griffe, op. cit., 40–2; but see Knight, op. cit., 126–7 (‘Paulinus three times calls it domestica tua 11 ecclesia’). Gregory of Tours, HF II. 20; see Fournier, Peuplement, 155, 160–6, 408. 12 Including the Rhineland, outside the cities (see Fletcher, Conversion, 131–4). 13 Above, pp. 27–8, 29. Tholey’s handsome census for chrism was perhaps in return for Trier conceding baptism. 14 Semmler, ‘Mission’, 842–9 (but see Raach, Mettlach, 9–12); Pfleger, ‘Entstehung’, 64–5, 85; Lemar15 ignier, ‘Organisation’, 453, 461–3, 467–70. See Despy, ‘Note’ (on Floreffe, Belgium), 192–6. 16 Above, at note 9. 17 Scha¨ferdiek (‘Heilige’, 128–30) emphasizes progressive concessions to private oratories from the 6th c. onwards. 18 Villa may already sometimes have meant a village (Wickham, ‘Rural Society’, 529 and n. 31). 19 See Aubrun, Limoges, 343–4. 10


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an open-air cross or an altar under a rough wooden shelter, had developed and converged to produce the small rural church. Wider evangelizing, changing burial practices, the thickening up of pastoral functions,20 and—sooner or later— growing populations not only justified the multiplication of churches but made them profitable; the presence of a church might itself attract settlers; and the establishment of the compulsory tithe in the later eighth century gave lords an overwhelming incentive to get for their estate churches tithe-rights at least, while this possibility would itself promote the change of role from household oratory to church for tenants and neighbours. Carolingian legislation tried to balance the claims of old churches and new, with the emphasis at first much in favour of the old.21 Baptismal rights were reserved in principle to the old parish churches—in Gaul the churches of the vici, in Italy the plebes; and tithe-rights were supposed to hang on this. Charlemagne’s capitulary of Salz (803) required tithes to go to the baptismal churches ‘where worship was done of old’; it allowed anyone who wished it ‘to build a church in his own property’ with the bishop’s consent, ‘but it must absolutely be provided that other, older churches shall not on account of new ones lose their jurisdiction or tithe . . . ’. The same line was taken by the provincial councils of 813 and repeated in later diocesan statutes. But as early as the 818–19 capitulary of Aachen it was conceded that a new church for a new estate could have the tithes from it; and the rules protecting old churches sometimes allowed the bishop to transfer some of their tithes to a new church.22 At Aachen such a new church is described as a ‘chapel or oratory’; the term capella was spreading, now, from the Carolingian royal chapel to private and subordinate churches,23 and beginning to supersede oratorium; but not used with any precision,24 nor evidently with any implication of incapacity for tithe-rights. These were already coming apart from baptismal right; they did not make a church baptismal, and priests were still in 845 being forbidden to baptize other than ‘in the vici and baptismal churches’.25 As early as 755, however, legislation that baptism could take place only where the bishop decreed implied that he might allow it to new churches;26 and ninth-century attempts to insist on tithes 20

See Julia Smith’s excellent ‘Religion and Lay Society’. I would therefore dispute Susan Reynolds’s view of the legislation as aiming ineffectually at promoting the rise of small parishes (Kingdoms, 82, 85). 22 See below, p. 464. Cf. Capit. no. 57 (802/13) c. 6: consent for private churches provided ‘that the canonical vici be not neglected’. 23 See Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, I. 11–28 and 98; Denton, Chapels, 8–13. Capella could still mean the clergy and equipment of a purely domestic mobile chapel (see Smith, op. cit., 663). 24 By the 10th c. ecclesia and capella were often interchangeable (neatly demonstrated in Maˆcon nos. 8 25 Meaux/Paris c. 48 (Conc. III no. 11); see also Stutz, Benef., 194 n. 58, 258 n. 72. and 38). 26 Ver c. 7 (Capit. no. 14); more realistic than pope Zacharias’s advice in 747 (straight from Gregory the Great) that consecrating a church built on anyone’s property must be conditional on its never having a baptistry (Ep. Karol. Aevi., III. 484, to Pippin, etc., c. 15). The exception for illness is of course made. 21

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going to baptismal churches were sometimes so worded as to protect the churches where people did in fact get baptized and go to mass,27 which might be the outcome of recent development. As long as many estates or settlements still lacked any church, large new parishes could be created by episcopal authority. A bishop might build and endow a new church on an episcopal estate or on his personal property, like any other landlord; but he might then, if it was in his own diocese, give it a parish far wider than the estate in which it lay, including other lords’ lands (if they had not got in first with their own churches).28 And he could do this as a favour for another founder. In the mid-ninth century Angilmar archbishop of Vienne allowed a certain Mauringo to build a basilica ‘suitable for a plebs’, and attached to it two villae—not evidently Mauringo’s land—whose inhabitants were to go there to pray and hear the Word, paying tithes to its clergy.29 A little later, Bernold bishop of Maˆcon consecrated basilicas built with his leave (west of the Saoˆne valley, in the edge of the Massif Central), one at Milly by a priest Bedeem, one at Sologny by a priest Grunrin, both of them probably canons of the cathedral;30 to each church he granted listed villae: for Bedeem, Milly itself, Laly, half the cultivated land of Cury, and ‘beyond the mountain’31 four other villae; for Grunrin, Sologny itself and five others.32 For Milly these villae were expressly granted to its ‘parish’; for Sologny more ambiguously to the church, but obviously meaning the same thing: Grunrin and his successors were to have ‘the tithes and votive offerings33 rendered there by the faithful of these villae’. There is no implication that the villae (evidently, in at least a loose sense, villages) belonged to the founders’ prebends or personal property beyond whatever they had in Milly and Sologny, nor even to the cathedral. The bishop may for ‘public’ reasons have carved both these new parishes, large as they were, out of the same huge primitive parish. But any resulting, still large parish was liable to be further broken up; fragments of both these fell into parishes created in the next two centuries.34 27

Chalon 813, Pavia, 845–50 (below, p. 467). In 808, in a Sens formulary, the bishop founds a church at Chailly (endowing it modestly) to which Chailly and three other villae shall ‘belong for attendance at mass and for baptism and preaching’, rendering it their tithes (MGH Formulae, 217; see Chaume, Recherches, 77–9). 29 d’Ache´ry, Spicilegium, xii. 119–20 (Saletas, Arde`che); see Chaume, op. cit., 79–80. Cf. Fournier, Peuplement, 428–31, on bishops of Clermont (e.g. 906, Brioude no. 330). 30 Each is frater et compresbiter noster. The sites may have been their prebends, out of cathedral property. 31 A rocky, wooded ‘outcrop’ (Duby, Rural Economy, trans. C. Postan (London, 1968), 384): probably ‘Col des Enceints’ (Michelin 1 : 200,000). The duas partes that the bishop gives to the church might mean the separate areas of Milly’s parish (Chaume, ‘Mode’, 72); alternatively two-thirds of the tithes, etc. 32 leaving one for the bishop. Maˆcon nos. 403, 407 (864–72). 33 Reading votis (vows, devotions) for notis in the text: the editor’s suggestion nonis makes no sense here (see index: ‘ninths and tenths’). 34 Chaume, Recherches, 71–7 (with map); Fournier, ‘Mise en place’, 520, 539–41 (annexe 6); cf. Aubrun, Limoges, 344–7. 28


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When archbishop Hincmar criticized the unnecessary partitioning of parishes, he described how an outlying settlement might be provided for without this.35 If winter floods or intervening marshes made getting to church difficult, or if the distance were too great for pregnant women or the aged, a chapel could be built, subject to the mother church and regularly visited by a priest with a portable altar;36 endowed with a little arable to support a caretaker,37 and somewhere for him to live; having a churchyard for the poor to be buried in, somewhere for the visiting priest to stable his horse, and storage for his tithes (tithes, that is, due to the mother church).38 But to freeze a chapel’s rights at this embryonic stage was not easy, as the archbishop knew. His own bitter and complicated disputes (868–71) with his nephew Hincmar bishop of Laon show what was actually happening, and show too how a bishop’s interest might lie either way. In his own diocese of Rheims, in the parish of the church of Juvigny (Aisne), there was a chapel which was the property of the church of Laon, as was the estate it served (the curtis Attolae).39 Hincmar of Laon as lord had forbidden the local settlers to pay tithe to the priest of Juvigny, claiming it for the chapel; Hincmar of Rheims as diocesan had forbidden mass to be celebrated in the chapel until tithes were paid to Juvigny. Hincmar of Laon had then, as his uncle scathingly described it, accused him of causing children to die unbaptized and adults without communion; whereas, he says, the people can go to Juvigny for mass; no one has been denied baptism or communion; no one has died without them. If the chapel is in fact the older church, as Hincmar of Laon claims, that does not affect the issue: Juvigny has had the tithes for the crucial thirty years; Laon has given the chapel almost nothing beyond its burial ground and its little house and garden; most of its tiny endowment comes from freemen’s gifts for burial-places. The settlement itself is small—Laon has only nine free and eleven servile holdings there; and there is no reason of distance, woodland, water, or marsh why it should not be subject to the parish of Juvigny.40 The case of Folembray was the reverse of this. Here the villa and its church lay in the diocese of Laon but were the property of Rheims. There had been a short period when, briefly lacking a priest, it had been served by the parish priest of Coucy; this priest had subsequently claimed that it ought to be subject to Coucy. 35 De eccl. et cap., 75–6. Hincmar here distinguishes between an oratory justified by pastoral need and one built out of private piety, the latter not to be allowed baptism (implying that the former may be). 36 37 Cf. Hincmar’s 856 capitulary c. 3 (Capit. episc,. II. 75). matricularius (Niermeyer sense 2). 38 Done by ecclesiastical initiative in Hincmar’s illustration because bishops’ activities were his theme. 39 Identified by McKeon, Hincmar of Laon, 66, as ‘at least part’ of Aguilcourt (dept. Aisne), but this is unconvincing. 40 ‘55 chapters’, Preface and c. 1 (PL 126. 290, 293–4; now newly edited in Conc., IV suppl. ii (2003), not used by me).

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Hincmar of Laon’s own inquiry had shown the contrary; but later he had dragged his feet about ordaining his uncle’s candidate as priest of Folembray,41 and finally brought the whole status of the church here in question again and put an interdict on it. The men of Folembray had been to the archbishop to complain: as long as they can remember, their church has been independent (per se fuit semper) and they have given it their tithes and votive offerings and had the services of a priest there; now they are deprived of this—no mass is celebrated; there is no provision for confession, communion, or baptism; two men (named) have died without the last rites. This church (unlike the chapel at curtis Attolae) is well enough endowed ‘to stand by itself ’, largely from lands left it by a rich and long-lived priest; while its past history alone (spelt out by the archbishop at immense length) ought to settle the matter. We are no more entitled, he says, to confound rural parishes than we are to divide them without reason.42 That both Folembray and Coucy are ‘parishes’—and that Juvigny is but the curtis Attolae is not—is for the archbishop a matter of common sense and recent history; not, in this wooded country with its quite recent clearances and settlements,43 a consequence of antiquity and ‘public’ origin.44 In the south the ancient public churches kept their baptismal monopoly rather longer. But even here, bishops in the eastern (broadly Catalan) Pyrenees45 were able for two-and-a-half centuries to create parishes from scratch for the new churches that they consecrated. The records are mostly composite charters in which the founders give the church its endowments while the bishop in much the same terms ‘conveys’ to it a parochia, or tithes, firstfruits, and offerings, within broad topographical bounds that he sets out.46 Baptism is almost never mentioned;47 yet there is no reservation of rights for mother churches,48 apart from dues to the cathedral. Something must go without saying: either having a ‘parish’ includes baptism, or most children must still be taken to the cathedral or some other old baptismal church, over mountain passes and down long valleys. 41

Or rather his uncle’s benefice-holder’s candidate (below, p. 77 note 21). Two letters (PL 126. 537–45, 555–64). For the course of the dispute (868–71) see Devisse, Hincmar, 43 750–5; McKeon, Hincmar of Laon, 66–7, 79–86. See Fournier, ‘Mise en place’, 542–3 (annexe 8). 44 For the practical problems that Hincmar expected see his 874 instructions to two archdeacons, c. 7 45 (Capit. episc., II. 88). Their dioceses were all initially in the province of Narbonne. 46 For Urgel, Urgellia, I esp. (857–952) nos. 4, 8–11, 13 (suspiciously close to no. 55?), 20–1, 24, 26–7, 30, 32– 3; and (1040–57) nos. 49, 55, 59, 64. Cf. Archivo Condal nos. 102–3, 146–9 (Barcelona 932, Vich 960); Roussillonnais nos. 7, 45 (Gerona 947, Elne 1053). Some probably confirm a rebuilt church’s parish (ibid. nos. 8, 25; Urgellia, I no. 18); others (mostly for individual founders) mention no parochial rights or bounds (857– 1101, ibid. nos. 5–7, 12, 19, 23, 29, 43, 57, 61, 63, 76) or explicitly rule out parochial status (903, ibid. no. 16: a noble’s oratory, subjected to a presumably baptismal church of St John the Baptist). 47 Perhaps only in comital foundations, ibid. nos. 20 (907), 36 (below, note 49), until 1168 (no. 85, otherwise remarkably conservative). Sergius IV’s confirmation (1011) of nine or ten churches of Arles-surTech’s mentions ‘tithes, firstfruits, and offerings’ for almost all, but not baptism (Marca Hisp., app. 48 no. 168). i.e. in cases where a ‘parish’ or tithes etc. are given. 42


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These Pyrenean parish churches are certainly not, normally, seigneurial churches. It is typically all the inhabitants who invite the bishop, at least notionally, and their leading men who (as individuals, couples, or families) give the endowments, often with one local donor outstanding among them but not, so far, as their lord.49 They seem to be independent peasant proprietors, in strong village communities;50 the new parish would encompass the whole settlement and its inhabitants’ lands.51 This is a mode of parish creation that negates any tidy pattern of parishes originally coterminous with landlords’ estates (that would become more usual later; but so would its overriding by banal lordships). Anywhere in the Frankish dominions, a country church might attract not only its lord’s tenants but their neighbours; it might still serve several villages, or a village with several lords; or with no lords but one or more dominant families.52 What matters here is that, nonetheless, the actual churches on which the new rural parishes were hung were almost everywhere produced by what can loosely be called private enterprise and in consequence belonged initially to some person, family, or group of families.53 Perhaps only in Brittany was the whole process apparently largely bypassed, the original and very old parishes (probably from the fifth or sixth century) being just small enough—each a large village and its territory, in a countryside not at all densely peopled—not to invite much partition until the nineteenth century.54 The word plebs (vernacular ‘plou’) here connoted not only the ecclesiastical parish but the rural community itself, with the church as its focus, its more-or-less hereditary priests being the chief local notables;55 this church probably, all along, providing baptism,56 under some degree of episcopal authority; in the ninth century only rarely itself someone’s property,57 and almost unchallenged by landlords’ seigneurial churches.58 Viking destruction, increasing aristocratic dominance, and more absorption into France must have changed this society by the eleventh century, but not, it seems, to the point of undermining its ancient parishes.

49 Except, probably, where a count or bishop takes the lead (Urgellia, I nos. 19, 20, 21, 24, 27, 33, 36). In no. 36 (977), count Oliba and his brother bp. Miro, making S. Maria of Serrateix into a monastery, give it ipsa nostra parrochia . . . que est nostro dominico tota ad integrum. 50 See Wickham, Land, 209–11; ‘Rural Society’, 512–16. 51 Perhaps rarely covering other villages (Archivo Condal nos. 146, 149, both built by the abbess of S. Juan-de-las-Abadesas, 960). 52 For the background of estate and settlement patterns see Wickham, ‘Rural Society’, 526–31. 53 On Pyrenean village churches see below, pp. 620–3, 653. 54 Davies, ‘Priests’, 191–7. Numbers doubtless increased between 6th and 9th cs. (ibid. 191 n. 60), but not greatly thereafter. For their size see ead., Small Worlds, 64–7, 105. 55 Brittany’s was a ‘peasant-based’ society like the Pyrenean, but with villages more organized and far older, and priests even more important. See Wickham, ‘Rural Society’, 516–19; Davies, ‘Priests’, 178–92. 56 ‘Probably’ on general grounds; Wendy Davies is more cautious (Priests’, 194 n. 70). 57 58 Ibid. 190 (Grandchamp, a priest’s in 808). Ibid. 196–7.

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Towns were different again, and themselves very diverse. In Poitiers the ancient Gallo-Roman model survived;59 but in most Frankish cities the number not just of churches but of parishes, urban and suburban, grew. This was not at first, nor principally ever, a matter of burgesses’ or lay lords’ private enterprise in their town properties; in a rich and ancient city new parish churches might be founded by a succession of bishops for public reasons.60 However, some early private oratories seem to have acquired parish rights, while others gave way to new, privately founded parish churches more evenly spread through the town.61 Meanwhile a town without a Roman past might have grown from a village with its own estate church, or round a castle with its chapel; it might grow further until it fell into more than one pre-existing parish; the pattern then would be more rural and seigneurial. There was a limit to the process of extending parochial rights to lesser churches. The level at which these rights settled would depend in part on the local balance between the power of great lords, the authority of bishops, and the initiative of lesser lords and freemen. But in all its variations in town and country, what laid the basis for twelfth-century distinctions between mere chapels and full parish churches was the sorting out of baptismal and tithe-rights in Carolingian times and later, partly under pressure from the lords of churches, some defending the old churches rather than pushing for the new;62 and the sorting out was done on grounds of the practical need for new churches and the historical rights of old ones (which might be ‘proprietary’ in origin, and not so very old); not on the ground of any surviving distinction between public and private.63

3.ii. Gaul: parish churches become objects of property While many private churches were becoming parochial or moving that way, some old parish churches were falling into private hands. They were desirable both because of their revenue in offerings (and later in tithes) and because of their often considerable wealth in land, augmented sometimes by windfalls such as a legacy from a rich priest.1 An ancient church might come under the protection 59

See Brooke, Churches, 98–9; more generally pp. 73–6, 98–100. Musset, ‘Villes episcopales’, 8, related the number of parish churches in Norman towns to the town’s antiquity and authority. 61 The Barcelona church whose priest’s disobedience engaged Charles the Bald’s council of Attigny, 874 62 See index: Cocon. (Capit. no. 303) was probably private. 63 The surviving distinction was between parochial (loosely) and domestic, e.g. Maˆcon no. 532 (1096– 1124), consecration for a widow and her sons of (evidently) a memorial chapel and cemetery: the bishop’s record makes no mention of need, allocation of tithes, or synodal dues. 1 e.g. at Folembray (below, note 22). 60


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and lordship of a great man who had made himself lord of the vicus in which it lay.2 Alternatively, as seventh-century legislation shows, a powerful layman might set himself up as rector or archpriest, perhaps ordained by the bishop under pressure, perhaps remaining a layman.3 Such protection or encroachment would both promote and be promoted by the increasing economic independence of the old churches. By the late seventh and early eighth centuries, however, these occasional practices had been subsumed into quite widespread secularization of churches and church property by Frankish nobles great and small, from the mayor downwards, under pressure of competition for clients and the need for fighting men.4 This secularization consisted often in taking for one’s own or one’s men’s use, with or without the ‘king’s word’ from the mayor, of the lands of cathedral and baptismal churches; and although the scale of all this is easily exaggerated, it seems that some rich collegiate churches really were reduced to supporting only a single priest.5 Their losses may be some indication that baptismal churches of public origin were not yet fully reduced to objects of property in themselves, readily obtainable as benefices by laymen who could then defend their own. But this is what soon came about. Independent churches themselves were seized, or obtained from the palace, by laymen or by ‘false priests’,6 and disposed of or exploited by them. Perhaps in the long run this reduced the motive for robbing them; under the Carolingian kings it seems to have been mainly great churches— abbeys and bishoprics—whose property was encroached on (until abbeys and bishoprics in turn became more available to rulers and their supporters). Meanwhile what was taken from them included rural churches as well as land.7 Charles Martel’s successors as mayors and later as kings acquired more control of this exploitation and tried to regulate it. In the 740s Carloman and Pippin, with Boniface, held councils by which, in principle, all church property was restored;8 but current holders were to keep what they had for life, and at their death, ‘if necessity compels’, the ruler could re-grant it subject to the original owner’s rights. Later (by Pippin as king, and by Charlemagne) a great church’s property might be formally ‘divided’, keeping part for the ruler to dispose of as new 2 The 9th-c. status as property of the churches at Trizac and Cerzat (Fournier, Peuplement, 402–9, 427) might have such origins. 3 Incerti loci after 614, c. 11 (excusing the bishop if the parishioners need the person’s defence—and presumably goodwill), Clichy 626–7 c. 21, Chalon-sur-Saoˆne 647–53 c. 5 (Conc. Gall. 511–695, 288, 295, 304). 4 Lesne, Proprie´te´, II. i. 3–8, 29–30, 41–60, 97–111; Wallace-Hadrill, Church, 134–6; Fouracre, Charles 5 Martel, 125, 137–45. Saint-Julien of Brioude; Saint-Vrain at Gennes (Lesne, op. cit., II. i. 78, 79). 6 Boniface, letter no. 61 (Ep. Sel., I. 125–7). 7 Secularized church property included churches which its holders had to repair (Estinnes, next note). By 798 Theodulf of Orleans could assume that village churches were lord’s ‘possessions . . . whether by hereditary or beneficiary right’ (c. 16, Capit. episc., II. 114). 8 Austrasian council, 742/3; Estinnes, 743; Soissons, 744 (Capit. nos. 10–12). On revised dates see below, p. 238 note 27.

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benefices. Land thus disposed of became both a benefice held by the mayor’s or king’s grant, and a precaria held from the owning church for a rent.9 This rent was fixed by 779 as a ‘ninth and tenth’ of the revenues of the property (a way of saying two-tenths or one-fifth of the revenues; almost certainly nothing to do with the ecclesiastical tithe).10 All this regulation, like the earlier expropriations that it brought under control, applied as well to churches themselves as to church lands, so that old baptismal churches were thrown in with bishops’ or abbots’ estate churches as benefices available to clerks or laymen; among these, churches that had not yet become economically independent of the diocese became so de facto, neither drawing on nor contributing to diocesan funds;11 while all these now independent propertyowning churches became, by implication, pieces of property themselves. This assumption both lies behind the attempts at regulation and is hardened by them. And for bishops the process included those old parish churches that had not fallen permanently into other hands. Coming to be thought of as belonging to bishops (as many lesser churches did already)12 was by far the most important way in which parish churches came to be objects of property. It may be tempting to argue that since authority in many ‘traditional’ regimes (in Max Weber’s sense) is treated much like property, what we are looking at in early medieval bishops’ dealings with churches—or at least with parish churches—is not property at all, but diocesan authority coloured and slightly shifted by ‘traditional’ ways of thinking. It is clear however that while diocesan authority did indeed become in some ways like property, bishops dealt with particular churches (churches that were no one else’s) as property: as much so as estates, vineyards, or mills.13 There were confusions, or blurred edges; but there was something real to confuse. The difference was clearly understood at the time in the case of churches situated in one diocese but belonging to another bishopric: the bishop is lord of some churches of which he is not diocesan bishop,14 and bishop of many churches of which he is not lord. This has already been illustrated from the disputes between the two Hincmars. Laon had acquired the curtis Attolae and its chapel in the diocese of Rheims by gift of a seventh-century bishop of Laon whose personal property it had been; while Folembray and its church lay in the diocese of Laon but were the property of Rheims. In the dispute about Folembray the archbishop shows throughout a firm grasp of his nephew’s canonical rights as diocesan and of his own distinct rights as 9

See Lesne, Proprie´te´, II. i. 41–65; Wallace-Hadrill, Church, 139–40; Goffart, Forgeries, 9–11. Constable, ‘Nona et Decima’, 224–50 (231–2 on the older literature); id., Tithes, 29–30. 11 12 13 See Lemarignier, ‘Organisation’, 475. Below, pp. 689–90. Below, pp. 691–5. 14 Churches were given to cathedral churches out of devotion to their particular saints (or for political reasons), regardless of the integrity of dioceses. 10


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lord of an extra-diocesan church (referring to the fifth-century council of Orange);15 and conversely of his own obligations towards bishops ‘having churches in our diocese’.16 These cases were argued at a high level of clarity characteristic of Carolingian churchmen; there is no confusion at this stage, or in these circles, between diocesan authority and landlordly property.17 But other men’s lordship (a lay lord’s, or another bishop’s) did tend to undermine authority, so that for churches in his diocese it was desirable for the bishop to establish his own lordship if he could.18 Past confusion about the Rheims and Laon churches arose mainly from their having been for some generations in the hands of lay fideles (the king’s at Juvigny, the archbishop’s at Folembray), who held the villas in benefice, making them immediate lords of the churches and their priests.19 According to the archbishop, the estates of Juvigny and the curtis Attolae had long been held, together, by a succession of counts and others, under whom the parish church and the chapel had been held, together, by a succession of priests; Charles the Bald’s recent restitution of the curtis Attolae to Laon did not affect these arrangements.20 The history of Folembray was more complicated: it had been held in benefice by the grandfather, father, brother, and nephew of a recent bishop of Laon, but given out of the family by archbishop Hincmar to a fidelis of his own.21 Under these beneficeholders the same priest Otteric held the church for sixty years;22 it was after his death that the two Hincmars were embroiled over the appointment of a successor. This brings us back to secularization; it was the prevalence of such benefices, resulting often from earlier secularization, that had completed the process of turning bishops into church-owners and parish churches into property. For when anything—an estate, a church—given or confirmed to a layman by royal benefice is recognized as a precaria allowed him out of the bishopric, this implies that the thing is a piece of episcopal property. What some earlier bishop lost may have been authority over a parish priest and the administration of diocesan funds; what his successor recovers, or is left entitled to claim, is property-right or lordship over the church.23 The same implication that churches of all kinds were objects of property, even ancient and important parish churches, owned by a bishop if by no one else, arose 15

Above, pp. 15–16. Hincmar did not misunderstand this as Stutz thought (see next note). He explains (PL 126. 540–1) his predecessors’ practice, and his modification of this in courtesy to fellow bishops (below, pp. 807–8). 17 See below, p. 696. Development of extra-diocesan property into enclaves or peculiars is not Carolingian. 18 Hincmar’s De eccl. et cap. was a criticism of excessive ambition and sharp practice in this pursuit 19 (below, pp. 802–6). See below, note 21 (Sigbert had requested a clerk). 20 21 55 cc., c. 1 (PL 126. 294). Letter, 860 (ibid. 538–9). 22 Otteric’s legacy enabled it to sustain the status of parish church (ibid. 540). 23 See Stutz, Benef., 183–93, 342–7. 16

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from the divisio of lands and churches between a bishopric and a county.24 At Chur in Rhaetia the secular authority of rector had been combined with the bishopric in the hands of a powerful senatorial family, the Victorides; and it is not clear how Charlemagne’s divisio was meant to affect the Victorides, nor whether bishop Victor’s later complaint to Louis the Pious was directed at the divisio itself or at the new count Roderick’s subsequent depredations.25 In either case the result had been that the bishop lost control of the vast majority of the churches of the city and region: out of over 230 churches, he said, no more than six baptismal and twenty-five lesser churches remained to the bishopric, and those badly despoiled; of five monasteries only the two nunneries; of the bodies of five saints, not one. Stutz saw the bishop’s complaint as a classic statement of the old Roman conception of churches as not objects of property at all but subject to the bishop’s public authority, against the new force of the Eigenkirche represented by the king’s or count’s seizure and exploitation of churches.26 Lesne, however, saw the bishop as making a simple counter-claim in terms of his own church’s property-rights in the churches he had lost:27 an example of how proprietary attitudes were by now natural to any bishop even of the most Roman family origins and in so Roman a province as Rhaetia.28 Arguably bishop Victor was crossing the line between these two views. Stutz maintained that the bishop did not complain of loss of his cathedral’s property, but purely of the weakening of his own authority and of ecclesiastical discipline. But the complaint says first of all that ‘the cathedral church of Chur is ruined and despoiled’, and only secondly that ‘there is no proper canonical order there, and almost every ancient practice of religion is destroyed’. Order depended on the obedience of the clergy, especially those of suburban churches, who used to ‘celebrate daily office’ in the cathedral; if the count’s possession of churches disrupted this obedience, then only in the remaining churches can the bishop have potestas; and these churches will be seen as his or his cathedral’s,29 in contrast to those that are the count’s or the fisc’s.30 Bishop Victor speaks of the churches that have been ‘taken away’ as those ‘anciently always possessed by the bishops’; and by ‘taken away’ he clearly means taken into possession as exploitable property, since he says ‘they have taken . . . churches, lands, and serfs’.31 That he 24

See Lesne, Proprie´te´, II. i. 84–6. Bu¨ndner UB, I nos. 46–7, 49. For a convincing dating (to 825) and interpretation see Clavadetscher, ‘Einfuhrung’. 26 Stutz, ‘Karls des Grossen divisio von Bistum und Grafschaft Chur’, Hist. Aufsa¨tzen K. Zeumer (1910), 27 101–52; id., Benef. 159–62. Cf. Meyer-Marthaler, Ra¨tien, 56–69. Lesne, Proprie´te´, II. i. 87 n. 3. 28 On the Victorides’ close links with Franks and Alemans see Bu¨ttner, ‘Christentum und fra¨nkischer 29 On the ambiguity of potestas see index: bishops: potestas. Staat’, 21–4, 146–7. 30 The inventory of royal property in Rhaetia after the divisio (Bu¨ndner UB, 375–96) lists numerous churches. 31 Victor also describes the churches as ‘belonging to the bishopric by the laws’ (leges, usually meaning secular law), and claims to have auctoritas firma (written title) for them. 25


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appeals to the emperor’s concern for the intentions of the churches’ founders, rather than of the cathedral’s benefactors, is not inconsistent with this: it would often be founders (clerical or lay) who had given the churches,32 out of both care for the lesser church and devotion to the greater; their intentions could be frustrated not merely by loss of episcopal control but by loss of the cathedral’s proprietary right on which this now depended. Victor could hope for full authority only in churches that his bishopric owned; this was probably broadly true by now of bishops all over the Carolingian dominions.

3.iii. Other regions In some regions the distinction hardly existed. In Frankish conquests beyond the Rhineland, where Christianity came late and organized bishoprics later still, most pastoral care and ministry came at first from missionary monasteries and their dependencies, founded by Frankish rulers or great convert nobles, or by monks on land that rulers or nobles gave them. In Thuringia, however, although Fulda and Hersfeld became very important, some of the earliest baptismal churches were more a matter of private enterprise, being built in pre-Bonifacian days by Frankish conquerors for their fortified places, and by the first converted Thuringian nobles.1 Even in Saxony, where Charlemagne ordered the communal endowment of what sound like parish churches, any actually built in his time probably belonged to whoever was locally or regionally powerful—native lords perhaps, but more certainly, for missionary churches serving large areas, those in command of the mission: bishop, king, or (before long) the great new monastery of Corvey.2 Churches of any kind remained scarce in northern Germany,3 multiplying rapidly only from the late eleventh century as population grew and the eastern frontiers were colonized. Only then did the landlord’s parish church become normal, its parish determined by its founder or simply coincident with his estate; while some old churches still kept their baptismal rights over large parishes.4 Further south, barbarian settlers were mostly converted ahead of Frankish rule. In Alemania and perhaps in Bavaria the very earliest parish churches may have 32 This would be impossible on Borgolte’s theory that privately founded Rhaetian churches had to be Stiftungen, not Eigenkirchen (‘Churra¨tische Bischofsstaat’, 95–7); but see index: Stiftung. 1 Schulze, ‘Entwicklung der thuring. Pfarrorg.’, 44–55, 67–70). Some big primitive parishes are also traceable, on what became royal estates (ibid. 33–4). 2 Ho¨mberg, ‘Entstehung der Kirchenorganisation Westfalen’, 47–53, 68–73, 83–4, 106–8; Erbe, Niederkirch. Ostsachsen, 16–48; Leesch, ‘Corveyer Pfarrsystem’, esp. 45–6. 3 See below, pp. 595, 596. 4 See D. Kurze, ‘Gemeinde’, 232–4; Schulze, op. cit., 57–62; from the older literature, H. F. Schmid, ‘Das Recht der Gru¨ndung’, 14–15, 213. On German towns, Mu¨ller, ‘Der Beitrag der Pfarreigeschichte zur Stadtgeschichte’, Go¨rres-Gesellschaft Hist. Jahrbuch, 94 (1974), 74–81.

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been built for the peoples of whole regions: churches that preceded settlements, sited at fords or crossroads, hilltops, burial barrows, or springs for baptism; perhaps the pre-Christian centres of Gaue or hundreds.5 But if these were originally no one’s property it was not because they belonged to common diocesan property, but because the concept of property in land was still unclear; many emerged as a duke’s or (in Alemania) the Frankish king’s. The next generation of rural churches probably had the same range of founders and lords as in the north: convert dukes and nobles, monks, monk-bishops, and emergent diocesan bishops.6 Alemania fell under several neighbouring bishoprics,7 but chiefly the underendowed see of Constance with its exceptionally large and barely controllable diocese; while in Bavaria a more effective diocesan system with patchy pre-parish arrangements was cobbled up from ramshackle origins, partly by the enterprise of monk-bishops.8 The family or priests’ foundations of eighth-century Bavaria and Alemania were not such natural bases for embryonic small parishes as the estate churches of the Frankish world. They may nevertheless have gone in that direction, serving the family’s serfs, dependants, and neighbours, or settlers attracted by the church itself; some certainly had tithes.9 Many Bavarians gave their private churches to the new bishoprics, as we have seen. Both the wealth and the sphere of effective authority of the Bavarian bishoprics consisted largely of their proprietary churches, many given en bloc by the dukes at the bishopric’s foundation, others acquired piecemeal.10 The former were more likely to be called ‘parochial’, not as being ‘parish’ churches (though at least some were also ‘baptismal’) but as being the bishopric’s property from its first endowment.11 The bishop’s authority over churches not his own was tenuous12—barely more than the right to consecrate them initially, and even there some other bishop, Irish perhaps, might do. Above all, the bishoprics (in Alemania too)13 were rivalled, as church-owners, by the great monasteries that were often their elders or coevals in the country; and these had collected not only family oratories but churches distinguished as 5 Weigel, ‘Das Patrozinium des Heil. Martin’, Studium Generale, 3 (1950), 148–52 (but see Bu¨ttner’s comment, ‘Christentum und Kirche’, 372 n. 47); E. Klebel, ‘Zur Geschichte des Christentums in Bayern vor Bonifazius’, Sankt Bonifatius (1954), 398–9. 6 Pfleger, ‘Entstehung’, 41–5; Tu¨chle, KG. Schwabens, I. 43–9; Bu¨ttner, ‘Christentum und Kirche’, 380, 7 and 364 n. 9 for literature; D. Kurze, ‘Gemeinde’, 222–31. Reuter, Germany, 60. 8 See Freising no. 235 (c.807, on the early history of St Martin’s, Biberbach); cf. the conflict between bp. Virgil of Salzburg and the priest Ursus at Oberalm (see index: Oberalm), the priest getting his ‘church of discord’ consecrated by a wandering bishop, but both churches surviving. Abp. Arno’s pastoral instructions of ?798, and Bavarian councils of c.800 (Conc., I nos. 22, 24), imply diocesan bishops’ duty to create a network of baptismal churches. 9 In Freising diocese, however, not many early tithed private churches were parish churches in 1315 10 See Stutz, Benef., 194, 197–8, 204–6; Nottarp, Bistumserrichtung, 226–8. (Stahleder, ‘EKn’, II. 10–11). 11 e.g. in Freising no. 181. See Bauerreiss, KG. Bayerns, 78–80; Stahleder, ‘EKn’, I. 179–84. 12 See Stutz, Benef., 205–8; Hartmann, ‘Zustand’, 419–20, 436–7. 13 See above, pp. 34, 37 (St Gall).


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‘baptismal’. The new diocesan bishops of Boniface’s reform tried to challenge the monasteries’ control of their own parochiae and the monks’ exercise of pastoral care and baptism.14 But a generation later Atto bishop of Freising was claiming churches from monasteries (before lay and royal judges) simply as episcopal property that had got into the wrong hands. In 804 he claimed several churches (with tithes) that the abbot of Chiemsee was ‘holding in his dominium contrary to canonical teaching’; but the matter was disputed on grounds not of canon law but of property-right: on the abbot’s side, traditio by their original owners;15 on the bishop’s, ‘having been put into possession earlier’ (per anteriorem vestituram) and unjustly robbed by duke Tassilo.16 In the same year Atto brought a suit against the abbot of Tegernsee for some fifteen ‘baptismal churches legitimately belonging to his bishopric’; the abbot was to restore whatever he could not prove ‘belonged more lawfully to his monastery, by the traditio of nobles, than to the bishopric’.17 The abbot later had the churches back from the bishop in benefice.18 It is not that bishops in Germany, south or north, had no control or initiative in dividing parishes or determining the rights of the churches they consecrated;19 but the new bishoprics could not even start from any assumption of a two-tier system in which only the bottom tier could be anyone’s property, while older bishoprics, like Chur, were soon deprived of this assumption.20 In Roman and Visigothic Spain, unlike Gaul, the legislation reveals no system of distinct baptismal churches under archpriests with subordinate rural churches,21 nor any restriction on the use of private oratories. It seems that any rural church, of anyone’s foundation, in vicus, villa, or fortified place, could provide baptism and receive offerings and voluntary tithes;22 at Toledo in 655 it seems to be assumed that any non-collegiate church substantial enough to have a permanent priest was a parish church.23 The churches whose founders’ interests needed to be 14

At councils of Ascheim (756) and Neuching (771); see Stutz, Benef., 211–16; Ratzinger, Forschungen, 494–8. Earlier, abbots and monk-bishops in Bavaria were hardly distinct. 15 Freising no. 193a: this has Chiemsee keep four churches and return two judged to have been misappropriated by an Irish bishop ‘Tuti Grecus’ (Dubdacrich, monk-bishop and abbot of Chiemsee). 16 This argument (and its political explanation) appears, however, only in no. 193b (also describing a 17 more complicated outcome). Freising no. 197. 18 Cf. the abbot of Isen’s family-minded request (800, ibid. no. 181) when restoring four ‘parochial churches’ to Freising. 19 Tuto bp. of Regensburg gave ‘pleban’ status to a chapel of Mondsee’s except for Easter and Whitsun baptisms (955, Landes ob der Enns, II no. 44); Bruno of Passau, dedicating a church of Tegernsee’s, confirmed its ‘public’ and ‘mother church’ status (1034, Tegernsee no. 8). In Saxony cf. the work attributed to Meinwerc of Paderborn (1009–36, Vita Meinwerci, cc. 96, 97); Sigfrid of Mu¨nster (1022–32; see index: 20 Reinmod). Above, pp. 77–9. 21 Archpriests appear in Me´rida (666) c. 10 (Conc. Visig., 332), but as cathedral functionaries. 22 See Fernańdez Alonso, Cura Pastoral, 202–7, 214–15; Martıńez Dıéz, Patrimonio, 51–69; Gonza´lez, in La Iglesia en la Espanã, I. 497–8, 532–5. 23 Toledo IX c. 2 (above, p. 24): it is ecclesiae parrochiales vel sacra monasteria whose founders’ concern is catered for.

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accommodated by the councils must have been among these apparently undifferentiated churches, not separate and alongside.24 In Christian Spain later, however, the idea of the parish may have sharpened. Certainly many or most rural churches were of private foundation, often for large estates or new colonizing settlements; and being in receipt of tithes and offerings (making them valuable investments as the tithe became increasingly obligatory), they look like incipient parish churches.25 But Garcıá Gallo maintains that private churches generally had no font, and that parish—that is, baptismal—churches, often collegiate and known as monasteria (like English minsters),26 were almost all episcopal property.27 The partial survival in Spain of the bishop’s third part of revenues from property-owning rural churches cannot, however, be convincingly used to argue for the relative weakness of the proprietary church and strength of the bishops’ public authority;28 where it existed it was a negotiable property-right like any rent. It was often alienated to monasteries, or taken by lay lords and later by kings;29 and when bishops took it from other lords’ churches this could be seen as unlawful, their power over churches not their own being identified with that exploiting power against which churches and their founders had been protected by seventh-century legislation:30 a strand in the pattern of exploitation of churches, rather than public authority working on a different plane. In England there were unquestionably superior churches: the monasteria or ‘minsters’ (in some contexts ‘old minsters’),31 important collegiate churches whose tithe, burial, and other rights, protected by kings in the tenth and eleventh centuries,32 extended over large parishes many of which were almost certainly primitive, going back to the seventh or eighth century.33 Monastic life may have been the core purpose of most early minsters; but all or most probably had 24 Garcıá Villada (Hist. ecles. de Espanã, II. 222–3) segregated the private church from the parish system (pp. 217–21), obscuring this point; but see Fernańdez Alonso (Cura Pastoral, 214–21). 25 See Bidagor, Iglesia, 96–7, 131–9. 26 In 919 king Ordonõ II and queen Elvira, founding San Pedro at Triacastela, needed to emphasize that it was to be fully monastic and not parochial (non popularem aecclesiam nec puplicam: M. Lucas Alvarez (ed.), La Documentacioń del Tumbo A de la Cate´dral de Santiago de Composte´la: Estudio y Edicioń (Leoń 1997), no. 31). 27 ‘Coyanza’, 391–2, 436–7 esp. n. 343. More recently, in La Iglesia en la Espanã, II. i, Fernańdez Conde (‘La iglesia propia’, esp. 136–9) and Rivera Recio (‘La catedral y la parroquia’, esp. 221–2) keep their respective subjects unrelated. 28 As Bidagor did, Iglesia propia, 97–8, 100–9, 122; in any case overrating the application of the bishop’s third (see Garcıá Gallo, ‘Coyanza’, 485–8, esp. n. 448). 29 Bidagor, Iglesia, 90–1, 111, 113–17, 145–6; and see below, pp. 718–19. 30 Above, pp. 19–20. King Sancho, refounding San Millań (1030), could forbid any bishop to require ‘firstfruits or thirds’ from the monks’ monasteries, parishes, or churches; three bishops undertaking to abide by this (1053) would ‘claim only what the canons lay down’ (S. Millań nos. 101, 154). 31 See Brooke, Churches, 1–18; Blair (ed.), Minsters and Parish Churches; and esp. id., Church in Anglo32 Saxon Society. Below, pp. 461, 464–5. 33 Disputed by Cambridge and Rollason, ‘Debate’, EME 4, 87–104; see Blair’s reply, ibid., esp. 199–203; Bassett, Parishes of Deerhurst area, 3–20; and Blair’s matured view, Church, esp. 153–60.


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a pastoral role (especially preaching and baptizing), fulfilled by itinerant clergy living alongside the monks or nuns, and perhaps by ordained monks; most minsters sooner or later lost their monastic character and became entirely clerical.34 These were not ancient episcopal churches. Most were apparently founded by a king or underking (or if by a bishop, on land that a king gave him), and probably served a regio, a rural territory (later perhaps emerging as a hundred or group of hundreds) from whose population the king drew services and any food-renders not diverted to the minster itself.35 Others were nobles’ family minsters, perhaps expected, like a king’s, to look after the people of a large area (a regio, or carved out of one).36 The great parish of Whalley (‘a vast tract of wild hilly country’) which long survived undivided with its seven dependent chapels, may have begun as the territory of a family minster.37 What the tenth- and eleventh-century kings did—apart from filling gaps, and restructuring after Viking disruption38— was perhaps to standardize, at least in theory, the rights of churches of various kinds and mixed origins.39 Whalley belonged at the Conquest to its own hereditary deans. In Domesday Book some important minsters counted as tenants-in-chief, but many were elements in the terra regis, or in a bishop’s, abbot’s, or lay magnate’s lordship.40 This may go back to pre-Viking times. Earlier minsters may have ‘belonged’ to their successive heads (this was how bishop Wilfrid’s minsters were his own to dispose of to followers and kinsmen),41 or in a looser sense to founder families. But from the later eighth century kings and perhaps other lay lords became more possessive in practice and conceptually;42 while it was as Worcester’s property that bishops of Worcester acquired lay-founded minsters.43 By the eleventh century bishops themselves were among the many lords building or rebuilding estate or manorial churches,44 and beginning (but late and 34 See esp. Mayr-Harting, Coming, 242–6; Thacker, ‘Monks, Preaching and Pastoral Care’, in Blair and Sharpe (eds.), Pastoral Care, 137–70; Blair, Church, 80–3, 124–6, 160–5. 35 On the problem of the territorial framework Page, ‘Remarks’, remains important; later, among much else, Bassett, ‘In Search of the Origins’, 18–21; see now Blair, Church, 153–60, and his references. To describe these units as ‘multiple [royal] estates’ is misleading (see Faith, Peasantry, on ‘extensive’ lordship; Blair, op. cit., 154 n. 77, for the literature). 36 e.g. Deerhurst (Blair, ‘Introduction’, 2–3); Wootton Wawen (Bassett, ‘In search’, 18); Breedonon-the-Hill (Keynes, Councils of Clofesho, 37–9). 37 Suggested by E. L. Cutts, Parish Priests and Their People (London, 1898), app. I, 557–61 (quotation at 557). 38 See Blair, ‘Secular Minster Churches’, 118–19; id., ‘Debate’, 196–7. Cambridge and Rollason would attribute the whole system to the 10th-c. kings, on a supposed ‘Carolingian’ model. 39 For attempts at ranking churches see II Edgar 1 and 2; VIII Aethelred 5. 1 (Liebermann, Gesetze, I. 196, 40 264; Robertson, Laws, 20–1, 118–19). See Blair, ‘Secular Minster Churches’, 125–8. 41 Below, pp. 128, 159, 201. 42 Below, pp. 242–4, 290–1; Blair, Church, 122–34, 282–90, 323–9. 43 44 Below, pp. 158–9, 205–6. Vita Wulfstani, iii c. 10 (ed. Darlington, 52).

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informally compared with Francia)45 to get them what would in the end amount to parochial rights, at the expense of all but residual rights of the old minsters.46 The time would come, however, at some stage after the Conquest, when the same lordly interests would restrict the number of new parishes;47 especially in towns, where lords lay or ecclesiastical could often check the informal proliferation of minute parish churches and maintain fewer, larger, and more valuable churches of their own.48 It was mainly at this level that parishes were at last defined and perpetuated by diocesan authority and the ‘cold hand’ of twelfthcentury canon law.49 In Scotland the crucial stage in the growth of small rural parishes is similar, though later and shorter (mostly within the twelfth century).50 Bishops built estate churches, as did new Norman landlords; these churches easily got parochial rights (the compulsory tithe itself being new)51 over areas that often coincided with their lords’ estates.52 And as in England, the Normans acquired (and often gave to monasteries) existing lesser churches in their new lordships.53 There were large-scale disputes (not paralleled in England) between bishops and lay lords for the possession of churches;54 as if new proprietary dealings by a new kind of lord were pushing the bishops into claiming, as property, churches over which they had formerly had a vague, loose jurisdiction.55 As for the earliest Scottish churches, it is not clear that they ever had specific pastoral or baptismal rights over even broadly defined territories;56 even the bishoprics mostly had no solid territory but a scatter of churches attached to them, and sometimes no settled see. In and beyond the Anglian regions there 45 Above, section i. See Blair, ‘Local Churches’, 268–71; Church, 385–95, 422–3. Any earlier existence of more ephemeral local churches would not affect the matter of parochial rights. 46 The normative sources are silent about baptism, though chrism was certainly supplied not only by bishops to minsters but by them to lesser churches (Foot, ‘ ‘‘By water in the spirit’’: The Administration of Baptism in Early Anglo-Saxon England’, in Pastoral Care, esp. 181–3; and below, p. 719). 47 See Round, ‘Essex Parishes’, 274. 48 On proliferation and its limits see Brooke, Churches, 73–6, 80–4; Campbell, Essays, 146–7, 152–3; id., Norwich, 9; Biddle, Winchester, 334–5. 49 See Brooke, Churches, 85–9, 104–5; and below, pp. 646–9. Smaller cathedral or minster towns had far fewer churches all along, with parishes variously determined by the large properties of baronial founders, by an old minster’s own property, or by later medieval planning (see Pearn, ‘Origin’, on Hereford, Shrewsbury, and Chester, esp. 78–9, 189–91, 379, 392). For Worcester, the old people’s 1092 declaration is a forgery (Julia Barrow, ‘Monks of Worcester’, 60–9). 50 What follows is based mainly on Morgan, ‘Organization’; Cowan, ‘Parochial System’; Ash, ‘St Andrew’s’; Watt, ‘Church in Scotland in 1137’; Macquarrie, ‘Early Christian Religious Houses’ (esp. 126–31). 51 In David I’s reign, 1124–53. 52 The earliest known lay lord’s foundation is Thor Longus’s c.1105 at Ednam, which he had peopled (king Edgar having given it him as deserta) and where he built the church, endowed it with one ploughland, and gave it to the monks of Durham (Lawrie, Early Scottish Charters nos. 24 and 33). 53 These pre-Norman lesser churches, sometimes with parishes that correspond to old ‘thanages’, are 54 found esp. north of the Tay. Cowan, ‘System’, 48–9. 55 Late 12th-c. reform eventually brought them some diocesan authority. 56 Pre-12th-c. Scottish kings were not in a position to declare or defend old churches’ rights like English kings.


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were important old churches much like English minsters; any such church must often have been at first the only church available, or source of travelling priests, for a thinly scattered population over a vast area, but this was not necessarily their intended purpose. North of the Forth some show signs of having begun as the church for a kin-group or other ancient and perhaps quite small community.57 In both broad regions, most must have begun (and often went on) as monasteria in at least the looser sense.58 They do not seem regularly to be at—or to become— royal centres; they are more likely to be under the bishop’s lordship, but until at least the twelfth century this was loose, traditional, and often distant; hardly property, but still less an antique ‘Roman’ authority threatened by proprietary ideas. It may be that most monasteries in Wales and the south-west (as possibly in Ireland despite its exceptionally monastic vocabulary) were broadly similar to English minsters in being or becoming more collegiate than monastic, while providing pastoral care under varying degrees of episcopal supervision.59 But the clas churches emerging into daylight in the Norman period as mother churches of big parishes—manned by family groups of married clergy, often learned and devout, owning the church they served and soon inheriting it in portions60—were evidently in their self-contained way no less proprietary than the lesser churches or chapels of the countryside61 (themselves now beginning to gain parish functions under the new Norman lords).62 The beginnings of the clas are in darkness, however, and there are no obvious lines for exploring the play between property-rights and the building of parochial systems in Wales (or, for different reasons, in Ireland). As for Scandinavia, even the beginnings are too late and too little documented to be usefully looked at here, beyond noting that the proliferating churches of the eleventh century were probably largely built by private enterprise.63 57 Ash, ‘St Andrew’s’, 117. Such kindred-based parishes may have something in common with Irish family monasteries and their lay clienteles, while the eight personae at Arbuthnott (ibid. 114) look something like a Welsh clas (notes 60, 62, below). 58 See K. H. Jackson, Gaelic Notes in the Book of Deer (Cambridge, 1972), 1–7. 59 See papers by Pryce, Charles-Edwards, and Sharpe, in Blair and Sharpe (eds.), Pastoral Care; cf. Sharpe, ‘Some problems’, 230–70; Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 241–64. 60 See Welsh Episc. Acts, I. 70–2; Pryce, ‘Church and Society’, 38–40; id., ‘Eccles. Wealth in Early Med. Wales’, in Edwards and Lane (eds.), Early Church in Wales, 28–9; Wyn-Evans, ‘Survival of the Clas as an Institution in Medieval Wales’, ibid. 61 Below, p. 601. 62 Pryce, ‘Church and Society’, 29–31. The clasau kept some superiority over their chapels at least as long as did English minsters (e.g. arrangements for chaplain of Llanbadarn Fawr, Welsh Episc. Acts, D101), and not all private foundations were successful: that at Sturmi, Glam. (see index: Sturmi) disappeared fairly soon. 63 P. Sawyer, ‘Dioceses and Parishes in 12th c. Scandinavia’, 38–9; Brink, ‘Formation of the Scandinavian Parish’, 23–8. For Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary (beyond this book’s range though in the Western Church) see Kloczowski, ‘Les Paroisses’, 187–98.

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3.iv. Italy In Italy things were different, and changed in a different way. In this old Christian country, in the north at least, much of the early pastoral system seems to have survived disruption by the Lombards. In the eighth century Tuscany in particular comes into view with important baptismal churches (plebes, vernacular ‘pievi’) each staffed by a college of clergy and ruled by one or two rectores: well-endowed property-owning churches, yet firmly under the bishop’s control, and sharply distinguished both from their own dependent oratories and from the growing swarm of small private churches.1 Over these last the plebes neither had nor needed authority, in general:2 they were not yet in the same line of business. The plebes were not for some time seen as the bishopric’s property; still less as anyone else’s. But there are significant early exceptions. In 801 Vitalis, bishop of Bologna, complained before Charlemagne that abbot Anselm and the monks of Nonantula had expelled his priest from the baptismal church at Lizzano.3 Anselm denied this,4 and declared his full recognition of the bishop’s spiritual and sacramental authority; but established that king Aistulf gave him the vicus and that he and the inhabitants built the church there with the then bishop’s consent.5 It was judged that the bishop should do what the canons required (consecration, preaching, supervision of the priest),6 and the priest be reinvested with the church and the agricultural produce he had been deprived of; but Anselm and his successors should securely possess what Aistulf had given ‘and everything situated on it (superposita) and justly and reasonably belonging to it’; baptismal or not, the church goes with the land it is on. The judgment distinguishes clearly between the bishop’s spiritual functions and the monastery’s lordship (while it conspicuously avoids legitimating any episcopal share of revenues or management of property). Different ideas govern the earlier case of S. Felice of Luogosano, in the duchy of Benevento. In a plea before the duke dateable to 764,7 the bishop claimed control of S. Felice against the monastery of S. Maria of Luogosano. It emerged that the church had been 1

See Boyd, Tithes and Parishes, 58–60; Nanni, Parrochia, pp. lx, 48–53; Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 7–10, 37; II. 24. A cathedral (with its baptistry) was often the city’s only baptismal church (Brooke, Churches, 100–1). 2 A plebs (strictly a people, but soon applied to its church) might have proprietary claims to particular churches; and possible economic demands seem implied by Alfanus bp. of Benevento freeing Trasemund’s church from any priest’s power ‘of dominating it in plebetana pars’ (sic), 781 (CDL V. ii no. 13). 3 Manaresi no. 21, of 801. 4 The priest left the church voluntarily; the monks will willingly let him have it back ‘if he can canonically fulfil his ministry’. 5 Shown by his consecrating it when invited to do so. 6 A more generous definition than Anselm’s (consecration, confirmation, preaching, as done by Vitalis’s predecessor). 7 This date (rather than 839) is convincingly proposed by Zielinski (ed.), CDL IV. ii. 158–9.


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founded, evidently from the first with fonts for baptism, by one Magnus who had put in his servus Guetichis as priest, and had set the church under the defence of the ducal palace, to which it had fallen on his death (perhaps in the 740s). Its priests had then been subject only to the palace, not to the bishop;8 it was assumed that the ‘obedience of the priest and church’ went to the palace along with ownership of the church (and conversely, had it gone to the bishop, this would have implied his ownership). The duchess Scauniperga and her son had subsequently given it—clearly as ducal property—to S. Maria. The bishop’s case was primarily that the church, being baptismal, must according to the canons belong to the bishop’s dominium.9 But the duke adjudged it to the monastery, on the grounds that the church had in the past ‘obeyed’ the palace, and not like other baptismal churches (as no one denied) the bishop. The argument for ignoring the canon law was put with brutal clarity. If the canons must always be obeyed, many a flourishing monastery would be ruined (presumably by losing proprietary churches); and the bishop would have to restore the bishopric of Siponto, suppressed by duke Romuald in favour of Benevento, certainly against the canons. The princes and bishops of Benevento had always judged according to the custom of their province, overriding any other law.10 So there existed, rarely as yet, the occasional proprietary baptismal church, built on a monastery’s land, or given to a monastery by a ruler who had got it in a semi-public way.11 Far more significant, however, than such occasional claims by dukes or monasteries is the counter-claim of bishops, not just to the administration of baptismal churches but to property-rights in them: a claim arguably lurking in Bologna’s case about Lizzano (the priest’s expulsion has deprived the bishop of potestas; the church belongs indifferently ‘to his bishopric’ or ‘by the laws, to his parochia’), and overt in Benevento’s claim to S. Felice (the bishop claims dominium rather than the more ambiguous potestas).12 The world of private churches belonging to priests or families was not, after all, entirely remote. Many of these had been given to a cathedral or a baptismal church—given as units of property and accepted as such;13 the idea crept in that a mother church owned all its dependencies whatever their origin, and soon coloured the cathedral’s relations to its plebes themselves.14 8

Guetichis held other churches, involving obedience to the bishop (Fonseca, ‘Particolarismo’, 1163–5). Vitalis of Bologna’s point about Lizzano was not (apparently) that the church was baptismal. 10 CDL IV. ii no. 47. See Stutz, Benef., 127–31; Martin, La Pouille, 237–8, 241–2 (lucid account of the bishop’s assumptions, but mistaking the palace’s point about Siponto as disinterestedly made by the bishop’s side). 11 e.g. two 9th-c. plebes in dioc. of Salerno (Ruggiero, ‘Per una storia’, 600–1; Fonseca, op. cit., 1174–5): Nocera, mother church of a vanished bishopric, confirmed to Salerno by prince Sicinulf, 841 (TavianiCarozzi, Le Principaute´ lombarde de Salerne, 668); Rota, linked with a gastald’s jurisdiction, sounding not 12 unlike an English minster. See Martin, La Pouille, 234–8. 13 Above, p. 52; Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 26–7, 34, 37, 94–5. 14 Ibid. III. 67–9; Wickham, Mountains, 68–9. Carolingian assumptions encouraged this in the kingdom: Capit. no. 91 (782–7) c. 1 lumps together ‘baptismal churches and oratories’ for repair by those responsible 9

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Accordingly from the late eighth century onwards many Italian bishops put priests into plebes or dependent oratories in the same way as into their own private churches, that is, by a lease—whatever kind of lease was used in that part of Italy, at that time, for landed property—much as he or anyone else would lease out a vineyard, mill, or olive plantation. The census paid, and the usual service of entertainment and lodging, were essentially a recognition of the bishop’s lordship.15 The starting point is that the plebs is a separate property-owning entity administered by its own rector; and this it remains even when treated as a leasable object (or objects, should it later be split into portions).16 The tenant priest himself may be granting leases, of dependent churches or other parts of his church’s property, or even of the whole (or his moiety or quarter if that is what he has); conveying not only land but tithes, offerings, and sometimes responsibility for providing divine service.17 In 979 a priest Peter received from Guy bishop of Lucca a moiety of the plebs of Massa di Burra, and within a few weeks leased the bulk of this (though not his portion in the pieval church itself) to a clerk, a layman, and their heirs.18 The more clearly the plebs had come to be a piece of property the more easily it could belong (leaving leases aside) as outright property to someone other than bishop or ruler: most likely a monastery (Bobbio had four plebes in 883),19 but occasionally a layman. An old private church might acquire baptismal rights, even be styled a plebs;20 more rarely perhaps, a new one might be founded as a fully fledged baptismal church.21 Lothar’s capitulary of 822–3 assumed already that a private church might have been allowed a font—though it also made clear that this exposed it to episcopal authority in a special way, and that its baptismal rights could be removed.22 In the early eleventh century the lay-owned plebs comes fully into the open. In 1004 the plebs of S. Maria in Isernia (Benevento), restored from ruin by count Landulf and his wife Gemma, was freed from the bishop by pope John XVIII and set under the dominium and potestas of the count and his heirs.23 This privilege is well known as a papal recognition of proprietary right, like the episcopal ‘liberations’ or ‘absolutions’ of the region;24 but it is the more in the past, who are to have their customary dominatio. The long-running Arezzo–Siena dispute was seen by 881 in terms of claims to own the baptismal churches (DKIII no. 31). See also Feller, Abruzzes, 785–805. 15 See Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 64–9, 77–94, 116–29; Nanni, Parrochia, 95–105; Boyd, Tithes, 68–74. 16 Below, pp. 545–6. 17 Boyd, Tithes, 71, 255–6 (app. II A). A dependent church could be served by the pleban clergy or constitute a separate benefice disposed of by the plebanus (Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 102–4, 178). See Manaresi 18 no. 15 (801). Mem. Lucc., V. 3 nos. 1496–7. 19 20 Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 109. See Settia, ‘Pievi’, 466. 21 Magnus’s and Anselm of Nonantula’s foundations, at notes 8 and 3–5, above; later, S. Maria de 22 Domno at Salerno (below, p. 405 note 75). Below, p. 793. 23 PL 139. 1480–1 (Kehr, Ital. Pont., VIII. 244 and n. 1); the only known plebs to be ‘freed’ (Feine, ‘Studien’, II. 90), the context being what Wickham calls the ‘privatizing’ of the county of Isernia (Italy, 162). 24 See index: absolutio.


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remarkable because the church was an ancient plebs. It recognized the count’s hold on a church he had in effect re-founded; but straight alienation to a layman of a baptismal church as a going concern was also possible. In 1054 the bishop of Adria granted a church of S. Andrea to Farulf the Bulgar and his male heirs without any limit, for a token census of three candles a year, with all its tithes and offerings; and allowed it ‘to be a plebs’ and a place for baptism:25 so simultaneously alienating an episcopal church (or, perhaps, recognizing its actual loss) and confirming its status. But drifting into hereditary tenure was more usual than such deliberate alienation. First, laymen as well as priests obtained leases of baptismal churches. The bishops of Tuscany and the north were under irresistible pressure from great men (native Lombards, or Franks and Bavarians in Carolingian service) to grant them leases of church property; this property included churches, among them old rich plebes.26 Already about 787 Charlemagne had decreed that baptismal churches must not be held by laymen; and Lothar in 822–3 released bishops from commitment to any predecessor’s lease of a baptismal or other church ‘moved by kinship, hope of reward, or friendship’.27 By a capitulary of 898, ‘ecclesiastical plebes should on no account be granted in benefice, to counts or to bishops’ vassals or to any laity’.28 ‘Benefice’ here need not mean an unwritten grant; but in the tenth century a church might be granted in benefice over the head of someone (priest or layman) who held it by a written lease.29 In the south the pressure on bishops seems less, probably because fewer ancient plebes had survived at all,30 while the compulsory tithe was not established until Norman times; but even here, archbishops of Canossa of the late tenth and eleventh centuries were granting twenty-nine-year leases of whole plebes to laymen.31 In Italy as elsewhere, a hereditary or much-renewed lease, still more an unwritten benefice, could turn into what was virtually inherited property, unrecoverable by the successors of the bishops who had granted them. In this way whole plebes, or fractions of them, or tithe-rights by themselves became the hereditary property of laymen as the heirs not of founders but of tenants.32

25

Muratori, Antiqu. Ital., VI. 363–4; see Stutz, Benef., 361 n. 76; and index: Farulf. Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 70, 86–8, 104–9; Violante, ‘Pievi’, 657–9, 660–9; below, p. 753. 27 Below, pp. 791, 793. 28 Capit. no. 225 (Lambert) c. 10. For a plebs as a layman’s benefice from the ruler, 879, see A. F. Frisi, Memorie storiche di Monza (Milan, 1794), II no. 5; impoverished by 920 (ibid. no. 12). 29 e.g. Nanni, Parrocchia, 99 at n. 20. 30 See Ruggiero, ‘Per una storia’, 583–91, 600–2 (and for an old plebs reduced to a village church, 589–90, 605, 609–11); Martin, La Pouille, 564, 630–1 (possibly no early plebes in Apulia); later, proliferating bishoprics (ibid. 566–76, 581–2) partly filled this role. 31 Below, p. 753 note 99. See Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 97–9, 140–2; II. 62; Fonseca, op. cit., 1175–6. 32 See Boyd, Tithes, 98–102, 103–7; Violante, ‘Pievi’, 665. 26

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Acquiring plebes by lease or benefice was for a long time, in most regions, more worthwhile than trying to get tithes and other parochial rights for private oratories, many of which only served a family or a few related households and could not easily serve whole estates when these were scattered over a wide terrain.33 At the same time the distinction between plebes and lesser churches probably survived partly because baptismal churches and their tithe-rights were made available to laymen. But this is not the whole picture, nor the end of the story. Estate churches did exist in the ninth century, chiefly in Piedmont, Lombardy, and the Veneto,34 also in Latium; sooner or later there would be pressure both from their lords and from tenants, dependants, or neighbours to get them some parochial rights.35 And even isolated oratories, accessible from a number of scattered independent settlements, might attract peasants for Sunday mass or—probably crucial—for local burial;36 or they might be built for this very purpose, not by lords but by small or middling landowners, often (especially in the south) acting as groups of neighbours—neighbours perhaps in the hill-country sense.37 There are many shades between this kind of embryonic parish church and the really private oratory (like Rosselm’s for his mother, built ‘because she lives a long way from a church’).38 Different again (and more likely to disrupt old arrangements) were new churches built by great monasteries and lay lords for new fortified settlements.39 The early absence of challenge to the plebes must go with the independence of many small landowners under Lombard rule, while the later importance of estate and incastellamento churches goes with increasing landlord power; nonetheless the survival in the eleventh century of many small proprietors also promoted the new small parishes.40 Whatever a rural church’s origin and whoever owned it, it would tend to become a ‘village’ church and to be considered ‘theirs’ by the local inhabitants.41 33

See Violante, ‘Pievi’, 648–9, 652–3; Settia, ‘Pievi’ 447, 451–3. For fragmentary estates, of rich, poor, and middling proprietors intermingled, see Wickham, Italy, 104–7; Mountains, 55–67; Land, 208, 259. 34 e.g. Codice dipl. Padovano, I, ed. A. Gloria (Venice, 1877), nos. 8, 15, 42, 67; Balzaretti (as above, p. 49 note 11: four of S. Ambrogio’s deliberately consolidated curtes had chapels or village churches). 35 Boyd, Tithes, 82–3; Violante, ‘Pievi’, 654. For Sicily see below, p. 505, note 29. 36 See Wickham, Community, 76–80 for the Lucchesia and more widely. 37 Toubert, Structures, 857–9; for the south, Ruggiero, ‘Storia’, 592–3; Fonseca, op. cit., 1172–3, 1192–3. 38 Mem. Lucc., IV. ii no. 37 (865): Rosselm has built it in his own and his brother’s property; he gives the site and some land and vineyard to the oratory itself (of SS. Mary and Peter) and to ‘the priest who will be appointed there by us’; nothing is said about its consecration or any other episcopal role. 39 See Toubert, Structures, 791, 860–6, 883; Feller, Abruzzes, 799–802, 804, 811–12; Violante, ‘Pievi’, 653–4, 656, 673–7. Earlier (mid-9th c.), the Beneventan bishops complained of gastalds building churches for (public) castri and proposed that those already built be either subjected to a plebs or recognized as plebes (c. 11; ed. Morin, ‘Un concile ine´dit’, Revue Beń., 17 (1900), 147, 150–1; for date, Taviani-Carozzi, Principaute´, 40 653–7). See Ruggiero, op. cit., 592–3; Wickham, Land, 114–15. 41 The point is Chris Wickham’s. The terms ‘village church’ and ‘village priest’ (ecclesia villana, presbiter villanus) occur in church leases, apparently carrying an established idea of their appropriate functions; first found 966 (Fonseca, op. cit., 1172–3).


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In the eleventh century bishops began to accept and assimilate these changes, which increasingly provided local pastoral care for the growing population.42 In the north of Italy bishops’ concessions tended to produce the pattern, familiar elsewhere, of the parish church as a landlord’s creation.43 In the south, pastoral functions were conceded as a new element in some charters of liberation for princely foundations;44 and in 951 John archbishop of Bari in liberating a church for its influential clerical owner allowed him such powers for himself, ‘that you and your sons’ sons may have the power of baptizing in that church, and appointing priests or deacons there . . . and I grant to you or to whomever you may give it the power of ruling that church and of ringing a bell or gong there’.45 Later, new or restored small churches in town and country were allowed limited rights over a defined community: the owner’s family and dependants, or ‘all those who dwell in your and your heirs’ property’, or houses within certain bounds. These were socially cementing functions: conducting processions, visiting houses to set up crosses and sprinkle holy water, taking communion to the sick, burial sometimes, even baptism.46 Closely allied to all this, for instance in Naples (which had some hundreds of churches), was the right to form a brotherhood or a stauritas: a kind of religious gild whose members, with their houses, would constitute what amounts to a small parish.47 By the twelfth century—with or without private initiative—a neighbourhood already centred on a church could be recognized as a parish and perhaps develop into a commune, while communes in turn promoted parishes;48 and the fact of a popular congregation attending a church began to determine its parochial status, not just in practice but in principle.49

42 Feine, ‘Studien’, II. 88–90, III. 135–8; Nanni, Parrocchia, 48–59, 110–14; Boyd, Tithes, 155–8; Feller, Abruzzes, 815–19; Taviani-Carozzi, op. cit., passim, esp. 760 (a private church serves Greeks in Salerno, almost accidentally), 789–90 (another serves Amalfitans). 43 Within narrow limits at first: Cremona sec. xi no. 29, of 1019, count Arduin and his wife Willa promise the bishop not to prevent tithes going to three plebes from Arduin’s castrum Briniano, and not to allow baptism at the castle chapel except for family members (strictly rationed). 44 In Salerno, 989, the princes’ S. Maria de Domno was (most unusually, in the heart of a city) given parochial rights alongside the cathedral’s (see Ruggiero, op. cit., 597–8). 45 Ughelli, Italia Sacra, VII, ed. Coleti (1717–22), 721–2. 46 e.g. Cava nos. 898 (1035), 1086 (1047), 1194 (1054). In cities the cathedral or plebs may have kept a monopoly of the Eucharist and of confession and absolution. 47 See index: stauritas; Feine, ‘Studien’, II. 48–9, 89–90; Taviani-Carozzi, op. cit., 788–90, 873. 48 On the likely interplay (with seigneurial power as a factor where it existed) see Wickham, Community, 74–81. 49 It was for the new small parishes that the word parochia came into common use in Italy.

4 The question of origins

Consideration of the interactions in different countries between private property in churches and the development of parishes has taken us far beyond the chronological bounds of this part of the book. Back in the eighth century, we left the proprietary church already in daylight for lesser churches still mostly nonparochial; a daylight not yet extending to monasteries, as we shall see later; but extensive enough to justify turning now to the question of origins. Stutz saw the proprietary church as originating in the primitive ‘household priesthood’ of heathen Germans: the father of a family offering prayer and sacrifice to the gods on behalf of his household. This, he thought, changed its character with the rise of chieftains among the heads of households. A lord with dependants too numerous to meet in his hall for worship would build a temple as an outbuilding: an Eigentempel, to which neighbours as well as dependants might come, and where he might delegate priesthood to a servant. When lords and their followers were converted, during or after their migrations, they continued these customs as Christians—if Arian, beyond the reach of the Roman bishops’ authority; if Catholic, resisting or ignoring that authority until it had been almost undermined and the bishops’ own attitudes riddled with the same barbarian assumptions. The landlord’s church, then, is the successor of a barbarian lord’s temple for his followers, while the independent priest’s church is the survival of the plain householder’s smaller-scale priesthood.1 This theory, with modifications, has been tenaciously maintained;2 but it rests on little evidence,3 relying mainly on deductive argument from a narrow base,4 1 ‘EK als Element’, 22–3; Benef., 89–95; ‘Kapitel’, 4–5. For a brief judicious summary (and of opposing opinion, mainly French) see Addleshaw, Development, 5. 2 Chiefly by Feine, e.g. ‘Ursprung und Wesen’, 120–3, modified (1950) in ‘Ursprung, Wesen und Bedeutung’, 195–9. 3 Mainly Tacitus’s Germania, c. 10, on prayers and omen-consulting ‘by the priest of the community’ for a public divination, and ‘by the head of the household himself if it is private’ (not implying sacrifices or anything else ‘priestly’). Stutz held also (Benef., 144 n. 44) that 8th-c. Thuringian priests combining pagan practices with so-called baptism must have been temple-owners (not supported by the papal letters cited, 4 Ep. Sel., I nos. 28, 80). See Torres, ‘Origen’, 89–95.

The question of origins

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and analogy with much later conditions in Iceland—conditions themselves inferred from even later laws and sagas.5 In the sagas, Norse settlers build temples of their own, one of them, Thorolf Mostrarskegg, using timber brought from home, including the roof-tree and image of Thor from his former temple. On the strength of this, along with archaeological evidence that (not surprisingly) the barbarians’ first churches were wooden, Stutz suggested that ‘perhaps we should think of the Eigentempel as built of wood, whose timbers the Icelanders took with them in their ships, and probably the migrating Germans in their wagons’.6 There may never have been such Norse and Icelandic temples. Thirteenthcentury saga writers, familiar with handsome churches in their own time, may have imagined elaborate temples for their ancestors; whereas assemblies probably really took place at open-air holy places or in chieftains’ halls.7 However, the Icelandic chieftains (goðar, ‘godly ones’) may still have had priestly functions, besides whatever was going by way of political power;8 and having each his own assembly-place or places, they would naturally be the first to build churches in the eleventh century, whether at old cult-places or new sites, and would naturally treat them entirely as their own. The saga picture of convert chieftains (such as Snorri, who lived at and controlled the holy place of Helgafell) building churches because the clergy assured them that this would guarantee places in heaven for their friends and followers, may not be far out.9 The possibility of parallels with Europe much earlier is enticing. But as critics pointed out from the first,10 we cannot draw conclusions about the migrating Germans of the fourth and fifth centuries from the practices of an individualist colonial society five centuries later, a society derived from (but not mirroring) a pagan Scandinavia that had long gone its own way alongside Christian Europe. Among the earlier pagan Germans, not only is there only occasional evidence of temple buildings as distinct from open-air holy places,11 but these places may have belonged—in some loose sense—to peoples or their heads, often kings.12 Religious rites would be a function of the assembly at which other public acts 5 e.g. K. Maurer, Island von seiner ersten Entdeckung (Munich 1871), 38–49, 85–97, 187–220. See now 6 ‘Kapitel’, 4 n. 3. Ve´steinsson, Christianization of Iceland, 5–8. 7 O. Olsen, ‘Horg, Hov og Kirke’, Aarboger for Nordisk Oldkyndighed (1965), 283–4 (English summary); B. and P. Sawyer, Medieval Scandinavia, 104–5. The temple at Uppsala described by Adam of Bremen may have been built to emulate Christian churches. 8 See Wickham, Land, 217–20. The name implies an originally religious status. 9 See Torres, ‘Origen’, 112–20; Byock, Med. Iceland, 58–9, 82–3, 143–4; Ve´steinsson, Christionization, 26–7, 37–45 (early churches largely fictional except perhaps those at Helgafell). On the historical value of the sagas as ‘broad, normative characterizations’, Wickham, Land, 217. 10 e.g. P. Fournier, ‘Proprie´te´ des e´glises’, 486–506; Thomas, Droit, 29. 11 De Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, I (Berlin, 1956), 372–8; Olsen, ‘Horg’, 279–82. See Blair, ‘A-S. Pagan Shrines’, 16–19, 22, and nn., on Yeavering; more broadly, id., Church, 51–7. 12 The function of Icelandic goðar may have developed by dispersal from larger, more coherent, premigration communities; Bo¨hmer early expressed this view (‘Eigenkirchentum in England’, 340).

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were performed, held at a public holy place, often the cairns or barrows where kings or nobles were buried—dead rulers who helped their living descendants to obtain good harvests and good fortune from the gods. Some of the oldest parish churches in Germany and the north were sited at old pagan centres,13 and such a church might have been built by a ruler whose pagan ancestors were buried there.14 But to argue from this that the proprietary church as such had its origins in communal worship under Germanic kings and nobles is hardly less speculative—and rather more perverse—than deriving it from the Germanic domestic hearth.15 When Feine said that ‘the essentials of the Eigenkirche are here’, including full property-rights over the place,16 he offered no evidence. In fact, we do not know what kind of hold a king or noble might have on such a site that would enable him eventually to build a church there. It is one thing for a new king—risen perhaps as a warlord, his wealth consisting of weapons, ornaments, horses, cattle, and slaves, his power based on a following of young warriors—to gain control of a community and its old cult-place;17 another for an ‘old’ king or established noble to possess his own ancestral graves as a cultplace for his family and followers, and perhaps as the core of family land. Both may have happened; and either could lead after conversion to the building of a church.18 For barbarian rulers still in their homelands, or settled long enough to have pagan ancestors buried near at hand, this may indeed be how their Eigenkirchen began.19 But it is unlikely that a pagan lord who held such a holy place was its proprietor—able to give, sell, lease, bequeath it—in the way that his Christian successor will be proprietor of the church that he builds there and endows out of landed property; and this after all is what Stutz, and Feine himself, regarded as crucial, ruling out a ‘Roman’ origin because Roman law did not allow it. For Feine’s ‘theory of origins’, such continuity as has been found between pagan and Christian use of sites is necessary but not sufficient. 13 J. Meier, Ahnengrab und Rechtstein (Berlin, 1950), 131–5; Tu¨chle, KG. Schwabens, I. 46–9; De Vries, op. cit., 340–8, 483–7. 14 It might conceivably survive as a ‘community church’ where lordship was absent or weak, but see below, pp. 657–8. 15 R. Ho¨slinger, ‘Die ‘‘alt-arische’’ Wurzel des Eigenkirchenrechts in ethnologischer Sicht’, O¨sterreichisches Archiv fu¨r Kirchenrecht, 3 (1952), 267–73, accepts both origins, attributing them respectively to the influence in Indo-European society of matriarchal, agrarian peoples and of patriarchal nomadic invaders, but sees the full Eigenkirche concept as an ‘extreme’ patriarchal authority produced by tensions resulting from city cultures. This highly theoretical article lacks evidence or illustration. 16 Feine, ‘Ursprung, Wesen und Bedeutung’, 197–9 (turning away from the ‘Eigentempel’ premises to Germanic ancestral graves). 17 See Blair, Church, 56–7 (on Yeavering): ‘possible that an emergent kingship . . . commandeered a 18 place of long-standing popular assembly’. See below, at note 98. 19 Such a church might mark a family’s handgemal or inalienable centre of inherited land, perhaps formerly marked by a symbolic pole, later by an open-air cross (Sto¨rmer, above, p. 46 note 97; H. Meyer, Das Handgemal (Weimar, 1934), 75–9). But the word first appears in the 10th c. (ibid. 98–102, 115–17); and see the sceptical view of Last, ‘Zur Einrichtung’, 346–7.


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In any case the privately owned church as commonly found in the West seems less like an import from the German forests than a colonial phenomenon. If the oldest churches of the Germans’ homelands were community cult-centres, it was further afield that they first founded churches on a smaller and more private scale: family churches, because clans had been fragmented;20 or estate churches, because it was as landlords that many barbarians settled into the Empire and took their pay. Any theory of German origins would be supported by evidence that those who arrived in the West as Arian Christians already treated their churches as private property. The Burgundians may have done so by the early sixth century.21 But we should need to know not only of the existence but something of the pattern of Arian church-owning to be able to derive it from German paganism; and this knowledge is entirely lacking. The theory of Schubert that Arian Christianity was itself the origin of the mainstream of the proprietary church in the West is open to the same objections and more, as Stutz himself showed.22 It seems more likely that Arian or ex-Arian Burgundians, Suevi, and Visigoths appear as the earliest German church-owners (and probably the Ostrogoths would be with them if we knew more about them) simply because they arrived as Christians. The apparent force of Stutz’s theory lies in this early spread of proprietary churches among the Germanic settlers,23 and their late and limited emergence in some less Germanized regions.24 There are defects in the geographical argument, however.25 In Rome and Ravenna, or anywhere where the bishop had a large share of both public authority and landed property, the local laity’s ethnicity would be irrelevant to his keeping churches largely in his own control. And the proprietary church in some form or other appeared far beyond the Germanic settlements: in the Byzantine Empire, among Slavs both western and eastern, and in still-Celtic regions. More serious than these negative arguments is the possibility of other explanations, which take into account the oratories and basilicas built by Roman provincial landlords before and during the barbarian invasions.26 For Feine, any 20

Against Haff’s suggestion that the 8th-c. plebs of Mosciano belonged to an exceptionally large, 21 coherent, transplanted Lombard fara, see below, p. 652. Above, p. 18. 22 Stutz, ‘Arianismus und Germanismus’ (Internationale Wochenschrift, 1909), esp. cols. 1573–6, on Schubert’s Das a¨lteste germanische Christentums (1909). 23 Some early criticism of Stutz’s theory on chronological grounds (Fournier, ‘Proprie´te´’, 505; Thomas, Droit, 30–1) was hardly justified. The evidence begins almost everywhere soon after conversion to Cath24 olicism, with Catholic bishops’ letters and legislation. See Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 133–4, 188–9. 25 Rhaetia has been seen as without proprietary churches only by representing lay foundations as Stiftungen on somewhat a priori grounds (see index: Stiftung). In Sardinia (see Stutz, ‘Eigenkirche, Eigenkloster’, 4) some churches were at its rulers’ disposal to give to mainland monasteries (e.g. 1089, St-Victor no. 1006). 26 Imbart, Origines, 176–7; Geńestal, ‘Origines’, 538–44; Dopsch, Wirtschaftliche und Soziale Grundlagen der Europaïschen Kulturentwicklung, II. 231–2; Hartmann, ‘Zustand’, 400–1.

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attempt to see these as proprietary broke down on the rule that privately founded churches had to be given into the full control of the bishop, and released from all proprietary claims by their founders, before consecration.27 But this gives too much weight to formal law, regardless of how widely it applied (at the time, only to the metropolitan area of Rome), how effectively it was enforced (at which we can only guess), and why it was found necessary. The efforts of pope Gelasius imply that founders of churches would treat them as private property, given the chance.28 The law was up against feelings and behaviour which cannot have been peculiar to the Germans already in the Empire; most of these were still Arians; the Catholics whose dealings with churches troubled Gelasius had Roman names like Peter or Placidia. In fact the bishops of the fifth century were engaged in a struggle which, with churches multiplying and order slipping, they might have lost or ceased to care about even without the barbarians. As it was, many of the new churches of the sixth and seventh centuries belonged to barbarians, and many old private oratories probably perished, wherever villas were deserted or destroyed or fell into the hands of pagans. But in the less disrupted parts of the West there must have been Roman landlords’ oratories surviving in the hands of the original family, or of their peaceful and legal successors; while some of the old provincial families were still in a position to found new churches, like Aredius and his mother Pelagia in Gaul.29 Such landowners, whatever law they lived under, were neighbours to barbarians, lived in the same world, and intermarried with them.30 And in south-east Wales, unaffected by Germanic settlement or conquest, we can now see a segment of the post-Roman West in which churches appear as family or individual property; providing in this as in other matters a ‘useful control’.31 In the Eastern Empire, without either barbarian settlement or (as in Wales) the collapse of Roman authority, a special ‘founder’s right’ was eventually defined,32 sharply dissociated by Stutz and Feine from Western property in churches because its legal base was different: not property such as one could have in land, but the Church’s gratitude to founders. But this is only to say that Byzantine lawyers rationalized founders’ claims in their own way; numerous small private oratories were in fact dealt with as private property limited by episcopal authority, and this seems to be how Justinian saw church-builders’ rights.33 As for 27

28 29 Feine, KRG 161; ‘Ursprung und Wesen’, 120–1. Above, pp. 13–15. Above, pp. 26–7. Orleans 541 was probably concerned with Roman as much as barbarian landlords. See Dopsch, 31 Grundlagen, II. 238–9. Davies, ‘Land and Power’ p. 6, above, pp. 31–2. 32 J. von Zhishmann, Das Stifterrecht in der morgenla¨ndischen Kirche (Vienna, 1888), 1–8; Feine, ‘Studien’, II. 96–8, and references in nn. 231–6. 33 Fuchs, Ordinationstitel, 155–8; E. Herman, in CMH IV. 2 (1967), 117–18 (brief sketch and references); R. Puza, ‘Gru¨nder einer Gemeinde und Stifter einer Kirche . . . in der christlichen Antike’, Archiv f. Kathol. Kirchenrecht, 151 (1982), 63–70, referring esp. to Steinwenter, ‘Die Rechtsstellung der Kirchen und Klo¨ster nach den Papyri’, ZSSKA 19 (1930). 30


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Byzantine monasteries, some were virtually the private property of landlords, or of abbots naming their own successors.34 The initial freedom in the Roman Empire of monasteries and their property from episcopal control (by virtue, originally, of monks being laymen) has indeed been seen as the model followed for private churches in the West, at least in Spain. Torres Lopez held that Visigothic church-owners adopted claims already made by Hispano-Romans, and that these had advanced their claims by obtaining ‘monastic’ independence for their churches, at first the only way to breach the unity of diocesan property and make room for their own control.35 Torres does not, however, establish the transition, essential to his theory, from the particular fraud of falsely representing a church as monastic36 to a general emulation of monastic independence without that pretence. Spanish legislation affirming the independent property of churches makes no reference to any monastic model;37 and it may be that the special point of claiming monastic status was only to escape from the bishop’s claim to the third of revenues.38 To reject a purely Germanic origin is not, of course, to accept a purely Roman one. The idea of simple imitation by the barbarians, likely enough in many regions, will not do as a general explanation, considering how quickly proprietary churches were set up where the disruption of Roman and Christian life had been most severe, as in north-east Gaul and the Rhineland. It has alternatively been represented as arising from common social and economic conditions, being an aspect of the landlord power emerging over most of the West in the later empire and the new kingdoms.39 If landlords were already wielding some degree of public authority over their tenants and dependants it might be natural for them to provide the means of worship and to take its proceeds, to see these functions (like others of an originally public kind) as personal rights,40 and so come to regard the church as their property and its priest as their man.41 In the long term it is against such a background that the unselfconscious treatment of churches and church revenues as property must be understood.42 But we cannot safely say that landlord power alone explains the emergence of the proprietary church, when we know so little in some regions about post-Roman 34

Feine, Studien, II. 97–100; Puza, as preceding note. ‘Origen’, 141–2, 206–7, 212–17. Torres has been credited with a ‘monastic theory’ of origins, but in fact argued only that monastic status provided a juridical basis for proprietary claims derived from growing 36 seigneurial power. See index: Le´rida. 37 Above, pp. 19–20. See, however, Bidagor, Iglesia, 57–8. 38 Martıńez Dıéz, Patrimonio, 147–58. 39 Dopsch, Grundlagen, II. 232–8, 242–6; Torres, ‘Origen’, 191–205. 40 P. Fournier, ‘Proprie´te´’, 505–6. 41 For a recent exposition of ‘landlordly’ origins (in Gaul) see Scha¨ferdiek, ‘Heilige’. 42 Feine objected that in the Byzantine empire the proprietary church was rather feebly established despite highly developed landlordship (KRG 163; ‘Ursprung und Wesen’, 122). But this landlordship existed in a setting of stronger public law and authority than in the West. 35

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landlord power itself: how far we should see landlords (recognizable as such to us) as gradually acquiring powers of government, or the other way round: magistrates in the wreckage of the empire, leviers of imperial taxes, protectionracketeers, barbarian warlords, village chieftains, turning in the course of time into landlords; and how soon and how widely any of this came about.43 An early theory of seigneurial origins was Imbart de la Tour’s, of a gradual development in the seventh century from patronage and protection of churches to the assumption of outright ownership. On this view, just as small proprietors commended themselves and their property to lords for protection, so did rural priests commend themselves and their churches to lords who were at first no more than great neighbours, or founders and patrons, but not, at first, proprietors.44 Gaulish legislation shows that powerful laymen did indeed get hold of rich parish churches; but not by the parish priest’s commendation—rather, these laymen took the position of parish priest or archpriest for themselves, perhaps because they had lordship over the whole vicus.45 As for a privately founded church in a villa, the hypothesis that its priest had sufficient hold on it and its property to be able, like a small landowner, to commend it to the protection of the founder’s heir would need much more explaining than the simpler supposition that it belonged to the founder’s heirs all along (which is what Gaulish legislation about landlords’ churches implies).46 The personal patronage of the late Empire, while it coloured the dealings of great laymen with the clergy and might well determine the circle from which a priest was picked, was not a stage on the way to church-owning but something coexisting and quite different.47 The background to Imbart’s view was the belief that large-scale lordship itself grew up in the early Middle Ages by the gradual submission of small free proprietors. On the different view (itself exaggerated)48 that the post-Roman world was already totally dominated by landlords, with peasant proprietors holding out only in cracks and gaps, the proprietary church could be regarded as from the first a natural and obvious consequence of landlord power—a profit-making adjunct of any estate, like a mill or a bakehouse that tenants have to use.49 This, in many regions, it eventually became; but it certainly was not so from the start. Early 43 See Wickham, Land, chs. 1 and 7; Le Jan, Famille, 109–13 (a convincing model for the Franks); Goffart, Barbarians, 92–8, 110–12, 148–57, 160–1, 216–18, 222–8 (various processes turning tax-entitlement to landlordship); Higham, Rome, Britain, 75, 116–18, 219. 44 Imbart, Origines, 175–6, 191–6, 207–13; see Stutz’s review, in Go¨ttingische gelehrte Anzeigen, 166 (1904), 29–30, 45–52. On Imbart’s thesis and its neglect, not by Stutz but by later German scholars, see A. Hedwig, 45 ‘Die EK in den urbarialen Quellen’, 59–63. Above, p. 26. 46 Above, pp. 25–6. 47 Imbart’s view could not be documented, as he admitted; and it seems to confuse different senses of 48 See Wickham, Land, ch. 7, esp. ‘additional note’ p. 225. ‘patronage’. 49 See H. Seé, Les Classes rurales et le re´gime domanial en France au moyen aˆge (Paris 1901), 111–12; Stutz, ‘EKvermo¨gen’, 1251.


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landlords’ oratories were probably usually for households rather than for tenants;50 while it was not until the late eighth century (or later outside the Carolingian empire) that tithe payment became compulsory; later still that the destination of tithes was fixed, to some extent in the landlord interest; and yet later that parishes tended to fall into newly-formed seigneuries.51 And numerous private churches existed without even potential claims on any community beyond the owning family, or any territory outside their endowment.52 Stutz meanwhile had taken the estate church as evidence not of any general or sub-Roman ‘landlordly’ origins but of his own theory. He argued that the further back one looked, the more those churches that were pertinences of estates predominated;53 and he held that this supported the idea of a Germanic lord, finding his dependants too numerous to assemble in his house, building himself a temple among his sheds and barns. But this predominance seems not true of Bavarians, Alemans, or Lombards; and in any case the argument is doubtful. It is true that a church constituting an estate in itself might have originated with its separation by gift, sale, or partition, as an economically valuable object, from a larger estate in which it had begun.54 But often it originated in the endowment of a church with a self-contained estate; and Feine, standing Stutz’s argument on its head, argued from the opposite premiss—the early predominance of self-sufficient churches— to the same conclusion, the family worship and non-Roman origins of the Eigenkirche.55 He pointed out that the estate church was not for some time a normal pertinence of any villa or manor, such that a large landlord would automatically be a multiple church-owner; it is not until the ninth-century polyptichs of Saint-Germain-des-Pre´s and other Frankish monasteries that great landlords other than rulers are found owning churches by the score.56 However, Feine’s argument that the hereditary priest’s church is positive evidence of household priesthood origins is shaky. It is not clear why vaguely priestly functions common to all heads of households should in Christian times stiffen into the taking of priest’s orders by some, while fading out for the majority. 50

See above, pp. 11–12, 66; below, p. 105. Below, pp. 462–74. The supposed model, the lord’s monopoly of the mill, may be no older than the 10th c. 52 For such churches, owners could expect gifts and offerings from dependants and kinsmen, perhaps from neighbours or pilgrims, but they had not established an extra claim on tenants’ produce. 53 Stutz, ‘Kapitel’, 5 n. 1, writing before Feine’s work on Lombard Italy, or H. F. Schmid’s on W. Slavonic parishes. Schmid argued for small family and priest-owned churches existing long before landlordship (‘Die rechtliche Grundlagen der Pfarrorganisation auf westslavischen Boden und ihre Entwicklung wa¨hrend des Mittelalters’, ZSSKA 46 (1926) and 48–51 (1928–31)); this was the second, stronger arm of Feine’s objection to the ‘landlord power’ explanation (see note 24, above). 54 55 Stutz, ‘Kapitel’, 6–7; see pp. 437–8. Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 8–9, 74–5. 56 Id., KRG 163–4; ‘Ursprung und Wesen’, 122. Among rulers, the 8th-c. Agilolfing dukes could endow the new bishopric of Salzburg with about 76 churches (many of them probably founded by smaller men, perhaps native Romans, under ducal lordship). 51

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This would be more convincing if ‘household priesthood’ itself looked more substantial; there is nothing specially priestly about a Thuringian householder’s ritual handing over, in the presence of his household, of the young widow of a slave in marriage to another.57 In any case, to admit as Feine does that such domestic roots of the proprietary church would be Indo-European rather than Germanic, because of their lively and indigenous variety among the Slavs,58 is to admit that they could be Greek and Roman too, and of course Celtic. So far this chapter has been mainly historiographical. Probably no historian now would expect to find a ‘Germanic’ or a ‘Roman’ explanation; even the search for ‘origins’ at all becomes dubious if what we have to explain is not a system of law but attitudes and practices taking shape as customary law.59 In any case there are at least two different things to be explained (leaving aside as a secondary development the old parish church becoming someone’s property): the church as part of a larger landlordly estate, and the church as a self-contained estate ruled by a landlordly priest, abbot, or abbess to whom (or to whose family) it belongs. But both seem best explained, in the West, by the partly diverse and partly common needs of Romans in a changing world and of settlers learning new things about religion, law, and property. If ‘origins’ means precedents, patterns of behaviour set by one’s forebears, they need not exist at all since any social practice must have a beginning, and that new things should begin in fifth- and sixth-century Europe would not be surprising.60 If earlier models are required, there are plenty in the Roman world: family burial-places, private oratories, Paulinus of Nola’s domestic monastery. But if we are looking for explanations this is a matter of motive and opportunity: of why people wanted their own churches and what made it possible. Arguably all we need to know is why, in the first few generations after conversion, property-owners wanted to build and endow churches at all; given that they did, it was natural enough that they should want to treat them as in some sense their own; and this became progressively easier as public law decayed.61 The everyday sense in which a church ‘belonged’ to someone who, in spite of having ‘given’ it an endowment, felt it was his own and treated it as his own, could easily—in the ambience of customary law—become what rulers and local courts recognized as a property-right.62 57 ‘Taking the woman’s right hand, he wrapped her in a cloak as marriage custom required, and in the presence of her fellow slaves and his own wife and children, gave her to him in marriage . . . ’ (Arbeo, Vita S. Haimhrammi, c. 39, SRMerov., IV. 515, in a miracle story), cited by Sto¨rmer (Adel, 142) as an example of 58 ‘household priesthood’. See note 53, above. 59 ‘Landlord power’ theories come nearer to recognizing this. 60 See the comment of K. F. Werner, ‘Important Noble Families’, in Reuter (ed. and trans.), Medieval Nobility, 142: the Eigenkirche was ‘a product of the late antique and Christian world’. Cf. Fernańdez Alonso, 61 Cura Pastoral, 215–24. See Fournier, ‘Proprie´te´’, 505–6. 62 See below, p. 776.


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It is possible that barbarians more easily regarded churches as their own without refinement or qualification,63 assimilating this to rights over land as soon as they had such rights; but it seems unnecessary to search for ‘origins’ for these assumptions in Germanic concepts of Munt or Gewere, or to speculate about which of these—the head of a household’s authority over persons or the uncomplicated possession of things, is the real root of church-ownership.64 It is more to the point that to endow a church was to make a gift, and that while Roman law had a concept of outright, gratuitous donation, barbarians might be less likely to see any gift as totally detached from the giver; on the contrary, it established a link with or even a hold on its recipient, only to be released by a countergift.65 Perhaps in giving land to a church and thereby to God, a saint, or the poor, a barbarian both staked a claim on God’s mercy, the saint’s intercessions, and the prayers of the poor, and kept a hold on land and church (the ultimate countergift—remedium animae—being realized invisibly and out of time).66 But a Roman landowner too, in late Roman or sub-Roman conditions, might endow a church without in practice letting go of the land altogether when he named or described it to the consecrating bishop.67 Many of the possible motives for building a church were motives equally for treating it as property afterwards. Direct economic gain is perhaps unlikely for the actual founder; offerings in his lifetime would be unlikely to outweigh his initial costs; if these were minimal (a small wooden church, unendowed and underequipped) so would offerings be.68 But there might be worldly advantages in turning some of one’s land into church property without really letting it go. If it were true of Frankish or of English settlers that at first they depended for land on temporary grants from their kings, to endow a church would have been the only way to secure the land for their heirs at all.69 Much more likely, it was (in England) at first only from kings, and for giving to churches, that nobles could get land (or rights over it) to treat as acquired and leave as they chose.70 Elsewhere, in foundations by nobles or the fully free, it seems clear that the land they gave was by now their hereditary alod: here the advantage might be that using the free share pro remedium animae could be combined with making special arrangements for one child, and perhaps that successive rectors could name their successors; or that church and land could be kept undivided under family control.71 For some, 63 As held by Scho¨nfeld, ‘Xenodochien’, 43; Bo¨hmer, ‘EKtum in England’, 341–5. But see below, 64 pp. 729–34. e.g. Feine, ‘Ursprung und Wesen’, 121. 65 See index: gift and countergift. 66 Conversely those rare founders who ‘gave themselves’ or offered their sons to their own church (above, pp. 41–2) might be trying to make a total renunciation of property in it (but see 67 above, p. 51). Above, p. 50; below, p. 438. 68 Braga II’s complaint (above, p. 21), that churches were being built for the purpose of taking half the 69 Below, pp. 112, 154–5. offerings, was probably only indignant rhetoric. 70 71 See below, pp. 154, 155. Above, pp. 39–47, 55–63.

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founding a church—thus putting one’s land under a saint’s protection—might be nothing to do with freedom of disposal but a way of retaining status, or even surviving, for Romans especially.72 In the decay of the Empire members of the landlord class could find by joining the clergy a vocation in an uneasy world and a livelihood not based entirely on rents or taxes. The flow of men of birth and influence into the clergy must to some extent presuppose, and would itself evoke, something more secure than a stipend at the bishop’s will. They would want to draw their income from property-owning churches, which might be the bishop’s, or a patron’s, or their own founded with what they could salvage from their personal fortunes.73 Finally, for anyone, the advantage of owning and living off a church might be not only its relative security from robbery or family vicissitudes but special privileges: some freedom from taxes or public burdens;74 possibly a right of sanctuary.75 But differing considerations of this kind are likely to be parasitic on more general reasons for founding private churches. From the eighth century onwards it is possible to build up a rich picture of common motives (at least for founding monasteries and other self-sufficient churches),76 partly by inference from the founders’ circumstances and the churches’ fortunes, partly from the intentions attributed to founders by the composers of their charters:77 largely conventional, but evidence of common ideas. We can see that a founder hoped for heavenly reward and forgiveness of his sins, to be helped in this world and the next by the prayers of monks or clergy and perhaps of the poor or pilgrims,78 and sometimes to live a more-or-less monastic life himself.79 We can infer that he wished to provide for his family’s religious needs, to create a focus for its lordly almsgiving, to provide it with a burial-place, and to embody its prestige in something solid and splendid.80 His concerns may not extend to any very remote future: he may indeed be clearer that he can do something for the dead than for the unborn (though he may hope that the unborn will do the same for him).81 Sooner or later one of his heirs or successors, or he himself, may give the church away to a 72 See Higham, Rome, Britain, 98–9, 219 (the Roman-British ‘gentry’); Halsall, Settlement and Social Organization, 251 (late Roman society in the Metz region). But 6th-c. Franks too might be politically highly 73 insecure (ibid. 34–9). e.g. Sulpicius Severus, above, p. 68. 74 e.g. Codex Theodos. 11. 1. 1; 11. 24. 6. 75 But probably only big parish churches, not at first in private hands, had sanctuary rights (Fournier, Peuplement, 423; see Campbell, Essays, 80, on king Ine’s use of minsters’ sanctuary as ‘a royal slave-trap’). 76 For estate churches we have little evidence. Approved reasons for building these would doubtless include provision for the Christianization or liturgical needs of dependants (see note 101, below). 77 Or by cartularists editing them. 78 e.g. Wissembourg no. 195 (718); CDL I–II nos. 48, 96, 203 (730, 748, 767); Scho¨nfeld, ‘Xenodochien’, 79 53 n. 6. Above, pp. 37, 124–7, 152–8, 162. 80 See below, pp. 119–21. 81 On the dead as persons, entitled to memoria, see Oexle, ‘Gegenwart der Toten’, 29–35; on this as pre-Christian, 48–50.


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greater church, either intending so to secure its future or allowing it to be swallowed up for the greater prize of a powerful saint’s goodwill;82 but what makes this possible is that the place is his own. Of course motives will have shifted by the eighth century and would continue to shift, as ideas developed (for instance about Purgatory). But we can probably project a good deal of this picture back into the fifth and sixth centuries, for both Romans and barbarians; the more so, for the Franks at least, in that numerous and widespread noble households were just establishing themselves as local lords.83 The evidence, archaeological and literary, points towards changing burial customs as central. To be the focus of burials, or itself a burial-place, is an important function of late Roman and early barbarian privately founded churches—perhaps indeed the strongest incentive for building them—and would tend to promote their being seen as property.84 Behind this is the rise of the cult of saints as the Empire in the West was foundering. For among the benefits of the saints’ friendship, perhaps the most important (outside the spiritual elite) was their company and help for the dead awaiting the general resurrection: burial ad sanctos, near the bodies of saints, was what Christians in the Mediterranean world wanted for themselves and those dear to them.85 This had a public aspect—the clustering of burials round the martyrs’ tombs in the suburban cemeteries, and the communal visits to them from the city on feast days, led by the bishop.86 But there was also a strong private strand to it,87 great senatorial aristocrats, women especially, getting possession of a saint’s body, building a shrine for it, perhaps in the public cemetery but perhaps on their own land,88 and making this their burial church, the focus of their own identity and seal of their status.89 Before long, the fragmentation of saints’ bodies multiplied their presence, while things or stuff that the saints had touched or 82

83 Below, pp. 178–80. Le Jan, Famille, 11, 106–13, 128–9. To represent the Stiftung as an alternative is unrealistic (see index: Stiftung). If any early memorial church was intended to have trustees distinct from its founders’ heirs, this would soon fade out of mind: what secured memoria was probably belief in the rights of the dead. See Borgolte, ‘Die Stiftungen des Mittelalters’, 80–8, 91–4 (by then, 1988, tacitly accommodating the Stiftung to founders’ property-rights). 85 Brown, Cult of Saints, esp. 27, 69–71; Aries, Hour of Our Death, 33–40. See Augustine’s subtle discussion (De cura pro mortuis agenda, PL 40 at 591–7) of Paulinus of Nola’s question ‘whether burial in the memoria of martyrs can do anything for the souls of the dead’ when a great lady wanted her son buried near St Felix. 86 Brown, Cult, 8–10, 23–7, 36–44, 98–105. A later move into the city from the suburbs for burial could be triggered by the translation of a saint’s relics (Bullough, ‘Burial’, 180 and n. 8; Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, 145–52). 87 See Brown, Cult, 32–6. Burial in church was constantly and ineffectually prohibited: concessions covered special laymen such as founders (R. W. Muncey, A History of the Consecration of Churches and Churchyards (Cambridge, 1930), 116–21, conveniently summarizes the legislation). 88 Brown, Cult, 33–4 (Pompeiana, 289; Asclepia, 304); Aries, Hour 38 (515 inscription on the tomb of Penthagothus, from the Viennois). 89 Paulinus of Nola’s life bridges the public and private: adopting St Felix’s tomb, spending his private wealth on enshrining it, identifying himself and his monks as Felix’s servants, eventually made bishop of Nola (Brown, Cult, 53–64; T. J. Lienhard, Paulinus of Nola (Cologne, 1977) 30, 70–2, 81). 84

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worn came to have the same power of reassurance.90 When it became normal to put relics, however minimal, in or under an altar at its consecration,91 this must have clinched the association of having one’s own church with having the hovering protection of a saint or saints for oneself and one’s family and dependants (for just as the saint could obtain God’s mercy for his devotees, so these could obtain the saint’s help for those to whom they stood as patron or paterfamilias). This is not to argue that the cult of saints could only be fulfilled by the foundation of private churches. Its public or communal aspect, in cathedrals, great basilicas, and suburban cemeteries, was more important; while for individuals, proximity to a saint could be sought in any great church, and relics could be kept about their person, carried on their travels, used for presents. Yet—closely linked as it was with insecurity and the assertion of status—it must have given a powerful impetus to the private building of churches. Barbarian kings and nobles came to share this reliance on the saints, and to make saints’ bodies, relics, or martyrdom sites their own, with status-enhancing effect. Sixth-century examples are king Childebert I building a church in Paris for a garment of St Vincent brought from Spain,92 and the dux Launebod in Toulouse at the place of St Saturninus’s martyrdom.93 In seventh-century Neustria the mayor Erchinoald went armed to retrieve from a neighbour the body of ‘his’ Irishman Fursa (‘give me back my saint!’), and buried him at Pe´ronne, Erchinoald’s own foundation and intended burial-place.94 As for nobles’ burials in general, excavations ranging from Bavaria and Alemania to northern Francia have found numerous churches from the seventh century and a few from the sixth, with one or more burials, often richly furnished, inside, under, or alongside them;95 apparently built by a more-or-less Christian lord or chieftain for his own (or his father’s) and his family’s burial, or to hallow the existing graves of pagan 90 See Herrmann-Mascard, Reliques, 40–9, 62–5; Markus, End, 140–8. For further literature see Geary, Living, 166–7 nn. 12–18. 91 The practice grew from the 4th c. onwards, coming (by the 9th c.) to be thought essential (Geary, Living, 146–63 and 184–5). Carthage 398 c. 83 (Conc. Africae 345–525, 204–5) came to be misunderstood as requiring all altars to contain relics (Markus, End, 148). 92 Liber Historiae Francorum, c. 26 (SRMerov., II. 283–4); Gregory of Tours, HF iv. 20 (Childebert’s burial there). 93 Saint-Sernin (now Notre-Dame) du Taur, Toulouse. Venantius Fortunatus’s poem, Carmina, ii. 8 (MGH SS. Auct. Antiqu., IV. 1), has Launebod’s building and his wife’s almsgiving reflect lustre on both families. See Sto¨rmer, Adel, 358; Irsigler, Fru¨hfra¨nk. Adel, 144, 213–44. 94 Virtutes Fursei, cc. 11–19, esp. 16 (SRMerov., IV. 44). Cf. Frankish kings buried with their saint-bishops (K. H. Kru¨ger, Ko¨nigsgrabkirchen der Franken, Angelsachsen und Langobarden bis zur Mitte des 8 Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1971), 454–5). 95 Among much else, see F. Stein, Adelsgra¨ber, 166–8; Heinemeyer, Erzbistum Mainz, I. 66–79 (esp. on Flonheim; see index); Young, ‘Mode fune´raire’ (esp. 394–6 on Hordain near Douai); S. P. Burnell, ‘Merovingian to Early Carolingian Founder-graves in S. Germany and Switzerland’, D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University (1988), esp. ch. 3. 4.


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ancestors.96 Initially this seems to be part of a move (not itself specifically Christian) by emerging aristocracies to segregated, elite burial; but marking this by churches—sooner or later consecrated and provided with relics—would radically change its significance.97 During this period the burying of ornaments or weapons with the dead slowly came to an end, as such brief displays of surplus wealth gave way to continuous commemoration and the adorning of altars in private churches: doubtless still asserting status and authority,98 but linked now with having the saint’s patronage. For Romans or barbarians alike, a lesser landlord’s small oratory, with relics (however minimal)99 and family burials, would be a focus of family feeling and of neighbours’ and dependants’ deference. An estate church catering simply for tenants would not have this kind of importance to its lord (he and his family would be buried elsewhere);100 but churches built primarily for tenants were probably not widespread before the ninth century. Domestic oratories, or grander burial churches, could be turning into popular churches, however; their scope enlarged not perhaps by any direct exercise of seigneurial power (although early fifth-century landlords were scolded for allowing pagan rites on their estates),101 but by the ebbing away of pagan hostility or indifference and the seeping down to peasants of belief in the saints’ healing and saving powers.102 This may be reflected only in the long run in the abandonment of distant and churchless cemeteries (the community thus rejoining the nobles who had removed themselves),103 but perhaps much earlier in the building of oratories for some pre-existing cemeteries.104 Overlapping with the cult of saints was the sense of the holiness of places, and sometimes what looks like a desire to have one’s own holy place, a source of 96

On converts’ concern for pagan ancestors see Wormald, ‘Bede, Beowulf’, 49, 52–3, 64, 67. On the problem of identifying pagan burials see Young, ‘Mode fune´raire’, 381–3, 401. 97 See Le Jan, Famille, 45–8, 109–13, 115–16 (establishing power over settlements; sacralizing the family’s space); Blair, Church, 51–65 (church-building attractive to people already wanting monumental burialplaces); Innes, State, 34–8 (the Church’s mediation changed the meaning of gift-exchange between living 98 and dead). See Bullough, ‘Burial’, 193–6. 99 See Imbart, Origines, 46–7. A scrap of bone or cloth would do, or later, a fragment of the consecrated Host (Chelsea 816 c. 2 (C&ED III. 580) emphasized the supreme value of this). 100 In a grander (or more intimate) foundation of their own, or in the baptismal church or an urban basilica (see Bullough, op. cit., 201). 101 See Fletcher, Conversion, 39–40, 59. Knight (End of Antiquity, 126–7) emphasizes the contribution of private churches to conversion and pastoral care. 102 On the complexities of peasant attitudes see Brown, Cult, 120; Fletcher, Conversion, 63–5. 103 See Oexle, ‘Gegenwart’, 48, 58, 60–1 (less fear of the dead, more sense of community with them); Halsall, Settlement, 273; E. Keller, ‘Der fru¨hmittelalterlich Adelsfriedhof mit Kirche von Herrsching am Amersee’, in I. Eberl, W. Hartung, J. Jahn (eds.), Fru¨h- und hochmittelalterlicher Adel in Schwaben und Bayern (Sigmariendorf, 1988), esp. 15–21. On the widely varying timing of the shift to village churchyards (mostly long after the formative period of the proprietary church) see Campbell, Essays, 79–80; Bullough, op. cit., 180–3; Knight, op. cit., 128–34; Wickham, Community, 78–9 and n. 66; Blair, Church, 238–45, 463–71. 104 Sometimes temporary, giving way to a new church and churchyard within the settlement (see Meaney and Hawkes, Two Cemeteries, 45–55). See more generally Smith, ‘Religion and Lay Society’, 672–3.

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supernatural power and blessing. A church’s social weight, privileges, relative safety, and income from offerings all depended on its sanctity being recognized by rulers and people; and its founder belonged to the same world. In early charters lords often speak of their ‘holy places’ as a variant on ‘places of saints’. Instead of acquiring relics for an oratory, a man might build an oratory as a shrine for relics that had already come his way.105 Or he might build it (and get relics for it) to shelter and honour a place already felt to be holy, perhaps remote from habitation, itself to prove an attraction for settlers seeking its protection.106 What made a place holy, if not relics put there for the purpose, might be belief that there a saint lay buried or had been martyred,107 or even that his body had once rested there. Gregory of Tours has a story from the Auvergne of relics of St Saturninus being taken across country and resting one night in a poor man’s hovel; the man was warned in a vision not to continue inhabiting the now sanctified building; ignoring this, he fell ill, recovering (and prospering) when he demolished his dwelling and built a wooden oratory there, where he prayed daily.108 Or it might be ambivalently hallowed by its pagan past,109 as when a church was built at the graves of ancestors (their lost power perhaps made up for by the new presence of a saint, or by making a Christian ancestor into a saint);110 or at or near other kinds of old holy place—hill, grove, tree, or spring111—simultaneously discrediting the old gods’ power and taking it over. Or it might be built at a place felt to be unaccountably benign—such as a great tree where the foresters saw lights and where lost pigs would be found.112 The migrating Germans had had to leave their holy places behind; but in an old country they could adopt and cherish old holy places. King Sigismund of the Burgundians in 515 built the monastery at Agaune on the site of St Maurice’s martyrdom, already a place of pilgrimage, not far from an old temple of Mercury.113 Many such places in the Roman-Celtic world would be already occupied by the oldest parish churches,114 and here in the course of time the 105

106 See below, p. 521; cf. Fournier, Peuplement, 411, 432. Ueding, Klostergru¨ndungen, 90–2. Imbart, Origines, 42–5; below, at notes 113, 117. 108 Gregory of Tours, Gloria Martyrorum, c. 47 (SRMerov., I. 520–1). 109 Imbart, op. cit., 38–42; Fournier, Peuplement, 163, 352, 410–11; E. Salin, La Civilization me´rovingienne, IV 110 Below, p. 119. (Paris, 1959), 473–97 (texts). 111 The monastery of Hautvilliers (7th c.) had a tree-stump built into its altar (9th-c. Vita Nivardi, SRMerov., V. 167). Luxeuil was founded at warm springs where it was believed there had been a pagan cult (Jonas, Vita Columbani, I. 10, p. 169). See F. Jones, The Holy Wells of Wales (Cardiff, 1954), 12–29 and map 2. 112 Vita Bercharii, 10th c. (see index: Berchar), on the 7th-c. foundation of Montier-en-Der. This persistent topos (found in foundation stories written up from mid-9th to 12th c.) must reflect a common idea of one kind of holy place. Cf. also note 116, below; and Bede’s story of king Oswald’s miracle-working death-place, revealed by the greenness of its grass (HE iii. 9, 10). 113 Prinz, Fru¨hes Mo¨nchtum, 102–3 and nn.; F. S. Paxton, ‘The Cult of St Sigismund’, EME 2 (1993), 100, 104. Cf. the Anglo-Saxons’ adoption of St Alban’s cult at Verulamium (implied by Bede’s knowledge of it, 114 HE i. 7). Seston, ‘Note’, 243–51; Griffe, ‘Paroisses’, 36–7. 107


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bishop might lose his hold and a local lord get possession.115 But new holy places could be made or discovered on land that belonged to a family or that a ruler could dispose of, and be secured by building a church there. Such a discovery, by two brothers on a hunting and gold-panning expedition in the woods, begins the story of the early eighth-century founding of the ‘cell’ at Pongau that Rupert of Salzburg dedicated to the native martyr Maximilian.116 Friedrich Prinz, taking the reported lights and sweet scent literally, saw the travellers as coming upon a secret cult-place of Roman Christians; but this seems less likely than that the place struck them as numinous, which bishop Rupert naturally accounted for by a saint (and why not Maximilian?) having died or been buried there.117 It is at least possible that some early foundations of oratories (perhaps future monasteries) began not in home-bound piety, still less as an aspect of estate management, but more like pinning down a mana under a stone altar for the benefit of one’s family and people. None of this points to smooth continuity with a similar past. That the way for a barbarian to secure his hold on a holy place was to build a church, give it land, get it consecrated by a bishop and served by consecrated priests, was the outcome of conversion and of settlement, often among Roman provincials who knew all this already. Certainly the desire of a first- or second-generation Christian (whether Roman or barbarian) to have his own church cannot be divorced from the social and psychological background to the conversion, including former pagan practices, themselves perhaps changing;118 and historians recently have emphasized that conversion involved a long process of assimilation. Yet church-building itself marks a real change, and not necessarily a painless one whereby new churches neatly fitted existing functions.119 A cross might be like a holy tree, but its meaning was different; a holy spring might be used as a font, but baptism was not magic; and the very fact of putting up a building changed the character of a holy place.120 The idea that a holy place could be tamed and owned, enclosed in walls on the pattern of house or hall, with casual bread-and-butter access to it, may (for barbarians) have been promoted by Christianity itself, promising more (usually) benevolent presences than those that made some pagan holy places too alarming to approach except on special occasions and with propitiating rituals,121 or too 115

Above, pp. 74–5. Libellus Virgilii (bp. Virgil’s mid-8th-c. account), incorporated in late 8th-c. Notitia Arnonis and Breves notitiae, ed. Losˇek, 94, 112. The discoverers (from a native provincial family, the gens Albina) were involved in the foundation, and the family retained an interest in it (but the interests of bishop, duke, and gens Albina are a still unresolved tangle); see index: St Maximilian. 117 Fru¨hes Mo¨nchtum, 403–4. The story probably acquired its desirable topoi when it was recorded. Virgil does not explain what the connection with Maximilian was supposed to be. 118 See Blair, Church, 51–7. 119 For a possible phase of heightened anxiety and fear about burials see Meaney and Hawkes, op. cit., 120 29–33. See Brown, Cult, 124–6, esp. on the church built at a cult-site in the Ge´vaudan. 121 See R. E. Sullivan, ‘The Carolingian Missionary and the Pagan’, Speculum, 28 (1953). 116

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dangerous for anyone but a powerful holy man to inhabit, like Guthlac in his demon-haunted barrow in the Fens.122 Meanwhile most lesser churches were probably built on mundane sites, chosen on practical grounds to satisfy a landowner’s ambition for a monumental burialplace, or for the sheer convenience of having his own chapel and priest. For a convert (barbarian or Roman) these were new needs, whatever pre-existing inclinations underlay them; needs recognized because of new beliefs: new duties of attending mass, a new conception of the needs of the ordinary dead, and the accessible friendship of the special dead. And if churches were to be privately founded it was almost inevitable, under customary law, that they would be privately owned. 122

Felix’s Life of Guthlac, cc. 28–35; see H. Ellis-Davidson, ‘Hill of the Dragon’, Folklore, 61 (1950), 175–7. The foundations at the traditional site (mapped and described c.1870 by Canon E. Moore) have been thought consistent with a long-barrow site on which had been built a 7th-c. oratory with medieval additions (remnants seen by Stukely, 1708). For details and references see Colgrave, Felix’s Life, 177, 183.

5 Early monasteries: their founders and abbots

Dealing separately with monasteries assumes a distinction; but this is not straightforward. In late antiquity monks and clergy could hardly be confused, nor could their establishments; but by the seventh century the opposite is true. Great basilicas or baptismal churches, staffed by clergy living collegiately, were called monasteria;1 a solitary and his acolyte might call their oratory a monasteriolum; small domestic churches in Italian towns were casually called monasteries, some of them founded in the hope that they would grow and live by a Rule.2 The terminology reflected the facts. There were monasteries in the West, great and small, that were unmistakably monastic, their members (whether or not in orders) living by a more or less ascetic Rule; but there was a wide, blurred borderland where monks under mixed and various Rules overlapped with the clergy,3 or were distinguishable but lived in the same establishment.4 For the likelihood of any monasterium being treated as property it was scale that mattered most: a great church, with its wealth, population, and undying community, whether strictly monastic or not, could survive longer as an autonomous institution with something like legal personality.5 It has been argued that far from becoming objects of property in the wake of lesser churches, monasteries in fact led the way;6 but supplying the model for the economic independence from the bishop that owners wanted for their churches7 does not imply that the

1

Pietri, ‘Les Abbe´s de basilique’, 5–28; Deanesly, ‘Minsters’, 36–44; Boyd, Tithes, 61–4. Above, p. 49. 3 For a summary, Wollasch, Mo¨nchtum, 41–4; for Spain, Linage Conde, Origines, III. 12–14. On 8th-c. attempts to distinguish clergy living collegiately as ‘canons’ see Semmler, ‘Mo¨nche und Kanoniker’, 4 78–94; Ladner, Idea of Reform, 351, 386–9. See above, pp. 82–3. 5 See Stutz, ‘EKvermo¨gen’, 1227. Monasteries were recognized before mid-5th c. as capable of receiving 6 donations (McLaughlin, Ancien droit, 34–5, 204–5 and n. 7). Above, p. 97. 7 ´ See index: Lerida. 2

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monasteries themselves were private property. For this the really early evidence comes mainly from the East, or from Roman parts of Italy;8 and from a period when monks were still mostly laymen and a monastery did not necessarily even have its own consecrated church (or group of churches) as its legal core.9 The economic basis of early Western monasteries (and so their attractiveness as property) varied with their origins. Some—usually in or near cities—were created to manage a hospital or guest-house, or to serve a saint’s cult; others more clearly monastic—often in remote places—were there to live an ascetic life, hospitality and almsgiving overflowing from this, a church built and relics obtained for the monks rather than the other way about. Both urban and rural monasteries normally lived off rents and produce from developed land;10 only in the seventh century did the proliferating rural monasteries of Gaul acquire great stretches of largely undeveloped land as well.11 The wealth of such a monastery would increase as its original endowment was developed,12 while more land was given by outsiders or brought in by its own members. It might also have profits from immunity,13 and of trade from fairs or markets, encouraged often by freedom from tolls, and stimulated by the needs of the monks’ own large households and by their production of surpluses.14 At the same time monasteries were centres of travel and communication in a relatively untravelled world;15 new monasteries were crucial for communication in newly opened-up country. So the monasteries of the West—those that were neither little religious households nor the temporary encampments of hermits—became landowning and powerwielding bodies, whose control was important to bishops and attractive to rulers and lay nobles.16 We need to consider what such control could amount to, and on what it would be based.

8 Pelagius I recommended (558–60, Jaffe´2, I. 987), for a particular monastery, that an abbot be chosen by the monks and the ‘lord of the estate’ (possessionis dominus; above, p. 15). Torres, Origen (214–15) took his premiss (that monasteries as property came first) from Po¨schl, but Po¨schl did not claim this for the West (Bischofsgut, I. 96–100). 9 Some 5th-c. Gaulish monks and nuns attended parish churches (Griffe, ‘Paroisses’, 42 and nn.): 10 consistent with having an oratory, however. Apart from hermit settlements. 11 The pioneering settlement in woodland or wilderness is a topos in Lives and foundation histories, but ‘desert’ or ‘forest’ was in fact received, probably with rights that a ruler could give over sparse inhabitants. See Balon, ‘Fondation de l’abbaye de Saint-Hubert’, DA 18 (1962), 505–9; Wickham, Land, 156–62. 12 Not much at first (Wickham, Land, 179–97), but promoted by their needs. 13 i.e. taxes, judicial fines, etc. otherwise collected by officials whose entry an immunity privilege forbade. 14 See (among much else) Prinz, Fru¨hes Mo¨nchtum, 534–9, and maps XII. A–C; Higounet, ‘Le Proble`me ećonomique’, 780–91 and 804 (map); Blair, Church, 256–61. 15 Besides hospitality, they could provide post-horses for rulers trying to maintain the imperial system 16 See Le Jan, Famille, 71–2, 123–4. of communications.

Early monasteries: founders and abbots

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5.i. The position of external founders The normal basis for such control by an outsider was foundation: providing the site and initial endowment. A literary source will sometimes represent the site as unowned,17 and it may be that land in mountainous country could be had for the taking (though a title for it might be needed later). But generally, even if the site and first fields had been heath or woodland, this was acquired from some landowner or confirmed by a ruler able to dispose of power over land. This lord might all along take a founder’s interest in the monastery: perhaps not merely allowing but inviting the monks to occupy land,18 and providing them with oxen and carts, their first season’s supplies, seedcorn for their first harvest; building materials and the services of masons and carpenters; vestments, books, and relics. So a monastery was likely to owe the core of its later wealth to someone outside the community. Yet it was a long time before this led to overt claims to lordship. Outside founders of monasteries in sixth-century Gaul were mostly bishops, usually using their own property, sometimes their church’s.19 Other kinds of founder became more common in the seventh and eighth centuries. A formula of Marculf’s expects a founder to be ‘such-and-such a bishop, or abbot, or illustrious man’.20 Vir illuster perhaps means a high royal official; the great Frankish laymen who founded monasteries under Irish influence were mainly officials of the Neustrian court or their close relations, some of them on their way into monastic life, later to become bishops.21 But the power of laymen and women to found monasteries reflects their now established position as landowning nobles; and with the shift of power and of economic and religious enterprise from Aquitanian and Neustrian to Austrasian nobles, a later generation of founders were the Pippinid mayors and their rivals or friends.22 17 In late 7th-c. Galicia, see Valerius of Bierzo’s story of his companion building an oratory at a place chosen on impulse (Valerii Narrationes, PL 87. 441–3). Wissembourg’s obscure 7th-c. origins may lie in a solitary’s settlement in unclaimed woodland (Glo¨ckner, ‘Anfa¨nge der Kloster Weissenburg’, 21–4). 18 e.g. Moutier-Grandval, founded by duke Gundoin for monks from Luxeuil (Vita Germani, cc. 7–9 (SRMerov., V. 36–7); Borgolte, ‘Grafengewalt’, 7–8); Chelles, by queen Balthild for nuns from Jouarre (Vita 19 Bertile, cc. 1, 4 (SRMerov., VI. 101, 104)). Lesne, Propr., I. 113–15; Ueding, Klostergru¨ndungen, 49–88. 20 Marculf, i. 2 (royal confirmation of a new monastery’s episcopal privilege. For dating of the formulary, c.690 with later additions, Heidrich, ‘Titulatur’, 188–90). Non-monastic abbots of basilicas founding monasteries on their private property include Leodebodus (Semmler, ‘Episcopi potestas’, 346), Charderic (Rosenwein, Space, 90–6), Widerad (see index). 21 e.g. Dado/Audoin and his brothers (Rebais-en-Brie, Jouarre), Eligius (Solignac, and a Paris nunnery), Filibert (Jumie`ges, Noirmoutier), Amandus (Elnone ¼ Saint-Amand, Nant, Barisy-aux-Bois). On Columbanus’s circle see Sprandel, Merov. Adel, 48–57; Gerberding, Rise of the Carolingians, 84–91; Le Jan, Famille, 389–96; Fletcher, Conversion, 136–54. 22 A. Hauck, KG Deutschland, I. 288–307; Prinz, Fru¨hes Mo¨nchtum, 140–6, 183, 218; Gerberding, Rise, 95–105; M. Werner, Lu¨tticher Raum, 356–61; Dierkens, Abbayes, 318–27.

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Founders’ charters (where we have them) emphasize that what they have given was completely their own: ‘he has built it by his own work, in property of his own, and has endowed it with things of his own’; the land was inherited from his parents, or given him by a king, or bought by him from specified owners, sometimes from his heirs;23 one way or other he has libera potestas of doing what he likes with it,24 as may a woman in her own inheritance or her widow’s dower.25 One of the earliest charters, from the 630s, is a woman’s: Eustadiola has ‘built a monastery’ (probably ruling it as abbess) in the city of Bourges, to which she now ‘donates and transfers’ a country church with all its possessions and ‘everything due to me by right in all these things’.26 Sometimes what seems to be a multiple foundation is the act of a family pooling its shares, as in the endowment of Honau on an island in the Rhine by members of the Eticho family, the ducal house of Alsace.27 For the Franks this alodial power was probably of long standing, acquired at the time of conquest with or without royal largesse;28 supplemented more recently by royal grants from the fisc, and in Austrasia by independent conquests and colonization. The Marculf formula describes the founder as having built it either ‘on his own property’ or ‘on the fisc’:29 this would be land from the fisc given for the purpose, often to a bishop or a palace official;30 sometimes giving not this or that villa, but lordship over whole undeveloped areas roughly delineated by their radius in miles.31 Formally at least, an outside founder would give the land outright to the church or the first abbot, to be held by the same right as he himself had had. Early in the sixth century Caesarius of Arles was concerned to secure his sister’s nunnery against both future bishops and his own kinsmen; his testament asserts that he has no inherited property; for what property he has he makes the bishopric and the nunnery his heirs.32 A century later, in 616, the testament of Bertram 23 Such acquisitions might be made for the purpose: e.g. for Saint-Mihiel, Verdun, founded 709 by a great Austrasian noble Wolfoald and his wife Adalsinda? (Pardessus no. 475. In defence of this charter against Lesort (‘St-Mihiel’, pp. lii–liii) see Heidrich, ‘Titulatur’, 213–18). 24 It is not certain whether Franks had a free share (but see below, p. 29 note 87). 25 See Le Jan, Famille, 54–5. 26 Text in Debus, ‘Studien’, i, no. 8; argument for authenticity, ibid. 57–66. Eustadiola’s only son’s consent is recorded for building (though not for endowing) the monastery. Clotild’s endowment for her nunnery at Bruye`res-le-Chatel, 673 (probably in her husband’s lifetime) was hers partly by luctuosa hereditas, reversion from a deceased child (Levillain, ‘Charte de Clotilde’, with text 42–5: ChLA no. 564). 27 Vollmer, ‘Etichonen’, 149–51; Wilsdorf, ‘Honau’, 4–5 (nos. 2–4, 6–8). But in Alemania, with perhaps an older nobility and wider-spread alodial rights, St Gall’s early endowments came from many different proprietors (Sprandel, St Gallen, 13–17, 28–32). 28 Against Bergengruen, Adel und Grundherrschaft, see esp. Irsigler, Fru¨hfra¨nk. Adel, 221–32 (trans. 29 ‘Aristocratic Character’, 106–12). Above, at note 20. 30 e.g. probably Audoin and his brothers for Rebais (though no genuine privilege survives); Eligius (see index); Amandus, for Nant (Vita Amandi, c. 23 (SRMerov., V. 445)); Wandregisil (below, p. 123). 31 e.g. for Stavelot-Malme´dy (643–8, DMerov., no. 81); for Fulda (mid-8th c., Eigil, Vita Sturmi, cc. 4–11, ed. Engelbert, 133–42); on both, Wickham, Land 156–8 (and nn. 3, 5), 178. 32 Testament, ed. Morin, in Rev. Beń., 16 (1899); trans. Klingshirn, Life, Testament, Letters. See Ueding, Klostergru¨ndungen 52–64; Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles, 122–4, 133–4, 252–4.


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bishop of Le Mans does the same for his cathedral church and his foundation of Saint-Pierre de la Couture.33 He explains that he has endowed La Couture almost entirely with his own property, but also with one small episcopal estate on the grounds that a cathedral church ought to foster its subject churches. Subject, that is, to its authority, not its ownership: it was the ninth-century forger, summarizing the testament, who said quite groundlessly that the bishop left this and other monasteries ‘by a most firm right to his successors, to be possessed and ruled perpetually’.34 Bertram’s stipulations are entirely concerned with his memoria: prayers and almsgiving for his soul, and commemorative feasts.35 These Gaulish founders were celibate bishops; Caesarius certainly lived by Roman law; the Frankish-named Bertram, too, seems to envisage a complete succession to his own property-rights by institutions capable of having property. Their testaments evidently mean what they say: they are not struggling with unsuitable formulae to say something quite different.36 But even the Austrasian nobleman, the deacon Grimo, in his testament of 634, seems to have the same intentions towards his foundation of Longuion. While treating his church of Tholey as a piece of property to be given to the bishopric of Verdun,37 he made Longuion his heir and gave it the villae of Longuion and Noers with vineyards on the Moselle; all this ‘I transfer into your ius and dominatio’, to go ‘entirely’ into the monastery’s potestas; stipulating only that the abbot continue to maintain sixteen poor men.38 Similar phrases appear in Marculf’s formula for a great endowment: ‘I donate . . . and wish it to be donated for ever, and I leave, convey, transmit and transfer it out of my ius and into their dominatio and potestas . . . entirely’ (ad integrum);39 concluding, ‘I reserve to myself in this no title of property whatever’.40 It is possible that diocesan bishops, to safeguard their authority, were refusing to approve foundations or consecrate churches on any other terms; but there is no satisfactory evidence for such refusals.41 33

Pardessus no. 230. See Ueding, op. cit., 151–2; Borgolte, ‘Felix est homo ille’, 5–18. Goffart, Forgeries, 229. 35 Prayers and alms by the clergy of Saint-Pierre, kinsmen, prote´ge´s, or people beholden to him (amici), and freed slaves looking after his grave (overseen by the abbot). The ex-slaves’ role is reminiscent of an antique Stiftung: see Borgolte, ‘Felix’, 16–18 (but pointing out Bertram’s dependence on a wide range of well-willers). 36 On Frankish testaments see U. Nonn, ‘Merowingische Testamente’, AfD 18 (1972), esp. 25–35, 76; Chevrier, ‘Dećlin’, 10–17. Cf. Ansoald bp. of Poitiers’s charter (not testament) for Filibert and his monks at Noirmoutiers, 677 (ed. Tardif in RHDFE 22 (1898), no. 1), giving estates to them and the monastery itself for them to have potestas and dominatio. Unusually, this charter is accompanied by a record of its deposit 37 in the municipal archives (ibid. nos. 2–3; see Debus, ‘Studien’, ii. 99–104). See index: Grimo. 38 39 ed. Levison, Aus Fru¨hzeit, 124–36. ii. 1; cf. ii. 3, 4 and 6. 40 Cf. formula taken from the lay founders’ charter (verging on a testament) for a nunnery in Angers (Angevin formulary no. 46, MGH Form. 20). 41 Semmler, ‘Potestas’, 382–4, argues for bishops’ assertiveness ‘in many cases’; none of his three instances (p. 382 n. 29) implies this, however, but rather—for hagiographical purposes—a bishop’s resentment, hostility, or cupidity, miraculously defeated or disarmed (Vita Amandi, I c. 23, Vita Eligii, II c. 19, Vita Leutfridi, c. 14: SRMerov., V. 446, IV. 710–11 (fn.), VII. i. 14). 34

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In the eighth century these and even more emphatic phrases of outright disposal or alienation are still being used:42 by the rich Burgundian abbot Widerad for his foundation at Flavigny, in his testament of 71743 and foundation charter of 719;44 by the Pippinids’ connections, Bertrada and her son Charibert, for Pru¨m in 721;45 by count Eberhard of the Eticho family for Murbach,46 ‘count Warner’ for Hornbach,47 perhaps Carloman for Fulda;48 and in the strictly drafted testament of 739 whereby the powerful but childless layman Abbo made his foundation of Novalesa his heir to vast scattered estates in the Alps and the Rhoˆne valley.49 But the expressions are now used in a setting where we may begin to be unsure of their meaning. With the entrenchment of a top layer of potentes among the Frankish nobility, their violent shifts of power in the later seventh century, and the rise of the Pippinid mayors to dominance, monasteries were perhaps more likely to be founded from the start as investments in wealth and power;50 though since prosperity and authority turned on right relations with God it is unlikely that any monastery was ever founded for purely economic or political motives. It is also true that these eighth-century magnates of eastern Francia—even more than Grimo a century earlier—lived in a world where lesser churches were treated unquestioningly as property, even if in some sense themselves endowed with land. But these may very seldom have had foundation charters.51 At their consecration some land would normally be given them to satisfy the bishop, and most builders would expect to support such a church and its priest with a landholding; uncomplicated by written words of outright donation, this could fit the anthropologist’s view of a gift as establishing a hold on the recipient (saint, priest, or church).52 For greater churches, endowed by testament or charter, this idea would hardly be absent and might produce tensions and mental reservations; but it need not have engulfed all notion of outright, gratuitous donation. So even for these eighth-century founders it might not be reasonable to assume, in the 42 Outside Francia, cf. duke Tassilo’s foundation charter for Kremsmu¨nster (ed. Fichtenau, ‘Urkunden Tassilos III’, 31–2); and the oldest known Spanish foundation charter (775), an Asturian king Silo’s (Espanã Sagrada, 18, 306–7). 43 The ‘great testament’ (Flavigny nos. 1 and 57) makes the monastery his heir (after bequests to three other churches); dated 717 by Constance Bouchard, ibid. 14–16 (removing difficulties created by Marilier’s date, 722). 44 719, foundation charter or ‘little testament’ (Flavigny nos. 2 and 58). See J. Marilier in Me´m. Soc. hist. 45 de droit et des inst. bourguignons, 23 (1962), 188–9. UBMR I no. 8 (see Altlux. UB., I no. 16). 46 Pardessus no. 544 (Bruckner, Reg. Alsatiae no. 127), basically accepted by Levison, ‘Kleine Beitra¨ge zu Quellen der fra¨nkische Geschichte’, NA 27 (1901–2), 373–88; see Wilsdorf, ‘Honau’, 59–64 (likeliest date 735). 47 c.742; ed. Doll, ‘Hornbach’, app., 141–2; defence of the charter’s basic authenticity, ibid. 108–17, and 48 of Warner’s existence (as count Warin), 117–21. 743; below, p. 223. 49 ed. Geary, Aristocracy in Provence, 38–79 (esp. para. 2); discussed, ibid. 10–31. On Abbo’s foundation charter of 726 (Novalesa no. 1) see below, at notes 61–2. 50 See Le Jan, Famille, 48–9, 122–6; Mayer, Mittelalt. Studien, 273–4 (on St Trudpert’s, oldest monastery east of the Rhine); Dierkens, Abbayes, 320–7 (Pippin II’s refoundation of Lobbes). 51 52 See below, pp. 443–4. See index: gift and countergift.


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teeth of the wording of their charters, that they meant to keep their monasteries as Eigenklo¨ster, unless we find either clear claims to dominium or actual transactions implying such claims. Both were now beginning to appear. By the later seventh century a monastery—especially a nunnery—might be explicitly given to a greater church.53 It is in such transactions that founders’ claims to own monasteries are first made plain (and, perhaps, first conceived). Amalfrid, founder of the nunnery of Honnecourt, giving it with all its endowment (including what others had given it) to SaintBertin in 685, described it as ‘our monastery, which I have built in our property’, and reserved it for life to himself as a precaria ‘to use, dominate, and improve’, and afterwards to his daughter as rectrix.54 Similarly Gammo founded the nunnery of Limeux and in 697 gave it (lavishly endowed) to Saint-Germain-des-Pre´s on the grounds that nuns could not look after themselves; while reserving the lifetime right ‘to possess and dominate . . . both that little monastery and the aforesaid villae’ to himself, his wife, and two daughters—one of whom, Bertha, he had made abbess.55 Both these transactions suggest that the owner’s family will continue to live off the endowment and perhaps on the spot, while some of its female members live a religious life there. A variation, reflecting its time, is the layman Fraericus’s traditio of his modest foundation at Fleury-en-Vexin, not to another church but to the mayor Pippin II, in his new dominance after the battle of Tertry in 687.56 To the legal historian Joseph Balon any such monastery, belonging to its founder’s wider lordship, or put by him into another lordship, could not possibly in this early period have dominium in its own endowments: it had mere tenure within a larger dominium like any estate church, and this is what defines an Eigenkloster; as opposed to a monastery founded with dominium or alodial right, which was essentially autonomous.57 But the charters do not support this distinction.58 Admittedly Amalfrid’s and Gammo’s charters refer to their nunneries’ endowments in fairly unemphatic terms, but no monastery was explicitly 53 The purported donation of a nunnery to the church of Vienne in 543 (Pardessus no. 140), for which a good case and plausible reconstruction was made by Patrick Amory in 1993 (‘The Textual Transmission of the Donatio Ansemundi’, Francia, 20. i), seems now established as a 9th-c. forgery by Beate Schilling, ‘Ansemundus dux . . . : Zur gefa¨lschten Gru¨ndungsurkunde des Andreasklosters (Vienne)’, AfD 46 54 (2000), 1–47. St-Bertin, 28–31; see Lemarignier, ‘Actes’, 40–1. 55 ´ Gammo’s charter (St-Germain-des-Pres no. 10; see Debus, ‘Studien’, i no. 6). Childebert III’s diploma of ?702 (DMerov. no. 153, original) records a probably fictitious placitum brought to reinforce the donation: through her advocate, Gammo’s widow Adelguda renounced the monastery by festuca (se dixit esse exitum); the king confirmed Saint-Germain’s possession ‘without further claim by Adalguda or her heirs’. See Ueding, op. cit., 183–5 and n. 92; W. Bergmann, ‘Untersuchungen zu der Gerichtsurkunden der Merowingerzeit’, AfD 22 (1976), 171–2. 56 Pippin gave it (improved, and manned with monks) to Saint-Wandrille, c.706 (GPFont., ii. 1 and 2, 57 pp. 14–17). Balon, Ius Medii Aevi, I. 10–12 (and nn. 62–4), 21, 23–6, 94–120. 58 In any case one of his examples (ibid. 114 n. 609) is a Le Mans forgery.

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founded with mere tenure.59 And in the eighth century founders using the old formulae begin to make provisos. Pippin II and his wife have it both ways in their charter of 706, completing the endowment of Echternach for Willibrord with the most emphatic phrases of outright and perpetual donation, but adding, ‘that the monastery itself shall always remain in our and our heirs’ dominatio and defence’: thus articulating in a charter the kind of practical power that he already had in a string of monasteries.60 Pippin of course had a ruler’s power. So had the great provincial governor Abbo; but this shows in his foundation charter for Novalesa (really a privilege) rather than in his later testament, which makes Novalesa his principal heir while reserving its government in common to himself and bishop Walchun (his helper in completing the building) for their lives.61 For Walchun this gubernatio was in part episcopal—choice of the next abbot, and supervision of property dealings and spiritual matters; but the property itself was to ‘remain in his potestas for life if he outlives me’.62 This, however, was postponing the church’s autonomy (as in some Lombard foundations),63 not nullifying it. More straightforwardly, the Aleman magnate Beata in 741 gave outright all her possessions in lands and men to her family nunnery of Lutzelau on an island in Lake Zurich—‘all these things I hand over and transfer to the monastery, to have power to do what they wish with it’; yet three years later, under threat of Frankish confiscation, she gave everything, including the nunnery, to St Gall, in return for money and horses for a journey to Rome, with usufruct for herself should she return safely.64 So to give lands in alodial terms to a monastery is not incompatible with its being an Eigenkloster, though we cannot assume its being so.65 Analysing the terms used in endowing it cannot tell us for certain; we have to look at its actual history, which may, however, demonstrate its founder’s political power but be quite inconclusive about his property-right. It has been argued for instance that when count Eberhard founded Murbach for the monk-bishop Pirmin66 he meant 59 The verbs habere or possedere (Aredius’s monks were to ‘have’ or ‘possess’ their lands under St Martin’s defence, above, pp. 26–7; in Italy cf. Bobbio, below, p. 235 note 1) were regularly used for ordinary property (see Levy, West Roman Vulgar Law, 61–4). 60 Echternach no. 14 (giving the moiety of the Echternach estate not already given by Irmina, abbess of ¨ ren; below, p. 222). See Dierkens, Abbayes, 318–27; Gerberding, Rise, 96–105. O 61 Above, p. 114; and see below, p. 195. 62 Testament, para. 53. Walchun (probably bp. of Embrun) was not Novalesa’s diocesan (Maurienne); this may have been the point. Abbo’s own lifetime control of Novalesa’s possessions is implied by the 726 charter not endowing it while the testament defers endowing it until his death. 63 64 Above, pp. 54–5. St Gallen nos. 7, 10; see Sprandel, St Gallen, 15–18. 65 Semmler has Widerad, founder of Flavigny, reserve dominatio over it for life, with usufruct of its possessions (‘Potestas’, 329). But Widerad’s testament reserves life tenure in his three ‘abbeys’, not Flavigny; what (by implication) he keeps back from Flavigny for his lifetime is his own church ornaments, books, etc.; his foundation charter for Flavigny (already his heir) makes an outright donation a die presente to abbot and monks; nothing that means dominatio is reserved, nor does the word appear. 66 Bruckner, Reg. Alsatiae nos. 113, 114 (episcopal and royal privileges, 728, partly authentic: below, pp. 194 note 29, 231 notes 9, 10).


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it to be family property, and that when he confirmed his foundation with solemn assertions of outright gift, not for Pirmin but for an abbot Romanus,67 he must have successfully asserted his claim by appointing his own abbot. On this view, Pirmin’s move in 728 to put Murbach under royal defence—in practice Charles Martel’s—was meant to frustrate the Eticho family interest, and led to an estrangement with the count (just as Pirmin’s supposed commendation of Reichenau to Charles Martel might have cut against the Alemanian duke’s intentions).68 Yet it seems possible that Romanus was Pirmin’s chosen abbot all along, and that Pirmin had voluntarily drifted from the scene.69 The other Eticho foundation for ‘pilgrim’ monks, at Honau, may have been intended from the first to be an independent Irish house, its abbots appointing their own successors; Eberhard and his brother the duke witnessed the first such appointment.70 The Eticho nunneries in Alsace (Hohenburg and Niedermunster) were much more clearly for family use, ruled by abbesses of the family.71 But what differed was the role envisaged for them; it seems unlikely that they were understood to have a totally different legal basis.72 The legal basis could in any case be hazy. It may often have been unclear from the start who was the founder, and before the eighth century this may not have mattered much. It could lie between a king and a lay or clerical noble on whom he bestowed fisc for the purpose, or between any donor of land and the first abbot: was the ‘real’ founder he who originally gave the land or he to whom it was given? Providing the site, giving the major endowments, and doing the planning and building could be variously divided and carry variable weight. For monasteries founded on the fisc, royal charters may show where the emphasis lay. The short-lived Cugnon seems to be formally the boy king Sigbert’s foundation, though done on the Pippinid mayor Grimoald’s initiative, while its successor Stavelot-Malme´dy, given its site and woodland by the king but built by Grimoald, was more easily seen as founded by him. Meanwhile Rebais seems nearer to being Audoin’s and his brothers’ foundation, and Solignac Eligius’s, than king Dagobert’s.73 But to take this as determining ‘whose Eigenkloster it was’ may be misconceived;74 for Cugnon and Stavelot-Malme´dy the processes may have been 67 Eberhard’s testament (note 46, above), probably 735, on his way into monastic life (probably at Remiremont: Wilsdorf, ‘Honau’, 64–5) having lost his only son and gone blind. 68 F. Beyerle, ‘Pirminius’, 142–7, 152–3; Jecker, ‘St Pirmins Erden- und Ordensheimat’, 15; but see 69 Heidrich, ‘Grundausstattung’, 35, 40–1, 58–62. See below, p. 179. 70 Below, p. 129. 71 Vollmer, ‘Etichonen’, 158–9; Cardot, ‘Le Pouvoir aristocratique et le sacre´’, 173–93. 72 There is no charter evidence for the nunneries, but their existence reflects the religious role of women in the family. 73 See M. Werner, Lu¨tticher Raum, 356–62; Fouracre and Gerberding, Late Merov. France, 141–3. 74 Mathias Werner sees Cugnon as ‘clearly a Ko¨nigskloster’ (though king Sigbert’s charter, c.646–7, is most unusually addressed to the mayor Grimoald alone) while Stavelot-Malme´dy was Grimoald’s (Lu¨tticher Raum, 356–61).

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differently described or choreographed rather than different in outcome; in both, the abbacy of the Luxeuil monk Remaclus probably mattered most. Historians believing that there must always have been some identifiable founder tend to think of ‘appointing the first abbot’ both as a criterion of being founder and as the founder’s ‘right’.75 But it seems not so much a legal consequence of foundation as part of the process: a monastery was usually founded for (if not by) a particular person who was to rule it:76 a chosen (or self-selected) daughter or son, or a holy man chosen by (or perhaps choosing) the landowner. Similarly, Lesne observed that in Merovingian times only actual founders seem to give monasteries away, and concluded that they had the legal capacity to do so and their heirs did not.77 But formal limitation on the founder’s heirs’ rights (such that kings or counts would enforce it) seems unlikely;78 it may be rather that his heirs—heirs, that is, to the monastery—would otherwise be the successive abbots or abbesses, whether family members or not. This introduces the main argument of the rest of this chapter.

5.ii. Family monasteries or abbots’ monasteries? It will be argued here that in pre-Carolingian times, although a founder’s family could have a strong positive interest in his foundation, the abbot or abbess was nearer than anyone else to ‘owning’ the place (subject always to political dangers) after the founder’s death. The abbot’s role allowed him to be seen in this light; the first abbot was often the founder’s heir or himself the sole founder; in designating his successor he was choosing his own heir, related or not; and a founder might not even have intended long-term family control, while if he did, achieving it was as yet doubtfully possible. To begin with, we can postulate a whole range of interests that the family might have in the foundation and its future control. These might start with security, even if for the Frankish nobility of the seventh century the worst insecurity was over.1 Their right to ancestral lands might be retrospectively 75 So Werner argues (with some circularity?) that Grimoald must have ‘appointed’ Remaclus to Stavelot-Malme´dy because he was evidently the founder and this was the founder’s right (ibid. 360–1 and n. 33, 363). 76 However, a community might be established before finding someone to rule it if a founder-abbot had too much on his hands (Pirmin at Murbach?), if a young prospective abbess needed an apprenticeship (Mildburg at Wenlock? see index: Liobsind), or for a politically important foundation (Pippin II getting 77 Ursmer for Lobbes). Lesne, Propr., I. 133–6, 141–2. 78 Semmler held that bishops could allow or disallow founders’ rights, normally allowing them only to actual founders; but see below, p. 200 note 5. 1 See Halsall, Settlement, 34–9, 51–2, 268–70.


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affirmed by a literate community with an interest in asserting it; and in putting land into a monastery’s keeping they might hope for a surer hold on it than was otherwise possible for successive generations of laymen and women dividing their inheritances. At the same time their frequent use of recent or ad hoc grants of royal fisc for monastic endowments suggests that such a grant (possibly carrying rights to royal claims on free inhabitants)2 was easier to get if it was for a monastery. On the other hand it may be that the main reason for seeking and using royal fisc was that, being acquired, it would be alienable, or alienable without family friction: which leaves the purpose of the alienation open. More positively, to control a monastery might be to control communications or a strong-point, to profit from colonization or trade, and to attract local deference, making it potentially a power-centre for a family and its network of allies.3 Nobles have been credited with an unconscious need to rule monasteries in order to support their authority with holiness, whether because with conversion they had lost some old charisma, or for the Frankish service nobles because they had never had it. More certainly, noble founder-abbots and abbesses of the seventh century did become saints; their names often superseded the original dedication, the power of their burial-places overshadowing that of the relics they themselves had obtained for their churches; and families cherished these ancestors and were fortified by them.4 A monastery founded by such an ancestor would be a source of blessing for the family and its people, and a proper place for later generations to be buried, waiting together for the general resurrection in an ark on the sea of time. So at Jouarre were buried the founder Ado’s stepmother Moda; his step-niece or step-cousin Telchild, the first abbess; her cousin Agilberta, the second abbess, aunt Balda, the third, and brother Agilbert, once bishop of the West Saxons and then of Paris; and Agilberta’s brother Ebrigisil, bishop of Meaux.5 All or most were local saints, not known of far afield but venerated probably by kinsmen, neighbours, and dependants.6 In southern Gaul Gallo-Roman aristocrats claimed descent from much earlier saints, by whom or for whose tombs their small family monasteries were founded.7 In many respects the probable motives for founding any church for one’s family might be more fully satisfied by making it a monastery. A monastic community could tend a holy place more lavishly, pray for the founders’ and their 2

At least where the fisc acquired was forest (see above, pp. 110 note 11, 112 note 31). See Le Jan, Famille, 46–9. 4 Prinz, Fru¨hes Mo¨nchtum, 489–96, 502–3; Irsigler, Fru¨hfra¨nk. Adel 233–7 (trans. ‘Aristocratic Character’, 112–14); for the Saxons later, K. Hauck, ‘Haus- und sippengebu¨ndene Literatur’, MIO¨G 62 (1954), 121–45. But see Cardot, ‘Pouvoir’, 187–91 for cases of delayed effect. 5 Gue´rout, ‘Origines’, 51–4; marquise de Maille´, Cryptes, 74–80, 195–255, 267–74, and plates; and 6 below, p. 131. See Fouracre and Gerberding, Late Merov. France, 38–50; Blair, Church, 141–9. 7 See Poly and Bournazel, Transformation, 221–6. 3

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ancestors’ souls with more hearts and voices, and earn them more merit8 than a priest with a clerk or two; even the unceasing psalmody of Agaune might be aspired to.9 Founders could also share in the wider ramifications of confraternity: count Eberhard stands at the head of Murbach’s list of ‘our deceased brothers’, to be prayed for in other houses far away.10 And where in a substantial family church there is a gentleman’s living for one or perhaps two or three, in a middling monastery there will be lordly status for the abbot or abbess and places for many others. For some families it may have been a means to limit their breeding, while for unmarried or widowed women it could provide a new kind of protection or of restraint.11 Of course the investment is greater, and it is the great—kings and queens, Merovingian courtiers, and Carolingian magnates—who found great monasteries, while middling or lesser nobles found ordinary churches, or small domestic nunneries such as those that swarmed in the Rhineland in the eighth century.12 A monastery might be envisaged not only as a family’s mausoleum and powerhouse of prayer, but as its source of pastoral care. Bede thinks of king Ethelwald as intending to go ‘to pray and hear the Word preached’ at Lastingham, besides hoping to be buried and prayed for there.13 This is Bede’s (or the Lastingham monks’) eighth-century notion of a lay founder’s proper intentions. Nearer to its subject is Jonas’s account of king Theuderic’s visits to Luxeuil, his jealous outburst at not being allowed free access to the sanctuary, and his quarrel with Columbanus over this.14 Here the king was up against strange ways that differed from the norm: at Saint-Martin of Tours or Saint-Denis kings could probably walk in and out at will. Nonetheless, before long the leading nobles would be sufficiently at home with Columbanus’s circle—perhaps especially attracted by Irish penitential practice, or by a positive attitude to unbaptized ancestors—for its influence to be decisive in colouring their piety and self-image.15

8 This would include the monks’ almsgiving, while giving to monks was itself giving to the poor. The explicit idea of vicarious merit appears much later, however (below, p. 832 note 20). 9 Prinz, op. cit., 104–7; Rosenwein, Space, 63, 76. 10 A. Ebner, ‘Liber Vitae und Nekrologien von Remiremont’, NA 19 (1894), 77–8. See K. Schmid, ‘Gemeinschaftsbewusstsein’, 18–81; G. Constable, ‘The Liber Memorialis of Remiremont’, Speculum, 48 (1972), 266–8, 276–7. 11 See Stafford, ‘Sons and Mothers’, 96–7; for a later period, Leyser, Rule and Conflict, 52–73. 12 On these last see Innes, State, 25–6; documented when given to Fulda or Lorsch (when families began 13 to value monk-priests’ masses more than women’s prayer). HE iii. 23. 14 Jonas, Vita Columbani, i. 19 (p. 190). By Jonas’s account, Theuderic asks ‘why access is not open to all Christians’ (as Rosenwein stresses, Space, 71); but he bases his complaint on his own largesse, suggesting concern primarily for himself and his companions. 15 See Wallace-Hadrill, Frankish Church, 63–7; Geary, Before France and Germany, 167–78; Fouracre and Gerberding, Late Merov. France, 144–50; Fletcher, Conversion, 138–40; Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 201–2. This is not to say that their piety was wholly shaped by Irish influence (double monasteries under abbesses were not Irish; nor was the cult of relics).


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So there are many reasons why the lay founder of a monastery might want to establish his descendants’ hold on it for the future: to involve them in his memoria, and to get the best of both worlds for them by giving land to endow a church while keeping control of its abbacy and membership; and equally convincing reasons why his descendants (or collaterals—several of the great founders had no living child) might value this and keep it up: motives and sentiments at many levels of power, prestige, and piety. And yet, when all this is said, it is very difficult to give a precise meaning to the terms ‘Hauskloster’ or ‘Sippenkloster’ by locating actual property-right in the family or kin-group;16 the monastery may be better seen as belonging to its successive abbots. This depends in the first place on the abbot being the obvious person to whom to attribute its endowments. In sentiment as well as words the property belongs to God, the saint, the church, and the monks who serve there; but in most of the West it is the abbot who controls the property subject to certain constraints, claims it at law, and is termed its lord.17 This is not self-evident or primitive. An early abbot was simply a spiritual father, with varying degrees of authority; in a loose-knit eremitical community there might be two. Indeed in Lesne’s view the abbot emerged as virtual proprietor of the monastic land only in the eighth century, as a consequence of rulers giving abbacies as benefices.18 But perhaps it was rather the other way about: an abbacy could be deployed as a benefice precisely because the abbot would be effectively in possession of the monastic property. Two abbots in one monastery was already anomalous in the seventh century; any second abbot was probably a designated successor.19 The mid-century council of Chalon-sur-Saoˆne laid down that any such chosen successor should have ‘no power of ruling the property’:20 by implication the present abbot has. In England, Theodore’s Penitential assumes that abbots have possessio or potestas in their monasteries;21 later, the 747 council of Clofesho laid down that ‘no one should take on a larger congregation than he can support’ in food and clothing; later still, Alfred’s laws call the abbot the monks’ hlaford:22 it is in his hall and at his board that they eat, like a lay lord’s warrior companions.23 16 See Last, ‘Zur Einrichtung geistliche Konvente in Sachsen’, 346–7 (‘Hauskloster’ is a problematic term); Le Jan, Famille, 13, 332, 393, 397 (a large Frankish kindred was not an organized clan); Airlie, 17 ‘Aristocracy’, New CMH II, 436–43. See Po¨schl, Bischofsgut, 101–4. 18 Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 67–8. 19 As perhaps c.670 at Saint-Wandrille (GPFont., p. xxxix). Benedict Biscop’s subordinate abbots at Wearmouth and Jarrow were felt to need explanation (Bede, Hist. abb., c. 7; Anon., Vita Ceolfridi, c. 12; Bedae Opera Hist., I. 371, 392). The RM abbot was to designate a successor as late as possible (ed. de Vogue´, cc. 92–4). RB c. 65 warns that some provosts (priors) might think themselves ‘second abbots’. 20 c. 12 (Conc. Galliae 511–695, 305). 21 Penitential, II. vi. 5 and 6 (C&ED III 195); though potestas in c. 5 is ambiguous. 22 Clofesho c. 28 (C&ED III. 374); Alfred cc. 20, 21 (Liebermann, Gesetze, 60–2). See John, ‘Secularium 23 See Baltrusch-Schneider, ‘Angelsa¨chsischen Doppelklo¨ster’, 70–1. prioratus’, 216–19.

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More sophisticated ideas had been in the air in the Mediterranean world. In sixth-century Rules other than Benedict’s, including the Regula Magistri, common property and individual poverty had been defined in terms of the Roman corpus or collegium;24 the property belonged to the monastery or to the community: ‘it is everyone’s and no one’s.’25 Decisions about it were made by the monks’ collective consultation, their ‘common counsel’; the abbot was its administrator or representative for legal transactions or for establishing possession (for instance by making a testament to leave to his successor’s control gifts made by monks which they might otherwise, if they went away, have tried to reclaim).26 But the Roman law on collegia—vague and perfunctory in any case (if less so in the East, with Justinian’s laws on piae causae)—was not much needed in the post-Roman West; the Regula Magistri’s requirement of common counsel for legal purposes became obsolete;27 Benedict’s avoidance of the legal problem, barely treating the monastery’s resources as property at all,28 was more realistic. As the paternalist and authoritarian (never absolute) abbot was increasingly promoted by the Rules of Benedict and Columbanus (often combined), the abbot’s powers over property must have appeared increasingly to be his own.29 This is a matter of everyday practice, not of explicit law, nor even of anything that the charters consistently say (endowments were generally given not only to the abbot but also to the monks, or congregatio, or monastery, or place; often indeed to the monastery ‘where so-and-so presides as abbot’).30 Abbesses normally had similar control of property, but may occasionally have had a male rector or custos behind them.31 Community life may come to the fore in gaps between heads,32 and must always be important behind the scenes; a Benedictine abbot was supposed to take counsel in important matters; but this was only to help him make decisions,33 and a lord who consults his men is no less a lord. This is emphasized, not contradicted, by provisions that donors sometimes made to safeguard their gifts against the abbot; or by Theodore’s ruling that an abbot or bishop wanting 24

What follows is based on Blecker, ‘Consilium’, esp. 2–5, 25–7, and Felten, ‘Herrschaft’, 206–23, 226–30. 26 RM cc. 16. 58, 48. RM c. 89. 31; see Blecker, op. cit., 7–20. 27 De Vogue´ concluded from this that the RM abbot always owned the property, the purpose of common counsel being extremely limited (La Re`gle, 83, 363); but see Felten, ‘Herrschaft’, 222–3, 228–9 nn. 128–9. 28 Only in RB cc. 58. 24–5, and 59. 3–5, on entrants’ or parents’ donations. See Blecker, op. cit., 20–2, 26, 28. 29 Occasional interventions by the bishop hardly affect this (see below, p. 192). 30 e.g. the various wordings of early donations in Wissembourg, passim from no. 38; Echternach nos. 3–38 (under Willibrord). 31 See Levillain, ‘Charte de Clotilde’, 16; cf. the nunnery in the Angevin formulary, above, p. 113 note 40 (mentioning a rector, though the current abbess is herself called custos). 32 Later, it was usually in vacancies that rulers granted monks election-right or lands for their mensa. 33 RB 3. 1–6. By contrast, consilium in RM was decision-making but restricted to property matters (Blecker, ‘Consilium’, 22–6). 25


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to exchange land between two churches needs their clergy’s consent even if both belong to him.34 Given that by the seventh century the heads of monasteries were easily seen as lords of the monastic property, an outside founder might well intend the monastery itself to belong to its first head,35 whether this was a stranger and holy man, or a friend and mentor, or his own son or daughter (or not intending it, he might find that it happened). What a lay lord gave to the first abbot might be not a monastery but land for building one: in Northumbria that is how Bede describes the gift of Lastingham by king Aethelwald to its first abbot Cedd, or of Gilling by king Oswy to its first abbot Trumhere (as a kind of wergild for Trumhere’s murdered kinsman king Oswin). Lastingham was at Cedd’s disposal when Aethelwald had (probably) come to a bad end.36 In Belgium in 648 the great villa of Sithiu was given in this way, though apparently not to a prospective abbot alone but to three founder-monks ‘that you should build a monastery there’, by a lay lord Adroald (who had no heirs), in a formal donation, ‘to have, hold, and possess and leave it to whomever you will to possess’.37 Irish-Frankish monasticism favoured the continuation of an old pattern (a real one, as well as a topos)38 in which the wandering holy man, finding his destined site in waste or woodland that a king or duke has the power to dispose of, has it given to him personally. The count Wandregisil, whose first attempt to live as a monk was frustrated by king Dagobert, later made his way to Bobbio and finally founded his own community at Fontenelle (later Saint-Wandrille) by the Seine, on royal fisc acquired from the mayor Erchinoald.39 This tradition survived in the eighth century, when Heden, the convert duke of Thuringia, gave his lands and fortress at Hammelberg to bishop Willibrord for a monastery, with ‘free power to do what he wants’ with the property.40 Earlier, the English monk-bishop Bertuin, invited by a noblewoman to settle where he wished on her land at Malonne, near Namur, is said to have got her to accept a relic in return, ‘so that it may be my possession’ and secure for his successors.41 34

35 Penitential, II. vi. 6 (C&ED III. 195). For a mid-7th-c. instance in Blois see below, p. 195. HE iii. 23 (pp. 174, 176), 24 (pp. 179–80). 37 St-Bertin nos. 2 and 3 (Folcoin’s narrative and text); Lemarignier raises a doubt about the charter’s address to all three (‘Actes’ 37 n. 8). Cf. bp. Amandus’s similarly worded charter (664) giving the villa of Barisy-aux-Bois to its first abbot ‘for building a monastery’ (Pardessus no. 350). 38 See Ueding, Klostergru¨ndungen, 16–31 on 6th-c. abbot-founders in an eremitical, often wandering, tradition. 39 Vita Wandregisili, cc. 6–14 (ed. B. Krusch, SRMerov., V. 15–20); see GPFont., I pp. iii–iv; Sprandel, Merow. Adel, 50, 52. 40 Echternach no. 26 (717). Willibrord’s position at Hammelberg contrasts with that at Echternach (above, p. 116). 41 Vita Bertuini, c. 4 (SRMerov., VII. 181); see Dierkens, Abbayes, 137–42 (suggesting late 8th c. for the Life, late 7th for the events). 36

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Another pattern in the seventh century was for the first abbot to be the sole founder, establishing his community on land that he had inherited or bought or taken in, or that had been given him earlier and without strings. A young nobleman or woman with a vocation could use his or her patrimony; a widow could dedicate her own property. Admittedly the monastery may later have an interest in establishing the abbot-founder’s full right to the property, perhaps misrepresenting a king’s role in the foundation so as to claim royal protection without royal lordship. The Lives of Carilef and of Lonogisil are each concerned to emphasize the king’s outright gift to the saint of land or of money to buy it:42 Lonogisil is made to ‘ask only that you will be the defender of my little cell which I have founded with the offerings of good men’.43 However, there is no doubt that many founder-abbots or abbesses were indeed rich nobles with alodial power who used it to found a monastery (or more than one); or rather, in the first instance, to support themselves and their companions. This tradition goes back to cultivated, gentlemanly abbots living quietly and austerely on their own estates in the sub-Roman world of sixth-century Gaul and Britain: Illtud, whose monastery in Glamorgan (Llantwit, ‘Illtud’s holy place’) was his personal property,44 or the Gallo-Roman Aredius in the Limousin.45 Aredius lived in a Frankish-dominated world on the eve of Columbanus’s coming; and those Franks that the Irish moved to religious life could equally well support themselves in it, by whatever personal property-right their own law and borrowings from Roman law allowed. Noblewomen could do this, and were likely to do so because of their chances in a fighting world of outliving their husbands or never marrying—though the quite credible convention of the Lives is of unwillingness to marry. So the noble girl Fara, blessed as a child by Columbanus, fell ill and lost her sight at the threat of matrimony, was cured and reconciled to her father by Eustasius (Columbanus’s successor at Luxeuil), and got land from her father to found her own nunnery in Brie46—Faremoutiers, Fara’s monastery. To this paternum solum, given her probably by a special arrangement for a daughter’s benefit, she added in her testament her portions in various estates (which she must already have been living on with her nuns), except in one where she left her share for her brothers and sister: this estate was perhaps the original family home, kept undivided when the rest was partitioned

42 Both were from monasteries (Saint-Calais and Saint-Longis) needing royal support against Le Mans. See Levison in SRMerov., VII. i. 430; Goffart, Forgeries, 75–8, 142. 43 44 Vita Lonoghyli, c. 6 (ed. Levison, SRMerov., VII. i. 436). See below, p. 130. 45 Above, pp. 26–7; Gregory of Tours, HF x. 29; Ueding, op. cit., 251–60 (monastery at Attane). 46 Jonas, Vita Columbani, i. 26, ii. 7 (209, 241–3). Aristocratic rivalries in the background emphasize, rather than undermine, the personal importance of the heads of monasteries: e.g. Nivelles, where Gertrude’s niece (below, p. 128) was the mayor Grimoald’s daughter.


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after their father’s death.47 So too Salaberga, prevented as a young widow from becoming a nun at Remiremont (again in the Luxeuil connection), became the founder-abbess of her own nunnery outside Laon.48 Another young woman’s private initiative was Bilhild’s nunnery, on a site outside Mainz bought from her uncle the bishop, allegedly for twelve gilded shields and twelve black horses, probably belonging to her kind but absent and unwanted husband, the Thuringian duke Heden.49 Faremoutiers and perhaps Laon became double monasteries; that Frankish noblewomen could own land and use it for their own foundations helped to make possible their rule as abbesses over both men and women.50 For a landowning man there was a wider range of possible roles; Geremar, a courtier of king Dagobert’s and an only son who inherited early, appears as the lay founder of one monastery, setting it under (and perhaps giving it to) an abbot; turning to monastic life and handing his inheritance to his own only son; appointed abbot of an existing monastery by bishop Audoin, but leaving after an attempt on his life and living as a hermit in a cave by the Seine; landed with his inheritance again when his son died, and out of this founding a second, small monastery for the son’s memoria; and finally, with all his remaining property, ‘making Christ his heir’ by his third foundation, the future Saint-Germer-de-Fly, where he lived, evidently as founder-abbot, until his death.51 Some founder-abbots were effectively sole founders through having been given lands by a number of donors: Lonogisil perhaps, founding his cell from the offerings of boni homines; in the mid-eighth century, Wynnebald founding Heidenheim partly with his own purchases, partly with gifts from other landowners.52 The best-documented instance, later still, is the Frisian Liudger, founder of Werden just beyond the Rhine on the edge of Saxony. The site was his 47

Gue´rout, ‘Le Testament de Sainte Fare’, text 816–21; on content see esp. 802–6. See Prinz, Fru¨hes Mo¨nchtum, 142–3; Bergengruen, Adel, 31–2, 73–5. Gue´rout’s distinction between Fara’s property-rights as abbess and as foundress or founder’s heir is unnecessary if to be abbess is to be the founder’s heir in respect of the monastery. Cf. the abbess Adela’s endowment of Pfalzel (Altlux. UB., I no. 19). 48 Jonas, Vita Columbani, ii. 8 (244–5). The Vita Salabergae, cc. 9–12 (ed. Krusch, SRMerov., V. 54–7) has her twice married and widowed, with five children, including three daughters who succeeded her in turn. Felten (A¨bte, 96) sees this past as validated by being mentioned only incidentally. 49 Vita, cc. 5–8, ed. Weidemann, ‘Urkunde und Vita der heilige Bilhildis’, Francia 21 (1994) 64–8, with reconstruction of Bilhild’s charter, 48–9. Heden already had a son and heir (ibid. 76). 50 Hilpisch, Doppelklo¨ster, 32–44 (for deeper reasons, convincingly documented, see BaltruschSchneider, below, p. 132 note 39). See Nelson, Politics and Ritual, 2–4, on the usefulness of women’s monastic foundations to families whose hold on land might depend on them; cf. Le Jan, Famille, 396–7. 51 Vita Geremarii, cc. 9–26 (Acta Sanctorum, Sept. vi, 698–703). Geremar evidently stayed (apart from royal service) in and around his home country. At Fly the site may have been episcopal property, but Geremar ibi totam suam hereditatem tradidit (cc. 23–6). On the (9th-c.) Life see Fouracre, ‘Work of Audoenus’, 84 and nn. 31–2; Gerberding, Rise, 86, 88–9. 52 Above, at note 43 (boni homines perhaps meaning men qualified to give their land); below, p. 135. Cf. Willibrord’s ‘testament’, 726 (above, p. 30).

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own,53 but from 793 to 801 endowments came from some dozen individual Franks and Frisians (including another Liudger). These gave lands usually to the relics of the Saviour and the Virgin Mary ‘that he always carries with him’, and always to him personally, with such expressions as ‘in hereditary right, with power to do as he wishes with it and put it in the hands of whomever he decides’; describing him at first as priest, later as abbot; by 796 giving the lands ‘for the perpetual use of God’s church’, not yet specified; by 799 naming the place where the relics are established, and speaking of their future custodians.54 Liudger must have determined the wording of these charters as his plans formed and his monastery was built. A contemporary of Liudger’s who similarly regarded her personal relic collection as capable of property-owning, or at least of representing the heavenly property-owners, was Emhilt, founder-abbess of Milz; not, however, only for the interim, like Liudger. She gives land ‘in various places’ out of her paternal and maternal inheritance, and the monastery that ‘I myself have built on it’, to God, St Mary, and the nuns already there; but her traditio to God and St Mary is made ‘to the relics of St Mary that are my own . . . in my own reliquary’, while any donations ‘to us in common’ are declared given to those relics.55 It might be thought that such a founder-abbot or abbess could not as a professed monk or nun remain owner of the monastery and its possessions, because under any strict Rule his or her private property, if not already given to kinsmen or the poor, would have to be surrendered to the monastic church. But Emhilt’s dispositions cannot arise from any qualm about the monastery and its possessions being her own: she not only reserves it to herself for life but repetitively emphasizes that the relics to which she has ‘conveyed’ everything are themselves her own property, acquired by her and not held in common with anyone, unlike the altar relics from which she carefully distinguishes them.56 Monks and nuns often did in fact keep their private property and dispose of it later.57 At one level, that of religious life, an abbot might have renounced all property when he made his profession—to his own foundation if that is where he is professed; but at another level, that of private law, he remains its proprietor until he explicitly gives it away.58 Consciousness of one level may creep into the other and contribute towards ambiguities as to whether past, present, or post obitum donations are intended; but we need not see Fara’s testament, for instance, as merely 53

‘in his paternal inheritance’ (Altridi vita Liudgeri, ii. 3 and 8, ed. Pertz, SS II. 412–14). UBNR nos. 2, 5–8, 10–11, 13–14, 20–1, 601, and Crecelius, ‘Traditiones Werthinensis’ (Z. des Bergischen 55 Fulda no. 154 (784). Geschichtsverein, 6, 1869), no. 15. On some of these see Nottarp, ‘Werden’, 81. 56 Defensive evidently against outsiders (see below, p. 136), not the nuns (on whose exceptional common ownership see below, p. 182). 57 Lesne, Proprie´te´, I. 108–10; Schulte, Adel und Kirche, 94–5; Gue´rout, ‘Testament’, 791–4. 58 The dichotomy was in theory eliminated by Justinian’s novella (535) that a monk’s property passed automatically to his monastery on his profession (Kay, ‘Benedict, Justinian and Donations mortis causa’, 169–93); but this was ineffectual in the 7th-c. West. 54


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recording acts of self-impoverishment made at her profession.59 Nor did the commitment to poverty prevent a rich and noble monk from giving some of his patrimony to another church altogether. Romaricus ‘had kept one villa’ after becoming a monk at Luxeuil, and used it to found Remiremont.60 Much later, the reformer Benedict of Aniane founded his monastery on land of his own which he had kept on becoming a monk eight years earlier.61 Any alodial property that an abbot had used for the home and support of his own community he would naturally sooner or later give or leave to the monastery itself. But doing so could hardly make any difference while he lived: on the one hand he might be living in personal poverty despite his surviving propertyrights; on the other, he would be in full control of the property whatever he had formally done with it. Even for an outside founder the point at which he transfers his property—or ostensibly transfers it—may be somewhat indefinite. It might be years before the church was completed and consecrated and a charter written to confirm long-past gifts or record new ones;62 in the meantime community life has been established, buildings put up, lands cultivated and stock bred, vestments, plate, and books acquired. An outside founder would at least have already handed lands and objects over in some visible way; but an abbot-founder need not have done this—it might not be obvious how he could. So a complex of property could exist in his hands long before it was formally given to the saint or the church. And when sooner or later he gave everything to his monastery—formally to the monks, the monastery, or the ‘place’63—in the haziness of any civil personality it might be effectively to his successors that he gave it.

5.iii. The abbot’s heir An abbot’s successor might be appointed by an outsider, elected by the monks, nominated by his predecessor, or something in between. In this pre-Carolingian period formal appointment by a lay lord is difficult to find after the founder’s time.1 Benedictine election was on its way in;2 but designation by the previous abbot was probably still by far the commonest procedure in much of the 59

See Gue´rout, ‘Testament’, 788–94. Vita Amati, Vita Romarici (founder-abbots of Remiremont), c. 5 (SRMerov., IV. 221). 61 Below, pp. 225–6. 62 On a later period see Galbraith, ‘Monastic Foundation Charters’, 214–18, esp. app. iii. 63 e.g. Willibrord to Echternach (as above, p. 30): ‘I convey and transfer to that house of God . . . and to that holy congregation of brothers . . . ’ 1 2 In 8th-c. Italy see the family nunnery of S. Bartolomeo, Ripoli (see index). Below, pp. 181–7. 60

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West.3 This power of designation both marks the abbot as the nearest thing to an ‘owner’ and makes the family’s hold precarious. Designation is close to, and sometimes explicitly is, an actual giving of the monastery to a chosen successor or leaving it to a chosen heir, much as the founder may have given it to the first abbot. This can be shown both from Saints’ Lives and similar material, and (though rarely) from charters. We sometimes find verbs for ‘giving’ and sometimes for ‘appointing’, but with much the same meaning. The Life of Gertrude says that Itta, the lay foundress of Nivelles, ‘appointed’ (constituit) her daughter Gertrude as first abbess, and Gertrude in the same way ‘appointed’ her niece.4 Bede describes king Ethelwald as giving the site of Lastingham to Cedd (or rather, begging him to accept it); Cedd in his turn ‘gave the monastery, to be ruled after him, to his brother Chad’.5 Stephen has Wilfrid ‘appoint’ his kinsman Tatbert as co-abbot of Ripon and chosen successor, because ‘he is my kinsman and has been my special companion’; later Stephen calls Tatbert Wilfrid’s ‘heir’.6 In Wilfrid we can see it working both ways: his monasteries have come to him sometimes by royal or other lay grant (giving a monastery or land for one),7 sometimes by the gift of an abbot or abbess—many of whom ‘dedicated their substance to him by vow, either keeping it themselves under his name or choosing to have him as heir after their death’8 (in effect, donation either reserving usufruct or post obitum). These and other incumbent abbots and abbesses, in their turn, were his ‘heirs’ under his testament; not merely (it seems) to treasure or to further lands, but to the actual monasteries. ‘Disposing of his houses and dividing his possessions’ went with ‘not leaving us orphans, without abbots’; designating Tatbert for Ripon, or Acca for Oundle, was part of the same exercise; and when a record is made of ‘all the lands . . . that he had previously given to abbots or now ordered to be given’, Stephen gives as example ‘the monastery of Hexham which he ordered to be given in possession to the priest Acca’.9 Election and designation are of course not mutually exclusive. At Nivelles, Gertrude consulted the nuns and monks before designating her niece.10 Even at Wearmouth–Jarrow, where something like real Benedictine election was thought 3 Required by the Regula Magistri (cc. 92, 93, 94), and probably by some Irish rules (Columbanus may have practised it). See R. Somerville, ‘Ordinatio abbatis in the Rule of St Benedict’, Revue Beń., 77 (1967). 4 Vita Geretrudis, cc. 2 and 6 (ed. Krusch, SRMerov., II. 456, 459–60). Cf. Vita Anstrudis, c. 4 (ed. Levison, SSRMerov., VI. 68): Salaberga ‘committed the pastoral care’ of N-D., Laon to her 20-year-old daughter 5 Anstrud. HE iii. 23 (pp. 174–5, 176). 6 7 Stephanus, Vita Wilfridi, cc. 63, 66 (pp. 136–8, 142). Ibid., cc. 8, 14, 22, 40 (pp. 16, 30, 44, 80). 8 Ibid., c. 21 (p. 44; cf. Nothelm’s sister, see index: Nothgyth). 9 Ibid., cc. 62, 63, 65 (pp. 134, 136–8, 140). 10 Above, note 4. Cf. Vita Lantberti (written c.800), c. 2 (SRMerov., V. 609): the Fontenelle monks ask the dying Wandregisel who should succeed him; he insists that God will provide, but proceeds to predict his two next successors, Lantbert and Ansbert (each described as elected, ibid., cc. 2 and 13, p. 627).


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of as the norm,11 Benedict Biscop had co-abbots and probably intended successors of his own appointment; when he and a co-abbot both lay ill he feared an unacceptable election, but in the event it was he who appointed Ceolfrid head of both houses, with general approval. And when Ceolfrid in turn resigned the abbacy to a successor Hwaetbert genuinely elected in his absence, the abbot-elect found Ceolfrid waiting for his passage and received his blessing.12 Bishop Egbert’s solution for the problem of owner-abbots designating two successors at once was that the congregation should choose one to rule first and the other to follow.13 This other is referred to as the one ‘counted as heir at the beginning’: here again the abbot is an ‘heir’; a chosen, designated heir, even if the idea of natural heirs has induced the former abbot to designate two. As for direct charter evidence of designation amounting to disposal of the monastery, this is scarce outside Lombard Italy;14 it would not normally require a charter. The nearest approach in Francia comes from the Irish monastery of Honau in Alsace, on an island in the Rhine. There is a garbled charter by which (about 723) the first bishop-abbot, Benedict, ‘conveys’ the monastery to his chosen successor Dubhan;15 and at least half a century later there is abbot Beatus’s charter giving property for his soul’s sake to the monastery and, after his death, to his not yet named successor.16 What Beatus gives—consisting of eight scattered churches—is everything he has acquired, bought, or developed, or ‘obtained by the hands of good men and by firm charters’17 with royal confirmation. It must cover everything acquired in his time as abbot, and possibly all the monastery’s property, as being in his time effectively his.18 He gives it: to that place, and those saints in whose honour it was built, and to the poor and pilgrims of the Irish race: all this I give so that that abbot whom I shall choose by ecclesiastical rule . . . shall have it all after my death . . . so that from the day of my passing, the same abbot of the place to whom I shall have entrusted it shall have the power of having, possessing, exchanging, and doing whatever he wants to do with that property, regularly and ecclesiastically . . .

11

Hist. abb. anon., cc. 16, 25 (Baedae Opera Hist., I. 393, 396). Ibid., cc. 12, 16, 29–30 (pp. 392–3, 398–9); Bede, Hist. abb., i. cc. 7, 11, 13, 18 (pp. 370, 374–7, 383). 14 Below, p. 137. Below, pp. 169–70; p. 165 for a Bavarian instance. 15 Preserved in a forged charter of Theuderic IV (see Ko¨lzer, Merowingerstudien, II. 30–3): Wilsdorf, ‘Honau’, 4 (no. 5), 77–8. 16 Bruckner, Reg. Alsatiae no. 275 (dating it 778). See Wilsdorf, ‘Honau’, 8–9 (no. 19; inclining to date it 810), 50–1. 17 . . . per manus bonorum hominum et per chartas firmas inveni. Invenire might mean ‘find’ (i.e. in Honau’s archives), rather than ‘obtain’. 18 Cf. Charlemagne’s charter for Beatus, 775 (DKarol. no. 100). On the churches see Wilsdorf, ‘Honau’, 51–2 and notes; if well endowed they could have constituted most of Honau’s endowment apart from the island itself. 12 13

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(subject, that is, to the monastic rule and church law).19 What is here conveyed from abbot to abbot is the monastery’s possessions, however, not (as in Benedict’s less reliable charter) the monastery itself.20 Designations in the literary sources are mostly of close relations: brother, nephew, daughter, niece; for a widow abbess to designate a daughter was commonplace. Gregory of Tours relates how, in his own time, Ingitrude the founder-abbess of a nunnery at Tours invited her middle-aged married daughter Berthegund to leave her husband and come to be made abbess. Bishop Gregory sent Berthegund home, but she returned a few years later ‘with ships full of her own and her husband’s possessions, and bringing one of her sons with her’; her mother Ingitrude persuaded her own son, who was bishop of Bordeaux, to annul the marriage. But mother and daughter quarrelled about family property, and Ingitrude appointed a niece or granddaughter instead—provoking her daughter to sack the monastery.21 Gregory seems to relish the preposterousness of this story. In a quite different spirit Bede describes an abbess Heriburg of a nunnery in Yorkshire grieving over the illness of a young nun who was her ‘carnal daughter’ and whom she had planned to make abbess after herself.22 But it should not be assumed that when an abbot or abbess is succeeded by a close relation this means that someone has a claim, under family law, to succeed. Certainly the seventh-century Life of Samson represents Illtud’s nephews as trying to poison Samson out of jealousy lest the priest of the pair be ‘deprived of his hereditary monastery, which he hoped to possess after his uncle’.23 But most so-called hereditary monasteries can show only short, and sometimes odd, descents. At Jouarre the first abbess seems to have been no direct relation of the founder Ado, but his father’s second wife’s niece or granddaughter; Ado’s own fame shifted to Rouen with that of his brother Audoin; it was his step-relations who kept a hold on Jouarre (probably contributing to its endowment). And what Ado had founded as a male monastery, and probably ruled himself as founderabbot, became a double monastery under abbesses. This may have happened when the old bishop Agilbert went to live a monastic life at Jouarre (perhaps 19 Cf. RM. c. 89. 31–2 (the old abbot to record in his ‘testament’ what remained out of monks’ donations); c. 93. 12–13 (to hand over to his chosen successor the Rule, keys, and an inventory—testament?—including monks’ entry gifts; see Blecker, Consilium, 9–12; Kay, ‘Benedict, Justinian’, 177–9). Beatus’s testament does not deal with entry gifts, but the verb invenire (note 17, above) is suggestive. 20 That designation might amount to donation of the monastery emerges in one version of Werden’s foundation history (Fundatio Werthinensis, SS XV. 166 note ), crediting Liudger with ruling that a chosen abbot ‘should not be allowed to receive that church with its possessions and congregation as if by a legal traditio’, but only have the charge committed to him by his predecessor. 21 HF ix. 33, x. 12; see below, at note 77. On their connections see Le Jan, Famille, 307, 396 n. 107; on the property dispute, Murray, Kinship Structure, 197–200. 22 HE v. 3 (pp. 285–6). If Bede disapproved, he left this unstated. 23 The monastery is also described as the ‘earthly inheritance’ of both nephews (Vita Samsonis, ed. R. Fawtier, cc. 14 and 16).


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becoming abbot, or filling the abbot’s role), was joined there by his sister and her nuns, and exchanged buildings because the monks were few and the nuns’ numbers increasing.24 Most double monasteries were from the start ruled by abbesses. Remiremont, unusually, had both abbot and abbess, the abbot dominant because Romaricus had founded it for himself on his own land.25 Hilpisch attributed these different patterns to foundation by male or female landowners, but did not remark that the same background can explain his ‘exception’, Jouarre.26 The apparent ease of the changes there itself suggests that the monastery belonged essentially to its successive heads: that Ado handed it to Agilbert, his step-relation; Agilbert to his sister, and she to her cousin.27 According to her Life, these first two abbesses had each urged their aunt Balda to become abbess, though (it is edifyingly claimed) it was the nuns’ election that finally persuaded her.28 We cannot establish that the family had a ‘right’ to have one of its daughters or widows so elected or designated, for after these three abbesses no more are known for over a century; Jouarre surfaces in the ninth century as royal. If Balda was indeed elected, this shows the succession of a family member resulting as well from the community’s wishes as from the previous head’s. Even in a real Benedictine election the monks might take for granted that they would elect a near kinsman, and the nearer the kinship the more obvious the choice. Benedict Biscop had to take steps to avert such an election at Wearmouth– Jarrow: lying ill, he warned his monks not to elect on grounds of family rather than worth, and said he would rather the monastery were deserted than ruled by his unworthy carnal brother.29 Later, bishop Megingoz of Wu¨rzburg was concerned lest his dying sister, an abbess, should be succeeded through the influence of the ignorant by one of her two unsuitable young nieces.30 But if it was a matter of choice, however natural, that a relation should be elected or designated, it followed that someone unrelated might be chosen. So when an abbot is described as a previous abbot’s ‘heir’, this does not necessarily imply any kinship at all, let alone anyone with a natural right to succeed: it means the one who does in fact succeed, probably by designation. When Bede says of bishop Swidbert’s monastery in Frisia that ‘his heirs still possess it’,31 this need not mean his descendants, even collateral. Nor can we assume that the hermit Wilgils’s posteri, who after a century still held his Humbermouth cell, were 24

See Gue´rout, ‘Origines’, 38–9. The marquise de Maille´’s different narrative (Les Cryptes) is based partly on the supposed model of events at Marchiennes which themselves rest on an entirely legendary 25 10th-c. Life (Vita Rictrudis, ed. Levison, SRMerov., VI. 91–4). See index: Romaricus. 26 27 Hilpisch, Doppelklo¨ster, 42–3. See above, p. 119. 28 Gue´rout, ‘Origines’, 16, 44–5 (the 17th-c. Vie de Ste Balde is probably based on a Latin original, 29 perhaps 8th c.). Bede, Hist. Abb., c. 11; Hist. abb. anon., c. 16 (pp. 375, 393–4). 30 31 MGH Epist. Sel., I no. 130 (785); see Levison, England and the Continent, 29. HE v. 11 (p. 302).

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literally his descendants; the ‘legitimate succession’ (or ‘successions’) by which Alcuin held it need mean no more than successive designations, though likely enough of kinsmen.32 More clearly, when in Felix’s Life of Guthlac the hermit is asked ‘who is to be heir of his place after his death’, and replies that ‘the heir to the place is still among pagans and not yet baptized’,33 he is not saying that he has a cousin who is next in line, who he happens to know is in Sussex or Frisia and will have to be traced and brought home. Guthlac is a seer: he sees, he knows that there is a nameless stranger who will one day come to Crowland and will in fact be his successor. And this turned out to be Cissa, who Felix tells us ‘at the present time possesses Guthlac’s seat’.34 What the term ‘heir’ most strongly conveys is not kinship but the idea that the place belongs to its successive heads.35 Nonetheless the succession of a non-kinsman was sometimes seen, perhaps even justified, as figurative kinship or filiation. At Nivelles, Gertrude’s niece’s elected successor Agnes was unrelated to the founder-family, but ‘she too had been nourished by the blessed Gertrude’.36 At Wearmouth–Jarrow, the anonymous Life juxtaposes Ceolfrid as Biscop’s spiritual kinsman with the natural brother ‘far removed in his mean-heartedness’, almost as if the brother’s exclusion needed explaining.37 But kinship was not the only ‘natural’ consideration. It mattered to the monks and nuns of Nivelles that Gertrude’s 20-year-old niece was ‘of an ancient and famous Frankish family’, and that Agnes was nobly born as well as being Gertrude’s pupil;38 it probably made her spiritual authority acceptable to noblemen.39 At Faremoutiers, not long after Fara’s time, English kings’ daughters with no known kinship to her were becoming abbesses.40 For a king’s widow or daughters to become abbesses in illustrious nunneries need not imply any hereditary claim to them. Nobility and royalty were qualifications for the rule of holy places; the ninth-century confraternity book of 32 Alcuin’s letter to abp. of Sens (Epist. Karol. Aevi, IV no. 120, p. 175): in cellula . . . cui ego . . . legitima Deo donante successione praesidio; and his Vita Willibrordi, Preface and c. 1 (SRMerov., VII. 114, 116): et posteri eius usque hodie . . . possident; quorum ego . . . eamdem cellam per successiones legitimas suscipi gubernandum (cf. Alcuin’s use of posteri for Willibrord’s successors at Echternach, ibid., c. 21; and Hornbach’s foundation charter for Pirmin’s and his monks’ successors, ‘that posteri may leave it to posteri for ever’, above, p. 114 note 47). Wilgils’s only known son was Willibrord, sent as an oblate to Ripon (Vita, c. 3) and never 33 apparently ruling his father’s cell. Felix’s Life of Guthlac, c. 48 (pp. 146–8). 34 Whether Guthlac’s sedes or locus was a small monastery in his lifetime is unclear, but likely (see Keynes, Clofesho, 44 and n. 189). 35 Occasionally an English bishop, designated by his predecessor, was called the predecessor’s ‘heir’ (see Cubitt, ‘Wilfrid’s ‘‘usurping bishops’’ ’, 30–2); the expression suggests a hazily proprietary notion 36 about bishoprics (below, p. 297). See note 38, below. 37 Hist. abb. anon., c. 16 (pp. 393–4); cf. Bede, Hist. abb., c. 13 (p. 377). 38 Vita Geretrudis, c. 6 (pp. 459–60, 467). Comparing spiritual with natural kinship, and conjoining noble birth with noble mind, were hagiographic staples. Bede deploys both as if the analogies were still warm for him (e.g. HE iii. 19 (p. 164); Hist. abb. cc. 1, 13 (pp. 364, 377), although his austere objection to basing authority on natural kinship or noble birth was fundamental (see Wormald, ‘Bede and Benedict Biscop’, in G. Bonner (ed.), Famulus Christi (1976), 152–5; Mayr-Harting, ‘The Venerable Bede’, 10–13). 39 40 See Baltrusch-Schneider, ‘Doppelklo¨ster’, 68–79. Bede, HE iii. 8 (p. 142).


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Lindisfarne puts ‘abbesses and queens’ into one category.41 Long before this, in the late sixth century, Radegund’s foundation, Holy Cross at Poitiers, had been almost destroyed by the king’s daughter Chrodechild campaigning to supplant the abbess Leubovera, first complaining to the kings her kinsmen that she and her cousin were ‘not treated like kings’ daughters’, later launching real warfare with forty rebel nuns and assorted thugs, and declaring—defiant in defeat—‘I am a queen’.42 She did not claim to be its legal heir, but (by implication) its natural lord by virtue of her rank.43 Bede says of the East Anglian princesses Saethryd and Ethelburg that each of them was made abbess at Faremoutiers for merit, ‘being a stranger’. Perhaps the pilgrim might be chosen not despite but because of this:44 a king’s daughter from over the sea might have some of the positive function or the honoured status of the stranger. Merovingian Gaul was wide open to strangers who might be given monasteries or land for monasteries:45 not only the Welsh, Irish, and English from overseas, but Franks or Visigoths from other regions of Gaul or from Spain. Some of these were powerful, dangerous, interfering holy men46—Samson, Columbanus, probably Pirmin. But they may be seen also as belonging to a nobility still sometimes mobile and with temporary possessions, the wandering abbot being not unlike a lay noble seeking service and reward from distant lords. His successive foundations might then be less a collection than a series, the founder-abbot moving on and leaving his earlier houses to others. Berchar came from Aquitaine to Luxeuil, then on to his godfather Nivard bishop of Rheims who gave him land for his first foundation of Hautvilliers;47 this he left in the hands of bishop Nivard, evidently as abbot in his place.48 It was probably then (about 662) 41 Levison, England, 28; and see Baltrusch-Schneider, op. cit., 75–8, esp. on Eanflaed abbess of Whitby. For nobles, sanctity, and monastic life see above, p. 119; for a later period, Murray, Reason and Society, 331–50. 42 Gregory of Tours, HF ix. 39–43, x. 15–17. See Ueding, Klostergru¨ndungen, 216–19. There are lively accounts in Wallace-Hadrill, Frankish Church, 44–5; James, Origins of France, 107–9; Stafford, ‘Sons and Mothers’, 98–9. 43 Gregory of Tours contrasts this with Radegund’s humility (setting herself under the abbess she had appointed). 44 In Bede’s cum esset peregrina (HE iii. 6, p. 142) cum could be either ‘although’ or ‘since’; or simply (as I render it) ‘being a stranger’, i.e. explained by merit alone. 45 Sometimes plural, as in the 7th-c. Vita of the 6th-c. Samson; see Davies, Wales in the Early Middle Ages, 162–3. Later, both Pirmin and Boniface (monk-bishops from distant lands) were endowed by magnates with lands for several monasteries, and may have been seen as abbot over the friends or disciples that they put in as abbots and (in Boniface’s case) abbesses. 46 See Morris, ‘Celtic Saints: A Note’, 2–16, on Samson and Paul Aurelian in 6th-c. Brittany. 47 Adso’s 10th-c. Vita Bercharii, cc. 2–20 (Mabillon, Acta SS. OSB., II. 832–43), evidently based on an earlier Life and (for Hautvilliers) on the (9th-c.?) Vita Nivardi, (SRMerov., V. 164–9). See also below, p. 201. 48 In the surviving fragment of Nivard’s privilege (662; Pardessus no. 346), a passage reporting Berchar’s ‘thinking’ (et sic pensitavit ipse Bercharius, ut dum advivimus . . . in nostra potestate debeat esse) has been read as intending Berchar himself to retain control of Hautvilliers in his lifetime (Semmler, ‘Potestas’, 310 n. 52; Gerberding, Rise, 102). But the first person here must apply to Nivard, author of the privilege,

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that he moved on to the ‘wilderness of Der’, where he got land from king Childeric II for a cell (Louzes), and from a noblewoman Waltildis for a nunnery (Pellemoutiers) ruled by, and probably given back to, the foundress or her niece.49 Finally in the same region he founded his monastery of Montier-en-Der, on a woodland site given him by the king; even from here, if the Life may be believed, going off to Rome and Jerusalem for relics.50 The Englishman Bertuin, who became a missionary monk-bishop at Malonne, had begun his monastic life at his own monastery in the Fens but left it to his kinsmen when he went on pilgrimage.51 Evidently an abbot need not hold his house for life; or rather, it is only by relatively severe standards that he is expected to (so that at Wearmouth– Jarrow, Ceolfrid’s resignation and pilgrimage have to be elaborately explained).52 Not all these pilgrims had broken with all family bonds. Paul Aurelian came to Brittany with more than twenty noble relations.53 Columbanus came to Gaul alone; but other Irishmen came by tradition with twelve followers,54 who might well be relations. These self-selected families might settle abroad as a pocket of their own kin. Fursa’s brothers Foillan and Ultan were with him in East Anglia and followed him to northern Gaul. Here the mayor Erchinoald initially welcomed them to Pe´ronne where he had buried Fursa, but later expelled them; Foillan went to the rival mayoral house and was given Fosses by Pippin I’s widow Itta (foundress of Nivelles); Ultan was perhaps a hermit there.55 Both Fosses and Pe´ronne remained predominantly Irish into the Carolingian period, and some of their recruits may for a time have come from the brothers’ kindred.56 For Honau far up the Rhine, Charlemagne’s reiteration in Beatus’s time of an undertaking to Irish pilgrims ‘that no generatio other than their own should possess their churches’57 suggests that the first few abbots were each others’ kinsmen. Family links were maintained overseas for a time, in the mid-eighth century, by the Englishmen Willibald and Wynnebald. The near-contemporary Life of not to Berchar. The Vita Nivardi (c. 10), summarizing the then intact privilege, has ‘at Berchar’s request, the bishop himself (ipse presul) was to keep it in his dominatio’ (the Vita consistently uses presul for bp. Nivard). 49 And another nunnery later (686), on land given by bp. Reolus (Pardessus no. 406; see Gerberding, Rise, 102–3). 50 Vita Bercharii, c. 16 (pp. 840–1); privilege of bp. Bertoend, 692 (Pardessus no. 423); Theuderic III’s muchinterpolated confirmation (685) of Childeric II’s immunity, claiming that Childeric built the monastery 51 (DMerov. no. 128). Vita Bertuini, cc. 1–4 (above, p. 123; below, pp. 159–60). 52 Bede, Hist. Abb., esp. cc. 16–19, 22; Hist abb. anon., esp. cc. 19–34 (pp. 380–6, 394–401). See Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (Princeton, 1988), 277–80; M. Gleason, ‘Bede and His Fathers’, Classica et 53 Medievalia, 45 (1994), 225–35. Morris, ‘Celtic Saints’, 11. 54 Gougaud, Christianity in Celtic Lands (London, 1932), 174. 55 Prinz, Fru¨hes Mo¨nchtum, 185–7; Dierkens, Abbayes, 70–6, 293–6, 303–12. Fursa’s own monastery (on land given him by Erchinoald) was Lagny where neither brother succeeded him. 56 Wilsdorf points out (‘Honau’ 49) that very few monasteries were seen as manned by the Irish (Fosses, Pe´ronne, Lagny, briefly Mazerolles). We have no evidence of Irish ascetics abroad gathering communities of married lay kinsmen (as at home) from which they could have been regularly recruited. 57 Below, pp. 231–2; probably a safeguard against being used as a royal benefice.


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Wynnebald describes in conventional terms his decision to abandon his inheritance and the company of his brothers and sisters. Yet his first journey was made with his brother and father; the father died and was buried on the way to Rome, at Lucca.58 Seven years later Wynnebald returned to Wessex to ‘induce any of his own genealogia to go with him for the holy warfare of God’s service’; and when after another visit to Rome he came north to Thuringia and was consecrated priest by Boniface, he still had with him his company of kinsmen and followers.59 Finally, like his brother Willibald, now after many independent journeys monkbishop at his own monastery of Eichsta¨tt in Franconia,60 Wynnebald founded his own monastery of Heidenheim, on uncultivated woodland which he bought himself; supplemented by gifts from other landowners ‘wishing to share their temporal things with him, so that he might ask for eternal rewards for them’. Here he cleared the land and settled, for the time being, as the independent owner of an Eigenkloster; and here he was succeeded by his sister Walpurga as abbess of a double monastery.61 They must have kept in touch with home: Hugeburc (the nun who wrote both brothers’ Lives) was a distant cousin, arriving just after Wynnebald’s death; a nun healed at Wynnebald’s tomb was ‘one of his parentela, his uncle’s daughter’.62 Yet after Walpurga’s death there was no natural or designated successor; already discipline had slipped and buildings been neglected; Heidenheim was taken over by the then bishop of Eichsta¨tt and manned with secular canons.63 Wynnebald himself had not turned into a comfortably settled landlord: towards the end of his life he released the monks from their obedience, wanting to go to Monte Cassino to die. In fact he died at Heidenheim, was buried there, and became a local saint like his sister.64 So at some unpredictable stopping place the pilgrim abbot may leave a lasting cult;65 but his foundations depend for their future on outsiders—bishops, mayors, or kings—not on the survival of his own transplanted family.66 In fact one probably should not imagine a pilgrim founder-abbot or the brother, sister, or cousin who succeeds him as envisaging generations of stable possession in the future. Even foundations by regional lords, in country probably full of their 58

Vita Wynnebaldi, c. 2 (SS XV. i. 107); Vita Willibaldi, c. 3 (ibid. 91). Vita Wynnebaldi, cc. 3–4 (ibid. 108–9). 60 See Pfeiffer, ‘Erfurt oder Eichsta¨tt?’, 147–57. Eichsta¨tt was given to Willibald by Boniface, and to Boniface by the convert magnate Suidger (see Prinz, op. cit., 244–55). 61 Vita Wynnebaldi, cc. 7, 13 (pp. 111–12, 116). See Levison, England, 81; Prinz, op. cit., 255–6. 62 Levison, England, 43, 294; Vita Wynnebaldi, c. 10 (p. 114). 63 Ex miraculis S. Waldburgis, SS XV. i. 540–1. Eichsta¨tt was in process of becoming a diocesan bishopric 64 (Pfeiffer, op. cit. 153–7). Vita Wynnebaldi, cc. 9–13 (pp. 113–17). 65 Cf. Wandregisil at Fontenelle (Saint-Wandrille) after long peregrination (above, p. 123). 66 Boniface foresaw this dependence for the abbots and abbesses (‘almost all peregrini’) that he left behind in Germany (see Holdsworth, ‘Saint Boniface’, 58–9). 59

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own kin, do not necessarily continue to go to their relations, as we have seen at Nivelles and Faremoutiers.67 The lord who set up a son or daughter in part of his patrimony may have had only short-term plans.68 His intention might be to escape from the rules of partible inheritance, or from the claims of the wider family, or both; to give to a favoured son or daughter, or one who would otherwise have done badly, both the means of salvation and an endowment larger than he or she would otherwise have got, and to secure it to him or her against the claims of other possible heirs. A nunnery set under the founder’s daughter (Honnecourt, Limeux, Nivelles) was probably founded especially for her.69 If it was given to a greater monastery, reserving usufruct, the lifetime security that this could provide might be all that was wanted.70 If not so alienated, it might be an independent property owned by its successive heads. The story told at Be`ze in Burgundy of its mid-seventh-century foundation would make the founders’ son Waldalen its owner-abbot (so far, likely enough),71 and their daughter Adalsind owner-abbess of a nunnery, Dornatiacum. She is said to have been driven by outside harassment to move her nuns to Be`ze, giving the nunnery’s possessions to her brother;72 who himself later needed protection against enemies robbing Be`ze not only of goods but of charters, which suggests disappointed collaterals.73 Much later, Emhilt’s insistence that it was not to the relics in the altar that she was giving Milz and its endowment looks like a response to a flaw in the separateness of her property, since four laymen, obviously her kinsmen, had claims to shares in the villa, church, and altar relics.74 The foundation of a small domestic monastery for or by a celibate child might be intended as a once-for-all alienation or separation,75 like the gift of land with an oblate child to an existing house. 67 Above, p. 132. For political causes see Felten, A¨bte, 134–8; Gerberding, Rise, 57–9; Le Jan, Famille, 125–6, 394–7. 68 Or no family plan at all. Fećamp, founded by a palace count Waning (in Audoin’s circle), had its first abbess from Bordeaux and fell soon to the mayor Ebroin (Sprandel, Merow. Adel, 53–4; Fouracre, ‘Work of Audoenus’, 84–5). Fouracre sees Waning’s family as failing to establish it as ‘a strictly familial cult-centre’; but perhaps this was never Waning’s aim (which is not to say that he positively wished to eliminate family control, as his much later Vita alleges). 69 Cf. N-D. of Le Mans (Ueding, Klostergru¨ndungen, 159–61, and below, p. 200 note 10). 70 Provided that the founders’ memoria was secured (below, p. 178). 71 On the founder Amalgar’s family see K. Werner, ‘Important Noble Families’, 155–8; G. Moyse, ‘Les Origines du monachisme dans le dioce`se de Besançon’, Bibl. Eć. Chartes, 131 (1973), 98–9. 72 This would make Be`ze temporarily a double monastery under an abbot. 73 The charters in the 12th-c. chronicle are spurious (Chron. Besuensis, 232–47; DMerov. nos. 91, 106, 120). Ko¨lzer concludes that identifying any reliable core to them must await a thorough critique of the chronicle (ibid. 234–6; cf. id, Merowingerstudien, II. 1–17). 74 Notitia of their quitclaiming these, added to Fulda no. 154; see above, p. 126). For these nobles, Eborachar, Hruodhart, Job, and Roggo (two pairs of Emhilt’s cousins), see Gockel, ‘Verwandschaft’, 10–27; and for their inferred common ancestor, who probably built the original church at Milz, ibid. 48–53. 75 The late 8th-c. abbesses Aba and Hiltisnot had clear proprietary rights in the monasteries they gave to Lorsch (below, pp. 178–9).


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It might on the other hand be seen as a way of keeping land in the family. A son’s share might be preserved from partition and kept available for a celibate son of the next generation and the next; a daughter’s dowry which would otherwise have left the family altogether might be kept in it for later unmarried daughters; and its head might be relied on for places in the monastery or leases of its land. But for this to work and go on working would require one of two conditions: either that each successive abbot or abbess has a natural heir with a right under family law or custom to succeed, a right not frustrated by the very existence of the monastery; or that the founder’s descendants are sufficiently highly organized or strictly ruled to fix the succession on each occasion. It has already been suggested that many ‘hereditary’ successions resulted from the strong natural inclination of abbot and community to choose someone of the right stock, not necessarily the abbot’s next-of-kin. Nonetheless, anyone who has a brother (like Biscop) or a child obviously has a natural heir. The trouble is that there may be more than one such; and that he, she, or they may not be in religious life. The idea of the natural heir or heirs was powerful enough to present both these hazards. The danger of partition was one that Lombard founders had to guard against; while in England, bishop Egbert in his Dialogues envisages ‘some having their own monasteries who dispose of them so unadvisedly that after their death two persons at once, of either sex, possess one monastery’.76 As to danger from a natural heir not in religious life or qualified for it, back in late sixth-century Tours, when Ingitrude reneged on her choice of her married daughter Berthegund as successor in her nunnery, Berthegund tried to wrest away its property, stripping it of its treasures and carrying off its crops; in fact, balked of the succession, she fell back on disputing her mother’s right to endow the nunnery at all, and was backed by the king’s judgment ‘that everything her mother and father had had should be subject to her dominium, and whatever Ingitrude had left to the monastery should be removed’.77 A century later, Biscop’s saying that he would rather Wearmouth– Jarrow were deserted than ruled by his unworthy brother may be not just hyperbole but reflect a real possibility that rejecting a natural heir could lead to the monastery’s destruction.78 For a monastery to survive as such, the idea of the natural heir would have to be modified. 76

Dialogue of Egbert, c. 11 (C&ED III. 408). Baltrusch-Schneider (‘Doppelklo¨ster’, 61) takes duo simul utriusque sexus to mean ‘of different sex’, but it could mean two men or two women (‘of either’ rather than ‘of each’ sex): divided abbacy was what mattered. 77 Above, at note 21; Childebert’s judgment was about the whole property (Murray, Kinship, 96), not just the monastery. Ueding (op. cit., 249–51) concluded from it that the nunnery itself was no part of the inheritance; true in the sense that it would normally go to a chosen heir (as Berthegund had originally been). 78 Above, at note 29; see I. Wood, The Most Holy Abbot Ceolfrid, Jarrow Lecture (1995), 10–11. Psalm 82, sung at Benedict Biscop’s death, includes the verse about those who ‘claim the Lord’s sanctuary as an inheritance’ so much quoted in later times (see index: Psalm 82).

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If, however, an abbot has a brother or a son, in religious life, and only one, or if an abbess has one daughter who is a nun, then his or her claims may be taken for granted, the succession a foregone conclusion (unless other values are at work, as at Wearmouth–Jarrow). But brother to brother would not take it down a generation, and parent to child is unlikely to be possible for long, depending as it would on a repeated pattern of widowhood or agreed separation. The succession of a niece or nephew was far more usual and no less hereditary. Here again, however, the strict unmodified succession of natural heirs would quickly lead to partition, secularization, or both; the really hereditary abbey is precarious, since sooner or later something must give—monastic life as most of the West understood it, or the abbots’ hereditary succession. Of course an abbot’s nonmonastic heir or heirs might appoint a monk-abbot or allow one to be elected, while keeping control for next time; but then it has passed from hereditary abbacy to outside lordship. The abbot could have an heir who was both natural and qualified under special rules. Lombard and other founders often specified that their church should go to whichever of the sons of the family, in each successive generation, was willing to live a religious and celibate life.79 But as soon as any such modification or qualification of the rights of natural heirs comes in, so does the need to make decisions. Which children out of a batch of cousins are to be brought up in religious life? If several of these are grown-up when an abbot dies, which has the best claim? Or if there is no one qualified, who is to be made so by a hasty profession and perhaps ordination? We are brought back to the question of who makes the decisions: an abbot able to designate his successor, a community able to elect, a family agreed on how to direct the designation or election, or the head of a family; and if a family, of what extension: the present abbot’s brothers and nephews, or some wider group of the founder’s multiplying descendants or collaterals. This hypothetical controlling family might on occasion choose a stranger or allow a stranger’s election; but if it retained the power consistently to determine the succession we could describe it as having effective lordship over the abbot’s head. Whether one thinks this likely (leaving out, for now, the question whether bishops could or would prevent it) depends on still obscure questions about family law and property. For instance, extended families probably did not have heads, any more than they had common property (even if we are thinking of the legal kindred with background hereditary rights, let alone the large, loose, bilateral kindreds that mattered socially and for memoria).80 A monastery might be 79

Above, pp. 55–6, 57–8; below, pp. 168–70. Le Jan, Famille, 90–8, 381–401; or the Sippe, distinguished from the parentela by the myth of a common ancestor (ibid. 393). Cf. Innes, State, 53, on ‘official’ kin and ‘practical’ kin. 80


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increasingly important to a wide network of kin, marriage connections, and allies, while lacking any long-term family-property basis (the evident importance of promoting or opposing particular abbots and abbesses is consistent with this). Any lasting family control is unproven for pre-Carolingian Francia; and its likelihood must vary from one country to another according to family structure.

6 Some non-Frankish patterns of family interest in monasteries

A closer look at ‘family’ or ‘hereditary’ monasteries outside Francia will show that family interest took diverse forms, justifying the expression ‘family monasteries’ in various senses; but that, as in Francia, it was generally abbots and sometimes abbesses, not founders’ families, that came nearest to ‘owning’ monasteries in a juridical sense in the seventh and eighth centuries.

6.i. Ireland It is in early Christian Ireland that the family-owned monastery might most hopefully be sought, since monasteries here were, by the seventh century, extraordinarily closely integrated into a society itself organized mainly by kinship.1 Christianity had arrived in a country with no Roman or Vulgar Roman property law and no Roman territorially based administration, but with numerous very small kingdoms, elaborate gradations of status, and distinctive family law. Most relevant here is that land and cattle belonged in the sixth and seventh centuries to individual married men inheriting these things in equal shares from their father, subject however to rights in the background not just of their own sons but of a close-knit kin-group, the four-generation derbfine descended from one great-grandfather. Thus the land might at a later stage be redistributed among male first and second cousins to make their shares more nearly equal and prevent a prolific branch from sinking into poverty, damaging the status of the rest. Further in the background were wider kin-groups to whose 1

This section owes much to Thomas Charles-Edwards’s patient personal explanation, especially of the legal sources.

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male members the property of an extinct derbfine would fall.2 The individual— even a childless man—could in theory dispose of nothing without the derbfine’s consent except his movables and, in part, his own acquisitions. There was apparently no ‘free share’ or other special exception for grants of land to churches, such as elsewhere in the West might provide an escape from family claims.3 It would seem, then, that it must often have been the family itself, probably the derbfine, that authorized the foundation of a monastery or even founded it by common action.4 The purest form of this would be a whole family offering all its property to God and establishing itself and its dependants as a religious community. In sixth-century Wales, according to his seventh-century Life, Samson and his parents, brothers, uncle, uncle’s family, and grandmother dedicated themselves to religious life and founded a group of churches which they regarded as their own;5 this sounds like the living and adult members of what in Ireland would be a derbfine.6 Kathleen Hughes conjectured that family foundations like this might lie at the origins of many Irish monasteries.7 A kin-group might have much to gain by such a joint foundation, in this world as well as the next, from the hallowing of persons and property,8 and from the common management and indivisibility of permanently pooled land and stock. On the face of it this could be only a short-term interest: an entirely monkish derbfine must die out. But the language of ‘monastery’ and ‘monk’ may be misleading: many ‘monks’ may have been nearer to secular clergy living collegiately.9 Furthermore the word ‘monks’ (manaig) was used to denote an outer circle of married men living on their own land, subject in theory to strict matrimonial rules, sometimes receiving land or stock as a loan from the abbot like clients of a secular lord, and paying him labour or dues in kind; but having sometimes a part in choosing him, and perhaps some say in his transactions.10 They might be descended from members of a founding derbfine (perhaps children at the time of the foundation) who never became celibates even if the founders did, and so received their shares of land under the church’s lordship.11 The outcome might be 2

Charles-Edwards, Early Irish and Welsh Kinship, 50–5, 61–73; Early Christian Ireland, 86–8. Even the obligatory bequest of movables to one’s burial church was limited by the kin-group’s rights (Charles-Edwards, Kinship, 67–70). 4 Perhaps on the initiative of the head of the kindred (on whom see ibid. 39). 5 Vita Samsonis, cc. 29–31. 6 The Vita, c. 30 has Samson say of a small sister that although having no vocation she should be looked after, ‘being human’ (quia homo est). On the similarity of the Welsh inheritance group to the derbfine see Charles-Edwards, Kinship, 211–13. 7 Hughes, Church, 75–6; ead., ‘Sanctity and Secularity’, 29–31. 8 But perhaps not in the early stages, when Christian groups were isolated enclaves; and it is then that such an all-out family conversion is most likely. 9 See Sharpe, ‘Problems’, 230–70; id., ‘Churches’, 98–102. 10 Hughes, Church, 136–41; Charles-Edwards, ‘Church and Settlement’, 170–5; Doherty, ‘Aspects of Hagiography’, 315–18; and esp. Etchingham, Church Organization, 363–454. Manach (plural manaig) gets variously translated as monastic ‘tenant’, ‘client’, or ‘dependant’. 11 Alternatively see note 23, below. 3

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a ‘monastic’ kindred whose still-propagating families provided both recruits and economic support for their ancestors’ foundation, while the same families were baptized, shriven, buried, and prayed for there, paying it tithes, firstfruits, and burial bequests (both their claim to pastoral care and their obligation to pay dues for it being almost certainly stronger than was the case for the ordinary laity).12 After all this, however, the original property-providing derbfine remains a hypothesis (perhaps likeliest for early times when Christians lived in enclaves trying to keep clear of the surrounding pagans).13 Other patterns for the founding of monasteries are equally possible, the more so since some ‘monasteries’ may have been purely monastic while others had perhaps a core of ascetics but a larger body of clergy ministering under a bishop’s authority to a lay population (with smaller churches under their wing).14 A derbfine might consent to an individual’s foundation, or contribute to a common foundation, of a church that only some of its members would enter or even belong to as manaig. A royal kindred, or perhaps a king on his own authority,15 might found a church to serve the whole tuáth;16 an individual might found a small monastery on his own newly acquired land; a wandering holy man might settle on unclaimed land,17 needing only to be given initial supplies and cattle.18 There is an almost total absence of early diploma evidence—only some cryptic narrative notes, sometimes expanded with passages from charters, of gifts to the church of Armagh, whereby lands (both acquired and inherited), people, or churches were given or subjected to St Patrick.19 We depend otherwise on scraps from Saints’ Lives,20 law treatises (often fragmentary), and the actual sites: ranging from small stone-walled or earthwork enclosures to great multivallate fortresses, sometimes with a cemetery evidently used for the laity, and perhaps a second or third church built when an earlier one was outgrown.21 A great church was the nearest thing to a city, its lands not a mere assemblage of old family lands but a new development necessitated by a large, growing, and complex settlement.22 Whatever its origins, any church might collect dependants or manaig; these do not have to be the left-out fringe of a founding derbfine,23 and a church with its 12

See Etchingham, op. cit., 256–89; qualifying this, Charles-Edwards, Ireland, 118–19. 14 See Mytum, Origins, 61. Sharpe, ‘Problems’, 251–63. 15 This might lie behind Vita Aedi, c. 34 (Vitae SS. Hiberniae, I. 44: dominus illius castelli). 16 See Charles-Edwards, ‘Pastoral role’, 64–5, 67–70; Sharpe, ‘Churches’, 106–8; and above, p. 85 note 59. 17 The Lives sometimes give this impression, e.g. Vita Abbani, cc. 22, 23, 28, 32 (Vitae SS. Hiberniae, I. 18 ´ Corraín, ‘Early Irish Churches’, 337–8. 17–18, 21, 23). For variety of origins see also O 19 Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh, Additamenta, 166–78, introd. 48–9; see Doherty, ‘Aspects’, 304–9. 20 Chiefly for what they can tell us of their authors’ time; see Sharpe, Saints’ Lives, 5–10, 13–14, 388–9. 21 See Norman and St Joseph, Early Development, 90, 96; Mytum, Origins, 63, 80–4; small churches and churchyards, ibid. 84–6, 100; often on marginal land, ibid. 63, 171–3. 22 Norman and St Joseph, 97, 12–114; Charles-Edwards, Ireland, 117–21. 23 Manaig might originate in grants to an existing church, such as (to Armagh) a son with his inheritance, or a campus with its unfree men (Charles-Edwards, ‘Church and Settlement’, 169–71); or by 13


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dependants could be analogous to a kin-group rather than a transformed actual one. Its own lands could hardly remain (if they had ever been) identical with the whole land of a founding derbfine and its perhaps proliferating successors. The kingroup could have acquired more from individuals taking in new land, or from lands falling in from extinct branches of the wider kindred. Conversely, the monastic property might extend beyond the family lands because of gifts or commendations from outside.24 Nor need a monastery’s paruchia—the area or people that its clergy serves25—coincide with a kindred’s territory. If it was more than a tuath, its broader range might depend on its founder-saint’s reputation; at first, perhaps, his power to protect the dead buried with him and to defend their lands, replacing their pagan ancestors buried on the boundaries;26 while Saints’ Lives later are largely concerned with competitive miracle-working and claims to rights and dues.27 Above all, whatever broad coincidence there may be of either monastic lordship or paruchia with a small or large family’s lands, this is nearer to setting the family under the monastery than over it; their ‘weaving together’ (in the Co´rus Be´scnai’s words)28 cannot helpfully be seen as either. Meanwhile a monastery constituted a distinct and perhaps expanding complex of land, stock, lordship, and sacred authority which some one person had to hold as abbot, being as much singled out from his brothers and cousins as any king or lay head of a kindred.29 In Ireland as elsewhere, it seems after all to be the abbot who is the inheritor and lord of the monastery, rather than the family collectively (and not only where a founder-abbot may have used his own acquisitions). If the founding saint was the heavenly owner, the abbot was his representative and heir, his comarba.30 When the abbot of Armagh was called ‘coarb of Patrick’ the heredity was figurative, but for monasteries founded this side of the mists it might be literal; and there need be little conceptual strain between the saint’s ownership and the abbot’s when the saint was an actual collateral ancestor.31 However, even if the rest of the kindred were more the saint’s subjects than the monastery’s owners, they might have the crucial right of providing the ‘material the agreed subjection of an entire kindred (or branch of one) to the church’s authority (ibid. 171–2; Etchingham, op. cit., 437–8). 24 The manaig’s probably variable title to their land makes monastic property difficult to define in any case. 25 Accepting Sharpe’s argument (‘Problems’, 243–7) that paruchia and monastic federation are not 26 the same. See Charles-Edwards, Kinship, 259–60, 261–5. 27 ´ Briain, ‘Hagiography of Plummer, introduction to Vitae SS. Hiberniae, pp. xci-ii and notes; F. O Leinster’, 457–60; Hughes, Introduction, 239–42. 28 This treatise (ed. Binchy, Corpus Iuris Hibernici (Dublin, 1978), but used by me in translation only, Ancient Laws of Ireland, III. 2–80) applies the metaphor to church and people in the tuáth (ibid. 32). See Charles-Edwards, ‘Pastoral Role’, 70–6. 29 The abbot might himself be the secular head, but was more often a brother or cousin (perhaps in a segmented branch of the kindred). 30 See Kenney, Sources, I. 292. For the saint as founder, supposed or actual, see Jackson, Gaelic Notes, 2–3. 31 See Charles-Edwards, ‘E´rlam: The Patron-Saint of an Irish Church’, esp. 267–72, 282–90.

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of an abbot’. Inevitably abbacies were objects of ambition, and the succession open to dispute, like that of kings. The Co´rus Be´scnai’s obscure statement about succession to office (whether of king or abbot) assumes that it belongs to a kindred among whose branches it may circulate, but not by a preordained cycle: ‘excellence’ must prevail.32 But it also seems to distinguish kinds of church according to which group has priority in producing an abbot, the founding saint’s kin or the ‘kin of the land’ (presumably the kin that provided the land) where these are different;33 and failing these, the commentator lays down a further sequence of eligibility: someone from among the manaig, or from the head church of the federation, or from another church in the same federation or belonging to the same kin, or finally a stranger, an ‘exile of God’.34 For Druim Lias a certain Fe´th Fio laid down much less elaborately that the right of inheritance was to lie with his own kindred, ‘if there be one of them . . . good, devout and conscientious’; failing this, it must go to one of the monastic community; or to one of the manaig; or finally to a stranger from the community of Armagh.35 These possibilities depend not only on different patterns of foundation, but also on churches belonging either to a far-flung federation of churches linked by filiation or friendship (which need not coincide with already linked kingdoms or kindreds),36 or to a large regional paruchia such as Armagh’s, in which lesser churches had sought or been set under the lordship of a great church’s patron saint and his heirs,37 creating a new link for the lesser kindred or tuáth (perhaps voluntarily, perhaps in the wake of defeat).38 The eligibility of such outer circles for abbacy perhaps opened the way (along with fictitious genealogies) for encroachment by royal dynasties,39 who in their turn would treat the office as their own. On the other hand a great and famous monastery might draw on so wide a field of ‘pilgrims’ for monks that it 32

See Charles-Edwards’s rendering, Kinship, 96–7. Two kins could be involved—or secular and ecclesiastical branches of a kin could result—when (as often) a church was founded ‘by collaboration between the kindred and a churchman’ (CharlesEdwards, ‘E´rlam’, 289). 34 Ibid. 273–7, expounding the whole Co´rus Be´scnai passage and commentary, taking the latter (though late medieval) as evidence for the fragmentary text. The rules seem to require an abbot already in office to give way if a good family abbot became available. 35 ´ Croínıń, Early Med. Ireland, 162–3; Fe´th Fio’s bequest to Armagh, Patrician Texts, 172, c. 9. See O Charles-Edwards, ‘E´rlam’, 277–8. 36 ´ Briain, ‘Hagiography’, 457 n. 16; Hughes, Church, 78, 81, Plummer, Vitae, pp. cxi–cxiii and notes; O 94; Maire Herbert, Iona, Kells, and Derry: The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba (Oxford, 1988), esp. 30–5, 53–5. 37 Hughes, Introduction, 75; see the submission of bishop Aed (abbot of Sletty and perhaps head of his kindred), Patrician Texts, 176–7, 178–9. 38 Aed’s donation to Armagh of his kin along with his church (preceding note) perhaps meant the kin’s ecclesiastical allegiance, since future abbots of Sletty were drawn from it; Coirpre ‘offered his regnum’, rendered by Bieler as ‘regalian rights’ (Patrician Texts, 172–4, c. 10), but possibly meaning the ecclesiastical allegiance of the tuáth. Sletty was probably given to distant Armagh to save it from Kildare (Charles39 ´ ´ Briain, ‘Hagiography’, 454–6. Edwards, Ireland, 261–2). O Croínıń, op. cit., 157–8; O 33


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overshadowed the founder’s kindred and chose its abbots for merit and learning. Thus there is no evidence of even the loosest hereditary succession at pre-Viking Clonmacnois, whose abbots came from many kindreds, not always noble.40 But this is not to say that only small obscure abbacies stayed long in one kin. Wherever a kindred was flourishing, reserve sources of abbots might be seldom drawn on or not even envisaged. Of Columba’s first nine successors at Iona, seven were members of the founder-abbot’s kindred, the Cene´l Conaill.41 Before the eighth century, succession was seldom from father to son; celibate uncle to celibate nephew, or cousin to cousin, was more likely. Any such succession of collaterals required decisions to be made, as did the rules for going outside the family: decisions perhaps by the lay head of the kindred (such as Fe´th Fio may have been),42 or by consensus in a small kindred; but probably often by the preceding abbot designating his successor (perhaps to obviate disputes, as with kingship).43 This might be his right where he was himself head of the kindred, or might derive from a founder-abbot’s personal rights in an endowment of his own acquisition, available for a chosen heir like Columba’s cousin and foster-son Baithene.44 At Sletty, Aed seems to have designated his successor Conchad by an edacht, a declaration made on approaching death.45 From the eighth century onwards, however, there were married abbots succeeded by their sons and grandsons.46 The abbots of Slane were drawn from the two families of Colmań and Cormac, sons following fathers through four generations of one family and three of the other, interspersed. At Lusk, abbot Crundmaél (d. 736) was succeeded by two successive sons, Conall and Colgu, ´ engus was abbot of Duleek nearby; one of O ´ engus’s sons while his other son O became abbot of Lusk, while another was ‘second abbot’, probably the designated heir; Colgu’s son was a later abbot of Lusk (d. 805), with Conall’s son as prior or economus.47 Such a married abbot (other than a widower) could not be a professed monk, but he might be an ordained priest, and sometimes a learned man or a patron of learning and art.48 But since conversely a celibate abbot might be a 40 J. Ryan, ‘Abbatial Succession at Clonmacnois’, 491–507; cf. Charles-Edwards, Ireland, 257–8 on Clonfertmulloe. 41 See Maire Herbert, Iona, Kells, and Derry, 37–47 (pointing out that the succession of two non-kinsmen was not remarked on). 42 What we see him doing, however, is laying down the rules themselves, for an existing church (perhaps as head of the larger kin, now narrowing the founder’s right to his own branch): see CharlesEdwards, ‘E´rlam’, 280. 43 Plummer, Vitae, p. cxvii and notes. See Binchy, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Kingship (Oxford, 1970), 25–7. 44 Adomnan’s Life of Columba, ed. and trans. A. O. and M. O. Anderson (London, 1961), 208–9. The Vita Samsonis (cc. 38, 40) has Samson given an Irish monastery by its abbot and giving it in turn to his uncle. 45 ‘Aed left the testament with Conchad’ (who then went to Armagh and was accepted as abbot of 46 Sletty): note 37, above. Cf. Honau, above, pp. 117, 129–30. Hughes, Church, 163, 188–9, 210–11. 47 Ibid. 162–3; diagrams in Mytum, Origins, 76. How the two families’ interest in Slane came about is 48 not clear. See Hughes, Church, 158–9, 161.

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layman or in only minor orders, the drift towards abbots who were neither monks nor priests was easy;49 or it might result from a deliberate dividing of the abbot’s roles as coarb (with all the secular power) and as spiritual father.50 The outcome was hereditary abbacies or coarbships more tenacious than anywhere else in the West: often segments of royal lineages not drawn on for kings, and persisting even when their larger kindred had lost hold in the region.51 This itself suggests that the decisions were being made by the abbots themselves, with their brothers; an aspect perhaps of the declining importance of the derbfine.52 These were ‘family monasteries’ in the sense that the abbacy belonged to one or more linked lineages; not in the sense that any outside lord or lay family controlled the office and through it the monastery’s resources of revenue and influence. Women’s monasteries look different. Although their legal capacity increased quite rapidly, they lacked hereditary property-right in land (apart from life tenure if they have no brothers);53 making it almost impossible for Irish women to found their own nunneries, still less double monasteries whose abbess would rule men as well as women. Even at St Brigid’s, Kildare (conceivably superseding the cult of a Celtic goddess),54 the men of the monastery were probably ruled by a bishopabbot.55 More ordinary nunneries that had any permanence (and these seem extraordinarily few)56 may have been founded on land set aside by a kindred for its unmarried daughters and widows, from among whom abbesses would be chosen. In the eighth and ninth centuries abbesses are more likely than abbots to be regularly professed and celibate, and to succeed not by any linear inheritance, but by collateral or looser connections of a kind that suggest a lord’s or a family’s choice.57 At St Moninna’s in the seventh century, one abbess is an earlier one’s great-niece, is succeeded by her own niece, and she by her sister; later the local

49 Abbot Cellach, succeeding at Armagh in 1105 (himself ordained priest on election), was grandson, great-grandson, and great-great-grandson of married laymen, abbots since 966, renowned for learning (Kenney, Sources, I. 353; Hughes, Church, 245–6; ead., ‘Sanctity’, 31–3). 50 51 ´ Corraín, ‘Early Irish Churches’, 328–30. See Sharpe, ‘Problems’, 263–5. See O 52 See Charles-Edwards, Kinship, 62, 82–4; and below, note 56. 53 See for a brief account F. Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin, 1988), 75–8; and papers by Thurneysen, Dillon, and Binchy in Binchy (ed.), Studies in Early Irish Law (Dublin, 1936); Binchy, ‘Secular Institutions’, in M. Dillon (ed.), Early Irish Society (Dublin, 1954), 52–65. In Patrician Texts, c. 11, 1–4 (174–5) a nun, Cummen, donates property including land (but acquired, not inherited). 54 Kenney, Sources I. 356–8; Sharpe, Saints’ Lives, 9; Charles-Edwards, Ireland, 187. 55 ´ Briain, ‘Hagiography’, 461. The Lives sometimes show nuns under Hilpisch, Doppelklo¨ster, 29–31; O an abbot’s rule (Plummer, Vitae, I. 23 and 39); and a nun, Lassar, evidently ruled the church of Druim Lias, being of the ‘kindred of the land’ there (Charles-Edwards, ‘E´rlam’, 279). 56 Kathleen Hughes (Introduction, 234–5) suggested that groups of religious women might live on family land that they held for life only. 57 According to a probably 8th-c. canon (Hughes, Church, 158–9) a layman as abbot (having inherited the rule of a nunnery?) might have brought in or hired a ‘governess’ (dominatrix).


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king’s family took control and two successive eighth-century abbesses were a king’s sister and his daughter.58 Once appointed, however, an abbess had some lordly authority and legal standing;59 she might be called ‘coarb’; perhaps her rights in her nunnery’s property were analogous to those of the ban-chomarba (‘female heir’) who in the absence of male heirs might hold property for life and claim it by a variant of the usual rituals.60 If the possibility of women becoming abbesses promoted some enlargement of women’s rights, it was as much a solvent as an expression of family property rights.

6.ii. Galicia The partly Suevic north-west corner of Visigothic Spain produced a different kind of family monasticism. Early monasteries in Spain as elsewhere were founded by kings (perhaps),1 bishops, lay nobles, noble founder-abbots, and solitaries. Among these in the mid-seventh century was the Visigothic noble Fructuosus, who— both fleeing and leading numerous noble followers—founded a string of monasteries in Galicia,2 probably setting them under designated abbots or abbesses as he himself moved on, while perhaps continuing to rule them as a monk-bishop (eventually bishop of Braga). It is from Fructuosus’s (or another’s) Common Rule for these monasteries3 that we learn of the existence of irregular family monasteries founded without episcopal authority. Its opening chapter lays down ‘that no one should presume to make monasteries by his own decision’, and goes on to describe how householders with their wives, children, serfs, and neighbours bind themselves together by oath to set up false monasteries in their own homes, getting private churches consecrated under this pretence,4 refusing to be subject to any superior, giving nothing to the poor but themselves claiming alms and seeking to be richer than ever they were in the world; quarrelling among themselves about the property they have pooled, exposed to the armed attacks of kinsmen, and choosing their 58

9th-c. list of abbesses, attached to Vita S. Monennae (ed. Esposito, ‘Conchubrani Vita S. Monennae’, Proc. R. Irish Acad., 12 (1910), 244–5); Kenney, Sources, I. 368, 370. 59 A domina, virgo sancta could act as surety, unlike other women (Hughes, Church, 127). 60 Charles-Edwards, Kinship, 82–4, 267–9. 1 There is a formula for a royal foundation (above, p. 22 note 38), but not unquestionably Visigothic. 2 Vita Fructuosi, cc. 3–8 (ed. Diaz and Diaz, 84–92). 3 Regula communis (perhaps by a later 7th-c. author), ed. Campos and Roca. See Herwegen, Das pactum des heilig. Fructuosus, 51–60 (but see Linage Conde, Los orı´gines, I. 300–1); Bishko, ‘Gallegan Pactual Monasticism’, 514–15; Orlandis, Estudios, 71–82, 99–112. For early Spanish monasticism generally see Linage 4 Conde, op. cit., I and II; Collins, Early Medieval Spain, 80–7. See index: Le´rida.

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abbot for permissiveness.5 These ‘false monasteries’ would hardly occupy the first chapter of the Common Rule, with their tendencies to scandal and discord so elaborately described, if they were mere contemptible sideshows of the monastic world.6 Their existence must be a threat to the federation’s standards; perhaps any monastery might tend that way in some degree.7 Fructuosus himself had faced the enmity of his sister’s husband when he tried to use his patrimony to found Compludo.8 Such was the danger of family claims from outside or of individual claims from within that the Common Rule insisted, expressly for this reason, on monks renouncing their property ‘absolutely’ or ‘radically’ before they joined.9 Donating it to the monastery might too easily be confused with the pooling of shares by members of an artificial housecommunity, any of whom might later want a partition; while conversely such a pooling by a natural family might too easily be seen as satisfying the monastic requirement of poverty.10 The family or families who form such a community may well believe that it is a monastery, and act on untutored religious motives: the Common Rule speaks of the ‘imaginary charity’ by which they first ‘mingle’ their goods, and attributes the enterprise not primarily to greed but to fear of Hell (a point echoed in the chapter that bans monks coming with their own property, fearing Hell rather than loving Christ).11 The Common Rule itself does not expect to receive only those free of all family ties and able to be fully professed. A long chapter discusses ‘how men with wives and children can live in the monastery without peril’: they should ‘give themselves into the power of the abbot’, give up all private property, and live as ‘guests and pilgrims’, their small children having access to them but being brought up for monastic life. So the ‘peril’ avoided is that family affections and property interests might swamp the monastic rule.12 Nor is the oath that binds the pseudo-religious together unrelated to the genuine monastic life of the region. In the Braga federation and others like it, the obedience due to abbots could become a conditional obedience based on a pact 5 Reg. comm., c. 1 (pp. 172–4). There are (limited) parallels with Bede’s complaint to bp. Ecgbert, below, p. 152. 6 Similarly c. 2 (175–7) would hardly have needed to condemn single priests misrepresenting their churches as monasteries unless the federation had included the potentially anarchic element of hermits and their cells. 7 Valerius, De genere monachorum, c. 26 (Espanã Sagrada, 16, 388–9) implies that genuine monasteries in decline were filled with unwillingly tonsured dependants ‘falsely called monks’. 8 9 Vita Fructuosi, c. 3. Reg. comm., cc. 6 and 18 (pp. 182–3, 203–4). 10 Martıńez Dıéz (Patrimonio, 157, 165) saw such pooling as a concession by pseudo-monasteries to the principle of poverty; but it was natural for those forming a common household. 11 See P. H. Blair, World of Bede, 126. 12 Reg. comm., c. 6. Zaragoza III (691) c. 3 tried to restrict and regulate the admission of laity into monasteries (Conc. Visig., 476). On their admission to semi-monastic status or to familiaritas see Orlandis, Estudios, 220–44.


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between abbot and monks. Appended to the Common Rule is a model pactum,13 by which ‘all we who are listed below . . . convey (tradimus) our souls to God and to you, our lord and father . . . that we may live together in a coenobium’. They promise obedience and submission to punishment, not, however, at the abbot’s discretion but prescribed in great detail for various kinds of offence, including conspiracy with kinsmen or fellow-monks against the abbot, and departure ‘without the blessing of the brothers’ as well as without the abbot’s leave. They reserve the right to submit any grievance that the abbot fails to redress to an outside authority (abbot, monk-bishop, or even count). The monks’ rights are described as potestas, balanced against the abbot’s potestas over them.14 Even though his ultimate obligation to them is ‘to offer us without harm or stain to Christ’,15 it is part of a contract. Such a pact serves the double function of establishing a new monastery by the common consent of its members, and making the monks’ profession to the abbot.16 Actual pacts in this tradition, which spread from Galicia across most of northern Spain,17 marked sometimes a new foundation, sometimes the entry of individual monks or nuns, sometimes submission to a new abbot.18 The abbot might be designated by his predecessor because of kinship,19 but was often elected; probably not because of any move away from family claims towards a more Benedictine rule: it was rather a shift from old Visigothic practices of appointment by the diocesan bishop (or possibly by the head of a short-lived monastic federation), towards a private fraternity or a comitatus. If a new monastic community really began without any pooled property it might set off as a landless travelling company, with perhaps some breeding sheep (alms from those they were leaving the richer?), eventually to settle and build a basic church. However, the prohibition on new monks bringing their own property soon disappeared (not surprisingly); what individuals conveyed to the abbot or abbess was themselves and their property. An early instance (if authentic) is the 781 foundation pact of S. Vicente, Oviedo.20 In this a priest Montano and twenty-five other men attach themselves to a small cell established on waste land twenty years earlier by an abbot Florestan and his priest nephew; giving to Florestan 13

In Reg. comm., ed. Campos and Roca, 208–11, or in Herwegen, Pactum, 1–4; see Linage Conde, Orı´gines, I. 304–6. A pact is mentioned in the Common Rule itself (c. 8: after his noviciate a monk is ‘listed 14 in the pact with his brothers’). Habeas potestatem in nos . . . habeamus et nos potestatem . . . 15 16 An eastern monastic idea (Herwegen, Pactum, 61–2). Ibid. 4, 25–9, 36–50, 62–3. 17 Linage Conde, Orı´gines, I. 308, 311, 320–3. 18 Herwegen, Pactum, 6–24, 32–5; Orlandis, Estudios, 112–15; Bishko, ‘Salvus of Albelda and Frontier Monasticism’, Speculum 23 (1948), 568–85; id., ‘Gallegan Pactual Monasticism’, 513–26. Linage Conde distinguishes real bilateral pacts between abbot and monks (op. cit., I. 308–23) from one-sided commitments ‘wrongly called pacts’ (325–33): both are relevant here. 19 Examples and comment in Orlandis, Estudios, 144–5. 20 S. Vicente no. 1. See Linage Conde, op. cit., I. 329, II. 669–71 (for its basic authenticity), II. 671–2 (reconstruction, removing evident interpolations).

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‘ourselves and all our property’, detailed ‘in another charter’ but here described as ‘lands, vineyards, orchards, waters . . . what belongs in its place to each of us among our heirs’ (that is, their individual shares of separate properties), while Montano gives books and treasure, and they ‘all together as one’ give horses, cattle, clothing, and equipment, all for the church of St Vincent. Florestan on his side ‘receives’ them, annulling and condemning in advance anyone’s alienation of property or of the monastery itself.21 But we can learn more of the possibilities, despite its lateness, from a Cantabrian pact of 980, where a whole community submits itself to its new abbot (provided he refrain from favouritism) and conveys to him the monastic property: ‘lands, vineyards, orchards, churches, books, buildings, vestments, and everything movable and immovable’, with their ‘powers’, in the plural, to do whatever he wishes with it; implying that the monastery’s property would belong to its members had they not willingly submitted it to successive abbots.22 This is not unlike a group of kinsmen or neighbours keeping their property pooled in an artificial brotherhood or housecommunity; and in the seventh-century beginnings of this world, the pseudomonastery whose members remain effectively the owners of their shares may be not so remote. We have what may well be the self-constituting pact of a seventh-century share-pooling community in the Regula Consensoria included by Benedict of Aniane in his collection.23 It consists of an agreement between monks, not of monks with their abbot, to found a monastery. There is no self-conveyance. Its emphasis, even in its scriptural citations, is not on obedience but on unity, community of goods, and taking no thought for the morrow. It may not be the pact of exactly such a pseudo-monastery as the Common Rule condemns: there is nothing in it about wives and children, or manumitted serfs. But it expects discord and departures; it stipulates that a departing brother is not to ‘take away with him anything of what is in the monastery, either what he once brought with himself, or what he acquired with his brothers’; it envisages the need to disperse in flight from enemy attack, perhaps that of hostile kinsmen,24 and later to rejoin the abbot with whatever property they have salvaged. In both contexts (individual secession or common flight) movable property seems to be what is meant: sheep and goats, perhaps, and pack-animals with loads of books, vestments, and plate. The importance of sheep, presumably for milk, 21

Already only rather weakly bilateral. Another early ‘pact’ is San Millań no. 1 (759), made by an abbess and confirmed by 27 named nuns, subjecting herself ‘body and soul’ (see below, p. 670) to her own foundation S. Miguel de Pedroso. 22 Herwegen, Pactum, 16–19 (Santillana-del-Mar); see Linage Conde, op. cit., I. 313–14. 23 Holstenius-Brockie (ed.), Codex Regularum, I. 136–7; Herwegen, Pactum, 71–9. Bishko, ‘Date and Nature’, 377–93, rejects Herwegen’s attribution to a pseudo-monastery but defends his dating and context 24 (7th-c. Galicia); cf. Linage Conde, op. cit., I. 306–8. See above, at note 5.


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cheese, and wool, to a monastery’s survival ‘in this laborious land’ is emphasized in the Common Rule;25 perhaps we should usually understand defecting brothers and marauding kinsmen as literally removing flocks and herds (perhaps in the course of seasonal movements) rather than reclaiming shares of agricultural land. Whether or not the Consensoria is itself a pact (all brothers have to subscribe to it), it mentions a pact whereby property was made common: ‘he may not keep as his own what belongs by the pact to everyone and is consecrated to God’. Perhaps some such pact was established by the mutual oath taken at the foundation of a pseudo-monastery, as the Common Rule describes.26 So for Galician monasticism the ‘false monastery’ is only just round the corner: the family or families, that is, who have pooled their lands and flocks, who still collectively own them and who cling to their individual rights in them; and such a monastery might be more irregular than bogus, its origin a genuine impulse to dedicate a whole family and its dependants to colonizing activity and religious life combined, hoping for safety and prosperity in both worlds.27 It might be superficially not unlike what an early Irish family monastery may have been; but it clearly had a different social background and a different legal basis.28 Irish monasteries—after the earliest, isolated times—were woven into the fabric of whole kindreds great or small, merging into them through their clients and parishioners, their abbots having spiritual and perhaps temporal authority over this larger kin-group. Galician ones seem more like floating rafts, their members bound together by a juridical contract which clearly separated them from their wider kindred, and their abbots faced with the centrifugal property-interests of individuals and nuclear families inside and outside the monastery; while spiritual authority over the outside laity lay not with abbots but with bishops (even if sometimes abbot-bishops). These were ‘family monasteries’ in the sense that they were domestic in scale and familial in composition, not (any more than in Ireland, perhaps even less) in the sense that a family existing independently of the monastery owns it from outside.

25

c. 9, on the importance of the shepherd’s task. Herwegen suggested (Pactum, 78–9) that the pact mentioned in the Consensoria would embody the individual’s submission of self and property to God, abbot, and community; doubtfully consistent with the Consensoria’s basis being an agreement among equals (see Bishko, ‘Date and Nature’, 391–2). 27 On the colonizing role of minimally monastic communities, with Fructuosus’s Rule or associated pacts for guidance and reassurance, see Linage Conde, op. cit., I. 302–4, 337–8. Spanish double monasteries perhaps began as regularizations of more-or-less mixed monasteries with a Fructuosan background (Orlandis, Estudios, 29–33, 169–81, 189–92). 28 The only certain insular influence was not Irish but Welsh, at the monastery S. Maria de Britonã. See Orlandis, Estudios, 106–10; P. David, E´tudes historiques sur la Galice et le Portugal du VIe au XIIe sie`cle (Coimbra, 1947), 44, 57–60. 26

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6.iii. England There is a broad similarity between the Common Rule’s strictures on ‘false monasteries’ in Galicia and Bede’s on those of Northumbria in his letter to bishop Egbert, some half a century later.1 The country, he says, is full of places called monasteries which are nothing of the kind. For the last thirty years various nobles—specifically praefecti2 and king’s thegns—have bought land from the king under pretext of building monasteries and have got these lands ‘ascribed to them in hereditary right by royal edicts’ (in other words by royal charter); and ‘having thus usurped to themselves petty territories3 and villages’, they set themselves up—‘free both from divine and human service’—as laymen ruling monks; or not even that, for they gather expelled ex-monks and deserters from other monasteries, or free their own dependants to be tonsured and promise obedience. There they live, at one moment in bed with their wives begetting children, the next moment rising to perform the monastic offices; while their wives with equal impudence acquire sites for nunneries and set themselves up as laywomen to rule nuns. So ‘many are found who call themselves equally abbots and king’s officers or thegns’, having made themselves abbots by their own judgment, knowing nothing of monastic life except by hearsay.4 These ‘monasteries’ sound not so much bogus as unacceptable by Bede’s standards; probably more clerical than monastic,5 and with a pastoral rather than ascetic role, yet covered by the word monasterium (which the English soon turned into ‘minster’).6 But Bede can hardly have invented the sharp lay property-interest he describes (quite different from any advantage that may be conjectured for property-pooling founders in Galicia). This interest must have lain in acquiring bookland—land granted by written document, boc—when this was still reserved for churches. None of Bede’s ‘royal edicts’ subscribed by ‘bishops, abbots, and great laymen’ survive from Northumbria, but from other English kingdoms we have enough authentic or acceptable charters of the later seventh and early eighth centuries to show that lay or religious men or women founding monasteria did it with land given them by ‘book’ for the purpose, by a king or underking, in the same terms as the kings used for giving land to existing churches or their heads.7 1

Epistola ad Ecgberctum, Bedae Opera Hist., I. 405–23 (esp. cc. 11–13); EHD I. 735–45. On the Galician parallel see P. H. Blair, World of Bede, 136; Sims-Williams, Religion, 126–8 (but on his view of Bede’s letter 2 see J. Blair, Church, 101 n. 106). Probably ealdormen rather than lesser officials (reeves). 3 4 See note 8, below, on agelluli. For analysis of the whole letter see Blair, Church, 101–7. 5 Perhaps married (Thacker, ‘Monks’, 155, 163–4), like minster clergy later. 6 In what follows I mostly use ‘monastery’ rather than ‘minster’ cogently recommended for pre-10th-c. England by Sarah Foot (‘Anglo-Saxon Minsters: A Review of Terminology’, 212–25), but too insular for this comparative chapter. 7 In this section, for brevity, I refer to charters by their number in Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters (S and number); the edition used is Birch, Codex Saxonicum, unless otherwise stated; dates and notes on


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This early bookland was almost certainly not ordinary landlord property but territory whose holder had otherwise royal rights over the inhabitants, chiefly food-renders;8 and these rights were given as near as might be outright. The formulae do not seem stereotyped or meaningless.9 They always emphasize perpetuity (ius perpetuum;10 in sempiterno possidenda; in propriam perpetualiter . . . potestatem), and often ‘free power’ (libera potestas, facultas, or licencia) to exploit, alienate or bequeath: ‘to leave to whatever successors she may wish’; ‘living or dying, to give by her own judgment to whom she may wish’; ‘to give it or exchange it as seems useful to you’; ‘as long as he lives . . . holding and possessing and leaving it to whomever he wills in his life or after his death’;11 a power that evidently remains with each successive holder.12 This perpetual right and continuing free disposal, described often as ‘monastic’ or ‘ecclesiastical’ right (for prospective lay founders as well as for ecclesiastics),13 appears occasionally as ‘hereditary’ right: a term arguably better explained not as the right for one’s heirs to inherit but as one’s own freedom to appoint an heir.14 When in 692 Nothelm, king of the South Saxons, gave land to his sister Nothgyth to build a monastery it became hers ‘hereditarily’, to give away in propriam potestatem.15 Later, land booked by king Ethelbald to his comes Cyneberht for a monastery, to be given or authenticity come mainly from the ‘Anglo-Saxon Charters’ website. The earliest original is Hlothere of Kent’s to abbot Beohrtwald, 679 (S 8; ChLA III no. 182); but Kentish kings were probably booking land much earlier (Chaplais, ‘Who Introduced Charters into England?’; Kelly (ed.), Charters of St Augustine’s, pp. lxxiv–lxxv). 8 This view, held by Maitland, 1897 (Domesday Book and Beyond, Essay II) and Eric John, 1966 (Orbis Britanniae, 100–11, 266–71), is strongly supported by recent topographical work (on whose implications see Wickham, Land and Power, 211–12, 214–15). See Faith, English Peasantry, 89–94, 104–5, 171–6; and above, p. 83 note 35. Bede’s word agelluli, diminutive of agri, cannot mean ‘small fields’ when tens or hundreds of hides were given; ager itself is nearer to ‘territory’ (John, Orbis, 266; cf. Blair, ‘Frithuwald’s Kingdom and the Origins of Surrey’, in Bassett (ed.) Origins, 98–105, on the very early (but disputed) S 1165 for Chertsey). Bede’s words ‘free from human service’ probably refer to the lands not being available for young nobles or retired veterans (letter, c. 11); not to immunity from fortification work or military service. 9 See Scharer, Angelsa¨chsische Ko¨nigsurkunde 24–44; Kelly (ed.), St Augustine’s, pp. lxxiii–lxxxv. With Vulgar Law origins, they may be misleading about the nature of what is given, but not totally so about what can be done with it. See John, Land Tenure, 1–10; and below, note 22. 10 See Wormald, Bede and the Conversion, 20. 11 Last four quotations: St Augustine’s nos. 40, 42; W. Midlands Charters no. 205 (text p. 203); ChLA III no. 183. 12 S 1165, expressly extending freedom of disposal to ‘your successors’, is disputed; but see below, at notes 42–5. Later, Alfred c. 41 implies that a man having bookland from his kin can alienate it if they have not forbidden this (note 65, below); later still, the formula Hit becwaeð (Wormald, Making of English Law, 385) emphasizes this freedom. 13 e.g. 736, king Ethelbald to his comes Cyneberht (S 89, the oldest Mercian original, ChLA III no. 183); also S 94 for his comes Aethelric, for the first time not explicitly for a monastery, but probably in fact for that at Wootton Wawen (Bassett, ‘In Search’, 18; Sims-Williams, Religion, 148–50). 14 This reading would obviate the difficulty that Patrick Wormald sees (Bede and the Conversion, 21, 22–3) in Bede’s phrase ius hereditarium (cf. id., Anglo-Saxon Deerhurst, 4–5). 15 S 45, with S 1172 in which she does so (to bp. Wilfrid); now Kelly, ed., Selsey Charters nos. 2a, 2b; together ‘fundamentally authentic’ (ibid. 15, 22, 17–18, 18–19. That it had come to Nothgyth ‘from her kinsmen’ suggests that Nothelm turned it into bookland rather than giving it her from scratch).

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left as he wished, came to Cyneberht’s son Ceolfrith, ‘abbot by paternal hereditary right’:16 more likely his father’s right to appoint an heir than his own right to inherit.17 So various Italian and sometimes Frankish formulae derived from Vulgar Roman law,18 which free Lombards or Franks could use to convey land that by now was really their own, were for some time19 used in England only by kings or underkings (with the justification of remedium animae and perhaps a countergift or purchase-price as well),20 not merely to convey rights over land but to make these disposable by the recipients, and at first only for churches or church founders— this being the purpose for which kings have been taught to use charters.21 Thus the founder of a family minster endowed with bookland has not simply given land to the Church while contriving to keep it: he has obtained property for himself and his heirs of a kind—alienable and bequeathable—that they could not otherwise have had.22 One problem is what the alternative was. It was argued by Eric John that they would otherwise have had no hereditary property at all; that in the small, shifting kingdoms of England, the still-mobile warrior class had hitherto depended entirely on lifelong loans of land from kings, kings alone having any alodial property or inherited rights over land.23 This has never seemed very likely, any more than the equivalent view about the Franks; and as for Francia, so for England the view has lately gained or regained ground that by the seventh century there must have been nobles with ancestral family lands.24 Such lands would be subject to powerful norms of natural heirs’ expectations, perhaps rigid 16

S 89 (above, note 13) and S 1411, Stour in Ismere. See Wormald, in The Anglo-Saxons (ed. J. Campbell),

95–7. 17 Cf. S 155 (799; ChLA III no. 223), S 1264 (811): Offa had quashed Ecgbert II of Kent’s charter booking lands to a layman Ealdhun (which Ealdhun gave to Canterbury), on the grounds that Ecgbert as Offa’s underking ‘was not allowed to ascribe lands in hereditary right’: i.e. on my view, could not make anyone free to choose his heir. Later, ‘the inheritance of Aethelric’ or ‘of Hemele and Duda’, claimed by Worcester (below, at notes 55–6), may mean not what they had inherited but what they gave to Worcester as (here) their heir. 18 See Wormald, Bede and the Conversion, 9–19 (with possible ‘Celtic’ influence, 17); for older literature 19 Levison, England, 224–33. See John, Land Tenure 9 and n. 1. 20 e.g. below, at note 43 (land at Wenlock ‘bought’ by abbot Aethelheah from king Merewalh); S 1177, Hwiccean princes to abbess Cuthswith; Bede’s letter, c. 12 (quoted above). 21 On the powerfully ecclesiastical, even sacral look of charters see Wormald, Bede and the Conversion, 8–13 including plates III and (for contrast) IV. 22 Susan Reynolds (Fiefs, 329) doubts the freedom of disposition, because church property was inalienable; but this would not prevent anyone from dealing with the whole complex. Susan Kelly suggests that alienability was a mainly lay interest developing later, the formulae being ‘without legal substance’ in the 7th c. (St Augustine’s, pp. lxxx–lxxxi and n. 31); but it was always in the Church’s interest that potential founders or benefactors be able to alienate. See also below, at notes 38–40. 23 John, Land Tenure, 45–63; Orbis, 80–127; cf. Stenton (tentatively), The Latin Charters of the Anglo-Saxon period (Oxford, 1955), 60–1. 24 e.g. Charles-Edwards, ‘The Distinction Between Land and Movable Wealth in A-S. England’, in P. H. Sawyer (ed.), Medieval Settlement (London, 1976), 183–4; Wormald, Bede and the Conversion, 21–2; Reynolds, Fiefs, 325–6.


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rules of partible inheritance; the attraction of bookland—quite apart from its substance—would be that it could be used for gifts to the Church and at the same time kept intact for one line, or directed to chosen heirs in each generation. Using it to support a minster must often have furthered family interests and family plans, by directing it to one son or daughter, at a time when ordinary inherited land had to be divided, while ordinary land-grants from a king were for life only.25 On either view, it has been held that a royal boc was needed because only kings could alienate land (even with the justification of remedium animae) or make it alienable by others. Against this Patrick Wormald has argued that bookland was disposable or alienable simply because it was acquired and not inherited, and that the value of the charter was as evidence of this.26 This argument does not quite dispose of the apparent royal monopoly. It could be true—without any special barbarian rigidity in family law—that only kings could make land alienable, if a legacy of late Roman conditions had made alienation difficult while also providing the late Roman remedy of the ruler’s authorization. This may apply to south-east Wales, where there is a broadly similar picture (though beginning earlier) of kings apparently having a monopoly of the power to give land to the Church, until in the late seventh century nobles began to do so, at first giving in conjunction with kings land that they have acquired from kings.27 But the subRoman background is much less likely for the English;28 and if what a boc gave was royal rights over free cultivators, the initial royal monopoly needs no explaining. In any case, the endowment of churches is not just a matter of adapting existing property-law to accommodate a new kind of owner and putting the gift on record at the new owners’ insistence: the innovation of written charters meant importing or reactivating sub-Roman notions of property. Bookland might, however, include ordinary landlordly estates that the beneficiary already held (inherited or loaned), now turned into bookland;29 and on it the monastery might already exist at some more-or-less domestic level, without formal endowments. So beneficiaries described as ‘abbot’ or ‘abbess’ may be either prospective founders or the heads of existing communities of all shades of regularity;30 among them some whom Bede would have regarded as mere 25 Either or both could weigh, as Wormald points out (Deerhurst, 4). See Blair, Church, 104 on the diversity of circumstances that ‘may underlie apparently similar grants of bookland’. 26 ‘Bede and the Conversion’, 22–3. 27 See Davies, ‘Land and Power’, 3–4, 10–11, 16–23; ead., Microcosm, 50–3, 62, 162–3. But in Wales too the real difficulty of alienation may (for independent aristocratic families as distinct from tenants) have lain in family law, making it useful to deploy the king’s name. 28 Bede’s use of the term ‘royal edict’ for the boc was probably literary. 29 See above, note 15 (Nothelm for Nothgyth). Any endowment would have to include a core of land, slaves, and perhaps dependent tenants (see Faith, Peasantry, 15–55; Blair, Church, 252–4). 30 As in Galicia, there are no sharp lines between false, irregular, and eccentric. Bede’s account implies an attempt at monastic routine, vitiated by ignorance. On Clofesho 747 c. 5 (C&ED III. 364)

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ealdormen or thegns,31 others put in charge by a father or brother and already (or soon to be) ordained or professed, and yet others—devout widows or elderly heads of households—embarking on religious life and rule, probably with a bishop’s approval.32 The attraction of bookland might be paramount at one end of the spectrum and not unfelt at the other, but probably seldom or never the sole motive for a foundation.33 The wish to secure a holy place for one’s heirs might arise precisely because it was a holy place: the three founders in 688 of a monastery at Farnham, whose bookland was mostly attached to Cusanweoh, Cusa’s sanctuary, sound from their names—Cedde, Cisi, and Criswa—like sons or descendants of Cusa, getting his pagan holy place (perhaps a burial-place) booked to them.34 Probably any family monastery might become a family burial-place, as Deerhurst was at the end of the eighth century.35 And that a religious establishment might draw its heads for a while from the kin of a genuinely religious founding abbot or abbess was as natural for the English as for the Franks, and sanctioned for both by Irish example. Lindisfarne, the first great Irish monastery of northern England, was not itself a natural hole for a family tree, being given to the pilgrim Aidan and peopled partly by his Irish companions, partly by English converts and boys that he adopted. But at the unlocated church whose abbots are described in the early ninth-century poem De abbatibus (written for a bishop of Lindisfarne, to celebrate his ancestors), four out of the six abbots were two pairs of brothers (and interestingly, in each pair the first is a priest and the second not—though he may well have been a professed monk).36 The place is alive and respected, a family background for a bishop to take pride in. The poet describes the lay noble Eanmund, who founded it early in the eighth century, as ‘obtaining’ what he was to give to Christ:37 probably, as the editor remarks, given him as bookland. We should not distinguish too sharply between ‘Church’ and laity as regards interest in having bookland, as if churchmen were interested only in perpetuity, not in alienability.38 A devout founder-abbot or abbess might want the continuing freedom of disposal see Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, 319 n. 26. Egbert’s dialogue, envisaging a monastery bequeathed to two heirs, treats this as a viable community which should choose one to rule first (above, pp. 129, 137). 31 Cf. ‘thegn-abbots’ endowed by king Ethelbald (Sims-Williams, Religion, 147–50). 32 Place-names such as Tetbury, Bibury (Tette’s or Baege’s ‘enclosed place’) may indicate a founderabbess’s minster (see Stenton (1943), in D. M. Stenton (ed.), Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 33 1970), 320; Blair, Church, 81 n. 8, 250. See esp. Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, 253–4. 34 S 235 (H. Edwards, Early WS. Charters: ‘basically authentic’), by the West Saxon king Caedwalla in his 35 See Wormald, Deerhurst, 3, 6. brief domination of Surrey. 36 Aethelwulf’s De abbatibus (ed. A. Campbell), sec. 13 and 15 (pp. 32–3, 38–9). Kathleen Hughes remarked (Church, 141) that the poem speaks of a ‘married monk’; but there is no implication that the monk’s second wife (he is rebuked in a vision for remarrying as a widower, sec. 11) is living with him or 37 even alive. Eanmundus Christo indeptus quod dederat almo, sec. 4 (8–9); introduction, p. xxiii. 38 Suggested (less crudely) by Kelly (above, note 22).


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precisely to protect the monastery against his or her natural and unchosen heirs, yet also hope that the chosen heirs will choose their own successors from what is probably their common kin. And so they often will—an abbot’s brother or nephew, conceivably a son born before his profession;39 an abbess’s sister, niece, or daughter.40 So it might seem at first sight that families were securing their future by identifying themselves with undying institutions. But what the charter does is not to secure the land for ever to a church or a corporation (some of the early charters do not even purport to do this, naming the monastery as an appendage to the individual abbot if at all);41 rather, it creates a continuing right to dispose of or bequeath the monastery and its land from one heir to the next: from founder to abbot and from abbot to abbot. The immediate founder might be not a layman but the abbot of another house, passing bookland on to the head of a new daughter house, as at the double minster of Wenlock in Shropshire where the core of the endowment was seemingly given to Mildburg by abbot Aethelheah of Icanho, who had ‘bought’ the land from Mildburg’s father Merewalh (underking of a small Welsh, English, or mixed kingdom).42 Later, a small estate came to Mildburg from a nun Feleburg who had received it from king Coenred of the Mercians and handed on Coenred’s charter with it; a smaller one was bought by Mildburg from a layman, a king’s comes who had received it (presumably from the king) by charter, which he likewise handed on; meanwhile extensive lands were given directly by her royal brothers, and a small estate later by their overking Ceolred.43 All (received over a period of about fifty years from c.680) were recorded in Mildburg’s ‘testament’ as her personal acquisitions, beginning with Wenlock itself.44 What happened next at Wenlock is unclear; but normally the abbot’s or abbess’s power to hand on the property must have meant designating his or her successor, handing on the original charter rather than making a new one. Aethelheah’s charter, if authentic, is ‘a very early . . . abbatial charter’45 (the other non-royal donors to Mildburg merely handed on their royal charters).46 But 39

40 I do not know of an example of this last. See above, pp. 128, 130; below, at note 47. e.g. S 8, S 1167): tibi tuoque monasterio; vobis et per vos monasterio vestro. On usage in 7th-c. Kent see Kelly (ed.), St Augustine’s, pp. lxxvii–viii. 42 See K. Pretty, ‘Defining the Magonsaete’, in Bassett (ed.), Origins, 171–83. Aethelheah’s monastery was probably at Iken, Suffolk (Finberg (ed.), W. Midlands Charters, 207–8, 209). On links between Magonsaete and East Angles, see Sims-Williams, Religion, 98–101; Thacker, ‘Kings, Saints’, 17. 43 S 1798–802, a narrative with charters presented as Mildburg’s testament, ed. Finberg, op. cit., 201–4, trans. 204–6, discussion 207–20. 44 ‘First I acquired this place called Wenlock’, from abbot Aethelheah and from a Frankish-named abbess Liobsind, perhaps Aethelheah’s abbess earlier (Sims-Williams, Religion, 110–11): establishing monastic life for the young Mildburg to take over? 45 John, Land Tenure, 9 n. 1. Cf. bp. Eorconwald’s donation of Barking to his sister, 687: Hart, EE Charters, 117–27. 46 Revisions or endorsements might be needed for handing over land or minster to the abbot of another church, or to laity (e.g. Selsey Charters no. 5, with Kelly’s lucid analysis, pp. 31–4). 41

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almost as early is what now seems the authentic donation of forty-eight hides at Bradfield (Berkshire) by a nobleman and perhaps abbot Haeha to his sister Cilla, probably with rule of the minster there for which they had both previously been given bookland.47 And in this case the donation was conditional; Cilla was to give all the land to the minster at her death, or if disposing of her property before that, to give the minster back to Haeha; she would still be ‘giving’ it, but would be obliged to do so. Later founders sometimes arranged a reversion into a bishop’s control. The conflicts that might result show up at a synod in 736–7, in litigation about the nunnery at Withington founded by two women, Dunne and her daughter Bucge, on land booked to them by king Ethelred of the Mercians with his underking Oshere of the Hwicce. Bucge was obviously the prospective abbess, but she had died, and Dunne had left the property to her other, married daughter’s daughter who was then under age—and whose mother, having charge of the property, now said the charter had been stolen. The synod declared that the land must be restored to the granddaughter, ‘the abbess Hrothware’, and after her death should go ‘as her elders previously decreed’ to the bishopric of Worcester.48 By 774 it was the bishop’s: in giving it for life only to an abbess Aethelburga, he says it was given him ‘in the right of his own liberty and possession’ by the abbess Hrothware;49 he assumes it had been hers to give, although the judgment of 736–7 suggests that either the original boc or the founder-abbess Dunne had specified this reversion to the bishopric50—perhaps failing a suitable heir, one able to be professed. A similar principle is laid down in the late eighth-century charter of Headda, priest and abbot, limiting the succession in the Lombard fashion,51 in what seems to be his hereditary church (some of its land given him by three underkings of the Hwicce),52 to male heirs of his own lineage in Holy Orders; failing this it must go to Worcester, whose alumnus he is.53 The reversion to Worcester of the minster at Westbury-on-Trym, on the other hand, was intended by its owner Aethelric to follow on his mother Ceolburg’s death in any case, to secure protection for her in her lifetime against the claims of the Berclingas, the Berkeley people. The dispute in 824 between the bishop of Worcester and Berkeley Minster was ‘about the inheritance of Aethelric son of Aethelmund, that is, the monastery of Westbury’, and the bishop’s successful claim by oath-helpers was based on possession of the monastery, land, and 47 See H. Edwards, WS Charters, 169–7, esp. 170–1; Kelly, Charters of Abingdon Abbey, pp. cxcvi, cci, and nos. 1–4, esp. no. 3; together radically overturning established views (see S 1179). 48 S 1429; the record was made as a new boc to replace the lost one. See John, Orbis, 85–6; 49 Sims-Williams, Religion, 130–2. S 1255. 50 51 52 See however Blair, Church, 116 n. 165. Above, pp. 51–8. S 56 (759, ChLA III no. 179). 53 S 1413 (CS 283). John (Orbis, 170) takes the hereditas to be not a church but an ordinary estate becoming a hereditary prebend of Worcester. But requiring the heir to be not only a priest but one qui rite et monastice ecclesiasticam normam regere queat points towards ruling a minster.


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charters as earlier settled by Aethelric. Aethelric had in fact declared this intention at a synod in 804, which he could do because at an earlier synod he had established his title and been judged ‘free to give my land and charters wherever I wished’.54 As for Berkeley’s claim, the grounds are nowhere stated; but much later evidence makes a Ceolburg abbess there, dying in 807; giving them, perhaps, a claim to Westbury as having been hers; perhaps a claim as her natural heirs, if the Berclingas were not only Berkeley’s monastic community but its founding family. A different pattern is suggested when Worcester in 789 defended its possession of Inkberrow and Bradley as ‘the inheritance of Hemele and Duda’, against the claim of Wulfheard son of Cussa. It seems likely that Inkberrow, founded by Oshere of the Hwicce for an abbess Cuthswith,55 had come by some abbess’s choice of heir to Hemele and Duda (if so, just such a pair of nominated heirs as bishop Egbert had envisaged),56 who had then given or sold it to the bishopric; while Wulfheard may have been natural heir to someone along the line.57 Inkberrow may already have lapsed from monastic or collegiate life. Both the minster itself and the family’s hold on it were precarious, precisely because of the freedom of disposition inherent in bookland. Sooner or later an abbot or abbess may give the property out of the family rather than designating an heir from within it. They may give it to a bishop or bishop’s church (perhaps to keep it out of lay hands, but no guarantee of its survival).58 Or they may give it to an admired abbot: Nothgyth gave to Wilfrid (as an abbot of abbots rather than as a diocesan bishop) the monastery she built on her brother’s grant;59 later, an abbess gave three monasteries to an abbot Forthred who may have been no relation of hers,60 any more than Wilfrid was of Nothgyth. And finally, an abbot or abbess may leave it in lay hands (as an abbess of Inkberrow may have done), or even arrange for its partition—perhaps among natural heirs, but what these get is unlikely to be a working monastery. When the monk-bishop Bertuin, moved by a vision to leave his establishment at Otbellum61 54 S 1187 (Aethelric, 804); S 1433 (824 dispute). See C. S. Taylor on Berkeley Minster in Trans. Bristol and Glos. Archaeol. Soc., 19 (1894–5), 70–84; Wormald, ‘Charters, Law’, 152–7 and 262 (App. 23); id., Deerhurst, 2–4; Keynes, Clofesho, 9 and nn., 11. 55 S 53; see Sims-Williams, ‘Cuthswith, Seventh Century Abbess of Inkberrow, near Worcester’, ASE 5 (1976), 1–21. 56 Above, note 29. Sims-Williams sees them only as ‘local landowners’ who ‘had acquired it’ (Religion, 238–9). 57 His father’s name suggests relationship to Cuthswith. He was allowed to hold the land for life. 58 e.g. (besides the cases just discussed) abbot Ceolfrith giving Stour in Ismere to Worcester (S 1411, between 757 and 774), perhaps expecting interference by his kin, so seeking Offa’s consent; by 781 (S 1257) Ismere was one of the estates, named with no mention of church or monastery, that Offa allowed Worcester to keep when surrendering the monastery of Bath (see index: Stour in Ismere). 59 60 See above, p. 153; below, p. 201. Below, p. 198 note 62. 61 Perhaps Outwell, in the Fens.

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and go overseas, summoned all his kinsmen and (in the words of his Life) ‘handed over to them his inheritance, that is his monastery and lands, and divided it among them as he wished’, it is far from certain that the monastery survived or was even meant to; especially since he took with him books, relics, and boys, and divided what movables were left among the poor.62 So if the grant of bookland has, perversely, created an assumption on the part of natural heirs that it should be theirs,63 it may often be the endowments rather than the endowed church that they want; while even in the rare case that the boc requires choice of heir within the kindred,64 this restriction seems not at all sure of remaining in force or of being observed.65 All this cuts against the ‘common-sense’ view that whatever the charters say, founder families must in fact have controlled the choice of head.66 Some minsters must indeed have been of intimate and (with luck) enduring interest to the family; Aethelric would never have alienated Deerhurst for a shortterm purpose as he did Westbury-on-Trym.67 But the underkings whose foundations have been seen as ‘dynastic proprietary churches’68 cannot be shown to have controlled or perhaps valued them for long: they began to be buried at the regional cathedrals;69 nothing is known of Wenlock after Mildburg’s time until 901,70 while the future St Peter’s, Gloucester, disappears as a nunnery after the third abbess.71 What has been created, then, is more like individual property than ‘family land’.72 And once laymen as such could have bookland,73 we are back in the standard position: that Christians want to devote wealth to God and at the same time to set up their sons or daughters, widows or mothers, with the prestige and relative security that that brings.74 We are no nearer in England than in Francia to finding that families continuously control monasteries and determine the succession.

62

63 Above, pp. 123, 134. See Wormald, Deerhurst, 5–6. e.g. S 114 (ChLA III no. 184), Offa to his minister Dudda (not however for founding a church), to leave to a chosen kinsman, remaining with his generatio; Headda’s charter (above, note 52). We cannot safely cite the very explicit S 70 (below, note 71). 65 S 1442, a claim in 897 that land had been booked (late 8th c.) with reservation to kin but taken by Worcester (see Wormald, Deerhurst, 5). Alfred’s law (c. 41; Liebermann, Gesetze, I. 74) supporting such 66 reservations suggests their insecurity. As Sims-Williams, Religion, 121–2. 67 68 See Wormald’s comment, Deerhurst, 6–7. Sims-Williams, Religion, 122–4. 69 Ibid. 124. The parallel rightly noted between the family burials at Wenlock and at Jouarre extends to the shortness of the period that they cover (see index: Jouarre). 70 A chalice was then given by the rulers of Mercia (Thacker, ‘Kings, Saints’, 4–5). 71 Sims-Williams, Religion, 125. Abbess Eafa may herself have given the monastery to the male clergy who held it later, electing their dominus as her successor. But this is only one of several possible readings of S 70 (Finberg (ed.), WMidlands Charters, 161; Sims-Williams, Religion, 124–5). 72 73 See also below, pp. 239–40, on royal abbesses. From Offa’s time. 74 The security should not be overstated. The abbess Eangyth, writing to Boniface about 720 (from a perhaps Mercian double monastery), complained of troubles brought on her by the monks’ dissensions, royal demands, deaths of friends and kinsmen, and the king’s hostility to her surviving nephew (Epist. Sel., I no. 14). 64


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6.iv. Bavaria Bavarian monastic foundations of the eighth century, when not ducal, were certainly noble family enterprises, often by the most powerful and well connected,1 whose less outstanding kinsmen founded the well-endowed but nonmonastic churches already discussed. A monastery could be endowed, like a lesser priest-owned church,2 with an individual founder’s whole available property (that is, what he had or would have after partition with any sons).3 Waltrich, a rich and influential priest of a great kindred, declared in his foundation charter for Scha¨ftlarn (c.762) that he had built a church and called on bishop Joseph of Freising to dedicate it; that the bishop ‘asked me before all my co-heirs if any of them wished to oppose my doing this, and how I intended to endow it’; that with his kinsmen’s consent he gave it two other churches ‘and myself, and whatever I have’ (perhaps meaning only what he had in that villa); and that he ‘conveyed’ it by the symbol of its bell-rope to the bishopric, provided that he and his ‘brothers’—evidently meaning fellow monks, although so far it is only an ‘oratory’— may have their caput there. Later (probably) he confirmed this traditio to Freising along with the perpetual existence of the monastery with all his acquisitions, ‘on behalf of myself and my relations and co-heirs, for the remedy of our souls’:4 it was a family undertaking (since they were his potential heirs), and further extensive endowments from other family members followed soon.5 Other monasteries were founded by pairs or groups of brothers or cousins using common or pooled property and often themselves entering the monastery. Such were the founders in the 760s of Tegernsee and Benediktbeuern6 (among the greatest in the land, rivalled only by the dukes’ monasteries Niederaltaich and Kremsmu¨nster); and the more modest Schliersee, founded by five brothers who, ‘abandoning worldly affairs, have chosen a place of our common inheritance in the wilderness called Schliersee and there have built a cell in the usual way’.7 Scharnitz (later at Schlehdorf) was founded by the Huosi Reginpreht with his 1 Fastlinger’s term ‘genealogischen Eigenklo¨ster’, i.e. monasteries belonging to one or other of the five great clans called genealogiae (Bedeutung 154), depended on identifying the founders of eight or nine monasteries as Huosi, while assuming that the genealogiae differed crucially from other noble clans (Sto¨rmer, Adel, 125–6, uses Sippenklo¨ster). On Huosi foundations (only Scharnitz certainly) see Sto¨rmer, Adelsgruppen, 92–101. On the genealogia see Murray, Germanic Kinship Structure, 99–106 (an inheritance 2 community); Sto¨rmer, Adel, 44–51, 90–1 (a ‘closed’ male-line kindred). Above, pp. 35, 41. 3 Lex Baiwariorum, I. 1 (Leges, V. 268). 4 Scha¨ftlarn no. 1a/b (a composite put together in the cartulary). See Holzfurtner, Gru¨ndung und Gru¨ndungsu¨berlieferung, 30–1, 211–12. 5 Scha¨ftlarn nos. 2–6. On Waltrich’s family, Sto¨rmer, Adelsgruppen, 99–101; Adel, 119; on the foundation, 6 See below, at notes 20–1. ibid. 360–1. 7 Freising no. 94 (779); probably founded 760s; Mitterer, Bischo¨fliche Ekl., 116–17; Holzfurtner, Gru¨ndung, 28–9.

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brother Irminfrid and their cousins Otilo and Croso, all with their portions of various villae probably inherited from a common grandfather. Some of these may have been still undivided, at any rate between the brothers, or if divided were now pooled again. The brothers’ mother also gave her temporary share.8 Scharnitz’s founders meant (whether really or notionally) to live a religious life there themselves; but some of them might yet come out, marry, and have sons, and for these hypothetical sons they reserved the son’s share.9 Thus Reginpreht, Irminfrid, and Otilo each gives his ‘whole inheritance’ provisionally and, within this, his own share absolutely; if he has sons they shall have their proper shares; if not, the whole inheritance will come to Scharnitz. For these three, then, the endowment is provisional except for their own free shares, which are given outright; but these cannot yet be identified or even quantified because an unknown number of sons’ shares may have to be pulled out. Only when we come to the fourth founder, Croso, is the whole endowment unconditional: having an ‘incurable injury’, he will, it is implied, certainly be childless; and so he ‘conveys himself and all his property’ and is tonsured there and then.10 There are hints at Scharnitz after its move to Schlehdorf in 772 that the founder-members still held on to their private property-rights. Reginpreht had given his property for ‘the common possession of the brothers who should live there’; but the reservation of future children’s rights implies that the common property was still seen as pooled shares. And in an obscure, ungrammatical document arranging the monastery’s affairs, bishop Arbeo seems to equate ‘the brothers gathered at Scharnitz’ with Reginpreht and his actual brother, and says— as if this had yet to be secured—‘it was established that they should unite their possessions as the norm of [religious] life lays down, so that whatever they had of their own they should throw together for the community’.11 All this looks like rescuing a large chunk of family property from being divided (or putting it indivisibly together again after partition), for some to continue to live on as monks, while others may hope for land-grants from it.12 At Scha¨ftlarn, where the initial endowment was one childless man’s inheritance, this could have been an agreed core for other members’ contributions towards what would amount to a fund of undivided land; of course with the benefits of memoria as well, and the saints’ protection for family and property. It may be also that a pooling of family shares or refraining from partition was the best basis for a colonizing enterprise, and that a monastic foundation, of which the founders were members, was the only way to achieve this pooling or avoid partition.13 8 9 10 13

Freising no. 19 (763); Holzfurtner, Gru¨ndung, 27–8. On the family, Sto¨rmer, Adel, 118. Cf. reservations by founders of non-monastic churches (above, pp. 43–4). 11 12 Freising no. 19. Ibid. no. 53 (772). See Jahn, ‘Tradere ad Sanctum’, 412–14. For monasteries colonizing see Fastlinger, op. cit., passim; Sto¨rmer, Adel, 127.


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But there are difficulties about seeing this practice as regularly favouring the survival of a selected family group at the expense of a larger circle.14 Had the founders of Scharnitz died childless without founding a monastery, their inherited lands would presumably have gone eventually to nephews or cousins; but founding the monastery in order to cut these out would have been pointless, in the absence of any direct descendants to be favoured. If, on the other hand, the founders did have children, these (or sons at least) were to take their shares out, not settle for a moral claim on the undivided property; partition would not be prevented unless they were to have lifetime usufruct only, which is not even hinted. Nor was the abbacy regularly kept in the founders’ family, which would probably be essential for maintaining a monastery as a fund of family land. At Scharnitz the founders ‘commended the church to be ruled’ by one of the cathedral clergy, Arbeo (perhaps a kinsman);15 Arbeo, becoming bishop, appointed his fellow cleric Atto in his place, with succession reserved for the founder Reginpreht.16 The founders of Schliersee, commending themselves (after perhaps some ten years) to bishop Arbeo’s authority, accepted a ‘master’ Perhtcoz from him, reserving election by and from themselves for the future but in fact (two years later) choosing Perhtcoz as abbot.17 In both these cases the idea may have been to establish monastic life for an initially uninstructed founder to take over.18 The priest Waltrich, however, was founder-abbot of Scha¨ftlarn,19 and according to tenth-century tradition one of the founders of Tegernsee was the first abbot.20 But only at Benediktbeuern was there any family succession, and that was apparently all in one generation (the three founders successively—their sister meanwhile being abbess of a family nunnery at Kochel).21 The two last of these ‘family monasteries’ came later to the Carolingian king;22 the other three 14

See above, p. 47. Freising no. 19 (763). Holzfurtner (Gru¨ndung, 206–7, 259) doubts this kinship, seeing Arbeo and his successor Atto as working throughout to secure Scharnitz for Freising, in automatic opposition to the founders. But the documents need not be so read. 16 Freising no. 53 (contemporaneous with the move to Schlehdorf, 772). After Reginpreht, abbots were to be appointed by the bishop from among the monks if possible (but the passage is obscure). When Atto in turn became bishop (783) he retained the abbacy for a time. 17 Above, at note 7; Holzfurtner, Gru¨ndung, 210. 18 Holzfurtner however takes both cases as showing the bishop’s power to appoint as Klosterherr (ibid. 207, 210). 19 Here too, Holzfurtner (ibid. 215) sees Waltrich as a member of the cathedral clergy appointed to the abbacy by the bishop, rather than as founder. The documents hardly support this. 20 DOII no. 192 (979) relates the then accepted foundation story of Tegernsee (see Prinz, Fru¨hes Mo¨nchtum, 374–6; Holzfurtner, Gru¨ndung, 176–8). 21 Holzfurtner accepts this succession as plausible (Gru¨ndung, 184–8). Its 11th-c. source, Gottschalk’s rotulus historicus, probably preserves some of Benediktbeuern’s then-documented history (Prinz, op. cit., 366–9; Sto¨rmer, Adel, 119–22; Geary, Phantoms, 116–18, 123, 126–33). 22 For monasteries going either to king or bishopric see Mitterer, EKl. passim; Sto¨rmer, Adel, 125–6, 359, 361–3; Holzfurtner, Gru¨ndung, 258–70 (representing these outcomes as resulting from radically different ‘policies’ of the founders; not allowing much for chance and contingency). 15

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came quite early to the bishopric of Freising, Schliersee probably and Scha¨ftlarn certainly by the founders’ intention.23 At Scharnitz-Schlehdorf the question of intention is more complicated. The founders had promised a small census to Freising, ‘that the bishop’s ditio may not be lacking for ordaining an abbot with the brothers’ consent’: not so clearly a traditio into Freising’s property as Waltrich’s.24 Among them, the intended future abbot Reginperht evidently had some power and status alongside the appointed abbot Atto,25 but he almost certainly never became abbot as planned. His brother Irminfrid came out and married, leaving a son Lantfrid who later was in possession (it seems) of more than his own reserved share, and when this was challenged ‘tried to claim his portion in the altar itself ’ of Scharnitz, that is (probably) to have a moiety of the altar revenues.26 But this claim was dismissed as stupid by Charlemagne’s missi, and it was not what his father and uncle had intended.27 It has been thought that at the same time, in 802, the founder Reginpreht himself surfaced (forty years after the foundation) as having reclaimed his land because the monastery was now lost to him.28 But the idea that this founder had survived long enough to be cheated out of his abbacy by the bishops Arbeo and Atto, but waited some thirty years after Arbeo made Atto abbot before understandably turning nasty, rests on what must be a mistaken identification. The Reginpreht of 802 cannot be Lantfrid’s aged (if living) uncle; he is obviously a relation but probably not a direct heir; the lands he defended as his own were not part of the original 763 endowment but a later benefaction.29 So there is no firm evidence that the founders were themselves aggrieved by the bishopric acquiring their foundation; even Lantfrid in the next generation seems to start from an objection to the monastery’s endowment rather than to the bishop’s control of it. If their family plans were flexible and short term, this might suggest an immediate need for security as the dominant motive; but at least some of these 23 This is not to say that Scha¨ftlarn could only ever have been Freising’s Eigenkloster (as Holzfurtner, Gru¨ndung, 259; see below, note 30). 24 Holzfurtner takes the census as establishing the bishop’s lordship (ibid. 206); but see index: census, 25 significance of. Ditio here could mean diocesan authority. See Mitterer, Ekl., 101–3. 26 Freising no. 184a/b (802 lawsuit before royal missi). That he was holding more than his portion is implied in no. 185 where he surrenders certain lands quod iniuste abstractum habuit. 27 There seems to be no expectation of any future sons having the abbacy, nor provision of the Lombard kind that they may have it if they become monks. 28 Mitterer held that Reginpreht married as well as Irminfrid, as the result (rather than cause as one might suggest) of the monastery coming to the bishopric, and that Reginpreht as well as his nephew Lantfrid disputed Scharnitz’s endowment after losing control (Ekl., 102–3, 110–11), being the Reginpreht who (like Lantfrid) was sued in 802 for lands belonging to Scharnitz (Freising nos. 186–7). This identification is accepted (undiscussed) by Prinz, Fru¨hes Mo¨nchtum, 551, and held possible by Sto¨rmer, Adel, 362. Holzfurtner assumes (Gru¨ndung, 259–60) that the founder Reginpreht had been cheated of the abbacy promised him (rather than slipping out of the running by marriage or death). 29 Their locations overlap only in one place-name (Kysingas); they had been given by the defendant Reginpreht’s cousin Keio.


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founders seem too powerful, and too close to Frankish interests, for this to be plausible; they will belong soon to Charlemagne’s Reichsaristokratie.30 Founders and their kinsmen could enjoy for a while, even under episcopal or royal lordship,31 more positive and many-levelled benefits than mere security: benefices probably, places for monks or nuns even if not abbacy, prestigious burial ad sanctos, the hope of salvation through memoria at the monastery and perhaps the cathedral too.32 Stutz was concerned to establish whether the bishops’ acquisitions of these monasteries rested on transactions that imply the founder’s property-right, rather than, at first, a mere seeking of protection.33 But he did not raise the question of whether it might sometimes be the abbot or abbess, rather than the founder as such, who has the property-right and makes the traditio (if that is what it is). Sometimes what has happened is that the abbot has himself become bishop—so Atto brought Scharnitz-Schlehdorf to Freising;34 sometimes, probably, the abbot being all along a member of the cathedral community35 had intended this reversion from the first. A much clearer case is the nunnery at Chiripahc, founded (before 737) by a nobleman Willihelm,36 who ‘gave that cell to his daughter Irminswind’. This was or became a real community living by the Rule of St Benedict,37 not simply a private church founded for the security and vocation of an unmarried daughter. Yet Irminswind in old age could give it for life, with her kinsmen’s consent and clearly as her own property, to her niece the nun Sapientia, reserving the succession to a nun Imma, with final reversion to Waltrich bishop of Passau ‘to be under the dominium and mundeburdium of St Stephen’.38 The intention, then, is to secure the bishopric’s lordship and protection, but this is done as the last of a series of conveyances of the ‘cell with its holy nuns’, by founder to abbess, abbess to abbess (for life), and finally to the present bishop, all described by the same verb, tradere. Certainly a lay founder might himself give his monastery to the bishopric, as in 767 Gunther count of Chiemgau, under pressure from bishop Virgil of Salzburg to 30

The case of Waltrich, however, depends on his identification with Waltrich bp. of Langres and Waltrich abbot of Dijon; Holzfurtner’s scepticism about this seems well founded (Gru¨ndung, 212–17). But it does not follow that he had no independent standing and could have founded Scha¨ftlarn only as a Freising property. 31 See Sto¨rmer, Adel, 125–6, 459–60, for family connections outlasting family control. 32 The different contributions of bishop, duke, and members of the gens Albina to the foundation of St Maximilian, Pongau, left all three with interests there, apparently peacefully before bp. Virgil’s time (see Jahn, ‘Tradere’, 405) though their balance is unclear (see below, p. 532). 33 Stutz, ‘EKnvermo¨gen’, 1226 n. 4. 34 See Mitterer, Ekl., 109–10. Cf. St Zeno’s, Isen (Prinz, op. cit., 373–4). 35 e.g. Perhtcoz at Schliersee, Waltrich at Scha¨ftlarn, perhaps Tarchanat founder of Mainbach (ibid. 36 On the place and family see Sto¨rmer, Adel, 219. 373–4). 37 Prinz, op. cit., 409–10. 38 Passau no. 33. For the point of the history—to support Irminswind’s request for Charlemagne’s confirmation (Dkarol. no. 170)—see Wolfram, ‘Notitia Arnonis’, 122.

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clarify his intentions for Otting, ‘conveyed’ it to the bishop with everything he had given it.39 Although the point at issue here is not entirely clear,40 the outcome was a property transaction: the new monastery was the lay founder’s to give.41 However, had he not given it to the bishopric it seems likely that in this period he would have effectively given it to its first abbot. The essential lordliness of an eighth-century Bavarian abbot is illuminated by the epitaph in verse from Ilmmunster, a daughter house of Tegernsee, for their praesul Eio: not only a priest and monk but rich and glorious, a giver of relics, ‘most faithful protector and solid defender’.42 If families have been squeezed out it is perhaps not only by bishop, duke, or king from above, but by abbots from below.

6.v. Italy In Lombard Italy of the eighth century we enter a more complex and selfconscious world. An earlier chapter has described the foundation there of private churches and the variety of futures envisaged for them. Any church that was to be served by more than one priest and a clerk or two might be called a monasterium and (not quite so readily) its rector an abbas. It might be a household fraternity—a founder and his son, a group of brothers and cousins, or three or four joint founders living ‘like germane brothers’;1 or a domestic nunnery established by a layman for his wife and daughters,2 or by a pair of sisters for themselves.3 A priest and his wife who came as pilgrims to Lucca, settling beside a church of the bishop’s, starting a xenodochium there and acquiring a vineyard to support it, were allowed to hold the church in officio monasteriale, meaning (it seems) little more than independence of the local plebs.4 But founders sometimes meant these households to grow and live by a Rule, or later owners might form this hope;5 while a few richer foundations by greater men were fully monastic from the first, with numbers sometimes growing into the hundreds.6 Both consciousness of the difference and arbitrariness in drawing 39 Libellus Virgilii, section in Breves notitiae, 13 (Salzburg. UB, I. 34–5, or ed. Losˇek), or Wolfram, ‘Libellus Virgilii’, app. D. It seems also (in Notitia Arnonis) that Gunther had ducal licence to give to Salzburg ‘what duke Tassilo had granted him in benefice’ in tributaries and lands: not, as Losˇek translates it (p. 88), that 40 Tassilo had given him the cell in benefice. Below, pp. 207–8. 41 Stutz (Benef., 208–9) emphasized its traditio after, not before, its consecration. 42 Quoted by Ratzinger, Forschungen, 472. 1 2 e.g. CDL I nos. 16, 31; and below, note 37. e.g. ibid. nos. 18, 30, 96, II. no. 178. 3 4 Ibid. I no. 83 (Verona, 745). Ibid. I no. 35. 5 A brother and sister inheriting S. Michele, Lucca gave it in 811 to a cousin to gather a community of nuns if she could (Mem. Lucc., V. ii no. 374). 6 See K. Schmid, ‘Anselm von Nonantula’, 33–96; Schwarzmaier, Lucca und das Reich, 27–40.


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the line are shown by a royal decree of 755, allowing an abbot to use oath-helpers, ‘provided he lives by a Rule . . . and has fifty or more monks subject to him’.7 Among the greater men, Walfrid founder of Monteverdi (in southern Tuscany) offered himself and four of his five sons ‘to serve God and live regularly in the monastery . . . that I have built in my own territory’ (752–4),8 a self-conveyance hardly less clear than those of Fortunatus and his son, or Alipert and his, to their own lesser churches in the region.9 Further, according to Walfrid’s Vita, another rich layman and a Corsican bishop were joint founders and would-be monks with him (setting up a separate establishment for the laymen’s wives):10 in this respect too Monteverdi is a grander version of some small domestic monasteries of Lucca. But others such as S. Eugenio, Siena, or S. Bartolomeo, Pistoia, were founded by great laymen clearly standing outside them (the gastaldus Warnfrid; the king’s physician Gaidoald).11 The greatest monasteries were founded by kings or dukes, or their wives, sometimes for pilgrim-abbots,12 sometimes for their own near kinsmen;13 endowed often with extensive, partly undeveloped land of the fisc. These rulers’ foundations have the worst-documented beginnings, leaving it often not clear whether the land was given outright to a founder-abbot,14 or subject to the ruler’s lordship because of its fiscal origins.15 But most private foundations especially in the kingdom were made on land clearly the founder’s own, sometimes including a grant from the fisc16 or other acquisitions, but mainly inherited—entire properties or free shares, single or pooled;17 consisting of stable, developed property, including vineyards, olive plantations, mills, and existing churches.18 In such a monastery the founder might claim potestas for himself and arrange its future destination as firmly as in any domestic oratory or little town church, as in Pistoia did Ratpert for S. Pietro and his richer fellow townsman Gaidoald for S. Bartolomeo.19 Rulers’ foundations might be treated in the same way, at the same private-property level: queen Ansa’s foundations were hers to dispose of;20 duke Lupus of Spoleto and his wife gave to Farfa their nunnery of S. Giorgio, 7

Aistulf c. 19 (MGH Leges in folio, IV. 203). CDL I no. 116 (754); new edn. (two versions) by S. Molitor in K. Schmid (ed.), Vita Walfredi, 152–65. 9 Above, pp. 51, 59. For the possible political background see Schmid, ibid. 7–9, 13–15, 19–20. 10 Vita Walfredi (written 800–10), cc. 2–4. On disparities between the charter and the Life, see Schmid 11 (ibid. 9, 14–15). CDL I no. 50 (730), II no. 203 (767). 12 13 See below, p. 235 note 1, 3. Nonantula for Anselm, Aistulf’s brother-in-law. 14 Voigt rejected this possibility too easily (Eigenklo¨ster, 33–6): see below, p. 235 note 1. 15 e.g. S. Sofia, Ponticello (see index). 16 e.g. CDL I nos. 28, 30 (S. Michele in Cipriano; S. Maria, Lucca). Schwarzmaier probably overstates the importance of royal fisc in the endowments of private churches in and near Lucca (Lucca, 27–31, 37–8). 17 e.g. (entire) CDL I no. 18; (free share) ibid. nos. 16, 96, II. no. 145; (pooled) ibid. I nos. 14, 24, II. no. 127. 18 Monteverdi’s lavish endowment included a monastery in Corsica and Walafrid’s share of two other 19 churches. CDL I no. 96, II no. 203. 20 Below, p. 235 note 4. 8

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explicitly meant for a large and eclectic community, with the words donamus et in aeterna traditione concedimus.21 Founders’ intentions about subsequent ownership vary widely, but have in common the assumption that this is the founder’s problem. In small private churches, as we have seen, potestas might go to a greater church; or to the founder’s lay heirs; or to each successive rector ordaining his successor; or occasionally to its own clergy as a group with ‘common counsel’.22 The same possibilities might reasonably apply to a larger monastery: it might be under a greater church; or under outside lay lordship (single or collective); or the property of its successive abbots, as many early Frankish and English houses seem virtually to be; or the property of its own members, as perhaps in Galicia. Some Italian monasteries were indeed given to greater ones, and as in Francia it is often these transactions that show they were their founders’ to give. That real monasteries were at all often meant to stay in lay ownership is doubtful: in this pre-Carolingian period they are seldom if ever found owned in shares with separate legal histories, as lesser churches are.23 Nor do their foundation charters specify collective appointment of abbot or abbess by lay co-heirs, on the pattern of common ordinatio of a rector.24 However, this was clearly a possibility: at the end of the eighth century the richly endowed family nunnery of S. Bartolomeo, Ripoli (near Florence), was in the control of the founders’ great-grandsons, who were able to determine that the present abbess, their aunt Eufrasia, should be succeeded by their sister Austriperta. The property, too, had remained a family affair: another aunt was to share Austriperta’s lifetime usufruct; the olive harvest was still to be shared between family and nunnery; they confirm their father’s change of mind about a particular estate.25 A larger and less domestic monastery, S. Eugenio, Siena, founded in 730, was left exposed to some kind of reserve lordship or visitatorial power of one of the founder’s lay heirs.26 The abbot and his successors were to be free of rebuke (reprehensio) by any man, including Warnfrid and his son and heirs; yet if anyone tried to alter anything after Warnfrid’s death, ‘one of my heirs or of my descent’ was to turn up and take charge27—to claim the power of ‘commanding, ruling, and defending . . . as if I myself were alive’. But there follows an obscure passage suggesting that the heir concerned was to join the community for the purpose of taking over as gubernator et rector: in fact, should supersede the abbot. Certainly whenever the founder speaks of having a single heir this seems to be both a natural and a qualified heir: a son or son’s son who will live in the 21

22 23 Farfa, no. 17 (751)2. Above, p. 62. Above, pp. 61–2. 25 26 Above, p. 62. Ughelli, Italia Sacra (ed. Coleti, 1718), III. 22–4. CDL I no. 50. 27 Feine (Studien, II. 19) read this passage as requiring the abbot to go to the founder’s heir to invoke his intervention. But this turns on taking as the subject the word abbas (supplied by Schiaparelli in a break in the MS), and unus de heredibus as the object in spite of its case. The abbot might be the culprit. 24


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monastery ‘chaste and tonsured’, and have potestas there as abbot or rector.28 Ratpert of Pistoia’s hypothetical son, who (he says in 748) should under Lombard law be his heir and have the xenodochium in his power, is excluded if unwilling to live a monastic life; he must then be content with his own moiety, without claiming the foundation to which his father’s moiety has gone. So also, failing a son, must Ratpert’s wife and daughter be content with their portions and have no rule in the monastery, unless they enter religious life there.29 Furthermore, if they do this, they and Ratpert’s mother and sister are to share potestas with an appointed abbot; and sometimes such an abbot, apparently not of the family, is to have the sole rule, like Gundo, rector or abbot of S. Silvestro, Lucca, who was not among its eleven founders (including several pairs of brothers). But Gundo did not have the power, essential to full potestas, of ordaining his successor.30 Nor did an abbot or abbess of the family necessarily have this power (perhaps most abbesses did not);31 the three brothers who controlled S. Bartolomeo, Ripoli, confirmed potestas to their aunt for life only, and meant the same to apply to her successors; the power remained with the lay heirs for the time being (to pass in due course to elected abbesses).32 But other abbot-heirs certainly had this power of ordinatio. Some of these can hardly be distinguished from the owner-rectors of small domestic churches, such as S. Agata, Lucca, whose founder Flavipert ‘ordained’ his brother, who in turn gave it to the bishopric,33 or S. Michele, Pugnano, whose founder-abbot Ratchis gave it to the duke’s clerical son Walprand and his kinsmen for ever.34 Nonetheless Flavipert envisaged ‘monks’ at S. Agata obeying his brother as ‘abbot’, and Ratchis spoke of the familiola that Walprand was to rule and keep from error. The priest Aiuald who could give two small ‘monasteries’ to S. Bartolomeo Pistoia, in straight proprietary terms (‘do, dono, trado atque offero’), thought of them as governable by the Rule of St Benedict35 (though one may wonder what he meant by this). S. Quirico, Lucca, was probably bigger and less domestic than S. Agata; and here in 786 the abbot was the priest Aunipert, who had been ‘chosen as guardian, governor, and abbot’ by his father the founder Autchis, with the power of ‘governing and ordaining’ as he chose. Accordingly he now appoints his nephew, another Autchis, ‘to remain after my death firmly ordained, as I now remain ordained by my father’, provided he becomes a priest and attends to the office, almsgiving, and lights. Autchis in his turn can ordain whomever he likes ‘who is worthy, from among my nepotes’ (great-nephews perhaps). If any of 28 Pertuald for S. Michele in Cipriano, 720; Ato for Colognora (usufruct only), 760; Teutprand for 29 S. Michele, Lucca, 764 (CDL I no. 28, II nos. 145, 178). See above, pp. 55, 55–6. 30 Below, at note 63. 31 32 See, however, the abbess of S. Lucia, Lucca, in 820 (below, p. 178). Above, at note 25. 33 34 35 Above, pp. 50–1. CDL I no. 40 (728). CDL II no. 180 (764).

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Aunipert’s other nephews wish to contribute property to the monastery and enter it as monks, they are to obey Autchis like sons and not set themselves up against him. So even if they are his brothers and cousins, they are to constitute a paternally ruled household, avoiding the dangers of fraternal dispute, secession, or partition.36 In contrast are occasional arrangements for several heirs, both natural and qualified, to share potestas in the monastery that they constitute and to rule it by common counsel, ‘like good germane brothers’:37 a fraternity keeping its shares together under common management. The co-heirs may be rationed to one heir apiece,38 for fear of too many partners; and presumably will severally ‘ordain’ their heirs as an abbot or rector might. Such a monastery, belonging to and consisting of a group of partners, might be not unlike the Galician propertypooling monastery, facing similar dangers of discord and disintegration (which the more usual full potestas for the abbot was meant to avoid). But olive- and vineyard-owners in Mediterranean towns would have different problems from hill farmers of the Atlantic seaboard; and for lack of early diploma evidence from Galicia we cannot compare even their overt hopes and fears. There was room for doubt about whether a monastery was in single or multiple ownership. In 750 the brother and nephews of a priest Claudian sued him (unsuccessfully) in the duke of Spoleto’s court about his property (substantia), consisting mainly of a monastery at Terentiano, which he had given as an entrygift to Farfa. Claudian claims to have built it himself on his own share after partition with his brothers, thirty years ago or more. His brother and nephews, on the other hand, say there had been no partition; they had allowed Claudian to have it ‘to build a common monastery for us, so that our sons could go there and be given to its service and learn their letters there’; they had built it in common with him and had in fact sent their sons there; after his death it ‘or its parts’ should revert to their or their sons’ potestas.39 In effect they claim that Claudian was appointed abbot by his brothers, who jointly owned the monastery and expected their sons to own it. It is not clear whether they have sons in lay life who should have their shares as outside owners, or whether all their sons have entered the monastery. The latter seems likely, since the property is described as their only domus culta or home farm, the rest being merely coloniciae (producing, probably, only fixed renders). It was perhaps a way of ensuring efficient, collective management of an otherwise insufficient family property, providing a group of brothers and first cousins with a livelihood, education, and clerical status. It remains obscure whether they were 36 37 38

Mem. Lucc., IV. i no. 96. e.g. Sicherad, Alipert, and Filerad, 757 (CDL II no. 127); Deusdede et al., 759 (ibid. II no. 138). 39 Ibid., no. 127. CDL IV. i no. 12 ( ¼ Farfa no. 25).


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committed to celibacy, and if so, whether there were cousins outside to supply them with heirs. Claudian’s declared intention, after holding Terentiano for thirty years, of ‘becoming a monk’ at Farfa, suggests that Terentiano was a college of secular clergy. Next year, when Farfa had the property, two priests, nephews of Claudian’s, had to be given holdings in compensation.40 A real monastery of celibates might continue, without being legally family property, to serve the needs of a wider family, as long as its members chose their kinsmen as heirs, or the abbot, himself his predecessor’s natural and qualified heir, admitted his own kinsmen. If some of the family could be called or pushed to celibacy, a daughter’s portion need never leave the family, nor a son’s share be further divided; some of it might go to his married brothers or nephews, some to the monastery,41 there to accrete to a solid core of property, providing security and dignity for celibates in future generations, and a recourse for the rest to fall back on in hard times. But of course it was also meant to provide a source of prayer, a burial-place, a setting for holy lives, and a channel for good works; and consciousness of danger to all this could induce a founder to go much further than insisting on single rule or common counsel, forbidding alienation,42 or trying to safeguard a xenodochium or an oratory should the monastery fail.43 So in many cases—perhaps in all where a monastery of some size is envisaged—the monks or nuns are to live by a Rule, sometimes specifically St Benedict’s,44 and sooner or later—notionally at least—to elect their head from among themselves.45 Kings meanwhile made grants of free election to their foundations;46 ordinatio by the preceding abbot may have come in some circles to be thought an abuse.47 Such election was usually postponed until the founder and his immediate family, or his appointed abbot or abbess, had died.48 At S. Bartolomeo, Ripoli, the transition to election was not arranged until three generations after its 40

Farfa no. 31. For S. Quirico, 786 (portio de re sua; Mem. Lucc., IV. i no. 96); Willeram’s foundation, 798 (ibid., 42 no. 119). e.g. S. Michele in Cipriano, 720 (CDL I no. 28). 43 e.g. at Verona, 745 (ibid., no. 83); Sesto, Friuli, 762 (ibid. II no. 162); SS. Felipe e Giacomo, Lucca, 790 44 (Mem. Lucc., V. ii no. 231). S. Eugenio, Siena, 730; Monteverdi, 754 (above, at notes 26, 8). 45 e.g. (from 685 to 767) CDL I nos. 7, 14 (corrupt and obscure), 16, 18, 30, 31, 50, 83, 96, 116, II no. 203; (790) Mem. Lucc., V. ii no. 231. 46 Liutprand to Farfa and to S. Pietro in Cielo d’oro; Desiderius to S. Salvatore, Brescia; see Voigt, Ko¨nigl. Ekl., 113–14. 47 Designation as in RM might be acceptable and ordinatio not (because implying that the abbot could dispose of the monastery). At Farfa c.770 abbot Alanus’s deathbed designation of an English abbot Wigbert was successfully repudiated by the monks as ‘against the holy canons and the rule of St Benedict’ (Constructio Farfensis, ed. U. Balzani, Fonti, 33 (1903), c. 12); but it may have been Wigbert’s last-minute and ad hoc profession that was disapproved. 48 e.g. (variously) at S. Maria Senatoris, S. Maria, Lucca, and S. Pietro, Pistoia (CDL I nos. 18, 30, 96). An exception is the renunciation by three brothers of all potestas in their two foundations in Friuli (originally one for themselves, one for their mother) after their departure to become monks in Tuscany (762, ibid. II no. 162. One, Erfo, became abbot at Monte Amiata). 41

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foundation. Here it was seen as transferring potestas to the nuns themselves and through them to each successive elected abbess.49 But sometimes election was to prevail from the beginning, for the first abbot or the first after the founder: Fortunatus’s sons and grandsons could join the community at Cassiana but should have no rights there; Walfrid’s sons and heirs were (by implication) to have no superiority at Monteverdi, but to live there with whatever other monks God and St Peter might call to their service; at Verona after the foundresses’ deaths their daughter and niece Nazirimda was to live regularly with the other nuns under an elected abbess.50 So some Italian founders, lacking perhaps the innocence to think full monastic life compatible indefinitely with their natural heirs’ lordship, not only set limits to this but set an end to it, or even settled from the start for the mere security of membership; which at the same time makes their own gift or their children’s selfsubmission complete. Even the great might share this unambitious aim; at Charlemagne’s approach in northern Italy the duke of Persiceto, not threatened with dispossession but uncertain about the future, got his young son Anselm into Nonantula rather than into his own father’s foundation at Adili,51 where the boy’s prospects might have seemed more obvious. These family plans are short-term, as so often, and concerned mainly for the nuclear family; cousins or nephews may be seen not as future beneficiaries but as dangerous rivals. And the emancipation of a monastery, like the alienation of a lesser church, need not detract from the founder’s prestige.52 Voigt argued that any restriction by the founder on what his heirs can do must, if they remain the owners, be without legal effect.53 But this is to beg the question of who the owners really are, given that we are not dealing with ownership as Roman or modern law would understand it. Potestas itself is sliced up in various ways. The abbot or abbess whose potestas is limited to rule and usufruct, almsgiving, and freeing serfs, but no other alienation, and most crucially no ordinatio, nonetheless has had some potestas carved out from the outside heirs’. Thus the arrangement made for S. Bartolomeo, Ripoli, where the lay heirs undertake that if they or their heirs try to prevent the abbess’s enfranchisements or withdraw any endowments the abbess may appoint a friend to claim from them a penalty of 1,000 gold solidi, need be neither extra-legal nor paradoxical.54 And outside heirs whose potestas is more limited, defined perhaps as mere defence (as at Ripoli when the time came for abbesses to be elected)55 or even reduced to nothing but 49

Above, note 25 (probably at first a small domestic establishment). Above, p. 59; below, p. 174; CDL I no. 83. 52 Schmid, ‘Anselm’, 107–13; Gaudenzi, ‘Nonantula’, 19–29. Above, p. 52; below, p. 178. 53 54 Ko¨nigl. Ekl., 126, 135. As Lo¨ning took it to be (Kirchenrechts, II. 641 n. 2). 55 See note 74, below; cf. S. Bartolomeo, Pistoia (CDL II no. 203). Defence probably meant primarily the obligation to support the church’s right to what it had been given. 50 51


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prayer,56 are to that extent not the owners: their potestas is shared or even superseded, by an elected abbot, or one who can ordain his successor; or from outside, by a ruler or great church to which the monastery is subjected for protection.57 It might be from that side, not by his natural heirs, that a founder’s intentions were frustrated. It is true that S. Maria, Lucca, instead of having elected abbesses as Ursus intended, was in 800 at the disposal of his great-grandson (who gave it to the bishopric in the hope of its better government, but left it open whether the bishop should ordain there ‘a man or an abbess’).58 On the other hand the xenodochium of S. Columbano, which was meant to be in the ordinatio of its three lay founders and their heirs, came quite soon to the bishopric—perhaps through its other founder and first ruler the archpriest Sichimund, who was the then bishop’s brother.59 It may have been sometimes not too difficult to top off the powers of government and usufruct with the crowning power of ordinatio, especially if there was any ambiguity in the foundation charter.60 A rector or abbot might as easily appoint his chosen successor at the expense of a cousin or nephew, or even give the establishment away like Claudian at Spoleto, as a lay lord push in his unqualified son or a crowd of lay co-heirs agree on their candidate. And a bishop with a claim to the reversion if things go wrong might assert his claim at the family’s expense at least as easily as the family might keep the bishop out. Accordingly some founders see subjection to bishop, ruler, or greater church as a menace and forbid it;61 each of the two Pistoia foundations (in 748 and 767) was to ‘remain in its own right’.62 Election itself need not be at risk from the founders’ heirs: it might comprehend rather than cancel their potestas. At S. Silvestro, Lucca, where the first abbot was appointed by the eleven founders’ common decision (c.720), his successor was to be chosen by a two-thirds majority of monks and founders together63—a mixture of partners’ ordinatio and monks’ election. More often these came to the same thing, where several brothers, cousins, or consortes both owned and constituted the monastery. At the end of the century Willeram and his son arranged for their foundation that after themselves the potestas, not of alienation but of rule, usufruct, and ordaining a priest, should belong to as many grandsons or great-grandsons as wished to live there tonsured, chaste, and contributing property.64 The Pistoia phrase ‘remaining in its own right’ here follows the restriction on alienating: the 56 57 58 60 61 62 63

S. Maria, Lucca; S. Agata, Lucca (CDL I nos. 30, 100, II no. 156). Below, pp. 236–7; above, pp. 52–3; cf. CDL I nos. 18, 83; Mem. Lucc., V. ii no. 231. 59 CDL I no. 30; Mem. Lucc., IV. i no. 126. Above, p. 49 note 7. See above, pp. 57–8. S. Pietro, Pistoia; S. Bartolomeo, Pistoia; Monteverdi (CDL I no. 96, II nos. 203, 116). in suo iure permanere; for the (non-legal) origin of this expression see below, pp. 181–2. 64 CDL I no. 24. Mem. Lucc., IV. i no. 119.

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owner-monks must keep it to themselves. In the same spirit forty years earlier Sicherad and his partners specified that their foundation should come to ‘no outsider and no public authority’ but only to their sons and heirs;65 for such a group, an agreed election would simply assert their own solidarity. Earlier still, the brothers who founded S. Pietro, Castellione, for any of their sons ‘who will serve God and live a monastic life there’ claim for themselves and their sons the power of ordaining a priest, while after their deaths ‘whoever the monks themselves shall choose from their congregation, he shall be ordained’:66 the monk-sons’ potestas would merge into the later monks’ election. Here, however, monastic life broke down or never began, perhaps for lack of willing sons; the church was divided and in part sold by 747, and given away by a married priest-owner in 768.67 So the founder’s family may not be very firmly in the saddle; but what will unseat it soonest is probably not free election. The founder who renounces lordship for his sons may be aware of this, the intentions attributed to him in his charter being not perhaps fictitious but a shade disingenuous. Walfrid restricts his sons to membership and forbids them to ‘engender pride’ in regard to monks or property; their only privilege is to be corrected but not expelled for wrongdoing.68 But we have for once some check on this from, oddly enough, his Vita, which relates without a trace of embarrassment that the second abbot, after Walfrid himself, was his favourite son Gumfrid, while the third (the author of the Life) was a son of the other lay founder.69 Gumfrid as a young man in deacon’s orders had run away at the prospect of being ordained priest, taking with him men, horses, and charters—charters presumably because he hoped to claim his portion in lay life, probably to marry. But he was fetched back and later became an exemplary abbot—for thirty years, so elected quite soon70—his past weakness being blandly compared with that of St Peter. What this story casts doubt on in Walfrid’s intentions is not the religious life for himself and his sons—Gumfrid had something to escape from; it is their lack of lordly prospects, which was either impracticable or not really intended. The family’s hold depends, even so, on internal cohesion: on the convent electing or the abbot designating from the founder’s kin. And this brings us full circle. For if the cohesion fails and the family loses its grip, it may be precisely this that leads to the frequent failure of monastic life to develop at all. It is not surprising then that some founders began to make firmer long-term claims for their families even while hoping for a real monastic community. About the same 65

66 67 CDL II no. 127. CDL I no. 31. CDL I no. 89, II no. 219. Above, at notes 8, 50. Non-expulsion of the sons was probably to keep them bound to Walfrid’s memoria (Borgolte, ‘Bischofsstaat’, 99). But to see their otherwise unprivileged membership as making Monteverdi technically a Stiftung (ibid. 97–100; see index: Stiftung) isolates it from its context; family 69 control was a matter of degree, often intended to change over time. cc. 2, 7, 12 (above, note 8). 70 Ibid., c. 7. Mem. Lucc., IV. i no. 70 is an act of Gumfrid’s as abbot, 770. 68


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time as the lay owners of the Ripoli nunnery decided it was time to renounce their potestas ordinandi in favour of the nuns’ choice,71 another family nunnery was founded by a husband and wife in Lucca, following much the usual pattern up to a point, keeping lifetime potestas of government for the founder, then for his wife, then her appointed abbess; any of their sons’ daughters may enter who wish; they hope that by the Lord’s will a congregation of nuns will come into being. But the nuns’ subsequent choice of abbess, instead of being seen as the culmination of the founders’ gift (with whatever underlying assumptions about the likely or natural choice), is explicitly subordinated to the right of any suitable daughter of theirs (aunt, therefore, to some of the nuns) to be ‘chosen as abbess’; only failing this are the nuns to have the power of electing the best from among themselves, and that ‘with our heirs’—though these heirs are supposed to have the power of defence only.72 The future is left vague, except that the nunnery is not to be alienated by its abbess or the lay heirs, but ‘always to remain in its own right’. Probably the founders intended their heirs’ role in the election to continue; perhaps they meant the priority given to a daughter of the house to continue too. And in all this they may be stating no more than what most founders tacitly expected. This sort of claim, elaborated and tightened up, had a future in late Carolingian Italy, as we shall see.73 But in the eighth century explicit claims to a continuing potestas ordinandi for founders’ heirs were rare in real monasteries, and so, it seems, were long spells of practical control by a family outside the community.74 In Italy as elsewhere, any lasting outside lordship will depend on avoiding or eliminating designation by the predecessor—here, ordinatio—so that successive abbesses or abbots can be appointed by or elected with the consent of successive lay lords (single or plural), able to bring the abbacy back, as long as they care to keep it going, to their own or their brothers’ children.

71

72 Above, at note 49. Mem. Lucc., IV. i no. 92 (SS. Pietro e Gregorio, 783). Below, pp. 399–401. 74 The xenodochium of S. Columbano, Lucca, was intended to remain in its founders’ heirs’ ordinatio, but did not (above, at note 59). The Ripoli nunnery (above, at notes 25, 32, 49) did, for four generations (but perhaps from purely domestic beginnings); the nunnery of S. Maria, Lucca (above, at note 58) was at a layman’s disposal after four generations, contrary to its founder’s plan (but perhaps having meanwhile decayed or stagnated). 73

7 Transition to outside lordship of monasteries

7.i. Were early founder families losing hold or letting go? So far, it has been argued that there is little evidence in pre-Carolingian Europe for real long-lasting family control, from outside the community, of the succession of heads of monasteries, such as would demonstrate—or constitute—outside lordship.1 Many or most heads still designated their successors; in doing this an abbot was with varying degrees of explicitness giving something of his own to an heir of his choice; and for good or bad reasons—which could include political pressure—he might sooner or later choose a pupil or favourite not of his own kin, or give his church away to a greater church. We need to consider how this power of disposal affected family interests. Behind it may lie tensions between the ideas of the natural and the chosen heir: tensions that may have been present in the act of foundation, where the founder may be making special arrangements for one of his children, or indeed setting up a holy man from a distant land. Sometimes endowing the monastery, or giving it to a greater church, is represented as choosing an heir in the absence of sons: but this does not mean there were no other potential heirs. There is no sign that the endowment of monasteries (or of lesser churches) resulted generally from a shortage of natural heirs—such a shortage as Goody has argued was the intended consequence of the Church’s restrictive marriage laws;2 on the contrary, the interests of actual and potential heirs were intimately involved in these foundations, some being provided for, others left out or injured;3 while sooner or later kinsmen might be disappointed or defrauded by what an abbot chose to do. 1 2 3

On ‘outside lordship’ see below, p. 190. Goody, Development, 43–7, 204–5; see below, note 25. e.g. the killers of Leutherius in the Vita Waldradae (see Halsall, Settlement, 46, 61).

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In the matter of disappointed heirs we have to distinguish between resenting the monastery’s existence and resenting its alienation. Objecting to its alienation suggests an expectation of benefiting from its existence. Admittedly, heirs who had hoped to dismantle the whole thing and recover the land might see themselves balked of this when the monastery was given away; but on the whole, family members who resist or resent alienation are likely to have been in on the benefits, or to have hoped to be. A clear example of this is the dispute over the family monastery at Terentiano, where Claudian’s brother and nephews have relied on the monastery for a dignified religious way of life, and try to prevent him giving it to Farfa.4 Even had they succeeded, however, the monastery might not have lasted long if its members were married (they are already talking of the monastery ‘or its parts’); while if they were celibate, it would either have been recruited and diluted from outside, or have simply come to a quiet end when the last of them died, in gentlemanly comfort on the family estate that they had kept together for their own short-term status and security. As for being injured by the original foundation, if the founders’ natural, unchosen heirs (direct or collateral) were all to benefit at one level or other from the existence of a family monastery there would in theory be no problem. But heirs were in fact seen as a possible threat; precautions were taken about this, by dire warnings against heirs’ encroachments but also by getting their consent; and in spite of these precautions heirs did sometimes make trouble, implying that they had little or no individual interest in the monastery nor collective control of it. Those injured might be the founder’s other sons and the first abbot’s brothers, perhaps because the abbot has their father’s portion as well as his own, or has been specially favoured with acquisitions. Or they might be the next generation, the abbot’s nephews and each others’ cousins. Even if the founder is childless, or has only one child and that one celibate, there might be collaterals balked of a childless cousin’s lands. These injuries to natural heirs could be minimized but hardly obviated. The founder can use for the purpose only land on which no one else has a natural claim—whatever in his part of the world he is allowed to give away for his soul; or he can involve his living heirs in a joint foundation, though this may simply postpone and spread the problem to a later generation. An example of such safeguards and their insufficiency is the partly provisional endowment of Scharnitz, where a son of one of the four founders made trouble in spite of having his own share extricated for him, his grievance either the monastery’s existence or its having passed to Freising.5 It is not always clear whether troublesome kinsmen want to control a monastery or to 4

Above, pp. 170–1.

5

Above, pp. 164–5 (Irminfrid’s son Lantfrid).

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disendow it;6 and the interests even of the close family need not be the same. Out of two grandsons of a man who founded a nunnery for his daughter, one may have too many daughters and rely on his aunt the abbess to accommodate some of them, while the other may have only sons and resent the nunnery’s existence. The fact remains that founding a monastery potentially injures the founder’s natural heirs, and the more this is so the less its alienation to a greater church may matter to them: giving it away may be not much worse than founding it in the first place. But giving it away need not be resented even by those interested in the foundation, if they value what they can still have, indeed have to a heightened degree: commemoration in the greater monastery,7 providing more prayers and a grander liturgy than the small family establishment could have done; the prestige both of the foundation itself and of its gift to a greater church; closeness to an important saint, and new or improved standing in a political cliente`le.8 It is usually the founder himself who alienates it, reserving life tenure for himself or a family member. The transaction may for him be a completion of his foundation, heightening its spiritual and social rewards, safeguarding it against outsiders or his other heirs, and clinching its benefits for a selected heir. This last intention, clear enough when founders give newly founded nunneries to great monasteries reserving their daughters’ abbacy,9 is explicit when the founder or founder’s son of the nunnery at Westbury-on-Trym gives it to Worcester expressly to get protection for his mother as abbess against the claims of ‘the Berkeley people’.10 So when an Eigenkloster flashes briefly into sight only to be swallowed up by a greater church we should not assume that this defrauded or frustrated family interests: that a founder’s natural heirs are injured if he gives the church away, or his own intentions thwarted if a later abbot does so. The optimistic may hope still to get the best of both worlds: that the monastery will flourish under its new protector, and at the same time its heads be drawn from the family, or at least its founders be still commemorated. In 820 an abbess of S. Lucia in Lucca gave her nunnery to the bishopric, for her own soul and that of the priest who had given the place to her, ‘that the monastery may prosper more and more, increasing our reward for the saving of our souls’.11 But others may have given their monastery away out of pessimism about human affairs, hoping only for security and salvation for themselves and a widow or child, and for their foundation only that it should serve the religious ends of its new owners. A foundress Aba giving Niwenhof to Lorsch in 786 hoped that the abbots would always be able to find 6

Or simply to share in the founders’ merit (below, pp. 592–3); but this seems more an 11th-c. than an 7 Or by its monks established in the lesser one. 8th-c. motive. 8 See Innes, State and Society, 18–27, 33–4; also Borgolte, ‘Gedenkstiftungen’, 595–602. 9 10 Above, p. 115; see Felten, A¨bte, 95–6. Above, pp. 158–9. 11 Mem. Lucc., IV. ii. 1 no. 18.


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an abbess from her genus; but failing this, they were to do what they thought best for Lorsch;12 the nunnery would have lost its raison d’eˆtre. Nor is it certain that getting rid of the family is something for which reforming bishops or empire-building abbots would scheme and calculate. It is far from clear that Wilfrid was collecting monasteries to secure them against family claims;13 nor if abbot-bishop Pirmin did commend his monasteries to Charles Martel need this be seen as rescuing them from becoming family monasteries: their founders could have intended Pirmin to have this freedom of action (it did not lose Eberhard the prayers of the Murbach monks and of the wider confraternity among whom their obituary list circulated).14 Bishops of Worcester later may have been more opportunistic than systematic; so may Freising and even Salzburg.15 Just as conscientious bishops do not have to be hostile to founders’ family influence, so, for a small monastery at least, rapid emancipation from the founding family was not always in the best interests of monastic life.16 There are hints that Heidenheim was becoming somewhat demoralized under Walpurga, perhaps because of uncertainty about the future, the absence of a natural and qualified heir.17 Certainly when a small monastery is given away to a bishopric this does not guarantee its future; its lands were likely sooner or later to be used to support the cathedral, the church reduced to a mere estate church, or a prebend church served by one of the cathedral clergy.18 And perhaps this is partly because the founder’s family is not deeply offended, being extinct, or losing interest when the foundation’s short-term purpose was achieved, or valuing more the rewards of giving property to the greater church and its saints.19 If the founder, however, makes no such conveyance but gives the monastery outright to its first head, this may be a close relation, but may sometimes be a holy man that he wants to pin down, perhaps to be buried with.20 Either way, he may still take it for granted that the first head will in due course do as he or she likes with it: hand it on to a niece or nephew, or to a stranger, or to a great 12 Lorsch no. 12. Cf. Hiltisnot’s arrangements for Erlenbach, 788 (ibid. no. 13), similar though without provision for failure of suitable abbesses. See below, pp. 188–9. 13 Above, p. 128; below, pp. 198, 201. Eric John saw Wilfrid as aiming to solve the ‘problem’ of hereditary monasteries by getting them into episcopal control (Orbis, 91); but such moves were rather 14 against him. Above, p. 120. 15 See below, pp. 205–8. Against this view see Holzfurtner, Gru¨ndung, 258–61. 16 Boniface’s friend Eangyth felt endangered in her monastery because kinsmen had died and her surviving nephew was useless through political ill-fortune (above, p. 160 note 74). 17 Above, p. 135. Conversely, the English monastery celebrated in De abbatibus (above, p. 156) evidently benefited from continuity of family interest. 18 Below, pp. 205–6; cf. Holzfurtner, Gru¨ndung, 261. Under a monastery some prospered, some disappeared, some became village churches (Lu¨beck, ‘Fuldaer Nebenkloster’, 16–32). 19 Most were given without safeguards for their monastic life. In England there may have been a growing casualness about how bookland was to serve remedium animae; and see Blair, Church, 129–30 (an ‘alienated and exploitative tone’ by the later 8th c.). 20 See above, p. 104, on the mayor Erchinoald and his saint Fursa.

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church. So the founder’s aims may be restricted to one or two people in one or two generations, the future perhaps too dark for him to entertain long-term ambitions for his lineage. If, occasionally, founders express the hope that future abbots or abbesses will continue to be drawn from their lineage,21 this may be less for their descendants’ sake than for their own or their ancestors’: the descendants will be usefully still on the spot to pray for their ancestors’ souls and perpetuate their alms. It may be that the short life of some family monasteries was the outcome of thwarted ‘strategies of heirship’,22 even if their original foundation were not. They might have been given to a greater church because heirs had in fact dwindled away; or because pessimism about warfare, plague, or political misfortune was compounded by looming problems about descendants’ marriages. But as in the foundation, so in the alienation, heirs seem as often on the one hand content or accommodated, on the other hand disappointed or frustrated, as non-existent. All this is in any case best understood not as free-floating patterns of motivation but as part of a process (which Matthew Innes has illuminated for the Middle Rhineland): the sudden peaking of pious donations in much of the West in the eighth and early ninth centuries, not of movables (then and long afterwards, testated to a wide range of churches for immediate prayers and masses) but of permanent lordship over lands. Lands were given to enrich great, old churches and to endow new ones, mostly small; these included family monasteries, often nunneries in which women of the family would pray for their dead; and many of these small establishments were themselves given with their lands to great churches, for social or political reasons and for a higher standard of long-term commemoration in the ‘large scale, ordered, male monasticism’ that was gaining ground. This massive flow of property to the Church came to an end, generally in the middle decades of the ninth century, not because nobles lost interest in its benefits but because the process was widely perceived as having gone far enough, while their liturgical needs had been largely met by their ancestors’ benefactions, only needing to be modestly topped up in each generation.23 This goes with the emergence (at different times in different countries) of what seem longer-term family ambitions.24 The Church in making it easier for individuals to give property to churches had at the same time enabled them to make plans for their immediate families and eventually for their descendants too; and if the Church was exigent, the Eigenkirche provided the laity with its response.25 For 21

22 e.g. above, at note 12. Goody, Development, 43–4, 46, 73, 204–5. Innes, State, 16–47. 24 See Le Jan, Famille, 251–62, 398–401, 423–6, 431–3; Bouchard, ‘Family Structure’. 25 Goody recognizes that the Eigenkirche gave the laity access to church property (Development, 107–10). But his thesis that ‘the Church’ deliberately made it difficult to beget heirs, in order to obtain bequests or donations, implies monolithic corporate interests, and more control of marriage and its definition than 23


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monasteries—especially when lay foundations picked up again in the later ninth century—this would mean the explicit lordship of a succession of outside lords.

7.ii. The conditions for lasting outside lordship The beginnings of lasting, formal, outside lordship of monasteries are obscure. In pre-Carolingian times we can only say that some kind of family interest must often lie behind the succession of abbots or abbesses over varying stretches of time, its influence depending either on political power or on the survival of family spirit within the monastery, not on law (even customary law). Meanwhile the sharply distinguished ‘autonomous’ monastery melts into greyness along with the clear-cut Eigenkloster with which it is supposedly contrasted. Various criteria for autonomy are sometimes suggested or implied, none of them quite satisfactory. Immunity granted by a Merovingian king may crown an independent alodial lordship; but there is nothing to show that monasteries without immunity, or their abbots, were thought of as holding their land by some dependent tenure.1 From another standpoint, the grant of monastic endowments by East Franks or Thuringians to their English missionary bishops has been seen as fulfilling the Gelasian rules for a founder’s surrender of rights to the diocesan bishop, thereby creating an autonomous monastery;2 but it can more naturally be seen as setting up Willibrord or Boniface like an owner-abbot, who may keep the monastery himself or hand it on to another of his own designation.3 Nor is it any criterion of autonomy that a community can elect its own abbot, or do so without needing a privilege: for election was itself not clear cut and need not exclude a role for bishop, lord, or predecessor; the Rule of St Benedict does not lay down a detailed electoral procedure for a self-governing institution.4 As for civil personality, there probably persists alongside the lordly power of any abbot an idea that the ‘place’ or the monastery has property rights under God and its patron saints, or that the community or familia has such rights; but the degree to which this is felt or articulated varies widely.5 In Tuscan charters, both was possible before the 12th c. (by which time the more extreme prohibitions were being relaxed). See Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford, 1989), 127–43; on Goody’s theory, 134–5. For another explanation of the tightened marriage laws see Le Jan, Famille, 127–8, 313–16. 1 As held by Balon, Ius, I. 10–12 (identifying immunity with alodial lordship; but see Fouracre, ‘Eternal 2 Light’, 53–81). Nottarp, Bistumserrichtung, 228–9. 3 As Willibrord kept Hammelberg, and Boniface handed Eichsta¨tt to Willibald or Fulda to Sturm (above, p. 123; below, pp. 201–2). 4 RB c. 64 (see excellent survey of opinions in RB 1980, 372–7). Eligere is often better translated as ‘to choose’ and electio as ‘choice’; but ‘election’ is convenient for the community’s choice. 5 See above, p. 122.

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personality and autonomy are implied when a monastery is to ‘remain in its own right’; but even this formula (originating not in any legal text but in a phrase of Augustine’s)6 seems to give the monastery no special legal status; often it goes with requiring the abbot or other heirs not to alienate the church to a bishopric or greater monastery—in fact, not to set it under another lordship than their own.7 An echo of the formula finds its way into Offa’s charter for Woking: ‘serving the Lord alone, the holy congregation is not to be deprived of its own potestas dominationis and its own ius.’8 Offa here attributes ius to the community; some English charters give land to the familia.9 In some countries all the individual members of a monastery could be treated as its owners—in Galicia by virtue of their contributions to its common property, occasionally in Italy because they are the founders’ heirs, exceptionally in Francia where each one of the twenty-two nuns of Milz took part along with their abbess Emhilt in its traditio to Fulda in 800.10 This does not amount to having corporate legal capacity. Nonetheless a great church with royal, episcopal, and sometimes papal privileges,11 its community drawn from a wide region or a far-flung connection, might behave and be treated as a body with a representative head, as well as a great independent lordship; such would be Monte Cassino or Saint-Denis: churches that could not conceivably be described as their abbot’s inheritance.12 The change coming is that by the end of the eighth century genuinely coenobitical monasteries of medium size with numbers perhaps in the twenties to fifties, and even large ones running into hundreds, have come under permanent outside lordship or are founded on that assumption: the lordship, that is, of greater monasteries and of bishoprics, of Frankish mayors, Lombard dukes, and kings; and, more obscurely, of lay nobles who are either the founder’s heirs or have come into possession by a ruler’s grant.13 Arguably what most promoted this change was the recent enormous shift of land to churches of all kinds,14 but especially to monasteries; this must have greatly increased the need of founders’ 6

sui iuris monasteria esse debere; from De moribus clericorum, quoted by Schwarz, ‘Jurisdicio’, 82. Above, pp. 173–4. Similar phrases in Benevento ducal charters (‘remain in its own liberty of privilege’) meant freedom from the bishop and obedience to the ducal palace (below, pp. 236–7). 8 CS no. 275 (S 144); see Stenton, ‘Medeshamstede and its Colonies’, 323. 9 e.g. 675–92, CS nos. 840, 843 (S 1806, 1804). 10 The named nuns cum ea pariter communibus manibus traditionem fecerunt (Fulda no. 264a; no. 264b, falsified to include Charlemagne’s confirmation, attributes the traditio to Emhilt alone, probably to make it look more normal). Her foundation charter (above, p. 126) had insisted that the property be in ‘the sisters’ potestas in common’. Cf. later 9th-c. Werden (below, pp. 255–6, 343, 346). 11 Appelt (‘Anfa¨nge’, 108) sees early papal privileges as ensuring independence and civil personality; but that does not make such a privilege the criterion. 12 Cf. St Augustine’s, Canterbury, under its learned Neapolitan abbot Hadrian (see Kelly (ed.), 13 St Augustine’s, p. xv). For lay lords see below, pp. 312–24, 339–52. 14 On the scale of this (though often mitigated by the donors’ usufruct for a life or two) see Innes, State, 47–50. 7


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heirs or successors to be a monastery’s acknowledged, juridical lord. At the same time it was probably becoming easier or more necessary to envisage layers of lordship, so that an abbot could be lord of his church and its lands but hold them from or under another lord.15 This would not mean that the monastery itself held its land other than in full property, but that the abbot held the monastery in an incomplete or dependent way, if only because he could not pass it on. This last point is crucial (in Italy too): abbots—and abbesses, where they had had it—were losing the power of designation or ordinatio.16 An abbot may in fact be allowed to name his successor, as Alcuin at the end of his life was allowed ‘to divide among his disciples the monasteries committed to him’;17 but this is a favour allowed by his lord, and the designated successors will be under the same lordship. Or the abbot may be chosen by the community: but it is the lord who allows this, permanently or for a particular occasion; and his consent to the monks’ choice may be not only necessary but overtly required. If election on these terms is allowed in a family monastery it may be controlled by the lord to promote his aunt or daughter or younger son, or allowed on one round to promote someone else but easily brought back to the family; at any rate more compatible with the perpetuation of family interests than designation could be.18 Early privileges of free election may actually have helped to open the way for outside lordship, rather than diminishing or surrendering an earlier control. Le´vyBruhl argued that any such privilege granted by a founder or at a founder’s request must logically imply a previous right to appoint; it is virtually on this alone that he rested his belief in the power of ‘owners’ to appoint abbots in the Merovingian period.19 But perhaps the specifications of free election found in some seventh-century Frankish royal privileges or early eighth-century nobles’ foundation charters were not so much granting election rights as attempting to secure them, whether against the claims of bishops or against the power of abbots.20 15

See Wollasch, Mo¨nchtum, 36–41 (missionary activity promoting outside lordship); Ewig, ‘Milo’, 419–21 (lordship needed for defence against secularization). 16 Designations had of course not been free from pressure or prior consultation (see Dierkens, Abbayes, 301–2, on Lobbes, c.713), but designation and the bishop’s blessing seem to have been the normal con17 stitutive procedure. Vita Alcuini, c. 11 (ed. W. Arndt, SS XV. i), p. 191. 18 It mattered to 10th- and 11th-c. Cluny’s virtual lordlessness that the abbots in practice designated their successors. 19 Elections, I, 51–6. His examples are all appointments by the original founder, and almost all of the first abbot (pp. 42–3, 54–9). 20 In Hornbach’s foundation charter (c.742; above, p. 114 note 47) election is emphasized (though not directly required): habeant potestatem tenendi, etc. tam hii peregrini quam illi patroni qui ex ipsis peregrinis spontanea voluntate eligenti sunt abbati. Doll (‘Hornbach’, 122–3) reads eligentes sunt abbates, making it the patroni, meaning the lay lords, who would choose the abbots (consequently he judged it an interpolation). But the older reading, eligendi sunt abbates, makes better sense, the patroni being the fathers or elders who would be chosen as abbots and have potestas over the property along with the other peregrini. For patronus

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Bishops are the obvious target. When Merovingian kings or founders specify free election it is normally in the context of freedom from the bishop’s interference;21 it is modelled on episcopal privileges, and except in the most disorderly times it either follows an episcopal privilege or needs one to confirm it.22 Marculf’s formula for a great foundation makes the founder claim the ordinary freedom from episcopal demands, but not free election: instead, he asks the bishop to make good appointments.23 Le´vy-Bruhl saw this as committing to the bishop a power which would otherwise have been the founder’s;24 but it implies rather the bishop’s existing authority. It is diocesan bishops who can grant free election (even if on request or under pressure), because they might otherwise have claimed to appoint or at least interfere; or popes, because they may contradict this claim.25 Eighth-century mayors and kings begin to imply that they are allowing election rather than insisting on it;26 but none before Charlemagne regularly grants ‘licence to elect’ in so many words.27 In Italy too, free election is first specified in popes’ or bishops’ privileges or in royal ones with the same implication. If Bobbio’s royal privilege of 652 has a genuine content, it is probably free election along with the exclusion of any exploiting power of the bishop;28 the same is true of Farfa’s papal privilege in 705.29 Farfa’s election right was confirmed later by Lombard kings,30 who were probably in a position either to enforce it or to override it, since it was to the king that the monks went about 770 when they wished to be rid of an undesirable abbot. But this abbot was not in fact appointed by king or duke: he was a stranger (an Englishman), professed in a hurry and designated by the previous abbot on his deathbed.31 This suggests the further possibility that a promise or privilege of free election may sometimes have been directed chiefly against future abbots’ freedom to meaning ‘abbot’ see Niermeyer (s.v.) sense 8, one instance (991); Urgellia, no. 36 (977); Burgos nos. 66 (1107) and 67; Guillot, Comte d’Anjou, II, Actes C 43 (1028, patrona for abbess). 21

e.g. for Novalesa (above, p. 116); see Sickel, Beitra¨ge, IV. 568–70. 23 See below, pp. 193–4. Marculf ii. 1 (ed. Uddholm, 162–74). 24 25 Elections, 55. See Anton, Studien, 80 (n. 90), 90, 92. 26 Pippin II for Echternach and Susteren (706, 714, below, pp. 222–3: nobis placuit inserendum ut . . . quem ex semetipsis elegerint, sibi constituant abbatem); king Pippin for Pru¨m (762, DKarol. no. 16: ex auctoritate nostra . . . concedimus . . . ut . . . eligere debeatis) and Saint-Denis (768, ibid., no. 25: liceat . . . eligere). Saint-Maurdes-Fosse´s’s ‘717’ privilege (allowing designation and election combined) can be rejected (DMerov. no. 174). 27 licencia eligendi abbatem; e.g. DKarol. nos. 86, 89, 152, 173 (Fulda, Hersfeld, Ansbach, Aniane). Charlemagne’s first election privilege, ibid., no. 72 (Lorsch, 772–3), is more like Pippin’s (iubemus . . . ut nostro . . . permisso . . . eligere valeant abbatem). This permission was probably to be sought on each occasion (see below, at note 43). 28 King Rodoald’s precept (CDL III no. 5); see Bru¨hl, Studien, 33–45. Cf. bishop Felix’s privilege (685) for S. Frediano, Lucca (CDL I no. 7); the founder Faulo’s charter referred to there (and in king Cunipert’s charter, CDL III no. 7) may itself have specified election. 29 Farfa no. 2. See Schwarz, ‘Jurisdicio’, 83–4. 30 31 Liutprand, 739 (CDL III no. 14; Desiderius, 762; (ibid. no. 35). Above, p. 171 note 47. 22


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designate. In many Italian monasteries far more modest than Farfa, eighthcentury founders hoped—or claimed to hope—to establish election (often after one or two named abbots or abbesses), though seldom with effect;32 what frustrated it (if seriously intended) might be the lay heirs, but might be an abbot or rector ‘ordaining’ his successor or alienating the monastery altogether. An early Frankish example that suggests the same preoccupation is Clotild’s foundation of Bruye`re-le-Chaˆtel in 673, setting up her niece Mummola as abbess provided that she and her successors live a regular life and the nuns have everything in common, and specifying election for the future.33 The foundress’s anxiety here may be not about the bishop (there are none of the usual limitations on his power), nor about her own lay heirs,34 but about her abbess niece. In England the same opposition to uncontrolled designation is implied in Theodore’s Penitential and the canons attributed to him: at the abbot’s death or retirement the congregation is to choose itself an abbot; and the abbot is not to ‘ordain anyone, from his own kinsmen or from strangers, nor to give his monastery to another abbot, without the monks’ will’.35 In the papal privilege obtained very early by Benedict Biscop for Wearmouth, the value of Benedictine election (which it seems certain the privilege embodied)36 was at least partly to obviate the claims of Biscop’s kinsmen to succeed him: an abbot is not to have a natural or self-promoted heir any more than a chosen one. In Theodore’s rulings the abbot can still have a successor named or in office before his death; but election privileges generally specify election ‘when the abbot is dead’,37 closing a possible loophole for designation. This is not to say that such a grant if made by a lay lord himself, and especially by a ruler, is never conceding powers of his own: by Carolingian times it probably is (or would be if observed), and earlier it may be. But even in the eighth century an election privilege may still be a blow to the abbot’s private power rather than the founder’s, and for the community as much a duty as a right. The motives for granting or requiring it may be mixed. The abbot’s power of ordinatio or designation was an obstacle to the founding family’s long-term hold, but equally a hazard to that internal order, based on merit and seniority without regard to status, kin, or personal favour, that St Benedict’s Rule was designed to promote.38 This made abbatial election one of the Rule’s advantages over the Regula Magistri 32

Above, pp. 171–2; see Wickham, ‘Economy and Society’, 276–7, esp. nn. 69–70. Above, p. 112 note 26. 34 Three ‘invited’ signatories were probably her brother’s sons, so potential heirs (Levillain, ‘Charte de Clotilde’, 22–3); and there was property left for her nearest heir (unnamed). 35 Penitential, II. vi. 3 and 4; cf. Canons, c. 6 (C&ED III. 195, 211). 36 Bede, Hist. abb., cc. 6, 11, 15, 16; Hist. abb. anon., cc. 16, 20, 25 (Opera, I. 369, 375, 380–1, 393–7). 37 The supposed earliest instance, and model is Rebais’s episcopal privilege, 637; but see below, p. 194 38 note 23. See esp. Mayr-Harting, ‘Bede, Rule of St Benedict, and Social Class’. 33

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and probably over various Irish rules. A founder could hardly simultaneously hope that election would promote the pure Benedictine ideal and that it would reliably land on his descendants; but his monastic ideal could be hazy and his idea of a decent election strongly coloured by family interest;39 while the normal clause specifying election ‘from among themselves’40 might actually safeguard the lord’s influence against outsiders. Of course it would be perverse to take election privileges as positively establishing a family’s or a lord’s control. For this we have to look not for mere influence but either for outright appointment or for open, formalized consent to election—either after its completion (but implying a veto) or during its course— such as begins to be specified, though often ambiguously, in Carolingian election diplomas.41 Consent is never reserved in seventh-century royal privileges, but the bishop’s privilege for Corbie in 664 promised to ordain the abbot elected by the monks with the founder king Clothair’s and his successors’ authorization, and the next Corbie elections were indeed confirmed by the king.42 By the eighth century, Echternach’s and Susteren’s mayoral charters allowing election on condition of the abbot’s fidelity (perhaps his actual promise of this) suggest that consent will have to be sought;43 and soon a mayor’s or king’s consent may be explicitly sought and given, simply as a consequence of his practical power to secure the abbacy for almost anyone. Pippin’s charter for his own refoundation of Pru¨m (762) makes it clear that he and his heirs could have introduced outsiders as abbots, but will not; and allows the monks ‘by our authority’ to elect their abbot according to the Rule, ‘with our consent and yours’.44 Auctoritas (so named) belongs to rulers; other lay lords are a different matter. Pope Zacharias in 748, in his letter of thanks and encouragement to various East Frankish nobles,45 after warning them that they needed the diocesan bishop’s approval for appointing a priest to an ordinary church, proceeds to the question of monasteries. If they wish to set up a monk or nun of their own kin to rule their own foundations,46 he or she must be consecrated by the diocesan bishop; after this first head’s death, if by then there is a congregatio it shall choose the 39

For a Tuscan example of such notions see above, p. 175. RB c. 64, envisaging ‘Christian neighbours’ acting against a bad election, left some scope for a lord (see Wollasch, Mo¨nchtum, 51). 40 Not explicit in RB c. 64, but Smaragdus’s early 9th-c. comment quotes Fructuosus’s Rule, abbas . . . e propriis semper coenobii monachis eligatur vir sanctus, discretus, etc. (CCM. 8, 313). 41 Above, notes 26–7; see Lu¨beck, ‘Fuldaer Abtswahlprivilegien’, 351–2. Unusually explicit is Louis the Pious’s requirement for Hersfeld that the abbot-elect be brought to him for approval (820, Hersfeld no. 29). 42 Levillain, ‘Examen critique’, documents nos. 5, 11. Appointment ‘by royal precept’ at Saint-Me´dard, Soissons (Semmler, ‘Potestas’, 321 n. 50, from Vita Medardi) might refer only to authorizing the process (see Sickel, Beitra¨ge, IV. 574). Back in 602, however, Gregory the Great’s privileges for queen Brunhild’s foundations at Autun give the actual choice to the king with the monks’, nuns’, or clergy’s consent (MGH Epist., II 376–81; see Hirsch, Untersuchungen, 370 n. 4; Anton, Studien, 52–4). 43 44 45 Below, p. 223. Below, pp. 223–4. Epist. Sel. Bonifacii, no. 83 (pp. 186–7). 46 The concession to founders in Toledo IX c. 2 (above, 1. iii at n. 57) applied to monasteria as well as ordinary churches.


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successor (one already educated in monastic life), again to be consecrated (so by implication approved) by the bishop, not put in by the founder.47 Whether from Zacharias’s information about the Franks or from his knowledge of the Lombards, he finds it natural to fear repeated appointments by the founder, perhaps of his children straight from lay life. The nobles that Zacharias addresses, however—founders or prospective founders of new churches48—include some who would not be lay outsiders but would themselves rule their new monasteries as abbots. This has its shadow: alongside the nobleman with a vocation who rules his monastery as a monk or would-be monk is the one who enjoys a monastery’s property as an unprofessed clerk or layman, with varying degrees of commitment to its interests.49 When we hear in 755 of monasteries that had ‘fallen into the hands of laymen’, with such consequences for religious life that the monks would be justified in leaving, or in England about the same time of laymen (rulers and others) who had seized power over monasteries and begun to rule the monks and possess the property,50 these need not be founders’ heirs, and in any case their fault is not that they appoint abbots but that they displace them (by what might have begun as ‘episodic hospitality’ and turned into settled residence and exploitation).51 Meanwhile both East Franks and English of this generation, for whatever private or political reasons, often gave their foundations away: west midlanders to Worcester, Boniface’s circle to Fulda, or later to the king.52 These practices lie behind the 777 testament of Fulrad abbot of Saint-Denis,53 which reveals him as both a collector and a founder of small monasteries, widely scattered in east Francia and Alemania. He had six of these ‘cells’, all apparently his own to dispose of as he liked. At Salonnes (the most substantial, in the diocese of Metz) and Herbrechtingen (in the Jura) he might be seen as a founder-abbot of the traditional type.54 Two others, close together in the Vosges, he built but did not directly rule, one at a place called ‘Fulrad’s settlement’, the other ‘Fulrad’s 47

The verb is missing: the editor suggests substituentur. Some are securely identifiable (Throand founder of Holzkirchen, Guntbert of Ansbach: below, p. 225), others tentatively so; including namesakes of Emhilt’s cousins (perhaps already planning a monastery at the pre-Boniface church at Milz, above, p. 136 note 74). See Bayer, S. Gumberts Kloster in Ansbach, 15–17; Bosl, Franken, 74–7; Gockel, ‘Verwandschaft’. The pope’s exhortations probably anticipate rather than follow these nobles’ foundations (see Sto¨rmer, ‘Eine Adelsgruppe’, 12–13); he would have learnt of their plans from Boniface, or Burchard of Wu¨rzburg as Gockel suggests. 49 See Felten, A¨bte, 88–98, 101–3, 108. 50 Ver c. 10 (Capit. no. 14); Boniface’s letter to archbishop Cuthbert (C&ED III 381; Epist. Sel., I no. 78). 51 Blair, Church, 281–6. 52 See below, at notes 63–8, and index: Fulda acquires monasteries; Charlemagne acquires monasteries. 53 ChLA XVI nos. 622–4 (different redactions); older edn., Tangl, ‘Testament Fulrads’, 207–10. See Fleckenstein, ‘Fulrad’, 17–19; Rosenwein, Space, 121–4 (with n. 24 for literature). 54 For Salonnes the ‘people’ (local nobles) had made contributions, which he describes as ‘given to me’; cf. Wynnebald at Heidenheim (above, pp. 134–5). For Herbrechtingen see DKarol. no. 83 (c.774). Fulrad 48

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cell’;55 the remaining two were given him almost certainly by their founders.56 All six were to stay in his potestas while he lived, and then to go to Saint-Denis. Fulrad seems a new phenomenon: a clerical member of Charlemagne’s aristocracy, priest but not monk, who founds or acquires monasteries scattered over the area where his interests lie, partly out of the spoils of Carolingian conquests (lands confiscated from Alemans or surrendered by them). He is a multiple lord of monasteries, quite unlike the super-abbot of a federation such as Pirmin’s. Yet each of his ‘cells’ is identified partly by the saints whose relics are buried there: he is a collector of holy places or of relics for holy places, not of mere packets of economic value or political influence;57 and he collects them to leave them to St Dionysius (Denis), his ‘heir’. Fulrad may have managed all these by casual deputing rather than by appointing abbots or rectors.58 But some abbots by this time are described in ways that suggest they were appointed by and answerable to someone else, as a custos.59 Abbot Widerad in 717 had three basilicas that he called his abbatiae, rather puzzlingly speaking of having ‘taken them into his care . . . to possess the holy places’, and reserving his life tenure in them, almost as if he had acquired them by his own initiative. But they are not his own as is his foundation, Flavigny; he does not expect to choose his successors in them; and he envisages possibly resigning them, or being deprived of them by a bishop (in which case his gifts to them may be revoked).60 Against a background of violence there may be no formal explanation of how a semi-secular abbot like Widerad obtained his churches. But a monkabbot might be appointed, with lifetime rights only, by a superior or absentee abbot (perhaps heading a confederation of monasteries), or by a predecessor who has named his successor’s successor.61 More relevant here is the abbess left ruling a house to which a greater church has been given the reversion. It is these reversions, arranged by themselves or endowed both partly with royal grants (ibid., nos. 107, 118); on their political function see Rosenwein, Space, 115–31; on Fulrad’s papal privilege (757), ibid. 108–9. 55 DKarol. no. 84 (St Pilt’s, built on Fulrad’s own property ‘at a place called Fulrodevilare’; distinct from Fulrodacella, modern Leberau). 56 ‘Adalung’s cell’ which Adalung mihi tradidit; Esslingen on the River Neckar, which Hafti mihi tradidit. Hafti’s has been excavated (a stone nave, covering 18 burials): see Innes, State, 27. On Fulrad’s cells and ‘networks of support and patronage’, ibid. 28–9. 57 This is not to discount the negative aspect of relic-collection: see Charlemagne’s agenda for discussion, 811 (Capit. no. 72), c. 7: ‘What is to be said of those who . . . carry the bones and relics of saints from place to place and there build new churches, and urgently exhort whoever they can to convey their possessions to them?’. 58 The wording of Charlemagne’s grants (above, notes 54, 55) suggests that even Salonnes had no abbot other than Fulrad. 59 Custos is not self-explanatory, however. Back in 667 Leodebodus calls himself custos of Saint-Aignan, Orleans (above, p. 111 note 20), perhaps only to indicate that although monastic life has been instituted there he is not a monk; but perhaps reflecting the fact that (great landowner as he is) Saint-Aignan is 60 not his own. Above, p. 114. 61 e.g. St-Bertin nos. 17, 19. Cf. the Bavarian abbess Irminswind designating her niece and niece’s successor, above, p. 165.


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their fathers, that first clearly and sharply create an outside lordship, with abbesses holding their monasteries by what could be called dependent tenure or, better, a limited property right. This appears in two conveyances to Lorsch by women founders (effectively abbesses) in the 780s.62 Aba, giving her nunnery of Niwenhof, reserved usufruct to herself for life, subject to a census of 10 solidi; after this the abbot was to choose the abbess, as long as possible from Aba’s kindred. Hiltisnot’s reservation was similar, except that her life tenure (for the census of a length of cloth) was explicitly to be ‘by your beneficium’. We do not need to see the census as a rent (rather than an acknowledgment), nor beneficium as a loan (rather than a favour), to recognize that these abbesses and their successors will have a restricted and incomplete lordship under a greater lordship. Other conveyances of monasteries to greater churches were by this time being made by laymen other than the original founders, and out of what looks like family property. Among those acquired by Fulda in Charlemagne’s time, often by untraceable routes,63 two were given by charter by members of the Mattonid family probably of the generation following the founders. In 788 the brothers Matto and Megingoz, nephews of Megingoz bishop of Wu¨rzburg, gave ‘our cell’ Einfirst along with other property as ‘the portion of our inheritance and whatever we have of our own’, being two-thirds of the whole property,64 which they were to hold for life in benefice and by precaria.65 A few years later the same Matto and his sister Juliana’s agent Othelm gave the nunnery of Wenkheim, as family property that they (complicatedly) shared: ‘the church and monasteriolum with its holy relics’, and all its land and other property (including more than sixty named serfs), ‘as it was inherited from our kinsmen and developed by us’; all this they have conveyed to Fulda (not in this case spelling out any lifetime reservation).66 However, there is nothing to show that Matto and Megingoz had had an abbot at Einfirst—they may have ruled and exploited it themselves; while at Wenkheim Juliana had been abbess as well as partner.67 So these conveyances do not presuppose the lordship over abbots or abbesses that they may have created. 62 Above, pp. 178–9 (both evidently written at Lorsch). Each is called not ‘abbess’ but Deo devota, but for each it is after her death that an abbess is to be appointed. 63 See Lu¨beck, ‘Fuldaer Nebenkloster’, 4–9, 16–20, 38–40; including the Saxon Gisla’s foundations, Karsbach and Wendhausen (below, p. 349 note 80). 64 The portio hereditatis nostrae probably means ‘the portion that constitutes our inheritance’ (their two-thirds being ‘whatever their father Matto had of his own’, the other third belonging to another branch of the family; see Scherg, ‘Das Grafengeschlecht der Mattonen’, 506–9; Bosl, Franken, 37–43). 65 Fulda no. 175. Lu¨beck (‘Nebenklo¨ster’, 13–15) suggested that the cell itself was to go immediately to Fulda, but nothing in the charter supports this. 66 Fulda no. 202. Matto did this as ‘alms’ for himself, his brother Megingoz, and those to whom he was indebted; Othelm for Juliana (perhaps his mother; Bosl, Franken, 38). 67 She was presumably one of the former abbess Hruadlaug’s and bishop Megingoz’s nieces whom Megingoz had wished to exclude (above, p. 131).

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Transactions of this kind made illustrious monasteries almost certainly the earliest lords over dependent abbots or (usually) abbesses.68 But they were inclined, if keeping their dependencies going at all, to treat them soon as branches of their own community;69 it was mainly bishops and kings that first developed lasting outside lordship. This term ‘outside lordship’ is not a rendering of any contemporary expression: it is only an attempt to convey concisely what Wollasch calls ‘lordship exercised from outside’,70 in the sense that the lord has wider lands and other bases. Its essence is control (sometimes voluntarily minimized) of the office of abbot or abbess; but it is not necessarily limited to this; or rather, this can open the way to establishing direct possession by taking over the abbacy in name or in effect. Contemporaries used many different expressions—dominatio, dominium, potestas, ius, and indeed proprietas—which do not in themselves make any distinction between outside lordship and direct possession; but this is because all these terms were fluid, a matter of degree and of context, as should appear in what follows. 68 69 70

Going back in Neustria to the later 7th c. (above, p. 115). e.g. Ferrie`res’s use of Saint-Josse (below, pp. 415–16). ‘ . . . einer Herrschaft u¨ber das Kloster, die von aussen her geu¨bt wird’ (Mo¨nchtum, 12).

8 The emergence of bishops’ lordship over monasteries

That some regular monasteries came eventually into the proprietary lordship of bishops was not (as it could be for city basilicas) a natural outcome of their sharing in the primitive common property of the diocese; they never did, since monks were not originally clergy nor monasteries identified with churches. Nor were bishops’ general claims on monasteries of the diocese ‘proprietary’ or even partially so;1 they were claims to authority, though with strongly economic implications on which monks’ and founders’ anxieties (as acknowledged in seventh-century bishops’ privileges) were largely but far from exclusively focused. But founders’ attitudes to episcopal authority were increasingly coloured by lordship; and it will be argued here that eighth-century bishops could hardly counter this, but competed with it by establishing their own proprietary lordship in particular cases.

8.i. Bishops’ claims to authority, sixth to eighth century The bishop had a basic authority over monks, asserted at Chalcedon in 451 rather vaguely for monks in general, more sharply for those in Orders;2 while shortly afterwards at Arles, in a local but evidently useful decision, laymen monks were by implication distinguished as subject primarily to their abbot.3 But since then, in the West, more monks were in Orders and celebrated mass in their own community’s church, while the term monasterium could cover a baptismal church with 1

As proposed by Franz Beyerle and by Schwarz (below, notes 42, 46). cc. 4 and 8 (Latin version, Mansi, VII, 375–6). See McLaughlin, Droit, 130–2; Rosenwein, Space, 32–3 (esp. n. 29 on interpretations of c. 8). 3 Conc. Galliae 314–506, 133, defining the bishop of Fre´jus’s powers in Le´rins (see McLaughlin, Droit, 133–5). 2

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collegiate clergy; differences began to be blurred.4 All this made a bishop’s relationship with distinctively monastic communities in his diocese ambiguous and difficult.5 From the monks’ point of view all they absolutely needed was that a bishop should be available for his sacramental functions: to consecrate altars, ordain priests and deacons, provide consecrated chrism, and bless or consecrate a new abbot. In the tradition of Irish peregrini this was all that was looked for,6 and a monastery or federation of monasteries might have its own monk-bishops. But the Rule of St Benedict expected help in a crisis from the diocesan bishop: he was to step in to set aside a bad election.7 And diocesan authority at its fullest, as implied (arguably) at Chalcedon and asserted at sixth-century Gaulish councils, could comprehend not only the monopoly of the sacramental functions against other bishops but also licensing new foundations, approving the choice of abbot, setting him in office, receiving his promise of obedience, authorizing his deposition, licensing his absences, requiring his attendance at synods, vetting alienations of property, and visiting to enforce discipline.8 It seems unlikely that much of this actually happened in Merovingian Gaul, outside the cities, in any routine way.9 Even if a bishop had laid down conditions for the foundation, these might be ignored or forgotten; he might often not know what was going on; and in any case he would hardly want to be regularly involved in the property dealings of distant rural monasteries, nor even necessarily in their choice of abbot. The extent of his control must have varied with his power base and personal influence.10 In general, in city and suburban basilicas— more clerical than monastic, involved in the city’s liturgical life, often the burialplace of past bishops—a more intensive and consistent control was both possible and acceptable; whereas for monastic communities in the countryside the bishop’s intervention was probably intermittent and occasional. But this might itself make it unwelcome; and there was scope for positive abuse by bishops, whether stretching their authority or exceeding it. 4

Above, p. 109 see Semmler, ‘Mission’, 846–9. Economic autonomy depended on being distinguishably monastic (see below, note 12; and index: Le´rida), but was itself less clear-cut when almost all churches were acquiring property. 6 At home the Irish monastic clergy may have been under territorial bishops. 7 With neighbouring abbots and others (RB c. 64). 8 See Szaivert, ‘Klosterexemtion’, 267–9; Schwarz, ‘Jurisdicio’, 37–45, 53–7; Felten, ‘Herrschaft’, 223–5 and nn. 118–19. For Visigothic Spain see Linage Conde, Origines, I. 224–6 (reading Toledo IV c. 50 as asserting the bishop’s ‘right to nominate’ abbots; but instituere might mean only ‘put into office’). 9 Semmler’s important survey ‘Episcopi potestas’ assumes the wide exercise, pre-8th c., of these episcopal powers; but his instances (outside cities) are fairly thin (pp. 307, 317–18, 336, 341, 365–6) and sometimes open to other interpretation (e.g. p. 318 n. 11). Felten’s appraisal (A¨bte, 61–9) is more realistic. 10 Audoin as bishop of Rouen could intervene constructively in a property dispute between rural monasteries (Vita Lantberti, c. 4, SRMerov., V. 611–12); but his power was limited by local interests (Fouracre, ‘Work of Audoenus’; id. and Gerberding, Late Merovingian France, 151). 5

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In the opposite scale were conciliar decisions in particular disputes, and mitigating legislation that declared abbots free from various obligations of the ordinary clergy, forbade bishops to charge for their sacramental acts, and restricted their interference in the choice of abbots;11 while Chalcedon itself had declared that ‘monasteries once dedicated by the bishop’s consent are to remain monasteries for ever, and the possessions belonging to them are to be reserved to the monastery’.12 Important rulings of Gregory the Great upheld the same principles.13 Sixth-century kings and queens, and bishops themselves, were concerned to protect their own foundations against future bishops; so (beginning with Caesarius of Arles) they sometimes obtained papal privileges;14 queen Radegund’s testament asked that her nunnery be protected from the bishop’s or anyone else’s ‘dominations’;15 councils recognized the independent property of the oldest royal foundations.16 But in the seventh century this pressure intensified, as queen Balthild made great urban basilicas fully monastic and pulled them away from episcopal control,17 while nobles founded rural monasteries with new saints’ relics, further from the bishops’ seats of power.18 The question of how far founders or monks wanted to go in fending off the bishop depends on the authenticity or authentic content of the partial-exemption privileges they now obtained from bishops.19 It can be argued that the more modest of these promised barely more than was required already by the common canon law. This was free election of the abbot; his full control of property, and of discipline except in extremity; no entry for the bishop except at the abbot’s request, for sacramental functions; for these no charges to be made, and in general no burdensome demands.20 But it will not quite do to say that they were simply defending the common law against plain breaches of it. Privileges were

11 Notably Carthage, 525 (esp. at p. 281), 536 (p. 283), in Conc. Africae 345–525, ed. C. Munier (Turnholt, 1974); known in 7th-c. Gaul. On 7th-c. Spain see Linage Conde, Origines, I. 224–5. 12 c. 24 (much quoted in the West in the future). 13 See McLaughlin, Droit, 84, 148–51, 183; Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 24–5. 14 See Schwarz, ‘Jurisdicio’, 47–9; Ewig, Gesamm. Schriften, II. 414–15. On Caesarius see below, p. 199, note 4 for the Autun privileges, 602, above, p. 186 note 42. 15 575–87; ed. Debus, ‘Studien’, II no. 26 (pp. 137–41); committing it to the care of the bishop of Poitiers with other bishops (see Rosenwein, Space, 52–8), and of future principes. 16 Above, p. 25. See Rosenwein, Space, 42–51. 17 See Levillain, ‘Saint-Denis’, 80–4; Pietri, ‘Abbe´s’, 5–7, 25–8. 18 See Geary, Before France, 147–9, 228–9; Gerberding, Rise, 68–9. Nunneries (not double monasteries) are exceptions to the preference for distance, the need for protection perhaps outweighing apprehensions about future bishops. Bilhild (see index) set her Mainz nunnery under the bishop’s defence but cursed any bishop breaching her charter. 19 That founders were often behind the obtaining of privileges is mainly inference, but see Sickel, Beitra¨ge, IV. 568–72. 20 Ewig’s second group, with ‘lesser’ freedom (Gesamm. Schriften, II. 416–17, 419–22: great basilicas reformed by queen Balthild, and her foundation Corbie). Marculf, i. 1 is probably taken from Saint-Pierrele-Vif’s, 660, and behind that Saint-Denis’s, 654. See Rosenwein, Space, 74–6, 78–80.

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needed, partly to certify monastic status itself, and partly because the ‘senior basilicas’ made monastic by Balthild had been particularly closely supervised by the bishops; but also because the law had drifted towards favouring the bishops.21 To some extent these monasteries were promoting one interpretation of the law against another.22 Furthermore there were privileges that went much further than this, for monasteries in Columbanus’s connection.23 What these conceded beyond the ordinary freedom was chiefly the right to invite any bishop to consecrate clergy, abbot, altars, and chrism; also that the community had not only the choice but the formal putting into office of the abbot or abbess.24 So the potestas or dominatio25 renounced in episcopal privileges may for the monks have been pejorative words suggesting exploitation and abuse, while denoting for the bishops a large part of their proper authority, especially (in the ‘Columbanian’ privileges) the diocesan monopoly of sacramental functions that gave them crucial leverage.26 They could nonetheless give up even this in special cases, in the seventh century more or less voluntarily, for reasons of friendship, piety, or respect for monastic life, often involving them in the actual foundation.27 The content (rather than form) of the ‘Columbanian’28 privileges was revived in the early eighth century for abbot Widerad’s Flavigny and count Eberhard’s Murbach,29 with the addition that the monks could elect their abbot from other observant monasteries (at Murbach, from another of Pirmin’s), and could resort to these for help with discipline.30 By this time the bishops’ secular power was being rapidly broken down by the Pippinid mayors or (in Aquitaine) the dukes;31 21

See Ewig, op. cit., 413–15. Several mid-7th-c. episcopal privileges cite Carthage, 525 (ibid. 544–5). 23 Ewig’s first group (ibid. 416–19), beginning with bishop Burgundofaro’s for Rebais, 637 (Pardessus no. 275; but its status is uncertain: see Ko¨lzer, DMerov., p. 126). 24 Schwarz (‘Jurisdicio’, 74–9) rejected the charters themselves and the very possibility of these ‘extreme’ privileges; but see Gue´rout, ‘Les Origines’, 39–44; Ewig, Gesamm. Schriften, II. 416 n. 31; Semmler, ‘Potestas’, 386–90; Wormald, ‘Aethelwold’, 24 n. 42. On related papal privileges see Anton, Studien, 89–91, 146–9. 25 The word potestas was giving way to dominatio or dominatus in late Merovingian privileges (Ewig, op. cit., 422–3, 425); close to dominium but with a pejorative tinge. 26 Occasionally a founder bypassed the diocesan bishop by setting up a monk-bishop as abbot, e.g. Grimoald’s Remaclus at Stavelot-Malme´dy; Pippin II’s successive abbots at Lobbes (Dierkens, Abbayes, 297–9, 322–4). 27 See Rosenwein, Space, 72–3, 77, 80–1 (gift-exchange, the prestige of restraint, alliance with new forms of the holy). For bishops in the Columbanian circle see Fouracre, ‘Work of Audoenus’; Fletcher, Conversion, 143–6. 28 Often so called, but exemption was not a preoccupation of Columbanus himself (see Rosenwein, Space, 64–8). 29 Ewig’s third group (Gesamm. Schriften, II. 417, 424–6, 476–83). On Flavigny’s privilege see Heidrich, ‘Titulatur’, 188–9 and n. 564. 30 See Jecker, ‘Erden- und Ordensheimat’, 18–22, 26–31, for possible links between Flavigny and Pirmin’s monasteries, and influence on Pirmin of the Fructuosan Pactum (resort for help to other monasteries or ‘a bishop living under a Rule’). Cf. Abbo’s wishes for Novalesa (below, n. 36). 31 Semmler, ‘Potestas’, passim; on Aquitaine, 364–8. 22


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bishops were losing their real hold on many city and suburban monasteries (besides Balthild’s already monasticized ‘senior basilicas’), as well as their more tenuous hold on monasteries further afield; privileges granted by their predecessors had opened the way to this, and were becoming difficult to ignore.32 Meanwhile Frankish founders had very early shown signs of thinking that such privilege was something they could demand or even create themselves.33 Eligius, founding Solignac about 630, excluded any bishop’s potestas and ius.34 And in the eighth century exemption is simply asserted for Saint-Mihiel in Wolfoald’s and for Flavigny in Widerad’s charters;35 while Abbo’s for Novalesa (726) amounts to an elaborate and emphatic grant of privilege, reflecting his position as a provincial governor.36 This attitude may go with assertiveness about the origins of the endowment. Rebais’s diploma from king Dagobert, if it has any genuine basis,37 may have excluded the bishop from any potestas in the monastery because it was built ‘on our largesse’ (gifts from the fisc). This would be a matter of royal dignity; but by 709 Wolfoald’s charter carries straight on from excluding any official’s or bishop’s demands to the words ‘because I have built it at my own expense and labour, in that property’ (whose origins, by inheritance or acquisition, have just been set out).38 An episcopal privilege itself may emphasize this: in the bishop of Chartres’s privilege of 696 for Notre-Dame at Blois, a previous bishop’s mother is said to have ‘built it by her own work . . . in property of her own’, endowed it with her own possessions with her son’s consent, and given it to a deacon Chrotchar either to be or to appoint its first abbot.39 So insistence on the founder’s power to dispose of his property may sometimes be directed as much against the bishop as against the natural heirs,40 suggesting that the bishop’s claims on a monastery are seen as claims on its possessions.41 The Blois foundation is perhaps a special case since the foundress’s son, the late bishop, might have inherited a claim on the monastery; but it is nonetheless by an episcopal privilege that his successor renounces any such claim, promising to leave the monks in peace, to let them elect their abbot ex semetipsis, not to 32

As some earlier bishops could (ibid. 327, 392). For instances of this for parish churches see above, pp. 27–8, 29–30 (Grimo, 634; Nordulf, 714). 34 Below, p. 221 note 5 (dioc. Limoges). 35 Above, p. 112 note 23, p. 114. See Sickel, Beitra¨ge, IV. 568; Heidrich, ‘Titulatur’, 116–22, 188–9, 213–18; cf. Semmler, ‘Potestas’, 349 and nn. (on Reichenau). 36 Above, pp. 114, 116; naming another monastery as a fallback source of abbots and for mutual help, counsel, penitential exile, and intervention in internal conflict; only failing this support may the diocesan correct them, not to punish faults but to heal wounds. 37 DMerov. no. 49; Rosenwein, Space, 67 n. 30. 38 Above, note 36. Cf. Abbo’s charter (Novalesa no. 1): in rem proprietatis nostre, ex opere nostro. 39 Pardessus no. 435: ChLA XIV no. 580. 40 Bishop Ansoald for Noirmoutiers (above, p. 113 note 36) fears his successors more than his kinsmen: if future bishops take anything away, the abbot has leave to choose, with the help of Ansoald’s kinsmen, compensating property from what Ansoald has given the cathedral. 41 This economic aspect of episcopal power is crucial, as Schwarz saw, but not the whole picture. 33

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demand dinners, hospitality, or gifts, in effect to refrain from dominatio, from lording it over the monastery; not explicitly proprietary, but verging on that. In general, what a bishop was renouncing in a privilege (whether diocesan authority or economic exploitation) was nothing as clear cut as proprietary lordship.42 Explicit lordship of monasteries by episcopal churches is so slow to emerge that it seems as if the dominatio that monks and founders resisted must have been seen by bishops and their clergy as a bundle of practical powers and rights springing from episcopacy itself.43 Much the same kind of undifferentiated power to exploit and domineer seems to be what the Irish at Bobbio feared from the bishop of Tortona.44 Jonas describes the bishop as ‘trying to make the abbot and the monastery’s livelihood subject to him’, the Arian king declining to judge ‘whether monasteries situated far away from towns ought to be administered by episcopal dominium’, and the pope— having satisfied himself of Bobbio’s monastic life—granting that no bishop should claim on any grounds to ‘dominate’ the monastery.45 The point about distance from the town suggests that the bishop wanted to treat Bobbio like a city basilica. It was not an outright claim to own the monastery, but would have exposed it both to economic exploitation and to interference with monastic life.46 The monks’ escape from this lay in seeking papal protection, here as elsewhere not an alternative lordship, but moral support for a church’s possessions and independence (which would require some exemption from episcopal authority as then manifesting itself).47 In Tuscany some sixty years later Felix bishop of Lucca promised S. Frediano that the monks should choose their next abbot; the bishop would not transfer to another church any of the founder Faulo’s endowment; whatever anyone gave, in men, beasts, or lands, would be in the abbot’s sole potestas; the bishop would ask for nothing but an annual dinner.48 What is envisaged and repudiated is a down-to-earth exploitation, based on an idea of diocesan authority though capable of solidifying into lordship. 42 Contrary to F. Beyerle’s view of certain clauses (no potestas inquietandi, no census, pastus, nor honor in rebus monasterii) as freeing the monastery from episcopal Eigenkirche-rights (‘Bischof Perminius’, 163–4). 43 Including some remnants of diocesan property administration, monastic exemption from this having been compromised by the blurring of monastic status (some 7th-c. privileges renounce munera that 44 ‘parishes and other monasteria’ pay). After Columbanus’s time. 45 Jonas, Vita Columbani, ii. 23 (pp. 281–2). On Honorius I’s privilege, 628, see Anton, Studien, 55–7; Rosenwein, Space, 66–7, 106–7. 46 Schwarz’s argument that Bobbio’s papal privilege gave not even partial exemption from diocesan jurisdiction but protection against the bishop’s exploitation (‘Jurisdicio’, 58–63) identifies exploitation too closely with property-right. 47 On the varying content of papal privileges see Appelt, ‘Anfa¨nge’, 103–11; Anton, Studien, 55–8 (Bobbio), 62–5 (English monasteries), 75–83 (Farfa), 86–7 (Fulda), 88–9 (Fulrad’s monasteries). 48 CDL I no. 7 (688); Feine, Studien, III. 68–9. In 714 Senator wished S. Maria, Pavia, both to ‘belong’ to the pope and to have royal defence, expressly to prevent potestas being attributed to the bishop (CDL I no. 18).


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Further south, in Benevento, diocesan authority and proprietary right were blurred almost to the point of fusion in the next century. Here monastic and non-monastic churches, founded under the duke’s lordship or given him by their founders, received ducal precepts which insisted on their freedom from the dominium, potestas, dicio, or condicio of the bishop, set this on a level with its converse, their obedience to the ducal palace, and associated it with security in their endowments.49 One of the earliest of these precepts, of 769, refers to a privilege to the same effect from a bishop; while an actual episcopal document of 781 promises that the bishop and his successors will consecrate whatever priest the founder and his heirs ordain, and have no other power over the church’s property.50 These are the earliest known of a large number of episcopal ‘liberations’ or ‘absolutions’ of private churches in Benevento and further south, over the next three centuries.51 Among the ducal precepts, Voigt distinguished sharply between those for ordinary churches and those for monasteries, maintaining that whereas the former involved a marked diminishing of diocesan authority those for monasteries were meant solely to exclude the bishop’s ownership.52 But even disregarding the vague use of monasterium in Italy, Voigt’s distinction cannot be sustained.53 The words absolutio or absolvere are used in documents either side of his line; so are the same expressions for the bishop’s power (dominatio, ditio, potestas); while the term obedientia (or audientia) used for subjection to the ducal palace’s lordship implies authority and jurisdiction. One may say of Beneventan monasteries what has earlier been argued in connection with the plebs of S. Felice, Luogosano:54 that for the duke to own a church was to have what was going by way of authority over it; that this came to mean that a bishop could claim authority only in churches that he or his cathedral church owned; and conversely that he would claim to own any church where he still had authority. No attempt is made in the ducal documents that exclude the bishop’s lordship to reserve him his legitimate jurisdiction—not because this could be taken as read (far from it), but because nothing except the consecration functions was meant to be reserved.55 Probably nowhere else did this dependence of authority on proprietary right go so far; but the tendency to it was general.56 When bishops’ demands are so largely economic, the retort of monks and founders comes near to being ‘this is not yours’; and this the bishop may concede in a privilege, be committed to by a 49 Done for Felicity’s and Garoin’s foundations, 755 and 769, and earlier for S. Sofia, Ponticello (above, p. 64 note 127; below, p. 236). 50 Above, p. 64 note 127 (Garoin’s and Trasemund’s foundations); CDL V. ii no. 13 (Trasemund’s 51 document from bishop Alfanus). Below, pp. 721–4. 52 53 54 Voigt, Eigenklo¨ster, 164, 169–74. Feine rejects it (‘Studien’, II. 19). Above, pp. 86–7. 55 The episcopal charters may, however, assert episcopal authority in principle by recognizing the facts. 56 This does not make them identical, or the distinction anachronistic (see below, pp. 696–7).

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privilege from someone else, or rebut by making the monastery actually his. How much this mattered would depend on the role of monasteries in the diocese. Wherever monasteries owned numerous lesser churches, as in Bavaria, or provided most of the pastoral care, as in England, the bishop’s authority in his diocese would be much reduced by monastic independence. The council of Hertford in 672 forbade bishops to disturb monasteries or take away their property;57 but beyond this apparently straightforward abuse there were probably tensions between newly organized diocesan authority and the Irish– Northumbrian tradition of abbot-bishops.58 The problem that Wilfrid presented was not only the huge size of his Northumbrian diocese but also his empire of monasteries scattered far beyond it.59 He sought papal protection for Ripon and Hexham to prevent their virtual confiscation for new bishops’ sees,60 and returned to Rome in 703 partly because he was being pushed to surrender his Mercian monasteries and other possessions to the archbishop, ‘to give them to whom he wished’,61 that is, to appoint their heads. What Wilfrid obtained from pope Agatho may have been not strictly a privilege for Ripon and Hexham but a letter supporting his rights in them.62 On the other hand the papal privilege for Woking and Bermondsey a few years later is certainly a protection privilege, comparable with Farfa’s in 705, distinguishing between the bishop’s canonical cura and the abbot’s control of the property.63 Here the need for papal protection could arise from Surrey’s instability—the uncertainty as to which king would rule, and therefore which bishop. But the alternative framework is like Wilfrid’s on a smaller scale: the rule of three abbeys by one abbot Headda, spanning Leicestershire and Surrey; all of them colonies of Medeshamstede, and the Leicestershire one, Breedon, founded explicitly as a centre of pastoral care.64 Such groups could appear as part of the live religious network of the country or as private empires obstructing the growth of proper dioceses. Bede in the next generation, well aware that some bishops were grasping, yet thought it proper that Northumbrian minsters should be at the joint disposal of king and bishop for new sees.65 For Bede this would be an exercise of authority, not of property-right; but authority was easily frustrated by property-right and could often only be preserved under its cover. 57

58 c. 3 (Bede, HE IV. 5). See John, ‘Problems’, 51–9. See Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, 130–2; Cubitt, ‘Wilfrid’s ‘‘usurping bishops’’ ’. 60 Such as Bede advocated (n. 65, below); see Cubitt, ibid. 21–2. 61 Stephanus, Vita, cc. 45, 47, 51 (pp. 90–110). 62 John, ‘Secularium prioratus’, 221 n. 1. Cf. Paul I’s attempt, 757, to recover three confiscated monasteries for abbot Forthred (C&ED III. 394–5; see Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 160 n. 3). 63 708–15, C&ED III. 276–8; from memoranda in 12th-c. Peterborough register (defended by Stenton, ‘Medeshamstede’, 319–22). See Appelt, ‘Anfa¨nge’, 107–9; Anton, Studien, 73–83. 64 675–92; CS nos. 840–3 (S 1803–6), from the same Peterborough memoranda (Stenton, 65 ‘Medeshamstede’, 315–18). Letter to Egbert, cc. 8, 9, 10 (Opera, I. 412–14). 59


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Much later, at the council of Chelsea in 816 under archbishop Wulfred, there was a radical attempt to reassert diocesan bishops’ authority over monasteries, even to the extent of claiming for them the choice of abbots and abbesses, or at least their control of the community’s choice.66 Behind this lies the fact that many English monasteria had great swathes of parochial responsibility, while there had been no such clarification as in Francia of the difference between monks and clergy.67 But what in practice the archbishop had to strive for was his revenues and ‘obedience’ from the monasteries of Minster and Reculver which king Cenwulf had taken from him; and he seems to have recovered these by c.827 on the strength of an agreement with Cenwulf’s daughter:68 it was a matter of lordship, hers or his.

8.ii. The bases of bishops’ lordship, seventh and eighth centuries In Francia by the eighth century the bishops were on the defensive; the undermining of their power pushed them into asserting lordship or property-right, in a way never before necessary, to preserve control in a narrower range of monasteries. Secularization sharpened this need. Basilicas and suburban monasteries once closely controlled by the bishop were used as benefices by rulers, perhaps by a deliberate divisio as at Maˆcon or Auxerre;1 the episcopal church’s only hope of regaining control was to claim them as property, subject perhaps to nona et decima2 and with luck, in the long run, recoverable. At the same time the more secular bishops, ‘Milo and his like’, were themselves exploiting such churches and using them as benefices on their own account,3 leaving their successors to reclaim them as cathedral property or not at all. Earlier, it had probably been a matter of degree: a monastery founded by a past bishop and in practice closely controlled by his successors would perhaps have counted as episcopal property, but this could be left hazy.4 Now that explicit lordship might be needed, grounds for it were required: conveyance by a former 66

cc. 4, 8 (C&ED III. 580–2); see Brooks, Canterbury, 175–6; id., Anglo-Saxon Myths, 117–21. 68 See Brooks, Canterbury, 187–91. Ibid. 180–2, on CS no. 384 (S 1436). 1 2 3 Below, p. 216. See above, pp. 75–6. Ewig, ‘Milo’, 419–20. 4 6th-c. bishops’ foundations, where we have the evidence (see Ueding, Klostergru¨ndungen, 50–64 on Caesarius of Arles), were not envisaged as episcopal property; so founding a monastery out of episcopal property was prima facie forbidden alienation (see ibid. 56–8; Klingshirn, Caesarius, 123–4, 134). For mid7th-c. Wissembourg, Dette’s emphasis on Dragebod’s role as ‘Eigenkirchenherr’ (Liber possessionum, 11–12) seems unfounded. 67

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lord,5 a bishop’s gift of his private possession, or foundation on the bishopric’s land; not simply the monastery’s lack of a privilege.6 The mid-ninth-century Le Mans forgeries aimed to provide the bishopric with such grounds on a heroic scale.7 The forger’s most important target,8 the monastery of Saint-Calais, was also the most audacious, since Saint-Calais had never had close links with the cathedral like a suburban or city church; and the bishopric’s second-century claim to the site, Carilef’s traditio of the monastery in 525, the precaria by which he and succeeding abbots held it from successive bishops, the precepts of emperors recognizing Le Mans’s rights, are fiction from beginning to end.9 Le Mans’s more modest claims to three city or local nunneries seem, however, to have some basis in transactions of the late seventh or early eighth century.10 For one of them, Le Tuffe´, bishop Aiglibert in 677 obtained a royal precept, whose substance was to annul charters that the abbess and her mother had been compelled to grant to two powerful laymen, promising to do their will in everything (presumably in land transactions, admissions of nuns, perhaps designation of the next abbess).11 The text, as now accepted, bases the bishop’s intervention on a previous donation of the monastery to Le Mans by the founder, a widow Loppa. But this—perhaps in the 660s—would be a rather early traditio to a bishopric, making unavoidable some scepticism about this part of the precept (besides the recognized interpolations);12 and the nunnery’s plight, though showing what could be done by intimidation, suggests that the abbess and her mother were independent landholders. So perhaps the bishop obtained the precept in some protective capacity, as the abbess’s kinsman or as diocesan bishop, rather than as lord.13 5

Semmler (‘Potestas’, 382–4; ‘Mission’, 847–8) sees such conveyances as merely conceding what was implicit in a bishop’s consent to a monastic foundation, i.e. that the founder renounced potestas in it (at least after his own lifetime). But this ignores donations to greater monasteries and to bishops of other dioceses; and see above, p. 113 note 41. 6 See Goffart, ‘Privilege’, 295–6: Saint-Calais’s lack of a privilege had only made Le Mans’s claims less 7 easy to disprove. Id., Forgeries, 24–8 (dating them 857–63), 41–2. 8 Important in itself (see Sprandel, ‘Civitas Cenomannorum’, 33–4) and as a test case (Goffart, Forgeries, 9 227–36, 243–7). Goffart, Forgeries, 61–5, 302–12. 10 The lay founders of Notre-Dame, Le Mans, belong to late 7th c., not early 6th (Haregar’s charter, ed. Havet, Oeuvres, I. 424–7); it was probably their daughter who later gave it to the bishopric (below, at note 54; Havet, Oeuvres, I. 380–6; Goffart, Forgeries, 293). Another St Mary’s church was perhaps a family monastery of bishop Aiglibert’s (ibid. 295–6; Havet, Oeuvres, I. 430–4). 11 DMerov. no. 118; Ko¨hler accepts Havet’s view of this charter as basically authentic though interpolated to reinforce the episcopal claim (Havet, Oeuvres, I. 408–11; reconstructed text 438–40). See Goffart, Forgeries, 165 n 3. 12 Goffart (Forgeries, 263) accepts the Le Mans story in outline. But if we could take the long passage about Loppa’s traditio (et Loppa . . . debeat permanere) as a further interpolation, this would leave simply a short condemnation and annulment of the extorted charters. 13 The sentence et contra . . . asserebat . . . Aiglibertus . . . quod predictum monasterium sue <sedis> ecclesie esse deberet (‘should be his church’s’), reads as if a word might be missing before esse, possibly making it ‘subject to’ rather than ‘property of’.


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Another doubtful case from the seventh century is the foundation of Hautvilliers for abbot Berchar, by bishop Nivard of Rheims. It seems likely that Berchar was initially set up as founder-abbot,14 and it was on his initiative that Nivard later took charge, in effect as abbot in Berchar’s place.15 It was settled then that future bishops were to ‘govern that monastery and defend the monks’. This does not explicitly promise them lordship; ‘governing’ sounds more like abbacy (though this would conflict with the free election that the monks were supposed to have after Nivard’s time).16 When a monastery was more straightforwardly brought or left by a bishop to his see,17 he might leave his successors to continue as bishop-abbots or rectors, probably (if the relationship holds) to be eventually seen as lords.18 But a bishop’s personal possession of a monastery as founder or abbot need not lead to its becoming episcopal property.19 Wilfrid in late seventh-century Northumbria and Mercia had monasteries of his own,20 but he was not an empire-building diocesan bishop collecting monasteries within his diocese to bolster his see’s authority and outside it to increase his revenue; the monasteries belonged to him, not to his episcopal church, and he disposed of them to chosen heirs.21 Willibrord on the other hand could not have prevented Echternach and Susteren becoming Carolingian possessions; but in any case he did not make his see of Utrecht his heir.22 Boniface founded monasteries on sites and with endowments given to him personally, and gave or commended each to a companion—Fulda to Sturm, Fritzlar to Wigbert, Eichsta¨tt to Willibald23—under Carolingian protection. It is true that bishop Lul of Mainz, as Boniface’s heir or 14 Above, pp. 133–4. According to Nivard’s fragmentary charter, the cathedral archives held documents recording his own acquisition of the site; he may have made a separate charter giving the site to Berchar (he speaks of ‘confirming’ the estate to the monastery); Vita Nivardi, c. 10 (168) has him give whatever he had had before he was bishop. 15 Cf. Flodoard, Hist. Rem., ii. 10 (p. 458): bishop Rigobert ‘received and ruled’ the monastery of Orbais after the first abbot’s death, i.e. held its abbacy. 16 Vita Nivardi, c. 10, summarizing the then-intact charter. 17 e.g. Mettlach, probably founded by Liutwin (late 7th or early 8th c.) and brought by him as bishop to Trier (below, p. 217). 18 In 8th-c. Bavaria, Scharnitz (above, p. 165), Staffelsee (Verhein, ‘Reichsgut’, 344–5). 19 An 8th-c. bp. might be compensated personally for his bishopric’s losses (or bribed to acquiesce in them) by being given an abbacy (Semmler, ‘Potestas’, 322, 336). 20 Cf. his contemporary bishop Sexwulf, ‘builder and abbot of . . . Medeshamstede’ (Bede, HE iv. 6). 21 Above, p. 128. If he hoped also for a successor to himself as abbot of abbots (as Vita, c. 64, p. 138, suggests, Ripon being already provided for by the designation of Tatbert), this had no bearing on succession to the see of York. On Wilfrid’s attitude to his possessions see M. Roper, ‘Wilfrid’s Landholdings in Northumbria’, in D. P. Kirby (ed.), Saint Wilfrid at Hexham (Newcastle, 1974), 61–3, 66–7. 22 Echternach no. 39 (‘testament’, 726). Chiemsee, ruled and perhaps founded by bp. Virgil’s monkbishop Dobdacrech, never became Salzburg’s but came via Tassilo and Charlemagne to Metz (DKarol. no. 162; Prinz, Fru¨hes Mo¨nchtum, 349–50, 432–3). 23 Below, p. 223; Wollasch, Mo¨nchtum, 28–9; Vita Willibaldi, c. 5 (‘Suidger conveyed the region of Eichsta¨tt to Saint Boniface . . . and Boniface to our bishop Willibald’).

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successor in general, held Fritzlar and Ohrdruf and briefly Fulda itself.24 But the first two were Lul’s to dispose of (to Charlemagne), not Mainz’s; and Fulda was quickly rescued from Lul’s dominium by king Pippin, at least partly on the grounds of papal protection obtained for it by Boniface25—protection against not only the diocesan (almost certainly Wu¨rzburg)26 but any bishop whatever.27 So Boniface did not intend his foundations to be appendages of Mainz.28 The case of St Gall shows up the difficulties and ambiguities that could bedevil the episcopal church’s lordship (even when Charlemagne was to some extent building bishoprics up again) if its chief basis was an abbot’s promotion to the bishopric.29 The old but poor see of Constance may have been claiming lordship in St Gall for some years (having been given the forest lands where it lay), but had failed to establish this in abbot Otmar’s time. Otmar had been chosen as priest for St Gallus’s burial-place about 720, by a magnate Waltram who intended him to gather monks and be the first abbot. Waltram probably gave it away outright to Otmar (any involvement of Charles Martel or Pippin seems unlikely).30 For many years Otmar behaved as an independent owner-abbot (probably helping Alemanian nobles to evade Frankish confiscation,31 and resisting Carolingian attempts to subject his monastery to the bishopric), until he was forcibly deposed and replaced by John from Reichenau.32 Abbot John promptly made an agreement with the bishop of Constance,33 but this did not unambiguously establish the bishop’s lordship: the handsome census of a horse and an ounce of gold that the abbots were to pay (in every other respect retaining potestas dominandi over the monastic property) might be compensation for lordship foregone,34 and asserting that the monastery ‘belongs’ (aspicit) to the bishopric is vague. 24 We depend on Eigil’s Vita Sturmi for this (below, p. 223). But Boniface had named Lul as successor in his ‘ministry of peoples and churches’ (Epist. Sel., I no. 193), which gave him a claim. See Wollasch, Mo¨nchtum, 34–6; Franke, ‘Fuldaer A¨bte’, 56–69; Hussong, ‘Reichsabtei Fulda’, 67, 85–95 (but Hussong’s reading, ibid. 91, of Eigil as calling Lul ‘the envious enemy of mankind’ sowing discord is impossible: this 25 is of course Satan). Fulda no. 15; Vita Sturmi, c. 20 (pp. 154–5). 26 See Hussong, op. cit., 47–61. 27 See Franke, op. cit., 64–5 and n. 44. Schwarz’s view (‘Jurisdicio’, 91–2) that this and other early papal privileges only ruled out claims on the property seems untenable. Hussong (op. cit., 61–76) surveys the literature. 28 Nottarp (Bistumserrichtung, 141–3, 229 n. 1) saw these foundations as fulfilling the Gelasian rules for putting the endowment into the diocesan bishop’s hands; but they are more like 7th-c. foundations given to an abbot who may hand them on to another. Cf. Lorsch, given by its founder to bp. Chrodegang personally, and by him not to Metz but to his brother (below, pp. 226–7). 29 Reichenau was similarly brought briefly to Constance (F. Beyerle, ‘Grundungsgeschichte’, 515; Miscoll-Reckert, Petershausen, 19–21, 23). 30 See Sprandel, St Gallen, 10–14 and below, p. 254 note 20. 31 Ibid. 15–21, 24–7, 31; including Beata and her family (above, p. 42). 32 Vita Galli auctore Walafrido (ed. Krusch, SRMerov., IV), cc. 14, 15, 17 (pp. 322–4), on which I follow, so far, Mayer, ‘Konstanz’, 485–91, 494–515. Cf. Sprandel, St Gallen, 32, 38–51; Miscoll-Reckert, Petershausen, 21–2, and nn. 34–42 for literature. 33 DKarol. no. 130 (Charlemagne’s confirmation, 780, of agreement made 759–60). 34 Cf. St Zeno’s census to the bishopric of Verona (below, p. 252 note 10); see index: census.


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Only when the new abbot became bishop himself was the bishopric in full possession of the monastery, with direct access to St Gall’s wealth. The natural sequel, however (unless the monastery were to be swallowed up),35 was for a later bishop to begin appointing abbots instead of being abbot:36 so in Charlemagne’s time there are again abbots distinct from the bishop. But the move from sole abbacy to lordship on these terms restricts what the bishop can get from the monastery: he may have the highly valuable disposal of the abbacy, but he will have lost the direct exploitation of some of the land;37 and what he has kept the monks can now fight and finally escape from.38 In 816 the old agreement was confirmed, but without the assertion of ‘belonging’ to the bishopric; in 817 St Gall received imperial immunity-defence; Ratpert has Louis the Pious declare for the monks ‘that the bishops should in future have no potestas over them other than by reason of spiritual authority’.39 By now the way out for St Gall was into royal defence, not back into an independent abbot’s lordship of a kind now almost obsolete (and for St Gall double-edged). The story also illustrates what less ephemeral bases for lordship there could have been. The bishop is said to have claimed, on the strength of a false charter, that the monastery ‘belonged to the bishopric’s property as it were by hereditary right’,40 while in another (undateable) lawsuit, to determine ‘whether the monastery ought to be under the bishop’s ditio or rather sui iuris’,41 the monks established that it was founded ‘in a free place’, not on episcopal land, nor on the fisc;42 nor had there been any traditio by anyone;43 whom to set over the place was for the emperor’s decision alone—implying that St Gall had in any case never been abbot John’s to give. Finally in 854, after further dispute, the census was abolished (eliminating a surviving ambiguity);44 the monastery surrendered some land to the bishopric;45 in all its other property St Gall was to be secure; the bishop was to have simply the canonical authority he had over other monasteries.46 35

Some urban or suburban basilicas were ruled by bishop or canons, with no abbot. Or to remain secular abbot but appoint subordinate monk-abbots, as for a time at St Gall. 37 Ratpert (Casus, c. 6, p. 65) says that under the (elected) abbot Cozbert, St Gall was heavily exploited by bishop Wolfleoz (bishop 811–39); but this was probably when bishopric and abbey were briefly reunited under Wolfleoz with Cozbert as ‘dean’ (St Gallen no. 217). 38 This became possible as St Gall ceased to be suspect to the Frankish rulers (see Miscoll-Reckert, op. cit., 24–5). 39 St Gallen nos. 218, 234 (BM2 nos. 605, 663); Ratpert, Casus, c. 6 (p. 66). The union under Salomon III 40 (890–919) was purely personal. Casus, c. 6 (pp. 65–6). 41 There survives only a brief 17th-c. summary (St Gallen, II, app. no. 22); Beyerle dates the case c.820 (‘Grundungsgeschichte’, 139–40). For sui iuris see above, pp. 181–2. 42 The point of this last denial (historically correct or not) could be that fisc might have been given to the bishopric for the foundation. 43 44 That is, any conveyance of the monastery to the cathedral church. See below, pp. 252–3. 45 Including some commended to St Gall by the bishop’s men when bishopric and abbey were ‘held together’. 46 DLD no. 69; Casus S. Galli, c. 8 (pp. 68–9). Cf. the judgment attributed to Louis the Pious, above, at note 39. 36

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This then had been the contrived and unsuccessful annexation of a place which in 760 had behind it two or three decades of enrichment by Alemanian nobles, a generation of Benedictine life and esprit de corps, and an older tradition of holiness and pilgrims’ resort (very different from a new family monastery like ScharnitzSchlehdorf being taken by its first abbot to the bishopric of Freising).47 All along it seems that what to the bishop was a legitimate dominium would be seen by the monks as abusive dominatio; and that what could have clarified or legitimized it was either episcopal foundation (by this time) or traditio by someone entitled to do this. In fact, despite many founders’ and monks’ distrust of bishops, monasteries had begun to be straightforwardly given to diocesan bishops and their cathedral churches, sometimes by owner-abbots or abbesses for their own or their monasteries’ security, or increasingly by rulers in the interests of the bishoprics.48 Where bishoprics were new and fluid, such donations might actually determine the extent and boundaries of a diocese, and might be so intended by a ruler.49 A monastery in an established diocese might, however, be given to another bishopric, perhaps for the very purpose of securing its freedom from its own diocesan bishop,50 or perhaps simply out of piety towards the church where a founder was educated or belonged to the cathedral clergy. This is probably true of Grimo giving Tholey to Verdun back in 634;51 and of the young priest and nobleman Trudo a generation later giving to Metz the future Saint-Trond—or the land and church where he would found it—in the diocese of Lie`ge.52 A monastery reliably recorded as given to its own diocesan bishopric in the late seventh century is the nunnery of Avennay, which bishop Nivard’s brother Gumbert ‘built . . . and conveyed to the church of Rheims; there are charters clearly showing this’.53 From Flodoard we can believe this. Otherwise we are brought back, uneasily, to Le Mans, where the earliest reasonably certain conveyance is that of Notre-Dame by the founders’ daughter Tenestina in her precaria of 708, ‘to hold it for my lifetime in usufruct by your beneficium’, probably as abbess; closely followed in 710 by that of Chaˆlons-en-Mayenne by its founder 47

Above, pp. 163, 164. As opposed to giving an abbacy to a particular bishop as personal compensation for other losses, or to strengthen his position in royal service (see Wollasch, Mo¨nchtum, 27). 49 The mayor Carloman’s donations of churches including the monastery of Karlburg to the new bishopric of Wu¨rzburg (741, Mon. Boica, 28 no. 11) both endowed it and staked out its diocese (Nottarp, Bistumserrichtung, 101 n. 2; M. Beck, ‘Wu¨rzburg’, in Beck and Bu¨ttner, Die Bistu¨mer Wu¨rzburg und Bamberg 50 (Berlin, 1937), 16–24, 80–2). Or for political reasons (see Oexle, ‘Karolinger’, 297). 51 See index: Tholey; not yet monastic, however. 52 Vita Trudonis (late 8th c.), cc. 6, 8–9, 12–13, 15 (ed. Mabillon, Acta SS. OSB., II. 1075–80). The traditio to Metz can be accepted (see M. Werner, Lu¨tticher Raum, 75–8), but not the diocesan role attributed to bp. Remaclus, who was abbot-bishop of Stavelot-Malme´dy (ibid. 74–5, 80–2). Saint-Trond became the abp. of Metz’s proprium ad regendum (‘his own to rule’, perhaps as abbot). See Rosenwein, Space, 124–33, on the 53 intentions of the Vita. Flodoard, Hist. rem. eccl., iii. 27 (549). 48


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Berarius, probably the dispossessed bishop of Rennes.54 Berarius gave all his own property to his nunnery and the nunnery itself to Le Mans, reserving its abbacy to the present abbess Cagliberta: a fairly early but straightforward case. But there are two special features which give us a glimpse of the background.55 First, Berarius with the diocesan bishop’s consent reserves the abbacy for a second, named abbess, and does this openly as a favour to her father the duke Crodegar, who has ‘helped him ceaselessly’. Godilda is to be abbess for life after Cagliberta; no one is to have power to deprive her; only after her death is Le Mans to appoint the abbesses. Secondly, this reversion to Le Mans is a return for benefices which bishop Herlemund has given Berarius to support him; and these benefices (excluded from what Berarius has of his own to give to the nunnery) include the abbacies of other churches: ‘those abbeys or benefices that I have in benefice from St Gervase’ (Le Mans).56 So Berarius himself holds abbeys (in the plural) that the bishop of Le Mans can use as benefices. The document was drawn up as an agreement between the duke and the two bishops, and demonstrates the pressures that may underlie any appointment of a head or account for any traditio to a bishopric. For the bishop may still be one of the potentes of the land,57 who could protect the monastery against others; and a particular founder may trust a particular bishop to do this (perhaps even to promote reform, such as putting an end to un-Benedictine designation), or gloomily see no better prospect of protection, or have a debt to pay or heavy persuasions to yield to. In England, minsters within the diocese were being given to Worcester about this time and perhaps earlier.58 Most were small and short-lived. Bath, the one rich and famous monastery that came to Worcester (probably by grant of Hwiccean underkings), had to be given up to king Offa in return for his conceding other estates.59 Worcester’s smaller monasteries might survive for a time under episcopal lordship, at least to the extent of being granted to an abbess for life by the bishop, or reserved to her for life by a lay donor.60 But when the magnate 54 ed. Havet, Oeuvres, I. 427–9 (the forger left this document very confused); ibid. 411, 414 (not Berarius bp. of Le Mans). 55 Cf. the earlier troubles of Le Tuffe´ (above, at notes 11–13). 56 Goffart (Forgeries, 264) regards the document as basically genuine, though interpolated ‘to intensify its prescriptions about episcopal ownership’. On the events see Sprandel, ‘Civitas Cenomannorum’, 33; Semmler, ‘Potestas’, 356–7. 57 Le Mans remained powerful until the 749 rebellion of Crodegar’s family which by then controlled it (ibid. 357–9). 58 Withington’s eventual reversion to Worcester may have been arranged at its foundation (7th c.) and included in its lost charter, though bp. Milred in 774 rested his right on its being ‘given’ him by the foundress’s granddaughter (above, p. 158). 59 Synod of Brentford, 781 (CS no. 241; translated EHD I. 466–7). See John, Orbis, 86–9; and below, p. 242. The estates kept included at least two minsters (Stour in Ismere, Bredon). 60 774, bp. Milred gave Withington to the abbess Aethelburga for life only (CS no. 217, S 1255); 777–80, Aldred underking of the Hwicce gave Fladbury for life to his kinswoman Aethelburga (perhaps the same),

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Aethelric did this for his mother at Westbury,61 he ruled that if the bishop failed to protect the monastery she could take the land and charters to someone else— something like the power of ‘going with his land to whatever lord he would’ that some of the English had even up to the Conquest. Such shakiness in the bishops’ lordship might help to explain their elimination (or acquiescence in the failure) of these monasteries and their heads. Worcester’s uncertain prospects in the case of Westbury turn probably on its not yet having the charters.62 The cathedral church of Canterbury, on the other hand, was given the monastery of Cookham (not in Canterbury’s diocese) in the plainest possible traditio by king Aethelbald (or so it was declared some two generations later at a synod of Clofesho);63 he sent a turf of Cookham’s lands and all its charters, including presumably one from himself, to be laid on the cathedral altar. But the monastery was lost to Canterbury when the charters were stolen (by two of the cathedral clergy) and given to king Cynewulf of the West Saxons. King Offa, however, was able to seize and hold the monastery, giving it to his own heirs, without ever getting possession of the charters; and Cynewulf’s easy act of restitution in sending them back to Canterbury did the cathedral no good until Offa was dead. Even when its rights were at last acknowledged, the outcome was not that the abbess of Cookham accepted the archbishop’s lordship: she was a powerful royal abbess with other property,64 which she exchanged for the right to keep Cookham as her own. Elsewhere, however, gifts of monasteries to bishoprics were more clearly than in England establishing bishops as lords of abbots or abbesses who had life tenure only.65 In Thuringia, small domestic monasteries could be given to the new bishopric of Wu¨rzburg. Immina, daughter of the convert duke Heden, gave the nunnery of Marienberg which her father had founded for her. The bishop might have granted it back to her for life; but what she wanted was another monastery, Karlburg, itself part of the bishopric’s original endowment. The author of the twelfth-century Life of bishop Burchard may well be using eighth-century charters when he has the bishop allow Immina ‘to possess Karlburg . . . in benefice until her life’s end’, and Immina grant Marienberg, her ‘paternal inheritance’, in

with a somewhat obscure suggestion that its reversion to Worcester had been intended for some time (CS no. 238, S 62). 61 804 (above, pp. 158–9). 62 They were still with the abbess, though the last of the series, recording her son’s testament, restricted what she might do. By 824, however, the bishop had ‘monastery, land, and charters’ in his 63 possession (CS nos. 379, S 1433). 798, C&ED III. 512–3; translated EHD I. 468–470. 64 Offa’s widow, his heir here (Levison, England, 251; below, pp. 242–3). 65 This may have been so for the abbot-founder in the early N. Italian case (707) of Lucedio (see index).


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‘perpetual property’ to the episcopal church, ‘not merely by precaria but traditione potestativa’—an outright conveyance by someone able to make it.66 In Bavaria the bishoprics began to acquire monasteries,67 mainly in their own dioceses, at first when bishops brought them as abbots to their bishoprics,68 but later by traditio, in much the same way as lesser churches and probably with the same consciousness that this alone could sustain their authority, not only over the monastery but over the churches it owned.69 Just short of a traditio was the action of the brother-founders of Schliersee in 779, ‘commending ourselves in everything . . . under the bishop’s ditio’;70 but by 817 this had come to mean property or lordship. The abbey was then a benefice held by one of the cathedral clergy, Warmunt; on his approaching death he surrendered to the bishop his possession (investitura) of the monastery; the monks now ask to be ruled by Warmunt’s brother Sindiho; the bishop accordingly ‘grants him the benefice his brother had had’ to hold in the bishopric’s service.71 After less than forty years, all that is left of the free election reserved by the founders is the monks’ elaborately worded humble request. The first clear traditio of a Bavarian monastery to a bishopric is count Gunther’s in 767 to Virgil, the Irish monk-bishop of Salzburg; the preliminaries are puzzling. Gunther had built the monastery of Otting ‘in his own inheritance’, invited the bishop to consecrate the church, and said he meant to establish monks there with enough property to support them. The bishop asked him ‘in whose dominium he wished the abbot and monks to be’, and when Gunther failed to answer, proposed to go away without consecrating the church, monastery, or abbot, ‘unless according to the canons I may know to what place their direction and domination are to belong’.72 Even if ‘to what place’ meant ‘to which bishopric’, this is not, on the face of it, a demand that the monastery be surrendered into Salzburg’s lordship (as it is usually represented).73 Nonetheless, Gunther’s response was to promise to give his foundation to the dominatio of Salzburg, and after the consecration he ‘handed over the church with everything he had given it to bishop Virgil, by the altar cloth’.74 66 When Immina moved with her nuns, bp. Burchard used the vacated site and property for a foundation of his own (Vita Burchardi (ed. Holder-Egger, SS XV. i), cc. 4, 5, 8 (pp. 27–9, 32–3)). 67 See Bauerreiss, KG Bayerns, I. 95–8; Mitterer, Eigenklo¨ster; Tellenbach, Passauischen Eigenklo¨ster. 68 69 70 Above, note 18. See Tellenbach, op. cit., 3–4, 87–8. See index: Schliersee. 71 Freising no. 376. 72 ad quem locum illorum rectitudo et dominatio constare debeat. Rectitudo might mean ‘title’ or propertyright (Niermeier sense 8) rather than ‘direction’ or jurisdiction (senses 4–5); depending on the bias of Virgil’s concern. ‘To what place’ is slightly odd, but taking ad quem as ‘to whom’ would leave locum hanging loose. 73 e.g. Wanderwitz, ‘Libellus Virgilii’, 359. Balon (Ius, I. n. 124, p. 261) held that the bishop wished to know where the alodial power was to lie (see above, p. 115); but Virgil’s questions were about abbot, monks, and monastery, not lands. 74 Breves notitiae, c. 13 (part of Libellus Virgilii), in Salzburg, I. 34–5; or Losˇek (ed.), ‘Notitia Arnonis und Breves Notitiae’, 120–1; or Wolfram, ‘Libellus Virgilii’, app. D. See Mitterer, Eigenklo¨ster, 69–71.

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Salzburg had since then somehow lost control of Otting, and this section of Virgil’s libellus was edited to make a case (ultimately successful) for getting it back;75 we cannot take it as a factual record of what was said and done. But its purpose required a canonical basis, and ‘the canons’ are referred to twice, more perspicuously than in the difficult reference to the right to be informed: Gunther’s traditio to the bishop is ‘according to the canons’, and the bishop is to ‘rule it according to the canons, like the other churches of his diocese’, with the power ‘of ruling the familia and ordaining the abbot there, and putting in monks or clergy’ from Salzburg. The obvious reference is to the canons from Chalcedon onwards asserting the bishop’s authority; and Virgil (who had not been submerged by the new diocesan organization but borne on its crest) may well have used dominium and dominatio broadly, to mean the whole elastic complex of power and authority that bishops might claim on the basis of the canons, that monasteries in Francia, Italy, or England might repel or minimize by a privilege, and that in Bavaria might well have belonged to an independent abbot. Even so, the obvious parallel is with the efforts of the bishops of Freising to get ordinary private churches given to them, not as itself demanded by law, but as the only secure basis for exercising authority.76 Traditio to the bishopric was one condition repudiated by the monks of St Gall. The other (apart from foundation on former fisc) was foundation on episcopal lands.77 In Francia by the eighth century a bishop might found a monastery out of episcopal property and expect it to remain under episcopal lordship unless deliberately given away—given, that is, not to its first abbot but to another outside lordship (mayor’s or king’s). The story of Pasquarius bishop of Nantes founding Indre on an island in the Loire may tell us little about the late seventhcentury foundation, but much about the monks’ interests a century later or more.78 The bishop of Charlemagne’s time must have been asserting lordship; and the monks’ determination to evade this was best served by claiming longstanding royal lordship, and claiming it on the ground of the founder’s alienation. So Pasquarius is represented as promising ‘that none of his successors should try to usurp anything of the monastery or of what he or others have given it . . . by reason of dominatio’; and as having, with the abbot, ‘conveyed’ the monastery into the king’s hands.79 75

Notitia Arnonis, c. 6 (Losˇek 88–9). For the late 8th-c. context see Wolfram, ‘Libellus Virgilii’, 204–5. 77 Above, pp. 38–9. Above, p. 203. Vita Ermenlundi (ed. Levison, SRMerov., V. 674–710; introd. 674–8), late 8th- or early 9th-c. Life of the first abbot. 79 Ibid., c. 4 (p. 693). The promise suggests a Merovingian episcopal privilege, seen by the Vita’s author as renouncing proprietary right. The royal precept freeing the monks from any dominatio and giving them 76 78


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Bishop Pasquarius in the seventh century may never have meant his successors to be lords of Indre, and any privilege he gave it renouncing dominatio could be taken as renouncing dominium.80 But with the mid-eighth-century foundation of Gorze by Chrodegang archbishop of Metz a new kind of relationship has appeared, and a new kind of privilege to embody it. How far Gorze was founded from cathedral property and how far from Chrodegang’s is uncertain.81 The privilege (756 or 757) begins like any private foundation charter with a narratio of Chrodegang wanting to do something for his soul’s remedy, and accordingly building a monastery and endowing it with ‘possessions that have come to me legally, by sales and exchanges’.82 He has king Pippin’s goodwill and the consent of his clergy and lay fideles of Metz, which suggests that cathedral property was used as well; but later in the privilege there is mention of a charter ‘that I made about that monastery to the church of St Stephen’, perhaps a traditio to the cathedral of what would otherwise have been Chrodegang’s own. The outcome in any case is a substantial and observant monastery which is meant to be permanently under the bishopric’s lordship while itself lordly and privileged.83 The abbot is to be elected by the monks, but with the bishop’s will and consent; if they find no one suitable the bishop is to appoint from elsewhere, with their will and consent. Many of the usual terms of earlier episcopal privileges are here (future bishops not to disturb or oppress the monastery, take away any of its property or offerings, or exact any earthly present when they leave after a visit). But the bishop can come and go as he chooses for prayer or visitation; and the founder begs his successors to ‘keep’84 all the property for the monks: by implication it will be in some sense the bishop’s to keep or not (and indeed before long the bishops of Metz were secular abbots of Gorze, often called custos or rector).85 Any repudiation of potestas or dominatio, such as some episcopal privileges had contained, is conspicuously absent.86 There is no explicit claim to dominium, but the monastery is to be ‘subject to the mundeburdium and defence of St Stephen of the church of Metz’. This, the privilege says, had already been laid down in Chrodegang’s earlier charter, which may itself have recorded a straightforward grant of dominium to the episcopal church; at any rate what mundeburdium royal defence was either a pre-existing forgery (Levison, ibid. 677; Heidrich, ‘Titulatur’, 123 n. 237) or anachronistically described by the author. 80 He had specified free election from the community of Saint-Wandrille (Vita Ansberti, c. 10, ibid. 626). 81 The charter listing Gorze’s endowments is not reliable (Gorze no. 1). 82 Ibid. no. 4; see Ewig, Gesamm. Schriften, 425–6. 83 An early sign of the Carolingian emphasis on ‘large scale, ordered, male monasticism focussed on 84 conservare. the liturgy of the mass’ (Innes, State, 25–6). 85 Below, pp. 420–1; see Oexle, ‘Karolinger’, 281–2. 86 Rosenwein calls Chrodegang’s charter an ‘anti-exemption’ (Space, 102–6) and spells out the detailed comparison with Marculf, i. 1 (pp. 221–4, app. 2).

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amounts to by now is evidently lordship.87 The privilege helped to set the stage for the ninth-century scene where bishops were ex officio lords and often abbots of numerous monasteries, within the diocese preserving authority or replacing authority otherwise lost, and outside it perpetuating weak patches in the authority of their colleagues. 87

Chrodegang’s immediate successor at Metz referred twice to Gorze ‘where abbot Theomar rules sub manu nostra’ (Oexle, ‘Karolinger’, 295 n. 99). Rosenwein (Space, 112) says rightly that Chrodegang ‘did not claim unbounded proprietorship’; but nor did any other outside lords.

9 The emergence of lay rulers’ lordship over monasteries

By Charlemagne’s time, in his dominions, large numbers of real monasteries and important collegiate churches were distinguished from others as in some sense belonging to the king. We have to consider how this massive assertion of outside lordship had come about and what it meant; and then to look at the parallel but different powers of other rulers.

9.i. The consequences of secularization in Francia In Merovingian Gaul the abbots of established, rich, more-or-less autonomous monasteries may often (though it is hard to prove) have been appointed by a king, as bishops were:1 not as an assertion that the church was the king’s property to dispose of, but as an act of sacral kingship or public power, which might equally be expressed in allowing or insisting on free election (perhaps, as at Corbie, with royal consent).2 But things began to change—both what was done and how it was described—as royal authority slipped into the hands of the Pippinid mayors, who were able to reward and secure fidelity and service partly by wielding the king’s patronage, and partly out of what they could take or allow others to take from churches. What began with some attrition of bishoprics’ and monasteries’ possessions by clerical and lay nobles including the mayors,3 progressed to the use of great churches themselves as benefices, including all their property or what was left of it: a use which it will here be argued did not spring from an acknowledged dominium, but led to it.

1

Below, pp. 292–3.

2

Above, p. 186.

3

Above, p. 75.

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The history of Saint-Wandrille, with its long run of Gesta abbatum,4 shows how the Pippinids were using a once independent abbey from the beginning of the century,5 having cleared their way by driving into exile the abbot Ansbert, bishop of Rouen.6 Linked with both the Pippinids and the Neustrian court, it was a natural focus for rivalry, important as it was (along with Jumie`ges) for control of the lower Seine. In the last struggle over Neustria, rival abbots were put in and expelled in turn by Ragamfred and Charles Martel; abbot Wando was at the battle where Ragamfred was beaten, and found him a horse to escape on.7 Charles’s nephew Hugh later held Saint-Wandrille, with Jumie`ges and the bishoprics of Rouen, Bayeux, and Paris;8 he was highly thought of at Saint-Wandrille, being its benefactor as he could well afford to be; he may even have been a monk.9 The abbey was next given to a bishop Lando, and then to Teutsind (abbot also of Saint-Martin of Tours), whom the author held responsible for dispersing the monastery’s lands.10 Later in the 740s Saint-Wandrille (with Saint-Vaast) was in the hands of another kinsman of Charles Martel’s, Guy—a clerk living like a layman, finally put to death for treachery. Saint-Wandrille meanwhile came to Raginfrid who also had Rouen; described as an ignorant, greedy nobleman who took away the monks’ livelihood for his own use, and whom the monks begged Pippin III to remove. Pippin condescended to ask the monks whom they would have, and at their request committed the abbey to that Wando who long ago had been turned out by Charles Martel. Wando in due course, old and blind, resigned; and successfully besought Pippin to accept his own and the monks’ choice of his successor, Austrulf.11 But for Pippin to allow them their way was a favour, giving no security for the future. Austrulf’s successor was Witlaic, chamberlain and prote´ge´ of the earlier abbot Teutsind, from whom he had obtained Saint-Martin iure beneficii (in the author’s ninth-century terminology), and now allegedly got Saint-Wandrille from Pippin (as king) by large gifts of gold and silver. Witlaic, after a long abbacy (c.754–87), left books, vestments, and a chalice to the monastery, but was judged ‘almost illiterate’ because he had only four books to leave.12 Meanwhile 4 Gesta sanctorum patrum Fontanellensis, written from earlier materials, first half of 9th c. See I. Wood, ‘Saint-Wandrille and its Hagiography’, 1–10; on its viewpoint (Neustrian, non-Carolingian), ibid. 10–14. 5 Bainus bp. of The´rouanne became ‘rector’ there, almost certainly by Pippin II’s doing, despite its probable episcopal privilege (Vita Ansberti, ed. Levison, c. 18, SRMerov., V. 630–1 and ed. note). 6 Ibid., c. 21 (p. 634). On what follows see Voigt, Karol. Klosterpolitik, 44–50; Gerberding, Rise, 95–8. 7 GPFont., iii. 1 (pp. 23–4). 8 On his position see Ewig, ‘Descriptio Franciae’, 162–3; I. Wood, ‘Saint-Wandrille’, 11. 9 GPFont., iv. 1 (pp. 37–40). 10 Ibid. v. 1 (pp. 43–4), vi. 1, 2 (pp. 46–51). See I. Wood, ‘Teutsind’, 41–2; on Teutsind’s and (later) Witlaic’s alienations as offending ‘traditional proprieties’ rather than ruinous, ibid. 34–9, 47–9. 11 GPFont., vii. 1 (pp. 56–7); viii. 1, 2 (pp. 58–62), ix. 3, x. 1 (pp. 68–71). 12 Ibid. xi. 1, 2 (pp. 79–81) and ed. comment. His name was deliberately misrepresented as Wido laicus (see Voigt, Klosterpol., 49–50); he was probably a cleric (Felten, A¨bte, 125).

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Saint-Wandrille had been promised to a nephew of his, Witbold, one of the palace clergy; but at his uncle’s death Witbold was away on royal service, and the abbey went to one of his colleagues, Gervold. Gervold’s record was mixed: he improved the buildings, gave plate, books, and lands, and recovered property alienated earlier; but he alienated more himself, and was seen as unduly afraid of the powerful, ‘fearing to lose the rule of the monastery’.13 Back in 747, when Pippin rid Saint-Wandrille of bishop Raginfrid, he was trying to impose order and was under pressure from Boniface to get rid of ‘false priests’ and restore church property. But doing this, Boniface complained, often simply increased the flow of suitors for favours: ‘making their way to the Frankish king’s palace, they beg to have churches and monasteries granted to them, so that they may live a lay life there wasting the places of saints.’14 What lies behind this is that the rule of great churches was by now obtainable mainly from the mayors, as benefices—that is, as boons or favours. This was a practical power, not a legal right: whoever could provide or withhold protection could get a monastic community to choose his nominee.15 Ancient basilicas and noblemen’s foundations were bundled together in these dealings.16 Saint-Wandrille had been founded before the mid-seventh century by Wandregisil’s private enterprise, though on a gift from the fisc;17 Wissembourg, in the mayor’s gift by 730, by leading Austrasian nobles and a future bishop of Speyer.18 Be`ze, probably founded in the mid-seventh century by a Burgundian for his son, was in Pippin’s hands as mayor to give to a married woman, Angla, said to be his mistress.19 Flavigny in Burgundy, which abbot Widerad had so lately founded out of his own property, ruled himself, and made his heir,20 was in Pippin’s gift by 75521 and was one of several great abbeys granted by Charlemagne to Alcuin.22 13

GPFont., xii. 1, 2, 3: a narrow view of Gervold, who was a valued supporter of Charlemagne’s. Epist. Sel., I no. 61 (p. 324). 15 Earlier, local magnates could do this at a lower level (above, pp. 200, 204–5). 16 See Ewig’s list, ‘Descriptio’, 164–5. 17 Above, p. 123; perhaps first claimed as royal by Louis the Pious’s immunity-defence grant, 815 (Bouquet, Recueil, VI. 482). GPFont., v. 2, x. 4 (pp. 44–5, 76–7) anachronistically summarizes diplomas from Charles Martel and Pippin as immunity-defence grants. Whether they were for immunity only (Sickel, Beitra¨ge, III. 236; Semmler, ‘Traditio’, 10–11) or defence only (Heidrich, ‘Titulatur’, 126), neither would yet imply proprietary lordship (see below, section iii) as distinct from favour. 18 Scha¨fer, ‘Die Abtei Weissenburg’, 44–51; Dette, Liber possessionum Wizemburg., 11–12, 21–2. 19 Chron. Besuensis, 248–9; see index: Be`ze. Voigt (Klosterpol., 53–5), Lesne (Propr., II. i. 19 n. 1), and Felten (A¨bte, 125) see the monastery as by now the bishopric of Langres’s property, given to Pippin’s brother Remigius and by him to Angla. But the passage reads more naturally as Pippin giving the bishopric’s property to his brother and, separately, Be`ze to Angla. 20 Above, p. 114. On its commendation to the ruler of Burgundy, see below, p. 231. 21 According to the abbatial list (SS VIII. 502–3) ‘Manasses was ordained abbot by gift of king Pippin’. 22 There were also 7th-c. nobles’ foundations treated as royal in the 9th c. after being in the hands of Carolingian queens or princesses, e.g. Laon, Faremoutiers, Remiremont (see Ewig, ‘Descriptio’, 163–4). On Jouarre see Gue´rout, ‘Origines’, 69–70, 74–6). 14

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Pippin’s commitment to reform cost him none of his practical power to dispose of abbeys; on the contrary, it was invoked by the bishops at the council of Ver for replacing recalcitrant abbots with observant ones.23 Free election, once a safeguard against the bishop’s oppression or the abbot’s private interests, was now a favour allowed by the ruler if he chose. A formulary probably from early in Charlemagne’s reign includes a letter from monks asking for other monks’ prayers for their efforts to recover the right of election, which they once had but have now lost, and another to the king reminding him of this privilege and complaining of the results of having been given in benefice.24 Both Pippin and Charlemagne gave abbeys to their servants, supporters, and children (usually a cleric, occasionally a monk from elsewhere, perhaps a layman or woman)25 partly to secure the place, as influential or strategically important, and partly to reward or endow the favoured person. Meanwhile any genuinely elected, regular abbot may be explicitly required to be ‘faithful’ to the mayor or king who allows his election: if the abbey is not given to someone already in the king’s service (perhaps personally commended to him), then its holder’s fidelity may be secured instead. Some of Charlemagne’s privileges lay down that an abbot-elect must be ‘faithful to us’;26 Charlemagne’s ancestors had first required this fidelity early in the century, in their own foundations.27 It does not necessarily imply that he must come and commend himself, to be established formally as a fidelis28 (which would make it easy to veto the election by refusing to accept him); but certainly abbots or the holders of abbeys could be removed for treachery. King Pippin’s removal of Sturm from Fulda (probably suspected of supporting duke Tassilo) is hardly different in its implications from his dealings as mayor with Guy at Saint-Wandrille. The monks got Sturm back when he was personally reconciled to Pippin—‘into the grace and friendship of the lord king’—who then ‘commended the monastery of Fulda to him to rule’.29 From the early eighth century onwards, then, mayors and kings were using abbeys as benefices for their dependants, or expecting elected abbots to be faithful to them. And in the course of the century, as we shall see, they were beginning to refer to certain monasteries as royal or as their own. But the connection between 23

per verbum et voluntatem domino rege [sic] vel consensu servorum Dei (c. 5, Capit. no. 14). Formulae Salicae nos. 61–2 (MGH Form., 261–2): ‘from the day when you granted us in benefice to him and we left your mundeburdis, we have had neither clothes nor shoes nor oil nor soap nor food . . . ’ (such complaints were probably conventional; see Felten, A¨bte, 13–14). 25 Probably not laymen before Charlemagne’s reign (Felten, A¨bte, 141–2). See Ewig, ‘Descriptio’, I. 162–4. 26 e.g. Ansbach and Ellwangen (below, p. 225 notes 43, 47). See Mu¨hlbacher, ‘Die Treupflicht’, 873–9; 27 Below, pp. 222–3. Felten, A¨bte, 132. 28 See Odegaard, Vassi and Fideles. That Ellwangen’s abbot-elect was to be fidei nostrae aptus suggests some prospective formal act. But when charters for Pru¨m, 762 (below, p. 224) and Fulda, 774 (DKarol. no. 86; Lu¨beck, ‘Abtswahlsprivilegien’, 348–9) require the (plural) monks to be faithful, this suggests nothing 29 sharper than ‘faithful subject’ (see below, p. 248). Vita Sturmi, cc. 17–20. 24


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these two developments is not simple. For a lord to be able to give something in benefice does not (at first) imply that it is his property: anything that he secures for his man, from some other person or community, is still a boon from him (this is explicit in grants of church land to laymen, by the church’s precaria but by the king’s benefice).30 Argenteuil probably belonged to Saint-Denis when Charlemagne gave it to his daughter Theodrada,31 and Innichen to Freising when it was given to Arno of Salzburg.32 So we cannot assume that a monastery given in benefice by a king must from the start be an object of his property-right or of lordship more focused than his general kingly power.33 The causal connection seems to be the other way round: that because the Carolingians could in practice treat many monasteries as their own, they began so to regard them in principle.34 It was not a claim inherited from the Merovingian kings.35 That queen Brunhild could drive Columbanus out of Luxeuil (or indeed that the goodwill of Arian Lombard kings was necessary to Bobbio) need not imply any property-right or dominium. When the Merovingians made abbots or bishops, or robbed their churches, or pushed them into making land-grants,36 they did it because they (intermittently) could; and when they helped them or gave them immunities, this was a personal favour coloured by royal duty to the church. Carolingian kings’ explicit lordship over great churches was not the precondition but the result, perhaps the rationalization, of their actual treatment of them in the past; and this treatment, for good and ill, resulted from their own immediate needs: Pippin II’s and Charles Martel’s rivalry with the Neustrians (hence the importance of Corbie, Saint-Wandrille, Jumie`ges, Saint-Denis); Pippin III’s need both to satisfy and to dominate the Austrasian nobles, and to give some security to churches while making them useful.37 Their lordship was the outcome of the shift from haphazard secularization by anyone who could do it, to secularization regulated and almost monopolized by Carloman and Pippin as mayors and by Pippin and Charlemagne as kings38 (and often used by Charlemagne’s time to promote administrators and scholars). 30 It is thus a fallacy to say that royal disposal of church property to vassi ‘speaks clearly for ownership’ (deutlich fu¨r Eigentum spricht: Bosl, ‘Wu¨rzburg’, 162). 31 Or so the monks later successfully claimed (Bouquet, Recueil, VI. 542). 32 Mon. Boica, 31.i no. 13. 33 Being required (in effect) to elect someone the king can trust may be different, however (perhaps restricted to houses of the king’s foundation or in his defence). 34 This (which was Lesne’s view, Propr., II. ii. 68) makes it unnecessary to suppose that (for instance) Wissembourg was a ‘king’s monastery’ by 730 (as Scha¨fer, ‘Weissenburg’, 44–5). 35 See below, pp. 221–2. Gregory the Great’s concession in his Autun privileges (above, p. 186 note 42) 36 221–2 is exceptional. See Lesne, Propr., I. 450. 37 See Laporte, ‘Monaste`res’, 20–5; Schieffer, Angelsachsen und Franken, 1444–9; Gerberding, Rise, 97–101, 103–5. 38 Charlemagne extended this to the great Italian monasteries, as successor to the Lombard kings and as a conqueror able to get his way.

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There are other aspects of this shift besides the use of individual and often independent abbeys as benefices. An earlier chapter touched on the consequences of secularization for parish or baptismal churches.39 Not only land was taken from bishoprics and great monasteries, and partly restored in Boniface’s time, but churches too, including monasteries that already belonged to a bishopric,40 or that might by being treated in this way come to be so regarded. The bishopric of Auxerre was subjected by Pippin to a divisio of its ‘villas and abbeys’, much of it for Bavarian nobles that Pippin was courting.41 Some of the property was restored by Charlemagne, but at least two important suburban churches were kept back: Auxerre recovered the nunnery of Saint-Julien only late in the ninth century, and Saint-Germain—the burial place of Germanus himself—never.42 A similar divisio was apparently made at Maˆcon for the benefit of ‘Sigovesus and his men’: the bishop had a precept promising immunity for his ‘episcopal villas and abbeys’, but excepting those that Pippin had granted in benefice or kept for his own need;43 for these the census already arranged should be paid, besides nona et decima, by whoever has either villas or abbeys in benefice.44 ‘Abbeys’ here seems a catch-all term, but at Auxerre it included monasteries that might be recognized as regular under the distinctions emerging at the time; the same is true of Chur, divided for the count’s benefit by Charlemagne.45 So a monastery might itself be the object secularized—taken away from a bishopric and probably given in benefice; perhaps later recognized as held from an episcopal church, on nona et decima terms or by precaria for a census, but still in the hands of someone who is beholden for it, or for being allowed to keep it, to the king.46 The outcome is likely to be that if the bishop recovers possession, episcopal control is sharpened into property;47 and if he does not, the church comes to be seen as the king’s. In Charlemagne’s time the bishop of Trier tried to claim the cell of Saint-Goar, which Pippin had given as a personal favour to the first abbot of Pru¨m. But Trier’s claim was overridden when this abbot, still holding the cell as his personal benefice, stated in justification that it was the king’s hereditary possession; Charlemagne’s missi confirmed this, the bishop gave way, and the king thereupon exercised his newly vindicated right by giving

39

40 Above, pp. 75, 77–8. See Po¨schl, Bischofsgut, 175–84. Wollasch, ‘Das Patrimonium B. Germani in Auxerre’, in Tellenbach (ed.), Grossfra¨nk. Adel, 189–93, 218–22; Werner, ‘Important Noble Families’, 164–5. 42 Gesta episc. Autissiod., cc. 32, 33 (SS XIII. 395); see Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 257–8. 43 abbatias tam beneficiatas quam dominicatas. 44 Maˆcon no. 67. See Lesne, Propr., II. i. 61; Voigt, Klosterpol., 13–14, 54 n. 1. for nona et decima see index. 45 Above, p. 78. On these ‘divisions’ see Semmler, ‘Potestas’, 350–2, 354, 377–8. 46 The Actus of Le Mans includes a precaria of a nunnery from bp. Merolus to an abbess on Charlemagne’s order. Havet accepted this (Oeuvres, I. 407) but Goffart has reservations (Forgeries, 297), as on all 47 the Le Mans precariae verbo regis (277–81). Above, pp. 199–200. 41


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Saint-Goar in perpetuity to Pru¨m.48 Of course the bishop’s claim may really have been flimsy, but it looks as if the king’s was new: produced to rebut the bishop’s claim, and resting only on the king’s father’s action.49 A different story with some of the same implications is that of Mettlach. In 782 Charlemagne described this monastery as ‘a thing of our property . . . which our grandfather Charles, as mayor, granted in benefice to Milo, and subsequently our lord and father Pippin, as king, granted to the same Milo’. But they seem to have done this out of Trier cathedral property. Mettlach was probably founded early in the century by the count-bishop Liutwin, and given by him to his cathedral; but who actually held it, often within the founder’s family,50 had been determined by mayoral and royal power.51 Liutwin’s son Milo had it in benefice, perhaps before he had the bishopric; then a chorepiscopus Hartham, first by Milo’s grant but later (after Milo’s death) by king Pippin’s. Later, it seems, Liutwin’s lay grandson Landbert received it in benefice from Pippin, in the cathedral view despoiling bishop Hartham of it by force with the king’s backing. Landbert’s lay sons and heirs were still holding it in 782, when Trier sued them for it. Charlemagne adjudged it to the bishopric, but by claiming it as his own: the lay claimants were to surrender the monastery to him for the cathedral—partibus nostris in causa Sancti Petri—and the bishops were then to have it for ever.52 The Mettlach judgment comes close to implying that property of the bishopric itself is the king’s to claim in law (even though in causa Sancti Petri). Indeed, much more far-reaching than the effect on lesser monasteries of being secularized was the effect on the greater churches themselves, not so much of being robbed, as of having their losses mitigated and regularized by mayoral or royal power. Only the ruler can and will begin to restore order in the middle of the century; and from being able in part to restore a great church’s property (that is, to affirm its title and have this marked by the benefice-holder’s census, while ensuring it actual possession of enough for its basic needs),53 the ruler gets the right to keep some back by divisio, and to determine the conditions on which a church holds its property. It is in this context that we first meet the expression ‘royal monasteries’: the council of Ver in 755 required abbots and abbesses to report on property 48 Account appended to Miraculi S. Goaris (SS XV at 372–3); written 839 but circumstantial and convincing. 49 Cf. Charlemagne giving Saint-Die´ to Saint-Denis (DKarol. no. 55), resting his right to do so on Pippin having ‘had it in his vestitura’ (either ‘in his possession’ or ‘at his disposal’). 50 For this great Austrasian family controlling Trier see Ewig, Trier im Merovingerreich, 140–3; id., ‘Milo’, 420–1. 51 Raach, Mettlach, 14–15, infers from this a change in Mettlach’s legal position between its foundation and Charles Martel’s time; but this assumes that ‘owning’ a monastery was a precondition of giving it in benefice. 52 DKarol. no. 148. Raach, Mettlach, 13 (and n. 47), 16, takes partibus nostris as implying property shared between king and cathedral, but see Niermeyer s.v. pars, senses 11–14. 53 See Goffart, Forgeries, 10–11 and nn., on the legislation of the 740s.

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restored to their monasteries, ‘to the king if they are royal, to the bishop if they are episcopal’.54 The implication is probably not that episcopal lordship is the only live alternative to the king’s, but that only monasteries controlled by one or the other will have benefited from recent restitutions. At the same time it is the restitutions themselves that clinch the ruler’s hold. This protective control must have diminished the independence of the greater churches’ lordships, while leaving much of their landlordship in others’ hands. But this left to the church and its prelate their own layer of lordship. Kings might conceivably have become the public owners or trustees of church lands;55 but this was pre-empted by the emphasis on ecclesiastical property-right that secularization and its remedies provoked, combined with the king’s actual power to make bishops and abbots: leading in the ninth century to the alternative situation, in which bishops and abbots were lords of their churches’ lands, while kings were lords of the prelates and their churches. This practical integrity came first to monasteries, which were easier to use whole as benefices for single fideles; but bishoprics too survived divisio and emerged later as relatively stable lordships. It is against this background that we can understand Carolingian measures to investigate and list church property—lands, revenues, and treasure—by the same machinery as was used for investigating the royal fisc. These measures did not imply that the property was the king’s,56 but sprang rather from his practical interest in the matter: the need to organize a divisio or secure a restitution;57 the need to know what the king is giving when he gives an abbey in benefice, or what damage has been done by the abbot he last gave it to. So after Witlaic’s abbacy at Saint-Wandrille Charlemagne commissioned an inventory there.58 The conclusion so far is that granting abbeys in benefice, not initially implying formal royal lordship over them, began to be seen as evidence of it by Charlemagne’s time; and that protective regulation was consistent with this lordship (rather than implying public ownership of church property). Goffart argues, however, that Frankish rulers’ proprietary lordship of great churches was still a long way off in 800, their domination remaining throughout the high Carolingian period a matter of royal function—pure protection and theocratic mastery—and emerging as a claim to property only after the mid-ninth century. He bases this mainly on the course of the dispute about the monastery of 54

c. 20 (Capit. no. 14). See Goffart, Forgeries, 11–19, 208–9; Kroell, L’Immunite´ franque, 163–4 (on Pippin’s intervention in 56 Aquitaine, 760). As argued by Metz, Reichsgut, 220–3. 57 751, Annales Alamannici, SS, I. 26: res ecclesiarum descriptas atque divisas (Pippin’s controlled secularization); and see above, at note 54. 58 GPFont., xi. 3 (pp. 82–3); the first known instance for a particular church. Raban Maur perhaps had the Brevium Exempla (below, p. 268 note 81) from Louis the Pious as model for investigating Fulda’s property after abbot Ratgar’s maladministration (Epist. Karol. Aevi., IV. 548–51, the monks’ complaint). See Metz, Reichsgut, 19–23, 46–51. 55


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Saint-Calais. The church of Le Mans, as part of its campaign to claim ancient and immutable ownership of all possible church property in the diocese, pursued its claim on Saint-Calais, opposed by the abbot and monks claiming autonomy; until in 863 at the council of Verberie a third party, Charles the Bald, stepped in to claim it as his own.59 ‘The king showed that he possessed the monastery from the side of his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father, by hereditary right, and without any census’ (the evidence being, presumably, Saint-Calais’s diplomas from Pippin, Charlemagne, and Louis the Pious, taking the monastery into royal defence),60 ‘and had committed it for government to monk-abbots one after another.’ Later his advocate showed that ‘the rulers of the Franks left this thing as an inheritance to king Charles, having held it as their own . . . not merely for thirty but for three hundred years’:61 here the evidence must have included the monks’ own forged foundation charters from king Childebert, and Merovingian immunity diplomas into which they had inserted royal defence.62 Before this, in Goffart’s view, royal defence of Saint-Calais had carried no implication of royal property. Admittedly the Carolingians had often treated it as if it were their own—granting it as a benefice to bishops of Le Mans, and to the present abbot—but only in 863 was it declared the king’s Eigenkloster, therefore only then did it become so. Kings hitherto were not like lords of Eigenkirchen; only when their public patronage failed, in the second half of the ninth century, did they come to claim ownership of formerly autonomous monasteries.63 But what Carolingian kings were claiming over such churches, and well before the midninth century, was hardly ‘ownership’; rather, it was the king’s outside lordship, more focused and ‘proprietary’ than general royal authority. It may well be right to see this as set firm in the ninth century, when the great churches achieved, subject to royal lordship, a clearer title to their land.64 For many monasteries, however, this outside lordship was recognized in Charlemagne’s or even Pippin’s time; sometimes decades after their subjection to practical control,65 but not a whole century. As for Saint-Calais, it had been commended to king Pippin in 752 in a way that amounted almost to giving it to him,66 and the Le Mans forger felt it necessary to have this undone by Charlemagne.67 The absence of any explicit claim before 863 that Saint-Calais was the king’s does not show that the claim then was a novelty, a last resort to counter the forger’s embarrassingly radical view of church property.68 Before that date the cathedral’s claims were not brought formally to 59 61 62 63 64 66

60 ACII no. 258, record of Verberie proceedings. Below, pp. 232–3. For the Roman-law significance of ‘30 years’ see Goffart, ‘Privilege’, 311–13. Havet, Oeuvres, I. 156–62. Forgeries, 237–9, 250–1 (here oddly speaking of ‘the birth of the Eigenkirche’, but cf. 238). 65 Ibid. 14–19, 251. e.g. Saint-Goar, Saint-Die´, Mettlach (above, pp. 216–17). 67 68 See note 60, above. Goffart, Forgeries, 143. As Goffart has it, ibid. 193–4.

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the king’s attention by either side, the forgeries being meant not to deceive the king’s court but to persuade the abbot and other holders of church lands to pay a census and so acknowledge Le Mans’s rights.69 Only when the bishop’s appeal to Nicholas I had the probably undesired result of committing the case to a Frankish council70 did any occasion arise for the king to make a formal claim. Meanwhile what the Saint-Calais monks wanted was not an impossible ‘autonomy’ but ordinary monastic freedom from episcopal domination, while the bishop represented them as rejecting proper diocesan authority; this was the initial issue at Verberie. The Le Mans clergy may not have expected the monks to want to fall back on royal lordship, but they did; and it was then, in the abbot’s support, that the king made his claim. Once he had made it the case changed its character, from an ostensibly disciplinary dispute between bishop and monastery, to a property case between bishop and king, ending with the bishop’s formal renunciation.71 The assembled bishops seem to have felt no difficulty about this,72 nor to have seen any problem about what the king’s ‘possession . . . by hereditary right’ consisted of, or what kind of evidence was relevant. The abbot opened the way to the king’s claim by asserting his own personal dependence on the king for his tenure of the monastery; the king’s first and last point was that he had in fact committed the monastery to successive monk-abbots (his recent grant to bishop Robert being made in error, but anyhow only a personal benefice); and his witnesses had only to say that previous grants of Saint-Calais to bishops had been made in benefice, and removable, not as restitution of the bishopric’s rights. To show that it was not Le Mans’s property, and that the king had in fact disposed of the abbey, occasionally to a bishop but normally to a regular abbot, was enough by now to establish that it was the king’s. This actual past makes it very unlikely that the idea of the king’s right (as distinct from the need to assert it in court) was new in 863.73 Charlemagne’s proprietary right in Saint-Goar, evoked as it was in a rather similar context, may well have been new when the cell had perhaps only once been given in benefice, and that not by himself. But Charles the Bald’s claim to Saint-Calais, at least seventy years later74 and after repeated acts of lordship there, is another matter; it is difficult to believe that his father and grandfather would not have understood 69

70 Ibid. 141–2, 218–19. Goffart, ‘Privilege’ 287–8, 328–9. Havet, Oeuvres, I. 187–9; Goffart, ‘Privilege’ 323–5, 330–2; id., Forgeries, 141–3, 235–6, 246–7. 72 Hincmar as annalist took the dispute in his stride: ‘Charles lawfully established his claim (legaliter evindicavit) to the abbey of Saint-Calais against Robert bp. of Le Mans, who wished to hold it bound to the right of his bishopric (iuri sui episcopatus mancipatam) by commendation of the Apostolic See’ (Ann. Bert., s.a. 863 (ed. Grat, pp. 103–4). 73 Nicholas I’s papal privilege for Saint-Calais virtually recognizes that the alternative to the bishop’s dominatio is not autonomy but royal lordship (the elected abbot is to receive potestas by the king’s ‘grant and consent’). See Goffart, ‘Privilege’, 306–7 (less radical than his developed thesis). 74 The Saint-Goar case is 791 at latest. 71


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as he did that Saint-Calais had belonged to them in their time and was now part of his inheritance.

9.ii. The explicit bases of royal lordship in Francia The term ‘royal monastery’, first found in a normative context at Ver in 755,1 appears occasionally thereafter, but other and sharper expressions were more usual: that a monastery was of the king’s property, fisc, or alod, or of his ius, dominium, or potestas, or his by hereditary right; or simply his (‘our monastery’);2 the same expressions as were used of anything belonging to the king, such as a villa of the fisc.3 Some of these were chapels attached to royal palaces,4 or small rural monasteries that were as much the king’s property as his estate churches. But others were great, rich, famous monasteries (in the stricter or the wider sense), including churches of ancient foundation which no one in Merovingian times had dealt with as property. Some support for regarding one of these last as the king’s could probably always have been produced if needed. It might have been founded by a Merovingian king or queen and endowed out of the fisc. Or—hardly different, or the difference not yet mattering—its founder might have been given fisc for the purpose by a king (Audoin and his brothers for Rebais, or Eligius for Solignac: not at the time making either monastery the king’s property),5 or allowed to found it on undeveloped land—desert, forest—which counted as the king’s (Grimoald at Stavelot-Malme´dy).6 The Carolingians’ hold on Saint-Wandrille, balanced by signs of royal favour, was not clearly legitimated until 815;7 but had justification been needed before that, fisc given to Wandregisel might in retrospect have served.8 But Carolingian royal lordship did not result automatically from such seventh-century origins. Even monasteries directly founded or heavily endowed by Merovingian kings or queens had probably not been seen as the property of their successors.9 The ‘senior basilicas’ and great royal burial-places, such as Saint-Martin of Tours, 1 Above, pp. 217–18. That a 7th-c. episcopal privilege calls the great privileged churches of Agaune, Le´rins, Luxeuil, and Saint-Marcel, Chalon, regalia monasteria is (as Mathias Werner points out, Lu¨tticher 2 Raum, 362 n. 42) no assertion of royal property-right. Below, note 51. 3 See Lesne, Propr., I. 142 n. 3; II. ii. 4–9 and nn. 4 See Verhein, ‘Quellen zum Reichsgut’, i. 391–2 and n. 286. 5 See above, pp. 117–18. On Eligius’s (dubious) foundation charter for Solignac c.630 (app. to Vita Eligii, SRMerov., IV. 746–9), denying potestas or ius to a bishop or anyone else ‘unless the gloriosissimus princeps 6 alone’, see M. Werner, Lu¨tticher Raum, 361–2. Above, p. 112 note 31. 7 8 Above, p. 213 note 17. See Prinz, Fru¨hes Mo¨nchtum, 128, 184–5, 191 n. 184. 9 See Semmler, ‘Potestas’, 320 (Saint-Me´dard), 353–4 (Saint-Marcel); cf. Ueding, Klostergru¨ndungen, 174–6, 178–91.

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Saint-Me´dard of Soissons, or Saint-Aignan of Orleans, and around Paris SaintDenis, Saint-Germain-des-Pre´s, and Sainte-Genevie`ve, were certainly objects of permanent royal concern. In the mid-seventh century queen Balthild’s ‘reform’ required bishops’ privileges for them,10 to induce them to adopt a more clearly monastic life and to pray more effectively for king and kingdom.11 Once removed from the close control that the bishops had had in them, they were the natural recipients of royal bounty; their abbots might be appointed by the king or with his consent, though of this we know oddly little;12 political and ceremonial acts were carried out there; deceased kings and their families waited there for the general resurrection. They embodied the kings’ hope of dynastic continuity, their claim to be orthodox, their function of providing peace and promoting salvation, their pull on the protection of saints.13 At Saint-Denis in 654 Clovis II reserved the king’s consent as well as the community’s to alienations by the abbot, on the ground of ‘the munificence of our kinsmen’.14 That seems as near as the Merovingians came to claiming these places as their property; it was the Carolingians who made themselves lords of these most lordly churches, first in practice and later in words.15 The Carolingians moved briskly in on Saint-Denis even before they were kings;16 but meanwhile they had their own family foundations (endowed by their ancestors out of their own alodial property or out of royal fisc that they controlled as mayors), and in these they had begun to make explicit claims to outside lordship well before other lay lords were doing so (fitting the general pattern of their rise).17 Willibrord’s Echternach, which rapidly collected large and distant endowments in Frisia, the lower Rhine, and Thuringia, may have been founded on a small scale as a monasteriolum for pilgrim monks by Irmina, abbess of Oeren (Pippin II’s mother-in-law), and given with her half of the estate to Willibrord.18 But Pippin and Plectrude, giving the other half in 706, describe the monastery as ‘built on our property’ and as ‘our monastery’, refer to Willibrord and his monks as set up there by them, and (on the strength of thus representing themselves as sole founders)19 claim lordship for themselves and their heirs in 10

See above, pp. 193–4; Nelson, Politics and Ritual, 38–9. Maintaining the unceasing psalmody of Agaune (see Rosenwein, Space, 63 n. 16, 76 n. 6). 12 Above, pp. 183–4. 13 See Kruger, Ko¨nigsgrabkirchen, 431–56, 476–8, 498–9; Wallace-Hadrill, Church, 126–31; Rosenwein, 14 Space, 51–91. DMerov. no. 85 (654, original: ChLA XIII no. 558). 15 See Rosenwein, Space, 97–101. 16 As mayors, Charles Martel was buried there and Pippin appointed Fulrad. As kings, Pippin was buried there; Charlemagne at one time hoped to be (DKarol. nos. 28, 55). Fulrad built the new abbey church under their aegis. See Wallace-Hadrill, Church, 131–3; Oexle, ‘Karolinger’, 270–4; Felten, A¨bte, 216–20. 17 Moving ahead of other kin-groups towards patrilinear succession and hierarchical links with fideles, 18 Echternach nos. 3, 4, 6, 9 (697–8, 699, 704). etc. (Le Jan, Famille 399–401). 19 Willibrord may also have put it into their mundiburd, if a genuine charter lies behind the prophetically worded grant attributed to him in the late 11th-c. Vita Willibrordi, c. 22 (SS XXIII. 24–5); Echternach no. 13 . 11


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a quite unprecedented way. The land is given ‘on this condition, that the monastery shall always remain in our and our heirs’ domination and defence’, while by a second charter the monks are to elect one of themselves as Willibrord’s successor, ‘on condition that he appear faithful in everything to our heirs . . . and remain under our mundeburd and defence’.20 Susteren was similarly taken over and developed from an existing oratory, and in 714 was given to Willibrord with the same proviso that his successor be faithful to Pippin and his heirs (but this time specifically to Plectrude’s descendants),21 and the same explicit assertion of their mundeburd and defence (though not, here, of dominatio).22 Even after this, however, a mayoral foundation could be made (in 743) without any assertion of lordship and defence, if Eigil’s Life of Sturm incorporates real charters of Carloman’s for Fulda as it seems to do.23 Lu¨beck argued, on a priori grounds of what ‘the law’ was, that foundation on the fisc made Fulda royal from the first;24 but there seems to be no such principle established while the Merovingians reigned. Carloman probably made an outright gift to Boniface as owner-abbot, so Sturm at Fulda could have thought of himself in the old way as Boniface’s heir.25 But Sturm was nonetheless expelled by Pippin III, and got back only with his goodwill; and Pippin exercised practical lordship by allowing bishop Lul to have dominium over Fulda during Sturm’s disgrace, and freeing Fulda from this dominium at Sturm’s restoration.26 In the context, Lul’s brief dominium evidently means his power (whatever its basis) to give Fulda an abbot;27 Pippin seems simply, as ruler, to have allowed Lul to assert a claim to be Boniface’s heir here rather than Sturm.28 There is no reason to think that Pippin was acting on any already formulated claim to royal lordship:29 this was implied at earliest when Fulda was taken under royal defence at Sturm’s request in 765.30 Fulda (like the much older Stavelot-Malme´dy) was a mayoral foundation on royal fisc, not on family lands. More like Echternach in this respect is Pru¨m: first founded in old-fashioned alodial terms in 721, by Pippin II’s sister-in-law and her 20

Echternach nos. 14, 15 (the same day). According to no. 15, Willibrord ‘confirmed the testament that we [Pippin] should have it under our and our heirs’ defence’, which could mean confirming a charter of Willibrord’s own to that effect (see preceding note), but might only mean acknowledging no. 14. 21 Thus leaving out Charles Martel, Pippin’s natural son and actual successor (see Gerberding, Rise, 22 127–8). Echternach no. 24. 23 Vita Sturmi, c. 12; Fulda no. 4 (see Stengel, ibid. 2–6). 24 ‘nach dem Staatskirchenrechte jener Zeit’ (‘Die Exemption’, 133–6). Fulda’s endowment must have been largely undeveloped woodland and therefore royal fisc (some nobles having rights in it which necessitated their co-operation in the endowment); see Wickham, Land, 156–8. What Carloman gave Boniface would be whatever rights the kings had had. 25 See Schieffer, Angelsachsen und Franken, 1500–5; Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 161–2, 259; Hussong, ‘Reichsabtei 26 Fulda’, 43–6; Franke, ‘Fuldaer A¨bte’, 58–61. 763–5; Vita Sturmi, cc. 17–20. 27 28 Ibid., c. 18. On Lul’s claim see above, p. 202 note 24. 29 Nor probably on the ground of a (literal) confiscation by Pippin from Sturm (as Engelbert suggests, 30 Vita Sturmi, 104–5). Below p. 227.

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son Charibert;31 but refounded in 762 by king Pippin and his wife Bertrada, Charibert’s daughter, with land in which husband and wife each have inherited shares. This refoundation by a king with his wife is done in much the same terms as any private noble’s foundation, much as his mayoral ancestors or he himself a dozen years earlier might have done (though now requiring the monks’ intercession for his family and kingdom). Like his grandparents for Echternach and Susteren, he lays down that the monastery shall be ‘in our potestas and defence and that of our heirs’, and makes these heirs’ protection conditional on the monks’ fidelity (not, here, the abbot’s); while reserving consent to the monks’ election of an abbot (in which, presumably, they will demonstrate their fidelity), and undertaking not to impose an outsider on them (as, evidently, he could have done).32 Being king, however, he gives Pru¨m immunity next year,33 compatible now (if not always) with outside lordship. The sharpest claim to own a monastery is made when it is alienated: not simply granted to someone as a benefice, but given away as property to a greater church. Carloman gave the nunnery at Karlburg, along with lesser churches, to the episcopal church of Wu¨rzburg; Pippin perhaps gave Saint-Mihiel at Verdun to Saint-Denis;34 Charlemagne gave the monasteriolum of Saint-Die´ in the Vosges to Saint-Denis, to ‘possess’ it with all its belongings, on condition of keeping ten or fifteen monks there at a time.35 Of these three, Karlburg was either Carloman’s own foundation or Charles Martel’s, in Frankish royal lands in Thuringia;36 Saint-Mihiel may have been confiscated from its lay founder (but the story is too obscure for any norms to be inferred from it);37 of Saint-Die´ it was enough for Charlemagne to say that ‘my lord and father Pippin is known to have held it in his vestitura’.38 But two other monasteries alienated by Charlemagne—Holzkirchen to Fulda in 775,39 Ansbach to Wu¨rzburg before 80040—had been the personal property of their founders, given outright to Charlemagne. A large number of small or middling monasteries were given him in this way, as pieces of property, by their lay founders or founder-abbots, exactly as they might have been given to a greater monastery or an episcopal church, by donation and traditio. This, rather than recent family foundation or remoter royal foundation, was what mostly 31

Above, p. 114. DKarol. no. 16 (ten years or more after the actual rebuilding; cf. ibid., no. 3). See Prinz, Fru¨hes Mo¨nchtum, 208; Zielinski, ‘Die Kloster- und Kirchengru¨ndungen der Karolinger’, 102–7. 33 DKarol. no. 18. 34 Mon. Boica, 28, no. 11 (Louis the Pious’s confirmation of Charlemagne’s confirmation of Carloman’s grant); DKarol. no. 8 (but see below, note 90). 35 Ibid., no. 55 (769; here perhaps not to the Saint-Denis but to Herbrechtingen). 36 37 Prinz, Fru¨hes Mo¨nchtum, 242–3; Bosl, Franken, 79–81. Below, note 90. 38 39 Above, p. 217 note 49. Below, note 41 (see Lu¨beck, ‘Nebenklo¨ster’, 21–2). 40 W. Scherzer, ‘Der Ubergang des Klosters St Gumbert’, in Herbipolis Iubilans (Wu¨rzburg, 1952), 115–17; authenticity of the notice, pp. 102–14; see Bayer, S. Gumberts Kloster in Ansbach, 54–6. 32


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brought monasteries into royal lordship. For those acquired only to be given away again, it may be the king’s alienation that purports to tell us the terms of the original gift to him. Thus count Throand is reported in Charlemagne’s charter as having built his monastery of Holzkirchen from new foundations, on his own property, and given it property of his own; ‘and afterwards . . . he conveyed that little monastery to us, in its entirety, with all its belongings . . . whatever he or other men have given it’: all this, ‘as Throand conveyed it to us, we convey to the church of St Boniface’.41 Of others we learn when Louis the Pious gives them away that they had been given to Charlemagne.42 However, the evidence of the king’s acquisition is more usually a royal diploma in favour of the monastery itself. Ansbach before it was given to Wu¨rzburg had a charter from Charlemagne acknowledging that its founder Guntbert had ‘conveyed and donated’ it to the king, voluntarily, by a charter of donation.43 For those not alienated the evidence is in similar charters (Charlemagne’s own or Louis the Pious’s confirmation). Charlemagne gave immunity to Charroux in Poitou when its founder count Roger came to court and ‘delegated it into our hands’ with all its extensive possessions, ornaments, and books—a change of plan, for we have also the count’s testament which kept the monastery under his own and his wife’s tuitio for their lifetimes, only afterwards ‘to be defended by royal tutela, defence, and potestas’.44 Roger had ‘appointed’ an abbot.45 Other donors, however, were abbot-owners (more or less) of the old kind. Louis the Pious giving immunity-defence to Sighard abbot of Berg (in northern Bavaria) related that the previous abbot Wolconard had built the monastery in his own property, endowed it with his own goods, and then conveyed it entire to Charlemagne.46 In a similar context Hariolf, founder of Ellwangen (by now bishop of Langres), produced a diploma of Charlemagne’s: having built it on his own property and given it everything he possessed, he had then with his heirs’ and kinsmen’s consent ‘wished to convey it’ to Charlemagne.47 Guntbert had probably become abbot of Ansbach.48 Benedict 41

DKarol. no. 106 (775). Stettwang (Mon. Boica, 28 no. 12), Aldrichszell (ibid. 31 no. 38), both described as conveyed to Charlemagne by unnamed persons, now given to Kempten; Casanova and Goudargues, ‘cells’ given to Charlemagne per cartulam donationis by count William, now to Aniane (HL II, Pr. no. 36). 43 DKarol. no. 152 (786), giving immunity, and election of an abbot ‘faithful to us’ after Guntbert’s death; see Bayer, Ansbach, 15–23. 44 DKarol. no. 194 (‘785–800’); Charroux, 53–62, with Monsabert’s introd. pp. xi-xv (identifying interpolations). See Oexle, ‘Le Monaste`re de Charroux au IXe s.’, Le Moyen Aˆge, 76 (1970), 193–4. 45 DKarol. no. 194 (here David, in the testament Dominicus). 46 Mon. Boica, 28 no. 7 (815). Berg (unidentified) is often paired with Wessobrun. 47 Above, n. 43; Wirtemberg. UB. I no. 71 (Louis the Pious’s confirmation, 814). The mid-9th-c. Vita Hariolfi (c. 1) has him first give Ellwangen for defence to Pippin. 48 Implied by the monks’ leave to elect after his death. His title ‘bishop’ in 786 probably means that he was consecrated bishop in his old age as abbot (Bayer, Ansbach, 68–71). 42

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of Aniane himself, having founded Aniane on his own alodial property, gave it to Charlemagne, whose diploma relates that Benedict ‘delegated it into our hands’ (like count Roger) and ‘conveyed that holy place under our protection and domination to rule’49 evidently by charter (like Guntbert), since Louis the Pious thirty years later referred to Benedict’s ‘charter of donation’ as evidence that the monastery ‘was originally my father’s and subsequently my own alod’.50 It is such clear-cut acquisitions that are first called ‘our monastery’ by Charlemagne;51 they have come to him in the most straightforwardly proprietary way. Charlemagne himself did not found monasteries; he acquired them, all in either the south-west or the east, often in newly colonized or newly conquered country.52 Ansbach and Ellwangen were only some 30 miles apart, in the wooded country between Main, Neckar, and Danube; each was allowed free election depending on the elect’s fidelity.53 Ansbach, having been given away again (or rather exchanged),54 never became a great place; but Ellwangen was kept and became a major royal monastery and an important centre of colonization and communications.55 Charlemagne’s greatest prize at the time, however, was Lorsch, founded by the powerful count Cancor and in 764 given by Cancor and his mother, with the consent of his son Heimrich, to Chrodegang bishop of Metz: not to the church of Metz but to Chrodegang personally, as their kinsman,56 to rule it as an ownerabbot. Chrodegang died soon afterwards (766), having left his younger brother Gundeland as ‘abbot of the monastery and heir after himself in that holy place’; it was Gundeland as abbot-owner who ‘conveyed the monastery into the hand and mundeburd of king Charles’.57 This act concluded a lawsuit of 772 in which abbot Gundeland complained that the founder’s son Heimrich had tried to claim the monastery, ‘saying that his father Cancor had left him possessed (vestitum) of it’; Gundeland produced a charter to show that ‘Heimrich’s grandmother Williswind and father Cancor had conveyed it . . . to his (Gundeland’s) brother archbishop Chrodegang’.58 Heimrich then renounced all claims on the monastery and Charlemagne gave judgment for 49

DKarol. no. 173 (792). Magnou-Nortier’s proposed version (Socie´te´, 95–6) does not differ here. 51 HL II Pr. no. 59 (assent to election, 822). Ansbach, Charroux, Lorsch, Hersfeld. 52 See Semmler, ‘Karl der Grosse’, 261–2, 268–72; Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 319–20. (Possible foundations by Charlemagne, however, are S. Antimo in Tuscany; Donze`re on the Rhoˆne.) 53 54 Above, notes 43, 47. Despite his promise of free election (see Felten, A¨bte, 202). 55 Burr, ‘Vita Hariolfi’, 39–48. On other monasteries acquired by Charlemagne (esp. Herrieden, with a probably similar history) see Bosl, Franken, 81–7. 56 See Innes, State, 18–19, 55 (‘not particularly close’ kinship, but important to both sides). 57 Lorsch nos. 3, 4 (DKarol. nos. 65, 72): Charlemagne’s 772 judgment and his privilege of defence and free election. 58 Paulus Diaconus (Gesta episc. Mett., SS II. 268), writing only c.20 years later, thought they had given it to Metz; but he must have been mistaken (see Semmler, ‘Abtei Lorsch’, 167 n. 5). 50


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Gundeland. It was then that Gundeland made his traditio to the king and received the corresponding royal privileges. The lawsuit may have been fictitious,59 and the outcome planned from the start. For although the original foundation was modest, it was well placed near the Worms crossing of the Rhine, at the near end of routes both to Bavaria and to Saxony; it could draw for endowments on developed and undeveloped land lying between Fulda’s to the north, and St Gall’s and Reichenau’s to the south; it had been given instant fame and riches by Chrodegang, who established monks there from his own foundation of Gorze and brought it relics of St Nazarius in a splendid procession across the Vosges;60 it had been moved and enlarged by abbot Gundeland, with further benefactions from Cancor’s brother; and its new church was finished in 774, just after its status as a royal monastery was completed, with Charlemagne himself present at the consecration. It rapidly rose to be one of the most important royal abbeys, burial-place of ninth-century Carolingians, with far-flung property in town and country. Meanwhile the ostensibly or really disappointed lay heir Heimrich remained an active benefactor.61 Charlemagne’s acquisition of Lorsch was paralleled by that of other potentially important monasteries in the huge diocese of Mainz or its sphere of interest, in bishop Lul’s time: in effect securing for royal power the fruits of Boniface’s work.62 Fulda itself, despite its papal privilege of 751,63 was as we have seen brought briefly under Lul’s dominium and removed from it again by acts of practical lordship of Pippin’s. Sturm was restored as Pippin’s reconciled fidelis, and Fulda was thereupon taken into royal defence (close, by now, to asserting lordship).64 It was just at this time that Lul had to acquiesce in the rise of Chrodegang’s Lorsch in his diocese, within ten years picked up by Charlemagne. Meanwhile Lul himself had founded Hersfeld,65 downstream on the same river as Fulda and perhaps to compensate for it;66 but three years after Charlemagne acquired Lorsch, Lul gave him Hersfeld. According to Charlemagne’s first diploma for Hersfeld (in 775),67 bishop Lul came to him at Quierzy, said he had built a monastery and established monks on his own property in wilderness within Charlemagne’s kingdom, and now ‘conveyed it into our hands so that it shall be under our protection and that of our sons and our genealogia’.68 Wehlt (Reichsabtei, 14–15) and Felten (A¨bte, 197–8) accept it as a genuine dispute. It may, however, have been engineered (rather than fictitious): see Innes, State, 179–82 on the politics. 60 Its relics brought it hundreds of small donations from kinsmen and neighbours in its first five years (Inner, State, 18–21). 61 As did his sisters (each deo sacrata). See ibid. 57–9; Semmler, ‘Lorsch’, 124–5 and 167 (on obituary 62 entries). See Schieffer, Angelsachsen, 1507–8, 1514–19. 63 64 65 Above, pp. 201–2. See below, section iii. Originally a hermitage of Sturm’s. 66 See Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 162. 67 DKarol. no. 89; Hersfeld no. 5 (and ed. comment p. 10). See Sickel, Beitra¨ge, I. 370, IV. 585. 68 By what is later described (Hersfeld nos. 4, 17) as a carta traditionis. 59

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There follows a confused combination of immunity, ecclesiastical privilege,69 defence, and election-right (confirmed and tidied up by Louis in 820).70 Lul was not alienated from Hersfeld by surrendering it (any more than count Heimrich from Lorsch); he remained its abbot71 and its benefactor, giving it the small monastery of Ohrdruf (one of Boniface’s) and getting it the bones of the English saint Wigbert.72 Within the next few years Charlemagne’s gains here were rounded off by Lul’s further surrender of Boniface’s more important foundation of Fritzlar,73 nearer to Saxony. So Charlemagne had built up his Reichskirche especially in this crucial area between middle Rhine, Saxony, and upper Danube, and at this crucial time of his subjugation of the Saxons,74 not (as at St-Goar or Mettlach) by a slippery drawing of new conclusions about old churches, but by acquiring new churches of other men’s foundation. Some of these men owed to him or his father much of what they had used for their foundations. Lul had been given lands and churches in benefice which appear among Hersfeld’s endowments from Charlemagne, having perhaps been provisionally given by Lul.75 Fulrad had been enriched out of Carolingian conquests in Alemania, and some of the endowments of his own foundations came direct from Charlemagne or Pippin;76 despite having (when ill) given part of his acquisitions to Pippin to use for pious purposes, he could in the end leave everything to Saint-Denis,77 but perhaps only because Saint-Denis itself was by now firmly under royal lordship. Hariolf came of a powerful, ancient family, and the land he used for Ellwangen was probably his own; but he may have been in trouble, surviving by resigning his bishopric and holding Ellwangen under Charlemagne’s lordship.78 Guntbert of Ansbach, on the other hand, before he set up as abbot (and was consecrated bishop) in his own well-endowed foundation, was only a valued warrior of Pippin’s, though rewarded with lands stretching from the northern Rhone to the middle Main.79 The lands were his to the extent that he could endow a monastery with them and give it away; but perhaps it was only to the king that he could give it, and perhaps he could not have done otherwise. The king’s gifts, it has been suggested, had been temporary 69

Taken by Lu¨beck (‘Rechtstellung’, 274–6) as ‘exemption’ of an extreme kind, mainly because of the words pontificium non habeant; but pontificium here means not episcopacy (Niermeyer sense 2—misreading this passage as referring to what the abbot must forgo) but something like potestas (ibid., sense 1): it is denied to ‘anyone of judicial power’ (cf. DKarol. no. 83). See Sickel, Beitra¨ge, IV. 585–7. 70 71 Hersfeld no. 29. Ibid. nos. 8, 9, et al. 72 73 Schieffer, op. cit., 1507–9, 1517–20; Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 164. DKarol. no. 142; Hersfeld no. 16. 74 The monasteries’ role in this is not always clear: some (not Lorsch) were mission churches (see Semmler, ‘Karl der Grosse’, 281–3), whose existence might be a reason for subduing the Saxons rather 75 than a means to that end. Hersfeld nos. 7, 12. 76 See DKarol. nos. 84, 107, 118. 77 In 768 he got back what he had given to Pippin (ibid., no. 27). See index: Fulrad. 78 Burr, in id. (ed.), Ellwangen 764–1964, 35–41, 45–7. Hariolf’s career is difficult to disentangle: probably a 79 lay founder, bishop by 769, in retirement a monk. Bayer, Ansbach, 68–71.


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ones that expired with Guntbert’s military career:80 not explicitly benefices, but not outright alodial gifts. Or it may be, in this and other cases, that the king had a hold in theory because the land had been taken from forest or wilderness (or could be so represented). However, the difficulty about any view of these transactions that attributes some prior claim to the king is that while the circumstances might support it, the transactions themselves do not. For Guntbert or Throand east of the Rhine as much as for Benedict of Aniane or count Roger south of the Loire, the donor’s property-right and his power to give the monastery away are spelt out as if the king’s title depended on it. The monastery was built ‘from its foundations’, ‘by new work’, sited on and endowed with the founder’s own property inherited or acquired; he came and gave it publicly—condonare, delegare, tradere—into the king’s hands,81 by manu potestativa,82 with any consent that was needed;83 perhaps by a carta, cartula, or testamentum donationis.84 Perhaps the return of the king’s gifts (where that is what they were) is not a matter of law but of sentiment about what is right and acquiescence in what is politically advisable.85 The outcome anyhow seems to be that the totally independent monastery, owned outright by its founder-abbot and his heirs, is ceasing to be widely viable in practice or even as an idea. For Fulda, freedom from Lul’s brief hold depends on accepting royal lordship: Sturm had been defeated not in trying to make Fulda ‘an autonomous, institutional legal person’ of a kind not yet possible,86 but in clinging to an independent abbot’s property-right that was becoming obsolete.87 For a monastery threatened by episcopal lordship the only way out is into royal lordship, for Fulda now (since Lul’s dominium could have led to Mainz’s) as later for Reichenau and St Gall.88 Although a community under pressure from a bishop might for a time try to rebut his claims without conceding royal lordship, it was likely sooner or later to find that its interest lay in claiming to be royal from of old. This alone makes evidence for Merovingian proprietary lordship suspect, and claims by a monastery to have been actually given or commended to a 80

81 Ibid. 23–6. Most of the foregoing phrases appear in all the relevant diplomas. i.e. by competent hand, with the power to do it (Throand’s grant of Holzkirchen, above, at note 41. 83 Hariolf’s grant of Ellwangen, above, at note 47. 84 Mentioned for Guntbert, Benedict, Lul (Hersfeld), Wolconard, count William (Casanova, above, note 42), and in a formula of Louis the Pious’s (Form., 305–6) giving to a fidelis Betto a cellula which Betto’s grandfather and uncle had conveyed to Charlemagne per strumenta cartarum. 85 i.e. what will win the king’s patronage for the donor (see De Jong in New CMH, II. 626). Cf. Innes, State, 185–8, on Charlemagne acquiring monasteries without trying to ‘bring the aristocracy to its knees’. 86 As suggested by Schieffer, op. cit., 1504–5. 87 This change is given an ideological slant when Louis the Pious confirms his father’s acceptance of Hariolf’s traditio because ‘in the rule of St Benedict it is read that no monk may dare to have anything of 88 his own’. Above, p. 203 below, pp. 253–4. 82

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seventh-century king are probably always false.89 Conveyances to eighth-century rulers before Charlemagne are uncertain too; even Pippin III may have had none, as mayor or king.90 What Pippin certainly received as king, however, were requests for his protection and commendations into his defence; what must next be discussed is whether this came to much the same thing.

9.iii. Royal defence in Francia The king’s lordship of a monastery had as an expected consequence his protection against anyone else. When Charlemagne acquired a monastery he usually bestowed on it immunity alone;1 but sometimes it had been given him explicitly to secure his protection, and the transaction itself could be described as putting the monastery into royal defence as well as lordship.2 There seems to be no idea that to be the ruler’s property and to be under defence are incompatible because one is applicable only to a thing and the other only to a person.3 On the contrary, lordship or proprietary right seems to imply defence. The problem is whether the reverse is true: whether a monastery not explicitly conveyed to the king but simply commended to his protection without any mention of dominium was in fact made his property; and whether royal defence was ever, in the Carolingian period, granted to a monastery without implying that it was the king’s. There is no certainly genuine defence privilege from any Merovingian king.4 Marculf, however, gives a formula for a charter of royal tuitio combined with the mayor’s mundeburd, for a bishop or abbot, his men, and his or his church’s property.5 If this promised anything specific it was access to the king’s court and a right to the mayor’s advocacy there;6 it did not imply any dominium over the 89

e.g. Rebais being given to Dagobert (Vita Agili, c. 19, Mabillon, Acta SS. O.S.B., II. 322–3), or Indre to Childebert III (above, p. 208 note 79). See Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 19 n. 3. 90 The ‘place’ called ‘St Michael’s mount’ surrendered by a Wolfoald to Pippin III (who gave it to Saint-Denis, DKarol. no. 8) is not safely identified with Saint-Mihiel, Verdun. It is not clear that Saint-Mihiel’s founder (see index: Wolfoald) can be the same as Pippin III’s enemy in 750 or later (see Laporte, ‘Monaste`res francs’, 29 and n. 4), or how Saint-Mihiel could have escaped Saint-Denis’s lordship by 772 (DKarol. no. 63). 1 e.g. Ansbach, Aniane (grant of defence interpolated), Charroux (DKarol. nos. 152, 173, 194). Lorsch had defence without (at first) immunity, Hersfeld had both in confused form (ibid., nos. 72, 73, 89). 2 Count Roger’s testament for Charroux; diplomas for Aniane and Hersfeld (above, pp. 225, 226, 227). That Charlemagne’s diploma for Lorsch promises defence while those for Aniane and Charroux do not may (so far) be unimportant: it could be taken for granted. 3 As Stutz, ‘Kapitel’, 25–32, 45; see below, pp. 730, 732–3; cf. the much earlier theory of V. Ehrenberg, Commendation und Huldigung nach fra¨nkischen Recht (Weimar, 1877), 75–9. Voigt (Ko¨nigl. EKl., 68–72, 86–7) argued robustly that churches could be both owned things and defended (or defending) persons. 4 See Heidrich, ‘Titulatur’, 124. 5 Marculf, i. 24 (ed. Uddholm, pp. 98–100); probably a post-690 addition (Rosenwein, Space, 110 n. 41). 6 See Havet, Oeuvres, I. 125–6. This is probably what bp. Desiderius wanted from Grimoald in mid-7th c., for his foundation Saint-Amand and his bishopric Cahors (see Rosenwein, Space, 109).


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church and its property. And the protection occasionally sought for particular monasteries may have been sometimes vaguer and more general than this, sometimes more practical and ad hoc.7 The implication of dominium over the monastery perhaps slips in when the mayors rather than the kings were not only taking the abbot’s causes in hand at court but providing the consequent protection, and when founders or abbots seeking the mayor’s patronage submitted to his practical mastery.8 Of three charters suggesting this for the 710s and 720s, Theuderic IV’s privilege for Murbach9 and Charles Martel’s foundation charter for Reichenau are spurious ;10 but abbot Widerad’s 719 charter for Flavigny seems fairly secure.11 It calls on the gloriosus dominus who rules Burgundy to intervene against any bishop’s demands, and (separately) commends the monastery ‘to God and the potestas of the king’.12 The first passage invokes authority, and potestas in the second might mean no more; but the Flavigny formula for a bishop’s privilege, probably embodying an actual one from the 730s confirming Widerad’s dispositions,13 has the founder ‘out of zeal for its complete defence, decree that it should belong (aspicere) to the king of Burgundy’.14 There follow some only slightly clearer commendations to Pippin III. The first of these was made to him as mayor, about 750: the Irish bishop Dubhan, abbot of Honau, ‘commended himself and all the property of his monastery’; Pippin ‘took him . . . under our mundeburd’ and enjoined all the powers of the land to leave the monks’ property undisturbed.15 It does not seem certain that the commendation of possessions here would be seen, yet, as conveying them into lordship rather than commending them to protection.16 It was followed by a grant of immunity from Pippin as king;17 and early in Charlemagne’s reign royal officials were to enforce the return of anything taken from Honau—land, vineyards, cattle, men, silver, or gold—‘since according to Frankish law, strangers’ property is the king’s’, while ‘the kings of the Franks have given this liberty to all Irish strangers, that no one should seize anything of theirs, nor should any kin besides their own possess 7

As in Radegund’s seeking royal tuitio for her nunnery besides the bishops’ protection (above, p. 193), or Columbanus’s request for ‘royal help and protection’ for Luxeuil (Jonas, Vita Columbani, i. 30). 8 Including the demand for fidelity (see Felten, A¨bte, 129–31; Heidrich, ‘Titulatur’, 125–6). 9 DMerov. no. 188. 10 On both see Beyerle, ‘Pirminius’, 141–3, 152–3; Heidrich, ‘Grundausstattung’, 34, 44–60. Pirmin may have sought mayoral protection, but perhaps not for specific monasteries (see Prinz, Fru¨hes Mo¨nchtum 2, 11 649). Above, p. 114; Schwarz’s doubts (‘Jurisdicio’, 78–9) are probably unjustified. 12 Perhaps in both passages meaning the mayor as holder of royal power (see Semmler, ‘Traditio’, 4). 13 For this view of Flavigny formula no. 44 (MGH Form., 480–1) see Heidrich, ‘Titulatur’, 188–9. 14 15 aspicere is vague, however. Pertz, Dipl. I, dipl. mai. dom., no. 20. 16 As argued by Semmler (‘Traditio’, 5–6), from Pippin’s use (in accepting this commendation and that of Saint-Calais) of Marculf, additamenta, no. 2 (ed. Uddholm, pp. 354–6). This seems too clear-cut a view of what protection of property implied (cf. Marculf, i. 24: above, note 5), intended as well for a bishop as an 17 abbot. DKarol. no. 10; cf. no. 11, confirming all Honau’s property and previous privileges.

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their churches’.18 Behind this must be the Eticho ducal family’s decline, exposing Honau to Frankish greed from which only the Carolingians could protect it,19 with the accompanying risk of their giving it in benefice, which they now in effect promise not to do. There is no assertion of royal dominium here. That pilgrim monks’ possessions are ‘the king’s own’ means only that they are to be sought out and got back for the church by royal ministers as if they were the king’s.20 Pippin’s grant of immunity had affirmed the abbot’s lordship over the possessions in the standard way.21 However, the basic change in this period is precisely that an abbot’s lordliness and potestas, the immunity of his monastic property, and even his power of designation if this is allowed,22 are no longer incompatible with being under lordship:23 and this is what Dubhan’s commendation to Pippin could easily come to mean. In much the same way when Pippin had just become king, Sigobald, abbot of Saint-Calais—following the fall of the family that had lately controlled Le Mans24—‘of his own power commended into our hand’ himself, his congregation, and their property, and was taken ‘into our mundeburd’, while the monks were to live ‘under our mundeburd and defence’.25 However, the next abbot felt the need to seek royal defence again from the same king,26 and the resulting diploma was confirmed word for word by Charlemagne for each of the two following abbots.27 This seems to imply that Sigobald’s original commendation was seen as personal and temporary; certainly it did not amount to a traditio. Yet it cannot have been purely personal—simply fixing up Pippin and Sigobald as lord and man: he commended the congregation and property as well as himself, and the response included the injunction to elect ex semetipsis. Probably some emergency in 760 made it desirable to get defence renewed (the special promise of help from the young Charles suggests this), while later each abbot wanted one in his own

18 Ibid. I no. 77 (773). Honau was nearer to belonging to its abbots than to its Eticho founders and protectors (above, pp. 117, 129). 19 See Vollmer, ‘Die Etichonen’, in Tellenbach (ed.), Grossfra¨nk. Adels, 151–2. 20 Cf. (later) below, pp. 256–8. The privilege is anyhow odd and probably worked over (DKarol., p. 111). 21 22 Dubhan and his successors ipsas res valeant dominare. See above, p. 183. 23 In DKarol. no. 173 (787), that the abbots of Aniane sub integre emunitatis nomine . . . valeant dominare is compatible with Aniane being put into the king’s defensio et dominatio ad regendum. See Sickel, Beitra¨ge, III. 24 209–10. Semmler, ‘Potestas’, 359–60. 25 DKarol. no. 2 (752); see Havet, Oeuvres I. 141–2. Semmler interprets this as he does Honau’s (above, note 16). 26 DKarol. no. 14 (760); abbot Nectarius had asked for Pippin’s tuitio and his son Charles’s mundeburd (Charles had undertaken the abbot’s and monastery’s ‘cause’, much as an earlier mayor might have done). 27 DKarol. nos. 62, 128 (771, 779); the clause about the king’s son’s mundeburd is mechanically reproduced (ed., ibid. 90, 178). The diplomas are open to doubt, being part of the collection made for use at Verberie (Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 29); but see Goffart, Forgeries, 79 n. 143.


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name28 (perhaps because of persistent claims by the bishops). By 863, when Charles the Bald successfully claimed the monastery at Verberie, it must have been by his ancestors’ defence diplomas that he showed hereditary right going back to his great-grandfather;29 and it is difficult to believe with Goffart that no such implication had been found in the diplomas before that,30 through all the years of the abbey being given as a benefice by Charlemagne and Louis, or intermittently enjoying free election by their concession.31 If the king’s dominium was hazy in 752, it may be in Charlemagne’s time that it became clear.32 For the Carolingians’ own family foundations early in the century the phrases ‘dominatio and defence’, ‘mundeburdis and defence’, and later ‘potestas and defence’,33 seem to be interchangeable. By Charlemagne’s time these terms are used in such apparently random combinations as to suggest tautology—that tutela, tuitio, mundeburdium, defensio, dominium, dominatio, and potestas overlap and shade into each other.34 It is fairly clear that the ‘protection’ words have been pulled in the direction of the ‘dominion’ words, rather than the reverse. They are fluid and many-layered, difficult to translate into a modern language. Potestas could certainly mean the practical ability to enforce authority, which must be implied in protection; but it could also mean the power over men and things that constituted the property-right of the time; while dominium had for the Romans been a standard word for property-right and still kept that meaning, however strongly coloured by personal authority. But there would always be more than a touch of ‘defence’ in outside lordship over a great church, as over a quasi-person (in principle quite distinct from lordship over the abbot personally, as senior over fidelis). Probably under Pippin, and certainly under Charlemagne, royal defence is no longer something that any substantial church might enjoy now and again.35 No defence privilege was granted by these two, it seems, except in response to an explicit commendation36—not a mere request for help—or occasionally after a traditio (though defence might then often be taken for granted).37 If commendation and 28 Havet, Oeuvres, I. 148, 151. Sickel, Beitra¨ge (III. 212–13) inferred from this case that such commendation 29 always had to be renewed, but see Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 59 n. 1. Above, pp. 218–21. 30 31 Forgeries, 143 and n. 40. See below, pp. 250–1, 255. 32 Another monastery possibly commended to Pippin, not by its abbot but by its lay founders, is Tegernsee in Bavaria (DOII no. 192); cf. Glo¨ckner on Wissembourg (‘Anfa¨nge’, 44). 33 The first two phrases appear in Echternach’s diplomas, the second in Susteren’s (equally committed to Pippin’s heirs’ lordship), the third in Pru¨m’s (above, pp. 223–4). 34 See Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 8 and nn. 35 It may sometimes mean the Carolingians’ general protection of church lands, but in question here is defence granted by diploma to particular churches. 36 This would cover Fulda, if Sturm’s reconciliation (765; above, p. 223) amounted to commending himself, and if Pippin’s command that Sturm ‘seek his causa and the monastery’s defence from no one but the king’ amounted to a defence grant (Eigil, Vita Sturmi, c. 20). 37 Above, note 2; Semmler, ‘Iussit princeps’, 103–4 and n. 10. However, without a defence privilege a monastery might (as later) be more exposed to alienation: those given away by Charlemagne did not have defence privileges (Felten, A¨bte, 192).

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traditio were the alternative grounds for a defence grant,38 this strongly suggests that commendation too, by now, put a monastery into the king’s dominium. Under Charlemagne occasional commendations of monasteries were still made alongside the new practice of traditio, and continued under Louis the Pious.39 It is not clear whether, by Charlemagne’s time, commendation differed at all in its outcome from traditio, and if not, why the two different forms were still used. When Gundeland of Lorsch is reported as ‘conveying the monastery . . . and commending its congregation’,40 this looks like a single act described from two angles, the use of two verbs being hardly significant.41 Lesne thought the acts distinct (though having the same result) because their bases were different: an outside proprietor or a founder-abbot could convey a monastery as property, but other abbots could only commend themselves and their congregations (Gundeland as both abbot and proprietor doing both).42 But abbot Dubhan of Honau who commended himself and his monastery’s property to Pippin seems virtually an owner-abbot; and in Charlemagne’s time abbot Olomund seems no less the owner of Montolieu, which he commended, than Benedict was of Aniane which he gave or conveyed.43 It seems more likely that the two kinds of transaction had become alternative ways, neither of them standardized or very carefully worded, of acting out and recording what is virtually the same thing. In Louis’s reign the new kind of defence privilege (combining it with immunity) was often the response to a founder’s request for royal defence, which by now so clearly meant lordship that the request to Louis was equivalent to a traditio to Charlemagne; only the terminology of traditio, dominant in Charlemagne’s reign, is itself now virtually superseded.44 The equivalence is especially clear for Santa Grata in the Spanish march, taken by Louis in 823 ‘under our potestas, indeed our tuitio and domination’, the monks and property ‘to be our own’, at the request of the founder bishop Possedonius of Urgel45 (who Charles the Bald later says ‘conferred’ the monastery on his father).46 Louis the Pious, however, also gave immunity-defence privileges without mention of any traditio, commendation, or founder’s request; and gave it 38 Defence or protection could be included in an idiosyncratic jumble of benefits: for Hersfeld (above, at n. 77) falling within the general rule, but not for Saint-Denis and its new dependency Salonnes, 777 (in a peculiar context: Rosenwein, Space, 115–27, 130–1; text, 225–6, App. 3). 39 Almost all in the south: Caunes and Montolieu to Charlemagne (DKarol. no. 178, and below, n. 43); Cruas, Banõla, but also Saint-Maur-des-Fosses, to Louis (BM2 nos. 654, 759, 787). 40 Above, p. 226. 41 To convey something seen at one level as a person comes close to commendation, while the verb tradere appears along with commendare in personal commendations. 42 43 Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 55–9, 59 n. 1. Above pp. 129, 231–2; PL 104. 1031–2; above, 225–6. 44 See Semmler, ‘Traditio’, 6–8. Tradere may have been used under Louis only for St Chinian, which the founder-abbot per cartulam traditionis nobis ad proprium tradidit (826, HL II. Pr. no. 71). 45 46 PL 104. 1125. contulit (844, ACII no. 45).


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furthermore to rich and ancient monasteries that had been as autonomous as a monastery could be, and to bishoprics. Before this, immunity and defence (though perfectly compatible) were essentially separate, only rarely and recently combined in the same privilege;47 while episcopal churches regularly had immunity and never defence.48 In fact it was still true, before 814, that any great church might be given immunity but only those with a special relationship to the king could have his defence. The change under Louis the Pious is that the two almost invariably go together, as a grant of defensio immunitatis nostrae (not strictly ‘defence and immunity’ but ‘the defence of our immunity’); and it was in these terms that he confirmed Charlemagne’s privileges including some that were actually for immunity alone.49 The meaning of this will be discussed in a later chapter.

9.iv. Rulers in Lombard Italy and pre-Viking England In Lombard Italy it is no easier than in Merovingian Francia to show that monasteries founded by rulers were necessarily their property or under their special lordship,1 though a few were clearly treated as private property by rulers or their wives.2 In monasteries of any size and regular life, there is no certain evidence of their heads being appointed by Lombard kings or dukes, apart from the first head of a new foundation (and there may often have been little difference between a royal founder’s first abbot and a founder-abbot).3 Certainly kings’ daughters became abbesses, but not necessarily by straightforward appointment.4 Kings, like other Lombard founders, often specified that the abbot or abbess should be elected, perhaps as in Francia sometimes more an injunction than a licence.5 47

On their beginning to come together see Rosenwein, Space, 111–12, 115–18. DKarol. no. 78, for Chur, was not for the bishopric as such but for ‘rector and people’, of Rhaetia (see Clavadetscher, ‘Einfuhrung’, 78–81). 49 We seldom have both Charles’s diploma and Louis’s (superseding) confirmation of it (Sickel, Beitra¨ge, III. 231–5). 1 Voigt argued that Bobbio in 613 was kept as royal property, king Agilulf’s precept giving Columbanus merely ‘licence to inhabit and possess’ the place (Ko¨nigl. Ekl., 30–5). ‘Licence to inhabit’ might indeed suggest that Agilulf simply settled holy men on his land; but ‘to possess’ is not contrasted with property; Agilulf goes on to ‘grant’ the lands ‘to your church of St Peter and to you . . . to be possessed for ever’ (CDL III no. 1); cf. king Adaloald’s confirmation (ibid., nos. 2–3); see Bru¨hl, Ko¨nigsurkunden, 19–32. 2 Queen Ansa gave Sestuno to Farfa and other monasteries to her foundation S. Salvatore, Brescia, keeping lifetime potestas in them (CDL III no. 14; Voigt, EKl., 26–9, 122–4). 3 Farfa was perhaps founded by a late 7th-c. duke and given to its first abbot Thomas (a Frank), coming under royal control later (Voigt, EKl., 46–50); at Monte Amiata, Erfo (from Friuli; see index: Erfo) was almost an independent founder-abbot given fisc for the purpose (CDL III nos. 21, 29: spurious, but see 4 Bru¨hl, op. cit., 140–5). Voigt, EKl., 112–13. 5 Ibid. 112–16. Thus king Desiderius required that a suitable abbess be chosen for S. Salvatore, Brescia (760, CDL III no. 14); but Liutprand (739, at the duke’s fall) gave Farfa ‘licence’ to elect next time; as did Desiderius after turning out Wigbert (above, p. 184). 48

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But churches including what seem to be real monasteries were being put by their founders (or taken with their agreement) into the defence or mundium of kings, or the audientia—jurisdiction, obedience—of a ducal palace, in ways that soon amount to recognizing or creating a proprietary lordship, rather earlier than any clear-cut commendations or conveyances to Frankish mayors or kings.6 Early in the eighth century an abbot Zacharias was given land from the Beneventan fisc for his foundation at Ponticello, with full power in his lifetime to ‘do what he wishes with the possessions and monastery’ and to appoint a priest or (later) abbot there, who was, however, to be in the palace’s obedience after Zacharias’s death; in the 740s duke Gisulf II made it more explicit that this applied to the monastery itself.7 In 743 Gisulf recognized that a monastery at Massano was currently in its builder’s dispositio, and laid down (as, by implication, the builder had ‘disposed’) that it should be in its present abbot’s potestas and remain ‘under the dispositio of our palace’, eventually with elected abbots appointed ‘by our ordinatio’.8 In both these cases—and for other, more clearly non-monastic churches—there seems to be a stage of being in the palace’s audientia but not yet in the duke’s full power. Ditio or potestas, liberum arbitrium (judgment, decision-making) or libertas arbitrii, are left for the time being to the founder or his appointed head: to Zacharias at Ponticello, or the abbot of Massano;9 to the successive priests of the church of S. Gregorio founded by a religious woman, Felicity;10 or much earlier, to the priests of the baptismal church of S. Felice, Luogosano (whose founder Magnus had in his time ‘defended it by the palace’—presumably resorted to the palace for defence of his rights—‘in his own right and dominion’).11 It seems clear, however, that future abbots’ or priests’ arbitrium—even a founder’s lifetime power—was limited and subordinate,12 their audientia at the palace amounting all along to being under ducal lordship. Their ‘liberty’ was primarily freedom from the bishop, which positively depended on obedience to the palace, in a setting where authority and proprietary lordship (duke’s or bishop’s) were not just closely related, as everywhere, but barely distinguishable.13 In the 760s lawsuit about S. Felice, Luogosano, the disputed audientia could equally be called 6

See Voigt, EKl., 39–43. CDL IV. ii nos. 10, 12, 17, 23–4 (723–4, 742, 744–5. No. 23 mentions monks, and abbot rather than priest). CDL IV. ii no. 20. 9 Probably also, while he lived, to ‘the late abbot Garoin’ whose foundation duke Arichis II declared in 769 to be in the palace’s obedience and ‘in our potestas ordinandi’ (ibid., no. 49). 10 Ibid., no. 42; above, p. 64 note 127. 11 Above, pp. 86–7. Magnus ‘ordained’ his own priest there, and gave it to the palace reserving lifelong dominion. 12 S. Felice, Luogosano, had had a priest or abbot expelled by ducal order, which was cited as evidence of ‘obeying’ the palace. 13 Duke Arichis’s assertion of lordship over Garoin’s foundation (above, note 9) was elicited by the current abbot’s request for confirmation of absolutio (see index). 7

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dominium.14 And whatever the dukes’ lordship amounted to, it was at their disposal: they gave these churches away, often to their own great monastery S. Sofia Benevento.15 When the duchy was divided in 849, its monasteries and their lands could be described simply as ‘belonging to the palace’.16 In Spoleto the equivalent of the Beneventan audientia seems to be ‘defence’, and this too seems by the later eighth century to amount to potestas: in 777 S. Angelo, Rieti, was claimed for the duke as belonging to the ius et defensio of the palace, while the bishop disputed its ever having belonged to the palace’s ius et potestas.17 In the rest of the kingdom the equivalent terms are defence and mundium. As early as 714, the founder of S. Maria Senatoris in Pavia wished it to ‘have’ the ruler’s defence, though the outcome is uncertain;18 in the middle of the century S. Pietro Somaldi at Lucca came somehow to king Aistulf—perhaps commended to his defence—and was given away by him to an individual, it seems as disposable property.19 There is no clear equivalence however until 772, when S. Maria, Cremona, was the king’s to dispose of to S. Salvatore, Brescia, to be in the greater monastery’s potestas et defensio as it had been in the mundium et potestas of the royal palace: this in consequence of its being destined by its founder Emisoind for the palace’s mundium after his wife Arelda’s and daughter’s deaths, and later put into the palace’s ‘defence’ by Arelda and her sons.20 So what was on the face of it Emisoind’s commendation into defence was effectively a conveyance with usufruct reserved, probably similar in purpose to the frequent Lombard grants of lesser churches to greater ones—the wish to secure the founder’s endowments and fulfil his intentions.21 The identification of mundium with property-right for S. Maria, Cremona, was seen by Voigt as marking a change. In his view they were distinct in the middle of the century, when king Aistulf forbade the practice of exacting double compensation (as enacted for royal possessions) for monasteries, basilicas, and xenodochia ‘in the defence of the sacred palace’: they were rather to be compensated in the same way as others not belonging to the palace.22 Voigt took this to show that monasteries only in royal defence had to be distinguished from those that were royal property.23 But the need to legislate in this way suggests the contrary: that 14

Above, pp. 86–7. For Ponticello a ducal donation is a matter of inference (ed. note, CDL IV. ii no. 24). 17 Divisio ducatus, c. 4 (MGH Leges in folio, IV. 222). Below, pp. 776–7. 18 CDL I no. 18. In 729 both king and pope are said to have taken it into their protection (ibid., no. 54); clear royal lordship appears under the Carolingians. 19 Above, p. 56 note 63. 20 CDL III no. 42; see Bru¨hl, Ko¨nigsurkunden, 202. On the family’s anxiety see Kurze, ‘Monasteri’, 346–7. 21 Above, pp. 52–3. 22 Aistulf 17 (MGH Leges in folio, IV. 202), referring to Rothari 369 (ibid. 85–6). 23 EKl., 68–72, 92–5 (to Voigt, royal defence and royal ownership were compatible, not identical). But Aistulf 17 uses alia, not cetera: not ‘like the rest of those that do not belong to the palace’, but ‘like others, which do not belong to the palace’. 15

16

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monasteries in the palace’s defence were considered to be royal possessions like royal estates, and the consequences of this assimilation had to be limited (because monasteries could litigate for themselves).24 Whether monasteries could really be the ruler’s exploitable possessions as his estates were, rather than being lordships subject to outside lordship, is another matter: perhaps a perception rather than an objective fact.25 There is some scanty evidence that monasteries owed hospitality, as one would expect; but probably limited by custom, and perhaps owed by all substantial monasteries, to rulers as such.26 This, and other traditional services or gifts for which there are scraps of evidence, are incompatible with really being the ruler’s exploitable property. The Frankish conquerors seem to have assumed that any monastery would be in somebody’s mundium, and probably that this amounted to being in his property or lordship: closely following the conquest Charlemagne decreed for ‘monasteries . . . known to be in the palace’s mundium or the bishop’s or that of other men’, that ‘everyone in whose mundium they are should compel them to live regularly’.27 On this a later gloss reads ‘mundio id est dominio’; this identification would probably have been acceptable at the time.28 Another capitulary of Charlemagne’s decreed that anyone wishing to possess a monastery or xenodochium that was ‘royal’ must have it by the king’s benefice.29 This is not to say that the Frankish king’s claims were restricted to what had belonged to the Lombard kings: a number of private foundations were disposed of as royal benefices in the ninth century, having been claimed or assumed by the fisc on grounds that we can only guess at30—just as in conquered Bavaria not only ducal but some nobles’ foundations were claimed by Charlemagne.31 But the great prizes, whether for their wealth and prestige or for their strategic position, were the old monasteries founded certainly or probably by kings or dukes. Queen Ansa’s nunnery of S. Salvatore, Brescia, became the preserve of Carolingian queens and princesses; Farfa, Monte Amiata, and Nonantula, like Kremsmu¨nster 24 This capacity to litigate and make transactions applies equally to monasteries that Voigt did recognize as Eigenklo¨ster (EKl., 108–10, 133–4). 25 See below, pp. 258–63, on the Frankish church. 26 Bru¨hl, ‘Fodrum’, 382–3, 388–92, and nn. 202–4; Voigt, EKl., 141–9; Schmid, ‘Anselm’, 29. 27 Capit. no. 91 c. 3 (782–7); see Sickel, Beitra¨ge, III. 243. Throughout this book, dates for capitularies differing from the dates in Capit. are from de Clercq (Le´gislation, I. 379–81) or Mordek (Bibliotheca, 1079–111). 28 Stutz’s claim (‘Kapitel’, 31–2) that this mundium was for abbots, monks, and clergy, not for the churches themselves, turned on believing that a church as an object of property could not enjoy defence. 29 Capit. no. 95 (787?), c. 6; accepting Sickel’s reading (Beitra¨ge, V. 316 n. 2), not ut regales sint, et (nor ut regulares sint, et) but et regales sunt. 30 S. Pietro, Pistoia, was explicitly claimed for the fisc against S. Bartolomeo (806, Manaresi no. 19). But of S. Bartolomeo we learn first that it was given in benefice (not necessarily on any legal ground) to a Bavarian, restored by 812 to its own abbot but subject to the new burden of military service (Manaresi no. 25). See Fischer, Ko¨nigtum, 190. 31 e.g. Metten (Lexicon fu¨r Theol. und Kirche, vii. 376); Otting (Fastlinger, Bedeutung, 61).


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in Bavaria,32 were marked down as imperial possessions by Charlemagne’s and Louis the Pious’s grants of defence or immunity-defence.33 In much of the West, including Italy, the dealings of Carolingian rulers with abbeys and bishoprics largely determined those of their successors, whether kings, dukes, or counts. In England, despite the powerful Carolingian model, substantially different patterns emerged. Royal authority was crucial to the organizing of dioceses and endowment of minsters; but English kings before the tenth century seem not to have had or needed any policy of establishing formal royal defence and lordship of great churches. Probably all were subject to the public burdens of sending men on military service or for road or bridge work;34 these did not mark out royal from noble foundations. Hospitality, too, was probably expected by kings from substantial minsters whoever had founded them.35 A few minster churches were important to kings as their burial-places (SS. Peter and Paul at Canterbury for Kent; Whitby for the Northumbrians; Repton and later Winchcombe for the Mercians),36 and no doubt these could be relied on to choose a head acceptable to the king or to accept a head chosen by him. But no more than contemporary Merovingian kings, or Lombard rulers later, can English kings of the seventh century be shown to have appointed abbots other than the first, and even the first may be nearer a founder-abbot than an appointed one.37 Certainly kings’ widows and daughters became abbesses in illustrious double monasteries, sometimes where their fathers or brothers were buried; but this need not imply overt ‘appointment’, nor even necessarily that the monastery was seen as royal or family property. An individual royal abbess might have founded her own monastery on bookland given her by her husband, father, or brothers; and there she might designate a sister or (as other widow-abbesses did) a daughter, or be able to rely on election having the same outcome. The nunnery of Ely was founded by Aetheldreda, daughter of king Anna of the East Angles and wife of king Egfrith of Northumbria, on land perhaps given her by her 32 Kremsmu¨nster’s Carolingian diplomas contrast sharply with duke Tassilo’s of 777 (see suggested reconstruction by Fichtenau, ‘Die Urkunden Herzog Tassilos III’, MIO¨G 71 (1963), 31–2). 33 Farfa (BM2 nos. 187–8, 591–2), Monte Amiata (ibid. no. 639), Nonantula (ibid., lost charters nos. 361, 363, 368, 370). See Fischer, Ko¨nigtum, 176–80; Wollasch, Mo¨nchtum, 19; Semmler, ‘Karl der Grosse’, 274–6. 34 i.e. the inhabitants of their bookland remained subject to these (above, p. 34 note 8). The passage in Theodore’s Penitential, I. iii. 1 (C&ED III. 179), on ‘human service’ is not relevant here (as Eric John read it, Orbis, 68): it prescribes submission to ‘human’ servitude as a possible penance for abducting a monk. 35 See Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 134–7. The monastery of abbess Eangyth and her daughter, whose troubles (above, p. 160 note 74) included the servitium of kings, queens, bishops, and royal officials, was clearly not ‘royal’. 36 H. M. Taylor, ‘Repton Reconsidered’, in Clemoes and Hughes (eds.), England Before the Conquest (Cambridge, 1971), 353; S. Bassett, ‘A Probable Mercian Royal Mausoleum at Winchcombe’, Antiq. Jnl., 65 37 (1985). See above, pp. 123, 153–4.

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first husband, underking of the South Gyrwe;38 she was succeeded there by her sister Sexburg, widow of king Earconbert of Kent, and she by her daughter Ermenhild, widow or ex-wife of king Wulfhere of the Mercians—both allegedly elected by the nuns. Sexburg meanwhile had founded her own monastery at Sheppey in Kent and had by implication set it under Ermenhild, who on moving to Ely ‘appointed her daughter Werburg in her place’ as abbess of Sheppey; Werburg may have succeeded her mother at Ely.39 But the line of widowed queens and their daughters had now ended, after an unusually long run.40 Behind these successions there must indeed be strong family interests in putting a king’s widow or daughter out of reach of marriage, or providing security for her, or both; but the interests or intrigues of more than one royal family are interwoven, and it seems to be through the women’s individual property (probably as holders of bookland) that these interests work.41 Ermenhild was one of three ‘distinguished abbesses’ present when king Wihtred of Kent, in 699, freed all Kentish minsters from ‘public tribute’ and other ‘cost or injury’ while reserving for himself the ‘honour and obedience’ that his predecessors enjoyed.42 It may be that all Kentish minsters were founded by kings; but there is no hint that the ‘honour and obedience’ they owed (any more than the ‘tribute’ they were released from) was seen as a founder’s juridical right,43 or implied formal control of the choice of abbess. Nor is this evident half a century later when Boniface accused king Aethelbald of taking away church revenues and imposing ‘violence and servitude’ on monks and priests.44 This suggests burdens of service or hospitality rather than oppressive appointments;45 and Boniface’s letter to archbishop Cuthbert speaks of kings and other laymen making themselves the rulers of monasteries in the abbot’s place,46 rather than imposing appointed abbots.

38 But see S. Ridyard, ‘Post-Conquest Attitudes to the Saints of the Anglo-Saxons’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 9 (1987), 186 and n. 47. 39 Bede, HE iv. 17; Liber Eliensis i. 15, 17–18, 24–5, 36–7. See Rigold, ‘The ‘‘Double Minsters’’ of Kent’, 30–4. 40 Werburg evidently ended her career back in Mercia as abbess of several monasteries, and was revered principally there (see Thacker, ‘Kings, Saints’, 4). 41 Rigold’s point (above, note 39) that the richest nunneries’ endowments were ‘a means of securing large sections of the royal domain’ for the future would hold good only if the royal family’s hold on the minster itself were secure and the abbesses amenable. See Blair, Church, 143–4 on some 7th-c. royal abbesses: ‘astute politicians who fended off royal and noble encroachers on monastic lands’; P. Stafford, ‘The King’s Wife in Wessex 800–1066’ (P&P, 10–23). 42 Kelly (ed.), St Augustine’s, no. 10 (S 20; authentic apart from regnal year and indiction). 43 This implication appears only in the ‘Bapchild’ privilege, evidently a 9th-c. forgery (below, at 44 note 48). Epist. Sel., I no. 73 (p. 152); trans., EHD I no. 177. 45 See Aethelbald’s charter of 749 (C&ED III. 386–7); Sims-Williams, Religion, 135; Blair, Church, 121–2. 46 sibi . . . rapiat monasterium de potestate episcopi vel abbatis vel abbatissae, et incipiat ipse vice abbatis regere et habere sub se monachos et pecuniam possidere (Epist. Sel., I no. 78; C&ED III. 381–2). Cf. Clofesho 747 c. 5 (ibid. 364) on ‘monasteries held by seculars’.


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By the ninth century kings were clearly making abbots or abbesses; yet in 816 the council of Chelsea’s unusual insistence on the bishops’ role in choosing abbots and abbesses may have been directed against choices made ‘for love or reward or kinship’ by predecessors designating or communities electing, as much as against nominations by kings.47 The ‘Bapchild’ privilege, probably forged for the dispute that immediately followed,48 did indeed assert that it was not for kings to appoint abbots and abbesses; but when it has king Wihtred undertake that no lay person should acquire dominium in a church or monastery, but rather an abbot or abbess be chosen with the bishop’s (or archbishop’s) advice, dominium seems to mean abbacy (in England dominus sometimes means abbot);49 and the preamble’s ‘secular man’, taking ‘as if his own possession’ things given to God, sounds like a head, not an outside lord. Some years before this we see that it might be the monks’ own choice that set them under a secular or lay ‘lord’ in this sense. At Clofesho in 803 archbishop Aethelhard published a mandate of pope Leo III’s that monasteries ‘should not presume to choose themselves lay or secular lords over the Lord’s inheritance’, and enjoined them to keep their Rule in this matter, as laid down by papal privileges or canon law or even by their ‘own possessors’ (these last being, perhaps, founders or owner-abbots of the past who in a boc had specified the succession of a religious or a priestly heir).50 In 838 it emerges that such an elected lay lord or abbot might be the king himself, the monks’ choice being a kind of commendation to him. When matters in dispute between the archbishop and the now dominant West Saxon kings were settled at Kingston,51 king Aethelwulf was to keep his hold for his lifetime on ‘free monasteries anciently established under the ius and dominium of abbots and abbesses’,52 whose familiae had chosen him or his father king Egbert ‘for protection and for dominium’, provided that they also have the bishop as ‘spiritual lord’;53 but after Aethelwulf’s time these minsters were to have free election of suitable and qualified heads, which neither king nor bishop would dispute.54 Evidently the monks’ or nuns’ commendation to the king’s protection had amounted to electing him abbot, or instead of an abbot; 47 Chelsea c. 4 (ibid. 580–1; cf. the obscure and ungrammatical c. 8). For the council and its background see Brooks, Canterbury, 175–82; Cubitt, Councils, 191–203; Blair, Church, 123–4. 48 C&ED III. 238–9. See Brooks, Canterbury, 180–6, 191–7; Scharer, Ko¨nigsurkunde, 100–2. On the dispute (over Reculver and Minster-in-Thanet: above, p. 199) see Brooks, A.S. Myths, 119 (Cenwulf’s appropriation 49 looks like a test case). John, ‘Secularium prioratus’, 216–19. 50 C&ED III. 545–6. The wording belongs to the English context (see Brooks, Canterbury, 179). 51 C&ED III. 617–18; Brooks, Canterbury, 197–200. 52 What made these monasteries ‘free’ may be simply having had abbots or abbesses, or that these had been elected. 53 Something like ‘and who have by their own will set up spiritual lords, that is the bishops, along with me’. Grammar and syntax are shaky enough (see Brooks, Canterbury, 198, whose suggested translation I only partly follow) to allow this passage to be stating a condition. 54 For the 838 accord as a ‘sell-out’ see Blair, Church, 132.

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which perhaps in eighth- or ninth-century England was no different from making the monastery his property (until he gave it away, or designated an heir there, or allowed an election). In Alfred’s will his request that the familia of Cheddar ‘choose’ his son Edward, as already agreed, probably has this meaning; while his wish that Damerham not only ‘choose the lord they prefer’ but ‘be given back their landbooks’ suggests that he has himself been their ‘lord’ in this intimate sense.55 So it begins to look as if in England a king’s sharpest property-right in monasteries consisted not in appointing but in being (or displacing) the abbot.56 The monastery could thus become a point on his itinerary, where he and his household would not merely be entertained but could live for a while on accumulated food-renders and estate produce, much like a lordly abbot with a large lay following and several monasteries;57 while the visits of a still-married queen to monasteries in her possession might hardly differ from those of a widowed queen as abbess.58 Nonetheless, the power to make abbots or abbesses seems to be being asserted and safeguarded by the dominant Mercian kings in the later eighth century. In 781 king Offa got the council of Brentford to restore to him the monastery of Bath, described as part of king Aethelbald’s inheritance, unjustly held by the bishop of Worcester ‘without hereditary right’: that is, probably, without a boc, or with a boc only from the underkings of the Hwicce.59 Bath was to be Offa’s ‘to have or . . . to grant to whomever he thought fit, and always to be enjoyed by his rightful heirs’.60 Taken in isolation, this might be aimed simply at stability for the monastery. His heirs at Bath need not be his successors in the kingdom (at Cookham his ‘heir’ was his widow Cynethryth);61 nor need they even be his descendants—they might simply be the successive abbots, who could be designated by their predecessor or elected by the monks yet still be Offa’s ‘heirs’.62 Indeed the immediate future of Bath might support the view that Offa wanted it freed from the bishop rather than formally subjected to himself. But it seems likely that his intentions were more aggressive than this.63 The king who took and kept Cookham abbey without having its charters, rejecting 55

EHD I no. 96 (at 493, 495). This must relate to secularization of actual sites, including Cheddar: see Blair, Church, 324–9. 56 Cf. Frankish rulers (below, pp. 266–7), including Charles the Bald (Aethelwulf’s father-in-law, and possibly in this respect model). 57 This would fit Blair’s argument (Church, 264–90) that minsters—increasingly exploited, even annexed—were becoming royal centres, rather than vice versa (on the whole). 58 Offa’s widow Cynethryth was perhaps abbess of Bedeford and Pectanege (CS no. 291, S 1258) as well as 59 of Cookham. Above, p. 205; and see Sims-Williams, Religion, 159–61. 60 CS no. 241 (S 1258). 61 See note 64, below. Cenwulf’s daughter Cwenthryth was called his ‘heir’ as abbess of Reculver and Minster-in-Thanet (CS no. 384, S 1436), and was probably also abbess and his heir at Winchcombe (below, 62 note 75). Cf. above, pp. 131–2. 63 See Blair, Church, 121–34, on the growing exploitation of minsters.


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repeated pleas from Canterbury which had them,64 must have had some harder and colder control there than natural deference or family feeling. Yet this cuts both ways: what he had at Cookham may not have been a firm outside lordship with the power to appoint, but rather the kind of direct exploitation that Boniface had complained of in Aethelbald’s time: ‘ruling instead of an abbot, having monks under him and possessing its wealth’.65 He may have let his wife have it all, perhaps in the sense of eating up its produce on regular visits with her household; though only later as a widow could she be its actual abbess (in which capacity she was near enough its owner to be able to buy out the archbishop and keep it for herself). However, had Offa wanted Cookham simply for a mother, daughter, or niece he could have given it her for life only.66 It seems to be a permanent, hereditary lordship of monasteries that was legitimated for him at the highest level, when pope Hadrian I (772–95) confirmed the ditio of monasteries that Offa had built or acquired, with all their belongings, not only to him but to his wife Cynethryth and the genealogia of his children for ever.67 His successor king Cenwulf obtained a similar privilege from Paschal I for monasteries he might wish to give to his own future heirs.68 Both privileges had originally annexed to them a list of the monasteries concerned, but neither list survives. Cenwulf already had a privilege from Leo III,69 that for all the monasteries he had legitimately acquired or inherited in all England he should have ‘free power to give them to whomever he wished, whether to religious places70 or to any persons’. At the same time this privilege for Cenwulf gave special protection to all churches and estates belonging to ‘the monastery where your body is to be buried’. This was Winchcombe, founded by Offa (or by kings of the Hwicce before him), but more largely endowed by Cenwulf,71 and sufficiently Cenwulf’s own for him to have forbidden any ‘heir’ of his to alienate any of its property for longer than one life.72 It is, however, not totally clear that these papal privileges refer to putting in abbots or abbesses, rather than taking their place; still less envisage the king’s heirs as future kings, rather than as actual abbots or abbesses. And the ‘heirs’ whose potential alienations Cenwulf wished to prevent were not his successors;73 64

65 Above, p. 206. Above, note 46 (pecunia here might be cattle, or movables generally). As did bishops, or laymen arranging reversions to bishops (above, pp. 205–6). 67 Liber diurnus, no. 93 (ed. Fo¨rster, pp. 172–3): formula for a privilege, identified as for Offa by the chance preservation of the proper name ‘Cynedrida’. On this and what follows see Levison, England, 29–32, 251–9; Brooks, Canterbury, 185–6. 68 . . . posteris heredibus . . . largire maluerit (CS no. 363, preserved in fragmentary form in a Winchcombe cartulary). 69 CS no. 337, regarded by Levison (England, 255) as basically genuine with gaps and misreadings. 70 71 Reading in piis locis for impiis locis. See Sims-Williams, Religion, 165–7. 72 This prohibition is probably the one genuine passage in the so-called foundation charter, C&ED III. 572–4 (ibid. 575; Levison, England, 253–9). 73 Cf. the minster at Bredon (Glos.): if CS no. 236 (S 116) is authentic, Offa intended lands that he gave it (780) to remain always in the dominium and potestas of his parentela and cognatio, by heirs ‘justly 66

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when the same concern was dealt with at the council of Chelsea in 816, it was ‘bishops, abbots, or abbesses’ who were forbidden to alienate;74 Cenwulf’s heirs at Winchcombe (who ignored or forgot his ban) were its abbesses.75 The same ambiguity, not helped by our dependence on a twice-translated version, is present in one further papal privilege, pope Leo III’s in 798 confirming the monastery of Glastonbury, with its vast territories, to Cenwulf’s son Cynehelm and his successors, ‘to have it freely for ever’ on condition that lights, psalmody, and masses were maintained there.76 This privilege was corroborated by Cenwulf, and there subscribed by the abbess ‘Kynedrith’ (perhaps his daughter Cwenthryth)77 and two of her kinswomen, with a remarkable provision: ‘on this condition, that if after a time it happen that a man of another lineage (progenies) gets possession and potestas of the venerable place of Glastonbury, nonetheless Cynehelm and his successors shall remain in their liberty and perpetual peace, securely without any disturbance, and confidently.’78 This probably means that a different royal dynasty (whether Mercian or West Saxon) may get control of the region,79 and with it potentially of the monastery: Cwenthryth (if it is she) wishes her brother and his heirs to be nonetheless left in peace at Glastonbury, perhaps as abbots, on the strength of Leo’s privilege.80 Even so, the stage seems to be at least set for kings to dispose repeatedly and formally of the abbacies of particular monasteries that were their own by foundation or by acquisition. As in Francia earlier, this was a lordship built on escalating practical claims on monastic resources,81 not the other way round.

succeeding’: an expression suggesting family control and exploitation as abbots or instead of abbots. Offa in fact (781) let Bredon go to the bishopric of Worcester; CS 236 perhaps staked out Offa’s family claim in advance of the bargain about Bath (above, at notes 59–60). 74 c. 7 (C&ED III. 582). 75 897 settlement (CS no. 575, S 1442) shortening leases made by two successive abbesses—probably Cenwulf’s daughter (Levison, England, 251–2; Thacker, ‘Kings, Saints’, 10–11), followed by his niece—and citing Cenwulf’s requirement (above, at note 72) that ‘no heir after him’ may grant for more than one life ‘the inheritance of Cenwulf that belongs to Winchcombe’. Levison (England, 252, 257) sees the niece, Aelflaed, as apparently ‘heiress of this ‘‘hereditas’’ of formally ecclesiastical endowments’; on my view, heiress qua abbess. 76 William of Malmesbury’s translation back into Latin (in his De antiquitate Glastonie ecclesie) of an English translation of a genuine privilege, CS no. 284; ed. and trans. J. Scott, The Early History of Glastonbury (1981), cc. 49, 50. See Levison, England, 32; Edwards (ed.), WS Charters, 52–5; Thacker, ‘Kings, Saints’, 8–9. William’s introductory summary reads the privilege as giving libertas donacionis, the liberty of giving it to its abbots (by the 12th c. the only way to understand in perpetuum habendi). 77 Otherwise Offa’s widow Cynethryth (see Levison, England, 251); but it would be difficult to explain Offa’s widow’s interest in the matter. Of the kinswomen’s names (not unusual enough to be conclusive), 78 ‘Aelflaed’ suggests Cenwulf’s niece. CS no. 285; c. 51 of Scott’s edn. 79 Neither Cenwulf’s line nor Brihtric’s (king of the West Saxons who had evidently consented to the Mercian arrangement) can have looked secure, and the Mercian hold on Wessex was shaky. 80 Cynehelm (buried at Winchcombe, becoming St Kenelm) must have lost any hold he had on 81 Glastonbury. See notes 57, 63, above.

Part II

Lordship over higher churches, ninth to eleventh century


10 Kings and princes

The emergence of rulers’ explicit lordship over particular monasteries, considered in Chapter 9, is not in itself—at least in Francia—particularly obscure; but the character of this lordship is complex and elusive. This chapter discusses (mainly for Francia) how the idea of a royal abbey, and indeed of a bishopric, as something in the ruler’s gift was formalized and generalized; then how royal lordship was extended by the new idea of immunity-defence, and what this meant; moving on to how what was essentially lordship over lords—that is, over churches and their heads having their own lordships—was nonetheless shot through with strands of more proprietary practice and perception.

10.i. Higher churches as benefices In Frankish lands in the eighth century a Carolingian mayor or king could dispose of some bishoprics and abbeys as beneficia to his lay or clerical followers, servants, and relations, while some more-or-less elected abbots and even a bishop might be expressly required to be faithful to him.1 In the course of the ninth century this vocabulary seems to become general, so that bishops and the abbots or abbesses of royal monasteries were referred to as a king’s fideles and (though less often) their bishoprics or abbeys as beneficia.2 This has been seen as demonstrating ‘the coming together of benefice and vassalage’ and producing the ‘feudalized higher church’.3 We may reject the ‘feudal’ terminology, avoid ‘vassalage’ as (for great men) anachronistic, and recognize that ‘benefice’ had various meanings of which the basic one is simply a boon or a favour,4 and yet be left with something real going on. 1

Above, pp. 214–15; below, p. 295. See Felten, A¨bte und Laiena¨bte, 143–55, 162–6, on assimilation of abbots to bishops in their political role. 3 Ganshof, Qu’est-ce que la feódalite´?, trans. P. Grierson, Feudalism, 3rd edn. (London, 1964), provides the 4 classic summary. On all this see Reynolds, Fiefs, 84–6, 92–5, 104, 118–19. 2

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What this was depends partly on the meaning here of the word fidelis: someone in a special relationship to a personal lord, established by commending himself and promising fidelity, or simply ‘faithful subject’.5 Probably this depended on the context. Merely requiring monks or clergy to elect a prelate faithful to the king need not imply that he must go to commend himself and promise fidelity. However, bishops and abbots were among the great men whose fidelity as subjects was specially important and who would on occasion be required to commit themselves to it, as the emperor ordered for Charles the Bald in 837.6 And conflicting loyalties and interests arose so frequently in the Frankish world from Louis the Pious’s last years onwards that it perhaps became not just an occasional precaution or crisis measure but part of the routine for the accession of a new king,7 or for a king receiving a new bishop or abbot. Archbishop Hincmar’s letter of 858, from the bishops at Quierzy to Louis the German, used to be seen as attempting in vain to repudiate such personal dependence. But in its context (their holding back from submitting to Louis the German, while indicating ostensibly to him but effectively to Charles what attitude to the Church might win or keep their support)8 it was concerned rather to define their position: they are ‘not men of such a kind that they should commend themselves to anyone in vassalaticum’ (vassalage in its current sense would be beneath them, so they brand Louis’s demands as amounting to that); they should, however, commend themselves and their churches for defence and support.9 What a lord entrusted to a fidelis to administer was also what he granted him for his support: calling counties, bishoprics, or abbeys honores emphasized the former, calling them beneficia the latter.10 It is true that no individual bishopric is found called the bishop’s benefice in the ninth century, and that where an abbacy is called its holder’s benefice he is usually an unelected outsider.11 But the word was also being used much more generally, for bishoprics and abbeys in the mass. This becomes clear in Charles the Bald’s reign.12 Hincmar in his De ecclesiis et capellis speaks of ‘bishoprics and monasteries’ as being ‘benefices of the lord king’;13 while his letter from Quierzy in 858 does not deny that bishoprics are benefices at all (any more than it denies that bishops commend themselves): it says rather that ‘the churches . . . committed to us by God are not such benefices, 5

Reynolds, Fiefs, 88–9. Ann. Bert., s.a. 837 (ed. Grat, pp. 22–3); cf. s.a. 870 (pp. 170–1, on Hincmar of Laon). 7 Ibid., s.a. 877 (pp. 219–21), accession of Louis the Stammerer (bishops made an undertaking, abbots took an oath). See Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 86–8; Odegaard, Vassi, 59–63. 8 Conc. III no. 41 (at 408–27); see Devisse, Hincmar, 313–27. 9 Quierzy letter c. 15. See Odegaard, Vassi, 85–9. 10 See Lesne’s nuanced analyses, ‘Les Diverses Acceptions du mot Beneficium’ and ‘E´veˆche´ et Abbaye’. 11 e.g. bp. Aldric at Saint-Calais (Verberie, 863: ACII no. 258); Ansegis (below, note 35). 12 Already suggested, however, in 811 and perhaps 818/19 (Capit. nos. 80 c. 7, 141 c. 26). 13 ed. Stratmann, 84. The context was the bishops’ duty not to damage the property of bishoprics and monasteries, which God had entrusted to the king ‘to defend, and commend to suitable stewards’. 6

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nor the king’s property in such a way, that he can give them or take them away unadvisedly, at his pleasure’.14 Hincmar’s distinctions would have been unnecessary if ‘benefice’ were just an anodyne word for a favour. By this time—arguably by Charlemagne’s time—to give something in benefice evidently did imply that the giver had some property in it, not just that he has been able to secure it for the beneficiary. Charlemagne for Saint-Goar and Mettlach, and now Charles the Bald for Saint-Calais,15 use the fact of having given the thing in benefice as evidence for their property-right or lordship. This does not mean that the beneficiary holds it ‘as a mere tenant’ (still less that the church itself holds its possessions in any dependent way): while he has it, it is his; but in a limited and contingent way, with the ruler’s right in the background. That ‘benefice’ had no fixed technical meaning as a class of dependent land tenure does not diminish the significance of a vocabulary that represented bishoprics and abbeys generally as things given by the king,16 so that even the elected regular abbot or more-or-less canonically elected bishop could be said to hold his church or office by the king’s gift. Meanwhile insistence on the prelate’s fidelity,17 combined with the ruler’s responsibility for reform, sharpened the need for the ruler’s consent to elections18 and began to make election privileges desirable for bishoprics as well as monasteries.19 This reinforced the idea that he ‘appointed’ prelates even if they were elected,20 and might justifiably depose them: acts also seen as ‘giving’ and ‘taking away’ the bishopric or monastery.21 In Louis’s time Paschasius Radbert has Wala complain ‘that bishoprics . . . are not properly given nor is election maintained’:22 evidently they will be ‘given’ in any case, properly or not. In the 817 partition between his sons, Louis decreed that Pippin and Louis should each ‘enjoy his own potestas in distributing all honores’ within his part of the kingdom, provided that in giving bishoprics and abbeys ‘ecclesiastical order’ is maintained.23 14

15 Above, note 8. Above, pp. 216–17, 218–21. ´ See Lesne, ‘Eveˆche´’, 30, 39–41, 45–7. Stutz’s view that abbeys and bishoprics were not yet royal benefices (‘Lehen’, 234) was based on rigidly ‘feudal’ criteria. 17 In monastic election privileges (above, pp. 183–6) and the earliest episcopal one (below, p. 295, 183–6); virtually dropped from such privileges after Charlemagne, when the elect had in any case to come and profess or swear fidelity. 18 e.g. Hersfeld no. 29 (Louis the Pious, 820). Louis’s group grant of election privilege to selected monasteries (819) left them still needing leave to elect on each occasion (Lesne, ‘Ordonnances’, 325–9, esp. 329 n. 2). 19 e.g. ACarloman, no. 71 and p. cxiv (883, Orleans); DKIII, nos. 119, 131 (885, Chalon-sur-Saoˆne, Paderborn). 20 e.g. Louis the Pious ‘appoints’ (constituimus) an abbot for Noirmoutier ‘from among themselves’ (830 diploma, below, p. 270 note 10). In the St Gall formulary (c.900), the serious part of no. 3 is a renewal of licence to elect, the elect to be brought to the king for appointment (MGH Form., 397–8). 21 e.g. Louis ‘took away’ Saint-Calais from Sigmund, regular abbot (Goffart, Forgeries, 314–16). Abbots— still more, bishops—were not easily removed, but Louis’s sons’ wars provided occasions. 22 Vita Walae (SS II, or Epitaph. Arsenii, ii. 4 (ed. Du¨mmler, p. 65); see Voigt, Klosterpol., 76. 23 Ordinatio imperii (Capit. no. 136); see Felten, A¨bte, 293. 16

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Soon ‘bishoprics, abbeys, counties, and fiscs’ are listed together as what a king has to dispose of, or what a kingdom consists of;24 and sometimes granted en bloc to create an intermediate lordship.25 It was largely Hincmar who made this lordship over great churches both explicit and respectable; and he may have helped to frame Charles the Bald’s protest at the pope’s presuming to commit to the king the custody of the see of Laon’s possessions: ‘we kings of the Franks . . . have hitherto been reckoned not the agents or bailiffs of bishops but the lords of the land’:26 implying that custody in vacancies belonged to the king anyhow, of his own right. This right itself reflects the beneficial character of a bishopric or abbey: at the holder’s death it returns to the king’s indominicatum, his immediate lordship, to hold as long as he likes or as conscience allows before regranting it.27 By this time, too, handing the pastoral staff to a new bishop was being done by the king rather than by the senior consecrating bishop:28 it has come to symbolize the king’s putting the bishop in possession of the bishopric, seen as office and property alike, honor and beneficium; or even of the church itself, as in 899 Louis the Blind ‘handed over the church’ of Vienne to the new archbishop (tradidit ei ecclesiam).29 Meanwhile in vacancies the king may ‘have the church in his hands’, as a variant on ‘bishopric’ or ‘abbey’.30 So the church, the core of the whole complex, is not left untouched by these ideas. Such few diplomas as define the position of individual abbots, lay, secular, or regular, seldom actually use the term beneficium.31 More often, they record that the grant was for life: that was the point of obtaining a charter. Hincmar as a young clerk in Charles the Bald’s service was given the ‘cell or monastery’ of Saint-Germer-de-Fly and his life tenure ‘confirmed by precept’; Pippin II of Aquitaine allowed the monk-abbot Ayraldus to ‘hold and possess’ the abbey of Manlieu ‘for the whole period of his life, under our donation’; Charles the Bald confirmed to the monk-abbot Rainald of Saint-Calais (himself perhaps elected) that he should ‘hold and possess . . . the abbey committed and given to him by 24

Ann. Bert., s.a. 837 (above, note 6), 870 (pp. 171–4, partition of Meersen); Nithard, Hist., iv. 3 (ed. Lauer, pp. 126–8: 842 preliminaries to Verdun); Capit. no. 251. See Ganshof, ‘Entstehungsgeschichte’, 318–24; Metz, Das karoling. Reichsgut, 63–5. 25 Fiscs, royal vills, and abbeys in the county of Coutances to Salomon of Brittany (Ann. Bert., s.a. 867 (p. 88); all bishoprics, abbeys, and counties in Bavaria, to Carloman ad servitium when he gave up the kingdom (Ann. Fuldenses, s.a. 879, SRGerm. sep. ed. (1891), 93). 26 Epist., nos. 7, 8 (PL 124. 878, 886), citing Augustine, per iura regum possidentur possessiones (see below, 27 See below, pp. 265–8. p. 812 note 56). For the context see Nelson, Charles the Bald, 236–8. 28 First mentioned (already iuxta morem) for Bremen, 865 (Vita Rimberti, c. 11, SS II. 769–70, written late 9th c. The commendatio is of the staff to the bishop, not of the bishop to the king as Minninger reads it, Von Clermont zum Wormser Konkordat, 24). Cf. Auxerre (Gestis episc., SS XIII. 400, similar date). These are clerical narratives, not official records. 29 Grenoble, Chartae Suppl. no. 2 (by the ferula). For the 11th-c. words accipe ecclesiam see below, 30 pp. 857–8. e.g. DLD no. 169 (876). 31 ´ ˆ ´ For instances see Voigt, Klosterpol., 176–80; Lesne, ‘Eveche’, 47 n. 1.

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us . . . as long as he lives in God’s will and in fidelity to us’.32 That such grants were benefices in a broad sense, and remained so after being confirmed as lifelong, went without saying: it could hardly be more clearly implied than in a diploma of Charles the Fat’s, which names the monasteries of Berg and Wessobrun as ‘earthly possessions’ suitable for securing the goodwill and rewarding the service of a fidelis,33 the secular abbot Engilmar, whose return for them will be prayer for the king and his ancestors and the maintenance of clerks for God’s service.34 Only in the occasional phrase ‘by beneficiary right’ (iure beneficiario) does there appear to be a more technical, legal implication, judging from its restriction to lay or secular abbots35 (who being unelected might otherwise lack a title, a ius). Meanwhile the principle that all these churches were held by the ruler’s grant—if it were to be a principle at all rather than the practical result of acts of power—had to be based on establishing that they belonged to the king in some sense stronger than general royal protection. To have given a church in benefice might be evidence of this, but could not provide a basis for it. It had been established for particular monasteries in Pippin’s and Charlemagne’s time, as churches had first trickled and then been gathered in strategic regions into the king’s lordship; but under Louis the Pious they were gathered wholesale, and bishoprics put on almost the same basis, often by the act of declaring them under his immunity-defence.

10.ii. Carolingian immunity-defence What, then, did Louis the Pious’s ‘defence of our immunity’ mean? This used to be debated in highly abstract terms, which are still difficult to avoid altogether. On one view (with many variants) it implied no kind of proprietary right; its enjoyment by hitherto autonomous churches, above all by bishoprics, showed this; immunity-defence was an expression of general theocratic protection, always owed in principle to the whole Church, now promised explicitly to particular churches.1 Defence in any tighter meaning, linked to proprietary lordship, had 32

ACII nos. 68 bis, 52 (donatione should perhaps read dominatione), 127 (840, 846, 850). Cf. the late 9th-c. story of Charlemagne’s unwillingness to give abbeys, etc. to bishops because ‘with this or that fisc or curtis, little abbey or church, I can make as good or better a vassal faithful to me as any count or bishop’ (Notker, Gesta Karoli, c. 13, SRGerm., 12, 17). See Odegaard, Vassi, 33–4. 34 DKIII no. 127. Both monasteries were in the third class, owing prayer only, in 819 (see, below, p. 270). 35 e.g. ACII no. 141 (851, Sainte-Colombe to a priest of Saint-Martin of Tours, already beneficio iure, now for life). Cf. GPFont., xiii. 1, 2 (92–8) on Ansegis at Luxeuil and Saint-Germer-de-Fly. 1 e.g. Sickel, Beitra¨ge, III. 239–49; Stengel, Immunita¨t, I. 570–7. On these and other 19th–20th-c. views see Fleckenstein, ‘Begriff’, 64–5; Felten, A¨bte, 190 n. 73. 33

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retreated into the background.2 Behind this view lay an almost certainly inflated idea of the importance of immunity, seeing it as a mark of autonomy and lordliness, incompatible with being under the proprietary lordship that Charlemagne’s defence had implied; one or the other, it seemed, must have been watered down. This problem disappears if immunity from the entry of royal officials is seen rather as a source of savings and perhaps profit, and a safeguard of peace and quiet; hitherto granted as a valuable but not spectacular favour,3 and occasionally to monasteries in someone else’s lordship.4 There was certainly an abrupt change in 814, both in the wording of diplomas (usually taking ‘under the defence of our protection and immunity’) and in the number issued over a short period,5 which can only be explained as a matter of policy. It probably reflected Louis’s commitment to promoting monastic life for its own sake,6 along with stricter community life for the clergy of great basilicas and cathedrals; granting immunity-defence may have either recognized or encouraged regularity, on both sides of the emerging line between monks and canons.7 But this religious purpose need not drag royal defence into vague generality; on the contrary, the king’s actual power over great churches could be rationalized as a matter of duty. Meanwhile some lesser monasteries definitely commended or conveyed to Louis were given immunity-defence,8 without any different terminology to distinguish it as old-fashioned defence from some new, more ethereal kind. Immunity-defence seems never to have been granted by Louis to churches clearly under the dominium of other lords. The few apparent examples of this (in any case not unambiguously amounting to immunity-defence) are for monasteries belonging to a bishopric or royal monastery, the dependency either clearly covered by the superior church’s immunity,9 or virtually freed from its lordship by a census intended to eliminate any further claim.10 Such a census would 2 A mid-20th-c. version is Semmler’s, that Louis’s immunity-defence replaced Charlemagne’s proprietary defence with feudal lordship (‘Traditio’, 13–14; ‘Princeps’, 122–3). 3 4 See Felten, A¨bte, 205–16; Fouracre, ‘Light’, 53–68. Felten, A¨bte, 212–13. 5 Of Louis’s known immunity-defence diplomas (just over 100), almost half were issued 814–16. Most were ostensibly confirming Charlemagne’s diplomas (above, p. 235); his Life has him ‘order the renewal of all precepts made for churches’ under former rulers (the likeliest source for the 11th-c. Ademar of Chabannes’s belief that Louis ‘recalled all abbatiae into his hand’, Chron., iii. 3, p. 113). See Semmler, ‘Princeps’, 97–9; Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 29–33; Felten, A¨bte, 189–92. 6 The first of the new privileges was for Benedict’s Aniane. 7 Things were different by 849 when Lothar I gave immunity-defence to Moutier-Grandval at its lay abbot’s request while confirming his tenure (DLothI no. 105): the abbot was his brother-in-law count 8 Liutfrid whose support was crucial. Sickel, Beitra¨ge, III. 272–3. 9 e.g. Bellecelle under Aniane (819, HL II Pr. 50); conversely Semmler’s six instances of Louis granting immunity alone were all to monasteries in non-royal lordship (‘Princeps’, 108). 10 e.g. Île-Barbe (BM2 no. 595; A. Coville, Recherches sur l’hist. de Lyon du Ve au Ixes. (Paris, 1928), 277–81, 286, 512–13); S. Zeno, Verona (BM2 no. 597: but slipping back into dependence, Manaresi no. 41; Fischer, Ko¨nigtum, 144 n. 44); and Noaille´, whose liberating census to Saint-Hilaire of Poitiers would be paid by the

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indeed normally indicate proprietary right, but it can be a residual sign of, or compensation for, a right otherwise defunct or renounced. At St Gall, the census to the bishop of Constance survived when the monastery was in every other respect removed from the bishop’s lordship;11 apparently the monks regarded the census as conditional on the king allowing them free election, and when Louis the German appointed the outsider Grimoald (his chancellor) they stopped paying it. As Ratpert relates it, Grimoald (who meant well by the monks and was on good terms with them) asks his deputy Hartmot why the census has not been paid, and is told that it is ‘because the security and immunity that by the king’s mercy the census previously secured for us, has been utterly taken away from us’. Grimoald asks why and by whom, and Hartmot replies, ‘Because of you: since we have been given in benefice to you, we have no obligation to pay the census to the bishop. We think it enough to be in servitude to your domination, and don’t wish to be divided among several.’12 So at one level the census is something to which they feel obliged only as long as the king treats them in a certain way (almost as if it were owed to the king); though at another level (to which Hartmot shifts his remarks in the end) it is indeed a mark of lordship of a kind, from which they feel absolved when set under the immediate lordship of the king’s benefice-holder; and it is not until the 854 settlement that St Gall is finally and completely released from the bishopric’s claims, the bishop to have no potestas and receive no census, and the monks to be under no secular power but the king’s, marked by the payment of ‘royal gifts’ which begin when the bishop’s census stops.13 Yet the immunity-defence they had had long ago from Louis the Pious had not been pure theocratic protection; both he and Louis the German had ‘given’ the abbey, whether to outsiders or to elected abbots;14 and Louis the German’s confirmation of the 854 settlement was made cum manu sua potestativa,15 himself giving to the bishopric the lands that St Gall gave up, and himself removing the monastery from the bishopric: acting, in fact, as lord of both churches.16 The lesson seems to be that lordship is complex, divisible, and open to confusion, not that it is no part of immunity-defence. In the later ninth century the meaning of royal defence was becoming blurred,17 fisc (BM2 no. 235; Levillain, ‘Les Origines du monaste`re de Nouaille´’, Bibl. ecole des Chartes, 71 (1910), 265, 288–90, 295–8). 11 12 Above, pp. 202–3. Ratpert, Casus S. Galli, c. 7 (pp. 67–8). 13 Ibid., c. 8 (68–9); DLD no. 69. Conversely, the old agreement specifying the census (confirmed 833, DLD no. 13) had barred any dona to the king unless offered gratis. 14 15 Ratpert, Casus, cc. 7, 9 (pp. 67, 71). i.e. by his hand having the legal power to do this. 16 Ibid., c. 8 (p. 69); DLD no. 69. See also DLD no. 71 (854?): St Gall to have the fiscal privileges (below, at note 42) of ‘other monasteries and benefices of ours’; the king to have potestas and dominium over it as over them. 17 Several arguably episcopal monasteries were by then given royal defence (Graff, ‘Kaiserurkunde’, 69–71), including several nunneries (870s to 890s) of which only Wunstorf seems a clear case. Possible

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but it never lost its connection with lordship; defence and dominium were weakened, divided or disputed together.18 When in 868 Ve´zelay was put under royal immunity-defence, being already (in prospect) the Holy See’s property, treating these as compatible suggests that one or both were shadowy.19 As for the grounds needed back in Louis the Pious’s time for a grant of immunity-defence, where no other lordship existed it might be enough that the monks or canons wanted it; but if anyone else had a possible claim, above all a bishop, this would have to be renounced (whittled away to a census), or rebutted (perhaps by concocting a long-past commendation or royal foundation);20 royal defence for any particular church still implied a concrete, particular claim to lordship.21 But Louis’s policy pushed this lordship into the gaps (or allowed it into the vacuum) where other outside lordship was lacking.22 It thus makes sense to see him as asserting royal lordship for the first time over bishoprics and ancient monasteries already in practice under the mayors’ or kings’ control, long-standing or recent.23 It might be thought that granting immunity-defence involved an undertaking not to use a monastery as a benefice; the monks of St Gall seem to have felt this.24 In the preceding century Pippin’s royal defence could include the promise of free election or an undertaking not to let an outsider have the monastery; in Charlemagne’s time monks could regard being given in benefice as passing out of the king’s mundeburd.25 Louis the Pious’s immunity-defence diplomas often specified free election and arguably should always have implied it,26 at least for monks, if immunity-defence was meant to encourage regularity. But it was not like that in practice nor even in principle. Louis gave Saint-Martin of Tours earlier instances are Cruas (854; but probably only later given to Arles); and De`vre (844, ACII no. 42; but the founder Ralph abp. of Bourges may have left his successors with diocesan authority only). 18 See Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 53–4; Semmler, ‘Traditio’, 13–16, 29–30. 19 Below, p. 345, with ACII no. 309. 20 e.g. St Gall’s stories of a royal gift of fisc to Gallus, and of Waltram conveying the monastery to Charles Martel or to king Pippin (see Sprandel, ‘St Gallen’, 23–4, 25–6). Cf. Indre’s story (above, p. 208). 21 Hornbach, where the lay heirs’ rights were specially safeguarded (below, pp. 341–2), had an unusual diploma granting a restricted immunity without asserting defence (Sickel, Beitra¨ge, V. 376–7). 22 Esp. where a bishop’s potential lordship had been obviated by papal or episcopal privilege (Semmler, ‘Princeps’, 110). 23 e.g. (long-standing) Saint-Wandrille (above, pp. 212–13); (recent) Saint-Bertin, ruled by regular abbots for many years without (evidently) needing a privilege, until Louis gave it ‘by royal gift’ to his chancellor Fridugis (Gesta abb. S. Bertini, cc. 35, 39, 47 (SS XIII. 613–14)), ten years before granting immunity-defence (Bouquet, VI. 482). Other monasteries coming obscurely into royal lordship are Novalesa (Geary, Aristocracy, 124–5, 152), Kempten (Schwarzmaier, Ko¨nigtum, 10–13, 20–6), Saint-Maximin Trier (Wisplinghoff, Untersuchungen, 5–27). 24 Above, at notes 11–12. For Ratpert (end of 9th c.) what the monks lost when Louis the German appointed an outsider was interchangeably ‘security of election’ and ‘privilege of immunity’ (Casus, cc. 7, 25 8 (p. 67)). Above, p. 214 note 24. 26 ¨ See Stengel, Immunitat, I. 567–70; Semmler, ‘Princeps’, 111–15.

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immunity-defence almost in the first round; yet four years later he could say, ‘divine goodness conferred on us and our ancestors the power of giving to whom we would the property (facultas) of the whole monastery of Saint-Martin and its possessions’.27 Election-right was sometimes given long after immunitydefence,28 and Felten has established that Louis was no less selective than Charlemagne in granting it.29 Even when granted it was often for the next occasion only; and even this concession was sometimes empty. It was so for Saint-Calais in Louis’s time,30 and again under Charles the Bald. In 850 Charles had given Saint-Calais for life to an abbot Reinold (‘as long as he lives in God’s will and remains in our fidelity’), and granted free election on a permanent basis at his request; but by 862 he had given it in benefice to bishop Robert, apparently because the monks failed or delayed to report their election and Robert got to him first.31 Immunity-defence may indeed have marked a status which would ideally be crowned by free election; but allowing or withholding this was part of the king’s lordship; if granted, it still required his leave on each occasion, and it was easily forgotten or ignored. Meanwhile Carolingian churchmen tried to separate the royal duty of protection from any right to exploit or domineer, but recognized that protection shaded into lordship.32 Very occasionally monks may have tried to claim protection alone without any implication of royal dominium.33 At Werden, the foundation history’s view about the recent past was that bishop Hildigrim as abbot had at the monks’ request commended them to the king ‘for protection alone’; it rejects the opinion of ill-wishers that he had thereby ‘given it to the king as property’, since he had no power to do this, having ‘never held it as his own’.34 But the foundation history is chiefly concerned to assert, not any absolute autonomy, but the monks’ collective claim to the endowment, as an argument against abuse of the abbacy: perhaps a bold bid to establish that the whole

816, PL 104. 1067–9 (see BM2, no. 629); 820, Cormery no. 7. The context was Louis’s entitlement to confirm the abbot’s foundation of Cormery (see below, pp. 414–15). 28 e.g. Saint-Calais (Havet, Oeuvres, I. 174–7); Saint-Maixent (immunity-defence 815; allowed a regular 29 Felten, A¨bte, 194–7, 216, 270–7. abbot 827, Bouquet VI. 553). 30 Having made this concession in 825, Louis gave Saint-Calais next time to bp. Aldric (testimony at Verberie, 863, see next note). 31 ACII nos. 127–8 (confirming immunity-defence the same day); Verberie, ibid. no. 258; Goffart, ‘Privilege’, 318 n. 2. 32 Wala of Corbie; Hincmar of Rheims (below, pp. 798, 812); see Goffart, Forgeries, 14–21. 33 What Solignac got at Soissons, 866 (confirming destroyed charters, Mansi, XV. 735–7) came close: kings should claim nothing but tutela or tuitio; but this amounted only to allowing them a regular abbot, not really renouncing lordship. 34 Fundatio mon. Werthinensis (SS XV. 165–7). Hildigrim (see index) had in fact commended the monastery to Louis the Younger’s patrocinium (877, DLJ no. 6; the words defensionis tuitione are interpolated over an erasure). 27

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endowment belonged to the community’s mensa, and not by any lord’s or abbot’s recent concession but by the founder’s intentions.35 As for Saint-Calais, the cathedral church’s forger must indeed have hoped that the monastery’s royal defence could be kept distinct from royal lordship; but the grounds are not strong for supposing that the monks themselves hoped to insist on one while evading the other.36 That their Life of Carilef makes a Merovingian king give land to the wandering hermit, without implying that he kept lordship over it, is no more than standard hagiographical matter; nor would it be misleading about sixth-century realities. And that their own forged foundation charter makes the same king Childebert give the land to Carilef and his monks by outright traditio only makes it look like any such Merovingian charter; there is no extraordinary emphasis on ‘the complete transfer of title’.37 Finally, that this and the three interpolated immunity diplomas38 have been made to include royal defence but do not mention royal lordship would be significant only if defence were not commonly understood to imply lordship. Normally, monks or canons would accept the implications of royal defence as a bar to other claims, especially a bishop’s.39 So at the council of Paris in 846 or 847, the abbot of Corbie showed not only earlier diplomas promising freedom of election and of property management, but also one of Charles the Bald’s, ‘who in the manner of his predecessors took that monastery into his familiarity and defence, as it were by hereditary right’;40 a description whose paternal and proprietary tone must reflect the monks’ wishes.41 One aspect of immunity-defence with a problematical bearing on the king’s proprietary claims is its bringing with it (always or sometimes) the judicial status of the royal fisc. Beyond, that is, the exclusion of public officials from hearing causes, collecting dues, or imposing services, the church might have positive privileges in the retention or recovery of its own property: advocacy at the royal court, special compensations, and use of the sworn inquest to establish its 35 See below, pp. 342–3. A synod in the 860s may have supported the monks’ claims ‘to be the monastery’s heirs’ and elect their abbot (Fundatio 167). 36 As argued by Goffart, Forgeries, 75–80, 142–3. 37 Ibid., 80 n. 145. 38 In the dossier sent to Nicholas I (Havet, Oeuvres I. 159–62; Goffart, ‘Privilege’, 313). 39 e.g. at St Gall, Fulda, Flavigny (above, at notes 13–16; pp. 229, 231). At Saint-Calais, had there not been a real commendation in 752 the monks might have invented an earlier one, like Rebais and Indre (above, p. 230 and 89). 40 ACII no. 7. i (cf. ibid. no. 423 of 877); Conc. III no. 13, pp. 144–7. 41 Such assertions of special favour may imply close family or personal connection: e.g. DLothI no. 57 for Pru¨m, 841 (cf. ibid. 310 and nos. 122, 139); ACII no. 425 for Compie`gne, 877. But Louis the Pious declaring Noirmoutier ‘under our special protection . . . and peculiarly defended’ may mean only that its island site justified special arrangements (below, p. 270 note 10). None of these implies a category of Eigenklo¨ster as distinct from Schutzklo¨ster.

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claims.42 The idea behind this seems to be analogy, not assimilation: church property would be treated like fisc, not turned into fisc.43 It would not mean that fiscal agents could roam the lands of a bishopric or monastery taking judicial profits, peasants’ dues, and the produce of demesne; immunity did not exclude the count’s men only to give the king’s men a free hand. Churchmen sometimes said that all church property ought to have the judicial privileges of the fisc. Louis the Pious had to promise this in 829, at least for whatever had been possessed unchallenged for thirty years;44 in 847 at Mainz, archbishop Raban Maur and his diocesans pressed Louis the German ‘not to agree with those who affirm that property given to the Lord ought not to be under the king’s defence like his own inheritance’.45 These opponents might be aggressive neighbours, beneficeholders,46 or dilapidating lay abbots—anyone who had gained by the Church’s earlier helplessness. The argument at Mainz was not that church property should have fiscal privileges because it in some sense belonged to the king: it was that whatever privileges the king’s property had, God’s property must have no less. But there was some ambiguity or tension at the time. Particular churches that had fiscal privileges had these as part of their immunity-defence, which— as defence—did make them the king’s churches. When the neighbours of Kempten (under immunity-defence from 814) claimed that its property should be ‘defended’ as theirs was, not as the king’s was, the abbot got Louis the Pious to confirm that it was ‘under the same law’ as the fisc on the grounds that the monastery itself was ‘of our property’, the abbot ‘having it in his government by our grant’;47 and Louis’s acquisition of Saint-Chinian meant that ‘the things of that monastery should be defended and protected . . . like other things of our property’.48 Similar phrases were used when Charles the Bald sent missi to inquire into Charroux’s affairs as ‘our affairs’ and set up advocates there ‘over things of our property’:49 this was at the abbot’s request and presumably for the monastery’s protection. 42

Sickel, Beitra¨ge, V. 326–44, 361–2, 372–3; Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 46–9. Whether or not all immunitydefence grants implied these fiscal privileges, they might be what was originally meant by ‘the defence of our immunity’. 43 This has been made to turn on highly abstract distinctions, seeing immunity-defence as new, ‘derived’, dependent immunity (the fisc’s, not the church’s) and merging Kirchengut with Kro¨ngut (Feine, 44 KRG I. 221–3; Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 31–42). Capit. nos. 188 c. 1, 191 c. 8. 45 Conc. III no. 14 c. 6. Cf. ACII no. 131 for Cormery (850), asserting its advocate’s power ‘of inquiring into and defending those things . . . as is proper in things offered and consecrated to God’. 46 47 See Quierzy, 873, c. 8 (Capit. no. 278). Mon. Boica, 28 nos. 5 (814), 15 (833). 48 See below, p. 262. Sicut alia vel nostrae proprietatis (using alia rather than cetera) could mean ‘like other things, which (unlike these) are ours’; but in the same context St Gall’s diplomas (below, p. 258) have cetera. 49 ACII no. 375 (869–74; on Charroux as royal see above, p. 225). But Pippin I of Aquitaine for Solignac asserts analogy only: ‘as the properties of our fiscs are defended and inquired into by our advocates, so should that monastery’s be . . . by theirs’ (838, API&II no. 37; cf. no. 49).

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Kempten had probably been in some degree refounded by Charlemagne,50 while Saint-Chinian had been founded on royal fisc and given back to Louis; indeed fiscal origin is asserted by Charles the Bald as the ground for fiscal privilege for his own foundation at Compie`gne, declaring of its endowments that ‘since the properties were all from our fisc, we wish . . . that they may remain jointly under the same law as the properties of our fisc’.51 The Le Mans forger was able to argue that because Saint-Calais’s lands were not in fact ‘defended’ like fisc, they could not have originated from fisc: assuming for his own purposes that only such an origin could make a monastery royal.52 But the same claims as for Kempten or Saint-Chinian were made even more clearly for St Gall and Reichenau, without fiscal origin being asserted. Louis the German affirmed St Gall’s benefit of compulsory inquest procedure, ‘because we wish to have the same dominatio and potestas over this monastery as we have over other monasteries and benefices of ours’, such as Reichenau; Charles the Fat in 887 promised St Gall that, ‘like . . . Reichenau and other places belonging to our fisc,53 they are to have compulsory oath and immunity . . . and to remain for all time under our immunity and defence’.54 A church’s clergy might in some contexts wish to avoid any implication that their lands were the king’s, but in other contexts assert it against other claims. Raban Maur as abbot of Fulda insisted to Ogier archbishop of Mainz that Fulda’s property was the king’s: ‘as you know, the possessions of that monastery and the churches belonging to it are royal property (proprietas dominicalis) which came to the lord emperor by hereditary right from paternal succession; therefore we are afraid to lose any of it.’55 But this was a claim to status and protection, not an invitation to landlord exploitation. The view (at the other extreme from seeing the king’s claims as purely public and theocratic) that church lands stood alongside ordinary royal lands as an exploitable part of the Reichsgut56 has (apart from theory) two main grounds: first, the use from Charlemagne’s time of the same methods for ‘describing’ ecclesiastical property as were used for the fisc; and secondly, the payment of allegedly similar renders in kind, under the name of servicium regis or regale, from great churches as from those royal estates that supplied the king’s household.57 That early inventories of church property (as at Saint-Wandrille or 50

51 Schwarzmaier, Ko¨nigtum, 10–13, 20–6. ACII no. 425 (877); see Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 12–13. Goffart, Forgeries, 144 (and n. 43), 236. 53 In the sense simply of royal property, a monastery might itself be ‘fiscal’: a Rheims nunnery ‘called regale vel fiscale because until recently it was in the royal potestas’ (Flodoard, Hist. rem., iv. 46 (SS XXXVI. 448); a villa formerly Le Mans’s given by Charles the Bald to Fosse´s as the site for a monastery ‘to be called monasterium fisci dominici’ (845, ACII no. 76), probably to fend off Le Mans; Pfa¨vers, which Otto I was advised was ‘no one’s more justly than yours fiscaliter’ (Eckhard, Casus S. Galli, c. 8 (SS II. 114)). 54 55 DLD nos. 71, 144, 146; DKIII no. 159. Epist. Karol. Aevi, III. 519–20, between 826 and 842. 56 Against more recent versions of this view see Wickham, ‘The fall of Rome . . . ’, 53–4. 57 Metz, Reichsgut, 19–23, 27, 46–53, 63, 220–5; Heusinger, ‘Servicium regis’, 27–81. 52

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Fulda) need have no such implication has already been suggested;58 and any investigations required by the treaty of Verdun’s allocation of bishoprics and abbeys59 would not imply that these were subject to direct landlord exploitation; like counties, they were honores in the king’s patronage,60 and sources of military service, gifts, and hospitality. As for the supplies forthcoming from bishoprics and monasteries, their similarity to the food-renders of royal estates is less than it may seem; scattered instances in the early ninth century (wine or cheese by the cartload, a single ox) fall somewhere in the area of gift-giving, hospitality, or the primitive duty of feeding a king.61 Abbots of royal monasteries, like bishops, were themselves the exploiting lords of the land and wielders of jurisdiction, with advocates probably of their own appointing;62 royal charters recognized both their lordly authority and their churches’ personality or ius.63 This is not to say that Louis the Pious’s lordship should be distinguished from an ‘ownership’ or proprietary right formerly exercised by Charlemagne64 (or as Goffart has it, coming in for the first time late in the reign of Charles the Bald).65 There is no contemporary vocabulary for such a distinction,66 and in practice these are matters of degree. Looking back to Charlemagne, his explicit lordship extended over far fewer great churches than Louis’s was to do but was hardly more ‘proprietary’ in practice or in words; and looking ahead to Charles the Bald, when he claimed to ‘possess’ Saint-Calais and ‘commit its government’ to successive abbots who by his own concession were to be elected,67 there is no reason to think he meant anything different from his and his father’s right as lords to confer great churches as honores. Nor can Louis’s own lordship over monasteries be helpfully seen as being of two distinct kinds, for those with and those without immunity-defence.68 This evidently did affect the likelihood of his giving the monastery away altogether,69 but it did not determine freedom of election; different royal monasteries had different packages of privilege, and privileges were not always observed; here again it is a matter of degree.

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59 60 Above, p. 218 and note 58. Below, p. 268. See Nelson, Charles the Bald, passim. 62 Below, p. 274. Below, p. 329 note 4. 63 e.g. Sainte-Colombe, Sens, ‘always to remain sui iuris and in its own abbot’s government’ (847, ACII no. 102, confirming episcopal privileges). 64 65 As Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 27–33; Semmler, ‘Princeps’, 115–23. Above, pp. 218, 219. 66 What contemporaries distinguished was churches having heads under the king’s lordship and those 67 ‘in the king’s hand’ or indominicatum (below, p. 266). Above, p. 219. 68 Or some being Reichsklo¨ster and others Ko¨nigsklo¨ster (below, p. 266 note 60). Different criteria for this 69 produce different results. Below, p. 261 note 69. 61

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10.iii. Proprietary dealings with higher churches From Louis the Pious’s reign most higher churches are great lordships under royal lordship: a lordship more focused than general royal authority, but acceptable even for bishoprics, and describable in traditional historiography as broadly or incipiently ‘feudal’. When kings speak of a substantial monastery or its possessions as their ‘property’, this cannot be taken to mean the full power of disposal and exploitation, and often rather stresses their obligation or inclination to favour and protect the monastery as ‘their own’.1 But on the other side of the picture is the actual, practical incompleteness of lordship under lordship; a layer of lordship may be permeable, a block of lordship insecure and liable to be treated as a thing, and the ruler’s proprietary language to that extent justified. A monastery without immunity-defence could be transferred into another church’s property by traditio; as Charlemagne had alienated his acquisitions Ansbach and Holzkirchen,2 so Louis the Pious gave to Kempten two others acquired by his father, the cells of Stettwang and Aldrichszell in Alemania, in each case ‘transferring it from our right into that monastery’s right and power’, and allowing the rectors of Kempten to do what they would with the cell and its possessions (though at Stettwang with the intention that monastic life should continue).3 Kempten too is ‘our monastery’, its land privileged because it is ‘of our property’,4 but it has its own ius and potestas; whereas the lesser monastery is in this context an object, owned and transferred.5 Later in the century such transactions can be found scattered over the Carolingian realms. In the 890s one of the Carolingians’ own family foundations, Susteren, was given to another, the richer and more favoured Pru¨m, ostensibly by the wish of the artist-priest Siginand who held it and now kept it for life.6 When some twenty years later Siginand let it go to unnamed potentes, Charles the Simple adjudged ‘that the abbey belongs more justly and lawfully to the property of the monastery of Pru¨m . . . than to anyone else’;7 it was a litigable possession. However, the reminder that the greater church too is of the king’s ‘property’ may be sharp. When Lothar I (on his father’s behalf) gave the small Savoyard monastery of Pagno to Novalesa, this was in compensation for property that he had removed from Novalesa—‘a monastery of our property’—as being 1

See above, pp. 257–8; cf. Louis the Pious for Aniane (Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 623–7, doc. no. 19). 3 Above, p. 224. Mon. Boica 28 nos. 12 (831), 38 (839). See Schwarzmaier, Ko¨nigtum, 27–8. 4 Above, p. 257. 5 Nonetheless it has possessions, being usually given ‘with all its possessions’ or more ambiguously ‘pertinences’. 6 895, DZwent. no. 2. Zwentibold’s father Arnulf had given it (a nunnery) to Siginand ‘for all time’, yet 7 on condition of giving it to a holy place of his choice (891, DArn. no. 85). ACII no. 84 (916). 2

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conveniently placed for a new pilgrims’ hospice on Mont Cenis.8 The greater church’s hold on the donation itself might be insecure in the face of the king’s interests, as when Charles the Bald, foreseeing inconvenience from his father’s donation of a small monastery to the monastery of Saint-Lomer, took it away and gave them another.9 These transactions show up both the powerlessness of the lesser churches and the shaky title of the greater. This insecurity dogged the abbey of Ferrie`res and its cell Saint-Josse, close to the great trading-port of Quentovic.10 Saint-Josse had been given to Ferrie`res by Louis the Pious; but in Louis’s sons’ wars it became a counter in competitive patronage, given in benefice by Lothar I to one of his palace clerks, and later by Charles the Bald to count Odulf for life, probably as the price of Odulf’s renewed fidelity after defecting to Lothar.11 In the middle of abbot Lupus’s efforts to regain Saint-Josse, Ferrie`res itself was (or was rumoured to be) given to an outsider Egilbert while Lupus was away on the king’s service.12 Although this crisis passed, and the cell too was eventually recovered, Charles had been dealing with both cell and abbey in the teeth of his own diploma of 841 confirming Louis’s grant of the cell and giving Ferrie`res licence to elect.13 But Lupus’s arguments on both issues had been moral and personal, not legal: he and his monastery had deserved better of the king; he had been insulted by Egilbert’s promotion, and shamed by the loss of what earlier abbots had won; the king’s salvation and earthly prosperity were set at risk by his ‘division’ of the church and the consequent lapse both of hospitality at Saint-Josse and of regular life at Ferrie`res; what, anyhow, had count Odulf done for the king—had he conquered a foreign people or pacified the realm?14 Saint-Josse would perhaps have been bled as badly and its hospitality as much reduced by the monks of Ferrie`res as by any palace clerk or lay noble holding it in benefice; and it may never have had much community life. But more substantial monasteries with a past of their own were given outright to greater churches, as Susteren was to Pru¨m, and especially to bishoprics;15 and although immunitydefence was the best protection against being subjected to a bishopric,16 it was no 8

DLothI no. 4 (825). Novalesa probably had immunity-defence from Louis the Pious (ibid. no. 92, confirming lost grants). 9 With immunity-defence for all Saint-Lomer’s property (843, ACII no. 21: see Tessier, ibid. I. 50). 10 For what follows see Lupus de Ferrie`res, Correspondance (ed. Levillain), with Nelson, Charles the Bald, 11 121, 125, 128, 148; and see index: St-Josse. ACII no. 30 (843); see Levillain, op. cit., I. 105, 148 n. 4. 12 Correspondance, no. 36 (844). Did Charles distrust Lupus (ibid. I. 160 n. 4; but see Nelson, op. cit., 125), 13 or was Lupus (captured in Pippin II’s ambush) rumoured to be dead? ACII no. 3 (841). 14 Correspondance, nos. 36, 42–3, 45, 47, 49. 15 Flavigny to Autun (877, below, p. 420); Donze`re to Viviers (849, DLothI no. 107; 877, ACII no. 443), and later to Tournus (887, DKIII no. 162). 16 Saint-Chaffre and Manlieu, both under immunity-defence, were rescued on that ground from their diocesan bishoprics (877, ACII nos. 405, 440, 442).

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longer a sure one.17 Two churches, one aiming to dominate the other, might well collect royal charters that were mutually conflicting, especially when the kingdoms themselves were in flux: charters acquired in turn by the quickness off the mark of an abbot or bishop, with more or less misremembering or misrepresenting of the past, supported if necessary by forgery; while the claims of both might be overlooked in favour of an astute or lucky clerk or lay fidelis. The fortunes of a monastery in being treated as property or as a proprietor could fluctuate, and would turn more on practical conditions—its numbers, wealth, and prestige, and the social standing and connections of its abbots (or of monks aspiring to abbacy)—than on what its charters said; still less on refinements of legal status that might be inferred from them. A monastery transferred permanently into another church’s possession will often, though not always, be called a ‘cell’, sometimes ‘little cell’ or ‘little abbey’,18 as will be one given outright to an individual;19 but so called because so treated, rather than exposed to this treatment because some legal disability made it technically a cell. So Saint-Loup at Chablis, given by Charles the Bald to SaintMartin of Tours as ‘a certain cell of our fisc’ and meant for the canons’ use, to be ‘joined to their other property and . . . held at their pleasure’,20 appears ten years later with independent property-rights, united with but not submerged under the great monastery,21 its dedication changed and its status dramatically raised not by any diploma but by the body of St Martin, translated there for safety from the Northmen. Some monasteries, however, would never be alienated, however much exploited and controlled; as Lesne remarked, a Carolingian king would hardly have felt free to give away Saint-Denis or Saint-Martin of Tours.22 Carolingian privileges sometimes promise not to alienate a monastery;23 and at the council of Meaux in 845 the king’s permanent alienation of monasteries given him for defence was condemned,24 but as a breach of his moral obligations rather than legally impossible.25 When in 912 the archbishop of Tours hoped to get the abbey of Marmoutier for his impoverished see by royal precept with count Robert’s backing as lay abbot, the monks’ successful protest mentioned their privileges but emphasized first their stupefaction that such long-standing royal potestas and the 17

Flavigny had it from Louis the Pious (confirmed, ACII no. 117). Of Berg and Wessobrun, given to the royal chapel at Regensburg (875, DLD. no. 161), Berg at least had immunity-defence (815, BM2 no. 598); but owing only prayer (above, p. 251 note 34) made them more dispensable. 18 Massino (given to St Gall 883, DKIII no. 92a) was abbatiola; Aniane’s Bellecelle, though electing its own abbot, was a cellula (HL II Pr. 50). But Donze`re and Flavigny (note 15, above) were given as abbatiae. 19 Below, p. 314 (abbatiuncula); p. 341 (cella, cellula, monasteriolum). 20 ACII no. 307 (867). Its lands were safer from plundering than Saint-Martin’s property in the lower 21 Loire valley. ACII nos. 437–8 (877); see Tessier, ibid. II. 465. 22 23 Propr., II. ii. 64. e.g. Saint-Chinian (829, Bouquet, VI. 549; 844, ACII no. 44). 24 25 Conc. III no. 11, c. 41. As Semmler sees it, ‘Traditio’, 27–8.

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‘special glory of St Martin’, hitherto inviolably preserved, ‘could in modern times be subjected to any lordship other than the king’s or their own abbot’.26 It emerges from all this that there are two quite different senses in which rulers might treat churches as property.27 One was by treating them as transferable things; this seems in practice (so far) to be restricted to small or middling monasteries, usually but not always lacking immunity-defence. The other was by directly intervening in even a great monastery’s or bishopric’s property management. This could include the initiating or even enforcing of exchanges;28 more often, however, merely authorizing or confirming them,29 which need imply nothing but princely authority with a background of Roman law,30 even if motivated by wanting to maintain the value of the honor. More important was the continued or revived secularization of church lands, and measures to keep this within bounds. On the one hand a ruler might, like the eighth-century mayors or kings, create benefices (for great nobles, lesser fighting men, or favoured clerics)31 out of the monastery’s or bishopric’s property, or ‘divide’ it, as Charles the Bald did when he ‘granted benefices from the abbey of Marchiennes, which he divided’ (while granting entire abbeys to other partisans of his in Lotharingia).32 On the other hand he might be involved in setting aside a mensa for the convent’s support when a monastery’s possessions were in lay or secular hands.33 These transactions are two sides of the same coin. Charles the Bald set aside revenues in this way when he split up Marchiennes’s possessions;34 the usual context, however, was tenure of the abbey as a single benefice by a lay or secular abbot.35 Louis seems to have decided at Aachen in 818–19 that such an arrangement should be made for all regular monasteries left under the potestas of secular abbots, giving the monks enough to live on in peace and keep their Rule, and leaving military service and other burdens to the abbot.36 Soon the practice spread to collegiate churches, including cathedrals.37 It was 26

ARobI, Appendix, no. 47. Leaving aside the use of their abbacies as benefices (below, Chapter 11). 28 See above, at notes 8–9. Some exchanges were between abbot and king, both sides acting as property-owners but the abbot with royal consent (DLD no. 43; DLothII no. 22). 29 e.g. DLD. nos. 16, 39, DLothII no. 26, DKonI nos. 21, 22. 30 The crucial rule forbade alienation but allowed exchanges with the ruler’s approval, i.e. his judgment on the exchange’s advantage for the church. See Tessier, ACII III. 218–19. 31 32 e.g. DLD no. 82; ACII no. 140. Ann. Bert., s.a. 876 (p. 211). 33 See Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 209 n. 43 (early instances); Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship, 85–92, 106–9, 111–13, 121–3, 127–35; for literature to mid-20th c., Bru¨hl, ‘Diplomatische Miszellen’, AfD 3 (1957), 9 and nn. The term mensa (first used, rarely, in Charles the Bald’s diplomas) is slightly misleading since besides food it 34 usually covered clothing and sometimes other costs. ACII no. 435 (877). 35 Charles evidently left part of Marchiennes for a secular abbot (the allocation gave revenue ad opus senioris and mentions revenues de indominicatu), presumably the palace deacon Berno who asked for the charter. 36 Ardo, Vita Benedicti Anian., c. 39 (SS XV. 217–18); for this understanding of monasteries ‘left under the power of canons’ see Lesne, ‘Ordonnances’, 330–5, 338 n. 1. 37 e.g. Freising c.830 (see Po¨schl, Bischofsgut, II. 155), followed by Arezzo 843, Viviers 849, Regensburg 859 (DLothI nos. 79, 107; DLD no. 96). 27

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much used by Charles the Bald, who could not avoid giving monasteries not just to seculars but to laymen.38 In his time what had begun (well before 818–19) as allocations of certain revenues to specific uses, the whole remaining in the abbot’s hands, began to look more like creating separate properties for abbot and community.39 The emphasis shifts, away from relief from the king’s demands and towards freedom from the abbot’s or rector’s encroachments (such as trying to benefice his men on the monks’ land);40 keeping out the abbot was sometimes put on a par with keeping out the iudex or other officials.41 Similar partitions were made in the middle kingdom.42 But in the eastern kingdom, where there were fewer secular and far fewer lay abbots (the monasteries being poorer and the king less short of land),43 Louis the German on occasion gave property to a monastic community for specified purposes, even explicitly for its subsistence, but not usually excluding the head of the house.44 Here and elsewhere the legal intentions are often not clear:45 what mattered was the practical effect (itself by no means secure).46 Louis the Pious’s partitions had been imposed by his authority and organized by his missi; later the king’s role is less clear. Sometimes a king gives land out of the fisc, as a new endowment47 (sometimes giving a small or decayed monastery of his own);48 and once the monks have their separate endowment, kings may add to it, since it is from the monks that prayers are expected.49 Here there is obviously no interference in existing monastic property. Often, however, the abbot or rector assigns the property out of the abbacy,50 the king merely 38

39 See below, p. 313. See Bernhardt, op. cit., 86–9, 106–9. e.g. ACII no. 235 (861); ACIII no. 35 (900). 41 ACII no. 274, DKIII no. 138, ACIII no. 38. Immunity-defence probably applied only to the community’s part; unusually explicit is ALouIV no. 6 (937, Saint-Amand). 42 e.g. DLothI nos. 48, 50, 139; DLothII nos. 17, 28. 43 See Felten, ‘Laiena¨bte’, 429–31; Bernhardt, op. cit., 110–16. 44 DLD nos. 40, 73, 161; similarly no. 93 (858), but see no. 128 (868), both for Herford; and no. 116 for Altaich. 45 i.e. whether a new property-owning entity is intended, or who will control the monks’ part (DLothI no. 48 and ed. note 140–1; ACIII nos. 46, 94). Restoring a regular abbot might involve reuniting the property (DLJ no. 23, for Hersfeld, 882); but eventually partitions were made between regular abbots and their monks. 46 Possessions given in usum fratrum to the Regensburg royal chapel were among those given with it ten years later to a chaplain of Charles the Fat’s for life (DLD no. 161, DKIII no. 127). In the western kingdom, beneficing vassals for military service sometimes fell on the convent’s property (Voigt, Klosterpol., 30). 47 ACII nos. 200, 230, 307, 313; DLothI no. 139; DLD nos. 73, 93, 128, 161; AEudes no. 33 (and see p. cxxvii). 48 Fischbeck to Corvey, Berg to Regensburg royal chapel (DLD nos. 73, 161), Croix-Saint-Ouen to SaintGermain-des-Pre´s, Saint-Loup (Chablis) to Saint-Martin of Tours (ACIII nos. 92, 307). 49 See Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 34–5 on royal benefactions to the monks’ mensa at Lorsch after Louis the German’s burial there. Charles the Simple’s donations and confirmations were regularly for psalmody or anniversary masses. 50 Bernhardt (op. cit., 89 n. 9) holds that abbatia does not normally mean the abbot’s part, even in the West; but he cites ratio abbatiae (88–9); and see ACII nos. 111, 269 (ex . . . monasterii abbatia, ex abbatia), and other instances. 40

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confirming this at his request;51 acting both as ruler with a protective function and as lord with an interest in the prelate’s honor (for an episcopal church it is almost always the bishop who is described as having assigned the lands to the canons’ use, with the king’s confirmation).52 Alternatively the land may evidently come out of the abbacy, and yet the allocation be worded as if it were the king’s to give;53 taking action at a lay abbot’s request (or sometimes the monks’),54 rather than confirming the abbot’s act. Tessier regarded such gifts out of the abbacy as the king’s to dispose of because he was ‘master of the abbacy’ and could do as he liked with it.55 Certainly in the early tenth century some of Charles the Simple’s grants are explicitly made by him ‘out of the abbacy’, at the great count-abbot Robert’s request.56 But it is inconceivable that the king could treat abbey lands as his own when they were held by the most powerful magnate in the land; what is really operative must be the abbot’s or rector’s request that the transfer be made. And many of Charles the Simple’s mensa diplomas take the other form, confirming what the abbot or someone else has given;57 there is probably no real difference. But it was undoubtedly the king’s business, since it perhaps enlarged the extent of an immunity and certainly affected the value of the honor he had to dispose of: one of the elements of his kingdom. These various actions, both protective and self-interested—and their converse, condoning earlier secularization, declining to remove benefice-holders,58 or secularizing further—do not amount to the direct exploitation of a piece of property.59 What the bishop or abbot holds as his honor or benefice is a mass of lordly power. If he is not a count Robert he may be intermittently squeezed or robbed by the king, whose demands can be stretched a long way by his own desperation and the prelate’s loyalty (or vulnerability to charges of disloyalty); or the king may assert some protective, paternalist, or theocratic control; but if he claims direct landlordship in the property it is probably safe to say that this is either in a vacancy, when the honor has fallen into his hands, or it amounts to a claim to be abbot himself. This is not a matter of ‘owning’ the monastery as 51

ACII nos. 106, 111, 215, 372; DLD no. 116; DLothII no. 28; DKarlmann no. 20; many by Charles the 52 Simple (below, note 56). An exception is ACIII no. 62. 53 ACII nos. 215, 315, 434, 444; DArn. no. 114 (see Wisplinghoff, Untersuchungen, 27–8); and below, note 56. 54 The latter normally in a vacancy (below, note 63); but see ACII no. 269 (864, for Saint-Germain, Auxerre), done ex abbatia at the monks’ request apparently during Charles’s son Lothar’s brief abbatiate. 55 ACII III. 226. 56 ACIII nos. 38, 45, 54, 77–8, 110. Cf. nos. 7 and 11, at the queen-mother’s request. 57 Ibid. nos. 46–7, 50, all for count Robert. No. 101 (919, Saint-Martin) was probably Robert’s charter for the monks, brought to the royal chancery to be turned into a royal diploma (ed. note). Cf. count-abbot 58 Reginar’s requests, below, p. 321 note 72. e.g. at Kempten (below, p. 270 note 3). 59 Past secularization was sometimes apologized for as a matter of urgent need (e.g. ACII no. 75; DLothII nos. 9, 17); not seen as following naturally from lordship.

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distinct from having lordship or defence over it;60 what the king was doing in such cases was exercising a different level of lordship, though the very possibility of stepping into this level of hands-on lordship amounts in itself to a kind of property. Some of the partitions to create a mensa were certainly done in a vacancy. If an abbot had died and not yet been replaced, or had been dispossessed for treachery, then the abbey is in the king’s hands anyhow;61 and what he could either keep himself or grant as a single benefice he could equally well carve up—whether ‘dividing’ an abbey for several of his lay partisans, or detaching a benefice for an individual clerk,62 or setting aside property for the community to live on or use for religious purposes.63 For the time being the abbacy is in his indominicatum; and if he keeps it for any length of time he is in effect claiming it for himself, with much the same variations of terminology as other rectores or lay abbots, and because for the time being he chose to and could. There might be theocratic and pastoral ideas behind this, peculiar to kings—as perhaps when Charlemagne is described as ‘pastor’ of Murbach, or Louis the Pious as abbot of Inden after the death of Benedict of Aniane; or even when Charles the Bald towards the end of his life calls himself ‘by God’s appointment . . . and the brothers’ election, abbot’ of Saint-Denis.64 But Hincmar describes the beginnings of this, eight years earlier, as the king ‘keeping the abbey for himself’, committing its affairs to provost, dean, and treasurer and its military service to the mayor of his palace;65 simply retaining in his own hands a piece of property that he would usually have granted out. There may be no significance in the actual title ‘abbot’ not being encountered in similar cases of protracted vacancy, as when in the preceding year Charles ‘did with the abbey of Saint-Vaast what he had earlier done with Saint-Quentin, keeping for himself the caput with the choicer vills, and dividing the rest among some of his men’.66 When SaintMartin of Tours was vacant after count Vivian’s death, Charles gave its cell Sainte-Colombe in benefice to one of the canons to hold ‘under the lordship and potestas of the rector’, marked by paying an annual census to the king’s chamber or to that of whatever abbot he might be inspired to appoint.67 This seems to imply 60 As Metz has it (Reichsgut, 220–4), distinguishing Ko¨nigsklo¨ster sometimes to be found in the king’s indominicatum from Reichsklo¨ster which only have to bear such burdens as military service or gifts (conceding however the difficulty of so classifying 9th-c. monasteries). Cf. Mayer, (below, p. 271 note 15; 61 282–3). Or if the vacancy of a bishopric has vacated an abbacy, as at Gorze, 876 (DLD no. 169). 62 Above, notes 31, 32. 63 e.g. DLothII no. 17 (see Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 208–9); DArn. no. 114; ACIII no. 34. For a bishopric, DLD no. 167 (875, Metz). 64 Felten, A¨bte, 280–1; Vita Ben. Anian., c. 42 (SS XV. 219 and ed. note); ACII no. 379 (875). See Voigt, Klosterpol., 33–5; Lesne, Propr., II. 2. ii 172–84; Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 45, 50–2. 65 66 Ann. Bert., s.a. 867 (pp. 134–5). Ibid., s.a. 866 (p. 132). 67 ACII no. 141. See Voigt, Klosterpol., 35.

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that Charles himself is rector for the time being; which may be no more than to say that he has the abbey in its vacancy, but it sounds as if this can go on as long as he chooses. These are abbeys that Charles keeps for the same reason that he may give them away or split them up: that they are valuable properties, bringing large revenues in money and kind. But protectiveness, proprietary feeling, and quasi-priestly aspirations could work to the same result, as for his own splendid foundation at his palace of Compie`gne, where it seems that he kept direct control;68 and perhaps when Charles the Fat undertook that should he outlive his wife Richardis he would keep S. Marino, Pavia, ‘in our hands and our private and special familiarity’, to be ruled and managed ‘by us and our ministers’.69 Meanwhile Lothar II was ‘king and abbot’ for the rich Lotharingian monastery of Lobbes until his death, when it was allotted to Charles the Bald, who gave it to his clerical son Carloman; but at Carloman’s fall ‘the abbey remained in his father’s hands for five years’.70 In bishoprics, though with no such option of calling himself a bishop, a king could take similar advantage of vacancies (with chorepiscopi for the bishop’s spiritual functions). Rheims was kept vacant for nine years by Charlemagne, who ‘held the bishopric in his dominicatum’, and again for ten years by Charles the Bald, each of them (according to Hincmar) giving much away in benefice.71 Metz, however, was vacant and in Charlemagne’s personal charge for twenty-four years for reasons evidently not exploitative but to do with enhancing its status in relation to Trier.72 It is uncertain when rulers began to take possession of vacant abbeys or bishoprics or on what grounds; or what exactly happened in practice in an ordinary vacancy of a few months. Moving in at a prelate’s death may have begun as protection against plundering by others, but was a natural move when abbeys and bishoprics were seen as honores or benefices bestowed by the king.73 It was probably usual to give or entrust the place to someone, lay or clerical, to manage for his own gain, whether or not passing something on to the king;74 in the later 68

ACII no. 425 (877); cf. Compie`gne, no. 15 (Henry I, c.1048). 881, DKIII no. 42. But he also undertook to protect the tenure of her men beneficed in the abbey lands, which throws a different light on his interest. 70 De fundatione, c. 6 (SS XIV. 550, 555); Ann. Bert., s.a. 870 (pp. 173–4). Two further kings, Louis the Stammerer and Louis the Younger, held Lobbes; then Lothar II’s bastard son Hugh (880). See Dierkens, 71 Abbayes, 129–30; Voigt, Klosterpol., 36. Report on the villa Neuilly, SS XV. 2. 1167–9; ACII no. 75. 72 Oexle, ‘Karolinger’, 279–84, 328–46. 73 On vacancies of bishoprics see Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 102–21; for Italy, Fischer, Ko¨nigtum, 111–12. 74 It could be used purely for patronage; at its most extreme, Charles the Fat ‘committed’ Metz’s property to Lothar II’s son Hugh ‘to lay waste’ (according to Hincmar, Ann. Bert., s.a. 882, pp. 248–9); i.e. he was allowed a free hand to loot it (see Nelson, Annals, 225 and n. 14). The proposal at Quierzy, 877, for diocesan bishop and count to have custody when an abbot died was specifically for the king’s imminent absence (Capit. no. 281 cc. 8, 9); normally he would make his own arrangements. 69

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ninth century the king’s candidate for the prelacy might be given possession in advance of being elected.75 But the easiest (and perhaps the oldest) way of exploiting a short vacancy was to seize the dead prelate’s treasure, stores, and livestock.76 This practice, later called spolia, seems not to have any particular bearing on property-rights in the church and its lands;77 but it is not sharply divided from a dilapidating style of estate management, cutting down timber or even dismantling buildings.78 More under the king’s own control was probably the carving out of benefices for his lay fideles (most easily done in a vacancy); and provided he was kept informed by hopeful supplicants, he could probably fill any prebends and dependent churches falling vacant during the vacancy.79 All this—secularization and its mitigation, vacancies and their prolongation— contributed to giving the king a wide-ranging interest in the Church’s wealth, demonstrated by the proliferation of surveys and inventories of church property, made often on royal initiative. Evidence of such inquiry, and occasionally of how it was made, goes back to the very beginning of Carolingian monarchy,80 and reappears under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious.81 The survey made in 842–3 for Verdun must have been more than just a list;82 in 853 Charles the Bald had his missi inquire into the condition and property of all monasteries (evidently covering episcopal monasteries as well as royal); in 869 he ordered reports on their honores from bishops, abbots, and abbesses themselves, besides ordering inventories of individual churches at various times.83 But these inquiries cannot all be explained on the narrow basis of ‘proprietary’ interest in the profits of lordship or direct exploitation.84 The information sought was very various: sometimes on produce, rents, and livestock,85 sometimes only 75

Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 108–9, 114–21. See Capit. no. 221 (Pavia, 876) c. 14, forbidding this: a deceased bishop’s possessions should be kept for his successor or distributed for his soul. Trosly (909) c. 14 (Mansi, XVIII. 302–3) speaks of plundering after a bishop’s death by ‘any of the more powerful men’, implying that kings had lost control. 77 It is not clear why spolia (as distinct from taking revenues in a vacancy) should result from a right of garde belonging to whoever ‘in fact or juridically, rightly or wrongly, is proprietor of the church’ as SaintPalais d’Aussac proposed (Droit de de´pouille, 204–7, 213–15). Perhaps a lord’s spolia simply pre-empted other people’s opportunistic robbery (long antedating any specific idea of garde). The moral rationalization could be that the bishop ought to have given them away before his death (Saint-Palais, op. cit., 191–5). 78 Exactions in vacancies at Chartres, renounced (c.1100) by count Stephen of Blois, included selling or cutting down timber; goods listed as customarily taken include lead, glass, wood, and stone (APhI no. 152). 79 See Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 106, 110–14. Most evidence for such windfall patronage is later. 80 Above, p. 218 at note 58. 81 Esp. assembling assorted bits of inventory as a formulary, Brevium exempla, c.811 (Capit. no. 128); see Metz, ‘Entstehung der Brevium Exempla’, DA 10 (1954) 395–8. For occasions see Lesne, Propr., III. 1–17; Metz, Reichsgut, 27, 51–3; Verhein, ‘Quellen zum Reichsgut’, i. 315–16; ii. 348–52, 373–9. 82 See Ganshof, ‘Entstehungsgeschichte’, 313–30; Nelson, ‘The Frankish Kingdoms’, New CMH, II. 120–1; Nithard, Hist., iv. 3–6. 83 Conc. III no. 27 (Soissons), capit. c. 1 (to be done cum consilio etiam et consensu ipsius qui monasterium 84 retinet); Ann. Bert., s.a. 869. As Metz appears to do, Reichsgut, 225. 85 Augsburg (Staffelsee) section of Brevium exempla (cc. 2–8); Lorsch inventory (see Metz, Reichsgut, 55–8). 76

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on the broadest outline of landed property (how many mansi, free or servile; how many unoccupied);86 or on what was in hand and what in benefice;87 sometimes not on land or livestock at all, but books, ornaments, and treasure;88 sometimes all this.89 The purposes must be equally various: sometimes primarily for the church’s own protection or reform;90 if for the king’s benefit, then it may be (mostly in the eighth century) to make a divisio for the benefit of a count or other benefice-holders, or (in the ninth) a partitio bonorum between abbot and community; to estimate what can be got by way of military service, supplies, or even taxation (falling also on counts and vassi) to raise a Danegeld;91 or to know what the king has given away, or has got back to keep for himself or give away again;92 or to work out an acceptable partition of the kingdom with these various uses in prospect. The church’s security and the king’s interest go together. If the monastery is enriched by others’ gifts or its own trade and colonizing, and well administered, it and its abbot will be more capable of serving the king in any of the many ways it might: abbots as missi living on their own resources; Hersfeld and Fulda in local defence and pacification, Wissembourg in keeping the posts going,93 all monasteries in splendid worship and effective prayer; or providing hospitality to the whole court, somewhere to celebrate Christmas or Easter, refuge for a royal widow or confinement for a defeated enemy; somewhere to die in comfort or to be buried in hope of resurrection; anything but a bald extension of the king’s own exploitable property.

10.iv. Services owed by higher churches In principle what a Frankish emperor or king received from bishoprics and abbeys—apart from being able to fill the offices—was not, except in special circumstances, the proceeds of direct landlord exploitation; it was the proceeds of outside lordship: the services for which those offices and their incumbents were suited, ranging from prayer through hospitality and ‘royal gifts’ to attendance at 86 Pfa¨vers section of the Rhaetia inventory; c. 9 of Augsburg section, Brevium exempla; Charles the Bald, 869 (note 83, above). See Verhein, op. cit., ii. 380–2, 389–90. 87 88 Wissembourg section, Brevium exempla (cc. 10–24). Charles the Bald, 853 (note 83, above). 89 Fulda inventory (Metz, Reichsgut, 397–8; Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 165–6); Staffelsee section, Brevium exempla; Saint-Riquier report for Louis the Pious (Hariulf, Chronique de St-Riquier, ed. F. Lot (Paris 1894), iii c. 3). 90 Perhaps Charlemagne for Saint-Wandrille, and the Fulda inventory; also suggested by the 853 capitulary, and Flodoard’s summary of Hincmar’s letter in execution of this (Hist. Rem., iii. 28). 91 Charles the Bald’s levies on mansi (Capit. no. 280; Ann. Bert., s.a. 866, 877). 92 Charles the Bald for Saint-Vaast (above, note 66), Lothar II for Lobbes (868; Lesne, Propr., III. 20–1). 93 Below, p. 275.

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court and military service. Any or all could be seen as the consideration in return for a gift, whether of endowments and immunity to the church itself, or of the honor—including or identified with the church—to the prelate;1 but it will be argued here that they should not be seen as ‘proprietary’. Military service can only be touched on here. It may have been originally left to immunity-holders to organize within their lands,2 which could result in the inhabitants (or those of them judged capable of military service) owing it as men to their lord, and he to the king.3 More certainly, specialized fighting men established on episcopal lands ‘by the king’s word’ were sometimes allowed (by Charles the Bald) to transfer themselves to the bishop and become his men; and increasingly bishops and abbots did their own beneficing of their own fighting men.4 The outcome seems to be patchy and diversified service rendered by prelates by means of tenants, vassi, or client neighbours.5 Consecrated bishops and regular abbots were not expected to lead their men into battle, but from Pippin’s reign onwards they were summoned to bring their men to the host, just as to attend courts and assemblies.6 In the eighth century such service was perhaps essentially personal.7 But the services were soon attached to the churches: in 819 at Aachen selected monasteries of the empire were listed according to what service they should in future do, fourteen owing military service and annual gifts, sixteen owing gifts alone, and eighteen nothing but prayer ‘for the emperor’s and his sons’ welfare and for the stability of the empire’.8 The dona here are the customary annual gifts, usually of two horses, shields, and lances: closely akin to military service, perhaps originally a symbolic substitute for it. The listing seems to have been Louis’s response, only partly favourable, to pressure from Benedict of Aniane to relieve observant monasteries that had been rendering both dona and militia.9 Monasteries with immunity appear in all three classes; what then or at any other time secured exemption from military service might be favour, poverty, or an exposed position where men were needed to defend the monastery itself.10 The abbot responsible would often be a secular clerk or a layman, in Louis’s time partly because the burden of military and political services had so swelled 1

2 See Classen, ‘Wormser Concordat’, 426 and n. 60. Kroell, Immunite´, 107–11. Implied in Mon. Boica, 28 no. 17 (clarifying Kempten’s exemption, 834). 4 5 See esp. Nelson, Politics and Ritual, 121–6. See Innes, State, 143–56. 6 Charlemagne’s surviving summons to an abbot for military service (806, Capit. no. 75) is to a lay abbot, however. 7 e.g. for Sturm of Fulda, or abbesses for whom only the king’s summons could justify absence from the cloister (755, Ver c. 6: Capit. no. 14). 8 Notitia de servitio monasteriorum (CCM I. 493–9 or ed. Lesne, ‘Ordonnances’, app. 489–93). 9 Lesne, ‘Ordonnances’, 321–8; Felten, A¨bte, 293–4. The authentic list is restricted to observant monasteries; among these, to those now promised election privilege; and among these, to monasteries currently bearing both charges (ibid. 335–8, 458–87). Those owing dona and/or militia of course owed 10 prayer also. e.g. Louis the Pious’s privilege for Noirmoutier, 830, PL 104. 1183–6. 3

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under Charlemagne that a monk could hardly fulfil them adequately without damage to his religious role;11 but regular abbots were left who had to be the lords of fighting men, chosen with that in mind, obliged to be often absent, and needing a large proportion of their monasteries’ resources for this service.12 Even where no military service was exacted a regular abbot might have local defence to manage, and be an important political figure (his status marked by rendering gifts) whose fidelity mattered: Raban Maur of Fulda (which owed prayer and gifts only) lost his abbey in 842 for supporting Lothar.13 And in the course of time the liability to military service (in any case falling on many churches not listed in 819) was removed from a few of the first group of 819 but extended to many of the second; in Germany by 981 (when a high proportion of the king’s forces was drawn from churches) these included Fulda, Hersfeld, Ellwangen, and Kempten.14 All these became princely in the end;15 it is only those of the third group, owing nothing but prayer, that mostly kept their modest position; and these were accordingly more likely to be treated as disposable objects, as were Berg and Wessobrunn by Charles the Fat.16 Not owing ceremonial gifts or military service may thus have tended to reduce a monastery to something nearer to being property; whereas to see churches that did owe these things as being thereby treated as Eigenklo¨ster, their service as arising from Eigenkirchenrecht, is to cram into a small box what belongs to the whole aristocratic ethos of the time.17 The same point can be made about hospitality, up to a point: it was right to entertain a king splendidly.18 But this has to be looked at more closely, considering that hospitality might require shelter, food, and drink for several hundred men, with fodder or at least grazing for their horses,19 for one night or several,

See Felten, A¨bte, 252–7, 276–9, 293–4. See the history outlined and concessions made for Corvey, 887 (DKIII no. 158). Cf. Rheinau’s licence to elect inter se ‘one worthy according to God and according to the world’ (870, DLD no. 130). 13 Or rather, made a politic withdrawal (see Innes, State, 212–13). 14 Indiculus loricatorum (MGH Const., I no.436): see Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 529 and nn. 443–4; Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 87–8; Auer, ‘Kriegsdienst’; Reuter, ‘Reconsideration’, 364 and n. 97. 15 See Schulte, Adel und Kirche, 207–8. As Auer shows (pp. 60–4), this does not support Mayer’s distinction between Reichsklo¨ster owing feudal military service and Ko¨nigsklo¨ster being the king’s property owing none (see below, pp. 282–3). 16 Above, p. 251; cf. Moutiers, Auxerre, given by Charles the Bald to Saint-Germain (Lesne, ‘Ordonnances’, 481 n. 2); Henry II’s alienation of monasteries valueless for military service (Vita Meinwerci, c. 144); Conrad III’s (1147) of Kemnade and Fischbeck (DKonIII no. 182). 17 Thus Lu¨beck saw Sturm’s defence of the Ehrenburg as forced on him in old age by Charlemagne’s ‘ownership’ of Fulda (see Beumann’s comment, ‘Eigils Vita Sturmi’, 11). Eigil takes it in his stride (Vita Sturmi, c. 25). 18 Even accommodating deposed rulers or important prisoners (see Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 106–8, 321) must have carried prestige. 19 See Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 70–1, 101; Bernhardt, Kingship, 58 and nn. Grazing was the barest minimum demand; later, albergi ad herbam appear among counts’ and viscounts’ rights in the Midi. 11

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and in some cases every year;20 and that beyond actual hospitality was the obligation to send supplies to the king, assist his travels and those of his servants or emissaries, or lend him horses, oxen, and wagons for his household or army. The demands have sometimes been seen as amounting to direct landlord exploitation, making monasteries ‘royal estates in clerical clothing’.21 This is an exaggeration even for eleventh-century Germany, where systematic royal exploitation of great churches reached its peak.22 Certainly hospitality and related supplies were of great economic value, especially where there was economic growth.23 But kings did not travel primarily in order to live off bishoprics, monasteries, and royal fiscs in rotation. The pattern of their travel was partly determined by special occasions, religious impulses, hunting plans, or the exigencies of war and rebellion;24 but its general purpose was to extend the king’s presence; for the Ottos at least, itinerant kingship was a mode of government.25 Monasteries at appropriate intervals on the mosttravelled routes might be used for frequent one-night stops; others for rarer but longer spells.26 Some great churches found it worthwhile to build a palace for royal visits.27 But this was an assertion of grandeur and of closeness to the king; royal visits often brought benefits—gifts, confirmations, privileges—which from the king’s point of view might both reward hospitality and make it possible;28 and much still turned on personal relations. Of course this hospitality was expensive;29 and when times were bad and kings were exigent, as in the western kingdom from the mid-ninth century, complaints were made and some exemptions sought.30 In the bishops’ letter of 858 to Louis the German—which Hincmar told Charles the Bald was meant more for him than for Louis31—the king is urged to secure better management of his estates to 20 As argued by Bernhardt (Kingship, 60–1, 67–8, 196–200, 253–82), on a wider range of evidence than the dating of royal charters. 21 Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 102 n. 390a quotes and rejects this from Helmut Weigel, 1959. 22 Two special cases in the Ottonian heartland come close: see Bernhardt, Kingship, 136–8, 156–7 (Gandersheim), 162–7 (St Maurice, Magdeburg, housed in what remained a royal residence, with land on whose produce the king retained claims; nonetheless a specially burdened monastery rather than a palace with attached church: see Blair’s distinction, Church, 283). 23 24 See Nelson, Politics and Ritual, 83–90. Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 26–7, 38, 121; Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 151–8. 25 See Bernhardt, Kingship, 45–52, 56–60; Leyser, Med. Germany and its Neighbours, 93–6. 26 Bernhardt, op. cit., 61–70 (Mu¨ller-Mertens’s ‘core’, ‘distant’, and ‘transit’ regions), 178–81, 211–22. 27 Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 29–31, 122–4; Maurer, ‘Rechtlicher Anspruch’, 259–60 (Reichenau’s palace for 28 Otto III). See Bernhardt, Kingship, 29–30, 33–4, 43, 117–18, 308–9. 29 Much less so if coming with a small household to fast or pray than for a feast and crown-wearing. 30 Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 39–51, 57–9. Exceptionally, Pippin II of Aquitaine undertook to visit Solignac only for prayer (i.e. his own devotions; 848, API&II no. 59). Some 10th-c. exemptions (Lesne, ‘Ordonnances’, 487 n. 1) ‘from all service except prayer’ (i.e. the community’s prayers for king and kingdom) were for the monks’ or canons’ mensa or stipendia, so in theory unnecessary (but see Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 102–4). 31 Above, p. 248.

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support his household, and not exact hospitality and transport services beyond the norms of his father’s time.32 But counts and other laity are among the victims as well as bishops, abbots, and abbesses;33 and the criticism is partly a matter of honour and propriety: kings should display largesse, not depend on that of their subjects. What has happened is the distortion or unbalancing, by the king’s poverty, of something in itself proper and honourable. It should not be assumed that when the king stayed at a monastery, or lodged his family and followers in the canons’ houses of a cathedral city, he always lived entirely at that church’s expense; on a visit of any length he might draw on his own nearby fiscs or town property, while his greater followers might have to send for supplies of their own.34 So hospitality in the sense of providing shelter, bedding, and stabling need not involve the whole cost of provisioning (it probably does in the more distant regions, but for far rarer visits). But conversely, provisioning might be required for the royal household lodged or encamped nearby, or passing through a neighbouring town. So it is not obvious where hospitality ends and supplying begins; and both may originate in a burden on the whole people, the primitive duty of feeding a king and looking after his messengers or guests. It is easy to distinguish from hospitality the customary annual gifts of horses, shields, and lances, sent to the king or taken to him by the abbot in person;35 or the six horses from the bishop of Trier,36 or Noirmoutier’s six pounds of silver.37 But when a king came, or was nearby, other gifts might be expected.38 Lupus abbot of Ferrie`res writing in 845 to Charles the Bald’s chancellor speaks separately of annual gifts (dona) and of other presents (munera). The dona, evidently fixed and customary, he has ready and wishes to know what to do with them; later he reports that he has sent them off as ordered (their ritual significance makes it 32

Conc. III no. 41 c. 14. On earlier practice see Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 25–6, 102–3. See Capit. no. 141 c. 29; and Metz, Reichsgut, 138–9. 34 See Frotar bp. of Toul’s request (Ep. Karol. Aevi, III. no. 3, p. 297), perhaps c.837, to Wigard abbot of Inden to send three cartloads of wine to Aachen; evidently an informal return from the abbot to the bishop for favours received, itself deserving reciprocation: the closing sentence, et quicquid iterum vobis de nostro servitio competit remandate, must mean ‘tell us what we can do for you in return’ (cf. ibid., no. 24 for a similar expression), not ‘send us whatever further you can for our service’ implying that the bishop owed the wine to the king (as Metz assumed, ‘Servicium’, iv. 57). 35 Hincmar explained these ‘vectigalia, among us called annua dona’ as due for royal defence of the Church (Epist., no. 12, PL 125. 1050–1); cf. Otto I’s diploma for St Maurice, Magdeburg (below, p. 283), though dona were not peculiar to churches. 36 DZ no. 18 (898; describing it as customary, and apparently explaining it by Trier’s having become a comitatus. 37 See above, note 10; required because Louis wishes to give his successors no grounds for violating the privilege (which otherwise frees Noirmoutier from all gifts, services, public works, etc.). However, the silver perhaps replaced not the former dona (described as modica) but hospitality (which the king would never want there). 38 Charles the Bald promised Solignac that a visiting king need only be given such eulogiae as the monks could afford (851, ACII no. 142, second version). 33

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matter how they are paid; probably best paid in person).39 The munera are undefined: he is sending what he can, like the widow’s mite.40 There were also renders in the ninth century that look like early examples of the renders in kind owed by royal monasteries in the eleventh-century empire, later largely commuted into money, and called servitium regis. Some of Saint-Germaindes-Pre´s’s peasants owed chickens, of which one or more were for the king;41 SaintDenis had to send 200 modii of wine to the royal fisc at Verneuil until Louis the Pious remitted it;42 Saint-Remi at Rheims supposedly sent an ox every year, all the way to Aachen;43 a story of Notker’s has Charlemagne show his appreciation of a cheese given him on a Friday for lack of fish by demanding two cartloads a year.44 Such contributions were seen by Heusinger as the beginning of something quite different from the dona, consisting of household supplies or draught animals of purely economic significance,45 as distinct from valuable objects signifying recognition of a lord’s protection, and gratitude for largesse. But the economic importance of these early renders (where we know of them) can be overrated. They might fill a gap in the court’s resources,46 or provide a welcome extra; but they do not amount to systematic exploitation of church lands. The 200 modii of wine (perhaps some 2,000 litres) would come from a tiny fraction of Saint-Denis’s vast estates.47 In Louis’s renunciation it is represented as something that an abbot was once asked for to make up for a temporary shortage at Verneuil, which later abbots continued to send, by implication as a courtesy, and the king’s agents have recently insisted on as a due.48 Bru¨hl sees this as invented for the occasion;49 but it seems plausible, and would make the first few consignments of wine a handsome present or extended hospitality. As for Saint-Remi’s annual ‘ox of Aachen’, it might have begun as a present, perhaps to acknowledge or solicit a favour, or for all we know (as has been suggested) some abbot’s lost bet.50 Gifts, renders, and hospitality run into each other.51 39

Charlemagne’s summons to abbot Fulrad of Saint-Quentin (above, note 10) requires him to send his dona before the placitum at which they are due, or preferably present them in person. 40 Correspondance, nos. 45, 47. 41 Pol. Irminon. v. 93, xxi. 4, 31, 53, 59, xxii. 4, 97 (see Metz, ‘Servicium’, i. 270–1. The pulli cannot be foals as Metz implies (ibid. 223–4); apart from their association with ova, a one-manse peasant household owing 42 ‘3 pulli and a 4th royal one’ could not possibly keep four brood-mares. c.828 (below, at notes 47–9). 43 In Saint-Remi’s polyptich certain tenants paid a denarius each pro bove aquensis (vi. 2, xvi. 2, 10, xvii. 2, 22, etc.). Considering the distance, it was probably commuted. 44 Notkeri, Gesta, I c. 15 (SRGerm., 18–19). 45 Heusinger, ‘Servicium regis’, 28–30, 77–9, arguing that while some of these dues sprang from old public obligations (the Roman cursus; Frankish hospitality to kings), others were a matter of ‘private law’ 46 and the Eigenkirche. Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 73–4. 47 A modius may have been a situla, a bucketful. The late 9th-c. Pru¨m inventory shows 30 modii or situlae to a cartload, while a single estate of Wissembourg’s was expected to produce 70 cartloads (Scha¨fer, 48 ‘Weissenburg’ 12 and n. 47): about ten times the Saint-Denis render. Bouquet, VI no. 128. 49 50 Fodrum, 73 n. 278. Scha¨fer, op. cit., 12. 51 e.g. API&II no. 59, renouncing all dona or paratae; paratae were provisions prepared for a visitor. In general on dona and eulogiae see Metz, ‘Servicium’, iv. 60–5.

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Explicit references to such supplies do not yet, in the ninth century, regularly call them servicium; nor when the word is used can it be assumed to have this meaning.52 When Lupus of Ferrie`res explains his inability to afford better presents for the king or, more importantly, another spell at court, he mentions ‘the frequent service, which used not to be exacted from my predecessors’;53 but this is not adequate evidence for a new burden, based, unlike the old dona and militia, on the Eigenkirche principle.54 Lupus’s complaints are generally so concrete—the scarcity of grain until the harvest comes in, the ten horses he lost on his mission to Burgundy last year, the loss of everything he had with him on the Aquitanian expedition, and his fighting men’s need for rest—that we would expect a graphic account of what he had had to send to the king and the resulting shortages. He seems rather to mean the unprecedented frequency of service in the wider sense:55 attendance at court, work as a missus, military expeditions; all extremely expensive, but what makes them almost intolerable is the loss of supplies from Saint-Josse. The king has here removed a major source of income as a benefice for a follower;56 it is unlikely that he is also taking supplies away by the cartload for his own household. No doubt Lupus would have stood better with Charles for sending him presents of wine, or furs, or objets d’art, but these would be the munera that Lupus would have sent if he could.57 Evidence of this mixed and scrappy kind is almost all we have for the ninth century. But the Wissembourg land register, whose oldest section may date from before 818,58 shows something on a significantly larger scale: large numbers of the monastery’s tenants, in more than fifty places, owing unspecified presents (eulogiae, probably of food); or cartloads of wine; or transport services—oxen and wagons, or barges on the Rhine; or post-horses,59 probably for anyone on the king’s business; or cartloads of pitch from the neighbouring forest for tarring buildings or boats. Much of this is described as ‘for the king’s service’, and to be sent ‘to the palace’, sometimes specifically Mainz, Worms, or Frankfurt; and sometimes ‘for the army’: horses, transport, money, or men.60

52

See Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 97–8. General abstract terms used include opera and obsequium as well as servitium; servitium is used under Louis the Pious in contexts where the service may be transport, post-horses, etc. 53 besides supplies. Correspondance, no. 45 (autumn 845). 54 As Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 76–7, here following Heusinger (above, note 45) rather than Bru¨hl. 55 Cf. bp. Frotar’s letter to Louis the Pious’s ostiarius (Ep. Karol. Aevi., III no. 6), asking to be excused from the servitium of going to Spain for the emperor, since otherwise ‘I could not serve him as I would 56 wish’ on his proposed visit to Toul next year. Above, p. 261. 57 Above, pp. 273–4. 58 Ed. Dette, Liber possessionum Wizemburgensis (surviving in a 13th-c. copy). But Dette’s grounds for this early dating are highly theoretical (see above, p. 30 note 93). 59 barefrida (paraveredi); see Scha¨fer, ‘Weissenburg’, 7–8. 60 Ibid. 5–11, 34–6; Metz, ‘Servitium’, iv. 44–53.

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But this is not the passing on of a monastery’s burdens to its tenants,61 still less the exploitation as royal fisc of the whole monastic endowment whatever its source, but the monastery’s responsibility for services owed to the king by the inhabitants of its lands, or some of them, in certain places.62 The burdens themselves (apart perhaps from the eulogiae) are exceptionally heavy and specialized, marking the great importance to the Carolingians of this stretch of the Rhine and the roads and palaces either side of it;63 the abbot’s or monastery’s own service was perhaps to organize and oversee all this.64 The services may have been collapsing by the end of the ninth century as the interests of the German kings shifted;65 the abbot probably provided his large contingent of fifty, on the Italian expedition of 981, independently of these peasant or small tenants’ services, commuted or not66 (just as he probably provided hospitality regardless of his tenants’ eulogiae). Such specialized services are different from large-scale provisioning of the king’s court with agricultural produce from church lands, such as may already in particular places have extended beyond direct hospitality and presents of cheese or wine.67 For the tenth century there is virtual silence about any systematic provisioning of this kind,68 though it almost certainly happened under the Ottos.69 It first emerges clearly in the mid-eleventh century in one of Werden’s land registers, which shows the abbey’s tenants having to supply large and precise quantities of livestock, cheese, eggs, oats, bread, and beer, and large numbers of dishes and cups.70 Next come diplomas of 1073 for the two royal nunneries of 61 Except perhaps the eulogiae (cf. Saint-Germain-des-Pre´s’s tenants’ poultry, or dues to Pru¨m ‘at the king’s coming’, Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 101); see Dette, Liber possessionum, 63. 62 Cf. miscellaneous services to the local fisc from lands of Fulda’s (DOII no. 274; see Scha¨fer, ‘Weissenburg’, 12–13). For Wissembourg, Scha¨fer proposes that a king had given the lands while reserving to an exceptional degree ancient burdens on its inhabitants (ibid., 1–5, 16–29); Dette, op. cit., 63–9, sees the services as due rather from former fisc as such. 63 Scha¨fer, op. cit., 6–7, 19–23, 24–5, 32–7, and 31 (map). 64 Metz (‘Servitium’, iv. 48) draws attention to Wissembourg’s secular abbot Grimoald (Louis the German’s chancellor). On its military aspect see Innes, State, 146–7. 65 The post service was granted (with the ‘gild of postmen’) to the bp. of Worms, 897 (see Dette, op. cit., 46); some men’s services, already available within limits for the abbot’s use, may soon have been used only by him (Scha¨fer, op. cit., 22–4). In 965 Otto I released Wissembourg’s people, including those ‘called fiscales or censuales’, from work on any fortifications except the monastery’s (DOI no. 287). 66 Scha¨fer, op. cit., 36, 38–9. 67 e.g. Werden’s 11th-c. list of peasant payments at Friemarsheim (huge quantities of bread, beer, and hound-fodder), arguably best explained by its dedication long ago to supporting Charlemagne’s expeditions to Saxony (Wisplinghoff, ‘Bauerliches Leben’, in W. Janssen and D. Lohrmann (eds.), Villa, curtis, grangia: Landwirtschaft (Munich, 1983, 151–5). 68 Conrad I’s grant of Lorsch to abbot Liuthart ‘provided . . . that he perform our regale servitium for it as anciently laid down’ (914, DKonI no. 23), seen by Wehlt as referring to such provisioning (Reichsabtei, 76–7), seems closer to the usage in DKonI no. 18 (913) renewing free election provided that the elect ‘appear suitable to God’s service and ours’. 69 The scale, range, and frequency of their travels would demand such a system, as Bernhardt argues (Kingship, 127–34, 180–1, 185–7, 195–6); servitia listed as an abbot’s might include some destined for the king. 70 Ko¨tschke (ed.), Rheinische Urbare, II. 137–67. See Heusinger, ‘Servicium regis’, 37–8; Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 200; Metz, ‘Servicium’, i. 191–3; Bernhardt, op. cit., 181–2.

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Regensburg, reducing their servitium of pigs; and a forged diploma for Remiremont, with a perhaps genuine list of the abbess’s dues (heavy ones, beginning with sixty pigs and twenty cows, but due only when the king came to Metz or Toul).71 According to Stavelot-Malme´dy’s land register of c.1130, abbot Poppo a century earlier had allocated certain estates to the servitium regni.72 By the twelfth or thirteenth century many monasteries in Germany owed money dues (diverse and irregular), apparently in commutation of supplies that they used to render, and under the now technical name of servitium regis.73 Meanwhile supplies from royal estates were called servitium regis as far back as Charlemagne’s capitulary de villis, and Heusinger associates with this the servitium that the legislation of 818–19 allows to be owed by a rural priest to his lord, in order to argue (in effect) that the servitium of great churches shared in the character of both: that it was a landlord’s due, from an Eigenkirche that was just one kind of landlord property.74 But at that time servitium (even in the singular) could mean whatever the monastery did for the king, from prayer to providing post-horses or fighting men.75 When later, in Germany, it became the standard term for the king’s provisions both from abbeys and from the fisc, this simply reflects their common destination ‘for the king’s service’.76 Naturally broadly the same kind of goods were required from eleventh-century Werden as from the royal estates listed in the twelfth-century inventory as attached to the king’s ‘table’;77 for both, news of the king’s coming would activate the slaughter of pigs and counting of cheeses. But they are not exactly the same (Werden provides cloths and tableware, strongly suggestive of hospitality);78 nor is the scale of Werden’s service comparable with what equivalent fisc would produce.79 Heusinger got round the fact that fiscal agents were not (in general) found levying the goods from church lands, by saying that the abbot himself is the king’s agent for this purpose.80 But this would remove all sting from Lampert of Hersfeld’s remark, on the exorbitant demands made in Henry IV’s name by archbishop Adalbert and count Werner, that they were claiming for the king ‘no 71

DHIV nos. 264–5 (Ober- and Niedermu¨nster); ibid. no. 237. See Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 200, 204–5; Metz, ‘Servitium’, i. 200–2, 214–15. 72 Metz, ‘Servitium’, i. 194. In 1085 the abbot let out an estate in return for a horse and a cartload of wine needed for the royal service (Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 222–4). 73 Lorsch’s exceptionally high due of £100 (recorded when remitted, 1147, DKonIII no. 167) was perhaps a heavy ‘gift’ rather than a commuted obligation to feed the court (Lorsch owned silver mines). In either case it is far-fetched to argue that Lorsch’s surrender of the abbatial part of three villae for release from it shows the due as ‘eigenkirchlich’ and ‘grundherrlich’ (Heusinger, op. cit., 81); it shows merely Lorsch’s 74 willingness to part with capital to escape it. Heusinger, op. cit, 27, 30, 33–5. 75 Heusinger himself demonstrates this (ibid. 28–30); cf. Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 97–8. 76 Or ‘for the king’s need’ (ad opus regis). 77 Indiculus curiarum, ed. Levison and Schulte, ‘Das Verzeichnis der ko¨niglichen Tafelgu¨ter’, NA 41 (1917), of an undecided 12th-c. date. 78 For other differences see Heusinger’s comparative table, ‘Servicium regis’, 155. 79 80 See Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 202; Heusinger, op. cit., 33–4. Heusinger, op. cit., 50.

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less right and power over the abbots than he had over his bailiffs (villici) and any other managers of the royal fisc’.81 This was what a greedy or desperate ruler might be caricatured as claiming. An abbot sending these supplies is arguably still essentially a host, at worst a rich subject from whom a heavy tax is required; according to circumstances hopeful of favours, on his mettle, resentful, or desperate; and if hard-pressed he may feel that he is being treated like a mere bailiff. If a monastery’s services and gifts are at first variable or unpredictable this is because they are personal; if fixed, this is because what began as personal service and gift-exchange has become a custom, which for the monks provides at least predictability. It has been held that by contrast with the abbeys the servitium of bishoprics was unlimited. This impression arises from the fact that Henry II— possibly the originator of the massive but defined demands on certain abbeys82— exploited the actual hospitality of bishops more (at least outside Saxony),83 so that their servitium remained an overspill of hospitality. A story is told of a bishop of Eichsta¨tt’s indignation at the demands made by Henry II for ‘full servitium on his way to Regensburg’, the official who came in advance listing everything in great detail, including ‘an immense quantity of wine’:84 the tone of the story suggests that it was the official’s arrogance and the galling detail that offended as much as the cost. This demand was evidently not for an actual stay at Eichsta¨tt; bishops like abbots might have to send supplies.85 But usually the king descended on the city itself, the whole cost of each visit falling on bishopric and city together.86 The contrast with the abbeys’ fixed services is certainly overdrawn (when Henry II or the Salian kings did stay for a few days in a monastery they are unlikely to have restricted their demands to the customary list);87 and Heusinger’s argument that the difference is positive evidence for the Eigenkirche origins of the service—first manifest for abbeys in the strict form of fixed dues, later taking hold of bishoprics in the looser form of a variable obligation88—seems perverse. If fixed dues were to be seen in the light of proprietary claims at all, they would indicate less exposure to them, not more. But of course the difference cannot possibly arise from the bishoprics being even more assimilated to royal property than the monasteries—they were undoubtedly less so; it must arise from their urban situations, larger accommodation, growing wealth, and the greater exigencies of their rank. 81

82 Lamperti Annales, s.a. 1063 (p. 89). Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 127, 199–200. Some Saxon monasteries had the large ‘sacral spaces’ now required (Bernhardt, Kingship, 295–6). 84 Heusinger, ‘Servicium regis’, 54 n. 2, from Anonymus Haserensis. 85 Implied in Lampert of Hersfeld’s account of Henry IV’s difficulties at Worms, Christmas 1073: ‘nor did the bishops and abbots or other public dignitaries pay him their accustomed obsequia’ (Lamperti Annales, p. 173; see Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 210). 86 Heusinger, op. cit., 56–61. For detail on the bishops’ service see Metz, ‘Servitium’, ii. 203–59; iii. 273–83. 11th-c. references to a bishop’s ‘due’ service probably mean what was proper, rather than fixed. 87 88 On the degree of difference see Metz, ‘Servitium’, ii. 258–9. Heusinger, op. cit., 76–81. 83

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In any case what is surprising is not such differences in function between bishoprics and abbeys, but the degree of similarity that had developed under the first Carolingians between offices not inherently very much alike. To expect them to be even more alike than they really were, by lumping all together under the academic construct of the Reichskirchengut, raises unnecessary problems. The king could get large-scale hospitality and provisions from great churches in various ways, not by treating their lands as his own,89 but by treating the prelates as lords under his lordship, his richest subjects, and his sometimes ill-used but often highly rewarded hosts. If they are due only from ‘royal’ churches, that is because owing these services is part of what makes a church royal. In this discussion France has slipped out of the picture. Much less is known about the late Carolingian or early Capetian kings’ itineraries, or about the court’s consumption and how it was catered for. Where they had access to ecclesiastical hospitality or supplies at all they might well, being poorer, have been more exigent than the Ottos, though perhaps not than Henry II or the Salians. By the twelfth century, however, the French kings like the Germans seem not usually to have stayed in even their greatest monasteries for more than a few days at a time. Like the Germans, but from far fewer churches, tenth and eleventh-century French kings had rights to supplies, closely related to hospitality, and later commuted into money payments; under various names, as gistum (whence ‘droit de gıˆte’), hospitalicium, herbergagium (lodging), fodrum (fodder), procuratio, conrodia, convivia: the last four on the whole referring to being fed (men or horses), the rest to being lodged, but with no sharp distinction.90 What the Capetian king had was only scraps and remnants of Carolingian royal rights, other princes having much the same rights over other churches. The monks of Saint-Vaast in the late twelfth century believed that long ago, before they fell into the hands of the counts of Flanders, the kings had been easier on them than the tenth-century counts were to be, coming only once in five or ten years, whereas the count came and stayed whenever he came to Arras, besides billeting fifty or a hundred knights on the monastic estates; until by agreement this was turned into a gavulum, a rent, and the only relic of actual hospitality was a caritas, a token meal of bread, fish, and wine.91 The king’s demands had been undefined but seldom required: in fact real hospitality, converted under the counts to a rent. But in general these services are not rent-like; they are rights of a ruler over a lordly establishment and its prelate.

89 90 91

Otto I’s St Maurice at Magdeburg is a rule-proving exception (above, note 22). See Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 220–2, 232–45, 271–80. Ibid. 276–8, from Saint-Vaast’s Liber de possessionibus.

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10.v. Germany after the Carolingians, and some contemporary states Looking at the services due to rulers has taken us well beyond the Carolingian reigns in east and west. On broader questions about rulers’ power over great churches after the ninth century, historians have concentrated on the Ottonian empire. The Ottos took over the bishoprics and royal monasteries of the eastern kingdom (and later of Lotharingia), founded more of both, and acquired monasteries founded by others (almost all in their own power-base of Saxony). Depending more on itineration than the Carolingians had done, they took more hospitality and supplies from higher churches and gave them more land and privileges to sustain or reward this; they also made extensive use of their royal chapel for administration and as a route to promotion for bishops;1 but beyond this we cannot usefully see them as creating an ‘Ottonian system of government’, giving governmental power to great churches under authoritatively appointed and reliable prelates.2 What follows is concerned with the narrower question of how far their dealings with higher churches—here specifically monasteries—can be seen as ‘proprietary’. The Ottos were more deliberately and actively involved in other people’s foundations than past kings had been, but not in any set pattern. Actual conveyance of a monastery (male or female) into the Ottos’ lordship was unusual,3 which suggests that commending it into the king’s defence still came to much the same thing under powerful kings.4 But the Ottos sometimes gave defence (normally combined with or absorbed into immunity)5 to churches under the lordship of a greater church, or enjoying papal protection, or remaining for a time under lay founders;6 which might point the other way, to royal defence having a more public, theocratic meaning.7 Nonetheless the king’s involvement in a foundation and taking it into defence did normally result in royal lordship, if not at once then subsequently, though how it did this is not always clear either from the words 1

See Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle; Ko¨hler, ‘Die Ottonische Reichskirche: ein Forschungsbericht’, 173–5. See Reuter, ‘Reconsideration’ (347 n. 1 for literature). 3 An example is Borghorst to Otto I (as related in DOIII no. 52). 4 See Semmler, ‘Traditio’, 16–22. On Henry III’s acquisitions see below, p. 369. Pfa¨vers (Rhaetia), supposedly already royal (above, p. 258 note 53, and DOI nos. 120, 250), received an exceptional privilege in 1040 (below, note 47) in response to abbot and monks ‘commending’ themselves (on the obscure cir5 cumstances see Seibert, ‘Libertas’, 532–3). See Kurze, ‘Isola’, 490. 6 Graff, ‘Kaiserurkunde’, 70–1 (10th-c. instances less ambiguous than his 9th-c. ones, above, p. 253 note 17); Semmler, ‘Traditio’, 17–19. 7 e.g. DOIII no. 385 (1000) for a monastery founded by the bp. of Piacenza, silent about the bishop’s lordship or lack of it. A monastery could receive from Henry II a simple letter of defence without being commended or conveyed to him (perhaps promising what any church in the empire had a latent claim to), but a full-scale defence privilege presupposed one or other (Kurze, ‘Isola’, 482–4). 2

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used or from the course of events. The noble widow Helmburg’s foundation of the nunnery8 of Fischbeck, endowed in part by Otto I in the form of a donation to Helmburg herself, was to be ‘subject to no secular dominium’ but his, and—a highly unusual provision—he ‘wishes to be their advocate and defender’.9 Advocacy here sounds more like lordly protection than jurisdictional office.10 Dominium itself, however, is claimed only negatively; and Fischbeck is not called a ‘royal abbey’ like Hilwartshausen11 (whose foundress in 960 gave land for it to Otto, not Otto to the foundress as here). But his giving the land ‘by hereditary right’ did not make it Helmburg’s to leave to her heirs (rather, it signified that it was his to give);12 his personal advocacy probably marked his primacy as founder;13 and Fischbeck was certainly under royal lordship later.14 In numerous other cases, from Otto I’s time to Henry II’s, a noble family’s foundation—usually a nunnery—was similarly set under royal defence (though without the idiosyncratic formulae of Fischbeck), its endowment sometimes passing via the king and sometimes augmented by him; its status sometimes to be that of the distinguished ‘royal’ monasteries (Herford, Gandersheim, Quedlinburg); its abbess normally to be elected inter se, but with various reservations of abbacy and advocacy for the family, short-term or indefinite.15 These transactions seem to be determined by the family’s immediate needs and the nature of the king’s interest, rather than by any care for legal categories. In some cases he wanted it only to confer it on a bishopric;16 otherwise what mattered to him was probably the monastery’s potential usefulness to his iter (usefulness that could be increased by any endowments coming from him).17 The expressions used to indicate royal control seem to be almost casual, rather than studied or formulaic; but sooner or later the king almost always emerged as lord of the monastery, appointing or consenting to election of its head, or giving it away.18 It seems clear that advocacy in a technical sense—exercising jurisdiction within an immunity—was now highly important. The content of immunity was changing: becoming less negative, more a matter of positive jurisdiction equivalent to the count’s; and great churches would soon be given other grants of comital 8

For brevity (and following Karl Leyser’s usage) I use the word ‘nunnery’ for communities that were mostly not Benedictine but more like later canonesses. 9 DOI no. 174. Louis the German’s Fischbeck (above, p. 264 note 48) had probably disappeared. 10 11 See below, p. 329. DOI no. 206, DOII no. 6 (sicut cetere regales abbatie). 12 See Leyser, ‘The Crisis of Medieval Germany’, 36 and n. 55. 13 For detailed discussion of the charter, Krumwiede, Fischbeck, 78–80, 86–90, 92–5. 14 It was Conrad III’s to give to Corvey, 1147 (DKonIII no. 182). 15 16 Below, pp. 357–60; see Leyser, Rule and Conflict, 66–70. Ibid. 69; and below, p. 284. 17 See Bernhardt, Kingship, 170–6. 18 e.g. Alsleben, built by count Gero and (shortly before his execution, 979) set under royal defence (DOII no. 190), renewed 1003 (DHII no. 44: the nuns to ‘call us defender’); but seen by Thietmar of Merseburg as making it ‘belong to the potestas of the emperor and his successors’ (Chron., iii. 10, SRGerm., NS, 9, 108–9).

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power, sometimes extending beyond their landlordship.19 All this meant greatly increased powers for advocates, and greater importance set on who appointed them; so it was a regular item, variously settled, in the dispositions made for nobles’ foundations under royal defence.20 Among fully royal monasteries some had an advocate appointed by the king, others were given the privilege of choosing their own, and yet others needed no privilege because they chose their own in any case. These differences were seen by Theodor Mayer as of fundamental importance, choice of advocate without need for a privilege indicating that a royal church had its own independent immunity, not ‘derived’ from that of the royal fisc, and would therefore eventually become a principality, having Reichsunmittelbarkeit, unmediated membership of the Reich. Mayer attributed this status—or potential—to the older and more important Carolingian royal churches, radically transformed by the change of dynasty from possessions of the former kings into members of or sharers in the kingdom, with civil personality; whereas new churches (even bishoprics) with ‘derived’ immunity were—unless exceptionally privileged—proprietary churches, mere possessions. Churches that were members of the Reich, or their prelates representing them, were in a feudal relation to the Crown, demonstrated by rendering hospitality and annual dona, and by owing military service in the 981 list; any Carolingian monasteries omitted from this list lacked the standing or antiquity to escape from being treated as royal property, and consequently paid undignified servitia rather than dignified dona.21 These last, practical differences are doubtful: the incompleteness of the 981 list makes it unsafe to draw conclusions from absences such as Echternach’s;22 and economic servitia were paid later by princely churches such as Reichenau, Werden, Corvey, and Stavelot-Malme´dy.23 As for the abstractions— Reichsunmittelbarkeit, original or derived immunity, and ‘feudal’ rather than proprietary relations—these do not correspond to any ninth- or tenth-century terminology, and lead to unnecessary difficulties and misfits.24 That new churches were often given the right to choose their advocate as well as their abbot or 19

Useful summary (with bibliography) in Bernhardt, op. cit., 33–4. The silence on this of Hilwartshausen’s diplomas (DOI no. 206, DOII no. 6) is unusual. 21 Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 36–8, 215, 217, 307 (clearly set out by Kempf, The Church in the Age of Feudalism, 273–4). Mayer’s view was dominated by the eventual emergence of principalities. 22 Otto I, restoring monastic life at Echternach (973, DOI no. 427), gave it defence but not immunity (though it had old immunity privileges), with free election of abbots (often overridden), and appointment of advocates by the king with the abbot’s consent. So it was relatively dependent (Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 172–3), 23 but these are matters of degree. See Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 197–8 and n. 330. 24 See Auer, ‘Kriegsdienst’, ii. 61–4; Bernhardt, Kingship, 71–2. An outstanding misfit is Lorsch, with immunity-defence and election-right repeatedly renewed, between and before being set under clerical outsiders and later temporarily alienated (see Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 35–46, and below, p. 284). Its renewal of privileges in 956 (DOI no. 176), seen by Semmler as making it a Reichskloster (‘Abtei Lorsch’, 133), seems no more decisive than earlier renewals. 20

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abbess, implying that they needed the king’s leave for this, could be due to their being new, rather than essentially different from monasteries that chose without a privilege; old bishoprics and some old monasteries can do it probably because they always have. Otto I’s splendid foundation for men, St Maurice at Magdeburg (937), had no explicit grant of immunity until Otto II’s time, but choice of ‘whoever they want as advocate’ as well as of abbot from among themselves; while royal defence was marked by the requirement that they pay yearly gifts of the Carolingian kind: a horse, shield, lance, and two pelts, to mark their being ‘in the king’s mundeburdis’.25 The dona would put them into Mayer’s princely category, while needing a privilege to choose their advocate would exclude them from it; it seems better to avoid the labels. St Maurice’s status was heightened three years later—and the king’s close personal hold in no way weakened—by setting it under papal protection as well;26 but its life as a great royal monastery was cut short by the change of plan that made it an archbishopric. Its female counterpart Quedlinburg, founded at the start of his reign by Otto I for his mother Matilda at one of the royal palaces in her large marriage portion, did eventually have princely status. But this did not depend on anything special in its foundation charter.27 The nuns were given free choice of abbess from among themselves, and such potestas in the endowments as ‘other religious women’ had; nonetheless it was subject to the king’s potestas and it was evidently not to choose its advocate.28 We do not have to decide whether this put it under ‘feudal lordship’ or made it ‘property’. It was both a very grand foundation and a family affair, occupying a fortified place that was an object of family rivalries. These rivalries may lie behind a famously problematical passage in Otto’s charter. This states first that ‘if anyone of our generatio’ (that is, of Otto’s descendants) ‘possesses the royal throne . . . the monastery and the nuns . . . are to be in his potestas and defence’; and secondly, ‘if however another is chosen as king, he shall hold his potestas over them as over other communities’. So lordship must stay with the king, descended from Otto or not. But the passage continues: ‘for (namque) whichever of our cognatio is most powerful should be had as advocate of both the place and the congregation.’ This is usually taken to mean separating advocacy from lordship if ‘another is chosen as king’, and allotting it to someone judged by Otto’s descendants to be the most powerful among them.29 But a more natural reading is Krumwiede’s, that whoever is king (assuming that this will be 25

26 27 DOI nos. 14, 15, 16 (all Sept.–Oct. 937). DOI no. 37 (941). DOI no. 1 (936). Assuming that the Liudolfing advocacy (see following note) included appointing a working advocate. 29 Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 218; Bernhardt, Kingship, 138–9. Both this view and Krumwiede’s (below) take cognatio in its wider sense as ‘kin’ rather than ‘maternal kin’. 28

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a Liudolfing at least)30 must by definition be the most powerful of the kindred— the best-qualified to provide protection—and so should keep both potestas and defence (advocacy in its broader sense).31 The third sentence, then, explains or comments on the second.32 The choice of king between Henry the Fowler’s sons had just been made, but future choices might arise; it would make sense, for Matilda’s security and for Henry’s soul, that whichever of their sons or grandsons were king should protect her foundation and his burial-place. Quedlinburg was to remain royal, but essentially for family reasons. The charter did, however, imply that Quedlinburg was inalienable from the kingship,33 and this is a crucial element in Mayer’s picture of the ‘unowned’ higher church. To put it the other way round, what makes it reasonable to say that a monastery is treated as royal property is its being given away. Otto I’s endowment for Quedlinburg included the monastery of Winetahusen.34 Later, in control now of Lotharingia, Otto I gave the abbey of Oeren to the church of Trier despite having recently allowed it free election, in a thoroughly proprietary exchange for the abbey of St Servatius, Maastricht (taking this into the ‘ius et proprietas of our public right or fisc’ and ‘annexing it for ever to our uses’ because he lacked resources in those parts).35 The monastery of Kesselheim (in Maingau), forfeited to Otto I by the rebellious Conradines ‘who possessed it hitherto’, was given by him in 966 to his new archbishopric of Magdeburg in proprietary terms: ‘we transfer and donate it out of our ius into that church’s ius for ever’, the archbishops to hold and possess it ‘and annex it at their will to their own uses’.36 Two years later he gave to the same church in similar terms his mother’s foundation at Engern in Westfalia, the monastery of Bibra founded by the estranged count Billing (apparently claimed by Otto as built on the fisc), and the important abbey of Wissembourg in Alsace, abbatia nostro iure propria; at Wissembourg reserving for the monks the election of their abbot, but subject to the archbishop’s consent.37 In 980 Otto II gave Wildeshausen to his own

30

This is not to say that Matilda and Otto could not imagine another change of dynasty, but that their immediate concern was within the kindred. 31 Krumwiede, Fischbeck, 90–2. His reading would explain more straightforwardly than does Bernhardt the passage ut nulli hominum umquam nisi tantum nobis nostrisque successoribus obtemperet aut quilibet regum aut episcoporum personae aliquod servitium ab ea impendatur. However, Krumwiede’s reading of potestativa manu (in si aliquis . . . regalem potestativa manu possideat sedem) as ‘taking by force’ is unwarranted: it is a standard phrase evidently meaning ‘having potestas’, i.e. legal capacity. 32 The conjunction namque usually signals an explanation, so better translated as ‘for’ than as ‘and’ or 33 This is so on any reading. ‘but’. 34 35 36 DOI no. 1. DOI no. 322 (perhaps 966); see below, at note 43. DOI no. 331. 37 DOI nos. 361, 363, 365. On Bibra see below, p. 362; Wissembourg’s status is unclear, its Carolingian diplomas either forged or lost (Magdeburg wanted it as sited among Christians, i.e. secure from Slav revolts).

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foundation at Memleben (his father’s death-place);38 later, Memleben itself was given to Hersfeld, Helmarshausen to Paderborn, others to Bamberg, all by Henry II whose policy it seems to have been to get rid of monasteries that were of no economic or military use to him.39 Correspondingly, a monastery or a category of monasteries declared inalienable is to that extent not property. A judgment was given at Frankfurt in 951 that an abbey with the right of electing its abbot ‘could not be given as property (in proprium) to a monastery or anyone’.40 The context was resistance by St Maximin, Trier, to the claims of the archbishopric;41 the point was to defend (or claim for the king) a church with a privilege that ought to prevent its subjection to another church. By the twelfth century the idea had emerged that ancient royal monasteries inherited from the Carolingians were inalienable (though it does not follow that those already lost had been alienated ‘illegally’).42 Meanwhile the principle was not ignored, though blurred as between having election-right and having immunity or defence, and correspondingly between being given in benefice and given away altogether. Otto I in giving Oeren to Trier seems to ignore his grant of election to the nuns in 953 (which they may have asked for because of the Frankfurt ruling, surely known to them as neighbours of St Maximin); but in 973 they obtained from Otto II the privilege not to be given in benefice but remain always ‘under the hand of the royal potestas’.43 In 966 Otto I gave the canons of the palace chapel of Aachen the election of their provost from among themselves; if there were no one suitable the king would appoint a canon from elsewhere, but not a bishop or monk; it was never to be given in proprium to any person or church, nor to a bishop or anyone else in benefice, but always to be in the king’s tuitio and immunity; and all this ‘recognizing the perilous times of our predecessors’ (here the Carolingian rulers of Lotharingia), some of whom had given abbeys away (to churches or even to laymen) that were under royal protection and immunity and had election inter se.44 In the kingdom of Burgundy in 968 king Conrad recovered Moutier-Grandval from the son of a lay abbot to whom his father Rudolph had given it as a benefice, supported by a judgment of Otto’s court which concluded that a privileged 38 DOII no. 228. He had acquired Wildeshausen by exchange (below, pp. 348–9). For Memleben’s brief importance see G. Wolf, ‘Das Marienkloster zu Memleben’, AfD. 41 (1995), esp. 25–30. 39 Below, p. 429; DHII nos. 331, 371; see Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 177–9. 40 Conc. VI. 1. no. 17 (p. 184). One without election-right could be put by royal ‘donation and privilege’ under a monastery that was under royal mundeburd, i.e. could be alienated provided it did not fall outside the king’s protection. 41 See Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 277; Wisplinghoff, Untersuchungen, 126; for further trouble, DOI no. 169 (953). 42 As Semmler, ‘Traditio’, 28. 43 DOII no. 55, reiterating Otto I’s election grant (DOI no. 168), and (it seems) tacitly retracting his donation to Trier (above, at note 35). That Trier had lost Oeren is assumed in 993 (DOIII no. 119). 44 DOI no. 316. Aachen being at the time one of Otto’s brother Bruno’s abbeys, its elected head was a provost.

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monastery could not properly be ‘given in proprietatem by the king’s hand’.45 Such judgments as this and that at Frankfurt are the nearest we get to legislation; but the rather loosely defined principle was an old one,46 and was hardly saying that a certain class of monastery could by definition not be treated as property, but rather that some monasteries had privileges that would be breached if this were done. And if the principle was not forgotten, neither was it respected.47 In 999–1000 Moutier-Grandval was given away by Rudolph III to the bishopric of Basle (with Otto III’s approval) because of the then bishop’s faithful service.48 Lorsch, with a long trail of privileges, was given by Otto III, who had quarrelled with the abbot, to the church of Worms in gratitude to bishop Franco; and although he retracted this on the bishop’s death next year, and got a papal privilege for Lorsch which emphatically put it outside all power or dominium other than of kings and popes,49 the abbey was again given away in 1065, by the young Henry IV to Adalbert of Bremen. Adalbert’s and his rival Anno of Cologne’s ability to extract great monasteries from Henry,50 initially helpless and later desperately in need of the bishops’ support, breached norms and met with resistance and disapproval; but not as formally ‘illegal’.51 Henry later seems to have given away (to the bishopric of Speyer) Hornbach, old and having immunity-defence of a kind from Louis the Pious, and unambiguously from Otto I, Otto III, and Henry himself.52 On Hornbach Mayer remarked that in spite of its Ottonian immunity privilege it was being treated as an Eigenkloster, and drew the lesson that the meaning of a medieval privilege depended on what its possessor managed to make of it;53 which comes close to conceding that his own distinctions are modern constructs. The fluctuating fortunes of monasteries and their varied privileges, sometimes contradicted or let slip, sometimes granted at one blow but often accumulated gradually as opportunity allowed, and more by their own and their friends’ efforts than by royal initiative or policy, all point to a shifting continuum of degrees of freedom and importance rather than two categories of church, one under ‘feudal 45

DRud. no. 44 (968). As reported in Rudolph’s diploma, the judgment left the kind of privileges vague: monasterium quod per privilegia constructum est (see above, p. 252, for its 849 immunity-defence). By the 968 46 judgment Liutfrid’s son gave back the abbey to king Conrad. Above, pp. 254–5. 47 ¨ See Bernhardt, Kingship, 73–5. So Pfavers wanted a wholly explicit privilege from Henry III (1040, DHIII no. 56): to be ‘free and secure from all unjust and external power’ and not to be alienated in benefice 48 or as property. DRud. nos. 87–8; contrary to the principle of the 968 judgment. 49 Lorsch no. 73 (Silvester II’s privilege, 999); Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 45–6 and n. 192. 50 Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 56; and 56–9 on the elected abbot of Lorsch’s successful resistance with magnate and vassal support. Cf. Henry’s (also unsuccessful) donation to Adalbert of the great royal monastery Corvey (DHIV no. 168). 51 As Semmler saw it, in his ‘constitutional’ interpretation of the princes’ opposition (‘Abtei Lorsch’, 133). 52 DHIV nos. 249 (1072), 396 (1087; but see ed. discussion). Henry was heir to Hornbach’s local patroni (junior branch of the Salians, lately extinct). See index: Hornbach, for its position earlier. 53 Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 46–7.

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lordship’ and one under proprietary right.54 Of course it was normally lesser monasteries that were actually alienated, and at the bottom end these might barely differ from ordinary rural churches; while those at the top end of the range (Fulda, Reichenau, and the like)55 were great lordships under outside lordship. But this was all the more reason for the king’s interest in who became abbot;56 while proximity to the king’s power-base in south-eastern Saxony and (later) western Franconia might also attract both higher favour and more interference. Discussion of these matters often assumes that the Saxon rulers’ hold on the succession of bishops, abbots, and abbesses was firmer than ever; but it may have been no more than the Carolingians had at their peak.57 As long as these prelates need to come to the king to promise fidelity and be invested with their office, that some of them had not been his first or free choice does not alter his position as their lord; but it undermines any idea that the Reichskirche was a large-scale manifestation of the Eigenkirche.58 As for deposing them, this seems by now to have been almost impossible in the case of bishops, but not for abbots;59 even the greatest abbots—perhaps especially the greatest—were not secure,60 any more than the greatest laymen; but the hazards they faced were those of war and politics, common to most of the great. There were of course occasions for kings to interfere in the property of even the greatest churches (though hardly more than the Carolingians had done).61 One was the establishment or enlargement of a mensa. Such partitions were not often made by the ruler in Germany,62 where lay abbacies were rare (kings having other means of reward); but Lotharingia was different.63 When Gerard bishop of Toul asked in 973 for the return of several abbeys to his church, one of these, Moyenmoutier, was in the hands of duke Frederick of upper Lotharingia; reserving the abbatia to Frederick for life, Otto II high-handedly used the community’s portion to 54

As in Semmler’s view of Lorsch’s 956 diploma (above, note 24). For Reichenau under Otto III see H. Maurer, ‘Anspruch’, 259–75, esp. on the celebratory (but also defensive?) poem De gestis Witigowonis abbatis, emphasizing not only laus, gloria, and honor but libertas, 56 potestas, and iura. See Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 316 on Fulda; more generally, 317–19. 57 See Reuter, ‘Reconsideration’, 348–56. 58 As e.g. Schlesinger, KG. Sachsens, 242–4; Rathgen, ‘Untersuchungen’, 76. 59 60 Reuter, op. cit., 356–8. e.g. at Corvey, Fulda, Reichenau (deposition of Witigow). 61 Henry I in 926 appears to dispose of Kempten’s property as his own, freeing a serf-priest described as proprii iuris nostri servum de familia Campidonensis coenobii genitum (DHI no. 10; see Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 12 n. 4); but the word genitum could mean that he was no longer Kempten’s, his birth in that familia being cited only to explain his servile status. 62 More characteristic were donations to an existing mensa, e.g. DKonI nos. 25, 26, DOI nos. 88, 181, and (most explicit) no. 325 (966) for the nuns of Essen; see Krumwiede, Fischbeck, 84. At Lorsch some years after Bruno’s secular abbacy Otto allowed what looks like a reuniting of the abbot’s and monks’ parts (963, DOI no. 252). 63 Otto I gave the nuns of Oeren (along with licence to elect) that part of the abbatia that they already held, while forbidding alienation by those who held the rest, evidently plural benefice-holders (953, DOI no. 168). 55

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compensate Toul for having its claim deferred: ‘bishop Gerard and his church are to possess the monks’ prebend in vestitura, and as much from the benefice of the abbey as he can obtain from the duke.’64 More to the point, the Ottonians could impose exchanges of monastic property. When (about 920) Otgar, a fidelis of Henry I’s, wanted to exchange an estate of his own for one of Fulda’s, distant from Fulda while convenient for himself (and probably already in his hands), the king acted as middleman, each property notionally passing through his hands;65 he justified taking the property away from Fulda on the grounds that it was given by his predecessors and lost through the abbots’ negligence,66 but conceded that something should be given them to obviate dispute. This looks like legitimating for Otgar the fruits of earlier secularization. More transparently, in 948 Otto I took churches and tithes from Hersfeld for his new bishopric of Magdeburg, compensating Hersfeld with other, less compact property; in 979 Otto II did likewise for his foundation Memleben, giving Hersfeld lands further west;67 and in 1020 Henry II made an exchange with Hersfeld for the benefit of the canons of Aachen.68 This last was accompanied by the description of Hersfeld as ‘of our special property-right, not belonging to the kingdom’;69 so a monastery could be understood to be the king’s own family property as distinct from belonging to his office, and it could be convenient to assert this to justify manipulating its possessions; this does not imply a distinction between objects of property and ‘members of the Reich’ immune from any such treatment.70 Reform itself often involved more intervention than merely getting a monk from Gorze or St Maximin into the abbacy; under Henry II and Conrad II it was closely linked to relieving rich monasteries of some of their wealth, sometimes to support bishoprics but often as secularization of the old kind, carving out benefices for fighting men.71 This goes with an intensification under Henry II of demands for hospitality and servitia; but better seen as tightening the screw on these great subjects’ services than as direct exploitation.72 As in Carolingian times, the most obvious occasion for direct lordship was a vacancy; this must have been the best opportunity for secularization, besides bringing windfalls of patronage. For France, there is less to be said (at least before the Investiture Contest) about the last Carolingians’ and the Capetian kings’ lordship over great churches, partly 64

65 66 DOII no. 62. DHI no. 8. Demonstrating that gifts were not totally relinquished. Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 172–5. In 1015 Henry II subjected Memleben itself to Hersfeld in a three-way exchange involving Bamberg (ibid. 177–8). See also Bernhardt, Kingship, 246–8, 250–2. 68 DHII no. 433. 69 Originating perhaps in his ancestor’s (renounced) lay abbacy there (below, p. 315). 70 In any case transactions in which the ruler took part are a small proportion of all monastic transactions. See the remark of Wickham, ‘Fall of Rome’, 53–4 (in the earlier, French version a crucial negative 71 is lost). See Reuter, Germany, 244–5. 72 Id., ‘Reconsideration’, 364–6; see also Blumenthal, Investiture Controversy, 43–9. 67

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because there was much less of it. The king’s defence was still sought in the tenth century, from Louis IV especially, but without the consequences of seeking it from the Ottos; often for foundations in the south, especially the Spanish march, far beyond the king’s real reach.73 Sometimes, even in these distant parts, the monastery was claimed for the king’s ditio, a term used perhaps to signify the ruler’s authority more clearly than did the long-weakened idea of defence. But the Catalan instances (in the 940s) are not surrenders of lordship by the Barcelona comital family: they are recognitions of royal authority which the great men find useful (for St Peter’s of Rode`s, to put extra weight behind an agreement already made for the monastery’s independence from St Stephen’s, Banõla; for Camprodoń, to legitimate the count’s acquisition of the church from the bishop).74 It looks like a more serious move when (in 949) Homblie`res in Picardy, about to be taken from nuns and handed over to Benedictine monks, was given up by a lay noble Eilbert to his lord count Albert and by Albert offered to Louis IV’s ditio for him to ensure its independence under a regular abbot.75 Correspondingly, when defence (let alone ditio) is omitted this may sometimes show that it could mean something and was being avoided, for instance in Louis’s confirmation for Cluny in 939.76 Here and there the king might retain a shadow of lordship where a prince was the real lord (Saint-Aubin, Angers, was still described as ‘royal’ in 962);77 or still receive the old dues and dona, or even be able to consent to the succession of abbots (lay or regular). In 987 Hugh Capet brought back to the Crown important churches that the Carolingians had lost to his ancestors, while taking over what they had managed to keep; the Capetian kings’ lordship of particular bishoprics and abbeys was spread a little wider (though barely beyond the Seine valley and the middle Loire) than their patches of comital power and sprinkling of other secular rights.78 In their relatively few great churches they had perhaps as much capacity to appoint prelates as the German kings in their many; they invested them similarly with ring and staff, or staff alone (even for an elected abbot it made 73

e.g. ACIII no. 22, ALouIV nos. 11, 23, 40, 41. Sometimes he was asked only for immunity, or only for confirmation of the endowment, e.g. (938) ALouIV nos. 7 (Cuxa), 8 (Ripoll). 74 ALouIV nos. 23 (944), 30 (948), 40 (952); see d’Abadal, Catalunya, II. i. 41–3, 222–3, and esp. 75–6. Cf. S. Juan de las Abadesas (ibid. 214–17), founded c.885 for count Wifred’s daughter Emma; having mundeburdium and immunity from Charles the Simple, 899; given (after restoration) to a new abbess, by count Borrel (949) who grandly claimed to be acting vice regali (ACIII no. 22; Udina-Martorell (ed.), Archivo condal, pp. x–xi, xx, and nos. 38, 128). 75 ALouIV no. 32; see below, p. 381. In practice, however, Homblie`res remained under Vermandois influence (Lesne, Propr., II. iii. 5). 76 ALouIV no. 10, confirming its possessions and duke William’s intentions. 77 St-Aubin no. 20 (bishop’s charter confirming mostly liturgical privileges); for the counts’ lordship see below, pp. 322–3. Being called ‘royal’ was perhaps to justify its being the place for a new bishop’s formal appointment, under the count’s control in practice (Poly and Bournazel, Transformation, 16). 78 See Hallam, Capetian France, 81 (map), 86–7; Newman, Le Domaine royal, 83–4, tables 202–4, 216, and maps.

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sense in mid-tenth-century France to say that ‘the place should be given by the king’s hand’);79 they received similar services from them (including military service when they could get little from anyone else);80 they had, however, less hold on what the prelates could do by way of minting or setting up markets.81 Like the German kings, the nearest they normally came to direct exploitation of a great church was their custody in vacancies, which in bishoprics gave them at least the very valuable appointment to canonries falling vacant.82 And again like the Germans, but under more pressure, they might dispose of their lordship of a monastery. The Life of count Burchard relates or invents an exchange between count and king where Burchard asks Hugh Capet for ‘a very small thing . . . the abbey of Saint Maur, which belongs to the royal dominium and is a fisc of yours’ (it is in Burchard’s interest to maximize Hugh’s ability to give it away); king Hugh resists this powerful request by deploying the opposite idea, that he could not ‘separate from his royal power’ what had always belonged to it; but lets him have it ‘for a time’ (to restore and reform).83 A century later, with firmer confidence, Philip I gave the abbey of Saint-Melon, Pontoise, to the archbishop of Rouen and his successors, in fedium, to ‘hold it from me and my successors in perpetuity’.84 Other princes in France had gradually acquired similar powers in their bishoprics and monasteries:85 dukes of Aquitaine and of Normandy, counts of Flanders and of Anjou, all directed elections or made outright appointments, sometimes granted election privileges, invested bishops and abbots with the staff, claimed their possessions in vacancies, received services from them, even expelled them;86 some gave benefices to their own milites out of church property.87 But only where for a generation or two they kept lay abbacies in their own hands did the princes come near to being long-term exploiting proprietors.88 Against this background of princely control, duke William of Normandy came to England with practices such as investiture with ring and staff and exploitation in vacancies which were probably new to the English churches.89 However, in 79 ALouIV no. 33, reporting appointment of the abbot-elect of Saint-Martin, Autun (see ARaoul no. 3 for the terms on which this election had been promised them in 924). See also Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 125. 80 See Hallam, Capetian France, 86–7; Reuter, ‘Reconsideration’, 368. 81 82 Reuter, ‘Reconsideration’, 366–7. See Hallam, op. cit., 86. 83 Vita comitis Burchardi (Bouquet, X. 351). Both the novelty and the significance of the idea have been exaggerated (e.g. Amann and Dumas, Hist., 299). Both Hugh and Robert did give monasteries away, to bishoprics (C. Pfister, E´tudes sur le re`gne de Robert le Pieux (Paris, 1885), 106–7). 84 85 APhI no. 127 (1092). See Dunbabin, France, passim (esp. 63–6 on Burgundy). 86 For instances of all this see Amann and Dumas, L’E´glise, passim (e.g. 238–40); and below, pp. 300–1, 378–9. 87 Bachrach, ‘Geoffrey Greymantle’, 8, 18, 30, 64–5 n. 130, argues that this count of Anjou’s exploiting of the 88 church’s resources was not simply taking over ‘Carolingian’ functions. See below, pp. 318–20. 89 For the significance of Eadmer’s account of these see Garnett, ‘Origins of the Crown’, 176–80. Orderic Vitalis (HE IV. 174–7) claimed that before the Conquest vacant abbeys were in the hands of diocesan bishops and vacant bishoprics in the hands of the metropolitan; but Barlow’s scepticism is convincing (Eng. Church 1000–1066, 98, 110–11).

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pre-Conquest England the claim to have ‘given’ or ‘granted’ the bishopric or abbacy was bluntly made by Edward the Confessor in writs to the shire courts;90 while the practical capacity to appoint bishops and important abbots was at least as high under the later Old English kings as under their Norman successors or their continental contemporaries.91 They too might confiscate monastic lands for an abbot’s or abbess’s crimes (Aethelwold warned kings and secular lords against doing this, robbing God who like the master of a criminal reeve had himself done no wrong);92 they too had military service from great churches,93 or loaned church property to their own men.94 These loans were almost certainly only the legitimated fragments of a mass of formerly monastic land, possibly taken over from deserted or defunct minsters in the Viking wars,95 but more probably gradually encroached on under pressure of military necessity, often from bases established in the minster precincts.96 In the west, Aethelred and Aethelflaed as rulers of the Mercians had been able to organize an exchange with Wenlock which brought back to the monastery land formerly ‘granted out (foras concessa) into royal lordship for that monastery’s liberty’ (perhaps buying protection), now given up on condition of its attachment to the abbot’s mensa, while a smaller amount of land, formerly ‘granted out’ for three lives, was given back for the community.97 Here past secularization, endowment of mensae for abbot and convent, and initiation of an exchange all look very Carolingian.98 Whether in Germany, France, or England, it hardly matters whether we choose to call these rulers’ powers ‘proprietary’, if we recognize first that their monasteries were under an authority more focused than any king’s general protective duty, which we can certainly call lordship; and secondly that this had clear proprietary aspects, both in occasional direct possession or exploitation, and in 90 ‘ich habbe geunnan . . . thes bissopriche’, ‘ic habbe unnen . . . the abbotriche’ (F. E. Harmer, AngloSaxon Writs (Stamford, 1989), nos. 23, 64; cf. nos. 50, 109, 115). Cf. Henry I’s writ of 1102, sciatis me dedisse abbatiam of Ramsey (Ramsey no. 418; RRAN II no. 607). 91 Barlow, op. cit., 98–111, 320–1. For nominations of abbots combined with promises of election next time, ibid. 104 n. 2; cf. king Aethelred’s charter for Abingdon, 993 (S 876; see Keynes, Diplomas, 98–102). 92 EHD I. 849. 93 For a good brief discussion of the controversy on this see J. Burton, Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain, 1000–1013, 26–8. On all these comparisons see Reuter, ‘Reconsideration’, 366–8. 94 e.g. CS nos. 568–9 (S 356), Alfred to his thegn Dudi with consent of familia of Malmesbury and reversion to it. See Fleming, ‘Monastic Lands and England’s Defence’, 250–3. Aethelred tried to restore property (e.g. to Abingdon, S 876) alienated by him or with his approval in his youth (Keynes, Diplomas, 95 99–101, 176–7, 186). As argued by Fleming, op. cit., esp. 261–5. 96 Blair, Church, 323–330. See Nelson, Politics and Ritual, 118–20, on Hincmar’s mistaken view about English kings. 97 CS no. 587 (901). They provisionally kept other lands of Wenlock’s, giving a golden chalice to secure this. 98 Later, 10th-c. kings acquired lordship (in some sense) of some other men’s foundations (below, pp. 410, 411–12). See Hudson, Land, 206 n. 137, 248 n. 89, for suggestions about pre-Conquest kings’ protective role.

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the power to dispose of the lordship itself over some abbeys at least. Bishoprics, however, need further consideration.

10.vi. Were bishoprics ever ‘proprietary’? In this chapter so far bishoprics have edged into the picture alongside monasteries. In the Carolingian realms, from Louis the Pious’s reign at least, bishops and abbots were spoken of in one breath (along with counts) as the king’s leading fideles and holders of honores; Louis’s immunity-defence was given to bishoprics as well as to monasteries; bishoprics and abbeys alike were or would soon be visibly bestowed by kings, through symbols standing for office and property together; vacant, they fell into the king’s hands; and the bishopric’s resources, like a great abbey’s, were at the king’s service through hospitality, supplies for the court, and provision of fighting men. Yet bishoprics were really not at all like abbeys, and even less susceptible to being treated as bits of property. A bishop’s sacramentally imparted Order and its sacramental powers defined him more sharply than anything defined an abbot. No king could claim to make a bishop unaided, nor could he—quite—make a ‘lay bishop’.1 And the bishop’s function in the Church was totally different from an abbot’s, essential not just to the spiritual richness of a Christian kingdom but to its whole fabric; so for a king or duke to appoint bishops was an act of public, princely authority, and would remain so except in the most aberrant circumstances. Of course it was tinged with proprietary attitudes (as was all authority and the disposal of it), but it did not make bishoprics into ‘proprietary churches’; they were great lordships brought formally and explicitly under a greater lordship. Before the Carolingians we cannot say even that much. Over much of the West the bishoprics were there before the kings. The bishops of fifth-century Gaul were often the only effective rulers and defenders of their cities; their successors were great men of the world, loaded with mutually feeding moral authority and riches, and sharing secular power with the counts.2 Merovingian kings recognized the bishops’ governmental functions and largely controlled their appointment;3 the public role was made practicable by royal control while 1 On powerful laymen being given strategic bishoprics (or seizing them) see Fouracre, Charles Martel, 125, 136–7; these might later appear in a bishop-list as vocatus episcopus (see Ewig, ‘Milo’, 427–8 on Ainmar at Orleans) or vocatus, sed non episcopus (L. Duchesne, Fastes e´piscopaux de l’ancienne Gaule (Paris, 1907–17), II. 356–8, 364). 2 See James, Origins, 49–53; Geary, Before France, 123–34; Kaiser, ‘Royaute´ et pouvoir e´piscopal’, 143–52. 3 See K. F. Werner, ‘Roˆle’, 51, on kings succeeding to the emperor’s authority.

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making this necessary. While sixth-century councils tried to safeguard election by clergy and people, the king’s role in it was recognized;4 Gregory of Tours assumes not only the practical but the formal necessity of the king’s consent; Marculf gives formulae for the people of a city asking the king to ‘institute’ a bishop-elect, and for the king directing the archbishop to consecrate him.5 Involvement with the wrong side in the Merovingians’ quarrels could get a bishop expelled from his see and (often) its property seized;6 but this was brute fact rather than legal principle, and it might be not the king’s men but the clergy who pillaged the cathedral treasure in a bishop’s trouble or after his death.7 Gregory of Tours gives several examples of ‘offering many gifts’ for a bishopric, which hostile contemporaries might call ‘buying’ it,8 but with no implication that it was a saleable property of the king’s, as distinct from something in his power, available by what both sides might see as decent gift-exchange. In any case it might be not the candidate but the electors who made a simoniac offer to the king, or not the king but electors who were bribed. And simony seems to have fallen into the background in the seventh century, perhaps because there was less liquid wealth about, while the kings were more concerned to satisfy partisans and were in any case losing control. What limited or threatened the Merovingians’ control was not canonical election (vaguely conceived in any case, and elastic enough to accommodate the ruler) but the growing power of great local families with hereditary interests in the bishoprics. Magnates in these circles could often get their sons or brothers elected, by ‘clergy and people’ who were largely their own kinsmen and dependants;9 or family interest might work through a bishop’s designation of his successor.10 Gregory of Tours’s own family produced generations of bishops in Tours and elsewhere. Often the same family provided both bishop and count; sometimes in the south the property of bishopric and county were indistinguishable.11 In the last decades of the seventh century warlike dynastic bishops

4 Clermont 535 c. 2; Orleans 533 c. 7, 538 c. 3, 549 cc. 9–11; Paris 556/573 c. 8 (Conc. Gall. 511–695). Orleans 549 c. 10 requires elections ‘with the king’s will’); Chlothar II, 614, confirming cc. 2 and 3 of Paris 612–14 (ibid. 275, 283), added that the elect should be appointed by the ruler’s ordinatio (ambiguous between imposing a candidate on the electors or formally putting their choice into office). 5 HF iii. 2, iv. 15, 35, vi. 9, 39, viii. 22; Marculf, I. 5–7; see Claude, ‘Bestellung’, 18–74. 6 7 HF vii. 27, viii. 12. See Lesne, Propr., I. 203–4. 8 HF iii. 2, x. 26; 6th-c. councils meanwhile reiterated legislation against simony. Later, Bede says of bp. Wine that he ‘bought the see of London for a price from king Wulfhere’ (HE iii. 7, p. 141). 9 See Wieruszowski, ‘Die Zusammensetzung des gallischen und fra¨nkischen Episkopats’, Bonner Jahrbuch, 127 (1922), 50–6; Geary, Before France, 124–6, 133–4. 10 Bertram bp. of Bordeaux (Gregory of Tours’s contemporary) designated his deacon and (probably) nephew, who was however rejected by the king (HF viii. 22). The practice was forbidden by Chlothar II’s 614 edict, c. 2 (Conc. Galliae 511–695, 283–4). 11 For Chur see Meyer-Marthaler, Ra¨tien, 56–63; for Lyons in 863, DLothII no. 21.

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emerged, often overshadowing the counts their kinsmen, and dominating what have been called ‘episcopal republics’ or ‘principalities’.12 But magnate families did not ‘own’ the bishoprics:13 there was no question of explicit hereditary claims, formal transfers of lordship, or lawsuits (such as there could be by now for monasteries);14 nor do individual bishops succeeding their fathers or uncles seem to have been seen as their ‘heirs’ in the sees, as abbots could be in monasteries. And once these families had been caught up in the struggle for control of Neustria, and began to have much to gain or lose from the patronage or hostility of the Austrasian mayors, much of the initiative went back to the ruler.15 In spite of strong dynastic interests and ambitions, the bishops by the mid-eighth century were on the whole the mayor’s and soon the king’s men. But this did not imply that the bishopric was the king’s property, any more than it was a noble family’s. If a ruler claimed to appoint bishops this was a claim to dispose of a public office; and if he actually did it this was because for the time being he could. It was the Carolingian mayors who could rescue episcopal property or an entire bishopric from Boniface’s ‘greedy laymen or adulterous clerks’,16 and who could then ‘divide’ the property as they thought useful. It was on their will, in fact, that the secure possession of a bishopric depended in practice; and it is out of this practical control, combined with a changing idea of Christian kingship,17 that the new way of looking at bishoprics springs: they, like the abbeys, whether secularized or rescued from secularization, are ‘given’ by the king as honores or benefices to fideles.18 Meanwhile old bishoprics outside the Frankish world were filled under similar competing interests. In Visigothic Spain the king’s consent to election was required,19 but bishops sometimes designated their sons or nephews to succeed them (a practice which the fifth-century pope Hilarus condemned for treating their episcopacy not as a gift of God but as their own to bequeath);20 while others

12

See Ewig, ‘Milo’, 421–9, 432–40; Kaiser, ‘Royaute´’, 150–2. Fichtenau, Das karolingische Imperium (Zurich, 1949), 166, cites Admonitio generalis (789) c. 19 and Frankfurt (794) c. 22 (‘bishops ought not to be appointed in villolis vel in agris’, or ‘in villolis nec in vicis’) as evidence for great men trying to have their ‘own bishops’; but the rulings came from early legislation 14 about suitable sees (see de Clercq, Legislation, I. 188). Above, p. 115 note 55. 15 See Lesne, Propr., II. i. 12–15; Ewig, ‘Milo’, 413–22, 427–9; Semmler, ‘Potestas’, 357–9. 16 Boniface to pope Zacharias, 742 (Epist. Sel., I no.50). At the 743–4 councils Carloman and Pippin claim to have appointed legitimate bishops for the cities, taking for granted that they should and could (see Lesne, Propr., II. i. 35–6). 17 By Charlemagne’s time the formal styles of bishops begin to acknowledge appointment by the king as well as by God (Hauck, KG. Deutschland, II. 207 n. 221). 18 Above, 10. i. On Carolingian control of elections see Imbart, Elections e´piscopales, 71–91; on the bishops’ revived or (as missi) new public functions, Kaiser, ‘Royaute´’, 153–7. 19 See Claude, ‘Bestellung’, 74. 20 Quoted by A. Eitel, ‘Die Spanische Kirche in vorgermanische Zeit’, in Festgabe Heinrich Finke (Mu¨nster, 1925), 9–10. 13

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were in fact succeeded by their near kin.21 In Lombard Italy the conflict of Arian and Catholic enabled kings and dukes to determine the succession to bishoprics in particular instances; but on the whole it seems that something more like canonical election (even if under increasing lay influence) survived until Charlemagne’s conquest,22 and that Charlemagne could usually get his way without any crude overriding of canonical election.23 It is from Italy under Charlemagne that we have the earliest known episcopal election privilege, for Aquileia in 792. Elaborating on the model established since 786 for abbatial elections, this grants to the cathedral clergy ‘as in other churches, according to canonical authority, licence to elect as pastor whomever they wish from among themselves’ who is worthy and suitable, ‘faithful in all things to us and our son king Pippin and all our gens’; such election being ‘permitted by our indulgence, saving our power as ruler (principalis potestas)’.24 This left plenty of scope for the king’s control, while the implicit claim to be able to bestow the ancient right of election is a startling assertion of royal authority; far more so than for monasteries, where the election of abbots and abbesses by their communities had only quite recently become the accepted norm. Louis the Pious, besides bringing individual bishoprics into his immunity-defence, allowed or required the election of bishops by clergy and people ‘out of their own diocese’, in the same edict of 818/19 that allowed selected monasteries election of their abbot ‘from among themselves’.25 It is not obvious what if anything the king gave up or a church gained by a grant (general or special) of free election. Some formal election, even of a nominated candidate, was probably normal in any case; while the real concession, that of election from their own number, was evidently subject to royal veto afterwards26 and perhaps to royal licence on each separate occasion.27 It seems clear, however, that whether for Carolingians, Ottonians, or Capetians, actually getting their own candidates ‘elected’ in the face of local interests—or retaining the initiative in choosing their own candidates in the first place—depended still on 21 See Thompson, Goths, 275–7, 289–98; Collins, Spain, 91–2 on 7th-c. Me´rida (but cf. ibid. 97 on the generally scanty information on ‘episcopal dynasties’). 22 See Fischer, Ko¨nigtum, 52 and (for literature) n. 1. 23 Nonetheless he could write to pope Hadrian about Waldo abbot of Reichenau that it had ‘pleased me to promote him to the see’ of Pavia, because of his outstanding service in ‘coming and going in these regions’ (quoted by Tellenbach, ‘Der grossfra¨nkische Adel und die Regierung Italiens’, id. (ed.), Grossfr. Adels, 48). 24 DKarol. no. 174 (see Mu¨hlbacher, ‘Treupflicht’, 877–9). DKarol. no. 78 (for Chur, 772/4) is not an election privilege in form or substance: its reference to Constantius and his successors ruling ‘by our permission . . . and by choice of the plebs’ concerns the bishops’ secular power as rectores. 25 Capit. no. 138; see Semmler, ‘Princeps’, 115–22; Schmitz, ‘Capitulary Legislation’, 429. 26 Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 82–3 and nn.; Schmitz, loc. cit. 27 Established as necessary under Charles the Bald (G. Weise, Ko¨nigtum und Bischofswahl (Berlin, 1912), 35–57; Bru¨hl, Fodrum, 51), giving kings more control of the length of the vacancy.

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their fluctuating power to reward, protect, or penalize the other interested parties (nobles or clergy).28 The ninth-century Carolingians in their fraternal wars were able to expel or depose bishops, usually by manipulating a church council or extorting a resignation;29 the Ottonians seem not to have deposed bishops, but did exile or dispossess them, usually temporarily.30 Seizing a live bishop’s temporalities perhaps implied that these were held under the king’s authority,31 as rather more clearly did taking them into his indominicatum in a vacancy.32 Long before this, other things reinforced a tendency of rulers to take an almost proprietary view of bishoprics. Even an old bishopric owed its immunity and related privileges to the ruler, and was usually endowed partly from the fisc. A king might divide a bishopric, or create a new one for part of his territory formerly belonging to a see outside it.33 With brand-new bishoprics, in newly converted country, the king could be clearly not only the giver of the bishopric to the individual bishop but its founder. Normally he would have provided the site for the cathedral church and bishop’s residence, perhaps paid for the building, and given some endowment (land, men, tribute),34 the core of the cathedral’s later wealth (whereas for an ancient Gaulish or Italian bishopric the core of its wealth went back to Roman times). The first bishop of a new missionary church might simply be chosen and appointed outright by a convert ruler. That is how Bede envisaged the Frankish freelance bishop Agilbert, not sent from either Canterbury or Iona but turning up—already consecrated—among the partly converted West Saxons, and invited by the king to stay and ‘be bishop for him and his people’. It was the kings alone who gave the missionary bishops places for their sees, and power over lands and men to support them; and the kings thereafter ‘gave’ bishoprics to successive bishops, and sometimes took them away, or drove the bishop out.35 Archbishop Theodore was able to take the initiative in consecrating bishops and allocating them to sees, being an exceptional man, with a papal mission, and arriving when 28

See Reuter, ‘Reconsideration’, 350–2; Fischer, Ko¨nigtum, 68. e.g. Lothar II’s dealings with Cologne (Ann. Bert., s.a. 864, 866). See also Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 88–97. Pseudo-Isidore was concerned to protect bishops against ill-motivated accusations. 30 Reuter, ‘Reconsideration’, 356–8. 31 Hincmar of Laon’s property was confiscated three years before his deposition (Ann. Bert., s.a. 868, 871). Hincmar of Rheims told Hadrian II (c.870) that for opposing the king and magnates he was threatened with being ‘able to sing mass at the altar of my church, but with no potestas over properties or 32 men’ (letter no. 27, PL 126. 182–3). Above, pp. 267–8. 33 For Merovingian instances see Lesne, Propr., I. 442. 34 Bede saw shortage of developed land at the king’s disposal as the chief obstacle to creating new bishoprics (letter to Egbert, above, p. 152, cc. 9, 10); in writing that former kings’ donations made it ‘not easy to find a vacant place’ he must mean an available (unbooked) developed estate or inhabited territory. 35 Setting up sees: HE iii. 3 (Aidan), ii. 15 and iii. 18 (Felix), iii. 7 (Birinus). Personal choices and rejections: e.g. HE iii. 7 (Agilbert, Wine). Cf. in Francia the outright appointments of Willehad for N. Saxony, 787, or Liudger at Mu¨nster, 802–5 (see Ganshof, Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy, 226 n. 52). 29

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the leading English kings needed his help; but even he could not override the hostility of king Ecgfrith to bishop Wilfrid, or indeed do without it for dividing Wilfrid’s diocese;36 and after his time the control of bishoprics largely fell back to the kings, each in his kingdom. This does not mean, however, that English bishoprics were being treated as royal Eigenkirchen.37 Bishops still made their professions of obedience to the archbishop,38 and met in occasional provincial councils at which their functions and authority could be agreed and clearly set out;39 in favourable circumstances electors still had a role; and in England as elsewhere, the king could be thought of as partaking in an election, whatever the realities.40 At the same time, bishops as well as kings could have proprietary attitudes to their cathedral churches. Stephanus has Wilfrid originate the proposal that Chad on surrendering York should be given Lichfield in Mercia, as something in his own gift: ‘a place given to himself by his friend king Wulfhere, suitable as an episcopal see either for himself or for anyone he might wish to give it to.’41 One or two bishops in the eighth century designated their successors;42 and here as anywhere, a bishop’s wealth and patronage would be of interest to his kin43 (though this might be sharpened by having little prospect of succeeding to the bishopric itself). In lands beyond the Rhine, converted and supplied with bishoprics under Frankish protection, the pattern of foundations is varied. Of the Englishman Willibrord in Frisia, Bede says that the mayor Pippin II ‘gave him a place for his episcopal see in his castle of Utrecht’, in the words he uses of English kings. But here we have also a charter, from the next mayor Charles Martel, making donations not to Willibrord but to the ‘monastery’ or the church; putting these endowments, however, into Willibrord’s ius and dominium and that of his successors, ‘to possess them in God’s name’.44 Among Boniface’s bishoprics, Wu¨rzburg on the Main had been a palace of the Thuringian dukes, and the place 36 Bede, HE iv. 1–3, 5–6, and esp. (on Northumbrian bishoprics) 12 at p. 229; Stephanus, Vita Wilfridi, 24, 29–34, 43–60 (concealing Wilfrid’s defeat); for the outcome see C&ED III. 171; Plummer, Baedae Opera 37 Hist., II. 326–8. As Bo¨hmer maintained (‘EKtum in England’, 338–9). 38 A ruler’s efforts to have his own archbishopric (Offa of Mercia at Canterbury’s expense, Nominoe¨ of Brittany at Tours’s) imply that his bishops were responsive to other authority than his. 39 Esp. Clofesho 747, cc. 1–4 (C&ED 363–4). 40 41 See Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1962), 240, 240–1. Vita Wilfridi, c. 15. 42 John of Beverley retired from York (c.720) having ‘ordained’ Wilfrid II to succeed him (Bede, HE v. 6, p. 292); see Goffart, Narrators, 273, 290–1. 43 Alcuin warned Eanbald abp. of York to ‘think yourself a steward, not a lord, and not let a crowd of kinsmen make you avaricious, as if you should gather up an inheritance for them’ (Ep. Karol. Aevi, II. 168; cf. ibid. 348). 44 HE v. 12; Pertz, Dipl., dipl. maiorum no. 12 (see Nottarp, Bistumserrichtung, 192–3). Cf. Charlemagne’s Saxon bishoprics, with endowments given sometimes to missionary bishop to found the church, sometimes to the church itself which is then entrusted to a bishop (K. Honselmann, ‘Die Gru¨ndung der sa¨chsischen Bistu¨mer 799’, AfD 34 (1988), esp. 1–2); a difference probably as unimportant for bishoprics as for monasteries (above, pp. 117–18, 122–3).

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where the missionary St Kilian had died; it came after duke Heden’s death to the mayor Carloman, who lavishly endowed the church already there with newly colonized lands, settlers’ dues, and twenty-five churches including a monastery. The short-lived bishopric of Erfurt, started at the same time, was more modestly endowed with an existing monastery itself founded by king Dagobert and endowed with Thuringian fisc.45 Despite Wu¨rzburg’s further acquisition of a monastery given to its first bishop Burchard by duke Heden’s daughter,46 Wu¨rzburg and Erfurt could hardly be more clearly royal or rather mayoral foundations. Eichsta¨tt on the other hand, on the north-western borders of Bavaria, with a church already there, was given to Boniface personally for a monastery by a powerful lord in the Nordgau, Suidger; Boniface gave it to his compatriot Willibald, whom he consecrated bishop in 741, and who founded a monastery there which was perhaps hardly less his own than Heidenheim was his brother Wynnebald’s.47 Eichsta¨tt was more clearly the first bishop’s own church than Utrecht had been for Willibrord,48 and it enjoyed little attention from kings before the early tenth century. Boniface’s new or reorganized bishoprics in Bavaria are different again. They were founded under the dukes’ protection and partly with ducal lands; but nobles and others contributed, and the core of each was the older endowments of an existing monastery (Salzburg at least having monk-bishops there already).49 Charlemagne enriched them, Salzburg especially, with lands conquered from the Slavs, at the same time bringing them under his practical lordship, clinched by Louis the Pious, for Salzburg at least, with immunity-defence.50 Heavy weather has been made of whether these new bishoprics of the eighth century were ‘proprietary churches’ though old ones were not. Weise argued that in Germany the grant of election privileges to new bishoprics showed them to be proprietary, the old bishoprics not needing any privilege;51 distinguishing among the Bavarian sees between those with and those without such a privilege, he suggested that what set Salzburg and Regensburg above the need for it might be their sites on old alodial land in Roman towns, while endowments from the duke were given in terms which specially renounced any proprietary right. Nottarp rebutted, for Salzburg, the non-ducal origin of the site, and pointed out that the duke’s traditio to the saint is no different from other foundations.52 However, his argument against these bishoprics being Eigenkirchen is itself highly theoretical, 45 47 48 49 50 52

46 Bost, ‘Wu¨rzburg’, 164; Reuter, ‘St Boniface’ 78–9. Above, pp. 206–7. Vita Willibaldi, c. 6 (p. 105). See Nottarp, op. cit., 76–86, 141; and above, p. 135. See Nottarp, op. cit., 195. Ibid. 138–40; Prinz, Fru¨hes Mo¨nchtum, 394–9, 402–3; Klebel, ‘Eigenklosterrecht’, 176–7. 51 BM2 nos. 606, 790 (Salzburg). Ko¨nigtum und Bischofswahl, 94–114. Bistumserrichtung, 214–17, with 214 n. 5.

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claiming that endowment formulae giving lands to God, the saint, the church, or the monastery were a recognition of the new church’s legal personality, while giving them to the first bishop personally was adhering to the Gelasian rules for putting endowments into the bishop’s hands and totally renouncing any property for the founder.53 But the same formulae used for private foundations of monasteries did not, by this time, rule out the founders’ lordship; while giving the endowments to the first bishop is more like giving them to a first abbot than reflecting Gelasian principles.54 Similar abstractions have been proposed as distinguishing the new bishoprics founded for their eastern conquests by the Saxon emperors: ‘derived’ rather than ‘original’ immunity, or the need for an election privilege; but the distinctions seem no more convincing for bishoprics than for monasteries.55 These new sees were variously supported by royal resources of land, fiscal tithes, and Slav tributes.56 Schlesinger said of Merseburg, Meissen, and Zeitz that though not founded as Eigenkirchen Otto I tended so to treat them, a tendency that John XII tried to counter by asserting that the founding of bishoprics was done on papal authority; while Otto I maintained his hold on them by making them depend at first on grants of revenue rather than land.57 It is not clear that anything would be lost here by forgetting about the ‘proprietary church’ (Otto needed to invoke papal authority to overcome the resistance of Mainz and Halberstadt); and it is a far-fetched view of Schlesinger’s that in allocating tithes at Magdeburg, two-thirds for the bishopric and one-third for the parish priests, the king was conceding his two-thirds share as lord of an Eigenkirche.58 Henry II’s foundation of Bamberg, richly endowed with royal and family property (especially monasteries) and intended as his family burial-place as well as for converting local Slavs,59 is certainly more nearly ‘proprietary’ than, say, Cologne or Trier, or even than new bishoprics with a wider-ranging missionary role; indeed Henry II came near to dealing with it as a transferable possession in 1020 when he ‘offered’ it for the

53

54 Ibid. 141, 191–4, 197–209. See above, Chapter 5. See above, pp. 257 note 43, 282–3. No bishopric had its advocate(s) appointed by the king (Tellenbach, Passau. EKl., 127–8); very few had (i.e. needed) a privilege to choose their own (Paderborn 881, DLJ no. 19; Brandenburg 1010, DHII no. 223). For a survey of approaches to these questions see Ko¨hler, ‘Reichskirche’, 158–9, 173–9. 56 Also churches, in bordering Christian lands. See Schlesinger, ‘Kirche im Sorbenland’, 366–7. 57 KG Sachsens, I, 242–7. 58 ‘Kirche im Sorbenland’, 356–8 (in any case the ‘lord’s two-thirds’ idea is exaggerated: below, pp. 512–16). Equally artificial is Widera’s argument (‘Kirchenzehnt in Deutschland’, 54–5) that Saxon rulers’ allocation of tithes to new bishoprics resulted from Eigenkirchenrecht giving them ‘not only secular but spiritual investiture’. 59 1007; DHII nos. 143, 144–70. See Reuter, Germany, 240–1; on its political importance, Wolter, Synoden, 232–4. 55

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Holy See’s ‘protection’ (for which it would annually pay a white horse splendidly harnessed);60 but he did not convey it into dominium (however notional).61 Any new bishopric, built and endowed from a ruler’s resources and filled by his choice, looks at the time like something of his own.62 But it would soon be as much open to mixed and competing interests and to ideas of public office and theocratic kingship as the old bishoprics; while the old were quite as much exposed to appointment of outsiders, exploitation in vacancies, secularization of their lands, and military or economic services. It seems that royal bishoprics whether new or old were subject to varying degrees of heavy-handed or intrusive lordship, rather than to anything sensibly described as proprietary right.63 We need to look separately, however, at bishoprics under lesser rulers and aristocrats. Out of seventy-seven bishoprics in the whole kingdom of France, the first Capetians were the effective lords of only a dozen, perhaps doubled by Louis VII’s time.64 The rest had begun to slip in the later ninth century into the hands of the princes;65 and whereas in Germany the Saxon kings were able to recover control of the Bavarian bishoprics that had been allowed to duke Arnulf,66 in France the process went on. At first it was a matter of magnates’ influence over the electors, either in competition with the king or with his acquiescence (as in 926 when Herbert of Vermandois got his 5-year-old son elected at Rheims, and king Ralph made Herbert temporal guardian of the see):67 expressions, in fact, of the kind of family interest that local nobles had always shown. But by the eleventh century the dukes at least were the acknowledged lords of many bishoprics68 (the duke of Normandy controlled all seven bishoprics of the 60 Part (reversed by Henry III) of a wider agreement between Henry II and Benedict VIII (DHII no. 427) on possessions either side of the Alps. 61 On the not necessarily proprietary significance of a census (here called pensio), see index: census, significance of. 62 In Spain cf. king Ordonõ II’s charter founding Leoń cathedral, giving his palace as its site and endowing it (Espanã Sagrada, 34. 440–2; after 916). 63 Otto III, Conrad II, and Henry II became canons in certain cathedral chapters, so gaining not only the prebend and spiritual benefits (Reuter, Germany, 365) but a foothold in the chapter’s patronage, especially in making new canons (Blumenthal, Controversy, 44–5). That this was useful shows how limited was the king’s power. 64 Newman, Domaine royal, 67–9, 216 (table): counting a bishopric as royal when the king can get his candidate in or take regalia. 65 Imbart, Les E´lections e´piscopales (esp. 222–84, 338–40) is clear and still useful; but see Lauranson-Rosaz, Auvergne, 233–5 (it was not a simple matter of ‘royal’ or ‘seigneurial’). 66 Thietmar of Merseburg remarked in this context that kings and emperors, not dukes, should appoint bishops (Chron., c. 26). 67 See Lesne, Proprie´te´, II. ii. 97; Amann and Dumas, Hist., 38, 240. Cf. ibid. 196, 232, 468 (Auxerre, Le Mans, Angers). 68 Leaving aside Languedoc and Catalonia, it seems (broadly) that even the great counts did not formally exercise once-royal rights over bishoprics as dukes did, though some took spolia (see K. F. Werner, ‘Kingdom and Principality’, 252–4 and n. 34). Fulbert of Chartres worked on the counts of BloisChampagne to acknowledge royal rights at Meaux (c.1009, c.1027); at Troyes however the 11th- and 12th-c.

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province of Rouen), with the ruler’s practical powers in vacancies and formal rights of investiture.69 This is part of the general dissipation of royal power, not much changed in its transfer to princes. In the small old bishoprics of the south, however, things were different. In the Midi by the eleventh century the power of the dukes of Aquitaine and of Gascony, and of the counts of Toulouse, was limited from below by that of lesser counts and viscounts; while in Provence the count of Arles’s authority was for a time almost extinguished, at least in the east, by the rise of new lordships which powerful families built up by force, sometimes from the remnants of an old viscounty.70 It was such families, below the level of great princes, that by now controlled certain bishoprics in ways that can look very close to ‘owning’ them. In Provence, the bishopric of Antibes was in the hands of the lords of Grasse, whose younger sons were bishops there almost throughout the eleventh century; supposedly given them by the count of Arles,71 it was part of the spoils of their role in driving out the Arabs of Le Freinet in 972. Inland, in the mountains, the bishopric of Sisteron was bought in 1042 by Raimbald, of the Orange-Me´vouillon family, a relation of the preceding bishop Peter, for his own son Peter; but having found him a better one (Vaison in the Rhoˆne valley), Raimbald kept Sisteron vacant for seventeen years, in his own and his knights’ hands.72 A little earlier Hugh bishop of Digne issued charters jointly with his father Guy, ‘in whose potestas my bishopric is established’ or ‘under whose tuitio it is’.73 Several of these bishops were married, but not, it seems, succeeded by their sons: the bishopric belongs (if at all) to the family, not the man. Not much can be learnt from these cases about the nature of the families’ hold. But other charters show family and episcopal property inextricably intertwined. Naturally a bishop may join with his brothers in giving family property away, but sometimes he gives away something evidently belonging to his church as if it were his own or his family’s. At Antibes the married bishop Audibert I, with his brother, gave to Le´rins the whole dominium of Vallauris, whatever he had there ‘on the part of the bishopric or in my own right’ (including churches); the preamble has him wish ‘to give to God and his saints and to the monks of Le´rins something of my possessions and of the churches of my bishopric’, and attributes to both brothers the same motives (care for their souls and their kinsmen’s, counts chose bishops apparently unchallenged, besides having regalia and spolia (Bur, Champagne, 185–6, 188). 69 e.g. dukes of Aquitaine at Limoges (see below, at notes 131–2). William VI in 1045 promised the canons a role in electing and that he would not diminish the bishopric (Gallia Christiana, II, instr., 172). 70 See Poly, Provence, 87–94, 115–18, 130–7. For Provençal bishoprics earlier, ibid. 61–6. 71 Allegedly half to Rodoard, the other half later to one of his sons (Le´rins no. 132, early 12th-c. 72 memorandum on a Le´rins estate). See Poly, Provence, 93, 157, 255. Ibid. 254–5. 73 St-Victor nos. 737–8.

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gratitude for the monks’ services, and some unspecified countergift).74 Gaucelm, a married bishop of Fre´jus, gave churches to Le´rins claiming both to ‘give something of my own possessions to God and His saints’ and to ‘give to God something of my bishopric’ (as if his episcopal church’s goods were not God’s already); with his canons’ consent but equally at the urgent request of some of his knights. Saint-Victor under abbot Isarn accepted bishops’ benefactions in similar terms: bishop Amelius of Senez’s restitution of churches to Saint-Victor needed his sons’ cooperation, and was incomplete or ineffective without the family act which followed it; yet he described the churches as among ‘the things of our bishopric’.75 All this fits the picture of eleventh-century Provence drawn by JeanPierre Poly, in which formerly public jurisdiction and property has become ‘privatized’;76 we can reasonably see these bishoprics as sunk into private property for the time being.77 West of the Rhoˆne, in Languedoc, we know a good deal more about the magnates’ dealings with bishoprics; but understanding them is another matter. Aristocratic society here and in Provence mingled and overlapped, but there were broad differences: in Languedoc less violence and disruption in the recent past, more prosperity, more survival of Carolingian institutions. Here too bishoprics were held by younger sons, but of older, office-holding families. For generations successive viscounts of Albi and Nıˆmes had a brother in one of the bishoprics, perhaps an uncle in the other;78 while bishops of Elne from the early tenth century to the later eleventh were sons of the comital family of Roussillon and later of Barcelona.79 So far, this might be just another region where comital or vicecomital families could get their members elected, perhaps by an electoral group so packed with friends and relations that no breach of canon law and no assertion of lordly right was necessary.80 But there is more to it than that. Bishoprics as well as abbeys, with their lands or honores, are listed along with counties, cities, castles, and alods, as things disposed of in testaments and family partitions, and in those fidelity-oaths made to a kinsman or ally that were a kind of non-aggression pact,81 promising to 74

75 Le´rins no. 131 (1038); cf. nos. 102–3. Le´rins no. 29 (1038); St-Victor nos. 768–70 (c.1040). Provence, 97–9, 115–18, 127–8, 361; on married bishops, 252–5. See also below, pp. 724–5. 77 A variant from further north in Burgundy-Provence is the view at Grenoble c.1100 that the late 10th-c. count-bp. Isarn, having rebuilt and endowed the church and repeopled the land after the Arabs’ expulsion, ‘had the bishopric per alodium as land that he had taken from a pagan people’ (Grenoble no. 16, recording a newly agreed divisio with a new comital family). 78 Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 344; with an interlude at Albi for a kinsman’s son, below, at notes 109–10. 79 The Barcelona comital family also regularly provided bishops of Be´salu, Vich, Gerona, Urgel (besides abbots of Cuxa and Ripoll). See more generally Imbart, Elections, 257, 287, 336–8, 340, 361; Fliche, ‘Premiers re´sultats’, 167; Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 344–6. 80 On some records of or agreements about episcopal elections, Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 331–6, 343–4. 81 Ibid. 15–16, 647–8; eadem, ‘Fide´lite´ et feódalite´ me´ridionale d’apre`s les serments de fide´lite´ (Xe–de´but XIIe s.)’, Annales du Midi, 80 (1968), at 462–76. 76

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respect the other’s lands or rights. The comital family of Carcassonne and Foix illustrates this repeatedly. In Roger the Old’s partition about 1002 between his two lay sons Raymond and Bernard, Bernard’s county of Couserans brought with it the bishopric there; and when a third, clerical brother Peter, now bishop of Gerona, made a partition of the county and city of Carcassonne with his nephew Roger II, Peter kept the bishopric of Carcassonne and its lands or honor besides various castles and abbeys.82 Meanwhile count Raymond had married the heiress Garsind, whose property under her father viscount William’s testament (990) included the city and bishopric of Be´ziers and later of Agde; both cities and their bishoprics, with various castles and abbeys, came to Garsind’s second son Peter, as his older brother’s fidelity-oath recognizes (c.1036).83 About this time (in 1037) Pons, count of Toulouse, gave to his wife as a marriage gift, for their future children, the bishopric and city of Albi with its mint, market, vineyards, churches, castles, lands, and men, with half the bishopric of Nıˆmes and other things, all described as ‘alods’ for her to ‘hold and possess’ for her lifetime.84 But the vicecomital family—the Trencavels—still had its rights in these bishoprics,85 and the viscount in the next generation, Raymond Trencavel, married Ermengard, one of count Peter’s daughters, so uniting his own rights in Albi and Nıˆmes with hers in (probably) Be´ziers and potentially in Carcassonne and Raze`s. In 1067 Ermengard’s only brother, Roger III, died childless, having recently conceded by fidelity-oath to his cousin count Roger of Foix the city, bishopric, abbeys, and castles of Carcassonne ‘or any other bishoprics, abbeys, cities, castles, or alods’ that Roger of Foix ‘has’.86 It was following this that bigger players, Raymond-Berengar and Almodis, count and countess of Barcelona, stepped in with designs on Carcassonne and Raze`s, and exchanged a remarkable set of documents with Raymond Trencavel and Ermengard.87 The documents, all of 1 or 2 March 1068, add up (as Fredric Cheyette has convincingly shown) to an agreement on how to divide the spoils if, as allies, they can secure them—chiefly by an outpouring of Barcelona’s plentiful gold—from Ermengard’s mother’s claims and the Foix family’s possession.88 But the agreement took the form of legal transactions of which the most relevant here are a quitclaim by Trencavel and Ermengard of the city and viscounty of Carcassonne with the whole bishopric (besides abbeys, castles, lands, mills, rivers, pastures) for 1,100 ounces of gold,89 and the grant back to them of much of this ad fevum: not, however, 82 HL V no. 162; ibid. nos. 201, 202 (ed. date ‘c.1034’). See Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 349–50; and below, 83 p. 387. HL V no. 150 (‘city’ probably means the viscounty); ibid. no. 209. 84 85 Ibid. no. 211; see Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 349–50. Below, note 90. 86 1063, HL V no. 256. This Roger was descended from Roger the Old’s son Bernard. 87 Raymond-Berengar too was descended from Roger the Old. See Cheyette, ‘The ‘‘Sale’’ of 88 Ibid. 833–9, 843–5, 862–3. Carcassonne’, 828–44, family tree 829. 89 HL V no. 280. i (ii is the sale, eo nomine, of the county of Raze`s—lacking a bishopric—with castles, abbeys, etc., for 1,100 oz.); Cheyette, op. cit., 834–7, docs. (summarized) 3 and 4.

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the bishopric which the count and countess will be keeping (if they ever get it),90 though the bishop was ‘to become the man’ of viscount Raymond and swear fidelity to him, saving his fidelity to the count and countess and their son.91 The ‘common-sense’ reading of such dealings—that bishoprics were bits of family property,92 and that we have here an extreme extension of proprietary rights93—is arguably not as mistaken as Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier judges it in her important study of the province of Narbonne.94 It may be true that counts and viscounts saw themselves as rulers, exercising public or princely power such as long ago, or elsewhere, belonged to kings.95 But on the one hand this does not distinguish them sharply from the dukes and counts of the north; and on the other hand it is hard to deny that the more fragmented is royal power the more ‘private’ it begins to look, subject as it is to family partitions or to multiple claims, and used for wives and daughters as well as for brothers and sons. The absence here of any idea of such power being held from a sovereign ruler cuts both ways, making it not only more ‘princely’ but also more a family matter. Magnou-Nortier’s argument that all this is not a manifestation of ‘l’e´glise priveé’ but a matter of public, quasi-royal authority, conforming in principle to the old Visigothic church law although subject to abuse in practice, requires a special interpretation of the term episcopatus in the Languedoc charters.96 Episcopatus, she maintains, has one meaning when it is given to the bishop: for him it is the office he enjoys, with its honor of lands and revenues attached; and another when given (or acknowledged as belonging) to a count or viscount or his wife or son-in-law, for whom it is a ‘droit reél’ disposable (whole or half) to another ruler.97 In this latter sense it consists not of an honor, a complex of property,98 but of the power to determine the election, the right in a vacancy to spolia from the late bishop’s goods, and the right to receive a donum from the new bishop. These three rights are all that is meant by the ‘bishopric’ as claimed by a 90

HL V no. 281; Cheyette, doc. 5. In doc. 6 the Trencavel and Barcelona families made each other heirs to these claims, failing children. In 1070 the Trencavel couple surrendered in broader terms, for another 2,000 oz. of gold, most of Ermengard’s claims in the counties of Raze`s, Couserans, Comminges, Carcassonne, Narbonne, and Toulouse, consisting of ‘cities, counties, bishoprics, viscounties, and other honores and dignities’ (HL V no. 293). On the alliance’s success (its eventual chief gainer being Ermengard) see Cheyette, op. cit., 850–60. 91 The same arrangement—not ‘feudal’ but personal and political—was made for any viscount that the count might appoint to Carcassonne. 92 For a list and summary of documents transferring or claiming an episcopatus see Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 349–50. 93 As Fliche, ‘Premiers re´sultats’, 164–6; compatible with seeing the bishops as generally pious and 94 Socie´te´, 353–5, 445–8. conscientious (pp. 167–9). 95 Ibid. 347–8, 354–5. Cf. count Raymond of Saint-Gilles confirming to the monks of Saint-Pons whatever they have acquired in ‘all the bishoprics and lands committed to me by God’ (1085; HL V 96 no. 366). Cf. abbatia, below, p. 387. 97 Socie´te´, 350 (on a convenientia about Elne, c.1074, between counts of Roussillon and Ampurias). 98 ‘Jamais les contes ou les vicomtes n’ont dispose´ d’un honor; ils n’ont fait que surveiller une fonction’ (ibid. 354).

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count or viscount or one of his family; or a half-share in them when what is held is half the bishopric.99 There is of course a difference between a lay ruler’s rights in a bishopric and those of the bishop himself. But it is difficult to believe that contemporaries understood episcopatus in two quite different senses, used as it was in a range of not very sharply differentiated contexts for what a count or viscount acknowledged in a fidelity-oath or allotted in a family division to another layman or woman; or to the bishop of another see; or to a present or prospective bishop of the see concerned. When Roger II recognized the right of his uncle Peter bishop of Gerona to the bishopric of Carcassonne,100 this probably meant Peter’s right to dispose of it, not to be its bishop (plurality of sees was not acceptable in the Midi): his position would be more like that of Frotarius bishop of Nıˆmes who shared with his viscount brother the disposal of the see of Albi.101 But when William count of Be´salu took an oath of fidelity to his cousin Wifred of Narbonne, it was Wifred’s own archbishopric with its pertinences that he acknowledged, along with castles, alods, and so on;102 and so it was when viscount Berengar made his peace with Wifred.103 Even between the laity the same bishopric could be ‘had’ at different levels or in different senses, as with Albi between the comital and vicecomital families.104 Or potential rights in it could be transferred, as by William count of Cerdanã in 1067, as ‘all the directum and the voces’—the right and the ‘voices’ or claims—that his mother-in-law the countess had been given by her husband in Carcassonne and Raze`s including the bishopric.105 The plural ‘voices’ seems more likely to reflect the shared and uncertain claims of large families than a legal concept of the rights, not the bishopric, as objects of property.106 Back in the mid-tenth century things may have been different. In 966 Matfred viscount of Narbonne divided his property between various churches and his two sons and a daughter, with the proviso that if his clerical son Ermengaud should attain to episcopal office—probably meaning specifically that of Narbonne—some of his original share should go to his brother.107 Sure enough by 977 Ermengaud was archbishop of Narbonne.108 Matfred evidently could not quite claim to dispose of the see as property, but his hopes of it had to be taken into account in his partition. Perhaps this is a transitional stage towards claims more negotiable and transferable than those of count-and-bishop families earlier (or elsewhere). By 1038 the brothers Bernard viscount of Albi and Frotarius bishop of Nıˆmes (who often appear as joint owners of property) could make an agreement with 99

100 101 102 Ibid. 353–5. Above, at note 82. Below, at notes 109–10. HL V no. 237, c.1053. 104 105 Ibid. no. 275. Above, at notes 84–5. Above, note 89 (end). 106 ‘Her share of the city, counties, and bishopric’, or ‘whatever she has or could have’ in them, would probably have meant much the same. 107 108 HL V no. 115. Raymond’s was by far the larger share in any case. Ibid. no. 127. 103

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a kinsman Bernard Aimard and his son William,109 which gave William the bishopric of Albi for life after the present bishop’s death; should William die before the bishopric fell vacant, his brother Peter was to have it.110 William Aimard was given the choice between becoming bishop himself or (perhaps if he needed to marry) getting another bishop consecrated; in the latter case what he got would be nearer to the viscount’s role, though he would still presumably need to invoke the viscount to secure his nominee’s election. But the viscount has committed himself to this, as part of a property transaction; it seems more a proprietor’s than a ruler’s way of disposing of the bishopric. And it is not evident that the power of determining the election was totally different from any property-right in the bishopric itself—William can play it either way. When, as in this case, a bishopric was not needed for a son of the count or viscount who controlled it, but was given or promised for this turn only to someone else, large sums of money might change hands as part of the agreement. In Catalonia about 1010 count Ermengaud of Urgel promised Sala, then bishop there, that on his death his nephew should succeed him, to be consecrated by Sala himself in his lifetime, if he liked: in any case the count was to receive as donum 250 pieces of gold, 100 at the consecration and 150 at the old bishop’s death.111 At Albi in 1038 Bernard and Frotarius were to have 5,000 solidi, while another 5,000 was to be paid in instalments to count Pons of Toulouse.112 Such partition of the price or donum between count and viscount may have been usual; there are similar references to the electio—the choice or say in the choice of bishop, or perhaps control of the formal process—being so divided. Halves in the electio or in a price paid may be what halves of a bishopric amounted to. Such halving may indeed reflect the public, official origins of the aristocracy’s rights in these matters.113 But it is not clear that any such official partition is implied in the 1068 agreement about the bishopric of Carcassonne, allowing viscount Raymond to have half of any price or gift given for it:114 Raymond was not expecting to be viscount of Carcassonne.115 And there were other halvings,

109

Ibid. no. 214; see Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 352, and her translation, doc. 18. It was assumed that Frotarius could not have this in plurality with Nıˆmes (cf. Peter of Gerona at Carcassonne). 111 Villanueva, Viage Literario, X, 285–7, app. 25; or ed. C. Baraut, ‘Documents 981–1010’, Urgellia, 3 112 no. 276. Above, note 109. These sums may be called pretium, datum, or donum. 113 Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 648. 114 Above, note 90. The words (et si dederit pretium aut datum fuerit per ipsum episcopatum per nullum ingenium habeat R. . . . medietatem de ipso pretium vel de ipso dono) could be read in the opposite sense—that viscount Raymond was not by any contrivance to have half of it; but it makes better sense to take per nullum ingenium as going with si dederit pretium (nullum for ullum is not unusual): ‘if on any pretext . . . ’. 115 See above, note 91. Cf. count of Barcelona’s (temporary) grant, 1050, to Berengar viscount of Narbonne of half the electio of the abp. of Tarragona, for Berengar’s help in reconquering Tarragona (Imbart, Elections, 286, from HL III. 312). 110

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not between counts and viscounts but within a family.116 Further, to say that such a ‘gift’ is no more than an acknowledgment of the ruler’s rights, equivalent to the dona of horses, shields, and lances paid to Carolingian kings,117 does not quite fit the facts that payment is found only when someone outside the immediate family circle is to be bishop; that the right to such gifts is negotiable; that security is taken for payment; and that some of the sums are extraordinarily large. The most spectacular instance of this, if it can be believed, was the 100,000 solidi paid in 1013, half to the count of Rouergue and half to viscount Raymond of Narbonne, by the count of Cerdanã, to secure for his 10-year-old son Wifred the succession to the archbishopric of Narbonne (after the viscount’s brother Ermengaud).118 Our view of this transaction comes from the complaint made to a church council at Arles many years later, in 1059, by the elderly viscount Berengar. He claims that he himself as a young man had bullied his parents into agreeing to the proposal because Wifred was his wife’s cousin, but had been made to regret this by the archbishop’s behaviour in making war on him and dilapidating his church’s possessions; above all impoverishing the church of Narbonne to raise the purchase-money—again, 100,000 solidi—to secure the bishopric of Urgel for his brother.119 The account is tendentious, the sums paid very likely exaggerated (at least for Urgel), the past under the former archbishop, Berengar’s uncle, idealized, and the present not unconscientious archbishop maligned.120 But it throws much light on the viscount’s thinking. His brief account of the original transaction for Narbonne takes it for granted as a normal way of going about things; of the archbishop acquiring the bishopric of Urgel for his brother, he says ‘it would have pleased me well enough if it hadn’t been to my damage’ (by robbing the church of Narbonne of its treasures); he complains of the archbishop turning church property to lay use ‘as if it were his paternal alod’, the point being—it seems—that it is his, Berengar’s inheritance, and Wifred’s only for life. The one good thing he attributes to Wifred is bringing from Spain long-coveted relics of the saints Justus and Pastor; but Wifred had spoilt this by quarrelling with the cathedral canons and removing the relics to a rural church; and when the viscount’s wife took the relics back for the cathedral, the archbishop excommunicated her, him, and their children—to which but for the fear of God he would pay little attention, coming from a bishop of such ill repute, and a simoniac into the bargain. Only here, right 116

e.g. for Nıˆmes (above, at note 84); Elne (below, note 127); and division of the price for Narbonne 117 (below, at note 118). Ibid. 352–3. 118 On this venture by the Barcelona comital family ‘outside the ordinary family orbit’ see Southern’s 119 brilliant sketch of the family’s interests and attitudes, Making, 118–22. HL V no. 251. 120 See Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 464–73. The bishops at Arles in 1059 refused to back Berengar’s complaint, despite the 1056 legatine council of Toulouse’s condemnation of clergy or monks ‘buying’ priestly office and counts or others ‘selling’ it (c. 4, Mansi, XIX col. 848).

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at the end of his story does he throw the word ‘simoniac’ at the archbishop—a useful, voguish idea, it seems, its disruptive power not yet apparent, nor Berengar’s own part in exposing his society to its ravages. His language suggests that he and his like did not think it wrong to pay for a bishopric, seeing this as an honourable gift-exchange between great families—‘one of the best churches from Rome to Spain’,121 full of books and treasure, against a princely heap of gold or silver. But it is no less proprietary for not being thought wrong; and the usual vocabulary only half avoids calling it buying and selling.122 In the 1038 arrangement for Albi, the Trencavel brothers and count Pons were to keep half each of the bishopric’s dominicatura (its lordly or official revenues, other than fees for sacramental functions) after the present bishop’s death, as a pledge for the payments due.123 Magnou-Nortier holds that any such claim on the revenues can only be—as here—security for getting a donum paid; it does not imply any lordship over the property. All that a count or viscount can have is garde, a protective function; to go beyond that is an abuse, not part of the system; the sign of this is the absence of any investiture of bishops with the temporalities.124 It is true that there is little clear evidence for exploitation of the lands in a vacancy (as distinct from spolia from a dead bishop’s movables).125 But holding the revenues until the price was paid does suggest already having possession in the vacancy. And whether that is so or not, the limited rights that a count or viscount can have in a bishopric—chiefly disposal of the office and the right to a gift for this—do not prevent the honor, the land, being part of what he or she has to dispose of. Peter bishop of Gerona—whose claim on the bishopric of Carcassonne seems comital, not episcopal—claimed the honor belonging to the bishopric;126 bishoprics were given, sold, or acknowledged in fidelity-oaths with their pertinences or honor.127 As for investiture, early in the eleventh century when count Ermengaud of Urgel undertook to let the present bishop Sala’s nephew Ermengaud succeed him, his charter says that he will ‘donate’ the bishopric to Ermengaud ‘and make vestitio to him’128—which must mean invest him, give him possession somehow. 121

His son Peter finally became archbishop when the aged Wifred died, 1079. In the 1068 agreements (above, at notes 88–91) Raze`s with no bishopric passes by venditio while Carcassonne including its bishopric is a matter for diffinitio, evacuatio, and guirpitio; but this may simply reflect Ermengard having actual possession in Raze`s but only claims on Carcassonne; gold is paid 123 in pretium for both. Above, at notes 109–10. 124 Socie´te´, 353, 445, 342. 125 The exactions on a dead bishop’s possessions that counts of Toulouse renounced to Be´ziers (1084, HL V no. 359) and Toulouse (1138, ibid. no. 537) sound like spolia only. But the comital renunciation to Urgel, 1162, reserved ‘custody of the see’s castles and villae’ in a vacancy (Marca Hisp., 507–8). 126 Above, at note 82. 127 e.g. in an agreement c.1074 count Pons guaranteed to count Gilbert ‘not to take away from him the moiety of the bishopric of the see of Elne nor of all those things . . . that belong to that bishopric’ (see 128 Magnon-Nortier, Socie´te´, 350). donare faciam . . . et vestitione ad illum faciam (above, at note 111). 122

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What happened in Catalonia may have happened in Languedoc; even if it did not, this is unlikely to reflect radically different ideas in societies that overlapped across the Pyrenees as much as Provence and Languedoc overlapped across the Rhoˆne.129 The fact that what a layman or woman could have in a bishopric (or an abbey) was not an unlimited power of direct exploitation is not what makes it different from the lordship of rulers in the north, where the same thing is true. On the contrary, it is different in being negotiable—closer to property, not further from it. It is one thing to say that the aristocratic families of Languedoc took seriously their responsibilities for the Church, and perhaps kept to their local version of canon law; quite another to say that they did not to an exceptional degree deal with bishoprics as their own. It is not clear whether all this had developed by the drift of public powers from higher to lower office-holders, or by the hardening of old family interests in the bishoprics. It looks like the latter in Limoges, perched between the Loire and the Midi.130 Dukes of Aquitaine in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries appointed successively two brothers of a viscount Guy and Guy’s son Gerald. At bishop Gerald’s death in 1021 there were disputed claims within the vicecomital family, suggesting that they had begun to see it as part of their patrimony.131 William V retained the initiative, however, and with the magnates’ approval appointed Jordan, provost of a collegiate church, investing him with the pastoral staff (gratis, stressed by the chronicler probably to mark the duke’s rejection of competing offers of money); at Jordan’s death in 1052 William VI was firmly in control.132 Here in northern Aquitaine the dukes were stronger in relation to the viscounts than were they or the counts of Toulouse further south. Even so, a king or prince anywhere might need to reckon with the claims of a local family.133 This family might be one in which a younger son was usually brought up for the bishopric, but perhaps took deacon’s, priest’s, and bishop’s Orders in the space of a few days,134 the option of his marrying having been kept open in case an heir were needed. But there were also families in which the clerical career was traditional and dominant, one or more sons being educated for the clergy, taking 129 For counts’ control of bishoprics in Catalonia, expressed in investiture and undertakings of fidelity, see Bonnassie´, Catalogne, 177–83, 705. Such practices may have been commoner in Languedoc than the records show, because of the lack of comital records for Toulouse; see discussion at the Moissac Colloque (Annales du Midi, 80 (1968), 480, 551, 560). 130 For what follows see Sackur, Cluniacenser, II. 59–61; Fontette, ‘E´veˆques de Limoges’, 553–8. 131 Ademar de Chabannes, Chron., iii. 57, pp. 182–3. 132 Petitioned by the canons in a doggerel letter (Gallia Christiana, II, instr., 173) to provide a good pastor, he organized a kind of election, with his ‘will and consent’ (having made a fairly vague promise in 1045, above, note 69). 133 Cf. in 11th-c. Normandy the competition for control of Seéz between the Belleˆmes and the dukes (Potts, Monastic Revival, 71–2). 134 At Limoges Gerald was made priest and bishop in a single ceremony (Fontette, ‘E´veˆques’, 555).

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Orders in due course, and succeeding eventually to a bishopric where uncles or great-uncles had been bishops and where family members were canons;135 such was the Salomon family at Constance.136 But although such families may have ‘obviously tried to make . . . a bishopric into a property which remained within the kin-group’,137 their interest was perhaps primarily in the status given to the family by its production of canons, deans, abbots, and bishops not always of the same see; and their means to this end was the elders’ fostering of the careers of their juniors, rather than establishing a right by (for instance) regular designation of successors.138 In Wales there were broadly similar ‘ecclesiastical families’ producing bishops, abbots, and archdeacons.139 Neither type of family can be seen as making themselves lords or proprietors of the bishopric unless they firmly control the succession for some time, and at least ‘appoint’ or invest any bishop who is not a kinsman: and it seems to be only in the far south that such powers appear below the level of princes. There were, however, regions of Europe where some bishops were married, as late as the twelfth century; wherever most priests were married, some bishops would be. In remoter countries (Iceland, Ireland, Brittany)140 these were sometimes succeeded by their sons. This probably does not make their bishoprics any more seriously ‘hereditary’ than those that passed between celibate kinsmen. It is possible that married bishops’ concern for their children made them more inclined to designate their successors rather than leave the choice to friends and relations; but designation, like election, is a vague and elastic concept, ranging from a firm public act to a private expression of hope; and the longest runs seem to end after three generations.141 In other regions with some married bishops, such as England (either side of the Conquest), Wales (in Norman times), and Normandy, they used their episcopacy to provide preferment for sons or—as celibates often did—for nephews, but not to make them their own successors.142 It was more usual for bishops—celibate or married—to exploit their patronage not for one heir but for their wider clerical kin (this was so normal as not to incur See K. Schmid, ‘Structure . . . ’, in Reuter (ed. and trans.), Medieval Nobility, 45–7. Three bishops Salomon, two of whom had brothers Waldo who were bishops at Freising and Chur 137 Ibid. 47. (late 9th and 10th cs.). 138 There were one-off attempts by celibate bishops to secure the succession for a nephew, e.g. Ulrich I of Augsburg, 971 (successful, but provoking objection); Michael of Regensburg, 972 (unsuccessful); see Amann and Dumas, L’E´glise, 468. 139 See Conway Davies, Welsh Ep. Acts, II (introd.), 493, 506–7, 515–17. 140 Bp. Isleifr’s son Gizurr, bishop 1082 (Ve´steinsson, Christianization, 144); bishops of Armagh before St Malachy (Gougaud, Christianity, 235). 141 Between late 10th and early 12th cs., Nantes passed once from father to son; Quimper from father (bishop and count) to son and grandson; Rennes likewise, and back to an uncle (Devailly, ‘Enqueˆte’, 297; id., ‘Restitutions’, 588, 590 n. 1). 142 See Cutts, Parish Priests, 262 n.; Brooke, ‘Gregorian Reform in Action’, 82–3, 84–7; Chibnall, World of Orderic, 32. 135

136

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blame), while endowing their lay kin out of episcopal property (especially tempting for married bishops with daughters).143 These depredations (which go back at least to Merovingian times)144 reflect proprietary attitudes, but not ‘proprietary right’: rather the reverse, since the bishop has to use his lifetime tenure to provide for his kin. Such family interests limited the powers of rulers, but did not themselves amount to property. In conclusion to this whole chapter on rulers’ lordship, we can hardly hope for a factual, objective answer to the question of whether higher churches were ‘proprietary’.145 It is a matter largely of rulers’ ideas and attitudes, and these were complex: personal, familial, public, sometimes theocratic.146 We can, however, set ourselves criteria for whether we choose to describe their lordship as ‘proprietary’, and perhaps the most helpful is alienability: this could point to setting monasteries on one side of the line, though only just, and bishoprics on the other, though not invariably. 143

Aldhun, an honoured bishop of Durham (990–1018), gave his daughter six episcopal vills as her marriage portion (Barlow, Eng. Church 1000–1066, 171–2); cf. David fitzGerald bp. of St David’s (Conway Davies, Welsh Episc. Acts, I. 74), Warin bp. of Rennes (Devailly, ‘Enqueˆte’, 297). 144 Bertram of Le Mans in his testament (above, pp. 112–13) claimed to have compensated for his land grants to kinsmen and friends by making the cathedral his heir. See Agde (506) cc. 7, 45 (Conc. Gall. 314–506, 195, 211). 145 For extremes of abstraction in pursuit of this see (e.g.) L. Santifaller, Zur Geschichte des ottonischsalischen Reichskirchensystems (Vienna, 1954), 18, 24. 146 For enlightening discussion from a different angle see Brooke, Churches, ch. 8.

11 Nobles other than founders’ heirs

Alongside the lordship of rulers over many higher churches, and that beginning to emerge of other founders and their heirs (considered in Chapter 12), are two other important ways for nobles to tap the economic resources of monasteries, and often their social, cultural, and spiritual riches too, without any necessary basis in foundation. These are lay abbacy (initially an outcome of the ruler’s lordship), and—more elusive—advocacy.

11.i. Lay abbots What a Carolingian king’s lordship of a monastery chiefly gave him apart from a claim on its services was something valuable to dispose of. A king in a strong position, with large or expanding resources, would dispose of abbacies to suit his own purposes, whether primarily to get public duties competently performed or to endow kinsmen, reward servants, support scholars, or promote reform.1 But a hard-pressed king would have to deploy abbacies to buy loyalty or propitiate might, and could land his successors sooner or later with no power to dispose of the abbacy again.2 From this arose a new kind of abbot-lord: not, as in the now remote Merovingian past, monk-abbots with alodial rights choosing their successors (though something like this had not disappeared),3 but lay abbots expecting to be succeeded by one of their natural heirs. Under the first Carolingians some great royal abbeys were given, often in plurality, to secular clerics as important royal servants; others were regularly used for the mayor’s or king’s bastard sons and stepsons, usually in minor orders, while the richest nunneries or double houses went to royal wives and 1 See Felten, ‘Laiena¨bte’, 422–6; id., A¨bte, 161–74, 216–79; M. de Jong, ‘Carolingian Monasticism’, New CMH, II. 634–6. 2 For some time abbacies helped to keep the aristocracy’s support despite the end of expansion (Le Jan, 3 Famille, 251, 262, 399–400). Below, pp. 352–4.

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daughters.4 Most of these were easily recovered, and available repeatedly for the same purposes of supporting the chapel and royal family. This continued through Louis the Pious’s reign and to a large extent under his sons.5 But in the western and middle kingdoms, under kings competing for loyalty with resources less than their father’s, grants of abbeys to lay magnates outside the king’s family became increasingly frequent after the mid-ninth century,6 a short step beyond giving them massive benefices out of monastic lands.7 In the long run, being given to laymen made the abbeys less likely to come back. This was not a great problem for the Lothars (who could dispose repeatedly of Stavelot-Malme´dy and probably St Maximin)8 or for Charles the Bald (who ‘took away’ from their two young sons the honores of counts killed fighting the northmen, including two great abbeys).9 It was in the nature of a benefice that, being a personal favour, it might be not renewed for an heir, and might even be withdrawn from the beneficiary in his lifetime (especially where war brought frequent changes of ruler). When Rudolph I as king of Burgundy gave the abbey of Romainmoutier to his sister Adelaide in 888, it had to be made clear that this was for life and that she was to have ‘the power of leaving it to whichever of her heirs she wishes’.10 Grants in proprium of what had formerly been held in benefice show that there was a real difference between benefice and property:11 a difference still felt in the kingdom of Burgundy in 968, when it was recorded that MoutierGrandval had been granted in benefice by king Conrad to count Liutfrid, who however ‘not long afterwards divided it among his progeny, not as benefice but as property’.12 But something revocable will not necessarily be revoked.13 The holder’s heirs might hope, not just to have it given them in their turn, but to keep it if nothing was said or done to the contrary. The need to ask could diminish or lapse; for 4 See Voigt, Klosterpolitik, 39–42; Ewig, ‘Descriptio Franciae’, 166; Wollasch, Mo¨nchtum, 22–3; Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle. 5 Exemplified at Saint-Bertin before it came to the counts of Flanders, late 9th c. (10th-c. account, Gesta abbatum S. Bertini, SS XIII. 614–23). See Felten, A¨bte, 280–8; McKitterick, Frankish Kingdoms, 252–4. 6 See Voigt, Klosterpolitik, 59–60, 71–5, 78–9, 88–122; Felten, ‘Laiena¨bte’, 427–31; McKitterick, op. cit., and Nelson, Charles the Bald, passim. In Hincmar’s part of Ann. Bert., see for instance s.a. 858–9, 876–7. Charles the Bald’s earliest known lay abbot is count Vivian at Saint-Martin of Tours (by 845; ACII nos. 80, 131, 136); Louis the Pious had had Einhard (Felten, A¨bte, 283–6). 7 Louis the Pious, restoring a regular abbot at Saint-Maixent (Poitou), left part of its possessions in the count’s hands (St-Maixent no. 4); he could instead have let the count have the abbey itself and established a conventual mensa. 8 Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 207–12; Wisplinghoff, Untersuchungen, 23–4; on their active patronage see Innes, State, 211–12, 222–30. 9 Ann. Bert., s.a. 866, 868 (pp. 131, 141–2): Robert count of Angers, Ranulf of Poitiers. 10 11 DRud. no. 3. Below, pp. 746–7; see Reynolds, Fiefs, 106–10. 12 Above, pp. 285–6. Nonetheless only one son of Liutfrid’s now surrendered it: perhaps Otto’s court would allow only the eldest to have any rights in what had begun as a benefice. 13 See Reynolds, Fiefs, 92–7, 102–7.

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Higher Churches, 9th to 11th century

Moutier-Grandval, in 968, the king’s taking no action and allowing Liutfrid to divide the abbey was seen as tantamount to giving it him in proprium.14 Royal patronage still mattered, and to get renewal could still be worthwhile even in the tenth century, but perhaps to make what is presumed to be the heir’s position safer (possibly against his own brothers); while the point of an explicit gift in proprium of what had been a benefice was sometimes evidently to enable the holder to give it away, not perhaps as being otherwise impossible, but with more security for the donee. In 905 Louis the Child gave bishop Salomon the ‘little abbey’ of Pfa¨vers iure proprietario ‘for all time’ and to do what he liked with it, with the consent of duke Burchard who had had it iure beneficiali and now gave it up;15 Salomon a few years later gave it to St Gall where he was abbot, while reserving its life tenure for himself and his nephew Waldo;16 Waldo, it is implied, would otherwise have inherited it (as, in the end, he did). By this time the occasional new grant of an abbey tends to spell out more clearly (if often in vain) whether it is meant to be permanent or temporary:17 either giving it explicitly as property, as the emperor Guy of Spoleto gave three abbeys in Pavia iure proprietario and in proprium to his wife and her heirs and heirs’ heirs (with potestas of having, holding, selling, exchanging, by hereditary right),18 or using such terms as ‘it shall remain in our potestas to dominate and ordain’, ‘it shall revert to the royal potestas’ or ‘ius’,19 or perhaps naming lives.20 There was no uniform process of ‘benefices becoming hereditary’,21 as the case of Moutier-Grandval shows. This had been in lay hands as early as Lothar I’s time, under a namesake and probably ancestor of the mid-tenth century Liutfrid;22 but it had remained at least notionally a benefice at the king’s disposal until the latest Liutfrid dealt with it as his own. On the other hand some abbeys given to king’s daughters much earlier may have been virtually their full property from the start.23 Louis the Pious seems to have given a nunnery at Rheims to his daughter Alpheida in such a way that she was able to give it to the bishopric, her sons taking part in the donation.24 Charlemagne’s daughter Theodrada could give the 14

The question discussed before the emperor was whether a monastery with royal privilege in 15 ‘consentiente . . . atque perdonante Burchardo’ (905, DLK no. 38). proprietatem dari liceat. 16 909, St Gallen no. 761. For the terms of Waldo’s inheritance see below, p. 780. 17 Voigt, Klosterpolitik, 174–81, 220–5. 18 I diplomi di Guido e di Lamberto, ed. Schiaparelli (Rome, 1906), nos. 5–7 (891, same day). 19 e.g. DLD no. 163 (875); DArn. no. 1 (887); below, note 24 (Brescia). 20 21 As in DArn. no. 1, and below, p. 318. See Reynolds, Fiefs, 107–13. 22 Above, p. 252 note 7. See Borgolte, ‘Geschichte der Grafengewalt’, 29–49 passim, and ed. note to DRud. no. 44. In 866 the first Liutfrid’s son Hugh was evidently lay abbot (DLothII no. 28); in 884 another Liutfrid probably was (DKIII no. 108). 23 A matter of degree because power of disposal could be qualified, e.g. restricted to giving it to a greater church. 24 Flodoard, Hist. Rem., iv. 46 (p. 448). Conversely, S. Giulia, Brescia’s reversion to Lothar I after his daughter Gisela’s lifetime had to be spelt out (848, 851: DLothI nos. 101, 115).


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nunnery of Schwarzach on the Main to the bishopric of Wu¨rzburg, manu potestativa (that is, by her hand having the potestas to give it) and as res proprietatis suae,25 while retaining it for life and making arrangements with successive bishops about who should succeed her.26 Most monasteries in Louis the German’s kingdom remained at his disposal, and not under strong lay pressure (he had more scope than his brothers for making rewards out of land and booty, and his monasteries being fewer held less of the developed land); apart from Bavaria under duke Arnulf, this more-or-less held under the last Carolingian kings and was built up by the Ottos. Of course the eastern kings—Carolingian, Saxon, or Salian—gave abbeys to their servants, friends, and relations; but those so favoured were for the most part either celibate clergy (often bishops) or committed to religious life.27 Even when a royal monastery was now and again in lay hands, it could be recovered. Otto the Liudolfing duke of Saxony, who had somehow obtained the abbacy of Hersfeld (bringing him lands and tithes in Thuringia), in 908 renounced any claim for his heirs in it so that when he died in 913 it reverted to royal control.28 In the middle kingdom there were more lay abbots, some of them beneficed by kings in episcopal monasteries,29 and made precarious by regional rivalries rather than by royal power until the Ottos took control of Lotharingia.30 It was in the western kingdom that lay abbots were left most secure. Often such an abbot was a count, whose county had become in practice hereditary,31 and with it any abbeys given to a predecessor and remaining with the county;32 the count then had what the king had lost, the power either to keep the abbey in hand or to dispose of it repeatedly. Charles the Bald had been able to give the late count Robert’s honores in Tours, including the abbey of Saint-Martin, away from his heirs; but Charles the Fat gave them back to Robert’s son Odo, from whom Saint-Martin passed (with other abbeys) to his brother Robert, from him to his son Hugh the Great, and so to Hugh’s descendants the 25 DLD no. 37 (referring to an earlier transaction). Her mother Fastrada may have founded Schwarzach on her own inherited land (Scherg, ‘Das Grafengeschlecht der Mattonen’, 510, 512). 26 A count’s daughter, then Theodrada’s own great-niece Hildegard (844); Hildegard got bp. Arn to ‘grant the monastery for life to her sister Bertha’ (856) (DLD nos. 34, 37, 76). 27 See Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 14–17; Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 35–40, 113, 323–4; Leyser, Rule, 49–50. 28 DLK no. 63; DKonI no. 15; see Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 170–1. 29 See below, pp. 420–1, 424. Cf. DOII no. 62 (973): duke Frederick of upper Lotharingia, holding Moyenmoutier, was ‘to hold the benefice of the abbatia only for his life’ with reversion to the church of Toul. 30 On Saint Maximin (crucial to the disputed control of Lotharingia, and never securely one family’s) see Wisplinghoff, Untersuchungen, 27–34, and (greatly refining the picture) Nightingale, Gorze Reform, 172–200, 221–8. See Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 207–14 (Stavelot-Malme´dy); Bulst, Klosterreform Wilhelm von Dijon, 102–3 (Moyenmoutier); J. Choux, ‘Dećadence et re´forme monastique dans la province de Tre`ves, 855–959’, Revue Beń., 70 (1960), esp. 205–9. 31 See Nelson, Charles the Bald epilogue, esp. 258–60, ‘the cutting-out of the king from the 32 Or used to endow it (Metz, Reichsgut, 226–7). transmission-process’.

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Capetian kings.33 In Flanders, count Baldwin II’s desire for the abbey of SaintBertin was thwarted, at first, by the monks, who got king Odo to commit the abbey to their former abbot Fulk,34 now a formidable archbishop of Rheims.35 But in 900, when Fulk had been murdered by one of count Baldwin’s knights, Baldwin could obtain Saint-Bertin ‘by royal donation’ from the young king Charles, and so start a line of abbot-counts. When he died in 918 he could leave the abbey with the counties of Boulogne and The´rouanne to his younger son Adalolf, comes et abbas; and on Adalolf’s death it went with the rest of his share to his older brother Arnulf, count of Flanders, who could be said to have ‘taken over the abbey by paternal succession’.36 Such hereditary tenure of abbacies by leading noble families promoted the emergence of lineages and of regional territorial powers.37 A ninth-century king could dispose of an abbey at more than one possible level. He could give the abbacy itself, that is, the direct exploitation of the property or the abbot’s part of it; or he could give away, surrender to a brother, or divide among his sons his own rights to services from it and to its future disposal.38 So a tenth-century count might control old royal abbeys either because an ancestor was given the abbacy in benefice or because the king’s power to dispose of it had been given him or drifted down to him.39 It makes little difference, since in the latter case he might (as a king might) choose to be abbot himself;40 while in the former case he might pull out of his ancestors’ direct exploitation and content himself with a lord’s or ruler’s disposal of it.41 Voigt, however, distinguished between two kinds of direct exploitation, that of an abbot or abbess (regular, secular, or lay), and that of a lay or secular ‘possessor’ (Inhaber) over the head of an abbot or abbess.42 Thus he saw the lay reformers of 33

In count Robert’s time, under Charles the Simple, a ‘royal precept’ would still have been needed to give Marmoutier to the archbishop of Rouen, but only Robert as lay abbot could have obtained this for him, and it was in Robert’s court that the plan was turned down (ARobI, app. no. 47; see above, pp. 262–3. 34 Folcuin (writing about 70 years later) saw it so. 35 For the politics see McKitterick, Frankish Kingdoms, 250–1; Airlie, ‘Aristocracy’, 447. 36 Folcuin, Gesta abb., cc. 98, 103, 105, 108 (SS XIII. 624–5, 627, 630). 37 Le Jan, Famille, 135–41, 257–9, 409–11, 427; and see Innes, State, 222–30. 38 Or (rarely) services without disposal, as in Louis the Younger’s regrant to his gravely ill brother Carloman (above, p. 250 note 25). 39 As perhaps to the Vermandois counts (Voigt, Klosterpolitik, 220–1). 40 See Lesne, Propr., II. iii. 13 and n. 1: the 12th-c. chronicler Gislebert, uncertain how the counts of Mons had come by the abbacy of Sainte-Waudru, believed that a count had obtained from an emperor the dominatio or dominium of the abbatia so that elected abbesses should be invested by the counts; but had at the next vacancy ‘occupied the abbatia itself, saying that it was his own’ (Gisleberti chron., SS XXI. 496–7). 41 In Germany and German-ruled Lotharingia the difference was sharper, both abbacy and royal rights over it being relatively easily recovered, e.g. Otto I’s brother Bruno’s abbacy at Lorsch; duke Conrad’s lordship over Stavelot-Malme´dy (Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 39–42, 212–14). 42 Klosterpolitik, 163–204, 218–25, 235–8. Voigt’s earliest examples (195) are count Miro at Saint-Michel of Cuxa (but see below, pp. 354–5) and count Berengar at Saint-Julien, Brioude (but relying on a nowdiscredited diploma: Magnou-Nortier, ‘Contribution a` l’e´tude des documents falsifie´s’, Cahiers de Civ. Me´d., 21 (1978), 313–23).


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the tenth century as withdrawing from their abbacies not straight to outside lordship but initially to the position of ‘possessor’, giving up the office being one thing, giving up usufruct another. But neither terminology nor actual practice quite justifies this. Terminology is so variable as to suggest indeed that some contemporaries felt there were distinctions to be made—that not everyone who ‘has’ an abbey is thereby an abbot; but judging from the proliferation of laymen and seculars actually called abbas, there was no way of drawing the line. A lay abbot—comes et abbas, dux et abbas, abbacomes—may be called rector or a lay abbess rectrix (implying the government of persons and property) as well, or instead; but so may regular abbots or abbesses.43 Where a particular lord or possessor of a monastery is never called abbot, this may indicate that he has a monk-abbot below him; but the converse does not hold: a lord allowing the monks their own abbot (not just dean or provost) may still call himself abbot.44 Variety and change, in terminology and in practice, are especially marked for royal nunneries; kings’ wives and daughters hold royal monasteries with or without the name of abbess, and with or without an abbess there as well.45 The terminology is equally uncertain or undiscriminating about the grant or appointment: dare, donare, conferre, largiri are all used for giving a monastery at any level; and whoever is given it will ‘have’, ‘hold’, ‘possess’, ‘govern’, or ‘rule’ it, at whatever level he can or will, and whether or not by the name of abbot.46 Voigt demonstrated this vagueness and saw it as obscuring the truth; but perhaps it tells the truth. A king who meant to make a difference between ‘giving the abbey’ to a lay or secular abbot and ‘giving the monastery to rule’ to a non-abbot would need to say so much more clearly.47 What mattered to the king was whether what he gave was recoverable, more than what level of lordship it conveyed; and calling it ‘abbatia’ or ‘monasterium’ seems often—though not always—immaterial.48 It is not that there were no men or women with positions approximating to Voigt’s ‘possessor’, somewhere between a lay abbot or abbess and an outside lord or ruler (perhaps especially true of queens); but this was a matter of degree. 43 Other, occasional terms—senior, dominus, defensor, tutor—can go with abbas or be clearly distinct (cf. 44 also founders keeping the abbacy in hand). See Voigt, Klosterpolitik, 163, 185–8. 45 Three successive royal women holding the Zu¨rich nunnery for life sound like abbesses in all but name (DLD nos. 67, 110, DKIII no. 7). The case of S. Salvatore (Sta Giulia) at Brescia, supporting emperors’ wives and daughters for several generations, is especially fluid and variable. 46 See Voigt, Klosterpolitik, 170–2; Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 73, 74 and n. 1, 82–3. 47 Voigt held that a lay abbot paid royal dues and services to the king, while a ‘possessor’ kept them for himself. But this too would have had to be spelt out. 48 Abbatia often meant the whole establishment (or sometimes the building) rather than either the abbot’s office or his portion. But a clear difference is implied in count Robert’s undertaking for Marmoutier not to let ‘the abbatia nor the monastery itself’ come into anyone else’s dominium (above, note 33).

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There are contexts in the next century, however, where having an abbatia may mean something genuinely different from any of this. In 901 Charles the Simple gave his fidelis Tedric the ‘little abbey’ of St Mary at Melun for his and his wife’s and one son’s lifetime, or failing a son for an heir of his choice, ‘to possess it entire in usufruct and by beneficiary right’ with its serfs, lands, vineyards, woods, meadows, and pastures;49 Louis IV gave two ‘abbeys’ in northern Burgundy (Faverney and Enfonvelle) to a man and his wife and heirs (undefined) who were to hold them for their lives, the abbeys then to revert undiminished to their former condition (undefined).50 If these acts really granted the abbacy—the abbot’s office and resources—to man, wife, and heir or heirs, this would hardly differ—in a small establishment without any monks’ mensa—from giving the monastery itself, for some degree of occupation and exploitation; and it is perhaps more likely not to have implied abbacy at all, but simply the possession (by relatively minor nobles) of land and buildings, perhaps following the disappearance of regular life or indeed of inhabitants. This concrete sense is supported when the word abbatiola, not abbatia, is used.51 Superficially similar is Charles the Simple’s confirmation to the church of Lie`ge of the abbatia of Hastie`re, reserving it for its present holder count Wigeric, his wife, and one son, ‘by beneficiary and usufructuary right’52 (chiming with Charles’s grant of Melun to Tedric). But Wigeric was a great man, his wife the king’s niece, himself the author of the transaction with Lie`ge (clearly a precarial exchange); he had probably founded the present monastery himself, on whatever he had been given there ‘by royal precept’.53 But what he had been given is obscure: perhaps the estate and its old parish church,54 not yet an abbatia at all; but perhaps, here too, a small, obscure or decayed monastery, obtained for the sake of refounding it. The distribution of direct exploiting power between a lay abbot or rector and a regular abbot or provost, or their female equivalents, did not depend on what they were called but on whether there was a mensa for the community and how substantial and independent it was. Where there was none, or it was disregarded, then any monk set up for spiritual rule would live, with the rest of the 49

ACIII no. 39 (901). ALouIV no. 12 (940); here not clear whether reversion was intended only if heirs failed, or after the couple’s immediate heirs. On the ideological and political background see Dunbabin, France, 22. 51 As for Melun. Cf. the ‘caput of the little abbey’, with 60 mansi, given iure beneficiario (probably by a count of Troyes) to a couple and their grandson (confirmed 935, ARaoul no. 26); or an abbatiola given in the later 9th c. to a man and his mother and half-brother to ‘possess for all time’ (confirmed 937, ALouIV 52 no. 5: see Bautier, ‘Saint-Merry’, 5–13, 15–19). ACIII no. 65 (911–15). 53 See Dierkens, Abbayes, 149–50; Nightingale, Gorze Reform, 72–3, 74–5; for precarial exchange, below, pp. 742–4. Wigeric’s son was Adalbero bp. of Metz, who claimed Hastie`re ‘by his ancestors’ largesse’ 54 (below, p. 425). See Dierkens, op. cit., 150–1 and n. 10. 50


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community, on whatever the lay abbot or rector chose to leave for them.55 But where there was a monks’ mensa (often, of course, by a lay abbot’s initiative) a monk-abbot or provost would in principle control it,56 so having some landlord’s power at least of usufruct, and probably of granting leases or benefices with the lay abbot’s consent. The layman or woman meanwhile, whether or not called abbot or abbess, would control, exploit, live off, or grant in benefice the rest of the property, the abbatial mensa,57 and might reside with his or her household, or (in the case of the great) descend at intervals.58 Appointing or accepting a regular abbot or abbess could itself be turned to account for patronage or even profit.59 And the lay abbot was still free to grant the whole in benefice to another abbot, lay or regular, and later to take possession again, perhaps again to withdraw. The tenth-century dukes of Aquitaine could step in and out of direct possession of Saint-Maixent, Saint-Hilaire in Poitiers, or (for a time) Saint-Julien of Brioude, with or without the name of abbot; sometimes with a lay or secular abbot below them, such as William III’s brother Ebolus bishop of Limoges, who in turn had regular abbots under him.60 At one stage William IV had an ‘abbot and fidelis’ Girbert at Saint-Maixent, whom he empowered to dispose of an alod for three lives by ‘conveying’ to him ‘as much as I and the monks of St Maxentius are seen to have’ there:61 claiming an intimate relation with the monks and their property which is perhaps no more susceptible of a legal or rational explanation than some proprietary expressions of ninth-century kings.62 Nonetheless it is such property-dealings—making exchanges, granting precariae, creating prebends—that reveal if anything does whether and how proprietary right was divided between a lay lord or abbot and a more internal abbot or provost.63 When in 924 a nobleman wanted ‘some small lands’ from the property of Saint-Marcel-le`s-Chalon for himself and his son for life, it was ‘of the largesse’ of countess Ermengard and her son Gilbert count of Chalon that he asked and obtained it; in 960 Gilbert’s daughter’s father-in-law, Robert viscount of Autun, ‘held the abbey’ and accordingly consented to a grant of its property.64 55 Whether or not Louis the Pious arranged any mensa for Saint-Bertin under Fridugis, the monks believed later that Fridugis kept for himself what he wanted out of the property (Gesta abb. S. Bertini, c. 47, SS XIII. 614. On Fridugis’s actually good record as a pluralist abbot see Felten, A¨bte, 18, 245–6, 270). 56 Specified in unformulaic ways, e.g. ACII nos. 430, 444 (877), ALB no. 26 (878), DKarlmann no. 14 (878), AEudes no. 33 (893). At St Maximin, Trier, there was marked clarification between 888 and 893 (DArn. nos. 10, 114; see Wisplinghoff, Untersuchungen, 27–8). 57 See Dierkens, Abbayes, 109–10 on Lothar II’s brother-in-law Hubert at Lobbes. 58 For residence see below, pp. 831–2. 59 e.g. queen Richilda and the nunnery of Origny (Flodoard, Hist. Rem., iii. 27 (p. 350)). 60 St-Maixent nos. 16, 18, 20, 23–4, 29, 33; cf. introd. pp. lxiii–lxviii; Voigt, Klosterpolitik, II. 195–8. 61 62 St-Maixent no. 37 (968). Above, pp. 256, 267. 63 On lay abbots’ disposal of possessions in Lotharingia see Parisse, ‘Noblesse et monaste`res’, 178–82. 64 St-Marcel-le`s-Chalon nos. 28, 107 (960).

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Back in 878 count Rudolph (not yet king in Burgundy), as ‘abbot of the monastery’ of Saint-Maurice of Agaune, had leased a Tuscan property of SaintMaurice’s to the empress Angilberga for life, declaring that the law required any such lease of church property to come from ‘the munificence of him who is known to direct the church at its head’.65 Becoming king, Rudolph kept the abbacy; and his successors (whose chief resource it was) remained in effect lay abbots throughout the tenth century,66 variously involved in granting precariae with or without the provost’s participation;67 until around 1000 king Conrad’s brother Burchard archbishop of Lyons (previously provost) began to be called ‘abbot’, with a third brother, Anselm (himself a bishop elsewhere), as provost. The three acted in various combinations for property transactions,68 this turning perhaps on the status of the property in question, but perhaps on who was about at the time or how much fuss the recipient might make, rather than on fine distinctions of the capacities of ruler, abbot, and provost.69 Even so, the more control of property a monk-abbot or provost had—whether in intensiveness (what he could do) or in extent (where he could do it)—the less there was for a lay or secular abbot or rector, and the nearer the latter’s position was to that of outside lord. The lay abbot might move out, or back, to this position to leave room for a son or brother (as the kings of Burgundy did at Agaune, and perhaps the dukes of Aquitaine at Saint-Maixent), or for a fidelis, often a viscount (whose heirs might end up as hereditary lay abbots by the same process as his lord’s ancestors had done).70 Or he might step back in favour of a regular abbot, as part of a plan of reform (enhancing his prestige and leaving him with a more princely role than formerly). But there are many degrees of this move. A lay abbot might merely allow the head of the monastic community to call himself abbot, leaving him to live with his fellows on their mensa. But he might have been responsible for creating this mensa in the first place,71 or for increasing it out of his own part, 65 DRud. no. 1. Cf. ibid. no. 37 (with ed. comment, 151–2): 962?, king Conrad leases res nostras ex abbatia nostra (Saint-Andre´-le-Bas) stating the same principle in terms of having dominatio. 66 About 979 the king is called rector; in 996 the abbatia is ‘under his regimen’ (ibid. nos. 48, 79). 67 e.g. jointly, ibid. nos. 49, 84, 90; without the provost, nos. 11 (910, an oddity: Rudolph I confirms a precaria ‘by our royal authority’), 48; provost alone, MHP, Chart., II nos. 45, 48–53. 68 DRud. nos. 92, 147, 149 (1001, clarifying their positions: Burchard as abbot, Anselm as provost, Rudolph ‘in whose potestas and regimen the church is known to be’), 161, 168–72; MHP, Chart., I nos. 61, 67, 71, 73. 69 After this the king’s exercise of nominally abbatial power seems occasional only (1011, 1030: DRud. nos. 103, 123), perhaps in short vacancies of what by now was the real abbacy. By 1039, under Salian rule, a younger Burchard (provost in 1030) could act alone as ‘archbishop and abbot’ (MHP, Chart., I no. 105). 70 e.g. Saint-Lubin from count of Blois to viscount (late 9th c.); Saint-Martial from count of Poitou to viscount of Limoges (10th c.). 71 Creating a minimal monks’ mensa could give him a freer hand with the bulk of the property; more generous arrangements may indicate competition with other nobles for the monks’ good-will (Nightingale, Gorze Reform, 10, 191–2, 198, 208–9).


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or recovering alienated lands for it.72 Finally he might give up what was left of the abbot’s part itself, along with the title ‘abbot’, perhaps giving the abbacy for the time being to a reformer from outside, intending to allow election later; or he might give the whole monastery away permanently to a famous reforming house.73 The great count Robert, as lay abbot of Saint-Martin of Tours, Saint-Denis, and other monasteries, was much involved in getting their communities’ mensae increased or restored.74 In an early instance of this (892) he took an estate away from one of his vassi and restored it to the canons of Saint-Martin, who were on the verge of going to his brother king Odo to complain about it. His charter represents him as asking the monastery’s advocate what fighting men could be expected from the vassus. ‘How many extra shields do you see him as providing for my service?’ ‘Not more than three’, he is told. ‘So am I for the sake of three shields to take their possessions away from St Martin and his brothers, to the damage of my soul?’75 But Robert did not give up abbacies. In Flanders, Baldwin II’s younger son Adalolf ‘count and abbot’ was remembered at Saint-Bertin for giving them a golden chalice and a pallium embroidered with pearls; but it was his successor as abbot, his older brother Arnulf, who gave most to the monastery while holding it in a close, possessive embrace: having his wife let into the monastic church to pray for health, the first woman ever to enter it, something that not even a queen had dared to propose; enriching it, in particular with the important estate of Merk ad usus fratrum (keeping this for his own and his wife’s and son’s lives, but paying the brothers 100 solidi a year for it);76 and finally handing Saint-Bertin over to be ruled by the reformer Gerard of Brogne. In the mid-tenth century, after a few years of rule by Gerard’s subordinates, the count gave it to his own nephew Hildebrand, a monk-abbot under whom it flourished (and to whom Arnulf also committed Saint-Vaast).77 So Arnulf had partly withdrawn from being abbot of Saint-Bertin towards being its outside lord. But it remained in his power to keep or restore more or less of the abbot’s property, and according to Folcuin he gave up ‘to the brothers’ use’ the vill of Arques, ‘one of the chief components of the abbacy, allotted to the abbot’s service . . . which the count himself, having received the abbey by paternal 72 Above, pp. 263–5, esp. count Robert for his abbeys. Cf. ACII no. 444 (877, duke Boso for Saint-Martin, Auxerre); ACIII nos. 69, 76 (912, count Reginar for St Maximin, Trier); other instances in Felten, ‘Laie73 na¨bte’, 419, A¨bte, 48–52. See below, pp. 832, 833–4. 74 For his lay abbacies see Dufour’s chronology, ARobI, pp. xci–xcvi. 75 ARobI, app. no. 37 (892). Cf. his restoring a cell, formerly supporting a hostel for the poor, given by his late brother ‘abbot Odo’ (as count of Paris) to an individual canon ‘at that time his fidelis’ (ibid., no. 42). 76 Folcuin, Gesta abb. S. Bertini, cc. 105, 106 (SS. XIII. 627–8); St-Bertin no. 76 (938). 77 Folcuin, Gesta, cc. 106–9 (also Saimt Peter’s, Ghent). See Platelle, ‘Oeuvre de Saint Ge´rard’; Wollasch, ‘Gerard von Brogne’; more broadly, McKitterick, Frankish Kingdoms, 252–4.

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succession, had held bound to his own use’.78 Only a complete handing over of the abbey lands to a regular abbot could count as renouncing the abbacy altogether, and this may seldom or never have happened; perhaps some of what a lay abbot had held would always stay behind, absorbed into his or his men’s hereditary property. And it remained in count Arnulf’s and his successors’ power to allow an election or to appoint at will;79 he had not given Saint-Bertin to Brogne itself, nor to Gerard permanently.80 A similar but more complicated withdrawal was that of count Geoffrey I of Anjou as abbot of Saint-Aubin, Angers.81 His first move was to rid it of canons and introduce monks, soon afterwards giving them a monk-abbot: but this was his younger brother Guy, who held it along with three other monasteries of the count’s, and was more like a lay or outsider abbot, squeezed in (like Ebolus at Saint-Maixent) between the community and the count. In 966, however, Geoffrey recorded that with Guy’s consent he had appointed a regular abbot, Widbold, who was to remain there as a ‘good shepherd’ for life, his successor to be elected by the monks ‘with our consent and that of our future genus’.82 As for the property, the count in this charter not only forbade encroachments on the monks’ stipends, but restored (in general terms) any land known to belong to the abbacy;83 his brother Guy had already given back (in equally general terms) any land he had taken away (in a curious charter saying in effect that he had tried and failed to rule well as a regular abbot).84 The new abbot is thus to have not only pastoral authority but also, in theory, full control of the whole abbatial property, enlarged by anything recovered from former beneficiaries: control that he is doubtless expected to use partly at the count’s request for the count’s men.85 Count Geoffrey declared the same intentions in 970 when he again appointed an abbot, Albert; this time ‘saving the monks’ will’ (which sounds like a very free interpretation of Benedictine election: their agreement to his choice), again with licence to elect next time.86 The appointment is done pro remedium animae—free 78

Folcuin, Gesta, c. 108. Ibid., cc. 109, 110; Simon, Gesta, c. 1 (pp. 636–7). See Voigt, Klosterpolitik, 220, 229–32; Guillot, Comte d’Anjou, I. 142–3 and n. 60. 80 What he gave is casually described by Folcuin as monasterium rather than abbatia; the language was no more precise than in the 9th c. (above, at notes 47–8). 81 For the origins of the counts’ abbacy here see Guillot, Comte, I. 131–8. 82 St-Aubin no. 2 (see Guillot, Comte, I. 146 n. 70 on the two versions; on Geoffrey’s and Guy’s reforms, 138–41, 145–50). 83 Soon afterwards he and Guy together restored a particular estate (Guillot, Comte, 146). Guillot does not raise the question whether there was or had been a conventual mensa. 84 St-Aubin no. 38. Guy held other abbeys, and the bishopric of Clermont (secured for him by Geoffrey). 85 See Bachrach, ‘Geoffrey Greymantle’, 15 and n. 59 (but see below, p. 377 note 39), 36–7. This made restitutions of monastic property often short-lived (see Platelle, op. cit., 137–8). 86 St-Aubin no. 21. See Guillot, Comte, I. 152 n. 95 on the clause salva voluntate monachorum. 79


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of charge, that is, which made it a good work in itself. At subsequent successions of a new abbot, successive counts repeatedly claim to have appointed him with the monks’ agreement,87 while implying that election-right for next time is the count’s concession. The verb used for appointing the abbot is delegare, which Guillot argues was carefully chosen because the count was still seen, residually, as abbot ‘delegating’ his office to a monk.88 In 1036, however, the first of several notifications from the congregation (subscribed by large numbers of monks) records their election of an abbot with count’s and bishop’s consent; the next one, in 1056, records that the abbot-elect has been presented to count Geoffrey II ‘under whose ditio the place stands’, to be invested by him with the temporalities.89 The counts by now have made a real withdrawal from the abbacy, while retaining and indeed enhancing their active lordship as rulers. Yet their original position as abbot was not forgotten: Fulk Nerra was later described as having acted as ‘arch-abbot’ in arbitrating between Saint-Aubin and Saint-Le´zin over property originally given them jointly by Fulk I as abbot of both.90 For such a lord, control of the abbey has become part of his hereditary lordship in which he has the kind of power that the king once had. This includes the possibility of alienating the abbey itself. Count Robert in 912 undertook on behalf of himself and later abbots not to let Marmoutier ‘come into anyone’s dominium except his own’.91 But soon such alienation could be a crucial step in reform. Marmoutier, despite count Robert’s promise, had come before 985 to the count of Blois,92 probably by royal gift with Hugh Capet’s agreement (the Robertians’ interests having shifted from the lower Loire); by 986 count Odo I had invited abbot Maiolus of Cluny to establish monks there under a Cluniac abbot, and was accordingly called instructor et defensor in 987 where in 985 he had been rector: from lay abbot to reforming and protecting lord. It was, however, removed from Cluny’s control in 998, not taken back into lay abbacy but given to a kinsman of the count’s, the regular abbot Gauzbert; the counts of Blois kept it in their lordship—their proprium dominium—when they ceded Touraine to the count of Anjou in 1044.93 Many such grants to reforming abbots of Cluny amounted only to the grant for life of the office of abbot (or disposal of the office), like count Arnulf’s grant of Saint-Bertin to Gerard of Brogne. But others were at least intended as permanent gifts of the whole monastery, including the power to dispose of it thereafter. 87

St-Aubin nos. 22, 24–6 (977–1027); in no. 23 (988) the count consents to a living abbot’s designation of 88 his successor. See table, Guillot, Comte, I. 151. Guillot, Comte, 152–3. 89 St-Aubin nos. 27, 28. 90 Ibid. nos. 177–8; Guillot, Comte, I. 153–4, II no. (C) 30 (1014, the title inserted c.1050). 91 Above, note 33. 92 Earlier it had been for a time dependent on Saint-Martin of Tours, so still in Robertian lordship. 93 Guillot, Comte, I. 173–5 and nn. 183–4.

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This was mostly in the eleventh century, and for smaller monasteries, often new; but back in 929 the widowed Adelaide, forty years after her brother king Rudolph I had given her Romainmoutier with the power to leave it to a chosen heir, gave ‘the monastery . . . with all the abbatia and all things belonging to that abbatia’, not to any of her sons but—partly for their souls—to Cluny, out of her ius et dominatio into the monks’ dominium et providentia.94 The abbey seems, however, to have been in king Conrad’s hands by 966,95 and he later gave it to Cluny once more, this time permanently.96 Such a grant need not wipe out all remnants of lordship: Conrad’s successor Rudolph III had a say in exchanges of Romainmoutier property effected by abbot Odilo.97 When at the height of the Gregorian reform Stephen count of Blois ‘began to think how I should deal with the abbeys left me by my fathers, as it were under royal right’, accordingly giving Saint-Germain of Auxerre to Cluny, he retained ‘certain customs that I have there for protecting the place and for supplying my visits’.98 So lay abbacy, having been a basis for hereditary lordship of once-royal abbeys, ended as its optional—and obsolescent—outcome. A lord retaining abbacy, enjoying the bulk of the property, and determining his successor (or being succeeded by a natural heir), was the nearest thing possible to a ‘proprietor’; but if he pulled out of this he made himself a greater man.99 Lay or secular abbots whose claims were based not on a remote royal grant but on relatively recent history sometimes hung on, however, to the late eleventh or the twelfth century, finally giving up in thoroughly proprietary terms. In the Limousin it was an aged lay or secular abbot, Hugh of Castelnau, who gave Beaulieu to Cluny. Since its ninth-century foundation by Ralph archbishop of Bourges and his brothers, of the vicecomital family of Turenne, it had somehow come (under the lordship of the viscounts of Comborn) into the hands of an older Hugh of Castelnau, who gave it to one of his sons, a monk Bernard (later bishop of Cahors).100 When this Bernard died in 1028 a ‘secular abbot’ was set over the monks, arguably the same man as a nephew of Bernard’s put in by the then viscount because of his hereditary claim. The monks complained about this ‘tyranny’ to a council at Limoges in 1031, which left it to the bishop to ‘ordain’ a monk-abbot, and exhorted ‘you, the outsider, to be not a 94 888 (above, note 10); 929, Cluny no. 379; for the souls of her husband duke Richard, brother king Rudolph, nephew the present king Rudolph, son Ralph now king of France, herself and her other sons (differentiating between ‘Rudolph’ and ‘Raoul’ or ‘Ralph’ may be incorrect, but makes for clarity). 95 96 97 DRud. no. 39. Evident in the 990s, ibid. nos. 61, 83. Ibid. nos. 155, 167. 98 Cluny no. 3717 (‘c.1096’). 99 It was prince-like action, earning moral prestige; perhaps also bringing access to lands recovered for the monks at others’ expense (see Bachrach, ‘Geoffrey Greymantle’, 37), though he might have had to compensate these others. On regional power-building by such means see Hlawitshka, ‘Herzog Giselbert’, 100 460–5. See Lauranson-Rosaz, Auvergne, 244–5; Bell, Knightly Piety, 45–7.


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waster but a defender and provider for the place’ (thus allowing him a proper role as titular abbot).101 Ademar of Chabannes’s account of all this does not name the secular abbot or the intruded nephew; but one or both must have been the younger Hugh of Castelnau.102 Hugh appears as abbot of some kind in 1028,103 and remained in office after the council (perhaps harrassing the next monk-abbot into accepting demotion to dean) for at least forty-five years.104 In 1076, however—probably under threat of excommunication—he gave it to abbot Hugh of Cluny (like any virtuous reforming lay abbot or founder’s heir), by a charter drafted for him in firmly proprietary terms. Beaulieu had ‘come into his hands by succession to his kinsmen’; he now wishes to assign it (delegare) to Cluny for abbot Hugh to ordain God’s service there under the Rule of St Benedict. He describes the donum in detail: important estates of Beaulieu’s from long ago.105 ‘All these I give up and release’, while he renounces dues from what has been left in the monks’ hands, except for a render of corn and wine and some other possessions ‘that my uncle Bernard the bishop held in his dominium’.106 Then or later Cluny wrote a different version of this transaction, attributing it not to Hugh of Castelnau but to the monks of Beaulieu commending themselves to Hugh of Cluny; this names last among half-a-dozen auctores et laudatores Hugh of Castelnau, ‘said to be abbot’, who confesses himself unworthy of this dignity and gives up ‘the monastery’ and all its honor to Cluny and its abbots, apart from what he wishes to retain ‘until He that gave me the beginning of a good intention shall give me its completion’.107 The outcome was the appointment of an abbot by Hugh of Cluny. But this was evidently more than the monks of Beaulieu had reckoned on; they combined with the still interested Hugh of Castelnau to drive out the Cluniac abbot;108 the matter was taken up by Urban II, and in 1095 a Hugh of Castelnau—either the same man or a namesake and heir109 (the original Hugh would have been rising 101

Mansi, XIX. 536–7 (account by Ademar of Chabannes). Deloche (introd. to Beaulieu, pp. xx-xxvi) took Hugh of Castelnau as having displaced an elected monk-abbot (another Bernard) whom bp. Jordan eventually reinstated. Marcus Bull (op. cit., 47–8) rejects this, but his alternative—that two (related) non-monk abbots were involved in 1031, Hugh as lay and Bernard as secular abbot—is not quite convincing. Ademar’s narrative can be read as identifying the laicalis persona imposed by the viscount with ille clericus, non monachus, abbas; Hugh could be essentially a layman though technically in minor orders. To see the current abbot Bernard as a secular ruling mainly secular clergy overlooks Ademar’s untechnical usage in describing worldly or imperfect monks as ‘secular’ (Mansi, XIX. 537); while the monks’ complaint that Beaulieu was secularibus conculcatus might mean ‘trampled on by lay powers’ rather than Bull’s ‘overrun by seculars’. See also note 113, below. 103 104 Beaulieu no. 122. Deloche, Beaulieu, pp. xix–xxiii. 105 Including Favars, put into the cellarer’s control a century earlier by the then lay and regular abbots (ibid., p. xvii and no. 50). 106 Cluny no. 3491; done with the bp. of Limoges’s counsel and that of the viscount of Comborn with 107 Ibid. no. 3490. his sons. 108 109 Deloche, Beaulieu, p. xxvii. Here for the first time called miles. 102

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85 even if given Beaulieu in his teens)—finally gave it up to Cluny through the pope. Urban’s bull relates this in terms that indicate Hugh’s physical occupation of the monastery and its property: ‘the knight Hugh, who was unlawfully occupying (incumbebat) the monastery’ and allowing the monks a bare livelihood,110 ‘rejected (refutavit) into our hands whatever power he had hitherto exercised, and through us restored the place to God and St Peter’ (that is, to Cluny).111 Titular abbots in Hugh of Castelnau’s world were certainly very different in style from those of the north (an Angevin traveller was amazed to discover that a bearded, splendid ‘abbot’ he encountered was an educated and sophisticated cleric);112 but in substance Hugh’s grasp on Beaulieu, comprising both exploitation and disposal, seems broadly equivalent to a lay abbot’s anywhere.113 Further north, meanwhile, old urban or suburban monasteries of Anjou, mostly in the city of Angers, were in the possession of lay families who had acquired them from the bishopric, as we learn when a bishop recovers them.114 In the first half of the eleventh century bishop Hubert (by an exchange) ‘put out of doors for ever’,115 from the abbey of Saint-Maurille, Reinard of ChaˆteauGontier and all his sons and daughters.116 A century later bishop Ulger acquired or recovered four collegiate churches from laity holding the abbacies. In 1131 he effectively bought the church of Saint-Le´zin from count Geoffrey IV,117 acquiring ‘whatever belonged to the management of abbot or lord’ (the counts had been both—and in the eleventh century had allowed even the provostry to become the hereditary property of a layman).118 In 1145 the lord of ChaˆteauGontier gave the chapel of Saint-Just, ‘in such a way that the bishops shall possess it . . . and have right over its canons, not only as bishops but as lords and abbots and deans’ (as deans they would be the immediate rulers of the canons), with the right ‘that I myself had’ to appoint and remove canons and control its possessions.119 At Saint-Saturnin, Angers, Amaury Crispin and his son Theobald gave up the abbatia which Amaury and his ancestors had wrongfully 110

111 ‘A patron to the monks ad parve vivendum.’ Epist., no. 198 (PL 151. 468). Quoted by Lauranson-Rosaz, Auvergne, 245–6, from the miracles of St Faith. 113 Deloche took it that Beaulieu’s lay abbots were like Moissac’s, originally defenders (abbates milites) appointed by the monks, turned masters (Beaulieu, pp. xviii–xix); but this view of Moissac’s secular abbots is itself doubtful (below, pp. 391–2; see Lauranson-Rosaz, Auvergne, 243–8); and Deloche’s first instance at Beaulieu, abbot Gerard I (pp. xix–xx, c. 971) could be an ordinary lay abbot from the founder114 family. Others had been acquired from the count (see note 118, below). 115 Taking eliminare literally, as legal ritual. 116 Recorded by Hubert’s successor Eusebius (Angers no. 31: Fanning, Acts, no. 48), when undoing an 117 Angers no. 203. arrangement of his own (below, p. 428 note 74). 118 This layman’s descendant Eon de Blaison partially renounced it to Saint-Le´zin, 1083–6: he had had (and partly kept) tithes, various rents, dues on sales; also (given up altogether) the right to sell burials, and nomination of a canon without consultation (Guillot, Comte, I. 269–70; II. C 104, C 179, C 349; and see 119 Bachrach, ‘Geoffrey Greymantle’, 5 and n. 15. Angers no. 206. 112


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held.120 And at Saint-Pierre, Angers, in 1140, Abbo of Rochefort with his wife Agnes, his eldest son Peter, and Peter’s wife and son, ‘gave or rather gave back . . . for ever, in alms, the church of St Peter, that is, the abbatia’; with the consent also of Abbo’s three other sons, among them Geoffrey who currently ‘possessed the abbey iure abbatis’. Bishop Ulger’s record of this last transaction is detailed and revealing.121 After a preliminary grant to cathedral representatives, Abbo fell ill and sent his sons to make the grant at the cathedral: there Peter ‘gave or gave back the abbey and its possessions . . . and rejected it into my hand with the keys of the church, handing them over to me’. Then with the same keys Peter’s son and two of his brothers each in turn gave up the church to the bishop; then all of them came to the high altar of the cathedral and ‘put this donum on it’ by the symbol of the pastoral staff. Next, Peter ordered the canons of Saint-Pierre, two or three of whom were present (and had brought the keys), to answer to the bishop and his successors as their abbot; and ordered his brother Geoffrey, ‘who was then abbot, not to retain the abbacy any more by hereditary right’, and at an hour of his own choice to ‘give up the abbacy to St Maurice’ (the cathedral). In return for this gift the bishop absolved them all from the sin of holding the abbey, promised them burial in the cathedral cemetery and a place in its martyrology, and gave them (between them) almost 15,000 solidi.122 The bishop then set out (on the same day, it seems) in a magnificent procession to Saint-Pierre and ‘invested’ himself and the cathedral with it: ‘I opened and shut the doors and rang the bells pro investitura’; then Geoffrey (at this stage the chief actor) took the church keys and put them on the altar for the bishop, to signify ‘giving up the abbacy’. Next they went into the chapter-house, where Geoffrey gave up the abbot’s seat to the bishop, sat himself in a canon’s seat (he was presumably a cleric), told the canons to obey the bishop as abbot, and ‘absolved them from his own potestas’. The whole procedure treats both the church and its abbacy as property to be handed over with every possible relevant bit of symbolism; though the very elaboration suggests a determination by the bishop to close all loopholes against the family by playing it their way.123 Little has been said here about lay abbots or abbesses outside the Frankish world. They were probably widespread over much of the West, but are often not easy to recognize. In tenth-century England, lay abbacy is probably what the Regularis Concordia meant by secularium prioratus;124 in ninth-century Italy it resulted 120

121 122 Ibid. no. 201 (1136/40). Ibid. no. 202. See below, pp. 761–2. Even so, five years later Abbo and his eldest son claimed the ‘cloister’ of Saint-Pierre (drawing as narrowly as possible the definition of what they had renounced?); but finally ‘granted the cloister and its 124 vicaria and whatever they used to have in it’ (ibid. no. 202). Below, p. 833. 123

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inevitably from Carolingian rule. But it is often not clear whether a family’s hold on a monastery originated in a ruler’s grant. And where such grants are recorded, as often in Italy (to kings’ wives or daughters in Pavia or Brescia; to a Bavarian benefice-holder of Charlemagne’s, or to Charles the Fat’s fidelis Autprand),125 it may be unclear whether the recipient is to be outside lord of the monastery, or its head in temporal matters (in effect having lay abbacy), or its proper head both temporal and spiritual;126 or perhaps to possess the buildings and property of a defunct monastery with a view to restoring it as its lord or abbot.127 For Farfa, what was clearly secular abbacy was granted (or perhaps only recognized) by Lothar I to Peter bishop of Spoleto in 843; worth citing here because bishop Peter—like a Frankish abbot-count—pulled out in favour of a monk, Hilderic, but not completely. By agreement with abbot Hilderic he kept for life the potestas ordinandi et disponendi of part of the property, mostly in the hands of various named people; typical of what any lay abbot might hope to keep when giving way to a monk.128

11.ii. Advocates Where lay abbacies were absent or disappearing, advocacy provided another means of access to monastic resources for the laity. Any thorough discussion of advocacy, or of immunity with which it is bound up, is impossible here, but the subject cannot be avoided since it is closely but controversially related to lordship over monasteries. It is probably a mistake to assume that all those called advocatus must have something in common besides the name.1 In Merovingian times a church’s advocate might be a powerful layman invoked ad hoc to press a case before the king;2 or a permanent lay agent or official. Such an official, then and later, might represent the church at the count’s court in litigation and in property transactions; or within its property, manage estates and exercise whatever jurisdiction the prelate had as a landlord; or do whatever needed to be done in an immunity by way of collecting fines, holding inquests, making arrests, perhaps organizing 125

Above, pp. 314, 317 note 45; p. 238; below, pp. 395–6. Clear enough, however, in DKarlmann no. 9 (877), to bp. Heimo of Belluno’s sister Rihswind, life tenure as abbess under the Benedictine Rule at S. Maria Theodata, Pavia (with licence to the nuns to elect 127 next time). As Autprand (above, note 125). 128 DLothI no. 73. 1 Stated as a premiss by Waas, Vogtei, I. 12–13; Hallinger also assumes a single (if complex) meaning (Gorze-Kluny, 573–9). 2 However, the diploma showing an inluster vir acting so for Be`ze, 666/7, is spurious (DMerov. no. 106). 126


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military service. Charlemagne legislated for the qualifications and public appointment of some such official advocates3 (not making them royal servants, but recognizing a public interest).4 Later, advocates appear with different functions and higher status (though some of the older kind persisted). In Ottonian Germany at least, change in the character of immunities brought comital jurisdiction to the advocate, making him virtually a private count.5 Independently of this, an advocate might lead the monastic contingent in war; or—less ‘public’—be responsible for armed defence of the church and its property.6 At the same time a great man promising permanent protection (even if only occasionally called on), without any question of being the church’s officer, might be called its advocate.7 And because protection, by arms or influence, was a function of a founder’s heir as outside lord, he too was often called ‘advocate’.8 It is frequently unclear which of these is in question. In any case the functions overlapped and could lead one to another: a defender and military leader needed jurisdiction, for instance;9 or profits of jurisdiction might be the inducement to provide protection.10 In the middle and western kingdoms immunity itself became more a matter of practical protection, the advocate’s jurisdiction developing partly for this reason.11 Later, for much of the tenth and eleventh centuries, in the West and the more loosely held of the Ottonian dominions,12 the fragmentation of once-public authority could spread the advocate’s power beyond the old immunity or regardless of it,13 while heightening the need for his protection against others. Meanwhile the more important the position of advocate, the more it would be sought by or offered to the great. There might then be little difference between appointing an advocate and commending a church to his protection; the distinction between the great protector and the (by now often hereditary) official might be blurred, leaving it unclear whether officials have

3 e.g. 802, Capit. no. 33 c. 13; see Senn, L’Institution des avoueries, 11 n. 1, 24–7, 31–43; Dopsch, Gesamm. Aufsa¨tze, 19–22. 4 For versions of the ‘royal officials’ view see Kroell, Immunite´, 264–81; Ganshof, ‘L’Immunite´ dans la monarchie franque’, Recueils de la Soc. Jean Bodin, I, 2nd edn. (Brussels, 1958), 199–200, 208–9. It seems clear, however, that Carolingian kings appointed advocates for their own monasteries only, even these sometimes choosing their own and not yet needing a licence for this (Dopsch, Gesamm. Aufsa¨tze, 22–9, 42–5; Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 33–8). 5 See Rathgen, ‘Untersuchungen’, 75; Otto, Die Entwicklung der deutschen Kirchenvogtei, 16–22, 28–38, 107–8 (a more complicated view); Reuter, Germany, 100, 218–20, 230–1 (lucid, brief account). 6 Less a change in the character of the advocate from ‘official’ to ‘military’ (Senn, Institution, 43–5, 81–2) 7 Ibid. 90–1. than a shift in what he might have to do. 8 There were also regional or local advocates for particular lordships or estates. 9 As in English shires and hundreds and the Oswaldslow immunity (John, Land Tenure, 113–26). 10 11 Senn, Institution, 81–3, 86–94. See Dopsch, Gesamm. Aufsa¨tze, 32–5, 40–2. 12 Esp. Lotharingia and Alsace (see Boshof, Kirchenvogtei; Dubled, Avouerie, 10–14). 13 Immunities were themselves weakened by the fragmentation (far from causing it; see Fouracre, ‘Eternal Light’, 66–7 and n. 35).

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changed their character or been superseded.14 Alternatively a protector-advocate might impose himself as the strongest man of the neighbourhood, effectively a protection-racketeer. And any judicial or military functions gave scope for oppression of the church’s peasants or townsmen (especially by local or subadvocates),15 and for demands on the monastery itself (such that the occasional broad, vague immunity-grants of the late ninth or tenth century might include advocates among those excluded from interfering).16 The misdeeds of advocates became a preoccupation of the Church’s rulers, so that advocates appear in canon law texts as potential oppressors. Of course all this varied regionally. In northern Germany what is most marked is the increased importance of the official advocate’s jurisdiction in the tenth century, its continued anchorage in immunity, and its becoming eventually a major element in independent princely power;17 while in Bavaria it seems more protective, and rooted more in hereditary power than in immunity.18 In France and Lotharingia we see rather the emergence of the protector-advocate, paid in land, hospitality, and other dues:19 sometimes an expression of princely power (perhaps replacing lay abbacy)20 at the level of dukes or great counts; but often an element in the once-comital power, itself involving jurisdiction, now informally scattered among lesser counts (old and official or new and self-made) and lords of castles, and turning into seigneurie banale.21 In Normandy, however, there were no such advocates; the duke’s comital power was such that bishops and abbots, like lay barons, had no more jurisdiction than they could be allowed to exercise themselves or through petty officials, while as a protector only the duke was recognized (and in the eleventh century occasionally called advocate).22 In the 14 The classic terminology presents a change from ‘Carolingian official’ to ‘lordly’ or ‘feudal’ advocacy (Senn, Institution, 85–94; Waas, Vogtei, I. 44, 52; Boshof, ‘Kirchenvogtei’, 80, 89–90). 15 e.g. Fleury under abbot Abbo complained of the ‘bad customs and persistent rapine’ of the advocate and viguier (a nephew of their enemy bp. Arnulf) in their lordship of Evera (Bouquet, Recueil, X. 561). 16 e.g. DArn. no. 41 (c.888) for the Saxon nunnery Ridigippi; DOI no. 325 (966) for Essen; DOII no. 307 (983) for Payerne in Rhaetia (see Dubled, Avouerie, 14). 17 See Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 18–21, 210–11; above, pp. 281–3. But even in 10th-c. royal diplomas for Saxon monasteries it probably sometimes means lordly protection (see above, pp. 280–1, 283–4, on Fischbeck and Quedlinburg). 18 See Sto¨rmer, Adel, 436–56. The founder’s heir’s advocacy that bp. Ulrich of Augsburg claimed to authorize (below, p. 815) was probably not jurisdictional. 19 The evidence is largely 11th- and 12th-c. regulations and agreements about advocacy (see Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 22, 190–8; Boshof, Kirchenvogtei, 91–108; R. Bloch, Klosterpolitik Leos IX, 202–3). See Bachrach, ‘Geoffrey Greymantle’, 19: agreement (975 or earlier) between count Geoffrey of Anjou and the abbess and nuns of Sainte-Croix, Poitiers, finding William IV of Aquitaine’s protection inadequate. Forgeries were frequent, esp. from 12th-c. Germany. 20 See Boshof, Kirchenvogtei, 68–9 (Moyenmoutier), 81–4 (Echternach, Remiremont, St Maximin); Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 229–30 (Stavelot-Malme´dy after duke Giselbert’s abbacy). 21 See below, at note 34. Advocacy could be the basis for a new county: see Dunbabin, France in the Making, 210. For an advocate’s mixed functions, and opportunities for oppression, see DHIII no. 372 A (a, b), B (1056; all falsified but with historical core) for St Maximin, Trier, under duke Giselbert. 22 Yver, ‘Absence de l’avouerie’, 192–4, 213.


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Midi great counts exercising custodia or guardia over monasteries were never called advocates; those so called were still monastic officials, not even managing immunities but representing their masters in the public courts.23 What matters here is how this shifting complex of roles was related to ordinary lordship over monasteries: a question debated by German scholars of the early and mid-twentieth century, often in highly theoretical terms.24 Some saw even the modest representative functions of Carolingian advocates as stemming at least in part from a lordly protection or mund kept back by founders when they endowed a monastery; or more emphatically saw the judicial powers of later advocates as the product of a massive Eigenkirchenrecht dug deep into the foundations of the State.25 The most far-reaching rejection of this saw Ottonian advocacy as public authority put into the hands of the great nobles of the region (its natural holders), who might (geography permitting) just happen to be also the founder’s heirs.26 Neither extreme is convincing. Carolingian advocates (of bishops, after all, as well as of abbots and abbesses) were officers of the churches or prelates they represented,27 even if, like any office, theirs tended to become hereditary (often attached to a landed benefice). On the other hand any such office would be of interest to founders’ heirs or other outside lords (including kings as lords of royal monasteries); and increasingly so as its functions changed and its status rose. It seems reasonable to suppose that the role of advocate as protector would belong to the outside lord—ruler, bishop, or lay noble—if there was one, or someone named by him;28 if a founder’s or lay abbot’s heir existed but someone else had protective advocacy (and permanently), the heirs must have lost all but formal lordship. As for advocacy as a jurisdictional office, where this was not in the abbot’s or abbess’s independent control it was probably at an outside lord’s disposal.29 The only other person who might have controlled it was the king, and there is no evidence of Carolingian, Ottonian, or later kings appointing advocates, 23

Senn, Institution, 100–3; Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 625–6; Lauranson-Rosaz, Auvergne, 249. The term disappears after the early 11th c. Contracts of commenda fulfilled some of the estate-management role of northern advocacy (ibid. 250–1), while similarly enabling lesser lords to exploit church lands (Poly and Bournazel, Transformation, 35–6). 24 Waas and Rathgen argued for their virtual identity, Otto for their essential independence. 25 Waas, Vogtei, I, and Rathgen, ‘Untersuchungen’, passim. 26 Otto, Entwicklung, 6–7, 37–8, 112, 129–39, 140–1. 27 Ibid. 8–25 (esp. on St Gall), 44 (Wissembourg), 50–1 (Fulda). 28 When kings granted advocacy or delegated protection of a royal monastery, the office would tend to become hereditary (see Klebel, ‘EKlrecht’, 180–3 on Bavaria, esp. in Henry IV’s minority, 1056–66). But for Lotharingia see Nightingale, Gorze Reform, 88, 199, 256–8: fluid and competitive relationships between rulers and protector-advocates. 29 Its disposal would belong originally to whoever counted as the immunity-holder—the bishop or abbot himself, the king in his fisc, or possibly a lay founder (if lay nobles ever had immunities).

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or licensing their election, for churches clearly not royal.30 As the role increased in importance, an effective outside lord might undertake it himself, and intend it for an heir, or allow the abbot and convent to choose from his descendants.31 If he reserved advocacy for himself and his family when he gave a monastery away,32 this probably implies that he had held it formerly, or (in a new foundation) would have held it had he kept the monastery in his lordship (though probably with less jurisdiction than it would now obtain, either under royal defence or with a royal grant of bannus).33 Although we do not have to see this in terms of advocacy being an inherent right of the ‘Eigenkirche-lord’, it must have contributed substantially to what lordship of a monastery could amount to. For when advocacy came to cover higher jurisdiction and military organization, it made claims on the peasants’ surplus (in fines, dues, forced labour, ‘customs’) that were equivalent—along with controlling the succession to tenancies—to banal lordship,34 competing with the ordinary manorial lordship of the abbot and convent; giving its holder access to monastic wealth that was otherwise hardly possible for lords, however successfully they might extract benefices or leases from the abbot. It could also be remunerated by an estate allotted to the advocate, or even a share in the monastery’s acquisitions.35 So lordship could include advocacy as perhaps its most materially valuable attribute: probably more valuable than control of the abbacy (at least in male communities),36 once abbacy was effectively reserved for the religious. But they are not interchangeable terms. It seems to be only in its loosest, least technical sense of protector that ‘advocate’ was an occasional near-synonym or casual equivalent of lord or patron;37 and only in Normandy (for a time) and England that ‘advocacy’—avoeson, advowson—became in the mid-twelfth century a synonym for ‘patronage’ as a newly emerging legal term, available there for this use because it had no other technical meaning.38 Nor, on the face of it, were the 30

See Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 33; Otto, Entwicklung, 132, 137; Dopsch, Gesamm. Aufsa¨tze, 28–30 (with differing views on the implications of licence to elect). 31 German founders often made (or secured) such arrangements for future advocacy (see Rathgen, ‘Untersuchungen’, 19–26; Dubled, Avouerie, 24–5, 29–32; and below, note 39. 32 See below, at notes 40–5. 33 The immunity that went with royal defence would add to any existing jurisdiction. For higher jurisdiction (bannus) granted to an advocate personally see Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 86–91, 126–7. 34 See Reuter, Germany, 230–1.This is not to say that banal lordship was the basis of immunity, or that it consisted in a right to what had been the king’s ban (see Fouracre, ‘Eternal Light’, 66; Dunbabin, France, 146–9). 35 See below, pp. 369–70; Dubled, Avouerie, 31–2, 38–9; Waas, Vogtei, I. 56–7. See also Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 209, on the value of advocacy in controlling colonization. 36 On abbacies for noblewomen see below, pp. 349, 356–60. 37 Not casual in count Ulrich’s foundation charter for Beromu¨nster (below, note 46), but not 38 Yver, ‘L’Absence’, 257–70. See below, pp. 892, 916. technical either.


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roles inseparable. In Germany and Lotharingia, advocacy in what seems at first to be a technical, jurisdictional sense was almost systematically reserved for the founder and his family when a monastery was put under royal defence, or given away to a bishopric, and above all, later, to the Holy See.39 Something of the kind happened occasionally in France and Flanders, when advocacy was kept in a monastery (sometimes an ancient one) given to a greater monastery for reform;40 but here the emphasis was on protection and its rewards rather than on jurisdiction, while what was kept was not always called advocacy,41 and is more helpfully seen as a remnant of lordship than as something institutionally distinct.42 In either case we can if we choose see it as a slice of lordship retained, diminishing the lordship given away; and an extreme version of this sees its retention bluntly as ‘remaining lord’, the lordship given away being merely nominal.43 But the advocacy retained could be both more and less than it had been as part of the former lordship: more, if its jurisdiction is increased; less, when subjected to conditions such as becoming elective if descendants fail or misbehave,44 or even made elective from the start. This last would not instantly wipe it out as a remnant of lordship: at Ravengiersburg, given to Mainz in 1073 with this provision, that the canons in fact chose their founder will have taken little managing; the same provision in conveying Zwiefalten to Rome was not made use of until one founder died (having ‘administered the advocacy iure proprietatis as long as he lived’) and the other, old and ill, declined to take it on.45 Meanwhile the very fact that advocacy could be separated and have its own legal history would make it useful for family purposes: available for a selected heir where ordinary lordship was partitioned or shared.46 This last advantage would diminish, however, wherever primogeniture began to take 39 See below, pp. 357, 369–71, 428, 842–3, 846–7; Rathgen, ‘Untersuchungen’, 6–15, 20–31; Klebel, ‘EKlrecht’, 195–8, 206–8; Boshof, Kirchenvogtei, 70–1. 40 e.g. Fleury no. 85 (1077), Pons of Glenne giving Saint-Symphorien, Autun, to Cluny is to ‘remain advocate’; Charroux no. 19 (1097), Manasses count of Guines confirming donation of Andres (Flanders) retains nothing except custody as advocate; and see Mager, ‘Studien’, 211–12. 41 e.g. Cluny no. 3717 (1096), count of Blois giving the abbacy of Saint-Germain, Auxerre, reserved ‘the customs that I have there for protecting the place and for the service of my visits’. Some 12th-c. French princes dropped the title of advocate while keeping its protective function (and much of its rewards) as guardia, part of their ruling power. 42 Reserving a protective role when giving a monastery away may not differ much from reducing lordship to protection in a monastery not given away (see below, pp. 344, 350–1; 374). Protection on its own is straightforward if seen as a minimal or residual lordship, often called advocacy; it is only problematic if seen as a variety of advocacy (e.g. Bur, Champagne, 354). 43 Rathgen, ‘Untersuchungen’, 47 (seeing this as the usual case). 44 e.g. Ottmarsheim (see index); cf. Rathgen, op. cit., 8–9. 45 Below, pp. 427, 371–2. 46 For Beromu¨nster (below, pp. 366–8) the founder establishes this separation from family property for what is clearly lordship of the monastery, using the term advocatus (as well as dominus advocatus, or dominus) probably to mark its separateness and its possible ending for misconduct.

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hold in ordinary lordship; and when advocacy is reserved to the holder of a particular castle it looks as if it is being firmly tied to a family property no longer expected to be shared.47 And the founder or donor retaining advocacy could be keeping not only the most economically valuable part of lordship, but the means of putting pressure on abbot, abbess, or community; while it would naturally combine with being the local defender and protector (and no doubt sometimes meant primarily that).48 Consequently advocacy sometimes carried with it in practice much of the lordship from which it had been formally separated, or else enabled the family to build up lordship again. We do not have to rationalize this as creating an ‘under-’ and an ‘over-lordship’;49 nor, on the other hand, need it imply that conveyance to the Holy See or other bishopric was merely nominal or metaphorical; calling the outcome ‘lordship’ or not must depend on our criteria.50 It is possible that certain founders or their heirs who had notionally renounced or given away lordship but retained advocacy were nonetheless able to dispose of the monastery later as if they were still its lords. The Habsburg count Werner is sometimes supposed to have conveyed his family monastery Muri to the Holy See in 1086 from a position of advocacy alone; this interpretation of the documents is open to doubt, however.51 Any unequivocal instances must have had political, not legal, explanations. As for the choice of abbot or abbess, some advocates could clearly influence this (as well as the admission of monks or nuns).52 But the crucial criterion of stretching advocacy into lordship would be achieving the formal right of investiture (or some equivalent); not impossible if no one else was doing it, but not in fact easy to demonstrate.53 47

In mid-11th c. Alsace, advocacy at Sainte-Croix-en-Plaine is for the eldest of the castle’s ‘possessors’ (Leo IX’s two nepotes who later disputed the advocacy may well have held the castle jointly); but at Bleurville it is for someone already envisaged as a single heir to the family castle (below, pp. 369–70). Cf. much earlier the Salians’ Limburg, below, p. 360. 48 As perhaps in mid-11th-c. Lotharingia and late 11th- and 12th-c. S. Germany (see Tellenbach, Passau. EKl., 147–52). 49 Nor to evade it by seeing what was kept as only sub-advocacy, as Waas did (Vogtei, I. 155–7, 168–70) whenever the sources distinguish between lordship and advocacy; e.g. in a perverse reading (ibid. 90–1) of Frederick Barbarossa’s decree about spolia. Advocacy could be split from lordship by being given in fief (12th c.), but also without any suggestion of this (see Tellenbach, Passau. EKl., 122–3). 50 See below, pp. 431–3. 51 See below, pp. 844–7. Waas (Vogtei, I. 53) described the advocate count Otto of Rheineck as giving the monastery of Laach to Cologne; but freeing the monastery from any ius and potestas was giving up remnants of lordship (UBMR I no. 530 (1144), II no. 66 (1184)). 52 e.g. Conrad of Wettin at Gerbstedt (below, at notes 69–77). Later 12th-c. advocates were sometimes given a vote (Rathgen, ‘Untersuchungen’, 16, 19). 53 Tellenbach, Passau. EKl., (pp. 133–5) pointed out that in all Waas’s examples (Vogtei, I. 72–5) of advocate appointing abbot, the advocate was identical with the lay lord: it is not as advocate that he makes the abbot. In Flanders, the chronicler’s reconstruction of how Sainte-Waudru’s advocates (counts of Mons) came to invest the abbesses (above, p. 316 note 40) turned on a ‘certain count’ being given the lordship (dominium, dominatio).


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A possible instance is the investing of an abbot of Saint-Mihiel about 1076, by countess Sophie, widowed daughter of duke Frederick II of Lorraine: an action described in 1117 as ‘the old practice’ and ‘unlawful custom’ that no new abbot could succeed at Saint-Mihiel ‘unless he had received the staff from the hand of the church’s advocate’.54 But this merely illustrates that ‘advocate’ could be used instead of ‘lord’ where they were the same person, the dukes having long been lords of the monastery.55 The case of Cormery on the River Indre is to some extent similar. In 1096 the canons of Saint-Martin of Tours claimed before Urban II at Tours that Cormery—founded long ago by their predecessors—had been ‘removed from their power by the count of Anjou by reason of advocacy or defence’. Evidently the count had invested the abbot, since by Urban’s judgment the abbot restored his staff, ‘improperly received’, to St Martin’s altar-tomb and took it back from there.56 Here too it is not clear that the former practice was really a stretching of advocacy, rather than an expression of long-established lordship.57 In Aquitaine, Ademar of Chabannes explaining the count of Angouleˆme’s power to dispose of the abbacy of Saint-Cybar says that all the counts had been ‘its advocates, defenders, and provisores’, holding a villa in benefice for the ‘office of defender’. This looks superficially like disposal of the abbacy by an official advocate; but these counts’ hold on Saint-Cybar must always have been lordly, and the villa an honorable gift rather than their pay.58 In Lotharingia, Sophie’s ducal ancestors may have become lords of Saint-Mihiel not by the route of protective advocacy, but by their general succession to onceroyal power;59 while what the counts of Anjou originally had at Cormery was probably lay abbacy.60 It is nonetheless possible that advocates of monasteries with distant lords could sometimes make themselves lords in disorderly times: an originally appointed or chosen advocate, or his heir, might edge into lordship,61 a 54 St-Mihiel no. 65 (unnecessarily seen by Senn, Institution, 151–2, as an isolated instance of advocates being able to invest, like lords). 55 Below, note 59. Cf. late 11th-c. Flanders, below, p. 379 note 50. 56 Mansi, XX. 926, or Cormery no. 44; see Guillot, Comte, I. 171–2. What made it non ordinate acceptum would, by then, be simply lay investiture. 57 See below, note 60. Its purported royal charter of 1007 is a forgery by the monks for this (1096) occasion (Guillot, Comte, I. 172 n. 180). 58 Ademar, Chron., iii. 36. On the counts of Angouleˆme see Dunbabin, France, 61, 121, 174. 59 See the Saint-Mihiel chronicler (writing c. 1035) on duke Frederick I (d. 978): ‘seeing the abbey was next to his lands and far removed from the king’s protection, he subjected it to his dominium . . . and passed that dominium to his descendants under the title of defence’ (c. 7, St-Mihiel, p. 11; also cc. 9, 11, on duke Theoderic to whose ditio the abbey was subject when he took over the advocacy). 60 It was one of count Geoffrey Greymantle’s brother Guy’s abbacies (above, p. 322); see Guillot, Comte, I. 140, 164–5, 167; on its passage from Robertian into Angevin hands, ibid. 168–75. 61 For possible instances of lordship usurped, perhaps from a base of defence or advocacy, see Lesne, Propr., II. iii. 22–5; Bur, Champagne, 352–3 (Vermandois counts at Montier-en-Der). For Ve´zelay, despite its papal protection, the counts of Nevers made their protection necessary from before 1000 (Fichtenau, Lebensordnungen, I. 314), and in the 12th c. twice claimed that their consent or presence was required for electing an abbot; but no claim to invest is suggested, and the mid-12th-c. count saw himself as tutor et defensor, not dominus (chron. in Mon. Vizeliac., ed. Huygens, 515, 520).

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protector turning into a lord, or a bullying servant into a master. But it is not clear that this could happen in lay nobles’ foundations of the later eleventh and twelfth century, even if the founding family disappeared. In twelfth-century Germany, although advocates other than founders’ heirs proliferated, it is doubtful whether they ever ‘turned into lords’ in any precise sense; and by now we are in an era of more legal precision. Whether this disadvantaged the advocates is another matter. The formal, proprietary lordship of founders’ heirs was becoming less related to real power, and advocacy—in Germany—more so,62 its political and territorial importance heightened by late eleventh-century conflict, while its scope for personal piety was ample.63 Many an advocate who was not notionally lord of the monastery, whether or not descended from its founders, enjoyed a high degree of lordly influence in it. An example is Goseck in south-east Saxony, an eleventh-century family foundation brought by one of its founders, archbishop Adalbert, to his distant see of Bremen, with formal control of the election of abbot,64 but reserving advocacy to the laymen of his family. His brother Frederick, a generous benefactor until his death in 1088, was able to rebuke an inadequate abbot and eventually send him home.65 Frederick was of course a founder; and the family’s lasting influence was not put to the test, since the lay heirs died out with him apart from a 3-year-old grandson.66 But a generation later the energetic widow Eilica, of the unrelated Billung family,67 successfully asked the archbishop (as lord) for the advocacy, and busied herself as advocatissa with finding them a good abbot after a run of unsuitable ones. She was even ‘accused by some people of expelling abbots’. But she sent the monk that she found for them to Bremen; it was from the archbishop that he ‘received the gift of this church’, though Eilica then ‘introduced’ him into Goseck.68 A sharper example, because practical lordship was actually in dispute, is Gerbstedt, a house for women re-endowed in the eleventh century by the tenthcentury founder’s descendants,69 the margrave Thietmo and his brothers. One of these, bishop Frederick, brought it by agreement to his (again, distant) church of Mu¨nster (probably in 1073),70 the advocacy remaining with Thietmo and passing 62

See Schmid, ‘Adel und Reform’, 306–8, 317–19. 64 Well summed up by Patze, ‘Adel und Stifterchronik’, 21. Below, pp. 370–1. 65 Chronicon Gozecense, i. c. 6 (SS X. 142). 66 Ibid. i. cc. 9, 11–21 (pp. 144–8). The grandson’s stepfather and guardian acted as advocate for a time (i. c. 28, ii. cc. 1, 2). 67 See Leyser, Med. Germany, 187. Abp. Adalbert in his time had been the Billungs’ chief opponent. 68 Chron. Gozec., ii. cc. 19–28 (pp. 154–6). Cf. the early 12th-c. advocate of Ottobeuren (grandson of an advocate chosen by an abbot), after the death of a young and foolish abbot, ‘bringing’ a good abbot from elsewhere and ‘appointing’ him, but with nothing said about investiture (13th-c. account, SS XXIII. 616–17; 69 perhaps a ‘good advocate’ stereotype?). See index: Gerbstedt. 70 See W. Holtzmann, ‘Wettinische Urkundenstudien’, 179–80. 63


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to his eldest son, margrave Conrad of Wettin. There was recurrent trouble between Conrad and later bishops of Mu¨nster; meanwhile (about 1118) the margrave achieved his own reform of the monastery and recovery of its misappropriated property.71 An account of all this appears in a long document presented as a notitia of Conrad’s, a late twelfth-century forgery evidently based on largely genuine documents.72 It sets out the terms of the eleventh-century refoundation, including reservation of the advocacy, inalienably, to the ‘oldest among the kinsmen’; describes the course and causes of the dispute; and culminates with a grand ecclesiastical assembly ratifying Conrad’s reform.73 The formal lordship of Gerbstedt clearly lay with the church of Mu¨nster: the bishop as lord has ‘confirmation of the abbess’, or the ‘giving’ of the abbacy.74 But what remained with the family was not just the functions and economic rewards of advocacy: it was the moral right of founders’ heirs to protect the property against exploitation by Mu¨nster, to uphold religious life for the founders’ memoria, and even to have a part in the choice of abbess.75 Later, however, the counts of Mansfeld (the rising territorial power) were able to acquire the advocacy, holding it from Mu¨nster;76 this probably evoked the forgery,77 to vindicate the founder family’s moral claim to the advocacy without denying Mu¨nster’s formal lordship. In conclusion, we can say that advocacy in most of its manifestations—or senses—was either an aspect or an adjunct of lordship over churches, but not inseparable from it; and where it existed separately, whatever its origins, it is doubtful whether it alone could lead (or lead back) to formal, juridical lordship. Its importance by the tenth century, like that of lay abbacy earlier, reflects the fact that outside lords of monasteries could not normally walk in or send in their men to take whatever dues or produce they wanted or settle the succession to tenancies. Once an endowment had been identified,78 the abbot or abbess was a person of consequence, with effective lordship over at least some property which in turn really belonged in some firm sense to his or her church. Even a resentful or hard-pressed lord did better not to trample over the abbot’s 71

UB Mansfeld no. 7 (Innocent II’s privilege, 1137). See Leyser, Rule, 71 and n. 51. UB Mansfeld no. 8: a fundatio, between a charter and a history; see Holtzmann, op. cit., 174–84 (naming it the Reformatio). 73 Under the legate Kuno of Pra¨neste, active in Saxony in 1118 (Holtzmann, op. cit., 182–3). 74 UB Mansfeld no. 3b (from Mu¨nster chronicle); no. 8 (the printed text has dandi abb[atissam], but abb[atiam] seems more likely). 75 The Reformatio (ibid. no. 8) has the founders require election ‘by common counsel of all the kinsmen’ (but this was before the donation to Mu¨nster), and more plausibly describes the donation as reserving ‘the heirs’ consent’ for making an abbess. Conrad had three daughters there as nuns, of whom 76 two became abbess (ibid. no. 5, from Wettin genealogy). Holtzmann, op. cit., 187–90. 77 Also the forgery of UB Mansfeld no. 6, elaborating the advocacy arrangements (Holtzmann, op. cit., 78 168–74, 184–90). Sometimes long delayed (note 51, above pp. 405–6, below). 72

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lordship, but to recognize it, and if not granting it more-or-less intact as a benefice, then to hold it himself as rector; or further east, and later, to compete with the abbot’s landlordship by exercising jurisdictional advocacy; and in the west, as lay abbacy disappeared, more opportunistically to make the most of protective advocacy.

12 Noble founders and their heirs

12.i. Ninth-century Carolingian realms north of the Alps The preceding chapter’s discussion of advocacy takes for granted the outside lordship of founders’ lay heirs. But the emergence of this hereditary lordship over monasteries is actually quite obscure (more so than that of lordship springing from lay abbacy). I have argued earlier that it was no more than adumbrated in the eighth century, when the loose structure of aristocratic kin-groups did not favour it (it was the Pippinids, significantly, that led the way in claiming lordship over their family foundations); and in the ninth century, as Re´gine Le Jan has shown, it was rather by collecting lay abbacies (with other honores) that the great families moved towards territorial lordship and patrilinear succession.1 Some of them meanwhile had lost whatever shaky hold they had on their ancestors’ foundations; and the received opinion is that from the mid-eighth century into the ninth, kings and bishops worked together to get monasteries into their own lordship and prevent lay nobles from using them as ‘building blocks for independent power’.2 This may be broadly true;3 but I shall argue here that it did not totally douse the incipient claims of lay founders’ heirs, indeed perhaps provoked them;4 on the other hand, that heirs still often claimed a direct possession more abbot-like than purely lordly; and that when new lay foundations picked up again in the later ninth century, they were seldom unambiguously intended for descendants’ permanent outside lordship. Already in Charlemagne’s time, Lorsch and Mettlach were the subjects of litigation where one party was a founder’s lay heir. In the 772 lawsuit over Lorsch (whether genuine or set up to clarify abbot Gundeland’s right to set it under royal defence), it made sense for Gundeland to report the founder’s son Heimrich as 1

2 Le Jan, Famille, 48–52, 399–400, 401–5, 410. See M. de Jong, ‘Carolingian Monasticism’, 626–7. The 755 council of Ver seems to assume (for regular monasteries at least) that any not royal would be episcopal; Lesne could believe that lay founders used their property-right only to transmit it to king, 4 bishop, or greater monastery (Propr., II. ii. 3–4). See Le Jan, Famille, 49–50. 3

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trying to ‘raise claims about the monastery’, and as saying ‘that his father Cancor had left him invested with the monastery’, whereas in fact Heimrich’s grandmother and his father Cancor had ‘conveyed and confirmed’ it to Cancor’s brother Chrodegang (the archbishop). And it made sense too for Heimrich to quitclaim the monastery and declare himself ‘gone out from it’ per festucam—by letting go of a symbolic rod; whereupon Charlemagne adjudged that the abbot had established his claim to the monastery for all time.5 The monastery is a causa, a res—a matter for litigation between an abbot-proprietor and a lay heir. Heimrich’s possession of Lorsch had been brief, perhaps fictitious. But lay heirs had possessed for rather longer the monastery of Mettlach, founded by the comital family of Trier and given to the cathedral (whose bishops they regularly supplied). A lay member of the family, Lambert, had it in benefice from king Pippin, and his three sons held it as their own; when Trier’s agents in 782 maintained that Lambert had ‘invaded that monastery by force and wrongly’,6 the sons asserted that the vestitura—lawful possession—was theirs because their father ‘had left them possessed of it in lawful alod’. Being unable to produce any testimony for this, however, they were made to surrender it to the king and through him to the bishopric.7 The motive for giving or commending monasteries to kings or bishops might be to frustrate the claims of heirs, not just to the endowments but to the monastery itself.8 The bishops at Meaux in 845 spoke of ‘monasteries set up by Godfearing men on their own property’ and put into the king’s ancestors’ defence ‘so that monastic life might be observed there in full liberty, eliminating the hereditary hope of their kindred’; Charles the Bald’s capitulary of 853 spoke of founders who gave monasteries to the king to prevent them being ‘divided by their heirs’.9 These hopes and fears suggest a background of monasteries in their founders’ heirs’ possession; destabilized though this probably was for older monasteries by Charlemagne’s pressure, or by his successes changing families’ fortunes for better or worse,10 we need not suppose that all nobles’ monasteries fell inwards to kings or bishops before being dispersed to other lords in the Carolingian decay. The bishops’ complaint in 845, and the subject for inquiry in 853, was that monasteries put into royal defence had been given away again (not just as benefices to successive lay abbots, but outright, in alodem); sometimes this was done for a member of the founding family. A cell given to Charlemagne by 5

6 7 Above, pp. 226–7. malo ordine (see below, pp. 777–8). Above, p. 217. Family claims probably gave some protection in much of the 8th c. (Ewig, ‘Milo’, 419–21), but by Charlemagne’s time many founders preferred royal defence. 9 Conc. III no. 11 c. 41; no. 27 (Soissons), capit. c. 2. 10 e.g. the Etichonids largely lost their ducal foundations in Alsace to Pippin and Charlemagne; their 9th-c. monastic interests were mostly new, more dispersed, and derived from royal patronage (Vollmer, ‘Die Etichonen’, 176–81). Cf. Scherg, ‘Das Grafengeschlecht der Mattonen’, 510–13. 8

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its owners was given by Louis the Pious to their grandson, his fidelis Betto, to do what he would with it;11 Lothar I took Mettlach from the bishopric of Trier for a time and gave it (on what terms is not clear) to count Guy of Spoleto,12 grandson of the Guy of the 782 lawsuit. What kings transferred or heirs claimed in alod was not only the power to make abbots: it seems to cover abbacy itself, or direct possession of buildings, lands, and serfs in the abbot’s place; putting it into the holder’s power either to make abbots or to take their place.13 But when the bishops said that the king’s alienations had resulted in driving out monastic life, it is unlikely that they thought the inevitable result of lay possession was totally to dispossess communities and reduce monasteries to mere shells. Charles the Bald gave the ‘little monastery’ of Cunault to count Vivian, by as outright a donation as could be, and with no conditions about maintaining monastic life;14 but describing it as the place ‘where St Maxenteuil lies buried’ suggests that a cult would go on there. The ‘little cell’ of Saint-Imetier was mistakenly given by Charles the Bald ‘in proprietary right’ to a man whose brother later took possession ‘as if by hereditary right’; in 861 it was restored to Maˆcon to which it really belonged;15 nothing was said to imply that it was not still functioning as a small monastic establishment. And calling such a place a monasteriolum, cella, or cellula does not make it in some technical sense different from a full-scale monastery or abbey;16 though it probably implies that it was small and unprivileged, and its head, if living, not of much account.17 Back in Charlemagne’s time, there is no suggestion that Lambert’s sons’ period of actual possession of Mettlach had suspended the life of the monastery. Nor is it likely, as a rule, that a founder’s lay descendants wanted this when they claimed a monastery. They probably wanted to exploit or grant out some of its land, but only the desperate would wish to be totally rid of monks or clergy: others would value the rewards of supporting a live monastery,18 and wish to enjoy or dispose of the office of abbot (among other things, controlling admissions). Only where the purpose of the foundation was very short-term, as sometimes for nunneries, was it easily dismantled.19 Nor did partible inheritance in a monastery inevitably imply the end of monastic life. Hornbach, founded for Pirmin by a member of the Mettlach 11

Put into a formulary (Form., imperial formulae no. 27) as a grant to a fidelis for faithful service. DLothI no. 67 (842), restoring it to Trier. For the politics see Innes, State, 211. 13 14 15 16 See above, p. 316. ACII no. 77 (845). ACII no. 236. See above, p. 262. 17 Such grants (see also above, p. 318) were probably normally made after the death of an abbot or abbess. 18 Perhaps including access to a superior culture, comfort, and domestic order (for northerners at least): ‘opportunities for transforming their own lives’ (Blair, Church, 281). 19 e.g. Sarrazac, below, pp. 344–5. 12

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founder family,20 probably (unlike Mettlach) remained in his descendants’ control until after 900.21 Under them it was favoured with privileges from Louis the Pious and Lothar I (partial immunity, and exemption from tolls), but only on condition ‘that the heirs of that monastery allow it to remain undivided’ so that monks could continue to keep the Rule there;22 this was the price that Hornbach’s lords paid for its privileges, if not their aim. It did not mean that the heirs could not hold it jointly—in Charlemagne’s time it was ‘possessed in common by Warner and Guy’, in Louis’s time two cousins, Lambert and Herard, had it as their ‘own’23—but that they must not divide its lands24 or set up two abbots. There was an abbot Wyrund (probably a kinsman) under Lambert and Herard; in 865 an abbot Richard, under a senior, Warner; in 900 a single senior and abbot, count Walaho.25 We cannot know how successive lords of Hornbach split the exploiting power with their abbot, if at all;26 probably any of them (but only one at a time, if they wished to keep their royal privileges) could have been abbot himself, like Walaho.27 These points about inheritance emerge in the history of Werden, on the western borders of Saxony. Normally it was ruled by clerical members of the founder Liudger’s family, probably designating their successors, and mostly bishops of Halberstadt or Mu¨nster.28 But in 855 an adult recruit, Folker, took drastic precautions against his handsome entry-gift being given in benefice without the monks’ consent, or ‘divided among themselves by the heirs of the monastery, as if by hereditary right’;29 and soon after this a lay heir, Bertold, did apparently take possession, until the monks got free of him at a synod in the mid860s.30 Folker’s charter implies that any lay heir’s possession might lead to alienations or division of the property, or even to the monastery’s neglect or destruction;31 but not that control of the property was all he could have or that 20

21 Above, p. 114 note 47. Doll, ‘Hornbach’, 128–9. On the Widonids see Le Jan, Famille, 250–1. 2 BM nos. 533–4 (814); Mon. Boica, 31 no. 18 (c.819), 28 no. 6 (823; see Sickel, Beitra¨ge, V. 377–8); DLothI nos. 15, 17 (833). See Doll, ‘Hornbach’, 125–7. 23 Mon. Boica, 31. i nos. 17 (819), 19 (822); 28 no. 6 (823); DLothI no. 16 (833). 24 There is nothing to suggest any actual family interest in partition: problems under Warner and Guy (Doll, ‘Hornbach’, 124) resulted rather from claims by the fisc. 25 Mon. Boica, 31. i no. 17; DLothII no. 24; Doll, ‘Hornbach’, 128–9. 26 Doll argues probably correctly that interpolations in the foundation charter were made in Louis the Pious’s time to support the recovery of lost property and the rights of the founders’ heirs (op. cit., 121–4). However, of his three suggested interpolations, the phrase totum et integrum . . . in perpetuum which he sees as insisting on indivisibility is common form (cf. Marculf, II. i); and on the patroni see above, p. 183 n. 20. 27 Doll argues (op. cit., 128–9) from Walaho being count and abbot to his counting as a royal lay abbot rather than as founder’s heir, but this seems unduly rigid. 28 See Ko¨tzschke (ed.), Urbare Werden, pp. xiv–xvii; Nottarp, ‘Werden’, 83–97. For its foundation see 29 above, pp. 125–6. Folker’s charter, UBNR I no. 65. 30 Fundatio Werthinensis (written early 10th c.?, perhaps partly mid-9th), SS XV. 165–7. The synod is unidentified. 31 It does not unambigously attribute all these dangers (besides partition) to the hypothetical heirs, but that is how it naturally reads. 22


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the end of the monastery would be inevitable; it was ‘the monastery’ that Bertold ‘invaded and claimed for himself’.32 There is often room for doubt—indeed there was sometimes uncertainty at the time—about the status of a particular monastery held by founder’s kin under royal defence when the meaning of this was becoming blurred. Had they inherited it from the founder, received it by outright donation from a king, or received its abbacy in benefice? Contemporaries might not need to sort these things out for decades, or ever. It is unlikely that the monks of Hornbach saw their monastery as falling halfway between a royal monastery and a Dynastenkloster, as historians have seen it.33 Yet the monks of Werden were both exploiting and rejecting the vagueness when they claimed to have been commended to the king ‘for protection only’, and that they themselves were the heirs.34 It is easy to set too much store by words and formulae. But the question here is what the founders’ heirs could expect by way of outside control or direct exploitation, and for how long; and on these practical matters we can reasonably take the charters (from founder or ruler) as evidence for the founder’s intentions. Intentions varied widely, as did what actually happened (where this is known). Louis the Pious somehow acquired Saint-Maur of Glanfeuil from its founders,35 and gave it to their kinsman Ebroin bishop of Poitiers, its reformer or refounder. Charles the Bald in 847 confirmed that Ebroin should have the ius and dominatio for life, evidently as abbot; then his kinsman Gauzlin (to govern by the Rule of St Benedict); then elected abbots, unless someone of the kindred turned up and asked the king for it. Only when the family abbots came to an end was it to come fully under royal defence.36 Glanfeuil in fact went by a slightly longer family chain to another kinsman, Odo,37 under whom it was abandoned in the face of the northmen and its relics (and dedication) taken to Fosse´s.38 Until then, Glanfeuil’s royal defence both safeguarded monastic life and supported the founder’s heirs’ 32 Later elaborations of Liudger’s intentions (n. 34, below) in the Fundatio (B) assume a strong family claim: the church to be the inheritance solely of Liudger, his kinsmen, and the monks; election inter se only if there is no suitable kinsman. 33 See Doll, ‘Hornbach’, 124–8, 131. Since its immunity was not immunity-defence implying royal lordship (above, p. 254), making it conditional on not dividing the monastery could be an expression of reforming authority rather than of tensions between family rights and fiscal origins. 34 See above, pp. 255–6. The Fundatio has them made so by Liudger himself: ‘gathering all his kindred, he gave the whole of his inheritance in ius et dominium fratrum’ (probably an invention to support the monks’ corporate sense, with family rectores usually far away at Mu¨nster or Halberstadt). 35 Traditionally a count Rorig, helped by the abbot of Fosse´s and by Louis (Ex Odonis mirac. S. Mauri, cc. 2–3, SS XV. 466–8; supposed diploma of 833, Bouquet, VI. 591–2, wholly or partly spurious); see Oexle, ‘Bischof Ebroin’, 145–9. 36 ACII no. 97; see Tessier, ibid. II. 229; Oexle, op. cit., esp. 158–61. Both Ebroin and Gauzlin were high palace officials, building up family power in Aquitaine. 37 Author of the fairly garbled foundation history in the Miracula (revealing himself as a kinsman in c. 3). 38 Odo later became abbot of Fosse´s, Glanfeuil becoming Fosse´s’s dependency, (see DKIII no. 149).

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abbacy; the family was important to Charles the Bald’s influence in Aquitaine. Although the king was to appoint or approve these abbots, their conditional right to the abbacy for an indefinite future amounts to a kind of property.39 More usual, however—if anything is said about future control, under royal defence or not—is reservation for one or two lives only. Count Bernard of Toulouse in 869 or 870 commended his father Raymond’s independent foundation of Vabres to Charles the Bald’s ‘domination and the safety of his immunity’, and had it granted for life to the present (clerical) abbot with succession for one of Bernard’s sons, Benedict (an oblate), with ‘similar potestas of using the monastery as long as he lives’ (using, not disposing).40 In this way Bernard made use of royal authority to legitimate for Benedict a role more profitable (though temporary) than Raymond had intended his own sons to have. For Raymond in 862 had declared himself ‘protector and defender’ for life and named Bernard and two other sons to have this role one after the other: not abbacy, and questionably lordship; each son was emphatically to be ‘not a dominator, not an heir, but defender’, and the monks ‘to remain in their own right and their own domination’.41 But such a declaration implies that his sons would otherwise have claimed lordship and perhaps have divided it: to avoid division may have been the point. A generation earlier, in 823, the way chosen by count Ralph of Turenne and his wife Aiga to establish a nunnery at Sarrazac for their daughter Immena was to give property in common to her and her clerical brother Ralph, emphatically taken out of what they and their three brothers would otherwise have shared, and with power to choose one of their brothers or nephews to be the nuns’ protector after their own deaths.42 These plans for a family role—whether abbacy or defence—are for the most part short-term: at Sarrazac to the point that Ralph (now archbishop of Bourges) bought Immena out of her share, and used it after her death for his own much grander male foundation at Beaulieu.43 This does not rule out the view that these and other foundations in southern France were made partly to hallow and anchor 39 In 921 the abbacy of Saint-Maur-des-Fosse´s itself was similarly promised by Charles the Simple to its refounder Bego’s descendants, Charles’s maternal cousins (ACIII no. 108). 40 ACII no. 339 (Vabres-l’Abbaye, dept. Aveyron). For count Bernard’s relations with the king see Nelson, Charles the Bald, 212, 232. 41 HL II Pr. no. 160 (the words constituimus non dominatorem, non heredem must apply to all three, though only explicitly to the eldest). Raymond’s only evident long-term plan for the monastery was autonomy, contrary to the foundation history’s invented royal diploma (ibid. no. 159; ACII no. 486). 42 Beaulieu no. 185. The community was probably very small, perhaps initially in the parental home. In 844 the widowed Aiga and her four sons (Godfrey now count, Ralph archbishop) did actually endow it, giving the land to its church Saint-Gene`se (for the older Ralph’s soul) but putting it into the potestas of its rectores (ibid. no. 34), currently Ralph and Immena. 43 Ibid. nos. 184, 193 (not mentioning the nunnery); by 856 Beaulieu’s endowment included Sarrazac and its church (ibid. no. 16). See Martindale, ‘The Nun Immena’, 32–40, on all this as exemplifying growing reliance on the prayers and masses of numerous priest-monks rather than the prayers of a few women. The older Ralph’s burial-place at Saint-Gene`se would be better cherished under Beaulieu.


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some of a noble’s property at a time of great political instability;44 but the aim may often have been the founder’s and a son’s or daughter’s status and security, rather than his remoter descendants’ future. And any long-term purpose of memoria might be better secured by a more independent monastery (at Beaulieu archbishop Ralph himself shared rule with an abbot but may have excluded his own heirs from dominium).45 Late in the century, in the Auvergne, count Gerald’s position in his foundation at Aurillac was much like that of a pious lay abbot;46 but his nephew and only heir Rainald was conspicuously not made abbot or rector.47 Leaving him lifetime usufruct of much of the property looks like an unfortunate necessity, not part of the purpose of the foundation.48 Gerald of Aurillac was in fact one of those who chose papal protection for his foundation.49 Lay founders were finding royal defence less effective, and some were supplementing or replacing it with papal protection, or even papal lordship. The first instance of this—with a markedly political background—was the act of count Gerard of Vienne and his wife for their female and male foundations Ve´zelay and Pothie`res, seeking papal protection in 858–9 but in 863 making what looks more like a traditio to the Holy See.50 This couple retained every level of control—protection, lordship, and usufruct—in their lifetimes, but nothing for their mortal heirs;51 and what they expected from the papacy for ever was primarily the fulfilment of their own pious vows.52 A more modest way of combining short-term family plans with long-term concern for memoria was to subject a monastery to a greater one. In Flanders, about 830, the monasterium of Steneland was used by its builder Goibert as an entry-gift to Saint-Bertin for his son Gundbert, endowing it with all his son’s 44

See Lewis, ‘Gerald of Aurillac’, Traditio, 20 (1964), 57–8 on Aurillac, Vabres, Beaulieu, and Tulle. But Gerald was childless, and fended off his nephew; Raymond denied his sons any ‘domination’ at Vabres; for Beaulieu see next note. 45 By the 856 charter (Beaulieu no. 16) the monks were to be under the dispositio et commune regimen of the founder and the first abbot, but then were to choose a tutor and mundeburd. On the 860 testament (ibid. no. 1) see below, note 90. What actually happened is unclear. 46 ACIII no. 21 (899) calls him ‘founder and rector’ (though with an abbot under him); the immunity excludes any jurisdiction ‘except Gerald’s and his sister’s’. In his testament, leaving almost everything to Aurillac, he reserved possession for his lifetime except for ‘what the monks possess at the present day’— probably their original, practical endowment, not a formal mensa (Odo, Vita Geraldi, ii. 4, PL 133. 671–3 and n. 102, text of testament). 47 Rainald was to defend the monks’ interests, and—as the text stands—to have the potestas of ‘putting in and removing abbots’; but perhaps a negative has been dropped (the syntax is faulty in any case). 48 According to Odo (Vita Geraldi, iv. 11, col. 702) Gerald distrusting Rainald secured an oath from him (which he broke) not to harass the monastery’s familia. 49 Odo, Vita Geraldi, ii. 4 and 17; see below, p. 837 note 61. 50 See below, pp. 837–8; Fried, ‘Laienadel und Papst’, 375–9 (count Gerard’s falling-out with Charles the Bald). 51 They had a living daughter Ava, and had provided for their ‘offspring and posterity’ before endowing the monasteries (Monumenta Vizel., cart. no. 2, letter to Nicholas I). 52 Ibid., lines 112–13, 127–9, 184. By 878 the nuns had left Ve´zelay and the monks had moved there from Pothie`res (ibid., cart. no. 4, John VIII’s privilege).

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inheritance (in some twenty places).53 But his and Gundbert’s claims remained sharply proprietary. Goibert kept possession until the day before his death in 838, when he handed over the keys, not to Saint-Bertin but to Gundbert, saying ‘all this I confirm to you, my son . . . to keep with due care this house of God and my and my ancestors’ alms and yours, while you live’. In 857 Gundbert had the secular abbot Adalard confirm his and his father’s traditio of the cell to SaintBertin, its possessions (by now much increased) to be always used for his and his ancestors’ commemorative alms, Gundbert to have the management and potestas for life and ‘if he dies soon’ to choose his successor. It was, however, taken away from Gundbert by a later secular abbot, Hilduin; so it was probably Gundbert who forged a charter from Charles the Bald confirming the attachment of Steneland’s endowments to its own expenses and the family’s alms, and confirming Gundbert and his chosen successor as lifelong wardens.54 In late ninth-century Alemania, count Ulrich provided similarly for family memoria by giving his church at Aadorf to St Gall;55 but having by then only a daughter living, his arrangements for her secured merely her livelihood. She and a sister had earlier been ‘abbesses’ at Aadorf;56 but what Ulrich now gave to St Gall was a monastery for men with liturgical obligations to himself and any relations buried there, reserving some possessions for his own and his demoted daughter’s use.57 Other monasteries in Carolingian Germany were founded or refounded with varying relations with the ruler and arrangements for heirs, which may as in southern France represent different possible approaches to family problems. For Werden we know something of what happened—the last of the family rectores, bishop Hildigrim II of Halberstadt, put Werden under royal defence in 877 while retaining his own lifetime potestas58—but nothing of what its founder Liudger intended, unless he really did ‘give his whole inheritance to the brothers’ ius and dominium’.59 In Alemania the obvious contrast is between Rheinau and Schienen.60 In 858 Wolvene, of an old regional family, gave into royal lordship the monastery of Rheinau, built by his ancestors, and by him restored from ruin and richly endowed with land and serfs. His object was almost certainly to secure it against 53 See Le Jan, Famille, 75 (and facing map, contrasting his merely regional with Evrard of Friuli’s ‘interregional’ possessions). 54 St-Bertin (from Folcuin), nos. 61, 82, 84, 87–8, 89 ( ¼ ACII no. 489; see ed. note), 90 (Gundbert’s inventory of Steneland ‘when abbot Hilduin unjustly took it all from Gundbert’s hand, kal. Sept. 867’). 55 St Gallen nos. 691, 697 (894, 895). 56 Ibid. no. 655 (886). A Gerold/Kerold signs as their brother; probably dead (and buried at Aadorf) by 894. The alienation then to St Gall illustrates the restricted circle of serious heirs: see Stuart Airlie, ‘The Aristocracy’, 440–1. 57 He had retained ownership of the gold and silver vessels and silk vestments at Aadorf; giving these in 895, he aimed to make them inalienable (see index: Aadorf). See Borgolte, ‘Gedenkstiftungen’, 597–8. 58 59 See index: Hildigrim. Above, note 34. 60 See K. Schmid, ‘Ko¨nigtum, Adel und Klo¨ster’, esp. 304–8.


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his quarrelling kinsmen.61 In Louis the German’s diploma as in Wolvene’s own charter, Wolvene has ‘conveyed the monastery out of his ius and potestas into our ius, dominatio, and mundeburdium’; Louis grants it back to him for life, ‘to hold and possess under our defence’; after his death the monks are to be allowed to elect an abbot inter se, with the king’s command and consent; the abbot shall owe the king nothing but prayers and annual dona of horse, shield, and lance. It could not be more clearly given to the king with only the reservation of life tenure for the donor (reiterated in 870).62 But the gift might need to be renewed and the tenure’s limit acknowledged: Charles the Fat, before he was king, declared that Wolvene, his ‘faithful abbot’, had ‘granted to me, Charles, to have after his death, in my own right and domination, the monastery built from his property’, and had afterwards made a property exchange with count Gozpert in which Charles now took part alongside Wolvene.63 This Gozpert was a powerful kinsman of Wolvene’s (the exchange perhaps settled a dispute). Gozpert’s son and namesake was count and abbot—probably an ordinary lay abbot by royal grant—when he restored the large property in question, in 892; reserving the right of redemption for himself and his heirs,64 probably in case they were to lose the abbacy, for which by now they perhaps depended on the monks’ and the king’s goodwill. So Rheinau had been put under active royal lordship and held by its donor for life only.65 Schienen had similar origins but an ultimately contrasting history. It was founded on a small scale by an Aleman noble early in the ninth century, by the 830s having seven monks and an abbot; and refounded or at least rebuilt in mid-century by a once powerful but now insecure magnate Hatto,66 who put his small son Lambert into it as a clerk (not an oblate, though Hatto later was vague or muddled about this) and himself entered the monastery as a clerk, by implication ruling it, and intending Lambert as his successor. This emerges in Nicholas I’s judgment on a dispute brought to him by Hatto and Lambert. Lambert has established, against his father, that he is a clerk and was never a monk nor wishes to be.67 His reason for insisting on this is that when he was irregularly forced into monastic life ‘his brothers took his maternal and paternal inheritance’. In the context, these are not biological brothers but his fellows in the monastery, who have treated his entire inheritance as common property, perhaps as his entry-gift. 61

On these family disputes and divided partisanship see ibid. 275–9. DLD no. 90 (an original) and Rheinau no. 9 (differing somewhat on the endowment); DLD no. 130. 63 876, DKIII no. 1. 64 Rheinau no. 23 (‘abbot’ by 888, ibid. no. 21); see Schmid, ‘Ko¨nigtum’, 262–3, 275. 65 Cf. Rohr in Thuringia, built by a count Christian and his wife on the king’s property; Louis the German grants it them in benefice for life (DLD no. 135). There is nothing about the succession of family members or elected heads in this (interesting but incomplete) charter. 66 Schmid, ‘Ko¨nigtum’, 283–91. 67 Ep. Karol. Aevi, IV. ii. 652–4 (Nicholas I, no. 132), discussed by Schmid, ‘Ko¨nigtum’, 282–3, 291–5, 300–1. 62

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Probably Lambert wanted to get out altogether with his property,68 which would have torn away what may well have been the major part of the monastery’s endowment. The outcome was that by papal judgment he remained a clerk (unless choosing to become a monk) but would share in the common property as a ‘religious canon’. Hatto’s wish for him to be his successor (as rector or secular abbot) is not reproved; and Lambert does indeed appear soon as abbot. His successor was probably another non-monk and a kinsman; the monastery began to decay, and early in the tenth century was acquired by Reichenau.69 It was never put into royal defence, and the family hold was none the longer for that.70 Of all German male monasteries under Carolingian kings, the one most clearly intended by its founder to stay in the family indefinitely is Wildeshausen in northwestern Saxony.71 There count Waltbert, grandson of the defeated and baptized Saxon leader Widukind, obtained relics of St Alexander for his family church in 850 and made it collegiate by 871, when he got it immunity-defence (not, by then, with any sharp implication of royal lordship).72 The following year he and his wife formally gave it its endowment and laid down precisely who was to govern it and ‘have it in potestas of having and holding’ after his own death: first their oldest son Wikbert, whom they had made a clerk, then Waltbert’s brother’s son if he became a clerk, then whoever willing to be a clerk was nearest to him ‘on the lay side’;73 failing a brother’s son, a sister’s; if his sons or successors made their sons clerks in competition with each other to qualify for dominatio, then the worthiest should be chosen (here vagueness creeps in: he does not specify how; what matters is probably to keep the office undivided); so that by God’s help, ‘through a whole line of nephews, a rector and governor may always be chosen from our kinsmen for the rule of that familia’; only failing all this was an abbot to be elected from the community.74 And so it came about, for four generations: the founder was the first rector, succeeded by his son Wikbert (by then bishop of Verden); Wikbert was succeeded probably by his brother’s son, and he by a sister’s or niece’s son Liudolf, bishop of Osnabru¨ck. Waltbert’s charter had forbidden ‘any of those who attain to this potestas’ to hand the community over to any lay or clerical power; but bishop Liudolf, his family interest perhaps diluted, did alienate it, by exchange, to Otto II 68

Schmid, ‘Ko¨nigtum’, 301, 307. Through another Hatto, abp. of Mainz, abbot of Reichenau, and probably heir to Schienen (ibid. 70 302–3). See Schmid, ‘Adel und Reform’, 304–6. 71 See Schmid, ‘Die Nachfaren Widukinds’, 2–10, 28–39; Airlie, ‘Aristocracy’, 441. 72 DLD no. 142. The immunity excepted from the usual exclusions ‘count Waldpert who at the present day . . . is rector of that monastery’, his son Wikbert ‘our deacon’, and his successors there. 73 i.e. having a layman as father? 74 Westfal. UB Additamenta, I. 532–4. Waltbert limits his and his successors’ power over the property, directing part of what he has given to the ‘brothers’; others’ gifts too are to be in the congregation’s potestas and not taken away by any senior (here equivalent to rector?). 69


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(his cousin, however).75 Clearly Louis the German’s immunity-defence had not limited Waltbert’s successors’ potestas in the monastery (though neither had this landed the king with unacceptable rectores). Meanwhile the lay heirs could give trouble: Wikbert in 891 needed to get the monastery’s establishment confirmed by Stephen V, and showed him Waltbert’s charter containing ‘his father’s wish most fully set out and all his kinsmen’s subscriptio confirming that wish’; the pope forbade infringement of this ‘by the bishop’s brother’ or any of his cognatio.76 Perhaps this brother was trying to anticipate his son’s succession.77 This proprietary right winding from nephew to nephew down the generations makes Wildeshausen so like an Italian hereditary priest’s church, and in this so unusual north of the Alps, that perhaps it was modelled on that pattern, observed by Waltbert when in Italy with Lothar I.78 If the model was peculiar to Waltbert, however, the fears and aspirations that it met were not: the Saxon nobles, so soon after conquest and conversion, had a special need of family monasteries with powerful relics to reinforce their local influence and consolidate their ‘fluctuating kins’,79 while some had an acute need of monasteries for their widows and daughters (which it will be convenient to discuss later, as more evident in the tenth century).80 And these needs, too, were only more intense variants of what may have moved ninth-century monastic founders anywhere. But the needs were not met by making external lords of the founder’s lay heirs. At Wildeshausen this was in effect ruled out. Widukind’s family was unusually dependent on clerical careers and status for members of each generation (for Waltbert actually for his eldest son); the rectores were to be clerks, and celibate ones, governing the community (which was clerical anyhow) and taking the place of abbots. Those of them who held a bishopric as well would need a deputy, however; making them hardly different from the rectors or secular abbots who ruled some monastic communities as founder’s heirs or the king’s beneficiaries (or both). These would exploit at least some of the property directly while allowing some to the community with perhaps a monk-abbot or a provost. At Werden, the founder’s clerical heirs were called rector or custos and no one was called abbot; when the layman Bertold ‘invaded’ the monastery we can be sure that he took at least some of its revenues and perhaps occupied some of its 75 DOII no. 228 (980), where Otto gave Wildeshausen to Memleben. This may not have come off (perhaps because of family objections); eventually (as a mere provostry) it came to Adalbert abp. of 76 Bremen. Westfal. UB Add., I. 534 (Jaffe´2 no. 3472). 77 Schmid, ‘Nachfaren Widukinds’, 7–8. 78 Schmid’s suggestion, ibid. 34–5; id., ‘Gemeinschaftsbewusstsein’, 55–8, 63–4. 79 See Leyser, Rule, 4, 87–8; Kohl, ‘Typologie sa¨chsischer Frauenklo¨ster’, 125–7. 80 But belonging to a continuous tradition from the Saxon conversion, according to the hagiographic account (Vita Liutbirgae of c.880, ed. O. Menzel, ‘Das Leben der Liutbirg’, Deutsch. Mittelalt., 3 (1937), cc. 1–2 and 7) of the convert Hessi’s widowed daughter Gisla setting up her two daughters with monasteriola.

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buildings.81 In Alemania, Wolvene at Rheinau was said to ‘be in charge’ (praeesse) and was called ‘abbot’ as well as ‘hereditary protector’, ‘founder’, ‘lord’;82 later there was a monk-abbot as well, an Irishman, apparently Wolvene’s creation.83 At Schienen, Hatto’s and Lambert’s positions were clearly of this kind.84 Of founders or their heirs in contemporary France, Benedict at Vabres was qualified to be a regular abbot; Ebroin and Gauzlin at Glanfeuil were clerical abbots; count Gerald was lay rector of Aurillac with a monk-abbot below him;85 count Gerard and his wife kept their foundations in their usufruct and under their cura for life, themselves, it seems, ruling the two communities, which were to elect an abbot and abbess only after the founders’ deaths.86 Most reservations for founders’ heirs were of this kind, reserving for a while what amounts to abbacy rather than an outside lord’s disposal of it; though for the actual founder, unless he has set the monastery firmly under royal lordship, the distinction between lordship and abbacy may hardly be live, and even for his heirs not always sharply drawn.87 But sometimes what is reserved is a protective role as ‘defender’, named or to be chosen in future, as at Sarrazac or Vabres. Something of this kind was proposed in the founder Rudolph’s charter of 861 for Wiesensteig in Alemania. This recorded the traditio or vestitura of land and serfs out of his and his son Erih’s ius into the monks’ ius and dominatio,88 the monks to have potestas in these things, and to elect their next abbot inter se (with no mention of any lord’s consent to this election). After Rudolph’s death they were to render to his son Erih a census, namely that when he had to go on the king’s service they would lend him a packhorse and man. They were to have ‘aid and defence’ from Erih in his lifetime, and afterwards from the best of Erih’s sons, and whichever of his descendants they found wise and God-fearing: ‘to him alone shall they pay that census, to other co-heirs nothing . . . nor shall my descent (generatio) have any other potestas over that place’ than what was here written.89 So a light and loose outside lordship was reserved for one heir, apparently chosen by the monks from among what it is assumed will be co-heirs; and the charter makes clear that these might otherwise have claimed some potestas. 81

Above, at note 30. Rheinau nos. 5, 11, 13; in no. 8 (860) Rheinau is ‘Wolvene’s monastery’; in DLD no. 130 (870) Wolvene is ‘known to be abbot’ there. 83 The late 9th-c. Vita Findani (ed. Holder-Egger, SS XV. i. 502–6) has Findan after long travels go to a nobleman in Alemania (clearly Wolvene) who after four years ‘had him made a monk in his own monastery called Rheinau’ (p. 504). 84 See Schmid, ‘Ko¨nigtum’, 291–5, reconstructing much of Schienen’s history from Remiremont’s 85 fraternity books. Above, at notes 40, 36, 46. 86 Founders’ letter to Nicholas I, above, notes 51–2. 87 The heirs or co-heirs at Hornbach might be either (above, at notes 23–27). 88 It was witnessed by ‘laity who saw and heard this traditio’ or who ‘saw the vestitura of the 89 monastery’. Wirtemberg. UB. no. 136. 82


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Any such element of choice by monks or nuns, if exercised in practice rather than leaving decisions to the family, would tend to make the defender less of a lord and more of a chosen protector or appointed advocate; even more so when not restricted to the family, as in archbishop Ralph’s charter for Beaulieu allowing the monks to choose ‘whom they will have as tutor and mundeburd’ after his death;90 or in the arrangements made by or for Charles the Fat’s wife Richardis for her house of canonesses at Andlau in Alsace, which she had founded on her paternal inheritance and put into the Holy See’s defence.91 Louis the Child’s diploma for Andlau, 906–9,92 laid down that it was to have as ‘defender’, for ‘support and mundeburdium in external matters’, Adalbero archbishop of Augsburg (Louis’s most prominent counsellor), succeeded by whomever he named out of the founder’s family,93 or failing that the abbess’s choice.94 The intended role seems to merge that of an appointed advocate with that of a founder’s heir whose lordship is shadowy. There was probably no real legal distinction between a defender and a lord unless lordship itself was clearly given elsewhere. Otherwise, lordship of a monastery would tend to go with the rest of a founder’s property to his natural heir or heirs; singling out an heir for this role may be a means of separating this lordship from the rest and keeping it undivided; it could still be seen as lordship, whether or not reduced in substance, and perhaps even if the choice passed from the family to the community. But these reservations—of either kind—are by their nature restrictive of longterm lordship: that is why they are explicit. What is spelt out is almost by definition abnormal: it is hardly surprising that we learn very little about ordinary inherited outside lordship until (in France) donations of monasteries to greater ones become numerous, in the tenth century.95 What would most clearly give substance to such lordship would be making or approving abbots or abbesses, after the first. There is little direct evidence for this in the ninth century, unless Gerald of Aurillac’s testament really did empower his nephew to appoint and 90 Beaulieu no. 16 (856; in contrast with Sarrazac, above, at note 42). In the (doubtful) testament of 860, however, instead of a chosen protector the king’s mundeburdium is invoked (ibid. no. 1; see below, 91 p. 836 esp. note 54). DKIII no. 96 (884). 92 DLK no. 68; see Schieffer (ed.), ibid. 200–2 for its date and authentic base (itself the model for whatever is genuine in ACIII no. 125, of 912). Cf. Dubled, Avouerie, 10–11, taking broadly the same view. 93 ex eadem stirpe, referring back to ipsa genealogia and ipsa prosapia from which abbesses were to be elected. 94 The passage regulating the advocate’s rights must be interpolated; that about Adalbero’s role is unlikely to be (Schieffer, op. cit., 201). The statuta attributed to Richardis, laying down unclear and impracticable rules for choosing a ‘defender and advocate’ from her kin (Bruckner, Dipl. Alsatiae no. 656, cc. 11–15), were accepted by Dubled (op. cit. 12–13) but see Schieffer, op. cit., 202. 95 For a glimpse of residual outside lordship kept by the 9th-c. counts of Troyes, of a ‘cell’ on the edge of the forest of Der, see ACII no. 171 (854–5): abbots to be elected ‘without any interrogatio by the count’; the abbot to pay the count 20d. a year in acknowledgment that the property was once his.

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remove abbots.96 But assuming it said the reverse, what it prohibited may have been common practice; founders’ promises of free election after short-term reservations have the same implication.97 If inherited lay lordship over monasteries as sacralized centres of family power was becoming normal in late ninthcentury France, this was an aspect of the emerging emphasis on lineage (stretching into past and future), and an element in the new regional powers forming after the 880s.98 Meanwhile there were still a few foundations made by founder-abbots on their own lands, like abbot Berno, who late in the ninth century built Gigny at his home on his alodial property, besides being given the ruined abbey of Baume, and eventually building Cluny on land (with a chapel) arguably given him outright by William duke of Aquitaine.99 From 910 to 926 he ruled all three (with three other houses), and before his death disposed of their abbacies—in effect, of the monasteries themselves: Gigny, Baume, and a cell to his nephew Guy; Cluny, Deóls, and Massay to Odo, his more famous successor (no kinsman of his but perhaps a son of Ebbo of Deóls and so in duke William’s circle).100 Later, the reformer Gerard of Brogne was abbot of his own foundation on his family property in Lorraine (eventually giving it to the diocesan bishopric, Lie`ge);101 while back in 878 the locus of St Flavian near Bologne (Haute Marne), which a monk Widrad built from his own resources and Louis the Stammerer endowed with a mere eight mansi and a chapel, but giving these in proprium to Widrad and his successors, seems to have similar potentialities.102 In Bavaria a church for a few canonesses, at Monheim, evidently belonged to its abbess Liubila and her sister Gerlinda. In 893, threatened by her relations and neighbours with expulsion from her maternal inheritance, Liubila asked the bishop of Eichsta¨tt for some of St Waldburg’s relics,103 apparently to give status and security to her monastery which she would then ‘convey by donation in perpetuity into the

96

97 Above, note 47. e.g. above, at notes 45, 62, 89. See Le Jan, Famille, 381, 422–7. Eberhard of Friuli’s collegiate foundation at Cysoing (dept. Nord) had looked set to become a great family’s sacral centre until its clerical heir alienated it to Rheims, a sign of the family’s decline (ibid. 50, 236, 350, 411). 99 Baume was given (to Gigny at Berno’s request, but also to Berno and his successors) by Rudolph I of Burgundy before 890 (see ARProv. Louis l’Aveugle no. 28), confirmed 903 (DRud. no. 9; see ed. note, 106–7). See Wollasch, Mo¨nchtum, 12–15 (and in general pp. 11–19 on abbots as lords of their monasteries); Semmler, ‘Das Erbe der karolingischen Klosterreform’, in Kottje and Maurer (eds.), Monastische Reformen, 74–7. 100 Bibliotheca Cluniacensis, ed. M. Marrier (Paris, 1614), 9–12 (926); Iogna-Prat’s doubts about this testament (‘La Geste des origines’, esp. 162–3) seem, at present, unnecessary. For Cluny and Deóls ( ¼ Bourg-Dieu) see below, pp. 835, 836. 101 Wollasch, Mo¨nchtum, 14–15, 17–18; id., ‘Gerard von Brogne’; Dierkens, Abbayes, 207–9. 102 ALB no. 11 and ed. note. It surfaces in the 11th c. as a derelict abbatia (see index: Sexfontaines). 103 She had been present at their translation to Eichsta¨tt (Ex mirac. Waldburgis, c. 5, SS XV. i. 541–2). 98


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bishop’s hand’.104 This she and Gerlinda did, with the consent of their four fellows, reserving the name and power of abbess for life to Liubila and after her Gerlinda (and the others in due course),105 restricting entry to the nobly born and those able to contribute to the church’s resources, and requiring from each member a token due of 1 denarius a year to St Willibald’s altar at Eichsta¨tt, ‘that they may know that they are in his dominium and potestas’.106 To mark this traditio ‘that she had made of the monastery . . . by hereditary right’, she and her nuns had to spend three nights outside the monastery: a dramatically symbolized withdrawal from proprietary right.107 Finally we may move across to the Pyrenees, to St Andrew at Exalada and its successor St Michael of Cuxa, whose early history was shaped by proprietary rights at three levels: those of its founder-monks, that of Protasius their leader and ultimately abbot, and eventually the outside lordship of the counts of CerdanãRoussillon. First (840–1) a dozen men and women, mostly cousins and siblings, gave all their inherited property to St Andrew and the monks at Exalada: two monks and two priests among the donors were probably the core of the new community.108 Next (854) a new group—a priest Protasius, three other priests, a monk, and a deacon—made a similar common donation amounting to a second foundation, as ‘we, brothers, in common’ who have chosen to live at Exalada, but reserving usufruct and indeed ius in their property until the last of them has died. Each man’s gift is listed in detail: mostly livestock; some stores, tools, clothes, vestments, and books; a little arable and vineyard. Protasius has most to give, while reserving to his own potestas his estate at Cuxa and 146 solidi to distribute in alms at his death. If ever they should be driven out and have to seek another monastery they were to take all their property with them, but if they lived and died at Exalada it was all to be the monastery’s.109 What did drive them out, twenty-four years later, was a disastrous flood. It was at this point that Protasius settled the survivors on his own estate of Cuxa, where he had meanwhile built a small church of St Germanus; here he at last became a

donative in perpetuum traderet, ibid., c. 6; cf. c. 10, propter traditionem quam fecerat . . . iure hereditario eiusdem monasterii. 105 These others seem to share in some degree in the property; but their succession to the abbacy was to depend on merit and be in the bishop’s discretion. 106 Recorded in a charter combining Liubila’s donation of the monastery reserving abbacy, and bp. Erkenbold’s acknowledgment of this and grant of another church (also in Monheim) in return (Mon. 107 Boica, 49 (ns, III) no. 1); in effect a precarial exchange. Ex mirac. Waldburgis, c. 10. 108 ˙ d’Abadal, ‘Eixalada-Cuixa’, 131–2; doc. no. 1. A donation in 847 by Bera count of Rase`s (Marca Hisp., app. no. 19) may have been of the original church at Exalada and surrounding land (d’Abadal, Catalunya, 80). 109 d’Abadal, ‘Eixalada-Cuixa’, 132–3 and no. 9. ACII no. 349 (871: below, at n. 116) lists ‘seven priests of noble genus’ (overlapping with the 854 founders) who had bought the site for the monastery, perhaps from the first group. 104

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full monk and was made abbot.110 The change of abbot, of place, and of dedication amounted to a third foundation and needed clarification: so once again, in 879, the monks (Protasius and thirty-odd other survivors)111 made a joint charter of donatio and traditio as ‘all of us, brothers, in common’: ‘we have chosen the place . . . founded by Protasius conversus in his own property and conveyed by him to us and our successors’; they convey themselves and their property to this church, St Germanus of Cuxa, and undertake to live there under the Rule of St Benedict, as equals receiving an inheritance one from the other:112 a pact not unlike those of northern Spain, implying that the monastery’s property consists of its members’ pooled possessions.113 Crucial to this pact, however, was Protasius’s part in it, giving to the church and monks ‘what I have’ in various places including Cuxa itself, ‘reserving nothing to my potestas’ but for all of them to live on, under the Rule; thus uniting his own property with the monastery’s and legitimating his position as monk and abbot. But before this, only a few days after the flood, and temporarily bed-ridden (having, perhaps, got cold and wet), the energetic old man had made his ‘testament’, calling himself abbot and assuming responsibility for the community and its rescued possessions.114 In effect he was founder-abbot of the relocated monastery. But the whole tenor of this testament was to commend the monastery’s future protection and guidance to count Miro, who had been a benefactor for some years.115 It was almost certainly he who, seven years before the flood, supported the monks’ application to Charles the Bald for royal defence and immunity.116 And either there and then (at Douzy in 871) or soon afterwards, the king commended or conveyed the monastery at Exalada ‘into the hands’ of count Miro,117 not as lay abbot but as outside lord and protector, near at hand and able to provide real protection as the king could not. So Protasius in his testament attributes his own abbacy to God’s grace and count Miro (perhaps rapidly consulted); he addresses Miro as ‘our senior’, ‘my dominus’, calls himself and the monks ‘your servi’, ‘your fideles’, and Cuxa ‘your monastery’; recognizes him as ‘helper, defender, and giver of possessions’;118 and begs him to save and defend 110 Earlier he appears as conversus or presbiter. Donations had been made to him, or to the then abbot, or to both: ‘a kind of condominium’ (d’Abadal, ‘Eixalada-Cuixa’, 134, 137–9). 111 The charter is in their names, as ‘all of us who were regularly traditi’ (i.e. put in as monks) and escaped the disaster (the first round of subscriptions however amounts to 50, presumably including some 112 recent, post-flood recruits). Ibid. 148–56 and no. 61. 113 114 Above, pp. 148, 149–51. Ibid. no. 54 (878). 115 Initially count of Conflent, later (from 878) of Roussillon; younger brother of Wifred the Hairy, count of Barcelona. 116 ACII no. 349 (871), an odd but acceptable diploma (see Tessier, ibid. II. 278, III. 245); for Miro’s role, d’Abadal, op. cit., 141–2. 117 Protasius’s testament states this (and that Charles had done it per epistolam suam). 118 Pointing out that ‘we hold nothing from the fisc, but only our own alod and yours’ (on the need to say this see d’Abadal, op. cit., 139–40).


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them, enforce discipline—even prevent sin119—and provide them with an abbot when he, Protasius, dies, ‘either from among themselves or whoever you can find that is pious and worthy’. But such submissive expressions and expectations are quite out of the ordinary, the product of the crisis and Protasius’s fear of not living to see his monastery through it. Miro’s most useful service before the flood had been, fortunately, to get all Exalada’s charters inspected and inventoried at his court:120 a ruler’s exercise. Some time later his brother’s widow and sons gave large endowments; and in the tenth century the brothers Sunifrid, Oliba, and Miro were generous and active patrons, calling themselves ‘donors, founders, and rebuilders’ when the enlarged church of St Germanus was dedicated in 953, described as having ditio in the monastery when its new church of St Michael was dedicated in 974, and responsible in 965 for finding Cuxa a distinguished abbot.121 Theirs is the outside lordship of regional rulers, not really describable as property; but their active patronage made obsolete any idea that the monastery belonged to its abbot or monks.122

12.ii. Ottonian and Salian Germany The aristocracy of the German kingdom eventually changed on lines broadly similar to what was beginning in late ninth-century France, moving towards territorial lordships and more structured and patrilinear families; but much later and from more archaic bases (in which, for instance, the inheritance of alods was shared not only by all sons but by brothers or nephews as well).1 The exception is Lotharingia, more thoroughly Frankish than the rest and socially undivided from northern France. But tenth-century Lotharingia was thrown into such turmoil by its long-contested takeover that its great laymen were left less territorially entrenched than in France,2 and remained for some time chiefly interested in the control (as lay abbots or later as advocates) of long-established monasteries, royal or episcopal.3 East of the Rhine, however, nobles had their own reasons (already touched on) for founding monasteries; though such was the

119

Such as individual property-owning (peculiares abentes). 876; consequently when most had been lost or destroyed in the flood, witnesses could vouch for their 121 reconstructed content, 879 (ibid. 148, 154–5). Ibid. 162–3, 177–8, 204–14; docs. nos. 77, 99. 122 The 879 pact was subscribed by a few later comers but soon ceased to be kept up to date (ibid. 56 and no. 61). 1 See Leyser, Med. Germany, 168–70 (summarizing Karl Schmid’s thesis); Reuter, Germany, 222–8. 2 See Le Jan, Famille, 416–20 (Ottonian royal power then further delaying the rise of firm territorial 3 principalities in Lotharingia). See Nightingale, Gorze Reform, 1–5, 169–73, 199–201, 256–8. 120

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Ottonian hold on their interest that their foundations were mostly made under the king’s aegis. So a starting-point for considering the position of lay founders’ heirs in tenthcentury Germany is the reservations that founders made in committing monasteries to royal defence or lordship; above all, monasteries for women (usually under a ‘canonical’ rule rather than Benedictine), and mostly in Saxony. Back in 877, the Liudolfings Brun and Otto, ‘faithful counts’ of Louis the Younger’s, conveyed to him—tradiderunt—the monastery of Gandersheim which their father Liudolf began to build and their sister Gerberga now ruled; it was to have royal protection (munimen) and remain in the king’s patronage (patrocinium); but as long as there was a suitable nun of their descent she was to be set over the nuns; failing that, the nuns should have power to elect their abbess.4 The Liudolfings’ intentions here seem sharper than those of contemporary Saxon founders of male monasteries, in clearly conveying lordship to the king while reserving abbacy to their descendants indefinitely. In 889 a noblewoman, Friduwi, conveyed to king Arnulf’s potestas not an existing nunnery but inherited lands on which she wished to found one; under royal defence and immunity, Metelen was to be in her regimen for life and afterwards in that of a suitable descendant of hers as long as any such could be found there.5 Similar conditions were laid down for Mo¨llenbeck, put by its founders into the mundeburd of the bishop of Minden.6 Such arrangements are better documented in the tenth century under the Ottos, partly because monasteries, and especially female ones, were more often set under royal defence, partly because there were more foundations, paid for directly or indirectly from the spoils of war: foundations sometimes by the first abbess as a widow or heiress, or by her and a daughter or sister; sometimes by a layman or a bishop with his sister as first abbess, or by a man (perhaps with no living sons) for his daughter or widowed daughter-in-law, or by a larger group of kinsmen.7 It would be pointless to go again over ground so illuminatingly covered by Karl Leyser: the longevity of noblewomen; their accumulation of property, and insecurity in the face of other heirs; the hope of providing them with lifetime security while preserving the property intact for the family, and perhaps solving otherwise intractable problems of family life (protecting unmarried daughters against incest and promiscuity, and the family against unwanted

4

DLJ no. 3. Gandersheim was ruled up to 919 by three successive sisters of duke Otto, for many years with their mother Oda as a resident and dominating founder; see Hrotswitha’s Carmen de primordiis coenobii Gandersheimensis (SS IV. 306–17 esp. 313–17). For ‘nun’ and ‘nunnery’ in this chapter see above, 5 p. 281 note 8. Darn. no. 59. 6 Darn. no. 147 (896); see index: Mo¨llenbeck. Of other 9th-c. Saxon nunneries we know much less; reservation for one daughter may be more typical, e.g. at Lamspringe (873, DLD no. 150). See Kohl, 7 ‘Typologie’, 120–31. For instances of all these see Leyser, Rule, 56, 65–8, 71, 150 n. 30.


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births); and the religious role of women, promoting by prayer and good works the soul’s salvation of their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons.8 What has to be discussed here is the narrower question of the founders’ intentions—and the actual outcome—for future control of the monastery and its possessions. Royal immunity and defence were evidently desirable or necessary for most of these monasteries.9 But whatever royal lordship this implied was normally combined with reserving to family members the abbacy and often the advocacy (so combining direct possession of the property at landlord level with jurisdiction over its people), at least for one life,10 and sometimes indefinitely: as long as anyone suitable could be found. This was arranged for Geseke, founded in the mid-tenth century by Haholt and his two brothers and their sister. She was to be the first abbess; after her, anyone of Haholt’s descent who was worthy; failing this, the nuns could choose an abbess inter se, but must return to the family line if possible. Haholt meanwhile was to be advocate, and after him his son if he had one, otherwise his brother’s son, and so on to the world’s end.11 Alsleben, founded and commended to Otto II’s mundeburdium by count Gero (probably already threatened with judicial combat and foreseeing his wife’s and sister’s need for protection),12 was not in the usual way reserved to Gero himself as advocate or to any named abbess; but ‘whenever there is need for an abbess or advocate to be appointed, as long as a worthy person can be found in his or his wife’s genus, of either sex, for either regimen’, he or she was to be appointed by the nuns’ election and approval.13 Vitzenburg, founded by a noble couple Brun and Adalind, was taken into Otto III’s defence and confirmed by him for life to the abbess Thietburg; after her death ‘the eldest nun of Adalind’s genus found in that monastery is to be appointed to the regimen of the church, as long as her generatio remains’, while the advocacy is confirmed to an heir of the founders whom the abbess and nuns have chosen as advocate, and afterwards with their consent to ‘the eldest of his maternal genus, as long as that generatio remains’.14

8

Ibid. 52–73. For doubts about what was peculiar to 10th-c. Saxony, see Geary, Phantoms, 64; but cf. 67–70. See above, pp. 280–1. On the loose structure of families making noble foundations unstable, see Schmid, ‘Adel und Reform’, 304–6. 10 e.g. Gernrode for the founder’s widowed daughter-in-law (below, p. 358; Leyser, Rule, 25, 66–7); Elten for the founder’s elder daughter (below, at notes 53–4). 11 DOI no. 158 (952); in family hands until 1014 (below, at notes 22–5). Cf. Heeslingen, founded (according to DOIII no. 24a, a draft diploma) under Adaldag abp. of Bremen’s defence by a count Hed for his daughter to be abbess and himself advocate, each to be succeeded by someone suitable of his kin infra tertiam generationem—either ‘within the third degree of affinity’ (Leyser, Rule, 69), or ‘up to the third generation’ (Hucke, Die Grafen von Stade, 154 n. 1035: making better sense of empowering the archbishops 12 to appoint hac generatione praeterita (‘when that generation is past’)). See Leyser, Rule, 45, 99. 13 DOII no. 190 (979). Thietmar has it founded as Gero’s burial place by his wife and sister after his execution (Chron., iii. 10, pp. 108–9); probably they completed it. See Hucke, Grafen von Stade, 149–50. 14 991, DOIII no. 68. 9

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A different pattern was followed for Oedingen, commended by its founder Gerberga—as ‘her monastery’—to Otto III’s mundeburdium, and by Otto immediately to the bishop of Cologne; but reserved to Gerberga for life, not apparently as abbess but to ‘appoint for herself’ whatever abbess she wished with the congregation’s consent, and an advocate from wherever she chose. After her death any suitable daughter or granddaughter of her son Hermann was to be made abbess with the archbishop’s consent; thereafter no abbess or advocate was to be appointed by outside power (emperor’s, king’s, or bishop’s), but the abbess only by the congregation’s will and the advocate only by the abbess’s choice:15 leaving family control to fade or survive as chance would have it. There may be no tidy answer to the question who, if anyone, was regarded as lord or proprietor of a nunnery founded under royal defence, or having the king involved in the foundation itself.16 Usually the monastery became clearly ‘royal’ sooner or later. Sometimes this was evidently intended from the first, most obviously when it was given the same status as Gandersheim, Quedlinburg, and ‘other royal abbeys’.17 When Otto I confirmed margrave Gero’s foundation of Gernrode it was Otto who ‘commended the abbey’ to Gero’s daughter-in-law at Gero’s request; and when a monastery brought into royal defence was given election of its abbesses, immediately or for the future, it is implicit that this is for the king to give18—and occasionally explicit. At Alsleben Otto II ‘allows’ the nuns to elect inter se ‘by our authority’ if the founders’ genus fails to provide a worthy abbess; Otto III claimed that after the founder’s daughter’s death the next abbess of Elten had succeeded ‘by right of our imperial potestas’.19 This is outside lordship, sometimes taking the proprietary form of disposing of the monastery to a bishopric.20 But whether this royal lordship was already evident or only in prospect, the rights reserved for founders and abbesses were often described as a kind of property for life. Otto I’s charter for Geseke not only relates that its founders meant their sister Wicburc ‘to possess it by ecclesiastical right’, but lays down that any future abbess of the founder’s stock should ‘possess the monastery potestative’; in his 968 charter confirming Elten’s endowments the abbess is to have ‘free potestas of possessing, dispensing, and doing with it what she wishes, as long as 15

1000, ibid. no. 363 (an original, but not from the imperial chancery). e.g. Fischbeck, whose founder Helmburg is represented as asking, not for her monastery to be taken into defence, but for permission to gather nuns there (see above, pp. 280–1); cf. Hilwartshausen (below, at notes 26–8). 17 e.g. Hilwartshausen, Elten, Oedingen, Alsleben, Kemnade (DOI no. 206, DOII nos. 6, 67, 190, DOIII no. 363, DHII nos. 44, 87). However, the point may have been to mark the monastery’s dignity rather than the king’s legal rights. 18 e.g. Gernrode, DOI no. 229; Hilwartshausen, ibid. no. 206; Heiningen, DHII, no. 261 (confirming 19 DOII no. 190; DOIII no. 235. Otto III’s). 20 Leyser, Rule, 69, for examples. 16


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this is for the good of the monastery and the sisters’, while Otto III’s charter speaks of lands that the first abbess had had in her potestas and investitura; Henry II’s for Kemnade confirms that ‘the monastery and abbacy are to remain in the potestas’ of the aged Billung sisters, abbess Frederun and countess Imma, though ‘by our grant’.21 And beyond the direct exploitation and lifetime control that abbacy carried, an abbot or abbess even under royal defence might be proprietor enough to dispose of the monastery itself: Geseke had been put under Otto I’s defence, but in 1014 its abbess Hildegund, a granddaughter of Haholt’s and the last of his female descendants, ‘seeing in herself the end of her cognatio who could direct the monastery’, was able to convey it into the mundeburdium of the archbishop of Cologne without (apparently) any royal involvement.22 What she evidently could not or would not do was designate someone unrelated (or even a second cousin) to succeed her;23 but it seems to be the founders’ wishes that restricted her, not the king’s lordship.24 In a sixty-year run of family abbesses royal defence could have faded into the background.25 Often the abbacy remained in the family for some time although the founders had not had this specified in the royal diploma, and even when it had specified election from the beginning. This was so at Hilwartshausen, founded by the widow Aeddila (out of her dead sons’ inheritances), with Otto I heavily involved,26 and supposedly with election of its abbess on the model of Herford and Gandersheim. Nothing was said about reservation even to the founder or her daughters; yet in 963 it was two sisters, Berthild and Emma, probably Aeddila’s daughters, who asked Otto II for his protection for the place;27 and it remained for some time under them and their kinswomen as successive abbesses.28 If the nuns were really electing abbesses, they did so from the family; even if the king’s

21 DOI no. 158; ibid. no. 358 (968), DOIII no. 235 (996); DHII no. 87 (1004. See Leyser, Rule, 55–6). Cf. Otto III for Gerberga at Oedingen (above, at note 15). 22 Archbishop’s charter of 1014 (ed. Seibertz, Herzogtums Westfalen I no. 23). See Leyser, Med. Germany, 171–2; Bernhard, Itinerant Kingship, 178, 203–4 (on Geseke’s limited usefulness to the king’s iter). 23 The 1014 charter does not even mention Haholt’s brothers among the founders, their descendants being out of the running for abbacy (see Bannasch, Paderborn, 52–5). They had given less than Haholt or Wicburc; doubtless their daughters would still be admitted as nuns. 24 The 1014 charter describes the family as hitherto ‘always possessing [the church] as if their own, using their free judgment’ (semper libero usi arbitrio sicuti propria possidentes: i.e. able to choose their abbesses?). 25 This may be so when an abbess asks to have royal defence renewed, e.g. at Alsleben (1003, DHII no. 44); three abbesses after the founder’s sister were of the house of Stade, descended from the founder’s son-in-law (Hucke, Grafen von Stade, 152 and n. 1018). 26 DOI no. 206 (960); and see Heinemeyer, ‘Adel, Kirche und Ko¨nigtum’, 135–7. 27 DOII no. 6 (963; claiming that the ‘place’ had been given them for a nunnery by Otto I, although the reverse seems to be true). Unusually, neither diploma touches on advocacy. 28 An abbess Helmburg appearing briefly (probably not the Fischbeck founder: see Goetting, ‘Das Hilwartshaüser Chirograph’, 39 n. 8) may have been Aeddila’s sister and almost a joint founder (Heinemeyer, ‘Adel’, 131–3, 146–7).

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consent were required, or sought in any case, he would naturally often confirm the choice of founders’ kin. What lies behind these apparent uncertainties must be the founders’ interest in securing the monastery and its lands to selected heirs (from either side—husband’s or wife’s) and to their not yet selected, but single, successors. This is clearest when the king gives land for its endowment to the founders, or is given family land by them which he then bestows on the monastery,29 or gives back forfeited family land for the purpose.30 Such transactions made it acquired land, at the founders’ disposal, freed from partible inheritance; the downside of this would be the king’s latent hold on his own gifts.31 But even without such participation in the endowment, royal defence could protect the position of the chosen heirs, at the same cost of latent royal lordship. For men’s monasteries royal defence might promote regularity rather than family abbacy (the founders wanting elected abbots from the start), but still protect the family’s advocacy.32 A royal diploma, confirming the foundation besides (normally) taking it into defence, could thus take the place of a foundation charter.33 At Limburg on the middle Rhine, the Salian count Conrad who founded the early castle monastery obtained for it an unusual diploma. This took it into Otto I’s mundeburdium on condition that ‘whichever of his [Conrad’s] heirs held the castle after his death’ was to be ‘patron and advocate’ of the monastery (a phrase which suggests a light lordship and broad, protective advocacy); while it safeguarded the endowments by requiring future kings and founder’s heirs to check each other’s dealings.34 And an independent family monastery was not inconceivable; royal defence was not always obtained at the beginning,35 or at all. Of the margrave of Meissen’s nunnery, founded out of the spoils of war, the Saxon annalist says simply, ‘Ricdag with his sister Eilswit built and founded the monastery called Gerbstedt, where his sister directed the nuns and where he himself was buried with his son Charles and many of that kindred’; it was re-endowed in the mid-eleventh century by his 29

Otto I to Helmburg for Fischbeck; Aeddila to Otto I for Hilwartshausen (note 16, above). Otto I divided the Billung count Wichman’s forfeited inheritance between the Billung monasteries, Lu¨neburg and Kemnade; probably allowing Wichman’s daughters their inheritance at Kemnade in the form of abbacy there (see Leyser, Rule, 55–6). 31 Claimable as his inheritance when the selected narrow line of heirs failed (Leyser, ‘Crisis’, 34–7). 32 e.g. Nienburg (moved from Thancmarsfeld), DOII no. 114 (975) and DHII no. 43 (1003): see Leyser, Rule, 70; and Helmarshausen, DOIII no. 256 (997): see Rathgen, ‘Untersuchungen’, 6–7; Heinemeyer, ‘Adel’, 126–9. 33 See Patze, ‘Adel und Stifterchronik’, 31–2 on the inclusion of a narratio of the foundation in such diplomata under the Ottos. 34 DOI no. 47 (942; a late 10th-c. copy). Nothing is said about choice of abbot; this, or consent to it, probably stayed with the castle lords in practice. 35 For Elten, DOI no. 358 confirmed the foundation; royal defence was obtained five years later (DOII no. 67). Dru¨beck existed by 960 (DOI no. 217); it was given immunity, defence, abbatial election, and abbess’s choice of advocate in 980 (DOII no. 225, at the request of count Wicher ‘and all those who claim any part in it’, now giving it up). 30


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descendants.36 Thietmar’s family monastery at Walbeck seems to have been entirely in the family’s control, shared between the founder’s two sons, Thietmar’s father and uncle; it was the latter (the survivor) who ceded the provostry (not, however, gratis) to Thietmar, already a canon there. At this point Thietmar received from his brothers a moiety (presumably their father’s) of the lands belonging to the monastery (the other moiety probably came from his uncle). On becoming bishop of Merseburg, Thietmar made one of his brothers (he too a canon) provost of Walbeck after him.37 Such an independent Hauskloster may be what count Henry of Stade hoped to establish at Heeslingen (its founder Hed and his daughters having died without heirs), when he had his 12-year-old daughter—already there as an oblate—veiled and made abbess, and later had his wife buried there in a stone church built by their daughter. Here Otto I’s intervention with the reluctant bishop seems purely personal, as the girl’s godfather.38 In the south, the men’s monastery of Ebersberg in Bavaria was founded by count Eberhard about 934 and not given away until either 1011 or 1039.39 In Lotharingia in 966 a nunnery at Vergaville was founded by a count Sigeric on his wife Bertha’s inheritance, but reserving the place ‘for protection’ to his posterity for ever and committing it to his son and son’s heirs; there was no royal defence although the charter itself was made under the emperor’s aegis.40 As always, it is impossible to tell what part was played in the succession of abbesses or abbots by the head of the family, family councils, family feeling within the community, or predecessor’s choice. What is certain is that by Otto I’s time advocacy was increasingly important alongside abbacy; and where it was held by a family member it had far more potentiality for real hereditary succession than abbacy had, being both male and lay; while it too could be kept undivided, going either to the eldest41 or to someone chosen in each generation. So if it remained with the founder’s kin, it was more likely to carry some practical control of the abbacy than vice versa.42 If as was more usual, however, family control vanished or withered away in the face of Ottonian royal power, this need not be a total loss for the founders. 36

Annalista Saxo, s.a. 985 (p. 633) above, 336–7. Thietmar, Chron., vi. 43–5, 47 (326–33); see Leyser, Rule, 41, 113–14. 38 Thietmar, Chron., ii. 42. Count Henry could probably claim kinship with the founder Hed (see note 11, above). By 986, however, Bremen had vindicated its lordship over Heeslingen (DOIII no. 24b), submerging Hed’s story in a vague attribution to bp. Adaldag’s antecessores. See Hucke, Grafen von Stade, 39 152–5; Leyser, Rule, 69. Below, notes 76–7. 40 The´venin no. 134; ‘not authentic in its present form’, but on this (and the couple) see Nightingale, Gorze Reform, 159–60. 41 e.g. Helmarshausen (above, note 32); later, Gerbstedt (above, p. 337). After mid-11th c., female advocates appear (envisaged for Ottmarsheim c.1050, below, note 102; found at Goseck, 12th c. above, p. 336). 42 e.g. perhaps at Hilwartshausen (above, at notes 26–8); see Heinemeyer, ‘Adel’, 138–40. 37

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Sometimes it certainly was, as for count Billing when Otto I gave Bibra to Magdeburg.43 Some founders may have hoped, in getting royal participation or defence, to establish a core of undivided and safeguarded family land. But for others, lacking living sons or running into trouble, intentions for control of the property were short term in any case (or became so, as for the male monastery Helmarshausen after an only grandson’s death).44 These founders may have positively wished the lands to go to their church and the church to king or bishop, rather than pass to a distant kinsman or be divided among collaterals; while long-term interests in memoria were not necessarily eclipsed.45 But in either case, the wider family lost potential inheritances. The foundation itself could be a grievance to frustrated heirs or disenchanted siblings, making royal defence useful for that reason rather than itself the grievance. In the ninth century Gandersheim’s endowment had been threatened by some of the Liudolfings, and in the tenth century the future Henry I allegedly had to prevent his brothers (who probably shared its lordship) taking away 11,000 mansi.46 Nor could it be taken for granted that an abbess’s kinsmen would allow her to leave her own property to her monastery.47 The sisters who in 963 asked Otto II for his protection of Hilwartshausen asked that it ‘should not owe anything to or be liable to be possessed by any of their relations or proheredes’,48 perhaps their male cousins who would otherwise have had the lands. Soon afterwards a large endowment came from a widow Helmburg; and almost forty years later, in 1003, two of Helmburg’s four daughters (canonesses at Gandersheim) made a settlement with their kinswoman Rothgard abbess of Hilwartshausen, giving them life tenure of some of their mother’s gift although they had consented to this gift at the time (the four daughters being each others’ heirs).49 So the excluded heirs were not necessarily distant or even collateral. Both at Borghorst and at Elten one daughter had been made the first abbess (at Borghorst a daughter by the founder Bertha’s second marriage) and it was a married daughter who made trouble, at Borghorst successfully recovering her own father’s property.50 In Bavaria, Adalbero had been involved with his childless brother count Eberhard in founding Ebersberg,

43

DOI no. 363 (original), with DOII no. 19; see Leyser, Rule, 23–4 and nn. Bernhardt, Kingship, 212–14. 45 Abp. Herbert in 1014 endowed Geseke with extensive tithe-rights explicitly to ensure the founders’ memoria, besides his own (above, note 22). 46 See Kohl, ‘Typologie’, 122; Leyser, Rule, 68 (‘a legend’). 47 48 See Leyser, Rule, 69 on the implication of DOI no. 190 for Meschede. DOII no. 6. 49 Goetting, ‘Hilwartsaüser Chirograph’, 37–55, with text, 56–8; see Leyser, Rule, 60; Heinemeyer, ‘Adel’, 142–6. The other two daughters, canonesses at Hilwartshausen itself, presumably had no grievance or claim, their mother’s possessions being consolidated there partly for their benefit. 50 989, DOIII no. 52 (first relating Bertha’s traditio of the monastery, for security against the envious, to Otto I for Magdeburg); see Leyser, Rule, 66 and n. 22. 44


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but later held up a major donation of Eberhard’s because he—Adalbero—‘had many sons’.51 It seems that such excluded heirs, actual or envisaged, usually wanted to recover land rather than to compete for abbacy, advocacy, or outside lordship.52 Adela’s claims on Elten53 began in this way, though they shifted later. The founder count Wichman had given it to his daughter Liutgard. At his death, his other daughter Adela challenged his donations to it as having been made without her consent, contrary to Saxon law; tried to get her sister’s donation of her own patrimony rescinded; and took it by force after Liutgard’s death (but was evicted by Otto III).54 Her second husband Baldric made further violent attacks on the town and monastery. Meanwhile Otto I’s role in the foundation had been only to confirm Wichman’s donations, made partly out of lands given him by Otto; he did not give it royal defence or imply any royal lordship in it, but on the contrary confirmed the abbess’s potestas; it was Otto II five years later who, at Wichman’s and Liutgard’s request (presumably to fend off Adela), took the monastery into his mundeburdium and gave the nuns the right to elect their abbess and to have an advocate chosen by her, like Quedlinburg, Essen, and Gandersheim.55 Otto III (having secured the succession of a new abbess) confirmed Elten’s property and status, and gave judgment on the dispute, on the face of it securing total renunciation by Adela and her husband, though she did in practice get partial possession of the lands.56 But by this time their aim seems to have shifted from disendowing (or reducing) the nunnery to possessing it, not merely by armed occupation but with a claim to legal possession which Baldric had to quitclaim.57 At Otto’s request, ‘by his own and his wife’s hand, he publicly conveyed (contradidit) that monastery into our mundeburdium’—he was in a position to do this, or it was convenient to allow him to—‘and as is the practice for laymen, put himself out of that same estate cum festuca’— with the symbolic rod. The estate (praedium) quitclaimed was evidently the monastery itself; for the diploma went on to relate that Baldric had ‘further’ (insuper) given up all the lands that abbess Liutgard had held, here listed; 51 Ebersberg no. 8; Chron. Eberspergense (SS XX. 9–15), 11–12 (only one son, Ulrich, seems to have survived). On the estate in question, Ahaheim, see below, at note 85. 52 Cf. in 10th-c. Lotharingia the monks of Gembloux’s loss of half the estate of Gembloux to the founder Wicbert’s brother-in-law Heribrand, given back at the end of the century by Heribrand’s daughter and her husband (Le Jan, Famille, 97, 236). 53 See Oediger, ‘Adelas Kampf um Elten’, 67–86. 54 DOIII no. 235 (Otto’s judgment, 996). See Oediger, op. cit., 76–7, on the legal point. It is not clear, from this judgment and Alpert of Metz’s account (De diversitate temporum, c. 3, MGH SS IV. 7–9), whether Adela objected both to her father’s donations outside what was Liudgard’s share and (separately) to Liudgard’s use of her share, or whether the two accounts refer to the same objection. 55 DOI nos. 358 (968), 397 (970); DOII no. 67 (973). 56 On the lands see Oediger, ‘Adela’s Kampf’, 79, 82–6. 57 This shift is overlooked in Oediger’s account, ibid. 78–9.

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and it was at Baldric’s petition that Otto then allowed the monastery the same privileges as in Otto II’s diploma, and confirmed its other provisions, along with the payment of a pound of silver every year to St Peter’s at Rome, as arranged by count Wichman, for security against enemies.58 This was not the end of troubles: Baldric raided Elten again after Otto III’s death, ‘breaking through the rampart that surrounded the church . . . and forcing the whole household to serve him’; Henry II restored the status quo.59 Oediger pointed out that Baldric is not said to have ejected the nuns, nor is the much-demonized Adela (used hagiographically as a foil for her sister) said to have tried to destroy the monastery or to have claimed anything not from her father’s property. Whether this shows that they wanted lordship over it as a going concern, or only that taking possession of the monastery seemed the best way to extort concessions of land, is unclear; the former is suggested by Otto III’s judgment (though Baldric evidently rejected this later). It may be, however, that their real goal was the fortified place that the monastery occupied; for they were engaged in a feud with a younger count Wichman, whom in 1016 they treacherously killed.60 Perhaps through the need to do penance for this, Adela must eventually have made her peace with the monastery and found it useful, since her daughter Azela entered it, bringing it her share of Adela’s inheritance, and becoming abbess there.61 A generation later there is a clear case of a monastery itself being formally claimed as common property by all the founders’ living or interested children. The men’s monastery of Brauweiler (diocese of Trier) had been built in the early 1020s by the palatine count Ezzo and his wife Matilda, Otto III’s sister; later, he or they put it under the mundeburd of the church of Cologne.62 But some time in the 1040s his middle-aged children, Hermann archbishop of Cologne and his two high-ranking sisters,63 challenged this and ‘demanded that monastery for themselves in hereditary right’, a claim that was upheld by judgment of the princes. By 1051, however, for their own and their relations’ ‘eternal memory’, they ‘by equal voice and consent conveyed their inheritance, the monastery’ to Cologne, for Hermann and his successors to be the abbey’s defenders and protectors. So their lawsuit—which involved the archbishop challenging his own church’s right— may have been fictitious, brought to lead up to this common traditio by all the 58

59 DOIII no. 235 (996). Oediger, op. cit., 80–1. Alpert of Metz, cc. 4 and 5 (pp. 9–10); Thietmar of Merseburg, vii. 47 (p. 456). 61 According to his Vita Adela’s son bp. Meinwerk of Paderborn disputed this property with his sister Azela, he for his cathedral church and monasteries, she for Elten (Oediger, op. cit., 81–2). Meanwhile Baldric had founded a monastery at Zyfflich (UBNR I no. 159). 62 On the sources see Semmler, Klosterreform von Siegburg, 186–7 and n. 50. Semmler points out (p. 188) that no provision was made for Cologne to control the abbacy, as for Geseke in 1014. 63 Theophanu abbess of Essen and Richeza dowager queen of Poland (their brother Otto of Bavaria had given up his share to Richeza). Ezzo had died 1034. 60


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co-heirs under the emperor’s aegis, as the strongest possible form of consent to the founders’ intentions, and the best way to preserve the family memoria.64 By this time, under the Salian kings, commendation or conveyance of monasteries to king or emperor had come to an end; if new foundations were given away it was to bishoprics (not now through the king), or from 1049 onwards to the Holy See. This sprang from a less dependent nobility—in Saxony, increasingly dissatisfied and resentful65—making more independent foundations, with more complex reasons for giving them away. Others were not given away, even notionally, but kept as family affairs (‘Hausklo¨ster’ in German historiography). New foundations in Saxony were more often for men, after about 1020; the special need for nunneries diminished, and magnate families were more inclined to make widows remarry to serve territorial ambitions.66 A men’s monastery or collegiate church, often of modest size and built in or beside a castle, belonging outright to a noble family, recording the family’s history, perhaps inventing its genealogy,67 and serving for several generations as its burial-place and focal point, is more characteristic of the eleventh and twelfth centuries than of the ninth or tenth, perhaps because of a greater emphasis on lineage, itself promoted by more nobles having family castles (each branch of a great family tending to have a castle to itself).68 For the Welfs in Alemania it was the combination of their castle at Ravensburg with their older monastery of Altdorf at its foot (later Weingarten) that provided the base on which the loose Sippe or clan could turn into a firmly anchored ‘house’.69 Not all German family monasteries had exactly this role,70 and for many the founders’ lordship lasted no more than a generation or two—being either lost with wider losses through war and politics, or given away, sometimes after the refoundation of a decayed monastery (though their hereditary advocacy was normally preserved, prolonging and strengthening their hold on a now reformed and prospering establishment).71 But when a monastery was kept under intimate family control, there may for that very reason be little evidence of its legal status. The monastery’s 64

See Semmler, op. cit., 187–9, based mainly on the acceptable passages in DHIII no. 272a (1051). 66 See Leyser, Rule, 70–1, 110–12; id., ‘Crisis’. Leyser, Rule, 64–5, 70–1. 67 Or such of it as related to the monastery’s history and in particular its property (see Geary, Phantoms, 76–9; more generally Patze, ‘Adel und Stifterchronik’). 68 See Schmid, ‘Problematik’, 30–42; Reuter, Germany, 226–8 and bibliog. to that chapter; id., ‘The Medieval Nobility in 20th Century Historiography’, in M. Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London, 1997). 69 Historia Welforum, ed. E. Ko¨nig, Schwa¨bische Chroniken der Stauferzeit, I, 2nd edn. (Sigmaringen, 1978), ¨ ber die Herkunft der Welfen’, in Tellenbach (ed.), cc. 10, 12, 13 and nn. 44, 58, 59; Fleckenstein, ‘U Grossfra¨nk. Adels, 83–5, 94, 109, 128–33; K. Schmid, ‘Welfisches Selbstversta¨ndnis’, in Fleckenstein and Schmid (eds.), Adel und Kirche (1968), 391, 403–5, 409–12, with family tree facing 400. For an illuminating family dispute, Jakobs, ‘Rudolf von Rheinfelden’, in Fleckenstein (ed.), Investiturstreit, 102 n. 61. 70 71 See Schmid, ‘Ko¨nigtum’, 331–4. See above, pp. 332–7. 65

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property might never have been clearly distinguished from the family’s by any formal endowment; or the endowing might be done by stages over the years.72 The monastery might be as much part of a castle as a domestic chapel would be, and hardly in itself a distinct object of lordship. Nonetheless, founders and their heirs seem often in the eleventh century to act more clearly than in the past as lords or proprietors, like the founders’ heirs at Brauweiler,73 and to be described in such terms in foundation histories or other narratives. In Bavaria the mid-eleventh-century Othlo of St Emmeram says of Altomu¨nster that a branch of the Welfs ‘possessed it as by hereditary right’, and leads up to this with a story of ‘a powerful man out of Alemania’ claiming the monastery in the past, ‘I know not by what conveyance or how by law’.74 Othlo implies that this man must have—or should have—had the monastery conveyed to him by someone able to do this, or inherited it under whatever law he lived by. In Ebersberg’s narrative cartulary, the founder’s nephew and successor Ulrich ‘gave the monastery’ to his eldest son Adalbero; the same Adalbero received a donation to Ebersberg ‘because he was lord of the monastery’; Adalbero later ‘gave the monastery into the hand’ of Henry III.75 With this last, Henry III’s diploma of 1039 agrees well enough: count Adalbero has ‘transferred it into our potestas . . . and alienated it from his and his family’s property and potestas’, on condition that he and after him his brother should keep the advocacy for life.76 The point of this sharp proprietary formula for the actual transaction was to assert that the king acquired full property in the monastery; but it implied that the donor had had as much.77 In Swabia in 1036, count Ulrich of Lenzburg made a clear assertion, in a charter of his own, of property-right in his family monastery of canons, Beromu¨nster. Finding himself ‘bereft of sons’,78 unwilling to ‘make it royal’ because he has low expectations of royal defence, and equally unwilling to leave it in common to his grandsons lest it be divided, he has ‘conveyed the place’ to his grandson Arnulf. Ulrich himself is to ‘have’ it for his lifetime, then his son Henry, then Arnulf;79 then one of Arnulf’s legitimate heirs, of age, should hold and possess it; ‘this 72

See Leyser, Rule, 114; and below, pp. 844–6, on Muri’s 1082 carta libertatis. Above, at notes 62–4. 74 nescio qua traditione [vel perhaps understood] quare lege: Vita Altonis (ed. Waitz, SS XV. 843–5), written as history and justification of Altomu¨nster’s recent refoundation for nuns (after 1030). 75 Ebersberg, i. 16, 30, 40. On the chronicle-cum-cartulary (composed by abbot Williram, mid-11th c.; separated by 19th-c. editors) see Johanek, ‘Rechtliche Funktion’, 147–50. 76 DHIII no. 15 (1039). 77 Ulrich may possibly have already given it to Henry II, 1011 (cf. DHII no. 230 for the Swabian nunnery Ku¨hbach, and ed. note); this would make Adalbero’s act in effect a quitclaim. But the chronicler abbot Williram (knowing only of Adalbero’s donation) has Ulrich in his lifetime ‘give’ the monastery to 78 Adalbero. His son Henry was apparently childless, perhaps celibate. 79 Arnulf is to possess it personaliter (perhaps meaning that he is to have it ‘as a persona’, i.e. take the place of an abbot or provost). 73


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traditio is to be made only to one of them . . . one, not all, and always one, of Arnulf’s heirs, born of my stock, is to hold and possess it, so as to be that church’s just and pious advocate and defender’. He goes on to outline this heir’s rights and duties and to allocate property between him and the canons; and finally makes elaborate fall-back provisions: should Arnulf or any of his heirs break these conditions, and prove incorrigible, the bishop of Constance is to take over and ‘hold’ the monastery; if the bishop is negligent or worse, ‘he and his church shall lose that place completely’ and the emperor of the time is to take it and give it a privilege of liberty; for the emperor, however, ‘I set up no authority or judge apart from God, the king of kings’.80 Ulrich has already said that he does not want to make the monastery royal unless driven to it; he is prepared to envisage this only if everything else has gone wrong.81 A closer look at the provisions of the charter can tell us something of what Ulrich’s ‘conveyance’ of his monastery meant. The advocacy—in a broad sense—that Ulrich intended for his heirs was an expression of their continuing lordship, not a residue from lordship given away.82 They were to respect the canons’ right (given by Ulrich) of electing their provost inter se, and to consent to such elections; this is outside lordship at least. The other obligations and restrictions that Ulrich plans put the lord close to the monastery’s affairs: he is not to give away its lands or serfs unless by an advantageous exchange; he is to see to the upkeep of books and buildings, and to feed the poor and the canons on family anniversaries and at a three-day banquet for the patronal feast-day. The allocation of lands is done ‘to separate what is to belong to the lord of the church—the lord advocate—and what to the brother canons’; this sounds like a partition between lord and canons of what will be in principle monastic property, rather than any still-needed disentangling of this from the mass of family property or even from Ulrich’s own portion.83 It is not clear, however, whether the bulk of these endowments already belongs in some sense to the monastery (some clearly does: the ‘brothers’ possession . . . around the canonica’), or is in the main newly given it by Ulrich (some evidently is).84 The lord-advocate is to ‘live’ from his allocation and fulfil all Ulrich’s regulations; this must mean keeping his hands off the canons’ share and 80

M. Herrgott (ed.), Genealogia diplomatica augustae gentis Habsburgicae, II (Vienna, 1737), no. 173 (1036). See below, at note 94, for his later change of heart. 82 For his choice of the word advocatus (besides dominus and dominus advocatus) see above, p. 333 note 46. 83 Besides the wording, the number of properties listed shows that those intended for the dominus advocatus are not identical with the count’s whole property there, nor even with his share after partition with his grandsons (in any case only the monastic land would need listing). The words at the end of the list—sint canonicorum, ut inde habeant victum et vestitum—are restricted by the editorial punctuation to the last curtis listed, but both sense and grammar attach it to everything following Caetera omnia. 84 The canons’ share is to include what Ulrich currently has in two places. 81

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paying for repairs and feasts out of his own; it cannot mean that he will have nothing else to live on. Conceivably one of many sons might be picked for the position in a partition of family lands, and get nothing else; but Ulrich cannot have envisaged this as a regular practice, since the advocate’s fixed share might be generous for one among half-a-dozen sons (an unusual scenario anyhow) but quite inadequate for one of two; in any case he might be an only son or only surviving adult son. Probably any son would have his own patrimony as well. The Ebersberg cartulary reflects the same kind of lordship in action, from the later tenth century up to Adalbero’s traditio to Henry III. There is the contested estate, Ahaheim, which Adalbero’s grandfather restored to the monastery only in the sense that he paid what sounds a handsome census for it while keeping it in hand, as did Adalbero’s father Ulrich; later, Ulrich ‘redeemed’ this estate by the gift of a church and its tithe, presumably meaning that the census was stopped.85 About 1015 Ulrich took an estate of Ebersberg’s (another church with tithes) to give to a friend, in return for five mansi, a transaction that looks more like an act of lordly control with some compensation than a genuinely negotiated exchange; in 1040 Adalbero made what looks a straightforward exchange with a miles, where what the count gives is Ebersberg’s and what he gets he passes on to Ebersberg.86 There is no reason to think the counts were being oppressive, as distinct from pursuing their own convenience; indeed they made many donations, sometimes for the monks’ use or ‘to supplement their food’;87 Adalbero even meant them to have Ahaheim at last, though not until his wife and he were both dead.88 From these different angles—what Beromu¨nster’s lord wished his heirs to do or not do, and what Ebersberg’s lords are recorded as doing—this looks like the kind of close paternalist control of the house and its property, or a section of its property, that a lay abbot would have had in an earlier age.89 Ebersberg (once it had become monastic) had a monk-abbot,90 where Beromu¨nster (being a house of canons) had a provost; but each of these probably controlled only what was allocated to the community.91 Some monasteries may have been under a less intimate, more hands-off lordship consisting essentially of disposal of the abbacy (doubtless along with servitium or hospitality). Hornbach, in Alsace, electing an abbot about 1008, had to 85

Ebersberg i (liber trad.) nos. 8, 16, 17 (and Chron. Ebersb. (SS XX. 9–15), 11, 12, 13). Ebersberg ii (liber concambiorum) nos. 1 (for Eberher), 9 (for Adalpert: both probably kinsmen). The 87 difference may lie simply in how Williram chose to word his record. Ibid. i nos. 27, 28, 38. 88 Ibid. i no. 35. All these entries are Williram’s notes or summaries, not transcriptions of charters. 89 It was as the monastery’s tutor that Adalbero received property by exchange with his kinsman (ibid. ii no. 9). There may be no particular significance in Ebersberg’s lord not being called advocatus in these records. 90 Ebersberg ii no. 1 (count Ulrich’s exchange which the familia approved coram Reginpoldo abbate); Chron. Ebersb., 13; ibid. 15, list of early provosts, later abbots, and lords with their wives. 91 It would be to this that the lord’s consent to transactions applied. 86


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get this accepted by the ‘patroni of the church’ (by now the junior branch of the Salians), and ran into problems because these patroni—also here called datores, ‘givers’ of the abbacy—were inclined to favour outsiders ‘whose right hands were full of gifts’.92 An interest in disposing of the abbacy profitably suggests a lack of direct exploitative hold on monastic lands. Such outside lords might be brothers or even cousins acting jointly (as perhaps at Hornbach), otherwise probably the head of a family; whereas a ‘lord advocate’ as intended at Beromu¨nster (expressly to avoid partition) might not be head of his family. In this case the succession might require explicit traditio from father to son or grandson, as done at Ebersberg and planned for Beromu¨nster. Nonetheless, both these houses came in different ways into the lordship or defence of Henry III, Ebersberg in 1039 by Adalbero’s traditio;93 Beromu¨nster in 1045 when Ulrich of Lenzburg, despite his earlier disinclination (either under pressure, or reassured by the change of ruler), put it into Henry III’s defence, and likewise his nunnery of Scha¨nnis.94 These two royal grants of defence were the last of their kind; and they made no arrangements for advocacy (count Ulrich probably expected to keep it in any case, and did).95 But around the same time, in Lotharingia, a few lay founders were giving their monasteries to ecclesiastical lords—the bishopric of Toul or the episcopal monastery Saint-Evre—while retaining the advocacy indefinitely, typically for whoever should hold the family castle, and usually the abbacy for a time at least.96 Count Rainard of Toul gave Bleurville (Vosges) to Toul under bishop Bruno, who as Leo IX confirmed Rainard’s elaborate conditions of this kind.97 It was Leo IX’s dealings with other nunneries belonging to his family and friends in Lotharingia that set the same pattern for donations to the Holy See.98 Leo himself inherited his father’s, mother’s, and two brothers’ foundation of Sainte-Croix-en-Plaine or Woffenheim, ‘left to me by hereditary right’, and subjected it ‘to our Apostolic See’, while arranging how the advocacy should pass: he had committed it to his nephew Henry, holding the castle of Egisheim; after

92 Mirac. S. Pirmini (?11th c.), c. 9 (SS XV. 33). See Doll, ‘Hornbach’, 129–31 on this family’s surviving rights or influence at Hornbach, arguably not much affected by the Ottos’ royal defence, but passing to Henry IV (above, p. 286). Patroni here is probably only elegant variation for domini or seniores, unrelated to its (disputed) use in Hornbach’s foundation charter (above, p. 183 note 20). 93 94 Whether or not repeating an earlier traditio (above, note 77). DHIII nos. 129–30. 95 Mayer argued (Fu¨rsten, 91) that Ulrich did not intend lordship to pass to Henry III and was trying to get royal defence without either formal commendation or traditio (so not needing an explicit grant of advocacy). But the monasteries were to have the same liberty as ‘other royal ones’ (ceteri, not alii), and the office of provost (or at Scha¨nnis, abbess) was to be committed to the elect ‘by royal potestas’. 96 e.g. (to Saint-Evre) the monasteries of Deuilly and of Saint-Pierre-sous-Chaˆtenois (see Boshof, 97 Epist. no. 49 (1050), PL no. 143. 661–3. ‘Kirchenvogtei’, 70–1). 98 See R. Bloch, ‘Klosterpolitik Leos IX’, esp. 197–209; P. Stintzi, ‘Leo IX. Fahrten ins Elsass’, in L. Sittler and P. Stintzi, Saint León IX, le Pape Alsacien (Colmar, 1950), 73–80.

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Henry’s death it was to go to the oldest of the castle’s ‘possessors’ (if there were several), and if no heir survived to another of ‘our kin . . . so that that advocacy shall always remain in our genus’. The advocate was entitled to dues from a particular village, and beyond that, should the monastery’s wealth increase, to one mansus in every twelve acquired.99 If he took more the abbess could appeal to the pope; if he then rejected the pope’s judgment they should get themselves another advocate, but still from the founder’s kin. The nuns were to elect the next abbess inter se if possible; and both blessing the abbess and giving her the abbacy were to belong only to the Holy See. Finally the annual render to Rome was to be a piece of goldsmith’s art: a rose weighing two ounces, so that the monastery ‘sited in my patrimony, and given every possible liberty by me, shall not be forgotten at Rome’.100 This is an extraordinary mixture of papal privilege and founder’s heir’s charter, making the clearest possible statements of personal property-right along with devotion to the Holy Cross. But Leo confirmed similar arrangements for Donauwo¨rth, founded by a nobleman Mangold for his daughter and given to the Holy See.101 Outside lordship in these nunneries, whittled down to investiture of the abbess and a ceremonial census (a gold rose, a set of vestments, a token candle), has been plainly given away to Rome or to Toul; while advocacy is carefully left with the family (more consistently so than the abbacy), but closely regulated.102 This is the beginning of a long period in Lotharingia and Germany when many lay lords of monasteries gave them to Rome or to regional bishoprics, usually retaining advocacy and with it a good deal of economic gain, pious interest, and lordly control, and—by its restriction to single heirs—a potentially firmer family base than ever before.103 In the early 1040s, however, a similar outcome could be reached in what looks a more old-fashioned way, determined more by personal fortunes. Some time before 1043, Goseck in south-east Saxony was built for monks by three powerful brothers, the cleric Adalbert and the palatine counts Dedo and Frederick, on a hillside with an old castle on it in their joint inheritance, and endowed by them (then and later) partly from their still ‘common patrimony’, partly from their divided portions which (having no sons) they could give 99

With this cf. Bleurville (above, note 97): besides a small servitium on the two patronal feast days, the advocate should have ‘a third part of the abbatia’ if called on for help. This could make sense as an occasional reward if it meant a third of the abbess’s revenues during his invited stay. 100 101 Epist. no. 30 (1049), PL 143. 635–7. Ibid. no. 32 (1049), 637–9. 102 Cf. the Habsburg foundation c.1045 of Ottmarsheim, given to Rome c.1050; count Rudolph to be advocate, then his wife, then any surviving son and his heirs, failing that a daughter (1063, DHIV no. 99; Leo IX’s privilege is lost). In contrast see Leo’s arrangements for Hohemburg/Hombourg, the holy place of his ancestor Eticho’s daughter Odilia: obligation to family memoria made him rededicate the neglected church and create a highly autonomous nunnery (1050, Epist. no. 50, PL 143. 663–4). 103 See Schmid, ‘Adel und Reform’, 305–8; id., ‘Problematik’, 42–5.


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independently (extra fratres suos).104 The foundation history (written a century later) declares of the three brothers that ‘it is perfectly clear that at that time the place belonged to them by hereditary right’ (in the context, the ‘place’ is as usual the monastery, not just its site).105 It was only Adalbert’s becoming archbishop of faraway Bremen that changed things, and at first in a thoroughly proprietary fashion, Adalbert giving up his share in the inheritance to his brothers in return for the prospect of Goseck’s coming eventually to Bremen. Almost twenty years later, probably influenced by recent examples, he tidied things up with a privilege promising free election of the abbot (to be presented to and appointed by the archbishop), and reserving advocacy to the senior layman of his stock as long as this was possible (in the event, not for long).106 Meanwhile, with the Hirsau reform in southern Germany,107 we can see a growing resolve among some founders to disengage altogether from proprietary lordship, but on assumptions as proprietary as ever. In the 1080s Cuono and Liutold, last survivors in the male line of an important family, endowed their father’s foundation Zwiefalten in northern Swabia, giving jointly their undivided inheritance from five other brothers, and something individually from their own portions.108 On Liutold’s portion claims were made by an aunt’s sons and by a brother’s widow (who was bought off). Both brothers tried so to dispose of things towards their heirs that none of them ‘could exercise any potestas or any claim on this monastery or its goods . . . by hereditary right’. Their sister Williberg’s son, count Werner of Gru¨ningen, ‘withdrew himself (se abdicavit) from this monastery and from all the estates’ in an exchange. When Cuono had died and Liutold had inherited everything—still counting as his although given to the monastery— their sister Matilda’s sons were given a castle and a curtis when they begged ‘not to be altogether deprived of such a patrimony’.109 Cuono’s precautions and Werner’s quitclaim show how claims on the endowments could amount to a claim on the monastery itself, as much in the 1080s as a century earlier. The chronicler sees the founders as having the monastery ‘in their potestas’ (with ‘advocacy and defence’ being also ‘in their hand’), until—‘lest perhaps they should convey to their heirs any potestas or tyranny to exert in the monastery, if they kept it in their dominium’—they arranged for its formal conveyance to the Holy See, with election by the monks of both abbot and advocate. The latter right was soon exercised (by choosing the great duke Welf); but only with the 104

Chron. Gozec., i cc. 1–3, 6–8 (SS X. 141–4). Ibid. i c. 1. Kinsmen of theirs had the opposite slope of the hill (i. c. 2); this does not seem to have been part of the monastic site (as Reuter saw it, Germany, 223). 106 Chron. Gozec., i. cc. 4, 7 (his charter). On Frederick (d. 1088) as advocate see above, p. 336. Cf. 107 Gerbstedt a generation later (above, p. 336–7). See below, pp. 843–7. 108 109 Like the founders of Goseck. Ortlieb of Zwiefalten, Chronicon, i (SS X. 71–83), cc. 1, 4–8. 105

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surviving founder’s consent.110 Leotold died in 1098, becoming a monk on his deathbed; he had commissioned a painting of the crucifixion for the wall above his father’s and brothers’ tombs; his and Cuono’s anniversaries were celebrated like an abbot’s; for a time at least, their memoria was intact.111

12.iii. Late Carolingian and Capetian France and Burgundy-Provence In tenth- and eleventh-century France, counts and other laymen with inherited control of monasteries were often the heirs of lay abbots put in by earlier rulers, or even of magnates who had more-or-less quietly taken control. But lay nobles did, of course, found monasteries in the tenth century, mostly the greater counts, now establishing their lineages and their territorial power (and some emerging, if ephemerally, as princes); and many more did so in the eleventh, often minor counts (self-named), viscounts, and lords of castles, enforcing their local dominance and imitating the religious patronage of the great. This pattern seems to apply over most of the West Frankish kingdom despite its great geographical diversity, and to some extent in Burgundy-Provence.1 At all levels, there were nunneries, sometimes explicitly for a daughter;2 communities of monks, some of them meant to have a high degree of autonomy; and (in northern France especially) collegiate churches of secular canons, by now quite distinct from monks (and much less demanding to found),3 but often superseded by monks before long.4 Either monks or canons might be established to serve a castle church. It was usual in the eleventh century for a new monastery or collegiate church to be based on an existing oratory or (for canons)5 parish church, sometimes in disuse or ruin, perhaps believed to have once been 110 Ortlieb of Zwiefalten, Chronicon, i (SS X. 71–83), cc. 12, 13, 15. On the tangle of claims see Schmid, ‘Problematik’, 27–8, 30; Leyser, Med. Germany, 185–6. 111 Chron., cc. 14, 17. Ortlieb (writing less than forty years later) reminds his fellows of all they owe (esp. to Liutold) and spells out the liturgical and almsgiving detail (perhaps it was being eroded). 1 See Dunbabin, France, esp. 89–100, 220–2. 2 A spectacular example from late 9th-c. Catalonia is S. Juan de las Abadesas for count Wifred’s daughter (above, p. 289 note 74), with, more unusually, S. Maria Ripoll for a son (d’Abadal, Catalunya, 157–8). It may be noted here that I have not discussed 10th–11th c. monastic foundations in Spain beyond Catalonia, because of the large number of loosely defined monasteria and the dubious status of many foundation charters (see Linage Conde, Origines, III, ‘Monasticon Hispanica’). 3 See Musset, ‘Recherches’, 7–21, 25; Lemarignier, ‘Aspects politiques’, 22–6, 30–7, and discussion 41–4; Yver, ‘Absence’, 195–200. 4 For 11th-c. Normandy see Chibnall, The World of Orderic Vitalis, 46–8; for examples, Orderic Vitalis, EH II. 130–1; III. 246–9 and n. 3; in Poitou, Tonnay-Charente (below, note 30). A few collegiate churches, however, were grand foundations, e.g. in Normandy the duke’s in Cherbourg castle; Odo Stigand’s SaintMartin of Ecajeul (Yver, ‘Absence’, 198–200). 5 Seldom monks in a parish church, but see Orderic Vitalis, HE II. 152–5 (Parnes).


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monastic. If intended for monks it was increasingly often subjected to a greater monastery, the founder either giving the church in its existing state for monks to be established there, or putting monks in first.6 Under the last Carolingian kings, especially Louis IV, some founders or their successors as far away as the Pyrenees still applied to the king for a privilege,7 though often only to confirm the monastery’s possessions and status. Founders who did seek royal defence could probably expect to retain their lordship, without need of the reservations made by earlier founders and still being made in Germany.8 Later, for lesser lords, a greater lord sometimes consented to the foundation or confirmed it; usually no more than getting credit for what he could hardly have prevented, but sometimes asserting princely authority that might bring the new foundation under his permanent control.9 But only in Normandy (where up to the 1030s it was only the dukes who founded or refounded regular monasteries)10 does it appear that for founders to put a monastery into the duke’s defence amounted, normally, to putting it under his lordship and making a real renunciation of juridical rights (though keeping, and gaining, much else).11 Even here this is more evident in the duke’s practical and ritual dealings—clearest for Saint-Evroul, founded in 1050—than in his charters.12 And in most of France we have to look elsewhere than to rulers’ privileges for founders’ intentions and practical assumptions: sometimes to the foundation charters of independent monasteries; more often to charters subjecting one monastery to another or giving an ordinary church to a monastery to be made monastic. Foundation charters for monasteries not subjected to another are quite few, and seldom informative about the founders’ intentions for the future.13 Unusually 6

Occasionally the future was explicitly left open (e.g. 1067–79, Actes abbayes caennaises no. 5; and below, 7 p. 687). Above, pp. 288–9. 8 Above, pp. 343–7, 357–9. 9 e.g. in Gascony count Bernard Tumapeler effectively took over Saint-Mont from its feckless founder (below, at note 78). 10 See Chibnall, World of Orderic, 46–8; more generally, eadem, ‘Monastic Foundations in England and Normandy, 1066–1189’. 11 See Cassandra Potts’s excellent demonstration of this, Monastic Revival, c. 6, esp. 111–18. 12 Duke William’s charter for Saint-Evroul’s founders, who ‘by common consent conveyed the place to his protection’ (tradiderunt eius tutelae; Orderic, HE II. 16–18), did not address the matter of lordship (ibid. 38–9; ADNorm. no. 122); but William invested their first abbot with the pastoral staff, and approved (or even in practice chose) subsequent abbots, besides investing them (Orderic, HE II. 16–19, 64–7, 74–5, 90–3, 144–7; see Yver, ‘Absence’, app. I, 271–9). On other baronial foundations see ibid. 202–7: monasteries freed by their founders from all claims came sooner or later under ducal defence and lordship, while a few, not so freed, remained in their founders’ lordship. See also ibid. 218 on Troarn: Robert of Belleˆme claimed to be its dominus (1101, ACPontieu no. 15) despite its ducal defence. 13 e.g. Gilduin miles’s charter for Pontlevoy (Loir-et-Cher), 1034 (Arbois de Jubainville, Hist. des Ducs de Champagne, I no. 37), giving ‘to the monks who are to serve God there’ his two existing churches at Pontlevoy ‘as freely and absolutely as I am known to hold them’; and Robert du Hommet’s (incomplete) charter for Saint-Fromond (Manche), early 11th c. (Musset, ‘Les Origines du prieure´ de Saint-Fromond’, BSAN, 53 (1956), 475–82, text 483–8).

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plain (but not in an actual foundation charter) is the potestas in San Miguel del Fay that its founder Gundwald, a great man of the Barcelona comital family, could testate to his heirs in 1041. Having founded it early in the century with his first wife, and now about to go into Spain, he made a testament leaving lands to the monastery, and other property between his daughters and his second wife. This property included the monastery itself: ‘I leave that monastery . . . in the potestas of my son-in-law Miro Garibert and my daughter Willa and her sons, and of all my posterity who are to hold Monboy after me for all time.’ And yet, the following year, he gave it to Saint-Victor of Marseilles: perhaps thinking the two destinations compatible at different levels.14 In apparent contrast is the occasional reservation in Languedoc of no more than the right or duty of protection. In 1019 Godrannus, founder of Saint-Genie`sdes-Mourgues for his daughter, laid down that if anyone harmed it his elder son Helizar should have the potestas of helping and defending it, along with ‘any son of his to whom he promises this, or to whom God shall give the greater prosperity in this world’; but nothing is said about the long term, and perhaps it was chiefly in their sister’s time that his sons were to be at hand.15 Nine years later similar provision was made for the nunnery of Gallargues, subjected (but not clearly given) to Saint-Genie`s-des-Mourgues: the founder Rostagnus and one of his sons, or whichever of his descendants had inherited Gallargues, were to ‘hold it for providing and defending, for their souls’ remedy’ (that is, not requiring anything else but that).16 This is like the minimal lordship kept in some ninthcentury foundations; though Rostagnus, like Gundwald, does not entrust his foundation vaguely to virtuous descendants but ties it to a particular family castle. In the less deep south, several foundation charters are more or less modelled on William the Pious’s for Cluny. But whereas that seems in no way misleading as to William’s total renouncing of lordship (or Ebbo’s at Deóls, or count Raymond’s at Thomie`res),17 others may be more formulaic. In the kingdom of Burgundy in 985, count Lambert and his wife founded a monastery at the existing church of Saint-Marcel of Sauzet; they gave its endowment to God, the saint, two named monks, and future monks; it was to be subject to no other place, but only to St Peter, paying a census of 5 solidi to Rome; its abbot was to be regular, and anyone trying to ‘put an abbot’ there for gold or silver should incur the enmity of all the saints and especially of St Benedict and his flock; they have made this donatio for nothing but the monks’ prayers; the anathema clause is elaborate and 14

St-Victor nos. 1048, 1051. For its earlier history see nos. 1044, 1049, 1045 (of 996, 1006, 1031). HL V no. 176 (Gard); see below, at note 54. 16 Ibid. V no. 188 (1028). An obscurity in the preceding passage makes it unclear whether the founders’ defence was to come into force at Gallargues only if Saint-Genie`s came to grief. 17 See below, pp. 835, 836. 15


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gruesome.18 The monastery was founded for the souls of Lambert and his wife, their sons, and all their relations living or dead, but the family reserves no power in it; it might have been as autonomous as Cluny.19 Yet in 1037, after neglect by recent abbots, Ademar, the then count of Valence, with his wife and five sons could ‘give’ the place to Cluny ‘to possess and ordain . . . in hereditary right and do whatever they wish with it’, receiving confraternity with the monks of Cluny for themselves, their kinsmen and friends, and for the good of count Lambert’s soul.20 No condition was made in the charter about reform; the decayed monastery is treated like any private church, as property to dispose of for whatever was on offer (here 10 ounces of gold besides their spiritual benefits); the foundation charter with its suggestion of autonomy survived only as part of Cluny’s title deeds. Any such donation to a great monastery—most often to Cluny or, in the last third of the eleventh century, to Saint-Victor of Marseilles across a wide swathe from Provence to Catalonia21—was itself an assertion of property right, explicit in varying degrees. The act is called a donum, donatio, or traditio; the dispositive words are typically ‘I donate and convey’, ‘give, grant, and relinquish’ the monastery or church. The recipient (the great church or its head and his successors) is to have it perpetually, in potestas, or in ius and dominium, or all of these; or ‘in hereditary right’, and ‘to do what they wish with it’,22 or (to an abbot) ‘in his own free and frank alod’.23 The donor’s right to give it is implied by all this, but sometimes spelt out: he is giving ‘something of our possessions’, or ‘out of our own inheritance’, or ‘our own alod’,24 or more narrowly de fundis voce possessionis, by right of possessing the site;25 it was ‘established under our potestas’, or has ‘come into my hands by succession to my kinsmen’, or ‘my father Fulk left it me by inheritance’;26 countess Beatrix of Beárn giving Saint-Savin-de-Rustan is concerned for the soul of her father ‘from whose hereditary right it came to me’.27 When the time came (not always immediately)28 for withdrawal or traditio, the symbolic acts sometimes reported are more eloquent than any words of donation or quitclaim—for instance for Saint-Flour in Auvergne, whose long-drawn-out 18 Cluny no. 1715, an original; also in Cart. C. In 985/6 king Conrad confirmed the foundation and gave it immunity and free election (ibid. no. 1716 ¼ Drud. no. 51). 19 Cluny’s actual autonomy probably depended on the collapse of William the Pious’s duchy after his 20 Cluny no. 2921. time as much as on respect for his intentions. 21 See Cowdrey, Cluniacs (discussing many of the following 11th-c. examples); Rosenwein, Rhinoceros Bound, 43–55; P. Schmid, ‘Marseiller Kirchenstaats’, 179–80, 183, 185–8, 194. 22 e.g. (between early 11th and early 12th c.) Cluny nos. 2921, St-Julien, Tours no. 9, Le´zat no. 299, Le´rins 23 no. 167, St-Victor no. 820, St-Beńigne no. 295, and countless more. HL V no. 292. 24 Le´zat no. 299, Gellone nos. 6/381/382, St-Victor no. 701. Cf. ADNorm. no. 162; and earlier, countess Adelaide giving Romainmoutier as res iuris mei Cluny no. 379. 25 Gellone no. 384 see below, at note 95. 26 St-Victor no. 825 (1073), Cluny no. 3491 (1076), HL V no. 383 (1093); cf. Cluny no. 3402 (1064). 27 28 St-Victor no. 818 (1087). e.g. St-Beńigne no. 356 (below, note 85).

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development into a priory of Cluny (c.996–1025) required a firm traditio to abbot Odilo by its intermittently penitent marauding lords. First Astorg (a clerk, related to Odilo) promised him the oratory; Astorg’s successor Amblard of Brezons favoured the plan; but their lord Amblard of Nonette wanted the rocky site for a fortress, and although deep trouble about a murder forced him to consent, he repeatedly went back on this. Amblard of Brezons moved on his own to invest Odilo with the oratory, putting his charter of donation on the altar and having it read out to the neighbouring lords. But when Amblard of Nonette finally gave in, the two Amblards made a much more dramatic ritual withdrawal from lordship: coming to the monastery door as strangers, asking for bread, wine, and a jug of water, and eating and drinking these outside under an ash tree.29 When Bego, in the same region, subjecting Figeac to Cluny, ‘exiled his progeny from the place and rendered them banished for ever’, this may have been done by some similar piece of theatre.30 Donation charters can sometimes point to the kind of relationship intended for the future or prevailing in the past: whether, that is, this was outside lordship or a closer, directly exploitative property-right. What (if anything) a donor explicitly forgoes may be evidence for what he has had, or may reveal only what the monks fear on general grounds.31 What (if anything) he reserves probably does tell us something about the past, if the church is not new; and about the intentions that he is prepared to admit and wants to safeguard. He may reserve remnants of a fairly demanding former lordship. These may consist of ‘customs’, services, hospitality; in the Midi, dominicatura (lordly rights): things that may go with being a ruler, or derive from a past ruler even if this has been forgotten.32 On the other hand the remnants may be houses or lands belonging to the church but kept in the lords’ possession, or work by the monastery’s tenants in the vintage, suggesting a past of close exploiting lordship.33 These different kinds of reservation— customs, possessions, tenants’ work—probably hung together in the minds of lords, undifferentiated,34 as things they could have or do. 29 St-Flour nos. V (epitome of foundation charters), VI (inventory and foundation history), 1–6. For the wider story, ibid. pp. clvii–clxxxv (editor’s lively though somewhat inconsistent account); Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 83–5. 30 Cluny no. 3469 (1074). Cf. donation of Tonnay-Charente to Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly, 1090 (Ange´ly no. 207); done first at Ange´ly, but later, at Tonnay, the lord and his sons were publicly ‘led out and removed’. 31 e.g. in the Toulousain (1027, Le´zat no. 299), no taking of pledges as fideiussores (using monastic property as security in judicial processes?), hospitality, census, or setting up any house to live in there; but usually less specific: services or customs generally, or ‘whatever I have hitherto had’ (e.g. HL V no. 270; St-Victor no. 820; from the north, ACFlandres no. 7 (1087); Saint-Fromond, above, note 13). 32 See below, at notes 109–11. 33 e.g. the Durforts at Saint-Martin-des-Puits (below, at note 69). Vintage work might be merely neighbourly, but not if its commutation was substantial (see next note). 34 e.g. viscount Ademar’s reservations in Saint-Martial, Limoges (1062, Cluny no. 3383)—200s. ‘for the vintage’, loan of a packhorse and man for military service, one night’s hospitality (and some jurisdiction) for the count of Poitou.


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Behind some of the possessions mentioned as in the lord’s hands may lie an unclear, uncompleted, postponed, or overturned endowment. Gundland’s bequest to San Miguel del Fay included lands he had given it long ago. More strikingly, in 1075 count Roger of Foix and his wife Sicard gave to Cluny a stretch of the Arie`ge valley including their castle of Lordat and some fifteen villages with a few churches, ‘to hold and possess for ever by right of property’, for abbot Hugh to ‘begin a monastery’; but by 1076 this plan had been drastically modified: less than a third of the endowment was to support the newly built church and a single monk, the rest to be kept for life by Roger and Sicard.35 Otherwise, what lies behind possessions either reserved or surrendered may be the practical power— never itself spelt out36—to extract leases or benefices of monastic land, for family members or for fighting men. This has indeed been seen as a motive for foundation, creating a store, accessible under amenable abbots, of family land otherwise threatened by partition or political misfortune.37 But the power itself (in any case not limitless) was not peculiar to founders’ heirs or dependent on any ancestral claim to the land; lay abbots, over-powerful advocates, and princes with or without formal advocacy, all had it in some degree.38 Abbo of Fleury saw Fulk Nerra’s remark about preferring to restore old monasteries rather than build new ones as humbug, because of his inroads on the property of Saint-Pierre-de-Ferrie`res for lands for his men.39 It was perhaps largely in the hope of preventing such demands by his heir that a landowner in the Rouergue, Saluster, giving an embryonic monastery to Vabres about 984, specified that after his death, Odobellus—probably his chosen or natural heir elsewhere—should be for the monastery ‘not heir but tutor and defender’. His charter here echoes Vabres’s own foundation charter of 862;40 but adapting this for a dependency has made the passage complement the forbidding of alienations by Vabres itself;41 so minimizing Odobellus’s claim to extort land grants, while giving him a protective role as a shadow of lordship forgone. 35 Cluny nos. 3480 (Barive copy), 3500 (A and B; B makes better sense). Roger had earlier given the land to Sicard although holding it with her for life; perhaps this caused difficulties. 36 Bachrach (‘Geoffrey Greymantle’, 8, 37) sees the auxilium mentioned in count Geoffrey’s ‘reform’ charter for Saint-Aubin (St-Aubin no. 2) as meaning this; but auxilium here is God’s help which Geoffrey hopes for if he restores Saint-Aubin’s land. 37 See Lewis, Development, 243–4. Dierkens on the founding of Waulsort in Lotharingia (Abbayes, 174, 186) shows more convincingly how such a foundation might bypass political uncertainties. 38 In the Midi, property might be in lay hands as part of a commenda contract (see below, at note 75), not necessarily either held or disposed of by the founder family. 39 Abbo’s letter to Gregory V (epist. 1, PL 139. 419–21) does not justify calling the count’s control ‘absolute’ (as Bachrach, ‘Geoffrey Greymantle’, 15 and n. 59). On Saint-Pierre (probably originally royal) see Guillot, Comte, I. 166. 40 Extract in HL V no. 137 (iv); see index: Vabres. Saluster may have had no son living (his donation was for his own, his father’s, his wife’s, and three named sons’ souls). 41 It invokes the count of Albi to take the monastery away from Vabres in case of misappropriation of its res, and give it to Saint-Pons.

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This limitation could have only moral force, and at first glance it contrasts with what is occasionally found, in the next century, in northern France: a requirement that the monks of a priory regard themselves as holding the monastery or its lands from the founder and his heirs. On the fringes of Brittany in 1037 a knight Manigenius rebuilt and endowed the ruined monastery of Saint-Cyr-le`s-Rennes, applied to Saint-Julien of Tours for help in manning it, and set it under the government of the abbot and his successors; but the monks of Saint-Cyr were to ‘believe themselves to hold the monastery for all time from me and my son or successor’.42 However, whether or not ‘holding from’ meant recognizing a superior lordship, the point may be chiefly that they should know themselves beholden to him; and his practical arrangements—he is to report to the abbot of Saint-Julien anything he finds amiss, after trying two or three times to correct the monks himself—define the role of a concerned patron (probably anxious for his family’s memoria), rather than the rights of a lord.43 By the end of the eleventh century, however, a monastery’s tenure from its founder might be more legalistically asserted: a knight Roscelin holding a village church in benefice from the archbishop of Sens obtained the archbishop’s leave to give it to Cluny for a monastery, in such a way that his heir should still hold it from the archbishop, while the monks (that is, probably, those established at Cannes-Ećluse) were to ‘have it through him’ (Roscelin’s heir).44 What would most visibly mark the founder’s heir’s position as an outside lord with more than simple patronal concern was his exercising the right of investing the abbot, abbess, or other head; in Normandy if the duke had these powers in other men’s foundations, as at Saint-E´vroul, it indicated that the founders had made him the monastery’s lord.45 Although in Languedoc some such ceremonial right could be reserved in isolation when a monastery was given away,46 and elsewhere might need to be specified as going with the monastery,47 in monasteries not given away it seems in general not to need spelling out. In 1003 countess Emma of Poitou got Silvester II to confirm that in her foundation at Bourgueil the elected abbot should be ‘presented’ to the duke of Aquitaine and the duke should make him the ‘gift’ of it;48 but Bourgueil’s situation in Anjou, exposed to the count of Anjou’s encroachment, explains this. For Fulk Nerra’s own foundation at Ronceray, it is not any comital charter but the nuns’ election 42 St-Julien nos. 13 (Manigenius’s first-person charter), 14 (notice, making clearer that it is the monks sent to Saint-Cyr who should ‘hope’ to hold the monastery from the founder and his heirs). 43 This provision appears only in no. 14. 44 45 St-Martin-des-Champs no. 68 (1062–96), ¼ Cluny no. 3386. Above, note 12. 46 Below, at notes 112–15. 47 The abbot of Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly accepting the abbey of Tonnay-Charente (above, note 30) specified that he and his successors were to invest any new abbot with the pastoral staff. 48 ipse ei donum praebeat (PL 139. 285–6).


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record that shows them in 1028 following the procedure that would be recorded in 1036 at the old monastery of Saint-Aubin: election with the count’s consent, and investiture of the elect by the count.49 Later, however, when investiture had become controversial, there are comital privileges in Flanders that expressly reserve investiture in collegiate churches to the founder’s heirs: in 1087 to the count himself at Tronchiennes (‘which from the beginning of its foundation has been in my ancestors’ hands’), freeing it without any reservation except ‘that I and my descendants shall give the provostry’; and in 1090 to Roger castellan of Lille at Phalempin (‘which his ancestors’ devotion built and which came to him by hereditary right’), where it is clearly Roger that is ‘the advocate to whom giving the provostry belongs’, who is to give it free of charge to the provostelect.50 Foundation charters seldom if ever claim for the founder’s heirs, in so many words, the actual choice of head (after the first).51 Nor can we infer that lords had had this right in the past from their putting it into the hands of a reforming abbot or congregation (as was normal in eleventh-century donations to Cluny).52 Very occasionally a lord records his act of choice as well as investiture, as in 949 count Borrel of Barcelona ‘chooses and proclaims’ a new abbess (already ‘chosen’ by his late father) for San Juan de las Abadesas, and ‘conveys the place’ to her;53 or in Languedoc the founder’s sons (along with local grandees and ‘clergy and people’—a throng of interested neighbours) at Saint-Genie`s-des-Mourgues in 1025. But that was for the first abbess, their sister Judith (chosen, they implausibly claim, after long consideration), for whom and with whose inheritance the nunnery was founded.54 Saint-Genie`s’s next election (of Judith’s niece), in 1043, is recorded in the nuns’ own record, as is an election forty years earlier at NotreDame-des-Moustiers in Provence (three nuns choosing the fourth): flowery 49 See Guillot, Comte, I. 175–6, and II. no. C 43; for Saint-Aubin, ibid. 190–1 and n. 243. Cf. electionrecord for Saint-Florent, Saumur, 1055 (ibid. 182–3): the elect was presented to count Geoffrey ‘of whose ius our monastery is’. 50 ACFlandres nos. 7 (privilege from Robert I’s son Robert) and 10 (privilege obtained by Roger from Robert I. ‘Advocate’ here is used as equivalent to ‘lord’, perhaps to distinguish him clearly from the count). 51 Even consent is seldom specified. Count Arnulf I did so for St Peter’s, Ghent, 941: see E. Sabbe, ‘Deux points concernant l’hist. de St-Pierre . . . ’, Revue Beń., 47 (1935) 52–61, on the late 11th-c. attempt to conceal this requirement by blacking it out in the charter and scratching it out in the cartulary. In Catalonia cf. Urgellia I no. 36 (S. Maria de Serrateix, 977). 52 Viscount Ademar II giving Saint-Martial to Cluny in 1062 (above, note 34) reveals that he and his ancestors have appointed abbots when he deplores their ‘selling the rule of souls to abbots buying it’ (Cluny no. 3383). 53 Archivo condal no. 128, recorded as hec eleccio et proclamacio (claiming to have had the nuns’ and others’ counsel). 54 HL V no. 183, and above, at note 15. Even this is imprecise as to who have (notionally) ‘chosen’ Judith; it seems to be her two brothers who finally say ‘we choose and bless Judith as abbess . . . ’. The founders’ choice of first head was normal everywhere, and in less ceremonious societies than the Midi could be put into effect by the bishop’s blessing.

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documents with elegant sentiments, each recording the founder’s or heirs’ presence at the abbess’s election or blessing, as if that were their entire role.55 Further north, in Anjou, election records sometimes record the count’s consent as well as the investiture that followed and implied this. So what (if anything) is named as a right, or recorded as publicly exercised, is in general only a formal, procedural role. All this is evidence neither for nor against the real choice lying with the founders’ heirs; as it normally would in a small family nunnery, but might not— after the founders’ time—in a large male monastery subject to competing influences.56 This topic is too large to embark on here. It is worth noting, however, that appointing the first head was not always part of the initial foundation process; it could happen after years of informal rule by the founders.57 Maillezais in the Vendeé was built in the late tenth century by count William IV and his wife Emma, manned with monks under a prior from Saint-Julien of Tours, its church consecrated, and its endowment given ‘to the place and the monks’;58 it was not until husband and wife had quarrelled and come together again, William had grown old and retired to Saint-Cyprien, and their son William the Great had succeeded him, that mother and son decided on the need for an abbot and ‘appointed’ their choice.59 The Maillezais chronicler claims that the monks of Emma’s foundation, Bourgueil, wanting the same man to be their own (third) abbot, begged duke William for this on the grounds that the care of both churches, ‘founded by him and his mother, belonged to him by founder’s right’.60 In longer-established monasteries, there is no lack of chronicle or epistolary evidence for high-handed dealings by the counts (mostly) who controlled them, expelling monks or abbots who resisted their reforms or otherwise displeased them.61 But often this looks more like political power than formal lordship;62 and without a more consistent control over the choice (or even survival) of heads than seems to be provable, we could hardly see it as property. 55

HL V no. 221 (1043); St-Victor no. 1053 (1004). On such influences see the widely applicable remarks of John Nightingale, Gorze Reform, 9–10, 36, 87–105, 165–6. Even when the first head of a small monastery was the founder’s son (see index: Moirax), this was probably not the prime purpose of the foundation. See, however (much earlier), S. Maria, Ripoll (above, note 2). 57 At Saint-Genie`s-des-Mourgues (founded 1019) the notional question in 1025 (above, note 54) was ‘who should be the nuns’ custos after our father’ (below, at note 76). 58 Peter of Maillezais, Relatio, I. i–ii (PL 146. 1252–4), written mid-11th c. 59 Ibid. I. v–vii (cols. 1255–60. William IV died 995). The verb used (twice) is praeficere. The chosen monk Theodolin insisted on formal election by his fellow monks, and became a famous reforming abbot. 60 Ibid. II. iii (cols. 1264–5). Emma had founded Bourgueil on her home ground during the separation. 61 e.g. count Landric of Nevers at Ve´zelay, 1026 (Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 86); count of La Perche at Nogentle-Rotrou, late 11th c. (ibid. 105). 62 The lords of La Sauve could secure the priory there for a monk who paid them to do so, a generation after the family had given it to Gellone (below, at note 93). 56


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However, there were individuals and families who seem to have had a recognized claim, not just as otherwise hands-off outside lords to invest at least notionally elected abbots, but rather to be abbot, or provide an abbot from the family, or fill the abbot’s place as direct exploiter and possessor of monastic property. It would be facile to say that a lord who can exploit the property regularly must ipso facto be abbot (he might have mutated without that from occasional guest to permanent occupant);63 but if we look at instances of close possessive management by lords, it does seem often to be explained by their quite specifically having the abbacy. When a lord gives an abbatia to a greater church it may usually be translatable by ‘abbey’, the monastery itself with its property; but sometimes it should probably be ‘abbacy’, the office and possessions of abbot.64 In the case of a small religious house with possessions not divided between head and community, having the abbacy could in any case amount to possession of the whole monastery.65 In the tenth century, in Picardy, it may have been this that the layman Eilbert conveyed as the abbatia of Homblie`res to his lord count Albert of Vermandois. We could think it just a brute occupation of land and buildings by Eilbert, were nothing known about him; but since he and his wife founded two other monasteries and supported reform, he had probably acquired the abbacy of Homblie`res after its last abbess’s death, in order to refound it for monks on a new site that he held by the count’s benefice. What count Albert then gave into Louis IV’s ditio was (if anything) the outside lordship.66 In the Limousin, perhaps about 970, when count Bernard of Pe´rigord ‘feared to retain under his potestas’ the irregular community of Saint-Soar of Genouillac, what he gave to its new abbot and monks was ‘the place with the whole abbatia belonging to it’;67 it sounds as if his potestas had been direct exploitation, perhaps as lay abbot. Something of the same kind, in Normandy some sixty years later, may explain duke Robert I’s surrender to Mont-Saint-Michel of ‘its altar and the whole monastery, which my predecessors hitherto claimed for themselves’; the monks are to have whatever is offered by the faithful to God and St Michael, and to live a religious life in peace under Robert’s and his heirs’ protection. If the dukes had indeed been taking offerings—holding the ‘altar’—this may have been 63

See Blair, Church, 281–6. The abbacia monasterii of Saint-Chinian (?1102, HL V no. 411. ii) sounds like abbacy or an abbot’s part; cf. Saint-Antonin of Fre´delas (1111, ibid. no. 438). But when a miles of Tours gave to Saint-Julien ‘to have perpetually’ the abbatia of Saint-Loup (a former nunnery, evidently deserted), this probably meant the physical church and buildings (1024, St-Julien nos. 9, 10); cf. Cubie`res (Aude), below, note 101. 65 Above, p. 318. 66 ALouIV no. 32 (949; see above, p. 289). See Homblie`res, introd. 1–4; Dierkens, Abbayes, 174–87. Another abbacy apparently acquired for reform was Fleury’s, which a count Elisiard solicited from king Ralph and conveyed to Odo of Cluny (Vita Odonis, iii. 8, PL 133. 80–1). 67 La Reóle no. 135 (‘970’, but the case for this seems flimsy). The emphasis on abbatia is repeated: locum cum omni abbatia . . . de mea dominatione transfero . . . ut tam coenobium quam omnem abbatiam . . . teneant. 64

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by virtue of possessing the abbacy;68 now they step back into outside lordship. In Languedoc late in the eleventh century, it was the abbatia that Bertrand of Durfort’s father Fulk had ‘left me by inheritance’ at Saint-Martin-des-Puits, and that now, ‘recognizing that I have wrongfully held it’, he gave to Lagrasse with the consent of his brothers and cousins and all their sons; this probably did mean abbacy, since the family had a close hold here on possessions and landlord rights, to give or keep.69 There were minor or middling lords or families in physical possession of monasteries and their endowments in tenth- and eleventh-century France, where with or without the word abbatia it is likely or evident that abbacy (or what amounted to that) had been granted them by a ruler (king or count).70 But since lay abbots or their heirs (at whatever level) might well have rebuilt or re-endowed or reformed their monasteries, and have the proprietary attitudes that went with that, it may be artificial to distinguish them from founders’ heirs; or not so much artificial as difficult. An example of this problem, in the duchy of Burgundy, is the position of Aimo, count of Bolenois, who held the abbatia of Sexfontaines from the count-bishop of Langres.71 In 1019 he got from bishop Lambert an extension of what sounds like a lease, ‘to possess the abbey for improvement’ (in melius augmentando) and keep clerks there, for the lives of his wife and two sons. The sons were to hold it (evidently in succession) ‘by right of dominatio’, in fidelity to the bishop; after their deaths the abbey was to be restored to the bishops’ dominatio. These emphatic terms suggest that Aimo had, and his sons were to have, complete control short of disposal, of what can be rendered equally well as ‘abbacy’ or ‘abbey’. Yet in 1030 Aimo did dispose of it, offering it (with the bishop’s consent) to William of Volpiano at Dijon, who accepted it provided that all its possessions were set under the abbots of Dijon to deal with as their own. Soon afterwards the next bishop referred to the monastery as having been given to Dijon ‘by perpetual gift’, and count Otto confirmed his father Aimo’s donation as made ‘by perpetual traditio’. Aimo’s charter of 1030 spoke of the monastery as ‘built by his predecessors’ in his castle of Sexfontaines; perhaps the castle itself had come to the counts by episcopal benefice.72 68 ADNorm. no. 73 (1027–35). Cf. count William of Nevers’s hold on the ‘altar’ of the collegiate church Saint-E´tienne, Nevers, as well as on ‘customs’ of the abbatia (1063, Cluny no. 3388). 69 HL V no. 383 (1093). But two donors of abbatiae to abbot Hugh of Cluny—viscount Ademar II (SaintMartial, 1062) and count Raymond (Saint-Gilles, 1066)—were evidently not claiming to have enjoyed the abbacy themselves: their reservations (and Ademar’s remorse) were those of outside lords (above, notes 34, 52; below, notes 109, 112–14). 70 e.g. Josseran lord of Uxelles’s hold on Saint-Laurens-le`s-Maˆcon (1074, Cluny no. 3475; Duby, Socie´te´ maˆconnaise, 158); Cadilo’s and his descendant Eon of Blaison’s hold on Saint-Le´zin, Angers (above, p. 326 note 118). See also above, p. 318. 71 Founded by a monk Widrad in 878 (above, p. 352), decayed in 10th c. in the hands of his family, lords of the castle there (Bulst, Klosterreform, 52–3), at some point coming to Langres. 72 St-Beńigne nos. 266, 295, 314, 316.


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The other way round, it may be clear enough that a founder or his heir is acting as lay or secular abbot. In 943–4 an extremely rich deacon Sulpicius (or Simplicius), with his two brothers, gave their ‘monastery’ Sainte-Marie-de-Camon with lavish new endowments to Lagrasse, out of their ius and into Lagrasse’s dominium and potestas;73 Sulpicius reserved life tenure for himself and afterwards for two nephews in succession, provided they would keep the Rule of St Benedict under the abbot of Lagrasse’s authority; the latter was to appoint a provost.74 This life tenure must have brought Sulpicius and his nephews much of what an abbot of Camon might otherwise have had; and fifteen years later Sulpicius (still not a monk, though his successors were expected to be) appears as ‘abbot and deacon’, arranging a commenda for the management of property by one of his kinsmen.75 The founder of Saint-Genie`s-des-Mourgues early in the eleventh century was evidently filling the abbess’s place in his lifetime: it was not until his death that his sons made their sister abbess, six years after its foundation; they spoke of him as the monastery’s custos and instructor (planner or arranger).76 What Gundwald left to his family in 1041 was probably outside lordship of San Miguel del Fay; but his own position, as founder, was not far off that of abbot: when in 1044 he negotiated a loan of 10 ounces of gold from the monastery to the bishop of Barcelona, the pledge was made ‘to the Lord and . . . the monastery and you Gundwald and the monks’ (though Gundwald gave his claim on the pledge to the monastery, and had probably produced the loan himself).77 Late in the eleventh century a lay founder or his heir could be called abbot, as in the remote past: the feckless Gascon knight who began the foundation of Saint-Mont and entered it after long delay is called its abbot by count Bernard Tumapeler; at Beaugency on the Loire, Lancelin was ‘abbot and lord’ of the canons of his own castle chapel.78 So throughout this period, in these regions, many monasteries were under the outside lordship of their founders, founders’ heirs or lay abbots’ heirs, and often under some degree of direct exploiting possession, unless and until they were disposed of—in proprietary terms—to greater monasteries. But it should not be supposed that there was always and necessarily some person or group that was 73 Or dominium and potestas were what they gave (the grammar is ambiguous): either way it was their own. The church seems to be the brothers’ common property but perhaps in Sulpicius’s possession (the alods and lesser churches given with it are their separate properties, Sulpicius giving most). 74 A Camon monk or one sent from Lagrasse (Magnou-Nortier’s emendation, Socie´te´, 409). The charter (cartulary copy, Lagrasse no. 54) is long, ungrammatical, and frequently switches person. 75 Lagrasse no. 76 (959). See Lauranson-Rosaz, Auvergne, 243–8, on secular abbots in the Midi dis76 Above, notes 54, 57. tributing commendae. 77 St-Victor no. 1047 (the bishop’s acknowledgment, with Gundwald’s donation at the end). That Gundwald’s testament (above, note 14) mentions his having some of his own donations in hand ‘by the monastery’s benefice’ is compatible with his being lay or secular abbot, if these lands were the convent’s. 78 St-Mont no. 7 (1062; see below, p. 639); Vendoˆme no. 301 (1081).

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thought of as lord or proprietor of a monastery. It might, like Cluny, be positively intended by its founder to be fully autonomous under an internally designated or elected abbot needing no outsider’s investiture;79 or there might at its foundation be no particular expectations about lordship one way or the other; or the focus of lordship might be left in doubt. There were patterns of foundation that left no obvious founder or founder’s heir as outside lord. In the early tenth century, when a foundation could still be made by an independent landowner as a monk-abbot,80 the tendency would be towards autonomy since he could choose internal heirs; especially where (as for Berno’s foundation Gigny, and Cluny which he built) there was no securely established regional ruling power.81 Later, a prospective head was sometimes so closely involved in a foundation or refoundation as to have at least a subordinate property-right in it. One such was the clerk Bilenus, bent on restoring and releasing from ‘captivity’ the old and once rich monastery of Saint-Victor at Nevers where he had been brought up; he persuaded its current holder Frotard (evidently a dilapidating lay abbot) to relinquish the church to count William, who then ‘gave it as a gift’ to Bilenus, ‘taking nothing in exchange’ (though the counts remained its effective lords).82 Another was the monk Pons on the Provençal coast, early in the eleventh century, who supposedly ‘chose for himself ’ a site near Vence where there was a group of deserted churches, persuaded the local principes (of the Vence or Orange family) to free it from any subjection to clergy or laity, created the monastery of Saint-Ve´ran (La Daurade), and later as abbot—fearing a decline in its prestige after his death—gave it to Le´rins. But it could almost as well be represented (and tends now to be seen) as founded for Pons, and eventually given to Le´rins, by the lay lords.83 Then there were manifestations of the eremitical movement: men, often penitent knights, who settled in the woods in groups of up to half-a-dozen, sometimes on their leader’s own land84 but often depending on local lords to allow them their site.85 Such were the six knights who in the late eleventh century 79 See below, p. 835; summed up in Louis IV’s confirmation: to be ‘free and absolved from all secular domination, as well of kings as of all rulers, or kinsmen of William’s’ (939, ALouIV no. 10). 80 81 For Gerard of Brogne see above, p. 352 at note 101. Above, p. 352. 82 ` Martene and Durand, Amplissima collectio, I (Paris, 1724), 434–6: narrative part of Henry I’s diploma of confirmation (see Soehneé, Catal. des Actes de Henri I (Paris, 1907), no. 98). Cf. in Catalonia the priest or monk founders of Grau d’Escales, 960, and S. Maria Serrateix, 977, under the brothers count Oliba and bp. Miro (Urgellia, I nos. 34, 36). 83 Le´rins nos. 146 (narrative focused on Pons, written at Le´rins for abbot Audibert, 1046–82); 154 bis (the regional lords’ foundation charter, 1033, finalizing the endowment and forbidding any ditio or dominatio); 147 (Pons’s donation to Le´rins, 1050); and 144, 149, 152–4, 156, 159 (Vence and Orange family members’ benefactions, confirmation of Pons’s donation, and later surrender of their own proprietary claims on it). 84 See Poly, Provence, 69, 190. Herluin’s at Bec; Nilus’s at Rossano in Calabria. 85 e.g. Vignory, where two brothers settled as solitaries in a wood by the castle, built a church and living-quarters, and gave it with the castle lords’ consent to Saint-Beńigne, Dijon, retaining their potestas in it for life (1081–1113, St-Beńigne no. 356). Cf. Molesme (below, note 88).


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set themselves up at Afflighem in Flanders, on a site belonging to the ruler and with piecemeal endowments from knightly families; there seems to be no one acknowledged founder.86 Indeed there was a latent possibility of the foundermembers seeing themselves as owning the monastery: one of the original founders, who had got out and returned to the world, tried to claim one-sixth of the whole property in its developed state, not as retrieving what he had put into the endowment (in fact the founder-members seem to have brought no land with them) but on the grounds that as one of the original six ‘a sixth part of the possessions belonged to him’.87 There were also collective or multiple foundations so complicated that identifying a founder’s heir as lord or patron was perhaps never envisaged.88 Aniane’s priory of Le Rozier, at the junction of the Tarn and Jonte in their deep, winding gorges through the Causses, might have been seen as founded by two sets of brothers who possessed the church there and gave it to Aniane for the purpose; or by one among them, Deusdet, who built the monastery, bought out his brothers, endowed it from his own inheritance and acquisitions, and ruled it as a monk and rector; or by all these and the score or more of neighbours whose individual gifts and sales to Deusdet, of lands, tithes, and shares of churches, were recorded in a long memorandum, drawn up in their collective name as ‘the men of Tarn and Jonte’, describing the outcome as a single honor that they had given to the new monastery and to Aniane and had sworn to respect.89 The uncertainty hardly mattered, since they all gave it in the end to Aniane and made no reservations, while doubtless most of them had sons accepted as monks and eligible as prior, besides prayers, masses, and burial-places. A background of multiple endowment, or the more usual cumulative benefactions from friends and neighbours, could lead to a plurality of links with local families,90 none of them lords of the monastery. 86 According to the exordium (Chron. Affligemense, SS IX. 407–16) countess Adela (Baldwin V’s widow) and her sons ‘whose alod it is’ consented (c. 4), and count Henry of Louvain gave them land and ‘liberty’ (c. 7); count Henry may have been the real founder, but his foundation charter (first in the cartulary) is a forgery (G. Despy, ‘La Fausse Charte de fondation de l’abbaye d’Affligem (1086) et l’histoire ancienne de Wavre’, Waurensia: Bull. du Cercle Hist. et Archeól. de Wavre et de la Re´gion, 26 (1977)). As for the exordium, C. Dereine’s case for its general plausibility (dating its cc. 1–17 to c.1125), ‘La Critique de l’‘‘Exordium Affligemense’’ et les origines de l’Abbaye d’Affligem’, Cahiers bruxellois, 14 (1969), still seems convincing after Despy’s contrary case in 1977 (op. cit., 71–5, 78–9). 87 Chron. Afflig., c. 7. The monks were advised to reply that once he had left, of his own accord, ‘he could no longer have a share in their common property’. 88 A relatively simple instance was Molesme’s endowment by a number of men and women giving their portions of a small fragmented alod (Molesme no. I. 2; introd. 113–15). Molesme was probably always expected to be autonomous. 89 Aniane nos. 214 (composite charter), 215–17 (brevis commemorationis, printed in three sections), editorially dated ‘1036–61’; and a new composite charter, 1075 (ibid. no. 212) which Aniane must have organized to be shorter, simpler, less eccentric, and properly involving the diocesan. 90 e.g. Orderic Vitalis (HE III. 204–7, 210–11) on Maule priory. See Chibnall, World, 17–29, 68–79; Harper-Bill, ‘Piety of the Anglo-Norman Knightly Class’, 68–71; Lynch, Simoniacal Entry, 27–36, 40–9; Bull, Knightly Piety, 140–53.

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Even where the founder’s identity was obvious, he might (without either giving the monastery away or clearly renouncing lordship) retain in practice only a vague patronal concern and an expectation of favours;91 or he might die leaving—intentionally or not—the monks to choose a protector. Tulle in the Limousin first took on their refounder viscount Ademar’s illegitimate son, giving him up in disgust when he fled from the prospect of visiting them; to their next choice, viscount Bernard of Turenne, they granted—for life only, they hoped— the castle of Monceaux that Ademar had given them; thereafter they were landed with whoever took possession of the castle (beginning with Bernard’s two sonsin-law), and were lucky if they had some protection in exchange.92 Giving a monastery away, the obvious indication of lordship, was sometimes abortive or ineffectual (not just made to seem so by heirs’ repetition of gifts in order to share the rewards). The church in the castle of La Sauve, for instance, was in 1029 given in clear proprietary terms to Gellone for a small priory, by the widowed countess Garsind (of Anduze and La Sauve) and her two sons; but a generation later a monk went to the principes—the lords of the castle—and successfully offered them money for the priory; in 1074 Gellone had to get it given again by Garsind’s grandson.93 In any case the subjection of one monastery to another was not invariably done under the form of a donation at all.94 This raises the possibility that when, on the contrary, the founder’s or his heir’s propertyright is sharply asserted in the act of giving it away, the charter may have been so drafted to ensure the church’s total freedom from family control, as in the exceptionally emphatic terms of the 1074 donation of La Sauve to Gellone: ‘I donate, grant, and bestow . . . to possess for ever . . . whole in entirety . . . reserving nothing nor taking away nor diminishing, and retaining nothing for myself, or for dominium or ius on my part, but . . . bestowing it entirely, by right of possessing the site.’95 Nonetheless, this would be pointless unless it reflected the laity’s thinking. 91 Conversely founder-families retaining no juridical role might be strongly interested and possessive, and the monasteries’ life closely linked to their political fortunes (see Orderic, HE II–IV passim, on SaintE´vroul and its Giroie and Grandmesnil founders); on Cluniac priories, Poeck, ‘Abbild oder Verband’, 104–8 (e.g. Dome`ne, effectively a family monastery). 92 From cartularist’s narrative (Tulle no. 290) about the castle c.930 to c.1035 (editor’s dating) when the monks ‘conveyed the castle in fief ’ to the lords of Ventadour and Comborn, probably already in possession but allowing the monastery thus to assert its right. 93 Gellone nos. 6, 381–4 (on no. 6 see Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 412–13). Cf. the repeated donations of Saint-Marcel-le`s-Chalon to Cluny by counts of Chalon (related in St-Marcel no. 6). 94 e.g. Manigenius putting Saint-Cyr-le`s-Rennes under the abbot of Saint-Julien’s government (above, at note 42); count Bernard Tumapeler’s subjection of Saint-Mont to Cluny (St-Mont no. 1, end); Bego’s subjection of Figeac to Cluny, giving the place not to St Peter but to the Holy Trinity, Figeac’s own dedication (above, at note 30). 95 de fundis voce possessionis (1074, Gellone no. 384). Cf. bp. Ulger acquiring Saint-Pierre, Angers (above, p. 327).


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Some of the examples cited in this chapter are from Languedoc,96 and many from the wider Midi. In this chapter the same broad concepts are applied to them as to others: outside lordship more ruler-like than proprietary in its demands, though it may be alienated in proprietary terms; and the closer, more possessive hold that may indicate lay or secular abbacy past or present. This needs some separate justification, since—like what is said above about Languedoc bishoprics—it runs counter to the views of Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier. Certainly the Midi was different. Here royal authority was almost totally forgotten after the ninth century, so that once royal monasteries, which Louis the Pious could describe as his ‘like other monasteries of Septimania’, came into the hands of counts and viscounts alongside their own family foundations, apparently with no shadow of an idea of being held from the king. The disputed question turns on how we should interpret charters in which abbeys, like bishoprics, were listed along with cities, castles, and alods in fidelity-oaths between kinsmen or in family partitions. In 1002, for instance, Roger I count of Carcassonne allotted to the older of his two lay sons the old royal abbey of Caunes and the abbey (first mentioned here) of Bernassonne, while reserving the remaining abbeys of his counties for a third, clerical son Peter; a generation later, Peter (now bishop of Gerona) was in possession of eight abbeys with their lands (by now including Caunes and Bernassonne).97 What Ermengard and viscount Raymond notionally made over to the count of Barcelona in March 1068—or undertook to let him have if together they could secure these things—included abbeys, some or all of which must have been formerly bishop Peter’s; in Carcassonne the viscount and his heirs were to hold one of these, the old royal abbey of Montolieu, in fevum; and if the count could buy the abbey of Caunes from the count of Rodez, the viscount should have that too. In 1070 he and his wife agreed further that these two abbeys were to revert to the count’s family if heirs failed in the viscount’s.98 Magnou-Nortier maintains, about abbeys as about bishoprics, that what was being handled in such transactions was purely a matter of a ruler’s public authority, interpreting the term abbatia much as she does episcopatus:99 a layman who claims or disposes of an abbatia is not claiming to be the proprietor or lord of the monastery, still less its abbot; all that abbatia means here is a public, quasiroyal role in the election, the right to a donum from the new abbot, and public rights called communia and dominicatura.100 96

For my broad usage of ‘Languedoc’ see above, p. 4. HL V nos. 162, 202. See family trees in Cheyette, ‘ ‘‘Sale’’ ’, 829; Dunbabin, France, 170–1. 98 99 See above, pp. 303–4; with HL V nos. 280–2, 293–4. Above, pp. 304–5. 100 Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 354, 391–2, 507; on dominicatura (remnants of royal authority now generally belonging to counts and viscounts: jurisdiction, hospitality, tolls, etc.), 172–81, 396–9, 507, 509 n. 138, 510. 97

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It will be argued here that although these rights were evidently elements in an abbatia,101 they were not the whole of it. About 1035 two uterine brothers, Peter Raymond (count of Carcassonne and viscount of Be´ziers) and Bermond lord of Sauve, made an agreement about the old Carolingian abbeys of Aniane and Gellone, Bermond surrendering them (or his potential claims to them) to Peter’s potestas, Peter returning them to Bermond in fevum but retaining the ‘election’ at Aniane with half the donum, and the communia with half of certain dominicatura (probably dues or profits from an annual fair).102 But we need not suppose that this left Bermond with nothing at Aniane but half of some public dues and half the donum from a new abbot: what he first surrendered, and so accepted in fevum, was the abbeys ‘with their alods and pertinences’: lands and material belongings. In 1068 the abbey of Montolieu similarly was to bring Raymond Trencavel ‘all its landed estate (honor) and pertinences’ (besides ‘election’ and hospitality); and the abbeys of the county of Raze`s were ‘sold’ to the count of Barcelona ‘with all their alods, tithes, first-fruits, offerings, and everything else belonging to them’,103 just the kind of mixed bag of pertinences that lesser churches carried with them further north.104 ‘Alods and pertinences’ are part of the abbatia conveyed; and that this might convey a practical hold on them is suggested by viscount Raymond’s undertaking to have no fortifications made in Caunes, Montolieu, or their properties.105 When Raymond IV, count of Toulouse, and his mother ‘conveyed, gave, and granted’ to Cluny the abbatia of Saint-Gilles in 1066, this too carried with it ‘the place and all its pertinences’.106 It is true that otherwise the gift of Saint-Gilles sounds like a string of abstractions: abbot Hugh was to have ‘potestas, districtio, et ordinatio’ over abbot, monks, and dependants; and a forged charter probably from the 1090s has a count give to Saint-Victor, Marseilles, the ‘potestas, electio, et dominatio’ that he used to have at Psalmodi.107 But even if these abstractions summed up the whole of what was given or supposedly given, potestas and dominatio could include control of property; even electio and ordinatio need not have exclusively ceremonial meanings. Similar vocabulary was used in Catalonia, when Bernard, count of Be´salu, gave to Cluny (for Moissac) the electio and 101 In any case, here as elsewhere, not always an abstract term: in 1073 a noble family gave to Moissac a church to whose monastic past ‘only the name Abbatia now testifies’ (HL V no. 309). 102 They arose in the octave of the feast of St Nazarius. 103 HL V nos. 206, 280 ii. Similar expressions are used in donations of lesser family monasteries, e.g. 104 See below, pp. 485–6. below, note 108. 105 Above, at note 98. 106 Cluny no. 3410. The papacy had a long-standing claim to Saint-Gilles which the countess and her son now acknowledged, claiming to hold it by the pope’s gift (see Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 95–6). In practice the counts kept a hold into the 12th c. (Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 508–9). 107 St-Victor no. 3 or HL V no. 229 iii; see Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 491–3 for its impossibility. Cf., however, the traditio to Hugh of Cluny of the electio and ordinatio of the abbot of Le´zat, by the monks and four named nobles, ‘in whom along with us [the monks] the election of the abbot rested’ (1073, Cluny no. 3454, a Barive copy; see Le´zat, I p. xxix).


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dominatio of three monasteries; and here there was clearly landed property at stake, for in two of the monasteries he had ‘redeemed’ the abbatia from those who held it in fevum, by grants for life of a chaplaincy or an estate de ipso honore— that is, out of the abbey’s property—as well as by 100 ounces of gold.108 For SaintGilles the point of spelling out what Cluny got was that something was kept back: the dominicatura and other ‘usages’ (of jurisdiction and hospitality).109 A slightly narrower reservation was made when Raymond gave to Cluny the abbatia of Goudargues ‘with all its appendages’, renouncing all customs that he and his ancestors had had, ‘apart from my own dominicaturae which I keep for myself ’.110 These were evidently public, comital rights (such as tolls and market dues);111 but reserving these when he gave away abbeys hardly shows that what the abbatia consisted of was itself purely public rights—if anything the reverse. At Saint-Gilles the countess and her son reserved also the ‘gift’ (donum): ‘so that our own and our relations’ memory may be kept for ever at Cluny, we retain this alone in the gift of the abbey, that the abbot’s successors shall receive the gift of the abbey from us and our successors, without any gain or price’.112 MagnouNortier, taking donum here in its frequent regional meaning of the price given for a bishopric or abbey by its new prelate or his family, finds the passage incomprehensible and suggests an amended reading which would reserve for the count the customary donum paid by a new abbot.113 But this makes no sense of ‘without any gain or price’. If we allow donum its meaning (more familiar in the north) of a lord’s or ruler’s ‘giving’ of an abbey to a new abbot, the text becomes straightforward, referring to some form of investiture by the count, to be done free of charge.114 The same meaning must attach to donum when Bernard, count of Be´salu, giving the deserted monastery of Saint-Martin of Lez to the monastery of Saint-Pons, stipulated that in his own lifetime he should have the abbey ‘in my fidelity and my gift (donum)’, though not be able to change or diminish what is given (the donatio);115 in other words each new abbot at Lez is to promise fidelity and receive the abbey, undiminished, from the count’s hand. 108 Cluny no. 3523 (1078). Cf. Peter count of Carcassonne’s donation to Be´ziers of Saint-Genie`s-de-laMer ‘with all its honor’ of houses, lands, and so on (1054, HL V no. 239), the honor being held in fevum by a certain Deusdet who had to be bought out with 600 solidi. 109 In 1096 count Raymond still had honores of St Giles’s ‘justly or unjustly’, and ‘right or wrong’ customs (given up before leaving on crusade, Goiffon, Bullaire no. 17; but clung to by his heirs). 110 Cluny no. 3404 (1065). 111 Sometimes dealt with in a fairly ‘private’ way, e.g. (976) held as an ‘alod’ by a lady who alienates them to a count (Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 173–4). 112 hoc in dono abbatie . . . solummodo retineremus, ut successores predicti abbatis a nobis vel a successoribus nostris donum predicti abbatie absque lucro et pretio accipiant (Cluny no. 3410). 113 donum solummodo retinemus in predicte abbatie absque ullo lucro vel precio (Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 507 n. 131). 114 On either interpretation, retaining the donum probably implied retaining some say in the election 115 HL V. no. 292. (see ibid. 507–8).

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These separations of rights show that the substance of an abbatia was complex, divisible, and shot through with formerly public rights; but not that it consisted, for the laity, of nothing but public or official powers. The abbatia that an abbot receives is something that a lord ‘gives’ (not merely overseeing the election);116 and when in 1070 Raymond Trencavel and Ermengard agreed not to sell, alienate, or give the abbeys of Montolieu and Caunes to anyone except the count or countess of Barcelona or their sons or daughters, ‘or to a monk put there for God’s service’,117 there is a clear implication that it would be the same sort of gift, of the same thing (the abbey), in either case. We have seen that an abbey was sometimes held in fevum by one layman (or couple) from another.118 At a lower level, the whole monastic honor could be held in fevum.119 This does not mean ‘feudal tenure’ of the abbey or its possessions;120 but it is nonetheless a kind of incomplete and temporary property,121 and it raises the question whether these fevum-holders might not sometimes be lay or secular abbots. In this region it was not by royal benefice that old royal monasteries came into the hands of counts, but rather as a side-effect of their wider gains of princely power.122 Counts and viscounts here did not call themselves ‘abbots’ or ‘rectors’ of the old monasteries they controlled or the new ones they founded. It is their clerical younger brothers who are made abbots, if of monks then probably over or alongside monk-abbots, but often celibate and sometimes monks themselves.123 Such a clerical abbot could hold the abbacy as family property; at Narbonne the viscount’s son Peter, abbot of Saint-Paul, joined with his three nephews to give tithes of saltbeds and fishing ‘in the alod of St Paul’ to the canonica (the community of canons: it is broadly like giving something from the abbacy to the community’s mensa); and it was ‘from that part of the altar of St Paul that the abbot is accustomed to hold by hereditary right’—his share of 116 The word donum could also be used for transferring an abbatia from one lord to another: in the 1068 agreement (above, note 98) a possible future donation of Caunes to the count of Barcelona by the count 117 of Rodez is a donum. HL V no. 294. 118 Bermond from his brother (Aniane and Gellone), Raymond and Ermengard from the count of Barcelona (Montolieu and Caunes). On feva in general see Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 165–9, 171–2, 650. 119 As in 1054 at Saint-Genie`s-de-la-Mer (above, note 108). 120 The passage describing the count of Toulouse as holding Moissac de manibus regum Francorum . . . in fevi iure . . . et homagio in the partly forged charter giving Moissac to Cluny (note 126, below) is unacceptable. 121 Bermond (above, at notes 102–3) was to give away none of what he received in fevum to man, woman or saint, without his brother’s consent. 122 e.g. Psalmodi, in the count’s hands by c.1000 (Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 395–6); count Raymond gave up various rights, 1071 and 1094 (ibid. 396; HL V no. 387), but kept jurisdiction over major crimes, and hospitality, defined in 1094 as two nights’ lodging for fifty knights. 123 Toulouse (1056), c. 5, that if any clerk is made a monk for the sake of assuming an abbacy he shall remain a monk but not get the honour he aspired to, suggests that some noble clergy in this region took the monastic habit to qualify them for abbacy rather than become secular abbots.


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offerings—that the canons were to be kept supplied with a pair of oxen.124 That these clerical abbots were different in origin and in style of life from northern lay abbots does not mean that they had no comparable proprietary hold on the monastery (even if this was often restricted, unlike Peter’s at Narbonne, to dispensing commendae).125 And there is risk of an over-sharp distinction. Historians use ‘secular abbot’ for an abbot who is a secular clerk; but contemporaries in the Midi used abbas secularis more to convey an outsider abbot’s function as ‘abbot for worldly affairs’; neither the term nor the role seems totally restricted to the clergy. When count Pons of Toulouse gave Moissac to Cluny, perhaps in 1053, he referred to a Gauzbert ‘who is now seen to be in that abbacy, second after me, and is called abbot’;126 in 1063 the same or another Gauzbert, abbas nominatus, declares that he bought his position—whatever this was—from count William (either Pons’s father long ago or his son recently)127 for the ‘great price’ of 30,000s., and now has renounced it, giving it back after his lifetime to count Pons and his son William; the counts are never to give, sell, or commend it to anyone, clerical or lay, even of Gauzbert’s own kindred, but to convey it to a regular abbot elected by the monks with Cluny’s consent.128 What was it that ‘abbot’ Gauzbert had bought from the count, considered himself and his predecessors to have held male et seculariter (or was prepared to have his scribe say so), intended nonetheless to keep for life, but would not let his heirs have after him? In the established version of his charter it is, as we might expect, the abbatia. But in another version, discovered by Magnou-Nortier, it is defensio;129 she argues that this is the authentic version, and that Gauzbert was not in the ordinary Frankish sense a lay abbot at all, but an advocate or defender, charged with keeping the peace and maintaining a small garrison, put into this office by public authority (but because it had given him scope to exploit church property, renouncing it for his heirs in the guilt-ridden 1060s).130 Her arguments for the defensio version are on balance convincing.131 But the fact remains that if it 124

HL V no. 341 (1080). See Lauranson-Rosaz, Auvergne, 242–8 (on the Midi-like institutions of Auvergne). 126 HL V no. 235; Cluny no. 3344 bis. The charter as it stands is largely forged (see Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 392 n. 42, 501–4), but this passage is probably acceptable; as is the reference to a regular abbot, Durannus from Cluny, ‘who rules by my choice’ (praeest mea electione; taken by Magnou-Nortier, ibid. 392 n. 44, as referring to abbot Hugh of Cluny, but clearly referring to Durannus on Bernard and Bruel’s reading Durannus abbas, rather than Devic and Vaisse`te’s Duranno abbate). 127 William III (d. 1037) seems more likely since Gauzbert had already given it back to Pons and the younger William, two or more years before this formal renunciation. 128 129 Cluny no. 3392 (a ‘notice of guerpitio’). Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 502–3. 130 Ibid. 395; eadem, ‘Abbe´s sećuliers ou avoue´s a` Moissac au XIe. sie`cle?’, Annales du Midi, 75 (1963), 447–53, esp. 449–50. 131 The other could be a forgery in William IV’s interest, wishing to reassert his own claims (MagnouNortier, Socie´te´, 503–4); if so it seems odd that Cluny accepted it as the better version, but perhaps the monks thought that abbatia looked more worth having or more comprehensible. 125

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was worth paying 30,000s. for, it must have amounted to fairly thoroughgoing exploitation (or at least the disposal) of landlord rights, urban profits, jurisdiction, perhaps tithes and offerings; leaving a rather meagre income for any real abbot. Gauzbert might, one would think, just as well have had the abbatia; and whatever he had, he renounced it with emphasis in favour of a regular abbot properly elected, strongly suggesting that his position had undermined that of any monkabbot if it had not actually eliminated him.132 Whatever his claim, it was a hereditary, family affair, and long survived both his lord the count’s gift to Cluny and his own renunciation. He speaks of his predecessors; and there had indeed been a ‘secular abbot’ Gauzbert (perhaps himself, however) in 1055.133 In 1073 a descendant, Bertrand, is ‘called abbot’ and confirms grants made by the counts about the defensio of Moissac (probably confirming Gauzbert’s renunciation) which, he says, his brother Raymond had unjustly ‘invaded’ on his behalf and bought for him from count William— unjustly because charters show that his father, his uncle, and his ancestor abbot Gauzbert had all renounced ‘bad customs’.134 Bertrand himself now renounces them to abbot Hunwald and the monks, and promises to be always faithful to abbot Hunwald, his senior—demoting himself, perhaps, to a position of deference to the regular abbot.135 But in 1098 ‘secular abbots’ were still envisaged as a possibility at Moissac; and in 1125 another Gauzbert was ‘secular abbot’ with hospitality claims which he gave up for 1200s.136 At this point Alphonse count of Toulouse promised never again to set up a ‘miles called abbot’; whether the earlier Gauzberts were laymen or clergy, this one is certainly a layman, a professional soldier meant to be an agent or defender and now become a nuisance.137 But the simplest explanation of his being called ‘abbot’ would be that his ancestors had indeed had authority over Moissac’s property, like secular abbots elsewhere in the Midi;138 even in Languedoc we can find a layman calling himself ‘abbot of the church’ that he and his brother have in their potestas and can give away.139 So it seems that the great men of Languedoc and the wider Midi occasionally put in or tolerated laymen as administrators or defenders called ‘abbots’ in a 132

Cf. Hugh of Castelnau at Beaulieu (above, pp. 324–6). HL V no. 243: another Gauzbert gave property to Moissac which he held in fevum from ‘abbot’ 134 Ibid. V no. 310. Gauzbert his senior. 135 Not by promising fidelity (which could be between equals) but by using the word senior. 136 HL V nos. 401, 493 i. 137 Ibid. no. 493 ii; he restores electio—presumably of an agent and defender—to the regular abbot and monks. 138 As described by Lauranson-Rosaz, Auvergne (above, note 75). 139 1062, HL V no. 262. Ordinary lay abbacy seems to be envisaged in count Bernard’s promise that ‘no abbot or possessor—monk, clerk, or layman’ should be put in to Saint-Martin at Lez by anyone other than the abbot of Saint-Pons (above, at note 115). 133


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peculiar local sense (a variant of the many different ways in which the laity everywhere got access to monastic wealth: advocacies, vicariates, commendae); generally, however, set up younger sons as proper secular abbots, or as regular abbots, and daughters as abbesses; and above all, freely disposed of abbeys (of their own foundation or once royal) as objects of their lordship. This aristocracy’s relaxed, worldly, ceremonious piety did not prevent them from dealing with churches as property in their own way.

12.iv. Italy, tenth and eleventh centuries In Italy old patterns survived here and there for small establishments, harking back to Lombard times: a monastery in late tenth-century Apulia founded on his own land by its first priest and abbot Peter, who in 1024 ‘ordained’ as abbot (to succeed when Peter died) a pupil and companion, who was to do the same, ‘so that this ordinatio should be from abbot to abbot for all time’;1 in 1044 in the Lucchese the collective foundation of a monastery by five men (three of them priests), to live there and have its rule while they lived, and their successors after them, with a provost elected by common counsel.2 But most monasteries were founded by great or middling landowners (individuals, married couples, groups of brothers, mostly claiming to live by Lombard or Salic law)3 out of their larger property; often using an existing private church and its endowment, which they enlarge for its new purpose; and exercising various degrees of lordship from outside. The most straightforward manifestation of this lordship was, as usual, giving it away. Here as in France, especially in the eleventh century, new or old monasteries, or churches to be made into monasteries, were given with all their belongings to greater ones—Cluny in the north, Camaldoli in Tuscany, Farfa and Monte Cassino in central Italy4—in terms that (where we have them) imply or assert the donors’ property-right.5 So among gifts to Cluny, in 1068 Ingezo, inhabitant of Lodi, gives a church he has built at Credayo for the abbot to 1 G. Coniglio (ed.), Le pergamene di Conversano (Bari, 1975), no. 36 (S. Benedetto, Polignano; for its future, ibid. no. 63; see Martin, La Pouille, 665). Cf. Taviani-Carozzi, Principaute´, 631–3 on La Cava’s founder-abbot, 1025; ibid. 665–6, and Feller, Les Abruzzes, 834–5, for late 10th-c. founder-abbesses who were to designate their successors. 2 Mem. Lucc., V. iii no. 1787 (from S. Ponziano archive): with intentions nonetheless characteristic of its time (to live as canons, ‘far removed from the world, in hidden places and harsh mountains’, near a mons heremita). A larger group of laity had given them the land. 3 Not evidently making any important difference to their transactions. 4 See Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 248–52; id., Age of Abbot Desiderius, 4–5, 7–12; W. Kurze, Monasteri e Nobilta`, 275–89; Goez, ‘Reformpapsttum und Adel’, 215–16, 222, 231–2. Cf. Feller, Abruzzes, 816, 833–4, on Casauria. 5 There are important cases where no donation charter survives (e.g. Berardenga to Camaldoli; all donations to Vallombrosa).

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establish monks there and do as he wishes with it, ‘without any contradiction by me or my heirs’; in 1083 two cousins, of the Martinengo family, have ‘donated and offered’ their church at Provaglio, iure proprietario, to Cluny ‘to have ad proprium’ with potestas of doing with it whatever Cluny’s agents (justly) wish.6 More complicatedly, in 1082 a chapel and monastery at Rodobbio was given to Cluny ‘to have as its own’ by a priest Peter, who bound himself not to ‘be unwilling to do what I have willed’ (nolle quod volui);7 he bought it the previous year, as yet unconsecrated, along with its possessions, from a layman Gisulf and five of his kinsmen, with the freedom to dispose of it proprietario nomine.8 Much earlier, in 967, a priest Adalgisus bought a chapel and possessions in Pavia from a iudex Gaidulf and his wife Ima and subjected it to abbot Maiolus for a monastery (the future S. Maiolo), but did not unambiguously give it to Cluny (rather, to its own future monks); this was clarified by a perhaps fictitious lawsuit after Gaidulf’s death (he and Ima had an interest—the chapel was founded for their souls as well as Adalgisus’s).9 For the donation of older monasteries an example from Umbria is S. Nicolo at Sangemini, founded in 1036–7; in 1119 its then abbot Carbo and four other members of the founding family gave it with all its possessions to Farfa, ‘all together, equally, and in common’, the abbots of Farfa to have potestas of entering the monastery and holding, enjoying, possessing, and ‘doing what you will’ short of alienation.10 Further south, S. Benedetto, Bagnorola was given to Monte Cassino in 1072, about thirty-five years after its foundation, by its founder and first abbot John (monk and priest), who both ‘offers the monastery’ to Monte Cassino with its belongings (including two churches), and ‘offers all this’ (the endowment) to the monastery and its future heads to ‘do with it whatever should please the rectors that the abbot of Monte Cassino sends there’. But he was probably acting under pressure or compulsion, for on the same day it was given by a different John (of Isernia),11 jointly with Geoffrey Ridel, the Norman duke of Gaeta and 6 Cluny nos. 3415, 3603 (with nothing laid down about monks, but it became a priory). On the family see Schwarzmaier, ‘Das Kloster S. Benedetto Polirone’, Adel und Kirche, ed. Fleckenstein and Schmid (1968), 291–3; trans. in N. Hunt (ed.), Cluniac Monasticism (Hamden, Conn., 1971), 139–40. 7 This formula was used for centuries (at least 8th to 12th) to renounce Roman-law freedom to change testamentary dispositions (Leicht, Il diritto privato, 295 n. 2), normally by donors whose personal law was Roman (though Peter’s was Lombard). 8 Cluny nos. 3584, 3591. Later that year, Ermengard (wife of one, sister of another of the original proprietors) promised Peter ‘and whomever you give it to or arrange should have it’ not to make any claim against him about the monastery (ibid. no. 3593); this could indicate that Peter kept rights in the monastery (Mager, ‘Studien’, 203–4), but despite the tense of the verbs it may be that his right to have given it needed to be secured retrospectively. 9 Cluny nos. 1228–9 with ed. note to 1229; Manaresi, ‘S. Maiolo’, Spiritualita` Cluniacense (Todi, 1960), 10 274–85. S. Maiolo no. 1 is spurious (ibid.). Farfa nos. 1189, 1184–8; see below, at notes 13, 40–1. 11 Gattola assumed that abbot John and John of Isernia were the same person, and suggested that there were two churches of St Benedict at Bagnorola. Two Johns and one church seems more likely.


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dominator of Pontecorvo, who had given this John the castle and monastery with power for him and his heirs to do as they wished with it.12 Some of these donations were expressly made as complete as possible, reserving nothing and renouncing any future claim. But such an undertaking in one charter may be modified in another. The five donors of S. Nicolo, Sangemini, in 1119, including its abbot Carbo, declared that they made no reservation; but the abbot of Farfa’s response to Carbo’s donation was ‘that you shall hold it for life for ruling and holding, improving and enjoying’—a kind of lease—‘and for rendering obedience to me and my successors as good monks do to their abbot’.13 Or it may be subject to important exceptions: in the donation of Bagnorola to Monte Cassino, John of Isernia’s joint charter with the duke—after saying ‘neither we . . . nor our wives nor our heirs’ reserved anything—went straight on: ‘except that I John reserve for myself and my three sons the potestas and dominatio of that monastery’, not to alienate but (subject to law and justice) to ‘dominate’ it in their lifetimes.14 John of Isernia’s position, given him by the duke and kept back from Monte Cassino, is either outside lordship or possibly lay abbacy (though in what relation to the monk-abbot John does not appear);15 Carbo’s position among his co-heirs, leased back to him by Farfa, looks like full abbacy. Such reservations for life tell us something about the donors’ rights in the monastery before they gave it away; reinforced, at Sangemini, by the casual description of what they are giving—the church and all its belongings, from lands and vineyards to books and charters—in terms of ‘what belongs to us and the monastery’ in the region. What they have had, and what Carbo at least will keep, is direct possession of at least some of the property. Reservations of usufruct for donors of churches (originally to bishoprics rather than greater monasteries) go back to Lombard times, and could soon take the form of a lease for ‘having, ruling, governing, improving, and enjoying usufruct’ (much like Farfa’s to Carbo) such as was made in 852 to a layman Causeram who had given his monastery to Lucca, and to Causeram’s daughter Hiudiperga who was already rectrix there.16 More interesting for the future is Charles the Fat’s grant in 883 of the ‘little monastery’ of S. Michele at Cerreto in Lombardy to his fidelis Autprand, combining a grant of life tenure with a kind of foundation charter and donation to a bishopric. Autprand (perhaps inheriting a family

12 Gattola, Historia, 264–5; John of Isernia is described both as giving it with the duke’s consent and as 13 Farfa nos. 1184, 1187. acting jointly with him. See H. Bloch, Monte Cassino, 871–2. 14 Above, note 12. The church, monastery, and rectores or custodes were, however, always to have and possess ‘this our offering’ (reading habeant, possideant for habeamus, possideamus, which make no sense here) ‘without any opposition by us or our heirs’. 15 The plan may have been, from the first, to make abbot John give up his abbacy, leaving more for 16 John of Isernia. Below, p. 753.

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interest in the place) has reported it as so ruined as to be unfit for human use, let alone divine worship; it is given him for life on condition of restoring it to monastic status; at his death it is to go to the church of Bergamo, to which, meanwhile, he is to render 100 pounds of oil a year (his pious enterprise must have brought him a productive olive plantation). Once the bishops have it they are to maintain twelve monks there, any shortfall in Autprand’s provision being made up out of nearby lands and serfs (presumably from the fisc); all this to be in the abbot’s potestas, and not in the power of the bishop or anyone else to take away. At the same time the permanent reservation was made that, should the bishop pervert the monastery to his own use, it was to be put into the potestas and dominatio of a clerk or priest of Autprand’s kin,17 paying the original census to Bergamo.18 In other words, Autprand’s life tenure of what looks like abbacy, with direct exploitation of the property, is revivable for a descendant if things go wrong. Later, a revived ius or potestas for heirs or descendants was sometimes specified as a sanction against alienation of the monastery or its possessions. Ingezo giving Credayo to Cluny in 1068 promised that he and his heirs would defend it and make double restitution if they failed in this or tried to take anything away; but if any abbot alienated anything, or failed to establish monks there up to the place’s capacity, ‘then I wish . . . the church to come into my potestas with all its pertinences, or to any of my nearer relations’, and to remain so until the abbot carried out the terms of the donation.19 In the priest Peter’s donation to Cluny of his church at Rodobbio, neither the abbot of Cluny nor the head or monks of Rodobbio were to have the potestas of alienating property; and should the abbot alienate the monastery itself, it and its possessions were to return to the potestas of the lay owners who sold it to Peter, or their descendants.20 Well into the twelfth century, Camaldoli was accepting such conditions on a broader front. Some donations of monasteries to Camaldoli were conditional on good government: the Guidi family giving their monastery of Luco (1086) ‘will observe all this as long as the monastery secundum sacrum ordinem steterit’;21 count Albert’s donation of Poppiena (1099) was valid only as long as the priors of Camaldoli would govern it ‘spiritually and regularly . . . if you do not, all the rights and acts granted by us to you shall revert to us’.22 The point of such precautions against misrule or alienation was clearly to secure for founders the monastic life and effective prayers 17

Or failing this, the archbishop of Milan. DKIII no. 88 ¼ Bergamo no. 196. Cf. DKIII no. 89 (Bergamo, no. 197), same date, not mentioning 19 Autprand’s family’s reserve powers. Above, at note 6. 20 Above, at notes 7–8. 21 Mittarelli, Annales Camaldulenses, III. 34–5 and App. no. 60 (pp. 85–6); see W. Kurze, Monasteri e 22 Nobilta´, 285. Mittarelli, Ann. Camald., III. App. no. 104 (pp. 149–50). 18


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for which they had both founded the monastery and given it to a greater one;23 to revive their original property-right was an appropriate sanction.24 Apart from such powers held in reserve, the donors may retain permanently some element, perhaps vague and shadowy, perhaps formal and defined, of outside lordship. At Bonadico, given to Cluny, the donor was to be ‘helper and defender’ but retain no other right, except that the church itself could not be alienated without his or his heir’s consent.25 Something of the kind is by implication reserved for the family from whom the priest Peter had bought the church at Rodobbio: the abbot of Cluny and the monks of Rodobbio were to have no power of appointing an ‘advocate or defender’, which would be ‘against the honour of those who made these charters of sale to me, or of their descendants’, and would (like alienating the monastery) be grounds for reversion to the family’s potestas.26 A more formal power sometimes retained was a role in the making of abbot or prior. Hermann bishop of Volterra, subjecting Adelmo to Camaldoli in 1073, gave up all potestas imperandi in the abbey ‘and all the things I used to do there, except investiture of the abbacy and consecration of the abbot’. What he ‘used to do’ (as both lord and diocesan) probably included choice of abbot; and he did in fact reserve for his successors the right to eject and replace unsuitable abbots or monks sent by Camaldoli.27 Soon after this, donors of monasteries to Camaldoli were reserving ‘patronage’, almost certainly giving them a veto.28 Even where no power was reserved, this need not make the donation unconditional: forbidding alienations either of the monastery itself or of its possessions, usually simply by excluding ‘selling, giving, alienating’ from the potestas conveyed, was normal;29 closely related to this was forbidding any subjection to a bishopric or to any potestas other than that chosen by the donors.30 Sometimes the charter restricts the new lord to taking a defined census.31 The breach of any such conditions would in theory invalidate the donation, with or 23 Goez (‘Reformpapsttum und Adel’, 214–27) sees all this as an early phase of general church reform, although partly motivated by the wish to secure their political or economic interests against marquises, bishops, or towns; see below, p. 840 at note 13. 24 By contrast the founders of S. Martino in Colle, Lucca, giving its iura, potestas, and ordinatio to Polirone as long as Polirone itself ‘remained in Cluniac ordinatio’, used as sanction S. Martino’s takeover by Cluny (1089, Polirone no. 42 bis). 25 Cluny no. 3736 (given notionally both to Cluny and to Cluny’s priory in Cremona, but it was Cluny that was envisaged as alienating and was entitled to a census). Cf. reservation of defence by the founders of S. Martino (preceding note), and by the multiple founders of S. Angelo, Morrone, 1047–9 (see below, 26 p. 608). Above, at note 20. 27 Ann. Camald., II app. no. 138 (pp. 238–40), with Reg. Camaldoli no. 386; see Kurze, Monasteri e nobilta´, 284. This is less clearly a conditional donation, or a donation at all, than subsequent donors’ acts (above, 28 at notes 21–3). Below, pp. 892–3. 29 e.g. Farfa no. 1184; Cluny nos. 3591, 3736, and next note. Cf. Feller, Abruzzes, 833–4: the late 10th-c. abbot of Casauria bound himself and his successors to the founder and donor of S. Savino and his heirs (obligo me . . . tibi) not to exchange or alienate the church (breached in 1059, however). 30 31 e.g. Cluny nos. 3415, 3603 (Credayo, Provaglio). e.g. at Bonadico (above, at note 25).

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without any spelt-out right of heirs or descendants to take over. The conditions may be meant partly to safeguard the donors’ hopes of leases, or financial assistance, or places for their sons or daughters; but also to secure effective prayers and the spiritual rewards of having provided for others to lead a religious life—these things being themselves often among the conditions set out.32 As for monasteries not subjected to a greater church, their foundation charters answer or raise some of the same questions. Much of what the donors of a monastery grant (or deny) to its new proprietors may be forgone (or reserved) by the founders of an independent monastery. But here as in France, there are foundation charters that on the face of it retain no lordship at all: endowment by the fullest possible permanent donation to some combination of God, saints, monastery, and abbot, with traditio by knife, rod, glove, turf, and tree-branch, and perhaps some symbolical self-expulsion such as opening and shutting of doors; giving potestas for everything except alienation; requiring future abbots to be elected by the congregation; asking only such return as prayers, masses, and monastic life. Such was countess Willa’s foundation of S. Maria in Florence in 978; or, only a trifle more exacting, count Raymond of Marsica’s foundation in 1000 of S. Maria in Cellis (Latium), to pay no tribute to anyone ‘except a wax candle worth 1 denarius to me and my heirs’.33 But S. Pietro at Avellana (in Umbria), founded in 1026 by Oderisius Borrell with provisions in many respects similar to these, was to be ‘always under our regimen and that of our genus’; and the monks are given ‘licence’ to elect their next abbot, implying that election was for the founders to allow.34 Both In Cellis and Avellana were in practice sufficiently at their founding families’ disposal to be given later to Monte Cassino (directly contrary, for Avellana, to its foundation charter, which forbade its subjection to any bishop or monastery).35 Another originally independent monastery later given to Monte Cassino was St John of Clusa, founded in 1047 by count Landolf (of the Capuan princely family) and two nephews.36 Both Clusa’s and Avellana’s charters are informative in what the founders forgo, or forbid to their heirs, showing what might have been otherwise expected. At Avellana they were not to diminish the property or impose any further census or service than the charter specified; at Clusa they were 32

See above, at notes 19–24. S. Maria, Firenze I no. 5; Gattola, Accessiones, I. 101–2. Willa was Boniface marquis of Tuscany’s daughter and marquis Hugh’s mother (on Willa’s and Hugh’s foundations see Miccoli, Chiesa gregoriana, 49–52). 34 Gattola, Historia, I. 238–9 (but in places almost impenetrably ungrammatical). For other emphatic claims in foundation charters to permanent regimen and potestas see Goez, ‘Reformpapsttum und Adel’, 214 n. 53 (Falesia, 1022; Buggiano, 1038). 35 Respectively in 1060 and 1069 (Bloch, Monte Cassino, 323, 364; Dormeier, Montecassino, 35, 39). 36 Gattola, Historia, 42–4; territory of Teano. See Bloch, op. cit., 250 (with 245). 33


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not to take any payment or reward for appointing an abbot, nor to remove anything by force, while their census of a loaf and candle three times a year (at a ceremonial ‘blessing’) implicitly set that limit to their demands. Positive assertions of power, however, are more explicit in Clusa’s charter. That the first abbot, a priest and monk, is ‘chosen’ or ‘pre-ordained’ by the founders would be normal anywhere; unusually, he is allowed with the monks’ agreement to ordain another abbot (whether as designated successor or as a working colleague is unclear); thereafter the monks are to elect among themselves. But the designation and subsequent elections are to be done ‘with our or our heirs’ consent’. Consent would normally be demonstrated by investing or installing the new head, and any reward or price for it paid then.37 For the nunnery of S. Matteo outside Pisa, the noblewoman Teutha who founded it in 1027, elaborately renouncing all potestas in the endowments, required that she, her heirs, and heirs’ heirs be ‘called to the church . . . to put in the abbess that the congregation chooses as best, and receive nothing as reward for this’.38 Meanwhile a foundation charter could still make no claims at all.39 The family group that in 1036–7 founded S. Nicolo at Sangemini—a bishop Dodo, a layman Juvenal, and his mother Nonvolia—‘donate, convey, and irrevocably bestow’ the church and its possessions ‘out of our own substance and right, into the right and ditio of SS Nicholas and Benedict’, to be in the abbot’s potestas to deal with as he and his congregation wished, to the end of the world. Juvenal separately granted that if he died childless three-quarters of his possessions movable and immovable should go to the monastery, which was to live by the Rule of St Benedict and pray for the souls of all Christians. The founders and their heirs were to be always protectors and defenders, and never to raise any question or claim.40 So far as this charter goes, the monastery was autonomous. But in fact, eighty years later, it was given to Farfa by four men besides the abbot (including brothers named Dodo and Juvenal), apparently laymen outside the monastery, not its members.41 However, alongside these variously minimal or muted claims were ambitious plans made by some founders in detailed provisions for future family lordship, and—for nunneries—family abbacy, going far beyond anything found north of the Alps. This began in eighth-century Tuscany, in at least one plan for election of abbesses to be subject to the outside heirs’ consent and for daughters of the house 37 Willa in the 10th c., allowing the monks of her Florentine monastery to ‘ordain’ as well as elect their abbot, was probably renouncing even a formal role (above, at note 33). 38 Regesto della Chiesa di Pisa, ed. N. Caturegli (Rome, 1938), no. 99: her husband was alive and consenting, and completed the foundation (Jan. 1028) after her death (ibid. no. 100). The first abbess was probably her daughter; a later one (1065, ibid. no. 154) was her namesake so perhaps a granddaughter. See Violante, ‘Nobilta` e chiese in Pisa’, in Fleckenstein and Schmid (eds.), Adel und Kirche, at 259–63. 39 At the extreme of positively renouncing lordship is William of Volpiano’s charter for Fruttuaria 40 (below, pp. 840–2). Farfa no. 1189. 41 Above, at notes 10, 13.

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to be preferred, though leaving the hoped-for duration of this uncertain.42 But a new stage was reached in the later ninth century (a time of very few new monastic foundations in Italy), when count Winigis and his wife founded their nunnery of Fontebona at Siena in 867, not only with an elaborate scheme of hypothetical successions for the immediate future but with an unabashed insistence that family rule be renewed indefinitely, with election only as a last resort, and under the permanent outside lordship of their lay heirs.43 The founders themselves were to rule the nunnery and have potestas for their lifetimes; it was then to pass to Winigis’s sister-in-law Itta as abbess, if she were alive and willing, otherwise to his daughter Richilda; the survivor of these two was to designate her successor from the founder’s male lineage. In 881, Richilda having died young, it was arranged more precisely that Itta, should she survive to do so, would designate a daughter, as yet hypothetical, of one of the founder’s two sons (perhaps in 867 unborn or precariously young).44 Both charters went on to rule (at some length) that only in the absence of any suitable daughter of the family, if not of Winigis’s male line then of his wife’s, were the nuns to elect one of themselves, with the founders’ heirs’ consent. Furthermore, if any abbess failed to maintain the full complement of twenty (in 881 thirty) nuns, the heirs could ‘cast her out’ and appoint a replacement. Their potestas was limited by the usual renouncing of any power to alienate the monastery’s property, and perhaps restricted to receiving a token 12 denarii annually45 (much like a census from a tenant-priest); but this will mark their lordship for ever: the lordship is not to taper off. The founders were nonetheless remarkably vague about which of their heirs, or who on their behalf, should exercise these powers. Notice of election was to be given, and the 12d. paid, to those heirs ‘who will best provide for that holy place according to God’; almost as vague as Warnfrid founding S. Eugenio, Siena a century and a half earlier, and hoping for the pious intervention in a crisis of some self-selected ‘one of my heirs or pro-heirs or of my stock’.46 One other late ninth-century foundation, at Aulla in Emilia, for men, comes even closer to the watchful outside control that eleventh-century founders would characteristically assert. Count Adalbert’s charter of 884, though the surviving copy is extremely garbled and obscure, reveals the same intention as Winigis of indefinite family control, but says nothing about family members’ abbacy, evidently—then as later, and as elsewhere—less important to founders of male 42

Above, pp. 174–5. The formulae of outright donation and traditio by which Fontebona was endowed presented no obstacle to such permanent lordship. 44 Berardenga nos. 4 and 53 (with some corrections by Cammarosano). See Cammarosano, La famiglia 45 dei Berardenghi, 69–70. Perhaps the earliest instance of such a census to founders’ heirs. 46 Above, p. 168. 43


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houses. The endowments were to be in the church’s and its rectors’ potestas, but only for possessing, cultivating, and usufruct. The appointment of priests seems to be in Adalbert’s power, and was to be in that of his heirs and heirs’ heirs. So by implication will be the appointment of abbot, since he provides for its being disputed among them: in such a case those willing to observe his wishes are to ‘ordain’ a priest and abbot chosen by the community, along with God-fearing neighbours (priests and laity); any heirs still declining to accept this are to have no power in the matter. None of these heirs is to dispute, diminish, divide, or remove any of what Adalbert has given to Aulla, unless for its defence; those of them unwilling to observe his statutes and appoint ‘good monks’ were to have no power of dealing in any way with what he has given to the monastery (implying that the others do have some power in its management or exploitation), whatever they do will be null and void, and it is against them that the anathema is specially directed.47 Both Winigis and Adalbert take for granted the collective lordship of all their heirs, while for actual dealings with their monasteries they want sheep and goats to be somehow sorted out: Winigis blandly wants notice of election to be given, and the census paid, to those heirs ‘who will best provide for that holy place according to God’; Adalbert threatens the goats with exclusion from potestas and with the pains of hell.48 Moving forward to the eleventh century, a striking example of a different approach to this problem of multiple heirs is that of marquis Odelric Maginfred and his wife Bertha, founding the nunnery of Caramagna in Piedmont in 1028. They ‘make God their heir’ at Caramagna, giving (with detailed exceptions) the castle, half its curtis, the basilica already there and its endowment, to Benedictine nuns ‘to have and possess and do what they wish with it on behalf of the monastery’; it is to be independent of any bishopric or monastery; the founders have chosen Richilda as abbess; while either of them lives it is to be in his or her regimen. So far this is unremarkable: but what follows is an elaborate scheme, explained at great length, not only for choosing abbesses in the near future but for selecting a single outside lord from among the founders’ descendants. To summarize broadly, the next abbess after Richilda is to be a daughter of theirs, if one is suitable and willing; after (or failing) this, a granddaughter (by their son or daughter); each is to have the potestas of taking the staff from the altar49 (so not from any earthly power), and may be consecrated and appointed by whatever bishop she wishes. When this succession of abbesses has either failed or come to its intended end after two generations, then a lay heir, male or female, 47 Muratori, Antichite, I. 210–12. The members of the community are mainly called ‘priests’ except for one reference to ‘good monks’. 48 Cf. Isola in 1001, below, at note 64: similar forfeiture of potestas, sandwiched between anathema and 49 impossible monetary penalty. The word baculum is omitted here but appears further on.

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determined first by sex and then by age within each generation, is to be the outside lord responsible for ‘ordaining’ or appointing the abbess (including choosing her, by implication), free of charge;50 but only for five generations (beginning with the founders, and ending with two kinsmen, one from each side).51 After this the nuns are to have the election and appointment of their abbess, the elect taking the staff from the altar where it will have been put (a final necessary detail) by one of the nuns with the consent of the rest. The detailed rules suggest a fear of dissension or neglect, and the absence of established principles for entitling a single heir to property;52 not making the rules apply indefinitely might indicate some combination of realism about the future, lack of interest in it beyond humanly imaginable great-grandchildren, and a wish ultimately to have the rewards of founding an autonomous monastery living by the Rule in more than name. Even then there was a role for kinsmen if ever the foundation charter were violated: once more two kinsmen, one from each side, were to have potestas in the monastery, ‘not as property but for government and defence’.53 Meanwhile Fontebona had come to ruin in the tenth century. Fears for the family had dominated its foundation charters: that children would die or grandchildren not be born. But the fears correspond to what seems a more marked ambition for lineage; and what proved insecure was the nunnery itself, not the family’s hold on it. Somehow—without primogeniture to single out one heir as lord, and perhaps reflecting the exceptional coherence and capacity for self-regulation of kin-groups in Carolingian Italy54—the family kept possession of the monastery throughout its decay (for which they were doubtless responsible), and afterwards of its site and land; until in 1003 Winigis’s descendants, two brothers of the Berardenghi family, founded a men’s monastery there (soon known as Berardenga).55 Their charter went into less detail about family rights than did the old nunnery’s charters, while asserting them more confidently. For the brothers’ lifetime and their wives’, it was to be ‘in our potestas and regimen for governing, planning, and usufruct’; after their deaths, to be in the potestas and regimen of their heirs and heirs’ heirs; the monks were not to put themselves into any other potestas ‘unless we or our heirs allow it’. There was no attempt to 50 ‘The monastery is to be in his/her ordinamentum, not to diminish it, nor take any reward for ordaining abbesses, but to govern and defend it and ordain abbesses gratis.’ 51 This finite arrangement resembles some 8th-c. Lombards’ dispositions for lesser churches, but these never went into such detail nor envisaged so many generations. 52 Thus the founders of Avellana (above, at notes 34–5) envisage their genus being succeeded, in care for the monastery, by hypothetical later benefactors vaguely described as acting ‘for love of God and the redemption of their souls and for love of us’. 53 MHP Chartae, I no. 272 (cols. 463–9); see Sackur, Cluniacenzer, II. 203–6 on the parallel foundation for 54 men, Susa. See Wickham, ‘Economy and Society’, 216–27. 55 Cammarosano, La famiglia, 71–84.


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reserve abbacy for their descendants, but the election and appointment of an abbot ‘is not to hold good without our licence and consent and that of our heirs and heirs’ heirs’; and ‘if the monks will not live regularly, we (and our heirs and heirs’ heirs) are to have licence to throw them out and introduce better ones’. They renounced the power of ‘selling, giving, or alienating’ the monastery or its possessions, as by implication they might have done, and undertook the obligation of defending it against any adversary.56 This is a firmly defined and heavyweight outside lordship—assumed to be collective, without rules or even moral criteria for selection—rather than close exploiting possession (after the founding couples). But what makes it look nonetheless proprietary is not (as so often) its being disposed of to a greater church, but that—most unusually for a large monastery—it came to be seen as held in moieties by the two brothers’ descendants. In 1004 it was ‘property (res) of the sons of Berard’;57 but in 1056 one of the heirs, Winisci, made a donation to ‘our moiety of the church and monastery’, and forbade anyone to remove it from that moiety;58 and in 1096 his nephew Walfred, making a donation, envisaged the possibility of actual partition and inserted the proviso that should this ever happen, or should the monastery become derelict, what he had given should revert to his branch’s property.59 The monastery was, in fact, given soon after this to Camaldoli, probably on similar terms to others; Walfred’s fear of division or desertion could provide a reason.60 It may have been the need to make a new family partition after the deaths of a nobleman Hildebrand and a childless son of his that prompted his widow Ava and two surviving sons (Berizo and Tegrim or Teuzo) to found S. Salvatore all’Isola in 1001.61 In their charter the founders renounce, for themselves and their heirs for ever, any ‘licence or potestas’ to subject the monastery to another church, to alienate or misuse its possessions, or to harm the abbot or monks. But potestas and dominatio belong to the founders’ male descendants (daughters and wives are explicitly excluded, so no share in the monastery would go out to the children of their marriages or remarriages); and as at Berardenga, what this primarily meant was the outside lord’s role in ‘ordaining’ the abbot chosen by the monks.62 The abbot must be ordained ‘regularly and canonically’, and thrown out if guilty of 56

57 Berardenga no. 2. It has echoes of the 881 charter for the nunnery. Ibid. no. 328. Ibid. no. 593; see Cammarosano, La famiglia, 75–80, including genealogies. Nonetheless (100–1) an oratory given jointly by two cousins, one from each branch, was given simply to the monastery as an 59 entity (1084–5). Berardenga no. 337 (witnessed by Winisci’s three grandsons). 60 No donation charter survives, but in 1098 an agreement between Camaldoli and all surviving family members (Reg. Camald. no. 607, or more helpfully punctuated in Cammarosano, La famiglia, 81–2) bound them not to injure Berardenga’s interests or take more than their long-standing census of 20d. Henry V’s privilege for Camaldoli (1111) lists Berardenga as ‘belonging’ to it (Reg. Camald. no. 717). 61 See Kurze, ‘Der Adel und das Kloster S. Salvatore all’Isola’, 452–3, 458–61; Cammarosano, Abbadia a 62 Isola, 39–77. See Cammarosano, Isola, 50–1 on ordinatio here. 58

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simony.63 Founders and heirs are to defend and help the monastery, and they, their heirs, and heirs’ heirs to be buried there. Finally, any of the family breaching these provisions and not making amends is to ‘lose all potestas and dominatio of the monastery’, his part in this going to those who ‘remain faithful’.64 Berardenga and Isola have in common that lordship is reserved for the male line (implied for Berardenga, explicit for Isola), that abbacy is not reserved for family members, and that elections are to be regular but under the lords’ control;65 and in this they strike a note soon to be dominant in Tuscany.66 The control seems directed towards securing high standards and freedom from simony for the good of the founders’ souls, rather than providing a living for future heirs. Probably if a family member were in the running his election would be promoted; but this was neither the purpose of family control nor the only way to ensure it.67 The abbacy of daughters in family nunneries still mattered for its own sake, but that too was not thought crucial for family control, as the plans for Caramagna show. Further south, something must be said about S. Massimo of Salerno as a grand collegiate church important to its founding family in a peculiarly close yet not straightforwardly proprietary way.68 Guaifer I (acceding in 861, twelve years after the partition between Salerno and Benevento) built it next to his own house, endowed it with both acquisitions and family land, and ‘gave’ it seven pueri (clergy from his household); its heads (sacerdotes, soon abbots) were to be ‘ordained’ by him and his heirs. But it was to be protected if necessary, whether against the palace or against his own heirs, by the monasteries of Monte Cassino and S. Vincenze, Volturno; though equally, these monasteries were to be subject to his heirs’ vigilance. So it belonged neither to the palace nor in any ordinary way to the family; indeed the monastery was to be an heir to family property alongside Guaifer’s sons, with the same share as any one son: a late and exceptionally articulate deployment of an idea with a distant Lombard past.69 63

See Goez, ‘Reformpapsttum und Adel’, 222–4. Cammarosano, Isola, doc. no. 4; discussed, pp. 50–5. On the sanctions clause see above, n. 49. 65 Cf. the almost contemporary foundation (1007) of Polirone (S. Benedetto Po, Lombardy) by the marquis Tedald (father of marquis Boniface), referring to the abbots and monks ‘that I and my heirs and those legitimately born from them . . . shall ordain’ (Polirone no. 14, with no. 13). On its future see Schwarzmaier, as above, note 6. 66 See Kurze, ‘Isola’, 459–60; id., Monasteri e Nobilta´, 313–15; Cammarosano, Isola, 48–50; (see below, p. 840). 67 Lineage consciousness in the male line was strong, and the eldest son probably had authority when necessary. See Kurze, ‘Isola’, 468. 68 What follows depends largely on Huguette Taviani-Carozzi’s analysis (Principaute´, 344–50, 409–11, 429–39). 69 Cava no. 64 (c.868); above, p. 59; below, pp. 734–5. Cf. S. Sofia, Salerno, founded by one of Guaifer’s descendants to be one of a consortium but soon subject to proprietary claims by the new princely house (Taviani-Carozzi, op. cit., 741–6, esp. 743–4). 64


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Guaifer probably hoped—with some justification—that his foundation would hold the family together in its sharing of inherited property but not the princely office.70 Involvement in S. Massimo’s affairs gave status and solidarity to successive rulers’ brothers and nephews, and soon to other supporters. Weighty transactions were authorized by the presence of one or two counts and gastalds, often ‘one of the heirs’;71 but as likely, even before the 981–3 change of dynasty, to be a cousin or unrelated, the designation ‘one of the heirs’ giving way to ‘one of the dominium’.72 The former seems to mean ‘heirs with’ rather than ‘of ’ the monastery,73 and the latter not lordship over the monastery but either a share in its own lordship or membership of the prince’s comitatus, or both:74 perhaps ‘one of the establishment’. Only late in the eleventh century, with declining importance, did S. Massimo begin to be thought of as owned in shares (one of them by the late abbot’s brother), coming eventually into the lordship of the rising monastery La Cava.75 Before this decadence, individual princes and nobles seem not to be directly enriched out of S. Massimo’s increasing wealth.76 For ordinary outside lords in the centre and north, however, there are indications even in foundation charters about their possible use or disposal of monastic property. Here as elsewhere the actual founders may keep the endowments in their own hands while they live. At Caramagna it is to God that they ‘make traditio and vestitura’ of the endowment, by knife, rod, turf, and tree-branch, for the abbess to do as she wished with it for the nuns’ benefit; but immediately preceding this in the charter, the real endowment is in effect postponed for their children to carry out: the moiety of the Caramagna estate and third of another, which the founders had given to the monastery, were to be defined as their sons and daughters and the nuns should agree; once decided, this divisio is to remain for ever.77 In the founders’ time the lands must have remained undivided in their possession, the nuns being supplied as the founders thought fit.

70

On the succession of the eldest son as prince (unusual in S. Italy) see ibid. 358–69. Or unum de ipsa hereditate (actually used for a cousin, not an heir of Guaifer I’s); analogous to de dominium (next note) in use of an abstract noun for a collectivity. 72 unum de dominium (or dominii, or dominiis), e.g. Cava nos. 372, 373 (984–5); Taviani-Carozzi, op. cit., 429–30, 432–7, for further instances, including the second dynasty princes, and often the abbot. 73 Not discussed in these terms by Taviani-Carozzi. 74 Ibid. 434, 437–8; proposing (separately) something like both these meanings, and invoking also dominium’s sense of convivium, a banquet. 75 Ibid. 434–5. Meanwhile S. Maria de Domno, founded by John II of the second dynasty (990, Cava no. 425), was a straightforward Eigenkirche from the first, described in the abbot’s transactions as ‘belonging to’ two groups of named heirs of prince John’s (1031 to 1056, Cava nos. 841, 873, 875, 892, 975, 1222); in 1059 expressed as ‘moieties’ (no. 1295); later alienated piecemeal, ultimately to La Cava (Taviani-Carozzi, 76 op. cit., 435–6). Ibid. 417–18. 77 Above, note 53. 71

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That later lords might otherwise have had access to the property is implied when founders bind themselves and their heirs not to remove or alienate anything, or require only a token census.78 And such clauses, even if observed, would not prevent lords putting pressure on the abbot for leases or benefices to themselves, their children or clients. Polirone’s foundation charter in 1007 allowed the abbot ‘no licence to make an exchange or precarium or libellus’ (apart from leases to peasants) ‘without my and my heirs’ and their legitimate offspring’s wish and command’,79 the last word (iussio) a reminder that lords might require an alienation for their own purposes. There is, of course, in this society of written record, direct and indirect evidence for leases to founders’ heirs among others.80 What is recorded may be their restoring the monastery’s possession or at least recognizing its right; twenty years after Berardenga’s re-endowment in 1003, one of the family gave it his moiety of a church that had been in the original endowment of 867,81 perhaps leased to them, perhaps simply taken back, in the period of neglect and decay. In Italy as elsewhere, such control has sometimes been seen as providing an economic explanation for the founding of monasteries, as a scheme to deposit family land in safe hands, secured from further partition and alienation (and perhaps reuniting portions already separated), where it could be exploited or temporarily removed whenever convenient. For Isola there is one major donation by a wife, followed shortly by a lease to her husband,82 that could support this (weakly, being eighty-five years after the foundation); but the pattern of family donations to Berardenga seems not to. They came in bursts, the members of each generation making their contribution pro remedium animae and restricting themselves thereafter to occasionally giving land for a consideration, often a loan.83 Pious donation to the family monastery was an investment for their souls’ salvation, requiring some outlay early in adult life, or perhaps for the burial of father, mother, or son;84 further donations seem to need a surer and more immediate return than the possibility of being able to get at the land later. Nonetheless, if individuals were going to part with lands—such as small estates resulting from partible inheritance, perhaps unimportant to their inheritors compared with lands elsewhere—it was in the family’s interest both religious and 78 e.g. (remarkably bunched, 1098–9) the pact for Berardenga (above, n. 61); the Guidi renunciation of mixed burdens on Rosano (Rosano no. 17); countess Matilda’s charter for her castle monastery at Brescello (Polirone no. 52). See also Matilda’s ultimately generous but complicated dealings with Polirone (ibid. nos. 33, 50, 70–2, 74–5, 77, 88) while having to cater for the interests of her knights (no. 71). 79 80 Above, note 65. e.g. the Isola lease to Ranieri, below, note 82. 81 Cammarosano, La famiglia, 93–4. 82 1086, Ranieri’s wife gave Isola her shares in seven properties, including five where (next year) the abbot leased to Ranieri for life his dead brother’s shares, now Isola’s (Cammarosano, Isola, 68–70 and nos. 38, 40). Isola could be gathering all this up in the family interest (see Violante, ‘Caracte´ristiques’, 93). 83 See Cammarosano, La famiglia, 93–4. On the wider question of ‘cycles’, of gift-giving, including cycles within families or cliente`les, see Wickham, Mountains, 194–7, 210–15. 84 e.g. Cammarosano, Isola, no. 11 (1025–7), Tegrim’s donation for his own and his dead son’s souls.


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economic to secure them for its own monastery. Committing the founders’ descendants to being buried at Isola was not far short of binding them or their nearest kin to make at least one pious donation there and not elsewhere.85 This interest, as well as fear of excessive partitions, is explicit in an act of the founder Berizo’s son Boniface in the 1070s, designed to ensure that his own three sons and their heirs held their property in common and made minimal alienations: each could give up to five mansi for his soul, but only to ‘churches that are my property’86 (which would include his share in Isola). This again hardly suggests a positive economic interest in endowing Isola or other churches, but rather that since a man must make provision for his soul this should benefit the family’s own churches. Lands given to a family monastery would remain in the family, not for unrestricted exploitation, but as the sustenance of a community that family members might join or put their children into, a fabric where they could be buried and prayed for, and a cult centre which might hold them together in spite of property partitions. These benefits were not necessarily lost if the monastery were finally given away, as Berardenga to Camaldoli; indeed they might be more secure under a reforming centre’s undisputed lordship.87 At Isola, however, both branches of the family died out in the male line, one in the first generation after the founder brothers, the other in the second,88 without the monastery having been given away; by 1100 Isola was left, not without occasional family benefactions (which continued as far as the grandchildren of Tegrim’s granddaughter), but with no lord.89 The outcome could have been that the ordinatio of abbots, as well as their consecration, passed to the bishop of Volterra—who did indeed claim it (and might have been able to turn this into lordship over the monastery); but the community and its new, independently elected abbot were able to fend off this claim, eventually securing from Frederick Barbarossa the status of a royal monastery with ‘no patron other than us’90 (gaining also—a necessary safeguard—exemption from diocesan authority).91 There was no legal problem in 85 Cf. the Lucchese founders giving their monastery to Polirone (above, n. 24), who promise (rather than require) that they and their heirs and descendants will always be buried at it if they die in the dioceses of Lucca, Pistoia, or Pisa. The need to promise something so normal and traditional suggests that it was threatened by individualist interests, probably favouring reform monasteries; of Tegrim’s two surviving sons, one (now bp. of Massa) did leave property to other churches besides Isola (Kurze, ‘Isola’, 462). 86 Cammarosano, Isola, no. 35 (complementing no. 37, donation of the moiety of an estate to a kind of trustee on condition of seeing that these rules were kept); see ibid. 59–63; Kurze, ‘Isola’, 4. 87 Especially when ‘patronage’ was reserved, as probably at Berardenga (below, p. 893 note 80). 88 Cammarosano, Isola, 56 (genealogical table). 89 See ibid. 82–3 on Isola seeking protection from high and distant powers (pope and emperor), not aiming to join any reform congregation, and cultivating alliances (in one case by a formal agreement) with local families. 90 See Kurze, ‘Isola’, 481–91 on the non-proprietary character of Isola’s earlier imperial defence of 1022; 91 491–5 on 12th-c. change. Ibid. 476–81.

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remaining lordless—no vacuum that had to be filled by either bishop or ruler: the convent itself could have invested its abbot-elect with office and property—but practical reasons for avoiding one potential lordship and seeking the other.

12.v. England, tenth and eleventh centuries Any nobles’ foundations in England surviving from pre-Viking times into the tenth century, and remaining in the family’s hands,1 were probably by then modest rural churches with a few secular clerks, or ‘monks’ indistinguishable from clerks,2 with perhaps the occasional richer church in the hands of a hereditary dean.3 More minsters of secular clergy—sometimes large and splendid, like Waltham Holy Cross—were now founded or refounded by lay magnates, for similar reasons as led to the foundation of collegiate churches in northern France;4 as were a few nunneries, mostly domestic and ephemeral,5 or linked with minster clergy. But the tenth-century planting of Benedictine life in refounded monasteries was mostly done by kings and the great reforming abbots and bishops (among whom Aethelwold at least was able to found monasteries largely from his own resources, on lands that he had bought).6 However, between the 970s and 1005 a handful of important monasteries of this new, consciously monastic kind were founded or partly founded by great laymen: Ramsey by the ealdorman Aethelwine; Tavistock by king Edgar’s brother-in-law Ordulf, son of Ordgar; Cerne and Eynsham by the ealdorman Aethelweard’s son Aethelmaer; Burton-on-Trent by the great thegn Wulfric Spot.7 For Cerne we have what purports to be Aethelmaer’s foundation charter, for Eynsham his short statement addressed to king Aethelred;8 for Burton we have 1

The term ‘lord of the church’ (e.g. Alfred’s Laws, c. 8; Gesetze, I. 54–5), which Liebermann took as founder or patron (ibid. II. 539), almost certainly meant the abbot or abbess (lay or regular). Cf. John, ‘Division of the Mensa in Early Eng. Monasteries’, JEH, 6 (1955), 146–7 and n. 5. 2 See above, pp. 82–3. 3 Below, p. 678. On the (mostly) modest continuing patronage of minsters see Blair, Church, 341–59; on the damaging burdens probably imposed by lesser lords on their family minsters, ibid. 284–5, 327–8. 4 See Blair, ‘Secular Minster Churches’, 120–5; id., Church, 357–8; Brett, ‘English Abbeys’, 291–2. 5 As implied in the late 10th-c. Will of Aethelgifu, 12–13 (ed. commentary, 33–4); cf. M. A. O’Donovan (ed.), Charters of Sherborne Abbey (Oxford, 1988), pp. lviii–lxi (obscure beginnings of Horton Abbey); Blair, ‘Introduction’, 3. Chatteris, founded for his sister by Eadnoth abbot of Ramsey (early 11th c.), seems more substantial; but the few emerging Benedictine nuns’ abbeys were royal. See Stafford, Unification, 192–3. 6 Libellus operum (Liber Eliensis, ed. Blake, pp. xxxiv, li–liii, and app. A, 395–7); Aelfric’s Life of Aethelwold, c. 17, and Wulfstan’s, cc. 23, 24 (ed. and trans. Winterbottom, Three Lives). See Yorke, ‘Aethelwold’, 68–9; Miller, Ely, 16–23. 7 Respectively c.969, c.980, 987, 1005, 1004. After four decades of political turmoil comes earl Leofric’s and his wife Godgifu’s foundation of Coventry (1043), but we have no evidence of their intentions for it; see Brett, ‘English Abbeys’, 289–90, on its possible future without the Norman Conquest. 8 Below, pp. 410–11. Aethelmaer’s will (Whitelock, Wills no. 10) antedates both.


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Wulfric’s will;9 for Tavistock, Eynsham, and Burton, charters from king Aethelred confirming their foundation;10 for Ramsey no certain charters, but a charter-based chronicle and some narrative in Byrhtferth’s Life of Oswald.11 The Ramsey sources show it as founded by Aethelwine in the sense that he gave bishop Oswald the fenland site and land, and helped him to build the great cruciform church;12 he and his wife and brothers were buried there. But the nearest we come to any formal claim to lordship on his part is in a lawsuit of 990–2, where (according to a twelfth-century account), angered at the monks having to defend their possessions by oath, he declared himself ‘advocate of the church of Ramsey, protector (tutor) of its possessions, witness to their brotherly devotion and faith’, and so their proper representative in court.13 But if this has any precise legal meaning, it may be no more than what would later be called ‘vouching to warranty’.14 Nor need the story of his visit with two of his sons, exhorting the monks to preserve his memoria and his sons to be benevolent patrons and respect his benefactions,15 mean anything more formal for the sons than preserving their father’s alms by warranting them, for the good of his soul.16 This seems to be supported by Wulfric Spot’s will. He evidently has no son, and most of what he leaves to his daughter, brother, nephews, and others is to go after their deaths to Burton, besides large immediate bequests (the place itself, land in some forty-four other places, a hundred horses not broken in, and sixteen brokenin geldings). He grants land to archbishop Aelfric to make him ‘a better friend and supporter of the monastery that I have founded’; gives another estate to his younger nephew Ufegeat for exactly the same purpose (while giving larger lands, both sides of the Mersey, to his brother Aelfhelm and older nephew on condition that they each supply the monks with 3,000 herring in the season); and finally desires his brother and the archbishop to be ‘protectors, friends, and advocates’17 of the foundation ‘not as their own possession but . . . for St Benedict’s order’.18 9 Burton Charters no. 29, trans. pp. xv–xix (based on Whitelock, Wills no. 17 with agreed changes); cf. EHD I. no. 125. 10 Finberg, ‘House of Ordgar’, text at 198–200; Mon. Angl., III. 11–13; Burton Charters no. 28 (S 838, 911, 906). On their founders as important counsellors of king Aethelred’s maturity see Keynes, Diplomas, 192–3. 11 Liber benefactorum in Chron. Ramsey (chronicle with charters), esp. cc. 49, 58, 60–2, 77; Vita S. Oswaldi, in Historians of the Church of York, 428–30, 434, 438. See Thacker, ‘Saint-making’, esp. 258–9. 12 According to the Vita he asked Oswald to ‘build a place common to us there’; Oswald’s agent 13 Chron. Ramsey, c. 49. Eadnoth built initially a ‘very small oratory’, dormitory, and refectory. 14 Fleming (Domesday Book and the Law; see subject index, 529 and 535, s.v. ‘warranty’) renders advocatus, defensor, and tutor all as ‘warrantor’ (supporter of title to property). This did not yet imply ongoing lordship as it would later (Hudson, Land, Law and Lordship, 52–3, 57–8). 15 ut locum hunc . . . affectu fraterno diligentes, in omni semper necessitate pro viribus eis patrocinari non desistatis (Chron. Ramsey, c. 60; after Oswald’s death and shortly before Aethelwine’s). 16 To see here a partition of authority, abbacy for Oswald’s family and advocacy for Aethelwine’s, is unconvincing. It seems indeed that Oswald himself was abbot for a time, and his successor Eadnoth was his kinsman; but there is no evidence for a formal office of advocate in England; see next note. 17 The words used are freond and fultum; mund, freond, and forespreocan. Cf. Aelfflaed’s will requiring the future ealdorman Aethelmaer ‘to be a true friend and advocate (forespeca) of the holy foundation’ of 18 Stoke-by-Nayland (Whitelock, Wills no. 15). Above, note 9.

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This last provision shows that being protector and advocate might follow from or foster a proprietary claim, but did not constitute such a claim. Indeed, in the same breath he ‘desires that the king be lord of the monastery that I built and of the estates that I have bequeathed to it’. King Aethelred’s charter for Burton echoes this, speaking of Wulfric ‘committing lordship (dominium) of the place and its inhabitants to my royal domination’, and of the abbot Wulfgeat having ‘free power of governing within and without under my ditio, any other man’s dominium being set aside’.19 Neither the will nor (arguably) the royal charter puts it in terms of a donation to the king implying proprietary lordship in the founder; rather, it echoes the wish of the Regularis Concordia for royal authority and protection. The ‘liberty’ granted by Aethelred here includes living under the Rule of St Benedict, but does not specify election of the abbot. His charter for Eynsham, however, attributes to the founder Aethelmaer the provision that future abbots be elected from the convent according to the Rule, but ‘with the king’s counsel’; and declares that ‘the king is mercifully to keep lordship over the shepherd and Christ’s flock, with careful vigilance20 . . . not for tyranny but for the place’s protection and increase; and no secular person whatever, apart from the king, is to be chosen to hold lordship of the place, lest it come to ruin’: here surely echoing the Regularis Concordia on the bad consequences of secularium prioratus.21 For Tavistock, earlier, king Aethelred’s charter made no claim to lordship (only promising protection), and indeed declared that after the founder Ordulf’s death ‘no layman is to usurp dominium’ (implying that Ordulf has it); after the present abbot’s death the next should be elected from the congregation if possible (with no mention of royal consent or counsel).22 Aethelmaer’s supposed charter for Cerne—here probably with some authentic basis—has him declare that the monks ‘are to have the free decision to choose themselves a secular patron wherever they think best’, and adjure his successor23 to respect this privilege and to beware, as must ‘all evil robbers’, ‘neither to claim our donation for their own lordships nor greedily to diminish it’.24 He shows no sign of commending Cerne to royal lordship, and evidently himself has the power to give the monks their free choice of lord or protector. Eynsham’s royal charter suggests that the monks there might, if not prohibited, have ‘chosen’ a secular 19

Above, note 10 (1004). Wulfgeat sounds like a family name. super pastorem et Christi gregem dominium solerti vigilantia custodiat (grammatically difficult to 21 translate). See index: secularium prioratus. 22 Above, note 10. All these royal charters make the monasteries free of all service apart from the standard public services for defence and communications; this would not determine who (if anyone) was the monastery’s lord. 23 ‘whoever I leave as a survivor’. His (only living?) son was Aethelnoth, dean and later abp. of Canterbury. 24 Mon. Angl., II. 625–6 (S 1217); discussed by Simon Keynes in his forthcoming book on charters. 20


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lord; but its echo of secularium prioratus leaves open the reading that they must not choose a lay or secular abbot (Aethelmaer himself ruled here ‘in place of an abbot’ initially,25 as founders could; later appointing Aelfric, from Cerne, under whom he declared himself willing to live as a monk).26 For Cerne, however, what is envisaged seems to be an outside protector. But the very possibility of choice blurs the distinction.27 Just as most freemen may not yet have been caught up in any permanent lordship over their land,28 and some according to Domesday Book could ‘go with their land’ to a lord of their choice,29 so monasteries need have had no hereditary lord from whom successive abbots were seen as formally holding monastery and land. Aethelmaer’s fears for Cerne are not that his heir will make himself its lord, but that he and others may rob it of its endowments; precisely the kind of trouble that monasteries did run into from their neighbours and their founders’ kinsmen, probably not through an ‘anti-monastic reaction’ but because some gained and some lost by any particular monastic reform or new foundation, and the friends or founders of one monastery might be dangerous to another.30 Here as anywhere, kinsmen not involved in a foundation might dispute its endowments; while those involved (and not only laymen) may have got leases or other life tenures for their relations, perhaps of formerly family lands now safeguarded against partition. But for this to go on with any special advantage for founders’ heirs depended on their maintaining control or influence, and it is not clear that they did. Such interests did not prevent Wulfric and (for Eynsham) Aethelmaer from turning their monasteries over to royal lordship of a theocratic kind,31 or— as Aethelmaer for Cerne—leaving them free to choose another protector. Nor did these interests promote highly focused favours to single churches: the wills show great men and women making bequests of money or movables to a number of churches (some new or reformed, some old and unchanged),32 while for their own foundations the charters give the impression, often, of bestowing lands gathered here and there for the purpose, rather than consolidating old family ipse patris vice fungens . . . Aethelred’s charter (Mon. Angl., III. 11–13), ending with a short charter of Aethelmaer’s addressed to the king and witan, including the wish that Aelfric remain praeses over the monks for life, ‘and after his death they are to choose themselves a praeses from their collegium; and I myself wish to live a common life with them, and to enjoy these possessions with them as long as I live’ (see below, note 33). 27 28 See above, pp. 241–2, on 9th-c. ambiguity. See now Faith, English Peasantry. 29 Clearly restated by Fleming, Domesday Book, 72–5. By the time this phrase could make sense the fact had become anomalous. 30 See Fisher, ‘Anti-monastic Reaction in the Reign of Edward the Martyr’, CMJ 10 (1952), 266–7 on Aethelwine; Stafford, Unification, 188–91; Wormald, Making, 153–7. 31 As was commended by the Regularis Concordia, and implied at Ramsey—not a royal foundation— when the first elected abbot, Eadnoth, was taken by bp. Aelphege to king Aethelred for his consent (Chron. Ramsey, c. 62). 32 e.g. Wulfric Spot’s bequests of 5 gold coins to every bishopric, monastic community, abbot, or abbess; and see Stafford, Unification, 190–1. 25

26

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lands round a new centre. Among these founders the ealdormen at least were princely figures, but—in a relatively centralized kingdom itself subject to repeated takeovers in the eleventh century—their fortunes and indeed their lives or their heirs’ lives were precarious;33 among them only Ordulf left an heir to be the antecessor of new lords in Domesday Book (and that not for Tavistock).34 By 1086 the abbots of their foundations were tenants-in-chief along with the abbots of royal foundations of the tenth-century reform. So all of them ended up as royal monasteries;35 but the route to this was not uniform or simple. After the Conquest the new lay barons were at first only concerned to give English lands, tithes, and churches to their monasteries at home.36 But from the 1080s a few of these donations were directed to founding a small dependent priory (often for a castle);37 and there were more important foundations, such as earl Roger’s abbey at Shrewsbury; earl Hugh’s at Chester; and earl William of Warenne’s priory at Lewes, subject to the distant and renowned Cluny.38 Perhaps a new kind of lordship is signalled by Roger’s foundation, based on a small church held from him by Orderic Vitalis’s French father Odelerius (and ostensibly at his persuasion), while its former owner Siward also co-operated at the earl’s hardly resistible invitation.39 Charters of foundation (or donation to a greater house) are scanty,40 and usually uninformative about founders’ lordship; but we can infer that founders and their heirs were the formal, legal lords of monasteries from the inclusion of these in the system of patronage or advowson that emerged in Angevin England.41 In particular, the founder’s heir’s lordship over monasteries subjected or even ‘given’ to a greater monastery was often recognized; or contested, showing that it was a legal question.42 Politically insecure though this lordship may have been, it was very different from what seems (even though we know rather little about pre-Conquest rights in land) the unusually fluid and therefore unproprietary lordship of founders around the millennium.

33 See Keynes, Diplomas, 209–13 on the retirements of Aethelmaer and Ordulf in 1005 (though Aethelmaer seems to have surfaced again c.1012 as an ealdorman, ibid. 197 n. 163) and on the murder of Wulfric Spot’s brother ealdorman Aelfhelm and blinding of his sons, Wulfric’s nephews, 1006 (Wulfric 34 died c.1002). See Finberg, ‘House of Ordgar’, 197. 35 36 Crisply stated by Brett, ‘English Abbeys’, 288–9. See Matthew, Norman Monasteries, 27–70. 37 Ibid. 44–51. 38 The post-Conquest emergence and multiplication of magnates’ monasteries is well summarized by Brett, op. cit., 297–300. An excellent survey, not restricted to Yorkshire, is Janet Burton’s Monastic Order in Yorkshire, 3–11 and c. 7. 39 See Chibnall, World of Orderic, 10, 16, and introd. to Orderic, HE I. 3–4; HE III. 142–3 with n. 2; Una Rees (ed.), Shrewsbury, introd. pp. x–xiv, and nos. 1, 35 (esp. at p. 33); and below, pp. 600–1. 40 A good example is Quarr’s, 1141–4 (original; ed. Galbraith, ‘Foundation Charters’, app. iii). Royal confirmations were probably more necessary; see the opinion about Henry I’s reign attributed to an abbot of St Alban’s under Henry II (Van Caenegem, English Lawsuits no. 415, at pp. 418–19). 41 S. Wood, English Monasteries and their Patrons, cs. i–v. 42 Ibid. 53–64; cf. the case of Wymondham (Van Caenegem, op. cit. no. 419).

13 Great churches as lords of monasteries

From Carolingian times to the twelfth century, countless lesser monasteries and many substantial ones came into the lordship of greater monasteries or of bishoprics, or were founded as theirs from the start; a lordship not basically different from that of lay lords, but differing often in its origin and in some of the interests and ideas that governed its exercise. Because of the mass of material, what follows is illustrated almost exclusively from France, Burgundy, Lotharingia, and Germany.1

13.i. The lordship of monasteries over monasteries By the eleventh century dependent monasteries were counted in dozens among the ‘possessions’ of great monasteries;2 but earlier, when monasteries sent out colonies or took lesser monasteries under their wing, it did not have to be in a legal sense that one ‘belonged’ to the other. Even when an abbot or community built and endowed a daughter house, it might not at first be treated or regarded as property, nor later securely so. Cormery, on the Indre near Tours, was set up by Itherius, secular abbot of St Martin’s.3 His charter of 791 relates that he has established a cell ‘to increase this monastery’s honour and for the profit of souls’ (perhaps as a retreat for clergy of St Martin’s, or for those of them wishing to live as monks);4 he has built it a church with relics of SS. Paul, Peter, and Martin, and has conveyed to it in perpetuity various possessions, given outright to the ‘holy place’ or cell. These possessions were recently gathered by exchange, purchase, or gift; since some are described as acquired for St Martin, others may have been 1

For its workings in an Italian diocese (Verona) see Miller, Formation of a Medieval Church, 117–35. In confirmations of property by kings and popes, e.g. (at random) ALouIV no. 16 (941) for Saint3 Philibert, Tournus; St-Victor no. 843 (Gregory VII, 1079). Charlemagne’s pro-chancellor. 4 ¨ See Felten, Abte, 231–3, 246, 268. 2

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acquired as Itherius’s own; and it seems to be he that founds the cell, although with his canons’ consent.5 So he could have conveyed it to St Martin; but there is no hint of this, nor any assertion of St Martin’s dominium or potestas. The monks’ only obligation is to provide a meal for the canons on the feast of SS Peter and Paul. In 820, however, Louis the Pious’s diploma asserts both Cormery’s status and St Martin’s potestas over it (including consent to the abbot’s election);6 this potestas of a great house of canons over a house of Benedictine monks makes sense as property which it hardly could as monastic authority. When, late in the eleventh century, the canons tried to recover their lost or attenuated control,7 they forged or altered a charter from Charlemagne to make Itherius ‘convey the place to St Martin’ and Charlemagne forbid its removal from St Martin’s potestas.8 Charlemagne’s charter authorizing the foundation of Corbigny by Manasses abbot of Flavigny may well be authentic, however, and it does at least say that the monks at Corbigny shall pay whatever census the abbot proposes;9 while the eventual foundation charter, almost ninety years later, is more proprietary than Cormery’s. In 864 a new abbot was shown Charlemagne’s licence and acted on it,10 taking builders to Corbigny, building an oratory there for twelve monks under a dean, and granting for their maintenance the place itself and all Flavigny’s vills in that county.11 The abbot’s charter does not represent this endowment (if such it may be called) as given to anyone or anything in particular (such as the oratory, or patron saints, or dean and monks); and it ends with anathema on anyone trying to remove Corbigny from Flavigny’s ‘subjection and dominium’.12 The mother house nonetheless lost hold of Corbigny, and in 1034 the bishop of Autun was asked to restore it, on the strength of charters showing that it ‘was subject of old to the ius of the monastery of Flavigny’; now, taking advantage of the death of an abbot ‘who had ruled it after a fashion’, and with the justification that it was much in need of reform (regular order relaxed, the property partitioned among the monks, the place impoverished), he declares that the abbot of Flavigny is to ‘direct, ordain, and dispose of the abbey as of his church’s other possessions (res).’13

5

6 Cormery no. 1 (and see pp. vii–viii). Ibid. no. 7. Charles the Bald had granted immunity-defence to Cormery itself (850, ACII no. 131); paradoxically this perhaps opened the way to Angevin lordship (beginning as lay abbacy). See Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 53 n. 1; 8 Guillot, Comte, 167–73. Cormery no. 2 ¼ DKarol. no. 259. 9 775–6, Flavigny no. 13 ¼ DKarol. no. 228 (there classed as spurious, but see Bouchard (ed.), Flavigny, 49). 10 Perhaps renewing an earlier aborted start. 11 Strictly, all that had come from Flavigny’s founder. 12 Flavigny no. 52. Charles the Bald’s donation of Flavigny to Autun (877) mentions Corbigny as ‘belonging’ to it (ACII no. 420). 13 Flavigny no. 49. He was Flavigny’s diocesan and its lord (preceding note). 7

Great churches as lords of monasteries

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A more instant property-right was created, as a rule, when outsiders as founders or heirs, or an insider as owner-abbot or -abbess, subjected an existing house to a greater one intending this to be permanent. They would naturally make a formal conveyance; and the recipients were seen as getting what the donors were seen as giving, that is, ius and dominium in the lesser monastery, ‘to have and possess it for ever’, ‘to do what they wish with it’.14 It was in these terms that rulers gave lesser monasteries (often as ‘cells’) to greater ones, ‘transferring it from our right into that monastery’s right and power’.15 Indeed in Carolingian times a cell actually built or restored by an abbot or community might be more clearly characterized as their property by a ruler’s (perhaps groundless) ‘donation’ of it than by their own act of foundation. Louis the Pious described Cormery as his donation to St Martin; and in 903 Rudolf I of Burgundy donated to Gigny the cell of Baume ‘which the monks of Gigny have rebuilt’, ‘out of our right to be had in right by abbot Berno and his successors’,16 although it was for all practical purposes Gigny’s—or Berno’s—already. Rulers and others gave small or unlucky monasteries to greater ones for one of two reasons (broadly speaking), or a compromise between the two: for the lesser house’s security and proper functioning (later, for an existing house, its reform), or to enrich the greater house or provide it with a useful reserve or refuge. The first objective might prevail only during one or two people’s lifetime. This was especially likely for nunneries, which provide the earliest examples of monasteries given to greater ones;17 but for any monastery, male or female—even, it seems, where safeguarding the founders’ memoria had been the chief objective18—the founding family might lose interest, disappear, or lack the clout to get their intentions observed. Numbers might then dwindle, and the superior house’s protection be made ineffectual by a ruler’s secularization, or turn to neglect or a gradual takeover of the property. In any case it was reasonable for the superior house to expect some return for its trouble, if only a census;19 and it might expect much more, as Ferrie`res did from Saint-Josse in the ninth century. Saint-Josse—near the Channel coast, close to E´taples and the great emporium of Quentovic—had been given to Alcuin by Charlemagne, with the function primarily of hospitality to Irish and English 14

15 e.g. Lorsch nos. 12, 13; Fulda no. 175. e.g. Louis the Pious to Kempten (above, p. 260). DRud. no. 9 (see above, p. 352). 17 Above, pp. 115, 178, 188–90; see Semmler, ‘Karl der Grosse’, 261–2. Cf. Sarrazac (above, p. 344 and note 43). 18 See Borgolte, ‘Gedenkstiftungen’, 595–601, on some late 8th- and 9th-c. donations to St Gall (esp. Marchtal, Jonschwil, Aadorf ). 19 Some dependent monasteries had minor military obligations to the mother house (such as a packhorse and man to St Gall), similar to those owed here and there to other lords (Auer, ‘Kriegsdienst’, ii. 64 and n. 38). 16

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pilgrims; but subsequently by Louis the Pious to Ferrie`res (which was among Alcuin’s abbacies), with the intention that surplus revenue be used for the monks’ support. In Lupus’s view regular life at Ferrie`res was impossible without this; he claimed (doubtless with exaggeration) that they depended on it for wax, cloth, fish, cheese, and vegetables;20 certainly both Lothar I and Charles the Bald found it worth giving in benefice.21 By 852 when the cell had at last been recovered, Ferrie`res felt secure enough to embark on an appeal for re-leading its own church roof.22 A dependent house’s treasure could be regarded as an emergency reserve: when count Ulrich in the 890s gave his family foundation at Aadorf to St Gall, stipulating that anything he had collected for Aadorf’s adornment should not be removed unless for safekeeping in violent times, he had to concede that it might in extreme need be disposed of by ‘the rightful dominatores of the place, that is the monks and servitors of St Gall’, for their own survival.23 If the donors arranged for one or two family members to be abbess or (rarely) abbot, the outcome was usually that the abbacy itself—not just lordship—was released for the superior house when the sequence was finished. In Languedoc in the mid-tenth century, when the deacon Sulpicius gave Sainte-Marie-de-Camon to Lagrasse, the abbot of Lagrasse was to appoint a provost and receive a census; but separately from this, Lagrasse was to have dues of wine and corn from Sulpicius and his nephews during their successive life tenures, probably instead of the full enjoyment of the abbacy that Lagrasse might eventually expect.24 Sulpicius seems to want to keep the revenues and prestige of abbot for himself and his two successors, while ensuring proper government and regular life (the abbot of Lagrasse was to visit and correct the monks). Where on the other hand the donors seem primarily concerned to give an exploitable property to the greater house or its abbot, what they give is likely to be specifically the abbacy of the lesser house, or (if there is no conventual mensa) what amounts to abbatial control of the whole.25 In a ruler’s grant especially, this is probably what is meant whether the object is called abbatia, monasterium, or cella. He might give it directly to a monastery26 (sometimes explicitly for its economic value),27 but more often to a greater house’s abbot as a benefice, for personal favour or political reasons; this could bring it later into the greater 20 Lupus, Correspondance, nos. 42, 47. Although this was a conventional complaint, Saint-Josse had access to traded goods; and the 200 miles or so to Ferrie`res would not be too far to cart dried peas, salted 21 fish, etc. Lupus, Correspondance, I no. 19; ACII no. 30 (843). 22 Lupus, nos. 84–7. 23 St Gallen nos. 691, 697 (repunctuating Wartmann’s ipsi iusti dominatores loci ipsius sancti Galli, videlicet 24 monachi as ipsi iusti dominatores loci ipsius, sancti Galli videlicet monachi). Above, p. 383. 25 See above, pp. 318–19. 26 ¨ tting (877, DKarlmann no. 2); ‘our e.g. Saint-Die´ to Saint-Denis (above, p. 217 note 49); Mattsee to O abbatia’ of Massino to St Gall (king Berengar, 904, St Gallen no. 734). 27 e.g. an abbatia to Cluny ad usus fratrum, 958 (Drud. no. 33).


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house’s lordship.28 This remained true when—as increasingly often—the motive was reform. It made sense to entrust a decayed or demoralized monastery to a famous abbot by ‘giving’ him the abbacy, at first usually temporarily, amounting only to the grant for life of the office of abbot, or the disposal of this (just a step further than merely inviting him to visit, take temporary charge, and provide a core of monks).29 But when the intention was to secure its permanent rule by him and his successors (more in the eleventh century than in the tenth, and usually for smaller monasteries, often new), it had to be put formally into their and their monastery’s lordship.30 At its tightest, the abbacy of the lesser house became part of the abbacy of the greater (once people have begun to think of abbacies in this material way). A reforming abbot holding another abbey would either appoint a monk-abbot, or himself remain its abbot and appoint a provost or prior; in the tenth and (mainly) eleventh centuries it was on these bases that the great families of monasteries dependent on famous mother houses were built (Saint-Victor’s dependent abbeys,31 Cluny’s priories)32 before the sophisticated constitution-making of the new Orders in the twelfth century. The superior abbot’s abbacy would in principle give him control of all or part of the dependent house’s possessions, even when it was given for reform. When in 1030 William of Volpiano accepted for Dijon the monastery of Sexfontaines from Aimo count of Bolenois, this was conditional on all its possessions being put under the abbots of Dijon to deal with as their own.33 Donors could try to limit this by any of a wide range of stipulations, such as a ban on all kinds of alienation,34 while fixing a census implies the dependency’s own property-right; but these arrangements belong to a world where the dependency would otherwise be an exploitable possession. At a pinch, the grounds for a monastery’s claim to lordship over a lesser one might be nothing to do with reform, nor even depend on traditio or on building, endowing, or manning, but turn on having unwittingly provided the site: in late eleventh-century Flanders the founder-hermits of Afflighem were faced with the abbot of Lobbes demanding ditio and obedience over both them and the place, on 28 Pippin gave Saint-Goar to Asuerus abbot of Pru¨m ‘by right of benefice only’, but Charlemagne gave it to the monastery (above, pp. 216–17), and Louis the Pious described it as Pru¨m’s (ex ratione monasterii; Lesne, Propr., II. ii. 157 n. 5). 29 Both moves (not sharply different) are characteristic of reforming lords’ dealings with Gerard of Brogne; with (mainly) 10th-c. abbots of Cluny; and normally (early 11th c.) with William of Volpiano at Saint-Beńigne, Dijon. 30 e.g. Dijon’s acquisition of Sexfontaines, 1030, late in abbot William’s life (above, p. 382); cf. Couches, a small deserted monastery given to Flavigny for restoration, interim by one bishop of Autun, perpetuo iure by his successor (1018, Flavigny no. 43). For Normandy see Chibnall, World, 48–9. 31 See P. Schmid, ‘Marseiller Kirchenstaat’, 179–83. Some donors required that abbots be appointed by the abbot of Saint-Victor, not elected by and from the community. 32 Cluny also had or claimed a few dependencies that remained abbeys (below, note 37). 33 34 Above, p. 382. e.g. in late 11th-c. Lombardy, Cluny nos. 3658, 3670, 3736.

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the strength of some claim to the site (the founders having gone rather too far with their inquiries about it). This looks like pure opportunism in the hope of being bought off; which was indeed done by the local bishop, the monks of Lobbes then quitclaiming the site (and with it any claim to lordship) by the symbol of a rod.35 Lobbes’s claim looks crude. But it involved the monks’ obedience; and in general, the bond between a monastery and its dependency was not simply proprietary.36 If the superior monastery appointed or allowed election of an abbot, it had a kind of outside lordship; the abbot of Cluny invested dependent abbots with their pastoral staves.37 Cluniac abbacy over priories was closer and potentially more ‘proprietary’ than that; yet its proprietary aspect might be relatively unimportant. The reason for abbot William’s insistence on Dijon having control of all Sexfontaines’s possessions was probably that this was necessary for any effective reorganization.38 Cluny’s priories—often new in any case—were not subject to that sort of control, normally paying a fixed census; and what mattered between their founders and Cluny was not their being Cluny’s property but their common abbatiate: the spiritual authority of the abbot of Cluny, his appointment of the priors, the convention that all their monks were professed to or consecrated by him.39 Cluny’s property or lordship was simply the legal framework available at the time.

13.ii. The lordship of bishoprics over monasteries For bishops, pastoral duty, liturgical standards, or reforming intentions could shape their lordship of monasteries, giving it a moral dimension missing or weaker for the laity,1 while intertwined with this were the ordinary economic and family interests that all lords shared. Bishops’ lordship, like that of lay lords, could originate in holding the abbacy;2 this must often explain why a bishop has direct control and exploitation of a monastery’s property or part of it, as distinct from 35

exfestucaverunt (Chron. Afflig., c. 4; see above, pp. 384–5). The abbot of Flavigny founding Corbigny under Flavigny’s dominium (above, at note 12) shows concern for authority and liturgical communion (ordained monks to come once a year to celebrate mass at Flavigny and stay until given leave to go home); countess Adelaide giving Romainmoutier to Cluny (above, p. 324) wished the congregations to behave as one. Later, see Poeck, ‘Abbild oder Verband’, 96–8. 37 Ibid. 99–100; and 103–4 on 12th-c. escapes or attempted escapes by subjected abbeys (see below, 38 Above, at note 33. p. 847). 39 See Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 73–4 and nn.; Iogna-Prat, ‘Cluny comme ‘‘syste`me eccle´sial’’ ’, 41–7; Poeck, op. cit., 100–4. On their founders’ interests see Racinet, ‘Le Prieure´ clunisien’. 1 2 See Wollasch, Mo¨nchtum, 142. For an older scenario see above, p. 201. 36


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oversight of its transactions. Of abbacies that came in the ninth century as a benefice from the ruler to an individual bishop,3 many were renewed for or kept by successive bishops, and sooner or later given by the ruler to the episcopal church in perpetuity.4 Other abbacies were given to the episcopal church in the first place, often restoring what had once belonged to it;5 many of these were collegiate rather than monastic (the distinction being by now fairly clear), and urban or suburban, their original link with the episcopal church broken by recent secularization, and ‘abbacy’ perhaps a rationalization of the bishop’s antique authority in them6 (while limitations on the bishop’s demands, as in archbishop Wenilo’s privilege for three city monasteries of Sens, could perhaps be seen as withdrawal from recent heavy-handed abbacy).7 That royal grants or restorations of abbatiae were indeed grants of the abbacy— notionally the abbot’s functions, certainly his revenues—is occasionally implied by its allocation to some specific use for the cathedral; more often made clear by expressly excluding the monks’ mensa.8 Explicit on both points is Autun’s acquisition of the abbacy of Flavigny, which the bishop was to use to support more cathedral canons, while withdrawing nothing from the monks’ ius and ditio and disposing only of the surplus that was in the abbot’s ius.9 So when two abbatiae were restored to Langres by Charles the Fat to be ‘conjoined and united’ with the rest of Langres’s property under its bishops’ potestas, or (a century later) five to Wu¨rzburg by Otto III for the bishops to ‘hold, possess, manage, and enjoy’,10 these abbatiae were almost certainly actual ‘abbacies’. So were those— sometimes of ancient and once-famous houses, such as Rebais—given expressly as sources of revenue, to episcopal churches said to be poor or nearly ruined.11

3 e.g. Wissembourg to Liudbert abp. of Mainz, but promising election next time (DKIII no. 63); abbacy of Saint-Hilaire to bp. Egfred of Poitiers provided it ‘return after his death to what it was before’ (AEudes no. 50: king Odo expecting to get the abbacy back would want its value maintained). 4 e.g. Cruas to Arles, by stages from successive archbishops’ benefice to the church of Arles’s ius et proprietas (854, DLothI, no. 134; 879, ARProv. no. 21; 921, ibid. no. 59). Cf. Flavigny to Autun (below, at nn. 9, 13), Lobbes to Lie`ge (Dierkens, Abbayes, 111–12), Chiemsee to Salzburg (Darn. no. 90); and see Felten, A¨bte, 35–6, 39–44. Other abbacies held by bishops slipped into the bishopric’s possession, or were at risk of this (Lesne, Propr., II. 2. ii. 153–7). 5 e.g. Saint-Andre´-le-Bas to Vienne (881, ARProv. (Boso) no. 20); three abbeys to Toul (877, ALB. no. 4); Saint-Servais, Maastricht to Trier (919, ACIII nos. 100, 103). 6 Implicit for Cologne in ex-bishop Gunther’s inventory (confirmed 866, DLothII no. 25), listing six monasteries and a church (mostly in Cologne) evidently supporting cathedral canons or cathedral expenses. 7 See ACII 392 n. 2 and royal confirmations, nos. 104 (848), 148 (852): archbishop to be content with defined annua dona (the monasteries having been addicti sub manibus et potestate antecessorum ipsius). 8 e.g. Saint-E´loi 878 (ALB no. 9), Saint-Seine 885 (below, note 10), Lobbes 889 (above, note 4). 9 See below, note 13. 10 885, DKIII no. 129 (Reóme´ and Saint-Seine); DOIII nos. 141, 315 (including Schwarzach and Neustadt, founded by the Mattonid ancestors of the recent or present bishops; confirmed, DHII nos. 37, 38). 11 ACIII nos. 57 (Rebais to Paris), 14, 23 (three abbeys to Narbonne); cf. Merseburg no. 19, Drud. nos. 86–7. See Felten, A¨bte, 34–5.

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However, when a ruler’s gift was called monasterium rather than abbatia this may make little difference.12 Just as permanent possession of the abbacy amounted to having lordship and disposal of the monastery, so having the monastery could include the option of enjoying its abbacy. At Flavigny, Adalgar bishop of Autun had abbatia from Charles the Bald, while John VIII’s privilege spoke of the church of Autun having the monasterium in ‘perpetual right and property’;13 so the bishop had direct exploitation of everything except the monks’ mensa,14 but could—having the same ius as the king had had—have granted the abbacy in benefice instead. In 895 king Arnulf gave the monasterium of Moosburg ‘to the see of Freising, after the death of my mother Liutswind’ (holding the abbacy, presumably), ‘in proprietary right’, for ‘the bishop to enjoy it in all use and utility by his own judgment and disposition’; evidently the bishop gave it to a chorepiscopus, Cuono, who in 908 gave it back to Freising as his ‘own little abbey’ (propria abbatiola sua) on condition of keeping it for life.15 Here there was probably no separate monks’ or clergy’s mensa, the bishop or his beneficiary having direct possession of the whole property as well as its disposal.16

Another origin for episcopal lordship was a bishop bringing with him an ancestor’s or his own private foundation,17 or (more often) founding a monastery when already bishop, at least partly out of his private property; either might carry abbacy with it. The obvious example of the latter is Gorze, whether or not by bishop Chrodegang’s intention.18 From at least its second abbot’s time until its reform in 933, the bishop of Metz was normally secular abbot or rector over the head of a regular abbot or provost,19 but appears once as ‘lord’ (dominus et senior) to what seems a fully functioning abbot.20 For a few years in the 850s it was held by a lay 12

Charlemagne gave Chiemsee to Metz as the monasterium ‘which Dobdogrecus the stranger had’ (see index: Dubdacrich) and ‘as it was possessed by Ambrose’ (788, Dkarol. no. 162); it might as well have been the abbatia, as when Arnulf took it from Metz for Salzburg (DArn. no. 90). 13 ACII no. 420; John VIII’s confirmation, Pflugk-Harttung, Acta pontif. Rom. inedita (1880), I no. 6 (now Flavigny no. 23, but less helpfully punctuated and rather misleadingly headed). 14 Even this fell under the bishop’s abbatial authority (as distinct from possession): he was to ‘rule, indeed govern it according to the Rule of St Benedict’. 15 DArn. no. 136; Freising no. 1045 (Cuono not appearing as ‘abbot’ here suggests that Moosburg was no longer supporting a community); a later bishop (957–72) alienated property ‘belonging to the abbatiola of Moosburg’ (ibid. no. 1181, an exchange). 16 Cf. DOI no. 154, giving a monasterium to Lie`ge, the bishops to have ‘the same potestas as in other things belonging to their See, with everything justly belonging to the monastery, lands, serfs, everything that could be named or spoken of’. 17 18 e.g. Hastie`re, brought to Metz by bp. Adalbero (below, at notes 51–2). Above, pp. 209–10. 19 But sometimes with a secular as subordinate abbot: Gorze nos. 43–5 (between 804 and 815), 90 (914). 20 Ibid. no. 48 (824), bp. Drogo and abbot Haldin; but cf. nos. 51–3 (848–9) where Drogo is abbot or rector. Monk-abbot (e.g. nos. 29, 47, of 790, 824), secular abbot (no. 90, of 914), or bishop (e.g. nos. 53, 87–9, of 849, 910), may be described as ‘in charge of ’ the monastery (praeesse).


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abbot Bivin, pushed in by king Lothar;21 bishop Adventius was able to get it back (having already ‘reintegrated’ some of its property, recovering benefices when their holders died, or earlier if he could)22 and in 863 put it under a regular abbot Betto. But if Adventius gave up episcopal abbacy (which is unclear) the effect was temporary: the same fluctuating nomenclature and functions continue up to the reform of the 930s.23 No clear rule emerges about authorizing transactions. Permanent alienations (always by exchange) were normally—but not invariably24—done either by the bishop or with his consent (possibly by him if coming from the abbacy, and with his consent if from the monks’ mensa). The apparent fluctuations probably reflect what was thought fitting or found convenient on particular occasions,25 rather than marking constitutional changes. The fact remains that in many legal contexts the bishop acted as Gorze’s head. When in 933 bishop Adalbero embarked on reform, he saw Chrodegang as intending an elected abbot to oversee ‘whatever belonged to the brothers’ mensa’, and as saying of the abbot that ‘if he held all the abbey’s land’ he would be responsible for military service from it, whereas ‘if he had nothing beyond what belonged to the brothers’ mensa’ he would owe no service apart from his religious function.26 If Chrodegang in the 750s really spelt out these alternatives and preferred the second (by implication not to enrich his bishopric but to free his monastery from secular service), it must have been in the now lost charter of endowment. Adalbero’s version explains very clearly the difference between a monk-abbot having and not having the abbacy’s property; evidently, for most of Gorze’s early history, it was the bishop who had it. Later bishops founding monasteries out of their private means—sometimes, in ninth- and tenth-century Saxony, jointly with a sister whose livelihood and status could be secured as its first abbess27—gave them to their sees with provisions that seem not to envisage future bishops keeping the abbacy. In 871 Liuthard bishop of Paderborn and his sister Waldburg obtained a diploma from Louis the German confirming their nunnery Neuernheerse’s subjection to Paderborn, with 21

Ibid. nos. 55, 57–8 (855–7), 60 (863, bp. Adventius’s comment). See Nightingale, Gorze Reform, 35–8 on Adventius having some scope for this even in Bivin’s time, and on his limited generosity to the monks once he had control. 23 Announcing the restoration, 863 (Gorze no. 60), Adventius represents Gorze as properly ‘governed by regular abbots possessing and dominating’ all acquisitions. The new monk-abbot Betto did make transactions in 864 (ibid. nos. 61–3, two of these with the bishop’s licence); but in 868–71 Adventius had a provost instead of an abbot, acting similarly (nos. 64–6). Yet it made sense in 880 for the next bishop and next abbot to exchange property of their respective churches (no. 74). 24 The monk-abbot alone authorized nos. 76, 79, 80 (880s; small affairs). 25 Cf. Agaune (above, p. 320). For fluid terminology cf. Flavigny under Autun (Flavigny nos. 24, 26): 878, bp. Adalgar is ‘in charge’ (praeesse videtur) with a provost under him, but is not called ‘abbot’; 903, his successor Walo is ‘bishop and abbot’, both he and the provost being ‘in charge’. It is not clear why 26 Bouchard sees Adalgar as a predator (‘Reform and Renewal’, 370). Gorze no. 92. 27 See Leyser, Rule, 61. 22

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safeguards: they conveyed their property to the church of Paderborn, but ‘so that the possessions shall stand for ever in the monastery’s potestas’; the monastery was to have mundeburdium and defence from the bishops, but was also taken under royal immunity and defence;28 after Waldburg’s death the nuns were to elect their abbess with the bishop’s consent; they were to pay an annual census of 4s.29 Later we can see an instance of such arrangements having gone wrong: Merisvit abbess of Ridigippi with her father count Agilhard complained (about 888) that she and her nuns had been turned out, contrary to the royal charter obtained by the founder Liudger’s nephew, bishop Hildigrim of Halberstadt, ‘in whose inheritance the monastery was built’. King Arnulf decreed (in an idiosyncratic immunity grant, characteristic of the time) that ‘no bishop, public judge, advocate, or kinsman of the bishop who first founded the place’ was to encroach on or change anything ‘without the will of the abbess and nuns’; they were to possess their property undisturbed under the king’s protection, while paying to Halberstadt ten solidi in silver a year ‘for the benefit conferred on them’.30 Evidently the current bishop was giving them trouble, and the quite substantial census (whether new or going back to bishop Hildigrim) was intended to pre-empt this in future. In central France a bishop of Nevers sought a royal privilege in 886 for a suburban nunnery he had founded at Cusset, without obvious family interests or fears of them (it is not obvious whether he was using his own or his cathedral’s property), but with an idea, clearly and sharply expressed, of limited episcopal power. He wants the nunnery protected against any bishop’s attempt to change its character (though the bishop must determine the number of nuns). When the abbess dies ‘the nuns are on no account to presume to elect themselves an abbess without the consent and judgment of the bishop of Nevers’, but neither is the bishop to appoint an outsider without the nuns’ agreement. In recognition of their subjection they are to pay a pound of silver annually; but no more is to be required of them, apart from some minimal friendly hospitality. The annual census is meant to set a strict limit to lordly demands.31 Such arrangements need not invariably rule out the bishop’s abbacy: restricting what he can have to an annual census might apply only to the convent’s mensa, not to the whole property, while an elected abbot or abbess might have authority only over internal matters and the convent’s mensa. But since none of these Nevers provisions is explicitly associated with the bishop being abbot or rector, it seems unlikely that he was. 28

This had by now relapsed from implying royal lordship (above, pp. 253–4). DLD no. 137. Bu¨ttner, ‘Erzbischof Liutbert’, 105, saw this as restricting Paderborn to a purely diocesan role: but mundeburdium and census suggest otherwise. Cf. Louis’s similar confirmation of 30 Wunstorf’s foundation by the bishop of Minden on similar terms (ibid. no. 140). DArn no. 41. 31 DKIII no. 138; concluding with a loose immunity-clause prohibiting any count, public judge, or bishop from ‘presuming to dominate by potentia the things that belong to the nuns’ uses’ or to make exactions from them, while setting all their possessions under Nevers’s immunity. 29


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And when a monastery was attributed to the bishop’s mundeburdium,32 or was to render him ceremonial dona, this probably does preclude his abbacy.33 Other founders besides bishops might give or subject their monastery to a bishopric, on broadly similar conditions. In late ninth-century Saxony, a priest and a woman (probably brother and sister) built a nunnery at Mo¨llenbeck, endowed it with a hundred dependent households, and asked the bishop of Minden (the diocesan) to take it into his and his bishopric’s mundeburdium. This he did, arranging to take a census of 5s., and to be received once a year with the same servitium as from other places in the diocese. The priest and the woman were to ‘hold and govern the place under their own potestas’ for life; after their deaths their niece (now made a nun) should rule it if she had turned out suitable; after her death, someone else suitable in the family; otherwise the nuns were to elect among themselves. Further, should the bishop go beyond these arrangements the nuns could ‘seek mundeburdium wherever they wish’.34 Yet in doing this they could also ‘sequestrate their possessions from those of the bishopric’: that this might be necessary suggests that the bishop’s lordship might in practice absorb monastic lands despite the implications of the census and limited servitium. These examples from the late ninth century are all communities of women, and the paternalist emphasis on subordination (without explicit claims to abbacy) along with protection from arbitrary or oppressive power may have applied particularly to them. But the same broad intentions are shown, then and later, in foundations for men under episcopal lordship. Royal privileges provide a good overview of the intentions of the bishops obtaining them. Normally, the monks or nuns are to recognize their subjection by a census or other due, but the bishop is forbidden to encroach on monastic possessions;35 and normally, free election of abbot or abbess subject to the bishop’s approval is prescribed, though often requiring him to choose a head from elsewhere if necessary; he is never given the outright appointment, but is to ‘constitute’, ‘ordain’, or ‘promote’ a head where this clearly means investing or installing him or her.36 The essentials of this pattern recur in tenth- and eleventh-century foundation charters and episcopal or papal privileges. Close to the pattern of earlier royal diplomas (and comparable to Mo¨llenbeck’s subjection to Minden) was the submission of Geseke in 1014 by its abbess, last of the founder’s line, into the mundeburdium of the archbishops of Cologne who were effectively made the founders’ 32

But DArn no. 136 puts the Moosburg ‘clergy’ into the bishop of Freising’s mundeburd despite apparently giving him abbatial power over the entire property (above, at notes 15–16). 33 More certainly for dona: see Saint-E´vre, below, at notes 42–8 . 34 DArn no. 147 (896). 35 Such diplomas (mid-9th c. onwards) contrast with DLothI no. 94 (845) allowing the abp. of Vienne ordinare quicquid rationabiliter et utiliter decreverit in the monastery of Romans (given to Vienne by its founder, an earlier archbishop). 36 Graff, ‘Kaiserurkunde’, 65–8, with detailed analysis of election clauses, mid-9th to 11th c.

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heirs.37 Not so very different, far away in the Albigeois about 1038, is the donation by two brothers, viscounts of Lautrec, of their nunnery of Vielmur to the church of Le Puy, with broadly similar provisions.38 Among bishops’ own foundations is Petershausen just outside Constance, founded by bishop Gebhard in 983 with the whole of his large inheritance; a grand Benedictine monastery whose papal privileges follow this established pattern.39 Its value lay rather in its contribution to the liturgical life of the city than in any straightforward economic gains; but it also served the prestige and piety of Gebhard’s kin, while shielded from any family domination.40 Two generations later, Gebhard bishop of Wu¨rzburg with his mother founded a collegiate church in the former parish church of Oehringen (where three counts of their kin were buried) and gave it in proprium to his see, out of ‘fear that divine service might completely cease there if the canonica came into the ius of my heirs’, but strictly limiting the bishops’ lordship.41 These principles appear more consistently, however, in the dealings of Lotharingian and Rhineland reforming bishops with houses that already belonged to them, modifying their own lordship to establish what they saw as ‘monastic liberty’. At Saint-Evre, a venerated holy place of Toul, bishop Gauzlin about 934 established a regular abbot after decades of intermittent lay abbacies resulting from royal confiscations.42 These had harmed Toul more than Saint-Evre, so that Gauzlin needed to woo the monks’ support.43 His charter of 936 confirms their restored possessions, fixes their dues, promises free election inter se but failing this to ‘seek and appoint’ an abbot at his discretion; if any bishop compels them to pay an earlier, heavier census they are entitled to claim four villae that Gauzlin has kept back.44 But no abbot is to attempt to withdraw the ‘cell’ from the bishop’s potestas; saving monastic liberty, it is to ‘remain always subject to the bishop of Toul’. Gauzlin commits to whoever is king the charge of upholding these twin ‘conditions’.45 37

See above, p. 359; Semmler, Klosterreform von Siegburg, 185–6. The nuns were to elect their abbess with the archbishop’s approval and to pay him a census ‘in recognition of subjection’. 38 Bishop and canons to have potestas and dominatio, but abbess and nuns to have usufruct and government of all property with the power of doing what they wanted with it (regulariter—within the Rule); census of 10s.; abbess to be elected by nuns and cathedral clergy (HL V no. 215; see Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 391). The last provision would probably not have been imposed on men, but does not cancel out the nuns’ economic independence. 39 Miscoll-Reckert, Kloster Petershausen, 85–7, 89–90. A later bishop claimed that Petershausen owed a gelding and its body-armour for his military service (ibid. 88–9), perhaps dona established by Gebhard. 40 41 Ibid. 109–17. Wirtemberg. UB. I no. 222 (1037; supposedly an original). 42 See Nightingale, Gorze Reform, 120–4. 43 Ibid. 122–7; and on Gauzlin’s restitutions, fairly modest and not unrewarded (partly spiritually), 44 On this retention see ibid. 119. 132–6. 45 Calmet, Hist. de Lorraine, I, Preuves, 342–4. The dues required were 12 pound loaves, 12 sesters of wine, two 5 pound candles; transport services in wartime, and hospitality, both at the bishop’s cost (i.e. paying wages, sending supplies?). Gauzlin’s claim to have rejected any proprietary hold on the place (literally, ‘repudiated the place from unlawful property or will’) may mean that he will not encroach on the abbacy.


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Much of this goes far back to bishop Frotar’s charter for Saint-Evre of c.836, with the same emphasis on subjection to Toul and ‘liberty of monastic religion’ (Frotar had worked with Benedict of Aniane).46 But Frotar had kept the choice of abbot for the bishop; and had required from the monks an annual feast, traditional dona of horse, shield, and lance, with two hides, two goatskins, and the loan of an ox-drawn cart in wartime. These dues were in return for restoring their endowments; he hopes to be able to transfer more.47 The dona suggest that he was to be the monastery’s outside lord; whether handing over lands implies that he had held the abbacy is unclear: he had certainly dealt rather freely with its relics of St Aprus, sending some to the abbot of Inden, and others to Charlemagne’s son Hugh to make up for not having a suitable horse for him.48 So Gauzlin a century later was restoring Frotar’s settlement, with the important change that the monks were to elect their abbot, and with reduced dues. At Gorze around the same time (933–6) Adalbero bishop of Metz embarked on a similar reform with a different ninth-century background. He did not explicitly renounce the abbacy held by his predecessors, but ruled that the re-established monks should have an abbot only of their own choice from their own congregation (or failing that, one found elsewhere by the bishop);49 and he partially re-endowed it over the next few years, transferring monastic property (as and when he could or would, with due regard for friends and family) back to the monks and their elected abbot.50 In nunneries Adalbero’s interests were more simply family-centred. His father count Wigeric’s burial-place Hastie`re—probably a small nunnery—should have been Adalbero’s for life only, with reversion to Lie`ge;51 but he claimed it as his own ‘perpetually’ by his father’s gift, got Otto I to give it to Metz, and—whether as bishop or as heir—used it to re-endow the decayed nunnery of Sainte-Glossinde under his niece as abbess.52 Gauzlin of Toul’s foundation of Bouxie`res-lesDames had probably similar family and personal importance (he was buried there);53 its supposed foundation charter is not adequate evidence for his intending its status to be like Saint-Evre’s.54

46

On Frotar’s charter harking back to Chrodegang’s for Gorze, see Nightingale, op. cit., 109, 116. Frotar’s charter, Gallia Christiana, XIII, instr. 447–50. On this and other sources for Gauzlin’s reform see Bu¨ttner, ‘Lothring. Klosterreform’, 18–23; on further attempts at restoration before the 930s, Night48 ingale, op. cit., 114–19. Frotar, epist., nos. 20, 30, 4 (Ep. Karol. Aevi, III. 289–90, 296, 279). 49 50 51 Gorze no. 92. Ibid. nos. 94, 96 (both 936); see below, at note 85. Above, p. 318. 52 Calmet, Lorraine, I, Preuves, 359–60; partially in Wampach, Altlux. UB no. 158 (945; Dierkens, Abbayes, 151 n. 16). On Adalbero’s opportunism (Lie`ge being currently vacant) and determination to secure Hastie`re by a plurality of barely consistent bonds see Dierkens, Abbayes, 149–55. Important light is thrown on the family’s position by Nightingale, Gorze Reform, 72–6. 53 Nightingale, op. cit., 148–9; and for other families’ competing interests, 149–66. 54 As argued by Bu¨ttner, ‘Lothring. Klosterreform’, 19–20. 47

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Such a pattern had already appeared, however, in Cologne’s privilege of 922 for its recently acquired nunnery of Gerresheim, whose canonesses had taken refuge in Cologne and commended themselves to the archbishop.55 So the liberty promised to Geseke in 1014 fell into a well-established pattern (by then ‘the liberty that all congregations of our bishopric are known to have’),56 which remained characteristic of Cologne’s monasteries acquired or founded later in the eleventh century: most importantly Siegburg and (probably) Saalfeld, intended largely for influence among the half-pagan Slavs.57 Mainz too, late in the century, was founding or acquiring monasteries (Hasungen, Ravengiersburg, Komburg)58 on similar terms, cogently expressed for Hasungen in 1081 when its canons opted to become Benedictine monks: they were to be free from any earthly service to the archbishop, to elect their abbots freely and be able to depose a bad one, and to choose an advocate; they were to have unthreatened ius proprium, the abbot having libera potestas of managing internal and external affairs.59 The Benedictine house of Komburg, given to Mainz by its lay founders, received similar status in 1090, set out at immense length as the founders’ intentions; with yet more emphasis on the monks’ ‘free potestas’ of electing their abbot (an outsider if necessary), while whoever they elect must be taken to the archbishop for investiture with the pastoral staff.60 That lordship was what a bishopric had in monasteries that it founded or acquired—outside lordship at least, with or without some quasi-abbatial power— is not cast in doubt by their being, usually, under its diocesan authority as well.61 Back in late ninth-century Saxony, Mo¨llenbeck’s obligation to render the same servitium as other places in the diocese does not make Minden’s rights there simply those of diocesan: the nuns’ last resort of looking elsewhere for mundeburdium would show this, if nothing else did.62 For a bishop with lordship over certain monasteries in his diocese it might be both difficult and unnecessary to 55 The privilege gave free election of abbess with the archbishop’s consent, and release from services to him and from having to accept his nominees as members (Semmler, Siegburg, 183–4). 56 Probably promised also to Brauweiler c.20 years later (ibid. 185–9). 57 Both founded by abp. Anno: Siegburg by 1066; Saalfeld (dioc. Mainz) 1071, Benedictine monks replacing canons (but Anno’s charter, Mainz no. 331, is at least partly forged). See Bu¨ttner, ‘Erzstift Mainz’, 38–9, 40–3 and nn.; Semmler, Siegburg, 190–2, 202–5. 58 Ravengiersburg acquired and Hasungen (his burial-place) founded by abp. Siegfried I by 1074, both for canons (Bu¨ttner, ‘Erzstift Mainz’, 45–8). 59 Siegfried I’s charter of 1081 (Mainz no. 358, its relevant part vindicated by Bu¨ttner, ‘Erzstift Mainz’, 47); probably not greatly changing its 1074 status, likely to have been much like Ravengiersburg’s where the lay founders’ intentions, confirmed by Siegfried I, included the canons’s right to elect a provost (inter se) and a good advocate (Mainz no. 341). 60 Abp. Ruthard’s confirmation, 1090 (ibid. no. 376; cf. no. 377). See Bu¨ttner, op. cit., 35–36; Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 201–8. 61 Unusually, most of the monasteries founded or acquired in the 12th c. by Otto bp. of Bamberg 62 See above, at note 34. (below, at notes 87–9) were in other dioceses.


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distinguish between what he did (or took) as lord and what as diocesan;63 but where bishop-lord and diocesan were different, distinguishing their roles and claims would be reasonably easy,64 with some tendency to reduce the diocesan’s role to the minimum (such as blessing or consecrating the abbot).65 As for the meaning of a monastery’s attribution to the bishopric’s mundeburdium, this had its lingering ambiguity as between lordship and mere defence, but seems normally to have implied lordship. Cologne in the later eleventh century used terms for its latest acquisitions that made their conveyance into the bishopric’s lordship clearer than the old formula of asking for mundeburdium;66 but this was a matter of firmer words (perhaps because of growing tensions), not a new principle. Nor was the bishopric’s lordship incompatible with the monastery itself ‘really’ having property. At Ravengiersburg, according to archbishop Siegfried I’s confirmation in 1074, the lay founders count Bertolf and his wife Hadewic chose as their heirs—after Christ—St Christopher and St Martin, that is to say the existing church at Ravengiersburg and the cathedral of Mainz; endowed St Christopher’s (which was their own) as the core of the future monastery; and conveyed the place and its possessions to the church of Mainz, for the archbishop to build a monastery and gather canons. The archbishop’s servants then occupied the place for three days to establish possession ‘as right and custom require’, followed by the archbishop himself taking possession and the lay couple renouncing it. Finally ‘at the canons’ request’ the archbishop made Berthold advocate, returning to him some of his endowments to hold in benefice for life.67 It could hardly be more clearly in episcopal lordship; but it does not follow that the couple’s initial endowment of St Christopher’s was of no real effect.68 It was potestativis manibus—by legally competent hands—that they conveyed the lands to the altar of St Christopher, as real a conveyance as that of the resulting complex to St Martin’s altar at Mainz. Komburg’s property-right is clearer still. Burchard and his brothers built it and conveyed ‘the place’ with its endowments, on the altar of St Nicholas—that is, to the new monastery itself—‘by their free hand . . . to God and St Nicholas as 63 e.g. for the castle monastery of Kappenberg, given to Mu¨nster by its founders and endowed by the bishop with churches and parochial rights in them (below, note 94). 64 In a disciplinary crisis lord and diocesan would probably cooperate, e.g. bps. Hermann of Metz and Henry of Lie`ge over the abbot’s succession at Saint-Trond, 1082–3 (Gesta abb. Trud., ii. 4–11, iii. 1 (SS X. 237–40)); the chronicler speaks of them having respectively ‘the donum of temporal possessions and of the cure of souls’ (ibid. ii. 11). 65 As for Wu¨rzburg at Mainz’s monastery Komburg (above, n. 60). 66 First evident in the second, complete traditio of Brauweiler by the founders’ heirs in the late 1040s 67 (Semmler, Siegburg, 189; above, pp. 364–5). Mainz no. 341. 68 As Bu¨ttner, ‘Erzstift Mainz’, 45–6, basing this partly on the charter crediting them with acting purely pro remedium animae and not for earthly reward such as precarial exchange: but why not take this at face value? Bu¨ttner’s view depends on Stutz’s dogma that an owned church cannot have property.

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property and to the abbot at his free disposition,69 for the benefit of the monks serving there’; later, to protect its monastic life, they ‘subjected the monastery to the see of Mainz by conveying it to St Martin’s altar’. The rest of the charter makes it clear that the abbot will still be a lordly figure, controlling the office of advocate, and capable of granting monastic lands to the laity (though the monks may depose him if he does). Here and at Ravengiersburg the bishop’s role in making the abbot is strictly limited to investiture. Archbishop Ruthard, confirming all this for Komburg, adds that should any archbishop try to infringe the monastery’s ‘right’ and ‘law’ or take away any of its endowment, the abbot and monks should in the last resort apply to Rome; and were papal intervention to fail, the abbot might if he wished ‘convey the coenobium to the Roman church on the altar of St Peter, receiving another charter like this one from the Apostolic See’.70 The whole charter was to be read out twice a year in synod by the cathedral subcustos in return for a gold coin (the role of the recognition census thus reduced to payment for a professional service, or perhaps for the cathedral’s recognition of Komburg’s status).71 The old pattern had developed to what was not far short of monastic autonomy. Choice of advocate was an important element in the ‘liberty’ of these monasteries.72 But typically, as we have seen, lay lords giving their foundations to bishoprics kept the advocacy. This could threaten or undermine the bishop’s lordship, especially for a distant see, but did not normally destroy its essence, investiture of the abbot (implying consent to his election).73 Meanwhile any idea that the bishop’s lordship implied abbacy as either its basis or its natural consequence seems largely forgotten. It remained a possibility in early eleventhcentury France, however, at least for city or suburban churches. Grimoard bishop of Angouleˆme, having obtained the monastery of Saint-Cybard from the counts, ‘left it without an abbot for many years’. Aldwin bishop of Limoges bought the abbacy of Saint-Martial from the viscounts and ‘having it in his hand’ took some of its treasure; his successor and nephew Gerald ‘not being able to claim the abbacy for himself ’ so resented this that he refused to consecrate its new abbot.74 A reforming archbishop of Sens, restoring the monastery of Saint-Pierre-le-Vif 69 Cf. at Hasungen the monks’ ius proprium and abbot’s libera potestas (above, at note 59). For different formulae with similar meaning in Piedmont see Cunibert bp. of Turin’s charter (1055) for his predecessor’s 70 foundation at Cavour (Cavour no. 9). Whatever this would mean, it would be a lordly act. 71 Mainz no. 376 (abp. Ruthard’s confirmation, 1090; no. 377 records the part played by Wigand, citizen of Mainz). See Bu¨ttner, ‘Erzstift Mainz’, 35–6; Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 202–3. 72 Even at Ravengiersburg the archbishop makes the lay founder advocate ‘at the canons’ request’. 73 Above, pp. 332–8. 74 Ademar of Chabannes, Chron., iii cc. 36, 49, 50. In Angers, the apparently high-handed and curiously worded dealing of bp. Eusebius (1047–81) with the collegiate church of Saint-Maurille (Angers no. 31; Fanning, Acts no. 48) makes some sense if the bishop was its abbot and had experimented with a substitute lay abbot.


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and introducing Cluniac monks, either took over the abbacy to do this or already held it, since he is reported as keeping half of it for his own use (‘not out of greed but from necessity’).75 If a monastery was a going concern at all, having its abbacy probably remained the only basis for any regular exploitation of its property (and sometimes for any radical reform). Meanwhile kings were still giving monasteries to bishoprics as sources of revenue, and perhaps still seeing this as giving them the abbot’s revenues. Henry II gave his new bishopric of Bamberg half-a-dozen abbatiae in the same bleak terms as he gave it ‘places’,76 in diplomas making no provision for their government. We need not take such silence literally, however. A diploma of the same day for one of the houses concerned, his own foundation Stein, starts by saying that Henry has ‘enjoined on the bishop the government . . . of several monasteries’, Stein among them; and records that Henry has given it a tollproducing place on the Rhine ‘for each successive abbot to have in his potestas’ but be unable to alienate ‘from the brothers’ use’.77 Stein’s representatives had come and complained of its poverty, asking him to increase its few possessions; this must have been on the understanding that the bishop would make considerable, but not unlimited, demands over the abbot’s head; Henry evidently did not intend him to absorb the entire abbacy. Some degree of exploitation can probably be expected of a bishop-lord whether or not he formally holds the abbacy. It is impossible to gauge how much, or to generalize about it. We can glimpse his role (whether as lord or as abbot) in property transactions; and this may extend to more than consent.78 There are late instances where an archbishop of Cologne receives a monastery’s donations (as if he were abbot), makes exchanges or precarial grants, or takes its movables to another monastery, and this in reformed houses as much as in others.79 Direct possession of certain lands and men is sometimes implied:80 at Ravengiersburg, Siegfried of Mainz and the lay founders (who kept a benefice there) sorted out which servants were to serve the archbishop after the couple’s deaths and which to obey the provost and brothers;81 the archbishop must be expecting some direct hold on the place, if only for his visits. In any period a bishop’s gain from his

75

Tellenbach, Church, State, 93 and n. 1 (quoting Saint-Pierre’s chronicle). Tellenbach saw this as showing that ‘Even if the lord made use of the monastic lands, there was no objection’ (Bennett’s translation); but abp. Sewin’s use was based on retaining half the abbacy. 76 ‘ . . . a certain locus of our property’ (DHII nos. 144–61: loci here are clearly ordinary estates); ‘a certain 77 abbatia of our property’ (ibid. nos. 162–7), all on 1 Nov. 1007. Ibid. no. 171. 78 See e.g. Miscoll-Reckert, Petershausen, 86–7; Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship, 100–4; Tellenbach, Passau. 79 EKl., 62–5 (esp. 64 n. 48), 73–4. Semmler, Siegburg, 201–2, 212. 80 In Bavaria some former monastic property may have been absorbed into a bishopric’s, after being managed together; but not on a large scale (see Klebel, ‘EKl.recht’, 185–92). 81 Above, note 67 (only a few servants were in question).

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monasteries might consist largely in hospitality, especially where he was also diocesan.82 Meanwhile the election of abbot or abbess with the bishop-lord’s consent often meant settling for his candidate.83 This would facilitate what was more important than any nibbling at produce, rent, or services: his use of monastic property as benefices for his own supporters84 (a bridge between controlling transactions and exploiting the land). At Gorze in the 930s bishop Adalbero was unwilling to resist his favourite brother’s demands for benefices out of monastic property;85 in the late eleventh century Saint-Martin of Tournai’s restoration turned on bishop Radbod getting its lands back from laymen who had them in benefice from him or his predecessors.86 Even in the twelfth century, when Otto of Bamberg acquired or built monasteries as the property of his episcopal church, he claimed control over their possessions: Calixtus II’s privilege confirming six of Otto’s foundations declared that ‘the care and administration of these monasteries’ possessions is to remain in your and your successors’ judgment and potestas’.87 Otto used this power in general benignly—rebuilding, giving books and vestments, acquiring more lands for them;88 but the other side of the picture (and perhaps the reason for getting such an emphatic statement of his power from the pope) was that he had somehow been induced to alienate lands belonging to Bamberg’s old monastery of Gengenbach (diocese of Strasbourg) to an Alsatian magnate; his inability to get this back for the monks embarrassed him and brought him a rebuke from Innocent II.89 It would be a mistake to see all this as ‘abuses’ of the bishop’s limited lordship. There could be ‘reforming’ reasons for interfering in elections,90 or even in property dealings; where he was also diocesan it could be his pastoral duty; and in some city monasteries a surviving tradition of the bishop’s abbacy, or equivalent intimate authority, might be seen as bringing the monks or canons into the circle 82 As diocesan he might have claims to parata, eulogia, etc. But Tellenbach found little evidence in Passau’s monasteries for heavy use of hospitality or heavy dues and services, and pointed out the limits set by the abbot’s lordly status (Passau. EKl., 60, 66–9); concluding that by the 12th c. the gain was in influence rather than economic profit (ibid. 77–87). 83 See Semmler, Siegburg, 204–9; Miscoll-Reckert, Petershausen, 89–96. 84 See Lesne, Propr., II. iii. 99–102 for 10th-c. instances; Tellenbach, Passau. EKl., 82–3. For other uses in bad times see ibid. 82 n. 11; Lesne, Propr., II. iii. 100 n. 2. 85 Nightingale, Gorze Reform, 80 and n. 31 (from Life of John of Gorze); for Adalbero’s family interests, 77–81; on the vicissitudes of Gorze’s villa of Moivrons, 37–8, 81–2. 86 St-Martin, Tournai no. 1 (1094). Cf. early 11th-c. bishops of Autun, unable to restore the coenobiolum of Couches without the consent of powerful laymen to whom their predecessors had scattered its 87 possessions (Flavigny no. 43). 1123; text in Relatio de piis operibus, c. 21 (SS XV. 1161). 88 89 Ibid., passim. Brackmann, ‘Bischof Otto’, 135–40. 90 e.g. bishops of Metz (as lord) and Lie`ge (as diocesan) putting in Lanzo at Saint-Trond (above, note 64).


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of the bishop’s clergy and their church and relics into the city’s liturgical life. If he took their treasures for another church they would be outraged, but it would not be blatant sacrilege.91 However, in violent times there was occasional violence between bishops and their monasteries;92 and by the later eleventh century there were increasing tensions between the proprietary attitudes of even the bestintentioned bishops and the monks’ aspirations for fuller liberty.93 These aspirations could be supported by founders wanting episcopal guidance but not domination,94 or by a bishop himself. Some lay founders, however, gave a site and partial endowment to a bishop for him to make the foundation; this eliminated lay lordship, but made the bishop the unquestioned founder and lord.95 Strongly proprietary language remained possible, even about a Cistercian house, as in Otto of Bamberg’s foundation of Aldersbach (1139) with free election of the abbot ‘saving our proprietas and ius’.96 The most important of sees is the most puzzling.97 Among the many monasteries put under the protection of Rome, some were explicitly put into St Peter’s dominium by a formal donation, or were supposed to have been so given in the past. These come scattered in time and place: a small cluster under Nicholas I and John VIII in later ninth-century France;98 a few more in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, mainly in France and Burgundy;99 in the mid-eleventh century, churches in Lorraine and southern Germany collected by Leo IX;100 and many more later, especially in Germany, by Gregory VII and his successors.101 It is not obvious whether such a donation was ever crucially different from 91

Bishop Lambert gave ornaments from Petershausen to Bamberg, at Henry II’s request, before 1007 (Miscoll-Reckert, Petershausen, 87–8). 92 e.g. Toul and Moyenmoutier, around 1000 (Bulst, Klosterreform, 102–4). 93 e.g. Gengenbach, let down by its reforming lord bp. Otto (above, at note 89), obtained a privilege from Innocent II which ignored Bamberg’s lordship and made the monastery independent (Brackmann, op. cit., 142–3). Cf. Petershausen (below, p. 847). 12th-c. forgeries tend to suppress the bishop’s role in elections and invent or heighten promises to leave the property alone (Tellenbach, Passau. Ekl., 80–2; Semmler, Siegburg, 200–1). 94 e.g. counts of Kappenberg (Saxony) granting their castle monastery to Mu¨nster ‘as a daughter, free from all subjection’ (1139, bishop’s charter, Westfal. UB., 2, Codex no. 231). 95 e.g. to Otto of Bamberg: Relatio, cc. 3–4 (SS XV. 1157–8); specific examples from other records, ibid. 1080, 1087; see Meyer, ‘Klostergru¨ndung in Bayern’, 194–6. 96 Tellenbach, Passau. Ekl., 57 n. 25. On the strength of proprietary ideas among late 12th-c. German bishops, not making them anti-reform or anti-papal, see ibid. 97–8. 97 For what follows see Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 8–15, and references. Hirsch, ‘Untersuchungen’ (posthumously edited), is still important. 98 Probably (as distinct, but not sharply, from other protected monasteries) Ve´zelay and Pothie`res (below, pp. 837–8), Aurillac (below, p. 837 note 61), Saint-Gilles (below, pp. 432–3). See Hirsch, ‘Untersuchungen’, 366–89. 99 For Cluny (probably not at foundation) and Saint-Pons of Thomie`res, 937, see below, p. 838 note 73. In Germany, Fulda’s status is problematic and was probably indeterminate: see Go¨tting, ‘Klo¨sterliche 100 Exemption’, 108–5, 125–47; Hirsch, op. cit., 395–7, 420–22. Above, p. 369–70. 101 Hirsch, Klosterimmunita¨t, 36–9. On Vendoˆme see below, p. 838 note 75.

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commending the church into papal protection.102 The main purpose of either was probably protection: the heavenly favour of St Peter, and the moral authority of his successors brought to bear (by popes that had it) on oppressors or more usefully on potential local protectors.103 Before the Investiture Contest the privileges often went hand-in-hand with royal immunity and defence;104 and they conveyed or implied some degree of freedom from the diocesan bishop, sometimes amounting by the twelfth century to full exemption, all episcopal authority resting with Rome.105 What Rome received from the monastery was normally limited to an annual census (sometimes quite handsome, but essentially a token), and the right to consent to the abbatial election by consecrating the elect at Rome (or delegating this). This is not to say that the papacy claimed or possessed no monasteries in a more practical sense—what other bishoprics could have, Rome had; but these were mostly in the city or not too distant.106 They could be discussed as instances of episcopal lordship of monasteries, if space allowed. The point to be made here is a different one. North of the Alps at least, the question arises whether the proprietary terms used were not purely metaphorical, representing what was not really a transfer of lordship but the creation of a new relationship of direct spiritual authority. If this were so it might, disconcertingly, undermine the literal reality of other donations of monasteries into ecclesiastical lordship. There is indeed a shaded area in which some grants of important and distant churches to, say, Cluny seem only to symbolize the intention that they be reformed and governed for a time by Cluny; while relationships between some episcopal monasteries and their bishop-lords in distant dioceses could be equally tenuous. But these point towards property being not illusory but a matter of degree, and sometimes of context; a point which applies to the papacy too.107 John VIII successfully ‘sued’ for Saint-Gilles (allegedly given to Rome long ago by St Giles himself)108 through his advocate at the council of Troyes, and the 102

Leo IX’s move towards more proprietary vocabulary was seen by Raissa Bloch as not much more than that (‘Klosterpolitik Leos IX’, 220–1); Fried saw more aggressive intentions (‘Laienadel und Papst’, 394–5). 103 See Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 17–21. The founders of Ve´zelay and Pothie`res invoked the pope’s willingness to excommunicate infringers of their endowments (below, p. 837 note 66: letter to Nicholas I, lines 162–6). 104 See Hirsch, ‘Untersuchungen’, passim; Tellenbach, Church in W. Europe, 114 n. 84 for literature; 105 Rosenwein, Space, 106–12. See Lemarignier, ‘L’Exemption monastique’, in A Cluny. 106 e.g. a nunnery in Lucca, 790, put under papal protection and if necessary potestas (Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 12 n. 1; Rosenwein, Space, 158). The papacy tried to acquire Farfa (rich, powerful, and close to Rome), claiming ius and dominatio before Lothar I, but failed (823, DLothI no. 51). 107 It was notional or minimal when it brought only a census, leaving the donors with advocacy amounting to effective lordship. 108 Saint-Gilles had applied for support against oppressive bishops of Nıˆmes on the strength of this story (Goiffon, Bullaire Saint-Gilles nos. 3 and 4).


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bishop of Nıˆmes (the defeated party) made a ‘corporal traditio’ of it to the advocate;109 here the request for papal protection could only be met by a juridical claim to real dominium.110 Much further north, more than a century later, Rome’s property-right in a monastery was sharply asserted when the archbishop of Tours complained to Sergius IV of being prevented from consecrating Fulk Nerra’s new foundation at Beaulieu-le`s-Loches in his archdiocese.111 The pope’s right to perform or delegate this consecration was an ecclesiastical matter, an aspect of what was emerging as exemption; but his spokesman’s vindication of it was flatly proprietary. ‘The monastery that Fulk built was certainly his own inheritance; he offered it and its consecration perpetually, for his soul . . . to the church of St Peter and into the potestas and dominium of our lord:112 why should he lose it from his lordship? . . . All I know is that whoever has the inheritance has the consecration.’ The context must be a need to conciliate the count, as Sergius’s next letter shows.113 And if, at the other extreme, the pope’s lordship (or a bishop’s, or a reforming abbot’s) was sometimes no more than metaphorical,114 the metaphor derived its force from ordinary cases where the words used meant what they said.

109

John VIII had meanwhile ‘granted’ Saint-Gilles to the priest Amelius and abbot Leo (PL 126. 788–91; cf. 791–5). 110 Not impossible here: Saint-Gilles to Rome by sea might be quicker than (for instance) overland to Troyes where the council met. 111 According to Ralph Glaber, abp. Hugh was invited by Fulk to consecrate the church but declined unless Fulk first restored illegitimate gains; Fulk, enraged, induced the pope to claim the consecration and send a legate to do it (Libri V., ii. iv. 5–6, pp. 60–2). 112 . . . et beati apostoli Petri ecclesiam et nostri seniori potestatis et dominii, monasterium . . . obtulit: the passage seems corrupt, but whether noster senior here is St Peter or the pope hardly matters. 113 Sergius IV, epist. 14, 15 (PL 139. 1525–7). 114 In the legalistic 12th c., papal lordship of monasteries was more literal and mundane; see Schreiber, Kurie und Kloster, I. 9–16, 23: more explicit traditio by lay founders; more proprietary vocabulary (‘alod and property’, ‘alod and patrimony’, etc.) used by popes.


Part III

Lower churches as property, ninth to twelfth century


14 Lesser churches’ resources in lands and other possessions

Turning now to ‘lower’ or ‘lesser’ churches is to turn, at the extremes, from the massive splendours of abbey churches with the treasure enshrined in them to wooden sheds with barely a pewter or horn chalice, and from lordships of several thousand mansi or peasant holdings to a single peasant holding or less. Between these extremes was a continuum, but one in which the vast majority of churches lay towards the bottom end. It should by now be clear that, by the eighth century, these can be described as ‘owned’ in a way not possible for great churches with large communities and lordly heads. So whereas Part II was largely concerned with whether and in what sense monasteries were treated as property, for lesser churches it is rather a question of how and in what degree. And while there are wells of evidence for particular monasteries’ foundation, juridical history, and religious importance, there is in total a shallower but larger sea of evidence for lords’ practical dealings with thousands of lesser churches. These differences invite a different approach in the chapters that follow, both more generalized and more densely illustrated: beginning with a survey of such churches’ resources in land and (in Chapter 15) pastoral revenues, and looking at their lords’ interest (strongly, but not merely, economic) in accumulating and exploiting these resources.

14.i. Endowments We have already seen the distinction between the church that with its lands and pertinences was managed and exploited as a self-contained estate, and the church that was part of or pertinent to a larger estate.1 This corresponds roughly to 1 Above, p. 30. Hedwig’s analysis (‘Die EK’, esp. 14–20, 30, 40 n. 162, 57–9) draws too hard a line between the ecclesia indominincata (which he renders as ‘private’) and the church held by a priest under ‘landlordship’. The former might be only temporarily in hand.

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Lower churches, 9th to 12th century

a difference of wealth and status, between the gentlemanly estate and the peasant holding. But it is often difficult, or artificial, to distinguish a relatively independent and well-endowed church within an estate from a church with an estate of its own. Churches could move in and out of these categories: sometimes an existing church was incorporated into a newly constructed estate;2 far more often, churches with their pertinences were separated from the estate they belonged to—carved out as self-contained gifts to monasteries,3 or occasionally retained when estates were alienated.4 And making the distinction at all must turn on the regional structure of estates; it will for instance make little sense in any context (such as much of Italy) of scattered holdings and small estates without manorial structure. Whatever the landholding framework, what a lesser church typically had by way of visible capital was its own site and fabric; its contents (books, plate, vestments); the priest’s house and farm buildings; a churchyard for burials; some cultivated land, basically arable, with whatever of woodland, pasture and meadow, orchard, vineyard, or olive trees local conditions allowed or required; and its stock of farm implements, draught and other animals, and unfree men and women with their dwellings. Of all this, land was the essential base. The concept of the inalienable endowment in land, which bishops had to secure before consecrating a new church, was established all over the West by sixth-century legislation never forgotten in the Romance regions,5 and by Carolingian legislation that spread the idea far more widely. It is generally called the dos—the bride’s dowry—or a variant such as dotalicium or sponsalicium.6 But it appears as clearly, much later, in the ‘gift land’ that Swedish freeholders must provide if they build a church—a measure of arable, pasture, and meadow, with a house, stable, and barn.7 There are regional twists to the idea: Iberian sources of the ninth and tenth centuries refer to a church’s dextri, its paced-out land round the church, established ‘as the canons teach . . . for burying bodies and for the support of the brothers’, requiring twelve paces for the former and another seventy-two for the latter (measures probably counting double paces, as the name suggests, and referring to a radius;8 even so, not realistic for subsistence). 2

e.g. Fournier, Peuplement, 426 and app. IA no. 4 (early 10th c.). e.g. Fleury no. 47 (941); Actes abbayes caennaises no. 7 (1080–2); Ange´ly no. 67 (1039). In St-Martin-desChamps nos. 60 (c.1078), 62 (1079– ), church and village must have been separated earlier, perhaps in a family partition; cf. Fournier, Peuplement, 426 and app. IB no. 10 (Mercoeur, early 10th c.). 4 e.g. St Gallen no. 189 (806); Stavelot-Malme´dy no. 51 (911); Ange´ly no. 110 (1048). 5 Above, p. 19; Stutz, Benef., 401 n. 5, 402–6. 6 On the intended analogy see below, pp. 735–6. 7 Church code of Va¨stergo¨tland, c. 1b (Bergin, Law of the Westgoths, 28). 8 e.g. (between 882 and 1033) PMHD nos. 9, 54, 63, 233 (‘84 dextri’, i.e. 12 þ 72), 278; cf. Bidagor, Iglesia, 87–9 and nn. Occasionally sinistri appear too (Arlanza no. 1; Sahaguń no. 126), supporting the double-pace interpretation; cf. Feller, Abruzzes, p. xiii, on Italian double paces. For radius rather than diameter see below, p. 452 note 55. 3

Resources: lands and other possessions

439

The principle that a church should be endowed is closely linked with the principle that the endowment should be used for its intended purpose, and the outcome in practice much the same. The priest of an estate church whose founder had not troubled to endow it at all might be no worse off than if the founder’s heirs treated the endowment as their own property. By Carolingian times the focus is on the priest’s livelihood and security; there is a difference between the old law that every church must have its adequate dos and that this must be inalienable, and the new Carolingian law that the priest must have his minimum living free of economic burdens (servitium). Louis the Pious’s momentous capitulary of Aachen, 818–19, laid down that ‘to every church should be attributed one whole mansus without any service, and the priests established in them shall not render any service (beyond ecclesiastical service) for the tithes, or for the offerings of the faithful, or for houses or churchyards or enclosures next the church, or for the aforesaid mansus. And if they have anything more than this, they may render due service for it to their lords.’9 This does not use the word dos or any equivalent. However, the statutory manse was thereafter often referred to as the mansus dotalis, implying its identity with the minimum dos—though sometimes, alternatively, as the manse ‘that the priest holds’.10 It would be natural in any case for the founder of a small rural church to allot it whatever was the basic unit of agrarian tenure. The legislation generalized the idea, and numerous churches all over the Carolingian empire and its successor states are described from the ninth century onwards as endowed with one mansus or hoba. What should count as adequate was set in Lothar I’s Italian capitulary in 832 at twelve bunuarii of arable (about 40 acres, a rather small manse by northern Frankish standards).11 A clear idea of the least that a small church should have lies behind archbishop Hincmar’s scathing words about the chapel of Attolae curtis: ‘apart from a little graveyard, and its smallholder’s hut with a little garden’, all it has had from the church of Laon is ‘two-and-a-half bunuarii of arable land’ in its total of seven, with no vineyard, no meadow or pasture, and no serf.12 Nonetheless, when Carolingian rulers or bishops were explicitly setting a standard for total endowment they often envisaged something more substantial than the single manse. Charlemagne required each congregation of the conquered Saxons to provide a site and enclosure for the church itself and two 9

Capit. no. 138, c. 10; see below, pp. 447–8. Cf. Meaux-Paris 845–6 (Conc. III no. 11), c. 63. To see the servitium (at Meaux, census) as a surviving public due (as Le Jan, Famille, 120–1) seems unnecessary. 10 In 867 Walter bp. of Orleans (Capit. episc., I. 190, c. 9) speaks of ‘priests who have not yet received a dos for their churches as laid down by king Charles and his father and grandfather’. 11 Capit. nos. 201–2 c. 1. On the Frankish mansus see Verhulst, ‘Economic Organization’, New CMH II., 493. It could be a fiscal unit representing a typical peasant holding, or an actual holding. 12 PL 126. 293–4; see index: Attolae curtis. The settlement itself was small: 9 free and 11 servile mansi.

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manses, besides male and female serfs in proportion to the parishioners’ numbers.13 The fourteen churches that he established on the fisc in the diocese of Wu¨rzburg, for converted Slavs, each with its basic manse, were later reported to Louis the Pious as ‘barely endowed’ (minime: they have the minimum); Louis’s response was to give each church a further two manses, each with its tributepaying inhabitant (who thus became a tenant of the new church).14 Even with the single manse, men and women were required as well. Louis the Pious’s legislation was described soon after his death as if it had specified a male and a female serf to go with the manse, and Lothar I’s decree implies that it had.15 In Bavaria a few years before Louis’s legislation, Hitto bishop of Freising envisaged a minimum endowment consisting of three serfs (presumably with land): his standard enquiry before consecrating a church—how does the founder mean to endow it?—was several times answered ‘that he endowed it with three serfs’, sometimes named, and sometimes with arable and meadow specified as well.16 Bishop Hitto’s wording was influenced later by the 818–19 rule: in 821, what the founder gives is described as a mansus vestitus, a manned or occupied holding, with the formulaic three serfs.17 A similar rule was asserted in Burgundy-Provence in 855 at the council of Valence: those who wanted to establish churches in their lands should confer on them one colonica vestita with three serfs. In the diocese of Rheims about the same time, archbishop Hincmar expected a priest to have four serfs with his manse, and this is what a council of Metz in 893 required to be free of census.18 It is not clear which of these regional requirements were for servi as tenants of a rent-producing manse, and which for household slaves, the workforce of a manse held in demesne. Whether slaves or tenants, they would provide labour for at least the priest’s house, garden, and livestock (stating the number need not point either way).19 In practice, in Francia, the basic manse could have serfs given with it and 13 Capit. no. 26 cc. 1, 15: two serfs for every 120 householders (perhaps the notional group supposed to build and endow a church); see Ho¨mberg, ‘Pfarrsystem des ko¨lnisch. Westfalen’, 32–3. Cf. king Stephen’s decree for Hungary, early 11th c. (Kloczowski, ‘Paroisses’, 192 n. 15). 14 DLD no. 42 (confirmation). See Schlesinger, ‘Kirche in Sorbenland’, 365. 15 Astronomus, Vita Hludovici, c. 28, ed. R. Rau (Darmstadt, 1955), 302. The mansus was to be cum pensatione legitima: Rau’s reading ‘with a fixed annual payment’ hardly makes sense; perhaps ‘by the lawful measure’. Lothar I required any (needed) unendowed church to be given, by the free men attending it, one manse and two serfs ‘according to my father’s command’ (above, at note 11). 16 e. g. Freising nos. 391, 394, 470. The verb is hereditare. The arable is sometimes described as 30 iornales or iugera (notionally what one team could plough in 30 days, Ganshof, Pol. St-Bertin, 182). 17 Freising no. 442. Founders often gave more land immediately after the required endowment; Hitto’s intention may always have been to ensure out of the total endowment an adequate living for the priest. 18 Valence, Conc. III no. 33 c. 9 (cf. Maˆcon, no. 36 c. 8); Hincmar’s questions for rural deans, 852, c. 2 (Capit. episc., II. 46); Metz ‘888’, c. 4 (Mansi, XVIII. 79; see Clercq, Le´gislation, II 337 n. 5). 19 Both servus and mancipium may be translated as ‘serf’ or as ‘slave’ (for historians’ differing usage see the chapters by Goetz, Verhulst, and Wickham, in New CMH, II). I generally use ‘serf’ unless they are clearly landless domestic slaves. In the Frankish context see Innes, State, 78–80.


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living on it as tenants, or be held in demesne while further holdings were tenanted.20 Whether the intention of the basic manse was to make the priest a small rent-receiving landlord or a substantial peasant farmer with some slave labour must vary from region to region, and perhaps makes little economic difference: to live mainly on the surplus of peasant households holding between them some forty acres of arable would hardly be more dignified or comfortable than working such a holding with three or four slaves or some semi-free cottagers.21 The Visigothic church had had a more gentlemanly standard: at the end of the seventh century a church with fewer than ten slaves was considered poor.22 Of course lesser churches’ actual wealth in land and men was much more diverse than the idea. In Carolingian times an occasional charter describes it. In 788–9 a Bavarian, Etpurc, and his son Into, giving to the bishopric of Passau a church they have founded and describing its substantia, begin with its ‘one chalice, one paten of silver, two chasubles, one alb, six maniples, two corporals’, and go straight on to a serf family with its land and possessions, three other serfs perhaps landless, and a half-share in two other people’s lands, along with ‘one horse, two oxen, one cow, twelve pigs, and twenty sheep’; in mid-ninth century Alemania a chapel has terra salica (its own demesne) and five inhabited holdings with their serfs.23 Far richer was the church at Mersch given to St Maximin, Trier, in 853 by the widow Erkanfrida, with demesne land, meadow, pastures, woodland, and a mill, as well as twelve manses with no fewer than ninety-six named serfs (presumably counting children), and another seven freed as rent-payers; yet this may have begun as the pertinence of a large estate, since it was not the entire property at Mersch—there was the lord’s manse and attached land intended for her husband’s nephews and niece.24 Richer still, and probably always an independent property, was the church given a few years later by its four joint owners to the bishopric of Speyer, reported by the royal missus as an excellent property, with terra salica and seventeen manses, each with meadow and arable of thirty iornales.25 In conquered and newly converted country, charters show missionary parish churches endowed with whole villae, and others even richer.26 In regions 20

e.g. for the former, UBMR II. 343–4; for the latter, DOI no. 313. Cluny endowed a chapel (dioc. Maˆcon) with a colonia and three serfs (950, Cluny no. 780): scrupulous adherence to Valence or a formulaic echo? 21 Such as the hospites of the Saint-Germain polyptich (Pol. Irminon., ii. 1, ix. 6, xix. 2). 22 Toledo XVI, 693 (Conc. Visig., p. 502); see Thompson, Goths in Spain, 299, 305–6. 23 Passau no. 18 (the shared lands were probably modest, judging by the small amount of livestock); DLD no. 69 (854). 24 Altlux. UB., I no. 88 (853 donation); Nelson, ‘The Wary Widow’, 111–13 (will); on Mersch, ibid. 99–100, 105–6. See below, p. 641. 25 DLD no. 92 (858; as an exchange this needed royal approval). For iornalis see above, note 16. 26 e.g. DOII no. 13 (976, confirming churches to the bishopric of Zeitz); but DLD no. 18 (a church with ‘land for a hundred manses and more’) is spurious.

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of Carolingian or Ottonian planning the small, poorly endowed parish churches were carved out much later. In other regions—Thuringia, converted early without much initial organization, or parts of East Saxony later—the foundation of local churches seems all along to have been left largely to individual enterprise, with a consequent wide variety of endowments, from churches with much less than a manse to a few with a score or more.27 But here too the richer churches seem usually the first in the field,28 endowed with undeveloped land and the tribute from conquered tribesmen, probably attracting settlers to its property rather than being inserted into an existing settlement. In newly colonized country in Spain, larger endowments are often specified besides the notional dextri.29 In West Francia the polyptichs give us some picture of the endowments of what were certainly estate churches. All those recorded for Saint-Germaindes-Pre´s in the 820s had lands not specially closely tied to what had just become the statutory mansus; slightly later polyptichs more often describe the land as one manse, and this seems not merely conventional. Saint-Remi’s attributes a freeman’s manse to several churches, two of them having each four serfs.30 But sometimes the priest had more, apparently as a personal benefice; two churches had small gifts of additional land from individuals;31 while in one large village, Courtisols, the church has not only a free manse in demesne but another held by a free tenant on the same terms as the abbey’s free tenants, oneand-a-half servile manses paying the same rents as the abbey’s, and two smallholders paying a few pence, chickens, and eggs.32 At the other extreme one church had only half a free manse; and the tersest entry is for Taissy: ‘there is one church, with half a servile manse.’ 33 Meanwhile on Saint-Germain’s estates there were churches seemingly richer in land that any of Saint-Remi’s: one with six dependent manses (occupied by sixteen households), one with five.34 Andreas Hedwig has recently argued that this is deceptive: that the dependants’ lands belonged to Saint-Germain, only their labour being allotted to the church. This reading of the polyptich is not quite convincing, however; the traditional 27

H. F. Schmid, ‘Recht der Gru¨ndung’, 14–36, 211–12; Schlesinger, ‘Kirche in Sorbenland’, 364–5; p. 79. For Bavaria see Stutz, Benef., 410–11. 28 See however Schmid, op. cit., 18, on the very rich church of Orlamunde founded c.1083. 29 e.g. PMHD no. 9 (882). Meanwhile Italian founders specify but do not usually quantify endowments. 30 Pol. St-Remi xv. 59–60; xviii. 23; xx. 75. 31 Ibid. xv. 62, xx. 75; xv. 61, xxii. 47. On xv (Ville-en-Selve) see Hedwig, ‘Die EK’ 41–44. 32 Pol. St-Remi xvii. 123–4 (not ‘Aguilcourt’, as in Gue´rard). For convenience I use Gue´rard’s subnumbers, but Devroey’s paragraphing makes better sense. 33 Pol. St-Remi xix. 18, xii. 5. (Devroey’s layout here shows the ancillae as not attached to the church). A few explicitly parish churches listed with only a half manse (an ecclesia plebeia of Chur’s; a basilica popularis of Wissembourg’s: Stutz, Benef., 402 n. 9) may have lost land earlier (see Lesne, Propr., II. i. 32). 34 Pol. Irminon. ix. 4 (St Maurice, Villemeux), xiii. B (Boissy); cf. xv. 2 (Villeneuve-St-Georges).


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reading, attributing to the better-off estate churches small estates of their own, seems still to hold good.35 In England the earliest extensive evidence is Domesday Book, though most of it omits churches or gives no indication of their land.36 In East Anglia the matter did include churches and chapels with their value and landholdings, and in Suffolk this survived in the final record. Endowments here range from an acre or two—a poor cottager’s holding—to two or three hides, a substantial freeman’s estate in which there would be some cottagers or slaves. In between were numerous churches credited with either fifteen or thirty acres—roughly what in much of England a typical villager would be said to hold. This is the nearest thing to the Carolingian mansus; though earlier, in days of less intensive cultivation, the conceptual equivalent would have been the hide; one hide was indeed the Domesday land of several Suffolk churches.37 These jurors’ estimates, or more likely traditional assessments, may themselves be shaped ultimately by the Carolingian idea; but not to the point of ironing out the actual diversity.38 Elsewhere in Domesday England it was often only the richer churches’ holdings, setting their priests above the ruck of ordinary villagers, that got recorded. At this level (leaving aside the richest old minsters) the dos is itself a manor, with lordship of the whole or a large part of a village.39 At any level there would be pasture rights proportionate to the holding, and the poorest church would have its firewood rights and whatever else a peasant had in woodland or heath; a richer one might have its own mills or even a market. That the bulk of the land was given (in some sense) by the builder of the church at its consecration can usually only be inferred.40 Monks might keep informal records of endowing churches on their own estates. But it seems rare (north of the Alps) for a small rural church to have its own foundation charter.41 One such survives from Lorraine in 1052, when a woman tenant of the archbishop of Trier records: ‘I have built an oratory in honour of St Peter and All Saints’ in 35 Hedwig, ‘Die EK’, 23, 26. His argument that ‘Habet ibi’ in the polyptich must always have as its subject the monastery or saint, not the church, is partly dogmatic (thinking landlordship within landlordship impossible) and partly stylistic. But it often translates naturally as ‘There is’ (cf. ‘il y a’); and an alternative verb is aspicere (to belong or be attached), used equally for the church’s undoubted endowment (aspiciunt ibi or aspiciunt ad ipsam ecclesiam . . . bunuarii . . . ) and for its dependants or dependencies (aspiciunt ibi hospites . . . , aspiciunt ad ipsam ecclesiam vi mansi), Pol. Irminon. ii. 1 (Palaiseau), ix. 4 (Villemeux). 36 See Blair, ‘Local Churches’, 266–7, 275–8. Some were probably only recently endowed at all. 37 Cf. the earliest known record of a parish church’s endowment in Scotland, c.1105, Thor Longus’ church at Ednam with one ploughland (above, p. 84 note 52). 38 See Bo¨hmer, ‘EKntum’, 308–15; Lennard, England, 288–94, 306–15, 327–8; Barlow, English Church 1000– 39 e.g. at Shrivenham (DB i (Berks) 57d). 1066, 190–6. 40 However, the donor to Saint-Maximin of a new chapel at Lintgen (896; below, pp. 465–6) has ‘conveyed to it pro dotalibus’ specified possessions; cf. p. 466 note 41. 41 Savigny’s cartulary records abbot Gauzmar’s charter of c.970 ‘donating’ to a church, in dotalicio, its site, one named serf, and two named mansi (Savigny no. 145).

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the villa of Bubenheim; the archbishop has dedicated it; ‘and I have endowed it with part of my estate’, described as fifteen iornales, four vineyards bearing in a good year six cartloads of wine, and two named ‘foundation serfs’ with their offspring. Later in the charter she adds that she has given ‘Gebba my female serf and her children’, paying two pennyworth of wax a year; and finally, ‘so that this dos or traditio may remain firm and unshaken’, she has asked to have the charter sealed with the archbishop’s seal.42 This charter—recording an endowment fairly generous in vineyard but meagre in arable—must have been required of her (and probably drafted) by the archbishop, as her lord as well as diocesan. Less unusual is the consecrating bishop’s description of the endowment in his own record;43 and in the Catalan Pyrenees, where numerous consecration records survive (from the ninth century onwards), these often incorporate first-person statements of what several individuals or family groups have given,44 and occasionally something more like a single founder’s or family’s formal charter, worded to treat an evidently non-monastic church as a legal person.45 From mid-ninth-century Burgundy we have an Autun consecration record incorporating an elaborate foundation charter, comparable to a monastery’s, from a layman and his son for their quite modestly endowed rural ‘chapel’.46

14.ii. Lords’ interest in their churches’ possessions What a church has in land and durable goods is not necessarily what it is worth to its lord. To a hereditary priest-owner it will be: the whole complex is both his patrimony and his livelihood; it is what some ancestor set aside, what his predecessors have made of it, what further capital has come to it from kinsmen or neighbours or been bought by his own savings: arable, vineyard, olive groves, town property; serfs, stock, barns, sheds; treasure, books, and vestments; the fabric of the church itself and the relics in its altar. All these either produce income for him, or attract him income from outside (neighbours’ and pilgrims’ 42

UBMR I no. 336. e.g. PMHD no. 54 (944); Cluny no. 780 (950; see Rosenwein, Neighbor, 147); Rheinisches UB no. 101 (1088); Welsh Episc. Acts D43; Brett, Eng. Church, 128 (Little Dunmow), 130 (Exhall). In 11th-c. Languedoc, Gellone no. 452 mentions a manse belonging to a church at Larzac ‘as is written in the church’s missal’. 44 Urgellia, I nos. 1, 4, 5, 6 (833–57); 7–11, 13 (but looks dubious with 55), 16, 20 (890–907); 30 (948); 55 (1044), 64 (1057). Cf. Archivo condal nos. 102–3 (932), 146–9 (960), all for abbesses of S. Juan de las Abadesas. 45 Urgellia, I nos. 25 (913), 29 (940); cf. HL II, Preuves no. 184 (873, Narbonne). Urgellia, I nos. 14, 23 (901, 912) look like founders’ separate documents, but were similarly written for and kept by the bishop. 46 Autun no. 45 (850–65, bp. Jonas), for Montbeugny (dept. Allier), endowed with an enclosed field of 1 modius (see Niermeyer, s.v.), arable (with meadow) of 5 modii, and cemetery; two mansi held by named serfs; and further meadow. See below, p. 802. The mid-9th c. foundation of Satolas (below, pp. 797–8) was probably collegiate. 43


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offerings in cash or kind, often convertible into capital); all contribute to what he is worth, not least his capacity for almsgiving. In Asturias in 990, for instance, a priest had at his disposal a church at Limanes, built by his grandfather and restored by his own labour, with everything he found there indoors or outdoors when he took it over, and buildings he had put up himself.1 Such an owner-priest may be able to sell property without the taint of church-robbing; certainly to effect an exchange.2 Of course such alienation could be improvident (and was often forbidden by the founders); a church and its property could be run down as well as improved. A family church or priest’s church was an investment in security, prestige, and hope of salvation, not a foolproof and fortune-proof assurance of future profit. Maintenance of the fabric might cost more than the income in rents and offerings could sustain, anyhow over some short critical period, and more than the owners’ other resources, if any, could meet. So changes of ownership often came about when overburdened or impoverished owners were anxious to give away a dilapidated church or sell it cheap, to someone who could afford to restore it. We have seen this happening in eighth-century Tuscany, and can see it again in eleventh-century Apulia.3 But what makes such church-owners poor is not the fact of having provided the land—they are still living on it—but its inadequacy for the calls on it, or their having allowed it to become inadequate.4 When on the other hand a landlord provides an endowment for an estate church, for its upkeep and its priest’s support, this is land that he could have kept for himself as a source of produce, rent, or labour. For him it is, at least initially, a straightforward cost, undertaken, if willingly, as a necessary lordly expense and act of piety. Furthermore, churches given away were often endowed for the first time—or their endowment was increased—at that point:5 pure cost to the donor, unless he reserves usufruct.6 However, any delayed endowment implies (if the church was in working order at all) that the founder had formerly borne all costs himself; and for any lord, endowment may be a more economical way of paying some of the church’s costs than bearing the direct charge would have been (depending on what these costs—fabric, lights, alms, the priest’s livelihood—were accepted as amounting to). It may increase in value under a succession of good 1

Below, p. 672 note 79, 674. An owner-priest in Amalfi (1018), selling land belonging to his church, justifies this as advantageous exchange: with the proceeds he has bought other land which ‘will turn out better for my church’ (below, 3 pp. 668–9). Below, p. 549 at note 79, 551 at note 97. 4 Impossibilitas was seen alongside neglect as causing the ruin of churches, i.e. their being redundant, or too large to restore from their own resources (Worms 829, Capit. no. 191 c. 3). 5 e.g. Brioude no. 235 (827; Fournier, Peuplement, 428); Beaulieu no. 164 (971); St-Pe`re, 127–31 (mid-11th c.), 138; UBNR I. 104 (10th c.). 6 Below, at notes 30–4 (unlikely for the small dotes of ordinary rural churches, in any case normally lacking the written context for such reservation). 2

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managers as priests, or in extent by a priest’s investment of his savings, his acquisitions staying with the church when he dies.7 It may be increased by accessions of land from parishioners, an acre here and a half-acre there, usually in return for a burial-place. A capitulary in 865 referred to small bits of land and vineyard given for burial as if any rural church might have them.8 In a manorialized society, however, such small donors are likely to be the church-owner’s tenants, so that his total lordship is not increased. For a new church, tenants’ contributions might amount almost to communal foundation. When Louis the Pious gave a site and the minimum single manse to his serfs at Neckarau to build a church for their own convenience, its further endowment came (with his leave) from them;9 in twelfth-century England, with more suggestion of compulsion or pressure though under the name of donatio, free tenants contributed to their lord’s new parish church at Keddington (Lincolnshire) at the rate of an acre for every bovate, half on one side of the village and half on the other (strips in two open fields, probably); a new chapel at Hutthorpe (Northants) was endowed on the same pattern.10 At Keddington the lord contributed too; at Hutthorpe not evidently. But as with a lord’s own gifts, so with his tenants’, they may immediately precede or accompany an alienation of the church and all its endowments: Louis the German’s serfs’ church was given to Pru¨m; Hutthorpe belonged to the parish church; Keddington was given to Alvingham Priory. So the lord is losing lordship over some acres of peasant land, not merely transferring them to his own estate church. Where voluntary gifts were made by individual free tenants to a church given away by their lord,11 he may, in allowing this, need to limit what they may alienate so as to safeguard his claim on their homage and service. This is often explicit in eleventh-century western France (‘provided I do not lose my men’s service’, ‘unless so much is given that I lose my homage altogether’);12 and is implied when groups of Provençal donors, giving two churches to Saint-Victor in 1059, gave licence ‘to all our men, as well milites as peasants’ to give to these churches ‘for their souls, some little part (we do not say all) of what they hold from us’.13 However, we know of such endowments only for those churches that came, like these, to greater, record-keeping establishments; and whether the church is 7

e.g. Otteric at Folembray (see index: Otteric). e.g. Pol. St-Remi xv. 61, xxii. 47. Hincmar observed that the chapel of Attolae curtis had 412 bunuarii out of its total of 7 from free men’s donations for burial-places (see index: Attolae curtis). Capit. no. 274 (Thusey, 865) c. 11 forbade lords to take rent for such lands any more than for the single manse. 9 DLD no. 145 (873, Louis the German confirms his father’s donation of the resulting church to Pru¨m). 10 Stenton, Danelaw Docs., pp. lxx–lxxi and no. 465. See Lennard, ‘Two Peasant Contributions to Church 11 Endowment’, EHR 67 (1952). e.g. St-Pe`re, 127–31, 215; Paray-le-Monial nos. 17, 25. 12 e.g. St-Vincent-du-Mans nos. 116, 201; St-Aubin nos. 371, 382; St-Cyprien no. 218. In N. Italy cf. Polirone, 13 no. 72 (1109). St-Victor nos. 687, 689. 8


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given away or kept, tenants’ contributions must at least relieve the founder of some of the immediate cost. Meanwhile for a ruler, especially a conqueror, parish churches could be endowed or enriched at his subjects’ cost by compulsion.14 For a private lord there was a positive accretion to his property from other people’s benefactions (or a priest’s acquisitions) if they came from outside his lordship; in Saint-Remi’s estates one of two small donors, the freeman Trutbold, is listed among the outsiders, and has given ‘land from outside’. Agobard of Lyons complains that lords regard their property in the church as comprising not only the original endowment but also anything given by the faithful for burial or other devout purposes.15 For a church that could attract such outsiders’ gifts or bequests, a small endowment might become a sprat to catch a mackerel. Yet the need for legislation persisted, though its implications shift and vary. Louis the Pious’s bishops complained that churches existed with little or no land; bishops were repeatedly required to insist on an adequate and inalienable dos;16 evidently endowment might be shirked or skimped, not necessarily out of meanness (the founder may think it unnecessary, intending to bear routine costs himself); but still with the implication that allocating land even to one’s own estate church was to give up in some degree its free disposal or exploitation. But legislation was also needed to fend off the founder and his heirs from what they have given; with different implications. Obviously most lords would want their church to prosper. Nonetheless, reiteration of the 818–19 ruling that (in effect) the minimum endowment be secured to the priest, rent-free, suggests that even where an adequate dos had been specified the founder might have kept such a hold on it that he might almost as well not have given it. Earlier Carolingian legislation, and perhaps the Visigothic legislation that it drew on,17 may however imply rather that the founder or his heirs might think the land reclaimable, at need or when convenient for family purposes,18 and perhaps alienate it, probably in benefice. Neither reaction amounts to deliberately undoing the endowment;19 but both come near to treating it as nominal, or its grant (entire) to successive priests as optional. In 855 the council of Valence ran alienation and burdening together, complaining that ‘the small possessions or endowments given to churches are irreverently taken away or diminished by very hard service’.20 14 The Saxons under Charlemagne, besides collective contributions, were perhaps meant to give each a tenth of his land (782 or 785, Capit. no. 26 c. 17). 15 Pol. St-Remi xxii. 35, 47; Agobard’s letter no. 5 (below, p. 795 note 46), c. xv (p. 172). 16 Capit. no. 178 (p. 367), and reiterated legislation (see Stutz, Benef., 278 n. 65); in England as late as 1102 (Westminster c. 17, C&S I no. 113 (p. 676). 17 Above, pp. 18–21; Capit. nos. 98 c. 21 (Pavia 801), 33 c. 15 (Aachen 802). 18 For reserving a right of redemption see above, pp. 43–4. 19 Loss of dotes because of lack of record, complained of by the 826 Council of Rome (Conc. II no. 46 20 c. 6. 6), sounds more like negligence and muddle. Conc. III no. 33 c. 9.

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Some may have taken the Aachen rule to mean that any existing endowment beyond the minimum could be kept in hand.21 But what most lords were actually taking from their estate churches’ lands in ninth-century Francia was probably not usufruct—taking smallholders’ dues, serfs’ labour, and actual produce, as if from his own demesne—but the priest’s rent (this would be what the council of Valence meant by ‘service’). The 818–19 legislation seems to assume that the priest holds and uses the whole endowment (whether directly or through tenants)22 and pays a rent for it: the aim is only to secure him the basic manse rent-free. What actual rents represented, however, is not a simple question. In the Saint-Remi polyptich there is no evident rent-free element; the priest’s rent is sometimes related to that of other tenants in the manor,23 but more often not; the pound of silver that the priest paid for the well-endowed church at Courtisols probably reflected tithes and offerings from the large population there, rather than being seen as paid for land.24 Sometimes the priest owed Christmas and Easter gifts (cakes, honey, wine, and chickens) which are the same as the mayor’s; he and the mayor are not simple tenants but, economically, the recipients of dues from others; socially, holders of status with gift-giving obligations. Here and there a priest owed a horse as a ‘gift’; this he would probably buy out of tithes and offerings rather than breed out of a mare of his own and rear on his own pasture, and it was paid for the church, not for the land.25 In eleventh-century England a church’s stated value in Domesday Book—its value to its lord—must normally have taken the form of a rent; sometimes this works out at a plausible rent per acre,26 which could be seen as paid for the land; but usually not. Meanwhile there is some ninth-century evidence of the alternative: direct exploitation of the glebe or its serfs by the lord. For Saint-Germain-des-Pre´s’s well-endowed church at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, the priest owed no rent, it seems (apart from his gift of a horse), but ploughing, reaping, and fencing services presumably done by his men.27 Grazing the lord’s horses was another frequent burden, complained of by councils.28 Of course such calls on labour or on pasture can be seen as a form of priest’s rent or service, or of unequal gift-exchange; any thoroughgoing use, taking the bulk of the produce, will hardly be documented 21

See Stutz, ‘Kapitel’, 80–1. Hedwig’s view that it assumed a surplus consisting of land that was the monastic lord’s in any case (‘Die EK’, 25–7) turns on his thesis that the churches had only the labour from dependants’ lands (above, pp. 442–3). 23 The church with only half a free manse had it ‘at the same rent as the others in that vill’ (Pol. St-Remi 24 xix. 18). Ibid. xvii. 124. 25 Pol. St-Remi xix. 18, xxii. 44, xviii. 20; for donum of a horse, Pol. Irminon ii. 1, xiii. 2, xv. 2, xix. 2. 26 See Bo¨hmer, ‘EKntum’, 318–19; Lennard, England, 321–3; Barlow, 1000–1066, 191–2, 200, 203. 27 Pol. Irminon. xv. 2; cf. Boissy, xiii. B; see Imbart, Origines, 258–60. 28 e.g. Thusey (865), Capit. no. 274 c. 11; Trosly (909) c. 6 (Mansi, XVIII. 279). 22


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since it implies neither custom nor agreement that might get recorded. But again looking ahead to Domesday Book, there are churches not valued even in East Anglia, which could mean that the glebe is not burdened at all, but could equally well mean that its value is merged in that of the manor. In Kent the priest or the church itself is often listed with the slaves; such a church either never had a dos or the dos is swallowed up in the demesne. At the other extreme, for the five-hide church of Luton (Beds.), an unusual discrepancy between the value (£3) and the rent (£1) may mean that the king’s tenant there got £1 from the priest and £2-worth of value from the glebe as well.29 A different approach is to look at the implications of the charters. We can leave aside the priestly or religious households living on their churches and retaining usufruct when they gave them away. Even Erkanfrida, living on the rich church that was her widow’s dower and reserving usufruct when she gave it to St Maximin in 853, may have been an ancilla Dei for most of her widowhood.30 But ten years earlier the Alemanian layman Adalhart reserved possession (pending any redemption) in everything he had given to his church of St Verena, for himself, his wife, and possible future sons and daughters;31 in 899, in an exchange with the church of Freising, a noble widow Irmburc not claiming any religious status retained tenure in a church with its house, garden, land, meadow, copses, and twenty named serfs; early in the tenth century king Arnulf’s mistress Ellinrat, ‘thinking of her future reward and of some sustenance in this present life’, gave up in an exchange with the church of Regensburg ‘her property, that is, the chapel at Ergolting with two other churches, with . . . manses and serfs . . . and everything useable belonging to that chapel, which she had in her possession and power at that time’, retaining however seventeen serfs and one hoba.32 All these are well-endowed churches with noble owners. By the eleventh century, in France and Burgundy, there is charter evidence for more ordinary rural churches when their lay or clerical lords, giving them to a monastery, reserved the means of life which they had evidently drawn from the church,33 if not as their whole income yet as a necessary part of it; this must have come in part from the glebe.34 A richer lord, for whom the revenues from a lesser church’s lands were trivial, could give them away without such reservations; that does not mean he had never taken them. Barlow, 1000–1066, 193–4; Lennard, England, 322 and n. 2. Above, p. 441; see Nelson, ‘The Wary Widow’, 100 on the tight time-scale involved. Above, pp. 43–4. Cf. St Gallen no. 556 (872), abbot’s precarial grant to the lay donor of a church, on similar terms (though subject to already established lifetime possession for—probably—an aunt). 32 Freising no. 1031 (899); DKonI no. 20 (914). 33 e.g. Cluny nos. 1272, 1325; Savigny no. 650; see below, pp. 638–40; Mager, ‘Verha¨ltnis’, 198. 34 In Cluny no. 1562 (981), a man and his son giving their moiety of a church and reserving life tenure in it gave into Cluny’s immediate possession (in vestitura) ‘the land that belongs to that church’—implying their own possession of it. 29 30 31

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More decisive than these reservations of usufruct (usually only for one or two lives) is that by the eleventh century the mansus dotalis had been largely superseded in much of the West by various arrangements for the priest’s living—a presbiterium or presbiteratus, a fiscum or fevum presbiterale—including a house, a barn, and some allotment of land; and this is not, like the Carolingian mansus, meant to be a rent-free part of whatever the priest holds: he holds nothing else. Arrangements for the priest’s living must be considered later; the point here is the clear implication that the rest of the land is being exploited by the lord himself, or by his beneficiaries.35 For the province of Narbonne, Magnou-Nortier sees the lord’s usufruct of church land not reserved for the priest as implying not property but guardianship: the ‘patron’ can exercise this ‘sans le`ser l’e´glise’.36 It may well have been without material harm to the church, but it is hard to see it as other than proprietary. This would apply also to taking over the whole glebe in gaps between priests—undocumented but probable anywhere, at any time;37 to dignify this as ‘custody in vacancies’ is probably misleading, though it might amount to that in practice (it could be simply sensible to safeguard a deceased priest’s harvest for his successor). Meanwhile the exploited endowment may slide into oblivion (absorbed into manorial demesne, or granted in benefice, or transferred to other churches). Occasionally we can infer that the lord has been using some of the land by his excluding it when he gives the church away: half of a meadow (probably meaning half its hay crop), or three mansi with huts;38 but this at least implies recognition that the land had been the church’s, as does the delayed gift to the monks of Molesme of ‘all the land’ of a church by a lord who a year earlier had given them its priest’s revenues and space on its land for their dwellings.39 The men and women who founded Molesme itself with their fragments of the family alod, including shares in a local church, gave up the church’s mansi ‘which they formerly had as their own’.40 More common, and more ambiguous, are donations including specific lands that appear to be additional gifts not among the church’s pertinences, yet look as if they may once have been the church’s—a manse next 35

St-Beńigne no. 372 (1089, duke’s confirmation of Odo of Bayeux’s endowment of Saint-Vigor-leGrand) distinguishes repeatedly (for seven villages) between terra presbiteris and terra quae ad ecclesiam 36 pertinet. Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 554. 37 ¨ See Stutz, ‘Regalie’, in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopadie, 16, 539. It might merge into raiding the priest’s own movables (see index: spolia). 38 St-Cyprien no. 158 (c.1030); St-Andre´-le-Bas nos. 211, 212 (1023, 1046). Cf. St-Beńigne no. 254 (1012–27, a church with only part of its possessions); La Reóle no. 78 (1088, a church with ‘the greater part’ of its property next the church). 39 Molesme no. i. 172 (before 1100). Cf. in the south-west St-Mont nos. 28, 87; Ange´ly no. 143 (1090s). 40 quasi proprios (Molesme no. i. 2). Cf. Altlux. UB no. 364 (c.1124 or later), mentioning a layman’s donation of a chapel with its dos ‘that he used to hold’.


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the church; an orchard by the apse; ‘vineyards around the church, and parcels of land there’;41 ‘things that had served our use’ (a man and his sister) including a stone dwelling-house, vineyard, some land, and three men with their families and holdings.42 In Poitou in 1094 the multiple donors of a church to the monks of Saint-Maixent sold to them separately the lands next the church, ‘of which however the church had not been in possession’ (non erat vestita: suggesting that it should have been), along with the habitations of men round the church, and the fiefs of Richard the woodman and John the clerk.43 Further south, a lord may give a church and an alod in terms that leave it entirely obscure how much of this land had previously belonged to the church. This was either unknown or unimportant when in 988 the countess Ermengard gave to her husband count Oliba, and he to the monastery of Arles-sur-Tech, ‘the alod called Costoja, and the church there, with tithes . . . and its cemetery, and the houses round the church . . . alod, houses, enclosures, gardens, vineyards, meadows . . . ’, all amounting to ‘everything . . . that I have in that place’;44 or when a century later an obscurer lord in the Auvergne gave to Sainte-Foi a moiety of a church with all pertinences ‘and everything else that belongs to that church or to that villa . . . just as I Stephen have it and as my father best had it and held it, with all fiefholders and servants who by me or from me have anything in the church or the villa’.45 This last instance points to what in France by the eleventh century had become the chief means of exploitation and often alienation of lesser churches’ endowments. Lords at all levels—bishops, abbots, counts, castle-holders—were creating benefices for their men, often milites (professional fighting men), out of their churches’ land; such men had to be squared—probably enlisted as fellow donors—if the church was to be sold or given away with endowments more or less reassembled;46 otherwise left in possession and (at best) transferred into the new lords’ lordship.47 The original grant to the tenant (if written) 41 St-Andre´-le-Bas no. 179 (early 11th c.); Savigny no. 640 (c.1030); St-Cyprien no. 582 (c.1025); St-Pe`re, 242–3 (1102); Cluny nos. 3008 (1049–1109), 3659 (1091); Bourbonnais no. 12 (1106). Giving ‘land next the church’ could be a first endowment, but these 11th-c. instances look more like tacit 42 restitutions. Cluny no. 3445 (1070–1107). 43 St-Maixent no. 182 (1094). From N. Italy, cf. Pinerole, no. ix (1082), donation of a chapel with cemetery ‘and other things round about that chapel which are our property’ (de nostris iuris). 44 Marca Hisp., App. nos. 138–9 (988). 45 pheusales and servientes (Niermeyer sense 3?) (1081, Ste-Foi no. 45). Cf. in Languedoc, Gellone nos. 450–2 (1087). 46 Often (late 11th–early 12th cs.) indicated by permission for the donor’s men to give anything ‘belonging to that church’ (e.g. St-Cyprien no. 473; St-Pe`re, 504–5); or for monks to accept it (Gellone nos. 151–2, 397, 400; Cormery no. 49). Earlier (not after 1061), Montier-en-Der no. 42 is conditional on the donor getting his milites out. 47 e.g. St-Pe`re, 214, 234–5 (1080, 1102); cf. Savigny no. 653 (c.1020); St-Flour no. vi. 18, 21, 22; St-Sernin, Toulouse no. 205 (c.1050).

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might recognize the church’s title;48 but this was easily ignored or forgotten.49 In some regions—south-eastern Provence especially—older churches had fallen into ruin and lost their lands irretrievably in past violence; while even for new or restored churches, the proliferating claims of brothers, cousins, and nephews in the lands of a family church often led to such confusion that reconstitution was virtually impossible and it had to be re-endowed from scratch.50 In less extreme cases, mostly in southern France, the atrium (usually enclosed), or cemetery, or a larger sanctuary (often marked out by crosses),51 were still recognized; though not without ambiguity, since land might be so marked or so described precisely because it was all that anyone could remember as the church’s.52 Even this could be firmly under the lord’s or family’s or their tenants’ control, so that Molesme could be given churches with, at first, only ‘so much of the atrium as the monks need’,53 or with an atrium that had within it the lord’s oven.54 However, the cemetery or sanctuary was the one element in almost any church’s land which it could hardly pay the lord to alienate from the church altogether (if he could help it), since its value depended ultimately on its sacrosanctity. The use of part of it for burials, and the fees or offerings that this attracted, is not the point here; nor is its occasional use for short-term asylum, profitable though this might be. What matters most to the lord as a landlord is its use for habitation.55 Through much of France, Provence, and the Pyrenees, especially where the Peace of God movement was most felt, the sanctuary was used in violent times for safe keeping of food stores, for temporary shelter of refugees, and in due course, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, for permanent houses;56 sometimes forming a whole new settlement—in western France a ‘bourg’. The very existence of the church and its sanctuary could thus attract population and promote 48 An abbot of Noaille´ grants land to a priest ex nostro beneficio but ex terra of Noaille´’s church at Mazerolles, 985 (Lesne, ‘Abbayes’, 41 and n. 4). 49 Imbart argued (convincingly) for far more confusion than Stutz would admit (Origines, 261–3; Stutz’s 50 1904 review, 34 and n. 2). See below, pp. 612–13. 51 Le´zat no. 275 (1080/1); St-Sernin, Toulouse, App. no. 18 (1092); St-Cyprien no. 473 (?late 11th c.); in (French) Burgundy, Molesme no. ii. 607 (1079). Cimeterium seems synonymous sometimes with atrium, sometimes with salvetas, sagreria, etc. 52 In Rouergue and Languedoc see Ste-Foi nos. 54 (1074–81), 58, 59 (1083): donors of churches mark out land ‘round the church’ to give (giving also anything identifiable as held by past priests). 53 Molesme no. i. 172 (1076–1100); cf. St-Martin-des-Champs no. 72 (1096). In Normandy cf. Orderic 54 Vitalis, II. 152–5 (delayed gift of the ‘whole area’ of a cemetery). Molesme no. ii. 610 (1079). 55 Even where the sanctuary was only ‘30 paces’ (a standard found in Spain and Languedoc) these were probably double paces (see above on dextri), and evidently a radius, not a diameter (see Gellone nos. 213–14; Nıˆmes no. 169; Ivo of Chartres, Panormia, iii c. 78, PL 161. 1098). 56 Musset, ‘Cimiterium ad refugium tantum vivorum’, Rev. du Moyen Aˆge Latin (1948), 56–60; Bonnassie´, Catalogne, 653–6; Che´deville, Chartres, 344–5; Aries, Hour of Our Death, 51–5, 62–71. For 12th-c. Saxony, H. Wiswe, ‘Dorfkirche und Grundherrschaft im su¨dlichen Niedersachsen wa¨hrend des spa¨teren Mittelalters’, Jahrbuch des Braunschweig. Geschichtsvereins, 2nd ser., 6 (1934), 84–6. See also legislation against it: Seligenstadt, 1023; Coyanza (Leoń), 1055; more lenient, Lillebonne (Normandy), 1080.


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peace and prosperity, at a time when economic revival was beginning ahead of the peace that it needed. Among the dangers envisaged might be the exactions of a lord with the ban;57 yet a lord—banal or manorial—was as likely to be positively involved. For him it could be a colonizing enterprise; he could for instance license a fair and take its profits. Development was not, of course, restricted to the cemetery or sanctuary, but this and the church itself was the core round which settlement took place: thus, in 1079 a woman gave her inherited church to Vendoˆme with the expectation that ‘both the monks and their peasants’ would build houses on land described as ‘round the church’ though outside the cemetery.58 Inevitably it is only for churches given away to monasteries or cathedrals that we have direct evidence of this development value. In eleventh-century France, from Languedoc to Normandy and the Île de France, this was often explicitly part of what was given away with a church, along with tithes, baptism and burial rights, lands, rents, and customs: ‘land near the church, for settling men’, with shares in two mills and a site for an oven; ‘the dwellings that are there now and that will be built there for love of St Faith’, with a market and all its dues;59 whatever the monks can build in the land round the church and its one agricultural manse by way of mills, fishponds, gardens, as well as an existing mill and fishery.60 But giving a church and its land to monks—perhaps a new church, or land for one61—may have been the best way of getting the development done, under corporate lords who could afford the cost and wait for results.62 The donor would benefit from this as lord (still) of the older part of the settlement, or of the castle by whose wall a new church and bourg were built;63 and besides this he might retain a share in the proceeds: all or half the dues from a fair or market, a mill or an oven; or a share in the profits and running expenses of a new mill, the monks bearing the 57

See Bonnassie´, Catalogne, 575–610, 652–7; but on the Peace movement as not essentially antiseigneurial, Goetz, ‘Protection of the Law’, 269–79. 58 Vendoˆme no. 282 (cimiterium probably in its narrower sense of ‘graveyard’). 59 St-Martin des Champs no. 61 (1078–9); Ste-Foi no. 27 (1031–60). Cf. in (French) Burgundy, Paray-leMonial no. 22 (n.d.); in Poitou, St-Cyprien nos. 475 (1083–1101), 473 (c.1045); in Touraine, St-Julien, Tours nos. 31 (1066), 34 (1073–85); Noyers nos. 8 (c.1057), 244 (c.1096); in Anjou, Cormery no. 45 (1070–1110); St-Aubin no. 287 (1047–67). Sometimes an already-founded bourg was given with the church, e.g. Fleury no. 75 (1065); Ange´ly nos. 147 (c.1069), 266 (1091), 271 (c.1088–9); Asse´-le-Riboul no. 1 (1097, explicitly for further 60 development). St-Maixent no. 95 (1041). 61 Noyers no. 40 (c.1065); Couture no. 31 (1097–1120); Vendoˆme nos. 324 (1085, Ralph de Beaugency gave the castle-chapel of Montfollet to be rebuilt in stone, with land for a bourg), 385 (c.1100, he gave land for a parish church and bourg to Saint-Lomer, Blois, though Vendoˆme having counter-claims kept a record). In Languedoc, Le´zat nos. 285 (c.1072–81), 1048 (1075). 62 For an individual’s failure see Cormery no. 33 (1007–25): the monks had accepted a layman’s offer to enclose a church’s bourg and do all possible building and improvement (to secure his life tenure, which they were disputing); achieving nothing, he was bought out. 63 St-Cyprien nos. 210 (1019–27), 167 (c.1030); Ste-Foi no. 66 (1065–87); Noyers no. 139 (c.1087); Vendoˆme no. 324 (1085). Cf. Chevalier, ‘Restitutions’, 136–7.

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capital cost;64 a share in the rent and fidelity of any burgesses ‘that the monks may be able to gather’;65 some houses, or a half share in the space for settlement.66 So to benefit from a church’s potential as a centre of development it was perhaps in the end not necessary or even advisable to own it;67 only to have owned it. This is not to say that unalloyed cooperation reigned. The donor of a church, or his heirs, might feel that his own share in what could be extracted from the burgesses was insufficient, and increase it by intimidation; or resent what he saw as inadequate investment by the monks; or think he could do better with a bourg or sauvete´ on another site and with a new partner.68 Things might go better if the monks’ realism deflated the donors’ optimism at the start, as when two brothers leaving for Jerusalem gave land and a ruined chapel to the monks of Noyers, trying to make it a condition ‘that the monks should make a bourg there, and rebuild the church’, and were told they must leave this to the abbot’s and monks’ judgment;69 or if the monks recognized quickly that they had made a mistake, as when Cluny allowed a donor to buy back and give to Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly a church too distant for Cluny to rebuild and improve.70

Whether or not the endowment had any special economic promise, the condition of the hallowed building at its core was crucial. An impoverished or feckless lord might indeed neglect the fabric, or even filch timber, stone, or lead for other buildings.71 But its good repair would maintain the church’s power to attract not only benefactions and offerings, but population. So might its total renewal. Sometimes this followed long disuse, as with the ‘little church’ in the Perche that a miles and his mother gave outright to Saint-Pe`re (under pressure from the lord from whom he held it), adding a little nearby arable; it had almost no parishioners left, no priest came there, however seldom, and ‘but for its altar-block, it would 64

e.g. St-Aubin no. 287 (1047–67); Noyers no. 40 (c.1065); St-Vincent-du-Mans no. 201 (c.1090); St-Pe`re, 142–3 (1102); in (French) Burgundy, Molesme no. i. 61 (late 11th c.). 65 Vendoˆme no. 163 (1062); Angers nos. 51 (1075, for Saint-Serge); in Brittany cf. Redon no. 385 (before 1050; arrangements implying that some burgesses remained the lord castellan’s). 66 Couture no. 31 (1097–1120); Ste-Foi no. 66 (1065–87); St-Victor no. 385 (mid-11th c.). Donations of ‘half the bourg and customs’ seem to mean that the donor keeps half, not that half is all he had: see St-Maixent no. 97 (1041–4); St-Cyprien no. 95 (c.1085). 67 Whether the bourg was seen as belonging to the local church on whose cemetery it arose was probably unimportant. 68 Seigneurial claims renounced (e.g. to Redon, above, note 65; Ange´ly no. 115, c.1097; Paray-le-Monial no. 167, 1080) or insisted on (e.g. ‘my burgesses shall not be received to inhabit [the monks’] land without my agreement’, St-Pe`re, 471–2) indicate potential friction; as does promising not to give any other saint 69 leave to make a sauvete´ nearby (Ste-Foi no. 538, c.1065). Noyers no. 252 (c.1096). 70 Ange´ly no. 56 (c.1088); perhaps originally under-endowed (the donor now gave it mills, meadows, a weir, a fishery, and some money). 71 More likely for benefice-holders than for founders’ heirs; see Capit. no. 28 c. 26 (Frankfurt, 794). A 1015 donation to Farfa including ‘stones, wood, and all work of its building’ among a church’s pertinences (Farfa no. 579) is unusual.


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seem to a stranger to be a poor man’s hovel’.72 But by that time a church was often simply not up to late eleventh-century standards.73 The growing wealth of the period had already brought stone churches to many villages (Ralph Glaber’s ‘white mantle of churches’, including ‘little village chapels’);74 a new church might still initially be a wooden shed, but this was probably meant to be temporary.75 To get a church rebuilt in stone and mortar could be a reason for giving or selling it to monks, or a condition.76 Certainly churches, like cemeteries, were used for secular purposes: meetings, negotiations, feasts; above all safe storage, against rain, fire, or robbery, of anything from hay and corn to tradegoods, money, or treasure.77 These uses are more communal than seigneurial, but the lord could share in them or charge for them. The larger and more solid the building the more attractive would such uses be, whether for lord, priest, or parishioners78 (often with the added security, for individuals, of storage chests or strongboxes for whose use the priest or lord would charge).79 But here again, the holiness that helped to make it safe might be worn away by such uses; a clean and seemly church would prosper more. It would certainly prosper more if decently furnished with books, plate, and vestments. In the ninth century, the polyptich of Saint-Germain-des-Pre´s regularly says of the abbey’s estate churches that they are in good repair and properly equipped (while one is described as having lost almost everything); that of SaintRemi sometimes lists vessels, books, and ornaments: at Rilly, for instance, endowed with a single manse, some vineyard, meadow, and two serfs, there was a cross plated with tin or pewter; a missal, lectionary, martyrology, and psalter; a pewter chalice and paten and some vestments.80 In Flanders in 867, the monk Gundbert, anxious to keep control of the rich family church that his father had given with him and for him to Saint-Bertin, made a long inventory of its property: ahead of its lands, serfs, cattle, and rents are listed its four reliquaries inlaid with

72

St-Pe`re, 491–2 (1070–1100). In Maˆcon no. 544 (1074–96), a man and his brothers gave a church to Maˆcon with an increased endowment, ‘praying that the church, which is badly built, may have its walls renewed and consecrated, with an adequate cemetery’. 74 Libri V., iii. iv. (13), vi (19), 114–16, 126–8. A mortared stone church was still remarkable, however (St-Pe`re, 127–8, before 1061; 138, before 1080). 75 For the ‘Great Rebuilding’ in England see Gem, ‘The English Parish Church’. 76 Vendoˆme no. 324 (1085); Noyers no. 252 (c.1096); and below, pp. 755–6. 77 The evidence is mainly repeated legislation (general and diocesan, 9th to 13th c.) against such uses. 78 Adrald’s concern that Saint-Pe`re build a stone church at Crot (below, p. 638) may relate to a due that he still took on corn stored there. 79 Pertinence-lists often include arca, archa; or arcagium, arcadium, probably meaning fees for their use; cf. census archarum que in ipsa essent ecclesia (Molesme no. i. 159); or a donor retaining archas seu alia vas sine arcandio: without paying the monks, or without charging other users? (St-Martin-des-Champs no. 39, c.1089). Other instances range from Normandy (Orderic, HE III. 152–4) to Languedoc (Gellone no. 109). 80 Pol. St-Remi vi. 17 (p. xiii for other examples). 73

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gold and silver, its silver chalice and paten, thurible, and three other chalices; vestments, in similar detail; a modest mixed dozen of books.81 The most elaborate regular inventorying of books (usually put first), plate, ornaments, bells, and vestments—running on to domestic, wine-making and farming gear, oxen, asses, goats—comes from southern Italy in the eleventh century, where town and country churches were leased to priests by written agreements.82 These emphasize the priest’s duty to keep the possessions intact, a religious as well as an economic responsibility, owed to the church itself as well as to its owner. Nonetheless the contents are part of the value of what the owner can dispose of, and this is clearly expressed when (as in this region earlier) such possessions are listed not in an inventory but in a generalized way as pertinences: ‘all gold and silver and books and ornament . . . and its substance in everything, houses and movables, cattle and serfs male and female . . . ’.83 Charters from the future Portugal from the ninth century onwards list as pertinences crosses, crowns, chalices, vestments, and books along with lands, buildings, vats, cisterns, livestock, and sometimes the clergy-house furniture.84 Similar pertinence lists are found in many eleventh-century charters of donation in Languedoc; that everything is the donors’ to give seems implicit always, and explicit when a man and his wife give a church to Le´zat ‘with bells and books, with chalice and thurible, that is with every ornament of ecclesiastical ministry . . . as much as belongs to it and that I am seen to have and possess there’.85 The same assumptions, shared or tolerated by the monks who drafted the charter, appear long before in Carolingian Hesse, where in 802 the seven joint donors of a church to Hersfeld began their pertinence list with ‘whatever we have in that church . . . in relics, reliquaries, crosses, gold, and silver’86 (though including the relics as ‘belonging’ to the church and its owner is fairly unusual).87 These things may be given by a founder at the beginning, and perhaps recorded as part of the endowment where this is recorded at all, as (often) in 81 See index: Steneland. In the same region c.865 a priest gave to Cysoing a church with only 30 bunuarii, two mansi, and a serf family, but (almost incredibly) with ‘artefacts . . . of 18 pounds of silver and 18 ounces of gold’ (Cysoing no. 2). Cf. Irmburc’s donation to Freising, 899 (above, note 32); and Etpurc’s modest list, 788–9 (see index: Etpurc). 82 e.g. (from 1006 to 1058) Cava nos. 582, 990, 1121, 1174, 1205, 1270; Bari V. no. 26 (1067, declaration by the tenant priest of what the owner ‘has given me as movables’). 83 Cava 119 (904). For pertinence lists and occasional inventories in central Italy, Farfa nos. 450, 460, 512, 514, 614, 659, 787, 850, 1010, 1186, 1190; and see Toubert, Structures, 868–9. 84 PMHD (from 870 to 1008) nos. 5, 9, 15, 51, 104, 152, 191, 200. In nos. 152 (986) and 409 (1058), pertinence lists contain an element of inventory in describing a few special things. Cf. Sahaguń no. 29, where specified books, thurible, bell, and pewter chalice lead straight on to a saddle and bridle and all kinds of stores and stock, all de nostris iuris abrasis in vestris iuris afirmatis. 85 Le´zat no. 299 (1027); cf. nos. 51, 267, 299, 306, 364; from the 10th c., nos. 223, 375. 86 Hersfeld no. 21. 87 An instance is Adalhart’s grant to St Gallen (above, pp. 43–4): ecclesiam cum reliquiis qui in eo collocata sunt . . . trado atque transfundo.


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Catalonia: of three brothers whose church was consecrated by the bishop of Gerona in 947, two laymen gave fields and vineyards while a deacon gave the site and with it liturgical books, chalice and paten, and a vestment.88 Otherwise they are later offerings, gifts, or legacies; perhaps given by its priest, paid for from other resources, or from the church’s own surplus put out of circulation for piety and prestige.89 Whether for a landlord, a family group or a priest-owner, they represent part of the value of the church—its value at all levels—as well as its cost. Good management will maintain and increase them; though as with the fabric, so even more easily with its contents, a small-scale owner may be tempted or forced into dilapidation, while a large-scale one may feel free to move things around, including relics, usually to hallow or honour another place. Carolingian legislation had forbidden this, extending to contents the old rules against alienation;90 and when an early eleventh-century count of Le Mans wanted to remove relics of a quite obscure saint, Rigomer, from a lesser church of his own, for the benefit of a highly respected abbot, he went about it surreptitiously as if it were indeed church robbery.91 Nonetheless, that vessels, ornaments, and even relics could be given by founders or benefactors meant that they could be owned outside the setting of a church;92 and sometimes they returned to this unanchored condition.93

By the eleventh century, then, at least in France which by then provides most of our evidence, the possibilities of a lord disposing of or directly exploiting a rural church’s property cover a wide range. Where the equipment was basic and the land barely enough for the priest’s household at subsistence level, these possibilities might be non-existent if the church was to be kept manned and functioning. They might be considerable, in churches whose endowments allowed the priest to live off a portion set aside for him, while any rent for the rest was probably superseded by excluding the priest from its use, its character as church land at risk of being forgotten (which might indeed reduce the church to unprofitable poverty). And they might be transformable, for some well-placed 88

Roussillonais no. 7. In PMHD nos. 5, 9 (907, 986) all the joint founders give all the plate, books, etc.; cf. Cava no. 425 (990). 89 On S. Italian priests’ legacies and entrance-gifts see below, pp. 549–50; Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 155. 90 See Stutz, ‘EK, EKl.’, 7–8. Mainz (813) forbade unauthorized translation of relics (Conc. II. no. 36 c. 51, 91 p. 272). Peter of Maillezais, relatio, PL 146. 1266–7. 92 They could belong to a great man’s travelling chapel, e.g. books and treasures left individually to wife, sons, and daughters by count Eckhard c.840 (including a gold-encased fragment of the True Cross) and by Eberhard duke of Friuli, 867 (The´venin, Textes (partial) nos. 76, 99; or Fleury no. 25, Cysoing no. 1). 93 Spectacularly, the ‘little cross holding the blood of Christ’ acquired from Waldo abbot of Reichenau by Hunfrid of Rhaetia c.800, originally lodged in Hunfrid’s nunnery at Scha¨nnis, but removed by his son in an emergency and carried about by his heirs for two more generations (Translatio sanguinis Domini (SS IV. 445–9), esp. cc. 13–20; see Airlie, ‘Aristocracy’, 441).

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churches, into entrepreneurial development in which the church too flourished, and in which the lord might happily invest some restitution or replacement of its former lands and even his property-right in the church itself. However, these considerations give a lopsided view of the wealth of churches and their value to lords. Sometimes it seems that a church’s land was indeed the bulk of its wealth and its chief attraction to later owners or tenants. But far more often, what had made endowing a rural church a good long-run investment was what came to it as a holy place and centre of worship: its revenue in tithes and other dues and offerings. Even for churches not inviting ambitious development (the great majority), this ‘pastoral’ revenue would increase as population grew and was consolidated into villages; it was among the chief profits envisaged where development was possible; and it in turn helped to finance new churches and improved cemeteries.

15 Lesser churches’ resources in tithes and offerings

15.i. Allocation of tithes and offerings between churches The building up of entitlements to what can loosely be called ‘pastoral’ revenues, and the role of lords in this, was touched on in Part I in the context of the converging of parish and private churches. It will be argued here that lords in some regions had a decisive influence, not on the origins, but on the allocation or direction of these revenues; not, however, fitting any universal pattern of directing their own dependants’ contributions to their own local churches, and not monopolizing control to the exclusion of episcopal authority or of some communal or individual choices. Offerings came first, starting with the bread and wine that early Christians brought to the altar for the Eucharist. By the later sixth century in the Western Church, regular offerings included wax for candles, oil for lamps, candles and lamps themselves, eggs, cheeses, and other produce for the clergy, sometimes money; often brought to the sacristy, rather than to the altar as part of the liturgy. Their intended destination if any would be to support the clergy, feed the poor, light the church, perhaps furnish or repair it. But their givers might not be thinking of their use at all. Some can be seen as extensions of the social practice of gift-giving: at one level to God or a saint, at another to bishop, abbot, or priest as a mark of respect; or perhaps as countergifts, token or substantial, for help provided, services rendered, or functions performed. Some took the place of pagan offerings left at sacred trees, springs, or hilltops, sheaves or beasts brought to a king or priest for seasonal sacrifice, or contributions to a ritual feast shared with the dead. Perhaps most important was care for the dead, especially ancestors, by making offerings to have their bodies buried in hallowed ground and to help their souls out of purgatory.

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But besides these particular purposes or occasions, Christians were morally obliged to give part of their wealth to the Church (for clergy, fabric, costs of worship, the poor, the ransoming of captives): an obligation defined in biblical terms as firstfruits—given to God from the first animals born or the first of the harvest—and the tenth part of one’s product or gains, mainly the year’s grain and animals born that year.1 Firstfruits (primitiae) were not sharply different from other offerings, and might loosely correspond to pagan autumnal offerings for next year’s harvest.2 But the tithe, a much weightier burden, was owed rather than offered; it was quantitatively defined, unlike firstfruits; and it corresponded to no specific ritual need, common or individual. It was this above all that had to be enjoined by preachers and councils, and that came to have the ruler’s backing in eighth-century Francia.3 Exactly how and in what sense the tithe became ‘compulsory’ is still obscure. It appears as a religious practice, probably only of the well-to-do, in fifth- and sixthcentury Gaul, in Visigothic Spain, and in seventh-century England.4 But Gaulish preaching and legislation presenting it as a Christian duty imply that it was widely ignored, evaded, or skimped.5 For converts it might be among the least comprehensible of their new obligations. English missionaries in the earlier eighth century would expect it of their converts and look to their Frankish patrons to back them in this; while for the enforced converts of the Carolingian conquests— Saxons, Slavs, and Avars—tithe-paying was part of what was enforced, along with baptism itself, and was (as Alcuin saw) a form of tribute.6 The first record of a lay ruler trying to enforce it is king Pippin’s instruction in 765 to the missionary bishop Lul to ‘ordain by the king’s command that every man render his tithe, willingly or not’; this may or may not have been restricted to missionary regions, or have applied to that year only.7 But already, a few years earlier, the bishops of Bavaria had asked duke Tassilo to punish those who would not pay tithe; and in 779 Charlemagne’s capitulary of Heristal put royal power behind the tithe for the whole of his dominions.8 1

For the biblical and moral basis see Constable, Tithes 9–19. W. A. Chaney, ‘Anglo-Saxon Church Dues’, Church History, 32 (1963), 271–5. On firstfruits generally see Viard, Dıˆme, 98–100, 237–40. 3 The attack on this received view (seeing all tithes as originally peasants’ dues to landlords, and as claimed for the Church by falsifying history) by the comte de Neufbourg and M. Gonon (Les Dıˆmes en Forez, Chartes de Forez, XV (Maˆcon, 1957), esp. 188–213) is not supported even by the narrow segment of 4 evidence used. Constable, Tithes, 19–21, 24–6; probably also in Italy (Boyd, Tithes, 33–6). 5 Viard, Dıˆme, 55–9, 92–4; Kuujo, Zehntwesen, 12–13 (useful summary of early legislation), 24–6; Constable, Tithes, 21–4. 6 Epist. Karol. Aevi, II nos. 107, 110, 111. Some references may be to a special one-off tithe of land and stock to endow new churches (see Kuujo, op. cit., 21–2). 7 See Kuujo, op. cit., 13, and n. 3 for literature. Viard proposed, convincingly, a general command but for one year only, in thanksgiving for an exceptional harvest (Dıˆme, 70–3). 8 Ascheim (755–60), Conc. II no. 10 c. 5; Heristal (779), Capit. no. 20 c. 7 (for background links with England see Cubitt, Councils, 155–61). 2

Resources: tithes and offerings

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Carolingian legislation, royal and ecclesiastical, continued to reiterate the compulsory tithe;9 Frankish rule brought it to northern Italy, while in the south it was probably never enforced until the Norman domination; in Spain tithe legislation appears only in the eleventh century.10 In England ‘church-scot’—probably firstfruits of grain—was enjoined by king Ine of the West Saxons in the early eighth century; but not until the tenth century were tithes taken under the wing of royal authority (followed later by other dues such as light-scot, and soul-scot for the dead).11 In Scandinavian law collections from the twelfth century and later, tithes and other church dues are prescribed.12 Very few countries of western Europe escaped the obligatory tithe, perhaps none after the twelfth century.13 Pippin’s and Charlemagne’s first moves do not seem to need any explanation beyond their general commitment to uphold the Church and their need to bid for God’s support by communal obedience to His commands.14 Pippin’s obligatory tithe in 765 was to accompany litanies of thanksgiving for good harvests, after dearth seen as punishment for sin; at Frankfurt in 794 bad harvests were attributed to demons devouring the grain because the people grudged the tithe.15 The difficulty was probably to get the people to share this belief. Archbishop Arn of Salzburg told his bishops to teach the faithful to pay their tithes to God instead of rendering paganish votive offerings (presumably to local spirits); later, archbishop Agobard of Lyons complained that the peasants would rather give some of their crops to sorcerors to protect them against bad weather than pay tithes to priests.16 Even for the pious, conscience might be satisfied by token firstfruits and a grudgingly calculated tithe, once these payments had become a form of tax. Nonetheless, as taxation these levies were successful enough to be extremely important in the economic life of western Europe, constituting a claim on the peasants’ surplus that must have been next in weight to the rents and labour 9

Charlemagne’s newly recognized capitulary of ?813 (ed. Mordek, Biblioth., app. I no. 13, p. 990), c. 6, is particularly clear (praecipimus et bannimus) and explicitly biblical (‘as the Lord spoke to Moses, saying . . . ’). 10 See Boyd, Tithes, 36–46, 230–2; Martin, Pouille, 609–13; Bidagor, Iglesia, 132–4. 11 Ine cc. 4 and 61 (Liebermann, Gesetze, I. 90–1, 116–17); I Athelstan cc. 1 and 4 (C&S I. i no. 11; the editors say there was as yet no secular penalty, but c. 5 seems to apply the king’s oferhyrnes to nonpayment); and from Edmund to Cnut, ibid. nos. 17 c. 2, 27 cc. 1, 2, 3, 28 c. 1, 49 c. 12, 52 c. 8, 64 cc. 13 and 82, and 65. See Wormald, Making, 295, 302, 306, 314, 342–3; Blair, Church, 433–45. 12 See P. Sawyer, ‘Dioceses and Parishes’ 40–1; B. and P. Sawyer, Medieval Scandinavia, 110–11; Byock, Iceland, 92–3 (not as clear as it looks, however). 13 See Kuujo, Zehntwesen, 54–60 on Frisia; Constable, Tithes, 26 n. 5 (references for Wales and Ireland); above, p. 84 (Scotland). For Latium, Toubert’s argument for general non-enforcement of the canonical tithe is doubtful (see below, p. 505); and his identifying most later decimae as secular tenths (as some certainly were) does not take account of laicization (below, note 26). See Dormeier, Monte Cassino, 88–90. 14 The idea that it was compensation for past and present secularizations is not convincing; see in particular Constable’s demonstration that nona et decima were not a doubled ecclesiastical tithe (above, p. 76 at note 10). More widely see Viard, Dıˆme, 74–85; Constable, Tithes, 28–31. 15 16 Capit. no. 17 (Pippin to Lul); no. 28 c. 25. Conc. I. no. 22 c. 5; Viard, Dıˆme, 90–2.

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rendered to their lords.17 This success would have been impossible without the support of lords; in the disintegrating Carolingian kingdoms it was they if anyone who could get their dependants to pay. Their interest in the matter was as the owners of churches. This is not to say that it was they who pressed for the tithe to be compulsory: such an explanation is neither needed nor plausible, since tithes were not yet benefiting estate churches. But once the tithe was established, church-owners had an acute interest in its destination, and once that was settled partly in favour of their churches, a strong interest in getting tithes paid. It was not self-evident that tithes must ‘belong’ to particular churches at all. As long as paying tithe was a personal observance of the well-to-do, its destination could be largely a matter of choice. Theodore’s Penitential had said that tithes should be given only to the poor or to strangers, or by laymen to a church18— implying some choice, at least for the clergy. Soon the official view was against any such freedom: the distribution of tithes was to be in the bishop’s power, not the payer’s.19 This does not imply any firm rule about where the tithe is paid, but only that the bishop is to control how the proceeds are spent. The principle, consistent with this, that gained ground in the eighth century was that tithe should be paid to—or at—the church where one received the sacraments, and especially where one’s children were baptized.20 But this implied the further question, where ought the laity to have their children baptized? Furthermore, where ought they to be buried? The first question had to be answered when the tithe came to depend on it; the second needed answering (not so rigidly)21 because offerings too were on the way to becoming customary fees. The answers soon took the form of assertions of the rights of particular churches over defined populations or territories.22 A ninth-century formula for a bishop allowing an abbot to rebuild a rural church stipulates that it should usurp from its mother church ‘neither tithe nor baptism nor burial’.23 Tithes that had primitively been paid at the baptismal churches were now paid to them; soon 17

Heavier for those only lightly burdened by lordship, and of course for the lordless (if anyone made them pay). 18 laici suas ad ecclesiam, sometimes translated as ‘laymen to their own churches’, but properly ‘laymen [to give] theirs to a church’ (or ‘the church’, see note 20, below). 19 Pope Zacharias’s letter to Frankish nobles, 748 (Epist. Sel. Bonifacii, no. 83); Charlemagne, 779 (Capit. no. 20, c. 7). 20 Viard, Dıˆme, 63–8, 77–8, 113–14; Constable, Tithes, 35–6. Theodore may have meant something like this by laici . . . ad ecclesiam. 21 Tribur (895) c. 15 required burial if possible at a cathedral, failing that at a monasterium, and failing that at the church where the deceased paid tithe (Capit. no. 252). 22 See Semmler, ‘Zehntgebot und Pfarrtermination in karolingischer Zeit’, in Mordek (ed.), Festschrift f. Friedrich Kempf (Sigmaringen 1983), 33–8, 41–3; id., ‘Mission’, 862–3. Cf. Capit. no. 81 c. 10 (probably a diocesan statute, 800–13), utterminum habeat unaquaque ecclesia, de quibus villis decimas recipiat. Before the 9th c., charters implying defined tithe-rights for named churches are deeply suspect, or may concern 23 secular tenths (e.g. DKarol., no. 206). Formulae, 264 (Formulae Parisienses).


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tithes, firstfruits, baptism, and burial rights became pertinences of churches, part of their value as property. This need not have been so: tithes could have been paid to agents of the bishop, or alms directly to the poor, or all offerings (instead of some) to the priests personally; conceptually they could have ‘belonged’ to the poor or to the dead without a church as channel.24 It is reasonable to suppose that things went as they did, if not because of the workings of the proprietary church itself, then at least because of attitudes and conditions that lay behind it.25 Discussion of this is bedevilled by the fact that not every reference to decima denotes the tithe owed to God by all Christians on biblical and canon-law grounds. Often it certainly or probably refers to a lord’s due: a tenth of a peasant’s produce—one among other customary fractions—describable as a secular or seigneurial tenth.26 Dealings with decimae cannot be taken as evidence for the present discussion unless the context or wording makes them clearly canonical tithes (for instance by associating them with firstfruits or offerings); which is not to say that all or most others were in fact secular tenths. Allowing for this, it seems safe to say of Francia that while lay lords kept a good deal of freedom as to where they made their own offerings, paid their own tithes, and had themselves buried, they were able increasingly to get their own churches supported by their dependants, and to have this authorized by legislation. The general movement towards the dispersal of parochial rights and the emergence of small rural parishes had the interest of lords of estate churches behind it, at least where settlements consisted predominantly of one or two lords’ dependants. As housed serfs with holdings succeeded household slaves, and free peasants drifted into dependent tenure, they constituted potential payers of tithes, firstfruits, and burial dues, for their lords’ private churches. This would intensify—alongside the compulsory use of their lords’ mills or ovens—with the tenth-century shift from ordinary landlordship to seigneurie with heightened power to command, and from scattered settlements to consolidated villages. Along with this went the multiplication of new private churches, many on the fringes of old parishes, in new woodland clearances, with the prospect of tithe-rights whose potential value was an incentive for promoting colonization.27 24 Gregory of Tours (Gloria martyr., c. 105) tells of a woman who under pretence of good works and religious life accumulated a hoard of gold, given her as offerings for poor relief or prisoners’ ransoms. 25 See Schreiber, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, 194–7. 26 The archaic English ‘tithe’ is convenient for the canonical tenth (cf. French ‘dıˆme’ and ‘dećime’). Sometimes, but not consistently, decimum (pl. decima) was used for secular tenths, rather than decima (pl. decimae). Confusion is easy because secular tenths (seigneurial or fiscal) were sometimes given to churches like any rent or tribute (e.g., probably, DOI no. 179), or—rarely—converted into canonical tithe (Charlemagne for Hersfeld: Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 167–8). Equally, canonical tithes were often ‘laicized’ (below, p. 501). 27 See, for the Moselle region, K. G. Lamprecht, Deutsche Wirtschaftsleben, I. i (Leipzig, 1886), 113–16. For other literature (pre-1964), Constable, Tithes, 105 n. 5.

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But the process is not as clear as this may sound, nor its explanation as simple. It is far from true, even in landlord-dominated societies, that all lesser churches quickly acquired the full range of offerings and tithe-rights. Nor if a lord did get these for his church was he simply carving out a larger share of the peasants’ surplus. New churches sprang up not only in newly colonized or newly converted lands but also in long-settled country, where they were built by bishops as well as by laymen, and were good investments precisely because they were needed, by growing and possibly increasingly Christian populations. If a village church was not needed the mother church would be in a strong position to resist it; and the mother church had, after all, its own lord, likely enough the ruler or a bishop. The demand would almost certainly be there: it was better, if tithes had to be paid anyhow, to pay them for services close at hand, and better to pay dues for burial in the village churchyard than miles away across hills or marshes. Baptism would not matter so much, since babies could be carried or children walk; in much of Europe the mother churches kept their baptismal rights (now no longer carrying a monopoly of tithe-rights) relatively intact for a long time.28 The change could have been promoted by collective pressure of churchowners on the ruler and the Church for legislative change; or by personal influence of individual owners on their diocesan bishop; or by seigneurial power pushing their tenants’ and dependants’ tithes to the estate church regardless of the law; or by any of these combined. We have already touched on Carolingian legislation in defence of the rights of old churches.29 Ninth-century concessions were mainly about tithes from new settlements or newly cleared land: crucially, the concession at Aachen in 818–19 allowing tithes to a church newly built for a new estate; and the rather more restrictive ruling at Tribur in 895, that if new lands were ‘four or five miles or more’ away from the mother church, and a church was built there with the bishop’s consent and provided with a priest, the new tithes could go to the new church.30 But concessions were also made in mid-century that allowed the tithes of existing parishioners to be transferred from old to new churches provided it were done with the bishop’s authority; the chief concern seems to be to prevent laymen transferring tithes on their own initiative.31 In the tighter-knit kingdom of tenth-century England, king Edgar’s legislation could be more conservative: all tithes were to be paid ‘to the old minster . . . both from the thegn’s demesne and from the land of his tenants as it is 28 See Susan Reynolds’s ‘sketch’, Kingdoms and Communities, 82–7 (subject to reservations about her estimate of previous opinion and still more her view of Carolingian legislation: see above, p. 69 note 21). 29 Above, p. 69. See esp. Salz 803–4 (Capit. no. 42 cc. 2, 3); Mainz and Arles 813 (Conc. II nos. 36 c. 41, 34 c. 20); Mainz 847 (Conc. III no. 14 c. 11). For this and what follows see Constable, Tithes, 37–42. 30 31 Capit. nos. 138 c. 12; 252 c. 14. Above, notes 19 and 29; below, notes 34–5.


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brought under the plough’—so including new land; ‘if however there is a thegn who has on his bookland a church where there is a graveyard, let him pay the third part of his own tithes into his church’—the rest, by implication, to the old minster.32 However, what was bringing tithe-rights to lesser rural churches was not only nor even perhaps primarily their lords’ pressure for relaxation of the law. Change came in England eventually without much of this;33 and the ninthcentury Frankish concessions recognized existing facts, or—probably very important—made it easy for individual bishops to do so. When Frankish capitularies and councils protected the rights of old churches and made limited concessions to new ones, they were not laying down rational rules for a passive community: they were struggling to impose order on a largely uncontrollable scene. Councils complained endlessly that the rights of old churches were not respected; Louis the Pious in 829 ordered action by his missi against anyone who ‘takes a tithe away from the church to which by right it ought to be given, and presumptuously gives it to another church, for gifts or friendship or any other cause’;34 in Italy after Frankish rule had imposed the regulated tithe and directed it to the plebes, the council of Pavia in 850 condemned equally ‘those who disdain to give tithes’ and ‘those who presume to give them by their own judgment’.35 This might mean no more than delivering tithes to a church of one’s own choice for the year. But charter evidence shows (and legislation implies)36 that permanent or semi-permanent gifts of tithes were made, often as part of the endowment of a new church, the founder apparently assuming that where he owns land there he can dispose of the tithe.37 The founders of the church of Satolas in Ise`re about 830 undertook that they and their heirs would ‘offer’ it ‘the whole decimatio’ every year from all their property, present or future—but reserved for themselves, for life, the right to ‘testate’ the tithe elsewhere, for restoring or building a different church if they wished.38 At the end of the century, when a layman Roger agreed with St Maximin, Trier, to found a church at Lintgen within their parish of Mersch, he ‘asked the monks’ for certain tithes ‘to be attached to that chapel’ (from the vill of Lintgen and other places, including newly cleared land); but he himself independently directed to it 32

II Edgar cc. 1, 2 (C&S I. i no. 27; EHD I. 395); see Blair, Church, 442–3. Below, at notes 57, 83–4; see Barlow, 1000–1066, 194–5. For a small thegn with freedom in this matter 34 beyond what the law envisaged see index: Stori. Capit. no. 191 (Worms) c. 6. 35 Boyd, Tithes, 36–8, 43–5; Conc. IV. no. 23 c. 17. Cf. Capit. no. 23 (898, Ravenna) c. 1. 36 By reiterating that transferring land to a new owner could not change the destination of its tithes (Salz, as above, note 29; Coblenz 922 (Conc. VI. i. no. 4 c. 8, and n. 33). 37 In many cases the dues given may be seigneurial tenths; but context or phraseology often shows 38 See index: Satolas. otherwise, as in the examples that follow. 33

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(illuc determinavi)39 the tithes from lands of theirs that he held.40 The monks in this case were transferring tithes that belonged to the parish of one of their churches; so, about the same time, were the monks of Gorze when they obliged a recent abbot’s cousin, the nobleman Bivin, with the tithes of Bivin’s vill of Doncourt for his oratory there, within Gorze’s parish of Brauville.41 But ecclesiastics claimed also to allocate tithes from their own land, quite as confidently as did lay landlords. In 813 the council of Chalon-sur-Saoˆne responded to complaints ‘that some bishops and abbots had refused to give tithes to the churches where their peasants heard mass’, that is, the old baptismal church, by decreeing that only tithes from the prelate’s own demesne could go to his own church.42 Either of two things, in principle different, may be implied by the legislation and the charters: lords’ control of their dependants’ tithe-paying, and their assumption, still, of freedom to allocate their own tithes. It is often not clear which is in question—tenants’ tithes or what it is convenient to call ‘demesne’ tithes; but the 813 ruling about bishops’ and abbots’ dependants shows that these lords had diverted their peasants’ tithes, and the concession of 818–19 was not just for new demesne but for whole new settlements. In England, king Edgar’s ruling made no such concession for tenants’ tithes; but the need to insist on their destination to the old minster implies that they were sometimes diverted. As to the claim of potentes to pay their own tithe as they liked, this did not necessarily benefit their own estate churches. Just as a lord of any substance would expect his coloni or serfs to be buried in the local church but might look to a grander burial-place, more powerfully charged with prayers and masses, for himself, so he might want their tithes to go to the local church but look higher for the destination of his own.43 In late ninth-century Alemania a layman gave tithes ‘from my own property . . . from grain and cattle and all things from which tithes should be given to God, pro remedium animae meae . . . to possess for ever’, to a church at some distance from his land and belonging to St Gall.44 The more usual destination was a monastery itself, perhaps a distant one; the first Norman lords in England treated tithes as loot to be piously heaped on monasteries at home. 39 An expression normally used by bishops determining tithe districts. The parish priest was always to hold the chapel, ‘lest St Michael’s [Mersch’s] earlier and more ancient terminatio should seem to be mutilated’. 40 Altlux. UB. I no. 129. Nightingale, Gorze Reform, 209 reads quas habere visus sum as referring to the tithes, but it seems to refer to the lands (possessiones). 41 Gorze nos. 77, 84. 46, For problems see Nightingale, op. cit., 46; but he misreads no. 77’s narratio. 42 Conc. II no. 37 c. 19 (probably meaning his cathedral or abbey church, not an estate church); Corbie’s 822 Statuta claimed its more substantial tenants’ tithes despite such legislation; see Constable, Tithes, 38–9, 59–60. 43 At the other extreme, he might direct his tithes to a domestic chaplain (as forbidden by a council of Leoń in 1288, Espanã Sagrada, 36. 253). 44 St Gallen no. 707. He undertook to feed the priest’s man coming for the tithe, and his draught horse or ox.


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This seems almost always to be demesne tithes alone,45 probably not for lack of practical power to dispose of tenants’ tithes but for lack of inclination to detach them. The lord’s control of his own tithing may have been felt to cover his unfree tenants at least, and perhaps all peasant tenants, if he so chose. In Normandy in the 1060s, Odo Stigand could give to his foundation of canons at Ecajeul ‘the tithes of the villagers’ of Sioville;46 and when in 1059 we find the pope himself, Nicholas II, giving to a monastery in Perugia all firstfruits and various tithes from three papal estates, including tithes on trade and business,47 he may be exercising a primitive freedom to direct his own piety but this now rests on ordinary seigneurial power. Either way, such lordly freedom contributed to the widespread detachment of estate tithes from estate churches in the end.

Even so, the most obvious destination for any such disposal of tithes, including one’s own, was to one’s own church or churches, while the most obvious hand behind the diversion of tithes to a new church was its founder’s. In the ninth century this is clear from Italian legislation as well as Frankish: a council of Pavia (845–50) complained that ‘laymen who have basilicas of their own, whether as property or in benefice, give their tithes not to the churches where they receive baptism . . . and other sacraments, but to their own basilicas or their own clergy, at will’; in 898 a capitulary laid down that ‘no one may confer tithes on his own chapel’ unless by the bishop’s leave.48 Back in Louis the Pious’s or Lothar’s time, a compromise had been reached after many disputes ‘between the bishops and other priests, and the counts, vassals, and our other fideles’ (so mainly Frankish nobles in Italy): while their tenants were to pay tithe to the plebes, the nobles were to be allowed to pay their own tithes in their own churches.49 The later legislation against precisely this may have aimed only to assert the need for episcopal consent. The churches in question would be private oratories and monasteries, not estate churches for peasants; the diversion of dependants’ tithes was for a long time largely avoided in Italy,50 even when (occasionally) baptismal rights were secured for a nobleman’s church.51 In Francia meanwhile the securing of a lord’s own tithes for his own church or churches was commonplace, and that of his dependants probably hardly less so. 45

See below, p. 511, esp. note 71. ADNorm., no. 222. Cf. Ste-Trinite´ du Mont nos. 30, 31 (c.1060, giving the tithe of named peasants, or ‘of all the men of the vill who belong to him’); Actes abbayes caennaises no. 5 (1067–79, giving the whole tithe 47 of his own lands ‘but from my men, only of corn’). Constable, Tithes, 95. 48 Conc. III no. 21 c. 11; Capit. no. 225 (Lambert at Ravenna) c. 9 (under penalty in the last resort of 49 destruction of the chapel). Capit. no. 168 c. 8. See Boyd, Tithes, 80–1. 50 See, however, Violante, ‘Pievi’, 673–4 on the dioc. of Volterra. 51 As early as 822–3, Lothar’s capitulary (Capit. no. 157 c. 2) shows that Italian bishops sometimes consecrated fonts for private churches (probably for family convenience. See Cremona, sec. xi no. 29 (1019), allowing count Arduin and his heirs strictly limited baptismal privileges for their castle chapel. 46

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Charlemagne himself had given the lead before the century began, instructing his estate managers to give the whole tithe from all cultivation ‘to the churches that are in our estates; and our tithes shall not be given to someone else’s church, unless this has been established of old’.52 The instruction does not explicitly cover his tenants’ tithes as is often assumed;53 but it seems likely that fiscal serfs at least would have their tithes directed to the estate church. Charlemagne’s respect here for established tithe-rights need not have impeded him much, even on old land, when the regulated tithe was so new. In any case it is significant that he describes the rival churches as ‘someone else’s’; he sees the matter in proprietary terms. Naturally, as royal authority weakened, neither emperor nor Church could prevent this power being assumed by other lords and used to enrich their own churches and make them independent. So in the late ninth century the empress Richardis had apparently injured one of Ebersheim’s churches by building a church on her own land and directing to it ‘first her own tithes and then those of the whole vill’ (with exceptions); in 967 the bishop of Verdun condemned the illicit attachment of tithes to a new chapel by the layman holding it in benefice who wanted to ‘make it stand by itself’; in 1061 the abbot of St Gall, founding a church for new settlers, could say ‘I have endowed it’ not only with its one manse but with ‘the whole decimatio’ within territorial bounds that ran from alp to alp.54 This is not to deny that bishops kept some authority in allocating tithe-rights, varying from region to region, and would normally have to be squared.55 In Italy their control was vitiated in the end not so much by allowing the old plebes to be robbed of their rights as by allowing those churches themselves to fall into lay control.56 In England the decay of the old minsters’ rights was late and slow, impeded more by royal power than by episcopal authority: the minsters were mainly the king’s, and his reeves could probably to some extent enforce tithe payment on the people of the old parishes (often hundreds) for the benefit of the minsters, rather than leaving enforcement and therefore allocation in the hands of lords. The tithes of English villagers had however by Norman times largely drifted to village churches, which must be mainly the work of the villagers’ lords; but the process is obscure. When some early twelfth-century churches were ‘endowed’ by their founders with the village tithes, these are probably 52

Capit. no. 32 (de villis) c. 6. e.g. Stutz, Benef., 244–5. There are other contexts in the capitulary where conlaboratio clearly means the demesne product. 54 Constable, Tithes, 65, from Ebersheim chronicle (doubtfully authentic, but presumably plausible later); St-Mihiel no. 28; St Gallen no. 822. For Catalonia and Roussillon, cf. Urgellia, I no. 24 (912, count Seniofred gives ‘tithes and firstfruits of my villulae’); Marca Hisp., I. 1226 (1002, count Gilbert for Perpignan). 55 In the last two instances (preceding note) the occasion was the church’s consecration and the bp. of 56 Urgel or of Elne also ‘gave’ the tithes, etc. or allocated the villulae as a parish. Above, p. 89. 53


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late instances of what had been quietly happening for some time, on record precisely because, by now, the bishops were getting some grip on the process of change.57 In Bavaria long before this the bishops were allowing tithe-rights to spread, not exclusively for their own churches.58 In 842 one of two churches given to Freising by the priest Oato had the tithes of nine villae;59 later, in exchanges between bishops and noblemen, ‘tithed churches’ pass in both directions.60 In one such, around 890, the bishop gives the nobleman Reginheri, ‘to have as property’, the church to which Reginheri himself (with three other nobles) has been giving his tithe; in another, half a century later, the bishop gives Frieso a church without tithes but allows him ‘to acquire the tithe . . . and convert it to that church’.61 Colonization favoured lords’ practical control. When the miles Routpert around 1000 called on the bishop of Freising to consecrate a church for him in a village called Niurutingen, ‘new clearings’, the cartularist saw the miles, not the bishop, as attaching to it ‘for endowment’ all the tithe to be paid ‘by Christian usage’ from settlements present and future within the new parish. Yet Routpert followed this by ‘commending’ the new church, with its parish and tithes, to the bishop; who in turn was able to subject it, ‘by episcopal authority’, to an existing parish church.62 Some forty years later count Adalbero was able to obtain from a miles Adalpert, without apparently any episcopal intervention, part of the parish of a church of Adalpert’s inheritance, so that ‘whatever the inhabitants ought to pay by Christian law’ should be paid to the count’s monastery of Ebersberg. But Altmann bishop of Passau had lordship and authority enough to endow his own monastic foundation of Gottweig partly by giving it four parrochiae created for the purpose, one of them by ‘cutting off from adjacent parishes parts that were remote from their churches’, and by allocating hitherto unallocated new tithes.63 57

e.g. 1104, Inga Bainard for Little Dunmow church (Brett, Eng. Church, 128, from MS cartulary); in the Marches, 1115–20, William Revel for St Mary’s, Hay (Welsh Ep. Acts, D43, bishop’s consecration record from cartulary of St John’s, Brecon). See Brett, op. cit., 128–31. 58 This emerges indirectly from Stahleder, ‘EKn’, I. 185. 59 Freising no. 652 (with nos. 653–4). Back in the 770s two donors to Freising dealt with ‘all the tithe that belongs to our church’ at Malching (ibid. no. 36), but this is so soon after Aschheim (above, note 8) that the tithes perhaps came to this church by choice or custom rather than by the bishop’s leave. (That they were canonical tithes, not secular tenths, is suggested by their being put into the bishop’s use immediately, ahead of the church itself.) 60 From lay lord to bishop, ibid. nos. 1031, 1076, 1393 (899, 926–7, 1022–3); from bishop to lay lord, nos. 986, 1030, 1247, 1329 (from 887 to c.1000); passing both ways, nos. 1156, 1275, 1336, 1429 (from after 957 to 1030s). By that time the founders and lesser benefactors of Ebersberg had many tithed churches to give (Ebersberg I nos. 6, 17, 28, 38, 101; II nos. 7, 24). 61 Freising nos. 986, 1098. Stahleder (op. cit., II. 11) understands no. 1098 as obliging Frieso to secure the tithes; but since he surrenders eight iugera and a mill ut decimam . . . adquireret this must be a valuable concession, not a burdensome undertaking. By 972–6 the church—now with tithes—was back in the 62 bishop’s hands, and granted in an exchange again (Freising no. 1237). Ebersberg II no. 8. 63 Ibid. II no. 9; Gottweig nos. 1, 2, 8–11.

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In northern Germany by this time, bishops were regularly ‘determining’ tithe districts but often in terms that acknowledge and perhaps submit to lords’ interests.64 Thus in 1006 archbishop Willigis of Mainz ‘conferred’ the whole decimatio within the bounds he had determined for the new church of Mo¨rschbach, not only on the church itself but on its founder Theodrich and all his successors. Similarly in 1072 archbishop Siegfried drew up tithe bounds (along streams and a road) for the chapel of Ravengiersburg and ‘conveyed the terminatio’ to its founder count Berthold. At the same time the count and his wife ‘endowed’ the chapel with tithes (probably owed by themselves or their dependants), for which the count himself had compensated the mother church— or rather its lords—with land.65 Some years later the same archbishop allocated the tithe of twenty-two villages (primitively due, it seems, to the cathedral church itself) to the great church of Orlamunde; his own act, but done at the request of the late margrave Otto and his wife, out of gratitude for their being ‘the first in Thuringia’ to recognize their obligation to pay tithe at all; a recognition described as an act of piety, done pro remedium animae, while the archbishop’s subsequent tithe allocation was done for their souls and his own.66 In the western kingdom too, bishops were not powerless. In the diocese of Be´ziers in 897 a layman and his wife had to ‘beg of the bishop’s gift’ that the tithes of their own alod be removed from the old parish church and attached to their new church at Villenouvette, while they compensated the parish church with arable land and vineyard.67 Villenouvette was evidently a new settlement; in older settled land where smaller parishes had to be squeezed in for pious or socially ambitious founders (rather than for any desperate pastoral need), the bishop’s authority might be even more necessary. In this same year the bishop of Limoges consecrated a ‘chapel’ at Favars for the abbot of Beaulieu, to replace a group (probably) of three churches now in ruins, whose tithes had come into the neighbouring churches’ possession (probably when the tithe payers took to going to church there); the bishop was retrieving some of these tithes, when for the chapel’s support he detached mansi from three existing parishes with the consent of their priests.68 Even this modest tithe district (seventeen mansi all told) was generous compared with what a later bishop of Limoges assigned to a new chapel of Tulle’s in 1070, ‘giving’ it five mansi taken out of the parish of Saint-Bonnet (whose church was only a mile away) with the priest’s consent; from these the 64

For the Rhineland, Wirtz sees this rather crudely as done on secular criteria for the benefit of church-owners (‘Donum’, 119–20). 65 Mainz nos. 242, 333. Terminatio . . . comiti . . . tradita might mean handing over the record. 66 Ibid. no. 365 (1083–4). Some episcopal acts of the kind, at a founder’s request, were reciprocated in land (1052–76, Westfal. UB, Codex no. 145; also a mansus to compensate the parish priest) or even a large 67 annual servitium (1063, Merseburg no. 76). Be´ziers no. 9. 68 Beaulieu no. 13; see Aubrun, Limoges, 350–3 and map, fig. 43.


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monk in charge was to have ‘tithes, offerings, and burials’ (the chapel had its own cemetery) and everything due to a church ‘by parochial right’.69 In this last case the five mansi were Tulle’s property (‘of the alod of St Martin’); the mansi annexed to Favars in 897 were probably Beaulieu’s.70 These fit the widespread pattern of tithes due to a church from its owner’s own tenants. But we have seen earlier how a ninth-century bishop of Maˆcon could ascribe to new churches (in thinly peopled hilly country) tributary territories much wider than their founders’ estates.71 In 874 the bishop of Constance was ‘asked by the heirs of the church’ at Birndorf in the Albgau ‘from what places or villae tithes should be paid to that church’; twenty-one neighbours under oath came up with a list of five villages besides Birndorf itself as rendering tithe there since Charlemagne’s time.72 In tenth-century Alsace, Mettlach’s land-register records an estate church ‘with the tithing of ten villages’, yet endowed only with a single manse; another similarly modestly endowed had the tithing of eight named villages; another of eleven. Where these are named they do not seem to be villae of Mettlach’s own (apart from the places where the churches lie).73 As churches multiplied there was less scope for one lord’s church being given rights over another lord’s tenants: he would probably have got in first. Nonetheless, in northern Germany eleventhcentury bishops were still attaching several whole villages to new churches, such as the noblewoman Reinmod’s seven monasteria (minsters, one might say) with parishes of anything up to ten villae.74 Meanwhile internal colonization made new tithes extremely important; the bishop’s rights over these could give a new church and its lord a stake in the development of wider territory.75 In 1091 the bishop of Limoges allocated to the new church of Saint-Nicholas, Auriol, to be built by the monks of Tulle ‘in the woods of Roia’, all land ‘round about’ that was not in an existing parish, ‘so that the settlers who live on the hill or in the wood . . . shall always render their 69 Tulle no. 178 (La Chapelle-Geneste; see also no. 177 from viscount of Comborn, probably as lord of Saint-Bonnet). 70 The ruined churches and at least one of the neighbouring parish churches (Chameyrac) were within a one-time royal fisc given to abp. Ralph for Beaulieu; the retrieved tithes were ex praedicti fisco. Cf. in dioc. Tours Cormery no. 30 (997), allowing Cormery to build a chapel strictly for its own men who were already parishioners of Cormery’s own church at Tauxigny. 71 Above, p. 70. Cf. Maˆcon no. 40/480 (bp. Gerald, 885–927, allowing two villae at his vassal Ratpert’s request as aliquid parrochiae for his chapel). For Auvergne cf. Fournier, Peuplement, 428–33 (see below, pp. 661–2): Blane`de’s tithes were removed from neighbouring parishes; Chanet’s were allotted largely 72 from the founder-priest John’s own colonizing enterprises. St Gallen no. 585. 73 UBMR II. 339–44 (Wanderella, Udera, Lohsma). 74 Built in consultation with Sigfrid bp. of Mu¨nster (1022–32) ‘in places where they were most necessary’ (Westfal. UB, Codex no. 103b). Cf. above, at note 66. 75 Novalia could be seen as the bishop’s property, going beyond his authority over tithe-allocation generally. In the Rhineland see Rheinisch. UB no. 101 (1088); Siegburg no. 48 (1139, particularly explicit). For pre-1964 literature see Constable, Tithes, 105 n. 5.

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tithes, firstfruits, offerings, burials, and proffers’ to it.76 These settlers might be men of the viscount of Turenne who gave the land to Tulle for the purpose, or of the abbot, or hitherto independent men on their own scattered clearings; in any case the new parish is defined negatively, as not part of an old parish, and topographically; not in terms of anyone’s lordship. At the same time, bishops’ dealings with tithes were often those natural to landlords and church-owners. If a bishop protects the rights of an old church this may be as its lord, perhaps in another diocese: Alberic bishop of Langres wrote to Frotar bishop of Toul (probably in Louis the Pious’s reign), ‘I have a vicus in your diocese called Boso’s monastery’—vicus here meaning the old parish church (while monasterium, here again, is like the English ‘minster’)— ‘but now it has lost both its name and its privilege and income, because of Teuderic’s new chapels consecrated by you’; he calls on his colleague to exert his authority ‘lest on account of new chapels a very ancient church should lose what it has held for so many years’.77 It may be a lay lord whose interest lies in maintaining the integrity of an old parish. In Languedoc at the end of the ninth century, a bishop of Maguelone encroached on the tithe-rights of an old baptismal church for the benefit of another church in the same village of Cocon, and it was the lay patronus of the baptismal church, along with the priest, who complained.78 It looks, too, as if the church of Saint-Andouque favoured by the bishop may have been his own private church, for when he acknowledged the rights of SaintJean-Baptiste to the parish of Cocon he was allowed to except a particular alod as part of a little enclave for Saint-Andouque. The agreement rested simply on the past: Saint-Andouque had had the tithes for only seven years, Saint-Jean for almost a hundred. So the interests of lords—bishops included—would vary, and often conflict. Many peasants were able or obliged to pay tithes to a church that was not their lord’s. When in the polyptichs a rural church is listed as bringing in external revenues,79 being used by neighbours who were not the abbot’s tenants, these may be free peasant proprietors exercising a choice or beginning to fall under lordship. But when it comes to several whole villages (which is what villae normally means by now), the inhabitants may be under other lordships, perhaps of a loose, undemanding kind with no local demesne; they are included in another lord’s parish either because it is ancient or because a recent bishop has successfully so 76 Tulle no. 501; possibly suspect since the new church’s rights were later contested by the monks of Cluse as owners of the old parish church; but see (raising no doubts) Aubrun, Limoges, 363–6; Bull, 77 Piety, 214–15. Epist. Karol. Aevi, III. 293–4 (no. 26). 78 At a council of Portus, 898 (Mansi XVIII. 179–82); see Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 426–7 and Doc. no. 13 79 See Duby, Rural Economy, 56. (translation).


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determined.80 All this is complicated in France at least by changes (to which it probably contributed) in the pattern and nature of lordship.81 Men whose ancestors had paid tithes to a church from outside the estate it belonged to might later fall within a ‘banal’ seigneurie that controlled the church (no longer strictly an ‘estate church’); inside such a seigneurie a castle priory might draw tithes and offerings from a new parish, or a parish church be founded for a new bourg; while under the seigneurie, or in its absence, the lord of a manor (perhaps a fragment of a former great domain) might build what can still be classed as an estate church, drawing tithes from his immediate tenants. Even in the twelfth century there were gaps where new parishes could be made without having to buy out existing claims; in Anjou a small lord, Matthew, challenged by lords of neighbouring parishes when he and bishop Ulger founded a church and cemetery, established that his land (deep in the count’s forest) was ‘never in any parish’, he and his father going ‘now to one church, now to another’, while ‘the men and women of my land’ were not bound to any parish.82 In much of eleventh-century England, with no such overlay of castle-based seigneuries, compact manorial lordships had emerged from the fragmenting of large territories and, as Rosamund Faith has shown, from the intensifying of lordship at a local level (covering many who had not formerly been dependent tenants).83 Although these lords’ small local churches may still have been initially more or less domestic, the possibility of securing tithes and offerings for them would work to promote the opening of church and graveyard to peasant tenants. In England it is easier than in France to find positive evidence for the frequent coincidence of parish or tithe district with founder’s or later lord’s estate.84 An English village with two churches often forms two parishes; or part of a village may fall into the parish of a neighbouring village’s church; and such apparent anomalies can often be shown to correspond to divided manorial lordship over the village long ago.85 Where parish and village lands—or ecclesiastical and civil 80 Obtaining tithes for a new church even from one’s own tenants might be difficult when tithes were already attached to great churches with great protectors. See Ho¨mberg, ‘Entstehung’, 46–7, on Cologne’s 81 tithes in Westfalia. See Duby, Socie´te´, 245–62. 82 Angers no. 179. 83 Faith, Peasantry, esp. 163–71, 173–6, 201–44. Diversion from old minsters to local churches of tithes owed by neighbouring free peasants (Faith’s ‘warland’ families) would be an aspect of their coming under local, seigneurial control (pre- and post-Conquest). 84 There are, however, ‘classic’ instances from France and Belgium: see Despy, ‘Note’, 191–6 and map (on Floreffe); less conclusive, Ganshof, ‘Actum Cispliaco’, 40–9, esp. 48–9 (on Ciply). Aubrun, Limoges, 343 n. 95, refers also to Brassine, ‘Les Paroisses primitives’ (on Jupille, dioc. Lie`ge) which I have not seen. 85 e.g. J. H. Round, Family Origins, 266–74 (Essex parishes); Stenton, Danelaw Docs., p. lxxv; D. M. Owen, ‘Chapelries and Rural Settlement’ (Kesteven, Lincs.), in Sawyer (ed.), Medieval Settlement, 66–71; Miller and Hatcher, Medieval England: Rural Society and Economic Change (London, 1978), 107 (Cambs. instances); VCH Oxon., V. 82, 83, 191, 202–3 (Cowley and Iffley); J. Croom, ‘Fragmentation’, 71 n. 16 (refs. for Dorset and Bucks.).

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parish—are more-or-less coextensive, they have often been a single Domesday manor (though other patterns remained possible: several villages sharing a church without ever, so far as we know, having the same landlord;86 or a churchless village forming a fragment of an ancient parish until modern times).87 In France the presence in a village of more than one church (parochial or not) seems more likely than in England to have an explanation other than divided lordship, such as the survival of a separate baptistry, or of an oratory founded for reasons of personal piety or commemoration and never aspiring to tithes.88 Even so, in Anjou in the late 1130s, bishop Ulger allowed a knight Pagan Mansell to build a church in a newly consecrated cemetery with his own men as its parishioners, along with the men of another knight, Henry; and this prospect seems to have provoked Henry to contemplate building a second church there (with the bishop’s leave).89 And earlier, where there was a single church for a village (compact or not) whose territory constituted the tithe-district, the church’s lord may often have been lord or de facto master of most of the village; while when certain mansi in a village were taken out to support a church elsewhere,90 tenurial explanations seem likeliest.

So there was a broad coincidence in much of the West between the tithe districts of rural churches and their founders’ or owners’ lordship, but this coincidence varied in nature and origin and was far from complete.91 In un-manorialized regions it was even less. In the Catalan Pyrenees from the ninth to the early eleventh century the district whose tithes, firstfruits, and offerings a bishop allocated to a new church must be the land that the whole settlement inhabited, cultivated, and used for grazing—the village lands, not defined by constituent mansi but roughly bounded by natural features—which as yet normally had no lord.92 The parish included the property of the church’s usually multiple founders (out of which they endowed it, individually or in couples or small family groups) but was certainly not identical with their property; and in any case it is not clear that they and their heirs ‘owned’ the church.93 In eleventh-century Provence, where great families’ lordships lay loosely over scattered alods and leases in the hands of family members, lesser nobles, independent peasants, and rent-paying tenants, tithes—more available here than in 86

Though they might have once been in a large block of territory organized for royal food-rents, etc. e.g. Littlemore (VCH Oxon., V. 212–13). Some small parishes may have been created not by manorial lords but by minster priests treating dependent chapels as prebends (Blair, ‘Introduction’, 11). 88 See above, p. 66 note 3, on grouped churches in Auvergne and Limousin. 89 Angers no. 139. If Henry goes ahead he will contribute half of the parish priest’s compensation. 90 Above, at notes 68–9. 91 Nor were tithe-district and parish always identical, either in practice or by legal definition. 92 Above, pp. 72–3. Where a single great lord (such as the count) did have lordship it could be he who 93 Discussed below, pp. 620–1. ‘gives’ the tithes etc. (above, note 54). 87


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Italy because of recent disruption of the old parishes—fell into more than one pattern. Some, it seems, came to a particular church from donors still free to allocate their own individual tithe, as when Goirand of Gonfaron gave ‘all the tithe of his labour’ from a rich vineyard, ‘which he paid, while he lived, most diligently and in a generous spirit’; his sons, keeping it back at first, restored it later; one of them gave also two-thirds of the tithe from three forges that he kept below the castle of Gonfaron.94 Other tithes came from some or all of the church’s own endowments: its tithe-payers were its own tenants, not its lord’s. This could happen piecemeal, when individual holdings were given to a church each bringing with it its peasant tenant’s dues, tasca (secular rent or tribute) and decima alike. But either these tenths were secular all along, or they belong to the decadence of a tithe system, not its creation: they had become part of the burden on dependent peasants, paid to whoever had a hold on them.95 More to the point here are occasional suggestions, in laymen’s grants of churches to St Victor, of an idea that a church should in principle draw tithes from all its own lands.96 This pattern—tithes from the church’s own endowments—could arise earlier in quite different conditions from those of southern Provence, and not as reconstruction after decay. In 903 a dispute between several churches in and around Dijon was settled on the basis that the three chief contenders should each have the tithes from its own land, as of old.97 In pre-Conquest Shropshire there is evidence of old churches drawing tithes from their own endowments rather than from any kind of parish (small defined rural parishes emerged later, from the wreckage left by earl Roger’s free-handed dealings with land and tithes alike).98 Such cases, involving churches of some substance, might originate from their own clergy exercising their freedom to allocate their demesne tithes and perhaps to annex their tenants’ tithes.99 In some English towns having not only numerous churches but tiny parishes, such tithes as they had may sometimes have come from the church’s own small property in shops and houses; though more likely from the founder’s and his tenants’ properties, or from the homes and properties of neighbours forming a voluntary parish.100 94 St-Victor no. 587, narrative of Goirand’s and his sons’ gifts. Cf. gifts of ‘half the tithe of our own labour’ or ‘own alod’; ‘tithe of the wine from the vines they have’ or ‘of their meadows’ (ibid. 95 nos. 284, 370). For tasca and decima see Poly, Provence, 288–90. 96 See below, p. 508. Cf. early 12th-c. restoration by the bp. of Antibes of various churches to Le´rins, including ‘the tithing of all their [the churches’] honours that they have or can acquire in the bishopric’ (Le´rins no. 129). 97 St-E´tienne, Dijon no. 17. Of the three chief churches one was collegiate, one monastic but with a small parish (plebicula), one a parish church. The remaining churches, of ‘little villages lying close to each other’, perhaps had tithes from villagers who were not tenants of the other three. 98 See Chibnall, ‘Eccles. Patronage’, 111–15. 99 Alternatively these tithe-allocations may be relics of much earlier allocations of churchscot and other church dues, perhaps paid by the inhabitants of a minster’s bookland along with their once-royal 100 food renders. See Blair, Church, 154–7. See below, p. 647.

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Whether or not based on the church-owner’s local lordship, tithes by the tenth century were a major part of most churches’ wealth, listed among their pertinences. This attachment of tithes to particular churches, as part of what they were worth, was not easy to reconcile with the ancient rules for partition of church revenue, under the bishop’s control, into four parts, for bishop, clergy, fabric, and the poor, or three parts, leaving the poor as a charge on bishop and clergy.101 These rules came, in principle, to apply to tithes. But as with offerings earlier, so with tithes in the ninth century, the bishops sometimes agreed or were persuaded to leave their portion unclaimed, or to regard it as left for the priest to administer;102 or, at the other extreme, came to regard their authority over spending the tithe as putting it all in their power.103 There was room for much conceptual confusion between responsibilities and rights, and between the partition of the tithe and the proper uses of the bishop’s or priest’s whole income.104 In practice, as long as tithes were being brought to relatively few churches it is quite possible that the bishop’s officials came there regularly to collect a third or a quarter, and to check on the clergy’s use of the rest. But increasingly, in the country, both the receipt and the distribution of tithes were in the hands of the local priest. It was for him to give what alms he could, to permanent matricularii (listed dependants of the church) and to others in need; and since this was a charge on his own income in any case, the poor’s share of the tithe could get absorbed into his income. So could the fabric’s share: he might need to sell tithes to pay for repairs, or for lights not supplied by offerings. Some tithes were paid in money (even in Carolingian times),105 but tithes in kind remained normal, and tended increasingly to be collected from the field by whoever was responsible for them or entitled to them. Responsibility and entitlement merged—whoever actually received or collected the tithe was easily regarded as having a right to it. Collection from the field made the claiming of a bishop’s portion less practicable, and chimed with the tendency for only one person to be entitled to all the tithe from a particular estate, or to all the tithes on certain products.106 So what seems to happen first, for practical reasons, is that the tithe gravitates one way or the other. In some conditions the parish priest takes the whole tithe (apart from his lord’s claims), and may or may not set some aside for the bishop. 101

Above, pp. 10, 11; useful summary in Kuujo, Zehntwesen, 168–9. Viard, Dıˆme, 119–23; Boyd, Tithes, 75–9; Constable, Tithes, 43–7, 52–6 (esp. 54 n. 4); Garcıá Gallo, Coyanza, 480–5. Pre-Conquest English kings and bishops legislated for division between fabric, poor, and clergy, with no bishop’s share (C&S I. i, no. 40 c. 68; no. 48 c. 56; no. 52). 103 8th–9th c. assertions of this authority (see Constable, op. cit., 44–5 and nn.) often used the word potestas, ambiguous in this context (see below, pp. 789–90, 805–7). 104 105 See Constable, op. cit., 47–56. Kuujo, Zehntwesen, 121–3. 106 Variously classed as ‘greater’ (usually corn, hay, flax, wine, horses, and cattle) and ‘lesser’ (garden and dairy produce, smaller animals and poultry). Tithes on fishing, hunting, etc. were less regulated. 102


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In other circumstances the bishop takes the whole tithe, and may or may not remit some of it to the parish clergy or spend some of it on their fabric.107 Where the bishop can do this it may be mainly because the parish churches are in his hands; his access to their whole tithe will both spring from and contribute to the idea that they are his. The other pattern is more usual, at least in the middle and western kingdoms; even in the early ninth century, some Frankish bishops held the priest responsible for spending the tithes on fabric, lights, or ornament, on the poor and strangers, and on himself.108 This lies behind archbishop Hincmar’s comment that the bishop was not meant to take a quarter of the priest’s revenues but to divide his own revenues in this way; showing how completely the old diocesan administration had been forgotten. Hincmar takes as his starting point that each church and its priest has its own revenue which is to be left entire to it, and he assumes that this includes the whole tithe; while the bishop has quite separate revenues of his own.109 As for the poor, Hincmar implies that matricularii live off tithes.110 But provision for the poor may lie anywhere between two extremes:111 at worst they get a trickle from the income of bishop, clergy, or monks; at best they get the whole of certain tithes bestowed on a hospital or almshouse by a founder able to secure tithes for it.112 How widespread, in these circumstances, was any actual rendering or collecting of the bishop’s third or quarter remains obscure.113 The bishop’s third was (or became) common in Spain, but as something that the bishop could claim from certain churches as a matter of custom and might give, sell, or trade for other kinds of property; much the same seems true of Bavaria, and later of Provence.114 In the south of France in 1056 an attempt was made to generalize the bishop’s third and so restore it to the level of principle, but not, it seems, for lay lords’ 107 Kuujo, Zehntwesen, 170–9 (Hamburg-Bremen, by contrast with Danish bishoprics), 189 (more general). See Ho¨mberg (‘Pfarrsystem’, 32) on Cologne’s Westfalian tithes. 108 Clearly stated at Meaux, 845, and at Metz, 893 (see below, p. 514 and note 15), but much earlier in diocesan legislation: Gherbald of Lie`ge i c. 5; Theodulf of Orleans ii c. 5 (Capit. episc., I. 17–18, 150); cf. Ralph of Bourges (mid-9th c.), c. 21 (ibid. 249). 109 De eccl. et cap., 119 (and ibid. 110, claiming that the bishop’s portion was only for under-endowed bishoprics). His questions for rural deans (852, Capit. episc., II. 2nd capit. c. 16, pp. 49–50) recognize a quarter called ‘the bishop’s’ but not destined for the bishop. 110 Ibid., c. 17 (p. 50. But how many churches had matricularii?). See Selborne, Ancient Facts and Fictions, 74–80. ‘Poor’ is an inadequate translation of pauperes: nearer to ‘the powerless’, so including orphans, 111 widows, and strangers. i.e. as regards tithes (not the only source of poor-relief). 112 e.g. bp. Anskar’s hospital at Bremen, with tithes of several villages (Kuujo, op. cit., 171–4). 113 Constable (Tithes, 53–6, esp. 54 n. 4) sees it as quite widely practised in the Carolingian period, but some of his evidence is normative only. For scepticism see Selborne, op. cit., 89–93; Kuujo, Zehntwesen, 190–1; Boyd, Tithes, 76–7, 86 (‘academic’ by the 9th c.). Abbo of Fleury, saying that from some thousand churches in a diocese a third or quarter should be plenty (below, pp. 819–20), might seem to imply regular levying of the bishop’s portion; but to make a watertight rebuttal of bishops’ claims on the whole tithe he needed to acknowledge their claim to a portion. 114 See Constable, Tithes, 316–17 (mid-12th-c. settlement between Burgos and Onã); Tegernsee no. 8 (1034 exchange between Passau and Tegernsee); St-Victor nos. 734, 971 (1115, 1143).

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churches.115 In Gascony the bishop’s quarter kept its original character more clearly, though here too the count of Armagnac, founder of Saint-Mont, acquired for it episcopal quarters in eleven churches by a property exchange between himself and the archbishop of Auch.116 In much of Europe the bishop’s share either disappeared very early117 or never appeared in practice at all.

15.ii. Offerings: seigneurial power or choice from below? For offerings, meanwhile, the old idea of the bishop’s share had been largely lost, except for some town basilicas and other churches in episcopal ownership: practicable perhaps for the sparse rural parishes of early times, but not for long. By the eleventh century local, regional, and general customs had proliferated, so that offerings could be elaborately distinguished according to who paid them and what was their occasion and intention.1 Some were given by individuals for individual reasons, to fulfil a vow or as part of a penance; for a blessing on a pilgrim’s pack before leaving home, or on newly planted fruit trees or a new well; for an annual commemorative mass; or for more or less unavoidable occasions— marriage, baptism, burial. There is no clear line between what was intended for a saint and what for his servants, or between what marked an occasion, in thanksgiving or penitence, and what was paid in exchange for something. Some offerings were virtually burial fees, though ninth-century legislation forbade any such exaction; some were fees for baptism or for extreme unction, though for these sacraments nothing should even have been asked.2 The fact is that it would have been unnatural not to make some return for them. Fees of this kind might be thought of as paying the priest to do what his consecration empowered him to do, being sometimes a token return for regular, seasonal functions that he is obliged to carry out for the community (his real reward being his status), but sometimes a substantial return for something more like a professional’s service to a client.3 But some he can only carry out if the 115

Toulouse cc. 10, 11 (Mansi, 19. 849); see below, pp. 515–16. St-Mont no. 42. The carta (¼ quarta) episcopalis was given sometimes to monasteries with the churches it was due from: ibid. nos. 44, 87 (see Schreiber, Gesamm. Abh., 126–7); St-Sernin, Toulouse, app. no. 18. See Constable, Tithes, 88 on the council of Auch, 1068. 117 In the Mainz-Hersfeld tithe disputes the archbishop’s quarter disappears from the equation between 845 and 1070 (Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 184). 1 See Schreiber, Gesamm. Abh., 156–68, ‘Liturgie und Abgabe’, 1–14, ‘Volkstum in EKzeitalter’, 235–40; for Spain, Martıńez Dıéz, Patrimonio, 31–4. 2 Theodulf of Orleans ii c. 4 (Capit. episc. I. 150); Raoul of Bourges c. 18 (ibid. 246–7). 3 See B. Malinowski’s useful distinction in ‘The Principle of Give and Take’, in A. Coser and B. Rosenberg (eds.), Sociological Theory: A Book of Readings, 3rd edn. (New York, 1969), 74–6. 116


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church he serves is entitled to them and equipped for them, having a licensed font or consecrated burial ground. So these revenues—like tithes—belong to some churches and not to others, and are due increasingly from predetermined groups of people. Others belong to a church in a more fundamental sense, being meant for its patron saint and probably put on the altar to indicate this. Along with these individual offerings for rites of passage or other special needs were regular or seasonal ones for feasts or fasts of the Church, common to all parishioners or to categories of them by age, sex, or status: offerings for every attendance at mass; larger offerings at Easter, Whitsun, and Christmas; sometimes penitential offerings in Lent. By the eleventh century offerings in the widest sense, especially for baptism and burial, were indispensable for the livelihood of the parish clergy and tended increasingly to be regarded as dues, which founders expected the diocesan bishop to allocate to their churches, like tithes, within certain bounds or from a specified community.4 However, it would be a mistake to think that any given church by the eleventh century got all the tithes and offerings in a single stream from all of a specific group of people. We can distinguish, broadly, between what happened to tithes and what to offerings. Agricultural tithes (not those for instance on trade, hunting, or fishing) were by now for the most part what would later be called ‘praedial’5—due from the property. Although there was still some residual freedom to direct one’s own tithe to a favoured church, possibly even for free peasants,6 the general trend had been for a person to pay tithe to a particular church depending, at first, on where he lived; later, on where his holdings lay; until finally it became a charge on specific lands regardless of who held them and where he received the sacraments.7 In parts of England grain tithes might even be taken in the form of the whole crop from one acre in ten.8 Elsewhere, especially where tithes had been commuted into money, the next step might be to a fixed money rent.9 But all this made it easy to treat the tithe from particular holdings or acres, as well as the tithe of certain animals or products, as separate, negotiable bits of revenue like any rent; and this happened on a huge scale (as both consequence and cause of lords lay and ecclesiastical getting their hands on tithes, as we shall see). So the integrity of any church’s tithe-rights was at risk almost as soon as it was achieved (if it ever was), often from pious benefactions for the benefit of 4

5 See esp. Schreiber, Gesamm. Abh., 153–5, 193–7, 201–2, 331–4. Constable, Tithes, 267–8, 287–8. In the eastern shires of pre-Conquest England, freemen jointly founding a church could perhaps assign to it their own tithes as well as baptism and burial dues (Barlow, 1000–1066, 196). 7 Or indeed whether: see Gerona 1068 c. 14 (Mansi, XIX. 1072) on tithe being due to the parish church from land held by Jews (this would not arise in most of the West). 8 Robertson, A.-S. Charters, app. I no. 5 (rights of the church of Lambourn) describes tithes in terms of 9 acres almost as extensions of the glebe. Kuujo, Zehntwesen, 121–3, 126. 6

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other churches. In eleventh-century Normandy, for instance, the founders of Saint-E´vroul endowed it extensively with churches and tithes, many of the tithes unattached to any church.10 They are often specific—the tithes of a mill or mills, in five places; of tolls, in five; of woodland, or wax, or cattle. And although sixteen of the twenty-five or so churches are given ‘with all their tithes’ we probably have to take this, here and in general by this time, as meaning all that they were in fact in receipt of, not the whole potential tithe of the parish. In the end this fragmentation cut right across the character of tithes as pertinences of churches; and the availability of detached tithes to clerics and laymen alike must have contributed to the declining importance of church ownership by the twelfth century. Offerings are another matter. Like tithes, they came to be due from certain communities or households to particular churches; like tithes, they were attracted from old churches to new; but once settled at the level of the village church they were more likely to stick there. For one thing, whereas the tithe of corn or hay could be carted straight from field or meadow to a barn or stack, and the tenth calf or piglet led or carried straight to market or slaughter or to join the tithereceiver’s stock, most offerings would be made in person in the church or at its door, often in a liturgical context; or if elsewhere then to the priest in person. Furthermore the parishioner making an offering or even paying a due was more likely to be paying for something he wanted done, and done there, than when he had his tithe collected. So when the lords of rural churches tried to get them rights to burial or baptism or other dues or offerings, they were working with the grain.11 This did not exclude competition or the need for clear agreements. Allocation was properly the bishop’s business, and was often done at the consecration of a new church.12 But such rulings could be modified, clarified, or (even more likely) predetermined, by agreement between the owners. In 1087 the monks of SaintFlorent, Saumur, after long delay and dispute, allowed the monks of Saint-Aubin, Angers, to build a ‘very small oratory’ at Sange for the use of monks there on agricultural business; but lest it should attract the locals, it was to have no priest of its own, no public mass, no tithes or offerings, no burial, ‘nor anything 10 Orderic, HE II. 32–8. They look like laicized tithes, not secular tenths. Cf. the collegiate church of Auchy’s endowments (Musset, ‘Recherches’, 32–5, app. ii no. 1). 11 See Constable, ‘Monastic Possession of Churches’, 312–13. 12 e.g. Cluny no. 3403 (1064), bp. of Chalon dedicates a chapel with burial ground for a new settlement in dense woodland but within an existing parish: the settlers are to render to the new chapel certam offerendam and baptism dues, and to be buried there. Cf. diocs. Hildesheim and Mainz, 11th–12th cs. (below, p. 597, and Hildesheim no. 202), where bishops authorized the functions (chiefly burial and baptism for a defined group) rather than allocating dues and offerings: the outcome is the same (underlined when the parish priest’s compensation is specified). In Lotharingia a count giving a moiety of a church to Cluny has ‘obtained’ from the bp. of Lie`ge that the church should ‘stand by itself’ and have ‘its own right of baptism and burial’ (1091, Cluny no. 3659).


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parochial at all’.13 Lay owners too might determine the matter: also in Anjou, Geoffrey de Jarzy sold a chapel in a wood to the abbot of Saint-Serge, Angers, but could not let them make a cemetery there as long as the parish church of Jarzy was in the hands of his mother. After her death (unless she had already allowed it) the monks were to make a cemetery, and furthermore ‘shall possess by perpetual right everything proper to a mother church’.14 The bishop’s consent, if needed at all,15 seems to have been confidently expected. As for the counts, Geoffrey Martel was said to have claimed as ‘ancient custom’ in Anjou that when the count built a castle, adjacent parishes must surrender the area to the new castle church.16 In the south, lay lords were potentially no less assertive: in 1050 Raimbald archbishop of Narbonne consecrated a church at Vignoles, in the existing parish of Sainte-Perpe´tue, on condition that its founders would claim or take away nothing—tithes, offerings, burials—belonging at the time to the parish church: not Bertran, nor his brother Bellot, nor Bertran’s wife, nor their children, nor any of their descendants or lineage.17 The emphasis on what belongs to the church ‘on that day’, even if formulaic, leaves it open for future development to bring revenues to the new church from new households or holdings. The record was made at a meeting of the family with the bishop and canons of Nıˆmes, and records a similar earlier meeting; one of Bertran’s sons is himself a canon; this is not a confrontation between different worlds but realistic precautions about future conflicts of interest within the same circle. But the old church’s existing revenues cannot have been thought very secure if they needed defending in these terms against all members of the family, living and unborn. In eleventh-century England the allocation was still largely traditional. Tithes, church-scot, Peter’s Pence, light dues, plough-alms, soul-scot and the rest were lumped together as ‘customs’, and might still all go to the mother church—as at Mottisfont (Hants) with ‘all the customs of living and dead’ over a parish with six chapels in it.18 Even when a small manorial church had a licensed graveyard, 13 St-Aubin no. 199. A complex agreement from late 11th-c. Rouergue (Ste-Foi no. 51) about tithes and offerings at Monte Boario, between a monk from Saint-Macaire (Gironde) and a layman and his son in Sainte-Foi’s interest, might be explained by the laymen having a church there (with a quasi-parish) which they intend for Sainte-Foi while Saint-Macaire owned the parish church. 14 Morice, Me´moires, I. 437, from Saint-Serge cartulary. Cf. in Glamorgan the dispute between the parish priest of Newcastle (Bridgend) and the lord of Sturmi about the village church that his father founded, where ‘children were christened and the dead buried’ (see index: Sturmi); probably the founder had determined the matter (perhaps with the regional dean’s goodwill, since the priest at Sturmi received the chrism from the dean of Wrenid). 15 In Vendoˆme no. 384 (c.1100) ‘the largesse of some legitimate possessor’ is recognized as a possible source of a parish church’s rights to offerings in a castle chapel. 16 St-Aubin no. 306 (see Guillot, Comte, II no. C.207). 17 Nıˆmes no. 127, pactum vel testamentum between the family and the bishop and canons. 18 For this and other Domesday instances see Barlow, 1000–1066, 198–9. For Leominster see Kemp, ‘Some Aspects’, esp. 86–9.

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soul-scot might still be due to the mother church. But the customs were beginning to be dispersed; after the Conquest lords of mother churches and of dependent churches are found disputing the customs and dividing them, so that every church had its own customs, limited by those of churches above or below. Early in the twelfth century the monks of Abingdon, lords of the old church of Chievely, were in dispute with a lord, Richard, about his village church at Peasemore. The late bishop Osmund had dedicated it for him and, crucially, blessed its graveyard, without Abingdon’s consent; but on the condition (which Richard ignored) that Chievely should lose none of its customs. The next bishop brought Richard round, not to submission but to compromise: Peasemore was to render 2s. a year to Abingdon and an acre each of wheat and of oats to the Chievely priest.19 Richard had thereby effectively bought the customs—and not only soul-scot—for Peasemore. A few years earlier, at Whistley, the monks’ interest lay the other way: the abbot had built a wooden chapel there for the inhabitants (who jibbed at the winter journey across a ford to Sonning) and for himself (needing somewhere to celebrate mass when staying at Whistley). Bishop Osmund dedicated it; the incumbent at Sonning complained, and the bishop— himself lord of Sonning—supported him after all. Here the agreement reached retained the customs for the mother church, only entitling the abbot’s clerk at Whistley to receive the offerings made there (votive offerings, perhaps, and those at Sunday mass). For this the abbot was to pay half a mark per annum, not to the priest of Sonning but to the bishop, presumably as lord.20 This last instance shows a need to distinguish at a different point on the scale: between what had become customary dues and what were still more-or-less genuine offerings.21 There are no clear lines between ‘compulsory’, ‘customary’, and ‘voluntary’. For many of these payments we do not know whether or how they were enforced; and it is not obvious how we should regard a penance imposed at confession,22 a commitment made as the only way to get a saint’s help, a seasonal offering on which one’s fellows believe their crops to depend, or an observance that one’s cousins believe will affect their grandfather’s fate in the afterlife. In these matters the pressures must come from family and community rather than seigneurial power.23 Nor are villagers necessarily without any choice in where their offerings go, or without influence on what becomes customary. Peasants who wanted to bury their dead close at hand might choose to go on taking their children some distance 19 Chron. Abingdon, II. 31, 120. Cf. dedication of chapel at Kingston Bagpuize (see index), with com20 Ibid. II. 18–19. pensation to Abingdon’s incumbent at Worth. 21 See Becquet, ‘Paroisse’, 212–13, for some distinctions and discussion. 22 See Schreiber, ‘Volkstum’, 244–6 on penance becoming tied to the parish by custom. 23 Schreiber (ibid. 243–4) remarks that offerings becoming customary dues were not altogether desacralized like tithes.


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for baptism. In eleventh-century England gilds and fraternities linked to cathedral churches or other minsters, sometimes of villagers headed by the village priest, demonstrate both attachment to the mother church and capacity to express this communally; while popular will may lie behind the survival here and there of obligations to attend the mother church at certain feasts.24 At the same time, both the existence and the extent of a new rural parish might depend on peasants’ choices, at least where their subjection to lords was still loose; and certainly where, as in much of Italy, lordships were scattered and peasants not as a rule tenants of their neighbourhood church’s owner.25 Choices might sometimes be determined not by convenience but by response to a charismatic figure, living or dead. The great crowd drawn by bishop Wulfstan when he came to dedicate a thegn’s church might affect its future congregation;26 so perhaps would a new church’s relics. In the longer run, possession of one saint’s relics rather than another’s might determine how far a church’s pull spread. In Forez in 1046 a lord, Ascheric, could assume that his church would attract offerings from ‘strangers and neighbours’ on its patronal feasts (and at any time from passing pilgrims).27 Further west, about the same time, a church’s future possession by Sainte-Foi was expected to draw outsiders’ offerings, from ‘those men and women who come to this church from other parishes, for love of God and St Faith’, for penance or for burial.28 It was probably for burial that choice was most valued and the largest voluntary offerings made. Free peasants would even give land—a half-acre of arable, a row of vines. In ninth-century Francia some of Saint-Remi’s churches had several such land grants ‘for a burial-place’;29 necessary perhaps precisely because the givers were free men and women, as yet only loosely attached to the estate and neither entitled nor obliged to be buried at its church. Giving something so important suggests the hope of a permanent family burial plot in return: archbishop Hincmar, forbidding the exaction of any fee for burial while allowing that something offered afterwards could be accepted, added, ‘let no one presume to contend for a burial-place as if by hereditary right’.30 See Barlow, 1000–1066, 196–9; Reynolds, Kingdoms, cc. 3 and 4. For Tuscany see Wickham, Community and Clientele, 74–81. Cf. Fournier, ‘Mise en place’, 515–17. Vita Wulfstani, c. 22. 27 Below, p. 492. It is also assumed that there will be voluntary attendance and offerings at any mass held by the monks after the public Sunday mass. 28 Ste-Foi nos. 10–12, 461 (various versions), donation by a lay family of the church of Prades-Se´gur ‘the old’. 29 Above, p. 446 and note 8. In 876 Fulda had minores traditiones (6 or 7 iugera upwards: not as small as Saint-Remi’s), some of them given pro sepulturis (DLD. no. 170). 30 Capit. episc., II, 3rd capit. (856), c. 2 (p. 74). Tribur, 895 (Capit. no. 252) c. 16 forbade anyone to sell a burial-place (‘the earth is the Lord’s’), aimed perhaps not at the priest but at parishioners with proprietary attitudes to bits of the burial ground. In Italy private sepulchres in a church might be sold by the priest or abbot (Capasso, Mon. Neapol. duc. hist., II nos. 11, 406), or reserved for his heirs by the donor of a church (1121, Tremiti no. 95). 24 25

26

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The old baptismal churches did not have primitive burial rights under canon law, and any customary monopoly was probably not asserted as a right until it was challenged in practice. In Italy this perhaps began in the ninth century, but became a matter of serious contention only later, when local churches began to try to charge for burials, while their right to bury people from a (somehow) defined area was perhaps crucial in creating the new parishes.31 In Francia and England, customs leading to rights seem similarly to be built up in the tenth and eleventh centuries, eventually for the benefit of the multiplying small rural parishes.32 Meanwhile nobles everywhere could either secure burial and commemoration in great churches or choose to be buried in their own oratories or monasteries, even (for the emerging lesser nobility) their own village churches.33 The Church tried to uphold both free choice and not being charged; by the twelfth century the latter had been let go, the papacy maintaining the Christian’s right to choose but also the entitled church’s right to be compensated.34 The poor could not afford a gift for a chosen burial-place as well as a fixed fee to the entitled church. But entitlement was not simply determined by seigneurial power to direct dependants’ offerings. That it should settle on a local church was in the community’s interest as well as the lord’s; while those who could afford it might be left free to choose. A lord might promote this freedom for his own dependants, to attract burials to one particular church. In the 1020s bishop Isembert of Poitiers built a church outside his castle of Chauvigny, gave it (with land and a watercourse) to the monks of Saint-Cyprien to develop as a bourg, and ‘decreed that whoever wished should come to the church and have himself buried there’; those taking advantage of this (as of the invitation to settle) must have included tenants of his own and parishioners of other churches of his. In 1081 Lancelin lord of Beaugency gave to Vendoˆme the church he had just built close to his castle, and persuaded the canons of his castle chapel to agree that any milites who chose, or their wives and children, could be buried at the new church; as could others, ‘provided the proper sepultura was first paid to the parish church’ (the knights’ free choice evidently not needing to be compensated for). In the Toulousain, a family giving their church to Sainte-Foi (1060–5) approved their

31

The suggestion of Settia, ‘Pievi’, 453–60, that the pievi catered almost solely for the poor, and oratories, castle churches etc. exclusively for the rich, was disputed in discussion. For Tuscany see Wickham, Community, 76, 78–80 (emphasizing, however, that we know very little). 32 See Kemp, ‘Some Aspects’, on Leominster’s concessions to local churches (though it long retained the right to burial fees from freeborn males aged 16 or over). In the Limousin, Uzerche no. 34 (1105) reserves sepultura nobilium to the cathedral, while no. 52.8 (c.1048) links sepultura popularis with a priest’s living. 33 e.g. in Gascony St-Mont no. 11 (1063); for England see below, p. 600. 34 In early 11th-c. English law, soul-scot must be paid to the entitled minster if someone is buried elsewhere: V Aethelred 12. 1; I Cnut 13. 1 (C&S I. i. nos. 49, 64).


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knights’ ‘donation’ of their bodies and their wives’ and children’s, ‘that they would be buried nowhere else than in that sauvete´ for love of St Faith’.35 All these were encouraging their own men’s free choice—or free abnegation of choice—to enhance the value of churches they were giving away. But both Isembert and Lancelin seem to invite other lords’ dependants too; and others, for instance in Rouergue, are found assuming that their churches will attract outsiders for burial and that this adds to their value.36 Most of those exercising this choice in eleventh-century western France will have been knights or new townsmen;37 but some were probably free peasants, especially in the wilder Rouergue. And it is striking that in 1114 an English lord defended his manorial church against the parish priest of Carisbrooke on the grounds not of his church’s rights but of his men’s freedom, ‘alive to go to whatever church they pleased, and dead to go wherever they wished for burial’.38 It is probably true that the economic value of small parish churches lay more in their compulsory hold on the people’s productivity than in their pull on voluntary offerings;39 and certainly true that those with more than minimal choice in how to safeguard their own or their ancestors’ souls were the potentes, able to choose their burial-places and to make donations to great churches (whose wealth was thus swelled by the generosity of the strong while what it consisted of—including tithes—was largely power over the pauperes, the powerless). Furthermore, over much of Europe in the high Middle Ages, seigneurial control was tightening and parochial rights hardening. But peasants’ religious or ritual choices might be narrowed in law by this, yet broadened in practice by increasing communal consciousness and confidence, journeys to the market town, a sprinkling of literacy. It is likely, but impossible to prove, that there remained room for individual piety, guilt, and generosity, not only for nobles, knights, and townsmen, but for peasant men and women, and among them not only for the free. Perhaps the largest enduring area of choice was between religion and magic: the parish priest, the hermit, or the wart-charmer; offerings in church, or spells and charms at home; though here too authority might try to weigh in. But regulated or not, and whatever their source or purpose, offerings of some kind would accrue to any church that functioned as a church at all, and would count among its pertinences. Unregulated, unpredictable offerings (including 35

St-Cyprien no. 210; Vendoˆme no. 301; Ste-Foi no. 538. Churches of Prades-Se´gur (above, note 28) and Nauviale (Ste-Foi no. 462). Cf. Noyers no. 40 (similar expectation for the new church and bourg to be built on Île-Bouchard, Touraine). 37 For readability I render milites as ‘knights’ here, but in this period it may give a misleading impression of social status. 38 Hase, ‘Mother Churches’, 57, 61 (app. 4, record of compromise). Cf. the similar claim by Matthew in Anjou, above, p. 473. 39 But some churches had never had tithes, others had largely lost them; for small churches’ dependence on offerings see Bull, Piety, 70. 36

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those to the priest personally) were pertinences in the loose sense that whatever they in fact amounted to was part of the church’s value; regulated, customary offerings, fees, and dues were pertinences in the stricter sense that the church was entitled to them from certain persons, households, or lands. By the eleventh century, with regional and local variations, they are regularly named in the charters as pertinences, along with tithes and lands (a church ‘with tithes, offerings and other belongings’; ‘with tithes, firstfruits, offerings, burials, baptisms . . . ’);40 often followed immediately or mingled indiscriminately with lands, vineyards, meadows, watercourses, serfs.41 All alike are elements in what the owners have to dispose of: ‘hoc est donum quod donaverunt, vineyards and fields and lands and tithes and burials and all other things that belong to that church.’42

15.iii. Lords’ enjoyment of tithes and offerings: its beginnings, and development mainly in France By the eleventh century, church-owners with various degrees of success have acquired for their churches—or seen them acquire—a range of pastoral revenues paid mainly though not exclusively by their own dependants. Some of these revenues are part of the total value of any church. The smallest private oratory must have some unregulated offerings, made by household members, dependants, neighbours, or travellers (important for small churches on a pilgrim route). Most churches by now are allowed burials, and will get offerings for this— ‘voluntary’ as long as the choice is real, but for parish churches becoming fixed and unavoidable, due even if the parishioner is buried elsewhere. Most village and some town churches have at least some tithes, even without the baptismal rights on which tithes originally depended; while an increasing number (with great regional variation) do have baptismal rights. Village churches will have offerings at Sunday mass; some old parish churches, whatever else they have lost, retain claims to a widely drawn congregation and its offerings on special feasts. Meanwhile the total volume of pastoral revenues—and the value of most individual churches, even though churches were multiplying—must have grown 40 An early example is Roussillonais no. 4, of 908 (a woman gives to La Grasse a villa and its church ‘with tithes, firstfruits, and offerings of the faithful’). 41 For random examples from France, Spain, Bavaria, see Imbart, Origines, 236–8 (in Spain, however, pertinence lists seem often restricted to possessions). Ambiguity is possible when cimiterium or baptisterium appear in the singular: burial fees or actual cemetery, baptism fees or (in the south) a baptistry? 42 St-Mont. no. 26 (c.1085).


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immensely between the ninth and the twelfth centuries, with rising population and increasing productivity, despite early regional setbacks from Viking slave raids or Arab devastation. How, then, does the lord of a church (when not himself its priest) actually profit from this revenue, representing the other major call on the peasants’ surplus besides rent and labour dues? In the first place it gives him a more valuable church to bestow on a priest (or give to a monastery, but that is a separate matter). And that at once raises the likelihood that he will want more in return than the satisfaction of having a well-conducted and well-furnished church for his family’s worship and providing well for a kinsman or servant. The lord may charge the priest rent or require gifts or services from him that, deliberately or not, reflect the income in pastoral revenues. The 818–19 legislation for the rent-free mansus had to insist also that priests should not ‘do any service’ for tithes and offerings; shortly afterwards the bishops complained to Louis the Pious that priests whose churches had ‘little or nothing’ by way of land were forced to pay census or provide fodder ‘out of only the tithes and offerings of the faithful, on which they can barely live’.1 This rent, they say, is paid ‘not for any benefice of theirs’—not, that is, for any land granted to the priest personally—‘but solely for the altar and the very walls . . . dedicated to God by the bishop’: paid, that is, for the holy place itself, the magnet that attracts the revenues. Jonas of Orleans thought such demands characteristic of lords pinched for means: ‘led by greed, they say: that priest gets a lot out of my church; so I want him to serve me at my will for what he gets from me—otherwise he shan’t have my church any longer’; while the potentes used churches that were slenderly endowed but rich in tithes and offerings as benefices for laymen or clerics, ‘in order that they may serve him for these offerings and tithes’.2 However, not all the bishops’ complaints about the abuse of tithes and offerings are to do with church-owners’ exactions. When archbishop Hincmar was disgusted to hear that the monks of Saint-Denis had ‘demanded a price from a certain priest for tithes’,3 this might be (as Stutz took it) an entrance fee or a census from a priest of theirs; but since Hincmar goes on to emphasize the bad example to the laity, who in his diocese had not yet thought of ‘selling the tithe’, the offence sounds more like a monastery’s (or its local agent’s) unwillingness to pay its own tithes to a parish priest without a sweetener.4 And when Jonas of Orleans speaks of those who ‘distribute tithes to priests in their own interest, and make those they rule do so, so that what is given is all or almost all twisted back to their own use’,5 this might

1 4 5

2 3 Capit. no. 178 c. 5. De instit. laic., ii c. 19 (PL 106. 204–5). Flodoard, Hist.Rem., iii c. 25. Louis the German had to deal with his own agents doing exactly this (873, DLD no. 147). Above, note 2.

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mean diverting tithe to one’s own church and exacting service in exchange;6 but it might alternatively mean picking a priest, not necessarily one serving a church, to receive one’s own and one’s dependants’ tithes as a way of directly hiring his personal services—a hair’sbreadth from not tithing at all. All told, the evidence for priests being charged a rent, service or entrance-gift that was intended to be for or out of their pastoral revenues is real but sparse; and when we find priests’ rents in the polyptichs, it is usually impossible to tell whether these rents were thought of as paid for tithes and offerings as well as for land. Even when they seem out of proportion to the land and must have been paid out of pastoral revenues, the reason may not be economic at all but a mark of status, a handsome exchange for a well-frequented church. In any case we can stand this on its head. A lord may be not charging the priest a rent for tithes and offerings, but allowing him a share of them—of what the lord sees as his own. The practical difference might lie in whether tithes, firstfruits, and other dues were in the first instance gathered by the lord’s men and taken to his barn, stockyard, or larder, or by the priest to his. Back in sixth-century Spain the council of Braga had agreed that a bishop should refuse to consecrate any church built with the motive of sharing the people’s offerings with the clergy.7 In early ninth-century Francia this is not prominent: what the bishops are to watch out for before consecrating a new church is its possible encroachment on the revenues of an old one,8 rather than its own exposure to its founder’s demands; while the laity’s chief fault is wilfulness about where to pay tithe. As for direct lay encroachments, reformers of Louis the Pious’s time were more preoccupied with the fate of church lands9 than with the impounding of tithes and consumable offerings. However, soon after this there is evidence that some lay owners were taking offerings or tithes—not just a gift or rent to reflect them, but the goods themselves. The first formal Carolingian complaint of this (along with the old condemnation of charging any census for them) is at Meaux in 845, in the restricted context of churches of the royal fisc held in benefice by laymen:10 it is wrong that such benefice-holders should ‘themselves receive the tithes and feed their dogs and slavewomen on them’ (a cliche´ with a long life before it: horses, dogs, or women, at choice); the priests should receive them and spend them on repairs, lights and hospitality, while ‘earnestly praying for you and the state of your kingdom’11—this is what Charles the Bald should value in his churches, not 6

7 Stutz, Benef., 265 n. 15, quotes a Carolingian gloss to this effect. Above, p. 21. Above, p. 464 note 29 (esp. Salz, 803). 9 Agobard, epist. no. 5 (below, p. 795 note 46) c. 12, on those fraudulently claiming ‘things that others have vowed and given’, seems primarily concerned about land: cf. ibid., c. 4. 10 Cf. the bishops’ discussion in 828–9 (Capit. no. 186). 11 Conc. III no. 11 c. 78. At E´pernay king and magnates accepted that laymen should not touch churches’ tithes (c. 16 of the 19 cc. accepted or adapted from Meaux-Paris, Capit. II no. 257). 8


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the capacity to provide his lay vassals with an improper income. By 893, however, the council of Metz says quite generally that ‘no lord should take any portion of tithes from his church, but only the priest serving in the place to which tithes were anciently directed’ (so treating simultaneously of tithes going to the wrong church and of lay lords getting them).12 In the tenth century similar complaints are made in Germany; in France at the end of the century Abbo of Fleury complains of the use of offerings ‘for the horses and hounds of laymen’;13 in the eleventh century it is a recurring theme of reforming councils.14 The earlier councils speak as if what was happening were simple robbery. But it seems likely that lords had come to think of tithes and offerings as theirs because the church was, long before this idea emerges clearly in private charters. Monasteries may have led the way in assumed legitimacy. Monks could receive tithes for other reasons than owning a tithe-receiving church (a great layman’s gift of his personal tithes; a bishop’s diversion of tithes to them; their own assumption of a claim to their own tenants’ tithes, as at Corbie by 822);15 but often tithes did come to a monastery from a rural church of its own.16 And monks may have been the earliest church-owners systematically to claim tithe from their estate churches and pay the priests out of it, precisely because they could already be seen on old, vague principles as proper beneficiaries of tithe (the monastery itself might be a mission station;17 or the monks might be seen as poor,18 though not yet singled out as ‘Christ’s poor’). For the same reason it is not always obvious whether an abbot or monastery is taking tithes as owner of the church or as lord of the parishioners—or whether, for a simple estate church, any difference would be felt. But in the Pru¨m polyptich of 893 tithes and burials go together, evidently as belonging to the estate churches: at Bastnach, besides the demesne, ‘there is a church, to which belong 13 iornales of land; the lord receives two parts of the tithe of wheat and hay, the priest the third part; the same with burials’; whereas at Noville (from its name, a new settlement) there is a chapel where the lord takes the whole tithe of hay and wheat, the priest only the third part of burials.19 12

c. 2 (Mansi, XVIII. 78). For the date see de Clercq, Le´gislation, 337 n. 5. Conc. VI. 1 no. 4 (Coblenz 922) c. 18 (see ed. discussion, 58–9); ibid. no. 13 (Ingelheim 948) c. 8 (on offerings; c. 9 on tithes may only concern non-payment). For Abbo see below, pp. 821–2. 14 Below, pp. 826, 827–8. 15 See Constable, Tithes, 57–71 (esp. 62 n. 4). Some of his early examples, esp. for mid-8th-c. Farfa (pp. 58–9), may be secular tenths; but Adalhart’s statutes for Corbie (822) ii. 17 (ed. Gue´rard, Pol. Irminon., II 16 app. V, 334–5) evidently deal with ecclesiastical tithes. Constable, Tithes, 61–2, and 62 nn. 1, 2. 17 See ibid. 74 n. 4 (Fulda and Hersfeld). 18 Implied when the bp. of Lie`ge c.817 gave tithes from episcopal estates to the monks of Saint-Hubert for their food and clothing (ibid. 69–70). 19 Altlux. UB. no. 120. xlviii, li. The ‘lord’ (senior) is the abbot. Nothing is said of the tithe of animals (still due to a mother church?). 13

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Lay lords however were still exercising freedom to direct their own tithes; they probably thought their dependants’ tithe-paying was their business; and they did not need the monks’ example to teach them the even simpler lesson that if a church was theirs, so were its revenues. Jonas of Orleans says (about directing tithes and offerings in one’s own interest) that ‘this kind of avarice had such a hold on some laymen that they thought they could pursue it justly, reasonably and blamelessly’, until the emperor Louis protected the Church against it.20 Jonas meant to persuade his noble reader that such an attitude was now untenable; but it could not really have been repressed by legislation. He goes on to imply as much when he says that laymen who indulge an appetite for tithes and offerings are stepping outside their proper function, like king Uzziah.21 These are not mere robbers, but people with the wrong idea of their role. The idea is natural enough; a rural church is something more than a lord’s investment in a new way of exploiting the peasantry. It meets a need; its founder has spent land and men on its endowment, and resources on its building and furnishing; he has obtained precious and holy objects for it, however modest—chalice and paten, some relic in the altar, and the basic service books (when any book was a thing of mystery and power); its priest is his man; its matricularius lives on his alms.22 Its income from parishioners is part of what he has given it or obtained for it to keep it going, to feed his priest, to maintain his alms: it is hardly surprising if some of this income eddies back to him or his heirs, whether as gift or service from the priest or directly. In Jonas’s time we hardly get behind the generalizations, though we have a glimpse in the sad tale of the priest Atto whose pay from the clerk Frotwin for serving a church should have been half the tithe but who was beaten up when he asked for his share.23 What he complains of is his personal treatment rather than the original arrangement: not getting his share of the tithe is not getting his pay. This is not to deny that priests of higher status than his were, then and later, in the position of tenants handing on in rent what could amount to a share of pastoral revenues, rather than of servants receiving a share as their pay. This must be discussed later. But as the Church’s public efforts flag, the private charters thicken up: and in the tenth and eleventh centuries the charters of laymen and ecclesiastics alike seem to imply a widespread assumption—by then with long usage as justification enough—that the lord of a church can both dispose of pastoral revenues and enjoy them.

20

21 Referring to the 818–19 ruling (above, at note 1). De institutione, II c. 19 (p. 205). In 846 Lothar I, granting to a layman the tithe-receiving chapel of Gu¨sten with matricularii already sharing in its revenues, gave him and future benefice-holders the monopoly of appointing any such 23 matricularius vel particeps (DLothI no. 96). Epist. Karol. Aevi, III. 339–40. See below, pp. 526–7. 22


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One early example of such a charter comes from Alemania in 894–5, when count Ulrich founds a monastery in an existing church at Aadorf giving it ‘my tithe . . . that I have in the Thurgau, both of wine and of grain, and payments for burial, and whatever belongs to that altar’,24 all to go after his death to St Gall; the abbot confirms that until then everything Ulrich has given is for ‘his own and his daughter Irmintrude’s use’ as well as for the clergy.25 But most of the relevant charters come from further west. In the mid-ninth century, in a precaria for a nobleman Acbert, Mainbod bishop of Maˆcon gives him tenure for three lives in a church and two chapels on his (Acbert’s) own property,26 ‘to have, with possessions and tithes’;27 in 959 in an exchange with Riculf bishop of Elne a married layman acquires a parish and its two churches, ‘that while I live I may hold, possess, and enjoy usufruct of that parish and those churches and the firstfruits, tithes, offerings, and alod’;28 in 961 a Catalan court case treats tithes and offerings as things that the builder of a church might have held lawfully by inheritance but has failed to show that he did.29 The bulk of the evidence, however, lies in charters of donation to monasteries; the instances that follow (deliberately numerous, to show that they are not mere aberrations) are organized to demonstrate ascending levels of suggestion, implication, and certainty. Suggestion sometimes lurks in their pertinence clauses, whose general pattern seems to be that in the tenth century churches are given ‘with land and tithes’ and only occasionally with offerings, and in the eleventh regularly with offerings as well, or ‘with tithes, firstfruits, offerings, baptisms, burials, and everything else belonging to it’, or some such formula. This has been touched on already; it has implications about how pastoral revenues are thought of (especially when they are described as ‘everything that comes out of the church’—its product),30 but it does not by itself imply that the lord enjoys them. An idiosyncratic or elaborate specification of the revenues given—not a mere generalized list of pertinences— comes nearer to suggesting that the lord has been taking them himself. When, in Auvergne, a church is given to Saint-Flour, with everything that belongs to it: that is, tithe, firstfruits, visitings, baptism, offering, penances, Paschal wax, seventh-day and thirtieth-day masses,31 and everything that goes 24 Joined with burial payments, this sounds like ecclesiastical tithe (though ‘what belongs to the altar’ seems here to be not altar offerings but liturgical vessels: see above, p. 346 note 57). 25 26 St Gallen nos. 691, 697. See below, pp. 693–4. 27 Cluny no. 493 (Barive’s copy of a supposed original); with the (rhetorically introduced) comment: ‘Let no one wonder why this speaks of giving him the tithes, since no contrariants have arisen to oppose this, trying to take away his paternal inheritance along with the tithes’; perhaps a matter of doubtful property-right rather than disputed propriety. 28 Bibl. Nat., Collection Moreau, Chartes et Diplomes 9, fos. 71–2. 29 Urgellia, II no. 143 (below, p. 787). Count Seniofred, 912, endowing a church with tithes and firstfruits from his villulae (ibid., I no. 24), kept two-thirds of the tithes for life as his ius. 30 31 e.g. Cluny nos. 912, 942. Masses at these intervals after a death.

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to the church, and burial, and one sester of wine for marriages; and outside the church, another church that belongs to it, and fields and meadows . . . houses, mills, watercourses, springs, and woods,32

this may do no more than spell out the riches of the church; but the cartularist thinking it worth detailing (in what is basically a summary of early donations) suggests otherwise.33 And all over France there are lists with significant omissions or qualifications: at random, from the late eleventh century, a church in Languedoc whose pertinences include all the tithe of flax, wool, and animals but one-third of the tithes of cereals and wine;34 in the Orleánais, a church ‘with loaves, candles, wax, coins, baptism, firstfruits, confessions, marriage blessings, all the burial, a moiety of the third of the tithe of grain’, with half the rent from houses in the cemetery, and three-quarters of the tithe from land that the abbot had earlier bought from the donor’s father;35 from the other side of France, churches given to Molesme with burial, offerings, all the tithe from the monks’ own demesne, but only half the peasants’ tithe.36 When Ascheric in 1046 gives to Savigny his church in Forez on a pilgrim route, including all the offerings of pilgrims on their way to Rome, Loreto, or Compostela, the patronal Feast Day offerings ‘from outsiders and neighbours’, tithes and these same offerings from the monks’ men living round the church, and offerings made at any Sunday mass the monks care to celebrate after the public mass, he is not simply being allowed to boast of the richness of his gift; he is evidently not giving the offerings and tithes of his own men there, nor the ordinary Sunday mass offerings from anyone.37 It is not obvious what has been happening to these. The straightforward explanation would be that the donor gives what he himself has been taking, and leaves out what goes to the priest. But often the opposite seems to be true, the lord keeping some of what he has always had, and giving away what includes the priest’s part.38 Where this inclusion is explicit (the presbiteratus or fevum presbiterale 32

St-Flour no. vi. 37 (mid-11th c.?). Cf. the emphatic words donatio autem istius ecclesiae talis est, introducing the list in St-Maixent no. 95 (1041); and the implications of giving a church with altare totum sine parte ullius hominis; sepulturam totam (1073–85, St-Julien, Tours, no 34). 34 Ste-Foi no. 67 (late 11th c., church in Haute-Garonne; panis stands for bread-making cereals). Irrelevant here are charters where everything is divided in the same proportion, indicating merely that the donor has only that share in the church. 35 Vendoˆme no. 265. Cf. St-Pe`re 208, 232–4, 495; ADNorm., no. 218A; in western France, St-Cyprien no. 95, Talmond no. 9, Ange´ly no. 271. 36 Molesme nos. i. 15, 52, 57, 68. Many donations of churches, all over France, were incomplete as 37 regards tithe only. Savigny no. 731. 38 That is what was first given to Saint-Pe`re, Chartres, out of the church of Dampierre: see below, at note 61. 33


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being named as given away with the church)39 this may mean only that in that monastery or region it has become part of the conventional list of pertinences. Otherwise, it may mean that the donor can transfer it because he has been enjoying it himself; or that it is temporarily unoccupied after a priest’s death; or that he transfers it over the priest’s head, and the priest with it.40 And since these last two possibilities are open, a list not mentioning the priest’s part may similarly include, or even constitute, what the priest had had. So we cannot conclude merely from a pertinence list that what a donor is described as transferring he had previously directly enjoyed. However, there is in eleventh-century charters a great variety of dispositive passages dealing with pastoral revenues, some of which do have clear implications about the donors’ past practice. In Touraine about 1078, a nobleman Goscelin of Sainte-Maure gave to Noyers ‘whatever he had’ in the church of Sepmes, including the burial fees of his own men and half of all offerings and other revenues, except for what belonged to the fedium sacerdotale.41 In Anjou in 1062, when the priory of Montjean acquired the whole of the church of La Pommeraye including the priest’s part, the notitia explains in passing that ‘all loaves, two-thirds of the candles, all burials of infants in their first year, had already been given us by Alberic lord of the castle and his wife Milesind, whose property they were’.42 In these cases what the owners give away must be what they have hitherto had, and what the priest is to keep is what they have allowed him, by choice or by custom. More often we learn of the division only from a later settlement between priest and monastery,43 where the very need for settlements may suggest that the monks have been demanding more than the previous lords. But a mideleventh-century Vendoˆme settlement gives the priest his portion ‘to hold as he formerly had it’;44 and a mid-twelfth-century dispute between Saint-Symphorien of Autun and Reynard, priest of a church recently given to Saint-Symphorien by Humbert de Marigny, was settled by the testimony of those who had witnessed Humbert’s original grant of the church to Reynard, listing in detail the kinds of offering that Humbert had ‘given’ the priest, with the implication that he had kept the rest for himself and that the monastery should have the same.45 What was generally set aside for the priest and how it was thought of will be 39 e.g. 10th c., Cluny nos. 546, 1272 (with the ‘parish’ also, often listed as a pertinence in Cluny charters); 11th c., ibid. nos. 2101, 2104, 2292, 2729, 2745, 2914; Savigny no. 651; Molesme II no. i. 55. Cf. Gellone 40 nos. 267–8 (1107). See below, pp. 566–7. 41 42 Noyers no. 72; see below, pp. 569–70. Marchegay, Recueil, 74–5. 43 See Schreiber, ‘Liturgie’, 2–3. 44 Vendoˆme no. 80, for Maze´, c.1050–70 (Van de Kieft, ‘Une e´glise priveé’, 161–2). Other early instances are St-Aubin no. 219 (1056–60); St-Beńigne no. 360 (1084). Molesme II nos. ii. 607, 609 (1079, for Flacy and Senan) might throw light on the lay donor’s former rights, but the charters seem dubious (cf. Molesme’s forged letters from Rainald bp. of Langres, esp. ibid. I app. viii no. 1). 45 St-Symphorien no. 27 (mid-12th c.).

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discussed later;46 but it needs to be emphasized here that the very existence of a priest’s living or fief, including some but not all of the pastoral revenues, implies that someone else is getting the rest. There are many laymen’s donations of churches so phrased as to imply or strongly suggest that the donors had been taking these revenues: giving a moiety of a church ‘as they were seen to have and possess it’, consisting of tithes, firstfruits, and ecclesiastici;47 or ‘all as we had and held them’, or ‘as well as our ancestors ever had and held them’;48 or, slightly more explicit, ‘whatever I have of my own in the church . . . of bread, candles, offerings, burial, as I have them in my own use’.49 Other charters are more explicit and often more precise about what the lord has been taking. In mid-eleventh-century Brittany, the lord of the castle of Migron gave to Redon a third of a church and of its cemetery, some of the tithe, ‘and whatever I am accustomed to take on saints’ days, and of wedding offerings, and candles for purifications’;50 in the Perche at some time before 1080, a tenant of the powerful Gouet family, giving his third of the church of Arrou to the monastery of Saint-Pe`re, gave with it ‘half the offerings at the four feasts, which I had kept for myself’;51 in Touraine, a nobleman Archembald with his wife and son gave ‘whatever I have been accustomed to receive on the chief festivals’, with a quarter of burials (and another half if they can get it from ‘him who holds it from me’; while keeping the fourth quarter until later).52 In Anjou, more interestingly, the monks of Bourgueil may have thought it worth tampering with a layman’s charter to suggest that offerings at confession, burial dues, and all tithes had been taken by him and had therefore been his to give.53 Moving south, in Auvergne a knight’s part in a church was half the burial, and half the offerings at ‘the three feasts’ (All Saints, Christmas, and the patronal feast); while in Languedoc between 1031 and 1048, a donor gave with two churches all possible parochial tithes and (comprehensively listed) dues and offerings as ‘everything that used to be given to me and my ancestors’.54 46

Below, pp. 560–72. Le´zat no. 151 (1061–1108; ecclesiastici probably means altar revenues); cf. in Poitou St-Cyprien nos. 474 (1040), 221 (1080), 340 (c.1100). 48 Le´zat nos. 157 (c.950), 364 (1058), 255 (1085). Cf. St-Sernin, Toulouse, app. no. 13 (1060); Be´ziers no. 93 (1093). 49 St-Vincent-du-Mans no. 576 (end of 11th c. ‘In my own use’ probably means that he is not giving what others hold from him). Cf. in Burgundy Paray-le-Monial nos. 150, 162, 167; Flavigny no. 17 (1100). 50 Redon no. 385 (before 1050). ‘My tithe’ is described here as two-thirds, but elsewhere as one-third of two-thirds (probably his share of a seigneurial two-thirds). 51 St-Pe`re, 208. He also gave, having probably had them himself, 4d. burial-fees for baptized children; all burial revenue from one place; half the burial from the inhabited atrium. Cf. ibid. 128–31. 52 53 Noyers nos. 8 (c.1057), 59 (c.1069). Guillot, Comte, II. 210–12, on C.338–340. 54 St-Flour no. vi. 31 (11th c.); Gellone nos. 109–10 (reading dari for dare, although—with the same outcome—solebant dare could (uncomfortably) refer to the parishioners. Cf. ibid. nos. 908 (1088), 268 (1107, with 267). On whether Languedoc was different from elsewhere in these matters see below, p. 620. 47


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Degrees of explicitness about the past must reflect the charter-drafter’s or the cartularist’s assumptions, purposes, and stylistic choices.55 But what was said about donors’ practical intentions for the future would need to be quite explicit. We see, for instance, such revenues being temporarily detached from the rest of a church to use for vestitura (that is, something for the future owners to possess straightaway, to maintain their claim to the rest). In 997 a priest Aymo, giving his church to the monks of Savigny but keeping it for life, granted them the immediate enjoyment of half the votive offerings and burial fees, de investitura.56 This is a priestly owner dealing with his own offerings, but in terms that make them a mark of property-right rather than of office. Half a century later a layman and his sister gave a church ‘of our inheritance’ after their deaths but ‘baptism and burial in vestituram’.57 Tithes had been given in this way by laymen earlier.58 The suggestion in such a transfer of revenues that the donor previously enjoyed them, and that what he now keeps for life is not simply lordship over the church but includes other pastoral revenues, becomes a certainty in the many donations of a church that expressly reserve usufruct or possession of all or some tithes and offerings, for the donor’s life or a widow’s or child’s. In 1069, for instance, Euphemia and her husband and children gave to Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly her inherited moiety of a church in the form of altar offerings and burial, leaving her with her moiety of the tithe, as we see when she later (probably as a widow) gave a third of that moiety, to follow her own death.59 Becoming more usual in the eleventh century are bald informal statements or casual later admissions that the donor of a church has kept back part of the offerings or tithes, without limiting this to a life or two.60 In the Perche again (before 1080), Albert son of the vidame of Chartres, another Gouet tenant, giving up the church of Saint-Lubin at Brou, allows that its priest shall have an annual allowance of wheat ‘from the tithes of the church, which we retain’; and all offerings except those of the four chief feasts, ‘of which we keep two-thirds for our own use’. In the same region in 1102, Landric and his sons (tenants of the same Gouet family) had given up the priest’s part of the church of Dampierre but 55 In William of La Ferte´-Mace´’s charter for Saint-Julien in 1053, only the repentant preamble reveals that he had been using for his own purposes the tithes, firstfruits, and burials of the five churches he was 56 giving (below, p. 587). Savigny no. 434. 57 Cluny no. 2874; cf. no. 2914 (1037, a married couple). 58 Cluny nos. 546 (953), 1433 (976–7). Cf. ibid. no. 3350 (dioc. Autun, c.1055 (original): when Richoara gives her church reserving life tenure, Cluny has in vestitura a third of the tithe (and a third of the 15 s. that the priest pays her). 59 Ange´ly nos. 263–4. Cf. ibid. nos. 4 (c.1084), 52 (c.1081), 317 (c.1095); and from all over France, Le´zat no. 156 (mid-10th c.); Aniane no. 223 (1026); Angers no. 46 (1046–55); Asse´-le-Riboul no. 1 (1097); St-Wandrille no. 43 (c.1071); Savigny no. 651 (c.1030); Cluny nos. 1272, 1325, 2745 (970?, 972, 1070); Molesme no. i. 218 (1112–16). 60 The other two-thirds of Euphemia’s moiety of tithes could have stayed with her children indefinitely.

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had kept—and now gave up, with other things—half the tithe ‘which was in our lordship of the church’ and half the burial fees.61 Everything Landric gave was given so freely that ‘neither burial nor any other custom’ was to be exacted by his sons or anyone else: perhaps in these parts the burial dues were the crucial test of really having given up rights in the church. In Touraine about 1065, the widow and her sons and daughters who gave to Noyers the site for a new church in Île-Bouchard reserved for themselves a quarter of the burial and of the four feasts’ offerings (while they granted to Noyers the same share in an existing country church of theirs,62 either wanting to even out the risks and profits of a new town church and an old country one, or liking the idea of sharing churches with the monks). In Maine (before 1080), Basil Fissard and his wife gave their church to Saint-Aubin with half its tithing and its burial, ‘retaining no domination or tie (retinaculum) there, except only a moiety of the offerings which we keep for the time being, just from the six chief feasts’, a retention which ran their son into trouble a quarter of a century later;63 while their giving only half the tithing needed no comment.64 Other donors in Anjou and Maine kept two-thirds of the tithes on important products—wine or grain.65 In the Perche about 1090, Achard gave up ‘bread, candles, burial, and firstfruits’ of the church of Souday, but ‘because of the sharpness of my poverty which constrains me, I keep in my hand one-third of the tithe of all grain (except that the monks are to have the whole of whatever comes from their own land)’; while in Brittany about 1045, Simon of Saint-Opportune-en-Retz giving his church to SaintAubin, Angers, ‘that is, the dominatura that he had in it in altar, burial, and half the tithe of his own land’, promised to give the remaining half when God should give him the inclination and opportunity.66 Moving south to Poitou, we find Ralph la Flamme about 1030 giving four churches and whatever belongs to them, ‘except half the burial, and of the lighting, and of money offerings’; four brothers about 1080 giving a church and agreeing that whichever of them dies first, the others will give for his soul the half tithe ‘which we now keep back’; another rather later keeping one-third of the tithes of grain, wine, lambs, calves, pigs, and wool, one-third of grain offerings at All Saints, and half the Easter offerings.67 South-eastwards in Rouergue, a man with his wife and children gave a church to Sainte-Foi on condition that his sons 61

St-Pe`re, 212 (before 1080); ibid. 242–3 (1102; Dampierre-sous-Brou). Noyers no. 40; in no. 54 another layman, perhaps the widow’s tenant, gives what may be this same quarter in the church of Crouzilles ‘so that I shall receive the same in the church they are building’ in Île63 Bouchard). St-Aubin no. 317 (before 1080); ibid. no. 322 (c.1100). 64 They had probably granted the other half in fief (below, in note 87). 65 St-Aubin no. 287 (1047–67); Asse´-le-Riboul no. 1 (1097). 66 St-Vincent-du-Mans no. 201 (c.1090); St-Aubin no. 915 (c.1045). 67 St-Cyprien nos. 158, 202, 417. Cf. ibid. nos. 48 (early 11th c.), 582 (c.1025), 195 (c.1080); in Saintonge, Ange´ly nos. 266 (1091), 308 (c.1098). 62


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should have two-thirds of the burial fees of parishioners.68 Further south again, in the diocese of Carcassonne, a family group surrendered the church of Licairac with its firstfruits, burials, offerings, lands, vineyards, and a moiety of the tithe, but of the other moiety ‘we surrender and relinquish three-quarters to God and St Faith; the other quarter of the moiety we retain’.69 Crossing to the Rhoˆne valley, we find a couple and four sons in 1083 giving to Saint-Andre´-le-Bas, Vienne (as an entry gift with a fifth son), their quarter of a parish church, defined as a quarter of the cemetery, of altar offerings and of various tithes, but excepting the tithes of wheat, barley, and hay (fifteen years or so later the four brothers gave ‘whatever their father had retained from the tithe’).70 And finally northwards to Molesme: that the many donations of moieties of tithe left the donor taking the other half is usually only to be inferred, but at least once is expressly stated; while the donors of another church, giving whatever they had (the atrium and its census, altar-offerings, burials, the rent of storage-chests) and ‘retaining nothing for themselves’, excepted one-third of the tithe of grain.71 Any pastoral revenues that a lay lord enjoyed might accompany other seigneurial rights. When Landric gave to Saint-Pe`re what he had reserved in the church at Dampierre,72 he gave also half of his oven—that is, of the fees for its use: in these regions we have reached what we certainly did not start from, the treatment of church, oven, and mill alike as lordly monopolies. Where lordships covered whole parishes, taking tithes from one’s own church might not differ in practice from taking them from one’s own peasants (even as a way of looking at it, this surfaces occasionally),73 or, for great ‘banal’ seigneuries, from villages under one’s power.74 The enjoyment of pastoral revenues could lead lords into a seigneurial interest in the definition of parishioners. About 1067, count Guy of Maˆcon giving to the church of Maˆcon a woodland site for a new church gave with it his own demesne tithes there; from other lands or woods, revenues and tithes held from him in benefice and not belonging to any other church; and the offerings ‘and all that Christian parishioners ought to pay to churches’ of those inhabiting or cultivating these lands.75 Then or soon after, in the hills of northern Rouergue, what Arnald 68

Ste-Foi no. 462 (1061–1108); cf. no. 204 (1065–87). 70 Ibid. no. 473 (1087–1107; one of a complicated sequence). St-Andre´-le-Bas nos. 262, 227. 71 Molesme nos. i. 183, 159 (both late 11th or early 12th c.). Cf. no. i. 2: the numerous owners who gave the alod of Molesme itself, ‘retaining nothing’, excepted whatever tithe any of them received from the 72 church of Pouilly. Above, at note 61. 73 . e.g. Orderic, HE III. 174–5: Hugh son of Odo gave to Maule priory ‘all the tithe from his land’ at Maule, and ‘if his men should bring any other land under cultivation’ (Chibnall’s trans.) the monks should have all the tithe from it ‘as Hugh himself would have done’. 74 See Bonnassie´, Catalogne, 601–6. In 1053 a lord restored to Saint-Cugat a church ‘with its tithes, firstfruits, offerings, and burials’ which his kinsmen holding the castle of Cervello´ had usurped (S. Cugat 75 no. 597). Maˆcon no. 11. 69

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Rodoard retained in the church of Bonneval covered ‘pledges and penance’ of those who had holdings ‘in my parish’, including the ox-driver’s wife if she lived on his estate; as for those coming from other parishes, if men from Broue´jouls dwelling in Bonneval nonetheless kept a holding in Broue´jouls (seasonal residents, perhaps, brought to Bonneval by grazing arrangements), ‘from them I shall have just the burial as I would if they lived in my parish’.76 In the same country, Pons son of Deusdet and his wife giving their church to Sainte-Foi (along with justice and vicaria in the village) and keeping two-thirds of the burials for their sons, gave the whole of outsiders’ burials; another family group, giving the church of Prades-Se´gur, gave with it ‘a quarter of the burials of those men and women who come to that church from other parishes’, and similarly their penance.77 In Touraine, when Odila and her children reserved a quarter of the burials from the new church in Île-Bouchard, they waived this (in favour of the monks of Noyers) for anyone from another parish choosing to be buried there.78 So some lords were more willing to give away what came from outsiders than their own dependants’ penitential or burial dues. Some of these donors were not heirs or successors to the founder (nor even to someone established as lord long ago by royal benefice), but holders of a slice of lordship recently created, often consisting at least in part of what had once been set aside for the priest; unless the slicing-up had been done before ever any priest’s part had been defined (as perhaps back in 996 when king Rudolf III of Burgundy, as lay abbot of St Maurice of Agaune, granted in benefice to a miles, his wife, and one heir, half the tithes and all the offerings of a rural church along with its endowments).79 Sometimes the donors’ intermediate position is suggested by what they had to dispose of, especially if restricted to altar revenues of some kind;80 or shown by the participation or consent of the lords from whom they held what they were giving.81 The fact remains that the original lord had dealt with pastoral revenues as his own,82 disposing of them to people who might be able to do the same in their turn. For if a church’s lord can detach pastoral revenues from it to keep for himself or his heirs, or to give to a monastery in vestitura, he can equally well detach them—or use them when detached—to 76

Ste-Foi no. 204 (1065–87, with slight repunctuation). Parrochia by now often means ‘village’. Ibid. nos. 462 (1061–1108), 10–11 (1031–59). 78 Noyers no. 40 (c.1065); above, at note 62. Cf. in Forez, Ascheric’s elaborate distinctions for offerings (not burials, apparently belonging to another church) between strangers, Savigny’s men, and by impli79 cation his own (above, at note 37). DRud. no. 79 (996 or 997). 80 In Auvergne, five brothers and a sister gave or sold to Saint-Flour the baptism, burial, offerings, and ‘all that belongs to the altar’ of the churches of Oradour and Chaudesaigues (St-Flour no. vi. 16), perhaps as a priest’s lay heirs (see below, in note 91). 81 See also (further north) the term iunioratus or iundragium (see index). 82 They could be described as in a lord’s ius proprium, e.g. Tulle no. 177 (1070þ); St-Pe`re, 486–7. 77


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bestow on his clients, or as marriage portions and the like for his family: easily (and by far the most frequently) with tithes alone, but quite workably with certain offerings and burial dues which the priest could pass on or leave the beneficiary to collect. So in Touraine in 1062 the knight Hugh of Alluyes who had married the daughter and heiress of a rich clerk allowed Vendoˆme the sepultura from two churches, with all altar revenues except the tithes, not for heavenly reward alone as his father-in-law had intended, but for the large sum of 700s., with two ounces of gold for his wife.83 In the duchy of Burgundy in the mid-1110s, Bernard of Clairvaux’s uncle gave Molesme his church of Crais with half its tithing, but the remainder only ‘after the death of his daughters, who were nuns’; the tithes must have been their entry-gifts, or portions to live on.84 Above all, detached tithes were granted by lords as benefices, sometimes in territorialized fragments, sometimes in thirds or moieties or as a whole.85 In 1085 Ralph of Beaugency, giving his castle chapel of Montfollet to Vendoˆme with all the castle tithe and burial, had first to acquire the tithe by compensating a man ‘who had held it as it were by hereditary right’.86 More usually we hear of such tenures when the holders give them up for a price or pro anima or both; as did the mid-eleventhcentury Poitevin families who could—without being lords of the churches in question—dispose of ‘two-thirds of the burial, and the candles’; or of the great feast-day candles, the blessed wax, and all burial fees (held from the local viscount).87 Tithes were also used as pledges for loans (often by the minor gentry who held them in benefice).88 By the later eleventh century, especially in western France, some local churches had suffered an extreme fragmentation of their pastoral revenues. A monastery acquiring a church, in western France especially, would gather up the 83

Vendoˆme no. 163 (Couesme and Chaˆteau-la-Vallie`re). Cf. in Languedoc, Be´ziers no. 89 (c.1089); in Poitou, St-Maixent no. 269 (1119); and instances from all over France of detached tithes as inheritances, entry gifts, marriage portions, etc. 84 Molesme no. i. 218 (1112–16), version A; cf. version B, different wording to same effect. 85 Described as given in benefice, in fevo, in fisco, etc., or as held from so-and-so’s casamentum; or conversely as in the donor’s direct lordship or demesne (in dominium or dominicatus or dominicatura). In St-Pe`re, 151–2 (before 1080), Isnard gives his church at Boissi but explains ‘I do not hold all the tithes in dominicatu, but my men hold many of them in fisco’ (with his leave to give them to St Peter). 86 Vendoˆme no. 324 (1085). 87 St-Cyprien nos. 475, 410. Cf. Jumie`ges nos. 36–7 (1087–8); St-Aubin no. 323 (probably c.1100: a woman and her sons and daughters, anxious about possessing tithes but unable or unwilling to relinquish them all, ‘give . . . a third part, at present, of all our tithing that we have by fief of lord Basil’ (above, at notes 63–4); in Languedoc, Le´zat no. 1158 (1085–94, Ademar and his sons return the third of a church’s tithes and all its firstfruits, burials, offerings, etc., which he holds ‘in fief’ from an intending donor). 88 e.g. St-Sernin, Toulouse no. 243, Be´ziers no. 87, Gellone no. 286, Cluny no. 3636, St-Martin-des-Champs no. 61, Orderic Vitalis HE III. 190–3.

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tithe-rights only if those who held them so chose,89 even if as a first step the tithes were recognized as ‘held from’ the monks. So in Brittany, a knight Ruald giving to Marmoutier ‘whatever in church, altar, or tithe I have in demesne’ (in six churches), distinguished this from ‘what priests or laymen hold from me’ which he also gave, ‘so that every man who holds anything from me—tithe, altar, or church—shall hold it from the abbot and monks’ unless willing to give it up completely.90 At the church of Luche´ in Anjou, the ‘altar and all offerings and all burial dues’ with the tithes of fourteen peasants were notionally at the disposal of the viscount Ralph, who ‘partly sold . . . and partly gave’ them to Saint-Aubin; but what he was able to transfer had to be qualified with ‘such as he had’ or ‘so far as he had it’ (sicut habebat), since each of seven lesser men had some combination of tithe, burial, and offering to give, sicut habebat, often from specified holdings or named tenants, sometimes with the consent of another person by whose casamentum or beneficium he held it. One of the seven, Gerard the seneschal, kept back candle offerings and half his burial fees and gave them later (for confraternity); another, Adam the provost, had previously granted half of his half of a village’s tithe to a man who had to be bought out with 12s.91 Particularly instructive is Marmoutier’s account of its acquisition (embarked on with hesitation) of the ‘almost deserted’ church of Neuville, by donations (unusually, all finalized at ‘the same day and hour, with the same witnesses’, in 1102) from Wicher lord of Chaˆteau-Renault and others. Wicher and his sons gave ‘whatever they had’ there, and ‘whatever Maurice held from him in fief’ (Wicher now buying Maurice out); Geoffrey of Vendoˆme gave his half of the church, held in fief from Wicher; Wicher and his son went on to give whatever the monks could acquire in their land without damage to their homage or service. Three others—perhaps not Wicher’s tenants—gave each ‘whatever he had in the church and its pertinences’ (with variations); a fourth gave tithes, offerings, firstfruits, ‘and other things of the kind’ from land of his own. All these donors ‘gave us everything . . . as absolute and free as they themselves had hitherto had them’.92 89 e.g. (for lay lords allowing or encouraging this) St-Pe`re, 143 (before 1070), 151–2 (before 1080), 485–6 (?late 11th c.); St-Aubin no. 915 (c.1045); Ange´ly no. 112 (before 1076: Elias Rufus, having given a church leaving the wine tithe in his men’s possession, arranges to divide with the abbot whatever of it either of them can acquire). 90 Morice, Me´moires, I. 383–4. Future tenure from the monastery may be implied when a lord gives ‘all the tithe [etc.] that I have, or man or woman through me’, e.g. Gellone nos. 908, 267–8, 284–5, 345 (from 1088 to 1114). 91 St-Aubin nos. 355–6, 359, 361 (from c.1057 to 1060s). Cf. Athenay (St-Vincent-du-Mans nos. 480–4), Tours-sur-Marne (below, p. 708), Saint-Martin of Caux (Gellone nos. 283–9; see Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 514–15); and Saint-Flour’s long, piecemeal acquisition (perhaps from the 1030s, certainly from c.1080, to 1119) of Oradour and Chaudesaigues from their inextricable lordly and priestly families (below, p. 581). 92 See Chevalier, ‘Restitutions’, 138, with text at 141–3. Cf. Che´deville, ‘Restitutions St-Vincent’, 210–13; Constable, Tithes, 110–16; Renardy, ‘Recherches’, 228, 238–9, 261; Lynch, Entry, 6–7 and n. 18.


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Detached tithes and offerings gathered up by greater churches were largely given and accepted as pious benefactions deserving appropriate rewards. Harvey Messor’s price to Vendoˆme in 1059 for his moiety of the tithe of a church was £20 of Poitevin money, with the promise of burial at Vendoˆme or reception as a monk, his two sons being bought off with 20s. and a foal; while that same Hugh of Alluyes who in 1062 drove so hard a bargain for the burial fees and altar offerings of two churches, eleven years later gave the whole tithe of one of them, ‘requiring absolutely no earthly reward’ but getting full measure in prayers and confraternity.93 In general, the parish churches did not benefit much from such surrendered revenues; the monks may have reattached some offerings to the priests’ livings, but probably little of the tithe. Occasionally however, at least in the south, it was to (or for) the parish church itself that its one-time revenues were restored;94 and in the north, fragments might be reassembled by lords and their knights for a new priory or collegiate church based on and serving a parish church.95 But a mass of detached tithes remained immovably in lay possession: laicized, as distinct from those that were secular all along.

15.iv. Lords’ enjoyment of tithes and offerings in other countries A reforming bishop of Nantes wrote in 1050 that the taking of tithes and offerings by others than the ministers of churches was more prevalent in ‘the Gauls’ than anywhere else;1 so perhaps our sharing this impression does not just reflect the exceptional wealth of cartulary material. Cartularies abound in France partly because monasteries did; they are strewn with the laity’s gifts and sales of rural churches, because France was already thick with churches founded by lay lords or fallen to them by secularization. In the north-east corner of the kingdom— Flanders and Picardy—and beyond it in Lotharingia, the evidence is thinner, partly because churches were fewer and often belonged to monasteries from the start.2 In twelfth-century Picardy, Saint-Vaast had a share (almost always 93

Vendoˆme no. 131; ibid. nos. 163 (above, at note 83), 242 (1073). Aniane no. 223 (1026); HL V no. 262 (1062, below, p. 828 note 39); ibid. no. 384 (1093); Gellone nos. 401 (1077–99), 345 (1114); Maˆcon no. 563 (late 11th–early 12th c.?); probably St-Flour no. vi. 31. 95 e.g. Odo Stigand and others, c.1063–6, for Saint-Martin of Ećajeul (ADNorm. no. 222). 1 In the preamble to a charter for Marmoutier, below, p. 871. 2 If given them, this was mainly by bishops or counts, not lesser nobles (who mostly gave lands and serfs); see Gand, St-Mihiel, Gorze, UBMR I (Pru¨m, St Maximin), passim. Churches given by the laity were usually pertinent to estates (e.g. Gand nos. 82, 91, 112–13, 121, but not no. 29), their own pertinences not specified. 94

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two-thirds) of some of the tithes and offerings in about a score of country churches;3 but the partitions may result from monastic reorganization rather than from previous lords’ arrangements. In Flanders count Robert II could declare in 1087 that his monastery at Tronchiennes owned all the tithes ‘of old and new land’, and all the offerings of any kind, from two parishes;4 it does not follow that he had taken them himself (though the context is his renunciation of potestas in the monastery). But he gave also, from one of these churches, something called the bodium: a word peculiar to Flanders, apparently meaning the lord’s share of the tithe, and evidently a standardized two-thirds. It probably first meant the ‘body’ of the church, the nave; since the revenues belonging to the priest were often called the ‘altar’ and so associated with the chancel, the rest could be figuratively seen as the nave.5 Apart from count Robert’s grants to Tronchiennes and other monasteries,6 the bodium appears by name only among the existing possessions of monasteries; that it had formerly been taken by the counts or other laity is an uncertain inference. But a charter of count Robert I in 1085 records that he has endowed a collegiate church at Cassel with ‘things in my property’ which include two-thirds of the tithes of Cassel and of other tithes.7 In Lotharingia by the end of the tenth century, precarial grants by St Maximin, Trier, were including tithe-rights among what made a church worth having. In one such in 998, Bertha, a count’s widow, received life tenure in a villa ‘with the church and all its tithing’, while donating another villa ‘with the church and its tithing’ that her husband had given her as a marriage portion.8 Admittedly this need not mean—though the economic emphasis of the precaria strongly suggests it—that Bertha herself lived off the tithes of first one and then both of these churches; it might only mean that the two churches carried their tithe-rights with them. But a forgery from the 1130s shows that by then St Maximin expected to take two-thirds of the tithe from many of its churches, and it was plausible for another forgery to imply that the lay donors of one church had formerly had the same.9 In reality some lords took more: around this time the count of Namur with his wife, sons, and daughters, founding the Premonstratensian abbey of Floreffe by giving the parish church to Norbert and his brothers, could describe the church as ‘formerly held by alodial right for our uses—that is, the tithe and 3

4 St-Vaast 259–391, passim (chiefly inventory). ACFlandres no. 7. L. Voet, ‘Bodium-Redecima’, Bulletin du Cange, 20 (1950), 208–11 (texts), 212–31. 6 ACFlandres nos. 8, 9. 7 Ibid. no. 6 (1085). Cf. nos. 83–4, for Oudenbourg, 1119: count Charles gave duae garbae (two out of three sheaves) from several parishes and places; Walter the butler and his brother, two-thirds of the Oudenbourg parish tithe (and all the small tithe). The decimatio used as a woman’s entry gift to a monastery (1104; ibid., no. 31) could be a secular tenth (but see next note). 8 Altlux. UB. I no. 207 (the word used is decimatio). 9 UBMR I nos. 302, 276 (see Wirtz, ‘Donum’, 143 n. 1, with 133 n. 1). 5


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the dos’ with certain other dues.10 In 1132, a noblewoman giving a church and all its tithes to Pru¨m, with the approval of two sons and a daughter, was able to reserve enjoyment of the whole tithe to a third son, himself a monk of Pru¨m.11 Beyond the Rhine we know even less. It seems unlikely that Frankish habits disappeared, as one sharp instance from western Thuringia may show. About 1060 one Reginbod gave land to Fulda with a church and all its tithes and its endowment of four manses. This land, along with one-third of the tithe, had been granted in usufruct by Reginbod’s late brother to the clerk who served there. Reginbod gave it all, the priest’s part included, to Fulda; but it looks as if his brother had in his time kept two-thirds of the tithe.12 This sort of evidence, so commonplace in France, is rare in northern Germany. There were in the eleventh century still far fewer rural churches with parochial rights than in the West. A great many tithes (not easy, in any case, to distinguish in the eastern marches from secular tenths imposed on the Slavs) had belonged to missionary monasteries from the first, or to churches established by the monasteries.13 Lay gifts of churches are not prominent in the endowments of new monasteries; and in Thuringia, a list of ten churches given to Erfurt by count Wichman as late as 1119 is by French standards archaically simple: no particularities, no fractions, no multi-levelled vested interests.14 An alternative angle is provided for eleventh-century Thuringia and southern Saxony by acts of archbishops of Mainz when consecrating new churches. These acts both allocate tithe-rights and acknowledge gifts of tithes, in terms which imply that lords were displaying praiseworthy piety if they agreed to pay tithes at all; that (as in ninth-century Francia) directing their own or their dependants’ tithes to their own church was part of ‘endowing’ it; and that the bishop on his side was ‘conferring’ or ‘conveying’ tithe-rights to the church’s lord as much as to the church.15 None of this tells us whether lords expected to enjoy their own churches’ tithes themselves; but this is at least suggested in one instance where a church with its dos and decimatio had been part of a count’s dowry to his wife.16 In Bavaria, apart from regions of colonization, the background to the lay hold on tithes was the more familiar gradual spread of tithe-rights among older 10

ACNamur no. 2 (1121). Altlux. UB. I no. 382. This son (apparently committed neither to poverty nor to residence) was to pay 10s. from the tithes to the monks on his mother’s anniversary and to have the rest for himself. 12 Fulda no. 762 (cf. Stutz, ‘Kapitel’, 43). In or before 1013, Bernward bp. of Hildesheim tried to get serving priests to recover (for church restorations) any ‘endowment tithes’ (decimationes dotales) that they had given to laity tributario iure (Hildesheim I no. 49), which sounds like tithes handed on to lay lords as a form of priest’s rent. 13 See Kuujo, Zehntwesen, 205–9; Constable, Tithes, 74 n. 4; Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 184. 14 Fulda no. 482 (archbishop’s confirmation). Behind this may lie the integrity of great domains in 15 16 Above, p. 470. Mainz no. 341 (late 11th c.). Germany, until 12th c. onwards. 11

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churches. Since most of these were bishops’ churches, the laity probably depended for their enjoyment of tithes less on their own foundations than on secularization or on property exchanges with bishops. But in these mainly tenthcentury exchanges, a few ‘tithed churches’ (or moieties of them) did pass from noblemen or women to bishops as well as the other way;17 tithes were treated, on both sides, as pertinences along with lands, serfs, and cattle; and the exchanges are so economic in emphasis as strongly to suggest that the tithes included in them are part of the church-owner’s income: of what the noble will enjoy after acquiring the church (often in full property, ‘to do whatever he chooses with it’), or used to enjoy before parting with it (and often afterwards, keeping it for life).18 This is made fairly certain by the fact that such exchanges can include tithes on their own19—sometimes what may be the bishop’s canonical third, but treated by now as disposable property.20 And when late tenth-century bishops convey churches with tithes ‘except for the third part, which belongs to the priest’, this may be in origin the priest’s canonical third, respected by the bishop while the church was his; but the churches are passing to lay hands, one for life to a woman and her niece, one in full property to a nobleman;21 and the implication of excepting the priest’s third must be that the new lay owner will enjoy the rest. The absence of any such reservations in tithed churches passing from the laity22 could mean that they had taken none of the tithe for themselves, but is compatible with their having taken it all (just as a priestly ancestor would have done), while paying a serving priest out of it at will.23 However, the eleventh-century lords of the monastery of Ebersberg, descendants of its founder count Eberhard, gave it not only tithed churches (as Eberhard had done a century earlier)24 but also shares of dependants’ tithes— two-thirds of the tithe due from five mansi; two-thirds of the tithe belonging to an estate church—as if these had been the lord’s share, leaving a third for the 17

Above, p. 469. e.g. Freising no. 1031 (899): the noble widow Irmburc keeps life tenure of a church and ‘all its tithing’ as well as its land and serfs (above, p. 449); cf. nos. 1076, 1275 (10th c.). Stahleder’s view (EKn, I. 180–1, II. 10) that in Freising no. 36 in the 770s the donors of Malching reserved lifelong enjoyment of tithes (and for their sisters and nephews) is a misreading: they gave the tithe to the bishop immediately, though with free disposal only after their deaths. 19 e.g. Freising no. 1221 (972–6). Tithes were also held by laymen in benefice from bishops (e.g. Gottweig nos. 110, 175, 188, and ed. notes). Cf. in Franconia Lorsch, I no. 76 (968, from chronicle); Wirtemb. UB. no. 216 (1023). 20 Freising nos. 1070 (926–37), 1247 (972–6); explicit in an exchange between Passau and Tegernsee, 1034 21 (Tegernsee no. 8). Freising nos. 1268 (977–81), 1329 (994–1005). 22 See, however, ibid. no. 1429 (1030s), an exchange in which count Odalschalch giving a church gave also ‘a part of the tithe, which he had retained’ in another church (pars probably meaning a third). 23 For Alemania, evidence about tithes given with churches to St Gall is thin, and most of the few references to tithes as a donor’s property could be to secular tithes (e.g. St Gallen nos. 556, 650; but on 691 see above, p. 491 note 24). 24 Ebersberg nos. I. 17, 28, 38 (all between c.1010 and 1040); ibid. no. I. 6 (c.934). 18


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priest. And this was explicit when the bishop of Wu¨rzburg in 1037 confirmed an earlier bishop’s exchange with count Hermann: the count had given to Wu¨rzburg his (inherited) two-thirds of a parish tithe, ‘the parish priest always having the third part’.25 When Ebersberg itself gave two-thirds of the tithe of a village to a priest and his presbiterissa for life (in exchange for some land),26 this looked more like the seigneurial portion than a serving priest’s allowance. Here as in the north, however, there is a shortage of this kind of evidence: no great number of churches were being given to monasteries, it seems,27 and those normally with no more particularity than ‘with dos and decimatio and all pertinentia’.28 In much of Italy the reservation of tithes to the plebes held firm,29 and for laymen to enjoy them they normally had to lease a plebs; as was done on a large scale both by great men like duke Boniface of Tuscany, and by rising men among the lesser nobility; in the country round Lucca many prominent families of the twelfth century had built up seigneurial power in the tenth as lessees of churches, church property, and tithes.30 For Latium, however, the very existence of the general canonical tithe has been questioned, partly because tithes were not in dispute between bishops and monasteries in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, while firstfruits and burial dues were;31 but this is natural when private churches given to Farfa or other religious houses usually had no tithe-rights anyhow. The disputes about other pastoral revenues would be consistent with former owners having taken them, but would certainly not prove it. In Italy generally, even the normal range of offerings that any church or its priest would get are not regularly listed among pertinences after the French fashion. Sometimes there is a general mention of ‘offerings of the living and the dead’; and churches are given to Farfa with votes (vows, votive offerings) or 25

26 Ibid. nos. I. 30, 37; Wu¨rttemb. UB., I no. 222 (middle). Ebersberg no. I. 85 (later 11th c.). See below, pp. 595–6. 28 In Freising no. 1393 (1022–3) a nobleman Reginold gives the bishop a half-share in a church, including halves of all offerings, tithe, and dos; but this looks like an inherited moiety, not a seigneurial slice, and need not imply more than lordship. 29 In S. Italy the bishopric often had the role of plebs. This might explain, in Norman Sicily, the otherwise puzzling 1097 settlement between bishops and barons (R. Pirri, Sicilia Sacra (Panormi, 1733), I. 696); making it a more Italian and less ‘Norman’ arrangement than Boyd recognized (Tithes, 232–4). Although conceding that a landowner (terrarius) building a rural chapel ‘may have the tithe of that casalis’ (perhaps a mere handful of dwellings), it dealt primarily with the great men’s own tithes, giving these to the bishops; it is the bishops (in theory) who will distribute the count’s tithe and allow one-third of a baron’s tithe to his castle chapel. 30 See Boyd, Tithes, 92–101; Violante, La societa Milanese (Bari, 1953), 142–9; Wickham, Mountains, 108–10. 31 Toubert, Structures, 874–81, 978–9 (citing as an exception a dispute over ius parrochialis in Subiaco). 27

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oblatio.32 More idiosyncratically, in the mid-eleventh century a church is given to Monte Cassino ‘with the building and books and everything whatever that God will give there through his servants . . .’, and another ‘with all its pertinences and with those payments and alms that will come there from whatever side . . . by way of offering’. Each of these churches is given by a large number of co-owners, male and female, lay and clerical, with such emphasis on renouncing all claim on what they are giving (‘we reserve nothing of it at all to us or our heirs or our wives’; ‘we reserve no portion for us or our heirs’), and this in such close proximity to the vague but markedly unformulaic listing of pertinences, as might suggest that they had previously shared in the offerings; but probably the point was rather to affirm the integrity of the property.33 Often, in any case, the serving priest was the owner and donor, perhaps with a brother or nephew as deacon and heir: the context for a seigneurial share is lacking. The Italian evidence by this time is anyhow less about donations of churches than about leases: leases to laymen or clergy, mainly by ecclesiastical owners. Both tithes and offerings may be mentioned as included in leases of plebes or parts of them, whether by the bishop or by their own rector;34 while in 1075 a lay family’s surrender of such a lease or benefice (coming close to a pious donation) could list as pertinences ‘offerings for living and dead, tithes and firstfruits, holy water, and whatever came to us through the plebs . . . on feastdays’.35 For lesser churches, with offerings only, a lease will sometimes reserve something for an ecclesiastical owner, such as half the offerings at the great feasts.36 In Latium, Farfa leased churches to groups of priests and charged them part of the proceeds of offerings and burial dues, along with their rent.37 Few of these arrangements reveal what if anything was taken by previous lay owners. In the south, however, especially in the principality of Salerno, there is a wealth of evidence for lay owners’ arrangements with their priests, and while these regularly reserve the

32

Ibid. 872; Farfa nos. 579, 656, 787, 850, 1150; more perfunctorily, dotis, votis in pertinence clauses (e.g. nos. 789, 892). Some Arezzo donation charters have longer lists, e.g. Arezzo no. 254 (1083, a share in a nonpieval church ‘with books, equipment, firstfruits, tithes, oblations, offerings, and mortuaries’). 33 Dormeier, Montecassino, app. nos. iii (1060?), i (1049). The Monte Cassino documents show 11th-c. donors reserving only defence and perhaps a small census (ibid. 93). 34 e.g. a bishop gives an archdeacon a plebs (Creti) ‘with oratories, tithing, holy water, and renders of the dead’ (1009, Arezzo no. 95); the priest Peter holding a moiety of a plebs sublet a dependent church with his half of its offerings (979, above, p. 88). Lucca episcopal leases of pievi seldom mention tithes or offerings (see, however, Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 99–104); but tithes may be there under the name of redditus (renders), due from everyone in named villages (Mem. Lucc., V. iii nos. 1497, 1515, 1563, 1644, 1780–1, from 979 to 1017; no. 1783 has decimatio as an alternative). 35 Arezzo no. 217 (1075), returning a quarter of a plebs to the abbot of Fiora; cf. no. 278 (1090), nine laymen returning the plebs of Creti to the cathedral. 36 Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 132 n. 170 (from Ferrara, 969). 37 Toubert, Structures, 925–6, from Liber largitorius.


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more valuable and durable offerings for the church itself, only very seldom is any share of offerings claimed for the owners’ consumption.38 In the north of Italy, where churches on large estates attracted settlers and accreted new rural parishes,39 the eleventh-century pattern was closer to the Frankish, lay lords having churches with tithes as well as offerings, and sometimes disposing (as lord, not leaseholder) of the tithe of whole parishes.40 Here too, lay donations of churches seldom particularize pastoral revenues or fractions of them;41 but tithes were given on their own, as in Piedmont (about 1100) a layman gave to the monastery of Cavour ‘the two-thirds of the tithe that I have in Bra’ (owed to a church that the monks already possessed), while in 1097 a widow with her son and daughter renounced all the tithe from their own land in a village, with symbolic guerpitio as for any other kind of property.42 And tithes on their own could be granted to the laity; in 1072 the abbot of Cavour granted half the tithes from three places (at the marquis’s command) to a woman and her son in return for providing the monastery with horses.43

Just over the Alps in the kingdom of Burgundy, Hugh bishop of Grenoble had by this time started his campaign for the surrender of churches and tithes, held in benefice or otherwise.44 Here the count, Guy III, had churches, tithes, and burial dues (or perhaps actual burial grounds) to surrender en masse. Other lords, more informatively, gave named churches and shares of tithes that went with them. In 1080 Hector and his wife Cana gave four churches, each with one-third of ‘the tithes that I possess in that village’ or of ‘the tithe of that parish’; about 1099 their six sons surrendered the two-thirds of the tithe that their father had retained; evidently the family had for a time enjoyed the whole tithe, not just a lord’s part. When two groups of knights, three brothers in each, gave a church with its cemetery and parts of the tithe, the position seems similar. Guiniterius’s sons gave a moiety, Gerald Moretus’s a third, of the tithe ‘of their alod’ or ‘that they had from their alod’, and later surrendered the other half, or two-thirds, which they had kept;45 the two groups’ ‘alods’ must have been their inherited shares of an estate from which they had taken the whole tithe. All these lords had enfeoffed others with some of the tithes, which are consequently surrendered also by a man 38 Below, p. 545. However, in Cava no. 157 (935) the five founders of a church agree that its rectors shall have half and nos consortes the other half of votive offerings (votatio), evidently in recompense for their 39 labour and expense. See above, p. 90; Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 135–7. 40 Sometimes back to bishopric or plebs, e.g. Cremona, I sec. xi nos. 23, 29 (1015, 1019); cf. no. 31 (1019): the margrave Boniface gives Cremona the tithes of four parishes, for a launegilt (Feine, Studien, III. 108). 41 For episcopal donations see Cavour nos. 2 (1037, foundation), 19 (1089). 42 43 44 Ibid. no. 21; Pinerole no. 11. Cavour no. 14. See Bligny, L’E´glise, 89. 45 Grenoble B.2, B.28, C.81 (late 11th–early 12th c.); B.85 (1080), B.95 (c.1099); B.109 (1100); cf. laudatio of B.111.

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and his wife, her sons and his daughters; or by the three sons of David, priest of the church concerned.46 Moving southwards in the kingdom we find that tithes are characteristically held by just such complex family groups, each heir or beneficiary needing to be separately bought out.47 In the confused conditions of eleventh-century Provence, the monks of Saint-Victor or Le´rins seem chiefly concerned to reassemble lands and rents rather than pursue the pastoral revenues of long-disrupted parishes. Nonetheless tithes came to them, in several ways: some given by those who owed them (landowners with some freedom to direct their own tithes); others, secularized if not secular all along, as part of the burden on dependent peasants, given away with them and their holdings.48 Others were given from lands already belonging to a church: when the lords of Chateaurenard had given the church at Besse to Saint-Victor, ‘the other men of Besse, all the heredes, gave the whole tithe of all the land that the church of St Stephen has and will have’; the Baux-Rians donors of Sainte-Perpe´tue, Brignolles, ‘make donatio and guerpitio of the tithe we have been claiming from the lands within the bounds of St Perpetua’.49 It is not obvious here, however, how the laymen came by the tithes in the first place, nor whether they thought they were transferring landlord’s dues to the church or recognizing parochial dues for it. Finally, much less ambiguously, there are tithes already recognized as due to a particular church,50 which laymen may intercept, along with offerings and firstfruits, sometimes with the clear implication that the church itself is theirs with all its revenues. Thus Pons of Bras, his wife, and five sons give to Saint-Victor ‘of our alod . . . in the territory of the castle of Bras, the church of St Stephen; we give everything we have there, or our men through us, in firstfruits, in offerings, in burial, in baptism . . . ’ (as well as lands ‘with tenth and tasca’);51 the Palliol family gave churches at Saint-Maximin with firstfruits, offerings, tithes of the monks’ land and of all the men living in the churches’ territory.52 Sometimes what is given is called a parochia: the monk Barnerius acquired for Saint-Victor from two laymen ‘the parish itself of Rocbaron, with half the tithe of bread-cereals, wine, and meat, and all its firstfruits, offerings, Lenten dues, and burials’; the lay lord 46 Ibid. B.96, B.109. B.111 and 112 involve the same or overlapping family groups; Richard Mainerius surrendered tithes in two parishes, one of which the bishop thereupon granted for rent to Richard’s 47 clerical son. Cf. Constable, Tithes, 113, 114 (Saint-Ismier). See below, pp. 613, 615. 48 Above, pp. 474–5. The Me´vouillon family’s donation of the church of Rioms (St-Victor no. 730) involved eight other men and women giving (with their families) sometimes tithes that they ‘have’, 49 sometimes rather tithes that they owe. St-Victor nos. 383 (c.1070), 367 (c.1060). 50 Even this may be the result of laymen’s grants, and apply largely to the church’s own tenants, rather than to any officially established parish. 51 St-Victor no. 373 (c.1060. ‘Tasca and tenth’ probably refers to two secular dues, but possibly to a secular and an ecclesiastical one now both in the lord’s hands). 52 Ibid. nos. 303, 294, 307 (1038, 1053, c.1060).


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Ricaus’s guerpitio for a group of churches renounced their ‘tithes, firstfruits, and parishes’ as well as their estates.53 That in such gifts there is very rarely any reservation for the priest, with complementary implications about what the donor had been taking, cannot in these conditions be taken to mean that the lay lords had taken nothing:54 it is more likely that they had taken everything (and the charters often assume that after the transfer the church will be served by a monk or monks, not by a sitting priest). Provence seems different from France mainly in the confusion and ignorance about the past that lay behind proprietary claims on churches and their pastoral revenues. That the neighbouring Languedoc had much in common with the rest of France in these respects has already been suggested.55 In Spain beyond the Pyrenees, there is generalized evidence that church-owners sometimes took pastoral revenues: a ninth-century penitential, echoing the 572 council of Braga, warns that ‘if anyone founds a church in his own land, let him not dare to claim the offerings’;56 early twelfth-century legislation at Leoń and Palencia condemns laymen taking offerings and tithes;57 in 1194 Celestine III spoke of laity giving to the monastery of Sahaguń the tithes ‘which by a bad custom they are used to have in Spain’.58 Late eleventh-century knights in Aragon depended on tithes (so king Peter’s complaint to Urban II implies) to support them in warfare against the Muslims;59 and profit from tithes may have been a motive for promoting colonization, for lay as well as ecclesiastical lords. However, there is almost no eleventh-century charter evidence for this,60 of the kind that all over France shows donors to monasteries openly giving—or retaining— tithes and offerings that they or their fathers have been taking.61 The preGregorian council of Coyanza, in 1055, spoke only of the servitium owed by priests to lords; taking service, rent, or hospitality may be as near as most lords came to tapping pastoral revenues.62 And although many eleventh-century transactions 53

Ibid. nos. 383 (c.1070), 318 (1040). When the founders of a new church at Maillane gave ‘a third part of the whole tithe of everything in the territory of Maillane’ (ibid. no. 444), they had probably been taking the whole tithe, or assumed that they could; endowing the church with a third of it was a way of setting up a priest’s portion. 55 56 Above, pp. 492, 494, 497. Quoted by Bidagor, Iglesia, 87–8 and n. 30. 57 See Orlandis, ‘Laicos’, 276–7; Bidagor, op. cit., 136–9; Garcıá Gallo, ‘Coyanza’, 511–12. 58 Sahaguń IV no. 1487. 59 Kehr, Papsttum, 30–1 and app. I. 55–7 (complaints against his bishops, including their taking the tithe from the knights’ own churches in the mountains). See below, p. 928 note 30, on the forged response of Urban II, showing the importance set on the matter. 60 A Catalan exception is S. Cugat no. 449 (1012): abbot Guitard grants a deserted church and settlement to a layman Isnabert to ‘rule’ (below, p. 752) with offerings, firstfruits, and other things given by the faithful, and with two-thirds of the tithe which tuo iure dedicamus. 61 See Garcıá Gallo, ‘Coyanza’, 509–10. A rare but obscure reference (ibid., n. 497) to tithes shared by a woman (probably lord of the church) and two men is PMHD no. 314 (1041). 62 Below, p. 854; Garcıá Gallo, ‘Coyanza’, 512. 54

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(involving laity on one side or both) convey shares of churches,63 sometimes very small, which look as if they carry some economic benefit more substantial than a fraction of a priest’s rent, this might consist in the use of land; charters here regularly mention dextri or lands—sometimes with houses, furniture, church ornaments—and very seldom tithes and offerings. Furthermore, private churches were more often independent than pertinent to an estate (as distinct from located in a named village), and do not evidently draw tithes or other compulsory dues from peasants under the church-owner’s lordship. Nonetheless, if private churches functioned as neighbourhood churches (as in Italy), while tithes tended to become compulsory without (unlike Italy) being reserved to old churches, pastoral revenues could probably be tapped by the churches’ proprietors regardless of whether they were the parishioners’ landlords. And the silence of the charters is so odd—especially about offerings, which all churches must have had—and so general, even in innocuous contexts (such as pertinence clauses, or what a tenant priest will have), as to weaken its force in arguing that lords were not taking offerings and (where available) tithes. In any case the silence is past when in 1165 (a generation before Celestine III’s comment about Spanish custom) a group of heirs and a monastery, holding moieties of a new church, agree that ‘the monks and the heirs are to divide whatever may come to the church . . . in firstfruits, tithes, offerings of the dead, bequests, and other benefits’, after giving the bishop his third.64

In pre-Conquest England, even when tithes were beginning to be paid to new rural churches, there is no direct evidence nor even implication that their lords were taking tithes or offerings.65 Many English priests may have been rent-paying tenants of their churches’ whole property and revenue, if not virtual owners. Others may have been so dependent that their lords took everything and gave them board and lodging: we do not know. Although some tithes were already paid to monasteries,66 this may be explained by ancient status as a minster, or by being able to tithe their own tenants, or by a benefactor’s freedom to direct his own tithe-paying,67 rather than by laymen’s gifts of tithe-receiving churches.68 After the Conquest however the new lords followed the practices of Normandy, giving churches with tithes and other dues to monasteries at home or to new 63

See below, pp. 632–3. Eslonza no. 93. One of the two chief heirs was a clerk (with heirs of his own), but not expecting to serve the church (the agreement covers appointment of a chaplain, jointly or in turns). 65 66 See Barlow, 1000–1066, 205–6. See Constable, Tithes, 82 n. 2. 67 Perhaps Aethelmaer for Cerne Abbey (S 1217). For some surviving freedom of this kind see index: Stori. 68 Among Constable’s examples, Peterborough (c.963) had tithes from estates, not from churches; Evesham (c.1023) reserved tithes and church dues when selling an estate (Robertson, Charters nos. 39, 81). 64


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foundations in England. Churches are usually described as given ‘with land and tithes’, or with one or the other; but not with such fractions of tithes as might imply an agreed division between lord and priest, nor with any specification of particular dues or offerings.69 This does not mean that Norman lords in England and Wales lacked control of tithes—far from it: they could make pious donations of tithes (often fractions) separately from a church;70 but with or without a church, they seem normally to be disposing of tithes that they and perhaps their peasants owed,71 rather than tithes that they had been enjoying. Even when they confirm their substantial tenants’ grants of tithes, these are probably grants of the tenant’s demesne tithes from lands that he holds from the lord, not of tithes themselves so held (implying enjoyment of them).72 Nonetheless, Drogo of Pevensey ran into trouble with Ralph bishop of Chichester for interfering with Battle Abbey’s possession of tithes given it by two other men, probably Drogo’s tenants.73 And in general the same possibilities, without certainties, appear as in Normandy.74 Occasional mentions of a village’s tithe, or villagers’ tithes,75 are compatible with the lord having taken them (and now giving them away, rather than merely redirecting them); so are the rare mentions of offerings or ‘customs’ as part of a donation.76 Particularly suggestive (but no more) is Geoffrey de Trailli’s donation to Thorney of a church ‘with all oblations and offerings, one full hide . . . and the tithes of the village’—giving the abbot seisin by the key of the church—to finance the abbey’s purchase of ornaments, and in exchange for confraternity.77 Here and in other early twelfthcentury instances of what would later be rationalized as ‘appropriation’ to a

69 e.g. (late 11th c.) St Werburgh, Chester, no. 3; Lewes, Part I. 10–20 (Latin text in Mon. Angl., V. 14–15); EYC VIII nos. 8–9, 15, 18, 20–1. 70 e.g. Text. Roff. cc. 103, 105–7, 122–6, 132–5, 154: donors with English and Norman names, giving tithes or fractions of tithes from named places, usually on their own. Robert of Saint-Amand gave half his tithe at Hescendena before giving the church with the other half (ibid. c. 116). 71 On demesne tithes see Lennard, England, 36–7; Brett, English Church, 225–6. However, a great lord could donate the entire tithe entitlements of several churches: Gilbert fitzRichard for Llanbadarn Fawr, from the original church’s dependent chapels (below, note 76); earl Arnulf of Montgomery for SaintMartin, Seéz, from all his churches in England (Welsh Episc. Acts, D 72). 72 e.g. Lewes, 7–9, 16–18, charters of William I and II of Warenne. 73 Chichester Acta no. 7 (Ralph Luffa, 1091–1123); with no. 4 for the donations (of demesne tithes). 74 Above, pp. 466–7. 75 e.g. Welsh Ep. Acts I. D 25 (1095–1115, giving the tithes of a village as well as of the donor’s rents, hunting, and fishing); Text. Roff. c. 94 (church of Northflete given by abp. Ralph with the ‘whole tithe of my dominicus, and of all villagers who have land in Dune’). 76 e.g. Text. Roff. no. 121, Haimo son of Vital gave a church ‘with all the customs belonging to it’ (for ‘customs’ in England see above, pp. 481–2). In Wales, Gilbert fitzRichard’s foundation charter (1115–30, Gloucester II no. 547) for Llanbadarn Fawr gave it everything belonging to the existing church of St Patern but also ‘all offerings brought to the altar of my chapel in my castle’. 77 Mon. Angl., II. 601 (no. 13, 1085–1112; see also Brett, Eng. Church, 153 and n. 4): church at Giveldene, perhaps in Beds. on the River Ivel: cf. Sudgivele, Nortgivele (Southill, Northill), in DB; a Walter de Trailly had a claim on Southill church, 1189–99 (Newnham no. 14).

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monastery under the bishop’s authority, a lord who can convey direct enjoyment of tithes and offerings may have had this himself.78 Archbishop Anselm in his selfexile was told by the cathedral monk Ordwy that in Canterbury diocese79 people claimed to have ‘often seen laymen standing at the altar collecting alms from it, and boldly usurping burials and other things belonging to the ius of priests’.80 Anselm was dismissive of this attempt to convict him of neglect; yet it is the kind of story that circulates because preposterous but not unimaginable. However, there is no legislation in Norman England like that in Normandy which forbade the laity any share in ‘the priest’s third part’,81 thereby assuming, it seems, that the rest was fair game.82

15.v. Was there a standard ‘lord’s share’? The proportion of one-third to the priest and two to the lord has cropped up repeatedly among the foregoing examples, in several parts of Europe. It is often suggested that there was a general rule that a church’s owner took two-thirds of its tithe, and perhaps of offerings too,1 under a supposed common Germanic customary law. But in fact the examples show a more varied division.2 It might be done by kinds of revenue rather than proportions, the lord taking all of certain dues and offerings, the priest all of others; if divided it was often into halves rather than thirds.3 Provincial (and even legatine) legislation of the eleventh century sometimes concedes that not all tithes can be wrenched away from the laity, but it does not consistently define any allowable or customary share. In preGregorian legislation, the council of Rheims of 1049 forbade laymen to hold

78 We cannot, however, assume any previous lay arrangement behind the division agreed between Peterborough’s sacristan and the priest Ansketil, about two chapels ‘which of old were in the sacristan’s hand and still are . . . with the customs that Christians ought to pay to their churches’ (see index: Ansketil). On lack of evidence for lay lords’ exploitation see Brett, Church, 229–30. 79 in ecclesiis ad curam meam proprie pertinentibus; further on, in ecclesiis nostris has to mean the same (not, here, his proprietary churches). 80 Epist. Anselmi (Anselmi Opera, V), no. 336 (to Ordwy). Anselm does not believe it has ever happened ‘in our churches’ (see preceding note). 81 Below, note 5. 82 Gregory VII’s belief in 1081 that William the Conqueror had ‘compelled laymen under oath to give up tithes that they had held’ (Reg. G. VII, ix. 5, p. 579, letter to Hugh of Die) is puzzling, whether referring to England or Normandy. The verb detinebant is ambiguous (held or withheld?) but the following verb dimittere points to ‘hold’. 1 e.g. Becquet, ‘La Paroisse’, 213. 2 See the pioneering work of Dillay, ‘Re´gime’, 270–2. 3 Above, pp. 493–4, 496–7. The 1070 settlement between Hersfeld and Mainz gave Hersfeld two-thirds of the tithe from some churches, from others half (Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 184).


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altaria, without defining these.4 At Toulouse in 1056, what must be left to the service of a church in a layman’s property was indeed defined as one-third of the tithes (besides all firstfruits and any other revenue or property assigned to the priest); at Tours in 1060, the laity were not to possess or dispose of ‘anything of what belongs to the offering or alms of a church, or burials, or at least one-third of the tithes’; and the same reserved third appears later in Normandy.5 But at Narbonne in 1054, when laymen were forbidden the enjoyment of firstfruits, offerings, price of burials, and other liturgical income, tithes were left undefended;6 and at Gerona in 1078, the legatine council decided, for churches immovably in lay hands, that ‘at least we absolutely forbid to laymen mass or altar offerings, and firstfruits’;7 implying, for tithes, that any or all may have to be left to the lords. So it is only in the legislation of western France from Toulouse northwards that the lord’s two-thirds is tacitly recognized (and only for tithes, not offerings).8 When the two-to-one proportion appears in England it seems to be a red herring, applying not to the lord’s share of his church’s revenues but to his power over the tithes that he himself owes. English thegns had been allowed to give one-third of their tithe to their own churches if they had a burial ground, the rest to the mother church (along with their men’s tithes).9 After the Conquest, Norman lords are found sometimes disposing of two-thirds of their own demesne tithe at choice,10 the remainder going (so far as we can tell) to whatever was the normal tithe-receiving church.11 On the face of it these two practices are totally different—though the decay of the minsters may have led the new lords to accept from the past only the allocation of one-third to the manorial church (seeing this as the parish church in practice, while mistaking the old minster’s claims for an antecessor’s whim). But in any case neither Edgar’s law nor Anglo-Norman practice has anything to do with dividing the church’s revenues.12

4

c. 3 (Mansi XIX. 742). For altaria see below, pp. 697–8. Toulouse c. 11 (below, at notes 27–8); Tours c. 8; Rouen 1074 c. 3, Lillebonne 1080 c. 4, Rouen 1096 c. 5 (Mansi, XIX. 849, 928; XX. 400, 556, 924). Thirds of tithes in Normandy were commonly known as garbae, sheaves, duae garbae meaning two out of three (e.g. Tre´port no. 1; Ste-Trinite´ du Mont no. 89). 6 7 c. 14 (Mansi, XIX. 830). Below, p. 828. 8 It appears in the supposed statutes of a Roman council of the 1070s (below, p. 828 note 34), but these 9 are a compilation of regional statutes, in this instance French. Above, pp. 464–5. 10 e.g. Walter de Gant for Bardney, 1115 (Mon. Angl., I. 628–9); Peter de Valognes founding Binham, c.1100 (ibid. III. 345; giving also two-thirds of the tithe owed by his knight tenants in Norfolk, with their consent). Some grants of ‘two sheaves’ in Normandy were probably of this kind, e.g. at Saint-Martin d’ Ećajeul where Odo Stigand persuaded two other laymen ‘to give their tithes, of which they had kept two parts’ (c.1063–6; ADNorm. no. 222). 11 Lennard, Rural England, 300, 316–17; Brett, English Church, 226–7. 12 Such divisions can be found in England later, between a monastery and its priest, 1177–82 (Collections Hist. Staffs., Marquess of Anglesey charters no. 30; the two manipuli or ‘handfuls’ reserved must mean two out of three sheaves). 5

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Where the two-to-one division is found in practice—and for tithes at least it is very widespread—it need not have a single common explanation. It is too easy to suppose some perversion or adaptation of the old canonical partition: the priest still getting the clergy’s third, the lord having got hold of the fabric’s share and the bishop’s, or the poor’s share where the bishop’s had lapsed from a quadripartite division.13 Stutz seems to assume that in the ninth century the fabric’s part might anyhow have been legitimately taken and spent by the lord; but this seems to be simply his view of what would have been reasonable.14 It is true that the bishops of west Francia in 845, dealing with the king’s benefice-holders, allow them when ecclesiastics to reserve the demesne tithe from the estate and spend it on the roof and lights. Although lay benefice-holders are explicitly excluded, that itself suggests that landlords may often in fact have applied the tithe they themselves owed to the repair of their estate churches. But this is quite different from taking the fabric’s share of the tithe due from parishioners. And the bishops’ advice in 845, like the legislation at Metz half a century later, shows plainly that the canonical partition had lapsed if it had ever happened: priests under lay benefice-holders were to take the whole tithe, from both demesne and parishioners, and to look after repair, lights, hospitality, and the poor.15 Similar objections hold against Geńestal’s view, much less tentative than Stutz’s, that eleventh-century partitions in Normandy and elsewhere derived directly from Carolingian partition between the fabric, the poor, and the priest; springing from the principle that what did not belong to the priest belonged to the church, and that since the church belonged to its lord he both took its two shares of the tithe and accepted the corresponding burdens. ‘Voila´ la logique, voila´ le droit.’16 Logical as it would be, there is little evidence for it. That a lord would in his own interest normally maintain the fabric is likely,17 and any tithes he got would contribute to this (or even to rebuilding in stone).18 But that even the ‘pious and conscientious’ lord took on direct responsibility for the poor, and spent on them half his receipts in tithes, seems unlikely. Provision out of the tithes for a matricularius might indeed be in the lord’s control, as a piece of petty patronage or perhaps a form of agricultural wage;19 but when archbishop 13

e.g. Bidagor, Iglesia, 136. Stutz, Benef., 263–4 (modified by 1937, Kapitel, 83–4). What bp. Gottschalk gave to a nobleman (Freising no. 1336) was a quarter-share of a tithed church (probably someone’s inheritance acquired by Freising), not a quarter of the tithe; this cannot demonstrate the lord’s claim to the fabric’s portion as E. Widera supposed (‘Kirchenzehnt’, 72). 15 Meaux c. 78 (Conc. III no. 11). In 893 the Trier provincial council at Metz (c. 2; Mansi, XVIII. 78) ruled similarly (against lords in general, not just holders of fiscal churches): only the serving priest ‘shall take the tithes in their entirety, for his own sustenance and for lights, bells, church building, priestly vestments, 16 and other equipment’ (only not mentioning the poor). Geńestal, ‘Modalite´’, 7–8. 17 18 Until parishioners were made partly responsible, 13th c. onwards. Above, pp. 454–5. 19 See above, p. 490 note 22. 14


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Hincmar heard that a count had given the position to his oxherd in exchange for a donkey, he rebuked him not only for ‘selling the alms of the poor’ but for usurping an ecclesiastical function; and in general he assumed that using tithes for the poor and in particular for a deserving matricularius was the priest’s duty.20 In fact there seems to be no evidence, from legislation or from charters, of lay lords getting two-thirds on any such logical and orderly basis, and it is hard to see how they could have done when the canonical partition itself was so little applied, and when even its theory was so confused.21 This is not to deny a possible link in particular regions. Where the bishop could in practice control the destination and use of tithes, he might well leave the priest with only the clergy’s third and give the other thirds, including his own if any, to a monastery;22 if, subsequently, the monastery acquired the church itself, it would have become a church-owner in receipt of two-thirds as an outcome of canonical tripartition. There may be no proven instances of this. But a late tenth-century bishop in Bavaria gave a layman (in an exchange) an episcopal church except for the priest’s third:23 which was thus transformed straight from the old canonical share, respected by the bishop, into what the lay lord ought to keep his hands off. This may be the nearest thing to Geńestal’s model that actually happened, and it depended on the bishop of Freising treating the tithes of his own churches as pertinences—part of their realizable value. A more usual but less direct link might be that canonical thirding, where it was really practised, accustomed local lords to the idea that one-third was proper pay for a priest. For Spain however, where it has been argued (on insufficient evidence)24 that the bishop’s third was regularly claimed, Bidagor proposed a different model: that is, that the remaining two-thirds, clergy’s as well as fabric’s, had in practice fallen to lords.25 Any lord taking all this must have allowed his priest other revenues— from land or offerings, or a straight wage—but nothing from tithes: this has nothing to do with partition of tithes between lord and priest. Bidagor suggests that the bishops’ consent to lords having two-thirds was grounded in public law, recognizing the lord’s functions of maintaining both clergy and fabric. But since Spanish bishops’ thirds seem to be a negotiable custom rather than a sign of strongly surviving public law, their consent looks more like straightforward sharing of the spoils.26 In the south of France the bishop’s third may have 20 Flodoard, Hist. Rem., iii. c. 26 (pp. 337–8), and above, pp. 476–7. Geńestal read a passage in Meaux c. 78, that where an ecclesiastic had the demesne tithe the parishioners’ tithe should go to the priests, as referring to neighbouring parish priests (‘Modalite´’, 7); but they are clearly the serving priests of the fiscal 21 churches in question. Above, pp. 476–8. 22 23 See Constable, Tithes, 61 (though without instances). Above, p. 504. 24 See Garcıá Gallo, Coyanza, 481–8 (on the wide variety of rules for dividing and spending revenues); 25 485 n. 448, 487 n. 452 (criticism of Bidagor). Bidagor, Iglesia, 122, 135. 26 Above, p. 82; below, pp. 718–19. ‘Royal thirds’, allowed in 13th-c. Castille for crusading expenses, were at first claimed as the fabric’s share (Bidagor, op. cit., 145–6), but this looks like 13th-c. rationalization.

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prevailed quite widely, but perhaps only for churches in ecclesiastical lordship. The council of Toulouse in 1056 seems to impose on all churches in episcopal or monastic ownership an obligation to pay the bishop a real, calculated third unless they were already paying a customary tertium (which had probably long ceased to be an actual third). Lay lords’ churches are quite differently treated—not, it seems, subjected to the bishop’s third at all. The ruling aims simply to make lay lords allow their priests a third under episcopal supervision; it is silent about the fate of the remainder.27 If (as is likely) the lay lords were taking it, this does not mean that they had ‘taken over’ the bishop’s third; it is more likely that canonical thirding had never been done in their churches.28 We can reasonably say, then, that wherever the bishop’s third did in part survive there would be a tendency to think in thirds; and in such regions, for churches not subject to it, the outcome might often be two-thirds for the lord. But this partition between lord and priest was usual also in regions of France and Lotharingia where it cannot convincingly be derived from canonical partition; it was not an old but an emergent practice, carving up tithes that by now in principle came entire to the church and priest; and it needs no special explanation. Thirding of anything may be widely customary; profits of jurisdiction were sometimes divided like this between the lord of a court and his official; two-to-one was an obvious proportion between superior and inferior.29 More significant than these divisions of tithes is the divergence, in what goes to the lord, between tithes, regular dues, and different kinds of individual fee or offering. The laity’s enjoyment of tithes (and sometimes firstfruits) was less and less dependent on owning a church to which they were due. Where the rural church is an element in the seigneurie, its tithes may belong to its lord as much because paid by his peasants as because due to his church. Sometimes the very existence of a church appears irrelevant;30 once territorialized,31 tithes and firstfruits may go with estates, as distinct from churches. Even from estates they are easily detached, perhaps kept back when the estate is transferred: in the south, a 27 cc. 10 and 11 (Mansi, XIX. 849). In the crucial passage in c. 11 (on ecclesiis in alodiis laicorum constitutis), one-third of tithes goes with firstfruits (not thirded), presbiterium, and ‘the other things’ (ceteris) reserved for the priest; making it part of the complex in the serving priest’s potestas: tertia pars here can hardly mean (as Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 361–2, takes it) the bishop’s third as in c. 10. 28 In Catalonia in 1040 the bishop consecrating Tost castle chapel allocated to it (with firstfruits and offerings) a third of the Tost tithes, which the lay founders had been taking unjustly and now renounced 29 (Urgellia, I no. 49); this does not look like the bishop’s third. See Schreiber, Gesamm. Abh., 190–3. 30 This does not imply that they were secular tenths all along. Cf. Marca Hisp., app. no. 103 (964), the count’s donation to a monastery of a scattered settlement with no church mentioned but ‘with tithes and firstfruits’ (evidently secularized ecclesiastical revenues) as well as ‘rent and labour dues that they [the inhabitants] render us’. 31 The division of unterritorialized tithes could produce great practical difficulties: see St-Martin-desChamps no. 176 (1120–4).


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penitential gift to Be´ziers (for killing a man during the Truce of God) was an alod consisting of lands and vineyards ‘with the whole tithe and whatever I have there . . . except the Martinmas firstfruits’; in the north, an entry gift to Jumie`ges was ‘whatever I have in the vill called Verneuil, except the tithing of wheat’.32 New tithes on new lands might never have been allocated to any church, being seen simply as part of the proceeds of development.33 A bishop of Regensburg in the early twelfth century accepted the tithes of Winkling from the hand of a nobleman Werinher to whose ‘property’ they ‘belonged’, and attached them explicitly and for the first time to Werinher’s own church there.34 Meanwhile some bishops readily leased or granted detached tithes to laymen, doubtless often legitimating the layman’s prior possession.35 So all sorts of tithe-owners came into being—monasteries, magnates, knights, clergy—by gift, sale, family settlement, mortgage, lease, or fief, without any property-right in a church to which the tithes once belonged. As to offerings, those that had become fixed and customary, such as burial dues, were not immune to being assimilated to seigneurial revenues, or to being granted in fief or otherwise detached.36 But they still mostly needed to be collected from the graveside, church door, or sacristy; and in general they were not scattered abroad as secularized, negotiable revenues, but divided between priest and lord, or former lords and a monastery. Finally, there were offerings that even the most unselfconscious lord would hardly assume were his, and that even the most precarious and ill-paid priest could hope to enjoy as his own. To some extent this is a practical matter: baptisms and burials could be kept track of; so perhaps could Sunday offerings, or at least offerings at the great feasts; but casual individual offerings for personal services (blessing a pilgrim, visiting the sick) might be given to the priest anywhere at any time.37 There is a conceptual difference too: some offerings spring entirely from the priest’s inherent sacramental power or his quasi-magical attributes, and not at all from the parochial status of his church. Nonetheless, by the eleventh century in France at least, almost all dues and offerings were potential matter for infinitely varied partition between lord and priest, even though what is left to the priest often suggests assumptions about what ought to be so left. This usually included the offerings made at or for private masses, for confessions, or 32

Be´ziers no. 77 (1069); Jumie`ges no. 43 (11th c.). See Che´deville, Chartres, 326–7. For bishops’ determinatio of hitherto unallocated tithes see above, pp. 471–2. 34 CDRatisbon. I no. 183. There may here have been a conversion of secular tenths into ecclesiastical tithes. 35 Kuujo, Zehntwesen, 35, 206–11; Renardy, ‘Recherches’, 205–61; Boyd, Tithes, 93, 96 (unusual in Italy, 36 Above, pp. 497–8. however). 37 Gregory VII distinguished offerings ad altare and ad manus (see Becquet, ‘La Paroisse’, 212–13); cf. Bourges 1031 c. 13 (Mansi, XIX. 505). 33

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for blessings on a marriage,38 and often baptism or burial offerings; sometimes the chief parties’ offerings (the bride’s and groom’s, or the combat champions’) belonged to the priest while what their friends or followers gave was divided. Offerings at Sunday mass or at the great feasts were divided in many ways; it was sometimes spelt out that what the lord and his family themselves gave was all for the priest.39 When in 1108 we find a knight in Berry giving to the abbey of SaintSulpice, Bourges, not only burial and baptism but the ‘reliefs’ of women (presumably after childbirth), blessings of pilgrims’ packs and of bride and groom, visiting of the sick, confessions, vigils, this is because he has come into possession of the priest’s part itself;40 he gives over and above this ‘the part I have had in the offerings on all feast days’, which he must have had as lord.41 Encroachments of this kind, driving the priest into an even smaller corner, must be discussed later. Here the point is that there was no clear distinction between what was the priest’s inherent personal right springing from his status, or his pay from individual parishioners for personal services, and what was allowed him by his lord as his pay for serving in the church: it depended on the point of view. When in the 1050s or 1060s the monks of Vendoˆme spelt out exactly how their priest at Maze´ was to live and what he was to have—a fixed allowance of wheat and of oats or barley (so he could not profit from increasing yields in tithes), all of the more personal offerings for various functions, half of the offerings in bread and in coins at Mass, half of certain Good Friday and Rogation Day offerings42—they establish at the end that they can take back the ‘gift of this income’43 if the conditions are not fulfilled: it is all basically theirs and they are paying him out of it. It seems likely that the counts of Anjou who gave them the church, and in whose time the priest evidently had the same portion,44 had felt much the same.

38

e.g. below, p. 563 at note 18. In Champagne, cf. 1099 settlement for the priest of Tours-sur-Marne (Cluny no. 3732): of marriage offerings, purifications of women, and thirtieth-day masses for the dead, ‘no one doubted that they belonged to the priest’. 39 On all this see Schreiber, Gesamm. Abh., 160–1, 206–7, 327; id., ‘Liturgie und Abgabe’, 4–7; Dillay, ‘Re´gime’, 273–7. 40 St-Sulpice no. 28. 41 See Devailly, ‘Restitutions’, 587 n. 2. 42 Vendoˆme no. 80; discussed by Van de Kieft, ‘Une e´glise priveé’, 157–68. The detail is more characteristic of the 12th than of the mid-11th c., but seems unlikely to have been interpolated in an agreement with a particular priest. 43 donativum censius illius. 44 The monks give him the presbiteratum ‘to hold as he formerly had it’.

16 Proprietors’ arrangements with their priests

The counterpart to a proprietor’s material gains from a church is his provision for its service. We need to consider how—as between lord and bishop—the priest of a private church was appointed; the difference made by the priest’s personal status (free or unfree); and the range of rights that he might have in the church and its resources, from tenure of the whole complex verging on propertyright, to nothing beyond perhaps a daily food allowance; with a broad middle ground where the majority stood, having tenure of a portion of the church’s resources—a priest’s part, which could be seen as his pay from the lord, yet with scope here too for a tough undergrowth of proprietary attitudes limiting the lord’s rights from below.

16.i. The priest’s appointment and status In early sixth-century Gaul, the council of Epaonense had forbidden putting saints’ relics in private oratories unless they could be properly honoured by a visiting priest;1 perhaps a few proprietors hoped that their collections of relics would emanate power or attract offerings without any regular cult, while others were content to have their oratory, shrine, or outdoor cross visited by the bishop’s travelling clergy, as in the north of England still in Bede’s time.2 But by the ninth century such arrangements were largely obsolete except in new missionary areas. The ruling of 818–19 about the rent-free mansus is immediately followed by a clause that once this is secured, every church should have its own priest;3 and 1 3

c. 25 (517, Conc. Gall. 511–695). Capit. no. 138, cc. 10, 11.

2

Bede’s letter to Egbert (above, p. 152 note 1), c. 5 (p. 408).

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this was the general trend under the Carolingians, although a mere oratory could still be virtually unendowed and be served by a visiting priest from the mother church.4 Of course the lord might be negligent, or the congregation have fallen away;5 or he might be persuaded or bribed to commend his church to the priest of a neighbouring church,6 or do this to keep his hands on more of the glebe or tithe. He might want only a clerk in minor orders, perhaps a particular young man not yet eligible for priest’s orders,7 or never likely to be eligible. But on the whole the interest of lords by this time lay with the legislation: one priest to each church, able to celebrate mass and entitled in principle to pastoral dues and offerings. Archbishop Hincmar could try to argue his diocesan clergy out of offering entrance-gifts by pointing out that every lord of a church wants a priest.8 In Carolingian times this interest might still be focused on meeting the religious needs of the lord’s own household (though not, obviously, for magnates or monasteries with scores of estate churches). By the eleventh century however the small rural parish with its own priest has become, in much of the West, part of the framework of rural societies forming under various degrees of lordly control.9 The lord needs a real priest, consecrated by a real bishop. This is the chink into which the diocesan bishop might insert the tip of his lever. As long as the rule held of ordaining to the ‘title’ of a particular church rather than ‘absolutely’,10 so that a clerk normally needed to be ordained priest at the point when his lord proposed to put him into a church, the bishop would be involved in the appointment—might even be regarded as making it11—and could try to insist on the canonical requirements of age, literacy, morals, and free status. But even here, there was always the possibility of getting one’s man ordained by another bishop—in the earlier centuries a wandering monk-bishop; later across a diocesan boundary.12 As with the consecration of new churches, so with the ordination of 4

As envisaged by Hincmar, De eccl. et cap. (ed. Brackmann), 75–6. The 826 council of Rome complained of churches left unmanned and lapsing into secular uses; where such a church was ‘in the ius of secular men’ they should be warned to appoint within three months 6 (Conc. II no. 46). See Hincmar’s 852 capitula I c. 17 (Capit. epics., II. 44–5). 7 e.g. Seminatus at Folembray (Hincmar’s letter, PL 126. 538). 8 874 (iv. 5; Capit. epics., II. 85). Somewhat contradictory is his rebuttal of the younger Hincmar’s charge of pushing the clerk Seminatus’s claim in the interest of the lay benefice-holder Sigbert: it does not matter to Sigbert whether any priest is ever ordained for that church (PL 126. 564). 9 However, in Aquitaine the council of Bourges, 1031, assumes that some priests serve several churches, not all visitable every Sunday (see Devailly, ‘Restitutions’, 588–9). 10 Chalcedon (451) c. 6 (Mansi, VII, 375–6). See Fuchs, Ordinationstitel, 6–10, 118, 125–30; for early western citations, Mordek, Vetus Gallica, 26 n. 37. 11 ordinare originally covered both appointment to an office and consecration to priest’s or deacon’s orders. 12 See Capit. no. 14 (Ver, 755) c. 13; St-Flour no. vi. 49, 50 (1095–1120): Arnold (not, however, pushed by a lord but pursuing his own claim) was ordained priest by the bishop of Rodez when rejected by the betterinformed diocesan (Clermont). 5

Proprietors and their priests

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clerks to serve in them, the bishop’s only real hold was the need for the exercise of his sacramental powers, and in these the diocesan had no monopoly. In any case the requirement that a priest be ordained for a particular church (and remain there) was weakened.13 A lord might have priests already in his service as purely domestic chaplains, or seeking his lordship when a church fell vacant; he could then simply appoint a ready-made priest: ‘put’ him into the church or ‘commend’ the church to him; the diocesan bishop need know nothing about it. Early Gaulish legislation had protested at lay lords taking on vagabond clerks;14 a priest leaving the diocese where he was ordained was supposed to carry a certificate from his original diocesan.15 Formulae exist for letters of recommendation from one bishop to another: an early ninth-century Sens formulary provides a letter for a priest wishing to stay with a named lord, and another for a priest ‘wishing to find a lord (senior) who will support him in temporal things and to whom he may render service’.16 But diocesan statutes of the same period had to legislate against wandering priests being given the charge of churches without the bishop’s leave.17 The main thrust of Carolingian legislation was to insist on the bishop’s consent being sought for appointment or removal of a priest, wherever he came from. This was a softening or blurring of the ancient law, which allowed a church’s founder to ask the bishop to appoint a particular clerk, the bishop making the actual appointment.18 Pope Zacharias, answering Pippin’s enquiries of 746 about private churches, had stuck to the line of the old papal letters and the Liber diurnus: a founder wanting masses celebrated in his oratory should know that he must ask the bishop for a priest. But his later letter to certain East Frankish nobles sheds more light on actual Frankish practice: they must not take on any priest unless he was consecrated by their own diocesan bishop or accepted by him on the strength of a recommendation—otherwise he might well be a runaway serf, not a priest at all; ‘none of you . . . should put a priest into any church until his origin and way of life have been approved by your bishop’.19 And this perhaps inadvertent acceptance of the view that a lord ‘put in’ the priest persisted under Carolingian rule, taking hold in Rome itself, where the council of 826 allows the builder of an oratory to 13 Fuchs, op. cit., 137–8, 178–95. Variously against moving at will and ordination absolute, see Capit. nos. 22, 28 (789 admon. generalis, c. 25, explicitly from Chalcedon; Frankfurt 794 c. 28); Conc. II nos. 36, 50 (Mainz 813 c. 12, Paris 829 c. 36); Capit. episc., I. 19, 39 (Gherbald bp. of Lie`ge, early 9th c.). 14 e.g. Arles 314 c. 21; Orleans 541 c. 7 (Conc. Gall. 314–506, 511–695). 15 Epaon. 517 cc. 5–6 (ibid. 25). Poupardin, ‘Fragments . . . Formulae Pithoei’ (Bibl. ec. Chartes, 69 (1908), p. 662), c. 7 shows a bishop apologetically rejecting an abbess’s uncertificated candidate (by implication 16 from elsewhere). Form., 218–19. 17 Gherbald of Lie`ge, II c. 13; Haito of Basel, c. 13 (Capit. episc., I. 30, 214). On linked problems, including priests coming from elsewhere with their lords, see Meaux-Paris 845–6 (Conc. III. no. 11) cc. 50–2. 18 Above, p. 15. 19 Epist. Karol. Aevi, III no. viii. 3 c. 15 (p. 484); Epist. Sel., I no. 83 (the verb is intromittere).

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‘commend it to whom he will . . . with valid commendatory letters and the bishop’s consent’.20 Early Carolingian legislation was more concerned to insist on a priest’s duties to the bishop than to limit his dependence on his lord.21 But Charlemagne always recognized in principle the need for the bishop’s consent to a priest’s appointment;22 and four of the five regional church councils of 813 weighed in, on removal as well as appointment, in varying terms summed up for them all when they put their decisions together: ‘all those assembled here agree that laymen should not turn priests out of churches . . . nor without the bishop’s consent give them churches or have them minister in basilicas’.23 A set of (probably) diocesan statutes states it crisply: ‘that no layman presume to put a priest into a church or turn him out, unless with the bishop’s consent’.24 It was repeated under Louis the Pious, who later tried to bring offenders under his ban; Charles the Bald more than once instructed his missi to act against them; archbishop Hincmar is found threatening to excommunicate the lord of a village church because ‘he has expelled the priest from the church, against the law, and committed it to another priest from another diocese’.25 Active kings and bishops could no doubt achieve much.26 But ninth-century bishops were asking only for a veto on what remained the lord’s act; and reiteration of the law27 shows that they could be baulked even of that, if only by their ignorance of what went on in the remoter countryside. A bishop would learn soon enough of a priest’s eviction, but not necessarily of his death and replacement. The same old Carolingian law had to be repeated in the east, at Coblenz in 922, Ingelheim (for both kingdoms) 948, and Augsburg 952.28 The decree at Seligenstadt in 1023, that ‘no layman should commend his church to any priest without the bishop’s consent, but should send him to the bishop . . . that it be established whether he is fit, in knowledge, age, and manners, to have a people of God entrusted to him’,29 is only rather clearer about how the consent is to be sought; though one may assume it would always have been by sending the priest

20

21 Conc., II no. 46 c. 21. See Stutz, Benef., 233–5. Capit. no. 97 (779–81, to counts, etc. in Italy: he has heard that they ‘refuse to have priests presented to the bishops’); no. 83 c. 7 (813?); no. 38 c. 12 (802?: only with the proper formalities can a layman know whether a man ‘can rightly be called a clerk or priest’); capit. of 813?, ed. Mordek (above, p. 461 note 9), c. 4. 23 Arles c. 4, Mainz c. 29, Chalon-sur-Saone c. 42, Tours c. 15 (Conc. II. nos. 34, 36–8); Concordia 24 episcoporum, c. 14 (ibid. app. B, p. 299). See Clercq, Le´gislation, I. 248–9. Capit. no. 81 (810–13?) c. 2. 25 Ibid. nos. 138 c. 9 (Aachen 818–19), 191 c. 1 (Worms 829), 274 c. 11 (Tusey 865), 275 c. 9 (Pıˆtres 869); Flodoard, Hist. Rem., iii c. 28, pp. 356–7. Cf. Capit. no. 210 c. 3 end (Pavia 845–50). 26 Complaints under Louis the Pious about bishops’ unreasonable refusals (below, pp. 792–3) imply a degree of enforcement. 27 e.g. 887, Cologne c. 4; 888, Mainz c. 5; 892, Vienne c. 4 (Mansi, XVIII. 47, 66, 122). 28 29 Conc. VI. i nos. 4 c. 9, 13 c. 4, 18 c. 9. Const., I. no. 437 c. 13 (p. 638). 22


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to the bishop, which one may loosely call ‘presentation.’30 In this pre-Gregorian half-century it seems to be only in Aquitaine, at Bourges in 1031, that the bishop’s role is presented as active: ‘that no layman should put priests into his churches except into the hand of his bishop, since the bishop ought to commend the cure of souls to every priest . . . ’31 But in Normandy in 1080 and 1096, councils still speak in much the old way: ‘a layman shall not give a priest to a church,32 or remove him from it, except with the bishop’s consent.’33 When the lord does produce a clerk in lower orders for the bishop to ordain, he will not expect the bishop to be difficult. Louis the Pious’s legislation of 818–19 blocked the claims of the more zealous bishops by adding to the requirement of the bishop’s consent that ‘if laymen offer clerks of worthy life and doctrine to the bishop, to be consecrated and appointed in their churches, he shall on no account reject them’, a rule that most bishops accepted as reasonable.34 But since in these cases the bishop really had something to confer—priesthood itself—not only was his practical position stronger, but the principle that he conferred the cure of souls and rule of the church was less remote; Carolingian legislation here is a real if weak link between the ninth council of Toledo and the later law of patronage. Archbishop Hincmar never lost sight of this principle, telling count Theodulf that if he ‘wants to have a priest’ he should bring a suitable clerk ‘and I will examine him, and will give him the church and ordain him’ if satisfied that no payment has passed;35 and pointing out to the younger Hincmar that as lord of churches in other bishops’ dioceses he (the older) had always sent clerks for the diocesan to approve and ordain, rather than taking advantage of the decree of Orange that would have allowed him (with the diocesan’s consent) to appoint alreadyconsecrated priests.36 Charters and dedication records from the ninth to the twelfth century show wide variation in wording and implied assumptions. A ninth-century formula has an abbot report to the bishop of Chartres ‘that we have given our church’ in suchand-such a villa to a deacon, yet ask that the deacon having been ordained priest may hold and rule it by the bishop’s authority.37 In 1032 archbishop Pilgrim of 30 The verb presentare was already occasionally used, e.g. in Charlemagne’s letter to counts in Italy 31 c. 22 (Mansi, XIX. 505). (above, note 22). 32 sic: laicus presbiterum non det vel abimat ecclesiae. Unless this is a (repeated) slip for presbitero non det . . . ecclesiam’, it must mean ‘provide a church with a priest’. 33 See below, p. 829. In Anjou, 1062, appointment in the bishop’s presence was said to be ‘the usage (mos) of the place and of the country’ (Marchegay, Recueil, 74–5; see Dillay’s comment, ‘Re´gime’, 265 n. 3). 34 Capit. no. 138 c. 9; and below, pp. 792–3. 35 He was rebuking Theodulf for demanding an entrance fee (Flodoard, Hist. Rem., c. 26, p. 337). 36 PL 126. 540–1, 561. See above, pp. 15–16, 76–7; below, p. 808 note 34. 37 Form., 557 (Extrav. ii c. 10). Cf. in 9th c. Lotharingia abp. Teutgaud of Trier’s recommendation to Franco of Lie`ge of two priests whose lords had ‘given’ them churches in dioc. Lie`ge (Wirtz, ‘Donum’, 118 n. 3).

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Cologne gave churches to the abbot of Deutz with the ‘power of . . . conveying and commending’ them.38 It was about this time that, further west, the language of ‘presenting’ to the bishop for him to ‘confer’ or ‘commend’ the cure of souls was creeping in;39 yet in Anjou even a century later, lay donors of churches to the bishopric were credited by bishop Ulger with renouncing the ‘right to put in the priest’ (ius ponendi) or even to expel or remove him.40 In Italy from the eighth century onwards the usual verb was ordinare: the owner or owners of a private church ‘ordained’ its priest, whether as a designated successor, a tenant, or (rarely) an unfree servant. Of course if not a priest already he had to be ordained priest by the bishop, but this was not what ‘ordaining’ here regularly meant.41 In the principality of Salerno, ordinatio by founders and their heirs was conceded by bishops as part of the ‘liberation’ of private churches;42 at Bari in 1032 the archbishop, having ‘dedicated and liberated’ the church built by the imperial catepan (governor) Pottho, accepted Pottho’s instruction to ‘ordain that church and put in a priest or monks’ on his behalf (vice eius).43 By contrast, in tenth-century Urgel dedication records for churches founded mainly by Pyrenean villagers, the bishop—having been at least notionally given the church ‘for consecration’—sometimes ‘establishes’ the priest (constituo, statuimus),44 but sometimes only states that the priest is to ‘rule with our consent’ (seldom, in either case, with any indication of whose choice was at work).45 Meanwhile the same councils that speak of laymen ‘putting priests in’ and ‘turning them out’ speak also of ‘giving’ or ‘commending’ churches to priests.46 These words make the priest look less like a lord’s appointed and sackable servant or agent, more like a tenant or temporary owner. The difference is not sharp or simple: what a tenant holds as a benefice may be his pay for a service. But there is a difference between holding a church with all its pertinences, including the 38

39 UBNR I no. 167. Above, at note 31. Angers nos. 174 (though qualified as ius, si posset dici), 175 (quicquid iuris . . . dicebat se habere), 179 (not qualified), all between 1125 and 1148 (bp. Ulger’s own notices). 41 See index: ordinare. Despite overtones of appointment to office, ordinatio had come to mean giving or leasing a church to someone or putting him into it. See Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 72–4. 42 e.g. Cava nos. 614, 898 (1009, 1035); see below, pp. 721–2. 43 Bari I no. 18 (1032; reading dedicavi for edificavi). In 1037 a church in Coltibuono whose founder’s sons had kept hold of its endowments and left it unserved was described as remaining inordinatum (Regesto di Coltibuono, ed. L. Pagliati (Rome, 1909), no. 27). 44 Urgellia, I nos. 13 (900, a deacon, with his father the leading founder), 38 (978, a priest not named among the builders or inviters). See above, pp. 72–3; below, pp. 621–2. 45 Ibid., nos. 9–11 (all 899), 23 (912, for the priest-founder, his nephew, and suitable descendants); no. 16, however (903), for an oratory without parochial rights, envisages priests appointed by the parish priest ‘by our licence’ and at the founder’s or his descendants’ request (i.e. choice?). 46 813, Arles c. 5, Chalon c. 42, Tours c. 15, Mainz c. 30; 948, Ingelheim c. 4; 952, Augsburg c. 9 (above, notes 23, 28). There is obviously no distinction intended between ‘putting in . . . expelling’ and ‘giving . . . taking away’. 40


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priestly function, as pay or reward for some extraneous service or general fidelity, and being paid something out of the church’s revenues for the function of serving it (and whatever else might be expected of him). In practice the priests of private churches present a wide range of status and tenure. Many had been unfree before their ordination: some were virtually so afterwards. Gregory the Great established the principle that a slave ordained priest was ipso facto freed, though the slave-owner’s consent was necessary (normally of course it was he who had the slave ordained).47 The legislation of 818–19 however required that a serf clerk be formally freed by his lord before ordination as a priest;48 if a runaway serf had been ordained he was to be degraded and restored to his lord; if he had been ignorant of his own origins, remaining in priest’s orders depended on his lord’s willingness to free him.49 The intention must be to safeguard lords against loss of serfs, and the Church against lords’ claims, while securing the personal freedom of priests that canon law required. But it undermined the principle that ordination itself freed; nor was it always respected (Louis the German in 833, Henry the Fowler almost a century later, are found formally freeing men already in priest’s orders).50 That clergy in lower orders, even deacons, could be and remain unfree seems by 818 to be seen as normal. And that a freed serf as a priest in his own master’s service—not an unclaimed runaway—might be brought up short by his servile origin if he tried to assert his independence is starkly expressed a century later by the council of Hohenaltheim: If anyone for love of God chooses one of his serfs, teaches him letters, grants him liberty, makes him a priest (by request to the bishop), and . . . gives him food and clothes; but afterwards, flown with pride, he refuses to celebrate mass and the canonical hours and to sing psalms for his lords, and will not obey them properly, saying that he is a free man and can become the man of anyone he chooses,

he is to be excommunicated until obedient, and if still obdurate, to be degraded and re-enslaved.51 The same principle was still being asserted in the eleventh century by the monks of Marmoutier for their own serfs, freed and ordained clerks for their service: one such ‘on condition that he become a priest when his age permits, and shall then carry out the function of priesthood in whichever of 47 On ‘slave’ or ‘serf’ see above, p. 440 note 19. ‘Slave’ seems right for Gregory I’s world; ‘serf’ may be better for 9th-c. Francia and later, for clergy from unfree peasant families. 48 In 7th-c. Spain, councils had insisted on the Church’s own slaves being freed before ordination (see Thompson, Goths in Spain, 306). 49 Capit. no. 138 c. 6; earlier, ibid. no. 22 (789, admonitio generalis) c. 23, and in Bavaria, ibid. no. 112 (800–3) c. 31. See Stutz, Benef., 248–53. 50 DLD no. 10; DHI no. 10. Louis the German’s priest may have been consecrated before the 818–19 ruling, but his continued serfdom had in any case been against church law. 51 916, Conc. VI no. 1 c. 38; see below, p. 814.

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our churches we shall wish, above all living chastely and preserving modesty’; but if he failed in this, he and any children were to be serfs again, ‘since we have made him a clerk for this purpose, that as an ordained priest he shall serve in our churches in all chastity.’52 Bishops too might free and ordain their own or their church’s serfs.53 When clergy were given away more-or-less as appendages of the churches they served, from the eighth through to the eleventh centuries,54 they were likely enough ex-serfs; and before 819 even priests could be counted among the mancipia of an estate.55 However, it would be a mistake to pin everything on formal status: to think that a serf or ex-serf was necessarily a despised and exploited servant, or a freeborn priest necessarily a secure and independent tenant. A Roman or post-Roman slave, a Carolingian serf or a twelfth-century ministerialis, could be a respected figure with substantial possessions out of which with his master’s leave he could give alms, even found a church of his own.56 A serf in orders might found a church and serve in it; it would be both his and his master’s. In 833 Louis the German, freeing his fidelis the priest Hunroc, gave him as his own all the possessions and serfs he had acquired on ‘Hunroc’s hill’,57 including the church built there; it sounds as if Hunroc had himself developed the place and built the church.58 Even an ex-serf serving in his master’s church may live on it and its minimum endowment as his holding; if he is given away with a church it may be because he cannot easily be dislodged. It could, on the other hand, be difficult for a priest to get away from bad pay and a hard master, like the unhappy Atto under the clerk Frotwin;59 but Atto was not Frotwin’s serf—he was or had been the emperor’s, and there lay his best hope of protection; while Frotwin held him bound by exploiting his ecclesiastical obedience, dragging him to the altar60 and making him ‘swear stability’. Atto was beaten, bullied, and made to ‘fear for my consecration—I fear what they have no fear of ’: perhaps that he would be forced into behaviour for which he could be degraded, perhaps a deeper dread of sacrilege to his person. 52

Quoted by Stutz (Benef., 252 nn. 49 and 53) from Marmoutier’s Liber de servis. Const., I no. 31 (royal judgment at Goslar, 1019). For Spain, see Bidagor, Iglesia, 18–19. 54 e.g. Wissembourg nos. 196, 227 (717, 719); Halberstadt no. 21 (936); Merseburg no. 46 (1017); Corvey no. 224 (1037); Ste-Foi no. 61 (c.1087); many instances from Normandy (Actes abbayes Caennaises no. 7; Orderic Vitalis, HE IV. 136–9). 55 When count Helingaud detached from a large donation (813) to Saint-Martin of Tours some 180 named serfs (mancipia) to free for his soul’s sake, four of these were priests (Gallia Christiana, XIV, instrumenta, cols. 15–19). 56 Visigothic legislation envisages fiscal serfs doing this, with royal consent (589, Toledo III c. 15; see Thompson, Goths in Spain, 305–6). For a founder-priest’s status as a royal servus, almost 500 years later, see 57 index: Gevuld. Unruochespergk. 58 DLD no. 10; cf. no. 11 (a fiscal church that had in some sense belonged to a royal serf Antkar). 59 Above, p. 490; below, p. 560. 60 Of St Remedius: probably the church that he served (in ‘Erkanger’s county’, i.e. Alsace). 53


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Probably his servile birth exposed him to bullying; perhaps the servile origins of many priests helped to expose priests in general, other than the well connected, to occasional violence or contempt. Such was the priest Folcrad in late ninthcentury Lorraine who rashly went to rebuke ‘his lady’ and her brother—he is described as ‘their priest’—for her desertion of her husband, and was set on and castrated by the brother and his gang.61 Less brutish but equally contemptuous is the attitude so trenchantly described by Agobard of Lyons in Louis the Pious’s time: ‘there is hardly anyone, aspiring even to modest worldly rank, who does not have a domestic priest—not one that he obeys, but from whom he unremittingly exacts obedience licit and illicit; so that many are found who wait at table, mix wine, exercise dogs, lead women’s saddle-horses, or manage petty estates’ (matters that a rough serf would not quite be up to). Since laymen cannot expect well-qualified priests for such work, they settle for the ignorant or criminal, ‘just so as to have their own priests’ and an excuse to neglect attendance at the mother church.62 When they want someone ordained they say to the bishop: ‘I have a little clerk, whom I’ve reared myself from among my serfs’ or ‘beneficeholders’ or ‘peasants’; or ‘I got him from so-and-so’ or ‘from such-and-such a country; I want you to ordain him priest for me’.63 Such a priest is of course not necessarily in charge of a lord’s church; he may be a purely domestic chaplain, though appointment to a church might often follow. The point here is that even a downtrodden lackey might not have been a serf at all. Jonas of Orleans in his similar account of despised priests, made to manage the laity’s affairs and wait on them, describes them only as ‘lacking worldly riches and rank’;64 Agobard envisages them being picked from any class of dependants, or coming from a distance. And this brings us to another side of the picture: it was no longer necessary to resort to one’s own serfs to serve one’s estate churches or household chapel. Already in Charlemagne’s time, his capitulary de villis had had to insist that his estate churches should go to ‘no other clerks . . . except our own, either of our familia or of our chapel’; that is, fiscal serfs or palace chaplains.65 The latter, the capellani, were at this time not necessarily of much higher status than the familia (any more than the lay vassi to whom they corresponded).66 But what 61 Metz (893) c. 10 (Mansi, XVIII. 80). The violence to priests condemned by 9th-c. councils was of course not necessarily or normally done by their lords. 62 Cf. Regino’s and Burchard of Worms’s citations from an untraced source: ‘some laymen order their priests to celebrate mass in their own houses, and so among the barking of dogs and the crowds of harlots the sacraments are desecrated rather than consecrated’ (Burchard, Decretum, iii. 61). 63 Epist. no. 11 (De privilegio et iure sacerdotis), c. 11 (Epist. Karol. Aevi, III. 203–6). See now Nelson, ‘Making Ends Meet’, 26–7, for comment and lively translation. 64 De institutione laicale, c. 20 (PL 106. 208–9). 65 Capit. no. 32 c. 6. See Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, 32–3; more generally 101–2, 104–5. 66 Ibid. 29–32, 86–7.

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was to be reserved for them was not just a function: it was status and a livelihood, for which there was competition; presumably Charlemagne’s agents were tempted to exercise their own patronage, in favour of their friends and relations or of the highest bidder. There were priests who actively sought good service and rich livings: independent and ambitious men, probably mostly freeborn, coming with letters of recommendation from another diocese; or already established in one church but keeping a hopeful eye on a neighbouring priest’s decrepitude;67 above all, offering competitive gifts (munera or exenia) to the lords of churches. Lords are of course condemned for exacting such gifts (and though these must often have been fixed by custom, the council of Arles in 813 implies that a priest might be chosen for what he could offer);68 but priests too are condemned, in diocesan legislation, for offering them. Hincmar reminds his clergy that ‘I have often warned you against giving superfluous gifts for widowed churches’, and tries to persuade them that this is unnecessary as well as wrong.69 Worst of all was making an offer for a church already occupied.70 What such clergy are competing for is not merely a livelihood: it is the chance to enrich themselves or their families, or to be equipped for almsgiving and pious benefactions. Between these two aims there was a shady area, especially in the use of tithes to support matricularii (one or two men entitled to a small allowance and in return serving the church as cleaners or gravediggers). From Hincmar’s points for rural deans’ inquiries, we learn that matricularii might be the priest’s relations; it was allowable for the priest to use the poor’s share for a brother or near kinsman who was poor or sick, but if he wanted other kinsmen with him he must feed and clothe them from his own part of the revenue.71 So whether or not he misrepresents his hangers-on as the deserving poor, he may be regarded by his family as a source of good things. More important, he can save and accumulate. Hincmar is concerned with the purchase of land by a priest with no patrimony of his own, one promoted ‘from the have-nothings’; his purchases belonged properly to his church, not to him or his heirs to keep, sell, give away to another church, or use for building houses for women servants.72 As for livestock and other movables, they might be enough to tempt a deceased priest’s lord into helping himself to as much as custom allowed (Hincmar rebuked count Theodulf 67 Condemned in Hincmar’s 852 capitula i. c. 17 (Capit. episc., II. 44). On the temptations of poverty and opportunities for prospering see Nelson, ‘Making Ends Meet’, 33–4. 68 c. 5. Of the other 813 councils, cf. Mainz c. 30, Tours c. 15, Rheims c. 21 (above, note 23). Cf. in 69 Burgundy-Provence, Vienne (892) c. 4 (Mansi, XVIII. 122). Above, at note 8. 70 Theodulf of Orleans c. 16, Gherbald of Lie`ge iii. 7, Haito of Basel c. 12 (Capit. episc., I. 114, 39, 213; late 8th–early 9th c.). See Devailly, ‘La Pastorale’, 35–6 and n. 91. 71 2nd capit., 852, c. 17 (Capit. episc., II. 50). 72 Ibid., cc. 18, 19; cf. Paris 829 c. 16 (Conc. II no. 50, p. 623).


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for taking what a priest had intended to be given for his soul in alms and also what was properly left to his church).73 These opportunities for self-advancement, for any priest not living at subsistence level, were a permanent feature of clerical life, still needing legislation in the twelfth century,74 and evoking the comment that Christian families unlike the Jews tended to educate only one son who, as a clerk, could help his parents and brothers and leave them his acquisitions.75 The assumption here is the family’s interest in a celibate clergy; with the married priest, whether tenant or owner, the wider family’s interest would be less direct, while his own property and his church’s would tend to become indistinguishable. Nor was his style of life necessarily a peasant’s. The priest of a well-endowed rural church, provided he had the glebe to himself,76 might be living at a gentlemanly level, the lord of a small manor. In eleventh-century England a celibate priest had a thegn’s status in the laws, and some had a glebe large enough to support this; while even those with an ordinary villager’s holding or less had some representative functions and presumably therewith some dignity, and would not, like their economic peers, be in danger of losing their free status.77 Long before this, wherever in Europe the parish system was developing into the framework of rural community life, the parish priest was increasingly unlikely to be a mere hireling or a nearslave;78 he had rights that went with his office, socially important functions, and pastoral responsibility for his parishioners (including his lord’s family if they were resident); their offerings to him were a matter not merely of legal dues but of remedium animae.79 When a priest ate in his lord’s hall, like Wulfric of Haselbury as a young hunting parson, or Girbert chaplain of Commercy (who used his wish to continue eating at his lord’s table as the criterion of not yet being ready to join the community of Molesme),80 this must have marked his dignity as well as his dependence.81 73 Flodoard, Hist. Rem., c. 26 (p. 337). The practice was condemned at Tribur 895, Hohenaltheim 916, and Coblenz 922 (see index: spolia); and contested in late 11th-c. Flanders (PL 151, Urban II epist. no. 70; Bouquet, Recueil, XIV. 74–6). On its (still obscure) origin and rationale see Saint-Palais, Droit de de´pouille. It is not that the cleric’s personal property belonged to the church (it did not: ibid. 209) and thus to the 74 church’s owner. Lateran III c. 15 (Mansi, XXII. 226). 75 See M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record (London, 1979), 195. 76 i.e. not largely in the lord’s hands, or a rich pluralist cleric’s as often in England (see Lennard, England, 317–18, 327–9). 77 Above, p. 448; see Barlow, 1000–1066, 207; on the varied wealth and status of rural priests, Lennard, op. cit., 306–32. 78 See e.g. Aubrun, Limoges, 349–50 (a donation of land to Beaulieu, 904, to secure for a kinsman a 79 See Schreiber, ‘Volkstum’, 234, 246–8. clerical education and prospect of a living). 80 John abbot of Ford, Wulfric of Haselbury, c. 1 (ed. M. Bell, Somerset Rec. Soc., 47 (1933), 13–14); Molesme no. i. 96 (see index: Commercy). Cf. St-Pe`re, 545 (1116–49): the priest of a chapel given to Saint-Pe`re is still to be fed at the lay donor’s table. 81 Jonas of Orleans (above, note 64) sees refusal of commensality to poor or low-born priests as a sign of contempt.

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But all this gave tenth- and eleventh-century lords a growing incentive to control their priests and exploit the churches’ resources.82 Even in the twelfth century the security and adequate livelihood of many parish priests still had to be fought for, by their own litigiousness or by reforming bishops, especially where their lord was an abbot or monastic community that could claim the personatus, the parson’s position, for itself; and we have seen already how from at least the ninth century into the twelfth, in varying degrees, lords lay and monastic had been annexing glebe or taking its produce, taking some of the offerings, and widely taking much of the tithe. What, then, is the range of pay or tenure that rural priests might expect, and what may be expected of them by way of rent or service?

16.ii. The priest as tenant of church, land, and revenue: Germany, Burgundy, France In the time of Louis the Pious, Agobard of Lyons wrote: ‘and now in some places there is no class of men, whether free or serf, so uncertain of their own dwelling as the priests; for they cannot be at all secure, nor know for how long they will be allowed to have their church or their home.’1 Such insecurity need not go with servile status; indeed the security implied in being given away with a church, without positively indicating serfdom, often suggests it; the clergy are part of the equipment.2 Nor did insecurity necessarily go with a wretched living: a priest might be turned out because a rival has made an offer for his church, while an illpaid priest might be held in near bondage, unable to get away.3 What mattered was whether the priest had some security of tenure,4 in the whole church (subject or not to rent or service to its lord); or in part of it, dividing its revenues with the lord; or none at all, being simply a hired servant. The 818–19 legislation probably envisaged the first of these three patterns; saying that no rent or service was to be paid for tithes, offerings, buildings, gardens, or the minimum of one mansus, and that ‘if they have anything further they may render due service for it to their lords’, almost implies that everything 82

See Hedwig, ‘Die EK’, 58–64 on the EK peaking in the 10th–11th c. for this reason. Epist. 5, c. 15 (p. 171). 2 An assumption still to be found in 11th-c. Normandy: rights in a village church sold by its lord to Saint-Martin-du-Bosc included ‘Odo the priest with the minster and all the land that he held’ (ADNorm. no. 218 A, ducal confirmation 1059–66). 3 Above, pp. 526–7 (Frotwin’s priest Atto, the emperor’s serf ‘by birth’, probably freed when consecrated). 4 This would contribute to lay lords’ criminal jurisdiction over clergy being an issue in the False Decretals. 1


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was in the priest’s (or his tenants’) possession.5 The only room for doubt seems to be over the land; it is not explicitly said that whatever the size of the endowment it is all to be held by the priest, but only that whatever he does hold beyond the rent-free manse he may pay for.6 It is unlikely however that the drafters of the Aachen legislation contemplated surplus endowment being legitimately withheld from the priest; we can take it that the whole complex—church, buildings, orchards, vineyards, arable and pasture, and all the pastoral revenues—was seen as a unit that the priest would hold, the important point being to see that he held the essential minimum of it rent free. For small churches within estates, the polyptichs tell us a little. Of St Germain’s churches, one is said to be held in benefice by a layman; of two others it is said merely that ‘so-and-so the priest holds it’.7 It is mainly for churches constituting self-contained estates that some charter evidence for the priest’s tenure exists. But in speaking of ‘tenure’ we should probably not intend anything more precise than that a priest ‘has’ or ‘holds’ a church under some kind of outside lordship. In an early St Gall charter (772), the priest Macandradus of a church at Fischingen granted to its lords or patruni, Witbert and Ratbod, for themselves, the saint, the church, and its future priests, all his conquistum in lands, vineyards, serfs, cattle or buildings, ‘whatever I have acquired from the Godfearing for my masses and prayers’; for this he received a horse and 20 solidi—probably a counter-gift rather than an economic price; in any case implying his independent status (perhaps as a member of the founding family) and his natural claim to all gains.8 There are later charters that record or explain the tenure’s origin in a lord’s grant or (more often) a donor’s reservation. When charters describe a church as formerly given in benefice,9 this probably means—as it would for ordinary land— only that it was given temporarily and on favourable terms,10 to support a kinsman or reward a fidelis. Ninth-century kings granted churches of the fisc, apparently entire, as benefices to priests, clerks, or laymen alike;11 a priest so 5

The possible surplus would include any tenanted mansi. On Hedwig’s somewhat forced view of this see above, pp. 442–3. 6 Above, p. 439. The drafters may also have had in mind land held by the priest personally. 7 Pol.Irminon., vi. 2, ii. 1, fragm. ii. 14. In other entries the priest is described as holding the church’s one manse (xx. 1); or he ‘has a flour mill, which he made’ (xxii. 1). Any church described as indominicata, held in demesne (vii. 83), may have been served by a priest but not a tenant priest. 8 St Gallen I no. 68. Stutz (Benef., 151–2) saw this as a step towards owners treating the priest’s gains as their own, like a serf’s; but it secures the gains for the church itself. 9 Its only evidence is usually the record of its supersession (below, p. 745). 10 The term beneficium was occasionally used for a rural church’s endowments (Lesne, ‘Eveˆche´ et abbaye’, 43–4 and nn.). This is quite distinct from its use for the whole complex being held by a priest. 11 For laity see below, pp. 745–6. Meaux-Paris, 845/6 c. 78 (above, pp. 488–9) asked first, unhopefully, that fiscal churches be given to priests, not laymen. Jonas of Orleans complained of potentes conferring their churches beneficiario more on their dependants whether clergy or laity (De instit. laic., c. 19, PL 106. 204–5).

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beneficed was simply a benefice-holder who happened to be qualified to serve the church himself but—being usually a royal chaplain—was most unlikely to do so.12 Royal benefice-holders would be expected to provide for the church’s service, but that was not the purpose of the grant (and they would obviously not give their priests tenure of the whole complex). Bavarian bishops, however, from at least Charlemagne’s time, had been granting churches in ‘benefice’ to priests or potential priests,13 sometimes certainly expected to serve the church; though the grant was not always willingly made, and it is from subsequent disputes that we hear of the original benefice. The very early case of the two Salzburg clergy, nephews of the part-founders (discoverers of the site) of St Maximilian, Pongau, and commended by them to the Salzburg church in bishop Rupert’s time, is ambiguous: it seems likely that what Rupert later gave them for life by ‘benefice’ (as bishop Virgil called it in mideighth century)14 was a half-share not in the Pongau cell but only in the land at Oberalm that their uncles had given it.15 Whatever it was, they got it renewed for their own nephews by what bishop Vergil later represented as sharp practice.16 But Virgil’s chief quarrel was with a later priest, duke Odilo’s chaplain Ursus, who asked for and obtained in benefice—not from the bishop but from the duke, though it may have been the bishop’s if anyone’s17—the cell itself and its whole Oberalm property.18 Ursus ‘was of the genealogia of the men of Albina’, the discoverer-founders’ kin; behind his tenure lies a powerful strand of family property-right. This had to be reckoned with by ninth-century bishops, in their better-documented arrangements. In 816 Hitto bishop of Freising re-granted a church in benefice to a clerk Frumolt, one of two brothers who were claiming it as family property, in return for Frumolt’s leaving to Freising all his inheritance (and with it any future claim);19 ten years earlier bishop Atto ‘commended’ a church to a deacon Meginperht whose family had given it to Freising and who now gave up his rights in it.20 It is often not clear where the balance lies between satisfying a claimant while securing his fidelity, and arranging for the church’s service and 12

See Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, 33–4, 98–105, 155, 225–6. Or occasionally to laity (799, Passau no. 46; 813, Freising no. 358). 14 In his Libellus, embodied (in two versions) in Notitia Arnonis and Breves notitiae, (late 8th c.). 15 See Wolfram, ‘Libellus Virgilii’, 193–8; Wanderwitz, ‘Libellus Virgilii’, 357–8. Jahn’s view on this 16 (‘Tradere’, 404–5) seems speculative. Breves notitiae, 3. 13–14 (ed. Losˇek, 106). 17 Wolfram (op. cit., 197–8, 203–4) argues for Salzburg’s fairly secure possession; but Wanderwitz (op. cit., 358) emphasizes duke Odilo’s restoration of the cell, and sees it as in his gift as his ‘Eigenkloster’. Perhaps the duke’s lordship here was of the not yet fully understood kind that rulers had over forests and their inhabitants (see above, p. 34 note 9). 18 Libellus Virgilii in Not. Arn., 8. 6; in Brev. not., 8. 2–7 (esp. 8. 4). The rival churches built by Virgil and Ursus, if at Oberalm (above, p. 34 note 8), are hardly relevant here. 19 Freising no. 358; see above, p. 43 note 78, for the family claim (and index: Mezcunda, for its earlier 20 grant to a woman). Freising nos. 228–9. 13


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management. Frumolt was to pay 1 solidus in silver as an annual census, and to ‘keep his faith’ towards the bishopric; Meginperht has his church entrusted to him ‘not otherwise . . . than to be our minister’, owing service ‘like other ministers of our estates’. This suggests a difference between enjoying a benefice as the bishop’s fidelis and managing a property, with functions attached, as his minister. But the difference is not sharp,21 and it may be only the diplomatic context that determines the wording.22 In two Freising documents of 815, priests or clerks are said to ‘commend themselves’ (or be ‘given’) ‘into the bishop’s hands, to serve him’, before their benefices can be granted or regranted to them, after a traditio of the church made by a priest-owner whose expectant heirs they are. In one case they are the donor’s two nephews, priests themselves; in the other the donor’s junior, probably his deacon and intended successor.23 In both cases the traditio itself has had to be renewed. In the former case the nephews are rumoured to be intending to call their uncle’s gift in question; consequently they have been made to surrender their benefice unconditionally; getting their commendation before renewing the benefice was a way of securing their acquiescence in Freising’s ownership.24 They got their uncle’s church back under the tight formulae of a lease: ‘that they shall have licence neither to sell nor to give nor to alienate nor to exchange nor to bring to ruin, but only as long as they live to use it and improve it.’ Furthermore it seems to be in effect a precaria: they ‘humbly begged’ that bishop Hitto would ‘deign to grant the benefice to them’.25 Here and elsewhere, many grants of churches were made in writing, not as benefices but as precariae in response to a request, and called prestaria or prestitum, a loan. A very early example from Austrasia (751–68) is the prestitum granted by the abbot of Stavelot-Malme´dy to a priest Severus, giving him lifelong usufruct of a church with its belongings, to revert to the abbey with all improvements at his death.26 It might be by precaria that usufruct was given back to the donor of a church,27 as in the late 870s to a deacon Gundbato, giving him life tenure in a church he was giving to St Emmeram, Regensburg. The church’s pertinences are described in what would soon be a characteristic jumble: curtis and parish together, tithes along with serfs and fields. Gundbato’s tenure is primarily an economic undertaking and an investment by St Emmeram in the Carinthian march: he is allowed to pursue any fugitive serfs of theirs beyond the River Raab 21

Cf. ibid. no. 477 (822): the priest donor of a church ‘asked that his nephew Minigo might receive that church in benefice . . . for his life, in the bishop’s service’, for a census to be decided. 22 Ibid. no. 358 is a third-person notice of past history; no. 229 is a first-person notice of a present 23 Ibid. nos. 345 (with no. 247), 346. transaction. 24 See Stutz, ‘Lehen und Pfru¨nde’, 239–42; these two cases presented him with theoretical difficulties 25 (note 29, below). Freising no. 477 (note 21, above). 26 27 ´ Stavelot-Malmedy no. 21. See below, pp. 740–4 (mainly for lay donors, however).

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and incorporate them into his church’s property; the whole is to revert to St Emmeram with his improvements, captured serfs and all.28 From St Gall we learn of priests as tenants from their donation charters, whether of the church itself or of something in exchange for it. In 897 a priest Pero gave the monks a house and lands for the expectation of a church: if he outlives its priest Engilbert, he is to have the church and everything belonging to it for life; if ever the rectores of St Gall take the church from him, he is to get back what he has given.29 The previous year, a priest Valerius gave property on St Victorsberg (in Rhaetia) to St Gall, his two brothers consenting, and received in exchange the church there in usufruct for life. But this turns out not to mean simply a church with its existing belongings. Valerius’s own share of provisions and grazing is (it seems) to count as belonging to the church, while other products are divided between church and monastery;30 all having belonged, probably, to Valerius and his brothers as developers of this Alpine estate. Valerius’s tenure is like Pero’s: ‘if anyone wants to expel him unjustly, by any occasion or for any price’ (an offer from a rival priest?) he is to get back all his donation; while should he be degraded, even deservedly, the monks are to receive him and feed him like a monk, for love of God.31 These ninth-century deacons and priests have acquired their tenure in various ways, recorded in various forms—a written lease; a king’s or bishop’s benefice recorded only when superseded or disputed; a precaria from an abbot, or reservation by a priestly donor. What they have is variously described as usufruct or as property for life, and variously restricted by duties of service and economic improvement, or by nothing beyond the obligation to see that it returns intact. However they hold it, what they hold seems in general to be the whole church with all its pertinences. From tenth- and early eleventh-century Germany there are only isolated scraps of evidence for similar arrangements: for instance in 917 a church given by Conrad I to a priest and chaplain ‘in proprium for life’;32 in 1015 or later, two churches given by bishop Meinwerc for life to priests who have given other property to Paderborn; a generation later, a church donated to Freising by a priest who has built it on land of his own, to be governed by him under Freising’s providentia and committed after his death to a cleric of his lineage.33 28

29 Regensburg no. 86 (in effect a precarial exchange). St Gallen no. 709. Firstfruits in gold or silver (from gold-panning and silver-mining?), and posts or stakes (taking pallios as a variant of palos), two-thirds to St Gall, one-third to St Victor; wool production, half and half. 31 Ibid. no. 705 (in Vorarlberg, S.E. of Lake Constance). More ordinary instances are ibid. nos. 169, 362 (802, 837?). 32 DKonI no. 32. Puzzlingly, the priest can hardly have had usufruct since he was entitled to food, clothing, and wine from Lorsch (which had the reversion); but failing this he was to have the whole church ‘as property for ever’. 33 Vita Meinwerci, cc. 38, 39 (SRGerm., 59. 37–8) and Westfal. UB., Codex no. 87. 4; Freising no. 1612 (1039–53). 30


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In contemporary France and Burgundy there is far more evidence for the creation of tenures, and not exclusively by bishops, abbots, and rulers. About 920 in the Lyonnais a priest Farnulf made an exchange with a lay couple, Ethenulf and his wife, of inherited property of his against a church of theirs, on condition ‘that if you or any heir of yours wants to take that church away in my lifetime, my inheritance shall return to me’.34 In the mid-tenth century a priest Silvester made a similar exchange with Savigny, receiving by prestaria, for life, a church ‘which my ancestors Barbariscus, Cathellus, and Nidocorvinus held’, and a moiety of another.35 But earlier in the century Savigny made just such exchanges (the monastery’s side of the transaction being described both as prestaria and as beneficium) with lay couples, where what the family gives is land and vineyards and what it gets is tenure of a church with its parish;36 so (though seldom) did Cluny later, under abbot Maiolus.37 These exchanges are clearly not primarily ways of getting churches served.38 Other priests were of course given life tenure of churches, by lords lay and ecclesiastical, without any donation on their part of the church itself or of land in exchange (though it is the records of transactions bringing in property that mainly survive). But even these grants may not be specially directed to getting the church served. In 980 abbot Maiolus granted the priest Adalbert for life a church ‘with all its tithes, offerings, burial, and storerooms, and whatever comes out of the church’, in almost exactly the same words as he granted another church to a lay couple and their sons, with the same implication that a church’s revenues are its product.39 Almost always the priest’s tenure would on the face of it be equally appropriate for a layman, or for a clerk never proceeding to priest’s orders, and we have no evidence that he served the church himself. Bishops of Maˆcon granted many such precariae, often to clerks (typically with a brother not evidently clerical), but only seldom to priests.40 Such grants might be made at another lord’s or ruler’s request,41 so that the patronage was effectively his. In 922 the archbishop of Vienne acceded to the request of duke Hugh ‘that we should grant something of the property of St Maurice, that is, the church of Saint-Quentin . . . per prestariam, ad censum’, to the priest Alcherius for life; the 34

Savigny no. 9 (Farnulf acting with consent of his lord the abbot of Savigny). Ibid. no. 39 (c.950). The church of which he received a moiety (not a priest’s part but a straight 36 moiety of everything) was an old parish church (Montrotier). Ibid. nos. 6, 7, 8. 37 e.g. Cluny no. 912; see below, pp. 741–2. 38 From Rouergue, see Ste-Foi no. 29 (948), exchange between Sainte-Foi and a deacon Audbert and priest Isambert; these two give lands and vineyards and receive a church to hold jointly, the survivor holding it for life; described as an agreement ut inter se . . . beneficiare debuissent and as beneficiaria. 39 Cluny nos. 942 and 1529 (980): quicquid ex ipsa ecclesia exit or exierit (cf. no. 912, c.970–5). 40 Maˆcon, passim (see below, p. 693); for a priest-canon and nephew, mid-10th c., no. 408. 41 Or a blunter intervention, as suggested by St-Marcel, Chalon nos. 103 (950–4) and 104 (960): the lay abbot count Robert may have secured a church of Saint-Marcel’s for a layman and his sons at the expense of earlier tenants, a priest and his heir. 35

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census is the substantial one of 18s. and two pounds of wax. Alcherius was ‘according to custom, himself to render the service due to the bishop’; this would be some mark of respect to his lord, probably of economic value (such as a supply of wine), not a liturgical function.42 Moving west and south, there is no need to suppose that the two tenth-century bishops of Elne who gave parish churches for life to women and their sons in exchange for grants of alodial land were acting in any essentially different spirit, even in the case (in 959) where the sons are a priest and a deacon who may well serve the church; this transaction is no different from another of the same year (959) made with a married vir religiosus; both alike are to ‘hold, possess, and fructificare’ the parish, churches, firstfruits, tithes, and offerings, as well as the alod each of them has given in exchange.43 Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier sees these transactions, at least those leasing churches to women, as ‘at first sight surprising’ but to be explained by the bishop’s interest in a deserving family one of whom will serve the church.44 Such interest is likely enough, here or elsewhere; but it is not applicable where the son seems to be a layman,45 and not needed to explain such an ordinary transaction. Meanwhile tenth-century bishops of Be´ziers made grants of lifelong tenure in churches, with or without an exchange, to a married couple, or a layman, or a priest and canon, all alike.46 Sometimes, however, the tenant priest is evidently to serve the church. This is implicit when Odo bishop of Chartres grants a church (before 977) to a canon Gerard and one heir, for them to ‘possess, rule, and manage according to canonical authority’, being ordained ‘through all the orders’, and irremovable ‘unless they stray from the path of truth’.47 And it is clear when the consecration and endowment of a new church is combined with securing its priest’s life tenure of the whole property and revenue. In 947 the bishop of Gerona consecrated the church that became Sainte-Marie de Fenestre, gave it the tithes, firstfruits, and offerings of two villages, and listed the alods given it by its multiple founders for its endowment, ‘so that the priests serving the altars may hold and possess it more firmly and validly’; then the chief founder, the layman Gothmar, conveyed the church ‘with the things belonging to it’ (as just established) to the priest Rodegar, ‘so that as long as he lives he shall hold and possess it . . . and serve the altars, without disturbance or molestation from me or anyone’.48 42 St-Andre´-le-Bas no. 18 (appendix of cathedral charters). On the other hand Saint-Sernin, Toulouse, had churches held by clerics owing some periodic liturgical service at Saint-Sernin; but probably (St-Sernin no. 158, c.980) or certainly (no. 133, c.1080) not serving the churches they lived off. 43 Collection Moreau, 9 fos. 68–70 (959, Ailo and her ordained sons); 16 fo. 31 (996, Ermetrude and 44 Gerard her son); 9 fos. 71–2 (959, Wifred). Socie´te´, 427–8. 45 46 Ermetrude’s son Gerard. Be´ziers nos. 18 (931), 27 (959), 36 (972). 47 St-Pe`re, 61–2. In 977 Gerard sold it, with Odo’s consent, to two women buying it to give to Saint-Pe`re 48 (ibid. 62). Marca Hisp., app. no. 84. Cf. Urgellia, I no. 33 (952); St-Cyprien no. 233 (c.942).


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In the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, all over France, the evidence becomes very varied and individual and more often reveals a serving priest. In the Île de France about 1134, two churches are granted to a clerk for life; every three years he is to promise that no descendant of his will claim any of the property, but he can do as he likes with movables except for those listed (from a silver-gilt cross to a sow with six piglets). To another (about 1130) is granted on broadly similar terms ‘the faculty of remaining for life’ in the church he already serves, unless he is absent on pilgrimage for more than three years.49 In eleventhcentury Anjou a clerk is granted a church ‘to have and hold’ for life, on the understanding that he restores it and improves the property; while in 1109 a young clerk is ‘invested’ (presumably symbolically only) with a church, which he is to ‘receive at a suitable time when it lacks a priest, having become a priest himself, if he wishes’, for lands given by his father.50 In the south, perhaps about 1096, a clerk gives a moiety of a church on condition that if he returns alive from Jerusalem he shall hold it from the monks ‘in obedience’; in Brittany in 1100, a priest’s clerical son’s donation of churches obliges Redon to have him ordained priest and let him serve them, living communally with the monks and being admitted as a monk in due course.51 In the last two instances it seems to be an owner-priest—founder or founder’s descendant—who gives away his church or a moiety of it while remaining its life tenant; but this (as distinct from reservation by a non-priestly donor) seems not very characteristic of eleventh-century France.52 On the other hand, in northern and western France the tenant’s right in a benefice was so close to hereditas or property that a tenant priest might take part in the grant of his church to a monastery, often consenting to it,53 occasionally credited with initiating it; Natalis, priest of Alluyes, ‘asked his lords, from whom he held the church and other things in benefice . . . to give him the power of transferring it into the potestas’ of Saint-Pe`re at Chartres, in return for reception as a monk should he wish it and burial in their cemetery.54 Churches were given to Poitevin monasteries by lords and their tenant-priests together. Sometimes what the priest has to give is clearly a priest’s part,55 but sometimes it looks like the whole church or virtually so. When the Chaˆtelaillons family gave three churches and one-third of another to Saint-Cyprien, two of them were given also by Aimeric the priest in 49 St-Martin-des-Champs nos. 206, 193 (in this case, soon resigning: nos. 194–5). Each paid a census of 50 one mark. St-Aubin nos. 44, 425. 51 Le´zat no. 240 (‘c.1096’, but early editors tend to attribute this First Crusade date to any journey to 52 Jerusalem); Redon no. 313 (1100; see index: Hurvodius. See below, pp. 633–4, 665 for instances. 53 e.g. Cluny no. 3382 (1062), Achard and Odo give a church ‘with the consent and approval (laude) of our men . . . who hold the church by our gift’, these men being a priest, a clerk, and a ‘provost’. Cf. 54 Uzerche nos. 74 (1068), 36 (1094). St-Pe`re, 192–3 (before 1070). 55 See below, pp. 565–6; probably true of Natalis at Alluyes, giving with the church ‘the land belonging to the altar’, offerings and burials, and the small tithes.

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whose ius or right they were, and who was to retain them for life.56 When in the 1080s or 1090s the bishop of Angouleˆme and several laymen gave two village churches at Yvrac and Fleurignac to Saint-Maixent, the churches’ chaplain Gerald, becoming a monk, ‘granted’ them (with his nephew significantly first among the witnesses). But a generation later another chaplain of Yvrac, leaving for Jerusalem, was able to give the monks ‘the church and everything in it’ (along with ‘houses that I built by my own resources’, a vineyard, and half the rent from houses in the cemetery). This he did ‘wishing to make no man heir to my possessions, but God and the convent of St Maixent’, and to appease their anger for entering ‘my chaplaincy’ without their consent.57 They gave him confraternity; and at his request they granted the chaplaincy to one Peter Giraudi.58 It looks as if he and probably Peter had an hereditary claim to total tenure of the church59 (now much reduced, for Peter is to have only half the altar offerings, ‘which is enough for him and which he willingly accepts’). These transactions, various as they are, all show tenant priests having a say in the traditio of a church to a monastery and rights in their own continued tenure (often transmutable into an entry gift).60 Other gifts of churches seem, so far as the record goes, to be made over the sitting priest’s head. It may be a small village church of which we know only that ‘so-and-so the priest holds it’, but not on what terms. Whatever rights he had may have been safeguarded, in most cases must have been, but this is often difficult to be sure of. In 936 a count and his wife gave Cluny a large estate and its church ‘which the priest Arnulf holds’, to take effect at their own deaths; meanwhile the monks were to have the church and one manse pro vestitura;61 whether Arnulf was to remain ‘holding’ the church is left unclear.62 Schreiber maintained that leaving the incumbent in possession was too normal to need stating in the donation charter;63 yet it was often stated. Early in the eleventh century Isembert bishop of Poitiers gave half a church of his own to Saint-Cyprien ‘after the death of Gumbald the priest who held it 56 St-Cyprien nos. 515–16 (1068–73; 1073–1100). Cf. Bourbonnais no. 6. vii (1095–6): in the donation of a church to the canons of Bourges ‘the clerk Gerald having held this church for many years hoc donum fecit et laudavit’. 57 St-Maixent nos. 172, 197, 291. Cf. St-Cyprien no. 16 (1068–73): the priest Otgerius wishes to ‘give in perpetuity’ a church (with large vineyard) that he evidently already holds from Saint-Cyprien (so probably 58 giving up the rest of his life tenure). Probably son of the earlier chaplain Gerald. 59 Their being capellani, holding a capellania, is compatible with this. 60 Cf. Molesme II no. i. 129 (late 11th–early 12th c.): the church of Commercy having been given to Molesme, Gerbert its chaplain makes his own dispositions, giving himself with all his property into the abbot’s hand, keeping his options open for becoming a monk, and intending to ‘have my churches (?) in 61 my proprietas’ as long as he remains a clerk. See index: Vestitura. 62 Cluny no. 446. Cf. Lyon, 22–4 (1069): Avitus gives to Cruas a church with ‘everything that Gerald the priest holds from me’. 63 Gesamm. Abh., 181–5. The question is closely linked to that of monks themselves serving their churches (below, pp. 685–6). The line between tenant-priest and monk in charge is blurred when the priest gives his church as an entry gift and retains tenure.


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from him’;64 in 1088 Pibo bishop of Toul gave a church to the monastery of Bar on condition that its priest Theoderic should retain ‘the privilege of pastor’ for life unless he chose to give it up, but after him the monks were to have everything: endowment, tithes, lighting, offerings, and alms. How the church was to be served in future is another matter; the point here is the life tenure, evidently in the whole complex, secured for the sitting priest.65 So a priest may hold a church because a lord has put him into it, to serve it, or to have a living from it, or both; or, increasingly, because a lord has had to accept him as a tenant, in which case the priest might almost as well be a proprietor (an Angevin clerk resorted to the ritual violence of cutting the bell-ropes to establish this).66 But the lines cannot be sharply drawn; any lord, lay or ecclesiastical, might think that accepting the late priest’s son or nephew was a natural and satisfactory way to get a church served and maintain his own cliente`le, provided he could keep control of the process.67 Throughout the period the terms used for a priest’s life tenure vary widely, and are often not formulaic at all but informal and practical. The variety is not between regions or monasteries: it can be found within a single cartulary.68 It is doubtfully useful to look for legal niceties in this, especially as to whether the relationship was ‘feudal’ in the classic sense, the priest a vassal commended to his lord in respect of his benefice.69 Rejecting these rigidities, we can recognize that even in the ninth century any church’s lord—dominus—might be called the priest’s senior, his seigneur, implying a personal relationship of service, respect, and hope of protection.70 But it is not for another three and a half centuries, well on into the period of formalized feudal law and (at first sight paradoxically) of the canon law of patronage, that we find explicit evidence of parsons sometimes swearing fidelity to the patron in respect of a church and its property.71 64

St-Cyprien no. 210. From the 10th c. cf. HL V no. 71 (937). St-Mihiel no. 46. Cf. N-D, Paris I. iv no. 19 (1026); Angers no. 51 (1075); Vendoˆme no. 395 (c.1100); in Provence, St-Victor no. 364 (11th c.). Tenure stated in the past tense had probably ended by death or resignation, not expulsion; when Humbert of the Neuchatel comital family gives Cluny a church to hold ‘as Durannus the priest formerly held it’ (Cluny no. 3665, end of 11th c.), Durannus is among those living and dead (he might be either) for whose souls the grant was made. Cf. Jumie`ges no. 12 (1027); St-Martin-desChamps no. 59 (1081–95). 66 This episode (c.1087) is cited from a MS source by Bienvenu, ‘Les Caracte`res originaux’ 546 n. 2. 67 See Cluny no. 2729 (Maˆconnais, 1020). In Languedoc, the mid-11th-c. endowment of Le Rozier included land given by the priest of Petraleve partly to secure the church there for his two (probably 68 clerical) sons (Aniane no. 216). e.g. that of Saint-Cyprien, Poitiers. 69 This question was crucial for Stutz, arguing in opposition to Imbart de la Tour that the ecclesiastical benefice originated in the ‘pre-feudal’ benefice, quite independent of vassalage, and in general retained that character (‘Lehen und Pfru¨nde’, 232–45). The two views were equally legalistic. 70 Stutz’s view (op. cit., 237–8) that senior here meant only ‘landlord’ or ‘churchowner’ is not tenable. See D. H. Green, The Carolingian Lord: Semantic Studies (Cambridge, 1965); on Hincmar’s usage see below, p. 809. 71 Dillay, ‘Re´gime’, 267 nn. 4 and 5 (on 13th c.); Barlow, Durham Peculiars, p. xiii n. 1; cf. Bidagor, Iglesia, 165, on late 12th-c. Spanish priests required ‘to be a faithful vassal’. Earlier, swearing fidelity was probably 65

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As for the term ‘fief ’, spreading in the later eleventh century, it is highly unusual to find it applied to a priest’s tenure of the whole complex (as distinct from what may be reserved for him within it).72 But ‘benefice’ remained in general and often synonymous use; and since both churches and estates (and combinations of the two) were held in benefice, and held alike by laymen, clerks and priests, it is artificial to exclude the church held by a priest from the common mass of dependent tenure. Whether the tenant is lay, clerical, or priestly, he can make his own arrangements for the church’s service by granting it—all or part—to a tenant priest or by paying a hired one.73 The benefice-holder, even if a priest, thus becomes immediate lord of the church and of its serving priest, under whatever lord gave him his tenure; and perhaps his tenure is effectively hereditary. In western France the terminology at all these levels is casually feudal by the later eleventh century. In Poitou an archpriest and his lay co-heirs in the church of Usson are the fedati (enfeoffed men) of the lords of Montmorillon, by whose casamentum they hold it (or a moiety of it), as ‘whatever we have at Usson by hereditary right, both in priestly and in lay fiscum’, including the fiscum of the working priest at the bottom of the pile.74 In Maine, a layman holds rights in the church of Courcemont ‘by the benefice’ of one lord and in the church of Me´zie`res ‘of the fief ’ of another; he is himself the capitalis dominus of the priests’ holdings in both; when he conveys it all to a monastery each priest surrenders his key and gets it back from the abbot ‘as from his lord’.75 If the rights of the lord immediately over the serving priest originated not in founding the church but in holding it as a benefice, he is even more likely than a founder’s heir to be in possession of some tithes, offerings, and glebe (or disposing of these things in fragments), squeezing the priest into a small ‘priest’s part’ or a wage and allowances. For other reasons this was the usual pattern in monasteries’ churches;76 for the serving priest to hold the whole church with all its property and revenues seems, after all, not very common in eleventh-century France. only for priest’s portions (e.g. in P. Thomas’s instance from Troyes, Droit, 145 and app. xiv); see below, pp. 563–4. 72 The Breton priest’s son giving his church and lands to Redon (above, at note 51) describes them as his ‘fief’. But in Cluny no. 3183 (1049–1109) ‘the church called Jussiaco, that is the fief that Robert the priest holds’ was probably only a feudum presbiterale (videlicet, id est, etc. are often used to narrow something down rather than to define it); for donors with only this to give see below, section V. 73 Or he too may dispose of it for profit or patronage (for an extreme example of resulting tangles, 74 early 11th c., see Cormery, no. 33). St-Cyprien nos. 395–6. Cf. Avrigny (c.1075, ibid. no. 286). 75 See below, pp. 564–5. Cf. the account of Fulk Nerra’s dealings with the church of Maze´ in Vendoˆme no. 44 (trans. Fanning, Hubert, Acts no. 1). 76 But see leases by priors of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, 1130s, evidently of whole churches for life (above, at note 49).


541

16.iii. The priest as tenant: Spain, Italy, England There are countries where for a tenant priest to hold the whole of a church’s property and revenue seems both more usual than in France and Burgundy and more directly related to getting the church served. In north-western Spain and the future Portugal agreements were made, often by name of pactum et placitum, and recorded by both parties’ charters: the lord committing a church to a priest for life, the priest acknowledging his obligations.1 Of course this evidence survives mainly for monasteries dealing with their churches; while alongside such pacts, and not always sharply distinct, are donation charters reserving life tenure for a priest in a church or churches that he himself or his lord has given to a monastery; or precarial grants where a priest has asked for life tenure in exchange for surrendering a claim on the church or donating other property.2 The ‘pacts’ however were made also by church-owning priests and laity; for instance in 1061 an old priest committing three churches to a younger one (whose unusual servitium is to clothe, shoe, and feed the older in his lifetime and afterwards to undertake ‘the care of my soul’); in 1092 a lay couple providing for two churches.3 And there is earlier evidence from dispute settlements: in 991 between two priests where one has to recognize that the other had put him in (under a placitum) ‘to do him good service’;4 in 1015 between a woman and a priest which ends with his being allowed to hold it ‘from her hand’ while it remains in her ius.5 A peculiarity of these agreements is that many of them explicitly create or recognize an hereditary claim for the priest’s family (or, what is more familiar, a donor’s reservation may go well beyond his own life: a priest donating a church in or after 1083 reserved life tenure for himself, his brother and a nephew, and afterwards for ‘one of our blood’ with the monks’ consent).6 In the leasing pacts, the priest is often entitled to designate his successor, probably by his deathbed will (it is put in terms of ‘leaving’ it, normally within his kin or posterity, but sometimes open: ‘you are to leave it to a good man, whether from your family or from strangers’).7 So to call these priests ‘tenants’ is convenient shorthand but rather misleading: rather, they are given a kind of property, subject to different degrees of limitation.8 Nonetheless the limitation may be decisive: reversion to 1

See Garcıá Gallo, ‘Coyanza’, 530–48. A cartulary may include either party’s charter. 3 Ibid. 521–2, 528–9; Orlandis, Estudios, 159–60. PMHD nos. 428, 782. 4 Ibid. no. 163 (991). The owner-priest Gontigius had bought out his co-heirs in the church; Sagulf was 5 Ibid. no. 226. probably one of these, now settling for a tenant’s pact. 6 Cardenã no. 141. Cf. Burgos nos. 22 (1078), 58 (1103), for similar conditions in donations to the bishopric; see Orlandis, Estudios, 162. See also below, pp. 673–4. 7 PMHD no. 698 (1088). See below, note 13, for a priest’s will to this effect. 8 So a grant obliging a priest to leave a church to a named monastery (or simply ‘for our souls’) could take the form of sale or donation rather than lease, e.g. PMHD nos. 51 (943, priest to priest) and 520 (1075, laywoman to priest). 2

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the monastery on the priest’s death may be stipulated (while failing this, the monks’ formal recognition of a priest’s chosen heir was probably needed); fidelity is often required, ‘service’ regularly mentioned (usually undefined: perhaps normally hospitality), sometimes a census; and the priest is often to have or hold the church ‘by the hand’ of the granter, or pro or post parte of the monastery’s patron saint (untranslatable, but implying that it remains the saint’s property).9 The terms of the agreements are often strongly economic: the tenant of a church, as of ordinary land, is to improve the property and not alienate anything. The development obligation is perhaps more emphasized where the tenant is not a priest (or not so described);10 but the laywoman’s priest in 1015 is to ‘build and plant’, and the lay couple’s priest in 1092 is to give it to tenants who will ‘build and plant well’.11 As for religious functions, little or nothing is said in these eleventhcentury charters;12 but the charter often requires priest’s orders or holy life in the priest’s successors, which points to their being expected to serve the church they hold.13 And in a carta convenientiae of 1101, the monastery of Leire in Navarre commends a church to a priest on condition of his fidelity and of ‘chanting well in the church, labouring well in the lands . . . and like our other dependencies, serving us and ours especially well when we come and stay’, besides rendering 30s. a year.14 This differs from most earlier agreements both in balancing economic with liturgical functions, and in taking the priest ‘into our society and fraternity’.15 But jumping almost a century ahead, to the kingdom of Leoń in 1192, we find a contract less intimate than this and even more firmly economic than earlier ones, when an abbot of Eslonza gives life tenure in a church to a clerk Juan Pe´rez, on condition of restoring the property, being ‘a faithful vassal to us’, keeping onethird of the tithes (the abbot having the rest),16 and giving the abbot an annual dinner; with a sharp emphasis on the monastery’s claim, on Juan’s death or departure, to a quarter of his movables and acquisitions—so the pact is broken should he ever try to store his wealth outside the church’s land.17 A bishop too might allow tenure, tending towards hereditary right, to clergy in charge of his own churches. The mixture of estate-managing office, liturgical 9 This might be disputed later, e.g. ibid. no. 663 (1086): two priests claim to have built a church as independent colonists but are shown to have it from Lorvaõ for life only, for a census. 10 e.g. Cendamir, 1004 (Garcıá Gallo, ‘Coyanza’, 531 n. 553); the magister Racemir, 1042 (PMHD no. 322); 11 Above, at notes 5, 3. cf. in Navarre Irache nos. 52 (1072), 140 (1141). 12 The cura de mia anima required by an aged priest from his successor (above, at note 3) was perhaps primarily prayer and commemoration; in any case personal. 13 e.g. under a priest’s will as cited by his successor (957, PMHD no. 74). Cf. S. Juan de la Penã no. 156 (1060), an abbot’s testament relating his obligation (laid down by his ancestors) to choose a successor of his kin ‘who will chant, and honour the church’, and accordingly naming his sister’s son should he ‘reach the age of understanding, and be good’: only failing this to the monastery of Cella. 14 15 Quoted by Orlandis, Estudios, 159 n. 89. See however PMHD no. 283 (1034). 16 Since Juan has everything else, the two-thirds of tithe looks like a kind of rent rather than a lord’s part 17 (cf. Italian leases, below, at notes 35–44). Eslonza no. 114.


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duty, and family property may be illustrated from the eleventh-century history— reconstructed in a thirteenth-century memorandum—of a Galician church which a priest gave to the episcopal church of Lugo. He left there a clerk, Desterigo, to whom the bishop ‘gave the church and the land round it’ as maiorino or steward; two of Desterigo’s nephews were allowed to succeed to this office and to be priests in the church. When each of these in turn ‘fell from his orders’ and fathered a daughter, the bishop ‘took away his stewardship’ from the second, but relented and allowed him to ‘stay in his church’. After various vicissitudes a later bishop reclaimed the property but allowed the family—including, it seems, one of the priests’ daughters—to hold it in his service.18 Hereditary tenure could thus get out of hand, especially by coming to be held in shares: in 1060 the monastery of Guimara˜es made a pact for tenure of a quarter of a church by six lay men and women whose aunt had held it.19 But churches could quite legitimately be put into the hands of a single layman,20 or come to one later if stipulations for priest’s orders had never been made or had been forgotten; indeed as late as 1210, a Castillian lawsuit shows hereditary tenure of a monastery’s church so secure that if there were no clerk in the family, a layman should hold it and appoint a chaplain; the tenant, lay or clerical, owing only a barrel of good wine, four gold coins, and three days’ hospitality.21 In Italy, for churches not owned outright by their priests (or by family groups that included a priest), the tenant priest with a written lease was normal.22 The earlier evidence—from Latium, Tuscany, and the north—is almost all for ecclesiastical church-owners;23 but as early as 768, from Viterbo, the agreement between a priest Gumbert and a layman Aimo already has much of the content typical of later leases. Gumbert is to live, work, and perform the daily office in the church of the Saviour at Toscanella, and to cultivate the church’s property; Aimo is not to expel him on any account, nor to set anyone over him;24 Aimo and his heirs will require nothing but one dinner a year; Gumbert is free to dispose, as alms for his own soul, of movable property produced by his own labour; each party undertakes to pay 50 solidi in gold if he breaks the agreement.25 From the ninth century 18 Hinojosa, Documentos Leoń y Castilla, no. 112: memorandum in 13th-c. cartulary on this church’s 11th19 PMHD no. 426. c. history. 20 21 Above, note 10. Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Silos, ed. M. Fe´rotin (Paris, 1897), no. 81. 22 Many of the instances below are quoted and discussed by Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 70–90, 112–90, and ‘Kirchenreform im Bistum Lucca’, 514–22. See also Nanni, ‘Parrochia’, 95–9. 23 An early instance (764) is CDL II no. 181 (a cartula promissionis in substance though not in form). 24 Particularly not a priest holding ‘Grauso’s share’ but the general promise appears in some later leases (below, at note 64). 25 CDL II no. 213 (combining Gumbert’s and Aimo’s mutual promises). Cf. Mem. Lucc., V. ii no. 376 (811), another early layman’s lease: the priest Landpert acknowledges his uncle Odolpert’s grant of a church (founded 810, ibid. IV. ii. 1 no. 11) on similar terms.

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onwards, well into the twelfth century, the leasing of churches was practised throughout most of Italy by bishops, abbots, and lay lords alike, for both plebes and private oratories. Sometimes such a lease superseded an unwritten ‘benefice’ in the broad sense of something given out of favour and goodwill;26 sometimes it was something like a precarial exchange.27 In some places, chiefly central and southern, it might be a three-generation emphyteusis lease;28 or most characteristic and widespread of all, a libellus lease, for twenty-nine years or for life or two lives, embodied in the owner’s cartula ordinationis and (what more often survives) the tenant’s cartula promissionis.29 Typically such a lease gave the priest potestas in everything short of alienating possessions or ‘ordaining’ his successor:30 he has the power of ‘holding, possessing, ruling’ (or some such list), and of usufruct and ‘doing what you will with the fruits’; and perhaps disposing of gains, or some of them, for his soul’s sake. This is like the potestas that founders or donors of churches reserved for themselves or their heirs: it is property, variously qualified. But its character as a lease is manifest in what the priest undertakes in return: to perform divine service and tend the lights, give alms, reside, look after the property and improve it; and to pay a census (minor in the earlier leases) in kind or money. In their provisions for residence, improvement, and keeping the property intact, leases of churches were not essentially different from leases of land.31 Even the special form for putting a priest into a church, the cartula ordinationis, has barely a lingering suggestion of appointment to a public office: to ‘ordain’ here is to arrange what is to happen to a piece of property, as well by granting it to a tenant as by naming one’s heir or successor. In early instances the church’s proprietor may ‘give’ or ‘grant’ it rather than ‘ordain’, and these remained alternatives; while the verb tradere is often used as well, or alone.32 This may always imply what is only occasionally explicit, a ritual handing over.33 Meanwhile the libellus form was adaptable enough to be 26

27 e.g. 843, Mem. Lucc., V. ii no. 586. Below, p. 558 at note 31. e.g. Monumenti Ravennati, I nos. 10, 81, and esp. II. no. 20 (981, a priest’s professio sponsionis to lay lords, with liturgical obligations including a weekly mass for the soul of the father of one or more of them). The forms were not mutually exclusive (an emphyteutic lease might be granted by precaria), and some leases were less formal, or intermediate in form (see Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 134, 139–42). 29 A 10th- and 11th-c. alternative to present-tense ordinatio and promissio was each party’s past-tense notarial memoratorium, e.g. Cava. nos. 119, 265, 276, and many more (for churches eventually acquired with their charters by La Cava). 30 Even this last was sometimes included for the next occasion, while in Cava no. 950, scriptum libellarii nomine, the archbishop gave indefinite power of ordinatio to future abbots of an intended monastery 31 (1039). e.g. (at random) Farfa nos. 181, 189; Cava nos. 550, 594. 32 In Naples (10th–11th c.) the monastery of SS. Sergio e Baccho used ponere, ordinare, confirmare, dare, and dare et tradere (e.g. RNeapAM, nos. 106, 223, 333, 447, 483, app. 41); in Bari (besides ordinare) mittere and conducere appear (Bari I no. 18); in Salerno lords ‘ordain’ priests to churches by ‘conveying’ the church (tradere: Cava, passim, as above, note 29; below, note 38). 33 Scattered references to literal traditio or to investiture: Mem. Lucc., IV. ii. no. 8 (806); Bari I no. 7 (983); Arezzo no. 95 (1009); S. Maiolo no. 4 (1085). 28


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used in the mid-ninth century for appointing an abbess; in the mid-eleventh for establishing priests in a collegiate church; in the early twelfth for giving a church to an abbot and monks for ever, conditionally on its service.34 Italian leases normally lease the church as an entity, carrying with it all its property and revenue; or sometimes a share of it, described as a moiety, third, or quarter of everything;35 they are not, as a rule, leases of a priest’s benefice or living carved out from the rest.36 When tenth- and eleventh-century Campania leases state the priest’s entitlement to all ‘offerings, vows,37 and burials . . . all crops and wine’,38 this seems a formulaic summing up of what any tenant would expect; and excepting from these the things that he may not dispose of—typically livestock, and things for the church’s adornment or liturgy—reserved them for the church itself, increasing its value as property but not the lord’s direct exploitation of it.39 It is true (here and elsewhere in Italy) that the lord sometimes reserved some bit of arable or vineyard for his own use, or a house, or one floor of a house.40 But this is seen as holding back something that would normally have gone with the church: what is being carved out is a small reserve for the lord, not an allowance for the priest. The occasional share of certain feast day offerings seems to be for greater churches owning lesser ones;41 while a priest’s promise in 974 that lay owners and their wives could enter the church and its possessions and make every use of them suggests the rhetoric of hospitality: he is still their tenant for the whole (apart from a reserved vineyard).42 The occasional more substantial exploitation by a lord taking a share of certain crops is either a relatively heavy rent,43 or arises from a complant arrangement44—a partnership in development of the whole estate, not a restriction of the priest to a reduced tenure within it. When what is leased is a fraction of the church, this implies, for a lay-owned church, simply that it was owned in shares, each partner ordaining his own priest or entrusting his own share to a common priest.45 For a bishop’s plebs it is more 34

Cattedrale Firenze no. 2; Dormeier, Monte Cassino, app. 1; Analfi nos. 108–9. e.g. S. Maria Firenze no. 29 (1031, a layman granting ‘an entire moiety’); Cava nos. 1258, 1270 (1058, two groups granting their respective moiety and third to the same priest, five months apart). 36 See Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 153–5, 170–1. Boyd’s examples of partial leases, Tithes, 94–5 and nn. 17, 18 (Mem. Lucc., IV. ii. 1 no. 74, V. iii nos. 1515, 1538), do not quite point to division between lord (or plebanus) and serving priest. However, Cava no. 1096 (1047) speaks of ‘things belonging to that church which the priests who hold the church are accustomed to hold in benefice’; and a few donors to N. Italian bishoprics thought it advisable to spell out the priest’s or priests’ use of the whole endowment (Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 37 180–1). votatio: votive offerings. 38 e.g. Cava nos. 265, 382, 582, 757, 990 (from 971 to 1042). 39 As in preceding note; cf. Naples leases (as in n. 32, above): ‘everything offered there’, with similar exceptions for the church’s benefit (but including immovables, which the Salerno leases probably assume 40 to be reserved). See Feine, Studien, III. 153–4, 169 and n. 264 (and below, at note 42). 41 42 e.g. S. Massimo, Salerno (ibid. 160). Cava no. 276 (974). 43 e.g. Mem. Lucc., IV. ii. 1 no. 16 (818): a priest’s census to an abbess includes half the crop of olives, acorns, chestnuts, and dried figs. For later, and southern, instances see below, p. 558. 44 Clearly in Gaeta no. 35 (933, bishop’s lease of a church and its land to a Roman priest and monk); 45 probably implied in Cava no. 169 (below, note 79). See above, note 35. 35

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problematic.46 Of course if the leaseholder is a layman, or a cleric not serving the church, the serving priest must have some lesser living or allowance, and this might consist of a fraction: perhaps implicit when the bishop leases a fraction to the non-serving tenant,47 or explicit in a separate lease to the priest alongside that already made to someone else.48 Either would fit Catherine Boyd’s picture of plebes losing possessions and revenues through bishops’ leases to grasping laymen.49 But against her further hypothesis, that what bishops had saved for the priest (or rather, for the plebs itself) was the clergy’s ancient canonical quarter of revenues,50 is the fact that the quarters (and, after all, moieties) leased to plebani were not simply of tithes and offerings, but of ‘houses and possessions’, dependent churches, and the plebes themselves. This suggests another possibility: the sharing of a plebs and its possessions between two rectors, or between priests lapsed from common property, resulting in portions to which the bishop ordained separately as they fell vacant;51 thus a bishop’s lease of a moiety to a priest sometimes begins by ‘ordaining’ him ‘in’ the plebs, though continuing ‘so that a moiety of that church may be in your potestas for your lifetime’.52 This alternative origin for fractions of plebes would suggest that the laity acquired church property as successors to the clergy by inheritance or sub-leasing,53 as much as by pressurizing the bishops.54 The tendency to hereditary tenure was strong. As elsewhere, it might result not from a benefice or lease but from the donor of a church reserving tenure for himself and an heir, or otherwise safeguarding his heirs’ or prote´ge´s’ interests.55 And a donor’s intentions could be open-ended: in 1096 a priest giving his church to the bishop of Veroli reserving lifetime tenure required also security for any future kinsmen of his who might become priests and continue to deserve the

46 Examples of quarters and moieties of plebes are Mem. Lucc., IV. ii. 1 no. 70 (968), V. iii nos. 1462 (975), 1496–7 (979). 47 What was leased to a layman might be a fraction of all the pieve’s possessions but not of the church itself; e.g. Mem. Lucc., IV. ii. 1 no. 74, V. iii nos. 1515, 1563 (980, 983). 48 Obviously such independent leases, made for life, are unlikely to be simultaneous. 49 Tithes, 94–5. 50 Ibid. 119–21, 132–5 (its attachment to the pieve being ‘an important modification’ as Boyd concedes, ibid. 120). On this view, post-Gregorian bishops recovering revenues from the laity left the pievi still with only their quarters. 51 It is true that 10th- or 11th-c. portions of pievi are hardly ever other than a quarter or a moiety (ibid. 120–1). But these would result if the rector’s rights were split (either once or twice), rather than several priests acquiring portions. Boyd’s 1032 instance from Parma (Tithes, 119) rather supports this (suggesting the earlier existence of four portions, of which three had been secularized). 52 e.g. Mem. Lucc., V. iii nos. 1462 (975), 1496 (979; see next note). 53 e.g. the priest Peter’s sub-lease to a clerk and a layman of much of his moiety of Massa di Burra, 979 (above, p. 88). 54 It would also imply that post-Gregorian bishops enforcing the quartese were reviving a defunct (rather than debased) principle. Boyd’s early 12th-c. instances (ibid. 132–4) are compatible with this. 55 Above, pp. 51–2, 63.


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bishop’s goodwill.56 Most leases probably had no such former owners’ claims behind them. Even so they were for life, or for twenty-nine years which might well be longer;57 they might be renewed later for a son or grandson;58 or made all along for more than one life, not necessarily father and son. In Florence a layman leased his moiety of a church in 1031 to two brothers, a priest for his life only and a layman with his sons or heirs; in Pavia in 1085 an abbess gave sole rule in a church to a priest Silo with succession for his clerical nephew Lanfranc (should Lanfranc die first, Silo was to rest content with his own tenure).59 Leases may conceal the recognition of existing arrangements in the hope of regulating or setting a term to them;60 occasionally the acceptance of more-orless pious squatters.61 On the other hand the dominance of written record in Italy did give owners some prospect of controlling successions, and it may often have been by their choice that a son or nephew succeeded (bishops or abbots maintaining their cliente`les; laymen taking a priestly family’s claims for granted).62 Tenant priests for their part needed promises: promises to defend their title,63 and not to evict them arbitrarily, or subject them to another priest;64 while in the south, some wanted the freedom to leave with their possessions.65 And in some regions hereditary succession, intended or otherwise, was unusual, as Toubert has shown for Latium, where Farfa’s leases to priests (whether of land or churches) were almost always for one life only or for twenty-nine years, while married priests were rare.66 In parts of the south, tenant priests might be Greek

56 Quotation sent me by the late David Whitton, from C. Scaccia Scarafoni (ed.), Le Carte dell, Archivio capitolare della Cattedrale di Veroli (which I have not been able to see), no. 77. See index: Mainard. 57 The point of the 29-year lease was to stop before the 30-year period for prescriptive right. It might let in a tenant’s heir or appointee for the years remaining when he died. 58 See Feine, ‘Studien’, II. 46–7, III. 95. In RNeapAM no. 447 (1088) a monastery’s tenant-priest who had succeeded his father was to be succeeded by his son provided he took orders. 59 S. Maria Firenze no. 29; S. Maiolo no. 4. Cf. Cava no. 1174 (1052), a two-life lease for the monk-priest Nicholas and his son Leo. 60 e.g. bishop James’s lease of S. Maria Sesto in 806 (Mem. Lucc., IV. ii. 1 no. 8) to the clerk Agiprand, who had had it in 799, and his priest father before him (ibid. V. ii nos. 281, 214); Agiprand now gave up omnia calomnia (claims perhaps to hereditary right). In general see Feine, ‘Kirchenreform im Bistum Lucca’, 516–17; Schwarzmaier, Lucca, 99. 61 See above, p. 64 note 117, on 8th-c. bishops of Lucca rewarding volunteer restorers of a derelict church by giving them tenure. Cf. bishop James’s lease (806) of SS. Maria e Ippolita to a priestly family secured by their past alms to the church (Mem. Lucc., V. ii no. 326). 62 e.g. lords of the castle of Matraio and the hereditary priests of S. Brizio (E. Conti, La formazione della struttura agraria nel contado fiorentino, I (Rome 1965), esp. 156–7, 248–50). Some 12th-c. Amalfitan leases to priests were to take effect after a father’s or uncle’s death: Amalfi no. 154 (1151, from lay owners); no. 179 63 (1169, from an abbot). e.g. Cava nos. 119, 265, 986; Amalfi no. 81. 64 See above, at note 24: Gaeta no. 35 (933); RNeapAM nos. 106, 223, and app. no. 41 (964, 991 and ?924); Cava no. 950 (1039, for the abbot of a prospective monastery); Amalfi no. 81 (1087). 65 Cava nos. 757 (1024), 1121 (1049); correspondingly in RNeapAM no. 483 (1095) the priest promises not to leave his island church. For Apulia see below, at note 94. 66 Toubert 779–84 (esp. 783 n. 3); 871 n. 3; 896 n. 3.

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monks,67 unattached to any monastery but vowed to celibacy, with pupils rather than sons to succeed them (though some were widowers with sons).68 So there were regions where priestly celibacy was general enough, or became so by the later eleventh century, to make priests as tenants (of churches or anything else) different from laymen, or from clergy in lower orders. At the same time there were things that made a church different from other leasable properties. Leasing it was a way of providing for its service as well as realizing its value. The tenant priest’s duties include celebrating mass and the daily office, tending the lights, and prayer;69 what he must improve and keep intact includes the fabric and contents of a holy place as well as fields, vineyards, and olive groves. The revenue that he enjoys includes offerings (and tithes if the church is a plebs)70 as well as rents; the acquisitions, some of which he may treat as his own and give in alms, will be either given as offerings or bought with offerings. And the special form of lease as ordinatio, where it was in use, was kept for priests or prospective priests; church leases to laymen were less distinct (apart from normally requiring the tenant to provide for divine service) from leases of ordinary land, and were often made for three lives in the first instance,71 or even for heirs indefinitely.72 By the tenth century, however, in northern and central Italy leases even to priests put more emphasis on economic exploitation and rather less on liturgical duties.73 Consistently with this, they occasionally allow a tenant priest (or deacon) to appoint a serving priest,74 or even a successor: that is, to grant the church, property, and liturgical obligations to another priest by lease or benefice even beyond his own lifetime.75 Things were to some extent different in the south, in Campania especially. Here it was far more often a lay lord or lords who gave the lease: a prince’s sons (as we see quite early in Salerno);76 or three count brothers, a layman and two nephews, or a large group of partners.77 What was to be leased must often, in the country, have been not an old developed property but a church newly built or 67

e.g. Cava nos. 382, 1121, 1270 (986, 1049, 1058); Bari I nos. 18, 26 (1032, 1067). Cava no. 1174 (above, note 59). 69 Bishop Elempert of Arezzo’s lease of a pieve to his archdeacon (1009) required him to ‘warn the people with divine admonitions and make them walk in the way of righteousness’ (Arezzo no. 95); but this—going with exceptional freedom to pass the church on by benefice or lease—looks like decoration. 70 71 See above, p. 506 note 34. Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 104–5, 112–15, 125–9. 72 e.g. Mem. Lucc., IV. ii. 1 no. 64 (938); and below, pp. 753–4 (1040). 73 See Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 120–3. 74 Mem. Lucc., IV. ii. 1 no. 70 (968) and V. iii no. 1496 (979) were bishops’ leases requiring divine service ‘by you or by your arrangement’. 75 As in bishop Elempert’s lease to his archdeacon (1009, above, note 69). This pieve was before long in the hands of a lay family which gave it up in 1090, claiming to have had it ‘in benefice’ from the cathedral, clearly without a lease (Arezzo no. 278). 76 Cava no. 119 (904), the priest Madelgar’s memoratorium that prince Guaifer’s sons have undertaken to let him reside there for life, the church with all its treasure, land, houses, stock, and serfs to be in his power 77 dominandum, lavorandum, gubernandum et regendum. e.g. Cava nos. 382, 757, 910, 1121, 1258. 68


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restored from ruin after Arab devastation, perhaps for a newly concentrated population in a new fortified village, and in need both of clergy and of resources. The leases are usually for one life, and usually to a priest: if for the priest’s heir also, implicitly or explicitly dependent on his priesthood (‘the clerk Sergius your son is to get himself made priest’);78 one of the rare leases to laity here is made by a bishop (in 940) to get an abandoned church restored.79 So leases are primarily a way of getting a church looked after and served. Campanian leases commonly qualify the leaseholder’s duties: ‘as is fitting for a country church’, ‘a church outside the city’, or even ‘a church like this one’; ‘for a village priest’, or ‘for Greek monks’.80 These priests provided an otherwise largely lacking ministry for the neighbourhood, though their liturgical duties might be partly domestic (ritual visits to the founding family’s houses),81 and distinguished burial-places might be a concern for either side.82 But these southern leases were strongly economic as well (which is not to say that they were commercial). An example of 1029 lists all the cattle given to a rural church by each of three counts who have founded it; the priest is to have use and possession for life, residing and doing God’s service ‘as a country priest should’; he is to look after the cattle, and may have one-third of the young beasts for himself; the lords will plant a thousand vines, which the priest is to tend and in due course have the whole harvest, with a money allowance to buy wine for the first four years; he is given fishing rights.83 Often, specific improvements are required: rebuilding the church, or building a new house, or planting a vineyard; providing six good pigs and a heifer within the year, or producing a book;84 not very clearly distinct from the entrance gifts (normally to the church itself)85 that were sometimes recorded or agreed on, or the promise of a legacy86 (besides 78 Amalfi no. 81 (1087), a count’s lease. This seems to be taken for granted in Cava no. 757 (1024, lay family’s lease to a priest and his clerical nephew), and ibid., no. 1174 (to a widower and son, both monks). 79 Cava no. 169 (940); having accepted the offer of three citizens of Amalfi to restore S. Felice de Fonti, he allows them and their heirs the choice of priests, and to share crops and offerings with them as they may agree. See Taviani-Carozzi’s excellent account, Principaute´, 623–7, of this church’s subsequent progress from a leased episcopal church to the heirs’ proprietary church. 80 e.g. Cava nos. 382, 582, 757, 1096, 1121, 1131. Sometimes there is just a residual sicut meruerit. 81 To visit each house at Christmas and Easter and present candles (1047–50, Cava nos. 1096, 1121); to visit them in illness, ceremoniously collect their bodies, and bury them and their men gratis (1050, ibid. no. 1131; see Taviani-Carozzi, op. cit., 764–6). 82 e.g. Capasso, Mon. Neap., II no. 406 (1026); RNeapAM no. 333 (1027); Amalfi nos. 81, 108–9. 83 Cava no. 812 (1029). 84 Cava nos. 910, 990, 1131, 1174; Amalfi no. 81; and see Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 160–1. Naples leases more often require the tenant to do whatever building and repairs are needed (e.g. RNeapAM nos. 106, 223, 447, 483). 85 An exception is the payment for a church lease by a widow and her lay son to the consuls of Gaeta, of £25 in silver ‘for the benefit of the city’ (934, Gaeta no. 36); cf. the 80 gold coins that a priest’s son is to pay to have a church when his father dies, very likely for the owner, S. Sofia Salerno (1052, Cava no. 1174). 86 e.g. ibid. nos. 276 (974, a legacy promised) and 382 (for the same church, below, at note 89); RNeapAM nos. 106, 223–4, 416.

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those gains and offerings that had to be left for the church). It is from the south that the elaborate inventories of movables come, running together books, chalices, vestments, oxen, pigs, and tools.87 There is careful regulation of how to divide any increase in the movable possessions between the priest’s personal property and the church’s,88 or (closely related) how the priest should leave what was his own. Thus in 986 two Greek priests leasing a country church at Vietri, to which they have given rich gifts in books, ornaments, and livestock, could do as they liked with offerings other than church equipment, oxen, or cows, and at death were to have the disposal of one-third of their possessions, the rest going to the church.89 What is left to the priest to dispose of at his death is sometimes described as for almsgiving for his soul,90 sometimes, later, as what his heirs may take away;91 while the church itself with all its property, real and movable, sacred and mundane, is to revert to the owner’s full potestas until he makes a new lease. In Apulia—hardly less Lombard than the neighbouring principalities— arrangements were similar, but rather more idiosyncratic.92 Here too were Greek monks willing to hold and serve churches and bringing movable wealth with them. The archbishop of Bari in 1032 ‘put in’ two such to hold the catepan’s new church outside the town and pray for emperor, catepan, and clergy. They had brought with them a pair of oxen, a horse, a book of the Gospels and other books, and the whole equipment of a priest: perhaps they were travelling with one horse between them and an ox-drawn cart full of treasure. There is as much emphasis on their obligation to stay—and that their possessions shall stay—as on their security: no archbishop can eject them or remove the church from their potestas without their proven guilt, but they are not to have the potestas of going away or giving up the church; after their deaths everything is to belong to the church; if they do leave or are expelled, they shall not have the potestas of taking anything away with them.93 Even more than for the church at Vietri, it looks as if the chief point of the lease was to secure their riches for the new church. Elements found in this lease recur in other Apulian charters: the priest not having the power of departure,94 and the emphasis on what he has brought to the church. Sometimes the record takes the form not of a lease in return for an 87

88 Above, p. 456. Above, at notes 38–9. Cava no. 382 (986); on this church and its founders (Amalfitan immigrants), and on the easy coexistence of Greek and Latin clergy, see Taviani-Carozzi, op. cit., 813–17. 90 e.g. Cava nos. 119, 265 (he may do as he wishes with any familia he may have, that is, presumably, free any serfs for his soul’s sake), 582, 1096. 91 e.g. ibid. nos. 812, 1174. In no. 757 (1024) the priest and his nephew, or the survivor, may themselves surrender the church and leave with all their movables. 92 Archbishops of Bari (or their agents) leased ordinary churches to priests by libellus but also, unusually for the south, gave plebes to laymen on 29-year leases (Bari I nos. 7, 12, of 983 and 1024), with powers that included ‘ordaining’ (the only indication that they will provide priests). 93 94 Ibid. I no. 18 (on the appointment see above, p. 524). Ibid. I nos. 26 (1067), 28 (1073). 89


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entrance gift, but of donating property to the church with tenure of the church as consequence or condition. In 1086 a priest Pascal gives land to a church (retaining burial there for himself and his heirs) into the hands of one of its part-owners, and is to get back half his gift if the others (currently minors) do not eventually want him as ‘abbot’ in their half: this is all that shows he holds or is to hold the church.95 In a similar record, of 1073, a clerk (not a serving priest) and his wife give vineyards, olive trees, and livestock to a church through its rector priest Andrew; and it is he that grants to the donors that they should ‘be in that church and keep it’ for life, with usufruct of what they have given and with a half-share in the church’s endowment and revenues (the other half, presumably, remaining with Andrew).96 Although on the face of it this leaves the rector much poorer than before, his church may have been so impoverished that the land and livestock were needed for its bare survival. Another context for a lease (for private lords as for bishops) was the hope of restoring a ruined church, and in the mid-eleventh century this brought life tenure of an Apulian church to a layman. It was old and falling down, when a Norman baron, Humphrey, took on the task of repairing it, brought it back into use, and promised to do more. The family group who owned it ‘conveyed’ it to him by the symbol of a staff or stick, to be in his potestas for his lifetime, with the power to establish clergy there for its service.97 So over much of the south by the eleventh century there was great flexibility in what could be done with and for a church. Greek monk-priests were on the move with cattle and treasure; the lease of a church might meet their need for land and a dwelling while enriching the church and securing its service by celibates. When churches were ruined, leases could be geared to getting them rebuilt or restocked as well as served. In this country of bare and arid hills with coastal towns rich in gold, the leasing of churches could be made to solve problems. In late pre-Conquest England there are scraps of evidence for priests holding the whole property and revenue in tenure from a lord. This would normally be a recent development: as long as village churches were mostly small, impermanent, unendowed, and without any dues or rights, there was nothing much for the priest to hold; ‘my priest’, in the wills, may be a household chaplain rather than a 95

Ibid. V no. 6. See below, p. 635. Ibid. I no. 27; if any archbishop or priest deal unjustly with them or expel them, everything they have given reverts to their potestas. Cf. ibid. I no. 46 (1141): a widowed laywoman’s gift of vineyards and cattle to an Apulian church secures her its life tenure with responsibility for maintaining divine service, and with the same provision for recovering the property if expelled. Back in 8th-c. Tuscany cf. CDL II no. 218. 97 Bari III no. 4. Not surprisingly the life tenure soon turned into property (cf. S. Felice de Fonti, above, note 79): the rebuilt church was ‘freed’ for Humphrey and his heirs by the bishop of Giovenazzo at its consecration, 1058 (RNeapAM no. 398). For a different solution for a ruined church near Naples see below, p. 607. 96

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free tenant. In two wills we seem to glimpse the change. In Aethelgifu’s will, 980– 90, a church is given a half-hide ‘and Edwin the priest is to be freed, and he is to have the church for his lifetime on condition he keep it in repair; and he is to be given a man’. Perhaps rather later, Siflaed left her lordship of Marlingford to Bury St Edmund’s, stipulating however that ‘my church is to be free, and Wulfmaer my priest is to sing at it, he and his issue, so long as they are in holy orders’; and (in another will, before going overseas) attaching a few acres of arable and meadow to the church.98 It may be only after these modest endowments that either church became a holding for a free priest to live on.99 Siflaed made St Edmund mund—protector or guardian—over the church (by implication) and other free holdings; as possessions to exploit, the monastery gained only Siflaed’s own house, land, and livestock. After the Conquest there will be no more talk of ‘him and his issue’ indefinitely, and lordship over a free tenure will be more than mere mund. But when William Rufus sold the royal minster of Sutton Courtenay to Abingdon, he required ‘that the clerk Aelfwine should be as honorably treated by the abbot as he had been when he lived under his own king’ (pointing out his usefulness, being knowledgeable in native law), and Aelfwine was able to get the abbot to give the church to him and his young son for both their lives; thereafter it would be up to the abbot and monks ‘to whom and how they would let (locare) that church’.100 The same result, of safeguarding the priest’s and a son’s tenure, was secured when Henry I gave to the episcopal church of Lincoln a church held by Brand the priest—called, indeed, ‘Brand’s church’—on condition that Brand and his son after him should hold it for life as a cathedral prebend.101 Of course such a clerical tenant is not necessarily the serving priest at all, any more than in France; it was not only prebendal churches that were held by absentees in royal service;102 and much later in the twelfth century the monks of Tewkesbury complained to the pope that their churches were useless to them, being held by absentees who took the revenues and put in substitutes, and whose sons succeeded them when they died.103 But it is clear that many married priests and their sons were the serving priests of the churches they held. Such a parson, 98

Whitelock, ‘The Will of Aethelgifu’, 8–9; eadem, Wills nos. 37, 38, with nn. at 206–7. Cf. the minster at Colne which three named priests were to ‘have’ by Leofgifu’s will (1035–44, ibid. no. 29) ‘as their lord granted it to them’; doubtless already endowed. 100 Chron. Abingdon, II. 26–9 (1090–4, RRAN no. 359). 101 Registrum Antiquiss. no. 35. Some other post-Conquest donations of churches reserving the current priest’s life tenure are EYC III no. 1424 (1116–19, if authentic); Mowbray Charters no. 13 (c.1107–29); St Peter’s, 102 Gloucester no. 551 (1115–30). See below, p. 675 note 102. 103 M. Cheney, Roger of Worcester, 77. Cf. the rich clerk Samson of Aubigny (mid-12th c.), holding eight or nine churches from Roger de Mowbray, making pious donations of these (with Mowbray’s consent) to Kenilworth and Newburgh while retaining life tenure in some, and arranging for his young son Roger’s support from them until old enough to ‘hold and rule’ them (Mowbray Charters nos. 175–8, 196–7). 99


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provided he could get himself ordained priest, had no need to resort to the bishop for the evolving procedures of admission, institution, and induction: he simply took over from his father, uncle or brother, needing only to have his claim as heir accepted by the lord he held from.104 The efforts of reforming bishops to get control, the papal judgments in their support, and the need to compromise since actual ejection of priests from their fathers’ churches would, the bishop of Hereford claimed, cause bloodshed, have been vividly described by Mary Cheney and others;105 all that need be said here is a little about the hereditary parson’s position. Some may have been descended from a pre-Conquest founder or perhaps purchaser of the church: as near to being its proprietor as Anglo-Norman law allowed—saddled now with a lord much as small English thegns and freemen were;106 or perhaps holding a church that his father or grandfather had given to a monastery while retaining its tenure.107 Most however were probably descended from a priest who with no such prior claim had had the church granted him for a life or lives; such, probably, was Osward to whom abbot Baldwin of Bury (1065– 98) granted the land and church of Thurston (Suffolk) ‘as my predecessor Leofstan gave it and I re-gave it to his father the priest Aluric’ (which has to be across the Conquest).108 In any case priests have lords, lay or ecclesiastical, who by the late twelfth century would be seen by diocesan bishops and canon lawyers as patrons. But lords, or those who wrote their charters, put things differently. When Avicia de Romilli in mid-century gave the canons of Drax the ‘advocatio and lordship’ of a church,109 this is unlikely to be a precocious avoidance of claiming to be able to give the church itself. It was given ‘saving the dignity of the parson Aky who possesses it at present’, and it makes better sense to suppose that this—a traditional respect for the freeholding priest—is what necessitated giving only lordship with the duty of being ‘vouched to warranty’110 (like Siflaed making St Edmund 104 A practice implied by the condemnation at Westminster 1125 (below, pp. 866–7). Cf. C. R. Cheney, From Becket to Langton, 126–7: jurors in 1194 had ‘never seen any parson presented’ for Dunston (Norfolk), which had always passed from father to son. 105 Roger of Worcester, 69–82; Brooke, ‘Gregorian Reform in Action: Clerical Marriage in England, 1050– 1200’, CHJ 12 (1956); J. Barrow, ‘Hereford Bishops’, 1–7. 106 See below, pp. 678–9, on the hereditary deans of Whalley; others will have been smaller men, e.g. the priest Richard who held Peterborough abbey’s church at Castor as his inheritance from a Peterborough knight, Thorold (below, p. 645). 107 See below, at note 114. Others could be descended from minster priests with prebends centred on a chapel (see Croom, ‘Fragmentation’, 74–5). The 12th-c. Worcester monks who forged the ‘1092’ charter (above, p. 84 note 49) thought it plausible to say that the secular clerks before the monastic reform held churches quasi propria (C&S I no. 100, at p. 638). 108 D. C. Douglas (ed.), Feudal Documents from Bury St Edmunds (London, 1932), no. 103 (conditional on celebrating six masses a week for the kings and for the monks, but close to a donation in its anathema on anyone alienating the property ‘from him or us’). 109 Quoted by Stenton, Danelaw Docs., p. lxxiv n. 4. 110 Rather than the ‘advowson’ of the later 12th c.

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only mund). A few years later (1153–69) one of the rare direct records of an arrangement between lord and parson is crisp and economical—but shaped not at all by canon law: the abbot and convent of Welbeck make known ‘that we have granted . . . to Thomas our clerk the church of Renton, to be held from us as long as he lives for the annual payment of a mark of silver’;111 while the mid-twelfthcentury abbot of St Benet Holme has ‘granted’ three churches to Thomas son of Thurbern, of a priestly family, to ‘hold them from the altar of St Benedict and from the sacristan, rendering him 10s. a year for the church’s lights’. The same abbot recognizes another family’s arrangements by ‘granting’ or ‘giving’ them churches in ‘perpetual alms’ along with manors or other lands in fief.112 The degree of real control by lords or patrons covers a wide range: at one extreme a cathedral chapter that regularly granted its churches for life (to a priest or someone who would provide one) for an annual payment, and could usually manage to retrieve and re-grant them, even if under some pressure to let in a son or nephew;113 at the other, a monastery encumbered with a parson not of its choosing whose hereditary claim it tried to override by presenting someone else.114 A lay patron too might try to exploit the new canon law to get rid of a hereditary priest and put in his own man. But others might be induced to recognize an heir by the payment of a higher census or ‘pension’;115 while for many lords, monastic as well as lay, the priest’s heir’s succession would be a matter of course. Perhaps it was just becoming less so for the monks of Pontefract in the late 1130s, when they ceded Darrington church with all its glebe and most of its tithe to the chaplain Robert, ‘his father having died’; but made this—perhaps under episcopal persuasion—a three-year lease, renewable if he gave satisfaction.116 Much of the evidence is late, from the later twelfth century or even the thirteenth; but the fact that for conscientious bishops the problem of married priests and their sons loomed at least as large as the problem of lay patrons behaving like proprietors indicates the prevalence in England of the tenant priest enjoying security and receiving all or most of his church’s revenues. A tenant priest or clerk did not have to have sons, however, to have a strong proprietary interest in his church and, as in contemporary France, to deal with it much as if it were his own. Early in the twelfth century a clerk Fritheric made 111

112 Danelaw Docs. no. 453 (1153–69) and p. lxxiv. See below, p. 677. On St Paul’s church leases see J. J. Davis in VCH London, I. 183–4; Brooke and Keir, London, 135–6. 114 M. Cheney, Roger, 135 and app. II nos. 2, 27, 68A. 115 Ibid. 73–4, 174–5, 185; C. R. Cheney, Becket to Langton, 127. 116 Abp. Thurstan’s notice of the pactum (EYC no. 1470), excepting from the parish tithe, and granting to the monks, two-thirds of their own demesne tithes (a provision which rules out the editor’s understanding of the pact—accepted also in York Episc. Acta—as reserving the glebe and parish tithe to the monks and not to Robert. The words retentis in manu sua can only apply to Robert, no doubt already in possession. His 21s. rent would be unlikely for a living without either glebe or tithes). 113


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Worcester cathedral priory his heir.117 His testament sets out at length ‘the things that belong to the church of St Helen’s’—chapels, tithes, and lands, including town dwellings round the church which he himself had recovered or bought for it—as constituting the property he has to dispose of (sic res meas disposui). Yet the church belongs to Worcester,118 whose monks ‘committed it to me for life’, to serve it and make them a profit; accordingly he has annually contributed such tithes as he has been able to turn into money towards the cathedral’s fabric; and now ‘all this—church, tithes, lands, and my labour—I restore and quitclaim to God and St Mary, pro remedium animae meae’. He restores also the land where he had built his house, and the labour he had put into that, ‘because it was their garden’; and another church, ‘because it was and is theirs’; and a half-hide elsewhere, ‘because it rightly belongs to them’. So his meritorious almsgiving, done for his soul’s remedy and rewarded by the monks with full confraternity,119 consists in restoring to them, improved, what is already theirs.

16.iv. The tenant priest’s rent or service The lords of churches held entire by the priests who serve them want them served. Probably they want also to be prayed for and to have masses for their souls and those of their dead;1 this is only rarely spelt out in a written grant of tenure,2 but occasionally surfaces in the context of a lord’s pious benefactions: in late tenth-century England, Aethelgifu’s will; in Lorraine in 1052, Glismont’s foundation charter for her oratory; each stipulating three masses a week— Aethelgifu for herself and her husband, Glismont for the unspecified dead; each also requiring the priest to keep the church (or its roof) in good repair, a practical obligation essential for the continuance of her alms.3 But alongside this could be some degree of economic gain (apart from—or without—any share of glebe, offerings, and tithes) in the shape of rent (census or 117 Hemingi Chartularium, 427–9. Fritheric was one of Wulfstan’s secular clerks (see Brett, Eng. Church, 174, 180–1, 183). 118 Hemingi Chart., 290, listing the monks’ houses and their tenants followed by the names of three churches and their priests or clerks, includes St Helen’s held by Fridericus. 119 Brett sees Fritheric’s testament as occasioned by becoming a monk (op. cit., 180); but he is given societas in omnibus beneficiis, to do for him alive and after death ‘as would be done for a monk’. 1 Even monks would expect reciprocity in prayer, especially if giving tenant priests confraternity (above, p. 542). 2 In Lucca, 816, the priest Rachiprand’s grant of S. Dalmazio to a priest and a clerk (above, p. 62) required the latter (‘son of Rachiperga’, perhaps Rachiprand’s sister) to qualify for priesthood and to pray for the souls of bishop James and of Rachiprand; in Apulia, 1067, below, p. 667 note 46. 3 See index: Aethelgifu, Glismont. What is unusual is not the expectation of prayer and memoria from monks or clergy, but its explicit requirement from a tenant priest.

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servitium)4 that was more than token, and a wide variety of practical services. On these there is copious but uneven evidence, which can be no more than dipped into here. Of course much of what we hear of priests’ rents and services in polemics or legislation is not applicable only to the tenant priest holding the bulk of the revenue and property. In Francia it may apply as much or more to the priest with a limited benefice, or none at all (personal services may be part of what he is hired to do by an allowance or wage, rather than what he renders for a benefice). Legislation from Charlemagne’s reign against priests being made to write charters or act as estate managers,5 Jonas of Orleans’s complaint that some lords made their priest wait at table, Agobard of Lyons on the priest as lackey,6 all have more bearing on the priest’s personal status and relationship with his lord, his senior, than on his tenure if any. Nonetheless the early ninth-century legislation seems designed for tenant priests, forbidding the payment of exenia on entrance to a church,7 but requiring the bishops to settle ‘what honor priests ought to pay to lords for churches’, probably meaning what service or rent.8 The Aachen legislation of 818–19 allows that anything beyond the minimum endowment and the pastoral revenues may be subject to rent or service (servitium covering both).9 In the Saint-Germain and Saint-Remi polyptichs we can see estate churches, with modest but more than minimum endowments, held by priests for various by no means trivial rents, gifts, and agricultural services. Several owe a horse as ‘gift’; one pays a pound of silver; another (for what seems to be his personal benefice) 10 solidi and ‘various attentions, as best he can, to each one’10 (that is, probably, to any of the monks).11 But a priest with only half a free manse pays a standard peasant rent (‘the same census as the others in that vill’), along with dues in kind equivalent to those of the village mayor, reflecting his status rather than the value of his holding, and owed ‘out of respect to the lords’ (the monks).12 Not surprisingly, in spite of the Aachen legislation—often repeated,13 and apparently ignored by some ecclesiastical lords—there are other and later examples of a priest paying a small peasant rent for the minimum manse or less. In the tenth and eleventh centuries the rent for a more substantial church ranged from a few denarii to 50s. or more; typically 5s. or less.14 Naturally it is mainly the 4 Census tends to be used for recognitive payments, servitium for something more substantial, perhaps supplies and hospitality. 5 Capit. no. 81, c. 13 (probably diocesan legislation, ?810–13; cf. Meaux (845) c. 49 (Conc. III. 108). 6 7 Above, p. 527. 813 councils, Conc. II nos. 34 c. 5, 35 c. 21, 36 c. 30, 38 c. 15. 8 9 10 As note 5, above, cc. 1, 3. Above, p. 439. diversa obsequia unicuique. 11 12 Above, p. 448; Pol. St-Remi. xv. 62. Ibid. xix. 18 (Bouconville). 13 With variations, once or twice a decade from the 820s to the early 10th c. (see Stutz, Benef., 264 n, 8, 278 n. 65). 14 e.g. St-Cyprien no. 233 (c.942), a 12d. census fixed for a new chapel with tithes, land, vineyard, meadow, and a mill; Maˆcon rents (late 9th to mid-11th c.) ranging from 12d. (Maˆcon nos. 523, 562) to 2, 3, or 6s. (nos. 408, 394, 421, 392). See Imbart, Origines, 256–7.


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rents paid to monasteries or bishops that we know of, but here and there the payments due to lay lords surface in their donations of churches (15s. to a FrenchBurgundian noblewoman in 1055; measures of wheat, oats, and wine to a Gascon viscountess about 1078).15 In Francia or anywhere else, any economic assessment of these varied rents and services in relation to the value of the church as a whole (or even of its lands alone) is impossible except in the broadest terms, and often beside the point in view of the non-market considerations in play. The same is true of entrance gifts (munera or exenia) which might be either competitive offers or customary dues,16 and might compensate for low rents or be token countergifts designed to make the grant secure. More important, often, than any rent in money or kind, and increasingly so as economic revival reduced the value of customary rents, would be the exaction of lodging (presumably not wanted from priests at peasant level) for a non-local lord and his family,17 or for his agents or knights (typically two, or seven, or ten, for one or sometimes two nights a year);18 fodder or grazing for visitors’ horses; longer-term grazing of the lord’s horses or cattle; perhaps the requisitioning of post-horses. Ralph bishop of Bourges warned lay lords of churches against ‘staying in priests’ houses with their wives and other women, and hounds’; Charles the Bald in 865 condemned the exaction of grazing from the rent-free manse; the council of Trosly in 909 condemned more generally the extortion of census, gifts, pasturing, and post-horses;19 and patrons in the late twelfth century—allowed, still, to receive rents for church lands (‘ancient and moderate’ rents approved by the bishop)—were still being forbidden to exact fodder and lodging.20 In Italy, as Feine showed, the early Tuscan leases, whether of baptismal or of lesser churches, usually laid down a light economic return: often an annual dinner for the owner and a few companions on the patronal feast; sometimes a token share of that day’s offerings, or a ritual census of loaves and candles at Christmas and Easter, or a few denarii—acknowledgment rather than rent.21 From the midninth century onwards more substantial rents are found: the census for a baptismal church in Tuscany might be 20, 30, or even 100s. These sums unmistakably 15

Cluny no. 3350; St-Mont no. 18. Cf. UBNR I no. 104 (958). This must be the meaning of muda de presbiteros (‘change of priests’) listed as a pertinence of a church given to Sainte-Foi (1060–1108, Ste-Foi no. 33; cf. no. 13). 17 e.g. for ecclesiastical lords St-Symphorien no. 27 (1139–77); Barlow, Durham Peculiars, 129, on Ednam (Lothian). For lay lords, Molesme no. i. 55 (late 11th c.); Cava no. 276. 18 In S.W. France lay donors often reserved this, e.g. Le´zat nos. 1577 (1061–90), 1583 (c.1130); Gellone no. 151 (1077, for 21 knights), Aniane nos. 223, 227–8 (1026, 1094–1108); or gave it, e.g. Ste-Foi no. 462 (1061–1108), St-Flour no. vi. 37 (11th c.), St-Mont no. 44 (c.1110). 19 Capit. episc., I. 247–8, c. 9; Capit. no. 274 (Tusey) c. 11; Mansi, XVIII. 279–80, c. 6. See Imbart, Origines, 20 304–15. Lucius III in 1184 (CIC II. 616–17: X 3. 38. 23). 21 Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 83–5, 92–4. The half-crop of olives etc., above, p. 545 note 43, seems exceptional here. 16

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reflect the yield from tithes as well as land.22 They might be owed not to the bishop himself but ‘to anyone who has the plebs . . . in benefice for the time being’:23 if the bishop has given it in benefice, its value to the beneficiary may depend on receiving a high rent rather than on his chances of getting a kinsman or dependant into it. The same is true for subject churches, usually on a smaller scale (rents of a few solidi), though as early as 814 one such was rich enough for its priest to owe a rent of 90s. to a clerk who held it in benefice from the bishop.24 In the south of Italy however, the tenth- and eleventh-century leases seem still to be for mainly recognitive dues of the traditional kind (loaves, candles, perhaps a dinner);25 not usually money (or not overtly),26 but sometimes combined with things of modest economic value such as a pig and some honey at Christmas, a sheep and some wax at Easter.27 For S. Giovanni at Vietri ‘twenty good lemons when there are any’ in a lease of 974 gives way in the next lease, twelve years later, to half the lemon crop (suggesting that young trees had come into bearing).28 Even occasional half-shares of two or three kinds of tree-fruit, olives, or chestnuts may have a sociable as well as economic significance.29 As in Tuscany earlier, when the census is trivial or token the church’s material value to its owner must lie in having it to dispose of from time to time, with luck improved in value by the last holder’s good management and good repute. And the value of having the church to dispose of may lie purely in the patronage, or may—but chiefly in central Italy—be realized in a substantial price or exenium, often in gold,30 or— more in the north—in land given for a precarial lease of the church.31 Where, as was usual in the south, the prospective tenant’s gift went to the church itself,32 an older church might have been much enriched by the eleventh century, its lords gaining not in rising rent or entrance gifts but in prestige, satisfied piety, and solid patronage. 22 See Boyd, Tithes, 94 for a broad comparison of some rents of ordinary estates with those, considerably higher, for pievi with not much land but with tithes from several villages. 23 Mem. Lucc., V. iii nos. 1069, 1115, 1127, 1297, running from 903 to 943; see Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 97. 24 Mem. Lucc., IV. i no. 8; V. ii no. 391 (S. Regulo, Gualdo; see Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 115). 25 e.g. in Naples the partners Gregory and Peter (below, p. 607) would demand nothing from their priest except (for Gregory) six loaves and six candles on the three great feasts, and a dinner with three companions on the patronal feast-day. Cf. Cava nos. 276, 582, 1258 (974, 1006, 1058). 26 An exception (959, Bari I no. 3) is a gold solidus (or equivalent) due annually from the priest and deacon holding two churches from the archbishop; but agreed separately, not in their lease: possibly the tip of an iceberg. 27 Cava no. 1174 (1052); here however the abbot of S. Sofia reserved also the right to the crop from land 28 ploughed by his own pair of oxen. Cava nos. 276 (974), 382 (986). 29 e.g. Bari I no. 28 (1073); Amalfi no. 98 (1100). Conversely the tenant priest may have concessions on the proprietors’ land: one man’s gathering of chestnuts, or a fishing right (Cava nos. 582, 812). 30 See Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 126, 141 (Farfa, S. Vincento Volturno, Monte Cassino); further south (in Gaeta and Naples), ibid. 172–3. 31 32 Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 130 (Bergamo). Above, pp. 549–51.


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In England it seems likely that the priest often paid the lord an entrance gift; but there is not much direct evidence.33 As for rents, Lanfranc’s council of Winchester in 1076 forbade ‘that any town or country clerk should render any service for the benefice of a church beyond what he did in the time of king Edward’.34 Priests’ rents appear in Domesday Book, sometimes explicitly, more often as the value attributed to a church, meaning its value to its lord. This has been touched on already, in the context of what a lord might expect to get for or from a village church’s glebe.35 Sometimes the rent looks as if it reflects the acreage of the glebe, sometimes not; in either case there seems no evidence of any distinction being felt at this level between rent for the glebe and rent for the church itself with all its pertinences. Very rarely, an estate survey shows a village priest owing an agricultural service; this looks more like a render for land as such (possibly, as sometimes in the Frankish polyptichs, for a personal holding rather than the church’s endowment).36 Of more dignified services, the one muchquoted instance from Domesday Book is the messenger service into Wales customarily done for the king (like the service of lay ‘riding-men’) by the priests of the three churches of Archenfield, besides saying two masses a week for him and owing 20s. at death37 (this last perhaps instead of an entrance gift, suggesting hereditary tenure). There was no reason for the Domesday inquest to be interested in ordinary priests’ personal services; and there are few actual leases or other evidence until mid-twelfth century.38 In Normandy the only services that the council of Lillebonne in 1080 allowed a priest to render were carrying his lord’s messages or going on business as his agent (returning to his church the same day), or accompanying him as chaplain (within Normandy, and leaving a substitute priest).39 However, the context here is the ban on laymen taking altar revenues, burial dues, or the priest’s third of the tithe: they are equally not to take anything for selling or giving these revenues, and it is for these that the priest is not to pay,40 beyond the personal services specified. We have moved, here, to a situation far commoner in eleventh-century France than tenure of the whole complex: that is, to the setting aside of a reserve for the priest. What laymen are being warned off at Lillebonne—warned off either encroaching on or charging for—is this reserve (or rather a generalized idea of what the reserve ought to be), not the whole complex; in particular, it seems to leave the lord free to take two-thirds of the tithe. It is to this kind of extremely 33 There are Aelfric’s remarks (below, p. 816); and 12th-c. legislation, explicit in Westminster 1138 c. 5 34 (C&S I no. 139). Ibid. no. 93, c. 4. 35 36 Above, pp. 448, 449. See Lennard, Rural England, 330–2. 37 DB i. 179b (Herefs.). The context is the statement of customs of Archenfield (Erging, the special 38 39 Welsh area). See above, pp. 553–4. Orderic Vitalis, HE III. 28–9. 40 nec presbiter inde servitium faciat (a point slightly obscured in Marjorie Chibnall’s translation).

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widespread arrangement that we must now turn: the priest’s partial tenure within the whole.

16.v. The priest with partial tenure, allowance, or wage Much of what might be said about the priest who lives on only a share of pastoral revenues and a restricted part of the endowment has already been implied in discussing the lord’s exploitation of land and enjoyment of tithes and offerings. But there is a difference between the priest having whatever his lord leaves for him from one year to the next, and his having a fixed portion, defined by custom or past agreement, which he and his successors ‘hold’ from the lord by the lord’s grant (actual or assumed)—thus tacitly legitimizing the lord’s part (while itself not immune from later lords’ encroachment, as we shall see). By the eleventh century, mainly in France, such a portion is widely called a presbiterium or presbiteratus, or a priest’s or priestly ‘fief’ or ‘fisc’ (fevum, fedium, or fiscum presbiteri or presbiterale), or sometimes the priest’s or priestly beneficium. But long before these names appear the thing itself must have been familiar. It could begin as an arrangement not between priest and lord, but between a serving priest and someone—layman, clerk, or priest—who held the church in benefice while unqualified, unable, or unwilling to serve it himself. The clerk Frotwin in Louis the Pious’s time who ‘had a church’ and put into it the priest Atto, promising him half the tithe,1 may well have ‘had’ it as a benefice-holder. Atto complained that after serving there for a year and a half he had ‘received nothing of what we had agreed on’: this is a purely personal arrangement. But from Lombardy in 875 comes the testament of a deacon, Stephen of Bergamo, dealing with his own church: he names three clerical successors in order (all probably his kinsmen), and finally the cathedral; but meanwhile his freed clerk Radald is to officiate, provide lights, and have the tithes from the estate and usufruct of half of certain houses and property;2 afterwards this is to go to whatever priest serves the church—Stephen intends a permanent arrangement as well as lifelong provision for his prote´ge´.3 However, the priest’s part must often have originated not in any agreement or endowment but in the accumulation of custom from year to year. 1

See index: Frotwin. Constable calls Frotwin a priest and sees them as dividing the priest’s share (Tithes, 61), but it reads as dividing the entire tithe. 2 These are explicitly possessions of his own, so not part of an existing endowment; but effectively made so by the testament. 3 Bergamo no. 24 (much damaged). Although serving priests in Italy were normally tenants with written leases, lords and (perhaps more) rectors of churches might still make insecure and low-paid appointments.


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In the tenth century there are a few instances from Germany;4 but it is in Burgundy (both duchy and kingdom) that evidence thickens up. In 954 a clerk Bodo, canon of Maˆcon, holding the church of Chardonnay by precaria from the bishop, asked that the clerk Jarlannus might have ‘what the priest formerly held’, that is, rights in two villae with burial and baptism offerings:5 a living of some kind (which Bodo as precarist could probably have arranged independently for his own lifetime, but not beyond). By now the word presbiteratus has surfaced, as meaning not (usually) the priest’s office in the abstract but his living. As early as 919 and 925, at Savigny, this was sufficiently established to be granted with a church out of monastic property to a lay couple and their son (in one case a clerk); at Cluny half a century later, abbot Maiolus could grant the moiety of a church and of its presbiteratus, which included vineyards.6 Also from Burgundy, in 972, comes what seldom survives, the written record of a grant to a serving priest—a deacon Gundric to his fidelis the priest Eymino: ‘I give you the presbiteratus . . . the tithes of that estate and the offerings of that parish, saving my service’, to hold for life.7 The priest has it conditionally: ‘if you do anything with it unjustly against me, I am to take it instead of you.’ In Lorraine, the polyptich of Saint-Vanne, Verdun, lists the moiety of a church (with three mansi of its endowment) where the priest is given the offerings and an allowance in kind, presumably out of tithes or glebe produce: one pig, six chickens, some wine and grain, a length of cloth, and the use of a horse.8 These and other early instances of a serving priest’s limited portion come from contexts so diverse as to suggest the chance surfacing of something very common and largely unrecorded. They hardly support the tidy view that Stutz formed in his pursuit of the origin of the ecclesiastical benefice, attributing a crucial role to the 818–19 legislation in promoting such arrangements by its distinction between what the priest should hold free of rent and what he might pay rent for.9 In Stutz’s view, although both these ‘parts’ (as he saw them) would at first be granted to the priest in benefice, to use for all his expenses as he chose, the idea gradually emerged that one part was for his livelihood (normally the rent-free single mansus)10 and the rest for lights, fabric, and alms. Alongside this supposed functional division of the property Stutz saw a move by lords to treat the extra endowment, for which they were allowed to take rent, as not needing to be 4

5 In DOI nos. 158 (952) and 208 (960, clearer); and see index: Alfrikesrod. Maˆcon no. 396. Savigny nos. 6, 7; Cluny, no. 1271. Cf. Savigny no. 139 (974; duo mansi qui ad presbiteratum pertinent). 7 Cluny no. 1326 (it is not clear whether the tithes and offerings here were part of the presbiteratus or additional to it). 8 Pol. St-Remi, App. III, 6 (reading mansi iii in dote. Oblationes . . . dantur presbitero, rather than Gue´rard’s 9 punctuation). Above, p. 439. 10 The Aachen ruling also forbids rent for house, churchyard, etc., and tithes or offerings, but in this context Stutz considers only the one-manse agricultural holding. 6

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granted to the priest at all: instead, the lord could keep it and exploit it directly (later perhaps rationalizing this as intended for the fabric). In other words, what has turned into the priest’s part is simply the minimum endowment of one manse.11 There are difficulties about all this.12 The notion that normally the rent-paying part was seen as meant for fabric, lights, and alms is itself unclear: was the lord meant to pay for these out of the rent, or the priest out of the produce? Any attempt to line up a functional division with paying or not paying rent is unsatisfactory. Independently of this, the theory that the rent-free manse came to be treated as all that the priest need hold sounds plausible, but does not work. The later priest’s portion was often made mainly or wholly out of certain tithes and offerings, overlapping but not identical with what was meant to be rent-free; where it did include land, this was neither limited to a single manse13 nor regularly free of rent. And to envisage Carolingian lords as needing to use their liberty to charge rent as a loophole enabling them to keep surplus endowment in their own hands implies an unlikely degree of practical restriction by the law.14 In the eleventh century, when the notion of a priest’s part was common currency over most of France, we still occasionally learn what it comprised. It must normally have included a house with outbuildings, garden, and orchard, and sometimes, perhaps often, a one-manse agricultural holding (this was the natural allotment of land for a serving priest living at peasant level). In a mideleventh-century surrender of a church to Sainte-Foi, the ‘benefice of the ecclesiastical fief ’ consists of one manse and a vineyard and garden, as well as a share of the burials, ‘which belongs to the priest’.15 But the priest might hold more agricultural land or none, while selected dues and offerings could equally well be called the priest’s ‘fief ’, meaning his pay or means of subsistence; in another donation to Sainte-Foi, ‘the fief that Rainald the priest holds and serves us for’ consisted of burial, baptism, penance, and offerings; the church’s lands and houses were in the lord’s or someone else’s hands.16 The sacerdotalis pars of a church in Brittany was one-third of tithes and of burials, all firstfruits, and altar offerings except at the three great feasts.17 11

Stutz, ‘Kapitel’, 72–7, 80–3. On Hedwig’s recent interpretation see above, pp. 442–3 note 35. We can set aside the suggestion that sometimes the priest’s part was the rent-paying surplus: it turns on taking the beneficium that one priest pays rent for in the Saint-Remi polyptich as equivalent to presbyteratus, etc., whereas it may be a personal benefice, not part of the endowment. 13 See below, at notes 16, 24–5. 14 There is as Stutz admitted no cis-Alpine evidence for lords reserving surplus glebe as such (as distinct from opportunistic encroachments); he fell back on a few 10th- and 11th-c. S. Italian leases reserving specified houses, lands, or vineyard (‘Kapitel’, 81 n. 3). 15 Ste-Foi no. 26 (in this case the priest’s manse was not the original endowment: a mansus ecclesiasticus 16 held by someone else is separately mentioned). Ste-Foi no. 12 (1031–59). 17 Morice, Memoires, I. 437–8 (from Saint-Florent cartulary). 12


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In Touraine about 1100, the fedium sacerdotale of the church of Sepmes was described in pernickety detail after Noyers acquired the church, in terms of entitlements for the priest and his clerk to candles, coins, thirds of certain offerings on specified feast days, fees for those personal services normally recognized as essentially the priest’s,18 and some land ‘belonging to the altar’;19 while in Berry in 1108, the priest’s fief of Neuilly-en-Dun had its own comprehensive pertinence list, beginning with a similar range of specified offerings or fees but continuing in general formulaic terms with ‘tithes, lands, meadows, vineyards . . . ’.20 In Normandy, priests evidently held some land as well as (often) a third of the tithe: monasteries were frequently given churches ‘with the priest’s land’.21 On the other side of France, about 1100, Molesme was given a presbiteratus comprising baptism, burials, offerings, and all the small tithe, with a moiety of the grain tithe and of ‘justice of the atrium’22—not, apparently, any land. Outside France there was similar variety. In Provence, where lay lords occasionally transferred with a church ‘everything that any of the priests had from the hands of our ancestors’, or ‘everything that the priest holds through us’, this could consist of ‘firstfruits, offerings, baptism, and burial’;23 but in 1010 a priest Walpert gave land to the church of Saint-Savournon for whatever priest was serving there to ‘hold and possess it for all time’; and in 1033 the term presbiteratus (rare here) was applied to a church’s two mansi.24 In an isolated instance from Franconia, the clerk who served a church given in 1062 to Fulda had been granted by a former lord one-third of the tithe and the usufruct of four huobi or manses (here seemingly the whole endowment).25 The priest or clerk holding such a living normally owed rent or service for it, and in some regions in the eleventh or twelfth century swore fidelity or did homage.26 In one of the rare records of a lay lord’s actual grant of a living, in late eleventh-century Languedoc, Roger of Muret and his wife grant in fief by carta donationis one-third of a church’s tithe and half its firstfruits and pledges,27 to a clerk and his son-in-law Guarmund. Guarmund (probably destined for priest’s 18 Even these could be seen as ‘given’ by the lord: the mid-12th-c. agreement between Saint-Symphorien and a priest (above, p. 493) relates that the lay lord Humbert ‘had given him’ confessions, blessings of pilgrims’ packs, etc. 19 Noyers no. 298, implausibly attributed to the lay donor’s deathbed declaration (for his donation see ibid no. 72, and index: Sepmes). For terra altaris, associated with or included in the priest’s living, see also 20 St-Pe`re, 208; Uzerche no. 34; Ange´ly nos. 66, 313. Below, note 50. Cf. Vendoˆme no. 80 for Maze´. 21 e.g. ADNorm. nos. 90, 103, 122, 144 (1035, c.1037–45, 1050, 1059). Cf. Orderic Vitalis, HE II. 32–9; translating terra presbiteri here as ‘glebe’ slightly obscures the meaning (see St-Beńigne no. 372 for SaintVigor-le-Grand, Normandy: terra presbiteri is distinguished from terra quae ad ecclesiam pertinet). 22 Molesme no. i. 172. ‘Justice of the atrium’ was probably penalties for offences committed there. 23 St-Victor no. 342 (1056); Le´rins no. 60 (1085–98). 24 St-Victor no. 133 (in a complant that Walpert held from count William I and his wife Adelais: she was Angevin, so perhaps introduced the idea of endowing a priest’s part); ibid. no. 378. 25 26 Fulda no. 762. See below, p. 583 (monasteries’ churches). 27 quadis, probably for guadiis; not self-explanatory.

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orders) is to do homage to Roger (‘become his man by both hands’), pay an entrance fee,28 ‘chant lawfully’, maintain the choir roof, pay synodal dues, faithfully collect the tithe (probably collecting Roger’s two-thirds for him), and provide hospitality for seven knights once a year, with oats for their horses.29

When we learn—precisely or broadly—what a priest held and how, this is usually because a lord has given or sold his church to a monastery while securing the present priest’s life tenure. The charter may name the priest’s part as an element in what is given to a monastery, but give it to take effect after the present priest’s time: in Touraine in mid-eleventh century, ‘so that after the death of the priest now serving it, the monks shall possess his benefice entire’; in Rouergue (after describing ‘the fief that Rainald the priest holds’), ‘all these things . . . we give after the death of Rainald’; in eastern France, two churches ‘with whatever belongs to the presbiteratus’ but not before the present priest leaves them.30 Alternatively (but not substantially different) the whole complex may be given at once, but stipulating that what the priest has had from his old lords he should have from the new: ‘the priest is to hold his part of the church from the abbot and monks as he held it from Walter and Ralph.’31 When viscount Ebalus in the Limousin in 1095 gave to Tulle everything belonging to a church that he had in dominio, stipulating that ‘the priests and baiuli, as they have from me, so they shall have from St Martin and the abbot’,32 this put the priests on a par with lesser church servants (sextons and the like), and may imply something less than tenure for life; but equating their position with that of lay fief-holders may mean rather more.33 The security it carries is explicit when the layman Roald in Brittany gives to Marmoutier, about 1050: whatever I have in dominio by way of church, altar, or tithe; and those things that I do not have in dominio, but that both priests and laity hold from me, I also give to St Martin, so that every man who holds anything from me—tithe, altar, or church—shall hold it from the abbot and monks, unless he is willing to give it up completely.34

This donor, however, goes on to weaken the priests’ position by submitting to the judgment of bishop and abbot ‘the priests’ portions that they have held from me, even though I shall have granted them in the same way as the rest’.35 By contrast, in late eleventh-century Maine, Saint-Vincent du Mans obtained the two 28

29 acaptatio (10s. of Toulouse money). Le´zat no. 1577 (1061–90). Noyers no. 8 (mid-11th c.), giving the junioratus of a church (see below, at notes 71–89); Ste-Foi no. 12 (above, at note 16, but only giving a moiety of Rainald’s fief); cf. ibid. nos. 10, 11 (1031–59); Montier-en-Der no. 64 (donation by Philip bp. of Troyes, 1121 at latest). 31 Couture no. 17 (1082). Noyers no. 254 (c.1097) puts it both ways: the priest’s fief is given ‘after his death’ 32 but meanwhile he ‘is to have it from the abbot and monks’. Tulle no 411. 33 e.g. Ste-Foi no. 37 (1060–2): ‘we give also the fief of the priests and the fiefs of other fevoales.’ 34 35 Morice, Me´moires, I. 383–4. Cf. below, p. 576. 30


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churches of Me´zie`res and Courcemont on terms that publicly secured each priest’s life tenure of the church itself and of his living; and here we learn not what the donor’s charter said but the cartularist’s version of what was done. First, agreement was reached in the donor’s house and all interested parties were paid off.36 At Courcemont the next day (a Sunday) various laymen gathered with the abbot under an elm outside the church; the donor, Robert of Sourdon, took the key of the church from Robert the priest (his godson), handed it to the abbot, told the priest to ask for it humbly from the abbot as from his lord, and begged the abbot to grant the priest the jundragium37 (equivalent, in the immediate context, to presbiterium).38 Earlier that day, much the same thing had been done at Me´zie`res:39 Robert took the key from the priest Hervey, gave it to the abbot, and asked him to grant that Hervey should hold the church for life; this is described as a grant of the presbiterium.40 Both transactions were witnessed by the same group of monks and local notables, eleven in all (among them the smith), with a two-mile walk or ride between the churches. Robert of Sourdon’s position must be looked at later;41 the point here is the securing of life tenure for the priests along with the abbot’s right to invest them. With tenure of part as of the whole, the priest might have a say in the donation of what he held.42 What the priest Natalis could dispose of with his lords’ leave as an entry gift to Saint-Pe`re Chartres is described as ‘the church’ but sounds in detail like a priest’s part.43 In Poitou in 1074, a priest Ralph ‘left the fedus presbiteratus of the churches he held’ to the abbot of Saint-Maixent44 (perhaps already lord of the churches). When about 1090 a priest Gislebert gave to Saint-Cyprien Poitiers ‘the church that he held, and whatever was seen to belong to it, that he had then or, not having, claimed’, there were things that his lords gave that they had in demesne, and there were offerings, baptisms, and burials that tenants of theirs held. Gislebert’s tenure sounds threatened and indeterminate; but whatever he had he could give to the monks and be re-established as their tenant, ‘to hold, rule, and possess it’ as long as he wished, or to become a monk, or to be helped if he fell into poverty.45 In 1105, when Walter of Gorzon gave his moiety of a church in Pe´rigord to Uzerche, he formally ‘expelled’ its priest Peter Gaucelm after compensating him with other possessions, and Peter then quitclaimed the 36

An earlier sale (St-Vincent du Mans no. 651) was perhaps disputed. 38 vindragium in the printed text, but see Niermeyer, s.v. But see below, at notes 72–5. Me´zieres-sous-Ballon (-sur-Ponthouin), dept. Sarthe. 40 41 St-Vincent-du-Mans nos. 654–5 (1080–1102). Below, at notes 77–81. 42 Above, pp. 537–8. A lord’s donation might be meant to take effect as well after the priest’s donation or quitclaim as after his death: e.g. Angers no. 51 (1075), the present priest to hold for life unless he 43 voluntarily gives it up. Above, p. 537 note 55. 44 St-Maixent no. 131 (1074). ‘Holding’ a church need not mean holding all its pertinences, being widely 45 used quite casually for being the serving priest. St-Cyprien nos. 108–9. 37

39

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priest’s fief into the abbot’s hand.46 Sometimes a priest’s consent or participation is more perfunctorily mentioned by the cartularist.47 Often however a donor gave the priest’s part simply as one among the church’s pertinences,48 with neither explicit reservation for the existing priest nor recorded participation by him. The implications of this are not at all clear.49 It could mean that lordship over the priest is transferred (or will be transferred after the donor’s death, if he has reserved his own usufruct of the church), the priest’s continued tenure being separately arranged50 or tacitly assumed: this seems likely when such expressions as ‘the land that the priest holds’ or ‘the alod that Gauzald the priest holds from me’ are used.51 On the other hand it could mean that the monks will be free to do as they like because the priest has died and the living is vacant; or because his tenure has been ended, probably with his consent. Very occasionally the vacancy is stated: ‘ . . . the ecclesiastical benefice, which is free today’;52 or it may be implied by use of a past tense: ‘whatever Ado the priest and Arimar his brother held in that vill’; ‘the whole benefice that Tecelin the clerk held’.53 Churches were given to Sainte-Foi by family groups with ‘the whole priest’s fief as any priest best held it’;54 implying that whatever the priest had is now available for the monks.

There remains the probability that some lay donors could give away the priest’s part unencumbered by a sitting tenant because they had it in their own hands, and this not merely as the short-term consequence of a recent priest’s death. They may have been taking not only such tithes, offerings, and glebe produce as fell outside a recognized priest’s part, but what used to be the priest’s part and was still remembered by that name.55 The lords giving to Saint-Pe`re, Chartres, their 46

Uzerche no. 34 (Saint-Meárd-de-Gorzon. The ‘exchange’ gave Peter half of what Walter had in 47 e.g. St-Aubin no. 345 (1096). another church); cf. ibid. nos. 36, 37 (1090s). 48 There are numerous instances from most of France, mid-10th c. to early 12th, using the same range of related terms (above, p. 560). Variants are honor sacerdotalis, Ste-Foi nos. 76, 501 (1055, 1065); vernacular ‘preveiril’ (presumably from presbiterale), ibid. nos. 78, 473 (1075, 1087–1107). 49 Its inclusion may sometimes be purely conventional. 50 Evrard’s grant of Neuilly-en-Dun to Saint-Sulpice, Bourges (1108; Kersers, ‘Essai’, no. 28), emphasizing donation of the feium presbiterale, is silent about a current priest; but the cartularist notes that Evrard confirmed an ‘agreement that the canons made with the priest’. 51 ADNorm. no. 144 (mid-11th c.); Grenoble no. A. 14 (1069). Cf. St-Victor no. 342 (1056); Gellone nos. 283 (1098), 287 (1100–2); Ste-Foi no. 9 (mid-11th c.); St-Flour no. VI. 22 (c.1080); Talmond nos. 3 (1056), 6 (after 1058). In mid-11th-c. Normandy a small lay lord’s donation of ‘Odo the priest with the church and all the land that he held’ (ADNorm. no. 218A) may reflect a different convention rather than 52 different facts. St-Cyprien no. 473 (1083–1101). 53 St-Andre´-le-Bas app. no. 20 (927); ADNorm. no. 122 (1080). Cf. (all late 11th c.) St-Victor no. 753, Ste-Foi no. 67, St-Cyprien no. 286. 54 Ste-Foi nos. 49, 52, 58, 59 (between 1065 and 1083). Cf. Aniane no. 223 (1026), Ange´ly no. 220 (‘c.1088–9’), Gellone no. 267 (1107). 55 This seems to be implied as early as the 920s, in lay lords’ donations to Vienne reserving usufruct in a church and its presbiteratus (St-Andre´-le-Bas, app. I and II (cathedral charters), nos. 10 , 18 , 20 , 113 ), unless usufruct is used loosely here to cover disposal of the priest’s office and living.


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rights in the church of Dampierre-sous-Brou began with the presbiterium and ‘land belonging to the altar’, only later giving up their lordly rights in tithes and burial dues; the lord who gave the church of Saint-Broin-les-Moines to Molesme in stages began with the presbiteratus, giving the land a year later (and perhaps the great tithe never).56 However, these lords’ power to do this (probably initially wanting the monks to serve the church under their lordship) may for all we know have depended on a priest’s death, as may some other donations where the priest’s part seems to be the chief element. But when at the end of the eleventh century Hugh of Vendeuvre gave the presbiteratus of his church of Fouche`res to Molesme, ‘without any share for himself or any of his heirs’, while reserving for himself half the usufruct of anything else of the church’s that he had, it seems implicit that the presbiteratus was potentially exploitable by the lord (which would squeeze the priest into an even smaller corner).57 The same thing is implied a generation later in Anjou: in a church given to Angers by a knight Salomon and his wife, son, daughter, and brother, ‘the bishop should have the quarter of the presbiteragium that Salomon said he had in his proprietas’, while those holding the other quarters from Salomon should hold them from the bishop.58 There are also donations that without purporting to give the priest’s part include things that had almost certainly come from it into the lord’s use.59 There is however far more evidence for the priest’s part being directly exploited, not by the lord of the church, but by a lay person or family holding it under him (like Salomon’s tenants).60 A striking example of lay possession at these two levels, lordly and priestly, comes from the south-west in the twelfth century. In 1126 one family group, William Unald and his brother and sons, gave up to Saint-Sernin Toulouse ‘whatever we have’ in the church of Saint-Anatole, consisting chiefly of two-thirds of its tithe, and described this as giving up dominium and potestas. Two years later another group, Peter Arnald and his sons, gave up ‘whatever we have’, which was ‘tithes, firstfruits, offerings, and cemetery’—the tithes being probably the one-third left over. Ten years later again, 56 St-Pe`re, 242–3 (before 1102); Molesme no. i. 172 (c.1100; see above, pp. 450, 563). Cf. Couture no. 13 (c.1050): ‘I give St Mary’s church, of which I formerly gave only the presbyterium’ (see below, p. 577). 57 Molesme no. i. 23. Cf. in Saintonge the local lords’ hold on half the ‘priest’s benefice’ at Varaize (Ange`ly no. 101). 58 Angers no. 199 (1136–48). There was a priest (who testified to Salomon’s rights in the choice of priest), but perhaps not holding anything. 59 Fulcand gave his third of the church of Arrou to Saint-Pe`re with his lordly share of Great Feast offerings (before 1080) but also certain burial fees, half the archadium (see index), and ‘land of the altar, which the priests are accustomed to hold’ (St-Pe`re, 208). 60 Or a cleric. The married clerk Huncbert in the castle church of Palluau (Vendeé) gave ‘parcels’ in it to Talmond—thirds and halves of particular offerings and tithes—which dovetail almost exactly with what the castle lord gave (c.1080–1115, Talmond no. 10), like a priest’s part; but going with this was the appointment of serving priests.

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Peter Arnald’s sons got back from the abbot at a small rent one-third of firstfruits, offerings, and burials, and one-ninth of the tithe (being a third of their original third): all this described as a third of the revenues for ‘singing’ or serving in the church.61 It is not stated (as it would be further north) that Peter Arnald holds from William Unald, but the Unald family are signatories to the Arnald donation. Both groups use what was by now a standard expression far beyond this region,62 ‘whatever we possess in the church, justly or unjustly’; William Unald adds the equally standard ‘or anyone through us’. The need for such catch-all phrases reflects the increasingly complex and slippery slicing-up of property rights in churches.63 These can certainly not as a rule be tidily sorted into what was originally lordly and originally priestly, nor even into what was recently so. An intermediate level of lordship might be carved partly out of what the original lord had had (such as parts of feast-day offerings, or hospitality) and partly out of what past priests had had. Nonetheless some laymen—not being lords of the church itself—held what was perceived at the time as the priest’s part, and it made sense to the council of Bourges in 1031 to declare ‘that secular men should not have, over the priests, the ecclesiastical benefices that they call fevi presbiterales’.64 So, in Provence, a layman and his wife in 1045 could give to Saint-Victor the entire presbiteratus of Saint-Savournon, so carefully established for future priests by Walpert’s endowment in 1010;65 and when in 1033 the lords of another church gave the two mansi that constituted its presbiteratus, one of these was held by the priest but the other by a layman put in by a lay fidelis of theirs, who took part in the donation.66 In France, Walter Infans in 1069 gave to Saint-Pe`re, Chartres, iure perpetuo, for his own soul and his wife’s, the presbiterium of a church and everything belonging to that presbiterium ‘in the altar and in offerings, burials, and tithes’, with consent of his lady Matilda (Gouet) ‘from whom he held that benefice’; in Touraine in 1086, two brothers gave to Noyers ‘whatever they had’ in a fedium sacerdotale with half the land belonging to it, the other half being held by the priest; in Poitou in 1093, a knight Guy gave a presbiterale fevum with onethird of the whole parish tithe of lambs, piglets, and wool, ‘all of which he had possessed for a long time, even if unjustly’.67 In the borders of Auvergne and Rouergue around 1100, three brothers gave ‘all that we have from the viscount of 61 St-Sernin, Toulouse nos. 156, 155, 164 (each group was making an entry gift for one of its members). Cf. Gellone no. 448 (1077–1100) for a similar but more complex pattern (here using the term fevum presbiterale for what ‘Deusdedit has given, with his wife and children’). 62 e.g. in the Maˆconnais c.1100 (Cluny no. 3806). It is formulaic, and applicable to any kind of property; not implying doubt about the legitimacy of owning churches or their revenues. 63 Above, pp. 498–501. A good example from Languedoc is Gellone no. 399 (1082). 64 Bourges c. 21 (Mansi, XIX. 505). Cf. Rouen (1074–85) c. 3, ne laici beneficiorum ecclesiae, quantum ad 65 tertiam sacerdotis partem pertinet, participes fiant. St-Victor no. 130, and above, at note 24. 66 67 Ibid. no. 378. St-Pe`re, 211; Noyers no. 135; St-Maixent no. 180.


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Carlat in the church of Salanac, that is, the whole fevum presbiterale and tithes and offerings’; and a little earlier, when the church of Monteils with its priestly fief was given by its lords, six other men and their wives and children gave ‘all that we have in the fief of that church, in burial, in hospitality, in offerings’.68 In Burgundy about the same time a married sister of Robert bishop of Langres gave to Molesme the altar and presbiteratus of the church of Sainte-Colombe-sur-Seine (with consent of her brother the bishop, evidently as the church’s lord).69 Meanwhile a lord’s sale or donation of a priest’s part might be subject to a layman’s life tenure in it: a fiscum presbiteri given to Saint-Maixent in Poitou after the death of Odolric the silversmith; a moiety of a priest’s part given to SaintPe`re, Chartres, after the death of the donor’s uncle.70

Into this scene, in some parts of France, has to be fitted the term junioratus or its semi-vernacular variant jundragium.71 This was defined at the time, in more than one context, as synonymous with the priest’s part: ‘the fevum presbiterale which they call the jundragium’; ‘the beneficium sacerdotis . . . which they call the junioratus’.72 But where the term is most in use—Touraine, Maine, and the Orleánais— its meaning seems rather different. Some time before 1080, Albert vicedominus of Chartres, holding Saint-Lubin in the castle of Brou from the lord of the castle (William Gouet), gave its junioratus to the monks of Saint-Pe`re so that its priests were ‘not to have as lords’ (literally be dominated by: dominari) ‘me or my successors, but to be appointed, dominated, and if they deserve it ejected, by the monks’;73 he was giving lordship over the priest, not use of the priest’s part. When around the same time, in Touraine, Goscelin of Sainte-Maure gave to Noyers ‘whatever he had in the church of Sepmes’, being a moiety of the junioratus and of offerings and other revenues, he expressly excluded those that belonged to the fedium sacerdotale. Also in Touraine, about 1092, the two lords of the church of La Celle Saint-Avant, each having a moiety of everything—junioratus, offerings, storage, burial, and tithes—and each having his own priest, agreed to give Noyers the junioratus, with whatever the priests had from them, and the land of the altar; one of them gave as an entry gift on his sickbed ‘whatever he had in the 68 Ste-Foi no. 545; ibid. no. 59 (1083. Hospitality rights must have crept into the fevum when it ceased to be the priest’s). Cf. no. 58 (similar), and nos. 49 and 52 (family groups giving ‘the whole priestly fief as any priest best held it’, 1065–87). Cf. in the Limousin Uzerche no. 52. 6, 8. 69 Molesme no. i. 103. Cf. ibid., no. i. 48: a layman gives a presbiteratus itself divided among his tenants, on whose several grants his own grant depends. 70 St-Maixent no. 97 (1041–4); St-Pe`re, 485–6. When Bernard of Clairvaux’s uncle Gaudry de Montbard gave a church to Molesme shorn of half its tithes for the lifetime of his two nun daughters (Molesme no i. 218), this could be described as ‘what they held for life of the presbiteratus’ (version B). 71 On the derivation of jundragium see Du Cange, s.v. 72 Marmoutier (Dunois) no. 24 (see Niermeyer on the misreading vindragium, s.v.); Molesme no. i. 25. Cf. Cluny no. 3386; and Paschal II to Ivo bp. of Chartres, 1102 (quoted by Niermeyer: beneficia presbiterorum que 73 apud vos junioratus vocantur). St-Pe`re, 212; see index: St-Lubin.

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junioratus . . . and the whole fief that a priest has from him in the church’.74 Here too it is fairly clear that junioratus means lordship and disposal of what is currently the priest’s part (with whatever revenues that brings), not its possession and use.75 In the cartulary of Saint-Vincent du Mans jundragium is at least once used in much the same way. There is not much internal explanation when Achard gives ‘such part and such claim as I have’ in the church of Souday including the jundragium.76 But the cartularist’s account of how the churches of Courcemont and Me´zie`res were acquired is more helpful. It relates that Robert of Sourdon sold the monks a moiety of each church, and with each ‘the jundragium sacerdotii, of which he himself was the chief lord (capitalis dominus)’.77 Later he nonetheless still ‘held in his hand’ the jundragium of both churches;78 giving this up took the form, already described, of transferring lordship over each priest from himself to the abbot.79 What he ‘held in his hand’ is clearly not the priests’ parts as then constituted, but, again, their lordship and disposal: what the priests possess is the sacerdotium, what their lord possesses is jundragium sacerdotii.80 After his death his elder son Matthew tried to claim the jundragium of both churches, and—pushing down to yet another level—to claim the sacerdotium itself, the priest’s part, after the death of Hervey the priest of Me´zie`res.81 A lord with the junioratus to dispose of seldom or never has that and nothing else. Some are said to have the church itself, or a moiety of it;82 most have at least some lordly rights in it besides the junioratus. Albert of Chartres, for instance, has tithes and two-thirds of the great feast offerings, which he keeps when he gives away his lordship over the priest; Achard keeps one-third of the grain tithe.83 But in many of these transactions a superior lord is involved. Achard’s donation was made in the chamber of his lord William Gouet, in the castle of Montmirail; Robert of Sourdon’s was confirmed in the castle of Ballon, with consent for Courcemont from Walter son of Gradulf ‘by whose benefice he held that church’ and (later) for Me´zie`res from Herbert of La Guierche to whom he owed service for it.84 The 74 Noyers no. 72 (c1078; see above, index: Sepmes); nos. 222–3 (the end of no. 222 is defective but clearly deals with ‘the junioratus of his moiety’). 75 Another charter supporting this is Noyers no. 244 (c.1096). 76 St-Vincent-du-Mans no. 201 (c.1090; for Achard’s retention of tithe see above, p. 496). Cf. ibid. no. 484 (1067–78, donation of a church including jundragium (misread as vindragium: note 72, above)). 77 St-Vincent-du-Mans no. 651 (1068–78). Each moiety otherwise comprised half the grain, wine, and other produce (from demesne, tithes, or both?), half the burial, and one-third of feast day offerings in bread (probably half of a lordly share). What happened to the other moieties, and how Robert came to 78 have jundragium undivided, is obscure. Ibid. no. 654 (1080–1102). 79 Above, at notes 37–41. 80 The editors (St-Vincent, p. xxxvi) take sacerdotium as ‘patronage’; but taking it as ‘the priest’s part’ and jundragium sacerdotii as lordship of it creates fewer difficulties. That the cartularist uses jundragium also for the priest Robert’s tenure, but presbiterium for the priest Hervey’s, may indicate some difference in their positions, perhaps some power of disposal for Robert (the donor Robert’s godson). 81 82 Ibid. nos. 657, 658 (1080–1102). e.g. Robert de Sourdon, and above, at notes 73–4. 83 84 Above, at notes 73, 76. St-Vincent-du-Mans no. 201; ibid. no. 651.


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lower (not necessarily lesser) lord’s tenure rests perhaps on quite recent enfeoffment, not on an ancestor’s foundation of the church; making junioratus a name for the kind of intermediate lordship that was sometimes squeezed in between lord and priest. This might explain the word, as junioratus because held under a senioratus—a seigneurie;85 the idea that it originally meant the allowance of one of the bishop’s subordinate clergy, a junior,86 is unconvincing when it appears so late and in the hands of laymen (or monks by their gift). The junioratus itself may comprehend more than lordship over the priest and his fief. When offerings, tithes, or bits of land were listed as given with the junioratus,87 by implication having been enjoyed by the donor and intended now for the monks, they may sometimes have been seen as included in it (lists of pertinences are often casual and unclear about what is an addition and what an amplification: no doubt this was either obvious or did not matter). There are instances too where a junioratus included or carried with it ‘a house by the church’;88 this might be a one-time priest’s house, if the junioratus had annexed something from the original priest’s part. Tenuous as such a hint may be, it could bring us back after all to the identification of junioratus with priest’s fief, and explain the discrepancy between what the term is said to mean and some of its uses. A layman who had got possession of the priest’s fief and arranged a diminished tenure for his priest would emerge as lord of that reduced holding, with some of the earlier priest’s part in his hand. So, according to context, junioratus and its derivatives may mean a former priest’s fief now in lay hands, or lay lordship and disposal of the present priest’s fief.89 Perhaps it is a late eleventh-century coinage for something only recently and regionally pinpointed. Monks might need such a word, or concept, in their efforts to gather up and piece together the fragmented churches of this region. Much the same thing seems to be meant when Geoffrey of Chailland, about 1075, gave ‘such magisterium as he had over the presbiterium’ of the church of Nuille´-sur-Vicoin, with one-third of various revenues, and a modest landholding to follow at his death. Above him, Gauslin of Anthenaise and his sons confirmed his donation, and themselves had land and seigneurial customs there to give; while under him, Geoffrey the priest could give post obitum everything he had or might acquire, as an entry gift should he wish. Meanwhile another layman, Gaudin of La Volue (a nearby farm), had somehow come by ‘a very good missal, a precious chasuble, a stole, a maniple, a cross, a silver chalice, one cruet, and two candlesticks’, which 85 The two words are not found in this relationship, however. Senioratus for lordship over a church, priest, or lay ‘abbot’ appears in Gascon charters of the period (St-Mont, passim). 86 Niermeyer s.v. junioratus (with examples not actually supporting this meaning). 87 88 e.g. Noyers nos. 233, 244, 290. Ibid. nos. 8, 290. 89 Some combination of these meanings might make sense of the jundragium (reading that for fundragium) that Rahere was to have in a church given to Angers by his wife (mid-11th c., Angers nos. 32, 46).

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he gave along with a house next the church, some vineyard, the tithe of his own fishing in the Mayenne, and all the tithes he had in dominio:90 the wreckage, perhaps, of an earlier priest’s part, fallen into lay hands along with the contents of his church.91 So in much of France by the later eleventh century, the priest is unlikely to hold the whole complex of church land and revenue; he may have a long-established presbiteratus, or a recently reduced one, or none. It may have been eroded piecemeal by the lord of the church for his own use, or more likely for his men; it may have come over the priest’s head to another lord as part of a lordship sliced off for him, or have come in fragments into the hands of lay tenants who exploit most of it directly. But we should not necessarily imagine a series of peasant priests helplessly watching their livelihood being encroached on by lay lords. Sometimes a petty local lord has a namesake as his priest,92 perhaps a godson for whom the priest’s part is an appropriate favour, or one of his own sons or nephews with a priest’s part as his modest but proper portion. In Saintonge about 1066 two laymen giving their rights in a church to Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly reserved a moiety of offerings and burials for the priest son of one of them as long as he served there, and for any priestly brother of his.93 A more substantial lord, in Poitou, could endow a younger son with several priests’ parts: Jordan Froterius in 1096 ‘gave the feoda presbiterorum of all the churches he had to his son Fulk when he offered him to God and the bishop to be made a clerk’; after Jordan’s death Fulk’s mother and brothers gave him to be a monk at Saint-Maixent, his entry gift being the dona— disposal to serving priests—of all these churches.94 The outcome here might be that the churches would be served by impoverished underlings, but the impulse had been to make suitable provision for a son dedicated to God’s service, whether as prospective priest or as monk. A priest wishing to become a monk at SaintFlorent, Saumur, found it worth while to buy from the four knights who held it the sacerdotalis pars of a church in Brittany, to offer as his entry gift.95 As for lay tenants holding the priest’s part, or elements of it, this need not arise from a lord’s deliberate enfeoffment of laymen;96 it could result from the family arrangements of a married priest, leaving lay sons or sons-in-law in possession.97 90

St-Vincent-du-Mans no. 471 (c.1075); nos. 474–5; no. 476 (1068–1077). La Volue was a farm in the 91 commune of Nuille´-sur-Vicoin. See below, at note 99. 92 e.g. a lord Fulchoius gives, as entry gift, a church with tithes; its priest Fulchoius later gives what sounds like a priest’s part, also as entry gift (St-Aubin no. 354). 93 Ange´ly no. 276. Their rights may be a former priest’s part (no. 277 shows the viscounts of Aulnay as 94 lords of the church). St-Maixent no. 191 (1096). 95 ´ Morice, Memoires I. 437–8 (these knights probably had the church itself, not just its priest’s part). Cf. Maˆcon no. 429 (1031–60), a priest ‘gives a vineyard, for the purchase of the presbiteratus of Chardonnay’. 96 But see below, p. 580 (an abbot of Saint-Maixent). 97 Easier to demonstrate for elements of the priest’s portion than for the whole; but see below, pp. 577–8.


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This may be so when lay possession of church revenues goes with a ‘house next the church’. At Colomiers near Toulouse, in the mid-twelfth century, a man known as ‘Arnold of the church’ lived in such a house, which his widow Poncia and her sons gave up to Saint-Sernin along with burials, offerings, and firstfruits (these having been, it seems, hers—perhaps as a priest’s daughter).98 Much earlier, a Burgundian knight who gave to Cluny his inherited moiety of a presbiteratus and his ‘house next the church’ might be a priest’s descendant rather than a lay lord’s; and such a background might explain how, in Maine, Gaudin of La Volue came by things that he may have thought of as his father’s or father-in-law’s gear, as well as tithes and a house.99 Also in Maine, the priest Hervey could set up his daughters with tithes out of his presbiterium;100 and in Saintonge four laymen disputing a tithe belonging to the church of Varaize claimed to ‘have it from their parentela’—they were the grandsons of a former priest.101 The story of this ‘tithe of Peudeugne’,102 at least as the cartularist relates it, well illustrates the intimate proprietary interest, earthy, pious, or both, that the priest and his family might have in his benefice. These men’s grandfather, the priest Andrew, who held a ‘priest’s benefice’ (already diminished) in the church before it came to Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly in 1077,103 finding himself in need of money had pledged this local tithe to a layman. When his wife protested in the best tradition of wifely good counsel, telling him—so she later said—that his church’s property ought not to be dealt with in this fashion, ‘the old man’ promised to redeem it quickly and put things right; but he never did. Widowed, she summoned to her house Ange´ly’s monk at Fontenet who had charge of the church, and with one of her sons (himself a priest) urged him not to let anyone—her own sons, or anyone else—have this tithe, or God would hold him responsible for her husband’s soul. The monk was reputedly delighted to hear this, perhaps not having realized that the tithe in question belonged to Varaize at all. He recovered the tithe (presumably from the old man’s creditors) and held it for fifteen years, before the priest’s grandsons began to dispute it towards the end of the century.104 98 St-Sernin, Toulouse nos. 195, 298, 301–2 (1144, 1157, 1161): repeated surrenders (with recognition of the abbot’s lordship), the last including ‘the house next the church where Arnold lived’; two of the sons retained the office and profits of collecting the grain tithe. 99 Cluny no. 3000 (1049–1109); above, at note 90. 100 Hervey’s sons-in-law gave the tithes to Saint-Vincent eventually, as he had intended (St-Vincent-duMans nos. 659–60). 101 Cf. Grenoble B no. 109 (1100, three sons of a priest approve the donation of tithes that they ‘have by the hand of the knights’ now giving them). 102 A place in the parish of Varaize (Charente-Maritime). 103 Ange´ly no. 96 (1077, Bertrand de Varaize’s donation of the church); no. 101 mentions ‘that part of the priest’s benefice which the priest Andrew retained’. 104 Ange´ly nos. 87 (account of ‘what was done about the tithe’ of Peudeugne, perhaps written c.1100; editorial punctuation has to be largely disregarded), 86 (c.1099; see below, pp. 581–2).

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In any such family group there might be a priest or potential priest; so there were priests whose rights to their limited livings were a family matter and contested (if need be) accordingly. Inevitably we know more about this under monastic lords. These seem more often to have accepted the fact than fought it,105 and we can be fairly sure that lay lords accepted it at least as readily, dealing as they might be with their own kinsmen and in any case seeing heirs’ claims as natural. Meanwhile there are glimpses of an underworld of priests with much less security and even less to live on. It is not that there is any sharp distinction between a ‘priest’s fief ’ and a money wage or allowance in kind: wages or allowances could be part of a fief, or even constitute it. Allowances in grain and hay might be a substitute for either tithes or arable and meadow.106 A priest in a church of SaintMartin des Champs’s had a mestiva—an allowance in grain—paid him out of the monks’ third of tithes (the other two-thirds belonging to a lay lord); another in a church whose presbiteragium a layman gave to Angers had a modiatio out of it, probably in wine or grain.107 When Andrew, the priest of Varaize, was deprived by his lords of half the ‘priest’s benefice’, he received ten sesters of wheat instead.108 This was probably a frequent form of reduced priest’s holding.109 Perhaps the watershed lies between a living—however small—that the priest pays for by some rent or service besides the service of the church,110 and a wage that simply pays him for his work; with a corresponding difference between having some expectation of holding it for life and some say in its destination, and having both wage and work at a lord’s discretion. In tenth-century England king Edgar laid down that anyone having a church without a graveyard (and so without a claim to part of his personal tithe) was to pay his priest what he chose out of the income left him when he had paid tithe to the old minster.111 However, such a priest at that time might be in effect a household chaplain, with whatever menial security and creature comforts that carried; since his church had probably nothing of its own as yet, he is not the hireling of someone else who enjoys all or some of 105

See below, pp. 580–2. e.g. at Maze´ (above, p. 518). Cf. Ange´ly no. 142 (a fedium presbiterale in a lay family’s church, apparently consisting of a wheat allowance). 107 St-Martin-des-Champs no. 176 (1120–4); Angers no. 76 (1105). Cf. Albert of Chartres (above, pp. 495–6). 108 Above, note 103. 109 See above, pp. 494: Archembald intended Noyers to have, after the present priest’s death, all his benefice except one measure of grain which Archembald used to give him annually (so previously part of the benefice, now the whole). 110 e.g.Couture no. 13 (c.1050: the lay donor of a presbiterium will require of the monks the servitium he used to require of the priest); Noyers no. 168 (c.1088: 4s. to a layman holding the junioratus); St-Beńigne no. 360 (1084, a redditus owed from three churches by a chaplain who seems to have only the matricularius’s living). 111 II Edgar I cc. 1. i. 2, 2. i (C&S I. i. no. 27). The ‘nine parts’ out of which the thegn is to pay his priest is what he has left after paying his tithe to the minster. 106


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the church’s revenues. But in Brittany in 1104 a woman Barbota, whose church was her livelihood and her children’s inheritance, used to ‘put in that church whatever chaplain I wished, by the year or by the month’; about the same time, a lay donor keeping life tenure of a small (non-parochial) church on Montmartre for a 10s. rent was to ‘have mass celebrated there two or three times a week’; much later, in Castille, if the abbot of Silos’s hereditary tenant in the church at Olmedo happened to be a layman he was to ‘put in a chaplain’.112 In the nature of things such records will be scarce; such as there are must be the tip of an iceberg, considering the many hirelings that would be needed; by small manorial lords perhaps quite seldom, by the lay heirs of a priest’s benefice rather more often, and by absentee or otherwise non-functioning priests or clerks most often of all.

16.vi. The priest’s living in monks’ churches Most of this chapter has dealt with provision made for serving priests by lay lords and individual clerks, though the evidence usually comes when a church passes into the hands of a monastery. Monasteries’ own arrangements are another matter, and varied greatly; but most frequent, certainly in eleventh-century France and probably widely, was the church served by a secular priest living on part only of its revenue and land, or on an allowance or wage—broadly the same arrangements as are found under lay or clerical lords, either because the needs to be met were much the same or because the monks had taken over a previous lord’s commitments. But monks might differ from other lords in what they wanted, what they could do, and what they thought they ought to do. In new churches the monks could start from scratch, allowing for local custom and the bishop’s probable concern. A church might even be founded on the principle of determining first what the priest was to have and making that the endowment: in 1061 the abbot of St Gall had a church consecrated for his new settlement of Appenzell, having ‘endowed’ it with ‘the prebend’ (or food allowance) ‘of one boy of our cloister’, a clothing allowance, a single mansus, and tithes from a defined area; all this he has ‘established by perpetual right’ to the priest there serving God.1 The idea behind this is unusual; but it was not uncommon for the living to include or consist of a monk’s or novice’s ‘prebend’ when the church was nearby, or to be seen as equivalent though provided out of tithes and glebe produce.2 112

See index: Barbota; St-Martin-des-Champs no. 73 (c.1096); above, p. 543. St Gallen no. 822. 2 In 12th-c. England successive parish priests of Burton had from the monastery the ‘procuratio of one monk’ (probably literally, since they lodged at the abbey gate; below, at notes 45–6). 1

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Most churches however came to monks from other lords, often landing them with a sitting tenant whose rights they confirmed3 (explicitly or by implication), or perhaps defined for the first time after a dispute. Thus the priest Reynard’s claims against Saint-Symphorien of Autun were settled partly by the testimony of those who knew what his lord Humbert had allowed him in the past; as to a house that Reynard claimed, he should have it if he could show that it belonged to the priest’s right; everything else was to be shared equally.4 But if the sitting tenant held the church with all or most of its pertinences, the monks might be allowed to set up his successor with less—a newly created priest’s portion;5 or the donor might intend the monks to be free to make their own arrangements after the present holder’s death.6 And sometimes the donor leaves the priest’s tenure or pay to the monastery’s discretion from the start: a church was given to Sainte-Foi with its fevum presbiterale among the pertinences given, the priest to receive this from the abbot ‘as they shall agree between them’; the priest of a church given to Saint-Flour was to render the monks ‘the service that they wish’.7 Even the Breton Roald who about 1050 gave churches to Marmoutier reserving their priests’ tenure went on to qualify this: ‘about the priests’ portions . . . I consent to their being settled as may be decided between bishop and abbot’.8 Much more explicit, in England in the 1090s, is William de Warenne II’s charter giving or confirming a large number of churches to his father’s foundation of Lewes, provided that the priests serving in them might have ‘all that is reasonably necessary for them for the service of God’, while from the rest the monks would have whatever they could decently have for themselves and the poor.9 This sounds like an elaborated echo of recent legislation in Normandy, where the council of Lillebonne in 1080, after requiring life tenure for the existing priest when a church was given to monks, went on to lay down the principles for subsequent appointments: a future priest might decide to live with the monks, but if not, ‘the abbot shall give him from the goods of the church the wherewithal to live decently and provide properly for the church’s service’; 3

e.g. Vendoˆme for Maze´: ‘we have given him the presbiteratus to hold as he formerly had it’ (Vendoˆme no. 80; see index: Maze´). 4 Above, p. 493. He was to bear all charges except the synodal dues, and to entertain the canons as his lords. 5 e.g. Cluny nos. 4017–18 (1130–2, dioc. Troyes); cf. Siegburg no. 36 (1124), archbishop’s division of rights in the Zu¨lpich castle parish church between the monks (to whom he had given it) and the ‘priest of the altar’. 6 e.g. in Robert bp. of Langres’s gift of an altar to Molesme (1085–1101, Molesme II no. i. 77); in England a layman Wening’s gift of a church to Battle (1091–1125, bishop’s confirmation, Chichester Acta no. 5, with ed. comment 57–8). 7 8 Ste-Foi no. 462 (1061–1108); St-Flour vi. 50–1. Cf. Cluny no. 3183. See index: Roald. 9 Lewes, I. 15–16 (Salzman’s English translation).


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any surplus was for the monastery’s use.10 Here for the first time the lord’s enjoyment of the church’s revenue after providing for the priest is, for monasteries, legitimated (rather than tacitly recognized, as it was for lay lords); and although an abbot who refuses to provide adequately for the priest is to be compelled to do so by the bishop, it is left to the abbot’s judgment in the first instance. Indeed it could be the lay donor himself who, like Warenne, invites the abbot to make such arrangements. But a bishop might already have an important role in resolving or anticipating disputes about the priest’s part, as in the elaborate divisions of offerings set out apparently by Richer archbishop of Sens in 1079 for the churches of Flacy and Senan when they were given to Molesme by lay lords:11 divisions, however, so different from each other as to suggest restatements of the custom of each church rather than rational new arrangements.12 Agreements between monks and priest may thus embody what is understood to be past practice or may represent a deliberate change. And there is one kind of donation which must lead to cutting down the future priest’s portion: that is, where the monastery is put in the place not of the lord but of the former priest.13 About 1050 a layman Guy gives to La Couture a church ‘as Vitalis the priest held it’, and the presbyterium of another church where ‘I Guy will require from the monks what I formerly required from the priest’. In this second church the monks are to ‘put in a priest’, and a new, reduced presbyterium is to be created for him, partly determined by Guy.14 In other such cases—perhaps in Guy’s other church—the monks may be free (possibly even expected) to serve the church themselves;15 but if as is far more likely they appoint a priest, he cannot but be worse off than the priest whose place the monks have taken. As with lay lords, some of what they have may be recognized as coming out of the priest’s portion: in the late eleventh century Robert bishop of Langres allowed Be`ze to have the 10 Mansi, XX. 556 (c. 4); Orderic Vitalis, HE III. 30 (my slightly different translation), with ed. comment, 30 n. 2. 11 Molesme nos. ii. 607, 609 (but see above, p. 493 note 44); cf. no. i. 25 (abp. Richer’s declaration about the presbiteratus of Senan because of complaints, c.1096). 12 For similar settlements under a bishop’s aegis, cf. St-Beńigne no. 360 (1084); and more unusual, Charroux no. 29 (1117). 13 However, a knight Albert’s donation of an old parish church for monks to hold ‘as the clerks who used to serve in it held it’ (1081–95, St-Martin-des-Champs no. 59) probably means that the monks replace the clergy of a collegiate church. 14 Couture no. 13 (c.1050; a rather confused reconstruction, running together earlier and later transactions). Guy having not yet given up lordship of the church can still divide certain feast day offerings; even when he gives the church itself, he arranges for the priest a share of burial fees (not exceeding 4d. a time). 15 As possibly when Robert de Brus and his wife and son gave the church of Middlesborough to Whitby for ‘some monks’ to live there and serve God and St Hilda, ‘able to live generously and adequately from the revenues of that church, the mother church of Whitby always having the surplus’ (c.1120, EYC no. 858). Although ‘serving God and St Hilda’ need not mean exercising any ministry, nothing is said about sparing anything for a secular priest.

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presbiteratus in two churches, the serving priests holding only moieties of what former priests had had; on the other side of France, Sainte-Croix of Poitiers had one-third of a ‘sacerdotal fief ’.16 An even sharper outcome appears when the monks of Montjean in Anjou completed their acquisition of the church of La Pommeraye in 1062 (having already been given the lords’ share of offerings and burials) by buying from the clerk who held it ‘everything belonging to the priest’s fief, whether lands, meadows, vineyards, or whatsoever revenues’: a substantial living, carrying the high rent of 24s., its alienation needing the clerk’s son’s consent. All this now comes to the monks who are obliged only ‘to appoint a priest at an annual wage’.17 Even in the more usual case of the monks taking the lords’ place rather than the clergy’s, they might well leave less for the priest than the former lords did. Housing and provisions might have to be found for a monk or monks as managers; or a church might be allocated to the support of an obedience, leading to a more exacting and organized exploitation. In Saintonge, SaintFlorent’s prior at Tesson had free choice of a priest to minister there, maintained by him ‘as and when he wished’ and having ‘nothing’ in the church, until (about 1095) a priest with the backing of local ‘noble friends’ obtained from the monks a lifelong but still modest allowance.18 In England around 1110, Peterborough’s sacristan had two chapels served by a priest Ansketil who by agreement—and only with the support of friends—was given what in France would be a typical priest’s portion (forty acres, one-third of the tithes of five places, the usual personal offerings), but subject to the substantial census of 10s.19 Furthermore (appropriately enough) the sacristan was to have all the most valuable offerings in wax and two-thirds of the small candles; monks anywhere might want a larger share of offerings in candles and wax than lay lords had taken. But this is trivial compared with monks’ acute need of access to the increasingly valuable tithe. Some time before 1150 a chapel was given to Saint-Pe`re, Chartres, with a half share in its tithes reserved for the priest but seen as a ‘wage’ and not intended to reflect rising prosperity: ‘if the tithe increases so that a priest could be hired for less than half of it, let this be done’;20 while paying a fixed allowance in kind instead would ensure that it was the monks, not their priest, who profited from rising tithe yields.21 So only in such exceptional cases as the replacement of the Breton woman Barbota’s hireling chaplain will the monks’ priest be positively better off, in that 16

Chron. Besuense (PL 162. 943); Ste-Croix no. 4 (after 1104). See index: Montjean. The whole transaction was agreed by the late lord’s widow and son, for a 18 St-Florent Saumur (Chartes saintongeaises) no. 30 (c.1095). consideration. 19 Mon. Angl., I. 390 (1107–14); see index: Anskytil. 20 St-Pe`re, 545 (1116–49; taking merces as ‘wage’ and locari as ‘be hired’). 21 Above, p. 574; see Van de Kieft, ‘E´glise priveé’, 161–2, on the Maze´ agreement. 17


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case with ‘a third of the benefice of the whole church’.22 Most monks, believing themselves not just socially but morally and spiritually superior to the secular clergy, may have thought their own sustenance and almsgiving the more deserving destination for glebe produce, offerings, and above all—as Christ’s poor—of tithes. This was the tradition that Robert of Arbrissel and the first monks of Molesme seem at first to have easily accepted;23 and it is not very surprising (though unusual) to find the bishop of Troyes retaining lordship of the presbiteratus of a church that he and his brother are giving to Molesme, lest the priest’s benefice should be diminished—‘since some monks maltreat their priests’.24 When the principles stated at Lillebonne in 1080 were repeated at Westminster in 1102, this was with much more asperity towards the monks: ‘that monks . . . should not so rob of their revenues the churches given them that the priests serving there suffer penury in things necessary for themselves and their churches.’25 These perceptions were not discounted by the fact that, so far as tithes go, rising populations and prosperity probably meant that much of the yield was genuinely surplus to the routine needs of village churches and their priests. Around 1100 a priest even with a reduced portion might indeed be better off than his predecessor of a century earlier, but only if his living did include a proportion of the parish tithe, and if the parish tithe itself was still reasonably intact. Either or both of these conditions might be absent.26 A priest might of course secure an enhanced portion if he had something to offer in exchange. An agreement in 1056–60 between the monks of Saint-Aubin Angers and a priest Ursio gave him ‘the entire offering’ in a castle church (feast days included), with baptisms and confessions, and domestic buildings round the church; he was to bear the charge of dues to the bishop, to provide lighting for the monk who managed the property, to furnish the church with books, vestments, and other things needed for worship, and—like a well-to-do tenant priest in Spain27—to keep all his movables within the church precincts and leave them all to St Albinus. No other priest was to claim this concession, ‘which is made for him alone’; afterwards the ‘accustomed agreement’ would hold.28 Ursio seems not to pay any rent, probably because of his entrance gift and promised legacy; others pay none perhaps for similar reasons.29 In contrast, it was by offering a 20s. 22

See index: Barbota. Objections of the later Cistercian kind are attributed to Robert by Orderic (HE IV. 312–15) in his imaginative account of the debate before the 1098 secession. 24 Molesme no. i. 144 (1083–1108. The church belonged to the bishopric and had been held by the 25 bishop’s brother by military service). c. 22 (C&SI no. 113 (p. 677). 26 27 See above, pp. 498–500. Above, p. 542. 28 St-Aubin no. 219. The value here set on the offerings, without tithes or much land, must reflect a largely noble or knightly congregation. 29 e.g. the priest of Maze´ (as note 3, above) to whose presbiteratus is added a demi-arpent of vineyard on condition that he develop as much again and leave it all to Vendoˆme, with (in return for confraternity) the rest of his and his wife’s possessions. 23

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rent that a priest in one of Stavelot-Malme´dy’s churches in 1127 got his portion greatly increased: half the tithe instead of one-third, and the whole glebe of seven and a half manses instead of a single rent-free one. His successor however, unable to afford this rent yet wanting the living secured for his foster-son, got the original smaller ‘prebend’ restored for the latter’s benefit.30 These stories point in different ways to another side of the picture. For a monastery as for any lord an established priest’s living was not just a means of hiring a priest but part of the currency of patronage and of property exchanges. Some tenth-century dealings of abbots and monks show such livings being granted (like whole churches) by precarial exchange,31 for instance to a couple and their son in return for four mansi.32 In mid-eleventh-century Provence a layman and his sons, granting joint property in their land clearances to Saint-Victor, received in benefice ‘for all time’, for their service and fidelity, the ‘chaplaincy’ of one of Saint-Victor’s churches; this consisted of one-third of its land and of everything coming to it except horses, mules, and wax; the church was to be served by a celibate chaplain.33 In Poitou in 1074 a fedus presbiteratus given to Saint-Maixent by a priest was soon afterwards granted for life to two brothers, ‘Cathalo’s sons’, at the request of a neighbouring abbot who had obtained the donation for SaintMaixent in the first place.34 In Burgundy about 1120 a priest Boso gave the monks of La Dome`ne ‘everything he held’ from them in a parish church and a chapel, in wedding-fees, firstfruits, offerings, and tithes, perhaps as part of a move to a better or securer living from Saint-Andre´-le-Bas.35 Meanwhile the ad hominem improvement of a priest’s portion could result from his having influential friends and relations.36 Any donor of a church or a priest’s part was in a strong position to secure the latter for a son, nephew, or grandson. When the Breton Barbota gave her church to Saint-Aubin in 1104, the monks not only allowed her daughter Domelina a third of their two-thirds, for life, but also allowed any son that Domelina might have in priest’s orders to hold the chaplaincy with its agreed one-third, and his mother’s share as well, for life.37 When Saint-Pe`re, Chartres, acquired the presbiterium of 30

31 Stavelot-Malme´dy no. 146. See index: precarial exchange. Savigny no. 6 (919). The church itself is represented as given, but probably restricted to the presbiteratus: intra hos fines quicquid ad presbiteratum S. Johannis aspicit. 33 St-Victor no. 423 (1048–61); see Poly, Provence, 147. Nothing is said about the working chaplain’s pay. 34 St-Maixent no. 131 (Kadelo/Cadelo/Cathalo is a recurring name in the vicecomital family of Aulnay). Conversely in 1071 Droho Ladent with his wife and bastard son got from Saint-Maixent allowances for life, confraternity, and burial, by giving up a presbiterale fedum, apparently their inheritance and livelihood (ibid. no. 179). 35 Dome`ne no. 128; he might be the Boso of St-Andre´-le-Bas no. 205 (?1121), being given the ‘chaplaincy’ of two churches in return for fidelity, service, and the expectation of all his acquisitions. 36 Above, at notes 18–19: the priest John at Tesson; Ansketil at Peterborough. 37 Below, pp 638–9. 32


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Saint-Lubin at Brou through the good offices of its priest Vitalis, a moiety of this was reserved after his death for his nephew Guy, ‘provided he is willing to live clerically and be a priest’.38 Not all such concessions committed the clerk to serve the church from which he would draw income: when (about 1081) a man and his four nephews gave to Noyers the junioratus of a church on the borders of Poitou and Touraine, one of the nephews, the clerk Aimeric, was to hold two-thirds of this, with the option of living at Noyers—some fifty miles away—with a monk’s allowance of bread, wine, and fish.39 Such transactions must often have sprung from a comfortable adherence to the mores of the region; and a monastery could afford to take the long view provided it was sure of possession after a life or two. But such assurance was not always possible. Even with no reservation on record a priest’s heirs both lay and clerical might claim his living for a clerk among them, or elements in it for themselves (tithes above all).40 In Auvergne, on the day that Robert of Saint-Urcize and his son Stephen gave the church of Chaudesaigues to Saint-Flour, Gerald the priest and his sons ‘gave the fief of the church’; later, six sons of Bernard Geraldi—probably the priest Gerald’s grandsons—contested this, and one of them, the priest Arnold who had got himself ordained over the diocesan border for this very purpose,41 had eventually to be reinstated in ‘that part of the church that Robert of Saint-Urcize and Stephen had committed to him for life’, to hold it in fidelity to the monks of Saint-Flour as long as he lived, or surrender it should he wish to go on pilgrimage.42 In Maine the abbot of Saint-Vincent du Mans, faced with a layman Gosbert and his nephew claiming a presbiterium by hereditary right, expelled the current priest and replaced him with Gosbert’s brother Fulk; even when the family were induced to renounce their claim (about 1103), Fulk was left in office for life with a moiety of tithes and offerings.43 In Saintonge, when the four lay grandsons of the priest of Varaize began to dispute part of its tithe, the monk in charge could only secure possession of it by allowing them to pledge it to him, as if it were really theirs.44 However, this stood a fair chance of bringing permanent possession to the monks in the end, since the priest’s grandsons 38

St-Pe`re 470–1 (obtained from the lay lords who gave the junioratus, above, p. 569). Noyers no. 82 (c.1081). See above, pp. 572–4. See also Barth, Hildebert, 146–8; Potts, Monastic Revival, 59–60 (but her transcription tertium denarium de sepultura, meaning a third of burial dues, must be correct, not her rendering 41 of denarium as ‘tithe’). Above, p. 520 note 12. 42 St-Flour nos. vi. 12, 16, 18, 20–2, 47–51 (the cartularist’s account, ending 1119). Saint-Flour acquired this church (strictly, one church and a moiety of another) and that of Oradour over many years, at different levels, from interlocking families (see index: Chaudesaigues). 43 St-Vincent-du-Mans no. 132, record of the settlement (made in bp. Hildebert’s court; the reforming abbot William of Marmoutier had pushed to have the improper concession undone). 44 Above, p. 573. Andrew stipulated that if the money were ever repaid the monks would vigorously pursue their right to the tithe (Ange´ly no. 87). For an evidently abandoned plan by two of the young men see no. 108. 39

40

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wanted the money for the journey to Jerusalem; described as having ‘reached military age’, they were probably petty knights. Most of these people from western and southern France, laymen and clerics alike hot in pursuit of any fragment of church revenue that had ever been in the family, seem to belong to the kind of pullulating minor nobility for whom the Crusade was a heaven-sent outlet and opportunity. A different and more solid kind of hereditary claim (to priest’s portions as well as to whole churches) faced monasteries in twelfth-century England, where it was so normal for priests to be married that whatever a priest had his only or eldest son would expect to get; even in limited livings there were settled priestly families drawn probably from the free peasantry or marginalized English gentry. In Staffordshire some time before 1150 the abbot and monks of Burton made a pact with Ailwin the priest, like Pontefract’s with the Darrington chaplain’s son,45 but for an exiguous living and without (on the face of it) the bishop’s involvement. They gave Ailwin four bovates of land and the chaplaincy of the parish church of Burton, with a monk’s allowance for himself, rations for one horse, and lodging at the abbey gate ‘as his father had’, all for a rent of 8s.46 No tithes or offerings are mentioned; but an earlier chaplain Recelbert (probably before Ailwin’s father Ailwin) appears in an extent of 1114–15 with various shares of tithes and altar offerings ‘except candles, which he does not have, but must provide himself ’. Recelbert also had the lodging and allowance, but only four acres. The four bovates later may have been an extra holding rather than glebe; almost at the end of the century, Ailwin’s son Vincent seems not to be a priest nor to hold the chaplaincy, but he still has the four bovates ‘as his father and grandfather held them’;47 this at least he can still inherit when reformers have done their worst. Even in Lotharingia, with monasteries well protected by authoritative bishops, Bruno archbishop of Trier about 1124 approved agreements between Gorze and the ‘vicars’ of two churches, each the son of his predecessor. Both churches, Stenay and Mouzay, had been given to Gorze in 1069 by duke Godfrey; Stenay had been a collegiate church, rich in relics and possessing three dependent churches; the monks had taken the canons’ place, but both here and at Mouzay had sent ‘suitable clerks’ to the archbishop to be given the pastoral care. It was the sons of these first vicars who after their fathers’ deaths ‘rose up in their fathers’ place’ and claimed their benefices, which are elaborately set out.48 The Stenay benefice was comfortable, that at Mouzay meagre (a single mansus and the tithes 45

Above, p. 554. 6s. for the land and 2s. for the chaplaincy (assuming that the provisions about rent are slightly garbled in the English abstracts). 47 Abstracts of charters for Ailwin, in Staffs, Collections (1937), nos. 7 and 24 (see preface by M. Deanesly, pp. liv–lvi); Wrottesley’s partial text of charter for Vincent, ibid., V. i (1884), 43; entry about Recelbert in 48 Shaw, Hist. of Staffordshire, I, app. p. 1. Gorze no. 148 (with nos. 138–9). 46


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from its inhabitants); but the same attitudes seem to govern their vicars’ sons’ claims, and this in newly established livings, after one generation only. Occasionally monks made an effort to secure a priest’s celibacy: Vitalis’s nephew Guy was to ‘live clerically’; Geoffrey the priest of Maze´ (married before his ordination) promised to ‘live chastely’, his wife leaving the parish; their joint confraternity is arranged.49 Otherwise the safeguards available to monks for securing their long-term control were mainly those open to any lord. Pacts or leases regularly insist that the benefice is for life only. Sometimes they record that the priest has sworn fidelity or even done homage, as Geoffrey did for Maze`; at Gorze in 1124 the two vicars’ sons each ‘affirmed the same fidelity’ as his father, after offering the same service and asking for the benefice, much like a lay heir claiming seisin in his father’s fief. Probably promising fidelity at least was usual, whether recorded or not. Here would lie the priest’s chief security in his living as well as the monastery’s chief claim on his service; but for the monastery it was double-edged, tending to create a presumption in favour of a possible heir. The balance between the monastery’s lordship and the priest’s tenure would depend on local custom and conditions; the bishop’s authority might not be in play at all unless there had been a dispute. This would change radically only with the growing role of later twelfth-century bishops in appointing vicars, securing adequate livings for them, and authorizing the monasteries’ enjoyment of the rest of their churches’ revenues. 49

See above, notes 14 and 29.

17 Lay proprietors

We turn now to look at the different classes of church-owners and their diverse interests. The church-owning laity ranged from kings and counts, through lesser lords and knights, to groups of small landowners or townsmen; individual priests and clerks had churches of their own; monasteries and collegiate churches had numerous churches in their lordship, as did bishops within and without their own dioceses. Starting with the laity, we can look first at those (mainly in Francia) who dealt with churches as individual lords, rather than as families or consortia with common property in them; though their property-rights were enmeshed with the rights of others, both lords and kin.

17.i. Rulers, nobles, and knights Rulers’ property in churches can be only lightly illustrated here. Wherever village churches were becoming common, rulers would have them on a large scale. The Agilolfing dukes of Bavaria could endow their new bishoprics with lesser churches by the score and still have plenty for the Carolingians to take over; Charlemagne had estate churches on his fisc in sufficient number to bring their management into the capitulary de villis. Old independent churches too were often in the ruler’s hands: his predecessors’ foundations; some private foundations given him for protection,1 or fallen to him by forfeiture; and most importantly, old baptismal churches serving large primitive parishes, likely by the eighth century to be seen as a ruler’s where they were not the bishop’s. In ninth-century Francia, kings’ dealings with particular churches show both the scale and the deployment of their property in them. Churches on their own, 1

Instances known to me in Francia are all of real monasteries, however (but in 10th-c. Leoń see Hinojosa, Documentos no. 2).

Lay proprietors

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as well as villae with estate churches or chapels, were given for life to royal chaplains and sometimes to lay fideles (in the western kingdom especially), and as dowries to queens.2 They were available too, sometimes in quantity, as endowments for monasteries or great royal chapels. Louis the Younger in 880 confirmed his father’s traditio to the chapel at Frankfurt of property consisting mainly of at least ten churches and chapels, only one or two of them clearly pertinent to an estate (though some may have been estate churches now separated from the fisc they had belonged to).3 In the tenth century the Saxon emperors must have had comparable control of churches on what came to them from the Carolingian fisc, and could sometimes dispose of important parish churches;4 but the greater part of their kingdom, thinly populated and lately converted, had few local churches; and in their own patrimony, estate churches were probably not an important element in their resources before the twelfth century. In the western kingdom, meanwhile, some churches were at the disposal of rulers only because of earlier secularization, or because the ruler held a lay abbacy. And in the general dispersal of Carolingian royal resources, lesser churches were alienated permanently with counties or lay abbacies to counts and other great laymen, among whose successors were the princes of the tenth and eleventh centuries. These princes, like earlier rulers, had churches in quantity for pious donations and political patronage. Many of these must have slipped out of the hands of kings, bishops, or monasteries; but churches themselves had multiplied, and (apart from his own foundations) power or wealth could often secure them for the prince. In 1054 La Trinite´, Vendoˆme, was endowed by Geoffrey Martel count of Anjou and his wife Agnes with some twenty-seven churches and three moieties, some of them bought for the purpose (from a position of strength); some extracted from the bishop, or from Saint-Aubin; one given him by his father Fulk who had it from the viscount of Vendoˆme as the price of the bishopric of Angers for the viscount’s son.5 Another, a suburban church in Angers, Geoffrey seems simply to have removed from the cathedral, in compensation remitting to the canons certain customs, and requiring the monks to carry out almsgiving obligations laid down by the founder, a priest Gerard;

2

e.g. below, pp. 745–6; e.g. ACII nos. 10, 16, 24, 35, 90, 445; for a queen’s dowry, ACIII no. 51 (907). DLJ no. 18. Cf. ACII no. 425 (877, for Compie`gne). 4 e.g. DOI nos. 37 (941, plebeia ecclesia to Magdeburg), 119 (950, baptismal church to St Gall). Others were clearly important, self-sufficient churches, e.g. ibid. no. 10 (937, Neunkirchen to Worms). See Pfleger, ‘Entstehung’, 70–2. 5 Vendoˆme no. 107; ibid. nos. 22, 69, and Guillot, Comte, II no. C.116; Vendoˆme no. 44 (see Fanning, Acts no. 1). Cf. Geoffrey Martel’s acquisition of Saint-Cle´ment, Craon, for Vendoˆme (Vendoˆme nos. 96–8, 30); see Southern, Making, 148–50; Guillot, Comte, I. 335–8. 3

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nonetheless overriding by princely power both Gerard’s intentions and the cathedral’s rights.6 William the Conqueror, enjoying princely power at home, and inheriting from the English kings much of their traditional authority while roughly doubling their already extensive landowning, may be assumed to have had numerous fairly new, small manorial churches in England and appears in Domesday Book as immediate lord of most of the old and rich ones: churches whose endowments made them substantial estates in themselves, often old minsters with extensive lands besides their remaining parochial rights in surrounding villages. The Norman kings dealt with such churches in ways that would have been familiar to the Carolingians, occasionally keeping the wealth of a rich church in their own hands for a time,7 but normally giving them for life to great pluralist clerks of their court8 (continuing the Confessor’s practice, and anticipating the Angevin kings’ method of supporting their civil servants), or in perpetuity to monasteries at home or in England.9 By contrast the kings of Burgundy at the beginning of the eleventh century seem barely princely. King Conrad in 968 had been able in theory to restore possessions to Moutier-Grandval which included seventeen chapels and a church, mostly pertinences of estates; but it is not clear that these evidently secularized possessions were actually in the king’s hands to restore.10 The kings’ main resource was the lay abbacy of Saint-Maurice, Agaune; this gave them the disposal of lesser churches, but it may be significant that what Rudolph III gave to a miles in 999 was not the whole church that had been asked for, but half its tithes and all its offerings and endowments.11 Later, Rudolph gave to a great noblewoman, with power to give them permanently (it seems) to whomever she wished, moieties of two churches in Vaucluse which he had given only in benefice to her father Lambert and he to her as her marriage portion.12 For Rudolph the pull between the demands of patronage and his own economic need may have been such that he retained moieties of the tithes or the churches in his own hands; richer princes usually dealt in entire churches. There can be no sharp line between princes and other great nobles as lords of churches, least of all perhaps in France where many public rights were scattered among the lords of castles and transformed into ‘customs’—or, in the south, 6 Gerard had given it to the cathedral, as the count’s charter blandly records, fearing that his work might be brought to nothing (1049, Vendoˆme no. 92); the cathedral recovered it by 1108 (ibid. no. 419). 7 e.g. Leominster, appearing in Domesday (DB i. 180a, Herefs.) as a great royal manor or perhaps a hundred, only its name (Leofminstre) denoting it a church; in the king’s hands at the time, as formerly in 8 Queen Edith’s: out of 80 hides he had 60 in demesne. See Lennard, England, 317–18. 9 Henry I gave Leominster to his new monastery at Reading. 10 11 DRud. no. 44 (see above, pp. 285–6). Ibid. no. 79 (996/7). 12 Ibid. no. 119 (1028). Both these are diplomatic curiosities (ed. 225, 289), no. 119 evidently composed by the lay recipient’s scribe.

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treated by lesser counts and viscounts as private inheritances, even though the idea of public authority survived. In the valley of the Garonne in 1049 William, son of a count Arnald, with his son Peter, wanting to establish a Cluniac priory at Moirax, endowed it predominantly with churches in the Agenais and further west: six whole churches, with a moiety and a quarter of two others. He gave the existing church at Moirax with its parish, firstfruits, tithes, ‘and everything else, whatever my father Arnald was seen to have there and we have up to now’; other churches were given ‘as Arnald held it’ (the same formula as for lands: ‘of Salenis as much as we have there, as Arnald held it or any living person by him’). Of the church of Saint-Loubert he explained that his father ‘had it as his own’ and free of any claim on it when he pledged it to another man for 100s., to revert to himself or William’s sons when the money was repaid; the quarter-church of Leyrac he had given to his godson, a deacon, in benefice for life.13 All this endowment is described as giving to abbot Hugh of Cluny ‘something of our inheritance, which came to us by right’.14 On a similar scale in the north-west, in 1053, William de la Ferte´-Mace´ gave to Saint-Julien of Tours five whole churches in Maine and Normandy, likewise with pastoral revenues, but also with episcopal customs such as synod dues which he held in benefice from the bishops of Seéz and of le Mans.15 Only in this last respect is his hold on churches any more thorough than William son of Arnald’s in the south.16 Lords at this level of wealth and power, with extensive lands and several churches besides any little churches pertinent to their estates, might have inherited them from ancestors who had received them as benefices from earlier rulers (often the secularized property of great churches).17 Further down the scale were lesser nobles, lords of single village churches, or of two or three18 (one probably mattering to them for memoria); merging into mere knights—that is, such knights as had land. These too, as immediate lords of local churches, might or might not be descendants or natural heirs of the founders, since by the eleventh century, from Aquitaine northwards, they usually held their churches under the aegis of a greater lord. They might, under a recently consolidated lordship, have inherited land on which an independent ancestor had built the church; or they might have been granted land on which they then built it; but they might have been granted the church itself (or a slice of it such as a junioratus),19 or land that already included the church. 13

Conjecturally reading quoad viveret for quo adiuverat in the printed text. 15 Cluny no. 2978. St-Julien, Tours no. 24 ¼ ADNorm. no. 131 (done in the duke’s presence). 16 On private holders of bishops’ customs see below, pp. 713–16. 17 See Duby, Socie´te´, 56–8 on the Be´rards, Garoux, and Josserans (ibid. 102, 336, 506 on their stock of churches). In Normandy see the numerous churches given (or first option promised) to Saint-E´vroul by both founder-families, Grandmesnil and Giroie (Orderic, HE II. 32–9). 18 See Beech on lesser lords in the Gaˆtine of Poitou (A Rural Society, 82–4). 19 See index: jundragium. 14

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Such a lord gave or sold his church with his lord’s consent (his lord, that is, in respect of that church—loosely or tightly).20 Thus late in the eleventh century, Gosbert of Bar-sur-Seine gave a church to Molesme with the approval (laudatio) of Walter count of Brienne and his sons, ‘from whom he held it in fief ’; in 1059 Odo son of Wazo, having bought a church back from a knight who had held it from him, gave it to Saint-Pe`re, Chartres, with the consent of his lady Matilda and her son William, of the substantial Gouet family, ‘from whom I possess it’; Walter son of Flahaut’s donation of part of a church to Saint-Martin-des-Champs in 1079 was conceded by Teudo Caput Ferri ‘because Walter held it from him’, and by a canon of Chartres ‘because Teudo held it from him’.21 In Poitou in 1041 a ‘nobleman’ Walter gave a church to Saint-Maixent (as compensation for damage caused by fighting over the monastery’s lands) with the consent of Maingot lord of the castle of Melle ‘who gave that church to Walter his fidelis’.22 None of these instances leaves it at all in doubt that the donor in some degree owes his possession of the church to the lord who consents.23 Sometimes the superior lord made the donation, the lord at the lower level consenting to this (his consent could be crucial and expensive),24 or making his own donation before, after, or alongside his lord’s; so when William son of William Giroie gave to Saint-Evroul seven churches ‘that he had in his potestas’, they were given also by seven named men, ‘the lords of those churches’.25 None of this need imply the ‘formal division of rights . . . as between lord and tenant’ that Susan Reynolds rightly rejects in this context,26 but rather coexisting rights, variously balanced, and often with obscure or vague histories.27 20 The lord’s consent is normally recorded in the donor’s charter, but sometimes in a separate charter of his own (early examples, 965 and 986, St-Pe`re, 55–6 and 72–3, both from Walter count of Dreux but quite different); often however we have only a cartularist’s summary, or narrative of how the church was acquired. 21 Molesme no. i. 104; St-Pe`re, 163–4 (cf. ibid. 192–3, 242–3, 504, all similarly involving the Gouets; ibid. 151–2, 232–4); St-Martin-des-Champs no. 20. Cf. ibid. nos. 25, 26; Bourbonnais nos. 6. v, vi; St-Julien, Tours 22 no. 51. St-Maixent no. 95. 23 Susan Reynolds, in her critique of the interpretation of ‘consents’ (Fiefs, 146–52), points out that the often-used phrases ‘of whose fief it is’, ‘of whose casamentum it is’, do not actually say that ‘it’ (the donated property) is itself a fief or casamentum (ibid. 149–50). Nonetheless the phrases may mean that it was acquired by his act of casamentum or fief-granting (Niermeyer, sense 1), or possibly that it came out of his property. And other phrases are less ambiguous, e.g. ‘from whom we hold that church feodaliter’, ‘from whom it proceeded’, ‘whose was the dominatio of that basilica, for it proceeded from them’ (Ange´ly nos. 213, 220, 283); or from the lord’s side, William of Sumbone confirming his late fidelis Sulpicius’s gift of a church that was his ‘benefice that he held from me’ (1081, St-Pe`re, 232–4). It is particularly difficult to see casamentum (deriving from ‘housing’) as referring to territory under someone’s governmental power or territorial lordship (as 24 Reynolds, Fiefs, 150 on the lords of Craon). See below, p. 749 at note 76. 25 Orderic, HE II. 34–7. Cf. St-Aubin no. 327 (c.1100); Marmoutier (Vendoˆmois) no. 13 (c. 1037), with no. 14. The chronology is often unclear, e.g. in Ste-Foi nos. 8, 9; St-Cyprien nos. 395–6. 26 Fiefs, 152; seeing this as the stark alternative to her view that the lord’s power made it merely sensible to secure his consent. This must often have been so (see ibid. 146–7); but some consenting lords were hardly (if at all) superior to the donor (below, at note 31); consent by ‘relatively insignificant men’ is not peculiar to late 10th-c. Cluny (ibid. 149). 27 Ibid. 158–9. More broadly, the role of lords great and small is an aspect of the ‘hie´rarchisation’ of the nobility (Le Jan, Famille, 141–53).

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Tiers of lay lordship could be elaborate, descending to holdings that consisted of fractions of churches, or fragmented pertinences of churches (tithes above all), or priests’ portions. In the duchy of Burgundy, the cartularist of Paray-le-Monial narrates with what may be deceptive clarity and briskness the acquisition in 1080 of a church held from the count of Chalon by the castellan Letbald of Digoine, from him by Hugh Letbald (a nephew?), from Hugh by Seguin, and from Seguin by Joceran of Fautrie`res, while several others, unnamed, had shares. ‘All these knights and others had divided the goods of the church among themselves at will’—suggesting both that the lords at every level had direct access to some of the land or revenues, and that at the lower levels there were family partitions of tithes and other pertinences—until they were all persuaded after various meetings to give up the church to Paray-le-Monial ‘for their souls’. First Letbald, ‘to whom the church mainly belonged’, gave it with its cemetery and priest’s portion, tithes, offerings, burial, and baptism, along with whatever of its tithes or property the monks could recover from anyone. Then Hugh offered the church and all its pertinences ‘in the same way’, adding that whatever the future ‘dean’ of the place could recover by way of lands or customs, he could have—all this, with some other property, given as an entry gift for his brother. Then lord Seguin gave ‘everything that he himself held in that church, or others held from him’; and Joceran similarly gave ‘all that he had in that church from his lord’. Besides these, lord Odilo Mieroz and his sons ‘who had some part in the church’ gave it; and the lords Geoffrey of Semur and Dalmatius of Bourbon each approved (laudavit) certain donations, by Seguin and Hugh respectively, of things that were of his property (ex suo iure). Finally all these donations were approved and confirmed by lord Letbald (the first donor in the chain) ‘by his own voice and hand’, putting the charters on the altar with a text of the Gospels. Then come the counter-gifts: 100s. for Letbald, 50s. for his wife and son, one good mule for Seguin, £4 in denarii for Joceran, 10s. for Odilo Mieroz.28 As an afterthought, a member of Letbald’s household ‘who had some little part (particula) in the church’ approved with his sons and received 7s.; and a brother of Joceran’s approved it all.29 No doubt some rungs of this ladder were shaky or notional, devised to account for and eliminate a doubtful claim. Even so, it belongs to a different scene from the densely complicated tenures of western France. In the Maˆconnais recognizable fiefs were (so far) few and small, created mainly to fix a relationship with 28 Hugh Letbald’s reward, a place for his son, had already been specified. The only lord not apparently involved in the donation is the count at the top of the ladder. 29 Paray-le-Monial no. 167 (church of Saint-Be´rain-sous-Sanvignes). Cf. from different regions St-Martindes-Champs nos. 39, 40 (c.1089); Vendoˆme no. 116, with 118 (1057); St-Julien, Tours no. 18 (1047); in the Limousin, Uzerche nos. 44, 45, and esp. 52 (c.1039).

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a client who has other lands of his own, each lord inclining to create fiefs out of what he himself holds as a fief.30 But east or west, the interest of the (usually) minor nobles and knights with the most direct hold on a church’s lands, or better still a cut out of its tithes, may not be very different. In some cases ‘holding from’ may have meant little more than a way of dealing with conflicting or overlapping claims; and real or notional, it could be between equals or near-equals,31 some of them with claims in several churches. We seldom hear of an unconsulted lord challenging a donation; though when in 1064 the knight Tetbald of Vendoˆme quitclaimed his junioratus at Naveil to Marmoutiers, Hamelin of Langeais claimed that this could not be done without his authorization because the church was ‘of his casamentum’ and any right that Tetbald had in it he had ‘in fief’ from him, Hamelin.32 These close-packed and often contested layers of lordship in churches, and the associated fragmentation of rights in them, must have been intensified in the whole region from Maine to Poitou by the warfare and politicking of successive counts of Anjou, creating a kind of vortex; while problems were sometimes resolved by these counts’ patronage of Saint-Aubin, or more conspicuously of Vendoˆme. Thus the church of Les Pins had been held in fief from Salomon of Lavardin by a knight Walter juvenis, who had given it with his daughter as a marriage portion; but Salomon took it away from Walter for fighting on bishop Gervase’s side against count Geoffrey Martel, Salomon’s lord. Later, Salomon gave it with his own daughter Eva to Aimeric of Alluyes; this couple sold it to countess Agnes, who gave it to Vendoˆme. Some time later Walter’s son-in-law surfaced, having like Walter been a partisan of the bishop’s, now returning to allegiance to the count; he hopefully reclaimed the church and land as his own (sui iuris), saying he had the count’s support in this; count Geoffrey denied any such promise, but wanting to secure his service, bought him off with another benefice.33 Such pressures were obviously not peculiar to this part of France, nor operating only in the dealings of lay princes. Many lay lords in France and Flanders held their churches in benefice from bishops or abbots, who had given them (or allowed them to be taken) because themselves in need of loyalty and service, or with relations to provide for, or under pressure from princes.34 In these cases, 30

Duby, Socie´te´, 235–7 (citing Saint-Be´rain-sous-Sanvignes). e.g. in Poitou, Ranulf of Bullio (one of several donors to Talmond with the founder’s successor Kadelo’s consent) gave a half-share in one church and consented to another man’s grant of a half-share in another, ‘held from’ Ranulf (Talmond no. 6). 32 Marmoutier (Vendoˆmois) no. 4 (c.1064), with the whole series nos. 1–12 (no. 1 shows that Tetbald’s father-in-law Robert of Marcigny held the church from Hamelin’s father; for family trees see White, 33 Custom, 62–3, 66–7). Vendoˆme nos. 62–4; Guillot, Comte, II on C. 106 (1046–7). 34 e.g. early 11th-c. bps. of Tournai (Hist. Torn., c. 107, SS XIV. 338; see Ganshof, Feudalism, 102). 31

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because the tenure’s origin in an ecclesiastical lord’s grant is more regularly stated, we can see more clearly how quickly hereditary claims were established and how difficult these were to resist.35 A tenant might give or sell his church, with his ecclesiastical lord’s consent;36 or might return it—as a pious donation— to the church from whom he held it. So in the Limousin about 1062 the rich parish church of Favars, formerly in Beaulieu’s control, was given back by Engelsiana (whose father had held it ‘at fief ’ from the abbot and who now herself so held it), along with her young great-nephews whose late father Guy of Lastours had so wished on his deathbed; and separately (perhaps simultaneously) by Archembald of Lastours, who had it ‘at fief ’ from the late Guy and Engelsiana, and called it ‘my church of Favars’.37 Alongside any superior lord’s interest or in its absence—and usually more acute— was the interest of heirs and perhaps of other kinsmen, whose consent to donations of property, recorded in the donors’ charters or in notices of the transaction, was normal in much of France in the eleventh century.38 Stephen White has argued persuasively that this laudatio parentum—relations’ approval— was required not by any legal rule, nor yet merely by prudence, but by norms of proper behaviour among kin: as much an obligation of his kin towards the donor as of him to them, and of all of them towards any ancestor for whose soul the gift was made. He shows also that the lists of consenting relations cannot be explained by or used to construct rules of inheritance or patterns of family structure, but varied (apart from the essential close kin) with circumstances and individual choice.39 Yet it was clearly important enough for a lot of trouble to be taken to obtain and record it (a boy, for instance, sought out and found in a named meadow).40 All this applies as much to donations of churches as of land, and for the same reasons: for the monks, chiefly the difficulty otherwise of securing the permanence of the gift. The charter by which a knight Albert gave an old parish church to Saint-Martin-des-Champs puts this most explicitly: it was granted by ‘those 35

e.g. from opposite sides of France, Montier-en-Der nos. 1, 18, 20, 44 (three parish churches and their dependent churches claimed by the Joinvilles, early to mid-11th c.); in Poitou, St-Maixent no. 235 (1110: Goscelin de Lezay like his father is St Maxentius’s ‘man’ for a ‘great benefice’ including a church and tithe); ibid. nos. 284–5 (?1117–27), Hugh lord of Lusignan asserts his and his ancestors’ tenure of the churches of Jazeneuil ‘in fief from the abbot’ and ‘ex casamento of St Maxentius’, supporting SaintMaixent’s title. 36 e.g. Marmoutier (Vendoˆmois) no. 1 (1007–29); Vendoˆme no. 69 (1040s); Cluny no. 3386 (1062–96). In some cases it may really be the superior, ecclesiastical lord’s initiative. 37 Beaulieu no. 14 (Archembald’s charter), ‘1062–72’ (must be nearer to 1062: see below, at note 46). 38 See Duby, Socie´te´, 66–7, 213–16, 221–3; for Norman England see Hudson, Land, 173–97, 202–7. 39 White, Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to Saints, esp. 86–176. But for the influence of great monasteries on the pattern (as well as the record) of consent see P. Stafford, ‘La Mutation Familiale’, 110–13. 40 St-Vincent-du-Mans no. 481 (late 11th c.). See White, op. cit., 44–5.

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who might be able to challenge it’ (calumpniare), namely Albert’s two daughters (with the husband of one of them) ‘to whom it belonged by hereditary right’, and two others unexplained, as well as Burchard of Montmorency ‘of whose benefice it was’.41 It would seem nonetheless theoretically possible that alienating a church required approval from a wider group than usual, since laudatio had other dimensions besides that of security; but (without having made any count) the groups consenting seem much as White found them for donations generally in the records of his five major western monasteries.42 Approval for grants of churches by wives (unless counting as a donor) and sons, or sons and daughters, or daughters and their husbands, or brothers with their sons, is too commonplace to need illustrating. Essential as it was, it did not necessarily work—or rather, it was often not final—for churches any more than for other property: heirs or kinsmen who consented to a donation, or the heirs of those who had done so, might yet ignore or undermine it, or more interestingly (because sometimes ambivalent) challenge it. In 1076 the sons of Elias Rufus formally confirmed their father’s donation of the church of Aujac and half of its tithes to Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly, each on condition that the others did the same; but after their father’s death they took the church back, claiming that their father gave it ‘unwillingly’ and that they had consented under duress.43 More devious, exploiting the need for the lord’s consent in order to invalidate his own, was the knight Winebert who confirmed his brother’s deathbed donation of a church to Saint-Pe`re, Chartres, but some years later sold part of the tithe to a woman—excusing himself by invoking the lord of whom he said the tithe was held: ‘it belonged to Wazo’s fief, and without his lord’s consent his own was worthless’ (his consent, that is, to his brother’s gift).44 Elias Rufus’s sons may have been hard pressed without the church of Aujac; and no doubt the knight Winebert wanted cash. But consenting heirs’ later claims or challenges must often have been made without hope or intention of recovering lordship of the church, or even some of its tithes or land, but for the sake of whatever the monks would pay for security, whether money and goods, confraternity and prayers, or both. And underlying this, they may hope to share the rewards of the original donation and, as Barbara Rosenwein has proposed, maintain their place in a social network of never quite completed 41 St-Martin-des-Champs no. 59 (1081–95. Albert gave the church, not just the altar as in the editor’s heading). 42 White, Custom, 58–61, 87–117 (he is not separately concerned with donations of churches). 43 Ange´ly nos. 112–13. Cf. Marmoutier (Vendoˆmois) no. 3 (among the sequence of claims and settlements about Naveil), Robert of Marcilly’s son Arnulf ‘made calumnia unjustly about the church of Naveil, which his father sold to St Martin with his consent’; St-Aubin no. 160 (1056–60); Angers nos. 66, 72 (1096, 1104). 44 St-Pe`re, 232–5 (1081, and before 1102). The lord who consented to the original donation was William de Sumbone (above, in note 23), receiving handsome counter-gifts; Wazo now had to be similarly compensated. For Wazo see Che´deville, Chartres, 270–1.

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gift-exchange.45 So some challenges may have been amicable, as perhaps when the young Limousin knights, great-nephews of the heiress Engelsiana, repudiated but now renewed (for 200s. and their father’s memoria) what they had done as ‘very small boys’.46 But many disputes must have been real and bitter, to judge by episodes of prolonged resistance or evasion and repetitive quitclaims (not just each rising generation securing its place in the network) and by the size of their eventual or accumulated pay-offs.47 When trouble came from possible heirs overlooked in the original transaction, they may be making a straightforward claim to the property;48 or they may be chiefly concerned to be in on the gift-exchange (while having been overlooked would itself be a grievance in need of remedy).49 It is seldom easy to see which is dominant. In Maine, some time before 1040, Waldin ‘the old’ of Malicorne had been given the nearby church of Artheze´ by Hamelin of Chaˆteau-du-Loir who had it from count Fulk; Waldin in turn had given it to his son-in-law; when Hamelin’s son bishop Gervase was induced by count Geoffrey to give it up to Saint-Aubin Angers, Waldin as tenant consented to this, compensated his son-inlaw, and quitclaimed the church to the bishop. When the count and the bishop were dead, however, the next lord of Malicorne, Waldin II, reclaimed the church and had to be bought off with countergifts that were more than token: 105s., a good mule, a good horse, and some land. Later still, exploiting rather than undoing his father’s and grandfather’s consent, Waldin III tried to compel the monks to acknowledge that they held their church at Artheze´ from him, because they had it by his ancestors’ alms; but was finally persuaded ‘that he lost nothing before God if what he thought were his and his relations’ alms were said to be the alms of others’ (in the monks’ view it had been given them from the royal fisc before count Fulk laid hands on it).50 White takes the monks’ account as reflecting Waldin’s true concern: he wants to maintain his family’s link with the land that symbolizes their link with God.51 This concern is not discredited by his having broken into the monks’ buildings, seized their oxen, and occupied their lands; but neither is it demonstrated. The theatrical or ritual meaning of violence could lie in asserting the rightness of a claim to property; in the final settlement he 45

To be the Neighbor of St Peter; see below, p. 756 in notes 14, 19. Beaulieu no. 15 (1073–6); see above, at note 37. 47 e.g. below, pp. 638, 760–1. Rosenwein’s generally persuasive view (based on donations to Cluny) probably underestimates the real resentments of some disappointed heirs. 48 e.g. Molesme nos. ii. 607 (1079), i. 106 (?early 12th c.): Herbert Guifel lord of La Ferte´-Loupie`re had given the church of Flacy with enlarged atrium and additional endowment, his wife and son consenting but not his daughter; after his death his son-in-law hoc totum calumpniari volebat (objecting especially to 49 the increase). See White, Custom, 165–6. 50 St-Aubin nos. 327, 325 (c.1100; 1102). 51 Custom, 168–9. It was actually land that Hamelin had given to Waldin III’s grandfather (perhaps that was ancient enough). 46

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secured all the land he had seized from Saint-Aubin during the quarrel. And it gave him cover for economic gains: he had seized vineyards given by his father and made the monks buy them back, to provide money for fortifying his castle against the Normans. In Saintonge, a church given by a certain Goscelin to Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly with his lord’s expensive collaboration (about 1081) was subject to multiple challenges over the next few years. One man said ‘it had been given to him before it was given to St John’, with his wife who was Goscelin’s niece (the couple were now allowed to hold a moiety of its tithe and land ‘feudally’ from the abbot); another had claimed a moiety on similar grounds, and now gave it, with the agreement of the uncle who had given it to his wife ‘saying that the church had come to him by right’; another woman had demanded a share in it ‘as her alod’ and now gave it, with her nephew who granted his hereditary share after his death; a little later a pair of brothers claimed a moiety of the tithe. Some of these may have been claiming tenure at a level below the donor’s; all were variously rewarded with societas, burial, or money.52 In Poitou, the son-in-law of one of several men who in 1094 gave a church to Saint-Maixent claimed a quarter share in it almost forty years later, and persisted in this despite defeat in the bishop’s court; finally, along with his four sons (and later their mother), surrendering it on terms that effectively made it an entry gift for one son.53 This church had been given to Saint-Maixent in 1094 at several levels: by the bishop,54 by two laymen with the five sons of one of them and their mother, by two brothers (with their sons) who held from the others in fief, and several other men and women, all described as ecclesiae donatores or datores. Earlier, the church of Perignac was similarly given to Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly by large family groups at two or more levels.55 With these churches in Aquitaine we are on the fringe of a different scene, where brothers and cousins, sometimes in large numbers, along with their wives and children, may be co-heirs or partners in family property kept undivided and all take part in donating what is already theirs, rather than consenting to a father’s or uncle’s or older brother’s act because they have an interest. The two things—participating in a donation and approving it—may not be very different;56 both are rewarded with counter-gifts, material and spiritual; which of the two was done may not have greatly mattered. But since they were on the whole differently described,57 they were presumably perceived as different. 52

Ange´ly nos. 69–73 (c.1084 to c.1100). St-Maixent nos. 182 (1094) and 292 (1131) (Saint-Symphorien at Romans. I take ‘Jodoin’ in no. 292 as 54 ‘Gelduin’ in no. 182). On the bishop’s role by now see below, pp. 866–7. 55 Ange´ly no. 265, with nos. 263–4 (c.1069 to c.1073). Cf. Bourbonnais nos. 6. i–iii (1078–93). 56 See White, Custom, 46–7, 160–1. 57 Sometimes the vocabulary used is flexible, combining consent and participation (as concedere can); or the record may waver between singular and plural first-persons. 53

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Participation was natural where some properties—such as churches—were conveniently kept as common family property (between brothers at least). What needs explaining is the other practice, commoner in the north, of donation by a single lord with his close relations’ consent. It is tempting to explain this tidily as the outcome of primogeniture, itself often seen as spreading with increasing prevalence of fiefs in the north rather than the more ‘alodial’ south. It is probably true that a fief or any land dependent on a lord’s grant (recent enough to be remembered) was rather more likely to go to one brother or son at a time (not necessarily by strict primogeniture);58 and probably true also that in eleventh-century France there was more land so held in the north than the south. Nonetheless there was plenty of partible inheritance in the north, and plenty of alodial land. Perhaps the drafting of charters in the north reflected family structures in which the eldest brother took the lead as head of the family, not as sole heir; in other cases the single donor may have been allotted the church in an earlier partition, or have been the only surviving son. The difference between north and south is in any case riddled with exceptions: many single-donor or couple’s charters in the south, many joint donations in the north, or separate donations of shares. Yet it remains true (whatever the explanation) that most lay-owned churches north of the Loire seem to have single lords who can give or sell them with their lords’ and heirs’ consent; whereas further south, there are larger family groups holding churches collectively for longer. To look at these will take us beyond Aquitaine into the far south of France and Provence, and across the Alps and the Pyrenees. First however it will be convenient to turn to Germany and to England, which seem both to be regions of mainly single lordship. It is an indication of the pre-twelfth century scarcity of local churches, in northern and central Germany beyond the Rhineland, that recorded donations there to monasteries or bishoprics are almost all of lands and serfs, not churches. Some churches may nonetheless have been among the endowments that greater nobles gave to their own monastic foundations; but with few exceptions, such as a couple of churches mentioned by Thietmar of Merseburg, this has to be argued from the locations and dedications of churches found in the monasteries’ possession later.59 The record evidence for lay founders or donors of local churches is scanty, but consistent with the Frankish background. In the later ninth century in western Saxony a small wooden church that a nobleman Sidag had built, endowed, and supposedly given to Paderborn, now collapsing, was rebuilt in 58

For nuanced comments on spread of primogeniture see Reynolds, Fiefs, 101–3, 177, 296–7. Erbe, Entwicklung, 68–82 (esp. 77–8 on Walbeck); Thietmar, Chron., i. 13, viii. 10 (pp. 18–19, 504–5). Older lay Eigenkirchen sometimes underlay new monasteries (see Ho¨mberg, ‘Entstehung’, 73, 84, 88). 59

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stone by his heirs and conveyed again to Paderborn at its rededication.60 About a century later, in 971–2, a lay couple Helmric and Liudwi gave to their church at Alfrikesrod the neighbouring settlement Bodenrod (intending it to be ‘under the priest’s hand’—a priest’s portion); and gave Alfrikesrod to Corvey, by implication with its newly enriched church (perhaps only now endowed at all).61 And between these two in time comes a rare sighting of a lay-owned church not being given away, when bishop Nithard of Mu¨nster dedicated it for his fidelis Bruning, allowing him and his descendants the ‘potestas of possessing it for ever’ and to be its lords (dominare) ‘as by hereditary right’.62 The eleventh century produces rather more donations of churches. In 1018 the widow Fretherun gave three manses and a church to bishop Meinwerk for her soul and her son’s (but this seems to be the only private church given him, among all the possessions that he gathered for Paderborn);63 an estate and church that the archbishop of Cologne gave to Deutz in the same year had been given him by the powerful couple Adela and Baldric.64 In 1037 the Corvey cartularist noted the abbot’s acquisition of a church in Bocla—along with its then priest—from Reginold, ‘the lord to whom it had come by hereditary right’ (which does not tell us whether his ancestors had founded it or been given it); Reginbod who gave his church to Fulda about 1060 seems to have inherited it from his brother.65 Then there are a few consecration records. Sigfrid bishop of Mu¨nster (1022–32), who confirmed to a small lord the century-old recognition of Bruning’s proprietary right, was evidently not asked for anything of the kind by the spectacularly beneficent Reinmod and her daughter, in the seven churches of their foundation that he consecrated and set up with parishes.66 In 1031 bishop Brantog of Halberstadt consecrated a church for a free couple, Hathegard and his wife Atta, who built it and endowed it with two mansi that they had in benefice from count Liudolf (himself giving it an adjacent field); they were Deo devoti so perhaps intending to live a religious life there.67 Some of these people look like small landlords. Evidently of higher standing were the couple, Sidag and Hezecha, who founded St Cecilia’s church in Goslar, probably in the 1070s; at its dedication Hezelo bishop of Hildesheim ‘granted 60 Westfal. UB, Codex no. 20 (incomplete, but evidently bp. Liuthard’s consecration record, 862–87. See Ho¨mberg, ‘Entstehung’, 54). 61 Corvey, III. 353–4 (A. x 301, with S. x 374–5). Cf. Milo bp. of Minden’s miles Worad, giving a small settlement and its church (969–96, Westfal. UB, Suppl. no. 479, an exchange). 62 Recorded only when renewed by bp. Sigfrid, but not suspicious (1022–32, Westfal. UB, Codex no. 103, legible though badly damaged original). Nithard died c.922. 63 Vita Meinwerci, c. 112. This is out of well over 100 donations to him, ibid., cc. 38–126; with some (largely overlapping) ‘originals’ in Westfal. UB, Codex no. 87; see Reuter, ‘Property Transactions’, 194–9 (app. 2). 64 Westfal. UB, Reg. no. 896. For Adela (as it happens, Meinwerk’s sister) and Baldric see index: Elten. 65 Corvey (ed. Eckhardt), III. 431–2; Fulda no. 762 (see index: Reginbod. 66 67 Westfal. UB, Codex no. 103b (see index: Reinmod). Halberstadt no. 71.

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them that baptism and burial of the faithful might be done there’. In the twelfth century Sidag’s nephew and namesake, a canon of Goslar, had ‘received it in ius possessionis by hereditary right’, and gave it with his brother Bodo’s consent to a lay kinsman, Rudolph. This donation, done in the presence of bishop Berthold (1119–30), was renewed in 1147 and confirmed by bishop Bernhard, with a more precise version of the priest’s powers: that is, ‘to bury all founders, builders, and possessors of that church and baptize their children’; adding, however, that no priest of the city may interfere if anyone wishes to frequent the church, and that its priest may visit the sick by invitation and bury (but not, it is implied, baptize) anyone who asks.68 At the beginning of the twelfth century, Ruthard archbishop of Mainz consecrated churches for lay founders with similar attention to their priests’ functions: an estate chapel for a free man Megenher, which the inhabitants were to attend for mass, baptism, and burial (Meginher compensating the mother church with some possessions), and whose advocate for all their property he and his principal or first-born heirs were to be;69 and a more domestic church, small but ‘decently built of stone’, built and endowed by a free man Reinfrid and his wife, where they and ‘those belonging to them’ could be baptized and buried.70 This looks like the founders’ main concern; it may possibly have engendered some lordly profit from dependants, but seems likely to have cost more than it brought in (although they had reserved potestas over the land for their own time). Meanwhile donations of churches went on. In 1096 in the diocese of Osnabru¨ck, a nun Demod had given the bishopric a village and its church with the consent of her heiress Liudgard, and a similar donation came from a widow Suanburg with her son’s and daughter’s consent; in 1100 the ‘free and noble’ Otto ‘conveyed by the lawful custom of the Franks’ a castle, monastery, and churches, to the archbishopric of Magdeburg.71 In two of these three we at last find the nearest heirs’ consent recorded; which does not imply that heirs’ consent was not needed always, and perhaps from a wider circle, but that for whatever reason it had been less important than in eleventh-century France to have it on record. In Bavaria and Swabia there were far more, and older, local churches; and though many of these had been given to the bishoprics or monasteries before the mid-ninth century, some survived in lay hands to be given later, or not at all; some came back to lay lords in exchanges; and new ones were built.72 Even so, from the tenth and eleventh centuries we have no great number of charters 68 Hildesheim nos. 94 (1054–79), 245 (1147). It is probably right to take these churches as identical, despite differences in the dedication (dedications sometimes changed) and the first Sidag’s wife’s name (people 69 had alternative names). Mainz no. 412 (1103, Eisenhausen, Hessen-Nassau): primi heredes. 70 Ibid. no. 420 (1104). 71 Westfal. UB, Reg. nos. 1273–4; UB. des Erzstifts Magdeburg, ed. F. Israel and W. Mo¨llenberg (Magdeburg, 72 Above, pp. 33–7, 47–8, 503–4. 1937), no. 175.

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giving churches away, that might tell us something about their donors’ social position or family arrangements. Ebersberg’s cartulary, however, provides glimpses of a few lay lords of churches, besides the counts of the founding family:73 the miles Routpert whom we have already seen building his church in ‘new clearings’ (around 1000) and giving it to the bishop; Eberhere, friend and probably kinsman of count Ulrich, acquiring a church by the count’s gift, about 1015; a miles Adalpert who had an inherited church with parochial rights, some of which he exchanged (about 1040) with count Adalbero against money or goods and half a manse for the church; and donors such as the nobleman Ansfrit giving his (presumably inherited) third part of a church, or the miles Rorich giving a parish church, later in the century.74 What we mostly see, north or south, is single lords, male or female, acting—on the face of it—independently.75 Lay donors of churches to monasteries or cathedrals in Norman England were naturally mainly the new lords—tenants-in-chief and their substantial tenants— who held churches much as did they or their like in France, only more consistently and explicitly under lordship, ultimately the ruler’s. Thus the Textus Roffensis records the king’s confirmation for Rochester of donations of churches by his important tenants Hamo Dapifer (whose two sons also ‘granted their father’s donation’ in the king’s presence), Roger Bigod, and Gilbert of Tonbridge; two other Normans gave churches as entry gifts for a son or a brother.76 Englishmen appear here as donors of only their own demesne tithes. However, we have glimpses of church-owning English laymen and women from both before and after the Conquest.77 Pre-Conquest thegns, whatever their rights over land may have been, seem to have moved towards primogeniture; it is usually single lords who are on record in Domesday as having held manors in king Edward’s time. At the same time many small and middling landlords had had no lord other than the king, holding with more or less free disposal what may still have counted as ‘bookland’.78 Such, perhaps, in the Danelaw, was Stori (or Tori) who in the time of king Edward had had some land and lordship in both Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, and in the former ‘could without leave from anyone make a church for himself in his land and in his soke, and send his tithe where he wished’.79 Others of similar standing survived the Conquest as 73

Ebersberg I (liber trad.) nos. 6 (c.935), 17, 28, 37, 38 (between c.1010 and c.1040). Ibid. II (liber concambiorum) no. 8 (in the cartulary because the bishop later subjected it to a parish church of Ebersberg’s); ibid. nos. 1, 9, 101 (c.1065), 24 (c.1080). 75 Meanwhile the ‘free share’ idea seems to have faded out in favour of securing adequate consent. 76 77 Text. Roff., cc. 97, 99, 100, 116, 121. For women see index: Aethelgifu, Siflaed, Leofgifu. 78 See Wormald, Making, 384–5 on the formula Hit becwaeð (perhaps early 11th c.) which declares an owner’s full right in something that he had from someone deceased who had it from his ancestors and owned it as they did; ‘as he gave it who had the power to give . . . so I have it’. Cf. ibid. 372–3 on the short 79 text Ymb Aewbricas, using the term ‘bookland’. DB i. 280b, 289a. 74

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landholders, under new lords or as minor tenants of the king. The three Englishmen Ailsi, Sewy, and Swertlin, two of whom were or had been king’s thegns, that we encounter in the Life of Wulfstan of Worcester inviting Wulfstan to consecrate their churches in (respectively) Gloucestershire, Nottinghamshire, and Buckinghamshire,80 were all still holding land in 1086; they could have built their churches either side of the Conquest.81 So might the men by whose English names some churches in Kent were known at the end of the century: Aelsi’s church, Blaceman’s church; Ordmaer’s and Dereman’s at Hoo.82 In Berkshire in the 1080s or 1090s the church (with cemetery) at Kingston Bagpuize was built by and dedicated for ‘the lords of the place’, Aethelhelm and Ralph, who sound like an Englishman and a Frenchman; not sharing a manor but holding different manors in the village,83 and cooperating to build it a church, satisfy the monks of Abingdon who were lords of the parish church (at Worth), and pay half each of the two pigs, two cheeses, and crops from two acres that were to compensate Abingdon’s priest.84 These were small lords with, as thegns, a ministerial role, who had become rooted in the land as great estates fragmented;85 different from the knights who scrabbled for tithes or bits of glebe in the Loire valley, and different also from the occasional French lord whose main inheritance was a self-contained church with its lands and revenues.86 In England the better endowed of the local churches, capable of maintaining a petty noble household, tended to belong to kings, earls, or bishops; some may possibly have been the inheritance of well-to-do married priests. A small estate church, on the other hand, could never have provided a livelihood for more than its serving priest and might not at first contribute at all to its lord’s resources. Such a church, if built by a resident lord,87 might not originally have been meant to cater for more than his immediate household; and even as its 80 Vita Wulfstani, 32, 40–1, 45; on their other lands see E. Mason, St Wulfstan of Worcester (Oxford, 1990), 166 n. 41, 236 n. 10, 237 n. 13. 81 They are more likely to have had the resources pre-Conquest; yet consecration post-Conquest might better explain Wulfstan’s invitations into other bishops’ dioceses (see ibid. 228, 233). 82 In Textus Roffensis and Domesday Monachorum: see Barlow, 1000–1066, 205 n. 4, from G. Ward in Archaeol. Cantiana 1932, 1933. Blacheman held Blackmanstone (Kent) TRE (DB i. 13b); see Lennard, England, 296. 83 DB i. 60c, 60d: they hold of different lords and with different predecessors (the manors are, however, similar—each 5 hides, land for 4 ploughs, 2 ploughs in demesne—suggesting the outcome of an earlier partition). The name Ralph might not indicate a French newcomer, but he had a son named Robert. 84 Abingdon Chron., II. 30–2, 120. For other mid- to late 11th-c. church-builders see dedication inscriptions transcribed and translated by E. Okasha, Handlist of Auglo-Soxon non-Runic Inscriptions (Cambridge, 1971), nos. 1, 28, 64, 73, 146; Blair, Church, 371–2, 385–95, 416–17. On townsmen as founders see below, 85 section v. e.g. by great lords’ grants to their own administrators (Faith, as in note 87 below). 86 Below, pp. 638–9. 87 Local churches were not built only where a lord was resident (see Lennard, England, 290–1; Barlow, 1000–1066, 194; Blair, Church, 393–4); but small resident lords were becoming more widespread as ‘extensive lordship’ fragmented, while scattered settlements tended to be brought together in nucleated villages (see Faith, Peasantry, 153–9, 163–75).

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role expanded it would be building up customs only gradually. Nor would it necessarily have, as yet, land for its priest to live on;88 he might live entirely in his lord’s household. Ailsi of Longney-on-Severn took a thoroughly domestic view of his church. Faced with bishop Wulfstan’s demand that he cut down the nut-tree (perhaps a walnut) in the churchyard, which took the church’s light, he preferred for the time being that the church go unconsecrated: under the tree was where he liked to sit on summer days to eat, drink, and dice.89 His church was not an investment but an amenity (in competition perhaps with the tree). It was proper and convenient for a thegn to have a church, even helping to define him as a thegn; related perhaps to his hospitality; and beginning to be seen as a decent burial-place for himself and his wife and children as well as his dependants.90 In Hampshire in the 1080s, Aelfric the Small did something probably unusual among English church-owners in formally conveying his new church at Milford (handing over its key at the dedication)91 to Christchurch, Twynham, whose dean was to appoint the priest.92 This donation is like that of any church to a greater one, but with a special English dimension: Christchurch was the mother church of the parish, and the first priest sent to Milford was one of the minster clergy. But Aelfric’s agreement with Christchurch (as remembered later by two old canons) left both church and priest effectively his. His slaves and cottagers were to be buried there (for a set fee of 4d.).93 The priest was to be fed at Aelfric’s table when he (Aelfric?) was resident;94 he was to accompany Aelfric to meetings of the hundred; before beginning mass he should wait a reasonable time for Aelfric out of respect. That Aelfric had nonetheless given the church away—perhaps for a price, or for protection—may reflect his probable childlessness and his postConquest losses.95 The high-born and once rich Englishman Siward, whose small wooden church at Shrewsbury had been given to earl Roger’s French clerk Odelerius (who rebuilt it in stone), had enough residual hereditary claim for earl Roger to get him to surrender it for the new abbey, compensating him with a village (one of his former possessions). Siward did have a son, but 88

89 See above, note 77, and Blair, Church, 407–10. Vita Wulfstani, 40–1. ‘Of People’s Ranks and Law’, c. 2 (Stubbs, Charters 88; trans. EHD I no. 52A), early 11th c. (Wormald, Making, 392–4). See Faith, Peasantry, 165–7; for burial, Blair, Church, 470. 91 Cf. Geoffrey de Trailli’s conveyance by its key of a (much richer) village church to Thorney Abbey, between 1085 and 1112 (Mon. Angl,. II. 601). 92 Hase, ‘Mother Churches of Hampshire’, 52, 54–6, based on the relevant part of two aged canons’ statement of the minster’s former rights. John Blair kindly sent me his transcript of this passage: now, with translation, in Church, 517–18 (app.). The statement reports Aelfric as giving a half-virgate to Milford church at its dedication (the normal procedure for endowment), before giving church and land to the 93 dean and canons. But no others (protecting the minster’s burial rights). 94 Any priest sent from Christchurch would come and go between there and Milford; nonetheless it seems slightly more likely to refer to Aelfric (who retained other property in the region). 95 For his position as a substantial landholder, though seriously reduced by the creation of the New Forest, see Hase, op. cit., 54–5; DB i. 50d, 51c, 51d. 90

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nonetheless—willingly or not—found security in giving the village to the abbey, keeping it for his own life only, and rewarded with the monks’ fraternity.96 But some of the English ministerial gentry were longer-term survivors, remaining indispensable to the new regime, perhaps rebuilding their diminished fortunes, their families intermarrying with the Norman knights that had largely supplanted them.97 So there was some continuity (or even partnership, as perhaps at Kingston Bagpuize) between English thegns and Norman knights as lords of village churches; the ‘great rebuilding’ went on, indeed intensified in the twelfth century, though with more ambition for seigneurial standards of space and dignity,98 and doubtless more compulsion on the villagers to contribute (if only by the diversion of their tithes). Post-Conquest lords, however, held lands and churches in fief from other lords (or the king), whose consent would be needed, in England as in France (only more certainly), if they gave a church away.99 Meanwhile in twelfth-century Wales, Norman and Flemish lords and their followers led the way for the Welsh gentry in founding new rural churches,100 often giving them to monasteries.101 Before that we can only say that some Welsh lesser churches were the property of lay families: probably those whose priests appear in a Llandaff list as ordained ‘under so-and-so’s heirs’;102 certainly one given with its land about 1040 by a certain Cadwallon, with his father’s consent and king Meurig’s agreement, to the bishop of Llandaff in compensation for brawling in his court.103 The older, larger, collegiate churches emerging as ‘portionary’ family property may have been so from early times.104

17.ii. Families and partnerships with common property Something has been said in earlier chapters about common family property and partible inheritance in churches in the eighth and early ninth centuries, chiefly in Italy, Bavaria, and Alemania. Here this theme is picked up again, in 96

Orderic, HE II. 194–5; DB i. 259d, Salop (Cheney Longville), among other entries; and above, p. 412. See Southern, Medieval Humanism, 226–30; Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State, 213–23. 98 Faith, Peasantry, 193–4; Blair, Church, 411–17. See Gem, ‘The English Parish Church’. 99 e.g. Mowbray nos. 183, 191, 297, 305, 321; lord’s donation of what his tenant has given, nos. 197, 199. 100 Such was the local lord Geoffrey of Sturmi (mid-12th-c. tenant of the earl of Gloucester), at whose new church ‘children were christened and the dead buried’ in his and his son Roger’s time (Welsh Episc. Acts L154; text in G. T. Clark (ed.), Cartae de Glamorgan, III (Dowlais, 1891), no. 619: parish priest’s recognition, after dispute with Roger, of the Sturmi church’s independence (see above, 481 note 14). Sturmi or Sturmistoun is Stormy, near Pyle, Glam. (its church seems to have been short-lived); the parish, Novum Castrum, must be Newcastle, Bridgend (4 miles away). 101 e.g. Wizo the Fleming to St Peter’s, Gloucester (a castle church, Dulas, Welsh Ep. Acts, D93–97); Richard fitzWilliam to Sherborne (several churches, ibid. D140. The editor’s rendering of advocacio here as 102 ‘advowson’ is misleading). See below, p. 675. 103 Ibid. L151 (Llandaff Charters no. 263); see Davies, ‘Adding Insult’, 138. 104 Above, p. 85. 97

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particular—because of their special application to churches—the practice of keeping partible inheritances undivided, as common family property, beyond the stage at which partition might be expected; and the related practice of constructing artificial families or partnerships with common property. It seems to be the frequent recourse to these practices that broadly distinguishes southern from northern Europe, not partible inheritance itself. It may be useful to start with some general points. In the first place, keeping family property undivided between adult and married brothers or cousins was not primitive or archaic,1 but a matter of practical economics sometimes sharpened by political conditions, reaching its peak, in France at least, in the eleventh century. Wherever it was the custom for property to be divided among all sons or all children, whether for great nobles, small landlords, or peasants, it might be convenient or necessary after a man’s death for his widow, sons, and unmarried daughters to keep the management and use of the land undivided for a time, and while this continued the property remained common. A man’s children had in a sense shared it with him while he lived, and unless their inheritances or marriage portions had already been carved out for them they shared it still, with each other, when he died. There was no radical change unless and until they made a division among themselves, leaving their mother with her widow’s portion. On marriage each might take his share; but they might instead choose to keep their property in common, even perhaps stay together in one household, with their wives and children, living on the proceeds of the undivided property.2 This indivision could—if rarely, for ordinary property—go on into the second generation, adult first cousins keeping the property together as their fathers had done; perhaps even longer. In richer families a good deal of individual or conjugal use of particular houses, fields, vineyards, or serfs must have gone on in family property not yet formally divided. An aristocratic family’s indivision might be a matter of deliberate policy, sometimes explicit agreements, to safeguard a centre of power and maintain the extended family’s influence.3 However, it might be not a whole generation agreeing not to divide, but two or three self-selected brothers or cousins agreeing to pool their shares as what was sometimes called a consortium. Occasionally a non-kinsman might be brought in 1

See Murray, Kinship Structure, 40–50, 179–81. See Duby, Socie´te´, 62–7, 213–21; Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. Manyon (London, 1961), 130–3; Poly (below, note 55); Wickham, Italy, 119–22, 187; more generally, Fichtenau, Tenth C., 82–7. Le Jan’s argument (Famille, 47–8, 237–42, 333–43) against the existence of ‘polynuclear’ households, convincing for her region and period (‘between Loire and Rhine’ up to 1000) is compatible with Duby’s picture of delayed division as rare and short-lived in the Maˆconnais before the 11th c., and then largely restricted to brothers, not cousins. 3 See also Leyser in EHR 96 (1981), 372–3 (reviewing Duby and Le Goff, Famille et parente´). 2

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as a partner and confrater in a small family group; while several non-kinsmen or distant kinsmen, perhaps two or more married couples, might form a consortium to hold their property in common, often seen as a kind of brotherhood, an artificial fraternity. The co-heirs or partners in a pooled or undivided property might or might not be thought of as having specified shares in it. In widely extended or complicated families the idea of a share might not go beyond such vague expressions as ‘such part as I have in it’; while in a more restricted group the shares were easily defined, so that two brothers might have a third each while their dead brother’s two sons each had a sixth. If they were living together in a single household, any such fractions would probably be notional, the members having food, drink, cloth, shoe-leather, and servants’ attendance according to status and practical need. For separate households however such shares might be ‘real’ as regards produce and revenues, divided among the conjugal families in proportion to their shares, though the land itself (and perhaps stock) remained common. But once a complete partition of landed property had been agreed on and carried out, so that each individual or couple had particular estates or fields, vineyards, or strips of vineyard as their own independent inheritance, the shares as such disappeared: it no longer made sense to speak of moieties, thirds, or quarters.4 In other words, the historian’s distinction between ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ shares can be misleading: for land at least, shares are always ideal; when they have been realized they cease to be shares. Thus both the mention of shares5 and the naming of them as fractions are evidence of family property for the time being undivided. In any family some property could be divided while some was kept common. A church was particularly likely to be founded jointly (if only to make it affordable), and kept undivided even by a family not otherwise practising indivision;6 or kept so for more generations than ordinary property, shown by the frequent holding of shares in a share.7 There could be strong positive reasons for indivision if the church was the centre of family piety and prestige, as well as obvious practical difficulties in the way of division. It may depend on the family’s wealth: a rich 4 An apparent exception is ‘Quinta’ in Spanish estate names; but it is understandable that the name for what a man could give away for his soul (see index: quinta) should survive as a word for an estate, with barely a residual notion of its having once been conventionally a fifth of someone’s property. 5 Thus an allocated inheritance (the outcome of division) is normally a portio (or in S. Italy sometimes a sortio), not a pars. Very occasionally a medietas turns out to be topographical (in Cluny no. 693 one moiety is a church and mansus, the other is land the other side of the river). 6 e.g. Cluny no. 3600 (1083): for endowing a priory at Contamine-sur-Arve (near Geneva), count Guy gives located mansi but his share of the local church (and of a ‘mountain’, and of a mill). 7 e.g. (taking a wide geographical range) Mettlach polyptich, UBMR II. 341 (in one church, a quarter and a third of another quarter); Be´ziers no. 6 (889, a couple and another man give a fifth of a villa and church except for another woman’s eighth of the fifth); Farfa no. 1029 (1077, donations including a third of a third of one church, a third of a sixth of another).

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family could allocate entire churches to individual shares, though they might well have one special church, probably a monastery, that they tried to keep in common; a middling family with one church could use it entire as one member’s share, but might choose not to; a family possessing little else would try to keep it together as their home and livelihood. At one extreme, common property might consist in the right of all and any family members to dwell in a family monastery and live on its resources.8 Carolingian reforming bishops had encountered churches belonging to co-heirs and had pressed for them to be managed by consensus.9 Some churches in ninthcentury Francia were indeed dealt with by groups of co-heirs acting together, such as the four men of the bishop of Speyer who in 858 gave him a well-endowed and tithe-receiving church; or half a century earlier, the six ‘counts’ and a woman (Deo sacrata), who gave to Hersfeld ‘one church, our portion: whatever we have in it by paternal or maternal inheritance, or by development’ (collaboratio). Among possessions that, in Alemania in the same year (802), Wago and Chadalo sons of count Perchtolt gave ‘by common counsel’ to St Gall, ‘both what is divided between us and what up to now we have in common’, was the church of Bussen and two or three others: it is likely that what they had in common included these churches. On the same day, however, Chadalo on his own gave whatever belonged to him at Wengen including his share of the church there: a share clearly in an undivided property, but treated separately.10 Such individual dealings in shares of churches, sometimes specified as fractions though often simply as ‘my part’, are frequent here;11 and while these too demonstrate an inheritance not yet actually divided, this is different from unanimity or common counsel. In the eleventh century the same thing applies to donations to the cathedral of Brixen in the Tirol, though with more specified fractions (usually moieties or quarters).12 In general in Germany, even in the south, individual dealings with entire churches (mostly pertinent to estates, but some independent) seem more frequent than dealings in shares, and both are more frequent than joint donations of common property.13 There is of course far more evidence for France and Burgundy. Here, just as single lordships could appear anywhere without needing primogeniture to explain them, so even in regions where single lordships were characteristic it is 8

9 e.g. below, at note 30 (Arce, Latium). Below, pp. 628–30. DLD. no. 92; Hersfeld no. 21 (802); St Gallen nos. 186, 185. 11 Ibid. nos. 221, 400, 485, 610 (all 9th c.). 12 Brixen nos. 73, 79, 336, 373, 387 (moieties); 84, 143, 155, 367 (quarters); 153, 207 (partes); 156 (a sixth). But in Bavaria, of Beromu¨nster’s ten churches in 1045 (DHIII no. 129) only four were incomplete (two threequarters, one two-thirds, and one a third). 13 Examples of group donations (brothers or sisters) from Swabia are Zu¨rich no. 242 (1100); Wirtemberg no. 257 (c.1100). 10

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not unusual for two or three brothers to give a church away jointly; while fractions of churches are found almost everywhere, numerous for instance in donations to Cluny, and themselves sometimes held in common. But large extended families dealing in whole churches are hardly to be found in northern France. From the Île de France there is the well-known passage (probably a tenthcentury interpolation) in the polyptich of Saint-Germain, explaining how the monastery had acquired the villa and church of Neauphlette.14 Its fourteen owners—thirteen men and one woman, all named—acted together to give up their property in return for lights in the monastery church and (presumably) security under the monks’ lordship. ‘All free and free-born’, they were probably descended from a petty noble who had had the estate and built its church, but whose too numerous descendants were too poor to bear the burden of military service. However, this is not a clear case of indivisio. Alhough the villa is described as ‘an alod’, the fourteen are said to have handed over ‘their alods’, the plural suggesting that the land was divided; the family might indeed have done better if they had kept everything in common. The church was probably in practice held in common, but it is merely listed as a pertinence. We have to look further south for large noble family groups not evidently impoverished, in control of their own economic life and almsgiving, making joint gifts of independent churches such as we have seen already in Aquitaine.15 In the western Mediterranean world and beyond the Pyrenees, it is quite normal to find a church held in common by a group large or small, of kinsmen or partners, who act together formally in dealing with it. Even here, however, appearances may mislead. Those who should participate in the gift of a church may often have been no more sharply determined than, elsewhere, those who should consent to it: anyone who thought he had an interest, not necessarily having actually enjoyed any benefit from it, might be named as a donor in a group brought together ad hoc.16 It is in Italy that the acting groups seem most stable and clearly defined as owning churches in common.17 Here such a consortium often, perhaps usually, begins with the church’s foundation by a number of men and women who may or may not be all related, rather than with the multiplication of a founder’s descendants. Foundation of a church by a consortium with the intention of keeping it as common property is by the tenth century found mostly in the south. In Campania four men and a woman, not obviously related, agreed in 935 to build a church of S. Severino on land belonging to one of them but at their common labour and 14 16 17

15 Pol. Irminon., 31–2. Above, pp. 594–5; cf. Ange´ly no. 142 (c.1089); Bourbonnais no. 11 (1100). This could explain cases where some donors are much more emphasised than others. Feine, ‘Studien’, II gives many examples (pp. 23–9, 34, 39, 44–5, 51–2, 67–70).

606


cost, the church ‘not to go out of our dominium but to remain always in our and our heirs’ potestas’.18 In 965 fourteen men—two possibly unrelated families and four other individuals—secured their common ownership of a church they planned to build by first securing common ownership of the site, getting another man, Andrew, to grant them land of his own ‘in such a way that I and my heirs shall have such a share there as any one of you’, there to build a church and ‘have it always communaliter, I and my heirs born and to be born, and likewise you and your heirs’.19 In 1018 in Amalfi twenty kinsmen and neighbours founded a church at Ravello, on a site that they jointly bought from an old church; the seller, a priest, finding no title deed to hand over, undertook that should any such emerge later he would ‘put it into your potestas and that of the rectors of your church’ (seeming to leave it open whether the property-right, potestas, would remain with the group and their heirs or settle with the rector and his successors).20 Other south Italian churches appear as clear-cut common property some time after their foundation, and not only in alienations to monasteries. At Puciano in 985 a church was rebuilt by six men, sons of four fathers, ‘who are all brothers and sortifices in one inheritance’, on land that they already owned in common; in 1024 a survivor of these refounders and the seven sons of two of them, ‘who are all consortifices in one church . . . ’, were still able jointly to dispose of it to its priest. In 1047 a church at Vietri was leased to its priest by six men, sons of three or four fathers, one of them acting also on behalf of a widowed kinswoman.21 And in 1141, a woman’s donation to a church in Apulia was accepted by seven men, ‘sortifices of that church’, all sons of different fathers, but evidently including some cousins.22 Among smaller groups, in 1039 two men (not brothers), ‘inhabitants of Luceria’ in northern Apulia, ‘had one church belonging to us from our fathers’ which they gave to the imperial count John, while their two wives jointly gave ‘the quarter that belongs to us from our husbands’ (with the licence from kinsmen and a iudex that Lombard law required for women’s property dealings).23 The men and women together gave the ‘entire church and the land and houses that we have there’, their donation being reciprocated by a single mantle as launegilt; this church was common property to the point that it was not seen as two moieties, while even the wives’ notional quarter seems to be common to the two of them. 18

Cava no. 157. Ibid. no. 231. Unusually (perhaps more decorative than realistic), their collective ordinatio of a priest was to be done by the doctos et scientes homines among them, if any. 20 Amalfi no. 34. Even larger numbers of founders can be found in Apulia; see Martin, La Pouille, 636. 21 Cava nos. 376, 757, pp. 1096; cf. no. 178. 22 23 Bari I no. 46 (cousinship suggested by repeated names). RNeapAM no. 374 (1039). 19

Lay proprietors

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Even for actual brothers, common property might be artificially constructed. In Salerno diocese in 1009 a man and his brother’s son built a church for a third brother John, a priest, on John’s paternal inheritance after division: so it was his alone; but once built (at the others’ expense), one-third of the church and its dos was given by John to each of the others (for a consideration, a launegild), so it became a shared church after all.24 Here defined shares, thirds, have been named, without implying any intention of separate dealings; this was probably normal in any small group of brothers or cousins, if not from the first, then soon. We can see something of the mechanics of this at a more aristocratic level in a church in mid-eleventh-century Salerno, where the counts Desideus and John, sons of a former count of the palace, jointly had one third; count Lando their germane cousin another; while the last belonged to an infant cousin of theirs, son of the late count Lando (uncle to the other three), and they acted on his behalf in jointly appointing a priest.25 The naming of shares is found also where one or two men make a non-kinsman into a partner or confrater. Near Naples, in 1019, the single proprietor of a ruined church, Gregory (son of the chamberlain of the church of Naples), took a partner Peter who was to rebuild, roof, and paint the church while Gregory was to re-endow it; the church was to be ‘for all time common to them and their heirs by moiety, and both sides are to ordain a priest there in common’.26 So the church is seen as owned in moieties, but intended never to be divided. The standing of these laymen and women varies from princes’ sons and palace officials to quite modest landholders described only as habitatores of a town or village. In this country of rent-paying peasant tenures interspersed with freely owned peasant lands, a private church was not an adjunct of landlordship, bringing peasants’ tithes to its lords or their men; having no tithes, and offerings mainly from the family itself, its economic value must have lain mostly in its land and stock. But since it would tend to become the neighbourhood church, it would increase the territorial influence of a great family or the local prestige of a lesser one.27 And for the latter a church might serve as a focus to hold together family land and support one or more of the family, with enough to spare to keep the church decently served and equipped and in good repair.

24 Cava no. 614. Making it temporarily John’s alone may have been done to facilitate getting absolutio for it from the abp. of Salerno (see below, pp. 666, 721–2). 25 Cava nos. 1121 (1049), 1205 (1054, Desideus and John here acting for both the others). See Taviani-Carozzi, op. cit., 855. 26 RNeapAM no. 314 (see Feine, ‘studien’, II. 48–9). The partners hoped that their restored church might acquire a stauritas (see below, p. 654). 27 See Taviani-Carozzi, Principaute´, 733–4, 764–6, 789–90; on the lords of S. Nicolo Gallocanto maintaining its tradition of Greek priests and liturgy, 760–1.

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But if it was under-endowed it might be a burden, not an asset; the Luceria family who gave their church to a Byzantine count were driven to this because they were too poor to keep up a proper round of ‘hours’ there. It was probably poverty that induced an Apulian family in 1041 to grant their shares in a dilapidated church to the Norman who had restored it, a grant intended to be for his life only but resulting after some years in his and his heirs’ lordship.28 Thirty years later it was Norman depredations robbing them of crops, wine, and oil that drove a priest and his wife, with another priest and his son whom (being childless) they had taken into partnership, to ‘set over us another powerful man as a stronger brother’, lord Mel of Bari, on terms that made him and his heirs effectively lords of the church, with power to appoint its rectors when the original partners have died.29 But the lack of any common formula for these moves suggests that they were idiosyncratic responses to untypical problems. These south Italian churches seem to have come under different degrees of community of property through a combination of well-understood Lombard family law and deliberate planning by brothers, kinsmen, or friends to achieve a variety of desired results. In central Italy the documents consist almost entirely of the eventual donations to greater churches,30 which tell us rather less. In Latium and Abruzzo we find some very large groups giving churches to Monte Cassino (for promotion to dependent monasteries), without, apparently, calculating the shares of individuals or sub-groups: this was unnecessary when they were all acting together to give the whole church, and doing so perhaps partly because they had become too many. In 1047–9 two counts and forty-two others named have ‘conveyed and granted’ a church at Morrone to three priests, who as rectores are to establish a monastery and subject it to Monte Cassino; the donors ‘reserve no portion for us or our heirs’ (though keeping the power to defend the property against other claims). About 1060 a church at Arce is more straightforwardly given by a deacon, a iudex, and eighteen or nineteen other men and women; these too ‘reserve nothing for ourselves, our heirs, our wives or anyone else’, but if any of the men or their heirs wants to live at the church and serve there for his soul he has the potestas and licence to do this. And in 1082 two iudices and ten other men, ‘inhabitants in the city of Veroli’, all with different fathers but acting ‘for ourselves and our brothers all equally agreeing’, give a church in Veroli ‘as it came to us by right of patronage’.31 28

29 Above, p. 551 and note 97. Bari IV no. 44. Monte Cassino and Farfa seem not to have kept their churches’ earlier documentation as La Cava did (acquiring churches from its late 11th-c. beginnings). 31 Dormeier, Montecassino, app. no. i (the priests, Adalbert, John, and Manno, were either among the donors or had namesakes among them); app. no. iii; app. no. iv (also reserving ‘patronage’: for such early and problematic uses of the term see below, pp. 897–3). 30

Lay proprietors

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Meanwhile numerous churches or shares in them, mostly in Latium and Umbria, came to Farfa from lay owners, most of them acting singly,32 some in small groups clearly holding in common;33 but some much larger groups, mostly giving whole churches. In 1003, eighteen men (including two priests) and a widow, ‘all nobles and kinsmen’, gave ‘all equally’ (with the fullest possible Lombard formulae of pious donation) a church near Tivoli, together with their ‘portion’ of arable land among other people’s portions on the other side of the river; but most such groups appear in the second half of the century, each numbering a dozen or so (usually three or four sets of brothers).34 And disposing collectively of unspecified shares, we find in 1097 some twenty-two people (three sets of brothers, including three priests, and eight women, two with their sons) giving ‘all our portion’ of a church; while in 1083 eleven men (sons of six fathers, in the castello of Galliano) made an exchange with Farfa, giving their ‘portion’ of a church elsewhere in return for Farfa’s in the castle church, each party thus rounding off its possession of the church it wanted.35 Both for Farfa and for Monte Cassino, these large groups could be descended from single founders; but it is more likely—especially when they are described as inhabitants of a castello36—that they have inherited their church from several founders, themselves kinsmen, or kinsmen and neighbours, and perhaps responsible for the original incastellamento. In Tuscany the kind of large, planned consortium found further south was rarer, but not unknown: in 919 S. Andrea at Compito was endowed by twelve men (sons of nine fathers) retaining for their male heirs the potestas of having, ruling, and defending it, and of ‘ordaining’ a priest by a two-thirds majority.37 There is more evidence of older patterns, however. Churches given to the bishopric of Lucca sometimes belonged to a single rector ordaining his successors; more often to a small group including a priest. As in the past, and as now in the south, the owners of family churches in or near the city might be nobles, officials, merchants, or craftsmen; up in the mountains they might be small or middling landholders, not lords of the village where they built their church but the chief landowners in it, like the Gundualdi of Campori whose last representatives still had fractions of their church in 948; or the brothers Boso, Leone, and Berno 32

Giving whole churches, e.g. Farfa nos. 421, 451, 452, 457; nos. 659 and 512 (a woman with husband’s consent and later his and their sons’ and grandsons’ confirmation); or shares (showing common property, but here dealt with singly), e.g. nos. 448, 450, 460, 472, 618, 626. 33 Whole churches, e.g. nos. 462, 579, 662 (usually one or two sets of brothers, some with wives, and sometimes including a priest); or shares, e.g. nos. 614, 656 (a widow with son and daughter ‘all equally’ granting and conveying a moiety), 789. 34 Ibid. no. 420; nos. 850, 859, 892, 947, 1010, 1192 (all listed by Toubert (Structures, 887 n. 3) as examples of Farfa gaining footholds by acquiring shares in churches; but these are group grants of whole churches). 35 36 Farfa no. 1150; ibid., no. 1071 (with no. 1028). e.g. ibid. nos. 1010, 1028, 1071, 1192. 37 Mem. Lucc., V. 3 no. 1186.

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(a priest) in Ornina in the 1020s and 1030s, who gave their church of S. Lorenzo to the monastery of Prataglia.38 In these families the lay property seems to be divided while the church was for some time kept together, not by an indefinitely expanding family but in successive generations by two or three brothers or cousins, a man and his son, or an uncle and nephew, who might be clergy, laity, or both. Such groups could result from ordinary inheritance of shares, in a family not proliferating. But they were probably more often kinsmen ‘ordained’ by their predecessors (which could conflict, or be confused, with inheritance), the mechanism that created these pairs or small groups of mainly clerical ‘ordainers’ being ‘ordination’ itself, not some variant of family law. Potential claims to the church—that is, to the power of ‘ordaining’ to it—could nonetheless be widely spread among kinsmen and be activated by disputes within the smaller group. An exceptionally illuminating instance is the church of S. Martino in Florence. This church was founded in the mid-tenth century by a deacon John, on his own, ordaining to it a clerical brother and nephew (not priests), the survivor of whom was to ordain from among his kin someone who would both serve the church and ordain to it in his turn.39 The survivor (John’s nephew)—calling himself custos, and still not a priest—accordingly ordained another clerical nephew of the founder’s, Regenbald, to be rector, gubernator, and custos; in 986 Regenbald in turn ordained two successors who seem to have been his own sons, namely a second Regenbald (at present a clerk) and a small boy, John infantulus (conditionally on his becoming a clerk). This ‘ordination’, of a suitable priest or prospective priest from among the founder’s kin, was to continue ‘one after the other to the end of the world’ (with fallback provisions: in the last resort, that the nearest kinsman ordain an outsider).40 John infantulus seems to have died as a young married man (and a layman); it is with the arrangements made in 1017 by his elder brother, the second Regenbald (now bishop of Fiesole—so a priest, the only one in the whole sequence), that trouble begins. He ‘ordained’ Tegrim, clerical son (probably in his teens) of the layman John, but to only one-third of the church (with the power to ordain to that third, if not a priestly son of his own then one of ‘Rollinda’s sons’),41 having—as emerges later—also ordained (or planned to do so) his own illegitimate sons Hugh and Berard (both clerks).42 38

Wickham, Mountains, 40–9, 208; see index: Campori. Related fairly consistently in subsequent cartae ordinationis (S. Maria Firenze nos. 7, 24, 69; the church came later to S. Maria). 40 Regenbald’s carta (ibid. no. 7). His nominees are described as his ‘beloved kinsmen’ and as ‘sons of Roca’, but in no. 24 the younger Reginald (now bishop of Fiesole) calls himself son of the late Reginald and Rotia. (It seems more likely that he was born out of wedlock than that his father—who was not even a priest—needed to be evasive in 986 about having children at all.) 41 42 Ibid. no. 24. (Rollinda was perhaps Tegrim’s sister). Ibid. nos. 50, 51 (see below, as in n. 45). 39

Lay proprietors

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So far, we might not be dealing with a family-owned church at all,43 as distinct from the bending of a founder’s intention that single priests from his kin have each a clerk ready to succeed him. But Tegrim later rustled up several of his relations, first (as he later declared) to renew his ordinatio, and in 1031 to convey their rights in the church to him. Two married couples, ‘seeing the place to be inordinata’ (so ignoring or rejecting bishop Regenbald’s arrangements), ‘decided to give and convey it’ to Tegrim; next day a man sold his ‘father’s portion of the church’ to Tegrim; and at some point a group of four brothers did the same with their ‘father’s and mother’s portion’.44 These people, all with (unquantified) property-rights in the church, emerge from the background when Tegrim needs to secure his position; though they may have been consulted, for all we know, about the earlier ‘ordinations’. Tegrim’s position will be discussed later;45 but it is relevant here that when the bishop’s son Hugh (established as rector by the 1060s, and probably committed to securing the church for the monastery of S. Maria) ordained to succeed him two monks of S. Maria and a third man conditionally on becoming a monk there, he had to explain precisely how these were each related to the family, ‘lest anyone should think I am ordaining strangers’.46 Very different—at once more collective and more chaotic—rights of large family groups or consortia can be found later in the foothills of the Alps: a church in the castrum of Vertemate given entire to Cluny in 1084 by over seventy men and women, ‘who all live by the law of the Lombards’, many of them father and son or husband and wife, the women often identified as so-and-so’s daughter; another at Olgiate in 1093 by about ninety-four men, some being father and son, others germane brothers, all milites, claiming to live by Lombard and Roman law;47 the church belongs to all of them (it is iuris nostri), and is to revert to their potestas should any abbot of Cluny alienate it.48 Such large numbers are most unlikely to go back to a single family that kept its collective hold on a church as it multiplied. At Vertemate they probably descended from several family groups that had once pooled property for a joint foundation, in the course of incastellamento; at Olgiate the absence of women rather suggests a new and artificial consortium. Both donations were made at Milan under an imperial missus, who probably put pressure on the throng of partners all to part with their unquantifiable rights at one blow. 43

As seen by H. F. Schmid, ‘Gemeinschaftskirchen’, 41–3. S. Maria Firenze nos. 30 (the couples’ pagina traditionis, acting communiter; not explicitly conveying 45 shares, as ed. heading), 31–4. See index: Tegrim. 46 47 Ibid. no. 69 (1070). Presumably some by one, some by the other. 48 Cluny nos. 3606, 3670. The church and castrum at Vertemate were being made a priory; the church at Olgiate (Comasco) was to be attached to Vertemate. The donors in no. 3670 include a number of Lanfrancs, Anselms, and Ottos, perhaps members of the Martinenga family (see Schwarzmeier, ‘Polirone’, 138–40), probably overlapping with the donors in no. 3606. For churches in northern Italy given by more ordinary groups see Cluny nos. 3312, 3595, 3597, 3603, 3658, 3668. 44

612


By contrast, in Provence, Saint-Victor of Marseilles could attract donations of churches from large family groups yet get possession of their lands only bit by bit with many setbacks. Efforts were made in the first half of the eleventh century to rescue the country from violence by peace assemblies and penitential renunciations of church property under the Peace and the Truce of God. But in the subAlpine east and the rocky eastward seaboard, where lay lords had grabbed solid slabs of lordship during the wiping out of the Arabs and subsequent private warfare,49 there was such deep confusion and ignorance about property-rights and public dues, such lack of a recorded or clearly remembered past, that when lesser churches, lands, and tithes were handed over to Saint-Victor or to Le´rins for restoration to ecclesiastical use, we might well see the laity not as transferring established property-rights in churches and their pertinences to alternative proprietors, but as letting go of half-ruined buildings and disrupted estates on which they had a purely de facto hold. However, that land and churches had once belonged to cathedrals and great monasteries was remembered in broad terms, and when a few families began to give them up, they were prepared to have this represented as restitution. So, soon after 1021, two brothers and their wives and seven sons, of the Moustiers family, in consideration of their great crimes, gave up ‘land in our potestas and ditio which is said to have been in the ius of St Victor and the monastery of Marseilles’, including a church; and in 1045 at a great peace assembly the Mison family gave up two churches that Arab attacks had forced the monastery to abandon: ‘we make . . . donation . . . of certain things, of our potestas but of its inheritance’.50 In these and similar restitutions, whatever the pressure and whatever the evidence,51 the family gets the credit for a pious donation, the monks being willing to draft charters for them which imply that what they were giving was theirs to give and that the gift deserved its heavenly recompense. But it was one thing to acknowledge that a deserted church or group of churches had once belonged to Saint-Victor or to Le´rins, or to the archbishop of Aix or of Arles; quite another to identify and hand over whatever pertinences of land or revenue the churches themselves should have. Of course many Provençal churches given to monasteries in the eleventh century must have been new, or restored from total disuse; a church could come to Saint-Victor newly founded or refounded, with a record of its endowment, its sponsalitium, made 49

See Poly, Provence, 88–94. St-Victor nos. 613 (Saint-Julien, valley of Lagnes), 691 (Gigors); see Poly, Provence, 95, 184 n. 76, 198–9. Cf. the Castellane family’s restitutions, with similar acknowledgments (Le´rins no. 186; St-Victor nos. 768–70). 51 In the donation of Saint-Julien (preceding note) reference was made to the 9th-c. Marseilles polyptich. 50

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(explicitly or probably) at its consecration52 (which might be combined with donation of the church to Saint-Victor, or precede it by some years).53 Often, however, the church given seems to be an old one, and neither ruined nor deserted; yet needing total reconstruction of its endowment, let alone of any parochial rights. Churches are given, not with a core of recognized pertinences, but with ‘lands round about’ or ‘lands adjacent’; or sometimes land defined by topographical boundaries—a road, a stream, a mountain ridge54—suggesting a single unbroken block of hill country, perhaps new land to develop, for a new settlement within the church’s sanctuary, or perhaps newly carved out over the heads of rent-paying peasants and often of milites whose grants will be needed as well. So half-a-dozen men and women or more, perhaps a score, from one of the twenty-odd lordly families of Provence or from rising knightly families, might jointly make a grant of the church and surrounding lands, apparently held in indivision along with their other possessions;55 while often in the same charter particular donors, from within the group or outside it, gave up particular possessions. At this level the lands given are sometimes described in great detail, having been in the hands of individuals, nuclear families, and groups of brothers, whose concessions have had to be secured. An example of the elaborate reconstruction that might be needed is that for the church of Saint-Pierre at Rioms (Droˆme), given by the Me´vouillon family: Ripert bishop of Gap, his three brothers, their mother, ‘some of our men’ (including two clerks and a priest), and women too. Individually and in groups they give mansi, half-mansi, pieces of land and vineyard (some of it next to the church), and tithes of some sort as well;56 the charter ends ‘I, Ripert and my mother and brothers and all these men and women give all this’ to the monastery.57 There is usually a total lack of clarity—even where the land in question explicitly includes the church’s site58—as to whether these possessions were being given out of the donors’ property to endow or re-endow the church, or whether they properly belonged to the church in any case. Much of the land being ‘given’ had probably once belonged to the local church and had simply fallen into the hands of the great families and their knights, who now considered it theirs to keep or give.59 52 e.g. St-Victor no. 678 (a couple and four sons give a modest endowment ‘out of our alod’ to the church they have built at Forcalquier, 1030); cf. nos. 214, 604, 670, 282, 268, 112, 477/8, 383, 384. 53 e.g. ibid. nos. 281–2, 267–9, 271–3, 444. But confusion may lie behind even such apparently straightforward new or recent endowment, e.g. ibid. nos. 44 (1030), 659 (1044). 54 e.g. Le´rins no. 194 (original); cf. ibid. no. 55 (bounds measured in dextri); St-Victor nos. 536, 602, 768. 55 Poly, Provence, 94–7, 159–60. 56 Mostly either secularized or secular all along, at any rate not from a territorial parish (see above, 57 pp. 475, 508). St-Victor no. 730 (1060). 58 e.g. ibid. nos. 617 (1064–79), 1095 (original, end of 11th c.). 59 e.g. ibid. nos. 115 (1046), 136 (1062), 1095 (preceding note). A vague expression may be used such as dono . . . terra [sic] quae est ad ecclesiam S. Stephani’—the last item in a complicated grant of the church itself with omnia quae ibi habemus, et homines per nos (ibid. no. 373).

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Some of these grants or surrenders of land for a local church had to be made again and again; some were pursued in minute detail by the monks, or rather by one of them as their agent. In mid-century, Saint-Victor’s rights in several churches in the valley of Gareóult were challenged with some violence by one Ricaus of Forcalqueiret who had obtained land in the valley with his wife. In a settlement with abbot Peter he quitclaimed all the churches with all their possessions and rights, and was pardoned for his sacrilege and breach of the Truce of God. Later, his five sons had to be bought out; so far, no different from countless French cases. But how much still remained to be done is shown us in a record, some 1800 words long, drawn up by a monk Barnerius around 1070 to record what he has acquired in the valleys of Gareóult and Saint-Me´dard: a farm here and there, bits of vineyard, bits of fields, tasca, tenths, from many different persons (including Ricaus himself); in return for money, wine, or oats, a cow, a mule, a pig, or a mare and her foal.60 Almost twice as long is the highly circumstantial narrative by the monk William of his labours late in the century to recover land at Chorges,61 by the higher reaches of the Durance, in country of the Mison-Dromon lordship. Here what was to be recovered was certainly seen as the sponsalicium of the local church of Sainte-Marie, itself belonging to Saint-Victor and managed by William; but getting the land identified and surrendered was a Sisyphean task, in the face of repeated verbal concessions, practical evasions, delays, and harassment, by the two interlocking knightly families who held the property (chiefly Pons ‘of the tower’ and his sons and nephew, and his brother’s widow’s second husband Peter of Rosset, with his own son who married the widow’s daughter). At almost every stage William’s story centres on the endowment rather than the church itself. To get the excommunicated Pons buried, his sons and widow ‘relinquished all that they had of the sponsalitium’; to secure his marriage, Peter of Rosset will make his intended ‘give up the sponsalitium’; trial by battle is avoided when Pons’s son Peter agrees ‘to ask his mother about the sponsalitium’ and to be prepared to swear that they are concealing none of it; the ‘count’ of Gap asks the laymen ‘why after making so many quitclaims about the sponsalitium they are still holding it’, to which Peter Pons replies ‘because the monks are demanding more, which isn’t part of the sponsalitium’. There is only a single mention of dispute over the church itself, when members of the family were pressed ‘to relinquish the church of St Mary and the sponsalitium’.62 At first sight this might suggest that they had 60

Ibid. nos. 385, 318, 383 (covering also other acquisitions in the region, from other families). Ibid. no. 1089 (original): c.3,000 words. The story has now been vividly told by Patrick Geary, Living With the Dead, 130–45; but his concern is with dispute management rather than with the matter in dispute. 62 Geary (op. cit., 134) has them ‘relinquish the property of the church’, but it is explicitly ecclesiam . . . et sponsalicium. 61

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simply taken possession of the church building. But since the object was to clear the way for a final settlement, and the men concerned were probably by now the chief co-heirs,63 it is more likely to signify that the whole family’s hold on the endowment had rested on a claim to the church itself.64 Furthermore some of what was in dispute at Chorges was ecclesiastical revenue:65 at their peak of aggressiveness the laymen took the church’s firstfruits and offerings. For the Gareóult churches, Ricaus had renounced ‘tithes, firstfruits, and parishes’ as well as endowments; and other churches were given with firstfruits, offerings, sometimes burials.66 Such a church must be a going concern; the donors are not simply in possession of a disused building and surrounding land. Whatever the background of confusion and actual dilapidation, it seems to be understood that the transfer of a church carried with it a trail of claims to lands and rights. And although these were often as slippery to gather up as an armful of live fish, they could still be envisaged as belonging to and going with the church; as when two laymen about 1070 gave their third part of a church at Entrages in the county of Riez ‘and of everything that belongs to it, in tithes, firstfruits, burials, offerings of the living or dead, vines, gardens, lands, houses, and plots’.67 Such an independent gift of a fraction of a church is paradoxically fairly rare in Provence.68 Probably the monks found that only a comprehensive donation by all or most of the partners stood much chance of overriding the tenacious separate tenures of bits and pieces. So we find whole churches given by brothers or cousins with wives, sons, and sons’ wives, sometimes recorded as all speaking in the firstperson plural, sometimes severally in the singular, sometimes all but a dominant couple in the third person;69 often reinforced by yet others, of the family or not, listed at the end as affirming it. An early example (1007) is the Ponte`ves family’s grant of the church of Sainte-Marie at Salernes (Villecroze). The initiative was taken by one of them, Atanulf, who, shortly before a journey to Rome on which he died, promised to rebuild the church and give it to Saint-Victor—described 63

Pons’s two sons and their first cousin. It is not clear how or when Saint-Victor’s claim to the church (or churches) of Chorges arose: the donation of 1020 cited by Geary seems to be the abp. of Embrun’s donation of a half-manse to the church of St Mary itself, along with other donors’ small endowments, in what reads like part of a consecration record (St-Victor no. 1057). 65 Disregarding the tenths that went with tasca from the disputed holdings (probably never eccle66 siastical tithes). Above, at note 60, and pp. 508–9. 67 St-Victor no. 753. Cf. ibid. nos. 294, 307, 303, on the Saint-Maximin churches (1050s). 68 The Baux-Rians grant (1056) of half the church of Saint-Jean, Brignolles, was their part in a joint grant (with the Arluf-Marseilles family) of the whole (St-Victor no. 342). In 1094 two-thirds of the castle church of Roquebrune were given to Le´rins separately but on the same day, by two sets of donors each set confirming the other’s grant (Le´rins nos. 12–15). However, St-Victor no. 753 (c.1070) seems to be an independent grant of a third of a church. 69 The persons may however have been garbled in cartulary versions, or more than one charter telescoped. 64

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both as giving it ‘as far as it belonged to him’ and as giving his portion in it— which he is then said to have done. But this took effect only as part of a gift by the whole family, Atanulf’s mother, widow, son, brothers, and other coheredes; the dead man himself is listed with the rest as affirming the gift ‘by his own mouth’, as attested by one who had heard him.70 Another early grant of a church to Saint-Victor, that of Sainte-Perpe´tue near Brignolles, was made separately by two branches of the Signes family, Guy and his wife Waldrada, Nivelon and his wife and three sons, each group credited with giving ‘of our alod that we have in the county of Aix . . . the church founded in honour of St Perpetua’; confirmed by their kinsman the bishop Enguerrand of Cavaillon, with his wife (or fidelis) Adalguda. They do not even notionally hold it in moieties: each nuclear family gives it all.71 It was perhaps Scocia, daughter of Guy’s wife Waldrada, who brought an unspecified share in another Brignolles church, Saint-Pierre, to the Baux-Rians family; in 1042 Waldrada was among ‘all of us, heirs and possessors’ who gave the church (‘with everything that we all have there, and everything the church itself has’), along with her daughter and son-inlaw Scocia and Gosfred, their four sons, and two other couples; with also a number of the Signes family, including her brother-in-law with his wife and sons, and bishop Enguerrand’s widow, sons, and grandsons.72 Even this crowd was not complete; next year one of Nivelon’s grandsons gave ‘the whole of my share that I have or should have in the church of St Peter . . . that came to me from my father or my uncle William and his sons’.73 There is clearly here a tangle of possible individual claims; but they are not quantified as thirds, quarters, sixteenths, and were thus all the more difficult for the monastery to pin down and eliminate. As with the grant of land to a church, its sponsalitium, so with the grant of the church to a monastery, heirs might resist, dispute, and have to be bought out—or allowed to participate in the merit—over many decades. The same grandson of Nivelon of Signes surrendered his unspecified share in Sainte-Perpe´tue, given some thirty years earlier; and it was not until 1074 that the bishop’s grandsons finally gave up their claims.74 What makes this different from the typical process further north is the background of indivisio. For the same reason, an individual’s independent gift of his share, however willingly made—as when Pons Fulco of the Arluf-Marseilles family gave, on his 70 St-Victor no. 486 (1007). In no. 487 Athanulf’s widow gives a quarter (her widow’s portion?) of the villare, but not of the church. 71 Ibid. nos. 334–6 (no. 335, dated 1016 by the editors, is word-for-word identical with no. 334, of 1011). Cf. the numerous donors of a church at Draguignan: ‘all of us, men and women . . . give the church; whatever each of us seems to have in it, we grant and give it in integro’ (ibid. no. 536). 72 Ibid. no. 368. Cf. the Baux-Rians share in Saint-Jean at Brignolles (note 68, above), and the large number of Baux-Rians co-heirs involved in giving the church at Esparron (St-Victor no. 267). 73 74 Ibid. no. 369 (see no. 335). Ibid. nos. 338, 341. See Poly, Provence, 183.

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own, ‘whatever has come to me from my share’ in five churches75—would not prevent his kinsmen’s claims from flowing into the vacuum that his gift had left. But to say that these claims were fluid or hydra-headed is not to say that they were not real property rights, which could with determination be gathered together for a complete transfer. Pons Fulco’s surrender must have been part of the elaborate process by which his uncle Guy, youngest son of Arlulf of Pierrefeu, pieced together what was perhaps his lavish entry gift as a monk of Marseilles, consisting of six churches in all (in the territories of three castles), at least one of them founded by Guy’s father and brothers (himself included), and another already given by his parents to Saint-Victor.76 Guy’s most important move was to make an exchange with his brother Girannus, giving Girannus all Guy’s inheritance in the castles and in Marseilles other than in the six churches, in return for Girannus’s share in these; he then in 1060 gave ‘into the hand of abbot Durand’ his own and what had been Girannus’s shares (undertaking however that if Girannus or his sons went back on their bargain, Saint-Victor would have Guy’s non-ecclesiastical inheritance instead). Of Guy’s other brothers, Pons gave his share in at least four of the churches; William and Alaman, and various nephews, ‘gave and confirmed’ their undefined claims, for a horse, a mule, or 20s.77 Later, what seems to be another nephew, perhaps a sister’s son, gave ‘something of my inheritance, for the redemption of my soul and my relations’ souls and for a very good mule . . . ’, this ‘something’ being the six churches and their pertinences— not even describing his claim as a share in them, let alone quantifying it.78 Meanwhile small parcels of land in the territory were separately collected by Guy from the individuals or nuclear families that held them.79 So we are brought back to the laborious gathering up of bits of endowment that have to be prised out of the grip of individual laymen and their wives and sons. But Provençal churches themselves with their lands and rights (however elusive) were evidently owned in the same way as most Provençal castles and their territories: that is, in common by extended lordly families, though held in jumbled fragments by members of those families and their knights and peasant tenants. In Languedoc, an early example of a church with multiple founders was SaintJean-Baptiste at Lieuran-Cabrie`res, the subject of a strikingly odd donation to the 75

St-Victor no. 386. Ibid. nos. 477/8 and 475 (ed. date ‘1000’, but it must be nearer mid-century). 77 Ibid. nos. 474 (notitia on Guy’s acquisitions for the monastery); 470 (Guy’s charter); 471 (Pons’s charter. This and Pons Fulco’s, above, note 75, list respectively only four and five of the churches, but names may have slipped in the cartulary copies, and the notitia lists all six for Pons Fulco). 78 Ibid. no. 476 (also quitclaiming what his uncle Pons had given). 79 Ibid. nos. 472–3, 474 (notitia). 76

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cathedral of Be´ziers in 918.80 A woman Tructuldis, her son Fulcherius, and a priest Leudonius, give ‘in’ this church ‘eight portions . . . possessed by us and by our heredes’, which seem to be shares not of the church but of its human possessions: the eight ‘portions’, on Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier’s convincing reading, are eight named men.81 Leodonius on his own gives two further portions, being two further named men. All this they give and convey to Be´ziers, ‘both by the voice of our aforesaid heirs and by the voice of the other founders of the church, as laid down in the carta matrice that was made under the name of twenty-three founders . . . to remain always in the potestas of St Nazarius for our souls and those of our kinsmen and heirs’. There is nothing to say how many of these ‘portions’ there are—possibly twenty-three (going back to the perhaps quite recent foundation),82 of which the three principals with their heirs by now have ten between them, while the ‘other founders’ presumably keep their portions, merely consenting to their partners’ alienation. To speak of serfs or slaves as ‘portions’ seems odd, unless they did somehow represent shares in the church; as they might do if their holdings were all the land the church possessed.83 In that case, alienating them would amount to pulling out of the consortium altogether, in favour of the cathedral. The matter was doubtless perfectly clear to those concerned, if only because, unlike us, they had the foundation charter.84 The problems about this donation, and about the foundation behind it, would be no easier to resolve on Magnou-Nortier’s theory (complementing her view about higher churches) that lay lords here were not the proprietors of lower churches but their guardians, under regional canon law surviving from the seventh-century Visigothic councils.85 Nor is this theory supported by the numerous quite ordinary charters giving churches to the regional monasteries. Most of these show churches given by family groups, usually fairly small (a couple or a widow with sons and daughters) or middling (a set of brothers with their wives and sons). But such groups often gave moieties or quarters,86 80

Be´ziers no. 17; for the place see Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 222. Ibid., 222–3. This seems the only possible reading: even if the grammar allowed the names to be those of the ‘heirs’ just mentioned, that would hardly make sense, not least because none of the names is among the eight witnesses’s names (after the three principals). 82 That eight ‘portions’ should still consist of eight men suggests this; though there has been time for Leudonius to inherit or acquire two further portions. However, the founders need not have contributed equally. 83 For ‘esclaves’ (with immovable as well as movable possessions) see ibid., 219–21. 84 i.e. the carta matrice (which may already have promised the church to Be´ziers, making the passage on St Nazarius’s potestas a quotation from that charter). 85 Socie´te´, 355–6, 393–4, 429–30, 445–6. This has become the orthodox view (e.g. Hallam, Capetian France, 56). It rests partly on an exaggerated view of the ‘e´glise priveé’ as giving its proprietor ‘un droit illimite´ de disposer de la res ecclesiae’. 86 Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 429 n. 158 gives the earliest examples of dealings in fractions (in 920, 928, 949, 1015) and points out their greater frequency later in the 11th c. 81

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implying the common property of a larger group; and some whole churches were given by large groups. These might be distinct branches of the same family, sometimes making separate charters, like the powerful lords of Sauve and Anduze (brothers and their respective descendants, holding these castles separately) for their castle church at Mairois (evidently undivided);87 or rather more amorphous though probably all related, like the two groups of nobles and knights who gave Sainte-Colombe to Le´zat in a single charter in 1079.88 A few of the larger, looser groups, with vague and recurring claims,89 are reminiscent of neighbouring Provence; but the general run could be anywhere in Aquitaine. The vocabulary is straightforwardly proprietary: ‘we are all equally donatores’ (sometimes venditores); ‘we donate and convey . . . something of our property’ or ‘inheritance’ or ‘alod’;90 conveying churches not only to great churches but to private groups,91 and using the same formulae as were used for ordinary possessions. The church may be given ‘to have, hold, leave to your posterity, and freely do whatever you choose with it’;92 on the other hand— property being qualifiable—its alienation may be forbidden, sometimes under the sanction that a kinsman may repurchase it at a token price.93 When, occasionally, the words potestas and dominium are used for what is conveyed (as in countess Garsind’s testament of about 972),94 there seems no reason to see this as the authority of lay guardians,95 or as echoing the Toledan legislation (where potestas denotes the proper authority of bishops over churches and their endowments, not the protective role allowed to founders).96 As for words clearly denoting protection, these do—rarely—appear, but they point the wrong way. Between 997 and 1031, Odo Aniano and his brother, son, and nephew (all named Arnold), giving to Le´zat the church of Saint-Christophe at 87

1041–2, Gellone nos. 397, 152; repeated in the next generation, 1077 (ibid. nos. 151, 153) and 1077–99 (no. 401), all with wife and sons; 1083, no. 400. 88 Le´zat no. 51; editor’s suggested genealogy, ibid. 35–6. For other large family groups giving churches cf. Gellone nos. 106–10, 283–92, 450–3; Le´zat nos. 305–9 (all 11th c.). 89 See instances above, note 87; below, p. 632. Cf. the churches of Licairac and Casalis (dioc. Carcassonne), let go bit by bit by (related?) families c.1055–1107, with a string of subsidiary donors (Sainte-Foi nos. 76, 501, 78, 473, 501). 90 e.g. Le´zat, Aniane, Gellone, St-Sernin, Nıˆmes, Ste-Foi (for churches in the diocs. of Carcassonne and Albi), passim, 10th and 11th cs. 91 e.g. Le´zat no. 391 (late 10th c., sale by two lay couples to three priests); no. 223 (?949), an individual (Aico Radulfi) quitclaims Saint-Christophe, Volvestre, which he had from an individual priest Astar (now deceased), to about twenty of his and Astar’s relations (judging by their names); perhaps to mark the end 92 of a lease from the family? Ibid. no. 391 (preceding note). 93 See below, p. 755. 94 totam potestatem et dominium de omnibus parrochiis of churches given to Saint-Pons, Tomie`res (HL V no. 126). Cf. HL V no. 147 (c.989); St-Sernin no. 156 (1126). 95 Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 429 n. 157. In 987 Pons count of Albi uses the phrase quicquid ad laicalem dominium pertinet to qualify his donation of a church to Albi (HL V no. 142; Magnou-Nortier, loc. cit.), but in the context this signifies ordinary lordship as distinct from episcopal dues and jurisdiction, not a special 96 kind of protective patronage. Above, pp. 19, 20–1.

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Volvestre (as ‘something of our inheritance’, and reserving the right to reacquire the honor if Le´zat were to alienate it), reserved also a protective function: ‘the donors are to hold the guardia and mantenentia in the service of God and St Peter’, though should they do any injury and not redress it, Le´zat could resort to one of its fideles to take on the ‘maintaining’. If this role had been all that the donors ever had, reserving it would have meant they had nothing to give (or to give again, as the three Arnolds did about 1032–5).97 The same quite ordinary assumptions seem adequate to explain the pertinence clauses of these charters, sometimes restricted to landed possessions but usually giving prominence to tithes, firstfruits, and offerings, and occasionally including the ‘priestly fief ’.98 Here as elsewhere, it is sometimes fairly clear that the donors have themselves been enjoying these things.99 And when, occasionally, lay donors of churches or shares in them reserved lifetime usufruct,100 this must have consisted of pastoral revenues, use of land, or both (as must the life tenure in a church and its pertinences that lay people were sometimes given by a bishop and canons in an exchange).101 Magnou-Nortier recognizes all this (indeed sees it, perhaps unnecessarily, as the only explanation of dealings in fractions of churches); but she considers it ‘canonical’ (barring some abuses), being intended to support the role of patron and defender as laid down in the Toledan compromise. In particular, she sees the mention of the priest’s part separately from pastoral revenues as showing a clear distinction between the two, the priest having usufruct of the endowment and some of the revenues, the lay lord having guardianship of the endowment while taking the rest of the revenue himself for the church’s upkeep.102 But pertinence clauses are really too ambiguous, here as elsewhere,103 to support such a tidy picture; nor does the Toledan legislation concede anything like this to founders or their heirs. The argument amounts to saying that when the charters speak in plain, proprietary terms they do not mean what they say, while what looks like proprietary behaviour is either not really so or it is an ‘abuse’. It is simpler to see it as reflecting largely unconsidered assumptions common to most of France. This does not undermine Magnou-Nortier’s compelling picture of conservative piety in an aristocratic church and laity at ease with each other; the practice of large aristocratic families holding churches as common property fits well into this. Further west again, in Cerdagne-Roussillon and the Catalan Pyrenees, we know more than usual about collective or multiple foundations of churches, from the 97

98 Le´zat nos. 217, 219. e.g. Gellone nos. 452, 461, 473 (all 1077–99). e.g. ibid. no. 401 (above, at note 87), one branch quitclaims ‘whatever we have in the church’ which includes half the offerings; and see above, pp. 492, 494, 497, 508–9. 100 101 e.g. Nıˆmes no. 34 (928), Le´zat no. 125 (945). Above, p. 536 (Elne and Be´ziers). 102 103 Socie´te´, 393–4, 429–30 (and nn. 158–160), 445–6. Above, p. 571. 99

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unparalleled number of bishops’ consecration records (chiefly from Urgel). These have been touched on already in several contexts;104 what matters here is that while a whole village community was often involved (inviting the bishop to consecrate its church; sometimes said to have built it), some among them are almost always named as endowing it (in the first person and the present tense: dono, donamus). Individuals, couples with their children, sets of brothers—rangeing from half-a-dozen people to twenty or so—each give different, specified lands to the church; sometimes there is something that they all give together (a house next the church, a garden or two),105 but in general the individuals or groups are separate property-owners, though doubtless linked by kinship and marriage.106 Usually two or three notables (clerical or lay) give more than the rest; and often a single person—a priest from within the community, or a count, abbot, or bishop from outside it—is the primary founder, although others contribute.107 Any or all of these may get called ‘founders’;108 but the consecration records do not reveal whether they were seen, or saw themselves, as a consortium owning the church. There is a real problem here, in the rarity of ordinary charters giving or selling lesser churches to greater ones.109 The question turns on how to interpret the formula, regularly included in the ninth-century Urgel records and intermittently later, by which the founders (before endowing the church) ‘convey it into the bishop’s hand’ (or potestas) ‘to be consecrated, as holy canons lay down’.110 If this traditio represents a real donation determining the church’s future, it implies that the church belongs temporarily to its founders but that they are obliged to surrender it permanently to the bishopric before it can be consecrated. But if it is symbolical only—‘handing the church over to be consecrated’, almost as part of the rite, to assert the principle of episcopal potestas laid down by Gallic and Toledan councils111—the question of future ownership is, so far, left open. 104

105 Above, pp. 72–3, 444. e.g. Urgellia, I nos. 5, 7 (857, 890). In one case (899, ibid. no. 9) some thirty donors are named as inviting the bishop, building the church, and collectively giving almost the entire endowment, but this may be over-simplification in the record. More often, their several donations are all summed up as nos omnes donamus or the like. 107 Baraut, ‘Consegracions’ (Urgellia, I. 17–18) conveniently lists community foundations and those of individuals separately, but the distinction is not sharp. 108 e.g. (from 899 to 1060) in Urgellia, I nos. 12, 15, 57, 61, 63, 67; and no. 64 (1057), where not only three named priests, and another six named, but ‘the whole people’ are fundantes. 109 Urgel’s charters recording ordinary acquisitions by purchase or donation include only a handful of churches up to 1050 (Urgellia, II–V), rather more later (VI, VII); the huge cartulary of S. Cugat, out of 800 donations, etc. from 904 to 1108, similarly few, though its papal privileges listed 17 or 18 ‘cells’ and churches in 1002, and 38 churches in 1098 (S. Cugat nos. 382, 774). See below, p. 673, for a church in the nearby Rioja initially owned by its main founders. 110 tradimus eam in manus pontificis ad consecrandum, with minor variations (Urgellia, I nos. 4–11, 9th c.; 16, 23, 25–6, 29, from 903 to 940; 64 (1057). 111 On the ambiguity of this potestas see above, p. 19; below, pp. 801–2, 806–7. 106

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The symbolical interpretation seems the more likely. An alternative formula found occasionally is that those endowing the church ‘give all these things into the church’s dos in the lord bishop’s potestas, to be perpetually dominated and possessed by the ministers of that same church’: so asserting the new church’s control of its own endowments as well as the bishop’s authority over them.112 And yet another variant, used by the bishops of Elne, was to require that the church be ‘subject’ to the cathedral church of St Eulalia.113 None of these brief formulae is convincing as an assertion, still less creation, of episcopal proprietary right.114 They were sometimes applied to churches that the bishop is unlikely to have wanted as property: a couple of priests’ foundations and a layman’s oratory, none of them given parochial rights.115 And it is worth noting that the monks of Cuxa, heavily interpolating the consecration record of S. Andreu of Valtarga to support their own claim to the church, left unaltered the usual formula of traditio to the bishop for consecration.116 On the other hand, we have only the scrappiest positive indications of founders (or the chief among them) retaining property-rights. From the consecration records, we may learn that a church had been firmly in its founders’ hands for some years before its consecration: two churches in the Riufarre´ valley were consecrated by the bishop of Elne in 993 at the request of its founders’ seventeen heirs, of whom three named (two priests and a iudex) did the handing over to the bishop ‘by succession to our relations’.117 More relevant to the postconsecration position are occasional references to the appointment of the first priest, or rulings about future appointments:118 these are usually inconclusive, but at the consecration of a church at Fenestre (diocese of Gerona) in 947 the chief lay founder, Gothmar, was able to convey the church to its first priest.119 Gothmar acted alone, it seems, although a dozen people had given land besides him and his mother and brothers; and it is usually only for such leading founders, not for any whole consortium, that even a say in the choice of priest is promised. In one very early case, however (in 857), ‘those men who built the church are to have the potestas to choose and retain a clerk’ (though perhaps only the first).120 112 Urgellia, I nos. 13 (900: but suspiciously close to no. 55), 20 (reading in potestate rather than in presencia), 21 (both 907), and 55 (1044, an original). 113 Roussillonnais nos. 8 (953), 25 (1022), 45 (1053) (the first two recording nothing about founders or endowments), and Marca Hisp. no. 199 (1025, church at Perpignan founded by eight boni homines). 114 They are totally unlike the earlier Freising charters, which—with occasional mention of conforming with the canons—recorded the donation of already-consecrated churches to the bishopric by established private-law forms (above, pp. 35–7, 38–9). 115 Urgellia, I nos. 23 (912), 29 (940), 16 (903; the bishop emphasized its status as an oratory subject to the parish church; on the priest’s appointment see above, p. 524 note 45). 116 Urgellia, I no. 8, as in d’Abadal, ‘Eixalada-Cuixa’, doc. no. 63; interpolated probably in the 11th c. 117 Marca Hisp. no. 142; see Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 427 n. 153 and doc. no. 21 (French trans.). 118 119 120 Above, p. 524. Marca Hisp., 860–2. Urgellia, I no. 4.

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More to the point are the founder-priests, of whom two (Magnulf in 912, Christian in 940) seem to be sole founders, each ‘conveying’ his church to the bishop to consecrate, but each reserving potestas in it for himself and his family; while in 948 another, Estfred, with several fellow-founders, is not said to have made this traditio, and yet it is the bishop who—exercising proper episcopal authority—‘gives the parish’ to Estfred for life and afterwards to his priestly nephews.121 Of other single or leading founders (counts, abbots, nobles), some did and some did not make the traditio (so far as the record goes); but expectation of their subsequent control of the church is no more apparent for the latter than for the former. It is unlikely that counts founding churches for the inhabitants of their castri intended to give them up to the bishopric;122 if their ownership is obscured by the form of the bishop’s record, so may be that of the leading settler families who were the effective founders of village churches. A certain vagueness in these documents about who count as founders might point to this not mattering much. But it may be only to the bishop that it did not matter. He was naturally mainly concerned to record the consecration itself and to claim the clergy’s canonical obedience and any synodal dues or census to him or the cathedral (the very shortest notes about consecrations mention and define the priest’s census). That it mattered to the laity surfaces occasionally.123 About 874 count Miro claimed the church of Saint-Vincent near Vernet-lesBains, which ‘ought to be his inheritance from his ancestor Bello’, against ‘Sesendoara and his heirs, both men and women’, who had ‘sold it unjustly’ to two priests.124 The great count trying to systematize his property in the Conflent was up against a group of co-heirs trying to assert their collective property-right. Nonetheless, multiple ‘founders’ may often have established no clear lordship or property-right at all. And whatever coherence they may have maintained in the future, these groups look like ad hoc alliances contributing bits of their separate properties (owned in common only at the level of nuclear families) to establish a church that they and their neighbours need. In the Atlantic-facing part of Christian Spain and the future Portugal, those founding or inheriting private churches range from counts and other obvious nobles with widespread interests, to what look like free landholders with property in a single settlement;125 while deacons and priests, ‘abbots’, confessi, and famuli 121

122 Ibid. nos. 23, 29, 30 (the first two without parochial rights). Ibid. nos. 20, 21. In founding the monastery at Serrateix (977) it was important to count Oliba and his brother bp. Miro to establish ‘who was the first auctor and founder or builder’ of the existing church (ibid. no. 36; they attribute its foundation to a group of monk-priests under the monk Froila, whom they have chosen as 124 abbot). d’Abadal, ‘Eixalada-Cuixa’, doc. no. 30, and comment. 125 One lone founder, in 1045, was so poor that he gave his ‘own monastery’ away because he could not afford the necessary 100s. to get it consecrated, nor provide the expected feast (Cardenã no. 168). 123

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Dei of both sexes are intertwined with their lay relations in the possession of churches; and above them, a king or count, queen or countess, or other lord, sometimes appears as the original granter of a church or as a chosen protector. Disputes about churches show a familiarity with written instruments and legal tenets along with great informality in their use, and produce complicated histories of long-past transactions and vicissitudes which give a strong impression of both insecurity and individuality.126 Nonetheless there is much more evidence than in the Pyrenees for some fairly large groups of founders (lay or mixed) with continued common property in their churches. The numerous founders in 1071 of the church of S. Romań of Penãmiań in Leon had expected to keep it ‘as their inheritance’, until the bishop’s objections induced them to convey it to its priest.127 The earliest large groups were probably founder-members of pactual monasteries, pooling their hitherto separate property for the purpose;128 but the term monasterium was used as loosely here as anywhere;129 there may be no sharp line between a pactual monastery and a church founded by a group intending to live in it. Such a group could establish itself by a pact and proceed to give the church as its common property to a greater monastery.130 Other agreements (surviving mainly from the north-west) committed the partners, resident or not, to keeping their church together. In 874 seven men—not said to be kinsmen—made a placitum, an agreement, that none of them would ‘give, sell, or testate’ their church or their inheritances unless ‘one to the others or to the church itself ’131 (so what they had besides the church was destined for it in the end). But the more usual group was smaller. In 999 a pair of married couples made a ‘pact and placitum’ to keep whole and undivided their inheritances in a village and church, selling, giving, testating, or exchanging only ‘one to the others’ and to their nephews and nieces, and ‘all our posterity’ likewise; if they or their sons or descendants broke this they would forfeit their share (ratio).132 In 1041 two brothers agreed with a lady Ermesinda to hold a church per medio unus cum alios—in common, each party having a moiety—‘and 126

See below, pp. 785–7. The vocabulary is often sophisticated, e.g. (as in Catalonia) the verb fundare for building and endowing (PMHD nos. 9, 12, 53, 163, 409), unusual so early. The apparent (sometimes baffling) indifference to case-endings and confusion of first and third persons is partly due to the nature of the record (see Collins, ‘Law and Charters’, 500–1 on Leonese telescoped records). 127 Sahaguń no. 708. 128 Above, pp. 148–51. I use the term ‘pactual monastery’ in the looser sense of resting on the monks’ common agreement, not necessarily a bilateral contract with the abbot. 129 See below, p. 669 note 61. 130 e.g. 970, Sahaguń no. 257: six men have built a church and now pactum facimus to God and their abbot ‘to live in one coenobium’ (before they ‘convey and grant’ their monastery to Santiago de Valda´rida). Cf. ibid. no. 270 (973), with an obscurer but perhaps similar background. 131 PMHD no. 7; see Hinojosa, ‘Fraternidad artificial’, 12. 132 PMHD no. 182. Cf. no. 5 (870), foundation of a family church by two couples, built sub uno consilio ‘in our estate’, no alienation except to ‘a priest and/or [vel] one of our family’.

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our and your posterity are to do the same’, paying twice the value of their share if they break the pact.133 Other instances come in the more familiar form of donations to a monastery (frequently giving also ‘ourselves’ or ‘our souls and bodies’, not by itself amounting to seeking admission as monks, but rather fraternity and burial, perhaps residence).134 In 871 a group of six men (variously related, lay and clerical, including a bishop), one woman (the bishop’s mother), and their sons, all agreed—nos omnes placuit una concordia—to give to S. Millań (in the Rioja) two churches inherited from their grandfathers ‘who came there from Leoń’ (themselves perhaps brothers); in 925 in Leoń, Ato with his son (a priest) and Ermegild with his six brothers, ‘heirs in the inheritance of our uncles’, gave their church to Sahaguń ‘by like mind and equal wish’.135 For smaller groups there are countless examples, typically brothers, sometimes sisters, often a man with his sister’s son or sons (subrini), or simply companions.136 Some were evidently energetic colonizers and developers, giving two or three churches built by themselves, with half-a-dozen mills.137 In 1043 four brothers (including a priest), giving to Vacariza a church that they had built, stated the right of the childless to dispose of their property at the expense of collaterals;138 suggesting the existence of a conflicting norm that would have given their cousins a claim. Where numerous ‘heirs’, named or unnamed, took part in a donation along with an inner group, they may have been potential claimants, involved to disarm them: as when in 1076 Asser Assuriz and his wife gave a church to Cardenã (in Castille) ‘together with our heirs’—four couples with (unnamed) sons, three brothers, a man with his mother and brothers, three women each with a sister or daughter or husband and sons, ‘and other heirs, not counted’.139 However, it was often only one man (usually a priest), occasionally a woman or a married couple, that disposed of a church.140 His or her right to have a church for life and pass it on (at will or to a specified destination) sometimes began with a

133

134 Ibid. no. 314. See below, p. 670. ´ San Millan no. 12; Sahaguń no. 32 (cf. no. 29 of 922, Ermegild’s group only, presumably at that stage dealing with only one uncle’s share). 136 e.g. PMHD no. 104 (972); San Millań nos. 2–5, 52, 113, 177 (from 800 to 1063); Sahaguń nos. 77, 321 (941, 984); Cardenã, passim (from 945 to 1083). 137 e.g. San Millań nos. 2, 4–5 (800, 852–3). 138 PMHD no. 327, citing Lex Visigothorum, iv. 2. 19 (Leges, I. 189). Cf. PMHD no. 163 (991): a man had founded a church and left it to his two sons, excluding his other heirs. 139 Cardenã no. 225. Cf. Arlanza no. 87 (1116, a single named donor with his ‘brothers, congermani, sobrini, and all relations, as many as are of my progenies’, who have ‘agreed to make a charter of donation of our own monastery’. 140 e.g. PMHD no. 20 (915); Catedral Oviedo no. 30 (976); San Millań nos. 14, 69 (903, 998); Arlanza nos. 38–9 (1042); Cardenã nos. 296, 325, 168, 246, 178 (965 to 1085); Onã no. 37 (1054, a woman). See also Garcıá Gallo, Coyanza, 501 nn. 480–3. 135

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king’s grant, which would itself fend off the kin;141 in 1072 the priest-donor of a church in Navarre insists ‘let none of my kindred . . . dare to say that it is no more mine than theirs’, since as everyone knows he has given a price for it to king Sancho.142 But with or without a royal grant behind it, a church could come into individual hands and so remain for some time, perhaps until given to a monastery. A striking tenth-century example is a church that passed from a count Geton and his wife to an abbot Gondesind who had it ‘in his ius’ for life; then to Gondesind’s daughter and her husband; sold by them to an abbot Aloytus, who held it in his ius for many years; from him to a countess Gonzina, who having had it in her ius gave it to Valasco Scemeniz her confrater with virtually free disposal.143 When eventually Valasco died, having probably intended the church to go to the monastery of Guimara˜es, another countess intervened to get it diverted to Valasco’s nephew and namesake, with pious but not priestly obligations, and again with almost free disposal.144 In 1059 Gomez, famulus Dei (a layman committed to a quasi-monastic life), was living by consent of his parents and relations in a church built by his ancestors, which he was able to give to his widowed sister Siti, while intending it eventually for a named kinsman and his heirs.145 In the earlier case Valasco Scemeniz was countess Gonzina’s confrater perhaps because she had already admitted him to partnership in the church. Others adopted heirs by charters of profiliatio: in 1005 a deacon Sandino, having a church of his own that had fallen into neglect, made a ‘charter of donation and inprofiliatio of my monastery’ in favour of Froila Gonsa´lvez, Froila and all his posterity to have it in perpetuity, ‘wiped out from my right and conveyed into your dominium’.146 Artificial fraternity assumes a background of common family property; at the same time, adoption of a son assumes the possibility of individual inheritance by a chosen heir.147 Meanwhile when a fraction of a church is itself held in common,148 this suggests an expanding family’s common property in the whole church over two or three generations. But it need not have expanded much. Those holding or claiming a share of what they say their colonizing ancestors founded several generations back may be quite a small group—sometimes just a layman and a 141

This may be its main purpose in some cases where the church was the would-be donor’s already, e.g. Irache nos. 17 and 25 (see below, p. 671 note 75). 142 Irache no. 50 (a high price in wine, livestock, and linen); cf. ibid. no. 15 (1056, a layman for his unambiguous entry gift). 143 PMHD no. 168 (memorandum of 994); for the last transaction see index: Valasco. 144 PMHD no. 251 (1022; disposal ‘to a good priest of your kinsmen or a stranger, or to the monastery of Guimara˜es, or wherever you wish, to whoever will remember you and those named above’). 145 146 Ibid. no. 409. Ibid. no. 194 (see index: Sandino). 147 The transactions—or metaphors—were not mutually exclusive: cf. ibid. no. 270 (1031), a priest’s charter of perfiliatio for his deacon describes him as congermanus. 148 See PMHD no. 357 (1047; inheritance of a third of a church disputed between two groups).

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priest, with their heirs.149 At the same time indivisio in the fullest sense, with shares not trafficked in nor even calculated, seems usually restricted here to siblings with perhaps a first cousin or two, except where there had been an initial pooling between partners related or otherwise, or perhaps when the claims of descendants were to depend on their monastic life. In any case the original common property looks, in Spain, as if it springs from a voluntary interdependence of brothers sticking together or partners getting together, for safety and for pious and economic enterprise in underpopulated and often dangerous country, rather than a family trying to resist the inroads of partible inheritance on unexpandable resources. For southern Europe as a whole there is no single pattern for common property in churches.

17.iii. Dealings in fractions We need to look more closely at the meaning and implications of dealings in separate fractions of churches. Fractions themselves do not result only from partible inheritance. They may result from a donor’s giving part and retaining part of a church,1 for his lifetime or indefinitely. Moieties especially can be ambiguous, arising possibly from foundation by a lord and tenant together,2 or created to settle a dispute over the whole church.3 The more obvious explanation other than partition is collective foundation. In England even before the Norman Conquest, partible inheritance seems almost restricted to peasants and small landowners, yet fractions of churches are to be found, chiefly (in Domesday Book) in East Anglia and Lincolnshire:4 this may sometimes go back to freemen practising partible inheritance who were individually substantial enough to found churches, but probably more often to freemen who had combined to found churches in which there were shares from the start. In Suffolk, in the lands of Hugh de Montfort, half of the church at Dagworth had belonged in king Edward’s time to a freeman Breme, killed at Hastings, the other half to six sokemen; at Helmingham, in the lands of Odo of Bayeux, two freemen held a 149

PMHD nos. 304 (1038), 357 (1047). See Mager, ‘Verha¨ltnis’, 190–1. Whether the donated fraction is the donor’s entire property in the church is not always clear; Fechter’s estimate (Cluny, Adel, 30) that it was so in about half the lay donations of fractions to Cluny up to 1109 is perhaps an underestimate. 2 Some such ‘parage’ arrangement might account for unexplained moieties at Courcemont and ´ Mezie`res (see index: Robert of Sourdon). 3 e.g. Molesme no. i. 137 (late 11th c.). 4 See Bo¨hmer, ‘EKntum’, 317–18; Lennard, England, 290, 320; Stenton, Danelaw Docs., pp. lxxvi–lxxviii; Barlow, 1000–1066, 193. 1

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quarter each of the church while the other half belonged to eleven freemen; at Wantisden a quarter belonged to one freeman, a quarter to two, a half to twenty-two.5 It is impossible to say what combination of joint foundation and partible inheritance lies behind these, but where the numbers holding the two moieties are so disparate it is more likely that a small thegn and a group of free peasants had cooperated (since we know that this happened)6 than that one branch of a family was so startlingly more prolific than the other. In Lincolnshire, joint enterprise by a few freemen with small separate manors in the village7 may lie behind the fractions of the church of Brocklesby given to Newhouse Abbey in the twelfth century: two separate sixths by two different local lords (each holding from a different lord) and a moiety by another, while the remaining sixth escaped Newhouse because yet another lord had given it to Tupholme Priory.8 Outside eastern England, early in the century, the church of Kingston Bagpuize was built and probably held in moieties by the two probably unrelated lords who had manors in the village.9 In Europe generally, however, fractional rights will normally indicate a partible inheritance, and furthermore that it had not yet been divided.10 In speaking of a ‘fraction’ we must see it as produced by a mental, not physical, division (‘defined share’ might be better). In any case, what kind of actual division was possible for a church? Given that it was to continue as a church, the building and its altar could not be physically broken up (the same thing would apply to a mill, a forge, or any other important bit of plant). Its lands could be partitioned, however (apart from any priest’s part), where formerly the rents and produce might have been consumed in an undivided household. Partition of church land between co-heirs is not easy to demonstrate,11 but may account for some of the dismemberment or disappearance of endowments that more usually seems to result from being granted out. Tithes and offerings (again, outside the priest’s part) could be divided in proportion to the original shares; though this is compatible with intending to keep the whole complex together.12 An obstacle to making a real partition, closely tied to the indivisibility of the consecrated building and its altar, was the office of priest. It was here that ninthcentury bishops saw the worst damage done by co-heirs dividing (the dispersal of tithes and offerings and the crumbling away of endowments having hardly yet 5 DB, ii. 408b, 409b (Dagworth); 376a (Helmingham); 306b, 307a, 344a (Wantisden). See Blair, Church, 6 399–400, with table of DB entries for Wantisden. See index: Hutthorpe, Keddington. 7 On the Domesday vocabulary of ‘manors’ see Maitland, DB and Beyond, 173–5. 8 9 Stenton, Danelaw Docs. nos. 244, 252, 254; see p. lxxv n. 5. Above, p. 599. 10 See above, p. 603. 11 A probable instance is Molesme no. i. 2. However, land might be partitioned in practice without any formal division of the whole complex. 12 In Anjou, a third of the church of Brion was defined as a third of its tithes, burial and offerings (St-Aubin no. 376; cf. in Brittany, Morice, Me´moires, 389).

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got going); but they identify the problem and propose a solution differently in east and in west Francia. The bishops at Paris in 846 or 849 complained (according to Hincmar) of the multiplied burdens put on priests: ‘each of these co-heirs for his own part afflicts the priests with rents, gifts, fodder-dues, provision of posthorses, and grazing’ (whether the plural ‘priests’ is more than casual is not clear). The bishops proposed an ambitious scheme for the co-heirs each to give to the church itself (as a kind of endowment) whatever went with his share,13 by a charter made ‘all together’, while committing themselves and their heirs not in future to ‘divide as their own’ what had been conveyed to the church nor to require any service other than spiritual; having done all this they should have ‘due observance (obsequium) and honour for the church’.14 But the east Frankish bishops at Mainz in 852 were chiefly concerned about the multiplication of priests: that by the division of churches ‘four shares are made of one altar and each share has its own priest’, with resulting discord; and their response was more realistic than that of the bishops at Paris. ‘Churches ought not to be divided among co-heirs’; if co-heirs cannot agree among themselves the bishop is to suspend divine service until they ‘return to concord and let the church have a priest . . . by their equal voice and counsel’. At Tribur more than forty years later the same point is made: ‘Where churches are possessed by several co-heirs, let unanimity of concord be procured . . . but if the co-partners disagree and will not set it under one priest, so that brawls and quarrels break out among them and among the clergy’, the bishop shall remove the relics and seal the church doors ‘until in unanimity . . . they all choose one priest’.15 It would probably be wrong to think of the bishops as trying to prescribe a particular inheritance system: nonetheless, if ‘heirs should not divide a church’ but yet are left with their rights, and if they are to decide on a priest ex pari voto atque consilio and by concordi unanimitas, it amounts to undivided common property. At Mainz the co-heirs seem to be envisaged as having chosen to appoint a priest each (expensive unless in an already collegiate church),16 at Tribur as having made conflicting and rival appointments. These things happened, but perhaps 13 quantum unicuique competeret, de sua portione daret. This probably means renouncing any revenue accruing to his share (Stutz, Benef., 270 n. 37), but might only mean giving up such demands on the priest as Hincmar mentions. 14 Hincmar, De eccl. et cap., 84–5. On identifying the council see Stratmann, ibid. 85 n. 16. The problem had been raised at Chalon, 813 (Conc. II no. 37 c. 26; for Italy cf. Mordek, Bibliotheca, app. I no. 14, c. 11); and considered under Louis the Pious, 818–19, 829 (Capit. nos. 138 c. 29, 191 c. 2) but left to the bishop’s 15 discretion. Conc. III no. 26 c. 5; Capit. no. 252 c. 32 (895). See Stutz, Benef., 270–1. 16 In late 11th-c. Touraine, two men ‘had a church . . . divided between them in this way, that of everything belonging to the church’ each had half, ‘and each had his own priest in his own part’, though later there seems to be only one priest (Noyers nos. 222, 223); in Spain, 1229, a council of Compostella (Hist. Compostella, V, App. no. 16 c. 7) forbade the admission of ‘any clerk presented to a smaller share of a church than a third’. Another, probably unusual arrangement, was for each partner to supply a (hired?) chaplain for the appropriate part of the year: in England, Colne no. 71 (1121–45); in Spain, Eslonza no. 93 (1165; see Garcıá Gallo, ‘Coyanza’, 527 and n. 544).

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quite seldom and notoriously. Complete partition being impossible, most churches belonging to more than one person were probably kept more-or-less common. Partners in Italy are found combining to appoint a single priest, or agreeing that they would;17 in England there are in Domesday Book ‘half priests’ belonging to certain lordships in divided villages: probably one village priest held from two lords each with a moiety.18 But the difficulty of real partition did not prevent shares being disposed of independently and having different legal histories: that is normally how we hear of them;19 and such dealings in churches show the strength of individual interests and motives within the family. To alienate one’s share in a church was not to make an immediate partition. The monastery or cathedral—or indeed the saint— to which the share was given (whether defined or simply as ‘my part’) took the donor’s place in the family or partnership, its share in principle no more distinct than his had been.20 This is clearly intended when a donor in 1019 gives to Farfa ‘my portion of the churches called St Martin, St Peter, and St Mary, and my portion of the books and endowments and goods . . . and all their ornaments, so far as they belong to me . . . and my portion of the church of St Michael . . . and of all its ornaments so far as belongs to me, and of its endowments’:21 he certainly does not intend the monks to remove his share of books, treasure, and land, nor does he even need to name it as a fraction. What a greater church got in practice, often after a delay in which the donor or other named person (such as a widow or child) had usufruct,22 might be a regular payment from the other partners;23 otherwise the appropriate or agreed portion of revenue or produce; and presumably a say at least in choosing the priest. The problems that could arise can be seen in the early ninth century in Tuscany, when a church was held in common between the bishop of Lucca, to whom a moiety had been given, and a layman Peter who had inherited the other moiety. Peter offered to ‘divide’ (and whatever else he meant by this he must have meant that endowments should be split); the bishop declined for fear of harm to the church, but offered instead to let Peter have both halves for three lives, thus safeguarding the church’s unity for the near future and securing it whole for the bishopric in the long run.24 The same problem arose in the mid-eleventh century between 17 See above, p. 607; for actual common appointments, above, p. 548, notes 76, 77; or acting separately and at different times but appointing the same priest, above, p. 545 note 35. 18 Lennard, England, 332 and n. 1 (but see 318 n. 5). For a shared priest in contemporary Rouergue see Ste-Foi no. 473 (1087–1107): ‘I relinquish my share of the priest’s servicium.’ 19 Sometimes, however, from polyptichs (Stutz, Benef., 171 n. 80), but almost certainly resulting from lay donations. 20 See above, p. 29 note 87. Instances are Ange´ly no. 273 (1071); in Castille, Onã no. 119 (1105). 21 Farfa no. 460; cf. Cava no. 664 (1013). 22 i.e. remained entitled to whatever he or she had had: home and livelihood, or a share of revenues. 23 24 An early instance (786) is St Gallen no. 105. Mem. Lucc., IV. i. ii no. 14 (813).

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Farfa and the bishop of Sabina who had moieties in a hilltop church, Farfa’s probably from lay donations by then forgotten (the bishop ‘does not know by what justice’ Farfa has its moiety).25 In Gascony around 1100, the monastery of Sorde had had a moiety of a church (given by its ‘possessor’) for over sixty years, until in a gap between abbots ‘our co-heirs’ seized the church, ‘that is, the moiety that St John had’. Under the settlement the co-heirs restored a moiety of everything (‘all these things, from the least to the greatest’), while both parties were to ‘put in the priest’.26 In Saxony about the same time, St Michael’s at Hildesheim had a moiety of a church, here too for ‘more than sixty years’,27 until abbot Conrad and the holder ‘by hereditary right’ of the other moiety, Riwin, found themselves in dispute about appointing a priest. They settled for an exchange giving land of the monastery’s to Riwin and the whole church in perpetuity to the abbot; the abbot later granted the church in benefice to one of Riwin’s sons. But when this son became a monk, his brother Theoderic claimed the church as his own,28 restoring it only after long resistance.29 Not only was such artificial membership of a family or consortium sometimes awkward to maintain, but common property in a church at all, with or without incorporated outsiders, might be unstable.30 Co-heirs, jointly or severally, are likely sooner or later to want change. They may, as we have seen, collectively part with the whole thing without even quantifying their shares: a straightforward and fairly infrequent expression of common ownership. Or they may—still acting as co-heirs or partners, but with more individualism—give their separate shares at the same time or within a year or two;31 or one member may collect others’ shares to give.32 But often, close or remote relations, and perhaps nonrelations who have acquired shares since the foundation, part with their shares by separate bargains over a generation or two, for substantial counter-gifts temporal and spiritual. In Saintonge about 1071 viscount Cadelo, whose father had earlier given a third of a church to Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly, gave them the other two-thirds, in return for 70s., a horse worth 200s., release from a medical bill of 300s. owed to one of the monks, and 50s. to his wife for her consent.33 In the 25

Farfa no. 883. The present abbot had broken an agreement not to alienate without the other’s 26 Sorde no. 8 (settlement, between 1105 and 1119). consent. 27 Probably a way of saying ‘longer by far than the required 30 years’. 28 Hildesheim no. 210 (bishop’s record of Theoderic’s resignation, 1135). 29 He had meanwhile hung on to the land given in exchange. St Michael’s moiety was said to have come from bp. Bernward (993–1022) who had it from Bodo, cathedral provost, with the consent of Bodo’s brother (probably Riwin’s ancestor). 30 Unless perhaps in a successful pactual monastery with celibate members replaced from outside. 31 e.g. Uzerche nos. 53, 61 (Mar. and Aug. 1019); Ange´ly no. 132 (c.1059); St-Cyprien nos. 571, 574–5 (1088); Reóle no. 82 (1099). See Bull, Piety, 212: when one brother ‘breaks ranks’ the others may follow. On the far side of France cf. Savigny nos. 133–4 (c.970), 659–62 (1021–2). 32 e.g. from a wide geographical spread, with many degrees of elaborateness, Savigny nos. 652–7 33 (1018–c.1020); Talmond nos. 4, 5 (c.1054, 1058); PMHD no. 660 (1086). Ange´ly no. 277.

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Rhineland at the end of the eleventh century the abbot of St James’s at Mainz recorded that the noblewoman Cuneza had given a moiety of a church, on condition that 20s. from its revenues were spent at the monastery on a light at her father’s tomb and alms at the hospital; while the abbot had acquired ‘the other part of the church’ from the nobleman Ludowic and his wife, by an exchange.34 Partners might have an agreement to secure each other’s consent to alienation, but such agreement was probably unusual and perhaps normally unnecessary.35 The process could be complex or confused. Saint-Pierre at Auban was given to Le´zat in 971, with the estate that it then belonged to, by three priests acting together; an act already complicated, however, by their having to exclude what they had ‘given to other men’, and (perhaps for that reason) giving Le´zat direct use of only one moiety and seigneurie over the other. By the mid-eleventh century some of it was back in lay hands (or had never left them): ‘a man called Auriol’ quitclaimed one-eighth of the church, and donated his moiety of another three-quarters, which he and Arnold Loup held jointly; nothing is said about the remaining eighth, nor about Arnold Loup’s intentions for his three-eighths. Finally in 1117, Peter of Martignac with his brother William, their nephew Martin and his sisters, and their own sons and daughters, gave up ‘everything that we hold or think that we have’ in this church (and another), conveying it all to Le´zat ‘by this latch-string’: a collective donation by a complete family group, its simplicity made possible by its total vagueness, but perhaps effective in conveying to the monastery whatever it still lacked.36 More typical is the confused acquisition of the church of Godz by Saint-Mont, from a family group giving their share as an entry gift for one of them, another man pledging his share (both these unquantified), a kinsman later giving up a dubious claim, and another man selling his sixth.37 Individuals’ traffic in shares could bring them not only to monasteries but to other individuals lay or priestly, usually without any suggestion of formal admission to an artificial fraternity. In the Iberian north-west by the later eleventh century this is specially characteristic, or else unusually evident because of the documented back history that came to monastic archives. Thus in 1082 an abbot Sando gave to a man and his wife and all their posterity a third of a church, being ‘as much as came to me in my portion’, along with all its documentation 34

Mainz no. 393. The abbot of Werden’s record of buying a moiety of a church from one of two brothers (1150, UBNR I no. 368) emphasizes the other’s (or his heir’s) consent, resting on a special agreement between the brothers about their whole paternal inheritance. 36 Le´zat nos. 375–6, 380 (near Polastron, Haute-Garonne). 37 St-Mont nos. 26 (c.1085), 25 (c.1090); but no. 87 (12a) attributes the donation to count Bernard Tumapeler earlier (c.1060) and to another man giving a quarter. 35

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from his ancestors, in return for help and defence; and in 1075 a woman Ileva gave to a priest for two measures of millet her entire share in a church, ‘as much as is counted to me among my brothers and coheirs’, being a quarter of a sixth.38 In 1069 a widow Gudina (having compensated her children out of her share in other property) sold her husband’s tenth part of a church to Tructesind Gutieriz and his wife for them and their posterity to have and do what they liked with it, in exchange for a good mare and a cow. Twelve years later the same couple acquired shares in another church, buying them for four oxen from Pelaio Eriz, consisting of a quarter inherited from his father and an eighth that he had bought. And a famulus Dei had acquired from Roderigo Danieliz (and in 1086 gave to the monastery of Arauca) two separate quarters of a church, one quarter being Roderigo’s original share and the other formerly his brother’s (a priest).39 To be free to give one’s share, whether in alms or not, even if with the others’ consent, was an individual right that set a limit to government ‘by common counsel’: indivisio need not amount to full family communism. This is demonstrated by agreements to prevent or limit such alienations. In 1008 a confessus Trasmir disposed of two-thirds of a church which he and a priest Arvald, his congermanus, now deceased, had agreed to hold together ‘in one inheritance and one brotherhood’, the survivor to have both parts. In 1060 three brothers and a sister, with two nephews, held a quarter-church which had been their aunt’s; by a pact and placitum with the monastery of Guimara˜es ‘we are to hold it in our lifetime, and our sons and nephews likewise’, with no licence to alienate it except to the monastery apart from intra-family dealings, ‘brother to brother-in-law or one to another among our progeny’.40 Here or anywhere, even to name fractions is perhaps to recognize that alienations may happen,41 though it might indicate only concern about the allocation of revenues or of priests’ services;42 either way, a small compact group intending to maintain ‘common counsel’ and a common economy might not at first think in terms of fractions at all. When (as so often) a defined share of a church was itself held in common and jointly disposed of, probably by one of the conjugal families or sets of siblings descended from the founder or founders, without their having yet defined their individual shares 38

PMHD nos. 656, 520 (perhaps only a small part of her total inheritance; she had sons). 40 Ibid. nos. 478, 597, 660. Ibid. nos. 200, 426. As in Le´zat no. 1150 (1026–31), a partition between two brothers but keeping their three churches in common: not only was a moiety of each church explicitly allotted to each brother, but each quitclaimed the other’s part and conceded his right ‘to do as he wished with it sine inganno’ (without deceit). 42 See above, note 18 and Taviani-Carozzi, Principaute´, 855–6. Cf. Cava no. 649 (1012): when a minor and his mother, left in poverty, are allowed to sell his (prospective) third share in a church and her quarter of that, the buyer and his heirs are to ‘receive from it such a share as we would have had’. 39 41

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within their sub-group’s share,43 this is because they are closer to each other than to their cousins; there are degrees of communality. In southern Italy it was evidently important to the individual or the sub-group to have their share defined and recognized. When in 950 the lordship of a church outside Naples was in dispute, two brothers claiming that it had been given them by local princes while six other men said they had it of old from their kinsmen, it was agreed that in return for payments in gold the two would admit each of the six ‘as one of us . . . you and your heirs with us and our heirs’, none stronger than another: so far, the creation of a new fraternity. But there were to be four parts, each allotted to one pair of brothers or cousins; each person could sell or leave his dominatio to his kinsmen, or to each other or their heirs; or if no one took up the offer then ‘whoever we want to give it to may have potestas, for so it has been willingly agreed among us’.44 Fractions might be specified also in leases to priests, even though for one and the same priest (perhaps to ensure fair shares of his services or gifts).45 The nobles of Salerno, brothers and cousins, who acted together to appoint a priest in 1049,46 nonetheless did this by making traditio of their separate thirds. With the same outcome but less initial coordination, in 1058 the minor son and the widow of a count Albert whose grandfather had bought the church of S. Nicolo of Gallocanto leased a moiety of it to a Greek monk-priest, and five months later two other grandsons leased their third to the same man.47 The eight consortifices who in 1024 leased their church of S. Adiutore to a priest and his clerk conveyed it to them in two moieties. In this case, however, there must have been internal traffic in shares since the foundation in 985: one of the partners, Miro iudex, had a whole moiety ‘by my purchases’, probably from cousins willing to be bought out; while the other moiety belonged to all eight—Miro and his two brothers, their four first or second cousins, and one survivor from the older generation.48 In Naples and Amalfi shares could be made up of ‘twelfths’, a moiety leased to a priest being called ‘six twelfths’, or in one church five widows disposing between them of ten twelfths, and a man (later and separately) of two; useful no doubt for its flexibility, making allocation to single individuals easier (the widows did not have two twelfths each, but one four, one three, and 43 e.g. Ange´ly no. 143 (c.1096), three brothers and a sister give a quarter church (but perhaps renouncing a doubtful claim since a more complex group had already given the whole church, ibid. no. 142). Cf. in the kingdom of Burgundy Chron. Besuense, 943; St-Andre´-le-Bas no. 183; in Forez, Cluny no. 3056. 44 Cava no. 178 (nothing is said about ordinatio of a priest or priests). 45 This was spelt out for the widow’s quarter in her son’s moiety at S. Nicolo, Gallocanto (below, 46 See index: Desideus, count. note 47). 47 Cava nos. 1258 (done on behalf of the widow’s son by another Albert), 1270 (the sixth unaccounted for may have been another grandson’s). See Taviani-Carozzi, Principaute´, 758–61, 855–6. 48 See index: Puciano.

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three one), and not necessarily indicating any special bent towards independent dealings.49 Meanwhile in Apulia, shares in a church seem in one instance to come very close to actual division at least of the land, when land was donated to a priest for his sortio (which was a moiety) rather than to the church as a whole. The intention was perhaps to establish that this land was for the use of the priest and his successors, rather than for his ‘other kinsmen and sortifices’ in the other moiety; some territorial partition of produce at least is implied. Also in Apulia, the priest Pascal donating land to a church (apparently as an entrance gift), into the hands of Passarus its only adult lord, gives it ‘both for your sortio and for the sortio of your cousin Libo’s sons’, implying that it might have been otherwise; but with the right to recover half his gift should the young men ‘eject me from their moiety’.50 Nothing quite like this seems to happen anywhere else. In France, with its written evidence of huge volume but less legal variety, we encounter fractions almost solely at the point of being given, sold, or quitclaimed to a monastery, often with a typical list of pertinences such as go with a whole church, ‘whatever belongs to this share’ being understood. But occasionally we get a glimpse of some particular thing having been actually divided, as in an eighth of a church given to Cluny ‘with all its pertinences, in cemetery, offerings, tithes, firstfruits, or land’ but also with a small measured patch of ground in the village.51 And sometimes more than this is half revealed. In the mid-eleventh century two knights, Ranulf of Brion and William Havard (not evidently brothers), gave to Saint-Aubin Angers their third part of the church of Brion; later, William’s heir (it seems) Ralph Toared claimed and then surrendered a sixth (a sixth, that is, of tithe, offering, and burial); but Ranulf’s eldest son Geoffrey quitclaimed not apparently a sixth but an odd assortment of individual rights: the presbiteratus; use of the monks’ door to the church, and of ‘the rock that opens into the church’ (perhaps a desirable cellar);52 a small bit of land; and the wine tithe which he claimed as ‘belonging to his fief ’ although Ralph Toared had sold it to the monks.53 Claiming the presbiteratus is ambiguous,54 while use of a door and a cellar might be a relic of shared privileges; but claiming the whole tithe on a particular product suggests that somewhere 49 See Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 167–8, nn. 259, 260 (1032, 1063; in each case both shares belonged to the same monastery, so not showing any separatist tendency but an intention to have two or more clerics); Amalfi nos. 108–9 (1108–9). 50 Bari III no. 8 (1060); ibid. V no. 6 (1086. In 1091 Passarus sold his moiety to the abp. of Bari, ibid. 51 1049–1109, Cluny no. 3056 (in Forez). V no. 16). 52 There is no clue to this in the existing church, but it sits on volcanic rock which in the mayor’s 53 secretary’s words is ‘comme un Gruye`re’. St-Aubin nos. 376, 378, 383 (mid- to late 11th c.). 54 It is not clear how Geoffrey could claim the whole presbiteratus, if that is what is meant.

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along the line separate dealings in shares had led to some actual (albeit disputed) division.55 It would be a mistake, then, to suppose of any church owned in fractions that because it could not be completely divided it must have been totally shared. An untidy mixture is more likely, the co-heirs (whether or not these include a greater church) dividing what they can and sharing what they must. In Rouergue a moiety of the church of Saint-Saturnin of Value´jols was given to Sainte-Foi about 1060 by a local lord, Robert; in 1081 his son Stephen, becoming a monk, gave the other half as his entry gift.56 Before Stephen’s donation the church itself must have been shared between him and St Faith or her monks: each had a moiety. But the terms of Stephen’s charter show that this indivisio was, as regards the church’s land, somewhat ragged. He and the monks did indeed share the lordship of some of the endowment, since he gave moieties of two mansi and of four dependencies ‘which belong to the church’. But he gave also whatever his tenants and servants had in the church and the estate ‘by me or from me’: so some of the land or tithe has been at his individual disposal.57 The outcome of such a breakdown into individual claims is not usually, however, indefinitely continued fragmentation.58 Since families could shrink as well as expand, fractions might be brought together by the elimination of all but one heir, and remain in his possession as a priest or a lay lord until he gave it away. Alternatively, if heirs were few and a church not too large a part of their total resources, the problem of partition might not arise (or have arisen ever) since the entire church could be made someone’s share in a partition. So in Auvergne a lord Pons of Turlande ‘came with his brother to divide their honores, and the church of Saint-Georges of Broussade came to Pons’s share’ (on record only because Pons then gave it to Saint-Flour).59 Failing a whole church, a moiety could be used for one son out of several. At Value´jols the monk Stephen had brothers and sisters; it looks as if the moiety that Robert had not given to the monks had been allotted to Stephen as his individual inheritance in dividing a larger property. This may have been done with the intention that he become a monk and use the moiety as his entry gift, thus bringing the whole church to Saint-Flour. Similarly in the Orleánais a knight who 55 Or the cartularist may have simplified as joint possession (in no. 376) what was partly held by one from the other (see no. 378). Both were knights of Sable-sur-Sarthe; only Ranulf and his son are called 56 ‘of Brion’. Ste-Foi nos. 44–5. 57 The partners also split tithes, offerings, and burials, but that is compatible with common property. 58 In any case shares were rarely kept track of down to tiny fractions (though in 1127 an entry gift to La Reóle seems to be ‘a quarter of a 20th’ of a church: Reóle no. 132). 59 St-Flour no. VI.35 (though puzzlingly Pons’s brother Gerald at some stage had what seems to be the same church at his disposal, ibid. no. VI.34). In 946 a couple divided their villa of Sevanis (dioc. Uzes?) between two sons (the others being already provided for), giving Sigbert the church with its presbiteratus and specified land, and Leutald the rest of the land as ‘the other moiety’ of the estate (Cluny no. 693).

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had only a moiety in a church (Saint-Pe`re, Chartres, already having the rest) could still use that moiety to provide for one clerical son Hugh, leaving ‘other benefices’ to his other sons. Here however the moiety was not enough for Hugh to live on, the church having been deserted: he offered it for sale to Saint-Pe`re, who, able to take a longer view, gave him a succession of small sums for it.60 So in both these instances the outcome, planned or not, was to bring the moieties together again permanently. Monks, on their side, laboured to gather up the remaining fractions of churches that they had a share in. Thus many churches once held in common by a family, later held in legally distinct if not practically separated fractions, were eventually brought together again in the hands of a monastery. There were no static categories making certain churches a family’s common property while others were individual property, their alienation subject only to lords’ and heirs’ consent; lordship in any church may shift, shatter, and reform.

17.iv. Lay lords’ livelihoods and family arrangements We should not assume that the lay lord or lords of a small church always had an economic interest in it; it might not bring in enough revenue for its own expenses. In this case (which might arise from initial under-endowment, lack or decline of pastoral revenue, or bad management by lords or priests) its lords might let its service and upkeep lapse, and should this lapse be permanent we may never know that the church once existed; what we hear of is the rescue— achieved or in prospect—of run-down churches by later lords, corporate or individual, who may have inherited the church from those who had neglected it, or acquired it from them if their solution had been to give it away.1 Or the lord of a church who was finding it a burden might give or sell it before it became derelict, to a new lord—often a great church—able to bear its costs for the time being. Or finally, perhaps more often than is evident, the costs may be accepted by the founders’ heirs as a proper bit of lordly expenditure. This is especially likely where a private church was serving only the lord’s household, not yet having the parochial care of peasants and the crucial revenues—tithes, offerings, burial dues—that normally went with this; but might also be true of any titheless private church, even one attended by tenants or neighbours, if it was in the hands of a tenant priest for whom the endowments and offerings were only just enough to 60 1

St-Pe`re, 133–4 (before 1080), 140–1 (before 1102); see index: Cruce´. See above, pp. 445, 454–5.

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live on. In such a church the lay lord might have much to value—a means of social control, a channel for almsgiving, perhaps a burial-place, the priest’s prayers, the saint’s help (especially if it is the lord’s only or most important church).2 But among poorer lords were some whose churches were not a burden to be shed or borne but essential to their livelihood and their family’s future. In Italy, where ordinary churches’ wealth lay mostly in land, a small family group that included the serving priest might depend on its church’s pasture, arable, vines, and olives for a joint livelihood. In France, by a quite different kind of dependence, a knight might live largely on tithes as well as land, employing an ill-paid priest and probably keeping the church minimally patched up to keep it functioning. Of course there would be borderline cases between burden and livelihood, as with the clerk Hugh whose inherited moiety of a church was meant to support him but failed because depopulation reduced its yield in tithes.3 Occasionally the lord of a single church in France seems to have little else to live on. Reneging on its alienation may indicate this. Adrald, the senior of three brothers who had sold their church to Marmoutier, made himself such a nuisance that the church was useless to Marmoutier and was sold to Saint-Pe`re, Chartres, with the three brothers’ agreement and that of the lords they had held it from; but Adrald in his neediness (‘for poverty always blinds’) hung onto it on the excuse that the monks had failed to rebuild the church as he said they had undertaken to do. After being many times excommunicated he did at last surrender the church, promising (with his family’s consent) to make no further claims on it or its land, or to the dues he had been taking on corn stored there.4 It looks as if he had regretted parting with an important part of his livelihood for the sake of ready cash. Adrald was almost certainly a small landlord for whom the estate church was much but not everything. More rarely, a self-contained church may have been literally all that a lay family had to live on.5 An exceptionally clear case is that of the Breton laywoman Barbota who in 1104—persuaded by the bishop—gave her church at the mouth of the Loire to Saint-Aubin Angers. ‘I, Barbota, having as my patrimony the church of St Brevin’, her charter begins; going on to explain that she has always put in a chaplain, by implication paying him what she chose.6 She and her family were to be provided for by the monastery maintaining her until 2 See the reservations sometimes made by donors of churches, e.g. stipulating their own burial at the church (St-Mont no. 11; St-Pe`re, 232–4); retaining a say in the priest’s appointment and the nomination of a 3 beneficiary for alms (Couture no. 13). See index: Cruce´. 4 St-Pe`re, 166–7 (the brothers’ charter, 1061), 216–17 (the monks’ notice, c.1080). His persistence was clearly not just to keep the gift-exchange process going. 5 This might conceivably apply to some of the many 10th-c. donors of churches reserving lifelong 6 See above, p. 575. usufruct.

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she died, and making monks of her two sons Evan and Daniel; allowing one-third of the monastery’s intended two-thirds of the revenues to her daughter Domelina for life; and giving that portion, along with the chaplaincy of the church (with its own newly allocated third), to any future son of Domelina’s who might become a priest.7 Such possession of a church and nothing else might go back to an ancestor in whose property the church had been one child’s portion; or possibly to a founder (priest or layman) who had put everything he had into the church (though when—much earlier—we occasionally encounter such foundations, they were being given to a greater church, by a founder committing himself to religious life, and having no heirs, or none still unprovided for, or none but a priestly or religious heir or widow).8 In Gascony about fifty years earlier the economic importance of churches to a knightly family was starkly shown up in a different manner, when a young man whose feckless father had alienated his entire patrimony had two churches retrieved for him to live on. According to the notitia fundationis of the priory of Saint-Mont, its founder (about 1036) was Raymond of Saint-Mont, the eldest of three brothers, who cleared the way for the foundation, with the support and consent of count Bernard Tumapeler, by agreeing to a partition with his brothers and mother. This left him with the hill and the settlement on it, the tithes, firstfruits, and other revenues of the parish, and two other churches. All this he used to endow the new monastery, intending to become a monk himself. But shirking this, he was left with nothing to live on: he and his wife spent the next five years on the move and spongeing on their relations, meanwhile producing a son and a daughter. Taunted by his kinsmen for his folly, he went at last to the count, undertook to become a monk, and begged him to allow something of what he had given the monastery to be diverted to his children. We do not learn what was done for the daughter; the son Bernard was set up with life tenure in the two churches other than Saint-Mont, along with three peasant tenants.9 Even a share in a church might constitute a layman’s whole patrimony, and that before partition with his sons: it seems so when Rignald of Arjac gave to Sainte-Foi a moiety of a third of the church there, being his entire property (omne meum alode), to pass to the monastery after his own death and that of his sons and his sons’ sons if any; then, should his son Hector (already a monk) survive his brothers and nephews, to be held by him for life as an obedience.10 In 1037 a certain Rainald was reduced by poverty and illness to asking for admission to 7

St-Aubin no. 910 (not in the cartulary but a triple original); see ed. note on the date. Above, pp. 35–7, 41, 50–3. St-Mont no. 1. By the 1090s Bernard or a later namesake had lost possession of one church (Montagnan) but was still claiming it (ibid. nos. 28, 87(5)). See Bull, Knightly Piety, 136–9, esp. on the notitia’s bias towards justifying count Bernard Tumapeler’s control of the priory (which he gave to Cluny). 10 Ste-Foi no. 416 (11th c.). ‘Arjac’ might be Arzac (Tarn), near Cahuzac-sur-Ve`re. 8 9

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Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly should he live, otherwise for burial there and a share in the monks’ prayers and good works, in return for ‘all my inheritance, whatever I know that I have and that came to me paterno iure,11 wherever it may be in the whole world: namely the share that I have in a certain church’ called Romagnoles with mills, watercourses, vineyards, meadows, lands, woods, and all pertinences.12 This—given at a fairly grand assembly of Aquitanian magnates—was probably his unseparated share of a family church. In richer families, where a whole substantial church could constitute—or be included in—one son’s or daughter’s portion,13 it might be directed specifically to furthering the family’s marriage plans, being deployed (before any general partition) as a daughter’s marriage portion from her father: her maritagium. Or it could be a wife’s marriage gift from her husband, her dotalicium or sponsalicium, destined to be her widow’s portion.14 The daughter’s marriage portion appears in Burgundy in 1028, when a noble widow Ermenburg obtained from Rudolf III full property in moieties of two churches which her father Lambert had had in benefice ‘and gave to her when he handed her over in marriage to Humbert’.15 In Anjou between 1046 and 1067, Agnes, widow of Hubert lord of the castle of Durtal, could give not only a parish church ‘which I possess from my former husband as dotalicium’ but a moiety of another church ‘which is of my maritagium’, presumably from her father. And in Saint-Aubin’s history of two of its churches, one had been given by Waldin lord of the castle of Malicorne to his daughter, the other (unusually) by a mother to her son, both for their marriages.16 However, allotting a church to one son or daughter may often have been planned to provide for a celibate. In Languedoc as early as 878, a division made by judges after a family dispute allotted two churches entire to a nun Fulcrada provided that she gave her co-heirs—four men—enough land from the rest of her inheritance to compensate them.17 Her abbess was originally a party to the dispute but pulled out, apparently to simplify things: Fulcrada’s property was probably coming to the monastery in any case, perhaps as a delayed entry gift.

11 Described further on as what came to him non materno sit [¼ sed] paterno iure, not necessarily implying that he also had property from his mother: the point could be that no maternal kin were 12 affected. Ange´ly no. 42. 13 Or given to one child (son or daughter) as melioratio (below, p. 748); or in at least one case left to the eldest daughter (1079, Vendoˆme no. 282: Adelildis gives her church with the consent of two sisters (besides her husband, son and daughter), ‘since she held it individually, left to her as the firstborn’). 14 See Duby, Socie´te´, 217–18. 15 DRud. no. 119 (see index: Ermenburg). Her son Hugh I abp. of Besançon inherited these moieties (ed. note, ibid. 289). 16 St-Aubin nos. 287–8 (1046–67, Agnes’s donations with different consents needed for each); ibid. no. 327 (see index: Malicorne). Cf. Vendoˆme nos. 62–4; Cluny no. 3351 (Richoara’s donation was later challenged by her son-in-law Letbald of Digoine); Orderic, HE II. 84–5 (a church given as a sister’s 17 marriage portion). The´venin, Textes no. 108.

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Meanwhile churches as the husband’s marriage gift appear from the Midi to Norman England. In Languedoc in 1093, when Pons Rostaing and his brother and cousin gave a church to Be´ziers, their uncle’s share was still in his widow’s possession for life as her sponsalicium. In Poitou about 1080 Maingod and his brothers gave the church at their castle of Melle to Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly with confirmation by their mother, ‘to whom that church belonged iure dotalicii, given her by their father’. In Maine in 1098 the nobleman Fulchoius, giving a church for his own entry to Saint-Aubin Angers, needed the participation of his second wife and her sons and had to compensate her with other land because it was her dos.18 In England in the 1120s countess Isabel de Warenne gave to Castle Acre a Norfolk church that ‘my lord the earl had given me’.19 Using a church for a widow’s dower might protect the dower against the husband’s kin (whose rights to inherit were perhaps hardening); but more effective—and perhaps planned all along—would be her donation of it to a monastery, reserving usufruct for life.20 An early example, illuminatingly explored by Janet Nelson, is the Lotharingian widow Erkanfrida’s donation of her wealthy church at Mersch to St Maximin in 853, followed shortly by her will.21 The church was to support masses and an annual feast for her own and her husband’s memoria. But it was also for her to live on, fending off the interest of her husband’s kin in her lifetime, while acknowledging it in providing that if, later, the property is diverted from the common good of the monks, ‘my husband’s heirs, to whom it belongs by hereditary right, shall have the power of taking it all back and possessing it’ pending its restoration to the monks.22 It was of course not only in widows’ donations that churches were kept for a layman or woman to enjoy for life. This was less frequent by the eleventh century; however, in 1038 Renald lord of Chaˆtillon-en-Bazois, giving a manse and church for his own entry to Saint-Beńigne at Dijon, retained a moiety of it for his wife’s lifetime as her dotalicium; and in the Midi around 1000, Amelius Simplicius of the comital family of Toulouse and Rodez, planning a journey to Rome, made a written division of his acquisitions (in effect a testament), among them a church left ultimately to Le´zat, in which his wife and his brother were each to have a quarter for life.23 It is not clear what these two might otherwise have expected in Amelius’s church: that he invoked the abbot’s protection for them, and insisted 18

19 Be´ziers no. 93; Ange´ly no. 219; St-Aubin no. 354. EYC VIII no. 21. See Nightingale, Gorze Reform, 7–8, 164–6. 21 Altlux. UB nos. 88, 89; Nelson, ‘The Wary Widow’, esp. 96–111, with text of the will pp. 111–13 (improving on Wampach’s). See Le Jan, Famille, 368–71; Nightingale, Reform, 190. 22 The repossession clause is only in the donation charter, the reservation to Erkanfrida’s use only in the will (see Nelson, ‘Widow’, 99 on the implications of this for other apparently immediate donations). Cf. countess Bertha, 996 (see index); Nightingale, Reform, 243–4. On women’s property as contestable, esp. 23 dower, see now Stafford, ‘Mutation’, 114–24. St-Beńigne no. 323; Le´zat no. 189. 20

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on his own lawful and independent acquisition of the property, suggests that other family members might have claimed it. So securing a church for a selected heir or heirs might still, around 1000, be the purpose of giving it to a monastery; but in the eleventh century it seems more often a necessary condition or a negotiated compromise. In Gascony late in the eleventh century, with the informality characteristic of both the region and the period, a lord William of Luppe gave the church of Daunian to SaintMont; but on his deathbed (mortally wounded) he retracted this in favour of his brother Arnald, ‘a more dear friend to me than my other brothers’, who was to be allowed to recover the church for himself (probably only for life) on payment of 50s. to the monastery. In the event Arnald seems to have claimed the church as his in any case, and far from paying for it, had to be bought off with 30s.24 We cannot, however, infer from this story what the favourite brother’s expectations would have been had the church not been given away in the first place; certainly after his death the monks got the four surviving brothers to come to Saint-Mont and renew the gift. In Navarre in 1111, a woman whose mother-in-law had promised a church to Irache on her deathbed, and whose husband had accordingly promised it after his own death, now gave it after her own death, meanwhile paying half the tithe of its vineyards in recognition (‘that my posterity may have no excuse for keeping what I am giving you in my lifetime’).25 As for exactly what a layman or woman had when he or she ‘had’ a church for life, this could have been anything from appointment of the priest and receipt of a rent from him, to enjoyment of all revenues while paying the priest a pittance. We can seldom know; but a man who claimed a church as having been his wife’s marriage-portion from her uncle (the uncle now giving it to Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly) was allowed a moiety of the church’s tithes and land, to be held from the abbot (who presumably held the other half ).26 It must already be evident that the use of churches, or shares in them, as entry gifts to monasteries was extremely frequent; though less often done for a daughter than for a son (or nephew, or brother), or for a male donor himself.27 With the necessary consent from lord and relations, it could be done out of dependent holdings as well as alods; not necessarily as part of any general partition, but often with a suggestion either that the entry gift is what the individual would in due course have inherited or that it is to count as his 24

25 26 St-Mont no. 17 (with no. 16 ). Irache no. 92. Ange´ly no. 70 (c.1084). e.g. uncle for nephew (Orderic, HE II. 84–7: Augerons); brother for brother (St-Cyprien nos. 195, 198); mother for son (ibid. no. 474; Reóle no. 66). Churches as a man’s entry gift for himself or a son are too numerous to need illustrating. In general see Lynch, Entry; Bull, Piety, 117–22. 27

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inheritance.28 Some time before 1050 a Breton, lord of the castle of Migron, gave to Redon his nearby family monastery at Frossay and a third of the church of Saint-Pierre next it, as entry gift for his adult son Judicahel (a miles), describing the gift as being in Judicahel’s ‘right and patrimony’ (with a third of Saint-Pierre perhaps because there were two other sons).29 But when in Languedoc, rather later, a man and four sons gave quarters of four churches to Le´zat for the admission of a fifth son, it looks as if the other sons’ shares had been settled leaving out the fifth (or before he was born), so that he was specially provided for by carving out shares of the family churches to make him a monk. More simply, a single church still held in common was given by a father and six sons for a seventh; another was given for one brother by all the others after their father’s death.30 When the gift is for the donor’s own entry, made out of what is already his own, his relations may still participate, as when about 1100 a Poitevin gave for his entry to Saint-Cyprien ‘whatever he had’ in two churches, his sister and her sons giving it too; or relations may have to be compensated, as when in Languedoc a certain Arnald giving a church and himself to Cluny recorded that he had given a villa to his brother Ademar in return for his oath not to claim the church, and had obtained a similar oath from a cousin.31 Often it was done with a lord’s help or initiative;32 and in an extreme case it might be thoroughly individualist, as in a lay lord’s entry gift to Irache in Navarre of the monasteriolum that had come to him by a royal gift to his uncle with freedom to dispose of it; this he does with the backing of his neighbours and to the exclusion of his kin.33 Such entry to monastery or chapter may be often not the primary purpose of giving a church, but a countergift (often one of several) acknowledging a donation made for other reasons.34 Either way the church is used for the support of one family member. The same is true of a church given away reserving its incumbency for a clerical son or brother of the donor—less often found, or less often recorded, than securing a place as monk or canon (though these could be

28 Reflected sometimes in the individual monk keeping some control or enjoyment of the property: e.g. 1034–5, the moiety of a church given to Preáux priory by a monk of Fećamp with Fećamp’s consent (ADNorm. no. 88) had probably been his entry gift. See also below, at note 35. 29 Redon nos. 315, 317, 385. No. 385 is witnessed and consented to by two other sons (Rivallo, Helugo), though three more sons appear in the 1070s (nos. 316, 318, 320). See index: Rivallo. 30 Le´zat no. 295 (c.1072–81); Gellone no. 908 (1088); Savigny no. 640 (c.1030). 31 St-Cyprien no. 340; Cluny no. 3063 (1049–1109). 32 See index: Hugh bp. of Bayeux; William de Sumbone. 33 Irache no. 15 (c.1056). Some Spanish donations of churches that might be taken for entry gifts involve in fact the much more nebulous traditio of ‘body and soul’ (below, p. 758 note 28). 34 e.g. (probably) Cluny no. 3806 (c.1100); St-Julien, Tours no. 67 (1120). In Westfalia, 1150, Roric’s price for selling to Werden his moiety of a church included the reception of two sons (UBNR I no. 368).

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alternatives, or even indistinctly combined).35 It is a weak echo of the arrangements made by some eighth-century Bavarians for their self-sufficient private churches, where the church may be both founded and given away to a greater church as a base for the security and dignity of a son destined for priesthood.36 When Saint-Pe`re, Chartres, accepted small rural churches on such conditions around the end of the eleventh century, the point seems rather different. Either a livelihood is reserved for a family member as a means to make the donation tolerable,37 or the donation is itself a means, not perhaps to secure him this particular living (his father or brothers could have kept the church and put him into it), but to launch him on a career under the monastery’s patronage. His living need not even be in the church given. Lambert with his mother, brother, and three sisters gave a chapel with some tithes to Saint-Pe`re on condition that ‘when my brother is of age to be ordained he shall hold the chapel in the same way as other priests do’; but should the place be too poor to support him, ‘the monks shall give him one of their churches on which he can live, and present him for orders’. Another church with its cemetery was given reserving a site there for the donor’s clerical son to build himself a house, but requiring for his future only that when he was ordained priest the monks would find him a decent living in some church of theirs.38 Such arrangements for incumbency do not look like the allocation of the church as a share, as entry gifts sometimes do; they suggest a background of primogeniture where a lord’s younger sons may depend for a career on the patronage of a greater lord, lay or ecclesiastical. But in such a scene younger sons could often be provided for within the family holdings, and it is clear that in England at least, if these holdings included a church kept permanently in the lordship—or, in the new terminology, the advowson—of successive lords, each lord in his generation could present a clerical son or brother as rector. If eventually the church does come to a monastery its domestic past may come to light, as Colin Morris has described for the church of Letheringsett in Norfolk; its history—written up when Binham Priory acquired it, with subsequent litigation, in the mid-thirteenth century—shows that from its early twelfth-century foundation by a local landowner, Grimbald, the pattern of putting in younger sons or brothers had been almost uninterrupted.39 35 See above, p. 537; Mont-Saint-Michel example in Potts, Revival, 51 (MS source); St-Gondon no. 24 (c.1100, complicated alternatives for a lay son and a priest nephew). Or occupation as an obedience could be reserved for a monk of the donor’s family (above, at note 10); cf. in late 11th-c. Languedoc the terms on which Saint-Martin, Magrens (Haute-Garonne) was twice (supposedly) given in moieties to Le´zat (Le´zat 36 nos. 1150 (at end), 1154–5, 1157). Above, pp. 40–1. 37 As for the clerk Hugh (above, pp. 636–7), though in that case miscalculated. 38 St-Pe`re, 492–3, 552. 39 ‘Letheringsett: The Early History of a Parish Church’, BIHR 44 (1971), 116–20.

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A different pattern, suggesting a more awkward transition between two ages, surfaces in a dispute in the court of the abbot of Peterborough in 1133, over the church of Castor (in the Soke).40 Here it was, at first sight oddly, the elder of two brothers who was a priest and had the church, while the younger had the fee (consisting of lordship, under the abbot, of part of the village). But it does not look as if the priest had been put in by his brother. Wanting to become a monk, he has surrendered the church to Peterborough as his entry gift; his position is hardly that of tenant rector of a manorial church: it is almost that of an ownerpriest (though under Peterborough’s soke).41 But his capacity to give himself and ‘his church’ survives from an obsolescent world. The younger brother challenges the elder’s act, claiming that the church belongs to his fee; and although he has to give up his claim and surrender the church to Peterborough with his two heirs’ consent (being compensated with a reduction in his service), this act itself halfestablishes an up-to-date rationale for his claim—the claim of a small lord to the church of his manor, or to what would soon be called its advowson. But the priest’s church and the layman’s land may well originate quite straightforwardly in an old-fashioned partible inheritance from their father Thorold (perhaps consisting of the church and its land rather than a manor and its church),42 not in an eccentric arrangement for the elder to hold of the younger. If any difference was made for the elder it might well be to allocate the church to him, especially if he was married or expected to marry and have a son in orders to succeed him; alternatively, if it was clear already that although the elder he would remain celibate, his entry to Peterborough with the church as his portion would have been intended at the time of the partition. These twelfth-century stories are at least suggestive about earlier family arrangements.

17.v. Townsmen and merchants, mainly in England The history of town churches and their ownership is an aspect of the total history of European towns in all their wide variety of structure and function; not even an 40 Peterborough’s record, ed. King, ‘The Estates of Peterborough Abbey 1086–1310’, app. B (pp. 475–6); see Franklin, ‘Minsters and Parishes: Northamptonshire Studies’, 150–4. 41 His father Thorold (probably one of Peterborough’s Domesday milites) could be descended from the owners of the estate from whom bp. Ethelwald bought it for Peterborough (see Franklin, op. cit., 135–7). 42 The church may have been the minster for an old parochia (see Franklin, op. cit., 135–7). The grand Romanesque church now standing (see Pevsner, Buildings of England: Bedfordshire, Huntingdon and Peterborough (1968), 227–8 and pl. 13) can only have been built by the abbey, not by small or middling landowners. Its dedication inscription bears the date 1124, putting it, bafflingly, before Richard’s grant; but there has been an alteration (from relief to incision) to produce the ‘xxiiii’ (Franklin, op. cit., 147–8, with excellent photograph); a dedication date nearer to mid-century is more likely.

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outline is attempted here.1 Since towns in general were not sharply divided from rural life, while some also contained great men’s town houses, most must have had at least some churches that belonged to the usual kinds of lord (rulers, magnates, and lesser landowners as well as ecclesiastics individually or in communities) and enjoyed the usual possessions and revenues (agricultural lands and tithes, besides town rents and the congregation’s offerings). Examples of these appear throughout this book, not separately treated from rural churches. But there were also churches built by and belonging to more typically urban groups—citizen families, gilds (rarely), companies of foreign merchants; not conspicuous nor even evident in all towns (not, for instance, in cities dominated by a handful of important churches belonging to the bishopric or chapter);2 but to be found or inferred in towns that had large numbers (in relation to the town’s size) of mainly middling and small churches, fairly evenly spread (not just satellite oratories clustered round the great basilicas),3 with some parochial or quasiparochial rights. These large numbers were characteristic of England and Italy (Naples, as the extreme instance, had not scores but hundreds of churches and chapels by the seventeenth century).4 But in Italy the founders and proprietors of churches, though mostly based in the city, had interests so spanning town and countryside, while cities themselves were so numerous, that all discussion in this book of Italian churches, rural, urban or suburban, has had at its centre the inhabitants of cities. For English towns, however, some separate discussion of more-or-less urban founders may be useful. Here by the end of the twelfth century York had nearly forty churches, Lincoln nearly fifty; Norwich somewhere between forty and sixty; London had over a hundred inside the walls and about twenty-five more in the suburbs; and away from these eastern towns, Winchester had some fifty. Probably at least half of these—in Norwich far more, in York probably fewer—were already there a century earlier.5 The great number of these sometimes minute churches (‘tiny box churches’, fostering that intimate relationship between priest and people that

1

See Brooke, Churches, 69–89. In a few cities the ecclesiastical landscape was grandiosely planned by a bishop or ruler; but even in Normandy, most urban and suburban parish churches of cathedral cities were probably bishops’ foundations (see Musset, ‘Villes e´piscopales’, 11–14). 3 As remained true of Poitiers (Brooke, Churches, 98–100). 4 483 in use, another 172 remembered (H. F. Schmid, ‘Gemeinschaftskirchen’, 50). 5 For this and what follows see esp. Brooke, op. cit., 75, 81–7, 102–5; Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History, 144–51; Brooke and Keir, London, 121–6; Biddle and Keene, in Biddle (ed.), Winchester Studies, I. 329–34, 486; Holdsworth, ‘The Church at Domesday’ (late 11th-c. Exeter). Other English towns had fewer and larger churches with more baronial founders (see above, p. 84, n. 49). See now Blair, Church, 402–7, with references to the plentiful recent literature. 2

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Christopher Brooke has conjured up)6 makes it clear enough that they were not provided by ecclesiastical authority to cater for growing populations, nor built by the lord of the town. Some may have been built by lords as household chapels for their town houses. But many must have been built by individual burgesses or groups of neighbours for themselves and their households, perhaps serving other neighbours, regularly or from time to time if they chose to give something for burial; and perhaps (for churches sited at the gates or on main streets) collecting offerings from passing travellers praying for a safe journey. They probably had very small endowments or none, apart from their own site and sometimes a cramped churchyard. If they had any tithes these were probably only personal tithes on the owners’ urban rents and trading profits, or perhaps on the produce of orchards and vineyards in the town.7 But in the eastern towns at least, their priests had (it seems) been able to bury the dead, celebrate mass, and even baptize: customary rather than formal parish rights, bringing in offerings, and growing up most easily while the bishops’ authority was still relatively weak, in the century before about 1100. Where they are reconstructible (in the City of London they survived into the twentieth century) these miniature parishes reinforce the impression of burgess enterprise at work: they were often bounded by lanes or alleyways between houses, while spanning a main street or a crossroads; suggesting that they consisted of the houses and yards of neighbours facing each other across the street.8 Most were compact, but where some had detached parts, as in Norwich, this would fit joint foundation by kinsmen whose property was not adjacent, or by neighbours who had also other property; or it might be the remains of a parish when a new small one had emerged. On the other hand, where boundaries did follow main streets this might suggest the remnant of what had been a lord’s estate attached to his town house (perhaps originally his soke linked by defence obligations to a country estate), now perhaps divided among his heirs, or among tenants who shared the use and informal possession of what had been its chapel.9 The priest may have been chosen by the chief householder or householders, and perhaps presented to the bishop; but often long predetermined by being the next priest in the family, or perhaps 6 Churches and Churchmen, 86–9, 104–5. C. P. S. Platt, English Medieval Town (London, 1976), 151–2 and nn., lists some of the smallest. 7 See Hill, Lincoln, 147–8 (drawing on 17th-c. terriers, showing tithes fixed by custom on parishioners’ town property). On the obscurity of early urban tithes, and the importance to town churches of offerings, see Brooke and Keir, op. cit., 126–7. 8 Stenton, Norman London (Hist. Assoc. 1934, with map); Brooke, Time the Archsatirist, inaugural lecture, Westfield College (London 1971), 18–22; Brooke and Keir, London, 124–5 (map), 130–3; Campbell, ‘Norwich’, map 7 (boundaries of c.1789, after some mergers). On the variety of probable origins for town parish boundaries see Pearn, ‘Origin’. 9 See Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire (Stroud, 1994), 150–2, 163; Biddle and Keene, op. cit., 332–4.

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simply found among the already ordained unbeneficed clergy of the town, bypassing the bishop. Most of this is inference or even speculation; but there is some documentary evidence. Domesday Book, if it covers a town at all, often gives us little more than some names of the holders of churches (with the churches themselves sometimes named) and who they hold them from. Where single churches are all held by different individuals, with names often English or partly English (Hugh son of Baldric, Richard son of Erfast),10 and not described as priests, this may suggest that they are substantial burgesses; but sometimes a pre-Conquest owner seems (from the spread of his property) to have been a thegn, such as Tochi or Toki (antecessor of the Norman Geoffrey Alselin) with his one church in Derby but two and a half in Lincoln 50 miles away, besides other possessions; while Colswein, the ‘speculative builder’ of thirty-six houses and two churches (unendowed) outside Lincoln, had so enriched himself out of the Conquest that whatever his origins he was hardly a mere burgess.11 At Norwich, however, Eadstan who had held two churches and one-sixth of another is described as a burgess of the king’s; another church had been held by twelve burgesses together, while unspecified burgesses had held another fifteen churches; burgesses now held forty-three chapels.12 These are almost certainly ‘various burgesses’, rather than ‘the burgesses’ collectively. We almost never hear how the holders of churches came by them, though in York Hugh son of Baldric had bought his church of St Andrew’s, along with four tenanted mansiones and twenty-nine ‘tiny lodgings’ (other churches here, too, are tagged on to holdings of three or four tenanted mansiones, sometimes more). Of St Mary Castlegate we know from a dedication stone that it had been built around 1000 by three named citizens;13 such information is unusual. For Winchester there is no Domesday evidence, but a royal survey of 1110 and bishop Henry’s of 1148 mention eight of the churches between them (leaving out, one may suppose, those that were beneath consideration or—perhaps for that reason—had escaped anything but family or neighbourly control). Three of these look as if they might fit Martin Biddle’s picture of a church beginning as the chapel for a single substantial town house, and becoming a quasi-parish church for the tenant households that took over when the house and estate were

10 At York (DB i. 298a,b). At Derby the only 1086 church-holder with an English name, Edric, had succeeded his father in it (DB i. 280b). 11 DB i. 336c (with Tochi cf. Stori: see index); only part of substantial holdings in Lincolnshire, from the king (336d–357c) and from others. See Hill, Lincoln, 48–50 (with map), 131–4. Blair, Church, 403–4, suggests that the unendowed churches indicate ‘improvidence’ in Colswein, but it might be calculated economy 12 (hoping for adequate revenues from offerings etc.). DB i. 116a, b (Norfolk). 13 Okasha, Handlist, no. 146; Addleshaw, Beginnings, 14 and pl. III.

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split up.14 But a fourth suggests the rare case of a church founded by a gild: held from the king in 1110 by Cheping son of Alveva (a rich man, probably a royal moneyer), it was on land where the cnihtas or retainers had had their hall (now held from the king by two other men).15 At Lincoln, however, a much more enlightening story was elicited by the Domesday inquest, about the church of All Saints. Godric son of Garewine had held the church and had given it to Peterborough Abbey when he became a monk there; but ‘all the burgesses of Lincoln say . . . that without the king’s consent neither Garewine nor her son Godric nor anyone else could give away the church out of the city, nor from among their own kinsmen’; a priest Ernwin now claims it ‘by inheritance from his cousin Godric’.16 Evidently it was seen as the inheritance of its successive priests (to the point that Godric could try to dispose of it), but within a framework of family property which might well go back to its foundation, probably with remoter kinship claims widely spread in the town and a common interest in preserving the custom. It soon emerges that many priests in Lincoln held their churches from the king—that is, not evidently from anyone else—when Henry I declared that he had given to the church of Lincoln and bishop Robert ‘all the churches of the borough of Lincoln within and without that the priests of those churches held from me, and whatever belongs to those churches’.17 More than a century later, justices in eyre were told by a jury that in a past reign ‘the citizens held many churches, and there were many parsons of them; then the king summoned the citizens to answer for their advowsons, and because they did not come, the churches were taken into the king’s hand and given to the bishop’.18 This looks like a garbled and anachronistic version of some investigation occasioned by Henry I’s grant, providing a dramatic explanation for the ending of something faintly remembered. In London too there were uncertainties, at an eyre in 1244, about the City churches: the jurors listed four important churches (including St Paul’s itself) as ‘in the king’s gift’, and another eight which they thought ought to be.19 But most of the probably privately founded churches of London had by that time been given to great churches, notably to St Paul’s and to Christchurch, Canterbury. Records of these donations show that most of the donors were priests or clerks, who remained in possession as tenants for their lifetime, and often a son after 14 St Peter in macellis, St George’s, St Martin’s in Parchment Street (Biddle et al., Winton Domesday, 37–8, 45, 106, 158–9, 333, 342 (fig. 12): Survey I nos. 23, 71, II nos. 510–15, 960). 15 Ibid. 34–5 (Survey I no. 10). By the 14th c. all eight churches were in episcopal or monastic patronage 16 (ibid. 334). DB i. 336b. See below, p. 676. 17 Registrum Antiquiss. no. 45 (1100–7); see Hill, Lincoln, 144–5. It might cover both careerist pluralist clergy holding churches in benefice, and local priests holding their family’s churches (perhaps the king’s 18 by default of any other lord). Hill, Lincoln, 145, paraphrase from Book of Fees, I. 363–4 (1226–7). 19 Brooke and Keir, London, 133–4.

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them, or even a longer succession. The priest Aelgar ‘granted his church’ to St Paul’s and they granted it back to his son Elias, to descend ‘from kinsman to kinsman’ for ever, provided there were a suitable heir; the deacon Orgar granted the canons two churches which his two sons were to hold, followed by a son of one of them and a son of his daughter (if they have sons), but then to the canons entirely and for ever.20 One of Orgar’s churches came to be known by his name, St Martin Orgar; other London churches too carry the English or Danish names of men who must have been remembered as founders or (like Orgar) as donors to St Paul’s.21 Some of these may have been laymen, more-or-less thegnly, like the alderman Brihtmaer of Gracechurch about 1054 (in this case named from his church: ‘the grass church’, thatched), who gave to Canterbury his house and church with all the endowments he and his family had given it (so here for once the donor is explicitly the founder), reserving it for life to his wife and two children, the monks to maintain divine service there.22 Any of these donors, clerical or lay, might belong to thegnly or citizen families with rights in the background (as at All Saints in Lincoln).23 There was also in London the well-endowed church of St Botolph without Aldgate, given in 1125 to the Austin canons of Holy Trinity Aldgate, by fifteen leading burgesses with (for the most part) resoundingly English names, described as ‘of that old descent of noble milites’—that is (as earlier charters make clear), descended from the cnihtas or retainers of the pre-Conquest cnihtengild whose jurisdiction had been given to Holy Trinity.24 St Botolph’s was ‘built on their land and might be said to be its head’: a gild church more unmistakable than the probable one in Winchester. Some foundations were evidently made by foreigners (probably acting in groups, and using land perhaps given them by a ruler): St Clement Danes; various St Olafs, for Norwegians;25 either as settlers making themselves a parish church or (initially) as travellers making a ‘merchants’ church’ for intermittent use, like those appearing round the Baltic.26 20

Hist. MSS. Commission Reports, 8. i (1881), app. 323a; 9. i (1883), app. 63a (original; see Brooke and Keir, London, pl. 31); t. Henry I or Stephen. A layman, Benedict son of Stephen of London, between 1161 and 1191 gave St Michael Cornhill, which his predecessors and he himself had ‘possessed by hereditary right’, to Evesham abbey, saying that it had belonged to Evesham long ago (Mon. Angl., II. 19); perhaps an ancestor 21 was Evesham’s priest in its London church. See Brooke and Keir, London, 138. 22 Brihtmaer’s charter (Old English: Robertson, Anglo-Saxon Charters no. 116; EHD II no. 278); entry in list (c.1100) of London properties given to Christ Church Canterbury, ibid. no. 280 (at p. 955), ed. B. W. Kissan in Trans. London and Middlesex Archaeol. Soc., ns 8, 57–69 (text at 57–9). 23 Some of this ‘urban aristocracy’ were virtually creating hereditary cathedral prebends by giving churches while reserving usufruct; see Brett, English Church, 188–91 (Salisbury, London). 24 Foundation narrative of Holy Trinity (EHD II no. 277, with ed. note on text, p. 950; ibid. nos. 273–5, the gild’s earlier royal charters; 276, Henry I’s for Holy Trinity). 25 See Brooke and Keir, London, 139–42. 26 See P. Johansen, ‘Die Kaufmanskirche im Ostseegebiet’, in T. Mayer (ed.), Studien zu den Anfa¨ngen des Sta¨dtwesens (Constance, 1958), esp. 500, 507–10, 515–20, 524.

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Some of these Baltic churches were for the herring fishery and its trade, and here there is a parallel in England. On the spit at what was to become Great Yarmouth was a small chapel used only in the herring season, and four or five huts that the fishermen occupied when they came ashore. Around 1105 the bishop of Norwich got the necessary royal licence and built a new church there, installing a chaplain to serve continuously, with some modest endowment.27 When ‘the men from the ports’ next came they threw this chaplain out, ‘thinking they could do as they liked with the church’: they had probably had some satisfactory arrangement with a local priest (a bucketful of fish whenever they came ashore?); perhaps they feared being charged tithes on their catch; in any case, rebuilt though it was, they evidently felt the chapel was theirs. Lay power was called on to get them out of it; some of them were killed.28

17.vi. ‘Community’ churches? We need to consider on a wider front whether or in what sense the local community itself, in town or country, ever ‘owned’ its church. As we have seen (with varying degrees of certainty), a number of kinsmen and neighbours, or foreign merchants, or clannish fishing crews, could combine to found a church as their common property, while themselves constituting its self-made congregation. On the other hand a pre-existing community of inhabitants may appear—formally recorded or incidentally revealed—as building or endowing a new local church,1 but usually in conjunction with a lord whose help or permission they need even if the initiative is theirs, and who is left as lord of the church or as its donor to a monastery (while in default of a lord, their leading families may—with less certainty—jointly own it). Finally, such a local community might collectively own or be patron of the church, without any necessary background of ownership by individuals or families. These types are often not easy to distinguish (nor clearly distinct in principle);2 and the last is not to be found anywhere with any certainty before the later twelfth century.

27

necessaria de suo proprio adjuvenit: ‘provided the necessary equipment’ in Van Caenegem’s translation, but more likely the means of livelihood. 28 Van Caenegem (ed.), English Lawsuits no. 173 (1104–7; bishop’s memorandum). On bp. Herbert’s request for help, Henry I had instructed the sheriff Roger Bigod to go there with ‘the men of the county’. 1 See esp. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, 88–90. 2 See ibid. 35, 97–8, on the absence of legal difference between a whole community in action and all its members acting together. Whether it was in fact all or only some is often obscured by the lack of a definite article in Latin: ‘the inhabitants’ or just ‘inhabitants’?

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Here and there in the early Middle Ages parishioners as such—not as founders—had some say in their priest’s appointment: not just sending to the bishop to ask for a priest, like the men of Folembray when the old priest Otteric died,3 but choosing their priest for the bishop’s approval.4 In eighth-century Tuscany the priest of a plebs was sometimes chosen by its clergy with the people’s consent, or even chosen by the people with their iudex or gastaldus.5 Rather than representing Germanic custom, a whole Lombard fara having become a Catholic congregation, this is probably a survival of primitive canon law giving the choice of priest (like that of bishop) to clergy and people.6 But the people’s choice of priest (or role in the choice) would not make the church their communal property. Although what is probably Charlemagne’s last capitulary speaks of ‘baptismal churches or others belonging to a bishopric, or even the peoples’ own’ (sive etiam proprie populorum,7 surely referring to plebes in the Lombard kingdom), this cannot mean ‘their own’ in any juridical sense: no plebs is leased, donated, sold, or pursued at law by the inhabitants of its territory, nor had these inhabitants the kind of collective identity that could have made this possible.8 The practice of popular election had a future (though for a long period it seems virtually dormant), but with no implication of popular ownership before the emergence of communes.9 For local churches, there are instances from all over the West of some degree of communal endowment.10 In the mid-ninth century the chapel of Attolae curtis belonged to the church of Laon, but its small holding of arable was largely what the ‘franci homines living on their own properties in that villa gave to the chapel for a burial ground’: too much (at about fourteen acres) to be itself a cemetery even in the wider sense, but rather an endowment to secure for the small free landowners burial-rights otherwise perhaps reserved to Laon’s tenants.11 Two centuries later, a church at Mesenich dedicated by archbishop Egilbert of Trier for the abbot of Brauweiler was given—besides its dos from the abbot—bits of 3

4 See index: Otteric. D. Kurze, Pfarrerwahlen, is a thorough survey of the question. e.g. S. Pietro Mosciano, 746 (CDL I no. 86). See Boyd, Tithes, 49–54; Kurze, op. cit., 58–62; Wickham, Community, 69–70. 6 See Nanni, ‘Parrochia’, 83–4; Kurze, op. cit., 10–11, 61–4, 72–3. The clergy’s election and people’s consent was explicitly prescribed at Pavia 845–50 (Conc. III no. 21 c. 4). The principle may be implied when Bavarian law speaks of a priest qualem plebs sibi recepit ad sacerdotem, as distinct from quem episcopus ordinavit (Lex Baiuu. I c. 9, Leges, III. 274; see Kurze, op. cit., 45–8). 7 ed. Mordek, Bibliotheca, app. I no. 13 (instructions for inquiry into the state of all churches) c. 8. 8 See Wickham, Community, 69–70 and n. 50. 9 When plebes emerge as property they are normally the bishopric’s. This was clearly so in 10th-c. Modena, yet in 908 the bishop could ask clergy and people ‘whom they wished to choose as archpriest’ (Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 110). See Kurze, Pfarrerwahlen, 69–71, 108–10. 10 Hincmar in De eccl. et cap. (pp. 75–6) envisaged a subordinate oratory being founded by ecclesiastical initiative, and the local people being persuaded to provide its modest endowment if they were not too callous or irreligious. 11 The freemen gave four bunuarii out of the total seven. See index: Attolae curtis. 5

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vineyard by eight named villagers; who also promised a modest annual almsgiving on behalf of the archbishop.12 When in 1086 a Norfolk church in a lordless village holds sixty acres ‘by the alms of many people’, or one of the two churches at Stonham in Suffolk has its whole endowment of twenty acres given by nine ‘free men’ for their souls’ sake,13 this looks more like complete foundation by a group of substantial peasants: and since Domesday Book does not attribute these churches to any manorial lord, they may have belonged to the founders’ heirs. Similar joint foundations by sokemen or free men may explain some of the frequent small fractional rights in East Anglian or Lincolnshire churches. But the property rights are still individual or family ones. Churches are built, endowed, and owned by the substantial landowners, whoever these may be: elsewhere, lords of whole villages or large parts of them; in this eastern countryside, smaller men and more numerous, but constituting groups of well-to-do families rather than homogeneous communities with common property.14 In the Rhineland there is a much earlier case of inhabitants founding their church (and in this case choosing their priest), if the arrangement for Steinheim is authentically attributed to the late tenth-century archbishop Willigis; but the chapel for the common use of all those living there is described as built and endowed by a certain Offinc and his ‘co-heirs and friends’—probably all the inhabitants that mattered.15 In the Catalan Pyrenees, from the late ninth century into the eleventh, such joint endowment by leading parishioners is documented, as we have seen; often with a single outstanding donor among them (layman or priest), or two or three such, ancestors perhaps of those who would later emerge as local lords of a newly dependent peasantry. What was intended (or happened) about subsequent lordship of these churches is mostly obscure.16 By contrast in Leoń, at Penãmiań in 1071, the crowd of men who gathered for the consecration of a church they had built (and presumably endowed) for themselves, and had invited the bishop to dedicate, did explicitly intend to keep it as their own hereditary property; the bishop, rejecting this not on principle but because they were too many, allowed them to convey it outright to their intended priest, and later got them or their sons and grandsons to undertake never to claim it as an inheritance.17 This still looks like a private consortium. A century later the men of 12

Rheinisches UB no. 101 (1088). DB ii. 189b (Swanton; cf. 24b, Estinford, Essex); ii. 438a. See Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 181; Bo¨hmer, ‘EKntum’, 313; Lennard, England, 290. 14 Above, pp. 627–8; see Barlow, 1000–1066, 193. Community feeling seems nonetheless at work when two or more private churches were sited by the same graveyard, or when the builders’ stated motive was to supplement the existing church’s accommodation: see Blair, Church, 397–9. 15 Mainz no. 332 (see Kurze, op. cit., 168–70). On this middling level in rural society (between the serfs and the great often absentee lords), prominent in villages of various degrees of autonomy, see Wickham, 16 Land, 213–14. Above, pp. 73, 621–3. 17 Sahaguń no. 708; see Hinojosa, ‘Fraternidad’, 10 n. 5. 13

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Villasabariego (led by two named knights) who claimed, against the monastery of Eslonza, ‘that the church should be theirs, and it belonged to them to turn out or accept a clerk’,18 may be nearer to seeing themselves as the local community, though their claim probably still rested on collaborative endowment with private possessions—perhaps the origin also of the right of the inhabitants of some thirteenth-century parishes of Leoń and Castille to have the priest chosen from their own sons, and of the strangely open-ended right, found here as in the ‘receptive churches’ of southern Italy, for any native-born clerks to serve in and live off the church.19 Italy before the rise of communes shows a sharper distinction than elsewhere between the undocumented behaviour of loosely associated peasants, adopting existing churches (and no doubt sometimes building their own) round which their communities crystallize, and the occasional large group of nobles, citizens, and clergy founding churches clearly documented as their common property, in which they act as partners or co-heirs (even if they were often also close neighbours).20 Even the seamen’s gild of St Nicholas at Bari, formed in 1087, was essentially a consortium of private founders—forty-one of the sixty-two raiders whose three ships had brought back the saint’s relics—each of whose descendants had a share in the church as a private property-right (though the people of Bari much later thought of it as communal).21 More blurred however is the character of a vicinia or a stauritas with an embryonic parish church:22 even if usually brought together by the church (or by its needs), it might sometimes consist of an extended family and its dependants, or begin as an alliance of families;23 or even as a gleam in the eye of individual partners, as with the two Neapolitans who in 1019 envisaged a future stauritas for their church, to be dealt with by their heirs ‘as other lords of churches do’.24 In a small town one or two families might be dominant, the rest of the population being largely their tenants, servants, and poor relations, so that neighbourhood churches could really be family churches, their almsgiving a way of looking after their own.25 18

19 Eslonza no. 18 (1178). Bidagor, Iglesia, 160; H. F. Schmid, ‘Gemeinschaftskirchen’, 55–8. Above, pp. 606, 608, 609, 611. 21 See H. F. Schmid, op. cit., 25–8, 32; and for the enterprise, Geary, Furta Sacra (Princeton, 1978), 22 115–27. See index: Stauritas. 23 Schmid, op. cit., 45–9. An 11th-c. account of the 7th-c. origins of the churches of Torcello (ibid. 1–6) represents them as founded and owned by powerful kindreds; Kurze (Pfarrerwahlen, 65) holds this a credible tradition. Cf. Genoa’s late medieval parish churches called gentilice (J. Heers, Le Clan familial au moyen aˆge (Paris, 1974), 257–8, 265). 24 RNeapAM no. 314. The very obscure passage about their proprietary intentions (a tunc ambe partes illas facere debeant et sic ipsi et heredes eorum cum ipse staurite facere debeant, uti faciunt alii dommini [sic] de aliis ecclesiis de foris cum suis stauritis) may mean, as Feine (‘Studien’, II. 49) took it, that the stauritas itself should have shares in the church. 25 H. F. Schmid’s Italian and Dalmatian ‘community churches’ include some that are plainly family or consortium foundations (‘Gemeinschaftskirchen’, 38–45). 20

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Change comes in the twelfth century. In the Rhineland, and further into north Germany, a more structured role for a community of prospective parishioners emerges, though this is still not envisaged as a community of any fixed or uniform legal status, nor has it a name apart from its membership—‘parishioners’, ‘inhabitants’, ‘men’; often ‘citizens’ (even though inhabiting small towns or villages).26 It is to these inhabitants—usually collectively and anonymously, though occasionally a few are picked out to be named—that the diocesan bishop sometimes attributes a new church’s foundation when he consecrates it: stating that they have built it at their own cost and endowed it with one or two manses from their own lands ‘for the priest’s use’, perhaps explaining how they came by the site (‘from the free man Herman and his wife Alfswith’), often giving their reasons (usually distance from their parish church).27 Occasionally the bishop leaves them to be served (as a ‘chapel’) by the priest of the mother church;28 where they have their own priest they are sometimes allowed to choose him29— which may by now be conceding something that parishioners quite often claimed to do or managed to do, rather than a rare privilege.30 Here and elsewhere, however, active parishioners might be partners in founding a church with a lay lord or local monastery,31 or hand it over to a monastery at its dedication.32 In Lorraine in 1127 the men of the village of Senon built a church with the abbot of Gorze’s consent, undertaking not only to endow but to equip it themselves, while agreeing to his condition that it belong to Gorze’s dependent monastery of Amel on whose land it was built.33 In twelfthcentury Italy such cooperation could result in shared control between a lay or ecclesiastical lord and a community, urban or rural. At Barbaricini in the diocese of Pisa the ‘church people’, some fifteen peasant households, had built a chapel with the help of their lord the abbot of S. Rossore, and on these grounds the abbot and people together appointed the chaplain.34 There was a wide range of relations between local communities and the lords of their churches, from rivalry for control (perhaps especially with lay lords) to formalized cooperation over 26

See D. Kurze, ‘La¨ndliche Gemeinde’, 245–8; more generally, Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, 97–100 (even if called universitas or communitas this need only mean ‘all of them’). 27 Mainz no. 413 (1103, Woffleben); Hildesheim nos. 221 (1140, Hasekenhusen), 228 (1142, Sehlem: here among the ‘citizens’ nine are named as the greater and more honorable); and below, note 29. For colonists’ churches see Kurze, ‘Gemeinde’, app. no. 1 (1106, Frederick abp. of Hamburg-Bremen for 28 settlers from across the Rhine). Woffleben and Hasekenhusen, preceding note. 29 Mainz no. 332 (1060–72, abp. Siegfried I purporting to confirm abp. Willigis’s arrangement of 995 for Steinheim); Kurze, ‘Gemeinde’, app. nos. 5–7 (1147 to 1187). 30 See Reynolds, op. cit., 93–6, 99–100. Cf. in Navarre Irache no. 163 (1156), agreement with the vicini of Oteiza about ‘our church’ (Irache’s), ‘giving’ them the potestas of choosing a custodian monk and a parish priest in consultation with the monastery (brief and laconic, suggesting an everyday affair). 31 32 This seems implicit in Halberstadt no. 143 (1118). e.g. Hildesheim no. 228 (1142). 33 Gorze no. 150 (1127, the bishop’s dedication record). Cf. ibid. no. 160 (1152, chapel of Ornel). 34 H. F. Schmid, ‘Gemeinschaftskirchen’, 17–19 (stated by witnesses in a dispute, shortly before 1200).

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appointments of clergy (typically with ecclesiastical lords—monasteries or cathedral chapters).35 But the Rhineland and north German communal foundations (a minority among new churches in any case) seem mostly to be made without a lord being involved:36 not because there were not great lords in the background (lay princes, bishops, monasteries) but because they did not much concern themselves with village churches. However, this need not mean that the parishioners were seen as collective proprietors of their church. Here and elsewhere in the later Middle Ages the local community could be important in the management of the church37 without having had any part in its foundation to support any property-right in it. In 1133 the church at Hahndorf was founded by a single lord, Gerhard provost of Riechenberg; but the bishop still had to adjudicate on claims by the cives of Do¨rnten that the cives of Hahndorf were subject to their church; and when the latter were declared long-standing parishioners not of Do¨rnten but of Haringen, it was they who now at Gerhard’s request were allowed baptism and burial at Hahndorf (with compensation to Haringen).38 More usually, parochial rights were given to founder-parishioners (with or without a lord in the picture); it is to them, not to the church or its successive priests, that the consecrating bishop allows burial and baptism at a new church, with diminished obligations (if any) to the mother church; described sometimes as ‘liberty’, or as being ‘absolved’ or ‘loosed’ from the mother church;39 reflecting new communal aspirations in a world where proprietary rights in churches were obsolescent, rather than the emergence of a new competitor for such rights. Where they could choose their priest, this might eventually be rationalized as canon-law patronage (acquired either by foundation or by purchase), though to be patron of its church or churches was fairly rare for a German town.40 Patronage clearly belonging to the commune, even if shared with a lord, is more characteristic of Italy. Here whole towns founding or acquiring churches were mainly in the Byzantine extreme south (or in Dalmatia);41 in most of Italy, from

35 See esp. (on the Lucchesia) Wickham, Community, 163–7; and id., Courts and Conflict, 93–7 (S. Lorenzo di Picciorano). See Feine, ‘Studien’, III. 112 (S. Silvestro of Nogara); Reynolds, Kingdoms, 93–4 (Sta Maria Novella). 36 Among the cases cited above (at notes 25–6), abp. Frederick was probably to be lord of his colonists’ churches as well as diocesan; the citizens’ request for parochial rights at Hodal was supported by the provost of Heinigen as lord of the site; the citizens of Sehlem ‘offered’ their church by the bishop’s hand 37 to the monastery of St Gothard; that seems to be about all. See Reynolds, Kingdoms, 91–3, 96–7. 38 Kurze, ‘Gemeinde’, app. no. 4 (and see pp. 246–8). Cf. Halberstadt no. 143 (1118). 39 All these variations are found in the instances cited above, note 27. Sometimes the founder-parishioners have ‘absolved’ themselves, by an apparently private arrangement with the parish priest, merely authorized by the bishop: e.g. 1147 at Ohlendorf (Kurze, ‘Gemeinde’, app. no. 6 ¼ Hildesheim 40 no. 246). See Mu¨ller, ‘Beitrag’, 83–5. 41 e.g. (as early as 11th c.) Zara, Split, or Polignano (Schmid, ‘Gemeinschaftskirchen’, 11–14).

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the mid-twelfth century onwards, we are looking at smaller communities.42 In town or country, a vicinia or a fraternity may build or rebuild its church, and— with or without having formally founded it—control its finances, perhaps pay the priest a fixed sum (almost a salary) in lieu of tithes, and elect or aspire to elect him;43 a commune achieving this last was sometimes recognized as patron or as part-patron. Even here, however, patronage was far from a necessary consequence (or implication) of election-right.44 The vicini might present their candidate to the head of a monastery or chapter having the patronage, who then as patron presented him to the bishop or archdeacon. In the complex disputes and negotiations between monasteries or chapters, pievani, and communes, for liturgical and economic control of churches,45 technical patronage—the juridical replacement for proprietary control—seems merely one element in what was at issue, or one form that it could take.46 In Italy the model for this may be the antique practice of election to the plebs;47 but it does not seem possible, here or anywhere, to trace the late medieval communally managed and sometimes communally owned church back to early community churches of hundreds or Gaue. By and large it seems that where a church (or by now, strictly, its patronage) was really the local community’s property, this was new in the later Middle Ages; and that any older collective property-right went back to a family or a consortium (or possibly a gild).48 Scandinavia was until recently seen as the one real home of ‘community churches’ dating from the conversion,49 neither a late-medieval product of the communal movement nor reducible to family ownership. Here, it was thought, in the relative absence of landlord power, the ancient regional community of fylke, herad, or harde built and endowed its church at or near its old cult centre and place of assembly; small parishes arose as organic subdivisions of the old districts; the people maintained their church and (in most regions) chose its priest, continuously from the tenth- and eleventh-century conversions to modern times; while merely scattered among the people’s churches might be the proprietary or 42

But see Kurze, ‘Gemeinde’, 120–1 on late 12th-c. Florence. See Nanni, Parrocchia, 109–10, 160–5; Schmid, op. cit., 15–21; Boyd, Tithes, 193–5; Wickham, 44 See Kurze, Pfarrerwahlen 137–8. Community, 165–8. 45 See Wickham, Courts, 224–76. 46 e.g. (though untypical, in having no priest of its own) S. Salvatore at Escheto, rebuilt and managed by a fraternity formed for the purpose, along with the leading local family whom they accept as the ‘patrons’ (ibid. 260–3). 47 See above, at notes 4–9; revived, or surviving, in some 12th-c. plebes. But for discontinuity and crucial differences see Kurze, Pfarrerwahlen, 138–40. 48 See Kurze, Pfarrerwahlen, 220–2, and (for Germany) ‘Gemeinde’, 248–9. 49 See Feine, ‘Genossenshaftliche Gemeindekirche’, 171–96 (a systematic survey for Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy); Haff, ‘Grosskirchspiel’, 4–49, 53–61; Kurze, Pfarrerwahlen 74–95 (partially preserving this view, for Sweden). 43

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‘convenience’ churches of landlords and men of substance. But it seems increasingly likely that the twelfth- and thirteenth-century lawbooks on which much of this picture depends50 do not tell us much about earlier practice, let alone enshrine primitive Germanic law, but rather set out disputed views of what current law was or ought to be (mingled with some familiar practices and some obsolete rules); that while missionary bishoprics were indeed based at old cult centres and places of assembly, and some of the old (much changing) districts may well have been primitive parishes, it does not follow that their churches were endowed and managed by their communities in the way described by the laws; that the new small parishes began in the twelfth century as tithe districts, often resulting from a church-owner’s efforts; and that (there being more lordship than used to be supposed) most churches were founded by rulers and rich landowners.51 Later, the village’s common interest in the church and responsibility for its upkeep may have been unusually developed, and the right to elect the priest unusually widely acquired; but as elsewhere in Europe, this appears mainly from the thirteenth century onwards. A similar early and ‘Germanic’ origin for community churches used to be claimed as possible for Frisia, where the later rarity of proprietary churches might weakly suggest that the community churches found in the thirteenth century were much older than that; and for Lower Saxony, on the strength of Charlemagne’s capitulary De partibus Saxoniae ordering the endowment of each church by its congregation.52 But in most of Saxony any resulting churches probably belonged to whatever lords were able to secure compulsory contributions. There is neither evidence nor likelihood that later medieval churches in community control go back in Saxony to Charlemagne’s time, let alone—here or elsewhere in Germany—to pre-Christian communities.53 Meanwhile if, anywhere, there was any early medieval church that slipped through the net of ordinary proprietary claims (not even being seen as the bishop’s by default), it could be that the question of its ownership had never arisen.

50 Relevant texts are Church Law of the Gulathing, cc. 8–12, 14; Frostathing cc. 7–8, 14–19 (L. M. Larson, The Earliest Norwegian Laws (New York, 1935), 39–44, 228–9, 231–3); Church Code of Va¨stergo¨tland (Sweden), cc. 1b, 3–5, 13–18 (A. Bergin, The Law of the Westgoths (Rock Island, Ill., 1906), 28–35); Latin version of Scanian law, texts v. 3, vi. 3 (Danmarks gamle Landskablove (1933), 1. 2. 918, 926). For ‘convenience’ churches: Gulathing c. 12, Frostathing c. 13 (Larsen, op.cit., 43, 231). 51 On all this see P. Sawyer, ‘Dioceses and Parishes’, 39–42; B. and P. Sawyer, Medieval Scandinavia, 17–21, 46–7, 80–5, 104–5, 108–11; S.Brink, ‘Formation’, 23–8 (on regional differences). 52 Haff, ‘Grosskirchspiel’, part ii, 17–29. 53 See Ho¨mberg, ‘Entstehung’, 62–7, 79, 106–8; Kurze, Pfarrerwahlen, 181–5, 196–200; Erbe, Niederkirch. Ostsachsen, 16–18.

18 Priests as proprietors

The priest who was lord or proprietor of the church he served, or might serve if he chose, is a familiar figure in most of early medieval Europe. Typically he has built and endowed it in his own property, or has inherited it from its founder; sometimes he has been designated or ‘ordained’ by his predecessor, usually a kinsman; sometimes, probably, he has simply taken his father’s or uncle’s place. Or he may have acquired the church by gift or purchase. If he serves it (not often easy to be sure of) he may or may not have been presented to the diocesan bishop by his predecessor, or have gone by himself to secure the bishop’s goodwill. At any rate, at some usually unknown time he has been consecrated priest by a bishop, probably of the diocese where his church lies and perhaps to that church’s title.1 He in turn is able to ‘ordain’ his successor,2 or otherwise dispose of the church to a chosen heir; or can simply expect to be succeeded by a natural heir (a son or nephew). Alternatively he may give his church away to a monastery or bishopric. He may have other property, perhaps more than one church; or have only a share in the church he serves, perhaps as the sole priest in a group of kinsmen, or as one of a small consortium of priests, or in partnership with a clerk who may be his natural or chosen heir. As with any property in the early Middle Ages, much of this is a matter of degree. Often the degrees were reasonably clear. Carolingian royal chanceries distinguished between giving a church in benefice, giving it in proprium but for life only, and giving it in proprium with power to dispose of it at will.3 A priest in Italy might be ‘ordained’ to a church with every kind of potestas except the crucial powers of ordaining his successor or giving or selling the church (so looking, to us, more like a tenant than a proprietor).4 And priests who gave their churches to monasteries while retaining usufruct for life, probably paying a census, were recognizably settling for dependent tenure. Later, however, the distinctions are 1 4

2 3 See above, pp. 520–1. Above, pp. 56–7. Below, pp. 745–7. Above, p. 544. For what follows see above, pp. 534, 537–9, 541–2.

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Lower churches 9th to 12th century

more blurred. By the eleventh century a tenant priest in France might be able to give away his church if he had his lord’s consent, while his own consent might be needed for his lord to give it away; the balance of rights between them is ruled by variable and shifting norms. If we want a criterion, it must be that the priest has free disposal of the church, or disposal constrained only by family claims, not by the need for a lord’s consent; but with lords as with kinsmen it is not always clear what is going on—consent, approval, or mere witnessing. And there is another consideration, weaker but perhaps more often live: that is, whether a lord has put the priest into his church to serve it or has rather accepted a tenant priest’s almost proprietary right. This chapter picks out some of these types—clear-cut or questionable—in the different countries of the West. In the ninth and early tenth centuries priests with churches that they can give away (often reserving usufruct for themselves or an heir or heirs) appear here and there in the Carolingian dominions north of the Alps. In Bavaria and Swabia, such priests as Oato giving his inherited church to Freising, or Hupold giving ‘Hupold’s cell’ to St Gall,5 belong in a century-old context of native nobles founding churches on their alodial land. Much the same may be true in Alsace, where a ninth-century fragment from Wissembourg lists ‘those clerks and laymen who have given their properties to the monastery’ by precarial exchanges: among these donors a priest gave a church with seven servile manses, another gave half a church with four servile manses and some vineyard.6 A priest disposing of a whole church may be the founder or the founder’s sole heir, or have had the church as his share in a partition.7 But in Swabia in 888 a royal chaplain could be given a church by king Arnulf in proprium for life and with power to dispose of it not just to a named monastery but to one of his choice; or even with the ‘free power of holding, conveying, selling, exchanging, or doing whatever he will with it’. It is not surprising to find this minor form of Carolingian dissipation of resources repeated under Henry the Fowler, in need of support in the south, when at Arnulf of Bavaria’s request Henry allowed a priest Hartpert ‘to possess for ever’, with power of ‘having, giving, selling, and doing whatever pleases him’, a church in the Engadin left him by his priest uncle who had ‘possessed it by royal precept’.8

5

Above, pp. 35, 37. Several 9th-c. priests gave estates to St Gall which may have included a church but are not so described (St Gallen nos. 406, 432, 525; perhaps no. 414 with reservation to a named man—the donor’s deacon?—if he becomes a priest). 6 In Brevium exempla, Capit. no. 128. These are small independent estates, at the richer end of small 7 rural churches. e.g. Ejo (see index) at Auuicozeshusir. 8 DArn. no. 11; cf. ibid. nos. 37 (free disposal), 15 (for granting only to St Gall or Reichenau), all 888; DHI no. 22 (930).

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In the kingdom of Burgundy there was a similar range of possibilities. In 907 a priest gave to the cathedral church of Vienne ‘something from the things of my inheritance’, chiefly a church with its pertinences; reserving usufruct for himself and another man, while paying a measure of wine and grain every year in vestitura (something to secure the cathedral’s right, rather than a rent).9 But here too priests could acquire churches, and as property;10 probably usually from the king: in 893 Rudolph I, petitioned by a priest Farulf, gave him a church with two manses ‘to have eternally in his own right, to do what he wishes with it by his free judgment’.11 In France, Beaulieu in the Limousin provides early examples of priests inheriting churches: in 868 a priest Adelbert gave ‘my church’ with all its pertinences, being everything ‘that my grandfather Stradigius left to my father Ragamfred, and my father to my brother the priest Landric, and Landric to me by the same carta testamenti’; in 936 a priest Ebroin gave ‘my domanial chapel’ with four manses and their vineyards—probably inherited, since he gave it for the souls of his kinsmen and brothers, reserved usufruct in it to a surviving brother and two nephews, and excluded his other heirs (except for reverting to their potestas should a future abbot alienate it).12 In Languedoc, about 925, a priest Ingilram could give to the church of Nıˆmes ‘something of my possessions’, a church of St John the Baptist, with reservation to a nephew who was to ‘have the priest Aimeric hold it under him, while he lives’.13 And here there were priests as partners in churches: in 958 a deacon and a priest gave Be´ziers two-thirds of a church and its lands and cemetery with the formula ‘we are donors together’; and three priests in 971, as ‘three donors equally’, gave an alod to Le´zat including a church and its books, vestments, vessels, lands, vineyards, and meadows, for the souls of their kinsmen (two more priests) who held it under them. These same three priests bought another church from two lay couples; their property-rights are unambiguously asserted.14 In Auvergne, however, the usual haziness or gradation between tenure and property appears when a priest John first (in 906) assisted the canons of SaintJulien of Brioude in building a church on a fundus of theirs on the plain, of which St-Andre´-le-Bas (app., cathedral charters no. 112 ). Another priest gave Vienne ‘something from the things of my own facultas that I am seen to have acquired by charters’, 871 (St-Andre´-le-Bas no. 108 , evidently a church). In N. France cf. Cysoing no. 2 (c.865): a priest conveys a church to Cysoing which he claims to have acquired legitimo iure ac labore multo, ad propriam dominationem (subject to the political superiority of Everard of Friuli, Cysoing’s founder, and his third son Adelard, ‘senior of this place’). 11 DRud. no. 4; done with the count of Portois’s consent. 12 Beaulieu nos. 179, 178 (dono . . . capellam meam dominicariam, perhaps meaning only that it was his landlordly property). 13 Nıˆmes no. 27 (which breaks off in the middle of a further reservation for a kinsman). 14 Be´ziers no. 26 (958), church of Saint-Genie`s ‘Cumexanos’ (probably cum exanos, its proceeds); Le´zat nos. 375, 391. 9

10

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he was the first (and census-paying) rector; and eighteen years later took the initiative in building a church for them on much higher land. This church too will be theirs and John its rector (with reversion, here, to a nephew); but here he seems (under their lordship) to be a colonizing landlord, and as much the canons’ benefactor as their agent.15 On the fringes of the Frankish world there are more straightforward property dealings by priests. One in Brittany recorded in 847 his sale and traditio of a church with its lands, vineyards, meadows, and so on (some or all of which he had himself bought), to a man and his wife with the power of ‘ . . . giving, exchanging, or doing whatever you choose with it’; a year or two later in the Spanish March two priests made a scriptura donationis of a church to their brother Abraham, a clerk, who later gave it ‘in his last will’ to the priest Protasius (founder of Eixalada-Cuxa).16 But tenth-century Urgel consecration records, for a few churches founded or refounded by priests, are less straightforward. One had an existing church given him by the bishop at his ordination, to restore, which he did with his kinsmen’s help, the bishop remaining its ‘defender and helper’; another was foremost among several founders; the remaining two were sole founders. All four reserved the church’s rule for themselves (or a brother) and for named or unnamed nephews and great-nephews; but the two sole founders went beyond this, one for his progenies, one for his consanguinitas ‘from one to another and from end to end’, no other genus to have any potestas there as long as his survives.17 It is not clear whether this almost bombastic insistence was meant to rebut episcopal lordship, or to curb the proprietary right of descendants to alienate family property.18 Moving on to the eleventh century, from Germany there is little evidence to draw on. However, one clear instance in Bavaria starts with the gift of land and houses by count Razo of Diessen to his fidelis and kinsman the priest Herbert, to have as his own and do what he liked with, followed by Herbert’s gift to Freising of the church he built on this land, on condition that he should rule it for life and that after his death it should be entrusted to ‘a clerk of his lineage’.19 By contrast there is a mass of material for eleventh-century France, yet it shows rather few priests 15 Brioude nos. 330 (Blane`de), 16 (Chanet); on the demographic implications see Fournier, Peuplement, 428–31. Cf. the founder-priests Bedeem and Grunrin (see index), perhaps Maˆcon canons building on their prebends; but Grunrin’s church was reserved for his clerical kinsmen. 16 Redon no. 33; d’Abadal, ‘Cuxa’, doc. no. 6; recorded 897 after flood damage to Cuxa’s records. 17 Urgellia, I nos. 14, 30, 23, 29 (901, 948, 912, 940), variously recorded as the priest’s charter, the bishop’s consecration record, or both combined. De uno in alio de fine usque in finem probably means from the end of each life to the end of the next. 18 In Urgellia, I no. 34 (960) Francemir, priest (and proprietor?) of S. Pedro, Gran d’Escales, wanting it made into a monastery, in effect alienated it to the bishop by declining to become abbot. 19 Freising no. 1612 a, b (1039–53).


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holding whole churches with all their property and revenue, whether as tenants or as alodial proprietors.20 From Normandy to Aquitaine there were certainly many priests and clerks with wives and children,21 and many who, married or not, had strongly proprietary and sometimes hereditary interests in what they held.22 But usually this seems to be a priest’s part, not the whole church; and a priest’s hold on a church here seems seldom actually traceable to his own or an ancestor’s independent foundation. However, priests’ dealings with their churches even in Normandy occasionally hint at the possibility of this, as in duke Richard II’s confirmation to Jumie`ges in 1027, mainly of what the dukes had given, with some churches or fractions of them from other laymen, but stating also that ‘a certain priest called Manno gave the church of Guiseniers’;23 or in Orderic Vitalis’s list of ‘lords of the churches’ who joined with their lord William Giroie in giving seven churches to Saint-Evroul, where the lord of one church is its priest.24 However, any hereditary hold on a church could go back to a grant in benefice; and when in the late twelfth century the sons of a deacon claimed his church, stating that he had held it ‘in fief and by hereditary right’ being the son and grandson of priests who had held it, it is more likely that the grandfather had been given tenure of the church than that an earlier ancestor had founded it.25 In Brittany the background of family land is clearer. In 1100 the clerk and priest’s son Hurvodius gave to Redon himself and all his property, including two churches and his share in two others, one of them Saint-Pierre at Frossay. His father, the priest Rivallo, was probably brother to the knight Judicahel whose third share of Saint-Pierre had been his entry gift to Redon half a century earlier.26 Hurvodius made his gift (on the conditions that we saw earlier) without a lord’s participation; he had a lord, and had had trouble with him, but did not evidently hold these churches from him. A little later the priest Redoret gave on similar terms a single church, probably his entire livelihood since with it he conveyed not only himself but his father, mother, and small son. He had to safeguard a small 20 Devailly reported having found (in the reform period) only two ‘desservants proprie´taires de leur e´glise’ for the 800–900 parish churches of the dioc. of Bourges, while even in Brittany, in the dioc. of Rennes, only six were found among some 200 (‘Enqueˆte’, 299; ‘Restitutions’, 585). 21 See Devailly, ‘Pastorale’, 31 on the 1031 council of Bourges. In Cormery no. 38 (1026–40), the reverendus vir Gerard sounds like an owner-priest in donating, with his wife and sons, a church including ‘everything that came to the altar and to the priest’s hand’ and ‘everything belonging to the priest’s ministry’, while retaining the feast-day offerings for life provided he does not live too long (left undefined). 22 Above, pp. 572–4, 580–2. 23 Jumie`ges no. 12 (Guiseniers was or had been the duke’s manor and Manno was probably his tenant, but was evidently not the dependent priest of a mere estate church). 24 HE II. 34–7 (the church was in Les-Essarts-en-Ouche; the donor was called priest of Les Essarts, suggesting that he served it himself). 25 Soudet, ‘Les Seigneurs patrons’, 314 n. 1. Such an origin seems implicit in Tre´port no. 4 (1101), Henry count of Eu’s donation of the parish church of Tre´port after removing it from the hands of the late priest’s wife, daughters, and other heirs (‘who wanted to possess God’s sanctuary hereditarily’, Ps. 82). 26 Redon no. 313; and see index: Frossay.

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due to the viscount of Donges and hospitality to the bishop of Nantes, and had obtained their consent; but it is clearly his donation, and he is described as ‘priest and lord of the church of Crossac’.27 In Anjou in 1077 a rich priest Hamelin gave the church of Broc to Vendoˆme ‘with its entirety’, along with ‘his own house’ next the church with oven, well, garden, curtis, and barn, half the rents from houses in the cemetery, and threequarters of the tithe from land that his father had previously sold to the abbot. Yet the pastoral revenues listed (‘loaves, candles, wax, pennies, baptism, firstfruits, confessions, blessing of nuptials and all burials, with a moiety of the third of the tithe of grain’) sound very like a priest’s part. But the point may be to emphasize the availability to the monks of everything that might have been in the hands of a serving priest (suggesting that Hamelin did serve it); it is certainly not that Hamelin had nothing more. He sold land to the monks at the same time, for £8 and a horse: this land (and perhaps ‘his’ house, and the cemetery rents) had probably either once belonged to the church, or it was of no account whether it did or not. Both land and church were evidently his share in his father’s lifetime; the gift was made with the consent of his father, mother, and two brothers. It was done at Chaˆteau-la-Vallie`re in the presence of a large company, including the archbishop of Tours and the lord of the castle, Hugh of Alluyes; Hugh must have approved, but it is not evident that his formal consent was needed.28 Moving southwards, in Poitou and Saintonge there are scattered instances of priests giving churches without being evidently beholden to a lord for them,29 though it may be a mistake to assume this.30 One more step southwards, however, brings us into a region where this supposition is reasonable when a priest seems to have free disposal of a church or of shares in it. In Gascony about 1081 a priest gave to Saint-Mont the church of Sevignac with all its honor, hoping for God’s forgiveness of his sins and the sins of his kinsmen alive or dead ‘who ordained this honor for me’.31 In Languedoc in 1060–5 a priest Deusdet in the diocese of Albi, lacking any paternal inheritance that he could dispose of, acquired from various people a church and (separately) lands for it, to give to Sainte-Foi; and acquired it in such a way that no one else could claim any census from it; Sainte-Foi is to have it ‘just as I am seen to hold and have it’; ‘there is no viguier there, and no one having any fief or alod or anything that he can call ‘‘his’’, whether his own or by commenda’.32 He seems to have deliberately freed it from the tangle of claims on its lands that he knew to be normal, by acquiring every 27

28 29 Redon no. 374. Vendoˆme no. 265. e.g. Ange´ly nos. 212 (c.1099), 302 (c.1096). A lord’s consent could be recorded separately (above, pp. 588 note 20). 31 qui mihi ordinaverunt hunc honorem (so not ‘who ordained me to it’ but ‘who arranged it for me’); with anathema against ‘any man or woman of my lineage who contradicts this gift’ (St-Mont no. 89). Cf. 32 Le´zat nos. 335 (1011), 267 (1085–96). Ste-Foi no. 57. 30


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possible claim himself. That his acquisition was not a simple purchase from a single owner reflects the proliferation of family claims and the confusion of church endowments with family property, not any absence of proprietary claims on churches: his boast is to have put together, and be able to transfer, a complete and unassailable title to the church, not fragmented, not undermined by enfeoffments, nor overlaid by lordship, viguerie, or commenda.33 In Provence, the kind of confusion that Deusdet eliminated was familiar and more difficult to deal with. An unusually straightforward case of an owner-priest is Almerad who in 1035 gave to Saint-Victor a church that he had built himself on the hilltop of Le Cousson, along with ‘all its inheritance’; endowing it with lands of his own (needing only a brother’s consent). His intention was to found a monastery, and his foundation was on a fairly grand scale, with five altars; two bishops were at its consecration, besides the abbot of Saint-Victor.34 Whether Almerad meant to rule it himself is unclear; it became the Moustiers burial church;35 he was probably himself a Moustiers. Two other priests, Venerandus and Rainoard, were able each to give himself, his church, and all his property to Saint-Victor, receiving it back to rule like an obedience or cell;36 these look at first sight like straightforward sole owners, but Venerandus’s church was endowed in part by a layman (under Moustiers lordship), and long subject to claims by him and his sons to ‘evil customs’ or to the land itself, including the site.37 It may have been more usual for a priest to own a church jointly with his brothers,38 sometimes being put in charge of it. In Italy there were other ideas and different complications. In 835 king Lothar I gave to the episcopal church of Arezzo a church that had been given to his uncle Pippin by a priest Barbatianus ex sua proprietate, out of his own property; at the present time it was held at rent by a priest Alprand ex nostra munificentia, by Lothar’s munificence.39 The difference between the priest as proprietor and as tenant could hardly be clearer. But this matter was sometimes in dispute;40 and there were trickier questions as to whether a priest was a church’s sole owner, enjoying all its income and able to dispose of it to a chosen successor or a greater church; or shared its income and its rule with partners, usually his brothers or cousins; or held it by their ordinatio, lacking only the power to give it away or ordain his successor. Here too, even when the history was tangled and disputed, 33

34 35 See index: commenda. St-Victor no. 743. Poly, Provence, 170 n. 217. St-Victor no. 611 (1048–61). 37 Ibid. nos. 605–7, 609–10; with no. 603 for the Saint-Jurs family’s and their Moustiers lords’ earlier donation of the whole villa. See Poly, Provence, 133, 184n. 71. 38 e.g. Pons among the donors in St-Victor, no. 230; a priest Guy (with wife and sons) among several owners committing a church at Gratemoine to a priest Isnard and his son (Le´rins nos. 63, 64). 39 40 DLothI no. 28. Above, p. 63 at note 113. 36

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the distinctions themselves seem fairly clear; but they do not necessarily identify a priest as ‘owner’ or ‘tenant’. The different possibilities emerge clearly in eighth-century Italy and have been discussed already.41 Later, especially in the south, the same range of possibilities can be illustrated from the stated intentions of founders. In Campania in 965, the fourteen founders of a church which was to belong to them and their heirs in common insisted that they or the learned and God-fearing among them in the future should always ordain a priest or monk to rule the church, perform divine service for them, and bury the dead. This priest is to hold and be lord of (dominare) the church’s land and vineyards, cultivate them and enjoy their usufruct; while if anyone tries to ‘remove the church or land from the power of the priest whom we shall ordain there, the church or land is to revert to our power or that of our heirs born or unborn, and after this reversion it shall always go back to the priest whom we shall have ordained there’.42 He will be a secure and landlordly tenant of the church, not its proprietor. By contrast, in 1009 the priest John whose brother and nephew built a church for him on his paternal inheritance was confirmed in possession of it by the archbishop of Salerno, John and his heirs always to have the potestas ‘of ordaining priests there as they wish’ (though he in fact went on to share this potestas ordinandi with his brother and nephew, as we have seen).43 When a priest himself founded a church there were again various possibilities. In 1047 a ‘priest and abbot’ Raidolf built the church of S. Lucia at Balnearia, on a piece of land of his own inheritance; but it was endowed by him and eleven others, men and women, with further land which was clearly their undivided common property. They are all called ‘benefactors’, but Raidolf ’s charter emphasizes both that the properties are to be in the church’s and its rectors’ potestas, and that ‘the church is to be in my potestas and that of my heirs, to ordain with all its possessions and its government, and to do whatever we wish’ (though taking only a small census from the ‘priests whom we shall ordain there’).44 But when (before 1071) a priest Basileus and his wife built and endowed a church in their own property in Apulia, they ‘put it into the hands’ of a priest Rusandus (Basileus’s godfather) and his deacon son Bisantius, agreeing that if Rusandus died before them they would ordain another priest to be Bisantius’s colleague, or Rusandus would do this if he were the survivor, and so ‘there should be always 41 Above, pp. 57–8, 170–1. For the later period, in S. Italy, see Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 70–95; II. 34, 44–7, 51, 42 63, 67–8. Above, p. 606. 43 Above, p. 607. The archbishop’s document (quoted in the course of John’s) clearly empowered him and his heirs to appoint their successors, not just subordinate clergy. 44 Cava no. 1073 (obscure in places, especially in its last few lines). In 1050 the archbishop ‘freed’ it for Raidolf (ibid. no. 1146), to be ‘always in your and your heirs’ potestas for ordaining priests or monks and clergy’.


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two priests to the world’s end’, the elder presumably always appointing a successor.45 The priest and his wife made this arrangement because after founding the church they remained without sons or daughters: it seems to be implied that a son or a son-in-law would have been their natural choice as rector; it would still have been a priest’s or priests’ church. Also in Apulia, in 1067, a lay couple (similarly childless) gave their church to a priest John, who after their deaths, himself falling ill, gave it to a priest Nicholas with potestas covering the usual range of rights and duties,46 conveying it to him with all its property and contents; though were Nicholas to die first the church should revert to John’s potestas. Whichever of them survived was to ordain a successor, ‘giving it to a good priest’ without wife or children; ‘and he shall afterwards do likewise, so that it shall go from priest to priest as abbot, and be free and absolute under its own abbot to the end of the world’. Nicholas’s potestas was given him ‘for life’, but in the context this is positive rather than negative: the church cannot be taken from him. Nonetheless his powers are not complete: he cannot depart from the church or alienate it. The one thing (besides paying no rent) that makes him unlike an ordinary leaseholding priest is his power (provided he outlives John) to ordain his successor and to pass this power on.47 However, the workings of ordinatio were not always straightforward, as we have seen in Tuscany, where bishop Regenbald as rector of S. Martino of Florence so ‘ordained’ the church in 1017 as to split it among three, his own illegitimate sons and his nephew Tegrim.48 It looked for a while as if Tegrim had secured the whole church for himself from his kin: not, in fact, as a priest, but his case is nonetheless relevant here as showing both his insecurity and the scope for doubt as to whether a rector or his kin were the real proprietors of a church. In 1034, three years after getting his kinsmen to acknowledge his claim, Tegrim—still only a subdeacon, and calling himself custos and ordinator of the church but not rector—took the further step of ‘ordaining’ to it Albert, abbot of S. Fidele at Strumi (first to two-thirds of the church, but six months later without specifying shares);49 probably intending it to be his entry gift to the monastery in due course, but more importantly to secure the backing of the monastery and its patrons the Guidi for his lifetime possession of the whole church. In 1059, however (aged 45 Bari IV no. 44. The plan was disrupted when the partners took on a ‘stronger brother’ (see index: Mel). 46 dominandum, . . . psallendum et orandum (unusually specific: for John, the couple and all Christians), regendum, habendum ibi mecum presbiteros monachos clericos quales voluero, . . . bona cultandum . . . , custodiendum ecclesiam et officiandum in ea. 47 Bari I no. 26 (Nicholas’s acknowledgment). If Nicholas died first John was to take his wishes into 48 account. See index: S. Martino, Florence. 49 S. Maria Firenze nos. 38, 39; probably intending to keep a third for himself (i.e. ordaining a partner rather than a successor).

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perhaps about 60, and ‘now a monk’), either dispossessed or fearing dispossession by the bishop’s sons, he went to duke Godfrey for a judgment, claiming to be the rightful ‘heir’ and lawfully ordained by the bishop his kinsman.50 About the same time abbot Albert brought his own claim, and was provisionally ‘invested’ with the church until the bishop’s son Hugh should turn up to put his case (his brother Berard having meanwhile ceded his ordinatio to him). Hugh seems to have made good his claim, probably by promising the church to the monastery of S. Maria in Florence, as Tegrim had to Strumi.51 So Tegrim had lost; but the way he explained his claim to be ‘heir’ is particularly enlightening. He seems to mean, first, that he is the most deserving of the natural heirs: if there were two brothers, he asks (about the first Regenbald’s sons), one a layman and one a bishop, is it right to prefer the bishop’s illegitimate (and disreputable) sons to the layman’s legitimate one (who has moreover ‘ordained the church much better’—that is, to the abbot of Strumi)? But he goes on to make an explicit distinction between being (himself) ‘ordained’ and having full property-right. On legal advice, he explains, he had had his ordinatio ‘renewed’ by his ‘near kinsmen, to whom the proprietas of the church belonged’, who ‘reordained me’.52 But later he had better advice, that he should ‘not merely have the church per decretum’,53 renewed for him ‘like a man with a libellus’ (that is, like a leaseholder), ‘but also by transfersio’ (or traditio: conveyance as property); his kinsmen had accordingly ‘in every way that belonged to them, conveyed it (tradiderunt) to me’, making charters for him (that is, those of 1031).54 So there was—or lawyers could say there was—a difference between being the properly ordained rector with power to ordain his successor (even if chosen for ‘natural heir’ reasons), and being the proprietor; although which position any particular priest occupied could be in doubt (or never raised).55 Meanwhile there were Italian priests with churches of their own in a much simpler sense than this. The Apulian priest John—in what seems an intermediate position—had forty-eight charters to hand over with his church to the priest Nicholas in 1067; but in Amalfi in 1018 another John, priest and priest’s son, could sell land belonging to his church with the explanation that he had no charters to hand over because the church and its lands had belonged to him and his kinsmen from ancient times:56 it sounds as if he had inherited it without any recorded 50

Ibid. no. 50 (apparently not mentioning that bp. Regenbald had ordained him only to a third). Ibid. nos. 51 (Albert’s plea), 56, 67 (Hugh’s land transactions, 1061, 1067), 69 (Hugh’s dispositions 52 in 1070). There is no record of these ordinations in the dossier. 53 Probably meaning ‘as decreed by the founder’ (cf. Hugh’s use of decretum in that sense in S. Maria, 54 Above, pp. 610–11. Firenze no. 69). 55 Cf. Amalfi no. 126 (1125): Peter (priest and priest’s son) ‘disposed’ of his moiety of a church by testament to a nephew (?sister’s son), who was to do the same for his own nephew (this is the gist of the here corrupted text); but thereafter all his sister’s descendants to have potestas to choose a priest (within 56 the kin if possible). Above, at note 47; Amalfi no. 34 (see index: Ravello). 51


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process of ordinatio. Also in 1018, a priest in Latium gave away a church of his own foundation, with all its pertinences (books, vestments, vineyards, and so on) without any reservation, but excepting some land he had given to his brother and some vineyard to his mother (probably before endowing his church, perhaps to secure their consent);57 another in Lombardy in 1082 disposed of a church that he had bought from a number of men.58 More surprisingly, in central Italy in 1096 a priest Mainard was able to convey his church to the bishopric of Veroli reserving tenure for himself and any priestly kinsmen, apparently because Gregory VII had earlier, when applied to by Mainard, declared void the claims of a lay lord to hereditas and proprietas in it, ‘since churches and their possessions should belong not to laymen but to the bishops and to their rectors’;59 eliminating the lay lord had left the rector as effective proprietor, presumably on the understanding that he would give it to the bishopric. In theory the bishop’s authority was the source of the rector’s; in practice, it seems, the safest way to put this church into the bishop’s control was to have it given him by its rector after recognizing the rector as having the power to give it. A different picture of priests with recognizable property in churches is found in the Iberian peninsula. In 836 in Castille a priest Kardellus with his father ‘built a monasterium in our property . . . and set up churches, houses and gardens, vineyards and orchards’, developing undeveloped land, in honour of SS. Peter, Paul, and Andrew (probably a group of three churches). At his father’s death, and feeling his own end near, Kardellus gave it all, ‘books, vestments, orchards, vineyards’, and all his remaining property (including a place called after him, villa Kardelli), to the foundation itself: that is, he finally endowed it.60 This, however, was a relatively large affair, to be staffed perhaps by a community;61 smaller priest-owned churches are more often encountered when given away to a great church. Of these it is usually left unclear whether the lands given with a church have ever been formally given to it. In Leoń in 929 a priest Arian ‘offers, conveys, and grants’ to the monks of Arlanza all his facultas movable and immovable, consisting of two whole churches and one-third of another, along with lands, vineyards, houses, and two water-mills; whether the lands belonged to the churches was probably not a live question as long as they all belonged to Arian. 57

Farfa no. 514 (1018). Also in Latium, cf. DOIII no. 327 (999). Cluny no. 3591. Cf. the priest Peter’s ‘monastery with chapel’ at Rodobbio (see index). 59 See above, pp. 546–7; below, p. 881. 60 Onã no. 2 (the whole foundation identified by then as the church of St Andrew at Asis). 61 Although many Spanish monasteria or monasteriola were evidently one-priest churches (even the title abbas implying little more), some did clearly have a small community, e.g. abbot Aznar whose monasterium contained ‘men and devout women’ when he gave himself and it to Irache (1060, Irache no. 17). See Linage Conde, Origines, III. 12–14. 58

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In Galicia, in 907, a priest Fradilan with similar vagueness about what if anything is his churches’ property gave to the abbot and monks of Lorvaõ ‘all my inheritance and facultas . . . that is, my churches of St Martin . . . and St Christina, with the whole of the villa there . . . and with all the equipment that I have been able to provide in those churches—books, censers, crosses, crowns, horses, mares, oxen, cows, sheep, and everything useful to man in this world; and I give you that villa with all its places and ancient bounds’.62 In 984 another priest gave to the same monastery, by the same kind of document, his villa with all its pertinences and his church with all its ornament, neither evidently belonging to the other:63 for an owner-priest it would make no difference. Other priests, however, gave churches with at least some conventional reference to their minimum endowment, such as ‘with its dextri and its equipment’ or ‘ornament’.64 When the priest Zalama in 1018 gave a church he had founded to the monastery of Vacariza, with its proper dextri, he said he had endowed as well as built it, in his own share of the villa, and had planted fruit-trees and vines for it as well as equipping it with books, silver chalices, silk and linen vestments; though he also gave alongside the church ‘all my facultas that I have or can acquire up to my death’.65 Some priests’ charters (like some laymen’s) combine giving a church with offering or conveying the donor’s self, or his ‘body and soul’;66 not usually meaning entry as a monk, but either admission to live in the monastery, or a looser association (fraternity or societas) compatible with remaining in his church; indeed the frequent reservation of life tenure in the church, or its donation post obitum,67 is occasionally combined with self-offering.68 Some priests disposed of their churches with equal freedom not to a great church but to other individual priests, or to laymen. Two priests in 927 exchanged churches, each making traditio to the other. A priest in 943, unable to pay the blood price for a man he had killed, got his lord to pay it for him at the price of giving the lord and his wife ‘my own church called St John’s, founded in the casale that belonged to my father’, which ‘you and your posterity shall have iure quieto’.69 In 1005 the deacon Sandino—surviving his brother and partner (a priest), 62

63 Arlanza no. 7 (see Bidagor, Iglesia, 18–21); PMHD no. 15. PMMD. no. 143. e.g. ibid. nos. 55 (946), 62 (950), 104 (972). See index: dextri. 65 Ibid. no. 233. Cf. S. Vicente, Oviedo no. 33 (1040), the priest Gevuld’s foundation charter for S. Pedro de Soto (see below, at notes 73–4). 66 e.g. San Millań nos. 53 (959), 111 (1037), 135 (1048); Arlanza no. 76 (1070). See Orlandis, ‘Traditio’, esp. 67 219–25, 250–4, 275–7, 309–22. e.g. PMHD no. 15 (907); Arlanza no. 20 (969). 68 e.g. San Millań no. 52 (959); more clearly, Cardenã no. 141 (1083 or later), Burgos nos. 22, 58 (1078, 1103). In Irache no. 25 (1063) the donor me obtuli . . . ad serviendum cum proprio monasterio, and is given societas. In San Millań no. 156 (1058) a priest gives himself ‘body and soul’ explicitly to live as a Benedictine monk, with his third of a church inherited from his mother; but adds in a postscript that he is to hold it for life under the abbot. 69 PMHD no. 32 (see below, p. 768); ibid. no. 53 (in no. 63 the couple give this church ‘acquired from the priest Adulfus’ to their monastic foundation, 951). Cf. ibid. no. 51 (also 943). 64


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and destitute after Arab incursions70—gave his church (receiving a horse as countergift) to a more substantial man and all his posterity iure quieto for ever, for his own lifetime support and almsgiving for his soul.71 A priest Aio built a church in his own inheritance and gave it by testament to his brother, evidently not a priest: the brother gave it to a woman and her son, who only after many years gave it to a monastery.72 Alongside this individualism were various constraints. Rulers occasionally took a hand in priests’ disposals of churches. The count Munõ Rodriguez who ruled in Asturias in the mid-eleventh century ‘asked’ a priest Gevuld to give his church by charter to Munõ’s own monastery, though Gevuld had built the church in his ‘modest inheritance’ and had ‘possessed it iuri meo in peace, without anyone’s domination’. Later the priest was able to repudiate this grant as made under intimidation, and to give his church and himself to S. Vicente, Oviedo.73 Kings could occasionally exert more authority with (on the face of it) less arm-twisting, perhaps because the donor was a royal servus (as was later said of Gevuld),74 perhaps because the donor’s right came from a king’s gift in the first place, with free disposal or some degree of this, or with a specified destination.75 Such was S. Julian de Bos which the priest John ‘acquired by charter as an honour and reward’ from Ferdinand I and queen Sancha, whose chancellor he had been; but on condition that he gave it after his death to S. Vicente for his own soul and theirs.76 Other lords had sometimes given a priest his church, and this could lie behind an hereditary priest’s hold on it. A lady Sarrazina gave freedom of disposition in a church to a deacon David; he used this (in 1031, as a priest) to take a deacon Ero as his congermanus, giving him half of the half that he had in his possession and promising him the same share in the remaining half if they could get it, for Ero or one of his lineage willing to live a regular life there. A priest Arvald, with a church (or two-thirds of it) given him by testament by a lady Faregia, similarly brought another man into partnership, who in 1008 was able as the survivor to dispose of 70

See Collins, Spain, 244, on Al Mansur’s late 10th-c. raids in the N.W. PMHD no. 194 (Sever-do-Vouga). There are obscurities in the wording of this charter, however (esp. post obitum meum tradi pro anima mea, without a subject). The recipient Froila Gonsalvez probably gave it to Vacariza, to which Sandino had given his other family monasterium at Rocas-do-Vouga, ibid. no. 191. See index: Sandino. 72 Ibid. no. 316 (before 1041). Cf. in Castille the 957 case where a layman renounces his claim to have been given a church (see index: Tobiella) by his brother, a priest. 73 Above, note 65 (foundation, 1040); S. Vicente, Oviedo no. 38 (1045). 74 In 1078 (ibid. no. 79) S. Vicente’s claim was vindicated against count Munõ Gonzalez, because Gevuld’s donation to S. Vicente had the royal consent which his earlier grant to Munõ’s grandfather lacked; necessary because he and all his generatio were royal servi. Gevuld’s charters make no reference to this status, which suggests that it might also apply to the donors Aznar and Sancho in the next note. 75 Priests’ donations confirmed or allowed by kings of Navarre include Irache nos. 17 (1060, royal charter allowing abbot Aznar ut tradas te . . . cum tuo . . . monasterio), 25 (1063, the priest Sancho’s notice that me obtuli . . . cum proprio monasterio at king Sancho Garcıá’s will and command). 76 S. Vicente, Oviedo no. 29 (see ed. note on the date). 71

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‘my own two-thirds’.77 The priest who receives his church by a ruler’s or anyone else’s grant may still be more a proprietor than a tenant; the grant creates property with limitations.78 More often, however, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, an owner-priest’s church seems to be an ancestor’s independent foundation,79 or his own foundation on ancestral land (and may sometimes have been so even when backed by a royal charter, sought perhaps for defence against unchosen kinsmen);80 so that family bonds are more in evidence than is lordship. A priest Munõ whose two churches were ‘all my share that I had from my kinsmen and my grandparents’ gave them to Arlanza with sanctions specifically against disruption by ‘any one of my surviving brothers or any of my kin’; the priest Zalama who built his church in his ‘own portion’ of inherited land still had kinsmen’s wishes to reckon with, giving it to Vacariza for his own soul and the souls of his kinsmen who had told him (or so his charter claims) to leave it in this way.81 Often a priest had only a share in a family church. This he might dispose of independently;82 or he might act with his co-heirs, lay or clerical, in giving away the whole church;83 in one case he functioned at two levels, giving it jointly with his seven brothers and—on the same day (13 May 922)—individually, as having had it ‘assigned’ to him by his grandmother and her priest son after their deaths.84 In joint as in individual donations the question of endowment is often left vague; but when in the Rioja in 1063 a priest Saturninus with his brother and brother’s wife gave themselves and their ‘own monastery’ to S. Millań, there is more precision than usual. Several other people had contributed lands and vineyards at its dedication, so that in the donors’ charter five separate couples or individuals confirm what they have given to the church (dedi in dote ego . . . ), and the priest and his brother and sister-in-law ‘make traditio of all these properties, both those 77

PMHD nos. 270, 200. See below, pp. 752–3. A priest’s ‘sale’ of his church to another priest ‘for life’, conditional on testating it to Lorvaõ (943, PMHD no. 51), was only a degree more restrictive than other priest-to-priest grants conditional on leaving the church to a priest or someone of religious life (above, p. 542 and note 13). 79 In S. Vicente, Oviedo no. 25 (990) the priest Artemius explains that the church he has restored at Limanes (see at note 93, below) was built by his grandfather, left by him to his nephew, and by both of them to him, Artemius. Cf. PMHD nos. 304 (1038) and 357 (1047, a complicated story; long passages helpfully punctuated in Garcıá Gallo, Coyanza, 527 n. 545; comment, 543 n. 583): disputes about churches in which one party claims a share through three or four generations from colonizing ancestors (in the 80 plural). See above, pp. 625–6. 81 Arlanza no. 20 (969); PMHD no. 233 (1018, above, at note 65). 82 e.g. San Millań no. 156 (1058; above, note 68, end); PMHD no. 189 (1002). 83 Among smaller groups giving churches, several consist of a priest and his brothers, e.g. Sahaguń no. 77 (941), PMHD nos. 104 (972), 191 (before 1002), 327 (1043); or his sister, ibid. no. 112 (974). Cf. San Millań no. 52 (959, two brothers and a cousin, all priests, with a fourth confessus); Sahaguń no. 321 (984, two priests and a layman giving a church ‘of our own inheritance’). 84 Sahaguń nos. 29 (Ermegild confessor and his six brothers, giving what must be a moiety, given the fuller donation in 925, above, p. 625) and 30 (the priest Donino’s titulum donationis). 78


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which come from our belongings and those which were offered to the holy basilica for its dedication and conveyed to us’; so the church’s endowments from others had been put into their hands as its joint owners.85 Other priests were put into sole possession by their family;86 or in one muchquoted case from Leoń, in 1071, by a large group of neighbours who had founded the church, among them the priest, to whom the rest gave the church ‘to do with it as might be his will, testating it, or having it, or whatever shall seem good to him’.87 A priest with this power of disposal might, as we have seen, give his church to a cathedral or monastery, but in so doing he might try to secure life tenure for a named cousin or nephew who was to become a priest,88 or for any kinsman ‘worthy to rule and hold it’.89 In 921, however, a priest gave his church to two of his cousins for life with no condition that they be priests, quoting the precept of the law that ‘anyone may do what he wishes with his own property’, but requiring that it go to Sahaguń after their deaths.90 Other churches were left indefinitely within the family. In 1068 a priest Auderigus made his priest nephew his adoptive son by carta perfiliationis, giving him property which included two churches (and all the documents that went with this, especially those rebutting the possible claim of another person’s sons or descendants); reserving, however, a moiety of them for his sister and her children should they turn up; and intending these inheritances for ‘all your posterity who shall be good men in priestly orders, or good sisters’91 (a wish for a quasi-monastic family life, probably too vague to hold up in the face of normal flexibility). Such continuing family possession could be set under a monastery’s lordship: as late as 1202, a priest giving his inherited monasterium to Onã stipulated that after his death ‘whoever of my progeny I appoint shall possess it, and whoever from our genus he appoints shall similarly possess it, and so on always, with the abbot’s and whole community’s licence, an abbot shall be chosen there from our line and hold the monasterium’, owing a modest census.92 These future priests may be nearer to the ‘tenancy’ than the ‘property’ side of the hazy frontier, but the donor is not preoccupied with any such question. Any priest disposing of a church by charter to another priest or clerk while leaving himself in partial possession for life, whether by adopting a son as 85 Ibid. no. 177 (1063); the last point has no equivalent in the Urgel dedication records of similar endowment patterns. 86 PMHD no. 21 (915): a priest has his church by textum scripturae from his father and five heirs, probably 87 his siblings. See index: Penãmiań. 88 PMHD no. 74 (957), charter of a priest Samuel whom the deceased priest Peter had appointed as his vicarius to give his church to Lorvaõ if his cousin Adefonsus did not remain in priest’s orders (as he 89 did not). e.g. Arlanza no. 76 (1070); Burgos no. 58 (1103). 90 91 Sahaguń no. 25 (921). PMHD no. 470. 92 Onã no. 345. He, his consobrinus (also a priest), and three confratres who seem to be his sons, received Onã’s confraternity and the promise of places should they ever wish to become monks.

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Auderigus did, or taking an artificial brother, or giving a share in the church with the prospect of the whole, can be seen similarly as appointing his successor (in effect, like ‘ordaining’ a successor in Italy). This was clearly the priest Artemius’s intention in 990 when he gave all his property (not already disposed of) to his inherited church at Limanes and simultaneously to a priest Modestus, to whom in the same transaction he gave the church itself, for life. After the deaths of both priests (Artemius evidently remaining a partner) the church was to go to a kinsman of either of them, willing to live a monastic life and pray for them.93 Whether a charter was necessary for the succession of an actual son is unclear. But Artemius has a son and daughter for whom he has provided already: the church is not for them. This is an almost rule-proving exception to a general impression that not many proprietor priests were married or were themselves priests’ sons. Some, however, certainly were. In 1085 a certain Fridixilo, giving his eighth part of a church to the monastery of Arauca, explained that it had come to him through his father Egika from his grandfather Elderigo, a priest. Elderigo had bought (not built) the church, and after many years had testated it, half to another monastery and half to his three sons (Fridixilo’s uncles—both priests—and his father).94 Priests who inherited their churches, whether or not they were priests’ sons, were characteristic in Spain for a long time.95 Hereditary priests were widespread also in twelfth-century England and Wales, and here more often the sons of married priests. But in post-Conquest England the nearest a priest could get to owning the church he served was to be its hereditary tenant, his right to succeed to his father’s or uncle’s church recognized by his lord (lay or ecclesiastical), his own son or nephew having the same expectation.96 However, some of these priests’ pre-Conquest ancestors may have been more like owner-priests in Spain: priests who had built and endowed their own churches, or whose family had done so; only losing their independence when they found themselves and their churches under lordship after 1066, like small surviving thegns, or submitted themselves and their churches to a monastery or cathedral. But whereas for tenth- and eleventh-century Spain there are numerous priest’s charters, for England in the same period we know very little about how priests

93 S. Vicente, Oviedo no. 25 (see index: Artemius). Cf. ibid. no. 11 (948): bp. Vimara (who has a church from his uncle) to his congermanus Adefonsus (a confessus, his kinsman), to ‘have’ it exactly as Vimara’s 94 uncle ‘held’ it. PMHD no. 649 (but why an 8th rather than a 6th?). 95 See Compostela 1229 c. 6 (Hist. Compostella V, app. no. 16): ‘clerks who have shares in various 96 Above, pp. 551–3. churches . . . by abuse, for instance by reason of patrimony.’


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held their churches or came by them in the first place.97 For Wales we know even less, apart from a precious list from William I’s or II’s time of churches consecrated by Herewald bishop of Llandaff and the priests he ‘ordained’ to them; often this tells us that he later ordained the first priest’s son or sons, sometimes that the priest was ordained ‘under so-and-so’s heirs’; the former might be the son of a founder-priest and the latter a tenant of lay founders.98 In England, Aelfric’s pastoral letters and Wulfstan’s regulations for the diocese of York suggest that priests were robustly independent, but not that they typically owned their own churches.99 In the one context where an expression translatable as ‘owning’ a church is actually used—that if a priest has bought or acquired another priest’s church he is to be suspended from officiating until the church is back in possession of ‘him who rightly owns it’100—it may make better sense as referring to a bishop or other lord rather than to the former priest (presumably at fault himself).101 There cannot be any general answer to this question. Some Domesday priests were probably still household servants, not ‘holding’ or ‘having’ a church at all. Some probably held it by loan for one life. Some may have had it given them outright, or as outright as a grant by boc could be.102 Yet others may have inherited a church built on bookland. Certainly the Domesday commissioners were told of priests in the time of king Edward who look something like proprietors of their churches. In Suffolk, in what was now Roger Bigod’s lordship, a free man Godric the priest had had seven acres and a church with six acres; he had been commended to Edric before Edric was outlawed, and afterwards to another lord; these were personal attachments, not affecting his title to his small free holding and church.103 In William of Arques’s land, Edmund the priest, a free man commended to St Etheldreda (that is, to Ely Abbey), had been nearer the status of a small thegn, with land that his wife brought him: some 140 acres in Clopton and sixty in Brandeston, each held ‘as a manor’ with a few bordars and serfs, a little 97 See Barlow, 1000–1066, 189–90. Much earlier, the late 8th-c. donation to Worcester by Headda abbot and priest, of inherited property (probably a church) with reservation for priests of his genealogia able to ‘rule monastically’ (see index: Headda), suggests a pattern familiar elsewhere. 98 Welsh Ep. Acts L 11. No church appears both as going to the first priest’s son and as held under heirs. 99 Aelfric in C&S I. 1 no. 40 (esp. cc. 72–82), no. 46 (esp. cc. 157–71, 185–9, 203, 207); ‘Northumbrian Priests’ Law’, ibid., no. 63, esp. cc. 2–18, 25–45 (also EHD I. 435–7). 100 ‘Northumbrian Priests’ Law’, cc. 2, 2. 1, 2. 2; the verb translated in EHD I. 435 as ‘owns’ is age. 101 Nonetheless in VIII Ethelred (1014; C&S I. 1 no. 52) cc. 18–27 clergy needing to rebut accusations are envisaged as either having kinsmen or being friendless, with no mention of lords; and in c. 28 a priest living an orderly life has a thegn’s wergild. 102 The twenty-odd churches held by Edward the Confessor’s chancellor and priest Regenbald may have been given him by boc. After his death his churches were given by Henry I to the canons of Cirencester as ‘the priest Regenbald’s entire holding’, ‘the things that were Regenbald’s’ (Cirencester no. 28. i): he was perhaps as much a lord of many churches as a ‘great pluralist’ with many benefices. See Round, Feudal England, 421–30; Lennard, Rural England, 317–19; Campbell, Essays, 149–50, 154. 103 DB ii. 342b (with 316a, 40 acres elsewhere).

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meadow, woodland to graze a few pigs, in one a mill. All this he ‘put into the church’ at Brandeston, with his wife’s consent, on condition that he could not sell or give it away from the church: probably endowing for the first time what was by implication his own church (and certainly seems not to have been Bury’s).104 Clearer than either of these is the case of the priest Eadmer, who had held Hurstmonceaux in Sussex, rated at five hides, with thirty villagers and twelve cottars, a church, some meadow and woodland; so he was the lord of a small thegn’s estate, perhaps originally bookland; and he could ‘go with his land to whom he would’, that is, commend himself to a lord of his choice.105 In Barlow’s words, ‘no-one could be freer in Anglo-Saxon England’;106 with a different emphasis, no one could be nearer to being an independent proprietor. All these three at their different economic levels had land besides what their church had (indeed none is mentioned for the church at Hurstmonceaux), though Edmund and his wife at Brandeston made the church the focus of their property. None of the three is easy to explain as holding land or church by loan; each of them could be explained as holding inherited property on which he had built or inherited a church. It looks as if none of these three left a priestly heir holding the land and church in 1086 (and Edmund’s large endowment of Brandeston was evidently aborted by William of Arques). But some priests in 1086 did derive their title from a predecessor of king Edward’s time.107 As we have seen, in Lincoln the priest Ernuin claimed the church of All Saints and whatever belonged to it ‘by inheritance from Godric his kinsman’, when Godric (not named as a priest, though he probably was) had made the church his entry gift to Peterborough Abbey. This church seems to be a piece of property which Godric, holding it, had thought to be at his free disposal, whereas Ernuin claimed it as his under family law and town custom (limited only by royal lordship, perhaps as much so before as after the Conquest).108 By contrast, St Mary’s church in Huntingdon was treated as priests’ property in what looks like a free market, indeed what in Barlow’s words ‘can only be described as speculation in real estate, mostly by royal courtiers’. It had once belonged to Thorney Abbey, but had come into the hands of king Edward; Edward had given it (not for life only, it seems) to two of his own priests, who had sold it to the king’s chamberlain, who had sold it to two priests of the 104

Ibid. 431b. The Clopton holding was one ploughland (perhaps 120 acres) and 22 acres. 106 DB i. 18a. 1000–1066, 188. 107 An instance (but perhaps a renewed loan) might be Bristoard/Brictward, holding in 1086 the wellendowed (112 hides) church of Great Bedwyn under royal lordship, held by his father TRE (DB i. 65b, Wilts.); probably both priests, though not so called. 108 See index: Ernuin. See Bo¨hmer, ‘EKntum’, 327–8; Barlow, op. cit., 193. 105


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borough.109 At the time of the Inquest it was actually in the hands of the sheriff, but the two local priests ‘held king Edward’s seal for it’, that is, presumably, the sealed writ by which it had passed to the king’s priests, thereafter constituting written title for any later holders. Whatever the nature of the king’s gift, it had carried the power to dispose of the church and with it similar power to dispose of it further. So there seem to be different intersecting worlds of owner-priests, some rewarded by the king, some buying, others inheriting, and all capable of surviving the Conquest subject to someone’s lordship, often the king’s. Priests and clerks who before about 1100 made real or ostensible entry gifts of London churches to Christchurch, Canterbury, or later gave away churches reserving life tenure for themselves and an heir (or beyond),110 may have inherited them from preConquest ancestors—ancestors by blood, that is, not just a Domesday antecessor.111 Such ancestors might of course be lay church-owners, probably minor thegns, rather than a line of priests.112 Such a background might explain the dealings of a mid-twelfth-century abbot of St Benet’s Holme with the two Norfolk manors and churches held from him by a priest, Osbert son of Griffin (the lands in fee, the churches in perpetual alms). After Osbert’s death the abbot distributed them to the priest’s three sons (two of them probably clerks at least): at Thurgarton, both manor and church to the first son John (who would thus be something like a ‘squarson’ of later times); at Thwaite, the manor to the second son Robert, and the church to the third son Richard, to hold from his brother in perpetual alms.113 If an ancestor had given both land and churches, such a distribution might well seem right or unavoidable. With a more priestly lineage, a clerk Thomas held from St Benet’s three Norfolk churches of which at least one had been originally given by his father Thurbern and grandfather Stigand, both priests.114 Two celebrated church-holding dynasties of northern England, one priestly, one clerical, grander than any of these town and country priests, both traced their lineage to pre-Conquest ancestors. The evidence about them points, however, to different legal histories. Ailred of Rievaulx’s ancestors were married priests and 109 DB i. 208a; Barlow, op. cit., 192–3; Hart (ed.), EECharters, 181–2 and no. 7 (king Edgar’s donation to Thorney). 110 In the list c.1100 of London properties given to Christchurch, Canterbury (above, p. 650 note 22), there are churches given as entry gifts by a priest Living, a clerk Godwin Bac, a priest Lifric (and two churches given by a priest and a clerk not evidently as entry gifts). See Brooke and Keir, London, 135–6. 111 However, William the Conqueror’s donation to Saint-Wandrille, for his chaplain Guncard’s entry, of four English churches ‘as Guncard’s antecessor held them’ (St-Wandrille no. 36) probably refers to a predecessor, not an ancestor (but only two of the churches are identifiable in Domesday, with no TRE 112 holders named). An instance might be the Castor family (see note 127, below). 113 St Benet Holme nos. 184 (after 1153), 188, 187, 189 (before 1168). That Osbert was a priest appears ibid. nos. 146–7. John and Richard must have been clerks at least. 114 Ibid. nos. 76, 83 (1126–7), 183 (1153–68).

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provosts of the church of Hexham since Ailred’s great-grandfather’s marriage into its priestly family; though they were seen also as having had it by gift of successive bishops of Durham (whose clergy they were).115 But in (probably) the 1090s it came into the lordship of the archbishops of York, and Eilaf I (who rebuilt it after the devastation of the north) and his son Eilaf II (Ailred’s father) held it not merely under successive archbishops, but under a canon of York who had it as a prebend; and later (from 1113) under the newly established regular canons of Hexham, to whom Eilaf II was a kind of liberally beneficed chaplain; until he surrendered his benefice to them in 1138, with his sons’ consent, shortly before entering Durham as a monk.116 Despite this apparent downgrading as a figure from an obsolete past, Eilaf had great personal prestige in the region, his status determined far more by his ancestry and by the relics that he tended with warm devotion as his ancestral duty,117 than by any transition from being almost a proprietor to being a tenant, though his ancestors probably had been genuinely in a more nearly ‘proprietary’ position than his. But in Lancashire the early hereditary rectors (called deans) of Whalley, with its vast hill-country parish and large endowments, look more like independent lords of the church.118 Cutts at the end of the nineteenth century made the convincing suggestion that an early lord of Whalley had ‘turned his house into a semi-secular monastery’, which had survived in the family’s hands under married deans who appointed the serving priests.119 If so their title must have rested ultimately on a grant of bookland. After the Conquest all that country came under the lordship of the Lacy lords of Pontefract, who in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries regularly accepted the claim of a deceased dean’s nearest heir and gave him a letter to take to the bishop, a procedure which the bishops could accept as presentation while successive deans treated it as simply recognizing their right.120 They were tenants with as much dominium as anyone could have in feudal England: rich lords, able to grant land to be held ‘from the church of Whalley and 115 Raine, Priory of Hexham, I. pp. vii-viii, 49–50, 191–2; also, on the early priests, Symeon of Durham, Opera, I. 79–80. At this stage the provosts (although priests) were not serving the church themselves. 116 Raine, Hexham, I. 54–6 (from prior Richard’s history). Eilaf’s entry gift to Durham seems to be the one estate that he had retained, at Cocken (Durham Episc. Charters no. 28 and Offler’s comments, 120–1). 117 Raine, Hexham, I. 190–3, 195–6, 205–6, from Ailred on the Saints of Hexham; F. M. Powicke (ed.), Life of Ailred of Rievaulx (London, 1950), pp. xxxiv–xxxix. The Hexham relics were of early saint-bishops. 118 See Whitaker, History of Whalley, I. 65–80. Probably justifiably, Whitaker takes as basically correct (except on the church’s remoter origins) a 14th-c. account of the history of Whalley and Blackburnshire (Mon., V. 642–4, written up at Whalley Abbey), evidently partly based on documents. It represents preConquest Blackburnshire as having many small lords all ‘holding in chief ’; among whom were the rectors of Whalley and of three other churches, where ‘each rector held and possessed the land and township where his church lay, as his church’s dos; and he governed that church, thus endowed, as his patrimony and inheritance, and freely chose a successor to himself from his sons or kinsmen’. 119 Parish Priests, 557–61. 120 ‘ . . . nothing more than a certificate that he was the rightful heir’ (ibid., 558). Whitaker’s suggested explanation for the rectors being lords of the manor (op. cit., 71–3) is anachronistic.


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from him and his successors in fee and inheritance’;121 one of them married into the Lacy family. Not until between 1224 and 1238 did the last and apparently unmarried dean, Roger, resign the deanery while getting himself consecrated priest and presented to a very substantial vicarage.122 There are parallels to the end of the line of married deans of Whalley in the story, unravelled by Brian Kemp, of the more modest (but still substantial) church of Eye in Herefordshire.123 Here in the early thirteenth century the last married chaplain Roger held both lay fee and church of the abbot of Reading, as had in turn his father and brother, both named Osbert. This Roger, like Roger of Whalley, gave up his hereditary hold on the church, became a priest, and stayed on for thirty-five years as ‘perpetual vicar’.124 Both were able to leave land for their lay heirs: Roger of Whalley kept some land for his brother, whose descendants long retained it;125 Roger of Eye was granted all the lay fee for himself and one son, and his grandson Philip of Eye held it still in the 1280s. More remarkably, this Philip, lord of the ‘manor’ of Eye (as it had come to be called),126 had a shot at suing the abbot for the advowson of the church, claiming that his ancestor Osbert had held both manor and advowson and had presented Roger as vicar.127 But the beginning of this story must be quite different from Whalley’s. The church of Eye had been the leading one of Leominster’s dependencies; land and church were acquired by Reading from Henry I with the rest of the lordship of Leominster; the hereditary clerks’ claim may be no older than the first Osbert’s benefice in the mid-twelfth century. Entrenched hereditary tenure is not evidence, by itself, for earlier independent property.128 Regardless of origins, however, free tenure of land was turning by the thirteenth century into something more like modern property, and clerks or priests who had land separate (or separated) from their church’s glebe could leave landowning descendants. But churches could not go the same way, or not for long; sooner or later a lay or monastic patron, with the bishop’s backing, would bring hereditary

121

Mon. Angl., V. 644 (two instances, probably quoting charters). In 1284 Henry de Lacy got the church appropriated to his Cistercian abbey at Stanlaw, later moved 123 to Whalley. Kemp, ‘Hereditary Benefices’, 1–15, with documents in appendix. 124 Ibid. 11, the abbot’s grant of the chapel to Osbert son of Osbert ‘as his father held it’; for the change (associated with Eye’s appropriation to Reading, 1216–19), ibid. 13–14. The terminology was fluid, however (earlier chaplains sometimes called vicar, Roger later sometimes called rector; ibid. 4, 8–9). 125 Pedigree of Towneley of Towneley, Whitaker, History of Whalley, II. 190. 126 It seems likely that the lay fee was originally part of the church’s glebe (see Kemp, op. cit., 5 n. 4). 127 Ibid. 6–8, 11; id. (ed.), Reading Cartularies I no. 336. For a similar probably unjustified claim that a church belongs to a manor, see the much earlier case of Castor, above, p. 645. 128 See above, pp. 552–4. 122


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tenure to an end. Thus Philip of Eye’s attempt to recover the church could only be made by misrepresenting the past in terms of manor and advowson; though in 1285 the oldest of the somewhat baffled jurors saw the past in more archaic and perhaps more accurate terms, saying that Roger had been ‘both lord and rector’.129 129

Kemp, op. cit., 7–8; Reading I no. 337 (record of the inquest mandated in no. 336), at 271–2.

19 Higher churches as proprietors

19.i. Monasteries, collegiate churches, chapters Monasteries were by the twelfth century by far the greatest lords of churches almost everywhere. But since most of the evidence used in this study for other kinds of lord comes from the moment when a church came into a monastery’s possession, while the evidence for the exploitation of churches and arrangements for their service comes mainly from that moment or from the monks’ subsequent dealings or surveys, monasteries’ churches will be treated only briefly and broadly here. To some extent the number of churches in monastic lordship was a function of their landowning. Already in its ninth-century polyptich Saint-Germain-des-Pre´s had thirty-six churches, some probably built by the monks, others given with estates;1 and the property covered may be only about a quarter of the total. Monasteries did build and endow churches on their estates. In France, we have seen Cormery in 997 building a chapel for its tenants because of winter floods, and Tulle a century later building a church in high woodlands to serve its settlers (though this was on land given to Tulle for the purpose).2 These were the two typical reasons in Germany too. In Swabia in 1061 the abbot of St Gall founded an oratory for the settlers ‘in a new place called Abbacella’; in early twelfth-century Franconia the abbot of St Alban’s, Mainz, established a church for the villagers at Medenbach to shorten their journey to church.3 In Westphalia in 1079, however, Warin abbot of Corvey built and endowed a church of St Michael on a wooded hill, not for pastoral care but for the religious life—probably as hermits—of an individual monk and a conversus.4 1

Polypt. Irminonis, passim. Above, p. 471 note 70 (Cormery no. 30); pp. 471–2, with viscount Boso’s charter (Tulle no. 498). In Castille, cf. Onã no. 58 (1070): Sancho II allows the monks ‘to populate, and build churches’ in their present or future possessions, ‘in populated or desolate places’. 3 St Gallen no. 822; Mainz no. 434. 4 Westfal. UB, I, Additamenta, no. 21 (later known as Heiligenberg; near Ho¨xter). 2

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But monasteries’ churches were mainly acquired, as part of their endowment and by subsequent donations. For most monasteries the great flood of churches came in the monastic reform period of the tenth and still more the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, to some extent swollen towards the end of this period by Gregorian reform ideas inducing the laity to unload their churches on favoured monasteries, or at least to choose churches rather than estates to give away.5 But the stream began long before this, bringing them churches often only as pertinences of estates, but often as independent properties.6 In 827 the canons of SaintJulien de Brioude were given a church by a married couple who had built and endowed it.7 Beaulieu was given churches by its founder archbishop Ralph, and by lay lords and owner-priests for the rest of the ninth century and well into the tenth,8 though very few in the eleventh (not all monasteries peaked at that time: it would depend on regional conditions, the timing of economic development, the community’s reputation, and the strength of the competition).9 By the mid-eleventh century any middling French monastery might have ten or fifteen churches; some had thirty or forty. Saint-Victor of Marseilles had several hundred, not only in Provence but in Languedoc, the Pyrenees, and reconquered parts of Spain. Cluny eventually had 110 in the dioceses of Maˆcon and Autun alone, while overall in its first two centuries it was given more than 300 (though this includes some fractions); of these, almost as many came in the tenth as in the eleventh century.10 In Germany, St Gall was given churches by neighbouring landowners, mainly in the second half of the eighth and first half of the ninth century, again at the end of the ninth and beginning of the tenth; after about 920, however, the stream seems to have dried up.11 This was in old Christian country; further north, some were given over the years, for instance to Corvey and Fulda, usually as pertinences of estates;12 but in much of Germany before the twelfth century there were so few lesser churches that they feature very little in donations to monasteries compared with lands and serfs. In Italy, by contrast, from small beginnings in the eighth century, large numbers of private churches—mostly independent oratories, some pertinent to estates, some resulting from incastellamento—were given to monasteries later. Farfa had more than 130 churches by 1118, eighty of them acquired between 1047 5

See below, p. 865. e.g. count Eberhard endowed Murbach, ?735, with loca indominicata and the basilicas belonging to them (above, p. 114 note 46); but king Pippin re-endowed Pru¨m in 762 with a ‘cell’ and two other 7 churches, besides villae (DKarol. I no. 16). Brioude no. 235. 8 9 Beaulieu, passim. e.g. notes 11–14, below. 10 ´ E. Baratier, ‘La Fondation et l’e´tendue du temporel de l’abbaye de Saint-Victor’, Province Historique, 16 (1966), at 406–37 (list for area of modern France); Fechter, Cluny, Adel, 29–31 (on donations). 11 St Gallen, III (covering 920–1093); see Sprandel, St Gallen, 77–81. 12 e.g. Corvey, II. 325–6, 329; III. 353–4; Fulda nos. 652, 744, 749, 754. 6

Higher churches as proprietors

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and 1089.13 From the mid-eleventh century to the 1120s Monte Cassino and La Cava each acquired getting on for 200 churches or fractions of them.14 In Spain and the future Portugal the more important monasteries were being given churches from the ninth century; Onã in Castille was endowed in 1002 with about a hundred.15 In England by the time of the Domesday Inquest many of the richer churches had been given to monasteries at home or overseas, and this continued in the twelfth century. By this time it was not unusual for a newly founded monastery to be endowed mainly with churches; English instances are earl Roger’s foundation at Shrewsbury in 1087 and William of Warenne’s at Lewes.16 Saint-E´vroul in Normandy (refounded about 1050) received some twenty-five churches from its two founder families, Giroie and Grandmesnil, besides four more from other lords, and other churches unspecified.17 These, with their pertinences (and various detached tithes), leave in the shade what the founders gave not pertinent to any church (two vills and a handful of ploughlands, mills, and men). Churches were given by laity and clergy as might be any other property, for the same range of spiritual and material rewards, even if there were growing reasons for giving churches rather than manors or curtes. The subject here, however, is not the donors’ motives but the monks’ attitudes or policy in acquiring and managing these dozens or hundreds of churches. Their attitudes must of course interlock and overlap with those of the donors, who if near at hand were their neighbours, lords, and relations; if from further afield, guests and pilgrims with networks of potential new friends behind them. A monastic community accepting a donation (or even a quitclaim) was doing something positive for the donors’ family living and dead—allowing them to acquire merit, purge sins, win the support of the monastery’s patrons heavenly and earthly; equally if the community made formal countergifts to establish this, promising confraternity, burial, anniversary masses, it was doing something for itself—enlarging both its influence in the countryside and its roll-call in the communion of saints.18 But these shared ideas (and accompanying bitterness when heirs felt that too much had been given, or monks that too much had been paid) applied to any benefaction, and do not by themselves make churches a special kind of property or a kind specially appropriate for monks. 13

Toubert, Structures, 884–8, 904–5. For a different regional timing see Feller, Abruzzes, 820–3. See Dormeier, Montecassino, 27–8 (listed, 28–52); Loud, ‘Cava’, 146–8. Onã no. 8 (see introd. p. xxx). 16 Cf. Robert de Brus’s endowment of Guisborough, EYC II no. 659 (grandson’s confirmation, 1170–90; see Newman, ‘Landowners’, 281); in Scotland, king David’s endowment of Holyrood Abbey (1128–36, Early Scottish Charters no. 153). 17 Orderic, HE III. 30–9; cf. ADNorm. no. 122. See Chibnall, ‘Ecclesiastical Patronage’, 108, 114. 18 See esp. Rosenwein, Neighbor, 45–6, 145–6; White, Custom, 154–73; Wickham, Mountains, 212–15; Feller, Abruzzes, 819–20, 825. 14 15

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Did monks, then (or nuns, or canons) in acquiring churches or in managing them see them as just a form of property like any other, or as bringing special opportunities and obligations? And did they behave differently towards their churches from other lords? Certainly they often seem to be planning and working over decades, by purchase and exchange as well as by inviting pious donations, to acquire particular churches and especially to piece together fractions, in a way that was probably rare for a lay family or succession of lay lords.19 The object may in some contexts have been, as Toubert has argued for Farfa, to gather up and develop small family churches’ lands rather than to collect churches as such; but by the second half of the eleventh century Farfa was collecting the churches of fortified settlements and others with parochial rights, and keeping churches back from its benefices to laymen.20 In eleventh-century France a monastery’s acquisition of a parish church was often meant as the starting point for attracting population to a new bourg, and the donor sometimes gave with it some of his seigneurial jurisdiction; while either from donors or from bishops a monastery might enjoy some ecclesiastical jurisdiction in its churches.21 The lord or lords of a church will want to give whatever they think is theirs to give and are willing to let go,22 but this may be modified or enlarged by what the monks particularly want or by what they regard as acceptable, and the words and concepts of the charter will usually originate with them (with some resulting standardization within their spheres of influence). By the later eleventh century most monasteries seem disinclined to lose or risk losing churches by granting them to the laity.23 That apart, their choice of what to do with a church was wide, for male religious at least. They may, if it is well endowed, make it the base for a substantial new cell or priory (as was certainly sometimes the donor’s intention), using the actual church for monastic worship as well as for whatever parish role it formerly had,24 or hiving off its parish role to an existing church or a new-built one close by.25 Otherwise, like other lords, they may either grant the whole complex to a tenant priest or clerk for a rent, or as we have seen enjoy the bulk of its produce and revenue themselves while supplying 19

For one example, however, from 8th–9th c. Abruzzo, see index: Ocretano. Toubert, Structures 285–6, 884–9, 904–11, 925–6. 21 Above, pp. 453–4; below, p. 713. This is distinct from exemption (see Knowles, Monastic Order, 602–6). 22 Usually giving up his lordship (e.g. 1063, St-Mont no. 11: ‘the brothers are to have and possess that church in the same way as I have held and possessed it’); but sometimes giving the position of priest under his lordship (above, pp. 577–8). 23 Apart from some farming (below, at note 27). See above, p. 453 note 62, on Cormery’s dealings with the lay tenant of a church, 1007–25. 24 See Fournier, Peuplement, 444–5; Schreiber, ‘Abgabenwesen’, 187–8 and nn. 133–4, 137; Matthew, Norman Monasteries, 58–63. 25 e.g. Gorze no. 155 (1032; see Berlie`re, ‘Exercice’, 239); Molesme no. i. 127 (before 1107); Fleury no. 80 (1071, Baudrevilliers). 20


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its priest with an allowance or a portion (itself perhaps subject to a small rent).26 If they take the former course this might be for a substantial rent, but was often done rather for reasons of patronage or because of successive priests’ hereditary claims. If, on the other hand, they are able to take the latter course, they may do much what lay lords would do, with a bailiff to manage the land for their benefit. Or they may farm the property to someone, lay or clerical, who will exploit it and provide cheaply for the church’s service.27 Or they may manage the property by settling a monk or two on it, who will use the church for their own priestly offices while a secular priest celebrates the parish mass there on Sundays and has the cure of souls.28 Or finally, they may save themselves the expense of paying a secular chaplain at all, by providing one of their own number to be the serving priest. How far this last practice was in fact to be found among real monks is a stillunsettled question,29 which can be only touched on here. There are ambiguous references to priests who might or might not be monks. In the mid-ninth century a pair of cousins gave their inherited church at Cond on the Moselle to StavelotMalme´dy, on condition that ‘a priest out of that monastery, fit to perform the priestly office’, should be sent to it and that the villagers could go there for mass, baptism, and the priest’s teaching;30 this might mean an ordained monk, but the monastery—having still a missionary role—could well have had resident secular clergy. It would not be surprising, however, to find actual monks preaching and administering the sacraments in any missionary region. There is of course, throughout the period, no problem about communities of secular clergy, often created to staff a parish church, and able to send their members to serve dependencies. But houses of regular canons too, especially in twelfth-century Germany, had new churches given them by bishops explicitly allowing the ‘brothers’ to preach, baptize, visit the sick, and bury the dead.31 Nor was this restricted to canons: in 1087 the bishop of Halberstadt allowed the monastery of Ilsenburg, in a named parish church ‘and indeed in all parish churches set under the monastery’s ius proprietatis, to have divine offices 26 Above, pp. 575–83; for early 12th-c. England see Brett, Church, 231–2. See Stavelot-Malmedy, nos. 152–4 (overlapping lists: churches that the abbot ‘gives’; or owing substantial dues such as 20 or 30 rams; or providing wax, loaves, cheeses, or money for lighting). 27 See Knowles, Mon. Order, 598–9; Constable, Tithes, 134–6. 28 e.g. what Achard gave to Saint-Vincent du Mans in the church of Souday (see index) included pannage in his woods for as many pigs as ‘the monk living in that place will have’ and for the monk’s priest’s pigs. Cf. St-Victor no. 725 (c.1040); Ange´ly no. 63 (c.1089). 29 See chiefly Berlie`re, ‘Exercice’, esp. 235–50, 340–50; Chibnall, ‘Monks and Pastoral Work’, 165–71, rebutting Matthew, Norman Monasteries, 59–64; but see Kemp, ‘Monastic Possession’, 144–6 and n. 50. 30 Stavelot-Malme´dy no. 32. 31 e.g. Erfurt I no. 6 (1104, for a ‘cell’ of Peterskloster, Erfurt’s); Westfal. UB, II, Codex no. 231 (1139, for Kappenberg). Cf. Constable, Tithes, 154 for Saint-Victor in Paris; St Botolph’s, Colchester.

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celebrated for the people by priest monks’.32 In France lay donors might arrange this themselves: in 1061 Adrald and his brothers, allowing Marmoutier to transfer the village church of Crot to Saint-Pe`re, Chartres, and conceding that ‘it should be served by whatever priest they wish’, set aside an earlier agreement ‘that a monk should never be lacking there’:33 by implication the monk would have served it. A group of monks could minister to nobles and knights in a castle priory;34 or to a popular congregation formed round revered relics or a holy place or holy man, as monks of Durham served in the church at Finchale built by the hermit Godric.35 When the monks of Saint-Maixent, Poitou, moved in to serve their nearby church of Saint-Leger, this was both an act of reform and a reclaiming of property: four ill-conducted clerks had been put in earlier by secular abbots; as the clerks died off the present abbot and monks did not replace them, but ‘kept the church in proprium for themselves’ and restored divine service there as of old.36 The record notes that ‘this church has no parish, but receives whatever the monastery does not take’: probably meaning that such offerings or other revenues as it had were at the monks’ disposal first, and only what they chose to leave was available for its alms, lights, or fabric. Monks might well feel, and were increasingly willing to argue, that they were better qualified for the service of altars and even for pastoral care than were most of the secular clergy, and that the gift of a church entitled them to send a monk or monks to serve it if they chose. But the stricter monastic view (shared by the stricter regular canons) was against this; so was the legislation of reforming popes and bishops, up to and including the Lateran Council of 1123.37 What was chiefly in dispute, however, was the monks’ claim to tithes, for which their pastoral work was one of the justifications;38 its deployment in the argument for monastic tithes may conceal its actual rarity. Nonetheless the legislation shows that it happened; and although it was certainly rare for a monk to be a parish priest when clear definitions had emerged, it may have been less unusual earlier for a monk to serve an almost-parochial local church.39 32

per presbiteros monachos (UB des Klosters Ilsenburg, ed. E. Jacobs (Halle, 1875) no. 7). See index: Adrald. In Italy the donor of a church in Apulia to the island monastery of Tremiti required a ‘monk and priest’ to serve it (1121, Tremiti no. 95; the singular verb indicates a monk-priest, although having one of each was envisaged as an alternative); cf. ibid. no. 111 (1158). But these are family churches, not quasi-parochial. 34 e.g. in the Welsh Marches, 1152, St Peter’s, Gloucester no. 207: Bernard bp. of St David’s licenses the monks to preach and ‘do Christianity in the manner of a priest’ in the castle church of Dulas (given them by Wizo the Fleming: cf. no. 206, of 1113–15); it is nonetheless assumed that they will have clergy there. 35 Barlow, Durham Peculiars, p. xii, n. 1. Cf. the role (excluding baptism) allowed to monks from Siegburg in a hilltop church given them at the people’s request by abp. Arnold I (1139, Siegburg no. 48). 36 St-Maixent no. 169 (1088). 37 On the arguments see Constable, Tithes, 144–85; id., ‘Monastic Possession’, 322–31; also Colvin, White 38 Canons, 272–88. See Constable, Tithes, 182–4, on Gratian’s Causa 16 qu. 1. 39 Kemp concludes that ‘there is simply insufficient evidence’ either way (‘Monastic Possession’, n. 50). Greek monks in Apulia are another matter (above, pp. 547–8, 550). 33


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It might be supposed that a major restraint on the monks’ management of a church would be the donors’ intentions. But how often did donors have any particular intention for the church they were giving? Sometimes they meant the monks to establish a priory or cell there. If not, they often reserved the existing incumbent’s rights for his life; sometimes they reserved the incumbency for a son or a nephew, or gave it as an entry gift for him while arranging for him to serve it;40 only occasionally did they express concern for the church’s future service,41 or stipulate that the monks rebuild it after neglect or build one bigger and better of stone and mortar.42 The monastery may be forbidden to alienate the church, but so it might for a gift of land: what this safeguards is the donation and its rewards, not the church itself. If it had had an important role for the donors’ memoria this might be transferred to the monastery;43 while only very rarely and locally is a donor’s charter drafted to honour the patron saint of the church given, by representing that saint as one of the gift’s beneficiaries, or invoking him or her to protect it.44 It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the main purpose of most gifts of churches was to enrich the greater church and support its own activities of almsgiving, prayer, and the august round of worship; often explicitly to feed and clothe the monks, so that it will belong to their mensa if they have one.45 Odo of Orbais in French Burgundy (either side of 1100), giving a church to Molesme with the option of making it a monastery should they wish, saw the alternative— which he declared equally acceptable—as ‘wishing rather to confer its revenues on the monastery of Molesme’.46 That this appropriation of the bulk of the revenues to the monastery’s use seldom went to the length of eliminating any secular priest or leaving only an ill-paid hireling may be due more to bishops than to donors.47 Secular collegiate churches also had lesser churches of their own. Italian pievi had subordinate oratories that had come to be treated as their property. Great Frankish urban basilicas, Carolingian or Ottonian royal chapels, and later collegiate foundations anywhere might have some churches built on their own 40

Above, pp. 642–4. An early instance is UBMR I no. 105 (866). 11th–12th c. instances include earl Warenne for Lewes (above, pp. 576–7); the donor to Tremiti (above, note 33), or his heirs, who can reclaim the church if the abbot fails to provide for its service as arranged; and see Kemp, op. cit., 140, on Hawsker chapel. 42 Above, p. 455; and see Chevalier, ‘Restitutions’, 136–7 on Azay-le-Rideau. 43 Above, pp. 48, 178, drawing esp. on Innes, State; see also Feller, Abruzzes, 817. 44 e.g. (in Poitou) St-Maixent nos. 91 (1041) and 201 (1100), both originals. 45 e.g. St-Cyprien no. 184 (938–49, reporting a former bishop’s gift); Westfal. UB, Addit., no. 10 (1042, for the nuns of Meschede); Ste-Foi no. 8 (1051); Vendoˆme no. 96 (1053); Le´zat no. 51 (1079). Spanish charters sometimes specify the monks’ sustenance, lights for altars, and almsgiving, e.g. San Millań no. 5 (853); Sahaguń nos. 270 (973), 321 (984). 46 Molesme no. ii. 159 (1076–1114). See Schreiber, Gesamm. Abh., 183–4. 47 On bishops’ rulings and concessions, below, pp. 582–3, 701–4; more effective after 1095 when the bishop’s leave was required for transferring churches into monastic lordship, below, pp. 866–8. 41

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estates but more given them by founders and benefactors. In this book there is no systematic separate treatment of secular collegiate churches: they varied too widely among themselves; the most illustrious differed too little, in external relations, from the great Benedictine monasteries; many communities shifted between different regimes; the word monasterium might be used of any of them, and the head of any might be called an abbot. Canons or clergy were, however, different from monks in one important respect, the appropriateness of their churches being served by their own members; but even here there was an uneasy borderland, occupied in the twelfth century by the regular canons. In great collegiate establishments, as in monasteries, where there was a separate conventual mensa some churches would be the dean’s or abbot’s and some the convent’s (though the division might emerge only slowly); and the same division applied between bishops and cathedral chapters. So although the cathedral clergy retained an interest in what the bishop gained or lost for their church and its saints, and a say in his alienations, they increasingly had churches of their own. These, if not part of their original allotment, were often given by a later bishop,48 perhaps gradually building or rebuilding a mensa or ‘prebend’ (in the singular) for them; sometimes aiming to restore common life where cathedral property had been divided among canons (as plural ‘prebends’) and fallen into their families’ hands.49 Others were given by individual canons,50 or by the laity for a share in the canons’ prayers and alms such as they would expect from monks, or as entry gifts.51 Any of these donors might be restoring or quitclaiming what was supposed to have once belonged to the cathedral: perhaps an item of a now disintegrated ninth-century canons’ mensa, or perhaps lost by an earlier bishop from property undivided at the time.52 It is often not clear, however, whether a church, given perhaps primarily to the cathedral’s saint or saints, was intended for the bishop, the chapter, or both; nor whether in the canons’ corporate dealings with churches they were granting a church of their own, consenting to the bishop’s grant of one of his, or dealing still with undivided property. At Maˆcon in the tenth century, grants of churches for life to laity or clergy—often to individual canons—were made by bishop, provost, 48 e.g. HL V no. 164 (testament of Ermengaud abp. of Narbonne, c.1005); Maˆcon, no. 607 (1096–1124); Liber Alb. Cenom. no. 123, (mid-12th c.). The two last were donations for the bishop’s own and his family’s 49 anniversaries. See also Stutz, Benef., 368 nn. 92, 93. e.g. Be´ziers no. 92 (1092). 50 e.g. Maˆcon no. 154 (?early 10th c.); Altlux. UB, no. 178 (967, precarial exchange). 51 e.g. St-Andre´-le-Bas, app. (Vienne cathedral) no. 20 (927); Maˆcon nos. 441–2 (and see next note); Angers nos. 32 and 46 (1047–55); Bourbonnais no. 6. i (1079–85); in Bavaria, Freising no. 1648 (1078–85). 52 Among lay restitutions are Maˆcon nos. 420 (954–60), 34 (1063–7), 536 (1096–1124); Liber Alb. Cenom. no. 109 (1111 or shortly before). Churches recovered and donated by bishops include Amiens no. 10 (1091–1102); Maˆcon no. 536 (1096–1124, given to the canons’ mensa by bp. Bernard for his soul and the souls of the laymen who quitclaimed it). Some had been in the donor-bishop’s hands as personal property (below, p. 694 note 43).


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and canons, or by the bishop at the request of canons and fideles, or with the canons’ consent, not only when subject to a census or a dinner for the canons53 but when it is said to be ‘of their portion’ (ratio): thus two chapels were given for life to a canon and his mother by the bishop, with the canons’ consent ‘because the things were seen to be of their ratio and annexed to their mensa’.54 In general the matter was clearer by the mid-twelfth century, as the chapter’s legal capacity began to emerge.55 Meanwhile (for cathedrals as for monasteries) particular churches might be attached to offices or obediences such as that of sacristan,56 or to a canon’s prebend.57 Apart from committing a church to one of its own members, a chapter had the same choice as a monastery between putting in a vicar or chaplain or granting it to a rent-paying tenant priest (or clerk who would provide for its service).58 It is unlike a monastery, however, in its complicated interest in the bishop’s authority or its proceeds. The chapter may enjoy some episcopal rights and revenues in its own churches because it has been allowed to take them (like some other lords);59 or it may have them from churches not its own because it was for the canons’ benefit that the bishop reserved these things. And the canons may have churches and episcopal revenues in another diocese, not only because the diocesan bishop has had to allow them this as lords, but also because their own bishop has to allow them control of an extra-diocesan enclave as part of their share of the cathedral’s rights.60

19.ii. Bishops and bishoprics Bishops in antiquity were the administrators of undivided diocesan property, not—as they became—proprietors of particular churches within and without their own dioceses. Something has been said in earlier chapters about how the change came about.1 As lords of great estates, bishops probably built estate 53

54 e.g. Maˆcon nos. 9, 97, 406, 475. Ibid. no. 421; cf. nos. 408, 414. See Barth, Hildebert, 241, 242–3 (it was clear by then that the chapter presented incumbents to certain churches). Cf. Barlow, Durham Peculiars, 9–11. 56 Be´ziers no. 92 (1092) shows the bishop’s cautious undoing of such an arrangement. For monasteries, see St-Sernin, Toulouse no. 193 (late 11th c.); Peterborough, (see index: Ansketil). 57 This might come with a secondary disintegration, if common life had once been introduced. On prebendal churches see Edwards, English Secular Cathedrals (Manchester, 1949), 37. 58 e.g. Cart. de l’Eveˆche´ du Mans, ed. B. de Broussillon, Arch. Hist. du Maine, I (1900), no. 44 (1142–60, the chapter allows a tenant-priest to leave the church to his nephew to ‘possess’, rendering only 10s. p.a.). Cf. the practice of the 12th-c. dean and chapter of St Paul’s, London (above, p. 554 note 113). 59 See below, pp. 713–14. 60 It was the chapter of Chartres, not the bishop, that claimed synodal dues from its churches’ priests in dioc. Lisieux (1014–22; below, pp. 712–13). Cf. Barlow, Durham Peculiars. 1 Above, pp. 9–11, 76. 55

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churches as soon as or sooner than other landowners; the point that the estate might lie in another bishop’s diocese was raised as early as 441, at Orange. By the eighth century, missionary bishops—Willibrord in Frisia, Boniface in Hesse and Thuringia—were building churches on lands of their own, often newly given them by convert nobles;2 these were baptismal churches for large areas, not estate churches. Later, Willigis archbishop of Mainz built parish churches in newly colonized land on sites that he acquired for the purpose;3 this would make them episcopal property even though their chief economic basis was not land but tithes allotted them by his authority. Meanwhile kings might give existing churches for the endowment (as well as the jurisdiction) of new bishoprics, or the relief of impoverished ones.4 Other churches came from clergy or laity making pious benefactions to their own cathedral, or to another whose saint they revered. Among these donors were bishops themselves, giving or leaving to their bishoprics (that is, to their cathedral church and future bishops) churches they had acquired, or inherited, or built on family property.5 By all these channels many churches came to be episcopal property in a quite unambiguous way. More elusive but more crucial were the consequences in Francia of early secularization, taking not only lands and estate churches but some old baptismal churches out of the bishops’ control and using them as mayoral or royal benefices. What the early Carolingians restored to the bishoprics, whether land or churches, was restored as property; what the bishops had managed to keep was treated as property—as pertinentia of the episcopal church—because it was no one else’s.6 And with baptismal churches especially, the surest way of maintaining more than the barest minimum of authority in particular churches was, for a long time, to establish that they ‘belonged’ to the bishopric just as others belonged to monasteries or to lay lords.7 In France during the Gregorian reform many bishops were nonetheless content to encourage the laity to give their churches to monasteries, directly or via the bishop.8 2 See Nottarp, Bistumserrichtung, 161 and n. 2. Willibrord, however, left his churches not to Utrecht but 3 to his monastery of Echternach (Echternach no. 39). See Lamprecht, Wirtschaftsleben, I. i. 117. 4 The Agilolfing dukes gave more than 60 estate churches to Salzburg (above, pp. 33–4); the 14 churches built and endowed by Charlemagne’s order for convert Slavs were given to Wu¨rzburg (confirmed, DLD. no. 42); Charles the Simple gave ‘all the [comital?] churches in the county of Roussillon or the Conflent’ to Elne (899, ACIII no. 26; cf. nos. 14, 23, for Narbonne). 5 e.g. 778, Peredeus bp. of Lucca (Mem. Lucc. IV. I no. 86); 967, Amelius bp. of Uze´s (Gellone nos. 281, 282); c.960, Hugh abp. of Toulouse (HL V. no. 109). A variant was the mid-9th c. bishop of Speyer acquiring a well-endowed church (with tithes from three villages) from four of his men, eventually for the bishopric, but for the bishop and his sister to hold for life (DLD no. 92). 6 Above, pp. 75–9. In 9th-c. Italy the bishops still controlled most baptismal churches, but in increasingly proprietary ways (above, pp. 86–8). 7 See Hartmann, ‘Zustand’, 419 and n. 53; and above, pp. 197–200. 8 Hildebert bp. of Le Mans (1097–1125) kept or gave to his canons some of the churches that he persuaded lay lords to give up (Barth, Hildebert, 126–7), but more often handed them straight on to a monastery (ibid. 130–3, 250).


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But some made a policy of collecting churches for their cathedral church (sometimes for the canons’ benefit), competing with monasteries rather than promoting their gains. Such was Ulger bishop of Angers (1125–48), who acquired at least eighteen churches not counting fractions and partial rights. Four of these were important collegiate churches, two of them acquired because ‘said to be’ properly the bishopric’s;9 the rest were lesser churches, in two cases given as pertinences of estates but the others on their own,10 often by knights with their family’s consent, with barely a suggestion that the donors had really nothing to give.11 Sometimes bishop Ulger’s record describes traditio or investiture by the usual symbolism of a key, or a knife, or by the bishop’s own pastoral staff (passed to the donors to put on the altar, then used by the bishop to invest them with their countergift of spiritual benefits).12 Using the staff perhaps suggested that the thing being given was something that the bishop ought to have; but even if the aim was to increase not only his resources but the scope of his authority, acts and words still implied that churches were conveyable objects. Even in the twelfth century bishops did not always hold on to the churches that they or their predecessors had accumulated; still less in the preceding centuries. Churches like other resources were used by bishops as by other lords to secure prayers and spiritual benefits from monks, service and loyalty from fideles, or provision for kinsmen and dependants (Avesgaud bishop of le Mans in the early tenth century was said to have bought two churches from his canons and ‘given’ one each to his sisters).13 Certainly the churches that bishops gave to monasteries (including their own foundations) were often their private or family churches, shown as such by the consent of brothers or mother and brothers, or by explanation of how it was inherited or acquired (in 1037 Hugh archbishop of Besançon gave to Saint-Beńigne at his mother’s request a church built by his father and her, where she was living).14 But others were more-or-less clearly part of the fabric of the diocese, including old baptismal churches;15 this may be indicated—even when the bishop speaks of remission of his sins—by his reserving a census for the 9

Angers nos. 201 (de iure episcopali sedis), 202 (quondam de iure beati Mauricii), 203, 206. Ibid. nos. 141, 167 (vici with their churches), 174, 185, 190, 195–6, 199, 215, 217–18, 221. See below, pp. 872–3. 12 Angers nos. 206 (keys), 185 (knife), 215, 218, 221 (bishop’s staff). 13 Acta episc. Cenom., c. 30, in Bouquet, Recueil, X. 385; if true, doubtless intended for life only. 14 St-Beńigne nos. 320, 327. Cf. Isembert bp. of Poitiers, c.1022 (St-Cyprien no. 212); Guy bp. of Geneva, 1083 (Cluny no. 3599, with no. 3600 where Guy son of count Guy gave his shares); in Leoń, Sahaguń nos. 197 (962, a bought church, so absque alicuius partis heredum), 253 (969, two-thirds of a church partly inherited from an uncle). 15 e.g. by Salomon bp. of Constance endowing St Magnus for St Gall, 898 (DArn. no. 165). Parish churches might have been already privatized, but not normally in Italy, where Albert bp. of Bobbio gave the monastery a plebs (1098, Bobbio no. 137). Altmann bp. of Passau (1065–91) was seen later as having wasted Passau’s property by giving parish churches to new houses of canons (Tellenbach, Passau. EKl., 29–31). 10 11

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cathedral, or (less certainly) by the cathedral clergy participating in the donation.16 It has to be said, however, that a bishop’s apparent donation, whatever its language, could often be mere recognition of the monastery’s actual possession of a church or churches17 (all the more likely when a number of churches were ‘given’ at one time);18 it may not even imply any past possession by the bishopric, though it will be a vehicle for some assertion of authority.19 Bishops also gave churches (without any doubt about their possession), to monasteries or other bishoprics, in exchange for other property; sometimes acknowledging the rules that required exchanges to be advantageous (acknowledgment which implied that the churches alienated were indeed items of property). In one such exchange between bishops, in 859, Ralph archbishop of Bourges gave a private church of his own (‘from his own alod’) for Stodilo bishop of Limoges and his successors to have as episcopal property, and received from Stodilo a church belonging to Limoges (‘from the possessions of St Stephen’) which Ralph was to hold ‘as his own alod’, doing what he chose with it ‘as with other things of his own’.20 There is no lack of clarity here: simply fairness for both parties, on one side the episcopal church of Limoges, on the other the archbishop personally (or his personal foundation, Beaulieu, for which the property was intended). Meanwhile bishops naturally gave or leased churches to individuals, clerical or lay. Leasing a church to a priest, or granting it in any way that gave him life tenure, was a proper way to get it served (and, for bishops, was probably far more usual than putting in a chaplain); but it could also be pure patronage, of a kind that it was almost as natural to use for lay fideles as for clerical prote´ge´s.21 In that case it might, by bishops as by rulers, be given permanently, in proprium;22 while later, giving it as benefice or fief could amount to that. But a bishop’s permanent gift or sale of a church to a layman or woman must have been rare;23 exchanges 16

Their participation or consent might arise from closeness to the bishop’s interests, or tacitly disclaim any prospect of a bequest. 17 This could be overt in a quitclaim, e.g. by Peter bp. of Carcassonne and his canons (mid-11th c.) for churches given to Sainte-Foi by a lay family (Sainte-Foi no. 77, with nos. 76, 473, 501). 18 e.g. St-Beńigne no. 374 (1092, Robert bp. of Langres, nine churches of which Saint-Beńigne already possessed at least two, perhaps all). Exceptionally large numbers ‘given’ to monasteries in one pontificate, e.g. by Hugh of Grenoble, 1080–1132 (Bligny, L’E´glise, 109 and n. 112), or Guy of Geneva, 1083–1119 (Schreiber, Gesamm. Abh., 303), invite the same caution. 19 S. Italian bishops’ ‘liberations’ of churches sometimes took the form of ‘giving’ them (e.g. to S. Lorenzo, Aversa: see index). 20 Beaulieu no. 24. Both the exchanged churches were in the diocese of Limoges. 21 Below, pp. 741–4. Hugh bp. of Toulouse’s testament, c.960 (HL V no. 109), shows churches in the life tenure of two priests, a clerk, and others undescribed including a married couple and their son. 22 See Stutz, ‘EKvermo¨gen’, 1259 n. 3 (examples from Freising). In 941 bp. Ovecco of Leoń with his clergy gave a church to two priests (germane brothers) to have for ever (Sahaguń no. 78). 23 For instances of sale see below, pp. 766 at note 86, 769–70; and for donation (perhaps recognizing the facts), above, p. 89 (Farulf’s token render of three candles at Martinmas does not make the transaction a lease: see Stutz, Benef., 361 n. 76).


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were more common, especially in ninth- and tenth-century Bavaria, where tithed churches might pass either way (and those that a layman gave to a bishop had probably been acquired in benefice from an earlier bishop).24 These were exchanges that gave away churches permanently. Alongside them were precarial exchanges, bringing churches—again sometimes tithed—to a clerk and his nephew, or a woman and her son, for their lives;25 while at the beginning of the ninth century a bishop could give a church as a benefice to a clerk or layman commending himself, or to a woman who had made herself useful to Freising when she was waiting on a daughter of Charlemagne’s.26 In the tenth and eleventh centuries Italian bishops lost control of some plebes by leasing or granting them to lay magnates.27 In the south of France the occasional church can be found given for life by bishop and canons to a layman, a lay couple, or a couple and their son.28 On a much larger scale, in Burgundy, bishops of Maˆcon (often with their canons) gave churches by precarial grant, sometimes in exchange for a donation29 but usually not, to nobles or clerks who asked for a named church or chapel, sometimes more than one. Such property is given, for life or lives, to a fidelis and his wife, a noblewoman and her daughter, most often a noble or knight with his wife and one son,30 in one case ‘for himself and one heir of his body, whether son or daughter’.31 Or it is given to a priest, more often a clerk (who may be a cathedral canon), almost always with a brother or brothers, a cousin or nephew.32 Some of these precariae (or prestariae) were explained (and others probably could be explained) as renewals of similar grants to ancestors,33 while some apparently new grants were then kept for several generations.34 A mid-tenth-century precarial grant of a church and its two chapels by bishop Mainbod, for Acbert’s, his wife’s, and his son’s lives, has a less straightforward background. The group (St Andrew with St John and St Marcel, at Iguerande) sounds like an old parish church with a baptistry and a relic chapel. They lay in Acbert’s land, and Acbert had already given them, as if they were his own, to his cousin Adso for him to give (retaining life tenure) to Cluny.35 It seems possible 24

Above, pp. 469, 504; Stutz, ‘EKvermo¨gen’, 1259 n. 3. Freising nos. 1275 (977–81), 1331 (994–1005). 26 27 Freising nos. 257 (807) and 358 (816; Mezcunda). Above, p. 89. 28 Above, p. 536 (Elne, Be´ziers). 29 Maˆcon no. 39 (882, bp. Guntard to a priest and his brother); nos. 8 and 38 (c.930, bp. Berno and count 30 Alberic). Ibid. nos. 2, 9, 92, 108, 265, 391, 398, 410, 411, 475, 505, 522 (from c.930 to mid-11th c.). 31 Ibid. no. 543 (c.996). 32 Ibid. nos. 392–4, 406, 408, 415, 421, 499, 500, 523, 562 (mid-10th to mid-11th c., but mostly before 1018). 33 Ibid. nos. 394, 499. 34 A church granted by prestaria in the 970s descended in the male line to an early 12th-c. dean of Maˆcon (ibid. nos. 265, 568, 577–8); churches given for life to three brothers, early 11th c., were retained by their family (lords of Ruffey) for more than a century (ibid. no. 392; Duby, Socie´te´, 70). 35 Cluny nos. 471, 486 (almost certainly on the same Sunday in March 937: Dr Maria Hillebrandt has kindly confirmed this view of the date, contrary to Chaume’s revision in Revue Mabillon, 29 (1939) 81–9); see index: Acbert. 25

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that Acbert had regretted this, and contrived to recover at least life tenure by going to the bishop and inviting him to treat the church as episcopal property.36 If so, we have a glimpse here of the bishop’s ancient control of parish churches being invoked and deployed as proprietary right, in a lay lord’s interest. In other parts of France, with even less control from written record, bishops lost churches to lords great and small by granting them in benefice.37 A rare instance of such a benefice-holder’s own charter dealing with the church is that of Robert (of Busançais) in 970, holding Angers cathedral property in benefice by grant of bishop Nefingus, and out of it granting a church with an old castle to a ‘vassal’ Rainald.38 Far more often we first learn of a bishop’s grant in benefice when a later bishop gets it back (if only to give it away).39 Sometimes the bishop recovered a church from lay holders by offering an exchange, as (long before Ulger’s campaign of recovery) Hubert bishop of Angers did for the suburban collegiate church of Saint-Maurille which was occupied by the lord of Chaˆteaugontier ‘with all his sons and daughters’. Hubert’s successor Eusebius—who is represented as narrating this—risked losing it again by giving it to one of his familiares, ‘transferring it from my ius into his potestas’ (evidently as lay abbot); but thinking better of this he bought him out, ‘transferring it from his potestas into my ius’, and promised his clergy (or the Saint-Maurille clergy) not to alienate it again.40 Sometimes the lay holders of a bishop’s church asked him to give it to a monastery, or asked to be allowed to do so themselves (sometimes no doubt pushed or prompted by the bishop).41 Hugh bishop of Bayeux, in the 1020s, gave to Jumie`ges when his ‘dearest miles’ Ralph had become a monk there, and at his petition, the land and church that Ralph had held from him.42 And often the bishop himself or his family restored to the episcopal church, or gave to a monastery, a church that had come to him or his ancestors by an earlier bishop’s benefice.43 When Philip bishop of Troyes gave the church of Planty to Molesme, it was with the consent and at the request of his brother Warner who ‘holds it in 36 Cluny no. 493 (Chaume’s unworkable assumption that this must precede nos. 471 and 486 is rejected by Dr Hillebrandt). Acbert had asked the bishop for a characterum munimen for the churches; yet nothing in his and Adso’s charters of 937 suggests that the churches were Maˆcon’s property. 37 A variant was a written grant for lives only, made irrecoverable by the recipient’s subsequent grants in benefice to others (see index: Harduin, bp). 38 Angers no. 18. The castle was probably Rochefort-sur-Loire, and Rainald the count’s man rather than Robert’s. See Bachrach, ‘Geoffrey Greymantle’, 6–7 and n. 23. 39 See Devailly, Le Berry, 255 on archbishops of Bourges giving recovered churches to monasteries. 40 Angers no. 31 (Fanning, Acts no. 48). 41 e.g. 1038, St-Beńigne no. 64 (bp. of Langres); 1055, Cluny no. 3348 (bp. of Auxerre); 1079, Cormery no. 43 (abp. of Sens); 1062–96, St-Martin-des-Champs no. 68 (see index: Cannes-Ećluse). For clerical holders, themselves with family interests, see St-Beńigne no. 322 (1038); St-Aubin no. 239 (1082–1101). 42 Jumie`ges no. 8. 43 e.g. Maˆcon no. 341 (972–7), bp. John and his mother give back a chapel ‘which our ancestors held unjustly by precaria’; Angers no. 23 (1001), bp. Rainald II restores to the canons two churches that he had ex episcopatu.


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fief of my church’; the monks were to hold it by ‘ecclesiastical service’—a sester of oil at All Saints—instead of the knight service that Warner had rendered.44 Such dealings are more religious and sociable than commercial; but they are certainly proprietary. All this shows not only that bishops’ lordship of churches could be in a constant flux of accumulation, loss, and recovery, but also that their proprietary dealings with churches cover almost the whole range of possibilities. They build and endow them, receive them as gifts, exchange and buy and sell them, use them sometimes for family purposes, give them for their souls’ sakes, quitclaim them to their actual possessors, lease or grant them in whatever ways the time and place allow, or tap their revenues for their own expenses. This last is well shown up by the Tournai chronicler’s comment in 1146 that if twelve alienated churches had still been in the bishop’s mensa ‘he could have fed many of the poor from them’.45 44

Molesme no. i. 144 (1083–1108).

45

See note 37, above.

20 Some proprietary elements in a bishop’s authority

The importance to bishops of their own lordship over churches does not mean that bishops generally became no more than lords of as many churches as they could get or keep, with no vestige of pastoral authority in the diocese as a whole, and no sense of a difference between this and proprietary lordship. The difference was sharply felt when a bishop had churches in another bishop’s diocese;1 and it was not so much blurred as overridden when such extra-diocesan churches were treated as an enclave, an outlying patch of authority. There was indeed a tendency for authority to follow property-right, so that one bishop’s secular lordship might rebut another’s authority; occasionally by agreement for particular churches,2 otherwise sanctioned by custom. So in England, in Eadmer’s words, ‘it was of old and is the usage and custom of archbishops of Canterbury that in their lands, wherever they may be in England, no bishop except themselves may have any right, but human and divine things alike are at his disposition as if in his own diocese’.3 This meant consecrating the churches and—broadly—appointing and disciplining their clergy. Within the diocese there could be some blunting of the difference; particular applications of diocesan authority tended to be submerged in the bishop’s lordly rights when applied to his own churches, and treated in other people’s churches (if assertable at all) as discrete items of property, widely known as the bishop’s ‘customs’. But elements of authority could be seen in this way as ‘belonging’ to 1 See above, pp. 71–2, 76–7, on the two Hincmars. Cf. Frotar bp. of Toul’s epist. 28 (Epist. Karol. Aevi, III. 294–5, between 826 and ?840) to Drogo bp. of Metz, on ‘churches of your ius situated in our providentia’. 2 e.g. exchange between Speyer and Worms, 1099, of diocesan jurisdictions over two churches and villages (Stutz, Benef., 354 n. 57; but mistaking it for an exchange of property-rights). 3 Eadmer, Hist. Novorum, 45–7, explaining Wulfstan of Worcester’s reassurance of Anselm about consecrating a church on a Canterbury manor in the dioc. of London (1094); cf. ibid. 21–2. For other such enclaves see Bo¨hmer, ‘EKntum’, 301–5; Barlow, Durham Peculiars.

Bishop’s authority: proprietary elements

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the bishop or his cathedral church without being confused with lordship.4 If you had asked (let us say) a cathedral canon in eleventh-century France whether suchand-such a church was in the bishop’s lordship or only subject to episcopal jurisdiction or customs, he would have understood the question and could usually have answered it, with or without qualifications. More difficult—perhaps even for contemporaries, certainly for us—are the many uses of the term ‘altar’ for what seems, at least over much of France, to be a focus of the bishop’s diocesan authority but also a form of property. This is here discussed before the geographically broader matter of ‘customs’.

20.i. Altaria ‘Altar’ used figuratively is common in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Sometimes it seems to mean the priest’s office, or the disposal of this; more often, revenues that arose from his service at the actual altar, or belonged to it in wider or narrower senses: offerings brought to it, or all offerings, sometimes with tithes and firstfruits—anything for which the altar was the magnet.5 Sometimes it appears among pertinences of a church, like atrium, burial, and tithes;6 or it can be virtually interchangeable both with ‘church’ and with tithes.7 So far it can hardly be a term of art. But in some contexts it was treated as a distinct item of property, as when a layman in mid-eleventh-century Maine was invited by another ‘to buy from him the part that he had in the church of Doucelles, that is, the altar’.8 In 1067–70 the chapter of Le Mans was given the altar of a church by the bishop, having bought what was called its nave; in 1079–85 a lay couple gave to Saint-Martin-des-Champs the nave of a church whose altar and atrium another lay couple had given a few years earlier.9 This can hardly mean literally that they owned and gave separate architectural parts; rather, it reflects an idea that revenues and lands not belonging to the altar (or to the chancel where it lay) were by analogy attached to the nave; like the use in Flanders of the word bodium (the ‘body’ of the church) for the lord’s share of the tithe.10 4 A good example is Peter bp. of Clermont’s qualified acceptance of a presentation by the abbot of 5 Cluny (1110, Cluny no. 3890). The chief biblical authority for this was 1 Corinthians 9: 13. 6 e.g. St-Martin-des-Champs nos. 39, 53, 61, 72; St-Pe`re, 234; Paray-le-Monial nos. 18, 19. Altars were often given ambiguously ‘with’ tithes. 7 e.g. at Clermont, 1095: ‘churches and tithes which in the Gaulish regions are commonly called altaria’ 8 (below, note 20). Below, note 16 (Doucelles). See Dillay, ‘Re´gime’, 281 n. 3. 9 Liber Alb. Cenom. 113 (1067–70); St-Martin-des-Champs nos. 16, 25, 26; cf. no. 72 (where the nave is called capsum). 10 See index: bodium. But in the St-Sulpice nos. 51, 53, a feodum presbiterale includes the corpus ecclesiae (c.1085); this must be different from Flemish bodium; perhaps literally the church building (cf. ibid. no. 55).

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This Flemish usage implies that the altar was what the priest had.11 But neither in Flanders nor elsewhere in France is ‘altar’ simply a synonym for the priest’s portion. Sometimes, presumably in one of its narrower senses, it is an element in a presbiterium along with offerings, burials, or tithes.12 Sometimes, on the other hand, a priest’s portion seems to be included within it, as in the agreement made with a clerk by the abbot of Montier-en-Der ‘about the altar of Neuville’, that the small tithes and inhabitants’ offerings be divided equally between monks, clerk, and serving priest (1121).13 However, this instance is consistent with the ‘altar’ having formerly been what the priest had: earlier lords here may have taken glebe produce and the great tithe, leaving the rest in the priest’s hands until slices were taken off for the monks and their clerical tenant.14 Where the priest did in fact get all or most of what might be called altar revenues, ‘the altar’ would be a natural way of designating his office and the revenues attached to it (if he also had some of the glebe this might be called ‘land of the altar’).15 When someone else—a clerk, or a lay tenant—got possession of these revenues and provided out of them for the church’s service, what he had might still be called ‘the altar’ if that was the local usage, and it would be ‘the altar’ that such a clerk or layman gave to a monastery (sometimes unmistakably not just a synonym for ‘church’).16 So we find Urban II’s council of Clermont forbidding anyone to buy himself a prebend or have it bought for him by his kinsmen, and applying this to ‘altars’ and ‘any ecclesiastical benefice’; while the next clause refers to ‘altars given by parsons to communities of canons or monks’, on the face of it just such donations as we see priests and clerks making of their rights in churches, as entry gifts to a monastery or to hold under its lordship.17 Half a century earlier Leo IX’s council of Rheims had associated altaria not with prebends or benefices as Clermont was to do, but with functions or office, ministeria ecclesiastica, not to be bought or sold and not to be held by the laity; in Germany twenty-five years earlier again, the 11 Implied in ACFlandres no. 25 (1100), count Robert II’s arrangements before giving a church to 12 Affligem. e.g. St-Pe`re, 211–12 (1069), 212–13 (before 1080). 13 Montier-en-Der no. 67 (1121); cf. St-Martin-des-Champs no. 67 (1096, granting an altar ‘provided that the feodum presbiteri is not diminished’). 14 See above, pp. 562–3, 566–9. In Languedoc altare could mean whatever the priest had, e.g. Le´zat no. 267 (1085–96), a clerk gives as his honor the moiety of an altar (perhaps he is one of two) consisting of revenues (tithes, firstfruits, offerings) and objects (chalices, thuribles, bells, vestments); probably someone else has the land. Cf. ibid. no. 364 (1058): a church’s ‘altar’ given by a layman sounds like a former priest’s part. 15 e.g. Molesme no. ii. 159 (1076–1114); St-Pe`re, 234; St-Vincent-du-Mans no. 545; St-Martin-des-Champs no. 61; Ange´ly no. 66 (c.1085). Terra sacerdotalis (e.g. ADNorm. no. 90), or terra presbiteri (e.g. Orderic, HE II. 32–5), may be much the same as terra altaris. 16 Occasionally an ‘altar’ is defined as medietas or dimidium of a church; either half the church’s revenues and glebe had been set aside for the priest and regarded as the ‘altar’ (perhaps St-Martin-desChamps no. 20, of 1079; Gand no. 207, of 1129), or an existing ‘altar’ was counted as a moiety in a family partition (possibly at Doucelles: St-Vincent-du-Mans nos. 536, 538). 17 Above, pp. 537–8, 565–6. On Clermont see below, at notes 20–1.


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council of Seligenstadt had anathematized anyone ‘who buys or sells an altar’, probably meaning much what was meant at Rheims;18 in the Rhineland long after this, ‘altar’ meant primarily the priest’s office.19 The term, then, was fluid, its meaning depending on period, region, and context. But it is in a compound sense of the priestly office and revenues, or power to dispose of them—to appoint the priest and arrange his remuneration— that it had its special significance as a focus for episcopal authority. This is prominent at Clermont. The clause about ‘churches or tithes . . . commonly called altaria, given to monasteries’, claimed that bishops ‘often compelled them to be redeemed for money . . . selling them by concealed avarice, when the clerks that they call parsons have died or been changed’; that is, bishops made a charge for allowing a new appointment. This the pope forbids, ‘just as we forbid the selling of any prebend’; furthermore, monasteries that had held altars or tithes subject to such redemptio for thirty years were to have them firmly without need for redemption.20 The clause on ‘altars given by parsons’ declared such donations valid only in the donor’s lifetime: ‘when the parsons are dead, the altars shall return, free, to the bishops’ hands’, unless the bishops have confirmed the monks’ or canons’ possession in writing.21 At first sight these clauses might seem easier to understand if they applied only to churches in the bishop’s lordship, his consent to a parson’s grant of an altar representing the lord’s role in the matter, and the redemptio that he might have required for the altar being equivalent to a tenant’s relief. But the wording makes clear that the principles set out—that the monastery has no permanent right to the altar unless the bishop has authorized it, while, if it is properly theirs, the bishop should take nothing at a change of priest—were understood as applying to all churches given to monasteries, not only to those in which the bishop could claim lordship.22 Although some eleventh-century lords, like their Carolingian predecessors, had dues from incoming priests similar to the bishop’s redemptio (or relevatio or relevamentum),23 this could by now be an alienated or usurped ‘custom’ 18 Rheims (1049) cc. 2, 3 (Mansi, XX. 742–3); Seligenstadt (1023) cc. 20, 22 (ibid. XIX. 399). It is bishops or archdeacons who are anathematized for ‘selling’ altars. 19 e.g. in Hildesheim no. 94 (1054–79, consecration record). In the later 11th and early 12th cs. in this region, the bishop’s or archdeacon’s role in appointing the priest could be called donum altaris, though this could also mean the disposal of altar revenues. See Wirtz, ‘Donum’, 124–7, esp. 124 n. 3, 126 n. 1. 20 Somerville (ed.), Decreta, 122–3, Cencius-Baluze c. 3. Petke, ‘Von EK zur Inkorporation’, 59–62, gives basic alternative meanings for altare, and convincingly sees it here as meaning the church as a whole but with emphasis on its altar revenues and altar service. But despite this crucial refinement he renders altare almost invariably as ‘Kirche’, esp. in paraphrasing charters and in discussing the Clermont clause on parsons’ donations (next note) where the use of altare is actually important. 21 Somerville (ed.), Decreta, 75, LL c. 5; the clearest of several versions, conveniently set out by Petke, op. cit., 63–5 and nn. 81–6 (cf. Somerville, op. cit., 39–40). On persona see below, note 38. 22 Cencius-Baluze c. 4 (Somerville (ed.), Decreta, 122–3) clearly applies to all monastic parish churches and equally clearly belongs with c. 3 (Decreta, 119–20). 23 See Barth, Hildebert, 253–64; Dillay, ‘Re´gime’, 281–3.

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of the diocesan bishop’s24 (or could be so represented). In 1009 Avesgaud bishop of Le Mans gave to the monastery of La Couture the ‘reliefs and payments of the altars’ in all its churches in the diocese, naming eight;25 once given they would (unless remitted) become lordly rights, but that seems not to be how they began: the bishop was renouncing what he might otherwise have claimed for himself, or more likely authorizing what the monks had been taking anyhow but thereby implying that it was properly due to him. It seems then that we should see these Clermont decrees in terms of public authority, the ‘altar’ standing for what the diocesan bishop ought to control in any church, that is, the priest’s appointment and his remuneration in tithes and offerings. But the practice condemned, that of making a charge for vacant altars, implies a background of more concrete, material ways of thinking. Such a charge, when mentioned in bishops’ charters,26 seems to have been paid to the bishop sometimes by the monastery’s priest as his relief or entrance fee, sometimes by the monastery to secure its own continued tenure of the altar:27 either way it could easily be represented or misrepresented as buying back the thing held. So it verges on treating altars as a kind of episcopal property. Almost a hundred years earlier, as we shall see, Abbo of Fleury attributed some such idea to the bishops of his time, though almost certainly exaggerating both its clarity and its malignity in deliberately distinguishing between altar and church. It seems likely that some bishops had tried to assert their authority over the appointment of priests and the destination of tithes by using the idea of the ‘altar’ as the focus of their authority, without seeing it as anything other than the core of the church.28 However that may be, in Lotharingia and all over northern and eastern France,29 from the later tenth century until well into the twelfth, we do in fact find bishops granting what their charters call altaria as if this were a technical term, to individual clerks,30 or to abbots for their lifetime or an incumbent’s lifetime,31 or (what mainly survives, and in great numbers) to monasteries in

24

Sometimes the due was in the hands of laymen other than the church’s lord (as a separated fragment of lordship, or acquired as an isolated episcopal custom; below, pp. 714 note 26). 25 Couture no. 7. Cf. St-Julien, Tours no. 3 (1004), Avesgaud’s undertaking not to exact venditiones and reditus annuos that the bishops used to have from two churches; venditio here (‘from those altars’) is probably equivalent to relevatio. 26 i.e. charters granting altars to monasteries and forgoing or reserving these dues. 27 Probable instances of the former are Gorze nos. 129, 137 (below, note 42), Actes Reims, 78 (1066); of the latter (as implied at Clermont, above, note 20), St-Pierre, Lille no. 2 (1066), Vendoˆme no. 87 (1045–68). 28 Below, pp. 821–4. 29 The dioceses most involved are those in the provinces of Rheims and Sens along with Verdun, Toul, and Langres. See now Petke, op. cit. 30 Revealed mainly in later grants to monasteries, e.g. Molesme no. i. 77 (1085–1101). 31 e.g. St-Bertin no. ii. 1. 8 (c. 1026).


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perpetuity.32 For instance, Gelduin archbishop of Sens in 1035 granted to Fleury the altars of five places, ‘so that whatever is seen to belong to us in those churches the monks shall possess securely without any claim by our successors’, except that synod and visitation dues were to be paid as hitherto.33 It is not obvious what this grant meant beyond ‘whatever it is in this church that is mine to give’, but Gelduin’s words would at least exclude any redemptio at a vacancy (whereas a temporary grant could be precisely what such a redemptio secured). We learn more when Herman bishop of Toul, between 1019 and 1026, rebukes an archdeacon and a rural dean for overriding his own and his predecessor’s gift of an altar to the monks of Saint-Beńigne, Dijon, at Saint-Blin, and on the same grounds reproaches two neighbouring lords for encroaching on the monks’ rights.34 One of these lords, the abbot of Saint-Urbain, had forbidden his men— parishioners of the church concerned—to pay tithes to it: the injury to the monks of Saint-Beńigne followed from their having been given the altar. The other, Stephen lord of Neufchaˆteau, had had the monks’ labourers thrown out from their barns and beaten in the churchyard, thus injuring the bishop by violating the cemetery and the monks by taking away their substance (the monks’ men had probably been storing hay or grain tithes that went with the altar). The archdeacon and dean (probably under the thumb of one or both of these lords, but perhaps concerned for revenues of their own) had prevented the monks’ priest from officiating: evidently putting in a priest was part of having the altar, though that this should be ‘of their choice’ and ‘at their will’ (perhaps excused from seeking the bishop’s consent) was Herman’s addition, as he explains.35 So such a grant seems to have meant, broadly, that a bishop authorized the monastery to take tithes, offerings, and whatever else counted as the altar (normally in a church that is the monastery’s already or is being given to it at the same time),36 and to arrange for the church’s service under his authority and within the limits he lays down.37 How much the monks gained (when the grant was not merely recognizing existing facts) depended by the mid-eleventh century on whether or not the altar was to be in the hands of a persona, a ‘parson’: roughly speaking, a clergyman with lifetime rights in the church.38 In a grant of an altar sub persona or sub personatu 32 Probably authentic early instances (966–1005, from bps. of Langres, Lyons, Autun, Troyes, Toul) include Flavigny nos. 16 (966), 18, 28, Cluny no. 1227 (967), Montier-en-Der nos. 15, 18, St-Beńigne nos. 204, 231 33 (see below, note 34). Fleury no. 74, the first recorded episcopal donation of an altar to Fleury. 34 35 St-Beńigne nos. 267–8 (with nos. 204, 231), 269–70. Ibid. no. 267. 36 See below, at notes 64, 72–4. 37 This was the context for the earliest requirements by bishops that monks appoint ‘vicars’ for pastoral care (below, note 49). 38 Still (on the whole) enlightening on persona is Champeaux, ‘Quelques observations’. On the stillobscure origin of the term, see ‘note on the ecclesiastical use of Latin persona’ in OED, s.v. ‘parson’. Neither the meaning ‘character’ or ‘role’ nor Ducange’s proposed ‘personage’ or ‘dignitary’ fits the recorded early usage (see Champeaux, op. cit., 60–5; Petke, op. cit., 51–3).

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(‘subject to parsonage’),39 the monks are obliged to appoint a parson, or rather to send a suitable clerk to the bishop or archdeacon for appointment as parson (perhaps after the lifetime of an existing incumbent or a new one now named);40 and unless the bishop renounces it there is probably (before 1095) a relief or redemptio to be paid him at each change of parson.41 However, it does not seem to be assumed that the monks must give the parson the whole altar (let alone the whole church). In 1088, for instance, Pibo bishop of Toul gave the altar of Bar-leDuc to Saint-Mihiel’s cell there, reserving life tenure for its present pastor; after whose death ‘the endowment and tithes, lighting, offerings, and alms’ would all go to the monks, ‘without any diminution or anyone else sharing, provided that the abbot and brothers present a fitting parson who shall receive the cure of souls from the bishop’.42 The monks’ ‘parson’ here will evidently have less than his predecessor; he is not what would later be called a rector, holding all the church’s property and revenue. Nonetheless it was desirable to be allowed an altar without the obligation to present a parson. In 1111 Geoffrey bishop of Beauvais granted to Saint-Wandrille that an altar they had held from the church of Beauvais per mutatione personae, ‘by change of parson’, one succeeding another, they should from now on have and hold absque persona, ‘without a parson’; for being thus ‘relieved of a parson’ (and presumably of redemptio) they were to pay a yearly census of 3s.43 The monks’ future enjoyment of altar revenue could be signalled, in the lifetime of a parson with tenure, by feast day offerings in vestitura.44 And many altars were granted in the first instance ‘without a parson’ or ‘parsonage’:45 without having to put in and provide for a parson.46 This does not mean that the church will go unserved, nor even that the bishop will have no control of its service; for altars of Ghent’s 39 This is, however, potentially ambiguous, as in St-Pierre, Lille no. 6 (1088): Lambert holding an altar sub personatu (i.e. as parson?) asks that it be given to the canons perpetuo sub personatu (i.e. holding as parsons, or obliged to have parsons?). 40 e.g. Molesme no. i. 77 (above, note 30); Gorze no. 142; Actes Reims, 78 (1066). 41 We might think that granting an altar in perpetuity implied freedom from redemptio; but this was often spelt out (see Petke, op. cit., 57–8); conversely, payments amounting to redemptio were sometimes specified in grants clearly perpetual, e.g. St-Pierre, Lille nos. 2, 6 (1066, 1088). 42 St-Mihiel no. 46. Cf. Gorze nos. 129, 137 (1055, 1064), giving altars to Gorze’s dependency Amel on terms that required the provost to have ‘made an agreement’ with his chosen parson, presumably about dividing revenues. 43 St-Wandrille no. 55. Cf. Gand and Homblie`res, below, note 47; St-Vaast, Arras, 389–91 (1091). 44 e.g. Molesme no. i. 77 (1085–1101); Gorze no. 142 (1096). 45 e.g. Cluny no. 3661 (see next note); E´veˆques d’Arras nos. 2, 4, 7 (1097–8); St-Martin, Tournai nos. 4, 5, 10, 21, 27 (1100–15, bps. of Cambrai, Tournai-Noyon, Laon); Gand no. 207 (1129, bp. of Cambrai). Petke quotes impersonaliter with the same meaning (op. cit., 48, 50). 46 It does not mean ‘without a sitting tenant now’. In 1091 Rainald abp. of Rheims gave the altar of Tours-sur-Marne to Cluny absque persona, on condition that the priest ‘who at that time held the personatus and parish’ should have them for life (or until deprived for misdemeanours); not stated in Rainald’s charter (Cluny no. 3661) but in abp. Manasses’s notice in 1099 (ibid. no. 3732), probably recording (when things had gone wrong, see next para.) an originally unwritten agreement.


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freed from parsons in 1108, ‘the priests are to receive the cure of souls from the hand of the bishop’.47 The point of their not being ‘parsons’ is almost certainly not that their living is limited but that they have no life tenure in it. Meanwhile the serving priest may be called a vicarius simply because he acts for the monks, serving their church as they might otherwise (however improperly) have done themselves.48 ‘Vicar’ and ‘parson’ are not yet sharply distinguished; sometimes they seem alternative words for the serving parish priest49 (so the priest of Tours-sur-Marne, deposed by 1099 for some offence from the ‘parsonage and parish’ reserved for him, defended his position as a local man with local support).50 Nor does the presence of a vicar imply, as it would later, that the monastery is a corporate parson or rector; so far, it can enjoy tithes, offerings, and glebe simply as a lord. However, the idea that it received these not as lord but as parson (or possibly as a plurality of parsons) was already creeping into charters before 1100,51 and Ivo of Chartres wrote to Urban II of monks redeeming altars sub nomine personarum. This shift of usage may be due to an increasingly felt need for monks to justify or legitimate taking altar revenues: it is when Ivo tries to prevent monks doing this (worried that ‘among us, those who do not serve the altar live by it’) that they ‘want to buy back the altars from me’ (itself an evil custom) ‘under the name of parsons’.52 So grants of altars free of ‘parsonage’ certainly amount to what would later be tidied up in canon law as appropriation or incorporation,53 but they only occasionally adumbrate the crucial concept that in the absence of an individual rector the monastery will be corporate rector; no such doctrine was needed in this period, before lordship over churches was reduced (in law) to patronage. Nor was this regional vocabulary of ‘altar’ and ‘parsonage’ necessary to the development of appropriation.54 Wherever a bishop (in England, Spain, western France, Burgundy, or Germany)55 confirmed monks’ or canons’ possession of a church, Gand no. 170. Cf. Homblie`res no. 37 (1124); E´veˆques d’Arras nos. 5 and 6 (1097–8). In 926 (dioc. Autun) a priest serving in place of an individual clerk is called vicarius sacerdos (Cluny no. 274; well known as the first appearance). Its earliest uses for a priest to serve a monastery’s church are in bishops’ grants of altars, Montier-en-Der no. 18 (991, Troyes); St-Beńigne no. 204 (992, Toul). 49 Casual interchangeability is suggested by comparing clauses in Gorze nos. 129 and 137 (1055, 1064). In Montier-en-Der no. 51 (1074) a clerk Hingo holding as ‘parson’ appears further on as ‘the aforementioned vicarius’. For ‘vicar’ in 12th-c. England see Kemp, ‘Monastic Possession’, 148–52; J. Barrow, ‘Monks of 50 Worcester’, 65–7. Cluny no. 3732 (see above, note 46). 51 Acquiring an altar absque persona is occasionally seen as holding it personaliter (1098, E´veˆques d’Arras no. 6) or as acquiring the personatus (Cluny no. 3732, above, note 46); and sometimes the abbot (or abbess), not the priest, is to attend synods (E´veˆques d’Arras nos. 1 (1097), 11 (1106)). 52 Epist., 12 (PL 162 col. 25; probably before 1095). 53 This (less qualified) is the central thesis of Petke’s article (op. cit., 51). 54 For England see Kemp, op. cit., 153–9 (though not taking into account the earlier N. French background), with a lucid summary of the developed system and its rationale (pp. 147–8). 55 Some acts of abps. of Cologne, summarized in Westfal. UB, Reg. as ‘incorporating’, are nothing of the kind even in substance, e.g. no. 978 (1032, UBNR I no. 167); some seem to be ordinary donations of 47

48

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tacitly or expressly allowed them to enjoy its pastoral revenues, and supervised agreements or settled disputes with their priests, this too was building up practices which would later be regulated under the new canon law. But in what circumstances could a bishop ‘grant’ an altar to a monastery? We need to know in particular cases whether the church itself belonged at the time to another lord, or to the bishopric, or belonged already to the monastery to which its altar was being given.56 The principle asserted may indeed be that the priest’s office and the revenues that went with it—or, at one step up, the power to dispose of these things—were in the bishop’s gift even though some other lord was lord of the church. But it is one thing for a bishop to see his recognition of a lord’s right to propose a priest, or his approval when this right is put into the hands of monks, or his consent to an allocation of altar revenues, in terms of giving or granting something that is in his gift; quite another for him to dispose independently of an altar in someone else’s church. It is hard to believe that an eleventh-century bishop would even have tried to treat another lord’s church in this way. It is seldom possible to see an altar being actually separated from a layman’s church.57 However, an example is the church of St Margaret at Rosnay-l’Hoˆpital (Aube). Here, not later than 1061, Tescelin viscount of Rosnay gave his inherited share in the church, in men, lands, and everything belonging to it, to Montier-enDer; in 1074, at the abbot’s request, Hugh bishop of Troyes gave its altar; in 1082 Warin count of Rosnay, wanting to give to Cluny ‘what I had in the church of St Margaret’, could not give its altar because the monks of Montier-en-Der had it (along with a quarter of the church itself, probably Tescelin’s part). But Warin was able to recover the altar for Cluny, and so complete his gift, when he entered Montier-en-Der as a monk and gave them alodial lands in exchange.58 It was the reassembling of fragmented property to complete a pious donation, done not only on the legate Hildebrand’s advice and by the bishop’s leave, but with the approval of count Theobald I and the consent of Warin’s kinsmen. It seems unlikely that bishop Hugh’s earlier grant of the altar had been made without the participation of Warin or his family. churches. But Siegburg no. 36 (1124) is close to an appropriation, without the French or Lotharingian terminology. By this time the terminology was obsolescent in its homeland (see below, p. 824). 56 This (a question not addressed by Petke) is often neither obvious from the bishop’s charter nor easy to ascertain. 57 Rosenwein (Neighbor, 147–8) sees Cluny’s acquisition of Saint-Jean de Chaveyriat (dioc. Lyons) as probably beginning with the archbishop’s grant of its altar and tithes (967, Cluny no. 1227); but the lay couple’s donation of the church to their son with reversion to Cluny should he die childless (ibid. no. 653, ‘943–93’) could have led to reversion before 967, while Roclenus’s donation in 974 (ibid. no. 1405) looks like 58 a superior lord’s quitclaim of what Cluny already had. Montier-en-Der nos. 41, 51, 56.


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With altars as with churches, some bishops’ grants to monks were made at a lord’s request;59 others after a lord’s surrender of the altar to the bishop,60 sometimes on condition (and perhaps usually on the understanding) that the bishop would give it to the monastery.61 Some lords surrendering an ‘altar’ may have had only that in any case—inherited from a former priest, or acquired in benefice from a former lord of the church (often, indeed, from a bishop).62 Others, being lords of the church, had been persuaded to give up under the name of ‘altar’ what (by the middle of the eleventh century) they were being told they ought not to have, or ought not to have let their tenants have—chiefly the direct enjoyment of offerings and disposal of the priest’s portion.63 Others again were giving or had given the whole church but sought the bishop’s cooperation as regards the altar.64 The lay lord’s donation of an altar and the bishop’s concession of it might be recorded in separate and independent charters with quite different implications;65 in such cases the bishop’s role hardly amounts to more than consent.66 In many cases, however, a church whose altar was separately dealt with by a bishop was probably in his own lordship.67 Most of these altar-granting bishops had large territorial lordships (often with a county), making them lords of a large proportion of the parish churches in their dioceses. Some of these churches’ lands would be in the hands of the bishop’s lay fideles.68 If he wanted to make a benefaction to a monastery out of his rights in a parish church without disturbing his men or transferring lordship over them, or to create a benefice for a priest but similarly excluding the lands that his fideles held, the altar was what he could give. Alternatively—and for the same reason, that the lands were already given in benefice—bishops might give altars of their own churches in benefice to clerks 59 e.g. Charroux no. 10 (1084, Gerard bp. of The´rouanne at the count of Guines’s request); and below, note 64. 60 Gand no. 125 (1046, Baldwin bp. of Tournai-Noyon grants an altar which Baldwin count of Flanders hactenus possederat et in manum nostram libere reddidit et effustucavit); cf. ibid. no. 230; Montier-en-Der note 64. 61 Abp. Rainald granted the altar of Tours-sur-Marne to Cluny (above, note 46) when the lords of Pleurs had given it up on that condition. 62 An altar given to Arrouaise by bp. Lambert at the petition of ‘lord Clarebold, knight’ (1097, E´veˆques d’Arras no. 3) might have been Clarebold’s in any of these ways. 63 Below, pp. 826, 827, 827–8. Without such pressure lay lords might not have thought of calling tithes and offerings in their control ‘the altar’. 64 e.g. St-Beńigne no. 301: Hugh abp. of Besançon gave the altar of a church given on the same occasion by count Renald I (1031–46); cf. from as far south as Avignon, earlier still (1006–33), St-Victor no. 444. In 1092 Ralph Everard and his wife asked bp. Gerard II of Cambrai to ‘free’ the altar of a church that they were using for a new foundation (1092, Gand no. 163). 65 e.g. St-Martin-des-Champs nos. 40, 41 (1089–90). 66 This applies equally to joint or parallel donations of ‘churches’ without the ‘altar’ terminology. Getting the bishop to give the altar may be a regional variant on giving the church itself via the bishop (see below, pp. 867–8). 67 e.g. St-Bertin no. ii. 2. 7 (1026; below, at note 84); Molesme no. i. 77 (1085–1101); St-Wandrille no. 55 68 (1111). See above, pp. 451–2.

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who would certainly not serve there,69 or to laymen as Abbo of Fleury complained.70 Sometimes it was the parson who initiated the grant of an altar to a monastery: this too could be the altar of a bishop’s church.71 Finally, where a monastery already has the church,72 the bishop may still grant the altar, meaning that he authorizes the monastery to take the tithes and offerings and arrange for the church’s service, under his authority and within the limits he sets out. Sometimes it is clear that the monastery or abbot must have had these things simply as lord of the churches, for a long time before applying to the bishop for legitimation;73 and the occasional wholesale grant of altars (mostly late in the eleventh century)74 must be of this kind, the bishop recognizing the facts, not out of growing weakness but out of increased authority. Whatever the particular altar’s legal history, when a bishop grants it to monks or canons he is both exercising and reserving authority. He may claim to determine whether or not the priest serving the altar and having the cure of souls75 is to have tenure as a parson;76 normally he reserves the synod and visitation dues,77 which mark the priest’s obedience to the bishop and membership of the diocesan clergy; increasingly often he spells out the monks’ future obligation to present their chosen clerk or priest to bishop or archdeacon to receive the cure of souls.78 If (before Clermont, 1095) he reserves the right to a payment at change of parson, 69

Perhaps the two clerks in Molesme no. i. 77; certainly the archdeacon in Gorze no. 142. See below, pp. 821–2, 823. e.g. (probably) St-Pierre, Lille nos. 6, 7 (1088, 1090); St-Martin, Tournai no. 5 (1103). The churches whose altars bishop Drogo confirmed to Saint-Bertin in 1040 (Champeaux, ‘Observations’ 58–9) sound like episcopal churches (two were granted by Drogo himself and only for the present parsons’ lives). 72 This must be effectively so in grants of altars to a monastery or chapter described as having the beneficium, probably meaning the landed endowments (see Lesne, ‘Eveˆche´ et abbaye’, 44–5); e.g. Gallia Christiana, XII, instr., 319 (986, bp. of Nevers for his cathedral canons), St-Beńigne no. 204 (992), Flavigny no. 28 (992). 73 e.g. St-Wandrille no. 48 (1098), ‘the altar of the village called Le Pecq’: Saint-Wandrille had Le Pecq under Charles the Bald and probably built the church. Cf. Montier-en-Der no. 18 (991), with the (9th-c.?) polyptich (ibid., no. 1 at 94–5, 98); Gorze nos. 86, 137 (Amel was Gorze’s in 903, its altar given in 1064); Gand nos. 52, 126 (estate and church of Hollaing acquired 979, the altar 1047). Abp. Gelduin’s grant for Fleury at the abbot’s request for the monks’ use (above, at note 33) probably shifted to the monks’ mensa altar revenues of a church already the abbot’s. 74 e.g. St-Bertin no. ii. 31 (1097, Gerard bp. of The´rouanne grants 20 altars, after the abbot’s apology for getting them confirmed by Urban II without clearance from bishop and chapter); E´veˆques d’Arras no. 6 (1098, bp. Lambert to Saint-Vaast, altars that they hold personaliter at 44 places); Gand nos. 184, 228 (1111, 1140). Cf. a century earlier Flavigny no. 28. For mass grants of ‘churches’ (perhaps hardly different) see above, p. 692 at note 18. 75 These functions did not necessarily go together (see Chibnall, ‘Monks and Pastoral Work’, 165–71), but this does not affect what granting an altar normally meant. 76 By mid-11th c. a bishop might require an agreement to be made about the priest’s portion (above, note 42; with no question, yet, of this being in the bishop’s discretion). 77 e.g. St-Martin-des-Champs nos. 67 (bp. of Meaux, 1096), 32, 40, 82, 119 (Paris, 1088–1107); Gand no. 201 (Tournai, 1123). 78 e.g., with much variation, Gorze nos. 129, 137, 142 (1055, 1064, 1096: Verdun and Chalons); Gand nos. 201, 228 (1123, 1140: Tournai). 70 71


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this can be seen as an assertion of continuing authority over the altar.79 Whether he is also transferring solid rights is another matter. If the church and its altar are straightforwardly the bishopric’s property then he is certainly transferring the right to choose the priest, to pay him out of tithes and offerings, and to enjoy the rest, because for historical reasons he has these rights in this particular church. And he is doing this, notionally at least, if the altar has been surrendered to him (however notionally) by another lord. In other grants of altars he may be simply relieving the monastery of customary dues. The grant in 1086 by Geoffrey bishop of Chartres to Saint-Pe`re of five altars in churches of Saint-Pe`re’s own, free not only of any future redemptio but of synod, visitation, and other customs, may be much the same thing as, earlier and further west, the bishop of Le Mans’s grant to La Couture not of altars but of their ‘reliefs and payments’.80 If a bishop remits redemptio at future changes of parson, or any annual census, this may be the sole economic value of his grant. But even when he is not transferring or renouncing actual rights and revenues, but only displaying his proper concern with the priest’s office and the destination of tithes and offerings by authorizing a monastery’s new acquisition or longstanding possession of an altar, this is put in terms of having something to grant or give. And whatever he is giving, it is a pious donation.81 The bishop may look for personal benefits for himself and his clergy: ‘that our memory may be kept by the monks’, ‘to diminish our sins’, ‘on condition of prayers for us’; or for an anniversary for himself, specified almsgiving, a mass and vigil for any canon who dies.82 It is on grounds of the ancient familiaritas between the monastery and the bishops that Hugh bishop of Troyes justifies granting to Montier-en-Der eight altars free from any payment at change of priest.83 In the bishopric’s own churches, granting altars is a straightforward alienation of property to another lord. One of the earlier dealings in altars, in 1026, makes this plain: the bishop of The´rouanne and the abbot of Saint-Bertin ‘have made an exchange of things of our churches’, the abbot giving lands, the bishop giving the altars of three places. The´rouanne was to possess the lands ‘without rent or any payment’; the abbot was to possess the altars ‘without payment or visitation dues 79

See above, note 41; and the implication of the bp. of Arras’s promise to replace one parson in three pro remedium animae nostrae, i.e. gratis (c.1030, St-Vaast, 63–4). 80 St-Pe`re, 246–7 Couture no. 7. Other altar grants remitting succession payments (under various names) include St-Bertin no. ii. 1. 8 (c.1026); Actes Reims, 59–60 (1040); Gorze nos. 129, 137 (1055, 1064); after Clermont (when bishops seem to have felt no less free to graciously remit this due), E´veˆques d’Arras no. 6; Gand no. 184 (both mass grants, above, note 74). 81 Bishop Herman of Toul complained that the recalcitrant archdeacon (above, at notes 34–5) was trying to ‘make my alms void’. 82 Fleury no. 74 (abp. of Sens, 1035), Montier-en-Der nos. 19, 49 (bps. of Troyes, 1030, 1072–81), Cluny no. 3661 (abp. of Rheims, 1091). Cf. Gorze nos. 137, 142; E´veˆques d’Arras nos. 1, 5, 6. 83 Montier-en-Der no. 49 (1072–81). Cf. the same bishop’s grant to Fleury for prayers and societas (1075, Fleury no. 84).

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and free from all exaction or imposition of parsonage’:84 thus equating visitation dues with rent, and throwing the burden of supporting a parson into the same balance. Far from having a general lordship over altars as such, the bishops were in the thick of other people’s proprietary claims and counter-claims to altars, made by lay lords, their parsons, and their tenants: claims (probably often originating in a benefice from a bishop, when it was not simply shorthand for a lord’s hold on tithes and offerings) whose existence the bishops must admit even when, for laymen, they reject their propriety (a rejection required for ‘altars’ well before it was required for churches as such).85 In or before 1114, when Philip bishop of Troyes ‘restored’ to Montier-en-Der (‘whose property it was’)86 the altar of Ceffonds, which the count of Brienne-le-Chaˆteau (who ‘held it contrary to ecclesiastical law’) had ‘restored’ to the bishop, ‘a tenant of the count’s called Ingelbert objected, saying that he had that altar as his holding’ (in casamento), a claim which the bishop and abbot had to be prepared to rebut.87 Here the bishop’s lordship was itself dubious, attributed to the ‘violence’ of an earlier bishop against Montier-en-Der; usually it was better founded, but nonetheless hemmed in by the rights of any benefice-holders. In 1089 Geoffrey bishop of Paris gave four altars to Saint-Martin-des-Champs with the consent of those who held them in benefice: Se´vran and Noisy-le-Grand, held by the count of Dammartin from the bishop and by another layman from the count; Bobigny by Waleran the precentor, Champigny by Joscelin the archdeacon.88 The lords of Pleurs, holding the altar of Tours-sur-Marne probably by an earlier archbishop’s benefice, ‘occupied it tenaciously’ before surrendering it to archbishop Rainald to give to Cluny.89 Any such benefice was exposed to sub-enfeoffment, as at Ceffonds, or to family claims. At Tours-sur-Marne the lords had given altar revenues to their castle knights, who had given them as marriage portions to their wives and daughters.90 At Champigny Joscelin’s brother Udo later ‘took away the altar and held it for some time’, but repented and restored it; later again, Udo’s son-in-law took it and restored it only after much delay and for a consideration (a horse, with 60s. for his 84

St-Bertin no. II. i. 7. When transferring property (rather than recognizing facts), stronger verbs than the usual concedere may be used: here reddere and tradere. Cf. bp. Baldwin’s donation to Saint-Pierre, Ghent (1046), of the altar recovered from the count (above, note 60): vobis . . . contrado, transfundo atque 85 transscribo. Above, at note 63. 86 It was apparently given by bp. Fromund in 1030 (Montier-en-Der no. 19). 87 Ibid. no. 60. A day was fixed ad causam diffiniendam super illo altari, utrum sui juris esset, sicut asserebat; the bishop and the abbot appeared, the knight did not; only then did the bishop have the altar in manu mea, liberum et absolutum ab omni calumpnia, to restore to Montier-en-Der. 88 89 St-Martin-des-Champs no. 40 (above, note 67). See next note. 90 Above, note 46 (what I render as castle knights is municipes, Niermeyer sense 2).


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wife ‘instead of two ounces of gold which she had wanted’).91 The twelfthcentury chronicler of Tournai saw the twelve rich ‘altars’ that bishop Harduin (about 1027) had granted for three generations to count Baldwin IV as having been made irrecoverable by Baldwin’s grants in ‘benefice’ or ‘fief ’ to his nobles and theirs to their knights, ‘so that they gradually passed from episcopal ius into the knights’ ius’.92 Further west too, in the diocese of Chartres (westernmost of the province of Sens) and those of Le Mans, Angers, and Tours, altars sometimes appear as something in the bishop’s control or gift, though only occasionally in their own charters granting them.93 Here too a bishop might grant, or claim to be granting, the altar of a church given by another lord94 (this is probably what had really happened when the canons of Le Mans recorded having bought the ‘nave’ of a church whose altar bishop Arnald gave them).95 But he might consent to another lord’s grant of the altar itself,96 or need a lord’s or benefice-holder’s cooperation in his own grant of an altar. Bishop Fulbert early in the century had given Chartres’s church of Naveil in benefice to a knight, Hilgod, and later with Hilgod’s consent to the monks of Marmoutiers; when, later, bishop Theoderic gave them the altar specifically, this was with the expensive consent of the influential archdeacon Hugh Doubleau, who had a third of it evidently as private property, being a kinsman of Hilgod’s.97 But when in mid-century the monks of Vendoˆme record having bought from Arnulf archbishop of Tours the altar of the church of Rivie`re, for which they have a charter from Geoffrey Fouel (uncle and guardian to the young heir of ÎleBouchard),98 this is different. What the archbishop has to sell them is not mere consent to their acquiring from another lord tithes, offerings, and choice of priest: it is leave to fill a present vacancy and the next one, combined with an undertaking to let them fill future vacancies at the same price (£10 to cover the first two, 91

St-Martin-des-Champs no. 90 (1096–1100). Galbert of Bruges, writing in 1146 (Hist. Tornacensis, iii. cc. 9–13 (MGH SS XIV. 337–9), including the bishop’s alleged charter, c. 9). But altaria here may simply mean ‘churches’. 93 Instances are Fanning, Acts no. 60 (before 1047, Hubert bp. of Angers for Saint-Serge); Angers no. 50 (1076, bp. Eusebius recognizing Saint-Aubin’s long-standing tenure of 1521 altars, which he had challenged). 94 In endowing Pontlevoy (see index), 1034, Gilduin miles gave two churches (in one of which he ‘holds’ the altar sub vicarii nomine; cf. below, note 100) and Theoderic bp. of Chartres granted the altars. Cf. this bishop’s grant of four altars to Vendoˆme (Vendoˆme no. 71, notitia) three of them in churches acquired for Vendoˆme by Countess Agnes. 95 Above, at note 9; perhaps choosing their wording to appear to exclude the altar from what the church’s lord had sold them. 96 e.g. St-Martin-des-Champs no. 20 (1079): bishop’s consent to a lay family’s grant of an altar (distinguished from ‘the other part of the church’, held and given by other laymen). 97 Marmoutier (Vendoˆmois) nos. 1, 2 (narrative of the church’s recent history). 98 Vendoˆme nos. 86–7. Fouel was perhaps merely acceding to count Geoffrey Martel’s removal of Rivie`re from the young heir’s inheritance and gift of it to Vendoˆme (ibid. no. 399; Guillot, Comte, 330–1). 92

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thereafter 100s. each), ‘as long as the church remains in their power (ditio)’. This looks like a patch of effective diocesan authority (which the monks may have thought worth accepting and even paying for, to support their own evidently shaky claim on the church);99 not a claim to be lord of the altar in another lord’s church. It is problematic in another way that when (between 1055 and 1063) Guy of Laval gave to Le Mans ‘the altars of his land’—presumably of all the churches in his lordship—reserving life tenure for ‘those knights who held the altars from Guy’,100 Guy himself is said to hold them ‘by gift’ (ex dono) of the preceding bishop Gervase.101 The ‘gift’ to a lay lord of altars in his own churches might mean anything from authorizing his right to choose priests (perhaps an unlikely claim for a bishop in mid-eleventh-century Maine)102 to allowing him to take altar revenues and pay a priest out of them. Guy was no doubt already doing all this; did he really accept such a ‘gift’ at bishop Gervase’s hand, or did the later Le Mans record only claim that it was so? A similar question arises more sharply about the church of Bre´zolles, built before 1061 by a royal vassal on land held from the king. When the founder’s son Albert gave the church to Saint-Pe`re, the altar was given not by him but by the bishop of Chartres, from whom he is said to hold it ‘in fief’. It is Albert’s own charter that purports to relate this: ‘my lord bishop Agobert added to this largesse of mine, at the abbot’s and my request, the church’s altar which I have always held in fief from the bishops of Chartres.’103 Local historians might have straightforward answers to some of these questions, reflecting the fragmented lordship in churches and tithes so widespread in western France. But it is more likely that bishops sometimes found opportunities (perhaps at the consecration of a new church, such as Bre´zolles) to assert their authority by recognizing what they could not prevent, and that this was seen as gift or enfeoffment. It is equally possible that nothing had actually been said or done at all but that a past ‘gift’ or ‘fief’ was asserted later, by bishop or canons in their own deeds or records, or even by the monks of Saint-Pe`re in their version of Albert’s charter, to make the point of principle. Much odder, however, is the capacity of Avesgaud bishop of Le Mans (995– 1035), in the church of Doucelles which belonged at least in part to a lay lord Hervey, to ‘hold the altar open’, that is, without an incumbent, and give it to a 99

The church became a priory of Marmoutier not long afterwards. They were to hold the altars more vicariorum (cf. Hilduin, above, note 94), perhaps meaning only that it is a temporary or official-like tenure like a viguier’s. 101 Liber Alb. Cenom. no. 183. Gervase was bishop 1036–55; his gift to Guy was probably pre-Rheims, 1049 (below, pp. 826–7). 102 Not unlikely that he would claim to approve lords’ choices, but that he would claim to authorize their having the choice. 103 St-Pe`re, 127–8 (Henry I’s licence to Albert to give the church), 128–31 (Albert’s charter giving the church with atrium, burial, and such tithe as was ‘in his hand’). 100


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layman Walter Siccabot. This suggests that the bishop had independent control of the priest’s appointment and was abusing it by creating a lay benefice instead. But he may have done it at Hervey’s request; and Hervey was able with the next bishop’s consent to buy the altar from Walter Siccabot, in order to give the whole church to Saint-Vincent du Mans.104 In fact, most of these instances where it looks at first sight as if the bishop really did have a hold on the altar of someone else’s church show at the same time that any lord could own or hold an altar; altars here were anyone’s game. In 1076 the monks of Vendoˆme bought an altar along with a moiety of a church from a layman Ascelin Chotard, who held it from a Breton couple Ingelbald and Domitilla, who had (by the monks’ account) themselves bought the altar from Arrald bishop of Chartres and had made Ascelin’s clerical son ‘vicar’ of the altar when they enfeoffed Ascelin.105 It would be strange indeed if in this part of France before the later eleventh century bishops had asserted, more than occasionally, anything but a notional authority over the altars of other lords’ churches.

20.ii. The bishop’s customs The difference between episcopal lordship and diocesan authority was implied, but also often blurred, in the reservations that tenth- and eleventh-century bishops made for themselves and their successors when they gave or confirmed churches or altars to monasteries or to individuals. What was reserved, even in a permanent gift, might be a census or servitium, probably often the rent that earlier tenants had rendered for a church in episcopal lordship;1 sometimes perhaps a substitute for redemptio;2 occasionally rather an acknowledgment by the beneficiaries that they held the church only by the bishop’s authorization or owed it to his munificence.3 But the census and servitium reserved by the bishop and canons of Clermont in giving a church to Saint-Pourçain in 1100 is explained on the grounds that ‘all churches and chapels of Auvergne should always be in the church of Clermont’s service and potestas’ (here authority, not property);4 and 104 St-Vincent-du-Mans nos. 536 (cartularist’s narrative), 535 (Hervey’s donation, 1047–65). This donation was subject to a disputed claim to one moiety of the church, until Fulk of Montfaucon quitclaimed it (ibid. no. 538); perhaps a failure by either claimant to present a parson had left the altar at Avesgaud’s 105 disposal. Vendoˆme no. 255 (1076). 1 e.g. payments of 12d. or between 2s. and 10s. (Maˆcon, passim); and see note 15, below. 2 e.g. above, p. 702 at note 43. 3 e.g. perhaps the diverse rents in money or kind reserved by Hugh bp. of Grenoble in grants to monasteries (above, p. 692 note 18); certainly the dues in gold or oil specified in some grants to S. 4 Lorenzo, Aversa (below, at note 63, and note 77). Bourbonnais no. 11.

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there were often reserved more specifically official dues marking the bishop’s authority over any church in his diocese. These were standardly, in northern and western France, synodalia and circada (payments made really or notionally on the occasions of the diocesan synod and of the bishop’s circuit or visitation);5 in the south more often synodum and parata, or parata and eulogiae—words meaning, originally, hospitality or food supplies prepared in advance, and ceremonial gifts (probably due at the synod):6 perhaps surviving from the bishop’s ancient public rights in parish churches, but often by now converted into money payments, sometimes themselves described as census or servitium,7 and looking like quasi-lordly dues. Other reservations, made in vaguer terms as mos or as custom,8 may designate a similar bundle of dues, their original significance perhaps forgotten; even apparently more fundamental claims, reserving ‘authority’, ‘reverence’, or ‘obedience’,9 may mean no more. However, certain specific functions of the bishop’s order or jurisdiction may be reserved by name: reconciling the church after sacrilege, along with such minimal jurisdiction as punishing sacrilege or violations of cemetery;10 sometimes disciplinary justice over the priest, and, increasingly, committing the cure of souls to him11 (which itself could be seen as a matter of custom).12 Only the most basic right of all, to supply every baptismal church in the diocese with chrism, seems in France not normally to need explicit reservation. Such more-or-less formulaic reservation of functions and dues arising from them, often in the same breath as rent or service, made them look less like surviving elements of authority applying in theory to all churches in the diocese, and more like items of the bishop’s property or pertinences of his episcopal church: they are his ‘customs’ or episcopalia.13 Consequently he or his canons might without claiming a complete enclave have some customs in their extradiocesan churches; as Chartres, around 1020, claimed synodalia from the priests of its churches in the diocese of Lisieux. Roger bishop of Lisieux for his part claimed 5

e.g. Couture no. 7 (1009); Fleury no. 74 (1035); Angers nos. 50 (1076), 79 (1113). e.g. Cluny nos. 373 (929), 1553 (981), 3680 (1094); Bourbonnais no. 13 (1108); many in Maˆcon. For Languedoc see useful summary in Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 360–2. 7 e.g. Maˆcon nos. 393, 415; Cluny no. 1553. 8 e.g. Cluny no. 3348 (1055, ‘saving due subjection to the bishop [Auxerre] and any mos or consuetudo’); and see below, note 13. 9 e.g. St-Martin-des-Champs no. 117 (1106); St-Symphorien, Autun no. 21 (1115); St-Victor no. 445 (1101); Gellone no. 266 (1096–1100). These bishops range from Geneva to Balbastro (Aragon). 10 e.g. Couture no. 7 (as note 5); Redon no. 285 (1062); Gallia Christiana, XIV, Instr. 173–4 (c. 1070); St-Martin-des-Champs no. 68 (1062–96); and see below, at note 44. 11 See above, p. 706; or among more deliberately comprehensive reservations, as below, at note 44; cf. St-Beńigne no. 84 (1075, Hugh bp. of Troyes). 12 Reserved as custom: St-Bertin no. ii. 18 (1116; see Mager, ‘Verha¨ltnis’, 196–7); Angers no. 79 (1113). Remitted as custom: St-Wandrille no. 55 (1111). 13 ‘Customs’ could be well enough understood to stand by itself in grants of altars, e.g. Molesme II no. i. 77 (1085–1101), ‘saving the customs of St Mammes and the church of Langres’. 6


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them by diocesan authority, putting under interdict those priests who insisted on paying them to Chartres.14 For churches within or without the diocese that were or had been clearly in the bishop’s or cathedral’s own lordship, the ‘customs’ might simply express that lordship;15 while even when these dues were claimed from other lords’ churches, they were things that ‘belonged’ to the bishop or his church. Once seen in that light, they could be given away. Whereas some are kept back from a bishop’s concession of altar or church, others may go with it and may indeed be the gift’s real content (if any).16 They may often have been allowed to lords of new churches at their consecration, as is recorded in Robert of Hommet’s foundation charter for Saint-Fromond (Robert ‘absolves’ the church ‘from all secular services and customs that belong to me’; Hugh bishop of Coutances likewise ‘grants that the church be quit and free from all synod and circuit and all custom’).17 But they were certainly usurped by some lords, where circumstances allowed; and (as with the closely related grants of altars) when a bishop grants his customs to the lay or monastic lord of an existing church he is often (perhaps almost always) recognizing what is already happening.18 Even when put in terms of freeing a church from episcopal customs, it comes to the same thing as conceding them to the lord.19 Further, in this part of France by the mid-eleventh century the customs in lords’ hands often included not only dues but penalties; and if lords (lay or monastic) were to collect the penalties for sacrilege or offences in the cemetery,20 they might have to do the work of judging and punishing; seen perhaps as a natural extension of seigneurial power.21 Bishops’ grants of episcopal dues or customs to individuals (clerks or lay lords) were not unknown in the south. In 969 the bishop and canons of Be´ziers made an 14 See bp. Fulbert’s letter to Roger bp. of Lisieux, 1014–22 (Letters and Poems no. 39), excusing the chapter’s parish priests’ refusal to pay synodalia to Roger, and undertaking that they will pay in future unless Roger decides to remit it (which he did not). See Lemarignier, Privile`ges, 66. 15 e.g. Lyon, 25–6 (1108), a parish church of Grenoble’s lordship in dioc. of Vienne, given away reserving 15s. annual census, hospitality, and parata (now money); cf. ibid. 30–1 (1106–12). 16 Above, p. 707; cf. Gellone no. 155 (late 11th c.), Pons bp. of Rodez glosses his ‘donating’ of a church (actually given by lay lords, ibid. nos. 450–6) as meaning ‘a moiety of parata and synod’. 17 See index: St-Fromond (first quarter of 11th c.) Cf. bp. Theoderic’s grant of altars for Pontlevoy (see index), declaring them ab omni episcopali retentione seu venditione perenniter absolutum, ab omni vero circada atque parata liberam (on venditio see above, p. 700 note 25). 18 e.g. St-Beńigne no. 383 (1096 or later, not ‘before 1096’ as ed.): William abp. of Rouen gives up to Saint-E´tienne, Caen, ‘the synod, circata, and every due’ of St Martin’s church at Longchamp, because ‘the monks of Dijon had them’ (before an exchange brought the church to Saint-E´tienne, ibid. no. 384). 19 Clearly stated in Cormery no. 30 (997), abp. Archembald of Tours’s licence to build a chapel in a parish of Cormery’s own: no bishop or archdeacon is to ‘require venditiones’ (see above, note 17) or exact circada or synod, ‘but the monks shall hold them for all time’. Cf. St-Julien, Tours no. 3 (1004; original): Avesgaud of Le Mans concedes that ‘the monks shall possess the synodales census and . . . circada or parata of these churches’ (only the venditiones are ended, not transferred). 20 e.g. in Redon no. 285 (1062), the abbot is to have sacrilegium over his own men in the three churches 21 concerned. On Norman lords see Chibnall, ‘Ecclesiastical Patronage’, 104.

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exchange with two brothers, a clerk and a deacon, which gave them (what perhaps they already had) one-third of a church with its titulus (probably the right for one of them to be ordained priest for it) and the parata, synod, and servitium due from it.22 But hugely different in degree, a few years later, was the concession by Sigfrid bishop of Le Mans of altar reliefs and synod and visitation dues from sixty-four churches, to the powerful lord Bouchard of Vendoˆme on whose military help his survival depended.23 A widespread lapse to lords (monastic as well as lay) of bishops’ reliefs in this diocese is suggested by bishop Avesgaud’s grants of them to Saint-Julien of Tours in 1004 and to La Couture in 1009, in the latter case giving both relevationes and recompensationes of their altars in eight named churches24 (‘compensations’ probably for the absence of reliefs where there were no parsons). In Le Mans again three or four decades later, reliefs were probably important among the unspecified ‘customs of all his churches’ that Hervey of Doucelles was given by bishop Gervase.25 A grant so generalized (apart from excepting synod and ‘circuit’) is ambiguous: it might mean payments from the churches (the bishop’s abandoned customs), or payments to them (Hervey’s lordly customs: tithes, offerings, burial dues, hospitality). But it could well mean both: a bundle of whatever the churches in practice produce for Hervey,26 all now alike as pertinences of his churches (and so treated in the bishop’s own charter). These concessions show that lords lay and monastic had these things; but also that lords wanted them recognized, and that bishops by doing this could make their point that the customs were in principle theirs.27 In exceptional circumstances it might be even more important to be given this opportunity: it could establish the extent of the diocese. Orderic Vitalis says of the Norman lord William son of Giroie that he ‘had the episcopal customs’ in the whole of his estate of Montreuil and Echauffour (where his father Giroie had built six churches), and attributes this to a ‘privilege’ obtained by Giroie from Roger bishop of Lisieux exempting the clergy on his lands from pleas elsewhere and from the attentions of archdeacons. This was in return for his having chosen to put his lands under Lisieux (and persuaded his sons-in-law to do the same) when the inhabitants ‘said they were not of any bishopric’.28 Orderic sees in early twelfthcentury terms what was probably Giroie’s simple annexation, likely enough 22

Be´ziers no. 32. Acta episc. Cenom., c. 29 (Bouquet, Recueil, X. 384). Sigfrid clearly did not give the 64 churches, as La 24 Roncie`re has it (Vie de Bouchard le Veńe´rable, p. x), but the dues from them. Above, p. 700. 25 In approving Hervey’s purchase of the altar of Doucelles, before Hervey gave the whole church to Saint-Vincent (above, pp. 710–11). 26 Cf. the vocabulary that described tithes, etc. as issuing from a church. As churches and their pertinences fragmented, particular customs might be alienated independently, as the relevamentum occasionally was (e.g. St-Vincent-du-Mans nos. 252 (1070–80), 209 (1103–9)). 27 On Normandy see C. Morris, ‘William I and the Church Courts’, EHR 82 (1967), 452 and n. 3. 28 Orderic, HE II. 26 (in my, more literal, translation) and n. 1. 23


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confirmed by bishop Roger in the 1020s, of ‘customs’ of half-forgotten origin (evidently including the jurisdictional ones) that would in fact have been due to the bishop not of Lisieux but of Seés.29 His story of the pious Giroie finding his people without a pastor and looking around for a good one is a didactic simplification of the weakness and disorganization of the bishoprics here at the beginning of the century, and the role of Norman lords’ territorial ambitions in the bishoprics’ re-emergence.30 It probably was indeed Giroie and his sons-in-law who shifted some of their lands and churches into the diocese of Lisieux, by the simple act of going there for recognition of their customs: not difficult if the bishops of Seés had lost their grip on old churches and never established it in new ones (crucially, perhaps, if the clergy did not even go to them for the chrism). When rulers or lay lords actually gave up these customs it was in terms that implied their right to dispose of them. This is especially evident in Normandy. Duke Robert in the 1030s declared of the abbey of Ce´risy’s churches and lands, ‘I have freed all these things from every ecclesiastical custom’; and even more startlingly for the nunnery of Montivilliers and its dozen churches, ‘I establish them absolved, immune, and altogether free of all episcopal custom’; in both cases with the archbishop of Rouen’s consent.31 In the middle of the century Giroie’s son William, one of the founders of Saint-E´vroul, gave it the customs that he and his father had had, with the consent of the then bishop of Lisieux.32 A little later Ralph Taisson ‘held in fief’ from the bishop of Bayeux ‘all the episcopal customs’ of twelve churches, and gave these customs with the bishop’s consent to his foundation Fontenay-sur-Odon.33 Sometimes it is a lay lord’s charter that shows him disposing of the bishop’s customs as his own. In the south, countess Garsind of Toulouse’s testament of c.972 directed to the ultimate owners (Albi and Saint-Pons) the parata of churches that she was bequeathing to individuls for life.34 This pales before William of la Ferte´-Mace´’s charter of 1053, from the borders of Normandy and Maine, giving to Saint-Julien of Tours three churches with all their revenues, naming in the same breath tithes, firstfruits, burial, synod dues, circada, all forfeitures for sacrilege, theft, and breach of cemetery, ‘and all offences belonging to the bishop; and whatever I possess at present or can acquire in future in these matters’, with the consent of the bishop of Seés, ‘of whom I hold these customs in benefice’; and 29

See Lemarignier, ‘Privile`ges’, 67–8; Chibnall, ‘Ecclesiastical Patronage’, 105–6. Lisieux was recovering from a vacancy of perhaps a century (see Lemarignier, op. cit., 65–6 and 67). For the background of feudal politics see Chibnall, op. cit., 105–8; cf. Potts, Monastic Revival, 71–2 and nn. 49–50, on Seés and the lords of Belleˆme. 31 ADNorm. nos. 64 (1032), 90 (1035); see Lemarignier, op. cit., 44–5. The churches concerned had been 32 the dukes’, who had presumably held them free of episcopal customs. Orderic, HE II. 26. 33 P. de Farcy (ed.), Abbayes de l’e´veˆche´ de Bayeux (1886), Fontenay no. 1 (1070). 34 HL V no. 126 (the churches of Vindrac and Bar). 30

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giving another two churches in almost the same terms, ‘with all revenues belonging to the bishop . . . as I possess them from the bishop of Le Mans, in whose episcopate they are’.35 As with altars so with customs, the bishop’s ‘benefice’ may be either a polite fiction (by the monks drafting the charter, to strengthen their right) or an actual recognition by a bishop in the past. Only slightly less explicit, from the nearby diocese of Chartres, is the grant of the church of Treón to Saint-Pe`re by two laymen: ‘as we have possessed it free of all episcopal exaction apart from giving the chrism and reconciling the church, we attribute it thus free to St Peter and the abbot and monks.’36 It sounds as if they or their father (whose vow they were fulfilling) have enjoyed all the other episcopal dues and penalties, leaving the bishop with only these two basic sacral functions. It was markedly not to the bishops that these lords surrendered the customs. When lords other than the duke became prominent in founding their own monasteries, they endowed them with churches often with ‘customs’ attached. The customs seem to be seen, by laity and monks at least, if not quite as natural pertinences of their churches then as legitimately alienated bits of episcopal property which they in turn can alienate as they like; it is noteworthy that the preamble of William de la Ferte´-Mace´’s charter makes him acknowledge the wrongness of holding tithes and firstfruits but not of customs: he has these because the bishops have let him.37 For monasteries, meanwhile, bishops’ concessions of customs were sometimes sweeping. The monks of Saint-Vincent du Mans made a note of what bishop Gervase had done for them in the middle of the century, including release not only from all relevationes but also from synodal and visitation dues38—precisely what bishops in a stronger position normally reserved in dealing with monasteries. When in 1076 bishop Eusebius of Angers listed what the monks of Saint-Aubin were to pay as synod and circada in the altars he was conceding to them, a few were to pay ‘nothing’.39 In dealing with monks as with laymen, these bishops were probably asserting a principle in respect of powers lost long ago. This may not be true, however (since he was later excommunicated for dilapidating his church’s property), of bishop Geoffrey of Chartres’s freeing in 1086 of five altars for Saint-Pe`re from future redemptio (slightly suggesting they have paid him on this occasion) and from ‘sale, synod, circada, and any custom or exaction of justice’ reserving, however, ‘justice over the priests serving there’ to the archdeacon Gauzlin for life.40 35

Above, p. 587. St-Pe`re, 215 (before 1080). They were probably sons of Hugh the vidame of Chartres. See below, pp. 828–9, for reforming legislation on the matter (1054 and later). 38 St-Vincent-du-Mans no. 13. Gervase reserved only the ‘pledge of forfeit’ when a church had to be 39 reconciled. Angers no. 50. 40 St-Pe`re, 246–7. 36 37


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This reservation of the archdeacon’s personal vested interest in a source of income shows episcopal authority being treated as a kind of property at one remove from the bishop; there is plenty of evidence for this.41 In these circumstances some laymen would naturally lay hands on the archdeacon’s dues and jurisdiction, even on the office itself; Innocent II complained in 1131 that some Norman laymen not only took episcopal rights, altar offerings, and ecclesiastical revenues, ‘but also, what is monstrous, presume to call themselves archdeacons’.42 In the south of France an archidiaconate (like other offices in the chapter) could be treated as family property.43 Meanwhile the chapter itself had a proprietary interest in the bishops’ rights since these belonged to his cathedral church. When churches or altars were alienated, the reserving of customs might be represented as mitigating the damage. In 1107, Gualo bishop of Paris granting four altars to Saint-Martin-des-Champs explained his reservations of basic episcopal authority—synod and visitation dues, reconciliations of churches, and the committing of the cure of souls—as done ‘lest church property should seem to be totally alienated from our hand’;44 just as, a century earlier, Avesgaud bishop of Le Mans’s concession to the monks of la Couture required their attendance at the cathedral on certain feast days and prayers for deceased canons, while they were to pay ‘as others do’ synod and circuit dues and penalties for cemetery offences, so that future bishops should have no reason to say that ‘too much had been given for so small a service’.45 This proprietary aspect of the ‘customs’ emphasizes the difference between a monastery’s enjoyment of episcopalia in its churches and exemption of the monastery itself from all diocesan jurisdiction (a vast topic barely touched in this book). The two things overlap, however; for instance, in England St Alban’s exemption included obtaining chrism for fifteen churches from a bishop of its own choosing; and in the Pyrenees much earlier, Sergius IV’s privilege for Arlessur-Tech in 1011, confirming its possession of a number of churches, decreed among much else that neither they nor their clergy need observe synods, they could have their clergy ordained in any see they chose, and obtain chrism wherever they wished.46 For this topic in Germany, Spain, and England, only sketches are attempted here. Bishops’ acts in Germany, giving or confirming churches to monasteries, or 41

e.g. ibid. 115 (1033), Marmoutier (Vendoˆmois) no. 2 (1052–63), St-Martin-des-Champs no. 32 (1088). Epist. no. 51 (PL 179. 99). In 1092 Philip I confirmed Walter count of Dreux’s redditio to the abp. of Rouen of ‘everything belonging to the archidiaconate of the Vexin’ that Walter had had in his hand, or 43 others through him (APhI no. 127). e.g. Be´ziers no. 82 (1077); cf. no. 92. 44 45 St-Martin-des-Champs no. 119. Above, p. 700. 46 Reg. Antiqu. Lincoln no. 104; Marca Hisp., no. 168. See Schreiber, Gesamm. Abh., 127–9; Knowles, Monastic Order, 602–6; Denton, Royal Free Chapels, 17–18, 88–9, 138–9. 42

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recording consecrations, do not as a matter of routine explicitly reserve particular elements in their authority, and seem only seldom to give them away. An early instance is the consecration of a layman Bruning’s church by bishop Nithard of Mu¨nster (who died c.922); Nithard ‘gave him this liberty, that the priest . . . should live there without census, and the bishop would take nothing else . . . except to have synod at appropriate times, and correct what had to be corrected’; in return for this—and for having his proprietary right recognized—Bruning gave the bishop a serf family with all its possessions. Among later instances, in 1124 archbishop Frederick I gave Siegburg a castle church ‘with our episcopal, chorepiscopal, and decanal census’; in 1139 the bishop of Mu¨nster, giving churches to the counts’ collegiate foundation Kappenberg, gave also the diocesan ‘ban’.47 In Spain, a mid-tenth-century bishop in Pamplona conceding episcopal rights in a village and church explained this as meaning that the church could get its chrism from the monastery of Lavasal to which it had been given by queen Tota.48 But the most commonly reserved, conceded, or disputed episcopal right was the tertium, the bishop’s third of tithes and offerings. This was an unusual survival of something that in most of the West had either disappeared or never existed; but it was due only from certain churches. In Pamplona in 984 a bishop’s claim to thirds from a number of churches given a century earlier to the monastery of Acosta was successfully rebutted in the royal court on grounds (it seems) that the monastery ‘was established in its own right’, belonging only to its saints, and not the subject of any pact49 (meaning, perhaps, that it did not belong by virtue of pooled shares to its own members or to founders’ heirs). It seems here to be the monastery’s status that determined its churches’ freedom from the thirds; but when in 1053 (Acosta and its churches having meanwhile come to S. Millań of Cogolla) three bishops recognized that their predecessors had never taken firstfruits or thirds in St Emilian’s churches, it had become a matter of custom and of royal will (it had been backed by king Sancho in 1030).50 Meanwhile the third often came to lay lords, and doubtless because of its great economic value it was in practice even more an object of traffic (given in alms, sold, or exchanged) than were any of the customs in France.51 It could be treated as indicating lordship: the tenth-century heir to the church of S. Cristina at Folgoso repudiated the promise by his predecessor, a priest, to pay the third to the bishop of Compostella, ‘but if you wish to have it and to claim a lord’s service in it, I grant it to you . . . for me and for all my heirs’;52 evidently it was not something 47

Above, p. 596; Siegburg no. 36; Westfal. UB, Codex no. 231. 49 50 S. Juan de la Penã no. 17 (947). San Millań no. 12. ibid. nos. 154, 101. e.g. Hist. Sahaguń no. 10 (921), bp. Frunimio of Leoń gave to Sahaguń various churches, including one where they were to enjoy tithes and offerings in full, including perpetual possession of the ‘ratio due to episcopal ius’, presumably the bishop’s third. See above, p. 82. 52 Santiago de Compostela, II app. no. 80 (p. 194). 48 51


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for the bishop to assert but for the heirs to give. In a dispute in 1091, however, it was seen as a matter of episcopal ius against Sahaguń’s ‘ancient mos’;53 and by the early twelfth century the episcopal rights of Compostella were in dispute on a wider front than the tertium, until in 1110 the inhabitants of certain parishes (laity as well as clergy) promised ‘obedience’ and payment of census and any just dues:54 so vague as to suggest things long understood. In the pre-Conquest English church, ‘customs’ usually meant dues common to all the old minsters including the cathedrals, consisting of tithe, church-scot, and so on, not payments arising from the bishop’s functions or jurisdiction.55 There were, however, ‘customs’ of the archbishop of Canterbury rendered by churches in the diocese listed in the Domesday Monachorum: an old list of thirteen minsters, and a number of lesser churches (added by Lanfranc) which had probably originally paid through the minsters. What they owed before Lanfranc’s reform was a mixture of renders in kind (probably for the archbishop’s Maundy Thursday alms to the poor), small sums (6d. or 7d.) as payment for communion wine and the chrism, and in a few cases large payments of 600d., not explained with any certainty.56 The churches were not all Canterbury property, so the renders were not rents; and the chrism payment at least was applicable to all baptismal churches in the diocese. It was a recognized principle that priests must go to their diocesan bishop to collect the chrism, or sometimes to a minster that had itself collected it from the bishop.57 That this was the only right extending beyond their own proprietary churches that pre-Conquest bishops had, as Bo¨hmer held, is unlikely. They may not have been able to get prospective priests of private churches presented to them; but there was a general obligation on priests to attend synods; and consecrating churches, perhaps confirming children, and probably as Barlow has argued imposing the larger penances, would all occasionally make the bishop’s authority felt in individual churches and would bring in gifts, penalties, or dues.58 By the twelfth century (as one would expect under French bishops) ‘episcopal customs’ (usually undefined except in late or dubious cases) appear in bishops’ charters, sometimes granted but more often reserved.59 It may be that earlier 53

Sahaguń no. 885. Espanã Sagrada, XX. 75–85 (using ‘archipresbiterate’ or the older ‘diocese’ for what I render as 55 ‘parishes’). See Barlow, 1000–1066, 179. 56 Ibid. 180–2 and 182 n. 1; Brett, English Church, 164–6. 57 Neglecting to collect the chrism could be punished by a secular penalty, according to ‘Edward and Guthrum’ (Barlow, op. cit., 143), an early 11th-c. work of abp. Wulfstan’s (as established by Whitelock, 1941; see Wormald, Making, 389–90). 58 Bo¨hmer, ‘EKntum’, 331–3; Barlow, op. cit., 179, 182, 243–6 (modifying his minimal view of the bishops’ powers in Durham Peculiars, pp. viii-ix). 59 e.g. successive bps. of St David’s for the castle church at Dulas (see index), allowing the monks ‘to admit and change their clerks at will’ with the reservation ut dent mihi rectitudines et consuetudines de ecclesiis. 54

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bishops had no need to define and reserve their rights, partly because they did not feel them to be threatened (only limited in traditional ways by the rights of minsters, some of which happened to belong to other great lords, chiefly the king); but partly perhaps because as yet the bishops claimed little beyond their sacral functions. When chapters, monasteries, or incipient royal free chapels do begin in the twelfth century to claim various degrees of freedom from jurisdiction and enjoyment of dues (often more against the archdeacon or rural dean than the bishop), the origin of their franchises seems often to lie in the traditional rights of minsters over primitive parishes, not in lordship over lesser churches by itself.60 There seems to be no evidence, early or late, of lay lords having the customs as in Normandy; in England and Wales the customs were neither natural extensions of seigneurial power nor normal pertinences of private churches; nor, in the bishop’s own churches, were his customs mere expressions of his lordship. When bishops resist, limit, or partially legitimate the franchises, this is in a new setting of active episcopal government made practicable now by archdeacons and largely bypassing the old minsters; and it is justified by reference to canon law, not as earlier in France by balancing the duty to preserve what belonged to the episcopal church with the rewards of making pious donations to other holy places.61 In Italy the picture is quite different. There are the bishops’ leases of plebes or other churches in their lordship, for rent and hospitality. But there are also recognitions by bishops of other lords’ rights in private churches, where what is explicitly reserved, if anything, is basic functions of ordo and of discipline, rationally set out as essentials of the bishop’s office rather than as discrete items of property or pertinences of his cathedral church. Thus in the north before the mid-tenth century a bishop of Reggio, recognizing before king Hugh’s missus a layman Rudolph’s claim to a chapel, reserved for the bishopric the consecration of priests and deacons, the blessing of chrism, and the priest’s attendance at his synod.62 But even these basic points of diocesan authority, so clearly identified, do not go without saying: they have to be secured in a lay court as the vestiges of a lost claim to property, lost because Rudolph and his father count Unroch had held the church for the crucial thirty years; and the bishop apparently reserved nothing else (no disciplinary oversight, nor consent to the choice of priest). In the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries similar formulae appear in the south in bishops’ concessions of churches to monasteries, sometimes combined 60

On all this (making anything beyond a sketch superfluous here) see Barlow, Durham Peculiars, pp. xi–xvi; id., 1000–1066, 249–54; Denton, Royal Free Chapels 78–9, 82–6, 137–8; Brett, English Church, 133, 135, 157, 166–7. 61 From 12th-c. Scotland however comes a glimpse of an older world, when bps. of St Andrew’s freed Durham’s estates and churches in Lothian from cana and cunevethe, cana being laws or the penalties for breaking them (due originally to the saints whose laws they were), cuneveth perhaps some kind of food62 rent (Barlow, Durham Peculiars, 122 n. 3). Below, pp. 783–4.


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with (but quite distinct from) a due of some kind (from the monastery, not from its church). In 1094, for instance, the bishop of Teano conceded four churches to S. Lorenzo, Aversa, for a ‘recognition’ of 10 pounds of oil a year, reserving as ‘episcopal right’ the ordination of priests, the consecration of altars, and the priest’s attendance at synods; in 1126 the bishop of Trani, conceding two churches to S. Lorenzo for an annual ‘honour’ to the cathedral of two gold coins, retains no potestas over the churches and their clergy except that they ought to come to him and to no one else for ordinations, consecrations of altars, and chrism and holy oil.63 In this case what is reserved is solely functions of the bishop’s ordo, his monopoly of these as diocesan seemingly unsafe; and seen as a reservation of potestas, that usefully ambiguous term which can cover both property and authority.64 It is interesting to find, in Catalonia about the same time, a viscount and his wife giving churches to Saint-Victor of Marseilles in which the bishop of Gerona ‘has had and should have no customary due, no census, except only chrism and holy oil, consecrations of altars, and ordinations of clergy’65—exactly the same (perhaps obvious) list. Here these sacral functions are put on a level with dues and rents (and presumably did in fact bring in gifts and fees); but in Italy they are usually kept distinct. In fact, behind such rational but minimal statements of what must be left to the bishop is a more radical view in southern Italy than anywhere else of the freedom that owners or lords can claim for their churches. Here, from eighth-century beginnings, some lay lords—princes and others—had asserted their churches’ freedom from any demand whatever by the bishop, not only for real monasteries but for lesser, more-or-less collegiate churches, often with parochial functions without being actual plebes. The eighth- and ninth-century dukes of Benevento issued precepts of absolutio for churches put under their defence, guaranteeing the founder’s rights for life, claiming appointment of rector or abbot for the palace thereafter, confirming the church’s possessions, and banning all claims by the bishop.66 Most of the evidence, however, comes from bishops’ almost unqualified concessions of these claims in letters of absolutio or libertas:67 for instance the bishop of Salerno, for prince Guaifer’s church and hospital of S. Massimo in 882, ‘to remain always free and absolved . . . without any jurisdiction (audientia) of us or our successors, and always to be in your and your heirs’ potestas’; and the archbishop a century later for the new dynasty’s foundation of S. Maria de 63

RNeapAM nos. 481 (see Feine, ‘Studien’, II. 55–6), 594. In the second instance the phrase used is ordinationes sacrorum ordinum; showing that ordinatio here means consecration to orders, not (as usually) 64 appointment to office. See index: potestas, ambiguity. 65 66 St-Victor no. 701 (before 1127). Above, p. 197. 67 See Feine, ‘Studien’, II. 20, 27–9, 34, 75–7; Ruggiero, ‘Per una storia’, 593, 596–600; Martin, La Pouille, 632–5; Taviani-Carozzi, Principaute´, 411, 657–67. Taviani-Carozzi assumes that although only a few of these charters survive, all private foundations of the period must have had them: this seems unlikely.

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Domno, freeing it and any subject churches for a payment of 10 pounds of silver, declaring the churches ‘always to be in your and your heirs’ power to hold, rule, govern, and to ordain such and so many priests and clerks there as you shall wish’.68 From the late tenth century into the twelfth a scatter of such concessions was made in the Lombard and Lombard-influenced south, not only to princes but to private founders great and small, lay or clerical, at or soon after or long after a church’s consecration;69 and not only for monastic communities but for churches of secular clergy, which were given baptismal and other quasi-parochial rights.70 In these documents the bishops variously renounce not only any jurisdiction (sometimes ‘absolving it from all diocesan lex’)71 or exaction (they will not exact dues and services, or charge for sacramental acts), but also any claim to dispose of the church’s possessions or to ‘have it in our potestas’.72 This last was what Guaifer prince of Salerno specially tried to anticipate in his foundation charter for S. Massimo; apparently without confidence that his heirs could prevent the building itself being taken away from them, he laid down that if the bishop ever got possession the endowments were to be removed and the bishop left with only the building.73 It looks paradoxical that a prince able to get the bishop to renounce any authority whatever should yet need to forestall his actually claiming the church as his own. It is not clear whether the point was that in a precarious world the local bishop might be as well placed as anyone to take advantage of a ruling family’s troubles, or that the ancient theoretical claim of the bishop to rule all churches in his diocese was understood as a claim to lordship in them, and was taken seriously enough to have to be renounced. Certainly this is suggested by one group of these documents, which attribute the need to free a church to the requirement of canon law that ‘all churches built or to be built must be in the ditio (or potestas) of the bishop in whose diocese they are sited’; one particularly explicit charter of 1012 goes straight on to say that because of this ‘you have asked us . . . to make this church free for you from all subjection (conditio) to our see’.74 It is evident too in the frequent cases where the concession takes the form of an exchange, transferring the church from bishop to founder (or founder’s heirs) in return for some pounds of silver, and declaring it 68

Cava nos. 87 (882), 412 (989; also reserving—or promising—the provision of chrism and oil). See Taviani-Carozzi, op. cit., 663–5. 69 At the consecration: abp. Bisantius for the catepan Pottho’s foundation (see index: Pottho). Long after consecration: Taviani-Carozzi, op. cit., 659 and n. 78. 70 Above, p. 91; Feine (‘Studien’, II. 88–91) found only one episcopal absolutio—and that a papal one— 71 for a plebs (above, pp. 88–9). e.g. Aversa no. 11 (1098) (below, note 77). 72 e.g. Cava no. 898 (1035). 73 Ibid. no. 64 (868). A similar provision by prince John’s wife Sykelgaita for S. Maria de Domno (?990, ibid no. 425) was against anyone able to take the church away from the heirs, not explicitly the bishop. 74 RNeapAM nos. 133, 203–5, 211 (969, 985–6, 988; Capua); Feine, ‘Studien’, II n. 200, quoting Arderad bp. of Fonturara, Apulia (1012; the closest to echoing Orleans 511 c. 17). The statement of canon law does not limit the absolutio (as Martin takes it, Pouille 634) but explains it; see Feine, op. cit., 79–80.


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‘free and secure’ in relation to the bishopric’s property (pars episcopii).75 The bishop may sometimes be making a real donation of a church that he has actually possessed; but perhaps fairly seldom.76 Apparently generous donations of churches (some with parishes or parochial rights) to S. Lorenzo, Aversa, by half-adozen bishops in the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries may all have been concessions of authority (thereby claiming to have it to concede) in churches already in the monks’ possession;77 S. Lorenzo seems to be systematically collecting these charters from bishops in whose dioceses they had churches. As in France for ‘altars’ or for customs, so here for ‘freeing’, getting the bishop’s charter does—importantly—imply recognition of his authority:78 nonetheless what is forgone is treated as a form of property. Occasionally, by the mid-eleventh century, some minimal claim to jurisdiction may be made: in 1050 the archbishop of Salerno, freeing a church for its priestabbot and his heirs, required their clergy to be ‘instituted according to the canons’, not brought from another diocese without his licence, and reserved the power to summon these clergy to his judgments.79 By contrast, in 1095 the archbishop of Oria’s liberation of four churches for the Aversa monastery renounced any potestas of excommunicating, putting under interdict, or summoning to synod;80 but perhaps S. Lorenzo wanted this precisely because such assertions of authority were beginning to be made. As for the diocesan bishop’s sacramental monopolies, even these could be given away on occasion (back in 986 the archbishop of Salerno allowed the monks of the newly founded S. Lorenzo, Capua, to build churches in their property at will and to ask any bishop they liked to dedicate them, or for any other opus Dei);81 and when these functions are mentioned as belonging to the diocesan, they seem at first not so much rights reserved as services promised: a bishop may promise to provide 75 e.g. Cava nos. 898, 1146 (abps. of Salerno, for a layman, 1035; for a priest, 1050); ibid. no. 1194 (bp. of Paestum, for Theodora widow of Pandulf son of prince Guaimar, 1054). See Feine, ‘Studien’, II. 81–2; Taviani-Carozzi, op. cit., 660–2. 76 What seems a clear instance is Cava no. 938 (1039), John bp. of Luceria’s sale to a layman Poto of a church which at the same time he frees from all conditio. 77 RNeapAM. nos. 438 (1084, abp. of Acerenza, three churches), 481 (1094, bp. of Teano, four churches), 484 (1095, abp. of Oria, four churches), 485 (1095, bp. of Troya, one church: to have it and its parish spiritualiter et seculariter, paying an annual ounce of gold in recognition ‘that this church was in our right’, where ius may be as ambiguous as potestas), 594 (1126, bp. of Trani, two churches); Aversa no. 11 (1098, abp. of Oria, two churches, one of them given to S. Lorenzo by ‘noblemen’ and the people of Monopoli). Only the two Oria charters explicitly ‘free’ or ‘absolve’ the churches (besides ‘granting’ or ‘giving’ them), but the content of others amounts to that. 78 See Ruggiero, ‘Per una storia’, 598–600: initially the charters simply recognized the facts (thereby staking a claim). 79 Cava no. 1146; see Taviani-Carozzi, op. cit., 664–5; Ruggiero, op. cit., 598–9. A substantial reservation of discipline is made in the 1095 Troya grant (note 77, above): the clergy are to accept the bishops’ correction and obey his summons to synod. For some earlier Apulian reservations see Martin, Pouille, 80 633–4 (but see note 74, above). Above, note 77. 81 RNeapAM no. 205 (see Stutz, ‘Alexander III’, 26 n. 6).


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chrism, holy oil, and communion bread, or to consecrate priests, or to reconcile a desecrated church, free of charge.82 At the height of these remarkable concessions, one has the impression in southern Italy not (as in northern Europe) of vagueness, blurred edges, and disparate customs promiscuously tossed together, but of a certain crude clarity. Jurisdiction or authority on the one hand, property or dominium on the other, are not confused but almost identified: a wrong-headed attitude (in reformers’ eyes), but not muddle-headed; if a church is yours you expect to govern it, and if not, not; while a claim to govern it is a claim to property. This was never an allpervading principle, but it was a persistent strand of thinking, from its explicit surfacing in late eighth-century Benevento to its loosening and fraying in the eleventh-century reform. For contrast we can move to deepest Provence. Most of the kingdom of Burgundy goes with the duchy in these matters, bishops of Besançon, Grenoble, or Lyons dealing with altars and customs in much the same way as those of Langres, Autun, or Maˆcon.83 But the small bishoprics of Alpine and maritime Provence seem to be in a class of their own, the bishops’ authority not so much blurred as almost submerged in common family property. The turbulent past had left many once episcopal churches in the hands of laymen, sometimes of a bishop’s own family;84 if eventually the family gave them to monks, a bishop’s part in this, even for a church in his own diocese, often seems in practice no more than his joining his brothers in a family donation. In the formalities he may be singled out as specially responsible for conveying the church, or its altar and altar revenues. When the Moustiers family, soon after 1021, restored to Saint-Victor its former property in the valley of Lagnes, it was their kinsman Aumerade bishop of Riez who specifically gave the church of SaintJulien, and also—as a grant to St Victor—freed its altar from all episcopal census. It was bishop Pons of Marseilles who in 1030 gave the church of Saint-Just to SaintVictor while his uncle viscount Fulk restored its endowment; but they jointly warned off ‘any of our heirs’. In the Me´vouillon grant of church and lands at Rioms in 1060, the whole complex including the church was given by all four brothers including bishop Ripert (with their mother and various others), then the church itself with its altars by Ripert separately.85 But this may reflect less an informed respect for episcopal authority than a vague idea that a bishop in the family is the right man to convey its (actually undivided) property in a church;

82 83 85

e.g. Cava nos. 412 (above, note 68 ), 898 (1035); Feine, ‘Studien’ II. 88, 89–90. 84 Above, note 15, and p. 705 note 64. Above, p. 301–2. St-Victor nos. 613, 615; no. 44; no. 730.


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and in other transactions a bishop joins his brothers on equal terms in giving away a family church.86 Sometimes, on the other hand, a bishop gives a church that probably belongs to his bishopric as if episcopal and family property were indistinguishable; as may well be the case when the bishopric itself was virtually family property. We have already seen such donations made by the married bishops Audibert I of Antibes, Gaucelm of Fre´jus, and Amelius of Senez.87 For Audibert we may add his donation to Le´rins of ‘the altars of all churches built in the county of Antibes’ (except parish churches), describing them as ‘my own property’.88 Early in the eleventh century bishop Aumerade of Riez, giving a church with all its pertinences to Le´rins, referred to the old canon law that allowed every bishop to enrich a monastery from the goods of his episcopal church, while he claimed in the same breath to be acting on his canons’ advice and with his Moustiers heirs’ consent.89 There is conceptual as well as practical confusion here, well illustrated also in the wording of bishop Gaucelm’s donation to Le´rins of five churches with their altars, or bishop Amelius’ restitution to Saint-Victor of the churches of Castellane.90 These donations to monasteries do not seem to reserve any rights or revenues for the bishop. Back in the tenth century Nantold bishop of Apt did stipulate, for a church that he was giving (with other things) to lay fideles, that the priest should enter ‘by the bishop’s gift’ and remain in the bishop’s fidelity; and he made the same reservations, along with a third of the priests’ ‘gift’ (probably entrance gift) and an annual ram and hog, in three churches whose tithe he was allowing a lay couple to keep.91 But in both cases he was keeping lordly control in churches of the bishopric’s property, not asserting diocesan jurisdiction in someone else’s church. By the twelfth century, however, some safeguarding of episcopal authority appears in bishops’ transactions. About 1097 bishop William I of Toulon conceded churches to Saint-Victor in a way that seems not to be merely part of the Arluf-Marseilles family’s donation, but in effect a diocesan recognition of this,92 since he reserved ‘bishop’s rights’ (his excommunications to be obeyed within the castle; the monks to be his fideles and friends). But these were idiosyncratic; more in the mainstream was the first bishop of Antibes not drawn from the lords of Grasse, who in 1113 restored a number of churches to Le´rins retaining the synodal dues and in some cases a proportion of the tithe.93 86

e.g. ibid. nos. 293 and 474 (passage on churches at Hye`res). Cf. ibid. nos. 230, 687–8, 1013. 88 Above, p. 301–2. Le´rins no. 102 (1041). Ibid. no. 210 (the Moustiers names suggest that the editors’ date, 990–7, is too early in his episcopacy: 90 cf. St-Victor no. 613). Le´tins no. 29 (1038), St-Victor nos. 768–70 (c.1040). 91 92 Apt nos. 26, 34 (976, 986). St-Victor no. 480. 93 Le´rins no. 129. Cf. St-Victor nos. 734, 735 (1115, 1129, bp. of Gap). 87

89

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By that time Provençal bishops are found granting or confirming churches, individually or by the score, to Saint-Victor or to Le´rins, in terms that leave it ambiguous whether they are making a transfer out of episcopal property (or a tangle of episcopal and family property: at Antibes in 1113 the bishop was perhaps disburdening himself and his bishopric of possessions they should never have had, while retaining a minimum of diocesan right), or conceding the monastery’s proprietary rights in churches of the diocese obtained from whatever source.94 This would at least assert diocesan authority even when nothing specific was reserved. It is rather clearer in 1143, in an agreement over certain churches between Toulon and Saint-Victor, that Toulon was giving up property claims in all but one while reserving varying diocesan rights; the one exception—a parish church at Pierrefeu—was to be kept by the bishop as property (he was to ‘have and possess’ it).95 Even in Provence, the relation and difference between property and authority were clarifying at last. 94 e.g. St.Victor. nos. 600, 601 (1085, 1099): successive bps. of Fre´jus, responding to the monks’ complaints about several churches of theirs in the diocese, ‘give’ them (‘reddo, dono et concedo’); some at least had been given long ago by laymen and women (ibid. nos. 602, 581, probably 551). 95 Ibid. no. 971.

PART IV

Ideas, Opinion, Change


21 The juridical condition of churches

The concluding chapters of this book concern the emergence of opinions on the rights and wrongs of treating churches as property, and eventual changes in practice. But first we need to consider how the property-right itself was understood and handled.

21.i. The church as person and as thing We can begin with the question (so far only glanced at) whether a church could both have property of its own and be itself the property of its founders or their successors. At a practical level, without meaning anything very precise by ‘property’, it obviously could (hence the possibility of bypassing the question up to now). But the classic formulation of the idea of churches as property made them mere things, incapable of having rights at all. In Stutz’s view the effect on a church of being owned was to extinguish its civil personality and make it a mere object with pertinences or appendages, not property. A church no more ‘owned’ its churchyard, priest’s house and garden, farm buildings, and land, than a mill its mill-pond and miller’s house. The church-owner had set these possessions aside as a sub-estate or separate possession, a Sondervermo¨gen; he might indeed regard this as dedicated to religious uses and inalienable from the church, but it is he, not the church, that owns the whole complex and can dispose of it en bloc.1 Certainly this power of disposal was constantly asserted. To take early examples of what was becoming normal, Willibrord’s testament in 726 relates how ‘Rothing gave me . . . a church in the castle of Antwerp . . . with its appendages’, named villae, and ‘a third part of the tolls in the castle itself’; in 790 Perahtold and his wife Gersind gave St Gall ‘our church at the place called 1

Below, notes 4, 13; cf. Tellenbach, Passau. Ekl., 52–65.

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Ideas, opinion, change

Rammesau which the River Danube flows round, with its houses, buildings, serfs, lands, meadows, pastures, ways, waters and water-courses, cattle of either sex, lands cultivated and uncultivated, movables and immovables, and whatever might be called pertinent to that church’.2 The first charter specifies actual pertinences, the second uses a standard pertinence formula, but with the same implications of what the donor can dispose of. For Stutz, churches so dealt with had lost all property-owning capacity. They were objects of proprietas, hereditas, potestas, or dominium; this last with no implication of lordship over a person, no near-identity with defence or mundium implying a relationship between persons;3 it was pure ‘Gewere’, uncomplicated power over things.4 This all-or-nothing approach must strike a modern reader as anachronistic, looking for clarity and consistency which customary law neither provided nor needed. We can nonetheless ask two questions. First, to whom or what were a church’s endowments supposed to be given? Secondly, what kind of gift was it, creating what kind of right? On the first question, it may be true that as Roman law (even vulgar law) was diluted and its principles blurred, so the late Roman idea of a church’s civil personality (taken for granted rather than worked out)5 was fractured. It is not that early medieval ideas of property were limited to living and earthly persons;6 on the contrary, people could and did in words and symbols attribute the capacity for property-owning sometimes to the actual church building or the place, the locus,7 sometimes to the altar as its focal point. More regularly and often simultaneously, they spoke of endowments as given to God, and more specifically to the church’s patron saint or saints, whose relics might be enshrined in the altar or buried under it.8 As for lesser churches, Imbart de la Tour suggested long ago that a reason for attributing independent property to them was the localized presence and protection of a saint.9 At the same time endowments were given to the mortals in charge on earth: abbot and monks, bishop and clergy, perhaps the priest of a lesser church.10 And since of this hierarchy of persons only the lower ranks were available to appear in lawcourts or take physical possession of gifts (as distinct from intervening from above by striking down false witnesses or stopping fires), it might be the bishop, abbot, or priest, as rector, who appeared as the owner in practice, perhaps seen as 2

3 Echternach no. 39; St Gallen no. 127. See above, pp. 230, 233, 234 note 41. Stutz, Benef., 370; id., ‘EKnvermo¨gen’, 1242–51; ‘Kapitel’, 15–23, 25–32, 45. 5 See above, pp. 11 note 10, 14, notes 16–17, 109 note 5, 122. 6 As argued by Ficker in 1872; see Bondroit’s criticisms, De capacitate, 143–50. 7 e.g. Gorze nos. 5, 6 (757, 759); Archiv condal Barcelona no. 231 (992). See Lo¨ning, Kirchenrechts, II. 645–6. 8 Charters in Spain often have especially high-flown addresses, ‘to the unconquered and triumphant lords’ such-and-such saints ‘and their relics’, e.g. PMHD nos. 5, 9, 191, 327, 649 (between 882 and 1085); Arlanza nos. 4, 39 (924, 1042); the dispositive part may give the property ‘to you our lords’ or ‘to God and the relics of the saints Mary and others buried there’, PMHD nos. 5 (882), 409 (1059). 9 10 Imbart, Origines, 47–8, 67–70. But charters giving lands to lesser churches are scarce. 4

The juridical condition of churches

731

the saint’s or the church’s representative. All these ideas and more (such as that property given for the poor was given to them) could co-exist; the phrases used in giving property to churches (even from Roman times) were mixed and various: ‘to God and to you, church of St Silvester’; ‘to God and to you, St Michael archangel, and to your monastery built by me’; ‘to the aforesaid monastery, to such-and-such a saint, and to such-and-such an abbot’; ‘to that place . . . and those saints . . . and to the poor and pilgrims of the Irish people’, and so on in infinite diversity.11 Grants by others than the founder sometimes look like a peppering with shot in the hope that one or two will hit the target: so in 772 a dependent Aleman priest promises his gains ‘to you’ (the owners) ‘and that church and that saint and its guardians’.12 Stutz of course was familiar with all this, but he held that in the course of time—first for lesser churches, then for greater ones—such expressions were drained of meaning, attributing property as a matter of form to a saint, an altar, or a church when in fact it belonged purely and simply to the church-owner (who might or might not be also the rector). Gifts were made to the altar in the form of a property transfer, using verbs such as tradere, donare, delegare, but this meant nothing: the possessions became simply pertinences of the altar which itself belonged to the owner. If the owner ‘gave’ a possession to his church he was merely changing the use of something of his own; if a third party gave something, he gave it really to the owner. Any attention paid to the Church’s prohibition on alienating church property could only mean that the owner would not transfer his own property from one use to another.13 All this rested on the principle that superficies solo cedit: that ownership of anything fixed to the ground (as a stone altar was) went with the ground itself. Thus even more meaningless was the occasional use of the old Roman formula that gave the site itself to the altar, which should have automatically excluded any founder’s property-right.14 Where, as in Lombard Italy, these formulae were combined with explicit reservation of potestas or dominium to founders and their heirs, Stutz saw this in nineteenth-century terms as a ‘hybrid’ resulting from the clash of ‘Germanic’ ideas with the bishops’ Roman law; and Feine classified Lombard foundations accordingly, identifying first those that really implied civil personality without any contradictory claims, the founder reserving at most a duty of defence; secondly, those using donation formulae but reserving dominium for one or two lives, thus postponing the church’s attainment of civil personality; and thirdly those establishing a ‘genuine Eigenkirche’, the founder reserving ownership 11

CDL I–II nos. 24, 145; MGH Form., 480–1; above, pp. 129–30. See Davies, Microcosm, 7, 9, 140; White, 12 St Gallen no. 68. The conjunction is vel (neither et nor aut). Custom, 19 n. 3. 13 Stutz, ‘EKnvermo¨gen’, 1249–53; ‘Kapitel’, 23–5; Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 57–62. 14 Stutz, ‘EK, EKl.’, 7; Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 5.

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indefinitely, the old formulae if used at all being meaningless.15 This analysis is fair enough as a way of categorizing the Lombard charters by their content. But it does not reflect the facts: churches in Feine’s first two categories were liable all along to be treated as property,16 and he himself shows that in practice defence merged into ownership.17 At the same time, the claim that words and phrases were being used vacuously is undermined by having to be applied very selectively. Lesser churches were constantly given as objects to greater churches, which were by implication real property-owners;18 so when a Bavarian founder gives land to his church and then gives church and land to the cathedral, symbolically placing the charter on the cathedral altar (or into the bishop’s hands, or on a casket of relics brought to the spot),19 on the legalistic view the latter transaction would be real and the former unreal; likewise when in 843 an Aleman noble gives land to his church and the church to St Gall, using of both the same words trado et transfundo.20 It is hard to believe that anyone thought like this: that both transactions were not equally real in sentiment and motive. On Stutz’s view, both became eventually equally unreal: when greater churches themselves became (as he saw it) objects of property, any churches ‘given’ to them became their mere pertinences (each with its own pertinences).21 But the language of ‘pertinences’ is ambiguous. When count Eberhard about 735 gave estates to the monastery of Murbach, ‘with the basilicas belonging to those places and whatever belongs to those basilicas’,22 this could be seen at both levels as ‘mere’ pertinences, but rather suggests layers of property-holding (pertinere has both meanings, like ‘belonging’ in English or ‘appartenir’ in French). The possibility of degrees or layers of property seems to be there all along:23 even a church owned as part of an estate might have rights. On the closely related matter of churches under defence, Bo¨hmer suggested that they were like serfs, neither quite persons nor quite things, or that like women or minors they needed 15

Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 14–15, 18–20; 22–7; 31–40, 56, 61, 63; II. 26–8. Above, pp. 50–2 and note 16, 54–5. 17 Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 58–61; cf. Voigt, Ko¨nigl. EKl., 70–3, 78–9. See above, p. 237, for ius et defensio palatii and ius et potestas palatii as interchangeable. 18 Stutz, ‘Kapitel’, 24–5, accepts that the formulae for giving property to great churches remained live for some time; cf. Nottarp, Bistumserrichtung, 192–209, 216 n. 3. 19 Stutz, ‘EKnvermo¨gen’, 1198–1208, 1241–63. 20 St Gallen no. 386. DOIII no. 305 (998) gave land to Memleben ex nostro iure in ius atque dominium eiusdem monasterii; DHII no. 331 (1015) gave Memleben to Hersfeld in exactly the same terms. 21 Nottarp (op. cit., 211–13) saw naming the cathedral saint as recipient of donations as merely promoting a ‘popular’ view, and legally meaningless since the same formulae were used for Eigenkirchen (213 n. 1; cf. Schlesinger, KG Sachsens, I. 247). But this begs the question. 22 Above, p. 114 note 46. 23 In Italy, see bp. Peredeus’s testament, 778 (above, p. 61); almost three centuries later, Cava no. 1073 (1047), below, p. 666 at note 44. 16


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a guardian to look after them;24 Voigt held more bluntly that churches could be both owned things and defended persons.25 Seeing churches as persons need not imply any strictly juristic notion of their personality; but the idea is no more childish or merely ‘popular’ than the idea of the church itself, with its property, as the property of a saint.26 The extreme Eigenkirche view is based, however, not solely on the legal difficulty of an owning person being an owned thing, but also on the logical difficulty of seeing someone as owning an altar because he owns its site, while the altar itself owns the site and everything else.27 And there is an imaginative difficulty, when God and the saints are brought into the picture, of seeing the church as subject to a kind of forked dominion coming both downwards from Heaven and sideways from castle or manor-house. But we should not feel compelled to sort out these difficulties. It is not evident that early medieval church-owners, or their advocates in court, felt the need of or used the principle superficies solo cedit28 (as distinct from the unargued assumption that whoever gave the site kept dominium over the church and its possessions).29 As for the more rebarbative idea of both saint and founder’s heir as proprietors, the dim glow of belonging to a saint could be acknowledged by seeing the lord of the church as holding it under the saint’s patronage; certainly an acceptable picture of things where the owner was himself the rector, a hereditary priest or abbot with alodial rights in the church. Such an owner would be well advised not to rob his own church;30 this might give force to the Church’s ban on alienation. In fact the variety of phrases used—giving in various combinations to God, the saints, the poor; the place, church, altar; rector, abbot, monks—suggests not a decline into meaningless formalism but paradox, confusion, a rich complexity; possibly for some a conscious embarrassment. However legally or logically impossible, it was humanly fully possible for a family to think of themselves as owning a church and, at another level, of the church and the saint who guarded it as owning everything they had given it—and even by a kind of symbiosis owning themselves, or those of them living there as clergy or monks.31 This was elegantly expressed for a tenth-century Neapolitan widow and daughter, probably living a 24

Bo¨hmer, EKtum, 342, 344; cf. Scho¨nfeld, ‘Xenodochien’, 47–9 and nn. Voigt, Ko¨nigl. Ekl., 2–4, 68–72, 86–7. 26 See Maitland’s illuminating remarks, Pollock and Maitland, English Law (2nd edn.), I. 243–4, 499–501; and now for the idea’s social significance Rosenwein, Neighbor, esp. 75–6. 27 See Stutz, ‘Kapitel’, 33–40; Thomas, Droit, 33–6. There were potential complications when a monastery contained a group of churches (e.g. Saint-Riquier) or a church had several altars (as any greater church would): while the high altar was the focus, gifts might be made to other particular altars (e.g. 1035, 28 Pinerole no. 6, with chantry-like obligations). See Thomas, Droit, 33–6. 29 Stutz, ‘Kapitel’, 33–40 and nn.; Feine, ‘Studien’, I. 57n. 147. 30 His caution might be more acute if he were contemplating removing not just the saint’s property 31 See above, pp. 51, 59. but his relics (see above, p. 457). 25

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domestic religious life, when they gave to the monastery of SS. Sergius and Bacchus their ‘own church’ of St Euphemia, reserving for their lifetimes the full power of exploitation, at the same time endowing it with nearby gardens, which they offered ‘to our church, oh blessed Euphemia martyr of Christ’.32 Paradox is after all built into Christianity itself, and these expressions need be no more meaningless than the Virgin’s address to her Child in the carol: ‘My son, my brother, father dear, why liest thou thus in hay?’ This basic paradox lies behind the patristic idea of a Christian making Christ one of his heirs: in St Augustine’s words: ‘Make a place for Christ among your sons, let your Lord be added to your family, let your Creator join your offspring . . . there being so great a difference, He has deigned to be a brother; and being the Father’s only Son, He wishes to have co-heirs. Seeing how generously He acts, why do you act so meagrely?’33 Transmuted in the early medieval world, this idea could contribute to the character of proprietary churches as both person and thing (sharply enough, perhaps, to bring out the tensions). For as already suggested,34 a Visigoth possibly, a Bavarian or Lombard certainly (with this teaching to light up the custom), could make a church one of his heirs—and as an heir, obviously a person—by giving it his free share. If it was an existing, greater church, its portion would be separated from the family once a partition was made, as intended by a Lombard who in 794 made the cathedral of Lucca his heir and laid down that after his death it should have full power, ‘like my other heirs who were born of my seed’.35 For a new, small church made ‘heir’ the founder might similarly intend it eventually to have its own separated share like a son and go its own way.36 He is more likely, however, to arrange that one of his real sons rule it; and after his death his sons, dividing his property, may throw the church and its share into the pool, ignore or forget (because of its need for a human ruler, its lack of any working personality) that it is supposed to be one of themselves, and either keep it as common property in which they have their shares or allot it as his portion to one among them (whose own heirs in turn might later share it). In southern Italy the idea of a church being one among its founder’s heirs was live enough in 868 for Guaifer prince of Salerno to make his new collegiate church of S. Massimo his heir for one son’s share, and for everything if his family were to die out; and though making characteristically Lombard arrangements for his own unlimited potestas (‘of doing what I wish and disposing in other ways’) and his sons’ and heirs’ more limited control (of appointing priests but not of 32 33 34 35 36

RNeapAM no. 6 (920); see Feine, Studien, II. 48. Augustine, Sermo, 86 c. xi. 13 (PL 38. 529); see Schultze, Seelteil, 187; Bruck, Kirchenva¨ter, 24–6, 76–104. Above, pp. 21–3, 36, 41, 50, 58–9. Mem. Lucc., IV. i. 113; see Schultze, Seelteil, 48. See below, at note 40. Specifying eventual election suggests this.


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alienation), he arranges for its protection against them if necessary. Yet the archbishop’s absolutio in 882 promised (in the standard way for these episcopal charters) that the church ‘should always be in your and your heirs’ power’;37 and after a period when S. Massimo’s status seems really and unusually to have reflected its heirship, abbot Alfer in the mid-eleventh century could speak of ‘the church belonging to us and to my consortes, sons of the late count Alfer’.38 The sentiment (while it lasts) that a church as an heir is a member of the family does not strictly depend on the ‘son’s share’ idea (possibly in any case restricted to the Lombards); using any kind of disposable share for a church could have the same effect. But there is little to suggest that among the Franks any idea of a soul’s share or free share entered into the founding of new churches39 (the church that in the 818–19 addenda to the written laws is described as heir to a share is clearly not a new private church but an existing great church, with its own immunity into which its separated share will eventually fall).40 Frankish endowments were generally made with heirs’ consent or participation rather than limited to a father’s share; while Frankish founders describing their churches as ‘heirs’ seem to be mostly childless bishops or abbots, or occasionally childless laity, exercising testamentary choice of heir.41 A man who founds a church as his sole heir may nonetheless give it away: when Meginhart ‘conveys and transfers’ his ‘inheritance’ both to the cathedral of Passau and to ‘my oratory that I myself built’, he calls the oratory ‘my heir’, but seems to have given it to the cathedral.42 Such churches are evidently both thing and person. The quite separate notion of a church’s endowment as a dos suggested that it was a person (indeed the bride of Christ), whether the analogy was meant to be with what a husband gave his wife (which is supported by the use in Provence and Languedoc of sponsalicium)43 or with what a father gave with his daughter (which would make better sense). But it seems only a figure of speech, not a fully thought-out metaphor, nor a lively literal belief like the saint’s ownership. In any case some ambiguity crept into the idea of the dos with Frankish legislation for the priest’s minimum living, especially since any endowment of a lesser church that 37

38 Cava nos. 64, 87 (see above, p. 404). Above, p. 405. For traces of a Frankish idea of a one-third soul’s share see Bruck, Kirchenva¨ter, 229–46. 40 Above, p. 29 note 87. For an Italian instance see above, at note 35. 41 Chevrier, ‘Dećlin’, 7 n. 3; Bruck, op. cit., 238–40. See above, pp. 112–13, 114. The 7th-c. Angevin lay founders’ charter (above, p. 113 note 40) concludes: ‘because we prefer you, sacrosanct church . . . to the rest of our heirs’; cf. Abbo’s (very correct) testament (above, 114 note 49): te sacrosancta ecclesia . . . heres mihi es tu . . . ceteri cetere exheredis sint tote. 42 Passau no. 34 (791 or 796.) Those for whose souls he does this include his wife and daughter, presumably dead or in religious life. 43 It might make sense as providing a dower for Christ to give to the church, but this seems tortuous. 39


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extended beyond the rent-free mansus was by implication open to being charged rent or service by the church’s lord.44 This raises the second question (always implicit in the first), that of the character of church property: whether a church—given that it was capable of having rights—always owned its endowment outright or alodially, or might sometimes be seen as holding it conditionally or temporarily, in what might be called dependent tenure. Balon argued in 1959 that churches in Merovingian times had to be either absolute owners free of anyone’s lordship (great churches whose founders had given them blocks of their own lordship) or else mere tenants (lesser churches founded within a lordship, with tenure like a peasant’s).45 This may be nearer to the truth about great churches than seeing them as items of property. But it turns on an unacceptably monolithic concept of dominium, identifying it with alodium as the lordship of the great, and with immunity, seen as almost total autonomy.46 His view made no sense of a hereditary priest’s church or an abbot’s own monastery; while for outside lords’ foundations it imposed a clarity not to be found in their charters, let alone their practice.47 These are questions about ideas and sentiments as well as about customary law. Since endowments could be seen simultaneously as God’s, a saint’s, and the church’s, the questions if posed at all might well be unresolvable. For God and the saints the property could only be perpetual and unconditional; for a church with legal personality, not necessarily (if it could be a prote´ge´ perhaps it could be a tenant). Very early on, the council of Braga (572) spoke with reprobation of a church founded sub tributaria condicione, in a peasant-like dependence. The Spanish bishops may have produced the idea of a dos as a counter to this; but with the Franks later, the very phrase mansus dotalis which came into widespread use after the 818–19 legislation suggests a parallel with the peasant’s position.48 Although a mansus originally meant a household and what it needed, by the ninth century it carried a strong flavour of being subject to and included in some lordship, as most peasant holdings were. This is affected by the fact that in such churches the priest was a dependant, perhaps a serf; although he might be seen as in charge of a church that owned its own dos, the confusion (as well as mutual influence) in Carolingian times between the church’s dos and the priest’s living meant that the priest’s dependence could seep into the church’s status. The question whether the church itself could be a tenant rather than a proprietor would be of little interest if it did not reflect real possibilities of precariousness and conditionality. Since the idea of a gift was hazy, if an endowment

44 46 47

45 Above, p. 439. See above, p. 115. On alod see Reynolds, Fiefs, 59–62; briefly on immunity, above, p. 252 and note 3. 48 Above, pp. 115–118. Above, pp. 19, 21, 22–3, 439.


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was meant to be for ever and irrevocable it might be as well to say so.49 Lombards sometimes tried to retain the freedom to dispose of land they had given for their souls in some other way later, as if with the Roman freedom to alter a testamentary disposition; hence Charlemagne’s decree that deathbed donations for the soul must be made ‘absolutely’ (apart from reserving usufruct), confirming Lombard law to this effect; modified, however, by Lothar I’s concession that freedom to make changes could be explicitly reserved.50 The Church’s legislation insisted on inalienability, and grants to the Church came to be thought of as permanent unless their legitimacy could be challenged; often, however, with an implicit reservation of lordship over them.51 Meanwhile, since a gift to be valid must be requited by some kind of return, the formula pro remedium animae suae can be seen in early charters as naming the countergift: the grant’s justification to the family. Later, the promise of masses and prayers could be described as a launegild,52 and this might be transmuted into a standing condition, a continuing return. As early as 775 the Asturian king Silo gave land in Galicia to an abbot and monks, ‘that you may pray for the reward of my soul’.53 Elaborating this into memoria, the foundation charter of S. Maria of Ripoll in 890 makes Wifred count of Barcelona and his wife realize through divine mercy ‘that almsgiving frees the soul from death’, feel it ‘a great thing . . . to build a house of God and honour it with our goods’, and endow it ‘on this condition, that they do not neglect to pray for our souls and our relations’ souls, that we may be found worthy to receive forgiveness and salvation’.54 To the count and his wife the church is ‘our monastery’, and the prayers are represented almost as a service rendered for the grant of land. Of course it was the abbot and monks who would perform the service; but it was to the church that its endowments were given on these terms. From this attitude developed later, in Normandy and Norman England, first the vocabulary of a grant ‘in alms’, and then its commonplace qualification as—variously—free, pure, secure, and perpetual, or simply as ‘free alms’ (frankalmoin).55 Originally meaning a donation without any service required or any lordship implied, ‘free alms’ came to denote a kind of tenure for the church: the land was given in perpetuity, but owing spiritual services (usually simply ‘prayer’); and so, arguably, subject to at least a notional lordship (whether of founders’ heirs or of the ruler).56 This was a way of rationalizing what were 49

e.g. St Gallen, passim: perpetualiter ad possidendum. Capit. no. 98 c. 1 (801); ibid. no. 163 c. 3 (825). See Leicht, Diritto, 293–5. Conversely donors in Italy sometimes renounced testamentary freedom to ‘unwish what I have wished’ (nolle quod volui: see index). 51 52 See below, 756–7. See index; and Schultze, ‘Der Einfluss der Kirche’, 98–100. 53 54 Espanã Sagrada, 18. 306–7. Marca Hispanica, app. no. 51. 55 See Maitland, op. cit., I. 240–4; Yver, ‘Une boutade’, 785–9; and esp. Hudson, Land, Law, 88–91, 96–7 on ‘alms’ replacing the language of ‘inheritance’ for church lands. 56 A donor’s lordship seems implied when monks are to hold ‘from’ him (tenere de; for DB instances, Maitland, op. cit., I. 242 n. 2; from Norman charters, Yver, op. cit., 786 n. 9); and perhaps 50

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virtually outright gifts to the Church,57 in a country where the emerging land law was based on the idea of the fief and on all land being ultimately held from the king. Accordingly in Domesday Book small and middling churches (or their saints) regularly appear as tenants of their lands.58 Yet this was (in George Garnett’s words) ‘against the grain’ of Domesday Book, and for the greatest churches it is least in evidence.59 For alongside tenure by church or saint was the straightforward rendering of military service by prelates in return for their tenure of bishopric or abbey. In other countries too, the position of prelates was being given a more sharply feudal interpretation, if only for its usefulness in settling or shelving the Investiture Contest.60 And although the dominant idea, then and earlier, was that the prelate held the church and its lands as his benefice in his lifetime, rendered services for it (spiritual, temporal, or both), and could forfeit it, while the church itself (under its saint) was the absolute owner of perpetual property, some seepage from the prelate’s position into the great church’s was possible (just as it was from the country priest’s position to his church’s). Even in Carolingian times there had been a pervasive ambiguity (reduced but not eliminated where there was a mensa for the congregation or chapter) as to whether it was the prelate or the great church that owed service, rendered gifts, or enjoyed protection. Already the bishop or abbot received his office and land as a benefice from a ruler, while at another level the church itself (or the place, or the monastery, or the congregation) was the proprietor of its endowments and yet itself a quasi-dependant or a prote´ge´61 (the 819 Notitia represented military service, dona, and prayers as owed by the monasteries).62 But in post-Conquest England the problem was sharpened by the strong position of the kings after the Conquest, when he ‘retains’ spiritual benefits (ibid. 787 n. 19). On undefined spiritual service see Maitland, op. cit., I. 500–1. 57 The donor’s lordship was very seldom mentioned in the charters (Hudson, Land, Law, 250–1). On the nonetheless hardening idea of frankalmoin as a way of holding land from a lord, making possible the progressively narrower definition of ‘alms’ for the assise utrum (from 1164), see Maitland, op. cit., I. 246–51; A. W. Douglas, ‘Frankalmoin and Jurisdictional Immunity: Maitland Revisited’, Speculum, 53 (1978), 26–48; brief discussion in Wood, Eng. Monasteries, 33–5. The Norman Summa de Legibus (pre-mid-13th c.; ed. Tardif, Coutumiers, II), xxx. 1 (p. 99), has the grantors of lands in ‘pure alms’ retain ‘absolutely nothing for themselves and their heirs except patronal lordship’ (dominium patronale), and the grantees ‘hold from them by alms as from patrons’ (see Yver, op. cit., 794–5); but this vocabulary was only recently to hand. For other facets see B. Thompson, ‘Free Alms Tenure’, 227–31. 58 Most clearly for substantial minsters, but also for village churches (the land ‘belongs’ to the church or the church ‘has’ it, even if the priest ‘holds’ the church from whoever holds the manor). 59 See Garnett, ‘Origins’, 192–5; the rubric may be Terra ecclesiae de Hereford or Terra S. Petri, but it is usually the individual prelate who ‘holds’ the lands. 60 See Classen, ‘Wormser Konkordat’, 420–8. 61 Charles the Bald in 845 gave property to Saint-Maur (Glanfeuil) iure proprietario, attributing potestas to the place as well as its rectors, and other property on the same day in ius beneficiarium (owing nona et decima to other churches), attributing this ius similarly to the monastery itself (ACII nos. 78, 79). 62 CCM I. 493–9.


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the heightened sense among churchmen of the issues at stake, and the beginning of a more analytical approach to them.63 For local churches the ambiguity was different (and of course less troublesome). The church had its glebe, normally recognized as its perpetual property; but it had no undying community to embody or represent it, only a discontinuity of successive priests overarched by the idea of the saint’s ownership;64 while the priest may hold the church itself from its lord, or may hold only a priest’s portion in it. It was partly because its personality was so much less substantial, or less evident, that the lesser church could be regularly treated as property in a way that greater churches could not. Ambiguity, fuzziness, and even paradox may bring us closer to the proprietary church than logic or legal analysis. Nonetheless, although the idea that churches might be owned could be whittled down to patronage, probably nothing could fully replace it at the level of theory except—in the long run—a juristically worked-out principle of corporate personality. Meanwhile to be treated as property (as lesser and middling churches were consistently, and greater ones in special or aberrant circumstances) was certainly to be treated as a thing, even though not as nothing but a thing. Transactions in churches, and lawsuits or dispute settlements about them, establish this; and although examples of transactions crop up throughout this book, and of litigation quite frequently, they need some separate discussion.

21.ii. Grants of churches to individuals: loans and gifts A church, like land, could be granted to an individual for life, or in perpetuity with freedom to alienate; given away to a greater church, with or without conditions; bought and sold, mortgaged, exchanged; renounced or quitclaimed. The subject here is the wide variety of transactions that resulted in life (or longer) tenure of churches by someone other than the serving priest.1 First, a church’s lord could give it to a greater church but keep it for life, or for more than one life, by making the donation post obitum, or by making it there and then but reserving usufruct or having it back in benefice. Secondly, its lord—in this case typically a ruler or 63

See Garnett, op. cit., esp. 193–7, 208–10. e.g. Kemble, Codex Dipl. no. 814 (S 1037), where (if authentic), Edward the Confessor gave a small estate to St Olave’s, Exeter, 1063, at its priest’s request, not to him but to ‘St Mary, St Thomas the apostle, and St Olaf king and martyr, to whom the church is built’ (constructa: perhaps consecrata?). See Barlow, 1000–1066, 189–90. 1 On serving priests see above, Chapter 16. 64

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prelate—could give it for life or more than one life to an individual, in benefice or by lease. Thirdly, these could be combined when a donor gave something, which might be a church, and received it back for life and with it some of the great church’s property, again perhaps a church, likewise to hold for life. Whether reserved by a donor or granted to a new holder, tenure of the whole church would normally consist in having whatever the lord had had in it. Where the serving priest securely held the whole complex, there would be little or nothing of economic value for a lord to grant over the priest’s head; but otherwise he might be granting the bulk of its lands and revenues, out of which the recipient might have to respect an established priest’s part, or provide for a priest as he thought fit. The first of these practices—reservation by a donor—has already been illustrated.2 In the ninth century it was characteristic of donors of churches to St Gall, their reservations variously worded: ‘to possess’, ‘hold’, ‘retain’, ‘take back’3 the church; an owner-priest for himself, or himself and a deacon nephew, or his sister and his brothers’ sons;4 a layman for himself, perhaps his wife, his sons if any, or his priest;5 usually subject to a small census presumably to secure the monastery’s long-term expectation; occasionally prolonged for as long as a male line lasts.6 In Burgundy by the end of the ninth century, churches were given to the cathedral church of Vienne reserving usufruct (the census here—such as 2 pounds of wax, or a loaf of bread—explicitly in vestitura, to secure the cathedral’s right). In the western kingdom Beaulieu’s cartulary provides early instances, such as the gift to the monks in 868 of a church and villa in Auvergne, by Guigo and his wife, with immediate traditio ‘from our right into their right and dominatio’, Guigo however to ‘hold it in usufruct while I live’, paying a pound of wax a year.7 In the tenth century these reservations of usufruct were frequent in donations of churches or shares of them, as of any other property, mostly by laymen and women, to monasteries and bishoprics in much of the West; continuing, though less frequent, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.8 Occasionally its being a church may make a difference: sometimes a tenth-century donor kept life tenure in an estate but gave its church, entire, at once (often explicitly in vestitura),9 or 2

3 e.g. above, Chapter 2, passim. Recipere may be better so translated than as ‘receive’. 5 6 e.g. St Gallen nos. 162, 169, 362, 365, 474. Ibid. nos. 185–6, 225, 386, 549. Ibid. no. 474. 7 ´ St-Andre-le-Bas, app. nos.10 (895), 113 (924); Beaulieu nos. 51 (Guigo’s charter), 173 (Notitia of Guigo’s son Evrard’s final traditio on his parents’ behalf, 881). 8 For Cluny see Fechter, Cluny, Adel, 26, 30 nn. 66b and c; reckoning these as about one-third of all 10thc. donations of churches to Cluny, roughly the same proportion as for ordinary property. Cf. De´leáge, Vie rurale, 1166–85 (table 1). There are numerous other 10th–12th-c. instances in (e.g.) Maˆcon, Savigny, Brioude, Ste-Foi, Le´zat, Ange´ly, Altlux. UB, Echternach. In Spain, donors’ reservations are typically for priests; but see S. Cugat no. 635 (1063); Irache no. 52 (below, note 97). 9 e.g. Cluny nos. 445–6, 728, 825 (936 to 955; Fechter mistakenly includes three of these among churches kept for life, op. cit., 30 nn. 66b–c); Fleury no. 47 (941). 4


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a share of it in advance of the rest;10 or (rarely, it seems) it could be reserved for a man but not for his wife.11 Sometimes a church was given to a monastery or bishopric neither post obitum nor with the condition written in that it was to be kept in usufruct, but on the understanding (or with the outcome) that it would be granted back to the donor or his nominee in benefice or precaria.12 The differences between these arrangements were often blurred, or unimportant (an individual’s charter of donation reserving usufruct could be met by the donee’s charter granting the property back to him in precaria).13 Any of these transactions, in churches as in lands, could be part of the continuing ‘give and take’ between lay families and regional monasteries described for Cluny by Barbara Rosenwein;14 while in peak periods of the flood of property to great churches, many donations can have been possible only on these terms.15 The temporary grant of a church was often made not to someone who has just given the church on that understanding, but to secure rent or service, or as an act of patronage, or to conciliate the powerful.16 This has already been discussed as regards tenant priests, with some incidental consideration of such grants to laymen or women.17 These grants, if written at all, tended to follow whatever forms of lease or temporary donation were available for any property at the time and place, and were as easily used for lay as for clerical recipients. In France and Burgundy such a grant was typically called a precaria (something asked for) or a prestaria (a loan). Grants by the bishops of Maˆcon in the tenth and eleventh centuries commonly state that a priest, a clerk, a canon with his mother, a layman with his wife and son, ‘came and asked that we would grant them something of St Vincent’s possessions’, which is then specified, often a church; and that the bishop has accordingly granted it to the postulant to ‘hold and possess for life’, and after him his wife or son or whatever named beneficiaries survive him, paying a stated census.18 Other bishops and abbots in France made 10 e.g. Savigny no. 139 (974); numerous Cluny examples from first half of 11th c. (Mager, ‘Verha¨ltnis’, 190–1 and n. 73). It may simply have been what could conveniently be given at once. 11 In Beaulieu no. 28, where a couple give a church and estate reserving usufruct (943–8), should she die first a vineyard goes immediately to Beaulieu, he retaining the church; should he die first, the church goes at once to Beaulieu, she retaining the rest. Cf. below, at note 26 (early 9th-c. Mainz). A counter-example is Cluny no. 1272 (969–70). 12 e.g. Freising no. 477 (822). On precaria in this context see Lemarignier, ‘Actes St-Bertin’, 43–4, 56. In Italy the grant back to the donor could be a formal lease; e.g. 852, the bp. of Lucca’s lease to a layman Causeram of a monasterium which Causeram himself had given to the bishopric, his daughter Hiudiperga being already rectrix there (Mem. Lucc., IV. 2 no. 33, Causeram’s carta repromissionis). 13 e.g. St Gallen nos. 222, 223 (817); cf. no. 556 (872). Precaria could be as non-technical (‘something asked 14 for’) as beneficium (‘a boon’). Neighbor, 49–76; for the 8th c. cf. I. Wood, ‘Teutsind’, 44–5. 15 See De´leáge’s caution (Vie rurale, 599 and n. 5) on Fulda and Corvey cartularists probably often omitting donors’ reservations. 16 The church had however sometimes come originally from the family of the beneficiary, e.g. Maˆcon no. 39 (882); perhaps Cluny no. 1073 (959). 17 18 Above, pp. 535–6, 543. Above, p. 693.

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similar grants of churches, as Maiolus of Cluny did in his forty years’ abbacy for a handful of noble clerks and laymen sometimes with their wives or sons, some more clearly as precaria than others.19 Such tenure easily became permanent. In mid-eleventh-century Champagne, Gosfred of Joinville asked Montier-en-Der for four churches for himself and two heirs, which were among seven churches that his father Stephen had taken from the monks and given up under threat of excommunication and royal intervention.20 Around that time in Gascony, La Reóle gave a moiety of a church to a layman (‘in fief’ according to the cartularist) on condition that none of his heirs should have it after him; but his son claimed it by hereditary right (and actually took its tithes) until in 1087, defeated at law, he had to surrender it.21 In some cases no rent is mentioned but land and a vineyard have been given in exchange for the lease.22 This is close to the kind of transaction—which may be called a precarial exchange23—whereby a bishop or abbot gives property in life tenure to someone who himself gives to the bishopric or monastery property of his own in perpetuity, but keeps this too for life. It was a transaction well suited to both parties: to individuals, usually laymen, taking a short view (perhaps unable to do otherwise) or wanting the best of both worlds (to make a pious donation while increasing their resources in their lifetime), and to monastic or cathedral communities able to take a long view (forgoing some income for the time being for the sake of increasing their total property).24 What the layman gives, or what he receives, or both, might include or consist of a church.25 Early arrangements of this kind, not yet under the name of precaria or prestaria, come widely scattered in the eastern kingdom, with churches passing both ways. As early as 815, Hrandolf and his wife Theotrath gave to Hersfeld vineyards, serfs, and town property in Mainz, keeping life usufruct, receiving in benefice from the abbot the chapel of Schornsheim in the Rhineland; what Hersfeld preserved was Hrandolf’s charter of donation, with provisions for life tenure turning on who is the survivor (including the chapel for him but not for her).26 In Thuringia in 887 the abbot of Fulda made such an arrangement with a famulus Dei Gotesdeu (here too the church was not what Gotesdeu gave but what he was given); it takes the 19 e.g. Cluny nos. 912, 942 (with 1529), 1073, 1501; see Fechter, op. cit., 29 and nn. Cf. Fleury nos. 35, 46 (907, 940). The evidence includes late 11th-c. restitutions, e.g. in Languedoc, Le´zat no. 83; in the Limousin, 20 Uzerche no. 48. Montier-en-Der nos. 20 (1027), 44 (not later than 1061). 21 La Reóle no. 76 (cartularist’s narrative). 22 e.g. Pol. Irminonis, ix. 152–8, 269, 270 (on Aulnay); Cluny nos. 912, 942, Fleury no. 35. 23 I reserve this term, rather arbitrarily, for what De´leáge calls ‘donation restitueé en usufruit augmenteé d’une concession en usufruit d’un bien propre du bailleur’, as distinct from ‘concession en usufruit compensatrice d’une donation’ (Vie rurale, 601). 24 See Weinberger, ‘Precarial Grants’, 163–9. 25 In De´leáge’s table 2 for Burgundy (op. cit., 1186–8) four out of his eleven cases involve churches. 26 Hersfeld no. 17 (this church had recently been a woman’s benefice, below, note 46).


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form of an exchange, but concludes (lease-like): ‘on this condition, that whatever he has given and whatever he has received he shall have for life and hold and possess in usufruct’, for an ounce of silver a year, all to return improved to Fulda.27 In Alemania in 870 St Gall made a similar arrangement but with the donor of a church, a layman Landeloh; some of what he gave and received was to be kept for life by his mother, some—including the church—by his priest Willebold, should they survive him.28 Further west such arrangements had already appeared under the name of precaria or prestaria; as in the archbishop of Vienne’s exchange with a couple who gave a villa with two churches and received in prestaria a villa with a church; to hold ad proprium while they lived, ‘both what they have given and what they have received’.29 Some of the many precariae given by bishops of Maˆcon were of this kind.30 About 930 an unusually important exchange-precaria was made between Maˆcon and count Alberic, more in line in its opening clauses with the ordinary precaria: Alberic has asked bishop Berno to give him ‘something from the earthly possessions of St Vincent’, namely the church of Saint-Amour (in the Jura), the office of provost there, and its chapels; the bishop has complied; Alberic’s two sons are to have all this for their lives. On the other hand the father and sons have given property including the chapel of Farges and another church, which they are also evidently to hold for life (for a census of 10s. in silver) since only after all three have died is Maˆcon to get possession both of its own property and of what the family has given.31 Unusually, the laymen’s counter-donation is explained: it is given ‘so that they may hold these things without taint of sin (because they are holy, and were given in alms to St Vincent)’;32 but the potential sin seems to be focused less on the sanctity of Saint-Amour than on its belonging to St Vincent; only a fair exchange could justify what they have gained. Also in the cartulary is count Alberic’s corresponding charter, starting with his own donation of Farges and explaining the other donations as ‘recompense’ for the bishop’s precaria to him and his sons; after whose deaths the church of Maˆcon ‘is to receive entire both these gifts and the precaria’.33 By this time abbots of Savigny and of Cluny were also making deals of this kind in land and occasionally in churches.34 27

Fulda no. 625 (887). St Gallen no. 549. In Bavaria the widow Irmburc’s transaction with Moosburg, 899 (See index: Irmburc) was of this kind. Among the earliest instances, though not totally explicit, are Brevium exempla, Capit. I no. 128 c. 10. 10 and 13 (between Wissembourg and priest-donors). 29 ARProv. no. 3 (858; Charles of Provence’s confirmation). 30 e.g. Maˆcon no. 39 (882), for a priest and his brother. 31 Except for the land at Farges (given immediately). 32 Probably the cartularist’s inserted comment. 33 Ibid. nos. 8, 38. The two charters as recorded do not agree exactly. 34 Savigny nos. 6, 7, 8 (919, 925, 927); no. 134 (c.970; two couples receive a moiety of a church recently acquired by Savigny, ibid. no. 133, and give the other moiety ‘which belongs to them’, so holding the reunited church for life). Cluny no. 1933 (992–3) may be an exchange-precaria in substance. 28

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Meanwhile exchange-precariae involving churches had appeared in Lotharingia:35 in 903 between Robert archbishop of Metz as abbot of Gorze and a married couple and their daughter, who have given land and vineyards and receive a church and other land, all to be held for life, more precario, ‘by our and our successors’ benefice’, and sub usufructuario.36 Above all such arrangements were made at Trier, with simpler, more confident terminology (to hold for life, iure precario), by archbishop Robert in 938 for his predecessor’s niece Ada and her two sons; by the cathedral canons in 967 for Wicfrid, chorepiscopus (who significantly asks that no heir of his shall be allowed to have these things iure precario); and by the abbot and monks of St Maximin in 909 for Roric with his wife and son, in 926 for Bernacer and his daughter, and in 978 for Udo and his wife Gisela.37 In all these cases what the individual or family received included a church, while what they gave did not, except for Bernacer’s important donation which included two churches. What survives is sometimes the abbot’s or bishop’s record (‘Ada daughter of Folrad came and asked me . . . ’), sometimes the individual donor’s charter, beginning either with his own donation (‘I Bernacer have given . . . ’), or with acknowledgment of what he has received (‘I Udo . . . have obtained a precaria from the abbot and monks of St Maximin . . . ’).38 Essentially the same kind of transaction can be found in Languedoc, preserved in the charters for the cathedral church of Elne by which two separate donors in 959 and a third in 996 each gave an alod (a quarter-share in a villa; land, houses, farms, and mills; a manse with garden, dovecot, cellars, vineyard, and fields) in exchange for a parish, its church, and its tithes and offerings, while each was to hold in usufruct both the church received and the alod given.39 Rulers and other lay lords probably never granted this kind of exchange-precaria in churches.40 But they made ordinary grants of churches in temporary tenure, to lay as well as clerical tenants, probably most often by benefice. Bishops and abbots often seem to use the word beneficium quite casually for what they are also calling a precaria or a grant of usufruct, calling it a benefice perhaps simply to indicate that it is a boon, a favour (often no doubt hardly voluntary), even if

35

An early instance is Pru¨m’s prestaria for Gerhild, 866 (UBMR I no.105), giving her tenure of a church she gave and of a church of Pru¨m’s (but this came indirectly from her; she evidently wanted it back because of unease about Prum’s management of it). This church was at a different Bacheim from the chapel mentioned in note 50, below; see ed. note, DLothII, 426–7. 36 Gorze no. 86; cf. no. 90 (914), an arrangement with Wigeric as secular abbot using virtually the same pile of formulae. In substance, cf. Lie`ge’s arrangement with Wigeric, 912–15 (above, p. 318); St-Mihiel no. 37 20. Altlux. UB nos. 154, 178, 141b, 150, 186. 38 On Roric and Bernacer see Nightingale, Gorze Reform, 209–10, 212–13. 39 Above, p. 536. Cf. much later in Normandy (again in effect but not by name) St-Wandrille no. 43 40 (c.1071). It would suit ecclesiastical establishments only.


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subject to rent.41 But for Carolingian rulers it seems nearer to being a technical term: an unwritten grant to someone deserving reward or needing maintenance, probably not specifying any payment, and in principle dependent on the grantor’s continued favour.42 The evidence for kings giving churches (or estates with churches) as benefices is almost never a direct written record of the grant.43 Often they were not fiscal churches at all, but belonged to a great church that had had to grant them to the king’s men; any written grant would come from the church, not the king, and might be called a precaria verbo regis, a temporary grant at the king’s command, though for the beneficiary it is still a benefice from the king.44 Benefices of this kind (and others made by lay abbots) sometimes surface when a great church’s property is restored.45 But other churches which evidently were the king’s were granted in benefice, as may emerge when the king gives a church away to a greater church.46 Often the benefice goes on record when it is superseded, by a grant for life (or longer) of a church ‘which he previously held in benefice’. For Carolingian rulers did make written grants of churches for life, as Louis the German did for his chaplain Liudprand, ‘to have securely all the days of his life’, after his death to revert to royal potestas.47 A church could be given ‘as property’—in proprietatem, in proprium, in ius et dominium—but for life only, often superseding a benefice; Charles the Fat did this for his priest and ministerialis Robert, and in almost the same terms for his fidelis Euprand.48 Lothar II gave the church and villa of Gu¨sten in Lotharingia to Otbert, vassal of Lothar’s partisan count Matfred, first in benefice, then in 856 ad proprium for life, and finally in 859 for himself and (should he marry) his wife and one heir, to hold usufructuario on condition of fidelity and military service.49 Otbert’s interest—religious as well as economic—in Gu¨sten after sixteen years or more was almost proprietary: he could ask Louis the German (taking control there after the treaty of Meersen) to give the church to Pru¨m, for Pru¨m to have exactly as he Otpert had it in his vestitura, on condition of maintaining twenty clerks there and feeding ten poor men, but—like a donor, 41

e.g. 799, Waltrich bp. of Passau to count Kerold, at his request, the church of Linz in usufruct as 42 a benefice (Passau no. 46). See Reynolds, Fiefs, 90–105. 43 DLD. no. 82 (857) records the grant of three chapels to a priest ‘in benefice for his lifetime’ for faithful service to Louis the German’s late daughter; but the point was to ensure reversion to the church of 44 Zurich. Above, pp. 75–6. 45 e.g. (all naming or referring to recent holders) ACII no. 75 (845), ibid. no. 236 (861), ARaoul no. 8 (925), DOIII no. 123 (993). 46 e.g. DKarol. I no. 144 (782), Charlemagne gave Hersfeld a fiscal church that a woman Lioba held by his benefice and was to keep for life (by what gets called both Charlemagne’s and the abbot’s ‘benefice’); DLothII no. 35 (866–9); DLJ no. 18 (880). See also Meaux-Paris 845–6 (MGH Conc., III no. 11 c. 78), and Stutz, 47 Benef., 164 n. 55. DLD no. 163 (875). 48 DKIII nos. 38 (881), 72 (883; granting the church for life sub usufructuario as well as in proprietatem). 49 DLothII nos. 5 (not explicitly, but evidently, for life only), 11. Lothar I had granted the church in ius et dominium to an earlier vassal of count Matfred’s (846, DLothI no. 96); the place (whose name Gu¨sten derived from its church, St Justina) was clearly important to Matfred.

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even though done by the king—reserving life tenure of everything (for a substantial census) for his wife Hildegard.50 Gu¨sten was evidently a collegiate church. Monasteries too—usually as abbatiae—could be granted by rulers in these terms. Louis the German in a privilege for SS. Felix and Regula at Zurich spoke of his daughter Bertha ruling it for life ‘and also possessing it in proprium by another precept’ of his (while Charles the Fat, giving it to his wife Richgard to have ‘all the days of her life, in usufruct’, could refer to Louis’s grant to Bertha as a precaria).51 Tenth-century German kings did likewise.52 In the West, when Charles the Simple granted an abbatiola to a layman for three lives ‘to possess by usufructuary and beneficiary right’, the general gist will have mattered more than the exact terminology.53 However, terms such as in proprium were more often used for property evidently thought of as permanent; but this needed to be made explicit. Just as a lifelong grant might supersede a benefice, so either might be superseded by a grant in proprium with power of disposal, or in ‘hereditary right’.54 Lothar I granted to his vassal Immo estates with chapels which Immo formerly held ‘by right of benefice’, now ‘as his own, by hereditary right, to do what he chooses or wishes with them’, provided he never left Lothar’s fidelity and service. Louis the German did the same for abbot Gozbald of Altaich, Charles the Bald for count Harduin, Arnulf for a priest Adalolt and for a fidelis Anno, all superseding benefices; Arnulf also for two of his chaplains, superseding grants for life.55 At the turn of the century Louis the Blind gave two chapels to his fidelis the priest Drogo ‘by hereditary right . . . to possess perpetually’, and an abbey to two lay fideles ‘to possess for the future’.56 The dispositive formula used for these grants in proprium, even if only for life, is typically ‘we transfer it from our right and domination into his’,57 either ‘to have for all the days of his life’ or ‘to have by proprietary right’ or ‘hereditary right’, 50

DLD no. 141 (giving also the chapel of Bacheim). Otpert and Hildegard were to see all this carried out, and it was done for their souls as well as Louis’s and his children’s. 51 Ibid. no. 110 (863; the ‘other precept’ does not survive); DKIII no. 7 (878; emphasizing that after her death it must return to royal potestas, perpetualiter potestative possidenda). Cf. ibid. nos. 30 (881), 88 (883, N. Italy), for grants ‘in proprietary right, for life’. 52 See Wehlt, Reichsabtei, 41–2 on royal grants of abbatia in life tenure, asserted in Lorsch’s privileges (914, DKonI, no. 23; 940, 963, DOI nos. 34, 252). Cf. Otto I’s Carolingian-like grant of S. Maria Theodata in Pavia to its regular abbess Regingard, to ‘hold and possess that monastery with all its pertinences . . . movable and immovable, to the end of her life’ (965, DOI no. 274). 53 Above, p. 318 (Melun); see Lesne, ‘Eveˆche´ et abbaye’, 47 n. 1. 54 Hereditario iure evidently means ‘with power to hand it on’. On this range of transactions see Gladiss, ‘Schenkungen’, esp. 94–102, 121–35; but his scepticism about formulae of free disposal having any meaning by the late 9th c., because kings could anyhow not prevent it, seems excessive in view of the demand for such grants (see Reynolds, Fiefs, 105, 107). 55 DLothI no. 83 (843); DLD no. 30 (841); ACII no. 24 (843); DArn. nos. 16, 82 (888, 891); ibid. nos. 15, 37 (both 888). 56 ARProv. nos. 32, 41 (896, 902). Cf. Rudolph III for the widow Ermenburg, 1028 (above, p. 586). 57 DLothI no. 83; DLD. no. 30.


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then setting out what he is to have the power to do. The power of disposal might be limited, narrowly or less so: king Arnulf’s grant to his chaplain Liudprand empowered him to give the church in alms to Reichenau or St Gall; that to the priest Adalolt, to whatever church he pleased.58 These terms may well be what the clerics concerned had asked for. But to Anno was given the power of ‘holding, giving, conveying, selling, exchanging, or doing whatever he pleases with it’; while Louis the Blind’s two laymen were given the power ‘of doing whatever they would, viz. selling, granting, giving, exchanging, and freely leaving to their heirs’.59 In their context, these formulae seem more than formulaic; such unlimited grants as these last amount to outright donation of an alod.60 Charles the Simple gave property including two churches to his wife as her dos, transferring it ‘from our right into her right and property, to have perpetually’; Otto I gave a noblewoman and her son land and a church in proprium, with all possible freedom of alienation.61 So (for the moment leaving aside the likelihood that benefices would be inherited) churches could be intentionally given away to individuals more-or-less completely and for ever. Nor was it only kings who could do this. In or before 919 the count of Nevers granted an estate and its chapel to a fidelis and his wife, ‘perpetually’, with the same libera potestas as they had in their other property.62 Very rarely (north of the Alps and Pyrenees) we have the text of an actual charter of donation from one lay person to another. Thus in 937 Acbert gave his inherited church (or group of churches) at Iguerande to his cousin Adso, with the words ‘I give and deliver everything to you, to do with it what you wish’—but in spite of this clause, intended for Cluny. Adso’s own charter giving the church to Cluny calls it ‘something of my property, which came to me by inheritance from my kindred, and which Acbert my cousin and his son Hugh conveyed to me by lawful charter according to their law, for me to offer it to God in their stead’.63 58 DArn. nos. 15, 16. Cf. his grant of the monastery Susteren to the artist-priest Siginand ‘for all time’ but to give to whatever holy place he chose (above, p. 260; it was actually given to Pru¨m by the king at Siginand’s request, perhaps Pru¨m’s preference rather than anything juridically important). Earlier, Immo’s power of disposal (above, at note 55) was subject to the king’s leave. 59 Above, at note 55–6. Anno did in fact exchange ‘one church and 7 hobae’, etc. with St Gall, as we know because (if only on St Gall’s side) it needed Arnulf’s confirmation (894, DArn. no. 129). 60 See also above, pp. 313–14. 61 ACIII no. 51 (907); DOI no. 80 (946). Cf. DRud. no. 30 (946), king Conrad’s grant of a chapel to his chaplain Ermenteus with potestas commutandi et vendendi, and Cluny no. 900 (954 þ ), Ermenteus’s sale to Cluny. 62 ACIII no. 99 (confirmation, 919). Cf. Noto abp. of Arles’s exchange (824) with a count Leibulf, giving him two churches proprietario iure ‘to claim them as his own and do with them whatever he wills’ (HL II no. 65). 63 Cluny nos. 471, 486 (for their date see above, p. 693 note 35); possibly the disguised renouncing of a disputed claim by Acbert and Hugh. On bp. Mainbod’s puzzling precarial grant to Acbert of the churches ‘sited on land of [Acbert’s] property’, see above, pp. 693–4.

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Cluny also possessed (and perhaps drafted) laymen’s charters of a different kind, from the mid-eleventh century: a married couple’s charter giving a village and its church to their son for life and his heir if any, and the testament or breve divisionalis of another couple allocating an estate with a church to two of their sons; in both cases to come to Cluny if legitimate heirs fail.64 This second couple’s arrangements are complicated: if both these brothers die childless, two other brothers are to have the property; if all four die childless, two named priests (their kinsmen) are to have it for life only (none of these six having licence to alienate), before it goes to Cluny.65 There are degrees of property here: only the natural heirs if any, or Cluny, will have it permanently with full power of disposal. In all three cases the reversion to Cluny is probably the reason not only for the charters’ survival but for their being needed at all. In the Midi, countess Garsind’s testament of 972 left churches to laymen for life only, with reversion to great churches.66 In 1046, however, Girberga daughter of Willa viscountess of Conflent gave as a melioratio—an improvement of his inheritance—to her son William Raimund a church with its firstfruits, tithes, offerings, and alods, ‘to do whatever you wish with it’ (acknowledging what seems to be his countergift of three mules); and explained that it had come to her by written donation and as melioratio from her own mother Willa.67 At the same time, while what was given as property might be incomplete, impermanent, or conditional, what began as a benefice—whether land alone or church—naturally tended to become hereditary.68 It was envisaged even in 829 that churches held by royal benefice might turn out to have been divided between co-heirs.69 It is hardly surprising that in 905 Louis the Child’s donation of Pfa¨vers to Salomon needed the consent of duke Burchard of Swabia who held it in benefice;70 but rather more significant when some seventy years later in Anjou, a local lord Raynard, backed or put up to it by his lord, count Odo I of Blois, could challenge the late countess Adela’s gift of a church to Saint-Aubin on the grounds that it belonged to his benefice, and have his assent bought with 4 pounds of silver.71 Over the next two centuries, to have been invested with a benefice or fief came in much of France and Germany to be a frequent title to land (and in Norman England almost the only one); effectively hereditary (in practice usually 64

Ibid. nos. 653 (943–64), 693 (946). 66 The church constituted one brother’s share (above, p. 636 note 59). HL V no. 126. 67 Roussillonais no. 41 (scriptura donationis vel inmeliorationis); preserved because the church later came to Urgel from her grandson (1072; ibid. nos. 52–4). 68 Discussed above, pp. 313–16, in relation to lay abbacies. See Reynolds, Fiefs, esp. 102–7. 69 70 Worms (Capit. no. 191) c. 2. Above, p. 314. 71 St-Aubin no. 3 (977); see Guillot, Comte, I. 22, II no. C.2; for the circumstances, Bachrach, ‘Geoffrey Greymantle’, 11 and n. 42. 65


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by primogeniture) under norms by which lords were increasingly bound; and a title to churches as much as to land. Already in the tenth century, but chiefly in the eleventh, it could (as we have seen) be a benefice-holder who gave a church away, with the consent or cooperation of his lord.72 The surviving deed may be the lord’s charter agreeing to the gift, or (more often) the benefice-holder’s own charter of donation, recording and briefly explaining his lord’s consent;73 but in either case, in terms that show the benefice-holder able to make a permanent donation. In 965 the consent of Walter count of Dreux to his vassal Teodfred’s gift of ‘a certain church of his benefice’ to Saint-Pe`re, Chartres, represents the monks as having asked Teodfred ‘to give it them by perpetual donation’; a hundred years later the knight Gauzbert, with the consent of count Ralph ‘of whose benefice I am seen to have it’, grants a church to Fleury ‘to have for ever’.74 Occasionally the charter records a joint traditio, as (about 1081) by Goscelin villicus and his lord Hugh de Surge`res to Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly, together handing to the prior the latch-string of the church door, although it was Goscelin’s donation with the agreement of Hugh ‘from whom I hold feudally’ (feodaliter).75 Goscelin obtained Hugh’s consent at a substantial price: first 100s. for leave to give the church ‘to whatever monastery I wished,’ and now 200s. and a silver-gilt vessel for leave to give it to St John. By contrast, in 1070 Rainald lord of Craon (in Mayenne) was paid highly by Vendoˆme for consenting to count Geoffrey’s donation of St Clement’s church, which Rainald’s father had had in benefice from the count, but to which Rainald insists he is ‘already the natural heir’ through his wife (that is, independently of his father’s benefice).76 All this suggests that who took the initiative and who agreed did not reflect any clear-cut division of property-right, and yet there could be real property-right on both sides.77 Often it is not a charter but the monks’ own record (perhaps incorporating paraphrases of charters) that both describes a church as a layman’s fief and shows 72 Above, pp. 537–8 (priests); 588 (laity). This is not to say that any donor seeking a lord’s consent must be a benefice-holder. 73 In widely varying terms (above, p. 588, and note 23); sometimes only mentioned to explain a lord’s attestation: ‘so-and-so, of whose casamentum it was’ or ‘by whose benefice he held that church’. 74 St-Pe`re, 55–6; Fleury, no. 75. Cf. St-Pe`re, 491–2 (1070–1100), a knight’s donation urged by his lord but made by himself. The donor’s lord’s own title appears as well when Isnard grants ‘my church . . . with the consent of my lord Teudo . . . who holds it by the king’s benefice’, and ‘of whose benefice I hold’ 75 (before 1080, ibid. 151–2). Ange´ly no. 69. 76 Vendoˆme no. 217. The countergift was £50 in denarii for Rainald and £7 for his wife (granddaughter of an earlier lord of Craon). 77 See also Cluny no. 3393 (1063, dioc. Nevers), donation of a moiety of a church by two clerks, to whom a miles had sold it for this purpose with the consent of ‘those from whom he possessed it’, these (four brothers) being then described by the cartularist as ‘those to whom it legally belonged’, and as ‘making the donation’ themselves after the clerks. Susan Reynolds’s discussion of pre-1100 ‘consents’ (Fiefs, 146–52; see above, p. 588 notes 23, 26) seems to me unduly sceptical about the implication, in many cases, of two or more levels of (perhaps often disputable) property-right, rather than the workings of ‘looming’ power.

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his power to dispose of it. The cartularist of Saint-Flour explains that Gerald of Turlande ‘gave the church of St George as a fief to Albuin of Broussade, and Albuin gave it for his soul’s redemption’ to St Florus.78 It was in feudal terms that the monks of Vendoˆme recorded their perceptions of the legal history of certain churches, such as that of Les Pins,79 or more complicatedly that of Maze´. Hubert viscount of Vendoˆme had held this (pertinent to an estate) in fief from count Fulk but surrendered the whole estate to him;80 Fulk separated estate and church, giving the church to a clerk who died without a legitimate heir (his surviving brother having been disinherited for fighting against the count); Fulk then held it for a time in his direct lordship, until he gave it to his son Geoffrey (Martel) on condition that Geoffrey likewise kept it in dominicatu, not giving it to anyone. Because of this agreement, when Geoffrey wished to give it to his follower Geoffrey Malramnus he merely let him have usufruct for the time being; Fulk, supposing his son to have given it in fevum, took it away; but learning that it was not after all a donatio, he allowed his son to have it and to let Malramnus have it as before.81 Evidently giving it in fief to Malramnus would have counted as a donation. A ruler’s or other lord’s original grant of a church in benefice or fief has usually left no direct record in the tenth or eleventh century. Only when grants of land in fief came to be made by charter do similar written grants of churches appear:82 in Lorraine in 1136 the abbot of Stavelot-Malme´dy granted a church to the abbot of Puble´mont (Lie`ge), who was to be invested with it at Stavelot and to swear fidelity for it, as would his successors.83 When two years later the same abbot granted a share of a church to the brothers of St Martin of Lie`ge ‘to possess by hereditary right’, this was probably just a more traditional formula for what amounted to much the same thing (that the rent for the former was 65s. and for the latter 2d. would not be for juristic reasons).84 Meanwhile other and older kinds of written grant, creating more temporary tenures, went on being made, not only for priests, and not only by princes or ecclesiastics; occasionally a lay lord, himself holding a church in fief, leases it by precaria to lay tenants. Angers preserved a charter of Robert of Busançais in 970 granting as a precaria to a man 78

St-Flour no. VI. 34. Albuin gave two other churches, probably his alodial property (mid-11th c.?). 80 See index: Les Pins. To secure the bishopric of Anjou for his son Hubert. 81 ˆ Vendome no. 44; summary in Fanning, Acts no. 1. Geoffrey Martel eventually ‘took the church as his own’ and gave it to Vendoˆme. 82 Not counting the rather different S. French or Catalan usage of fevum: e.g. S. Cugat no. 553 (1040, the abbot’s grant of a castle including a church, a moiety pro alodio and a moiety pro fevo). 83 Stavelot-Malme´dy no. 162 (not using any such word as feudum, however). 84 Ibid. no. 166. Cf. ACFlandres no. 84 (1119): notice of count Charles that Walter the Butler and his brother Conan have given St Mary’s church at Oudenbourg to St Peter’s monastery there, sub hereditario censu et perpetuo, the rent to be an annual £9 (with 9s. remitted for paying the sinodal due). See Holt, ‘Feudal Society’, ii, ‘Notions of Patrimony’, 199–201 for ‘hereditary right’ in Normandy. 79


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and his wife, to hold for an annual census and leave to one successor, a church which he himself held in benefice from the bishop; the Vendoˆme monks preserved (because the church subsequently came to them) a charter of Joscelin and his wife Ermentrude (with the consent of Burchard count of Vendoˆme) for a woman Doda and her son Vivian who had ‘asked that we would grant to them and one heir one church, dedicated to St Denis, for a census, by manufirma’ (a precarial grant for a small or token rent).85 This sketch has been largely confined, especially for the eleventh century, to France, Lorraine, and Burgundy. In other regions there were broadly similar transactions by which lords lay and ecclesiastical granted churches to individuals or families just as they would grant lands: benefices, written leases of various kinds, and donations with various degrees of freedom of disposal or hereditary right. From Norman England, among many leases of churches to clergy, we may note one by St Paul’s to a probable layman, Nicholas son of Algar, ‘and after him to one heir of his kindred whom he is to choose’, as he did (‘he assigned to us as heir by charter’ Robert son of Ralph son of Herlwin);86 he is not specified as the church’s donor, but to get such terms he probably was. From Germany isolated fragments surface. In Rhaetia in the later eleventh century a nobleman and his wife were granted a church for life by a bishop of Brixen, in return for surrendering another property granted them for life by an earlier bishop; a freeman Kazili had a moiety of a church given him—potenti manu delegata, conveyed by the hand competent to do so—by his lady Gisela and her son, and could himself give it in the same way, potenter, having the power, into the hand of bishop Altuin for the church of Brixen.87 In Saxony later, a canon of Goslar, Sidag, had given his inherited church to his cousin Rudolf, ‘so that whatever dominium he had in that church by right of possession should from then on belong fully to Rudolf and his wife and offspring’, and in 1147 brought this donatio to be confirmed by the bishop of Hildesheim.88 Perhaps forty or fifty years earlier, an abbot of St Michael’s at Hildesheim granted a church ‘by right of benefice’ to two successive laymen (one of them the son of a former lord of a moiety of it, bought out by an earlier abbot); yet the church could be described as having been in the abbot’s ‘just and free possession’ during these laymen’s tenure; and when another son of the former part-lord ‘claimed the church for himself as if hereditary property ad tempus’, he 85

Above, p. 694 (Geoffrey Martel probably did something similar for Geoffrey Malramnus, above, at note 81); Vendoˆme no. 27 (1002–8). Vivian was able later to give the church to Vendoˆme with the consent of his lord Joscelin Bodel and of count Geoffrey, ibid. no. 28; Guillot, Comte, II. 123–4. 86 Hist. MSS Comm. Report, 9. i app. 64a (early or mid-12th c.). Cf. ibid. 62a–64b for other St Paul’s leases of churches, sometimes back to a donor, with varying concessions to heirs. See Brett, English Church, 220 87 and n. 4. Brixen nos. 236 (1070–80), 373 (1085–97). 88 Hildesheim UB. no. 245 (above, pp. 596–7).

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was not (despite this qualification) claiming his brother’s benefice but challenging the original transaction by which his father had surrendered his ‘hereditary right’.89 In the Iberian peninsula charters conveying churches between individuals (lay or priestly) occur frequently. Some are explicit donations for the indefinite future (‘to you and all your posterity’), with freedom to dispose of the church post obitum ‘to whom you will’ (often emphasized in kings’ donations).90 But some, equally generous in their perpetuity, carried obligations: in Catalonia in 1012 a colonizing noble Isnabert ‘asked’ S. Cugat for a church (where he seems to have settled already and built a stone tower), and was given it ‘for ever’ but without power to alienate, and reserving for S. Cugat—nos donatores—the right to plough and take crops from as much as they can manage; a century later in Castille count Go´mez Gonza´lez and his wife gave Miguel Dıáz a church for him to ‘populate’ and make monastic, he and his clerical posterity to be forever its domini et patroni (here clearly meaning abbots), looking after its possessions and praying for the donors.91 Other donations are explicitly or effectively for one life or two, requiring the church to be testated for the donor’s soul (sometimes to support the ongoing care of his soul), at choice, or within limits, or to a named monastery.92 A memorandum of 994 about a particular church (whose changes of proprietor we have looked at already) includes a countess Gonzina’s donation of it to her confrater Valasco who has ‘asked me . . . to grant you that church as a gift . . . and I have granted it, to have it free (ingenua) for your life and leave it after your death to a monastery or priest or a brother or sister’ (meaning a monk or nun) ‘to whom the care of our soul is to be committed by charter . . . or to your gens or to a stranger, as your will may be’ (a parade of possibilities amounting to free disposal, but for the crucial obligation to memoria);93 meanwhile to be ‘wiped out from my right and delivered and confirmed into Valasco’s right’.94 Besides these (sometimes 89

Ibid. no. 210 (see above, p. 631). e.g. Irache no. 45 (1069); cf. ibid. no. 15 (1056, a layman’s entry gift of what he had by royal grant with power to leave it cui placuisset). Ibid. no. 5 (1032), royal donation of a monasteriolum to lord Go´mez (its builder) to give to whom he wishes post posteritatem suam (i.e. failing any descendant?) but only to holy places, not to milites. 91 S. Cugat no. 449; Burgos no. 66 (1107. In no. 67 they are abbates et seniores; see above, p. 183 note 20). Cf. ibid. no. 194 (1005: see index: Sandino); ibid. no. 656 (1082, an abbot’s condonatio of his inherited third of a church to a couple with obligation to maintain him in his lifetime). 92 PMHD nos. 520 (1075), 663 (1086, reversion to Lorvaõ), both for priests; ibid., no. 251 (1022, reversion to the donor’s nephew); S. Cugat no. 639 (1064, abbot and convent’s donation to a magnate couple and one heir, to pay one gold coin a year, able to alienate but only to S. Cugat). A variant is Irache no. 48 (1071), royal donation to a woman for her faithful service, to go after her death to Irache for her own soul. 93 The penultimate aut may be intrusive, leaving a choice in appointing a priest, monk, or nun between kin and strangers; but cf. PMHD no. 251 (above, p. 626 note 144), wide open except for the 94 memoria obligation. PMHD no. 168 (above, p. 623). 90


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with elements of precaria about them) there are closely related transactions not called donatio,95 especially the placita or pacta already discussed: formal agreements between two parties establishing a kind of lease, typically for a priest (often empowered to choose his successor),96 but sometimes for a layman or group of men and women, usually ‘to live at the church’, and either expressly without licence to alienate or testate it, or emphasizing its reversion.97 From Italy we have some evidence for unwritten benefices, but chiefly a mass of written leases of churches. Leaving aside leases to priests (here more liable to differ from leases of ordinary property),98 from the ninth century onwards in the north and centre, and later (but less often) in the south, bishops were leasing to laymen both plebes and lesser churches, in the same way as they leased lands, by libellus or great libellus, or by a three-life lease, while the priests of plebes did the same with their subject churches.99 Even monasteries with some claim to the name could be leased to the laity in the ninth century: in 808 John bishop of Lucca leased the ‘church and monastery’ of S. Salvatore at Montione to the Frankish magnate Wicheram, because it was ruined and the duke meant to restore it (his piety being drawn by dedications to the Saviour);100 it was nonetheless a leasable bit of property. So in 852 was the Lucca nunnery whose former owner Causeram, having given it to the bishopric, acknowledged in a carta repromissionis like any leaseholder that he and his daughter, the present abbess, were to have the potestas of rule and usufruct, to see that the office and masses were celebrated and lights maintained, and to pay six good silver denarii as annual census.101 The laity too could lease out their churches to other laity. In 909 we find a nobleman in the Ravennate acknowledging that a great lady had leased him her monasterium for his lifetime, livellario nomine, with everything belonging to it, to render 6 denarii a year ‘to you and your heirs’, with no power to alienate except to peasant tenants;102 in Tuscany in 1040, two laymen (brothers) leased to another layman and his heirs—with responsibility to provide for divine service—their portio in

95 e.g. a priest’s ‘sale’ of his church to another ‘for life’, to testate it to Lorvaõ (PMHD no. 32); a priest’s cartula benefactis vel perfiliationis for his deacon (ibid. no. 270). 96 e.g. PMHD nos. 226, 283, 374, 780 (between 1015 and 1092). 97 e.g. Irache no. 52 (1072), ‘pact’ between abbot of Irache and lord Sancho of Aberıń, divinely inspired to ‘rule’ a deserted monasteriolum; cf. ibid. no. 140 (1141, more like an Italian lease); PMHD no. 426. 98 Above, p. 548. 99 Above, pp. 543–8. In Apulia archbishops of Canossa leased plebes by 29-year libelli to laymen (983 and 1024, Bari I nos. 7, 12) with responsibility for ‘ordaining’ the church, i.e. providing clergy (see Martin, La Pouille, 631). For episcopal or monastic leases or benefices in Tuscany leaving plebes or shares in them in lay hands, late 11th c., see Arezzo no. 222, and below, note 107. 100 Mem. Lucc., V. ii no. 291. 101 Ibid., IV. 2 no. 33. In the south cf. a bishop’s grant (979) of potestas over two churches on episcopal land to a founder-abbess for life with power to designate her successor (Taviani-Carozzi, 102 Principaute´, 665–6). Mon. Ravennati, I no. 10.

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a ‘baptismal plebs’ and two other churches which they had by libellus from the cathedral church.103 As elsewhere, a bishop’s or abbot’s lease could bring a church back to its original donors: in 1066 a bishop of Reggio confirmed his predecessor’s grant of an estate and chapel ‘by emphyteutic and precarial right’, to the family that had previously given it to the bishopric, and to their posterity; on condition of devout service by priests and clerks and a token 2d. a year.104 And the outcome of any such hereditary lease not restricted to clerics could be property-right indistinguishable from that of founders. One of the fairly rare southern leases to laymen, made in 940 (to get a church restored) by the bishop of Salerno to three citizens of Amalfi and their heirs, led step by step over the next few generations to its treatment as ordinary family property, as Taviani-Carozzi cogently demonstrates.105 As for leases with a term, laymen surrendering these to Farfa in the early eleventh century did it for a consideration,106 and as a quitclaim or refutatio of what they might well have kept.107 So wherever these transactions are found, even to some extent in Italy, the blurred and blunted categories of late Roman vulgar law that Levy has described are in the background, and the ‘hazy atmosphere’ evoked by Maitland is all around us:108 where loans may be permanent and gifts temporary, one shading into the other; and where more than one dominium or different degrees of potestas can coexist in the same thing. If we can call this ‘property’ at all, we can so call it in dealing with churches. Another aspect of this haziness will next be considered: the uncertain border between gifts and sales.

21.iii. Donations, sales, exchanges, mortgages Although those with the power of permanently alienating a church sometimes gave it to a family member or an individual prelate, by far the most documented and probably in fact the commonest use of this power was to make a pious donation of it to a greater church. But pious donation was not a simple matter 103

104 Lucca, Carte sec. XI, III no. 73. Muratori, Antiq. Ital., III. 195. Principaute´, 622–6 (S. Felice de Fonti): Cava nos. 169, 242, 274, 297, 516, 627 (from 940 to 1009). 106 e.g. Farfa, nos. 470 (1005), 476 (1008). 107 Cf. in Tuscany later, Arezzo no. 217 (1075, a group of laity ‘give and sell’ a quarter share in a plebs to the abbey of S. Fiora whence it came); ibid. no. 278 (1090, a larger group surrender a whole plebs to the cathedral, which looks more like a reforming response). Peter Damian’s complaint (see Boyd, Tithes, 106) would apply to churches as well as to church lands. 108 Vulgar Law, e.g. 45–9, 61–3, 66, 87–97; Pollock and Maitland, History, II. 12. See also Hudson, Land, Law, 99–101 on the interests promoting 12th-c. clarification. 105


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(even when it can be taken literally).1 It could be delayed (in effect) by reserving usufruct; or qualified by retaining customs or services such as hospitality, or the function of defence or advocacy.2 It could be conditional, often on not alienating the gift or any part of it (sometimes specifically from the community’s use), in particular not granting it in benefice; the donor’s heir or heirs sometimes have the right to reclaim it or redeem it for a few denarii if this condition is broken.3 The prohibition, with or without that sanction, features over a long period in donations of churches as of land, to monasteries and cathedrals ranging from Trier to Farfa and from St Gall to Toulouse.4 A moiety of a church given to Le´zat on such conditions, which fell into the hands of a powerful outsider, was actually seized by an heir of the donors, ‘a very prudent knight’, and recovered from him by the monks with great difficulty in the 1080s.5 A donation was sometimes conditional on there being no future offspring; or on their not wishing to redeem the donation, or even on the donor himself not so wishing.6 A striking instance of giving a church under such conditions is Adalhart’s donation of St Verena to St Gall in 843.7 By the eleventh century in France at least such conditions seem largely to have dropped out of charters of donation; no formal provision was needed for donors sometimes to think better of a gift, or for their heirs to challenge it if they had not consented, and sometimes even when they had. But other conditions were by then sometimes accepted by a monastery, such as undertaking to rebuild a church;8 heirs’ claims might be based on the monks’ failure to do this.9 At least one church was taken back on such grounds: about 1088 a lord in Saintonge bought back for 100s. (and gave to Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly) a church that his late brother had given to Cluny to rebuild and that Cluny did nothing about because it was poor, small, and distant.10 There is no suggestion that his brother had reserved any right of redemption,11 and the figure 1

See Reuter, ‘Transactions’, 170–3. Sometimes perhaps more making a promise than reserving a right, e.g. St-Beńigne nos. 312 (1032–5), 313 (1033). 3 In Hartung’s view (above, p. 47) such provisions indicate that the donor had reserved usufruct for his successors (weakly supported by an instance of unrestricted donation by a childless donor). More convincingly, they protected donors’ memoria (Bernhardt, Kingship, 95–105) while reinforcing the reflection back from perpetual donation to donors’ hereditary right (Holt, ‘Notions’, 206). 4 To be found (9th c. onwards) in St Gallen, Altlux. UB (esp. St Maximin), Cluny, Flavigny, Beaulieu, SteFoi, Uzerche, St-Sernin Toulouse, Be´ziers, Nıˆmes, Le´zat. In Farfa no. 512 (1018) a donor’s husband, sons, and grandsons can take back anything alienated and not recovered, whereas her own charter, no. 659 (1012), had given full power of alienation. Later 11th-c. prohibitions, e.g. Cluny nos. 3415, 3603, 3658, 3736, mostly have no repossession clause, or specify reversion only until the damage is undone. 5 Le´zat nos. 1154 (987–1004), 1155–7 (1070s to 1080s): St-Martin, Magrens. 6 e.g. St Gallen nos. 353 (835), 461 (858); no. 556 (872) disallows redemption, but reserves life tenure for any legitimate heirs male or female. 7 Ibid. no. 386 (above, pp. 43–4). Cf. Beaulieu no. 22 (899): the donor of a moiety reserves his brother’s 8 right to recover it by exchange. Above, p. 455. 9 10 Above, p. 638. Ange´ly no. 56. 11 The right of redemption that he left to his niece explicitly excluded what he had already given to the monastery, contrary to the editor’s comment. 2

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looks plausible for an agreed price. However, provision for redemption by a gold coin still went on in twelfth-century Bavaria (against neglect of the donor’s memoria, or—for monasteries given to Passau—against a bishop’s oppression or misrule).12 Far away in Apulia, in 1121, a lay donor stipulated not redemption but repossession in case of either alienation or failure to provide a monk-priest: ‘I and my son may take and hold that church in our own property’ until the fault is remedied.13 Such conditions fit the anthropologist’s view of a gift as a link or bridge, the giver retaining an interest in it or attachment to it.14 However, that pious donations were often delayed, incomplete, conditional, or unsafe (if not all heirs have consented) does not mean that they were simply revocable, nor even that they had to be renewed by every generation.15 Donors reneging on a donation normally put forward a reason; heirs challenging it often denied that it had happened, or said it had been done under coercion, or that they themselves had not consented, or that their consent was invalid.16 In Normandy late in the eleventh century, Robert who gave his church of Grandvilliers to Saint-Wandrille later reoccupied the property because the monks had neglected it; this could be a reason without any explicit condition being broken. Long afterwards, ill and penitent, he gave it back with his wife’s and son’s consent; but after his death his son disputed the donation and drove Saint-Wandrille’s ploughmen from the land; finally giving up his claim for a payment of 30s.17 This is typical of countless similar stories, mainly from western France.18 Such challenges may often reflect something more positive: a claim both social and religious to be involved in a kinsman’s or ancestor’s gift and its rewards; making it not impermanent so much as an ongoing process, involving many people, and never absolutely completed.19

12

Ebersberg no. III. 34 (?early 12th c.; cf. no. III. 43 for the same provision in donating a mill, estate, and 13 Tremiti no. 95. serfs); Tellenbach, Passau. Ekl., 40 and n. 221, 48–9 and n. 260. 14 See index: gift. A useful introduction (esp. to Mauss, The Gift) is L. Mair, Introduction to Social Anthropology, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1972), 179–93. See White, Custom, 27–39, 79–82; Rosenwein, Neighbor, 45–6, 139–40, 145–6. We need to distinguish the gift (seen in this light) from Roman donation (as a legal form for gratuitous alienation); but Roman donation provided the conventional formulae without fully reflecting the facts (see Levy, Vulgar Law, 137–46; Barthe´lemy, Vendoˆme, 52–8). 15 For this view see M. Cheney, Roger bp. of Worcester, 93–6 (with app. I nos. 77–81), 147–8, 191; but her instances show donations disputed, rather than invalidated by death (bp. Roger’s complaint and Alexander III’s comment are consistent with this, allowing for rhetorical exaggeration). See Hudson, Land, Law, 173–8. 16 e.g. Ange´ly no. 113; Beaulieu nos. 14, 15 (above, pp. 592–3); St-Victor no. 691. See White, Custom, 69–74; 17 Reuter, ‘Transactions’, 185–6. St-Wandrille, no. 50. 18 See Lynch, Entry, 8–10 and nn. 30–40; Johnson, Prayer, Patronage, 92–6 (with table). Cluny’s relative freedom from such trouble perhaps reflects more Roman law influence in Burgundy (Schreiber, Gesamm. Abh., 122–3; cf. Duby, The Chivalrous Society, trans. (London, 1977) 92–6, with table). 19 See Rosenwein, Neighbor, esp. 49–77, 111–14, 122–5, 134–9, 202–3; White, Custom, esp. 31–9, 79–82, 151–3, 158–61, 165–6. An example, mid- to late 11th c., is Uzerche nos. 52. 1–11.


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So quitclaims—even those that followed litigation—became barely distinguishable from donations, a blurring promoted by the monks’ drafting of charters.20 Donation to an immortal person or an undying community was naturally envisaged as permanent, even if subject to conditions; and probably the most praiseworthy donations were unconditional, the only real conflict of norms lying in whether the best possible gift was tied for ever to its destination, or given with total freedom of disposal—with potestas not only of control, possession, and usufruct but of ‘selling, giving, exchanging . . . and doing what you will with it’.21 Nonetheless, since ordinary gifts to kinsmen, wives, or fideles were often for life only, to make a gift complete and permanent needed emphasis—as much when the thing given was a church as when it was land. The formulae for this vary widely in detail, but fill the same general need. Transferring a thing to an abbot and monks ‘out of our right into your right and dominium’ needs the addition of something like ‘and to your successors living a religious life there’; it has to be ‘for ever’, ‘in perpetuity’, ‘to the end of the world’. Typically there is a long string of dispositive verbs, as if to make sure of doing the thing thoroughly: a donor has not only to ‘give’ and ‘deliver’ but perhaps to donate, grant, offer, transfer, dispose.22 That a church is given ‘irrevocably’ is stated in some of Farfa’s charters;23 others (here and elsewhere) undertake that no claim, question, or contest will be raised, or use the formula promising not to unwish what one has wished.24 When in 1091 a church in Lombardy was given to Cluny by members of the great family of Martinenga—two brothers living by Lombard law, their mother with a kinsman or second husband by Alemanian—the different observances required were carefully recorded. All four ‘give and offer our portions by cartula offersionis’ for Cluny’s officials to do as they wished with them; but besides this Ferlinda and Albert (whether because of their law or because actually in possession) make an elaborate traditio et investitura by knife, stick, turf, and branch, and ‘expel ourselves out of it, quitclaim it, and at once absent ourselves’, relinquishing the proprietas for Cluny’s officials ‘to do with it what they wish from the present day by proprietary right, without any contradiction or challenge by us or our heirs’.25 By contrast, in eleventh-century Normandy, with its still-developing 20 e.g. St-Victor no. 725; Ste-Foi no. 78; Ange´ly no. 313; Bourbonnais no. 15 with no. 12. See White, Custom, 38–9, 48–52. 21 For inconsistency (attempting both at once?) see Farfa no. 420 (1003); and below, note 25. A clause such as potestas quicquid facere volueritis, if meant to be more than formulaic, might need an emphatic variation, e.g. potestas et plenissima largitas (Farfa nos. 420, 709, 659, 1150). 22 e.g. Farfa nos. 1230 (951), 420 (1003): do, dono, trado, volo et iudico pro anima mea . . . et concedo et constituo; damus, donamus, cedimus, tradimus et irrevocabiliter largimur. 23 Ibid. nos. 420, 450, 659, 1189 (1003 to 1036). 24 Ibid. nos. 659, 662, 787, 1150, 1184; cf. St-Aubin no. 241 (1007–27). See index: nolle quod voluit; cf. Cluny no. 3736 (of 1100). 25 Cluny no. 3658 (1091; nonetheless going on to forbid alienation). Cf. no. 3600 (1083), almost identical description of traditio where the donor lives by Salic law.

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notions of rights in land and its lack of notarial standards for written record, churches or lands were given to monasteries under a variety of brief descriptions: ‘to possess by hereditary right’, ‘in perpetual inheritance’, ‘in alod’, or later ‘in alms’;26 while in Brittany with its old tradition of written record churches had been given in the tenth century with more formal wording: ‘I give and grant . . . the church this day . . . in dicumbitio and in eternal inheritance.’27 All these formulae, firm or groping, carry the same assertions or implications of potestas, dominium, ius proprietatis on the donor’s side: this is both what he has to give and what enables him to give it. Above all, a gift needed a countergift to validate or justify it, perhaps to complete it;28 and for a pious donation, whether of land or of a church, to say that it was made ‘for the welfare of my soul’ was to say that it had its necessary recompense.29 So in an early charter for Cluny, following a brief preamble on God’s grant to his faithful that out of their temporal things they could both redeem their sins and obtain eternal rewards, Artald with his wife Hildegard gives a chapel and all its belongings ‘for the redemption of our souls, and for the souls of Bracding and my other co-heirs who held it before me, and of those who have willingly consented to this donation’; while—unusually—the support is invoked of a wider circle of ‘those who have anything on this hill or round about’, because the donation ‘is made as much for them as for me’.30 Occasionally a donor feels his debit so deep that he hopes only to have it wiped out, not to end up in credit; the donation is not just in a general way for forgiveness of the donor’s and his kinsmen’s sins (often stated in the preamble and in any case essential to remedium animae), but a penance for specific evil doings, perhaps compensation to the monastery itself,31 perhaps a kind of wergild for someone the donor has killed.32 The two levels in this, provision for the dead man’s soul constituting compensation to the kin, is unusually clear when (in the 1080s) a church was given by

26

e.g. Ste-Trinite´-du-Mont, nos. 23, 24, 36, 47. See Holt, ‘Notions’, 199–200; Hudson, Land, Law, 88–91. e.g. Cart. de Lande´vennec, ed. R. le Men and Ernault (1886), nos. 24, 25, 36 (dicumbitio seems to mean being unencumbered). Although using the first-person and present tense, these have behind them the earlier practice in Brittany (see W. Davies, ‘Latin Charter-tradition’, esp. 262–3, 269–70, 275). 28 A complementary (perhaps alternative) way to make a gift complete may be the Spanish formula of giving ‘first’ the donor’s ‘body and soul’ (without literally entering as a monk): e.g. San Millań no. 2 (800); Arlanza no. 80 (1076); Cardenã no. 130 and passim (945 to 981, and 1066 to 1085); only sometimes alongside remedium animae. 29 See M. Pappenheim, ‘Uber die Rechtsnatur der altgerm. Schenkung’, ZSSGA 53 (1933), 70–80; 30 Cluny no. 378 (929). Fichtenau, ‘Arenga’, 143–4. 31 e.g. (associated with the Peace movement) for depredations or damage, St-Victor no. 725 (c.1040), St-Maixent no. 95 (1041); later, Ange´ly no. 145 (c.1075). 32 e.g. Ange´ly. no. 282 (by 1097), and next note. Paray-le-Monial no. 18 has been taken as a sacrilegepurging donation of rights in a church where a son had been killed; but this depends on unconvincing editorial punctuation. 27


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Patrick of Sourches to Geoffrey of Brullon whose son he had accidentally killed, and by Geoffrey with Patrick’s agreement to La Couture.33 But by that time donors of land or of churches increasingly wanted, for themselves and their ancestors, their wives, children, and relations, some visible and immediate signs of their salvation, or mechanisms for it over and above the bare act of parting with the property to lay up treasure in Heaven. Prayers in their lifetime, a burial-place, perhaps deathbed admission to the community or a funeral as for a monk or canon, anniversary masses, inscription of their name in the Liber memorialis; burial for a dead son, or entry for a living one; perhaps some specified almsgiving or commemorative feast; in more general terms, the monks’ societas or confraternity, and a share in the rewards of their way of life; all or some of these things are spelt out,34 and more-or-less explicitly seen as recompense for what has been given35 (although sometimes more like a condition on which it is given).36 Where, however, the main purpose of a donation was to secure a burial-place, or to be an entry gift,37 this is different (although not sharply so) from giving the property pro anima and receiving as acknowledgment a mixed bag of benefits perhaps including burial and the prospect of admission should it ever be wanted (probably in old age or at death’s door).38 Either way there is barter going on, but with differing emphasis.39 A mid-eleventh-century charter of Tecelin, viscount of Rosnay, for Montier-en-Der is most unusually both framed and worded on the assumption that the thing given is used to buy the benefits. It gives priority to 33 Couture no. 18 (1081–90). Patrick asked that all the deceased’s kindred be sharers in these benefits and prayers, ‘to make the donation firm’: i.e. to ensure that they are satisfied. 34 See, among much else, Nelson, ‘Widow’, 99, 100–1 (on Erkanfrida’s commemorative feast); Smith, ‘Religion’, 674–6; Dormeier, Montecassino, 146–58; Lynch, Entry, 27–50; Harper-Bill, ‘Piety’, 69–71; Bull, Piety, 157–65, 170–91 (excellent discussion of what benefactors wanted and of the evidence). For a range of examples see Vendoˆme no. 123 (1059); Beaulieu no. 14 (1062–72); Ange´ly nos. 70–1, 73, 113, 313 (between 1076 and c.1100); from England, Mowbray no. 13 (1107–29). 35 Explicit, for instance, in St-Julien, Tours no. 9 (1024), notitia of the miles Walter’s donation of Saint-Loup: econtra, in compensatione tanti beneficii, the abbot gave him societas etc. (with special psalms and masses, and one poor man to be fed daily and clothed at Easter). 36 e.g. Cluny no. 3042 (1049–1109, dioc. Lyons): ea convenientia, ut partem et societatem haberemus in omnibus beneficiis eorum. See Thompson, ‘Free Alms’, 227–8 on the tendency to see such things as services done for the land. Some, e.g. bell-ringing at family funerals (1055–64, Liber Alb. Cenom. no. 111), had probably been formerly done by the now donated church. 37 e.g. perhaps Savigny nos. 644, 650, 651 (c.1030–3, recorded simply as pro anima and for burial); entry gifts for sons etc., above, pp. 642–3; a donor’s own entry gift, Ange´ly no. 48 (c.1026), Cluny no. 3053 (1049– 1109), St-Pe`re, 232–4 (1081; not completed at death so converted to a burial gift). In Couture no. 18 (above, at note 33), elaborate liturgical care for his dead son’s soul was clearly the whole purpose of Geoffrey’s donation. 38 Languedoc provides instances of both: churches as simple entry gifts, Gellone nos. 908, 166, 300 (1088, 1097, c.1100–2); monks’ places as incidental rewards, Aniane nos. 223, 46, Gellone no. 401 (1026, 1097, 1077–99). 39 The barter has more dimensions than can be discussed here, e.g. donations as themselves countergifts for property given by God (Rosenwein, Neighbor, 137–8); or perhaps to dead ancestors for the inheritance (Geary, Living with the Dead, 77–83, 90–1; somewhat speculative).

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setting out the benefits he has decided to ‘buy’ with some of his property (so far unspecified)—rations for a poor man or later for any son that he decides to make a monk, and burial for himself and his wife—and only at the end states the ‘price for which I have bought so great a benefit’, namely his share in a church.40 Whether the property is the price for the benefits or the benefits are countergifts for the property, some of them have economic as well as spiritual value: places for sons or daughters obviously so, burial-places since these were normally paid for in some way. But besides this, most conspicuously in eleventh-century France, Burgundy, and Provence, whether for land or churches, material countergifts were becoming normal, given to the donor and his wife and sons, and often to consenting lords or kinsmen, or to those who later renounced their challenge or claim: a horse, a mule, a cloak, sometimes with a money value put on it; or an ounce of gold, or so many solidi, or pounds of denarii.41 Giroie of Rennes, who (between 1020 and 1027) gave his church in Anjou to Saint-Aubin for his own and his father’s, mother’s, and brother’s souls, received from the abbot the ‘spontaneous gift’ of ‘an excellent horse and two carpets’.42 When Richoara about 1055 gave to Cluny her church in the diocese of Autun with the consent of her husband, sons, daughters, and kindred, ‘that we may have a share in all the good works done’ at Cluny, she and her husband ‘have however accepted one excellent horse’; later her son-in-law challenged the donation but consented when given 100s., while her daughter accepted ‘good skins’ to the same value.43 In 1081 William de Sumbone with his wife and son approved the late Sulpicius’s gift of a church to Saint-Pe`re, Chartres, ‘for the redemption of our souls; for this I have received 100s. of Chartres money, my wife 2 ounces of gold, and my son a bicoloured reindeer skin’.44 The mention of such material countergifts was usually combined with at least the assertion that the donation was made pro anima,45 and sometimes with specific spiritual rewards, simple or elaborate;46 occasionally with a protestation that these mattered more to the donor than any 40

Montier-en-Der no. 41 (not later than 1061). Ibid. no. 42 (abbot’s notice) is comparable. See Schreiber, Gesamm. Abh., 122–5; White, Custom, 27 n. 65; Barthe´lemy, Vendoˆme, 690–2. St-Aubin no. 241. Bp. Hugh of Bayeux’s donation of a church to Jumie`ges as a knight’s entry gift (see index: Hugh, bp. of Bayeux) concludes ‘for this I have received one horse of great price’. 43 Cluny no. 3351; no. 3350 (an original), not mentioning the horse, seems to be a later confirmation as a 44 widow. See index: William of Sumbone. 45 e.g. Sahaguń no. 24 (921); Cluny no. 239 (c.994); Paray-le-Monial no. 18, St-Victor no. 725, Gellone nos. 153, 450, St-Sernin, Toulouse no. 291, Ange´ly nos. 112–13, 143, 145, Cormery no. 49 (all 11th c.). Cf. Orderic (HE II. 34–5, evidently using charters): William Giroie’s son William gave seven churches to Saint-E´vroul accepta haud modica pecunia, but also, with those who held the churches under him, ‘willingly conveyed all this pro redemptione animarum suarum’. 46 Examples of unusually elaborate mixed countergifts are Liber Alb. Cenom. no. 111 (1055–64); Cluny no. 3806 (c.1100). Simpler examples (material countergifts with prayers, societas, a place, or burial) are numerous throughout the 11th and early 12th cs. 41

42


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price he received. A rich example of this last was composed by the monks of Savigny, for a nobleman so slow to hand over the lands of a church he had given them that they had had to disburse not only the original countergift of two silver goblets but four successive further sums and a good horse before everything was released.47 When, on the other hand, the only countergifts mentioned are in money or goods, this is almost always in brief cartulary notes or summaries. The function of goods or money as countergift may be spelt out: ‘that the gift may be more firmly held’, or ‘lest it should seem to have no reciprocation’;48 but the sums of money given for churches cover a wide range, clearly sometimes much more than a token recognition of the gift. The 12s. paid by Saint-Vincent du Mans at the donation of a church, ‘so that this might remain firm and unshaken’, might be recognitive only; the £30 and one very good horse paid by an abbot of Vendoˆme ‘as acknowledgement of the donation’ of a church looks more like an inducement to part with it.49 But such sums are impossible to evaluate in relation to the property given. Even when only land is given it is not possible to say what its market price would have been,50 or even that there could be such a thing, though it might be just possible to have a view about its yield in rents and produce; for a church with tithes and offerings as well, any estimate would be guesswork. The payments to the chief donor or donors of a whole church range typically from 30s. to 100s., the latter so frequent and widespread as to suggest a convention.51 In the Bourbonnais around 1080 the princeps Archembald received £12 from the canons of Bourges for one church, and for another 100s. and one mule, his wife receiving an ounce of gold and another donor 70s.52 Higher figures are found in late eleventh-century Normandy: £24, 2 ounces of gold, and a horse, or £71 to one brother, 20s. and two horses to another;53 in Auvergne, ‘for the donation’ of two important churches to Saint-Flour about 1080, 1,000s. to one brother besides admission for one of his knights, a mule to a second brother, 100s. to a third;54 in Languedoc in 1093, 1,000s. for a single church from the canons of 47

Savigny no. 649 (c.1030), written at his request. Cf. Harper-Bill, ‘Piety’, 67, on Jumie`ges no. 25 (c.1054). e.g. St-Mont nos. 30 (1068), 88 (c.1085); Angers no. 66 (1096). On the security provided by countergifts see Hudson, Land, Law, 165–6, 190–1. 49 St-Vincent-du-Mans no. 581 (1068–78; see Che´deville, ‘Restitutions’, 210); Vendoˆme no. 327 (1086). Cf. Orderic, HE III. 184–7, on the 100s. horse given (with confraternity) to Ansold of Maule for confirming his father’s donations; see Chibnall, World, 55–6 on the value to a minor family of a war-horse as countergift. 50 See Fontette, Vente, 21 n. 9. 51 See Mager, Verha¨ltnis, 202–3, 206–7 (but the 100s. limit to Redon’s payment to the bishop on acquiring any parish church in his diocese, below, note 70, is not evidence for what donors could expect). 52 Bourbonnais nos. vi. 1 and 3; cf. vi. 2. 53 Ste-Trinite´-du-Mont nos. 91, 95 (but for more than one church); cf. Jumie`ges no. 12 (1027). Elsewhere cf. Angers no. 66 (1096); in the Orleánais St-Gondon nos. 7, 8 (1095), Gilo of Sully’s surrender of SaintGondon (ancient and strategically important) to Saint-Florent, Saumur for confraternity in one charter and for 1,000s. in another (the high price will have been for Gilo’s support against Vierzon’s claim). 54 Oradour and Chaudesaigues (St-Flour no. vi. 22, text of agreement, perhaps shortened); the churches were probably in the first brother’s portion, the others consenting. 48

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Be´ziers to two brothers, with 600s. for a cousin.55 Some forty years later, ten times as much was paid by the church of Angers under bishop Ulger for large collegiate churches—10,000s. to count Geoffrey for Saint-Le´zin, and for Saint-Pierre ‘almost 15,000s.’ in individual sums to three generations of a lay family.56 Large or small, the sums are round, not the result of close calculation; they are often combined with spiritual rewards, and mixed with valuable objects; and there is no sharp line to be drawn between payments to donors and those to heirs or kinsmen consenting at the time or disclaiming later.57 Should we nonetheless, when the countergifts are substantial, say that the church has been ‘sold’? Where money has passed it is often called caritas, given out of charity, or words to that effect:58 a conscious denial of its being a purchase price. Both donors and recipients might want it not to appear as a sale, not (initially) because churches ought not to be bought and sold (the same forms of gift and countergift were used for ordinary land), but because the donor wanted credit for a pious donation while the community wanted his friendship and a reputation for attracting gifts.59 By the late eleventh century prohibitions on selling churches were in play as well (though even these did not clearly apply to selling dominium over the church).60 Sometimes a money payment was made but not mentioned: in Bavaria about the beginning of the twelfth century the nobleman Dietmar’s charter giving an estate and church to Ebersberg mentions no return but the keeping of his own anniversary; the abbot, however, records it among his acquisitions for the monastery as ‘barely acquired for £20’. Other charters of donation may have similar omissions.61 But they frequently do record what the donor has ‘accepted’, and to describe such dealings as pretended donations or disguised sales is to oversimplify.62 If there was pretence it was hardly calculated to deceive (indeed in some donation charters or records of them the sum paid is quite casually called a ‘price’);63 and 55 Be´ziers no. 93. Cf. HL V nos. 239 and 242 (1054); Gellone no.15 (1051–74); Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 514–15 56 Angers no. 202. for Gellone’s outlay on Saint-Martin de Caux. 57 Sometimes more was paid for a quitclaim than for the original donation, despite quitclaims being usually framed as pious donations with similar religious rewards. 58 e.g. Ange´ly no. 143, Cormery no. 49, St-Vincent-du-Mans no. 486, St-Pe`re, 163–4, Maˆcon no. 534 (all later 11th c.), St-Julien, Tours no. 67 (1120), Angers no. 217 (1138–48) and even (as caritas copiosa) no. 202 (above, at note 56). Cf. causa amoris (Gellone nos. 153, 291); ‘some grace, for love of God’ (Morice, Memoires, 389). 59 See White, Custom, 26–31; more generally Wickham, Mountains, 212–15, 258–9. 60 As distinct from bishops ‘selling’ altars, or clergy ‘buying’ prebends or benefices. See, however, Clermont 1095, Bodl. version, c. 8 (ed. Somerville, p. 114). 61 Ebersberg nos. 34, 35. Cf. the alternative charters for Gilo’s donation of Saint-Gondon to Saumur (above, note 53): the one not mentioning the 1,000s. might have been more useful in court (though preceding the Clermont legislation by some months). 62 See e.g. Mollat, ‘Restitutions’, 404; Bienvenu, in discussion of Devailly’s paper (Cahiers, 1975), 274. 63 e.g. Cluny nos. 239 (c.994), 3042 (1049–1109); Le´zat no. 254 (997–1031); Noyers no. 30 (c.1063); Ste-Foi no. 77 (c.1055); St-Flour no. vi. 21 (c.1080). Most of these have at least perfunctory pious preambles and are made pro anima.


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even donors anxious to raise serious money probably hoped for the best of both worlds. It is unnecessary and misleading to aim at sorting out these reciprocated donations into either genuine gifts met by symbolic countergifts or virtual sales for broadly economic prices: there is a continuum between the two.64 And a substantial sum might still be essentially a countergift, required chiefly to satisfy kinsmen or descendants or to mark the grandeur of the gift.65 The fact remains that (for property in general) donations reciprocated by money payments were happening on a large scale in the eleventh century, while the Roman form of sale had become rare in (roughly speaking) the north and was losing its distinctiveness in the south. This suggests that the donation form was now being used, not to disguise sales, but (often) as a new way of making what were in practice sales.66 If this is true of many transactions in land, it must be often true of churches. In the second half of the eleventh century monks themselves frequently said they had bought a church. In a settlement between Saint-Aubin and Marmoutier, a long narrative relates how Marmoutier had inconsiderately bought at a high price the church of Chaˆteau-du-Loir which SaintAubin had lost and had hoped to buy back; amity was restored when Marmoutier allowed Saint-Aubin to buy it from them at a lower price.67 The monks of Vendoˆme listed a number of churches and moieties of churches that they had ‘bought’ from various laymen; and they too had a story of being outbid by Marmoutiers for a church when they had begun negotiations for its purchase.68 When monks spoke thus of buying and selling churches, this was probably often just a casual and realistic (if occasionally sardonic) vocabulary for transactions that took the form of donations, with the donor accepting a material countergift of some importance to him,69 perhaps having been approached by the monastery in the first place, or perhaps having looked around for the best offer. 64 See Rosenwein, Neighbor, 78–86, 98–9; Wickham, Mountains, 213–15, 256–9, Land, 265–9; Barthe´lemy, Vendoˆme, 693–4; Reuter, ‘Transactions’, 176–83 (but no churches involved). Distinctions were firmer in Italy, having the technical term launegild for what was usually only a token (e.g. a cap for a woman quitclaiming her marital share in a chapel, 1093, Cluny no. 3669); see Martin, La Pouille, 476. 65 e.g. ADNorm. no. 86 ( ¼ St-Beńigne no. 312), 1032–5, duke Robert’s charter relating that abbot William gave a knight £60 in denarii for his donation of a church, ‘that it be firm for ever’. 66 See Lemarignier, ‘Actes’, 58–63; Chevrier, ‘Evolution’, 203–9; Fontette, op. cit., 15–24. Barthe´lemy sees what swallowed up ‘sale’ not as ‘donation’ (both being ineffectual abstractions) but the all-pervading ‘gift’ (op. cit., 51–8, 692–3). 67 St-Aubi no. 402 (after 1067). Cf. in Marmoutier’s dossier of 11th-c. charters and notices for its church at Naveil (Marmoutier: Vendoˆmois nos. 1–11), nos. 1, 3, 5, 6. 68 Vendoˆme nos. 116–19 (c.1057), 128–9 (1059 and later), 154–5 (1062). For Marmoutier’s bid the record is a (possibly doubtful) comital charter (ibid. no. 153; Guillot, Comte, II. C.194). See Barthe´lemy, op. cit., 694–5, 697–9. Cf. Liber Alb. Cenom. no. 113 (1067–70); St-Beńigne no. 254 (1012–27), from chronicle; Orderic on SaintE´vroul’s acquisitions, HE II. 36–7. 69 St-Vincent-du-Mans no. 651 (1068–78) relates that Robert de Sourdon (see index) ‘sold’ his moiety of two churches for £20, but records his putting the donum on the altar; cf. Cormery no. 45 (1070–1110); Ste-Trinite´-du-Mont no. 29 (1059). Orderic, however, uses of William Giroie’s son William (above, note 45) the verb tribuit, neutral between ‘gave’ and ‘sold’.

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Any monastery actively building up its holdings in churches, as Marmoutier seems to have been doing, would be near to creating a market in them.70 The church of Crot, bought for Marmoutier by a monk from his cousins Adrald and his brothers, was a bad buy because of Adrald’s continuing grip on it; but SaintPe`re, Chartres (nearer at hand), was willing to buy it from Marmoutier, foreseeing its eventual usefulness. Not only Saint-Pe`re’s cartularist, but the charter drafted for Adrald to confirm Saint-Pe`re’s possession (c.1080), describes him and his brothers as having ‘sold’ the church to Marmoutier; yet in the same breath, it has them ask to be included in Saint-Pe`re’s prayers as they had been in Marmoutier’s; while the fact of their consent being needed (and given pro anima, accepting 10s.) makes their original grant not strictly a sale.71 The same cartularist describes the clerk Hugh offering to ‘sell’ his moiety of the deserted church of Cruce´, and the two monks of Saint-Pe`re that he approached ‘buying’ it from him, giving him first 7s., then 5s., then 3s., as he kept coming back for more and cadging these ‘little presents for his needs’.72 Hugh’s was hardly a pious donation but still less was it a formal sale: ‘buy’ is loosely used to describe informal moves to rescue a prote´ge´ from destitution in return for something that might one day be worth having. Monks distinguishing between giving and selling may often have meant nothing more than whether or not goods or money passed in more than trifling quantity. Nonetheless there were still, mostly in southern Europe, acts described as sales, of churches as of other things, using the terms vendere and venditio, sometimes conforming hardly at all to Roman rules for a sale, but sometimes including enough of the essentials to be called sales in a fairly strict sense.73 A fully elaborated act of sale in the twelfth century would have the author name himself as vendor, name the buyer, describe the thing being sold and his own competence to sell it; state the agreed money price and acknowledge that he has received it and is satisfied, or that nothing remains to be paid; state that the thing sold is handed over ‘from the present day’, out of his own right into the buyer’s right and dominium, with full power to give, sell, and do as he wishes with it; and finally guarantee the buyer’s peaceful possession under pain of surrendering double the purchase price.74 Earlier, even if all that appears in a charter (or the cartularist’s version of it) is the opening ego, venditor or nos venditores, the use of the verb vendere, and the acknowledgment of having received the agreed price, combined 70 With similar implications see Redon no. 285 (1062). Cf. promises of first option to buy, e.g. Giroie’s sons to Saint-E´vroul for all their churches and tithes (Orderic, HE II. 30–1); bp. of Lucca’s agreement with 71 a couple (1052; Nanni, Parrochia, 47). St-Pe`re 166–7, 216–17 (see index: Adrald). 72 See index: Cruce´. 73 Leaving aside early changes in the legal nature of the act, from the contract to sell to the contract 74 See Fontette, Vente, 32–6. that was itself the sale (Levy, Vulgar Law, 127–37).


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with the absence of any pious preamble, pro anima clause, or threat of hellfire, we can accept it as a formal sale. It would be pedantic to insist on the price being stated in money, since the difference between money and commodities was not firm, while a named money price may sometimes have indicated the value of goods, the goods being what were really wanted.75 A few such acts did bring churches or fractions of them to monasteries or bishoprics in the south.76 In Languedoc in 889 the bishop and canons of Be´ziers acquired rights in a church with a fifth of a villa, from a married couple and another man. These three style themselves vendors, explain how the property came to them, ‘transfer all this into the potestas of St Nazarius’, and ‘sell it to you . . . and receive the price’ of 25s. agreed between them, which has been paid. In 920 a married couple (perhaps more summarily) sell a quarter of a church to Caunes, for things each valued at so many solidi, which have been paid. In Rouergue between 996 and 1031 a couple have sold to Sainte-Foi ‘an alod of ours’, being a quarter of a church; as price they have received 160s.; the monks are to do what they wish with it.77 In Castille in 944 count Asur Fernańdez and his wife sell ‘our own church’ to ‘you, our buyer’ the abbot and monks of San Salvador de Loberuela, adhering quite closely to the formulae of sale, though the agreed price consists of two horses, ten mares, and a pair of stirrups, their values adding up to 212s.78 In central Italy, unsurprisingly, more formally elaborate sales of churches or shares in them were still being made in the eleventh century, to Farfa: in 1011 a group of five brothers and cousins who have given a quarter of a church appear further on as ‘we the vendors’, and have given it ‘at an agreed and fixed price’ amounting to 80s., the monks to have potestas et plenissima largitas to do as they wish with it from the present day; in 1046 two brothers and the wife of one of them sold land, a vineyard, and their share of a church for 100s., with similar formulae.79 When a later cartularist at Farfa noted the acquisition of a church from four brothers and cousins with their wives, ‘a price being given’ in silver coins (£8 in denarii of Pavia), with a penalty of 2 pounds of best gold, this probably referred to a formal sale.80 75 See R. Doehaerd, Le Haut Moyen Aˆge occidental: ećonomies et socie´te´s, 2nd edn. (Paris, 1982), 323–6; Murray, Reason and Society, 31–5. For a sale where the price paid for a villa and church is a precious object desired for itself see below, at note 116. 76 An early instance is the 680 sale to Moissac, above, p. 27. 77 Be´ziers no. 6; Bibl. Nat. Collection Doat 58, fos. 241–2 (perhaps shortened by the cartularist); Ste-Foi no. 28 (but with mansi reserved for the woman’s life). 78 Onã no. 4; but the version incorporated in no. 3 (same date) is described as cartula donationis and 79 includes an anathema clause. Farfa nos. 614, 789. 80 Ibid. no. 1186 (1119). But overt purchases of churches by monasteries were not frequent in central (or southern) Italy; Dormeier (Monte Cassino, 94–6) found very few. For Tuscany however see Nanni, Parrochia, 46–7 and nn. 101–4.

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Some of the identifiable sales of churches were made not to great churches but to individuals, the record being preserved if the title passed eventually to a great church. In mid-ninth-century Brittany a priest Dumfrad sold a church (which he himself had earlier bought) to a man and wife by a charter which observes almost all the requirements for a proper sale, except that the price is ‘things worth 200s.’.81 In the Limousin in 864, a layman Ragambald made a formal sale of his church (for ‘things worth 100s.’) to Ralph archbishop of Bourges personally, giving him unrestricted power to dispose of it by ‘proprietary right’, which Ralph then exercised in a clear pious donation to his own foundation, Beaulieu.82 In 938 in Languedoc a layman sold a villa and two-thirds of its church in much the same way, not to the church of Elne but to the bishop personally.83 In 972 in the Spanish March, there is an equally formal sale of a church by Borrell count of Barcelona and his wife to their fidelis Astolf, with the object of giving him as his ‘own alod’ what he already held per fevum, the price being a horse, a bull-calf, and a very good mule, altogether worth 70 ounces of gold (showing, if correctly transcribed, the inflationary effect of Arab gold in the region); the form followed is that of Roman vulgar law, but the purpose of the sale and the nature of the payment belong to the tenth century.84 A century later in northern Italy six kinsmen made a formal sale of a monasterium and chapel to a priest, for £1,000 in denarii.85 Besides such acts, many charters allude to the purchase of a church in the past, which may or may not have been a formal sale; the point was to establish the present donor’s exclusive right in the church. In 951 a man gave Farfa lands, vineyards, and a share in a church ‘which came to me by purchase’ from Rampo son of Lupo; in Brittany in 954 the donor of a family church to Lande´vennec explained that ‘I bought that church from my brothers for gold and silver and good horses’, besides giving them land to secure the church as his own ‘eternal inheritance’ to give away; in 977 two women gave to Saint-Pe`re, Chartres, a church which they had ‘bought for an assessed price’ from a canon; in 990 the testament of countess Adelaide of Narbonne disposed of a moiety of a church that she had bought from Anno archbishop of Arles.86 A century later in the future Portugal, a priest’s grandson, making a pious donation of his eighth share in a 81

82 Redon no. 33. Beaulieu nos. 25–6. Addressing the bishop in the second-person singular, ‘I the vendor have received from you the buyer . . . the price agreed between me and you (800s.)’, etc. (Collection Moreau 6, fos. 99–100). 84 Marca Hisp., 900–1 (App. no. 113). Cf. Urgellia, II no. 100 (941); d’Abadal, ‘Eixalada-Cuixa’, doc. no. 100. 85 See index: Rodobbio. For a different form see Atti privati Milanese del sec. XI, I, ed. G. Vittani and C. Manaresi (Milan, 1933), no. 78 (1016), an archpriest acknowledging receipt from a priest of £100 as finitum precium for a chapel, and continuing: vendo ego Aupertus . . . tibi Arioaldo . . . per ac cartula . . . nec licead ullo 86 tempore nolle quod volui. Farfa no. 1230; Lande´vennec no. 24; St-Pe`re, 61–2; HL V no. 151. 83


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church, relates that his grandfather ‘bought that whole inheritance’ for a horse with a silver-trimmed saddle and bridle.87 In England this kind of evidence is lacking, but an Old English inscription over the south door of the Yorkshire church of Kirkdale relates that ‘Orm son of Gamal bought St Gregory’s minster when it was all broken and fallen, and he had it built new . . . ’; and with very different implications, the scribes of the Domesday Inquest told the recent history of St Mary’s Huntingdon in terms of two of king Edward’s priests selling it to the king’s chamberlain who sold it to another two priests.88 But it is usually impossible to be sure what kind of transaction lies behind such statements; the money or goods that passed, from individuals as well as from great churches, may have been nearer to countergifts than to prices; and perhaps it hardly matters. In the tenth and eleventh centuries the charters themselves, whether in favour of great churches or of individuals, were increasingly mixed or indeterminate in form. This is perhaps convergence rather than confusion: pious donations (identifiable as such by preamble, pro anima clause, or anathema) often included some of the Roman-law requirements for a sale: power of disposal ab hac die, guarantee to defend, and financial penalty in case of failure with the provision that the present charter would nonetheless remain in force; while in a donation as in a sale the penalty may be double the value of the thing given, but may even in a sale be a named amount of gold, or vaguely ‘double or triple’.89 Some such convergence in the use of formulae that might make a transfer look more secure seems natural enough. The convergence is easy to illustrate for dealings in churches in the tenth and eleventh centuries, especially in southern countries.90 There are acts described as venditio or using the verb vendere for no apparent reason, not naming a price so far as the record shows,91 or in various respects more akin to pious donation; for instance in 949 in the Maˆconnais, a deacon Ado ‘sells’ moieties of a chapel and a church, but the large sum paid (9 pounds of silver, or equivalent) is not mentioned until after the penalty clause and is explained as a countergift (‘that our

87

PMHD no. 649 (1085). Cf. Irache no. 23 (1062). Okasha, ‘Hand-list’, no. 64; and above, pp. 676–7. 89 e.g. Farfa nos. 448, 614, 618, 626, 656, 662 (all early 11th c.). The clause post poenam solutam haec carta . . . omni tempore sit firma prevented the penalty being a redemption of the property. In Languedoc cf. Be´ziers nos. 26, 31 (958, 969), donations with double penalty like a sale (one with, one without anathema). See Chevrier, ‘Evolution’, 205. 90 A northern instance is St-Pe`re, 72–3 (986), count Walter of Dreux’s charter allowing Saint-Pe`re to acquire a church from the benefice of his fidelis Archenulf; Archenulf and his wife are among the witnesses as venditores et datores; all they receive is an annual pension of 2s. ‘as caritas and for looking after the place’. 91 e.g. Be´ziers no. 17 (918), a carta venditionis in which three donatores ‘give’ their eight shares in a church pro remedium animarum and forbidding alienation (above, pp. 617–18); Farfa no. 448 (1003), carta venditionis but pro redemptione animarum. 88

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action may be more surely believed’).92 Then there are acts described as venditio et donatio or whose authors are ‘vendors and donors’, often meaning that part was sold and part given pro anima,93 but still sometimes with nothing to make it look like a sale,94 or nothing apart from what could be a countergift;95 or with conditions inconsistent with sale (such as forbidding alienation).96 Conversely the bishop of Carcassonne about 1055 quitclaims two churches to Sainte-Foi after a dispute, but employs the formulae of sale in acknowledging receipt of 184s. for this guerpitio et evacuatio.97 Much of this is a matter of mixing formulae and stretching the meaning of words;98 but it goes rather beyond that when Bernard Arbert and his brother Arnald, having in 1080 explicitly sold their quarter of a church and its presbiterium to Peter provost of Nıˆmes for 12s., nonetheless had a say in the matter along with their sister when the purchaser gave the church to the cathedral twelve years later. Either harsh realities, or the invasion of sale by gift-exchange ideas, required them now to ‘give and quitclaim’ whatever they had in the church, a quitclaim which their ‘sale’ should have made otiose.99 In the Iberian peninsula there seems to be even more informality and variety, along with a strong tradition of written record. There is the 944 sale already mentioned, formally correct in essentials (but twinned with a donation to the same effect); in 927 a carta venditionis by one priest to another, of ‘my church’, where the ‘price’ consists of ‘another church, of yours’; in 943 another formal sale by a priest to a priest, but ‘delivered into your dominium’ only for life, afterwards to go for the vendor’s soul to the monastery of Lorvaõ.100 In 965 three sisters ‘sell’ three-quarters of a church to a man, with classic wording about the price, but going straight on to spiritual penalties; while in 941 a bishop of Leoń’s grant of a church in perpetuity to two priest brothers seems more like a donation met by countergifts (a silver dish in honore and a few days later a very good mule).101

92 Cluny no. 751 (also—not sale-like—reserving usufruct for life and giving a vineyard and field in vestitura). Cf. ibid. no. 900 (c. 954): Ermenteus, priest of Vienne, hoping for peace and perpetual life in Christ, having both the wish (to give?) and the necessity (to sell?), sells his chapel to Cluny and has received the agreed price of 100s. 93 Or perhaps that the price was intentionally set low (see Magnou-Nortier, Socie´te´, 552), as perhaps in Le´zat no. 1576 (1090). From northern France cf. Luche´ which viscount Raoul ‘partly sold for 500s. and 94 partly gave pro anima’ (c.1057, St-Aubin no. 355). e.g. Gellone no. 109 (1031–48), with no. 110. 95 e.g. Lyon, 22–4 (1069); also in the Lyonnais, Cluny no. 3042. 96 e.g. Le´zat no. 165 (c.950); Aniane no. 271 (1075). 97 Ste-Foi no. 77 (c.1055). Cf. no. 78 (1075): a layman quitclaims the same churches and receives 80s., but unambiguously as a pious donation. 98 However, the verb dare (as distinct from donare) did not need to be stretched, having become a general-purpose word for transferring, like ‘give’ in modern English. 99 Nıˆmes nos. 159, 163 (1080, 1092). In Italy we have already seen two cases of an interest reserved for sellers of a church when their buyer passed it on to Cluny (above, pp. 394 at note 9; 396 at note 20). 100 Above, at note 78; PMHD no. 32; ibid. no. 51. 101 Cardenã no. 38; Sahaguń no. 78, called only carta scripturarum.


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In 1005 the deacon Sandino’s transfer of a church to Froila Gonsa´lvez, conditional on being himself supported for life and on something being given pro anima after his death, is an explicit donation, and the mare that he has accepted ‘to make the charter firm’102 is clearly a countergift. But in 1043 a priest’s cartula venditionis of a church to an abbot, naming as ‘price’ a bay horse with saddle and bridle, with other livestock (of stated money values), bread-cereals, and wine, has the formulae of a proper sale (the price which satisfies the vendor and of which nothing is owing, the traditio from this day out of his right into the buyer’s, the buyer’s potestas of doing what he will with it);103 and similar sales, of fractions of churches, are found in the next few decades.104 In 1082, however, the abbot Sando ‘gave’ his third of a church to a couple and their posterity, under the name of a donation, though its condition—‘that you may defend and help me’—is represented as if it were the price in a sale: ‘because this much has satisfied me, and nothing remains due with you’.105 This kind of merging of gift and sale need not indicate decaying legal knowledge, odd though some of its manifestations look (an exchange of churches treated as a sale; the promise of help and defence treated as a price). Intermediate or indeterminate forms could be usefully flexible, enabling the parties to achieve a variety of practical and spiritual ends. The choices may often have been more a matter of style than of substance; but a sale may sometimes simply have seemed the most secure way of fully and permanently alienating a property. At the other extreme from this haziness can be set a south Italian transaction of 1039, legally unambiguous (though hardly typical) and on the face of it singlemindedly commercial. This is the sale by John bishop of Luceria of a church belonging to his bishopric, for which he had sought a purchaser—someone ‘to whom we might give that church by convenientia and receive a price for it’— intending to use the purchase money to buy something else useful to his bishopric. He has found a willing buyer in Poto, son of Poterisus of Luceria. He quotes the decree of Aistulf about convenienciae and exchanges: roughly that a correctly made contract between a Lombard and a bishop or abbot was binding on the ecclesiastic’s successors, as was an exchange of landed property provided it was judged at the time by public authority to be advantageous to the church;106 and he calls on judges and his own advocate to confirm that this contract should stand. He declares that he has given and delivered the church to Poto, with all its 102

PMHD no. 194 (see index: Sandino). Here and in (e.g.) PMHD no. 270 (1031), ad cartam confirmandam or ad confirmatione cartule does not mean ‘for confirming the document’ but to ‘strengthen’ or ‘make firm’ 103 what it says. PMHD no. 326. 104 Ibid. nos. 478, 597. 105 Ibid. no. 656. The formula tantum mihi bene complacuit or quod mihi bene placuit seems by then to be used indifferently in sales and donations, for real prices or for countergifts, while penalties seem much the 106 same in either (e.g. ibid. nos. 53, 326, 426, 649). Aistulf, 755, c. 16 (Leges, IV. 201–2).

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pertinences, to have and possess for ever, reserving no portion in it; he has received from Poto 15 gold solidi, fully paid up; Poto and his heirs are to have the church in their potestas and dominatio, to do as they like with it and give it to whomever they choose. At this point the bishop moves to considerations arising from the fact that the thing sold is a church under his authority: he gives its new owner and his heirs the high degree of freedom from episcopal authority that bishops here commonly allowed to private churches.107 Finally there is the usual financial penalty (though at the high rate, in relation to the price, of 100 gold solidi), with the usual stipulation that paying the penalty would not annul the charter.108 The intention to buy something else for his bishopric with the proceeds is stated (truly or not) presumably to justify the transaction as amounting to an advantageous exchange, perhaps therefore more secure for the purchaser. What would otherwise have made it vulnerable was the alienation of church property, not the sale of a church. The principle of advantageous exchange, dragged in by bishop John to justify a sale, was often invoked to justify simple exchanges of property, usually by bishops; and naturally the property was often a church, sometimes exchanged for another church, sometimes not. Noto archbishop of Arles in 824 exchanged churches with a count, Ralph archbishop of Bourges in 859 with the bishop of Limoges, a bishop of Lucca in 862 with his brother, a count;109 bishops of Freising made such exchanges with lay nobles or counts from the mid-ninth century into the eleventh, churches going either way; in 969 the bishop of Be´ziers exchanged fractions of churches with a pair of brothers, and in 971 a church for land with the abbey of Aniane.110 Abbot Maiolus at Cluny, and even Desiderius of Monte Cassino, made occasional exchanges which brought churches to lay lords.111 William of Volpiano, the reforming abbot of Dijon, made a ‘mutual transfer of properties’ with Gerard count of Metz, which brought the abbey an estate on the upper Meuse, and gave the count (with other things) a church in Lombardy; but what count Gerard wanted this for was to give it at once to William’s foundation Fruttuaria.112 In Asturias in 1044 count Pinedos and his wife, endowing San Juan de Corias with various churches, explained that they had acquired four of these from the bishop of Oviedo in exchange for four others more useful to his see.113 Such transactions were usually called by name, commutatio, concambium, or 107

108 See above, pp. 721–4. Cava no. 938. HL II. no. 65; Bearlieu no. 24; Mem. Lucc., IV. ii. 1 no. 36 (the count’s charter). See Stutz, Benef., 353–5. 110 Above, pp. 148, 469 note 60, and DKonII no. 213 (1034); Be´ziers nos. 32, 34. 111 Cluny no. 1933 (992–3, giving back a church to a lay family in return for three others); Dormeier, Monte Cassino, 96–9. 112 St-Beńigne no. 271 (1020; nothing is said about advantageous exchange, perhaps because of the count’s planned gift). Cf. ibid. no. 384 (1096), exchange of churches with abbot of Saint-E´tienne, Caen, on 113 geographical grounds. Hinojosa, Documentos, 19. 109


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escambium.114 They were reasonably distinct from sales, even though sometimes money was thrown in as a makeweight.115 But occasionally something amounting to an exchange was not so called, such as count Hugh’s venditio of a villa and church to Saint-Andre´-le-Bas in 920, where 30 pounds of silver is added to what he ‘sells’, and his object is clearly to acquire a cloth-of-gold altar-hanging.116 Exchanges involving churches were not an everyday affair, and were perhaps most characteristic of dealings between great churches, or between bishops and rulers.117 A Spanish instance of this last, in 1045—king Garcıá of Pamplona’s carta mutationis for Irache, giving a church and taking a castle—is pious in tone and on the defensive, emphasizing the lavishness of what he is giving for the castle ‘because I do not wish to have it culpably’.118 Finally, something must be said about the occasional pledging of a church as security for a loan: normally, it seems, actually handing it over to the lender, so nearer to pawning than to mortgaging in the modern English sense.119 Sometimes, in the south of France, laymen borrowed from laymen with churches as security;120 sometimes a monastery or its head borrowed from laymen, as an abbot of Saint-Sernin pledged to Pons Umberti two-thirds of what the monastery had in the church at Saint-Anatholy,121 or as the Domesday Inquest reported of St Mary’s at Huntingdon, that the abbot of Thorney had pledged it to certain burgesses.122 Even William of Volpiano as abbot of Dijon, in an emergency, handed over two churches recently acquired in Normandy to a certain Atto ‘le Fou’ for a loan of £100; later duke Richard II redeemed the churches for him.123 But usually it was a monastery that made the loan, standing a good chance of obtaining permanent property in the thing pledged. Instances of this where a church or a share in a church was the pledge can probably be found anywhere 114

i.e. where both parties give and receive permanent property. e.g. HL V nos. 17, 54 (897, 931); St-Julien, Tours no. 1 (1002); Catalunya, II. 75–7 (952, count Wifred exchanges lands and 1,000s. for a church from the bp. of Gerona, for founding St Peter, Camprodoń). 116 St-Andre´-le-Bas no. 124 (the silver is part of what is sold, not of the price paid). Cf. above, at note 100 (927 ‘sale’ of a church for a church); Farfa no. 1262 (bp. of Sabina’s quitclaim of one church against Farfa’s grant of another, 1090). 117 Rulers used exchanges to compensate great churches for more or less compulsory losses, e.g. DArn. no. 90 (891, giving Luxeuil to Metz when taking Chiemsee for Salzburg); Otto II, Henry II (above, p. 288); ADNorm. no. 87 (1034–5); DLothIII no. 31 (1131). In any case the ruler’s authority was needed in theory (as public judgment on the required advantageousness) and sometimes sought in practice, for a church’s exchange of more than a few mansi (see the Ebersberg cartularist’s comment in DKonII no. 213, of 1034). 118 Irache no. 8. 119 But consistent with the archaic mort-gage in French; see Geńestal, Le Roˆle des monaste`res 1–5; 120 Barthe´lemy, Vendoˆme, 701. e.g. below, at note 137, 140; cf. in Maine St-Aubin no. 317. 121 St-Sernin, Toulouse nos. 165–6 (mid-12th c.). Cf. Irache, no. 171 (1158), donors of a moiety of a church envisage an abbot wanting to ‘put it in pledge’ (and allow this if necessary). 122 Probably king Edward had then bought the debt from the burgesses and so could dispose of the church (above, as note 88). 123 ADNorm. no. 86 (1032–5), Robert I’s charter confirming his predecessors’ benefactions. 115

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where ordinary lands were so used: conspicuously in Gascony and Languedoc and in Normandy and Maine.124 There may be a fixed term for repayment, in which case the church is very likely to fall to the monastery; if as seems usual there is no fixed term, the borrower or his heirs would probably at some stage be allowed or encouraged to give the church pro anima and be let off the debt, or even be paid more. Late in the tenth century Guy, successor of a man who had pledged his (or his wife’s) two-thirds of a church to Mont-Saint-Michel, was pressed by the monks to sell it to them, and eventually agreed, won over by their offer and (his charter claims) by the value he set on their prayers for his ancestor the borrower. A generation later two men whose father Gradeloc had pledged his church to Mont-Saint-Michel and had finally given it to the monks for his soul, took it back because the monks after many years had failed to lend them horses when they went campaigning (as promised); but now gave it back again for their souls and their father’s, receiving a countergift of £8 (twice the original debt) instead of the horse-lending (and keeping their right to refuge in the mount: this is a close neighbourly relationship, not a business one).125 Meanwhile the revenues take the place of interest, and there may be a minimum rather than a maximum term for the loan.126 When late in the eleventh century the monks of Saint-Vincent-du-Mans had a moiety of the church of Me´zie`res pledged to them for 50s. by Norman son of Bernard, they were to have it at least long enough to take three harvests from it;127 if he then paid back the money ‘he should get his church back’, otherwise as long as he held their money they should hold the church. If he wanted to pay them he must do it from his own resources, not someone else’s; in other words he could not sell his rights in the church to a third party willing to pay the debt: the monks were more concerned to keep the church than to recover the loan.128 They held it for the rest of Norman’s life and renewed the loan to his son Odo, with a further 30s.129 So far this is straightforward; but even the opening moves are strangely coloured by the practices of pious donation. Norman when pledging his moiety— initiating the mortgage, not winding it up—had given the revenues to the monks ‘in alms’, and had ‘put the donum on the altar’ of St Vincent. When in much the 124

e.g. St-Mont no. 26 (c.1085); Le´zat no. 13 (c.1100); St-Vincent-du-Mans nos. 650, 667, 697 (below, at notes 127–9); Norman instances in Geńestal, Roˆle, 22 n. 1 (see his appendices). 125 126 Ibid., app. nos. v and iv. Ibid. 12–16, 58–61, 70–7. 127 ´ Genestal (ibid. 30–2) held that where the pledge was a church the lender could not take physical possession but only receive some revenues via the incumbent (and have presentation in a vacancy); this could be true from the later 12th c. onwards, but before that, lenders would have whatever the borrowers had had as lords. 128 Cf. St-Wandrille no. 117 (1063–89): redeemable only after 20 years, out of the borrowers’ own means, and by them or their sons or daughters, no other kinsman; and saleable (eventually) only to Saint-Wandrille. 129 St-Vincent-du-Mans nos. 650, 667. The verbs used here are invadiare or inguagiare; in the south, pignorare or mittere in pignore.


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same way the monks lent 50s. to Hugh of La Borie in return for his moiety of the church of Courcemont, to be held by the monks ‘in alms’ for three years or as long as he held their money, Hugh too ‘put the donum on the altar’; it looks like a kind of investiture with the thing pledged.130 ‘In alms’ could mean only that the monks were to pay no rent or service for the revenues, but might mean that the mortgagers hope already for some heavenly reward besides their money.131 At Me´zie`res, however, when Norman’s sons came and gave the whole pledged moiety in alms, again putting the ‘gift’ on the altar, this does look like a final donation in return for remission of the debt: they were given a caritas of 70s., probably by remitting most of the 80s. borrowed but perhaps in addition to it; their lord Matthew of Sourdon ‘granted the donum in alms’ for a countergift of 25s.; and their other brothers, sister, and Odo’s wife all consented for countergifts of a few denarii.132 For Courcemont the record does not even name the transaction as putting the church in pledge. Neither does the record of broadly similar dealings in Lorraine, between Stavelot-Malme´dy and a lord Anselm of Bra. In 1103 Anselm and his sons, planning to go to Hungary, borrowed 1212 marks from the monks and put the church of Bra—which they held in benefice from the abbey—into the monks’ possession, on condition that if any of them came home alive he should have it back; otherwise the monks were to keep it, for Anselm’s and his sons’ and kinsmen’s souls. None of them did return; but when Anselm’s son-in-law Evrard of Ysers claimed the benefice by ‘hereditary right’, the new abbot (being hard pressed by royal demands) made a private deal, accepting 12 marks from him and allowing him the church in benefice, while himself offering to pay off Anselm’s debt to the monks. The monks rejected this, being determined to keep the church, and in 1124 made a settlement with Evrard which left him taking tithes but not appointing the priest.133 Here it was explicit from the first that the pledge might become a pious donation. It is more puzzling to find them actually assimilated when a layman in Gascony, feeling death approaching, ‘put the church of Corneillan in pledge pro anima sua’ to St John and the monks of Saint-Mont for 100s.134 Did he want the money to dispense for his soul, or had he perhaps not borrowed the money at all 130 Ibid. no. 697. Here however the cartulary account may obscure a lapse of time between the loan and the donum; if so it could be a final donation when the debt was remitted. 131 As implied in Guy’s charter for Mont-St-Michel, above, at note 125. 132 St-Vincent-du-Mans nos. 667–9. 133 Stavelot-Malme´dy nos. 133 (Anselm’s charter of 1103, probably altered by the monks to exclude all heirs), 143 (settlement of 1124 relating the original conditions as reserving the sons’ rights). 134 St-Mont no. 79 (c.1082); later substituting the church of Saint-Germer under pressure from count and magnates because of the viscount’s objections. On family interests and piety in the workings of the ‘land market’, including pledging, see Bull, Piety, esp. 268–72.

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but pledged the church as security for alms of that amount to be given to the monks by his heirs? Sometimes the original agreement is recorded, either in the monks’ memorandum or, more rarely, in a first-person charter from the borrower.135 More likely to be recorded, however, is the final acquisition by the monastery.136 That a church is pledged to another layman is most likely to emerge when it is given to a monastery. One of the churches given to Moirax by William son of Arnald in 1049 was not immediately available, since his father ‘had put it in pledge to Arnald of Sauniac’; but William could give it because it was to revert to him or his sons when the money was repaid.137 It could happen that a church given as an entry gift was pledged to or by a third party at the time; if it is the borrower who gives it,138 the monastery can redeem it by paying off his debt; if the lender, the monastery has acquired the debt and is probably counting on the borrower defaulting.139 When Bernard Pons offered his son Peter to be a monk at Le´zat, he gave him for his entry gift moieties of two churches which he had in pledge from his cousin Raymond Matfred, along with half a mill and a holding both pledged to him by another man; if the debtors are unwilling to let the things go they are not to pay the debt to anyone but Peter (presumably to use, faute de mieux, as his entry gift).140 So pledging a church may turn out to be a kind of sale where the seller gets his price long before the buyer gets full property-right;141 and perhaps at the same time a delayed pious donation where, inverting the usual course, usufruct passes before property-right does. No doubt some pledged churches were redeemed, in which case the monks would have no reason to keep a record, but these might not greatly swell the fairly small known numbers.142 The fact remains that where lands were mortgageable so were churches, and Bernard Pons’s charter for his son makes no distinction, among the things he holds in pledge, between churches, mills, and holdings. All these various transactions belonged to a network of social relationships in a gift-exchange world; even sales and mortgages went on between friends or 135 e.g. Anselm’s for Bra (above, note 133). Cf. Gilbert bp. of Barcelona’s acknowledgment of his debt (10 oz. of gold, to be repaid with 15 oz.) to God and the monastery of San-Miguel-del-Fay for restoring his cathedral (above, p. 383); pledging the church of Saint-Vincent of Riels, ‘with all its alods, tithes, firstfruits, offerings, and all pertinences’ (but no question here of the proceeds being the only interest). 136 e.g. Geńestal, Roˆle, app. nos. iv, v, viii (see pp. 17–18); probably St-Vincent-du-Mans no. 667. 137 138 See index: Moirax. e.g. St-Mont no. 88 (c.1085). 139 e.g. Geńestal, Roˆle, app. no. viii (but the pledge here is not the church itself or a share in it but its 140 Le´zat no. 39 (c.1085–96); cf. no. 98. houses; cf. app. no. xxii). 141 Not necessarily a low price: see (though not on churches) Barthe´lemy, Vendoˆme, 702. 142 Some odd-looking transactions may involve a loan and pledge, e.g. St-Sernin, Toulouse no. 47 (c.1000), elaborate arrangements that may turn on an unmentioned loan; Cluny no. 1325 (972), an explicit loan but the church seems to be donated, not pledged.


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potential friends. But it is pious donations, gifts to saints, that differed most radically from any modern counterpart, while their glow often touched the other transactions. Indeed they have no counterpart, being sui generis, and this is as true of gifts of churches as of anything else. Whether there was an extra dimension to the gift of a church remains open to question. If inherited alodial land was peculiarly suitable for establishing a lasting link between a family and a great church or its patron saint,143 then an inherited church, itself an alod, might be even more so. The symbolism of the countergifts may reflect this: it seems possible that the occasional payment in gold was meant to reflect the splendour or even the sacredness of the thing given, and perhaps not merely to justify but to complete its difficult alienation.144 This could be true also of dealings in churches between individuals, as with the Breton buying out his brothers with gold, silver, and horses.145 Back in 782, both the price paid and the penalty set in Magniprand’s transfer of S. Dalmazio to the English king’s daughter was 700 gold solidi,146 a huge sum even in the debased gold of eighth-century Lucca; perhaps reflecting symbolic rather than material value. More certainly, the special quality of a church as a thing donated could be marked by special conditions for its future, as we have seen;147 or by the donor keeping a hand on the reins, like the local lord Guy giving the church of Sauge about 1050, who was to be consulted about appointing or removing the priest, and to nominate ‘his own poor man’ for alms;148 a sort of thing that might happen far more often than it was spelt out. More solidly and formally, the Apulian layman giving his church to Tremiti in 1121 kept as property his own family tomb in it, while if he or a son became a clerk or monk he could rule the church for life with a Tremiti monk or clerk as colleague.149 But while such significance would attach to the alienation of a magnate family’s chief church (probably itself a monastery), or a minor noble family’s only church (perhaps to be made monastic), it might not apply at all to the general ruck of local churches, given away to enrich a great church with their endowments and pastoral revenues, and usually without any conditions specially bearing on their own status as churches.150

143

See White, Custom, 167–8; Innes, State, 40–2; and (with caution) Gurevic˘, ‘Repre´sentations’, 529–37. However, small amounts of gold were typically given to donors’ wives, probably for personal 145 adornment. Above, at note 86 (954). 146 Above, p. 64. For the penalty (due for trying to expel her, the charter remaining in force) see Mem. Lucc., V. 2 no. 186; for the price (already paid; to be given back if she returns the property with all the charters—as may have happened), ibid. no. 187. The sums were not called penalty and price, however, 147 nor the transaction a sale. Above, at notes 8–13. 148 Couture no. 13; cf. St-Sernin, Toulouse no. 155; or Manigenius at Saint-Cyr (above, p. 378). 149 150 Besides other safeguards (above, at note 13). See above, p. 687. 144

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21.iv. Litigation Customary law may have affected procedure more than substance; but in meeting the needs of those who had freedom and power, and resting on their assumptions about what was right, it would naturally make it possible for them to claim or defend anything that they thought of as property, including churches. In most of the West, from the eighth century onwards, we find rulers’ or public courts—or increasingly, ad hoc assemblies of laymen and ecclesiastics—dealing with claims to churches as they would with claims to land, by the same processes and on the same grounds. There is the same tendency to settle for what might prove acceptable and lasting, rather than plaintiffs pursuing and defendants defending their right to the last ditch (though they may do so outside court);1 and the same pre-eminence of custom rather than codified or decreed law (even if written law is quoted).2 What we may call ‘litigation’ merges at the informal end into negotiation to solve or anticipate problems, and at the formal end into the use of public acts and written record to make transactions secure (sometimes by a fictitious lawsuit).3 The concern of this chapter is with matters brought to a ruler, a bishop, or an assembly, as a dispute requiring either mediation or judgment; signalled in the cartularies by a term such as altercatio, querela, intentio, causatio, lis, or the trickier placitum.4 The role of a ruler in this could be anything from crucial to non-existent. An effective ruler had practical help to offer, and would have his own interest in treating as a matter for his inquiry, judgment, and action anything that his important subjects regarded as property. Where, on the other hand, peaceful settlement depended entirely (instead of largely) on local consensus, an aggrieved party would doubtless first complain to a local protector such as a count or bishop, but eventually with his support to some assembly of notables whose assumptions would shape what could be claimed and how. In Lombard Italy, Farfa preserved some of the earliest surviving records of claims to churches brought to a ruler’s court (here the duke of Spoleto’s), beginning in the mid-eighth century and multiplying from the early days of 1 I use the terms ‘plaintiff’ and ‘defendant’ for convenience, not as translating any contemporary legal terms. 2 It seems that nothing in the Leges bears directly on churches as themselves property (though what little they say on inheritance law would apply). Citation of them was usually on procedure, esp. the use of charter evidence; this did involve questions about alienating land to the church: see McKitterick, Carolingians, 65–7. On symbolic and practical use of the Leges see ibid. 37–57; Wormald, ‘Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis’, in P. Sawyer and I. Wood (eds.), Early Medieval Kingship (Leeds, 1977), 105–38. 3 On Francia see esp. Fouracre, ‘Disputes’, 23–43; Nelson, ‘Dispute Settlement’, 55–64. For a possible early (702) fictitious lawsuit over a church see above, p. 115 note 55. 4 On the conduct and recording of lawsuits in the Carolingian world, 8th and 9th cs., see Wormald, Making, 70–90. For placitum see Niermeyer, giving 26 meanings.


777

Charlemagne’s overlordship.5 Two linked cases about the church or monastery of S. Angelo, Rieti, show what would soon become typical. The first, in 777, was between the ducal palace and the bishopric. When five priests of the cathedral were unwilling to swear that the church was not ‘public’ (that is, not the duke’s), attention turned to an earlier ducal charter or ‘judgment’, which a former bishop Teuto had and (on his deathbed) gave to his brother Pando; but Pando said he had burnt it, and no one remembered (or would admit to remembering) its content. So S. Angelo was adjudged to the palace,6 and soon afterwards the duke gave it away, indirectly to Farfa.7 But the late bishop’s brother and nephews had their own interest in it; in 780, when Charlemagne was in Italy, Pando’s son Paul complained to him (the duke being present) that the church ‘belonged to his kinsmen’, as part of what they had from their aunt Gutta (confirmed by king Liutprand), and the duke had taken it from them. Charlemagne left the duke to settle the matter, as a dispute, now, between Pando’s family and Farfa. Pando and his sons and consortes produce Liutprand’s precept; but it does not mention S. Angelo. Farfa now claims that the palace’s right to the church was declared in the document that Pando burnt. Invited to produce it, the family confirm its fate; asked what was in it, two of the consortes (one of whom, a priest, had actually read it) claim not to know which way it went; Pando himself admits that ‘if it had not been against us, we would certainly not have burnt it’. Finally the official who wrote it testifies that it supported the palace; Pando concedes this; invited to produce other documents, the family have none; they are fined for destroying the document, and the abbot of Farfa is to ‘have and possess that church of S. Angelo’ by the palace’s grant.8 So the family’s opportunistic invoking of Charlemagne’s help had failed; but it was a judicial process that settled the matter.9 In Tuscany several disputes over churches were brought before Charlemagne’s missi or local judges;10 and an elaborate record survives for a case brought in 833 in Siena, before the emperor Lothar’s missi (themselves bishops), between Peter bishop of Arezzo and Vigilius abbot of S. Antimo about the monasterium (collegiate church) of S. Pietro d’Asso. The record, issued in the names of the missi, 5 For mid-8th c. see the case of Terentiano (above, pp. 170–1). In the kingdom, the Pisan case above (pp. 57 note 71) was not disputing possession of a church but the legitimacy of its endowment. 6 7 CDL IV. i no. 29 ¼ Manaresi no. 3. CDL IV. i nos. 30–1, and ed. p. 91. 8 Ibid. no. 35 ¼ Manaresi no. 5. Pando, his brothers, and his consortes, may have been the clergy of S. Angelo as well as claiming to be its proprietors (cf. Terentiano, above, note 5). 9 For other cases brought by Farfa in the duke’s court claiming churches against laymen see CDL IV. i no. 14; and Farfa II no. 138 (785; a layman acknowledges the monks’ right to a church of whose dos he had taken ‘a little’; seeing from their charter that he could not possibly claim the church he now ‘donates and grants’ his possible share of the dos, evidently without waiting for a judgment). 10 Including in 806 the complicated matter of S. Pietro, Pistoia (see index), claimed against S. Bartolomeo for the royal fisc (Manaresi no. 19).


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reports the long dialogue that takes place. Bishop Peter’s advocates state that S. Antimo has ‘invaded and held the monasterium with its pertinences, against law and malo ordine’ (‘in a bad manner’ or ‘by a bad disposition of things’—‘wrongly’ would do—a formula implying customary norms, and soon to be widespread in the Carolingian world); ‘therefore we ask you to give judgment between us and get justice done on the part of S. Antimo, because by the laws it belongs to St Donatus’ (i.e. Arezzo). The abbot’s advocates reply: ‘It is true that we have and hold that monasterium with its pertinences, but not against law nor malo ordine, because we have here this precept . . . from king Charles’, showing that he had granted them the property within which S. Pietro lay. There follows argument about the charter’s content; it does not mention the church among the property’s pertinences, as Arezzo argues it would have done if Charlemagne had meant to give it. The abbot then shifts his ground, saying that S. Pietro was given in benefice by Charlemagne to earlier abbots and by Louis and Lothar to himself, and that he holds it ‘also on behalf of S. Antimo’ (a weak point, picked up by the missi who question whether the grants to the abbots were not purely personal: he concedes that they were); he has no other documents to show. The bishop then has the emperor’s instruction to the missi read out: it sets out Arezzo’s case, orders the missi to investigate it, and requires them to ‘re-invest’ the bishop without delay if the abbot is claiming purely on grounds of a benefice while the bishop has documentary evidence. Accordingly the bishop is invited to show his documents, and produces a string of them from king Liutprand onwards. The abbot’s side is given one more chance to show evidence of any kind: ‘a precept or a judgment or a witness or any act’; they acknowledge that they have nothing of the kind, nor any grounds for holding the church ‘except as we have said already, that we have it by benefice’ from Louis and Lothar. The missi declare that in view of the emperor’s instructions ‘you certainly cannot hold it any longer on that ground’. Nonetheless, to complete the case they inquire (of both clergy and laity) whether the church of Arezzo has ever had vestitura—lawful possession—of S. Pietro, since the abbot says it has not. It emerges that a former bishop was re-invested—put back in possession—on Charlemagne’s order, and subsequently appointed four successive abbots11 (thus demonstrating his vestitura). So finally the missi ‘have made the abbot’s advocates . . . re-invest the bishop’s advocates . . . with this monasterium and its pertinences . . . and have had this notitia made’ by a notary.12 Whether the predominant need here was to show that justice was done or elaborately to display Arezzo’s right, the object would be to establish that right. 11 12

All archpriests (suggesting that S. Pietro, Asso, was a pieve). Manaresi no. 42. In general on Italian land disputes see Wickham, Land and Power, 229–56.


779

In conquered Bavaria too, many cases about churches were brought to a ‘public placitum’ or to Carolingian missi, especially by early ninth-century bishops of Freising suing monasteries, priests, laymen, or other bishops.13 In 818 a layman Waldker was accused of unjustly entering the curtis and house of the church at Pach14 and beating one of the church’s serfs; he did not deny the entry or, presumably, the beating—these will have been the theatrical demonstration of his vestitura—but said that ‘the church and everything belonging to it was his own’, and that he, not the bishop, had lawful possession. Sworn men, however, said that bishop Atto had had the church potestative15 and had granted it in benefice to a priest, and bishop Hitto likewise until Waldker ‘unjustly dispossessed him’. The court judged that Waldker should reinvest the bishop (as he subsequently did by the church bell-rope);16 and he acknowledged, as was probably common form, that he could not have what he wanted.17 In 802 such a case was brought by nobles against the bishop, when a religious woman and her brother claimed that bishop Atto was ‘unjustly in possession of their paternal inheritance’, chiefly a church, but lost their case on the grounds of a nobleman’s conveyance to Freising long ago.18 In the Carolingian heartland we have already seen two monasteries being claimed against lay heirs before Charlemagne himself: Lorsch in 772 by its ownerabbot (perhaps only clearing the way for him to commend it to Charlemagne), and Mettlach in 782 by the church of Trier suing the three sons of Lambert. Trier said that Lambert had ‘invaded the monastery malo ordine’; the sons, that Lambert had left them lawfully in possession.19 This dispute was decided on the basis of what the elders of the region said, along with the sons’ failure to produce evidence of their lawful vestitura. In both cases the monastery is said to be ‘vindicated and won at law’ for all time by the successful party.20 In these two cases what was at issue was arguably direct possession of the property—in fact, the abbacy itself—rather than lordship over an abbot;21 whereas at Asso in Tuscany vestitura was demonstrated by appointing abbots; 13

e.g. Hu¨bner, ‘Gerichtsurkunden’, nos. 168–70 (803–4), 177 (807), 219a, 238, 243, 247 (all between 818 and 823); the background is the bishops’ continuing need to restore or secure their property after Frankish 14 conquest. Langenbach (Bitterauf) or Laimbach (Sto¨rmer, Adel, 136 n. 93). 15 i.e. having potestas, lawful power. 16 Cf. Freising no. 703a, b (849): a priest, reneging on having given Freising his share of a church, is defeated by witnesses and documents and reinvests the bishop by the fringe of the altar-cloth. 17 Freising no. 401a. The case was held before the bishop himself and a count (see Stutz, ‘Kapitel’, 60–3, rebutting Heusler’s argument that it was ‘only’ about possession, not right: vestitura was proper, lawful 18 possession). Freising no. 183. 19 Above, pp. 339–40. 20 Lorsch is evindicatum atque elitigatum for the abbot; Mettlach elidiatum (sic) atque evindicatum for Trier. From further west cf. Hu¨bner, ‘Gerichtsurkunden’, no. 93 (775), case before Charlemagne between Herchenrad bp. of Paris and Fulrad of Saint-Denis about a monastery (Plaisir); the parties’ charters being contradictory, it was settled by ‘ordeal of the Cross’ (see Wormald, Making, 71), Fulrad’s man failing. 21 See above, p. 341.

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while at Pach in Bavaria, the bishop’s vestitura consisted in appointing priests, but Waldker’s claim was evidently to landlordly control. Which level of lordship was in question is usually left vague;22 suggesting an assumption that whoever won the church had the choice of how he used it, so far as the court was concerned (an assumption consistent with its being only fairly modest monasteries, not the great and lordly, that were matter for lawsuits). The later ninth and the two following centuries yield a wide variety of lawsuits about churches from different parts of the disintegrated Carolingian realms; and whereas the earlier cases were mostly taken to an authoritative conclusion, there was now increasing importance set on a voluntary surrender or quitclaim even if not a compromise. Often all that survives is a short notitia or a cartularist’s note; the fuller records come from the south (broadly defined).23 St Gall’s unique store of original charters brings us a lawsuit over the ‘little abbey’ of Pfa¨vers in Rhaetia.24 Salamon bishop of Constance had given this to St Gall, but subject to a pact reserving it for life to himself and then his nephew Waldo, along with an estate called Busnang for which they were to pay a small census. Should Waldo become bishop he was to give up Pfa¨vers to St Gall, but keep Busnang; but if the monks denied him Busnang he could have the abbey of Pfa¨vers in hereditary right.25 This pact was the background to litigation in 920 between Waldo, now bishop as expected, and the monks of St Gall, before duke Burchard. Waldo said that the monks and their dean Cozolt were claiming Pfa¨vers malo ordine, having broken their pact;26 ‘the whole people of Chur knows this’, and had judged in his favour earlier; king Conrad had then given Waldo ‘this precept about Pfa¨vers that I hold in my hand’. On the strength of this, and on Burchard’s instructions, ‘all the Romans and Alemans judged that if Cozolt and his advocate could not defeat the bishop and his advocate with lawful witnesses, they should henceforth have neither grievance (querela) nor grounds for a claim (racio)’; at this point St Gall’s side gave in (and were spared a heavy penalty by the duke interceding for them).27 In the Limousin in 870 a more ordinary case was brought before the count of Toulouse by the abbot of Beaulieu and his advocate, suing a man called Adenus who they say ‘had malo ordine taken away the church’ of Cousages that archbishop Ralph had given to Beaulieu. Adenus (probably heir to Ragambald 22 A later dispute among Alemans (below, at note 48–9) seems to involve both access to possessions and appointment of priest (‘ordaining the church’). 23 See Wormald, Making, 91 (more literate law-reporting, more resort to the written lex, and more survival of the notariate); ibid. 69 (Bavaria and Alemania were ‘southern’). 24 25 See above, p. 314. St Gallen no. 761 (909). 26 Cozolt had ‘made an unjust traditio’, presumably of Busnang (perhaps granting it to someone else for a higher rent: see Wartmann’s comment, St Gallen, III. 2). 27 Ibid. no. 779, a notitia kept by St Gall although the judgment was against them, probably in hope of finding a loophole later.


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who had sold it to Ralph)28 was interrogated as to ‘whether he could lawfully defend this’; he declared that he could not, and engaged to come on the day appointed to reinvest the abbot ‘by his hands, as he had robbed him’; this he did, by the church bell-rope; the abbot had to make the record.29 Further south, in 898, a more elaborate record relates a case brought by the bishop of Nıˆmes against a certain Rostagnus, before a large assembly. The style and procedures are regional; it had to be established that the bishop’s advocate lived by Gothic law and Rostagnus by Salic.30 But the issue was ordinary: that Rostagnus had dealt with a church and its pertinences ‘unjustly, malo ordine, and against the law’,31 whereas the bishop’s advocate ‘held in his hand’ a charter of donation, and former bishops had the church ad proprium for the crucial thirty years. Rostagnus said he could produce an auctor—a source for his right32—named Aimard, but failed to do this in the forty days allowed, and admitted that he had no documents ‘by which he could defend these things ad proprium’. So it was adjudged that he must restore everything to the bishop’s advocate, and he engaged ‘as was his law’ to walk round the possessions, re-invest the advocate, and ‘put him in’.33 Such cases still arose in eleventh-century Languedoc. A dispute in 1026 between two monasteries—unusually, pushed right to the end without compromise or even a quitclaim—came to an ad hoc assembly still using the placitum procedure and expecting the experts to look up apposite legal texts. Aimeric abbot of Le´zat and Odo abbot of Simorre (Gers) both undertook to accept the judgment of ‘abbots and monks’ on the disputed abbey of Sainte-Marie de Peyrissas; a gathering of monks and laity met in the presence of count Roger of Comminges. Aimeric complained that Odo ‘had unjustly and by force snatched the potestas of that abbey from St Peter’ (that is, from Le´zat); the assembled abbots ‘interrogated abbot Aimeric as to what kind of right St Peter claimed in the abbey’, and were told that a clerk Asnerius had given the place—deserted woodland at the time, which he held unchallenged—as an entry gift, and later, having become abbot, had built the church there; Le´zat then held it unchallenged for thirty years. In reply abbot Odo produced a document purporting to show that a predecessor of his had bought the place, but this was defective in various ways; so the abbots judged that the entry gift and the thirty years’ possession made St Peter’s right better than St Saturnin’s (Simorre’s). But Odo would not accept this. So the 28

Beaulieu nos 25–6. Ibid. no. 27 (870). Despite Adenus’s apparently rapid surrender, this does not look quite like a fictitious suit to secure his quitclaim. There may have been unrecorded out-of-court negotiation. 30 This affected the choice of procedures (but requiring litigants to declare their personal law was rare outside Italy; see Wormald, Making, 81 and n. 262). 31 The verb used, sancire, leaves it unclear what Rostagnus was accused of doing with the church, but the conclusion of the case shows that he was in possession. 32 Perhaps author of a charter (whose evidence would be valuable even in the charter’s absence). 33 Nıˆmes no. 8 (898); described as both judicium and notitia, made by the bishop’s advocate. 29

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abbots looked in the Visigothic lawbook and the canons, and found a canon supporting the thirty-year prescription specifically for such a case between churches; Odo rejected this also. Then the lay lords weighed in, deciding that abbot Aimeric should say ‘by one man’ (one man’s oath?) that ‘St Peter formerly had the lawful donation and vestitio of the place from a dominus potestativus’—a lord competent to dispose of it—‘and that St Peter’s right was better than St Saturnin’s’; this too Odo rejected. So it was proposed to settle it by combat; Odo refused. Finally the assembled seniores, seeing that Odo would neither do right nor accept it, advised count Roger to restore the potestas of Sainte-Marie to Le´zat, ‘and so he did’.34 So only after every effort had been made to get the loser to concede defeat (in a case begun as an agreed resort to fellow monks) was action by the ruler brought into play.35 More characteristic is a record of 1053 from Be´ziers, relating how the cathedral clergy came before Ermengaud of Casulis and other lords to complain against Odo Bernard and his brothers Rostagnus, William, and others, about a church that the family was keeping from them. First the assembled lords asked the clergy whether they had any charter or recorded judgment; they produced a canon who had ‘held the ink-well’ from which the testament was written that reserved the church to Be´ziers after the deaths of the testator and his son Bernard (evidently the defendants’ father). Asked for their reply, the brothers answered: ‘We have no writing, but our grandfather and our father held that church as alod.’ The lords decided that it must be settled by combat, and adjourned the placitum accordingly. At the adjourned session the canons renewed their claim against the brothers, ‘that they are taking that church away from God and St Nazarius and holding it malo ordine’; the brothers renewed their defence, that they had seen their father hold it all his life; but added that at his death he had told them to quitclaim it to Be´ziers, and they had then acquired it by fief from bishop Berengar.36 Three of the laymen present thought this a falsehood, and tried to push the bishop into supporting his canons; but when the bishop persisted ‘in his malice’ (expecting gold from the family), the placitum was dispersed without reaching a conclusion, and the clergy had to wait for bishop Berengar’s death. The next bishop took steps to recover the church for them, renewing their complaint against the family in a placitum before the viscount; who mediated between them and advised the new bishop to offer the family 300s. The outcome was that Odo and two of his brothers came to Be´ziers and quitclaimed the 34

Le´zat no. 409. The procedure seems too elaborate, involving too many actors, to have been set up as theatre from beginning to end. Perhaps the pursuit of full victory was more characteristic of monasteries than of laity (cf. St Clement, Craon, below, note 73). 36 Or that their father had told them to do this (but this too would recognize Be´ziers’s claim). 35


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church, ‘with its tithes and firstfruits’ (suggesting, but not establishing, that they had been taking these); the record takes the form of their notice of quitclaim.37 It was presumably the brothers’ move in claiming a grant by the previous bishop—or their success in buying his support—that prevented this case from actually coming to combat. Late in the eleventh century and early in the twelfth, the priory of Saint-Mont in Gascony was involved in disputes about its churches, begun by local laymen challenging earlier donations; several of these did come to trial by combat, won by the monks (or in one case by the archbishop of Auch on their behalf) and ending with the defeated party renouncing all claim, while the monks on advice clinched this by payments despite their victory.38 Anywhere, an heir’s challenge if genuinely hostile would open a lawsuit. By contrast, in mideleventh-century Provence emerging from confusion, there was litigation (often at peace assemblies) brought by monasteries against lay families that had taken possession of churches and their pertinences. The case could be put to the ordeal, ‘that each should prove his right by the judgment of God’: as at the 1045 assembly where the Misons family, in possession of churches claimed by St Victor, would not recognize ‘very ancient charters’, rejected the result of ordeal by hot iron, and insisted on ordeal by water, which they lost (their man’s bonds broke and his legs waved in the air, causing much bucolic pleasure). The result in this and other cases was the family’s guerpitio, expressed as a willing pious donation.39 Meanwhile in tenth-century Italy the Lombard and Carolingian pattern of litigation still governed the way churches were disputed. In 945, before king Hugh’s missus, Aribald bishop of Reggio and his advocate sued—rashly perhaps—a powerful layman Rudolph for a chapel. The record begins with Rudolph’s account to the missus of what had happened already: ‘they charged me in court (mallaverunt me), in your presence, that I had unjustly and malo ordine entered and held the chapel with . . . all its pertinences, which they said should belong to the bishopric; I answered that the church was . . . in my proprietas,40 and not malo ordine’, because he and his father count Unroch had had it all, as property, for the necessary thirty years. He had declined the judges’ invitation to prove this by witnesses; the bishop’s side, however, engaged to prove by witnesses or by inquest that the bishopric had been in possession (vestiti) of the church and its things, as property, within those years. Now they are back in court; ‘here I am, ready to accept their testimonies’. There follows a total retraction by the bishop 37

HL V no. 236 (1053), from Be´ziers cartulary. St-Mont nos. 76 and 87.4 (c.1085, church of Aurions: the combat almost became a free-for-all); nos. 28 and 87.5 (c.1090, Montagnan); no. 16 (1104, church of Daunian). 39 St-Victor no. 691 (see Poly, Provence, 184 n. 76, 198–9). Cf. St-Victor. nos. 725 (c.1040), 307, 303 (1058 and c.1060), 1091 (1096; original, but recording only the conclusion). 40 The passage is untranslatable: quod ecclesia ipsa . . . ad meam haberet et detineret proprietatem. 38

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and his advocate, who can produce no witnesses, and have concluded that the church with all its pertinences ‘should by the laws be yours, Rudolph’, the bishop keeping nothing but the barest minimum of his canonical rights. The judges confirm this in proprietary terms (‘from now on Rudolph should have and hold the church in its entirety with its pertinences, as his property’), order the losing side to ‘remain quiet and content’, and advise Rudolph to have a notitia made for security (so this notarial record is the successful party’s, not the court’s).41 In eleventh-century central Italy, Farfa continued active in litigation over churches, mostly against laymen who in the end renounced their claims; in one case, in 1013, giving up when he could not answer the factual question (put by the papal primicerius, and entirely of its time), ‘in what way do these things belong to you?—acquired by you, or by succession to your parentes?’42 But in Rome itself, in 998, the priests of S. Eustachio sued the abbot of Farfa over two city churches, before a judge appointed by Otto III and others by Gregory V. Much turned on the correct procedure for Farfa’s defence, since the abbey claimed to be under Lombard law,43 whereas the judges were all ‘Romans’ until they co-opted the abbot’s ‘Lombard’ advocate (a matter, it seems, of technical expertise). Farfa won the case, because the priests’ witnesses contradicted each other and the priests themselves could not swear that what they were suing for was ‘right’; they were finally ordered to renounce the churches to Farfa. Had oaths been taken on both sides, inconclusively, it was to have gone to combat.44 If the procedures here were different, and to some extent ad hoc, the issue was as plainly proprietary as anywhere else: the priests’ advocate declared that their predecessors had given the abbot’s predecessors a three-life lease, which had now expired; Farfa’s advocate replied that the monastery had ‘possessed these churches as property for forty years’.45 Most disputes about churches could as well have arisen over estates, mills, or vineyards.46 One kind of problem, however—doubt or dispute within a family over who should have what shares—may have arisen predominantly about churches, because of their special importance to families combined with virtual indivisibility. An early example from Bavaria is the dispute among the Huosi in 791, about their rights in St Martin’s at Auuicozeshusir, beginning with a family 41

Hu¨bner, ‘Gerichtsurkunden’, no. 888; Muratori, Antiqu., I. 463–6. Farfa no. 637, breve memoratorium of the case (brought before duke Alberic with papal backing) between abbot Guy of Farfa and Buccio son of Gunzo about a church with its vineyards, lands, and woods (the abbot claiming to have it ‘justly and reasonably’ by a charter of sale). 43 This affected what questions had to be answered and what oaths taken. 44 45 Raised in importance in Italian justice by Otto I. DOIII no. 278 (998). 46 That a church and therefore a saint was a party made a difference (see Wormald, Making, 90); that a church was the object in dispute need not. 42


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council but brought on the bishop’s advice to the missi.47 In Alemania a century later, a St Gall notice records a placitum before count Burchard ‘about the church of Lo¨ffingen, as to who were the most competent (potentissime), by their ancestry, to possess and dispose of the things of that church’; some twenty-six named nobles, primores populi, testified on oath that the kinsmen of five named men (and present survivors of those five)48 ‘should alone have the potestas of ordaining that church’. Since this left malcontents grumbling, the leading men of the council picked up their swords and vowed to support the decision ‘to the point of bloodshed’.49 Yet despite these strong feelings it seems to have been a problem to be solved rather than a two-sided adversarial dispute.50 By contrast, in 960 two laymen came before count Raymond of Rodez and other noblemen, contending against each other for a church which had in fact been left to Beaulieu (after the death of his son) by a man, Rigald, whose inheritance they must each have claimed while unwilling to settle for moieties. It was judged that the two must choose champions and establish the truth by combat. Probably the winner would have gone on to sue Beaulieu for the church (or vice versa: it is not clear who was in possession). But when by sunset neither side had won, the count and the other bystanders judged that ‘each of them should by right have nothing ad possidendum’, but it should go to Beaulieu as intended by Rigald. The disputants were to make a guerpitio to God and St Peter; the record is their notitia of this; in it they are allowed to say that they have ‘asked to have it done for love of God and St Peter’.51 Other kinds of dispute (often bluntly called intentio pro ecclesia) between individuals or groups of laymen and priests are found in tenth-century Leoń and Castille, and even more in eleventh-century Galicia and the future Portugal (probably because colonization there had been more than usually interrupted).52 In Leoń a successful case was brought in 953 by an abbot Peter, against a certain Victino who had given him a monastery and lands to settle, but then evicted him 47

See above, pp. 45–6. Normally we only have the record if, later, the church came to a greater church, in this case Freising; but Auuicozeshusir being unidentified has no known history. 48 Perhaps only one survivor (only one appears among the nobles testifying). 49 St Gallen no. 673 (889). 50 Cf. the more formally adversarial dispute over a church near Naples (950), between two brothers on the one hand and six other men; settled however by creating four shares (above, p. 634). In Tuscany, 1059, the dispute over S. Martino, Florence, brought before duke Godfrey (above, pp. 667–8) raised problems of substance about family and individual rights, peculiar to churches because of Italian succession by ordinatio. 51 Beaulieu no. 47 (conceivably describing a piece of theatre set up to establish Beaulieu’s right). Cf. from early 12th-c. Languedoc a succession of placita (1106–19) finally establishing Gellone’s right to Saint-Martin, Caux, via judgments on disputed family claims (Gellone no. 291). 52 For a vivid later perception of this see PMHD no. 746 (1091), a case brought before the regional ‘lord of the land’ turning not on the validity of the monks’ charter but on the identity of the church after many vicissitudes.

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from them, as also from a church of Peter’s own inheritance.53 In Castille in 945, before assembled abbots, a monk Stephen (who seems to be acting individually) sued a priest Ariolf for the inheritance (lands and a church) of an earlier priest, which Stephen claimed by traditio and Ariolf by purchase. This case turned entirely on their rival documents: Stephen’s was judged ‘false and invalid’, Ariolf’s ‘true and to be held valid for ever’; Stephen had to throw his forgery in the fire and show contrition.54 Further west, in 1038, two pairs—each a layman and a priest—bound themselves to accept a verdict over a disputed church; each side put forward ancestors who had founded or ‘had’ the church (the plaintiffs’ going further back); each produced ten witnesses; but only the plaintiffs brought written evidence, which turned the scale.55 In 1047 two priests and their heirs claimed possession of a church by three generations of ancestors, against a layman and his priest son and heirs, and related a complicated history of who had held the church and how, and of recent litigation bringing to the defendants a sixth of the church, which they now had to renounce.56 Meanwhile lay or priestly holders of churches were sued by abbots. Two of the Castillian cases discussed by Roger Collins concern churches.57 In one, of 957, Garcıá Refugano acknowledges (in effect) that his priest brother had given the church at Tobiella to Cardenã, that he, Garcıá, had expelled Cardenã’s monks from it, that the count had intervened for the monastery, and that Garcıá had undertaken to come before the count with charters showing that his brother had given the church to him; but had been unable to prove this and had no such document. In the other, of 941, a priest recognizes that his uncle had by charter donated a church to Cardenã, and pledges himself to restore it to the monks ‘by the hand of a saio’.58 In the west a century later, the abbot of Vacariza successfully sued the kinsmen of a deceased lady for a church that she had left him by testament; in 1053 the abbot of Guimara˜es similarly sued a widow and her sons, who had to pay a penalty and admit to having no documents; in 1086 an abbot was in dispute with two brothers, they claiming to have built a church, he claiming it by a testament, settled by his granting it them for life for 53 Catedral Oviedo no. 26 (the document runs together separate records of half-a-dozen stages in the case, more-or-less organized to demonstrate Victinus’s defeat; described and analyzed by Collins, ‘Law and Charters’, 498–502 (in the context of the general lack of record for the loser’s case). 54 Cardenã no. 69 (beginning with Jimeno’s sale to Ariolf, 914). Cf. PMHD no. 226 (1015), a lady and a priest disputing over a church; each produced ‘writings’; his were adjudged later than hers; he gave up the church and received it back for life. The document is the priest’s pactum, made before a saio. 55 PMHD no. 304 (1038), memorandum by the victors (whose success was however inconclusive because the defendants rejected it). 56 ibid. no. 357 (1047), the defendants’ recognition or renunciation (passages of this corrupt and difficult text are quoted, more helpfully punctuated, by Garcıá Gallo, ‘Coyanza’, 527 n. 425). 57 ‘Disputes’, 92–4; perhaps, in Castille, recorded by the winner rather than a notary (ibid. 95). 58 Cardenã nos. 210 (Garcıá Refugano’s manifestum, translated by Collins, op. cit., 92–3) and 275.


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a rent.59 Closely related to this are the cases where a priest claimed hereditary right in a church which a bishop, monastery, or lay lord said he had only for life or on a lease;60 presenting a sharper issue than was likely to arise over an ordinary landholding, because for a lord to control the succession to a church was both more important and more attainable.61 It is plain in many of these cases that the loser’s declaration conceding defeat and abandoning his claim was crucial; and outside Italy, increasingly often, the charter or notitia embodying this (worded, naturally, by the successful side) seems to be the only record, sometimes quite elaborate (especially in Spain).62 In Catalonia in 961 an evacuatio of this kind records a much more unusual dispute, not over possession of a church, but over its unauthorized foundation and the diversion to it of parochial revenues. The defendant recognizes that ‘I Oliba built a church there without lawful right (absque legem) and took away tithes and firstfruits’ from the parish church and the bishop’s potestas, and had claimed to hold them not absque legem but ‘as my inheritance by my relations’ wish’. He had been given several opportunities to prove by witnesses or by a written judgment that he could lawfully hold these things; he recognizes that he cannot (now or ever), and that he has usurped them absque legem for twelve years.63 All this time in pre-Conquest England there were disputes about the possession of churches, sometimes heard at synods;64 but few records survive and they reveal little about the proceedings.65 Only in the early twelfth century, on the verge of becoming out of date, do relatively clear lawsuits about churches appear, though rarely in any detail. Sometimes this was in a bishops’ court but (it seems) taking for granted that what was being judged was a matter of property-right;66 sometimes in a mixed, more-or-less informal assembly of the kind that might settle disputes anywhere;67 and increasingly a matter of royal intervention of the kind that would soon establish the common law for cases of advowson or 59 PMHD nos. 311 (1040, victors’ memorandum), 386 (1053, the judge’s record), 663 (1086, abbot’s grant to the family). In Leoń cf. Alfonso VI’s judgment in a ‘fierce contest’, 1078, between S. Vicente of Oviedo and count Munõ Gonza´lez each claiming a church by grant of its founder, the priest Gevuld (now deceased) on whose status as the king’s property the case is made to turn (above, p. 671). 60 e.g. above, p. 541. 61 For such a case in Italy held before Gregory VII, and given an ideological twist by the priest involved, see below, p. 881. 62 On these documents of evacuatio or manifestum, characteristic of both Catalonia and Leoń and found also in Castille, see Collins, ‘Disputes’, 87, 92. 63 Urgellia, II no. 143 (presumably in the bishop’s court). 64 e.g. in 824, about Westbury-on-Trym (above, pp. 158–9); clearly seen as a property dispute. 65 On English lawsuits in general see Wormald, ‘Law, Charters’, in Davies and Fouracre, Settlement of Disputes, 150–1 (they ‘have no sort of placitum format’); id., ‘A Handlist of Anglo-Saxon lawsuits’, ASE 17 (1988) (six of these are about churches); id., Making, 143–61. 66 e.g. Van Caenegem, Lawsuits nos. 223, 233a. 67 Ibid. no. 223 (from Symeon of Durham: ‘before a large gathering of important men’).

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presentation, but so far concerned simply with the rightful possession of churches (whatever that may have entailed). At first this intervention consisted mainly in exerting favour, ordering someone to be re-seised of a church that he says is his, or allowing him to re-seise himself.68 But the order might be to re-seise ‘justly’,69 or ‘per rectum’, by right or justice, requiring an inquiry and judgment by the recipient’s court.70 Sometimes (early in Henry II’s reign) the intervention is an order to a bishop to act on a judgment already made in his, the bishop’s, court;71 and sometimes, even in Henry I’s time, it is clear that the claim has already been formally made and allowed in the king’s court72 (hardly different from going to the king and getting him to intervene). It would be irrelevant here to push further into the twelfth century. Jurisdiction over the possession of churches was by then being tidied up, falling sometimes to lay rulers, sometimes to bishops and therefore to the Roman curia;73 but the assumptions behind it were being undermined, as we shall see.

68

e.g. Henry I allowing his dispenser Simon to take possession of a church that Simon claimed ‘belonged to him by hereditary right’, or giving Autin’s son Baldwin a writ that he be re-seised of the church of Shillington (ibid. nos. 222 from Abingdon chronicle, 233b from Ramsey chronicle). 69 Stephen ordered Robert fitzWalter ‘justly to re-seise the abbot of Gloucester in his church of [Chipping] Norton’ (RRAN III no. 354). 70 Baldwin’s writ for Shillington (above, note 68) was an order to re-seise ‘by right’, leading the abbot to offer a hearing in his own court or the bishop’s. 71 1158, to bp. of Norwich for abbot of St Benet’s, Holme: ‘I order you without delay to maintain full right to the abbot about a church that he claims, since he deraigned it [derationavit, established his claim] in your court’ (Van Caenegem no. 383a. No. 383b is almost identical but speaks of the advocatio of the church, probably a cartularist’s amendment). 72 Henry I to the bishop and chapter of Bayeux informing them that ‘the priest Godfrey disrationavit ecclesiam suam (Holy Saviour in Caen) in curia mea’ (Bayeux no. 38). 73 e.g. litigation about Saint-Cle´ment, Craon, between Saint-Aubin, Angers, and Vendoˆme (more or less settled by Urban II), described by Southern, Making of the Middle Ages, 148–51. Cf. Ange´ly nos. 100, 102 (1096); St-Gondon nos. 9, 11 (1104); Bourbonnais nos. 16, 18 (1124, 1145); St-Mihiel no. 75 (1128).

22 Legislation and reforming opinion

The chief external constraint on property-right in churches, from the first, was the tenuous but never defunct authority of bishops over their founding, manning, and functioning (with the spasmodic support of rulers). And the bishops’ conception of this authority and its proper exercise, along with the responsiveness to it of clergy, monks, and laity, depended on the changing background of ideas and the development of law and opinion. The subject of this chapter, then, is not the general ambience of ideas and attitudes surrounding the practical workings of proprietary churches under customary law (an ambience which this book has been concerned with throughout), but the articulate opinions of leading churchmen or canonists, usually formed or expressed at councils.

22.i. The eighth and ninth centuries Among the many concerns of post-Roman church councils the matter of private churches was not prominent, even at the Visigothic councils where it was most directly addressed. Certainly lords might have to be prodded to endow their churches and to respect their ancestors’ donations; occasionally the crucial but ambiguous principle would be stated that their churches or their churches’ property should be under the bishop’s potestas;1 above all, their clergy had to be treated as the bishops’ subjects.2 In the mid-seventh century the council of Chalon-sur-Saoˆne made the most explicit assertion yet that what went on in private oratories was the bishop’s business;3 but the lords’ property-right was neither defined nor denied. This was still so when Frankish church legislation began again in the 740s: the emphasis is on the clergy’s obedience to the diocesan 1 The Vetus Gallica collection (c.600) was much concerned with the administration of church property 2 (tituli xxxi–xxxv) but not specifically with lay claims on it. See above, pp. 18–19, 20–21, 26. 3 Above, p. 26.

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bishop, without explicit questioning of the rights of lords, and almost without criticism of their actions.4 The Bavarian council of Ascheim in 756 has been seen as challenging the Eigenkirche,5 but does so only in a general statement that bishops should control church property.6 Meanwhile Gelasius’s requirement that founders renounce all property-right seems unknown.7 Nonetheless, in Francia the mid-eighth-century reforms as a whole may have been seen as a threat, not only by those enjoying the fruits of secularization but also by founders and lords of lesser churches and monasteries. It is hard to see why else the mayor Pippin should have asked pope Zacharias (among much else) ‘about laymen who build churches in their properties: who ought to rule and govern them?’8 Zacharias’s reply in 747 relayed (in part) the old Gelasian rules: no consecration of a new church until its endowment had been received, properly documented; no baptistry to be built there and no ‘cardinal priest’ appointed; if the founder wants masses celebrated he must ask the bishop for a priest.9 This answer was not exactly to the point;10 it certainly did not explain what was meant by episcopal potestas over church endowments. ‘Who should rule’ churches founded by laymen was not something that Boniface had asked about:11 for him the answer would be obvious; but founders and their heirs may well have thought: ‘these churches are ours, why should anyone else control them?’ The matter was at last becoming a recognized problem, and one that concerned the ruler. Rulers’ pronouncements began with Charlemagne: first for the conquered kingdom of Italy, that those responsible in the past for repairing churches (both baptismal churches and oratories) should do so now, and ‘that both the royal curtis and the Lombards should have the same dominatio in them as has been their custom’;12 then for the Franks the capitulary of Frankfurt of 794, declaring of ‘churches built by free men’ that ‘it is lawful to convey or sell them provided the church is not destroyed and daily services are preserved’13—a sharp and unprecedented recognition of property-right, limited though this is by the proviso.14 Such assertions may represent in part a defensive reaction to the emphasis, in 4 We hear at Ver 755 of ‘defenders’ of disobedient clergy, and of those receiving unauthorized clergy 5 from another diocese (Capit. no. 14 cc. 8, 12). e.g. Ratzinger, Forschungen, 496–8. 6 Conc. II no. 10 c. 3 (probably mainly aimed at monks’ churches). 7 Above, pp. 13–14; absent from the collections (so far as I know) until late 11th c. 8 The questions are known only from Zacharias’s reply, addressed to the mayor Pippin and bishops, abbots, and proceres of the Franks (Epist. Karol. Aevi., I. 480–5); this question is at c. 15; see also c. 4, ‘what 9 obedience should rural priests render to bishops and cardinal priests?’. See above, pp. 13–14. 10 His letter next year to named Frankish laymen (above, pp. 186–7) was more so, in accepting that 11 founders could choose a priest with the bishop’s consent. See Epist. Sel., I nos. 50–1, 60, 80. 12 782–7, Capit. no. 91 c. 1 (for dates differing from Boretius’s see above, p. 238 note 27). 13 Ibid. no. 28 c. 54 (the last substantive clause of the capitulary). 14 At first sight similarly affirmative is Capit. no. 36 (802) c. 17, applying the 30-year prescription to ‘anyone’s’ possession of a church or parish; but in its context this means the incumbency of priests and bishops.

Legislation and reforming opinion

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canon-law collections now circulating north of the Alps,15 on episcopal authority and the sanctity of church property. But chiefly there were positive, reforming responses, arising partly from Charlemagne’s concern that churchmen should not only serve his practical purposes but also by strict life, liturgical observance, and prayer secure a right relationship with God. Some of these responses bore on private churches.16 Charlemagne must have been subject to pressures from various interests; an early capitulary for Italy rules out lay possession of baptismal churches—though almost certainly referring only to leases, not property (lay owners of pievi were probably as yet unknown).17 In general lay ownership is not questioned. In 802 at Aachen, ‘all churches and basilicas are to remain in ecclesiastical defence and potestas’; but this evidently did not cancel out the founder’s right, which it goes on to qualify: ‘of the possessions of that basilica, no one shall dare to put them into division or allot them; and what has once been offered shall not be turned about . . . ’18 So the endowment must be undivided, permanent, protected by the bishop’s authority, and seen as belonging to the church; but the lord’s property in the church itself is not challenged.19 Thereafter the emphasis is on the bishop’s consent to new foundations (in terms that assume the founder’s reasonable expectation),20 his protection by this means of the rights of existing parish churches,21 his consent to appointments of priests, and the related age-old matter of the clergy’s obedience.22 Finally in the five provincial councils of 813— concerned with such matters along with much else23—all but Rheims reiterated 15

Including Dionysio-Hadriana given by Hadrian I to Charlemagne. At first mainly in generalities (Heristal 779, Capit. no. 20 c. 4: diocesan bishops’ potestas over priests and clergy), or ancient principles (Admonitio generalis, 789, ibid. no. 22 c. 25: no one to be ordained absolute, and c. 31: places once devoted to monastic use never to become secularia habitacula), from Chalcedon cc. 6 and 24. But in 779/81 (Capit. no. 97) Charlemagne rebukes his counts and vassals in Italy for appointing clergy without the bishop’s consent. 17 Capit. no. 95 (see de Clercq, Le´gislation, I. 165–6) c. 2: ‘On baptismal churches, ut nullatenus eas laici homines tenere debeant, sed per sacerdotes fiant . . . gubernatae’. 18 Capit. no. 33 c. 15. The ending is difficult: non revolvatur et sanctificetur et vindicetur; perhaps ‘is not to be turned about, now hallowed and now reclaimed’. Stutz (Benef., 224–5) took it to mean ‘shall not be dedicated to or claimed for another church’. 19 The nearest to this is a canon preserved (if not invented) in a small private collection (Capit. no. 114 c. 3): churches are not to be consecrated without a dos, and once consecrated, are ‘to be in the bishop’s potestas’ (echoing Orleans 511 c. 17); ‘if any layman seeks any portion of it’ (i.e., probably, of the dos) the church is to be closed. 20 ‘Whoever has or wants to have a consecrated oratory shall endow it from his own possessions by the bishop’s counsel’ (802/13, Capit. I no. 57 c. 6); more firmly, ‘whoever wants to build a church in his property shall be allowed to’ with the bishop’s consent (Salz 803/4, ibid. no. 42 c. 3). 21 See above, p. 69. 22 For a thorough account of Charlemagne’s relevant legislation see Stutz, Benef. 223–35. Cf. Ganshof, Carolingians 212 and nn. 85–92; Hartmann, ‘Zustand’, 404–9; id., Synoden, 454–5. 23 The driving force may have been Charlemagne’s angry criticism in 811 (Capit. no. 72, de causis cum episcopis et abbatibus tractandis; see Ganshof, ‘Note’, esp. 3–5 and critical ed. 20–5; Felten, A¨bte, 171–3; doubtless a rhetorician’s work, but perhaps reflecting Charlemagne’s own baffled anxiety); but this was not evidently directed at the lords of lower churches. 16

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that no one could put a priest in or out without the bishop’s consent, and—a new point—all but Chalon-sur-Saoˆne condemned any payment to a lord by a priest for admission.24 But Charlemagne died in the same year;25 and five years later these matters were much more prominent in Louis the Pious’s reforming council at Aachen in 818–19. This started with a promise to stop secularizing church property, and it dealt with a wide range of other matters. But within its first twelve clauses (out of twenty-nine), it reasserted the authority of bishops; insisted on the personal freedom of all priests, while safeguarding lords’ rights over their serfs; restated the need for the bishop’s consent to putting in or removing a priest, but with the important addition that if laymen offered suitable clerks for consecration and appointment to their churches, the bishops were not to reject them; laid down the minimum endowment of one mansus with house, farmyard, and garden for the priest to live on free of rent or service, but allowed ‘due service’ to a lord for land over and above that;26 required ‘that every church should have its own priest’; and allowed new churches in new settlements to have tithes.27 The clauses were carefully drafted in a spirit of constructive compromise; but significant less for their reservations of power to bishops than for the concessions to lords. These mostly gave legal recognition to what lords must have been doing anyhow (controlling the freeing and ordaining of their serfs, taking rent from surplus glebe, getting the priests of their choice), but also set the door ajar for them to begin to get tithe-rights for their churches.28 However, the very need for lords’ interests to be expressly catered for shows that with imperial backing the bishops were not helpless. Indeed some among them were both able and willing to ignore the ruling that they should not reject suitable candidates, perhaps out of hostility to particular lords or favour to clerks of their own, but perhaps on principle (the choice ought to be the bishop’s). Against such aggression various counter-assertions were made. In 829 the bishops recognized groundless rejection as a legitimate lay grievance, and agreed ‘that if a layman offers a suitable and useful clerk he should on no account be rejected by the bishop without a definite reason’, which must be 24 Arles cc. 4, 5, Rheims c. 21, Mainz cc. 29, 30, Chalon (for Lyons) c. 42, Tours c. 15 (Conc. II. nos. 34–8). Capit. no. 78 summarizes the councils’ conclusions (de Clercq, Le´gislation, I. 248–9). On entry payments cf. bp. Theodulf of Orleans, 798, c. 16 (Capit. episc., I. 114), and Capit. no. 81 c. 1 (see de Clercq, Legislation, I. 291). Small customary presents were probably not meant to be ruled out (see Meier-Welcker, ‘Simonie’, 75, 81). 25 The councils had by then reported to an assembly at Aachen; the recently identified capitulare generale (Mordek, Bibliotheca, app. I no. 13) may be Charlemagne’s response (see esp. c. 4). 26 But not for tithes and offerings. 27 Capit. no. 138 cc. 2, 6, 9–12; see above, pp. 439, 464, 487, 519–20, 523, 525, 530–1. Problems postponed (c. 29) included that of co-heirs’ churches. 28 On all this see Stutz, Benef., 248–60; and for subsequent 9th-c. legislation, ibid. 261–4, 267–80; Hartmann, Synoden, 161–4, 455–7.


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explained:29 a ruling whose inclusiveness so struck Raban Maur as archbishop of Mainz that he described it as allowing ‘everyone everywhere, not only clerks and abbots but also laymen and vassi dominici’, to commit their churches to their own priests with the bishop’s consent.30 On a different front, in 822–3 Lothar decreed in Italy that if fonts had been consecrated in a church built by a free man he should ‘not lose his inheritance’ on that account, but the bishop could if he wished transfer the function of baptism to a church of his own, the church from which this function was removed ‘remaining in the builder’s ius’.31 So the bishop could rescind a predecessor’s concession of baptismal rights,32 but not claim that the church, being baptismal, belonged to the bishopric. Soon after this, probably in response to some actual claims of this kind, the rights of lords—long established in Lombard Italy, and subject now to imperial legislation, local and general33—were expressly recognized by the papacy,34 when Eugenius II’s council of Rome of 826 decreed: ‘A monastery or oratory canonically built shall not be removed from its builder’s dominium against his will’ (going on to state, in the terms used at Aachen in 818– 19, this lord’s right to commend it to the priest of his choice with the bishop’s consent). Further, in connection with providing priests for neglected churches, it distinguished between churches subject to the bishop’s own ius and those ‘established in the ius of secular men’.35 Both clauses emphasize the bishop’s authority over the priests concerned, but distinguish this from dominium or ius which may be someone else’s. Meanwhile the question of the potestas over church property claimed for bishops in canon-law texts remained largely undiscussed.36 The attitude of most bishops was pragmatic: what mattered for private churches was the actual practice of lords, priests, and bishops; for instance that ‘suitable and useful’ clerics should be chosen, in ‘charity and reason’, preserving ‘peace and concord’.37 Some were more outraged, or more vocal, about avaricious or arrogant lords of churches; as in Jonas of Orleans’s lively characterizations of the church-owner of 29 Conc. II no. 50 (Paris) c. 22, and Capit. no. 196 (Relatio episcoporum c. 18). On the council of Paris, the Relatio (the bishops’ report on three councils held at Louis’s request, only the Paris decisions surviving), and the so-called ‘capitulary’ of Worms, see De Clercq, Le´gislation, II. 60–8. 30 Epist. Karol. Aevi, III. 520 (fragmentary, in two slightly different versions). 31 Capit. no. 157 (Olona) c. 2. Thomas (Droit, 46) was misled by Pertz’s earlier reading ipsa vero aqua (recte ipsa vero a qua) into thinking that the clause concerned ownership of the fonts. 32 Assuming that the diocesan had consecrated the fonts (alternatively they might have been con33 secrated irregularly by a travelling bishop). See Stutz, Benef., 260; Fischer, Ko¨nigtum, 91–4. 34 There had been privileges to this effect, esp. Hadrian I’s for king Offa of Mercia (above, p. 243). 35 Conc. II no. 46 cc. 21, 24 (at 576–7. Seculares in such contexts usually means laity); repeated, Rome 853 (ibid., III no. 32); Pavia 850 (ibid. no. 23 c. 15; but distinguishing rather obscurely between founders’ rights over xenodochia in the bishops’ potestas and over those under the church’s defensio). 36 Conc. II no. 50 (Paris 829) c. 15, headed qualiter tractandae vel quid sint res ecclesiae, asserted the bishops’ potestas solely to point out their responsibility and lack of personal property-right in these res. 37 Paris c. 22 and relatio episcoporum (see above, note 29).

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straitened means who will have a priest ordained for his church only on condition of getting a cut out of the tithes and offerings, or the greater man who grants a church in benefice to get a return for its tithes and offerings where those are the bulk of its value. As a result of such grants to milites, he rather predictably says, ‘there are churches now so holed, roofless, or even collapsed’ as to be unfit for worship. But what was basically wrong here—what made it so ‘out of order, incongruous with the Christian religion, and dangerous to those doing it’—was the layman’s usurpation of the bishop’s functions (like the Old Testament king Uzziah) in disposing of ‘tithes and offerings of the faithful, offered to God’.38 This is as near as Jonas gets to the problem of church property: his concerns are both more practical and more spiritual. By 829 the bishops were indeed concerned about the misuse of church property, but in the form of Louis the Pious’s secularizations as he became politically weaker.39 This, along with a broader unease, was the context for forceful statements made at Paris in 829 and repeated over the next five decades, of the sacredness of church property—because of its origins and purposes—as ‘nothing other than the vows of the faithful, the ransoms of sinners, and the patrimony of the poor’.40 This famous passage from the fifth-century writer Julian Pomerius41 was far more than a commonplace. It was charged with religious force, and linked to the idea that church property was or should be common (in Pomerius’s words: ‘What does the Church have, when it has it in common with all those having nothing?’); an idea that had come to mean that monks and nuns, or any clergy living a common life, were doing what originally all Christians had done but now for the most part could only help the elite to do, by giving property to the Church.42 After 829 these ideas were cast explicitly at rulers secularizing the property of great churches; at Paris they were deployed in the bishops’ description of their own ideal behaviour, but this was in part a defence against royal demands on episcopal property (demands themselves sometimes justified on grounds of common property or apostolic poverty, arguing that great churches might well have something to spare for the king’s men).43 But ideas of sacredness 38

De institutione laicali, probably c.829 (PL 106. 204–5, 208). See above, pp. 487, 490). For the background of unease about the consequences of Louis’s remarriage see Wallace-Hadrill, Church, 231–3. 40 Above, note 29. For earlier instances see Ganz, ‘Ideology’, 26 and n. 52; later, attributed by Paschasius Radbert to Wala rebuking the emperor (below, note 64); quoted at Aachen 836, Ver 844, in the 857 admonitio (Conc. II no. 56 c. 48, III no. 7 c. 12, Capit. no. 266, end), and repeatedly by abp. Hincmar (e.g. ibid. no. 297 c. 7); boosted meanwhile by inclusion in the forged ‘decretal of Pope Urban’ (below, note 95). 41 De vita contemplativa, quoted by Devisse, Hincmar, 298–302, 501–2 (remarking on its not being quoted before the 9th c.). 42 On the idea of common life for the clergy see Ladner, Idea of Reform, 319–424; Ganz, ‘Ideology’, 17–23. See Hincmar’s epistola synodalis from Tusey, 860 (Conc. IV no. 3B). 43 Above, note 29: cc. 4–25, where cc. 13–18 deal with bishops’ duties towards their churches’ property; c. 18 maintains that the Church’s riches are not excessive if properly spent. 39


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and communality were not generally applied to the endowments of private churches. There was one notable exception to this in the 820s. Agobard archbishop of Lyons had already, in a letter to his colleague at Vienne, voiced views like those of Jonas of Orleans about the present-day nobility’s contempt for the priesthood, in particular their own house-priests; he thought the best the bishops could do in these bad times was refuse to ordain actual criminals or the totally ignorant, while assuring the disillusioned laity that the sacraments were valid regardless of the priest’s merits. Agobard wanted these problems discussed.44 But in 822 at Attigny the most contested topic was probably secularization; and there, as Agobard later reported (probably again to a colleague), he diffidently made suggestions—which, however, others saw as radical and aggressive (what would nowadays be called ‘unhelpful’)—about the dangers in the use and disposal of ecclesiastical possessions by laymen. Nothing that he reports having said at Attigny need apply to anything but secularization. But he was absent, perhaps told to stay away, from the council of Compie`gne next year, where in the general wish for consensus it seems that nothing much was decided;45 so his letter goes on to set out what he might have said about the whole question of ‘the management of ecclesiastical possessions’, in a long, rhetorical deployment of scriptural texts in relation to modern practice.46 The treatise is framed to show by scriptural citations that the Hebrews or even Egyptian infidels did (or were enjoined to do) certain good things, and refrained from (or were punished for) certain bad things, and at each step to stress by rhetorical questions how modern Christians fail to do as well, or do much worse. Thus the Hebrews rendered tithes and firstfruits to feed widows, orphans, and priests, provided dwellings and pastures for the priests and treasure for the temple, and heeded the precept not to delay rendering what they had vowed; even quite reprehensible kings brought to the temple what their fathers had vowed but not rendered; those who re-enslaved freed men and women were punished; even infidels respected their own gods and dared not violate their holy things. All this shows up those modern Christians who not only fail to make offerings, but much worse, ‘usurp, invade, grab, or allow to grabbers what others have vowed and rendered’; take away what their fathers gave; re-enslave those freed by others and given to the Church; and rather than honouring the Lord out of their own substance, dishonour Him by taking what is His.47 44 Agobardi epist. no. 11, to Bernard abp. of Vienne (Epist. Karol. Aevi, III. 203–6). See Boshof, 45 Agobard, 77–81. On his presence at Attigny but not at Compie`gne see epist. no. 5 cc. 1–6. 46 Epist. no. 5 (De dispensatione eccl. rerum), Epist. Karol. Aevi, III. 166–79. (Boshof, op. cit., 85–100, summarizes the letter from a different angle). 47 Epist. no. 5 cc. 7–14. For similar rhetorical points cf. the 836 conciliar letter to king Pippin of Aquitaine (Conc. II no. 56, esp. c. 38, pp. 745–6).

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So far, all Agobard’s points could still apply simply to the secularization of church property by rulers, or their prote´ge´s, or their unruly subjects.48 The lords of rural churches might lay claim on lands given by others, but so did the ruler giving a great church’s lands in benefice; sons taking away their fathers’ donations could be the impious heirs of church founders, but could as well be kings undoing their ancestors’ benefactions to bishoprics. But at this point Agobard moves nearer to the matter of private churches. The priests of Pharoah’s Egypt, he says, were secure in their possessions, whereas in some places now the priests are more insecure in their habitations than anyone.49 Next he makes the somewhat disconnected point (anticipating his later turning from Old to New Testament) that Christ drove out those doing worldly business in the temple: if selling anything in the Lord’s house is unlawful, how much more wicked to make that house itself an object of traffic! Then he reverts to Egyptian priests: Pharoah’s, being fed in famines at public cost, had no need to sell their possessions, whereas ‘now not only church possessions but churches themselves, with their possessions, are sold’.50 He can hardly have meant that priests were selling churches; the kind of priest in a position to do this would not be the insecure dependant that Agobard has just described. He seems, in fact, to slide from an implication that priests are reduced to selling church property in bad times (perhaps church furnishings or the odd half-acre) to the unconnected fact of traffic in churches by the lords of churches. This somewhat contrived elision, and the awkward insertion about trading inside the temple that precedes it, suggests anxiety to move to his new matter and difficulty in organizing the transition.51 That he has indeed made this step becomes clear in the next sentence, about those whose great- and great-great-grandfathers built and endowed churches and by written testament declared that they had no heirs but the church and its rectors; who now, contrary to the piety of their elders, if they can claim the building for themselves, think it licit to sell with the actual church not only the things given by the founders, but the many other things devoted to it by many of the faithful for burials or some other devout purpose.

The Old Testament temple, he goes on to say, is a proper analogy for churches, whose neglect or robbery is equally deserving of punishment52—the punishment of those princes ‘who have said: let us possess by inheritance the sanctuary of God.’53 48 This—with the political context—undermines Walter Ullmann’s view of the letter as essentially an 49 attack on the ‘proprietary church system’ (see below, at note 59). See above, p. 530. 50 51 Epist. no. 5 c. 15 (pp. 171–2). Boshof notes the shift but not its awkwardness. 52 cc. 16, 17. Cf. the 836 letter to Pippin (above, note 47), c. 71 (p. 759). 53 qui dixerunt ‘hereditate possideamus sanctuarium Dei’, Psalm 82 v. 13 (Vulgate; Ps. 83 in Authorized Version); a favourite 9th-c. citation (e.g. Ver 844 c. 12; Pseudo-Isid., 178–9; Corbie’s papal privilege, 855, ed.


797

From here on the letter is back on more general ground, now mainly citing the New Testament: on the nature of sacrilege, the proper uses of church property,54 ‘giving to God what is God’s’ (tithes, firstfruits, and other gifts); on the penalties of robbing the Church, which amounts to robbing the poor since property was given to the ‘holy poor’, through ‘holy preachers’, themselves poor; and how the laudable practice had arisen of endowing churches so that these could, out of their own property, support their preachers and ministers, the poor and strangers.55 Right at the beginning of his quarrying of the Old Testament, when he emphasizes that tenths and firstfruits were to be rendered through the priests and only at the altar,56 Agobard was concerned to show what he here came back to, that churches were the channel for giving to God and the poor as well as to monks and clergy; that this is what made church possessions sacrosanct; and that the faithful who had made gifts for these purposes were defrauded when what they had given was misused or taken away.57 And he clearly sees church-owners (lay or not)58 as among the offenders, especially in the matter of trafficking in churches which was the most marked way of claiming property-right in them. But even he was not saying that such property-right could not exist, or (as Walter Ullmann has it) that a church and the land it stands on ‘could not form the subject of a legal transaction’; let alone extending this to ‘the layman who disposed of his churches by appointing his clerics’.59 Nor did Agobard say that any such propertyclaim was itself sacrilegious. His verse from Psalm 82, about those desiring hereditary possession of God’s sanctuary—a quotation found useful three centuries later for attacking the claim to own churches—was deployed by Agobard only in the context of churches being neglected or robbed.60 Even so, Agobard’s ideology seems at least once to have led him to persuade the founders of a new church to let it go. This was a church in the archdiocese of Vienne, founded by Lempteus and his wife Agilois at their ‘own villa’ of Satolas (Ise`re), having ‘first asked licence’ of both archbishops, the diocesan Bernard of Vienne and his neighbour Agobard. In the founders’ charter of about 830 they Levillain; Hincmar of Rheims at Tusey, above, note 42; but always in the context of appropriating church property (or, for Corbie, abbacy), not of church-owning. 54 Here briefly turning to the ‘Gallican’ canons: the laity not to be dispensatores of sacred things, let alone possessors; oeconomi to be chosen from the clergy; ‘fields, vineyards, and serfs’ to be reserved for clergy, monks, and peregrini (cc. 19–20; perhaps thinking chiefly of lay abbacy). 55 cc. 23–5: the punishment of Ananias and Saphira, and many later miracles, show ‘how much reverence, faith, and guardianship is to be devoted to these possessions’ (c. 24, p. 177). 56 non in quibuscunque locis sed in sacris, id est iuxta altare Domini (c. 7, p. 169). 57 cc. 20–8 (esp. c. 24). 58 He is not, he says, speaking only of the laity: there are bishops, abbots, and clergy just as blameworthy (c. 29, p. 178). 59 Growth of Papal Government, 136–7. Of Ullmann’s citations in support of this (ibid. 136 n. 2), one attacks the selling of churches (above, note 50), the others do not relate specifically to dealings in 60 churches. See above, at note 53.

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deliberately leave it free of any lordship, conveying its endowments ‘out of our ius and dominatio into yours, sacrosanct church of God’, and making it their heir for ever in its endowment (rather more emphatically than did seventhand eighth-century monastic foundation charters or Marculf ’s formulary); and explicitly ‘reserving to our heirs’ (that is, their mortal heirs to their other lands) ‘honour alone, instead of patrocinium’,61 while ‘leaving them no licence to remove, sell, or exchange any of these possessions, but desiring you’ (the new church) ‘to remain free for ever under your special law (privilegium), so that God’s ministers serving there may be pleased to pray for our souls’. Finally they address the two archbishops, begging them ‘for all time to ordain for that church’ only worthy ministers (with a clear implication that they leave this entirely to the bishops). The dispositive part of the charter is addressed throughout to the new church itself, not to its clergy or their head, nor even its patron saints, Peter and Paul; it is to belong to no one but itself alone.62 Much more urgent to most reformers than the condition of lesser churches were secularization and the related matters of military service and lay abbacy. These have themselves been seen by some historians as a manifestation of property in churches at the highest level.63 But they do not seem to have been discussed in those terms at the time. The nearest approach to this was over bishoprics and abbeys being ‘given’ by rulers. Wala of Corbie is said to have asked Louis the Pious to consider ‘what is it that you give, when you bestow the honores of churches, or as I think the onera (burdens)?’; if what the king claimed to give was the possessions, these were consecrated to God as alms and belonged to His churches; if the spiritual role, he was going beyond his office.64 Florus the Deacon, of Lyons, approached the matter less tentatively: since episcopacy is a gift of the Holy Spirit, ‘any ruler does gravely wrong if he thinks he can bestow this by his own beneficium’.65 But Florus was not using ‘benefice’ here in any technical sense (and Wala is not reported as using it at all).66 Royal control of elections and appointment of lay abbots was debated for the most part in terms of the duties of rulers, public necessity, the sacredness of church property, the sin of simony, and the distinction between spiritual and temporal affairs.67 61

i.e. protective power or lordship. Grenoble no. A.7. In the cartulary it starts as a notice, turns to addressing the new church, and finally addresses the two archbishops. The middle part may have been proffered at the consecration (performed by a chorepiscopus). See Imbart, Origines, 206–7; Stutz, Go¨tting. gelehrt. Anz. (1904), 51 n. 1. 63 See above, p. 271. 64 Vita Walae, ii. 2 (SS II. 548), or Epitaphium Arsenii (ed. Du¨mmler); perhaps not rejecting the terminology outright (see above, p. 249) but questioning its meaning. 65 De electionibus, c. 4 (PL 119. 13). 66 Hincmar in 857 was nearer to thinking the word itself important (above, pp. 248–9). 67 e.g. Ardo, Vita Ben. Anian., c. 39 (SS XV. 217); Paschasius Radbert, Vita Walae/Epitaphium Arsenii ii. 3, 4; id., Vita Adalhardi, c. 68 (PL 120. 1542); Conc., II no. 50 (Paris 829). On military service, reforming opinion shifted from trying to secure freedom from it in exchange for secularization, to insisting that prelates 62


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This remained true when protests and negotiations on these and related matters (secularization, lay abbacies, prolonged episcopal vacancies) hotted up again in 83668 and continued under Charles the Bald;69 culminating in 845–6 at Meaux and Paris, where a thorough statement of reforms to be demanded was drawn up (now by implication rejecting the argument from necessity);70 followed by the inevitable rejection of most of this by king and laity, at E´pernay in 846.71 This was not the end of councils remonstrating, or of capitularies making concessions; but councils of the 850s seem less optimistic, and the king, while needing to promise more, was able to deliver less (not from greater weakness but because of the priority of patronage and defence).72 Lack of success seems by now to have persuaded some churchmen that what was needed was much clearer statements of the law as it should be and ideally was: clearer decrees from church councils, rulings from popes, and capitularies from emperors. It may have been for a narrower and more immediate need that the ‘Pseudo-Isidore’ and related forgeries, supplying these decretals and capitularies, were produced and put into circulation in the middle of the century;73 but it was the wider need that made them so successful. The inalienability of church property was a major theme in them; so were the authority and security of bishops, and the status of the clergy.74 As for the proprietary church, the false capitularies touched on it only here and there,75 and the false decretals not at all:76 their assertions of the sacredness and communality of church property were directed at condemning secularization of the great churches’ lands.77 Meanwhile could send their own men from their own lands (see Lesne, Propr., II. i. 147, 165–7, 212–13); on the related moral and religious problems for regular abbots see Felten, A¨bte, 161–74. 68 At Louis’s restoration after his overthrow, marked by the council of Aachen 836 (Conc., II no. 56, esp. cc. 48–50, 59–61). 69 Esp. at Yu¨tz and Ver, 844 (Conc. III nos. 6, 7). Controversy seems almost restricted to the western kingdom, but all three kings were at Yu¨tz (Thionville/Diedenhofen, near Trier) for peacemaking, and at Meersen in 847 all three promised redress. 70 Conc. III no. 11 (Meaux-Paris, June 845 and Feb. 846) esp. cc. 9–10 (on lay abbacy), 17–23 (on measures 71 to make this, and prolonged vacancies, etc., unnecessary). Capit. no. 257. 72 e.g. Conc. III no. 27 (Soissons 853); Capit. no. 266 (Quierzy 857). See Wallace-Hadrill, Church, 268–75; Nelson, Charles the Bald, cs. 6–8 (on the politics); eadem, Politics and Ritual, 98–100 (on the character of legislation in this reign: some problems may have been ‘quite local and/or short-term’ or even a single case). 73 For opinions about their provenance and immediate context see Fuhrmann, Einfluss, I. 191–4; for their date, 200–14. On the contemporary need see R. E. Reynolds in New CMH, II. 615–17; more narrowly Brundage, Med. Canon Law, 26–7. 74 On their character and content see Lesne, Propr., II. i. 237–44; Fuhrmann, Einfluss, I, esp. 145–7, 584; Ullmann, Growth, 183–4, 186–7. Imbart (Origines, 222–3) claimed that the false capitularies embodied ‘toute une theórie du patronage’, but his citations do not support this. 75 Invented or inflated texts of Benedictus Levita’s include i c. 386 (Leges in folio, II. 2. 69), invalidating any sale of a monastery; ii c. 102 (ibid. 78), the house of anyone having unlicensed masses celebrated in it is to be confiscated; ii. c. 69 (ibid. 77), on unendowed or ruined churches (see below, at note 81). 76 Apart from an innocuous reference to early Christians ‘building churches on their estates’; see 77 Fuhrmann, Einfluss, I. 39–40 and n. 73. See Ganz, ‘Ideology’, 26–8, and below, at note 95.

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in the real world, concern about lesser churches was still focused on practical and moral issues, old, recent, and new or newly prominent: the clergy’s status and obedience; defence of the old churches’ rights; division among co-heirs;78 lords exacting entrance gifts, or rents for the basic manse or for others’ donations, or taking tithes and offerings;79 and so far with almost no evidence for argument about property in churches in itself.80 This surfaced, however, at the council for the provinces of Lyons, Vienne, and Arles at Valence in 855. Its most celebrated clause was almost certainly influenced by an invented capitulary of Benedictus Levita’s ‘about those who will not endow their churches, or restore their endowment’: the bishop was to ‘recall these churches to the dominium of his own see to possess for the future’, and if any free man resisted this, ‘the relics shall be taken away and put in a better place, and the churches themselves be destroyed or burnt down’.81 But even this fictitious ruling does not dispute the founder’s or his heir’s right to the church: it is ‘his’, to be forfeited only if he denies it its proper dos, and destroyed only if he resists this forfeiture. Clause 9 of the council of Valence is in fact more radical than this.82 Although its substance is mainly to reassert the inalienability of endowments of (specifically) parish churches, to redefine the minimum endowment, and to forbid the exaction of any census from this, these fairly ordinary provisions are justified in strongly ideological terms. ‘Parish priests are heavily and degradingly oppressed by the laity and no respect shown for their priestly rank . . . and the small possessions or dotes conferred on churches are irreverently taken away and diminished by hard service’; priests are to ‘remain under the bishop whose assistants they are, and fulfil their . . . office freely and quietly under the mother church’. Finally, for those who ‘are not afraid to take away endowments, exact hard service, or threaten harm to the priests’ the penalty is not only excommunication but ‘the total destruction of such churches’, and their relocation and consecration at ‘another place, under a better peace’ (which would probably mean on episcopal land). Stutz says of this that ‘of course the lord does not thereby lose his ownership’,83 which is no doubt true of the original site (this would be his in customary law whatever the bishop’s view about the consequences of consecrating it). But this 78

For repeated attention to this, 813–95, see above, pp. 628–9. For relevant legislation (tending to cluster 845–55, 868–9, and 887–95; in all the Frankish kingdoms but esp. the western) see Stutz, Benef., 261–4, 267–80; Hartmann, ‘Zustand’, 420–3, 434–6; id., Synoden, 455–7. 80 In a different tradition was a reforming council probably at Benevento (above, p. 90 note 39), almost certainly mid-9th c. (Taviani-Carozzi, Principaute´, 653–7: perhaps overstating its kinship to Carolingian legislation); this reasserted the law about clergy being ordained only to a particular church, and consecration of a church depending on its adequate dos. 81 Benedictus Levita ii. c. 69. 2 (Leges in folio, II. 2. 77). 82 Conc. III no. 33 c. 9; repeated in the same year at Maˆcon (ibid. no. 36 c. 8). See Hartmann, Synoden, 83 266–70. Benef., 269 n. 29. 79


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applies to established churches subjected to abuse. For new ones the council demands initial surrender of the church and presumably its site and other endowments, not just to the bishop’s authority (as the canons were usually interpreted) but to the bishopric’s property, its ius: ‘seculars and faithful laity who wish to build churches on their lands’ must not only endow them with the statutory manned holding but must ‘at once submit that church to the ius of the bishop and the holy mother church. Otherwise . . . we shall not perform the consecration’. We are back to the old possibility, raised here and there in the past, that new churches ought to be given as property to the bishopric.84 In this southern part of the middle kingdom something of Agobard’s teaching may have survived.85 But there is a fundamental difference between the conditions for consecration laid down at Valence and the foundation under Agobard’s influence of the church of Satolas, some twenty-five years earlier.86 For in Satolas’s foundation charter there is not the slightest hint of the church or its dos being given to the bishopric. Nor indeed had Agobard proposed such a thing in his treatise after Compie`gne; his concern was with the sin of robbing, neglecting, or trafficking in churches, not with a legal or administrative remedy for this, nor with any idea that the ideal of Christian common property could be realized by such a remedy. Had he gone further towards articulating his objection to churches being treated as property, he might have objected even to bishops doing this. Instead, Satolas was intended to enjoy autonomy and the fullest possible property-right in its possessions. There is nothing to suggest that the Satolas model was widely followed, or followed at all;87 and after Agobard’s time, ideas of the sacrosanctity of endowments were pushed in the direction not chosen by him, of emphasizing the bishop’s potestas over churches and their endowments on the basis of the relevant sixth- and seventh-century canons.88 At Soissons in 853 this was clearly applied to ‘all churches and priests’.89 And although this potestas was normally taken to mean diocesan authority,90 there was always the possibility of the more robust interpretation that equated it with ius or property-right, long since implied 84

See below, at note 91. Lyons itself was in this kingdom although some of its dioceses were not. Above, at notes 61–2. 87 Later in the 9th c. it is for the occasional monastery that such autonomy is claimed or sought, whereas Satolas’s charter suggests a well-endowed but not monastic church. 88 Chiefly Orleans 511 c. 17, Toledo III c. 19, Toledo IV c. 33 (above, pp. 15, 18–19); known by then from several collections. An earlier explicit citing of Toledo III c. 19 is in Aachen 836 c. 48 (above, note 68), but the context is secularization, lay abbacies, etc. 89 ‘It is to be announced to everyone and ordained by the missi that all churches and priests are to remain under immunity and privilege’ (see below, p. 809 note 42) ‘and under the ordinatio and dispositio of the bishops of the particular dioceses in which they stand’ (Conc. III no. 27 capit. c. 4). 90 This was implied in the Carolingian legislation appealed to at Soissons, and at Rome, 826 (above, at note 35); see also note 36. 85

86

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(perhaps fairly casually) when Arbeo of Freising spoke of churches being conveyed to him ‘according to the canons’,91 and now deliberately given it at Valence. This legislation may partly explain a curious foundation charter for a rural chapel at Montbeugny, contained in a notice of its consecration around this time by Jonas bishop of Autun (so in the province of Lyons). After endowing it (not lavishly),92 its founders (a father and son) gave it—clearly as property—to the bishopric, in order to make it ‘free and quit for all time from any temporal domination or assaults of heirs’. However, they or one closely related heir were to have it in mundeburdum all their lives,93 ‘by right not of domination or heredity but of defence and protection’, paying a pound of wax as census to Autun. And the charter goes on to require that as long as the founders and any of their successors ‘preserve by possessing and possess by safeguarding’ that chapel, paying the census, the bishop shall not out of anger or covetousness ‘take away our or our successors’ ius hereditatis’ (in their mundeburdium, presumably), nor turn the property to his own uses.94 If bishop Jonas drafted their charter to conform to recent regional legislation, he had almost to negate this to satisfy the founders’ hopes and suspicions. The idea had no obvious resonance in Pseudo-Isidore. Even the ‘letter of Urban I’, which took all church property back to the ideal of Christian community and attributed it in past, present, and future to the bishops’ ditio as successors to the Apostles,95 has little to do with the argument about lesser churches as it in fact developed. ‘Urban’ was taken up by the quite separate forger at Le Mans, to claim in the ‘Life of St Julian’ that all landowners in Maine had given all their property to Julian’s new bishopric and lived in apostolic poverty.96 But both texts, ‘Urban’ and the ‘Life of Julian’, were too remote from reality to be directly useful to bishops in actually acquiring churches as property.97 It is not evident that bishops of Le Mans bothered to base claims to ordinary rural churches on their forger’s work or the view of history behind it. But any bishop might have tried to get particular churches surrendered to him at their consecration or later, not on these pseudo-historical grounds nor necessarily on ideological grounds at all, but as the best practical means of securing authority in them or income from them, and on whatever pretexts the 91

92 Above, p. 38 and note 36. Above, p. 444 note 46. dum nos vel unus legalium haeredum propinquior superstites apparuerimus; what follows suggests that this was to go on indefinitely (always for a single heir), i.e. it was not like a precaria for three lives. 94 Autun no. 45 (‘850–865’: 855–6 looks likely). 95 Decr. Pseudo-Isid., 142–4; see Ganz, ‘Ideology’, 27–8 (but Ganz’s translation of ditio as ‘ownership’ is 96 perhaps too tight). Ganz, op. cit., 29–30; Goffart, Forgeries, 225–6, 360. 97 The Le Mans forger asserted the bishopric’s claim in particular cases; but these were monasteries, which could be represented by forged or altered charters as having been given to Le Mans. 93


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law offered if lay piety failed. Valence c. 9 could support a claim to a new church (such as Montbeugny); while these or Benedictus Levita’s false capitulary on ruined churches could be used to try to get an existing church surrendered where its dos had been invaded, or wrongly burdened, or never established, even if it is unlikely that any bishop would in practice get an obstinate lord’s church torched. A related practice, attributed by archbishop Hincmar to Prudentius bishop of Troyes ‘and others’, was refusing to consecrate a new church where the old one had fallen into ruin, on the grounds that bodies were buried there; the bishop then insists on a new foundation in another place, which he has himself acquired for the purpose ‘by some contrivance’ (so it will be on his land that the new church is built); ‘and by this trick (with shameful gain and acting against the sacred rules) they claim for their own potestas or unreasonably divide parishes established of old’.98 Presumably the bishop would transfer the tithe entitlement of the original church to the new one, or in part to neighbouring churches; leaving the lord with only a ruin and perhaps the endowments back again, but no pastoral revenues and no prospect of legitimately getting a priest for it. Such moves may not have been as disreputably motivated as Hincmar claimed; but they would be objectionable to the laity and probably to many bishops; churches belonging to Rheims in the diocese of Troyes may have been affected.99 At the same time (the late 850s) there was a different but related problem in the diocese of Soissons, where bishop Rothad having deposed a priest Adelold, went on to divide his parish and have a new church built in it. Adelold had complained, apparently with Hincmar’s support; he may have been a clerk of Hincmar’s and the church an extra-diocesan property of Rheims’s.100 Meanwhile the lords of churches affected by Prudentius’s manoeuvres in the diocese of Troyes would have a grievance; there had been complaints to the king.101 It was in these two contexts that Hincmar was invited by Charles the Bald, perhaps in 857–8,102 to send him ‘what I could put together on the matter’: a ‘collection’, therefore, as well as an argumentative treatise, ‘on churches and chapels’.103 98

De eccl. et cap., ed. Stratmann, 82–3. Flodoard has Hincmar write to Prudentius ‘about churches of the see of Rheims sited in his diocese’, which he (Prudentius) treated inequitably; see Stratmann, introd. to De eccl. et cap., 8–9 (suggesting that an answer from Prudentius may have been what Hincmar was rebutting in that work). 100 See ibid. 10–11. For Hincmar’s wider dissatisfaction with Rothad see McKeon, Hincmar of Laon, 57–60. 101 Hincmar’s introductory passage, De eccl. et cap., 63. It seems likely that the complaints to Charles about Prudentius concerned his dealings with ruined churches. McKeon (op. cit., 57–8) sees the complaints as made by priests whose churches were losing out to new private chapels because of the complaisance of bishops, but this would not fit the general tenor of De eccl. et cap. 102 Stratmann, De eccl. et cap. (introd.), 18–20; anyhow before Prudentius’s death in 861. 103 On the collections used by Hincmar, esp. Dionysio-Hadriana and Dacheriana, see ibid. 20–4. 99

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22.ii. Hincmar of Rheims’s defence of lay lordship Hincmar’s Collectio de ecclesiis et capellis deals initially with the rights of priests and of old parishes,1 but it moves on to an explicit defence of lords’ dominium over churches:2 not justifying this from first principles, but arguing for its compatibility with church law. What follows here is not a prećis of the work,3 but picks out some characteristic features and highlights its essential theme. The most engaging passages are those designed to show how bishops should deal with certain practical problems, consistently with the canons and with common sense, without attacking existing rights of lords, priests, or churches. An example is the much-quoted passage about how to establish a rural oratory for which there is a need, without damage to the parish.4 Another is the discussion of what to do about restoring old churches where bodies are buried, without making this an excuse to build a new church in the bishop’s lordship. Where possible the church should be repaired on its existing site without moving the altar, so as not to need reconsecrating; it need not be moved simply on the grounds that Christians are buried there; such burial in an already consecrated church is entirely proper, considering the presence of saints’ relics, the communion of living and dead, and even the church’s own character as the body of Christ.5 If, however, the church is too far gone to be restored on its original site, it should be moved to a place very close and convenient,6 where there is no body buried; and the necessary consecration should not be made the occasion for diverting tithes, dividing the parish, or robbing an ancient church of its privilege. Even if it has to be moved a long way, because its isolation exposes the priest to robbers, or wet ground makes it unfit for burials and there is no old martyrium in reach, or for other (suggested) practical reasons amounting to ‘certain and reasonable necessity’, the move should secure the priest’s needs and the people’s convenience, not the bishop’s ‘shameful gain’.7 1 De eccl. et cap., 64–83. Devisse saw this, misleadingly, as the main subject of the treatise (Hincmar de Reims, 829–31). P. Thomas (Droit, 41–5) and Weinzierl (‘Hinkmar’, 140–2) rightly saw it as primarily a criticism of some bishops’ efforts to get churches into their possession. 2 Since the text lacks chapter headings or numbers, the work has to be referred to by printed page. The older literature refers to Gundlach’s (1889) or Gaudenzi’s (1892) editions; my references are to Martina Stratmann’s (1990; usefully divided into three sections distinguished by genre and by type of source). In what follows I dispute Stratmann’s interpretation in one important respect (notes 28, 30); her excellent edition makes the discussion possible. 3 Stutz gives a long analysis (rather than a prećis) of the argument and its sources (Benef., 285–93 and nn.)—useful although imposing a structure that is not quite Hincmar’s. I hope that my own regrouping of 4 Hincmar’s points is transparent. De eccl., 75–6. 5 Ibid. 79–82. Hincmar points out that this used to be done in Gregory the Great’s time; in St Peter’s itself many bodies are buried, ‘some of them perhaps not among the elect’. He recognizes that the presence of a body before consecration debars consecration. 6 7 So probably in the same lord’s land, as Stratmann remarks (ibid. 9). Ibid. 82–3.


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But the governing theme, on which these moral and practical problems depend, is the question of how the potestas attributed by the canons to diocesan bishops is to be understood. First as to what it is not: being regularly linked or even identified with ordinatio, it is ‘for ordering, not disordering’; that is, not ‘for dividing or confounding’ churches or parishes, which in any case belong to the priests’ management as well as the bishop’s; ‘we are not allowed arbitrarily (pro libitu nostro) to . . . transform the privilege of ancient churches for the sake of new oratories, or to divide parishes established of old’.8 Above all, this potestas is not dominium or property-right, nor does it entitle the bishop to demand dominium from those who have it; to think that it does is to misinterpret the crucial canons, Orleans 511 c. 17 (that all churches should ‘stay in the potestas of the bishop in whose territory they are sited’) and Toledo III c. 19 (that founders must not try to prevent the dos they have given being subject to the diocesan bishop’s ordinatio).9 No pope or council has ever decreed ‘that churches should be conveyed (tradantur) by their builders to the motherchurch of the bishopric’10 as a condition of having them consecrated (indeed this would be simony); in particular, it is nowhere laid down that churches built with the diocesan bishop’s consent on the lands of another bishopric or of a monastery have to be conveyed (tradi) to the diocesan bishop’s church. Churches are to be under the bishop’s potestas ‘not in such a way that their builders should be deprived of the name of dominium and of their due service (obsequium)’.11 Toledo III c. 19 requires that everything should be in the bishop’s ordinatio—again, ‘ordering not disordering’—and in his potestas, ‘that is, his management (dispositio) and government; but not for him to claim for his own dominium’12 or ‘not as some have lately begun perversely to purvey . . . that churches should be removed from the ditio of others whose they had been, as if these absolutely should not and could not have proper honour or due service (spiritual and ecclesiastical) from them or even the name of lordship (senioratus), and that the churches should belong wholly to the bishop’s ius’.13 If this recent interpretation were right, it would have to be applied not only to Orleans and Toledo but to the much more authoritative Chalcedon c. 8, which would oblige the bishops ‘to claim monasteries for ourselves from kings 8

Ibid. 64–9, 77–9, 90. Ibid. 76–7 (inconvenienter interpretantes), 88–9 (prave interpretatum: ‘among the Gallican canons it is precisely to these that they appeal, interpreting the Orleans canon wrongly as anyone who reads the series . . . will understand’). In Toledo III c. 19 (Conc. Visig., 131) the Hispana text says simply ‘the bishop’, in the context obviously the diocesan; Hincmar’s gloss, ‘the bishop in whose territory it is’, is in no way misleading (as implied by Stutz, Benef., 289 n. 33). 10 Cf. De eccl., 90–1: the bishop’s care of lesser churches’ possessions does not entitle him to demand 11 indebita traditio (conveyance to the bishopric literally ‘not owed’). Ibid. 86–7. 12 Ibid. 90: non autem ad dominii proprii evindicationem; cf. 90–1, Hincmar’s comment on Toledo III c. 20. 13 De eccl., 95–6. For the context see below, at note 38. 9

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and other magnates’ (which Hincmar implies would be absurd or at least impossible).14 It follows that various occasions when a bishop may legitimately intervene in a church’s affairs do not justify his confiscating it or insisting on its donation to the cathedral church. For instance, one of the possible grounds Hincmar has suggested for having to move a church is that its proper status—lex et honor—could not be got from co-heirs;15 but Frankish legislation about the partition of churches had never aimed to confiscate them: ‘in this capitulary’ (Worms 829) ‘it is not written that the bishop ought to take churches divided among co-heirs away from them’, or remove the relics ‘if the co-heirs are willing to keep and honour them’ while at Paris later, rules had been agreed that would allow co-heirs ‘to have the due service (obsequium) and honour from their churches’.16 The point is repeated in another context: those bishops get a reputation for greed who take advantage of such legislation to ‘take churches away from anyone they can, subjecting them to their own lordship (dominatus) and getting them conveyed to their cathedral church’.17 Similarly, legislation under Louis the Pious on what should be done about ruined churches did not say that the bishop should take such a church away from ‘him whose it had been’ and subject it to his own dominatio.18 But Hincmar was not diminishing or disparaging the bishop’s potestas; he gave it a strong positive meaning, as what we could call ‘authority’19 and Hincmar calls ordinatio, dispensatio, dispositio, gubernatio, providentia: words for managing, arranging, governing, looking after, which he distinguishes clearly—like bishop Frotar earlier—from dominium or ius (perhaps only once slipping into using potestas instead of one of these last).20 When he first cites the key text from Toledo III for the bishop’s potestas and ordinatio, he says this consists essentially in ‘ordaining priests, consecrating churches, and managing the possessions and endowments belonging to them’21 when he brings together all the major texts crucial to both him and his opponents, one evidently important to him is c. 9 of the 341 council of Antioch, ‘that every bishop should have potestas in his own diocese’ to rule ‘with the respect appropriate to individuals’ and to look after possessions, besides ordaining clergy and having general jurisdiction.22 What all this involved in practice is set out in detail in a section of the treatise that takes the 14

Loc. cit. (followed, pp. 97–8, by relevant passages from letters of Gregory the Great). 16 17 Ibid. 82–3. Ibid. 84–5 (see above, pp. 628–9). Ibid. 92–3. 18 Ibid. 93: ‘clause 3 of the aforesaid synod in the emperor Louis’s time’, i.e. Worms 829 (Capit. no. 191). 19 The word auctoritas was occasionally used in this sense (e.g. Tribur 895 c. 32), though more usually applied to sources of law or doctrine. 20 De eccl., 77 line 1. For Frotar see above, p. 696 note 1. 21 Ibid. 69–71. Hincmar here uses ordinatio in the technical sense of ordaining priests, which is only one element within ordinatio in his broader, abstract sense. The whole passage is oddly misunderstood by Devisse, Hincmar (830 at n. 15); perhaps misled by Gundlach’s reading of conservatio for consecratio (see 22 Stratmann’s ed., 69 l. 2). De eccl., 88–9; also 98–9. 15


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form of an episcopal capitulary and a list of tasks for archdeacons and rural deans;23 rounded off with the acid remark that if all this is not enough, a bishop should apply to his metropolitan or a synod for leave to do more.24 Nor are the churches of other lords exempt from or outside the scope of this potestas; the diocesan’s power and the lord’s dominium coexist.25 This applies as much to fellow-bishops with churches in one’s diocese as to church-owning monasteries or lay lords. Churches built on and endowed from the lands of a bishopric or monastery were to be consecrated and remain ‘under the potestas and dispositio of the bishops’ (here obviously the diocesans) ‘and the regimen and dispositio of the priests’. Furthermore, when we find churches (along with other things) conveyed by charters of donation to bishoprics or monasteries or indeed to anyone, and even exchanged against villae, such churches were ‘still in the bishops’ government and management and that of their priests, and the priests themselves canonically subject to the bishops’.26 As for the Gallican canons on which his opponents specially rely27 (and others that Hincmar cites), the potestas and ordinatio that they demand do indeed apply to all churches without exception; the dispute was not about this but about what the words meant. ‘Look’, he goes on, ‘how clearly the holy canons show us what potestas we should have over the churches in our territories’: all churches in the diocese, regardless of whose they are, and ‘saving to everyone the right of due possession and the lawful possession of due right,28 should belong to the potestas of the bishop in whose territory they are placed (that is, to his regular ordinatio and just dispositio)’ and ‘whoever they may be given to and in whosesoever dominium they may be’, they should have the normal rights of rural churches, secured by the bishop’s care.29 Bishoprics, monasteries, and other lords of churches are dealt with alike here; there is no question for Hincmar of a bishopric’s extra-diocesan proprietary churches being ‘enclaves’ of episcopal authority carved out of another diocese.30 Orange c. 9 (of 441) was important to Hincmar because it recognized a founderbishop’s right, in a church that he built on his property in another bishop’s 23 Ibid. 99–107 (Stratmann’s sec. II); cf. also pp. 93–5 (citing inter alia 818–19 cc. 10, 11, 9) and pp. 95–6 (alleging—surely realistically—a right for bishops to provide an incumbent if the lord fails to offer a suitable one; cf. his letters to counts Theodulf and Bertram, below, notes 46–7. 24 Ibid. 112 (beginning of Stratmann’s sec. III). 25 26 They were of course often in the same hands, but that is not the point. Ibid. 86–7, 87–8. 27 Above, at note 9. 28 Stratmann (ibid. 12) gives undue weight to these phrases, implying that they make a large hole in the bishop’s potestas (whereas they rather indicate its nature or the spirit in which it should be exercised), and making them refer solely to the rights of Eigenkirche-lords (whereas what follows shows that they refer equally to priests’ rights, see next note). 29 i.e. that they ‘remain under due immunity’ (freedom from rent on the basic manse: below, note 42) ‘and the priests not suffer any . . . undue exaction from the churches’ dos or tithes by anyone’ (ibid. 90–1; with 92, 93–5). 30 As Stratmann takes it (ibid. 13), citing Stutz, Benef., 341 n. 33; but see below, note 32.

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diocese, to nominate a clerk for the diocesan bishop to ordain, or even to send an already-ordained priest for him to accept,31 while it firmly reserved to the diocesan—the bishop ‘in whose territory it is’—both the dedication of the church and its ‘government’: the diocesan’s government coexists with the founder’s choice of clerk.32 He sums up c. 13 of the council of Antioch as showing that churches are not to be in the potestas of a bishop other than the diocesan (‘the bishop in whose territory they are situated’), and says consistently with this: ‘We bishops’ should be content with the old rulings ‘about other bishops’ churches set up in our dioceses, since we would not want our own churches in a fellow bishop’s diocese to be claimed by him for his own dominium’.33 What the outsider bishop has, then, is dominium, the lord’s rights, not episcopal potestas in an enclave. In his conflict with his nephew Hincmar of Laon some dozen years later, in which he deploys the same key canons of Orange, Orleans, and Toledo, his letters show him totally clear about his nephew’s proper authority as diocesan over his (the archbishop’s) church of Folembray in the diocese of Laon; while over his nephew’s chapel at Attolae curtis in the archdiocese of Rheims, he recognizes Laon’s lordship but asserts his own diocesan authority.34 This is implicit, too, in his sketch of former dealings with other churches, his own in the dioceses of Laon and Soissons and those of other bishops in his own. Yet it remains true that in this treatise ‘about churches and chapels’ he was engaged in a lively and even enthusiastic defence of the rights of churchowners. He sees these rights as widely spread, and valid for all who have founded, inherited, or acquired churches.35 Donations of churches—‘which we do not read to have been contradicted by our elders’—are made ‘by kings and by free men and women . . . to bishoprics, monasteries or whom you will’, while exchanges are ‘between whom you will’; churches may belong to ‘the king’s dominatio, or a bishopric’s or monastery’s immunity, or the property of any 31 This last was a special concession; Hincmar later pointed out that he and others have lately refrained from taking it up (above, p. 523); even before that it may have been unusual. It possibly involved a misunderstanding of Orange (above, p. 16 note 29); if so, Hincmar’s only misunderstanding of it (see next note). 32 De eccl., 88; much more fully in his 870 letter to Hincmar of Laon (PL 126. 540–1). Stutz’s view (Benef., 341 n. 33) that Hincmar misread Orange c. 9 was based on his own misreading of Hincmar. Hincmar’s version (very close to the established text of Orange) has dedication reserved for the bishop in cuius territorio ecclesia assurgit, ordination of the builder-bishop’s chosen clerks by the bishop in cuius territorio est, and the ‘whole government of the church’ belonging to him in cuius civitatis territorio ecclesia surrexit. Stutz argued that Hincmar read the first and third as meaning the diocesan but the second as the estateowner bishop, making it the latter who ordained the clerks. Such a muddle on Hincmar’s part is most unlikely, and favouring enclaves at all would make nonsense of his whole argument. 33 De eccl., 89–90 (citing also Orleans 541 c. 33, si quis in agro suo oratorium fecerit), 92. 34 Above, pp. 71–2, 76–7 (the relevance of Orange c. 9 was that he could have sent an already consecrated priest to Folembray but had chosen not to). 35 In passages respectively about consecration of churches, about co-heirs, and about transactions (‘whoever they may be given to and in whosesoever dominium they may be’, De eccl., 90–1).


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free man’.36 And ‘we bishops’, being bound by the old rulings about other bishops’ churches in the diocese, ‘ought not to seek in other lords’ churches what we cannot exact from other bishoprics’ churches’:37 all lords should be treated alike. It is a matter of tradition as well as of law; to treat other lords’ churches differently from those of fellow bishops is to ‘strive against custom and authority’. And citing the ruling of 818–19 (about not rejecting lords’ suitable candidates) to show ‘how our forefathers understood’ the bishops’ ordinatio and potestas (that is, as ‘just and reasonable dispositio’ compatible with the rights of lords), he sees them as ‘handing it on to us . . . preserved by custom over the course of so many years’.38 Hincmar had no call in this treatise to define lords’ rights over churches in the systematic way that he defined the bishop’s role, but his picture can be pieced together. The lord can give the church away or exchange it; choose and appoint a suitable clerk approved and consecrated by the diocesan; take a reasonable rent for any endowment beyond the basic manse; and expect ‘spiritual’ service in the form of preaching, prayer, and divine office. He cannot appoint or remove a priest without the bishop’s leave, or take tithes or offerings, or anything compulsory from the basic manse. But he is the priest’s personal lord, his senior, and as such can expect something in the way of voluntary ceremonial gifts or eulogiae even if the priest holds nothing extra,39 and personal deference as well as spiritual service, especially (Hincmar seems to imply) when the priest was formerly his serf 40 (though it should be said that Hincmar sees the priest as owing spiritual service to his parishioners in gratitude for their tithes, as well as to his lord for the church’s endowment).41 It is part of the bishop’s role to ensure the priest’s respect and service to his lord. He must also ensure the basic manse’s freedom from rent,42 see that lords provide priests with adequate material goods in return for their spiritual services, and defend priests against their lords’ oppression;43

36 Ibid. 87–8, 90–1 (‘immunity’ here seems to mean simply ecclesiastical lordship: the king’s dominatio, the great church’s immunitas, and the free man’s proprietas, look like elegant variation). Cf. Capit. no. 275 (Pıˆtres, 869, drafted by Hincmar: Hartmann, ‘Zustand’, 430–2) c. 9: ut si abbates vel abbatissae aut comites seu vassi nostri aut ceteri laici clericos probabilis vitae . . . obtulerint . . . 37 De eccl., 92–3 (see above, at note 33); obviously this does not mean that diocesans should not exercise 38 their potestas. Ibid. 92–3, 95–6. 39 Ibid. 107–8, introduced as yet another thing the bishop should see to. 40 Ibid. 91–2. Priests should not grudge this, as if thinking themselves totally exempt from subjection to their lords (seniores). Cf. 829 Relatio episcoporum, c. 11 (Capit. no. 196), where priests’ negligence, greed, and failure to ‘show due reverence to their seniores’ was said to have given lords an excuse for illtreating them. 41 The long passage from a homily of Gregory the Great’s at the end of the treatise (De eccl., 116–27) is at least partly concerned with what bishops and priests should do to deserve the people’s support. 42 This must be what he usually means by the ‘immunity’ of churches and their endowments; see 43 Capit. no. 275 (Pıˆtres, 869) c. 9 (p. 335, l. 11). De eccl., 107, and above, note 29.

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but Hincmar devotes far more space to the oppression of priests by bishops themselves.44 It is likely enough that Hincmar, or Rheims, had a particular interest in the affairs that occasioned his treatise. But this does not mean that his main motive was to defend Rheims’s own proprietary churches,45 or that he valued these more than proper order in his diocese and province and in the Church as a whole. In asking Hincmar of Rheims to set out the relevant law, Charles the Bald was approaching a leading critic of secularization and lay abbacies; not a malleable propagandist for royal or lay interests, nor even a narrow devotee of his own church’s property (important though this was to any conscientious prelate), but a bishop with a strong sense of his order and its duties. He had high standards for his own diocesan clergy, and was active in combating the abuses that lay lordship could breed. His much-quoted letter to a count Theodulf, evidently lord of several churches in the diocese, shows his principled approach to a range of practical matters: Theodulf’s seizure of property left in alms by dead priests (sacrilege as well as unlawful); his disposing of the matricula of a church in return for a donkey (robbing the poor, both criminal and shameful); his proposal to ‘sell’ a church by taking a price for the next incumbency (‘if any clerk gives you a single denarius for that church or any other in my diocese . . . he will not be ordained in it by me’).46 To another nobleman, Liutard, who had expelled a priest and put in another already consecrated elsewhere, Hincmar writes warning him of his impending excommunication; and instructs the local dean to excommunicate the intruded priest and warn the people off his masses.47 Meanwhile his diocesan statutes and instructions for deans’ inquiries had, among much else, striven to prevent priests making simoniacal entrance gifts to their lords, and treated lords’ priests firmly as part of his diocesan clergy48 (in writing to count Theodulf he refers to a priest of the count’s as ‘my minister’). He cannot convincingly be regarded as barely aware of abuses or inclined to turn a blind eye to them.49 44

De eccl., 108–12. See Nelson, ‘Making Ends Meet’, 29–30 on Hincmar as probable drafter of the decrees of Toulouse 844 (Conc. III no. 4), with lively translation of these; and pp. 30–3 on his insight into the problem of priests as pauperes. 45 As Stratmann proposes (De eccl., 13–14; cf. eadem, Hinkmar von Rheims (Sigmaringen, 1991), 53, taking it that Prudentius claimed extra-diocesan churches for diocesan administration, against Hincmar’s claim for the outsider-bishop’s lordship; but Hincmar saw these as coexisting. 46 Flodoard, Hist. Rem., iii c. 26 (pp. 337–8). Cf. letter to his kinsman count Bertram of Tardenois, warning him to produce a suitable clerk quickly for a vacant church and not leave the people with no pastor or only a hireling (ibid., p. 342). 47 Ibid. c. 28 (pp. 356–7). On all this see above, pp. 514–15; 522, 523, 528–9. 48 Above, p. 520; and see Hartmann, ‘Zustand’, 432–4. 49 As implied by Stratmann’s remark about ‘Missta¨nder, die auch ihm nicht verborgen geblieben sein ko¨nnen’ (De eccl., 13).


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His defence of lords’ rights seems to spring rather from a conservative and aristocratic point of view that found them traditional and natural. It goes with his dislike of anything arbitrary or capricious; all should be done according to law (which might be provincial law, suited to local circumstances) or reason (of a practical kind); characteristically he appeals to the sense of honour—his opponents are out for shameful gain; their sharp practice to get a church moved out of a lord’s lordship is shameful; count Theodulf should be ashamed to sell a matricula for the price of a donkey; he himself is ashamed to hear that the monks of Saint-Denis have made their priests pay for tithes.50 For the arguments of his opponents (which had almost certainly been put into writing, probably by Prudentius of Troyes)51 we depend on Hincmar; but to rebut their case he would need to represent it fairly (fairness about their motives is another matter). Clearly they relied heavily on the sixth-century legislation.52 Neither side was right historically about this; it belonged to an age when bishops were still trying to maintain the unity of diocesan property, but before what survived of this had hardened into property belonging to the cathedral church. The power then envisaged might have been more nearly proprietary (in some aspects) than Hincmar’s view of it, but much less so than Prudentius’s. It was because ‘potestas’ was genuinely ambiguous or elastic that controversy on these lines was possible.53 Both sides took it for granted that lower churches could be owned as property, but for Prudentius only by a bishopric (though they would be surrendered to it by traditio, with all that that implied); while for Hincmar they could properly belong to any great church, lay ruler, or noble man or woman. His view may have rested on tradition and sentiment, and his case have been largely negative (demonstrating that the law was not what his opponents claimed); yet his approach was actually more rational and in the long run constructive than theirs, because it freed episcopal authority over churches from dependence on proprietary right. Meanwhile the focusing of controversy on the bishop’s potestas does not mean that the sacredness of church property was not still in play as a possible line of attack on lay lordship. Prudentius may have argued like Agobard for the unfitness of laymen disposing of churches and their endowments, which were sacred as being their forefathers’ or other faithful persons’ offerings; perhaps Hincmar was answering this when he said of monasteries that they too ‘are endowed with the vows and alms of the faithful’, but nonetheless subject to the lordship of kings and other great men.54 This compatibility of a church’s sacred property with its 50

51 Above, p. 487. Stratmann, De eccl., 8–9; see above, p. 803 note 99. Stratmann (loc. cit.) finds it surprising that the crucial Orleans and Toledo canons say nothing about Eigenkirchen; but this is perhaps to assume Prudentius’s view of what they mean. 53 See Hartmann, ‘Zustand’, 428–9: Prudentius and others were simply trying to increase the number of bishops’ churches, seeing this as the only way forward. 54 De eccl., 95–6; cf. his aside, ibid. 108, on the propriety of bishops rendering honour to kings and those who are supreme in the respublica (like priests to their lords), for the offerings on which bishoprics and monasteries depend. 52

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holder’s service to a lord is a point Hincmar made elsewhere about great churches. Taking the line that secularization and lay abbacies were unnecessary now that bishops and abbots rendered military service and kept their own vassals for this on church lands, he insisted that the lands so used were as much consecrated to God as those that the clergy lived on, and as much deserving of royal protection and immunity.55 Church lands were ‘possessed under the laws of kings’ and subject to service and annual gifts, while still to be respected as ‘vows of the faithful, price of sinners, patrimony of the poor, and sustenance of the Lord’s serfs and maidservants’.56 So this sacredness limits and defines the kind of lordship a king can have in a great church: ‘the churches committed to us by God are not such benefices, or property of the king in such a way, that he can give them or take them away at will and without consultation, since everything of the Church’s is consecrated to God’.57 It is in this sense—though with a subtle change of emphasis—that he speaks of ‘bishoprics and monasteries, which are benefices of the king, commended to the king by God to defend and commit to suitable administrators.’58 Years later, warning the young king Louis the Stammerer against the evil counsel that he could tell electors whom to elect bishop, or that episcopal property was in his potestas to give to whom he wished, he reiterates that ecclesiastical possessions are ‘offered to the Lord’ as vota fidelium, pretia peccatorum, patrimonium pauperum.59

22.iii. The tenth century, to Abbo of Fleury The treatise ‘On churches and chapels’ had at least some short-term influence, being echoed (by Hincmar’s own drafting) in Charles the Bald’s capitulary of Pıˆtres in 869;1 while Prudentius’s writing may have provided ammunition to some bishops, such as Hincmar of Laon who evidently tried at some point ‘to compel churches . . . existing in the properties of free men and co-heirs’ to be given up.2 But probably more characteristic is Wulfad archbishop of Bourges in his pastoral letter of 870 to his diocesan clergy and laity, showing—without any obvious influence, and in a different, more ‘southern’ setting3—much the same 55 Letter from Quierzy, 858 (Capit. no. 41 at 432); memorandum pro ecclesiae libertatum defensione (PL 125. 1050–1). 56 Ibid. 1051; letter to Hadrian II (PL 126. 184–5); in both, quoting from St Augustine (per iura regum 57 Ecclesia possidet possessiones). Letter from Quierzy (above, pp. 248–9). 58 59 De eccl., 84–5. PL 126. 110–17. 1 Capit. no. 275, esp. cc. 8 and 9. 2 Hincmar of Rheims’s letter to the Laon clergy, 871 (PL 126. 274). 3 The difference is mainly stylistic (though the need to urge the church-owning laity ‘not to stay there with your wives’ seems absent from Hincmar’s world).


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assumptions about lay lords as Hincmar of Rheims.4 These archbishops’ relaxed acceptance that priests had lords contrasts with the tetchy rebuke of pope Nicholas I to the archbishop of Vienne in 865 for referring to his letter-bearer as ‘priest of the illustrious count Gerard’: It sounds ridiculous . . . Did count Gerard consecrate him? Does he belong to his diocese? Where did you read or learn this?—unless from the existence of priests not ordained according to the canons, specifically for a city church or the church of an estate or a martyrium or a monastery . . . but set up in the houses of laymen, and living with the laity to the point that they are not said to be God’s or any church’s priests but this count’s or that duke’s’.5

However, the pope’s objection here was not to the proprietary church,6 but to household chaplains not ordained to any ‘title’. As to the longer term, Hincmar’s influence is evident, long after his death, at the council of Trosly in 909 (for the province of Rheims and beyond).7 Here (among much else of a traditional Carolingian kind,8 strongly worded and elaborately supported) a long clause describes the established limitations on what lords could do in or have from their churches, in words often close to Hincmar’s. The clause goes on to a Hincmar-like insistence ‘that we are not taking away the lords’ dominium from them, as if they should not or cannot have the name of lordship (senioratus) in the things granted them by God, while churches should rather belong to the bishops; we are only delineating the bishop’s government, not claiming for ourselves the lord’s power’. There follows a passage, very close to Hincmar, on getting priests to render ‘fitting honour and due service (obsequium)—spiritual and ecclesiastical—to those in whose dominion (ditio) their churches stand’, without resentment or rebellion, and to ‘show themselves grateful to their lords and parishioners, on whose offerings they live’.9 The second of these two passages may indicate only that there had been a few complaints from lords about churlish behaviour by low-born clergy; but the first may suggest that in some circles lay lordship still needed justifying, though it more likely means that asserting its limitations without this reassurance might be taken amiss by the laity. If the controversy was still faintly alive in the region, Trosly may represent its last gasp. Not many copies of Hincmar’s treatise survive,10 and none of whatever Prudentius wrote; probably for most of the tenth century Prudentius’s case had little appeal, while Hincmar’s defence of lords’ rights was unnecessary. 4

5 PL 121. 1135–42, at 1139. PL 119. 917–18. As Ullmann saw it, in a rather forced reading of Nicholas’s rebuke (Growth, 196–7). 7 G. Schmitz, ‘Konzil von Trosly’, DA 33 (1977), with text; on attendance, pp. 341–4; scanty survival of its 8 decisions, pp. 346, 434. Cf. Schro¨der, Synoden, 194–7. Preface, and cc. 1–5, 14. 9 10 c. 6. Stratmann, De eccl., 52–5 (introd.). 6

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The council of Hohenaltheim in 916 for the eastern kingdom, opened by a papal legate, dealt with some disciplinary matters, but its dominant subject was the position of bishops and the need for fidelity to the new king Conrad.11 It did, however, (like Tribur in 895) assert the right of ecclesiastics from bishops downwards to dispose of their own possessions before they died, and it made clear that this was to apply to ‘priests who serve laymen’.12 But these bishops also decreed excommunication for a ‘fugitive clerk’ who would not return to his church ‘or his own lord’, adding the lord to the bishop as a possible injured party;13 and they produced the harshly worded clause decreeing excommunication and ultimately degradation and re-enslavement for a serf whose lord had freed him and had him made priest, ‘if flown with pride he refuses to celebrate mass . . . and sing psalms for his lords, and will not obey them rightly’:14 an untempered version of Hincmar’s bland view of the proper deference of priest to senior. After this, the council of Coblenz in 92215 ruled more explicitly that after a priest’s death ‘the lord of the church should claim no dominium’ in his goods; made other rulings that restricted but recognized the lord’s rights—on heirs disputing over a common church, on the bishop’s right to synodal attendance or dues ‘whosesoever a chapel, church, or congregation may be’, and perhaps on the wrongness of laymen taking tithes from their ‘own chapels’; and repeated at some length that most essential of Carolingian refrains, that lords must not put in or expel priests without the bishop’s consent.16 This last was reiterated by two midcentury, mainly German councils (summoned by Otto I), Ingelheim in 948 and Augsburg in 952; while Ingelheim condemned any lay potestas over altar offerings and forbade any layman to beat or harrass a priest.17 That seems to be all for almost three-quarters of a century;18 while in France after Trosly in 909 there seems to be no legislation at provincial level or higher for well over a century.19 11

See Hellman, ‘Hohenaltheim’, 296–306; Wolter, Synoden, 11–19. The Saxon bishops were absent. Conc. VI i, no. 1 cc. 36, 37. 13 Ibid., c. 26 (echoing two of the 813 councils, but adding vel domino proprio or vel ad dominum suum (Wehl, ibid. 33 nn. 107, 108). 14 Ibid. c. 38 (and nn. 154–8); see above, p. 525. By contrast Trosly c. 6 had represented deference to a lay lord as something for bishops to commend by example, ‘we being disciples of a mild and humble Master’ (Matth. 11: 29; see Hincmar, De eccl., 83–4). 15 Summoned by both Henry the Fowler and Charles the Simple, but attended by only eight bishops, all from Henry’s kingdom. See Wolter, Synoden, 25–8. 16 Conc. VI no. 4 cc. 9 (end), 14, 15, 18 (dubiously authentic), and 9 (first part). 17 Conc. VI. i no. 13 cc. 4, 5 (one MS has flagellare, another the more likely flagitare, ‘harass’ or ‘burden’, paired with fatigare); ibid. no. 18 c. 8. They also deal with tithes (not to be kept by seculares, Ingelheim c. 9; to be in the bishop’s potestas, Augsburg c. 9), but not necessarily referring to church-owners. 18 On other German councils (up to 1023), with agenda mainly political or judicial, see Wolter, Synoden; on their scanty surviving legislation, ibid. 474–7. 19 Provincial councils, and one (Laon 965) described as totius Franciae, dealt essentially with crises (Schro¨der, Synoden, 6, 100–319); any legislation was ‘local and diocesan’ (McKitterick, Frankish Church, 12


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This does not mean that individual bishops had given up trying to assert their authority (especially when consecrating new churches), within the framework of lords’ rights; they could even occasionally confirm or question these rights in particular cases.20 More strikingly, the outstanding and long-lived bishop Ulrich of Augsburg (924–73) is said to have formulated principles determining his willingness to consecrate churches.21 But there were no frequent meetings of bishops from a whole province or more, where complaints could be brought, problems discussed, and consensus reached or controversy pursued; where, that is, opinion could be formed.22 What counted as acceptable must have varied from bishop to bishop and from case to case (depending on local politics and the importance of individual lords), and certainly differed markedly between regions. At Augsburg, bishop Ulrich could (apparently) proceed after consecrating a church to ‘commend its advocacy to the lawful heir’ by the rite of putting a cloak on him,23 thus claiming both to approve the founder’s lordship and to define it harmlessly as protective advocacy. By contrast in Westphalia, Nithard bishop of Mu¨nster not only recognized the lay founder Bruning’s and his heirs’ potestas in their church (in return for the gift of a serf family), but gave it the libertas that the bishop would take nothing from the priest except synodal dues and would correct what needed correcting.24 Meanwhile in parts of southern Italy bishops expressly renounced almost all power in particular churches in favour of their founders; and in 1004 pope John XVIII allowed count Landulf of Isernia and his heirs ‘to rule in dominium and potestas’ the church of S.Maria (a plebs) that he and his late wife had rebuilt.25 All of these—except perhaps Ulrich, if he could really impose his ritual—were probably accepting what they could not prevent; nonetheless thereby staking a claim.26 During the long legislative quiescence on the continent, conditions in England were different. Here in a smaller more cohesive kingdom, with local communities closely linked to the centre, occasional assemblies of bishops and great laymen, presided over by the king, declared law both secular and ecclesiastical; so 152–3). Local councils often condemned the pillaging of church property (Schro¨der, op. cit., 78 and nn.), as part of the Peace of God movement (see Goetz, ‘Protection of the Church’, 270–9). 20 e.g. Hervey bp. of Autun’s consent (926, Cluny no. 274) to arrangements between an archdeacon Adso and a layman Giso about Giso’s church; Mainbod bp. of Maˆcon’s dealings with the nobleman Acbert (above, pp. 693–4). 21 Vita Udalrici, cc. 7, 8 (PL 135. 1024–5); written c.982 by one of his clergy. 22 On the importance of such synods to bishops, for forming a programme and articulating what they expected from kings, see Nelson, Politics, 239–43. 23 panno imposito (Vita, as above, note 21), c. 7. The ‘heir’ must mean the founder, as having endowed 24 Above, p. 596. Nithard died c.922. the church from his own land. 25 Above, pp. 721–4; for Isernia 1004, above, pp. 88–9. 26 Cf. bishops’ grants of ‘customs’ (above, pp. 712–14). An early instance (in effect) is Cluny no. 373 (929), Berno bp. of Maˆcon conceding ‘whatever belongs to the bishop or archdeacon’ in four of Cluny’s churches.

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that canons of the Church could take the form of royal laws and be published in the vernacular.27 These dealt with morals both lay and clerical, observance of feasts and fasts, payment of tithes and other dues, and protection of churches and their rights. Obviously these last touched the interests of the lords of churches; but there is no such reiteration as in ninth-century Francia of complaints about their actions or demands. However, king Aethelred’s—that is, archbishop Wulfstan’s—laws of 1008 forbade any man to enslave or subject a church, or traffic in it wrongfully,28 or expel its minister without the bishop’s consent.29 It is not clear whether ‘subjecting’ it (forbidden also in the Northumbrian Priests’ Law,30 without elaboration) might take other forms than selling it or expelling its priest. The Latin version has it forbid ‘that anyone, subjecting his church to the yoke of servitude by any transaction, become a seller of churches’; and adds, ‘but let them always remain free in the most light servitude of Christ’.31 ‘Selling’ may mean taking an entrance gift from the priest, rather than outright sale from one lord to another; either way, the point about servitude may be the practical one that if someone (layman or clerk) has paid for a church he will try to recoup his expenditure. But this amounts to very little in all the lawgiving from Edmund to Cnut, whether because abuse was not widespread or because of an uncritical attitude is difficult to say. Outside the legislation, abbot Aelfric’s writings show some concern with the status of churches in relation to lay lords: he deplores the selling of churches ‘as if they were mere mills’;32 and in his homily for the dedication of a church (which can be seen as stating norms, if not the law), no one is to take money for a church; ‘no layman is to presume to have direction or authority over the servants of God’, usurping Christ’s functions as head of His household—even a clerk in orders cannot take on such headship by his own initiative; and ‘if a layman wishes to raise or endow a minster, he is to hand over to God whatever he does for it, and . . . never to hold authority over the ordained servants of God . . . he may help in worldly concerns, and leave them to live according to the direction of their books and the teaching of their spiritual superior’.33 Here Aelfric seems to envisage and condemn not the outside lordship of a founder, but his retaining the church’s government, as a lay abbot or dean.34 Meanwhile on the continent there remained in the background a continuing interest in the law, which preserved in new collections many of the Carolingian 27

See Wormald, Making, esp. 310–20, 330, 339–45. ‘ne ciricmangunge [church-mongering] mid unrihte ne macige’. 29 30 Aethelred V. 10. 2 (Liebermann, Gesetze, I. 240–1). Gesetze, I. 381. 31 Ethelred ‘VI’ 15 (Gesetze, I. 250–1). 32 Passio S. Albani, in Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. W. W. Skeat, EETS 82 (1885), 430–1. ‘Some men sell even a church for hire, like mills’ sounds like requiring entrance-gifts. 33 Catholic Homilies (ed. B. Thorpe), II. 592–5; trans. mainly from EHD I. 852. 34 See index: secularium prioratus. 28


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canons and royal laws dealing with proprietary churches, as well as relevant earlier canons.35 Their selection and arrangement might tell us something of the ideas or assumptions of the collectors,36 but probably more about their practical purposes or the points they needed to make in a particular dispute; while much must have been included simply because it was there. Regino of Pru¨m’s collection of c.906 was designed for bishops exercising jurisdiction in their synods;37 scattered among its canons are most of the practical issues involving lords: conditions for consecrating churches, endowment with the rent-free mansus, old and new churches’ tithe-rights; the bishop’s consent to the lord’s choice of priest, the ban on entrance-gifts, what service the priest may render, what is to happen to his possessions acquired as a priest; the ordination of freed serfs (it is among these texts that Regino includes the injunction to bishops not to reject a lord’s suitable candidate),38 the problem of clergy coming from another diocese, the rule against ordination other than to a titulus; division among coheirs, restoration of ruined churches, improper uses of the church building (parties, storage), lords not to take tithes.39 All this is probably evidence of what was (as always) going on, and of conscientious bishops not having given up on it; but not of an ideological position. We come nearer to this when Regino includes, early in the book, the old canons asserting the diocesan bishop’s authority over churches and their endowments;40 but there is nothing to suggest that he took this potestas in Prudentius’s sense.41 He gives a sweeping heading, ‘that laity should not hold churches . . . ’, to what turns out to be the 845–6 protest at the king granting fiscal churches to laymen:42 what is condemned here is not lay lordship but direct lay tenure of what should be held by a priest, including tithes. Further into the tenth century, it seems unlikely that other canon-law collections would shed more light than Regino’s.43 On a superficial look at Atto bishop of Vercelli (c.924–60), his Capitulare seems to address, among relevant problems, only that of clerks being ordained without a ‘title’, or leaving a church to which they were ordained and moving to another.44 His contemporary Rather, bishop (intermittently) of Verona, wrote not a collection but an extremely demanding synodical letter to his Verona clergy; it states the essentials trenchantly in one 35

On a broader front see McKitterick, ‘The Church’, 153–6. See Mordek, Kirchenrecht und Reform, 5–6, on the emergence of systematic collections, enabling an author to convey his own views and objectives without altering the texts. 37 38 See Fournier and Le Bras, Collections, I. 244–7. Libri duo, i. c. 407. 39 Mainly in i (esp. cc. 23–30, 34–59). 40 Ibid. i. cc. 15, 33, 14 (Orleans 511 c. 17, Toledo 589 c. 19, and its more recent assertion at Soissons, 853). 41 42 Above, pp. 811. Ibid. i. cc. 248–50 Conc., III no. 11, c. 78. 43 This is based only on Fournier and Le Bras’s survey, Collections, I. 268–315; almost all are still unpublished (see Ke´ry, Canonical Collections, 182–94). 44 cc. 30, 32 (PL 134. 35). See Wemple, Atto of Vercelli, 10–12, 38–47. 36

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concise, composite paragraph, coming however from an earlier source.45 Both bishops, in other writings, were largely concerned about what they saw as oppression and robbery of the church in Italy by ephemeral kings and magnates.46 Atto also deplored the consequences of clerical marriage or concubinage, including the misappropriation of church property; and regretted such priests’ exposure to pressure by the powerful, so that ‘they presume at their lords’ command to sing mass at any place or time, celebrate baptism, absolve those bound or bind those absolved, against canon law and without discretion’.47 But he did not see the remedy in terms of eliminating the laity’s lordship over lesser churches,48 or defining the bishop’s power over them more tightly,49 or even making the most of the priesthood’s penitential authority.50 As for grandiloquent statements of principle, Atto declares in his treatise De pressuris that what belongs to the Church belongs to Christ as her bridegroom, while as His bride she is omnium domina, mistress of all things: ‘what Christian then will be so foolish as to name himself her lord, or presumptuously enjoy her possessions?’ Yet the context is not the claim to own churches but the general spoliation of church property, including that of vacant bishoprics.51 It was in this context, too, that Rather urged in more traditional terms that a king should ‘know that you are appointed as the Church’s advocate, not its lord (it would be absurd for anyone to lord it over his mother); its defender, not its steward (this as you know is the bishop); its patron, not its minister . . . Whatever is offered to the Lord is holy of holies, and belongs to the ius of the priests’.52 It is only towards the end of the century, in the writings of Abbo abbot of Fleury in the heart of France, that some thinking about the proprietary church reappears. Abbo’s collection of canons was addressed to the new Capetian kings Hugh and his son Robert, to show them their rights and duties especially in defence of 45 Weigle (ed.), Briefe, no. 25 (966). This passage is part of a long insertion, a ‘so-called homily of Leo IV’ (ibid. 130–5); it includes the statement that nullus per potestatem saecularium ecclesiam obtineat, envisaged here probably as being put in without the bishop’s consent. See also his De contemptu canonum (addressed to a colleague), asserting the bishop’s potestas and complaining of the Verona clergy’s greed and indiscipline (PL 136. 487–92), but not of subservience to secular lords. 46 See Fliche, La Re´forme Gre´gorienne, I. 60–74 (Atto), 75–90 (Rather); Weigle, ‘Ratherius’; Wemple, Atto, 2–7, 13–18. Fliche’s presentation of Rather as a ‘pre-Gregorian reformer’ is overstated; but neither was he wholly self-interested: see Miller, Formation, 161 n. 81. 47 See Wemple, Atto, 110–14 and n. 23. 48 He came nearer to this for great churches, commending genuine free election followed by royal consent (ibid. 114–15, 129–34). 49 His canonical resources (ibid. 209–17) may not have included the important Orleans and Toledo 50 texts. Ibid. 6–8, 65–9, 124–9, 135–7. 51 De pressuris eccl., part 3 (PL 134. 87–90). In the same context (col. 90) he quotes the much-used verse from Psalm 82. 52 Praeloquia, part 4 c. 34 (PL 136. 284–5), treatise (936–8) on the duties of various ranks and conditions of men and women, here a king (king Hugh had imprisoned him for treachery).


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the monastic order;53 by itself it would hardly reveal more about his views than that he was defending monastic interests, drawing attention to the inalienability of church property, and pointing to limits on what bishops could claim from churches.54 However, he includes canons that recognize founders’ interests or even rights in ordinary churches,55 and others (or the same ones)56 that mark the subjection of these foundations to episcopal authority. For the meaning of his selection we have to look further. It was evidently made in part to solicit royal support for his opposition at the council of Saint-Denis in 993 to the bishops of the region, in particular his own diocesan and enemy, bishop Arnulf of Orleans.57 Aimo in his Life of Abbo says of the bishops at Saint-Denis that ‘their talk was all of tithes . . . which they tried to take away from laymen and monks’;58 perhaps aiming to reverse the drift of tithes into the hands of both lay lords and monasteries, but probably also to recover control of their allocation between churches, and perhaps of how they were spent. This implies that some bishops—at councils occasioned by the politics of Hugh Capet’s accession—were at last pursuing a joint programme that could be argued on grounds of law and principle; though how far it was in fact so argued, and how widely it ranged beyond tithes, is impossible to say since we depend on Abbo’s and Aimo’s accounts of it. Abbo’s case against the bishops is set out in a letter to a friend ‘G’, probably a fellow abbot,59 and more briefly in his apologia to the kings Hugh and Robert after violence had erupted at Saint-Denis.60 His case turned largely on defining the bishops’ potestas over church revenues and possessions, on similar lines to Hincmar’s long ago. No one disputes, writes Abbo, that endowments and tithes are in the bishops’ hands, that is in their potestas, in the sense in which the kingdom is in the king’s hands: as a responsibility.61 The canons allowing the bishop a third or a quarter of the tithe make sense only if it is strictly for ordinatio that the bishop controls the whole tithe, not for treating it as property; and from around a thousand churches in any diocese, a third or even a quarter ought to be plenty.62 He proceeds (in rebutting the bishops’ claim to receive annual accounts from churches)63 to emphasize that a bishop cannot alienate his subject churches’ 53

54 PL 139. 473–508; preface, 473. e.g. (on the last topic) cc. 5, 31, 37–8. cc. 30 (Toledo III c. 19), 32 (Toledo IX cc. 1, 2), 37 (Roman synod 826). 56 cc. 11, 30, 32, and 35 (Toledo IV c. 33). 57 See Cousin, Abbon, 131–2, 134–5; Constable, Tithes, 79–81; on the wider issues Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 58 Aimo, Vita Abbonis, c. 9 (PL 139. 396–7). 29–32. 59 PL 139. 440–60. Gauzbert abbot of Saint-Martin of Tours seems more likely than Gauzlin future abbot of Fleury. 60 Ibid. 462–72. Abbo had to rebut the charge of fomenting this violence (started by monks of Saint61 Letter to ‘G’, at 441. Denis, probably pursuing a tithe dispute with the bp. of Paris). 62 Ibid. 441–2. Whether the bishops were actually getting this is another matter; it suited Abbo’s argument to suppose so. This passage is seriously misunderstood by Violante, ‘Monachesimo Cluniacense’, 36–7 and n. 63. 63 Abbo points out that Braga [II] c. 2 requires it only for the bishop’s third of offerings when this is remitted for the church’s expenses (PL 139. 442). 55

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endowments or tithes apart from his own portion, only this last being his property.64 The broader canons that Abbo was accused of speaking against (although, he says, he hardly saw a book opened at the council)65 must have been the familiar ones about the bishop’s potestas over churches and their endowments. Of these he includes Toledo III c. 19 in his collection,66 along with canons showing what this does not mean: a bishop cannot at will reduce or suppress a church’s privilege; bishops must not turn church possessions to their own use, or alienate anything of a church’s; an abbot is not free to alienate to a bishop more than might be needed for the site of a parish church.67 The point of all this for Abbo was to defend the rights of monasteries and their churches to their independent possessions and revenues, rather than the right of lords (lay or otherwise) to their churches; so he does not deploy Hincmar’s argument that the bishop’s potestas in churches is compatible with someone else’s dominium. Indeed he spoke strongly in these same letters against the whole conception of a church being anyone’s property but God’s. In the letter to ‘G’ the context is his criticizing the bishops’ proprietary idea of their potestas: ‘the Church is Christ’s and no one else’s; there should be no disputing among men about its sustenance or goods, since whose the whole is, His is the part.’68 In his apologia to the two kings it is put in the context of their duty to uphold ‘one faith, one baptism, one catholic Church’. Every church building deserves the highest honour and reverence because of the sacraments celebrated within it. So whoever wants to be saved should beware of believing any church to be anyone’s possession but God’s alone. What was said to Peter, prince of the apostles, was ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church’; mine, He said, not thine . . . and if the Church is not Peter’s, whose will it be? Will Peter’s successors dare to claim for themselves a potestas that Peter, ruler of the Church, did not have?69 For certain, dearest princes, we neither live nor speak like catholics when I say that such-and-such a church is mine, or so-and-so says of another church that it is his.70

On the related matter of simony, he complains that churches are bought and sold like beasts of burden; and that ‘there is almost nothing belonging to the Church—which is God’s alone—that is not bestowed for a price;71 . . . and the dealers in these things disingenuously claim not to be buying the blessing by which the grace of the Holy Spirit is received, but only the possessions of churches . . . whereas one cannot exist without the other’, any more than fire without fuel.72 In a 64 66 69 70 71 72

65 He has the ‘faculty of giving, selling, or possessing’ his portion. Apologia at 468. 67 68 Above, nn. 55–6. cc. 5, 25, 31–2, 37–8, 42 (PL 139. 479–80, 489–97). PL 139. 440. ‘Peter’s successors’ here are bishops generally, not the pope in particular. Ibid. 465–6; cf. Aimo, Vita, c. 8, ibid. 395–6 (citing it as ‘among other heresies’). He lists orders, offices, and functions. Ibid. 466–7 (cf. his letter to abbot Bernard, next note).


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letter to a former pupil, Bernard abbot of Beaulieu, urging him not to accept the bishopric of Cahors on the terms proposed by the count of Toulouse and the archbishop of Bourges, Abbo condemns simony not only as buying the grace of the Holy Spirit but also as implying that the church in question is someone’s property: ‘Whose is the church, if not God’s alone? Who is its lord, if not God? For even if a church needs its two defenders (advocati), one for temporal and one for spiritual things, neither of them has it as a lord (dominus), able to buy or sell what Christ has redeemed by his blood’;73 that is, neither archbishop nor count can claim dominium in the church of Cahors. This sort of thing had not, so far as we know, been said by an important churchman for a long time (perhaps not since Wala).74 However, these comments were based on scripture, not on canon law, and their intention was moral and devotional rather than radical. In defending monastic tithes Abbo was defending the customary rights of monasteries over their own churches,75 even if he thought it impious to think of these as property. And in speaking of the total ban on alienating church property, he insists (presumably referring to some pointscoring by his opponents) that there is no alienation when an abbot builds and endows a church on the monastery’s land, since it remains in the monastery’s possession and brings it income, as can be seen by examining Fleury’s old polyptichs which record what such churches owe to abbot and community in return for their endowments. Furthermore, his friend should not worry about the view that ‘monks ought not to hold churches’ (though an individual monk could do so only if in orders and serving the church).76 His conviction of the superiority of monks to secular clergy is obviously in play here; but even lay lords have their minimal rights recognized in his collection.77 In the same context Abbo provides evidence for the existence of an opinion, which he vigorously rejects, to which historians have given a good deal of weight. He complains of a new distinction between ‘church’ and ‘altar’, invented in order to claim that though the church may be some other lord’s the altar is the bishop’s and at his disposal.78 On this excuse, bishops have used churches’ endowments (which ‘by a good trick’79 they claim are not the church’s but the altar’s) as gifts or benefices for their own fighting men. Indeed altars themselves are given to laymen instead of supporting monks and clergy, while offerings are diverted from pilgrims, orphans, widows, and the repair of churches to the benefit of the laity’s 73

74 Aimo, Vita, c. 10 (ibid. 398). As remarked by Lesne, Propr., II. iii. 98 n. 1. Proprietary churches were one important source of monastic possession of tithes, among others (see Constable, Tithes, 57–72). 76 Letter to ‘G’ (PL 139. 442). See Constable (op. cit., 81 and n. 4) on this last, evidently corrupted 77 passage. Above, at note 55. 78 Briefly condemned in the apologia as ‘another most grave error’; at greater length in the letter to 79 ‘G’ (PL 139. 465–6 and 440–1. bona tegna (techna). 75

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horses and dogs.80 The whole idea, he says, is a grave error: an ecclesiastical building alone, without its altar, is no more a church than a body without a soul is a man; the attempt to separate them is akin to the heresy of separating the human and the divine natures of Christ into two persons. It is clearly the bishops— doctores Christianorum, rectores plebium—that Abbo blames both for the distinction and for its abuse.81 He says nothing here about lay founders’ claims on tithes or offerings (in this respect they were, however improperly, in the same boat as the monks), but only about laymen getting ‘altars’ in benefice from bishops (which gave him the opportunity to say in effect that if tithes had come to laymen it was largely the bishops’ fault). It is not clear exactly what distinction these bishops intended. It is usually taken that the ‘church’ covered all material things: the building itself, houses, farm buildings, lands, which were allowed to belong to lay lords (or to monasteries); while the ‘altar’ covered tithes, offerings, and the priest’s appointment.82 But this definition does not allow for Abbo’s charge that the bishops ‘coveted other men’s lands’ and claimed under cover of the distinction to dispose of endowments as well as of offerings.83 Part of the monks’ grievance (in fact the most obscure aspect of it) was evidently about encroachment on their churches’ lands; perhaps selected lands were already seen as attached to altars.84 Alternatively, what the bishops were claiming to deal with as the ‘altar’ was simply the priest’s office,85 which would entail disposing of whatever the priest would or should possess, whether in lands or revenues. Nor is it clear what was the bishops’ aim in making the distinction (if not the ‘good trick’ of Abbo’s sarcasm). It is sometimes taken as a response to the abuses of lay lordship and the shrinking authority of bishops, an attempt by ‘moderate’ bishops to rescue the essentials while conceding the rest.86 It is true, as we have seen, that throughout the late tenth and the eleventh centuries, in northern and 80 Abbo does not mention tithes by name here (probably because subsuming them in offerings made their diversion sound worse), but goes on to say ‘no one disputes that endowments and tithes are in the hands of the bishops’ as a responsibility. 81 Letter to ‘G’, 440–1. Thomas (Droit, 79–80 and 80 n. 1) did not see that these doctores and rectores are the grammatical subject of what follows, nor that further on (having skipped the words judicio episcoporum) it is not laymen but bishops who ‘assert that altars are theirs, separating them from churches absque ullis auctoribus’ (i.e. without any scriptural or canonical support; eccentrically read by Thomas as ‘sauf quelques fondateurs’). Unfortunately this translation is adopted wholesale in Aubrun’s La Paroisse en France (Paris, 1986), as the second half of his ‘document 20’ (p. 215; there added to the (unrelated) Apologia passage cited above, at note 70). Meanwhile in 1954 Cousin described the distinction as ‘imagineé par des seigneurs cupides’ (Abbon, 139). However, back in 1894 Wahrmund (Patronatsrecht, 36) denied its invention by the laity; and H. Hoesch in 1970 (Die kanonistischen Quellen im Werk Humberts von Moyenmoutier, 196) 82 read Abbo correctly. e.g. Wahrmund, op. cit., 36 n. 33; Thomas, Droit, 77. 83 And tithes, by implication (above, note 80). 84 Above, p. 698, note 15, for 11th-c. mentions of ‘land of the altar’. 85 Wirtz (‘Donum’, 122) assumes this, rendering altare as ‘Amt’ in the French context. 86 e.g. Thomas, op. cit., 76–80; Imbart, Origines, 271–2; Lemarignier, Privile`ges, 65.


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north-eastern France, bishops could either really give or (perhaps more often) claim to have given ‘altars’ to monasteries, evidently meaning the priest’s office and the revenues that went with it, or the power to dispose of these things. But these altars were normally in the bishop’s own churches, or churches already belonging to the monastery, or being given to it at the same time by a lay lord.87 Eleventh-century legislation sometimes specified altars as what laymen must not have;88 but this was a way of saying that they should not appoint priests uncontrolled, or take tithes or offerings, or burial and baptism dues; not asserting that altars were episcopal property. Both in legislation and in bishops’ charters, altare stands for the most sacred element or aspect of a church and therefore a focus of the bishop’s authority; but not in opposition to ecclesia left to the lord’s unfettered control.89 Abbo’s attack on the distinction represents it as directed as much against monastic as lay interests; indeed as itself contributing to lay possession of tithes and offerings by enabling bishops to use altars as benefices for laymen. This certainly happened, as we have seen. In 1026 Franco bishop of Paris complained to Fulbert of Chartres that his predecessor Rainald had given altars in benefice to laymen (earlier he was himself rebuked by Fulbert for trying to persuade him to do the like).90 But Franco’s complaint almost certainly refers to Rainald’s alienation from the bishop’s mensa of two villages, including their churches, to the count of Chateaubriand:91 if so the churches had been nobody else’s but the bishopric’s, the ‘altars’ were not treated separately from them, and Franco perhaps called them ‘altars’ only for purposes of complaint to a colleague. Later, altars actually held as separate benefices by clerks or laymen were almost certainly in churches of the bishop’s lordship, not anyone else’s.92 In fact it is not obvious that there can have been a major monastic grievance on this front.93 It seems likely too that the distinction itself was neither as consistent nor as prevalent as some historians have supposed.94 Perhaps Abbo’s words have been taken too unquestioningly as evidence of an important new idea that has to be seen as either a retreat or an advance. He may have seized on recent usage of the term altare by bishops anxious to assert in principle their authority over the appointment of priests and allocation of tithes and offerings, attributing to them 87

88 Above, pp. 700–1, 704–6. Below, pp. 827, 828. ‘Altar’ was often a near-synonym for ‘church’. Lords gave up ‘altars’ as pious donations for counter-gifts spiritual and material; not (as Hinschius supposed, Kirchenrecht, II. 438–9) as part of a tacit bargain with a reforming bishop to leave their lordship over church and lands unchallenged (no such bargain was necessary). 90 Fulbert, Letters, no. 91 (1024). 91 See Cart. de l’eglise Notre-Dame de Paris, ed. Gue´rard (Paris, 1850), I. 326. 92 Above, pp. 705–6, 708–9. 93 There must have been at least one or two cases impinging on Fleury or Saint-Denis. 94 e.g. Thomas (Droit, 77–8), Barth (Hildebert, 133, 197–9, 258–9); not all their references support the distinction. Fichtenau (Tenth Century, 219–20) describes the idea as ‘widely shared’, but cites only Abbo; as does Sackur, Cluniacenser, II. 25–6. 89

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mutually exclusive definitions of church and altar that they never intended. And in the end ‘the altar’ was not perhaps a very useful concept for bishops. The word itself was slippery, used for anything from the priest’s office or a bundle of tithes and offerings to a near-synonym for a church. It was not necessary nor even desirable for bishops’ assertions of authority that they should speak of ‘altars’ rather than of ‘churches’; in other regions and other countries bishops used other vocabulary in the eleventh century (and the bishops of the north were beginning to do so by the 1120s,95 while having been always liable to speak of ‘churches’ rather than altars without necessarily meaning anything different). At Clermont in 1095 much was said about ‘altars’,96 but nothing that could not have been said in other ways; and during the twelfth century the idea was overtaken by the more sophisticated distinction between spiritualities and temporalities,97 altare remaining in figurative use but in more restricted senses.

22.iv. Old themes in the eleventh century Some twenty-five years after Abbo’s collection of canons, Burchard bishop of Worms made his much larger one,1 with a far less specialized purpose. Designed by a conscientious bishop for himself and his colleagues, it was about to become by far the most influential collection since Regino of Pru¨m’s: equally systematic (which is to say, only moderately so) and much more comprehensive. His dominating principle seems to have been to uphold the authority of bishops, which involved (among much else) a close attention to abuses by the lords of lesser churches; all the relevant topics covered by Regino are covered, often more fully, by Burchard.2 He includes the major texts that assert the bishop’s potestas over churches and their endowments and tithes;3 but is happy with a heading ‘About laymen who have their own churches’.4 He reproduces from Hohenaltheim a century earlier (not naming this source) the penalty for an ex-serf priest who arrogantly disobeys his lord;5 neither this nor an older canon that in 95 In St-Martin-des-Champs (a good indicator because of its wide geographical range) grants of ‘altars’ (as distinct from ‘churches’ or specified rights in churches) peter out then. Cf. the varied expressions used by Philip bp. of Troyes c.1115–21 (Montier-en-Der nos. 63–4, 66). 96 Above, pp. 698, 699; below, p. 828. 97 It was this that underlay what Imbart called ‘double investiture’ of a priest by lord and bishop or archdeacon, rather than (as he held) a distinction between church and altar as separate items of property (Origines, 251, 255, 300, 350). 1 Decretum (or Decretorum libri viginti), PL. 140. 537–1018; c.1020. 2 Esp. in books ii (‘about holy orders’) and iii (‘about churches’): e.g. ii. 144–7, 206–7; iii. 6–14, 20, 38, 40–7, 52–3 (and see below, nn. 4 and 7); largely from Regino and Regino’s sources. 3 Orleans 511 c. 17, Toledo III. c. 19 (Decretum iii. 8, 20; see also iii. 146–50). 4 5 Ibid. iii. 239. Cf. iii. 116, ‘what priests should render to their lords for their churches’. Ibid. ii. 234.


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effect limits this obedience (forbidding mass to be celebrated in unseemly conditions in a private house)6 need refer to a priest serving in a lord’s church, but they belong to the same world. The belief that a freed serf should know his place must have been as natural to an aristocratic bishop in 1020 as to the bishops of 916. Burchard often changed his texts or gave them false attributions, which may give us some idea of how he rated them. For instance, the 829 Paris ruling on coheirs of churches is given to Gregory the Great, and that ‘no priest should give presents on entrance to a church’ (from Ansegis’s capitulary collection) is given to a council of Orleans.7 Much further on, in Book xv (‘About the laity’), he quotes at length from Zacharias’s letter to the Franks about the churches they had founded, attributing it to ‘sayings of Augustine’ (but with the oddly restrictive heading ‘That laymen should not force the priests who hold their churches to do anything other than divine service’).8 Two of his texts were particularly important to reformers of the next generations: one decreeing deposition for a bishop who ‘obtains a church through secular powers’ (evidently meaning his bishopric),9 and another (already important in the ninth century, and potentially relevant to the proprietary church) that ‘no faculty of disposing of ecclesiastical properties should ever be attributed to laymen even though religious’.10 In Burchard’s time, under the emperor Henry II, legislating councils began once more to be held in the Empire;11 inaugurating a long series held in various countries of the West (mostly France) and especially in Rome, up to and through the Gregorian reform. The first to touch directly on the lords of churches was a council of only the province of Mainz, held at Seligenstadt in 1023, primarily to deal with a high-level illicit marriage. It must have drawn on Burchard’s expertise12 (he was present), and offers few surprises.13 It forbade the laity to carry swords in church or hold meetings there, and also—a new point, the product of economic revival—to put up buildings in the atrium (not necessarily the lord’s doing).14 Only the familiar clause that no layman was to ‘commend his church’ to a priest without the bishop’s consent applies directly and explicitly to lords; 6

Decretum, iii. 61 (from Regino, origin unknown). Ibid. iii. 41, 117. For actual sources see Hoffmann and Pokorny, Dekret, ‘Quellenregister’, 173–244. However, most of his canons condemning entrance-gifts and requiring the bishop’s consent to appointments are more or less correctly and modestly attributed to Carolingian councils (Decretum, iii. 8 113–14, 116–17). Ibid. xv. 30. 9 Ibid. iii. 109 (from a 9th-c. collection but attributed to ‘canons of the Apostles’, late 4th-c. Greek collection). 10 Ibid. xv. 35, from Pseudo-Isid., ‘letter of Stephen II’ (ed. Hinschius, p. 106), based on a decree of pope Symmachus (502); much quoted and adapted, 11th–12th cs. (see Laudage, Priesterbild, 232–3; Fuhrmann, Einfluss, 584 and n. 431). 11 Goslar 1019 (Const., I no. 31), Pavia 1022 (ibid. no. 34): cc. on clerical celibacy and the status of unfree clerics’ children, esp. of clerics who were themselves church serfs (the context being the alienation of church property, whether by or consisting of clerics’ children). See Wolter, Synoden, 278–9, 284, 286–9. 12 Wolter, Synoden, 304–5 and n. 328. 13 14 On its main concerns (clerical and liturgical) see ibid. 300–2. Const., I no. 437, cc. 9, 12. 7

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interestingly, its wording left open the interpretation that it was the bishop who gave the parish or the cure of souls.15 Half-implied at Seligenstadt, this was clearly asserted in northern Aquitaine, at Bourges in 1031: ‘no layman shall put priests into his churches unless into the hand of his bishop, because the bishop should commend the cure of souls to every priest for the parishes of individual churches’.16 A string of clauses deals with clerical celibacy, clergy children (daughters not to marry, sons not to be ordained), and the ordination of ex-serfs; others deal with what the priest may or may not have (he can have for himself offerings put into his hands;17 he must not charge for baptism, penance, or burial).18 These affect lords only indirectly. But one clause puts what amounts to the old ban on laymen taking tithes or offerings, or laying claim to endowments, in the terminology of eleventh-century France: ‘secular men are not to have ecclesiastical benefices that they call fevi presbiterales, over the priests.’19 Bourges stands at the beginning of a period—the middle third of the century— in which several reforming decrees, in France at least, have been read as the opening moves in a war against the proprietary church;20 but they are more convincingly seen, still, as attacking some of its consequences,21 although increasingly led or driven by Rome. This is evident at the far more important council held at Rheims in 1049 by Leo IX, the first effective reforming pope of those set up by Henry III.22 He made the unprecedented demand that the bishops and abbots present declare themselves—in the alarming presence of St Remigius’s relics—innocent of simony in acquiring their offices, or stand trial if they could not deny it: a dramatic challenge to long-standing norms of gift and countergift.23 But the business to be discussed was ‘many unlawful things done in Gaulish lands against the canons’;24 with the outcome that Leo decreed, first, that no one was to 15

Ibid., c 13. Mansi, XIX. 501–6, c. 22. By contrast see abp. Pilgrim of Cologne’s charter for Deutz (1032, UBNR I no. 167), giving the abbot potestas of ‘commending’ churches ‘to whom he wishes’ (in the context, tenant priests), like other ‘abbots and provosts, clerks and laymen’ (i.e. the complete range of lords) in the archdiocese. 17 The legitimate alternative envisaged must be its going to the church’s expenses (cf. Easter offerings of wax, for lighting the altar), not its being taken by a lord. 18 Bourges cc. 5–6, 8–11, 19–20; 13; 12 (cf. Tribur 1036 c. 4). 19 Bourges c. 21. Minninger, Von Clermont, 98–9, takes this as forbidding feudal dependency between priest and lord; but it makes better sense as trying to secure for the priest the fevum presbiteralis in its usual 20 sense (see index). So seen by Schreiber, Gesamm. Abh., 300–2. 21 See T. Schieffer, ‘Cluny et la querelle des investitures’, Revue Hist., 225 (1961), 53 and n. 1; and below, at notes 38–41. 22 See Brooke’s short but penetrating account of Leo’s pontificate, Europe in the Central Middle Ages (London, 1964), 252–61; also Blumenthal, Controversy, 70–87. 23 Anselm (monk of Saint-Re´mi, Rheims), Historia dedicationis ecclesiae S. Remigii, cc. 14–16 (PL 142. 1431–6) on the first three days of the council, whose occasion was the dedication (on the fourth day) of Saint-Re´mi’s new church. This drew great crowds, giving the proceedings wide publicity despite the low attendance of bishops (see Southern’s vivid account, Making of the Middle Ages, 125–7). 24 Hist. dedicationis, c. 14 (PL 142. 1431), first day. 16


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be promoted to ecclesiastial government (in the context, a bishopric) without election by clergy and people; secondly, no one should buy or sell ‘holy Orders or ecclesiastical offices or altars’—which would cover everything from episcopacy down to being priest in a small church; thirdly, none of the laity should hold any ecclesiastical office or altars, nor should any bishop consent to this; fourthly, no one but the bishop or his minister should exact any customs in the atria of churches; fifthly, no one was to charge anything for burial, baptism, Eucharist, or visiting the sick. There follow clauses on the behaviour of the clergy, and much else (including individual excommunications of lay nobles, mostly for marriage offences).25 The whole sequence is far better organized than the decisions of other recent councils, so that we may reasonably take the order of the clauses as indicating Leo’s priorities. There is nothing to say that a layman could not be lord of a church: what he must not have is office (such as an abbacy or archdeaconry), altar revenues (such as should have gone to a priest or priests), or the use of sacred space. The wording, deliberately or not, does avoid speaking of the laity as ‘the lords of churches’, or as dealing with ‘their churches’; but this may be because the range of laity concerned was wider than that, covering for instance hereditary archdeacons, heirs to former canons’ prebends, or holders of fevi presbiterales. It cannot reflect any feeling on Leo IX’s part that churches could not be property at all; the second day’s business included a case between Toul and Rheims about the monastery of Montier-en-Der, the bishop of Toul claiming that the abbey ‘belonged to the possession’ of the church of Toul and had been taken away from it, while the archbishop ‘replied that the abbey was rather of his ius’ (as was established next day on the charter evidence).26 Leo himself was at home in a world where not only bishops but lay nobles were lords of monasteries.27 Reforming councils after this were so frequent that it ceases to be useful to consider them singly.28 Old themes were pursued with new vigour; of those relevant here, lay possession of tithes and offerings is what appears most regularly (Peter Damian said that giving tithes to the laity was giving them deadly poison).29 In 1050 at a Roman council Leo IX evidently decreed that all laymen must under pain of excommunication surrender church revenues, in particular tithes and offerings, to those who served the altars (so Airard the reforming bishop of Nantes declared, and tried to carry it out);30 the Easter council of Rome in 1059 declared that the laity must faithfully render tithes, first fruits and offerings, which must be in the bishops’ dispositio.31 But French councils, even 25 26 28 29 31

Ibid., c. 16 (1436–7), third day (or Mansi, XIX. 742–3, numbering the clauses). 27 Ibid., c. 15 (1433), second day. Above, pp. 369–70. Including papal councils at Rome or elsewhere, and legatine councils. 30 Epist. iv. 12, to ‘bishop V.’ (PL 104. 321–4, at 324). Below, p. 871. c. 5 (Mansi, XIX. 898).

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those held under papal legates, were (on this front) more conservative. That at Narbonne in 1054 went into unusual detail about the offerings in question, but it left out tithes altogether;32 so twenty-four years later in the Catalan Pyrenees did the legatine council at Gerona.33 At Toulouse in 1056, Tours in 1060, and much later at councils in Normandy, the laity were forbidden any kind of offerings and a third of the tithe or ‘at least’ a third—the rest, apparently, they can have.34 But the total ban was repeated at Rome by Gregory VII in 1078;35 by a legatine council at Quedlinburg in 1085 (as regards claiming tithes as property);36 and by Urban II at Clermont in 1095, with the unusual formulation that ‘as laymen should not withhold their tithe, so they should not take tithe; therefore it is forbidden to all laity to retain altars or churches for themselves any more’.37 This last shows how close was the idea of not holding offerings or tithes— describable as not holding ‘altars’—to not holding ‘churches’; Gregory VII’s warning to laymen in 1078 was against ‘possessing churches’ as well as holding tithes. In the same year, the legatine council of Gerona declared: ‘we know that churches do not properly belong to laymen’ (or ‘are not appropriate’ to them); ‘but where they cannot be totally taken away, at least we forbid laymen to hold offerings, firstfruits, burial and baptism dues’;38 to have these things is to have a church in part. But what these decrees rejected in principle may have been— originally—not lay lordship over churches, but rather the direct possession of buildings, land, and revenues, at the expense of the priest;39 perhaps also the even more objectionable holding of ecclesiastical offices by laymen,40 and intrusion 32

cc. 13, 14 (Mansi, XIX. 830). Below, at note 38. Cf. Poitiers (also 1078), an important reforming council with nothing recorded about tithes or offerings; perhaps in W. France it was difficult to raise the matter without making undesirable concessions. 34 See above, p. 513 (and pp. 515–16 on interpreting Toulouse c. 11). The so-called council of Rome 1074– 5 (Pflugk-Harttung, Acta inedita, II no. 161), with a similar clause (c. 1), is a post-1083 compilation from mainly French sources (Hefele-Leclerq, op. cit., V. 1. 307). 35 Rome, November 1078 cc. 7, 16, 32 (Epist. Sel., II. 2, Reg. G. VII, 401–4). 36 c. 5 (Mansi, XX. 608); but allowing laity to hold tithes as benefices granted by the legitimate possessors. 37 Somerville (ed.), Decreta Claromont., LL cc. 19, 20. See ibid. 6–38 on the many divergent and differently numbered versions of the Clermont decrees (chaotic in Mansi, XX). 38 c. 13 (Mansi, XX. 520). Feine saw this as the first explicit condemnation of lay ownership of churches (‘Kirchenreform und Niederkirchenwesen’, 507), but it is far from explicit: competere (to belong, be suitable) is vague. It may have been taken from a much earlier decree, since it appears, word for word, as c. 11 in a set of decrees attributed to Nicholas I in 1060 (Mansi, XIX. 875; see Tellenbach, Church, 286–7); if this is authentic it strengthens the case for seeing the assertion as relatively modest. 39 See HL V no. 262 (1062): a legatine council of Toulouse (1060–1?) is said to have decreed that no layman could enter the kingdom of Heaven who contrary to the canons male invasam possederit ecclesiam; the two laymen responding to this (below, p. 877) seem to take it primarily to mean that they have ‘unjustly held and wrongly possessed’ tithes, burial, offerings, and various lands (which they now renounce to their churches), and only secondarily as prompting them to give away the churches to St Victor. 40 Condemned at Rheims, 1049 (above, at note 25); Toulouse 1056 c. 8 (Mansi, XIX. 848); Tours 1060 c. 1 (ibid. 925–6); Compostella 1060 and 1063 (Garcıá Gallo, Coyanza, 291–2); Gerona 1068 c. 1 (Mansi, XIX. 1070–1). 33


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into bishops’ ‘customs’. Condemnation of this last, arguably implied at Rheims in 1049, was made clear on a narrower front at Narbonne (forbidding laymen to retain synodal dues for themselves without consent of bishop or clergy), and still needed stating broadly and clearly at Rouen in 1096 (‘no layman is to have the episcopal customs, or justice belonging to the care of souls’).41 Lay lordship over churches may itself have been condemned at Nantes, as one pocket of reform, by the 1060s.42 But it was taken for granted wherever the old theme of the need for the diocesan bishop’s consent to priests’ appointments was picked up, as it still was occasionally (at Tours in 1060, Winchester in 1072, Lillebonne in 1080, Rouen in 1096);43 while the Carolingian rule requiring the bishop to accept a lord’s suitable candidate was restated at Lillebonne (in a new concise formulation: ‘the bishop shall not reject him if he is acceptable, nor keep him if he is unacceptable’).44 Alongside this may go the theme, almost as old, that nothing must be paid by the priest for his admission;45 and even older problems of clergy coming from outside the diocese, especially for service as domestic chaplains.46 But outside Normandy and England, where reform remained oldfashioned,47 such legislation was being overtaken by the rising wave of condemnations of lay investiture. Before turning to this, however, we need to look at a separate stream of ideas contributing to it, that of monastic ‘liberty’.

41

Ibid. XIX. 830, c. 13; XX. 924, c. 7. Below, pp. 867, 871; see notes 16 and 40 for doubts. 43 Mansi, XIX. 927 (Tours c. 4); Brett, ‘A Collection of Anglo-Norman Councils’, JEH 26 (1975) 308 (text, c. 5), 303–5; Orderic, HE III. 30–1, or Mansi, XX. 557 (Lillebonne c. 9); Rouen 1096 c. 6 (Mansi, XX. 924). 44 See preceding note. 45 Combined at Tours and Rouen with the clause requiring the bishop’s consent. 46 Melfi 1089 cc. 9, 10, Clermont 1095 c. 18 (ibid. XX. 723, 817). 47 See Barlow, 1066–1154, 122–9. 42

23 Monastic reform: lordship and liberty

During the collective silence of the bishops over much of the tenth century, the foundation or reform of monasteries was attracting support from swelling numbers of individual bishops, monks, and laity over most of the West.1 Monastic reform itself was a matter of discipline, community of property, and liturgical decorum (without, now, the overarching concern for uniformity that had marked the imperial reform of Benedict of Aniane’s time and would soon appear in king Edgar’s England).2 But we need to consider how proprietary lordship over monasteries was related to reform, and how far it was rejected in the developing idea of monastic liberty.

23.i. Reform and lordship A cloistered community life with a routine of prayer, study, and splendid worship required large resources of developed land, serfs, and movable wealth,3 and was undermined when these resources were diminished by warfare or the secularization that warfare demanded. Lay abbacy (along with land grants for fighting men) had been a theme of complaint against Carolingian kings after Louis the Pious.4 The bishops at Trosly in 909, the last reforming council in the full Carolingian tradition, considered what to do about the standing of monasteries— or rather, their collapse: non statu sed lapsu. This they attributed first to pagan destruction or looting; but secondly (whether for monks, canons, or nuns) to the 1

See Tellenbach’s penetrating discussion, Church in W. Europe, 101–21. See Wormald, ‘Aethelwold’, 32–3; on common property, John, Orbis, 163–9; Sackur, Cluniacenser, I. 50–3. 3 William of Volpiano was renowned for the ‘riches and sanctity’ of the monasteries he ruled (Ralph Glaber, Libri V, iii. v. 16); the need to defend Cluniac possessions, as Peter the Venerable eloquently did in the 12th c., was far off. 4 See Felten, A¨bte, 296–304 on the changing character of the complaints and their peaking in 845–6. 2

Monastic reform: lordship and liberty

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lack of regular rectores and to government by strangers—illiterate lay abbots who lived there with their wives, children, fighting men, and hounds. The two long clauses on the matter are filled with familiar texts about the proper use of church property and the sacrilege of robbing or misusing it;5 the only action proposed is to speak to the king about it, though by now there was more future in putting moral pressure on the magnates. The lodging of the household is part of a stereotype of the greedy and ignorant lay abbot (or his wife), found also in the ‘miracles’ section of Saints’ Lives, for instance in the Life of Deicolus, from Lure.6 This monastery was supposed to have been given by king Lothar II to his mistress Waldrada (‘a hellish dowry’), and she to have wasted the property and driven out the monks, later committing it to her kinsman count Eberhard; who after her death, and after devastation by Magyar raiders, ‘invaded . . . by force’ and ‘held it as his own’, as did his son count Hugh; evidently holding it in their direct possession: ‘Heu pro dolor! The blessed Deicolus never thought to have counts as his heirs in the place, but monks pleasing to God; nor intended to feed horses and hounds, but to gather the poor and pilgrims.’7 Another strand in the stereotype is the shrunken number of starving monks.8 Yet another is sacrilegious hankerings (appropriately punished) to control the saint’s power or possess his relics: Megingaud, new lay abbot of St Maximin of Trier, supposedly saying to his wife in bed that what the emperor had given him in benefice ‘is Maximin himself with his abbey—and if you like I will give him to you’; or count Hugh’s wife at Lure, scared off trying to open Deicolus’s tomb but managing to get a tooth out of Columbanus’s.9 But the Life of Deicolus contains also the benign stereotype of the penitent layman choosing to live with the monks, as do count Hugh and his sons (who had been stricken ill for casually sleeping near the saint’s tomb).10 And in reality, a largely resident lay or secular abbot might well think himself a genuine abbot,11 and be a useful one;12 while a regular abbot might be no less committed to his relations or to a ruler, and therefore no less exploitative, and seen as such.13 It was nonetheless consistent with the stereotype of the penitent layman that Count Hugh and his sons are represented as finding a famous hermit, Baltram, to rule 5

6 cc. 3 and 4 (above, p. 813 note 7). In the future Franche-Comte´. Vita S. Deicoli, cc. 12, 13 (SS XV. 677–9). For the stereotype outside hagiography see DOII no. 192 (979) for Tegernsee; and the ferocious warning that a St Gall monk added (with black humour?) to a formula for royal licence to elect (MG. Form. 397–8). 8 e.g. from Glanfeuil, Ex Odonis mirac., c. 1 (SS XV. 464–5). 9 Sigehardi mirac. S. Maximini, c. 8 (SS IV. 231), written c.960; Vita S. Deicoli, c. 14 (680; punished of 10 course by toothache). Vita S. Deicoli, cc. 12, 13, 14 (677–80). 11 Implied at Meaux-Paris 845–6, c. 10: laymen living in monasteries ‘as lords and masters’ judge ‘like abbots’ the monks’ way of life. From St Maximin we hear of the monks’ ‘usual blessing’ of a lay abbot 12 (893, DArn. no. 114). Esp. by creating or improving a mensa (Felten, A¨bte, 48–52). 13 e.g. Gesta abbatum Trudonensium, i. 10–12 (SS X. 233–6); Novalesa, II, chron., app. cc. v–ix; and see Schulte, Adel und Kirche, 123, 126. 7

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the monastery of Lure, intending to obey him, and explaining that the monastery ‘does not belong to us’ but to the blessed Deicolus.14 Otto I’s diploma shows only that Baltram had received the place from count Hugh’s sons Eberhard and Hugh,15 not that they lived there as monks and renounced all lordship. However, monastic reform in the tenth century did in fact depend crucially on the support of lords,16 support shot through with proprietary assumptions. Lay (and often episcopal) lords promoted reform partly by exercising their powers: getting new monks from elsewhere, compelling old monks to conform, appointing a new abbot or putting the monastery temporarily into the hands of a famous reformer; and partly by reducing or renouncing their powers: restoring property,17 withdrawing from abbacy;18 perhaps mitigating or regulating rights to hospitality, or power over peasants that they or their subordinates had as advocates or vicedomini.19 What induced lay men and women to spend or renounce material resources in these ways might be disinterested piety at various levels—love of God, admiration for a holy man, sorrow at seeing a noble church in ruins—but this was (as always) fuelled by belief in the power of monks’ and nuns’ prayer and in the possibility of sharing their heavenly rewards,20 all now increasingly embodied in liturgical obligations to founders and benefactors, while overflowing to the benefit of all the faithful.21 Of course there are instances of recovering from shortlived fear or enthusiasm, or of favouring one monastery while cool towards another,22 and political reasons for land-grants or for reform itself;23 there was probably often an element of emulation or even of fashion; while the more frugally minded might try to do things cheaply.24 Expensive or dauntingly difficult reform might be avoided by turning a monastery over to canons: a smaller community, a less exacting way of life, less scandal incurred by lay abbacy or 14

15 Vita Deicoli (above, note 7), c. 15. DOI no. 199 (959). See Tellenbach, ‘Il monachesimo riformato ed i laici’, 120–8; id., ‘Reformmo¨nchtum und Laien’, 372–86. 17 See, however, Nightingale, Gorze Reform, 10–21, 191–5, 208–15: we should not exaggerate the amount of restitution either forthcoming or needed. 18 Above, pp. 321–3. Cf. the count of Pe´rigord at Saint-Soar, Genouillac, 970 (Reóle no. 135). 19 e.g. above, p. 376. 20 Cluny’s foundation charter (below, note 48) attributes to duke William ‘this faith, this hope, that although I cannot myself despise all worldly things, at least by supporting those who do . . . I may be rewarded with the righteous’. 21 See below, at note 43. For the 9th c., M. de Jong, ‘Carolingian Monasticism’, 647–50. 22 See Dunbabin, France, 120. 23 See above, p. 324 note 99; Nightingale, Gorze Reform, 10–15, 36–7, 87–8, 134–40, 220–6. On motivation see Bouchard’s sensible discussion, Sword, Mitre and Cloister, 225–46; Wormald, ‘Aethelwold’, 35–7; Nightingale’s ‘Epilogue’, op. cit., 261–4. 24 This may underlie Fulk Nerra’s message to Gregory V ‘that he would rather restore old ruined monasteries than found new ones’ (above, p. 377); but Abbo found this ‘frivolous and hollow’ because of Fulk’s maltreatment of an existing monastery, not because the preference was itself ‘detestable’ (Guillot’s view, Comte, I. 166–7 and nn. 152–3). 16


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other secularization, yet the service of the church assured at a decent level.25 This has implications about how much more was now expected of monks.26 But reform, whatever its costs, did not necessarily or even often require the surrender of all outside lordship (such as consenting to the abbot’s election and investing him with his office),27 except when this lordship was alienated to a greater church. In tenth-century England lay lordship of some kind was challenged by the Regularis Concordia, forbidding monasteries to accept secularium prioratus—the rule or pre-eminence of seculars or laity—which had been so ruinous in the past, and bidding them turn instead to the dominium of the king and queen alone.28 Secularium prioratus is unlikely to mean the lordship of founders’ descendants, however; even had ending this been in the monks’ power, the Concordia was concerned with monasteries mostly founded or refounded by kings and bishops. It probably means the rule of lay men or women as or instead of abbots or abbesses, either put in by former kings (though of this in England we know nothing) or chosen by monasteries. Such choices—doubtless often under compulsion—had evidently been happening in the eighth and ninth centuries;29 physical danger and internal decay may have prolonged the practice, and in the later tenth century it reappears—independently of the Concordia—as a possibility.30 When lay founders other than kings and queens emerged, two of their five foundations were indeed put under royal lordship, in that respect conforming with the Concordia. If, in the others, the founders’ heirs lacked lordly powers (as perhaps they did) the reason is more likely to lie in the nature of English lordship than in reforming principles.31 There seems to be no question of subjecting these English monasteries to established reform centres; and this was rare in tenth- and eleventh-century Lotharingia or Germany. In Germany the relatively few old monasteries were still in the king’s hands, not fallen to hereditary lay abbots; while (at least in Ottonian Saxony) the lay founders of new monasteries, especially for women, normally sought or had to accept royal defence for them.32 In Lotharingia, only loosely controlled by the German kings, important monasteries were often in the lordship of bishops, who reformed them with the help of famous abbots but kept them in their bishopric’s lordship.33 In France, Burgundy-Provence, Spain, and Italy, where lay lords of monasteries preponderated, Cluny and other reforming centres were proportionately 25

See above, p. 372. Meanwhile founding houses for women was more focused on their security, comfort, and role in 27 family memoria, not requiring full Benedictine life. Above, pp. 378–80. 28 Regularis Concordia, c. 10. On ‘prior’ see Symons, ibid., p. xxx (cf. spiritualis imperii prioratum, in c. 7). 29 30 31 Above, pp. 241–2. Above, pp. 410–11. Above, pp. 411–12. 32 Above, pp. 280–1; 358–60. 33 Above, pp. 420–1, 424–5. See Nightingale, Gorze Reform, on Gorze and Saint-Evre. 26

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important. They worked, however, not by challenging lords’ rights but by inspiring them to want reform, or responding to their wanting it, along with the heightened memoria that reform would promote in the lesser monastery (or indeed that the donation itself would buy in the greater). If a lord gave a monastery away for reform, transferring his rights to the abbot and convent of the greater monastery, his traditio allowed him to assert that it was his to give (as indeed was accepted in Cluny’s papal privilege of 931),34 while his prestige and influence might be enhanced rather than diminished, and his memoria better served;35 if he only invited a reforming abbot to take the monastery temporarily into his hands, he might keep it in his family’s lordship with the reformer’s goodwill;36 or where his intentions had been unclear he might get it back without lasting ill-will.37 Even a more permanent subjection to a reforming house could be combined with retaining a formal lordship for the founder or refounder, by arranging for the monks sent to his monastery to ‘have’ or ‘hold’ it from him and his heirs; perhaps simply a recognition that it came from him in the first place, but likely to be marked by some kind of investiture of successive priors and perhaps accompanied by a lively surviving patronal interest.38 At Cluny, however, the eleventh-century abbots were moving towards a more organized administration of dependent houses, increasingly often holding the abbacy themselves and appointing or removing priors. Georg Schreiber, believing that Cluny was working on lay piety to eliminate the Eigenkirche,39 saw this multiple abbatiate as intended to prevent elections promoting the founder’s kin;40 but the point was probably to ensure the survival of Cluniac standards rather than to exclude the family.41 The Cluniac attitude to the laity seems pragmatic, making the best of goodwill where they found it;42 but also shaped by a generous social conception of the purpose of religious life.43 They remained not set on any one legal relationship requiring total renunciation by lay lords.44 William of Volpiano, 34

John XI’s approval ‘if you agree to take some monastery into your ditio for improvement, by the wish of those to whose disposal it is seen to belong’ (PL 132. 1057; reading tua for sua). 35 See Wollasch, ‘Reform und Adel’, 283–7. Memoria at both houses is emphasized in Adelaide’s donation of Romainmoutier to Cluny, 929 (above, p. 324); though her requirements were hardly typical, her named kinsmen being kings, one dead and two living. 36 Ibid. 286–7; id., Mo¨nchtum, 149–58. 37 See the count of Blois’s dealings with Cluny over Marmoutier, above, p. 323; G. Oury, ‘L’Abbe´ 38 Above, p. 378. Gauzbert de Saint-Julien de Tours’, Rev. Mabillon, 30 (1964), 90–5. 39 Gesamm. Abh., I. 92, 97–8, 337–42. 40 He cited count Bernard’s donation of Saint-Mont to Cluny (St-Mont no.1), ‘so that the rectores of that place may do whatever they wish with it from now on, for ever, without any contradiction’; but this is only a variant on common formulae to achieve a complete alienation of anything. 41 Heads of Cluny’s priories were often from the founder-family (Poeck, ‘Abbild’, 106–9, 111). 42 This view has prevailed from Sackur, Die Cluniacenzer (1892–4), onwards; challenged by Hallinger, Gorze-Kluny (1950), presenting Cluny as ‘antifeudal’, ‘anti-lay’, esp. 581–93; but see Tellenbach, Church, State, 93–7; id., Church in Western Europe, 118–19, 293–6; Wormald, ‘Aethelwold’, 19–22. On the historiography 43 before 1970, Cowdrey, Cluniacs, pp. xiii–xix. See esp. Wollasch, ‘Reform und Adel’, 284–5. 44 On varieties of dependence see above, p. 418.


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sent from Cluny in 990 to be abbot of Saint-Beńigne at Dijon and called in as a reformer by several great lords, declares in his charter for his own family foundation of Fruttuaria in Lombardy that the other places in his charge ‘rejoice to have each its own possessor and defender’, before he embarks on the matter of Fruttuaria’s lack of one (which is both intentional and a problem).45 Cluny’s congregation of dependent monasteries was thus largely formed on the basis that monasteries had lords who could give them away if they chose, transferring their lordship to Cluny; while its wider influence was often felt by lords who kept their lordship. But Cluny itself had no obvious lord.46 It was founded in a region distant from the power-centre of any ruler, even that (in the Auvergne) of its founder, William the Pious, duke of Aquitaine. William’s fairly traditional foundation charter (of 910) gave its not very lavish endowments to its patron saints Peter and Paul, its monks and possessions to be under the potestas and dominatio of abbot Berno for life, the monks having power to elect his successor;47 they were to render 10 gold solidi to Rome every five years for lights in St Peter’s, and to be under papal protection. William being himself childless, the charter made no reservations for his heirs. But it went further than this in declaring the monks to be ‘from this day’ not subject to his own power or that of his kin, or to any royal or other earthly power; and in a free-floating adaptation of royal immunity formulae, it demanded that no secular ruler, count, bishop, or pope should ever invade or alienate its possessions, or set any prelate over them against their will.48 In the background was a long-established strand of thinking that lay (or any earthly) lordship of a monastery was best avoided altogether,49 or perhaps rather that renouncing it from the first—as distinct from alienating it—was a way of perfecting one’s alms. The general acceptance that churches had lords did not make a lordless church inconceivable.50 The foundation about 830 of Satolas as an autonomous church that was not monastic nor even obviously collegiate seems to be isolated, and its position would have been unsustainable.51 But the idea that 45

46 Below, pp. 840–1. See Wollasch, ‘Reform und Adel’, 282–3; id., Mo¨nchtum, 146–8, 151. 10th- and 11th-c. abbots of Cluny were, however, regularly designated by their predecessor with the monks’ consent (see Wollasch, Mo¨nchtum, 156–7), a surer way than Benedictine election of excluding lordly influence. 48 Cluny no. 112; see Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 4 n. 1. Against doubts raised by Iogna-Prat, ‘La Geste des origines’, see Atsma and Ve´zin, ‘Cluny et Tours’, 120–1. On its content see Cowdrey, op. cit., 4–8; Rosenwein, Space, 156–9. 49 Cowdrey’s lucid survey, op. cit., 7–12, arguably overstates the ‘widespread revulsion’ involved. 50 Cowdrey’s remark (ibid. 37) that ‘A vacuum of lordship was unthinkable’, true in its context (God’s or His saints’ lordship fills any void), obscures the possibility of eliminating the lordship of mortals without explicitly donating it to higher powers. Cf. Tellenbach, ‘A monastery without a lord and owner seemed at first an impossibility’ (Church in W. Europe, 294–5): but outside lordship had actually emerged rather slowly, 7th–9th cs. (above, Chapters 5–9). 51 Above, pp. 797–8. It would fall to the diocesan bishopric’s dominium, unless it came to a different great church (as Satolas probably to Lyons). 47

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a real monastery might not need a lord appeared some thirty years later (if indeed it had ever been absent), in charters where lordship is either disclaimed for the heirs and replaced by some protective role, or reduced to such a role (replacement and reduction may hardly differ). At Vabres in 862 count Raymond’s sons in turn were to be ‘not a dominator, not an heir, but a defender’;52 and his charter goes beyond softening or altering his heirs’ lordship to prescribe something like autonomy.53 Ralph archbishop of Bourges, founding Beaulieu in the Limousin on family lands a few years earlier, seems to have had similar intentions (and count Raymond was present when Ralph made his ‘testament’ of 860).54 Perhaps we should see count Raymond at Vabres (and the founders of far-away Wiesensteig)55 as expressing pious aspirations for the good behaviour of their heirs rather than supplanting lordship by something legally different.56 But archbishop Ralph seems to have excluded his heirs from even a protective role; and some tenth-century founders renounced this even for themselves. William the Pious (childless in any case) claimed no role at Cluny, however shadowy; nor, seven years later, did his fidelis Ebbo of Deóls—who did have sons—in his even more emphatic rejection of family claims at Bourg-Dieu, where he exhorts his family to claim no hospitality, ‘little presents’, or access to property or offerings, ‘as if (quasi) being mundeburd or advocate’, and as each of them would want his own inheritance respected, so to respect the portion of SS. Mary, Peter, and Paul; finally undertaking never to withdraw anything he has given, whatever the monks may do.57 Nor did Raymond Pons in 937 make any reservation when he declared that his foundation Saint-Pons of Thomie`res was ‘to be free from the domination of anyone, so that neither king nor prince nor bishop nor anyone of my relations may presume to exercise domination’.58 The moral fervour put into Ebbo’s and Raymond Pons’s charters flares up in quoting Psalm 82’s curse on those claiming to ‘possess the sanctuary of God’ (in the context, concerned with any infraction of the charter rather than sharply with claims to lordship; but nearer to that than in its earlier appearances).59 52

Above, p. 344. The monks were to ‘stand in their own ius and dominatio’. In the north, the late 9th-c. chronicler of Werden claimed that the founder Liudger had made the monks his heirs, so its royal defence could not be royal lordship (above, pp. 255–6, 343). 54 This (Beaulieu no. 1) was evidently interpolated (late 11th c.?) with grandiloquent assertions of autonomy from Cluny’s foundation charter. But most of the charter is independent of Cluny’s, including the anathema on infringement by ‘the dignity of royal power, the loftiness of any royal magnates, or the 55 cunning of my nearest heirs or pro-heirs’. See above, p. 351 note 90. Above, p. 350. 56 Only when lordship is clearly given away will any protective role retained be legally rather than morally distinct. 57 Foundation charter ed. Sackur, Cluniacenser, I, app. 2 (379–81; from Deóls cartulary). 58 HL V. no. 69. 59 See index: Psalm 82. On the role of immunity in such ideas see Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 5 and n. 1, 8–9, 11; and taking immunity in a wider sense (merging later with the Peace of God), Rosenwein, Space, esp. 138–55, 163–83. 53


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But with or without reserving a protective role, the grandest way of freeing a new foundation from secular lordship—and doing more for it than that—was to give or commend it to St Peter at Rome. Count Gerard of Vienne and his wife Bertha did one or other in 863 for Pothie`res and Ve´zelay (soon after the rejections of lordship by the founders of Beaulieu, Vabres, and Wiesensteig, and like them reserving their own usufruct and defence for life).60 Others did it in the 880s– 890s;61 so, famously, did William the Pious for Cluny in 910, followed by Ebbo for Bourg-Dieu in 917, and Raymond Pons for Thomie`res in 937.62 Among these actions there is a difference between conveyance into Rome’s property with consequent papal protection (done only by founders),63 and simple commendation into papal protection (done sometimes by the abbot of an established monastery).64 But the difference was not sharp, even in the wording of papal privileges;65 still less in the founders’ stated intentions. Gerard’s and Bertha’s dealings with their foundations are not unambiguous. The 858–9 foundation charter only commends the monasteries for protection. In the couple’s letter to Nicholas I in 863, however, they speak of wishing to commit the monasteries to his dominatio; yet in the dispositive words further on it is to his studium (assiduity, devotion) that they ‘commend’, ‘subject’, and ‘commit’ the monasteries and their inhabitants for him to ‘govern, protect, and defend them’, much as in 858–9.66 The letter begins as a foundation record; in that context ‘making God and the apostles Peter and Paul the heir’ to possessions not reserved for their posterity looks like endowing the monasteries, not giving them away.67 Only in Nicholas I’s privilege for Ve´zelay are the founders clearly said to have 60 Above, p. 345. Such reservation may indicate that the founder or donor had had the abbacy, formally or not. 61 The empress Richardis for Andlau, (above, p. 351); probably count Gerald for Aurillac (above, p. 345), ‘giving his res to St Peter’ on a visit to Rome and establishing a census (Odo, Vita Geraldi, ii. 4, PL 133. 672–3). 62 Above, at notes 57–59; and see Stephen VIII’s letter for Deóls, 839–42 (text in Sackur, Cluniacenser, I. 378–9). 63 e.g. (probably) Ve´zelay and Pothie`res, Andlau, Aurillac (for Cluny see below, at notes 73–5). SaintGilles is a special case, protected against the claims of Nıˆmes on the grounds that St Giles himself had given it to Rome (above, pp. 432–3). 64 e.g. Charroux, 878 (Charroux, 67–70); Montieramey, 878 (ed. Arbois de la Jubainville, Bibl. Ec. Chartes, 3rd ser. 5 (1854), 281–3); Montier-en-Der, 884–5 (see Lesne, Propr., II. i. 91); Corvey, 887 (PL 129. 794–5). 65 Both kinds derive from the same models in Gregory the Great’s register, guaranteeing monastic freedom and security of possessions, primarily against bishops (Appelt, ‘Die Anfa¨nge’, 103–4, 111). 66 Gerard’s so-called ‘testament’, Mon. Vizeliac., 244–8 no. 1 (12th-c. copy); ibid. 249–54, no. 2. See Rosenwein’s comparison of the Cluny and Pothie`res/Ve´zelay foundation charters (Space, 157–9 and app. 6, pp. 231–4), displaying the emphasis on independence for Cluny and on outside control for Pothie`res/ Ve´zelay (though some of the contrasts are modified in no. 2, e.g. endowments given to the saints, and restriction on papal property dealings, lines 101–5). 67 no. 2, lines 14–17, 37–41. Only Pothie`res (the men’s house) had this dedication to SS. Peter and Paul. Ve´zelay’s endowment was more perfunctorily described (lines 72–7), immediately after stating its dedication (to the Saviour and St Mary).

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made the Roman church their heir to the monastery, ‘by charter of donation’.68 But if this was not exactly what they had intended, the difference may not have mattered. Rome’s property-right was strictly limited to a census of 1 pound of silver from each monastery; monks and nuns were to live sub suo iure, electing their own abbess or abbot with the pope’s approval,69 exempt from the diocesan bishop’s exactions or uninvited entry, owing nothing but charity to anyone, and not subject to any alienations of their property.70 The census itself seems nearer to recognizing fatherly protection—a gift-exchange between unequals—than to acknowledging a property-right.71 Still less is it clear that duke William in 910 thought he was donating Cluny to Rome. The choice of dedication, to the Apostles Peter and Paul, must have been related to the intention of seeking papal protection at least;72 but, given this dedication, donating the endowments to these saints does not by itself mean donation to the See of Rome, but rather the endowing of the monastery itself.73 The kings of France, Ralph in 927 and Louis IV in 939, confirming the foundation, both spoke of its being the pope’s ‘for protecting, not for dominating’74 (though perhaps this set a moral limitation on lordship rather than ruling it out). It may be that papal proprietorship, for all its increasing explicitness,75 remained essentially an optional metaphor for a monastery’s protected sacrosanctity; when eleventh-century popes called Cluny a ‘peculiar possession’ of St Peter they did not mean mundane property. But we should not distinguish sharply when the practical consequences were at first so slender. Given that lordship shaded into 68

Ibid., no. 3, May 863, addressed to future abbesses and to Gerard and Bertha; Pothie´res must have had a similar privilege. This passage (lines 11–15) may be a 12th-c. interpolation, but see also lines 44–5 and 81–2. See Hirsch, ‘Untersuchungen’, 366–71, 379–81; Fried, ‘Laienadel’, 375–89. 69 This became normal: popes sometimes ‘ordained’, i.e. formally appointed, their monasteries’ elected heads, or consecrated them; taking over the diocesan bishop’s role rather than acting as lord. 70 In all three documents, the popes are not to grant anything even in benefice. Emphasis was also put on the pope fulfilling the founders’ pious intentions. 71 The popes, receiving only the census, will provide ‘the support of kind fatherhood . . . with pastoral concern’ (863 privilege). Cf. Cluny’s privilege, 931 (below, note 74). 72 Rosenwein (Space, 159–62) suggests that William saw Sergius III as a politically valuable protector for Cluny but an undesirable lord. 73 Cf. Saint-Pons of Thomie`res: Raymond Pons’s charter (937) relates first that he has ‘offered a praedium of ours to Christ, St Mary and the martyr St Pons’, and then that he ‘decreed that the place be subject to the Roman See’ paying 10s. p.a. ‘for recognition’ (HL V. no. 69; see Schro¨der, Synoden, 239 against Magnou-Nortier’s view of the passage as interpolated); this hardly conveys dominium (though HL V. no. 67, specifying the endowments, is more ambiguous). 74 ARaoul no. 12; ALouIV no. 10. Cluny’s first papal privilege, John XI’s of 931 for abbot Odo, describes Cluny’s census as acknowledgment that it ‘belongs’ to the Apostolic See ‘for protecting and cherishing’. Cowdrey’s conviction that a census must indicate ‘apostolic proprietorship’ (Cluniacs, 15 n. 1) seems too unqualified (see Szaivert, ‘Klosterexemtion’, 289; and see index: census, significance of. 75 When Geoffrey Martel and his wife Agnes gave Vendoˆme ‘into the patrocinium and ditio’ of St Peter, to be in the popes’ ‘tuitio and defence’, Victor II’s privilege in response (1056) said ‘you have offered it to St Peter and his successors in alodium and patrimonium’ (Vendoˆme nos. 105, 107); cf. bp. Ivo of Chartres, 1097 (it is free from any secular potestas having been given to the Roman see ut proprium alodium (ibid. no. 355). In the 12th c. this was the normal terminology (see esp. Schreiber, Kurie und Kloster, 9–26).


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protection—and that symbolism and metaphor were all-pervading—we can see St Peter’s right as at least an attenuated outside lordship,76 varying in its effectiveness,77 but proprietary enough in principle to exclude, normally, anyone else’s claim to formal lordship.78

23.ii. Monastic liberty Meanwhile, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, what reformed monasteries aspired to was increasingly expressed as being ‘free’ or enjoying ‘liberty’. John Cowdrey has pointed out that Odo, second abbot of Cluny, had this made explicit in privileges from king Ralph and pope John XI, representing duke William as intending Cluny to be ‘free from all secular domination’ (dominatus) or even ‘from all domination’, thereby adding nothing in substance to William’s charter but deliberately deploying the word liber which is absent from it (as is libertas).1 The idea of monastic liberty now developing was more dynamic than its ninthcentury beginnings,2 and more detached from royal immunity-defence; though in Germany the somewhat limited and inert idea of liberty dependent on royal lordship (centred on free election and inalienability) survived under the Saxon and early Salian kings,3 associated with antiquity and renown,4 and losing its value only in the later eleventh century.5 The emergent idea included the old desire for some freedom from diocesan bishops (tending now towards full exemption),6 but versions of it were developed by reforming bishops for their own monasteries;7 its chief content was freedom from secular domination, whether of founders’ kin, 76

77 See above, pp. 431–3. See Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 17–22. As distinct from formal advocacy or a protective role as ‘defender and helper’ (Vendoˆme no. 106). An exception would be count Bertram’s donation to Gregory VII of all his bishoprics and abbeys in Provence, evidently notional or symbolical from the first (see Poly, Provence, 271–2 and nn. 144–5). Sometimes a territorial lord recovered or retained virtual control, e.g. counts of Toulouse over Saint-Pons; or acquired some control from scratch, e.g. counts of Nevers at Ve´zelay (see Fichtenau, Tenth C., 234; but ‘had to be ceded to’ mistranslates his ‘musste zich . . . an dem Grafen . . . wenden’, Lebensordnungen I. 314). 1 Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 16–17. In Joan Evans’s translation (Monastic Life at Cluny, 910–1157 (Oxford, 1931), 4– 6) the words ‘liberty’ and ‘wholly freed’ are unwarranted. 2 On the 9th-c. Frankish idea of monastic liberty, appearing in royal, episcopal, or papal privileges, see Goffart, ‘Privilege’; Bu¨ttner, ‘Liutbert von Mainz’, 105–6, 108–12. 3 Henry II’s diplomas represent monasteries as given him libertandi gratia (e.g. DHII nos. 230, 248). Cf. Henry III’s for Ebersberg, Beromu¨nster, and more interestingly Pf a¨vers (DHIII nos. 15, 129, 56). 4 As in Tegernsee’s reaction (mid-11th c.) to the ‘sinister rumour’ that the monastery was about to be ‘put into servitude’ by being given in benefice (rhyming letter, Epist. Sel., III no. 126). 5 Papal protection began to be detached from royal defence; Henry V’s alienation of Pf a¨vers (1114) led it to turn to papal protection for a better liberty (Seibert, ‘Libertas’, esp. 503–7). 6 See Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 22–32 for useful summary of its beginnings. 7 e.g. at Toul, Cologne, Mainz (above, pp. 425, 426), esp. later 11th–early 12th c.; e.g. libertas (or ius, lex, pax et justitia) ‘such as other abbeys of Cologne enjoy’ (Semmler, Siegburg, 196–7). 78

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rulers, or oppressive neighbours: so known also as ‘immunity’ in a wide, loose sense.8 And since monasteries given outright to great monasteries were freed thereby from lay lordship, they too—on a favourable view, not necessarily their own—had a modest share in monastic liberty.9 The highest liberty, however, was widely recognized as that secured by the lordship of St Peter: ‘Roman’ liberty, combining the Holy See’s temporal lordship with its direct spiritual rule, with Cluny as the exemplar.10 But a different idea of monastic freedom was alive in eleventh-century Italy, still grounded perhaps in the wish to perfect an act of alms rather than in a principled hostility to lay domination.11 In 1028 the founders of Caramagna in Piedmont were close to the old Lombard idea of tapering off the founders’ potestas when they planned family control for several generations, to be followed by full autonomy under the Rule of St Benedict.12 But they kept family intervention in reserve: like the contemporary Tuscan nobility, their interest in monastic foundation and reform left them at ease with their own control, indeed reliant on it to secure their reforming ends, including (in Tuscany) the suppression of simony which threatened their memoria.13 On the other hand William of Volpiano’s charter (about 1015) for his and his brothers’ foundation at Fruttuaria in Lombardy asserts an undelayed autonomy.14 The charter’s main purpose was clearly to defend Fruttuaria’s independence from Saint-Beńigne, Dijon, where William was abbot and two of his brothers had become monks; but this is set in a sweeping assertion of absolute liberty and lordlessness. He begins by stating that the recently built monastery ‘stands most free and absolved (liberrimum atque absolutissimum) from subjection to any bishopric or monastery’, adding further on ‘or secular lordship’;15 points out its consequent lack of any ‘protector’ or ‘possessor and defender’ such as his other abbeys had (‘although various people might contend for this, not out of piety but out of avarice and to extend their dominium’);16 disclaims for himself any property 8

See Rosenwein, Space. As expressed in Hugh count-bp. of Chalon’s donation of Paray-le-Monial and Saint-Marcel to Cluny (999, Cluny no. 2484); or count Bernard Tumapeler’s wishes for Saint-Mont (1055, Saint-Mont no. 1). 10 Cowdrey, Cluniacs, esp. 32–40. 11 Cf. 11th-c. Spain, where some founders gave a choice of defender—pope, king, or any powerful person—‘provided that our kinsmen shall have no dominium whatever in it’ (1044, Hinojosa, Documentos no. 12: self-evidently not excluding lay influence as such); or ‘let none of my sons or nepotes, or of my 12 descendants, say that it is his’ (Irache no. 38 (1066) ). Above, pp. 401–2. 13 See Miccoli, Chiesa Gregoriana, 52–7, 64–6; and (more nuanced) Goez, ‘Reformpapsttum und Adel’, 214, 222–9. 14 Text in Bulst, Klosterreform, 223–5 (app. I): hardly a foundation charter, though usually so called. 15 Its freedom, he says, was ‘confirmed and corroborated’ by privileges from emperors, kings, bishops, and esp. popes. 16 Who were these diversi? Perhaps Robert’s sons (see Bulst, op. cit., 138 n. 108), or the emperor’s agents? 9


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in it (‘I shall explain how it came to me—but I say ‘‘to me’’ not in the sense of possession but as having undertaken the task of building it’); and tells the history of the core endowment, the patrimony at Fruttuaria. His brother Godfrey had not given his share of this as entry gift to Dijon (‘as all the monks who were present when he took the habit know’), but left it to his brother Nithard; who later joined him at Dijon but again (by implication) not bringing with him any of this patrimony.17 Instead, Nithard and his other brother Robert (now the only non-monk) had given it to the new monastery by conveying it to a kind of trustee (Gontard archdeacon of Turin), who then made a ‘legal testament called a iudicatus’18 to bestow it on the monastery without loss of the land’s free status;19 the outcome (three times stated) is that it belongs to God.20 This bit of estate history is there to show that Saint-Beńigne has no possible claim on Fruttuaria through the monks Godfrey and Nithard, nor through abbot William himself.21 To eliminate any seed of grievance about this, rich gifts of jewelled vestments have been sent from Fruttuaria to Dijon to commemorate and reward the goodwill of Saint-Beńigne’s lord, Bruno bishop of Langres.22 But other dangers seem needed to explain the lengths that William went to in securing the charter’s extraordinarily wide circulation and numerous subscriptions;23 Fruttuaria had just lost its supporter king Arduin (defeated, and shortly to die in the monastery)24 and may have been in fear of the victor Henry II, despite holding a recent charter from him.25 The view that William had earlier conveyed Fruttuaria into Henry’s ‘ownership’ is not supported by these charters26 (and 17

On their actual entry gifts see ibid. 143. This (confirmed in DHII no. 305) was probably effectively Fruttuaria’s foundation charter. Its ‘first and ancient dignity’, or ‘ancient liberty’ derived from its ‘noble possessors’ (the meaning of this is not obvious). 20 ‘It passed into the Lord’s possession’, ‘Christ became its heir’, ‘it was freely given to God’. 21 It was probably to avoid any suggestion of merged abbacies that he never called himself abbot of Fruttuaria, despite ruling it for some years (Bulst, op. cit., 129–33). 22 Bulst (ibid. 141–6) refutes the argument that this was buying it out of being a Langres episcopal 23 Eigenkloster. Ibid. 245–8. 24 Arduin’s charter (1005, Arduin no. 9 in DHII) confirms the exclusion of any clerical or lay potestas and condemns ‘any authority of donatio [dominatio?] or occasion of ambitious prelacy’ (perhaps the hostile bishop of Vercelli’s). His help is prominently acknowledged in William’s charter. See Sackur, Cluniacenser, II. 1–16. 25 1014, confirming the foundation and Guntard’s iudicatus (above, at note 18). His diploma of 1006 confirmed possessions and took the monastery into defence (simple defence, not implying lordship: above, p. 280 note 7); that of 1023 in effect confirms both, with ‘liberty in all things’ and whatever pope Benedict and ‘many bishops’ had laid down ‘about the abbot’s election and consecration’ (DHII nos. 304–5, 120, 494). For Henry’s temporary anger at William’s supposed partisanship see Vita Willelmi abbatis, c. xi, in Rodulfus Glaber Opera, 282–3. 26 The view is Bulst’s (op. cit., 136–9 and n. 102a, seeing this as William’s only means of extricating Fruttuaria from Arduin’s confiscated possessions). But DHII no. 494 allows in practice what Arduin had granted; DKonII no. 70 (1026) gives the same liberty as Cluny; DHIII no. 338 (1055) grants ‘that the monastery . . . be free and subject to no one’s potestas’; DHIV no. 220 (1069) is much the same, rather than at last restoring the liberty promised by king Arduin, as Bulst has it. 18 19

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would make the assertions of the ‘foundation charter’ absurd and foolhardy); and he certainly did not convey it to St Peter.27 William’s conception of monastic liberty, Cluniac though he was, did not depend on conveyance or commendation to the Holy See; Fruttuaria was not ultimately lordless, but God’s lordship was not mediated through any other.28 Fifty years later the idea of ‘Roman’ liberty had certainly come to predominate, in some degree caught up into the reformers’ broader ideology of freedom from lay power. Even so, achieving this liberty still depended essentially on the will of a monastery’s lord, not only in practice but, in at least some reformers’ minds, in principle. The Gregorian canonist Anselm of Lucca included in his collection, under the simple heading, ‘That no one should claim monasteries for himself against the will of their founders’, a quotation from Gregory the Great slightly misread as meaning that it was unreasonable for anyone to take a monastery away from its founders’ dispositio arbitrarily and against their will.29 It is not obvious what Anselm had in mind here—perhaps some attempted takeover by a super-abbot, or some initiative of Gregory VII’s that he thought went too far. That lords’ wishes were normally still decisive, and responded to diverse ideas of monastic liberty, is evident in southern Germany. Here monasteries had begun to be given to Rome by mid-century,30 their donors being allowed to keep not just the role of local defender (like the counts of Anjou for La Trinite´, Vendoˆme)31 but hereditary advocacy, leaving them nearer than the pope to having solid practical lordship.32 Gregory VII in his later years, however, pursued a clear policy of getting monasteries conveyed into the property of St Peter to the exclusion of any other lordship, even advocacy.33 This policy (implicitly identifying monastic liberty with St Peter’s lordship), and Urban II’s later retreat from it, affected the course of reform for monasteries in Swabia (now at last under Cluniac influence, partly through Fruttuaria). 27 Neither John XVIII’s nor Benedict VIII’s privilege (1006, 1015: PL 139. 1485–6, 1597–8) implies any traditio to Rome, as Bulst recognizes (unnecessarily seeing royal ownership as the only explanation); and see Tellenbach, Church in W. Europe, 296. 28 Cf. S. Salvatore, Silvamunda, 1066: ‘to be nobody’s own, nor in the mundium of any Lombard or anyone, except in the sole defence of God and St Peter and his church built there’ and of successive abbots (Leicht, Il diritto, 7 nn. 2 and 3). 29 Rationis ordo non patitur, ut monasterium contra voluntatem fundatorum ab eorum dispositione ad arbitrium suum quisquam debeat vindicare (Anselmi Collectio, iv. 8, ed. Thaner, 195). Gregory did indeed say (Reg., viii 30; MGH Epist., II. 32), responding to a complaint by monks about a dependent monastery, that a monastery should not be claimed by a lay person ‘especially against the will of the founders’ (almost certainly meaning their initial intentions, not the current wishes of founders’ heirs); not, however, ‘from the founders’ disposition’ but from that of its mother house’s monks (to which in its original context eorum clearly refers). 30 Gratian read it as Anselm did (below, p. 891 note 63). Above, pp. 369–70. 31 Vendoˆme no. 106 (above, p. 838 note 75). For the politics of Geoffrey Martel’s surrender (almost costless to himself) see Guillot, Comte, I. 92–4; Johnson, ‘Pious Legends’, 114–15, 120. 32 Above, pp. 333–4, 336. 33 For his earlier attitude (e.g. for Woffenheim) see Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 201.


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For Hirsau, family monastery of the counts of Calw,34 the revealing moment is Gregory’s reception of its royal charter of 1075 which confirmed the liberty agreed for it by its refounder count Albert and its reforming abbot William.35 According to this charter,36 Albert had given back all the monastic property (and more) into the potestas and proprietas of God and SS. Mary, Peter, Aurelian, and Benedict; the monastery was to be ‘subject to the yoke of no earthly person or power, except the dominatio, ordinatio, and potestas of the abbot alone’; Albert with his wife, sons, and daughters had renounced all potestas, service, ius, and proprietas in the monastery. The monks were to elect and install their own abbot, to be invested by their dean from the altar of St Aurelian (so by the saint himself);37 the advocate was to be chosen from the count of Calw’s family as long as there was one suitable; and a gold bezant was to be paid to Rome every Easter, for the monastery to be defended ‘under the mundeburdium and majesty of the Roman church’.38 The donation to the patron saints, the potestas of the abbot, and the protection of the Holy See all seem to echo (if indirectly) Cluny’s foundation charter of 910, embodying an old conception of monastic liberty under papal protection rather than papal lordship (what count Albert had had to be persuaded of must have been that Hirsau should belong to its own saints, rather than that he should give it away).39 In 1075–6 Gregory VII confirmed this charter but only in the broadest terms, and with a crucial proviso—he confirmed whatever was not contrary to ‘canonical sanctions’—which left Hirsau wide open to his own conception of monastic liberty;40 he probably hoped to abolish the founder’s claims even to advocacy, while making Hirsau one of the Roman church’s ‘own’ monasteries.41 These two aims—for Hirsau apparently swept aside by the escalation of conflict with Henry IV—were explicit in Gregory’s dealings in 1080 with All Saints, Schaffhausen, when he rescinded a privilege of Alexander II’s allowing the founder and his heirs (counts of Nellenburg) not only the advocacy but 34 See K. Schmid, ‘Das Kloster Hirsau und seine Stifter’, Forschungen zur oberrhein. Landesgesch., 9 (1959), 114–20. 35 On their earlier relations see Schmid, op. cit., 60–9, 120–2; Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 196–203; but cf. Tellenbach, Church in W. Europe, 299. 36 DHIV no. 280, known as the ‘Hirsau Formula’ because of its later influence. For its authenticity see Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 52–82, 86–112; on its content, Jakobs, Hirsauer, 17–21; Cowdrey, Gregory VII, 255–6. 37 He was to be ‘canonically’ ordained, which must mean by the diocesan bishop. 38 Probably based on a privilege from Alexander II (Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 197). 39 The chronicler Berthold of Reichenau saw Albert and his wife and sons as giving Hirsau to God and its patron saints, ‘emancipating’ it from themselves, and confirming its libera potestas et cura to abbot William and his successors (SS V. 281, s.a. 1075). Tellenbach thought that Berthold deliberately ignored Hirsau’s relation to the papacy, implying an idiosyncratic criticism of all dominion over monasteries, even papal (Church, State, 119–20). But what Berthold’s account omits (not in any case an assertion of papal lordship) comes so far on in a long document that he might have failed to read or hear it. 40 Jaffe´ 5279. See Jakobs, ‘Adel’, 55 n. 40; Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 199–203; id., Gregory VII, 256–9. 41 On William’s acceptance of the changed plan see Cowdrey, op. cit., 203–4.

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appointment of the abbot—probably meaning investiture—and ‘administration of the property’. Instead, Gregory decreed ‘that . . . absolutely no living person be allowed to claim any proprietary ties:42 not hereditary right, not advocacy, not investiture, nor any power whatever, to the damage of the brothers’ quiet and liberty’, and gave them the ‘liberty of the Roman See’ enjoyed by Cluny and Saint-Victor of Marseilles; a move made possible by William of Hirsau persuading the founder’s son Burchard that he ought not to have what Alexander II had conceded.43 For Muri the record—the twelfth-century Acta Murensia—is rich, belonging loosely to the genre of chronicle-with-charters, its documents probably partly copied but largely paraphrased.44 It presents the apparent problem of its Habsburg lord count Werner, under the influence of the abbots William of Hirsau and Siegfried of Schaffhausen, renouncing lordship in 1082 not to St Peter at Rome but to the monastery’s own patron saints (like count Albert at Hirsau in 1075), only to exercise lordship again in making a traditio to Rome in 1086; and parallel with this, renouncing hereditary advocacy in 1082 but taking it back in 1086 (just before the conveyance to Rome).45 If this is correct it shows count Werner’s lordship bouncing up like a balloon pushed under water. Alternatively, both lordship and advocacy may have been given away to and later given back by St Blasien, to whose abbot Muri was temporarily subjected for reform in 1082.46 However, it is possible to suggest a different reading of the carta libertatis drawn up in 1082. According to the Acta’s account of this, Werner ‘came to the principal altar and set the place totally and perfectly free, so that none of his descendants or heirs could have or contrive any share (ratio) in the place’.47 This need not mean renouncing lordship over the monastery itself. The context suggests rather that he was renouncing any share in the village and estate of Muri, taking ‘the place’ (locus) in its basic sense. The visiting abbots had advised Werner, as it were all in one breath, ‘for the good of his soul to set the place free and separate his peasants and servants from the cell (for what now is the cell was then

42

Or ‘relationships of property’ (conditiones proprietatis: see Niermeyer, conditio, sense 1). Reg. GVII, vii. 24 (502–5), addressed to William of Hirsau. See K. Hils, Die Grafen von Nellenburg im 11 Jahrhundert (Freiburg, 1967), 72–4, 82–91 (Burchard did not actually renounce advocacy until 1091, and his heir held it until 1100). 44 Acta Murensia, ed. Kiem, 16–45; see Patze, ‘Adel und Stifterchronik’, 56–7; Jakobs, ‘Die Adel in der Klosterreform von St Blasien’, 45–9; Kastner, Hist. fundationum monasteriorum, 13–18. 45 See Mayer, op. cit., 113–22, presenting events on these lines and posing the problem accordingly. 46 Jakobs, ‘Muri’, 56–7, 63–4; K. Schmid, ‘Adel und Reform’, 308, 312–14. Schmid saw Werner’s act in 1082 as fundamentally renouncing all Eigenklosterrecht, but undone with St Blasien’s agreement when found to have undesirable consequences. The Acta (cc. 9–11, at pp. 31, 32–3, 35) do not support this legalistic view of Werner’s dealings with St Blasien; which also barely fits his evident aspirations for Muri (Schmid, 47 op. cit., 315). For a variant see Kastner, Hist., 14–17. Acta Murensia, c. 10, pp. 32–3. 43


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a village)’ 48 the next chapter describes this being done, with various exchanges of land and serfs, and land in other places exchanged for Werner’s original third share of the village which he had never yet given up. The charter itself, it is implied, includes details about these exchanges.49 This reading is consistent with Werner’s ‘conveying’ the new charter (itself standing for whatever was being renounced), on the chief altar, to God and SS. Mary, Peter, and Martin:50 this would be a long-delayed completion of the unfinished endowment of the monastery.51 It is consistent too with his then handing the charter to the abbot of St Blasien and his four monks who were to reform the monastery, to observe it ‘as they would render account for it at the Day of Judgment’.52 It is Werner—still behaving as lord—who then makes the old monks accept the authority of the newcomers, marking this by commending to the latter the monastery’s books and church furnishings, spread on the carpet in front of the altar.53 He ‘thus commended to them all the things of the monastery both within and without’ (the latter, presumably, when he handed them the charter listing the lands). This arrangement with the resident St Blasien monks hardly amounts to donation of the monastery to St Blasien, but nonetheless makes it difficult to see the charter as a solemn gift of autonomy (especially since Muri was left temporarily without an abbot).54 It would also be strange that the abbots William and Siegfried, firm Gregorians by now, did not get Werner to commend Muri to Rome in 1082 if he was then determining its fundamental status.55 If Werner was only disentangling his and the monks’ possessions, this also puts in a different light his ‘ordering the monks to elect themselves an advocate’.56 This is usually regarded as giving up his family’s right to advocacy as part of the freeing of the monastery; so that his ‘taking back the advocacy into his own potestas’ within a few years (buying out the current, elected advocate) becomes a 48

Schmid, ‘Adel’, 311 describes this as ‘an interesting detail’; but it reads as if finding the people homes and holdings elsewhere was what Werner chiefly needed to do to release ‘the place’ from his hold on it. 49 Acta Murensia, cc. 10, 11 (pp. 32–3, 34–5); for the back history cc. 6, 8 (pp. 25, 28–9; Werner was the survivor of three brothers. For delayed separation of property cf. above, pp. 366, 367–8, 377). The author declines to copy out the charter, partly because the original was to hand (burnt later). 50 51 Ibid., c. 10, p. 33. See ibid., c. 8, pp. 27–9. 52 Ibid., cc. 9, 10, pp. 31, 33. It is evidently not for St Blasien but for the monks left in charge. 53 Ibid., c. 10, pp. 33–4. 54 See ibid., cc. 9 and 11, pp. 30–1, 35–6 (one of the four, the prior Rupert, was soon trying to become abbot). On St Blasien’s fluid relations with Muri and other monasteries see Wollasch, ‘Muri und St Blasien’, esp. 422–41. 55 Their concern that he pull out of involvement in the monks’ possessions corresponds to William’s advice to count Burchard to give up ‘administration of the property’ of Schaffhausen (above, at notes 42–3). 56 Both moves bear on his inviting those serfs who were now the monastery’s to choose what ‘law’ they wished to be under (Acta Murensia, c. 10, pp. 33–4).

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major step to renew his grip. It seems more likely that letting them choose on this occasion and the next was just an aspect of standing back from their possessions, easily brought to an end when it suited him.57 That does not mean it was casual: the Acta has him declare at a public assembly that his eldest son should ‘receive the advocacy from the abbot’, though not as a matter of hereditary right. Once the monks had their own abbot again,58 Werner was ready to take the step—now normal for a layman under strong reform influences—of parting with his lordship of the monastery itself, while retaining the advocacy: eliciting the privilege of 1086 (from the cardinals then in Rome),59 which describes the count with his wife and sons as having ‘emancipated’ the monastery ‘out of his ius’ into that of the Apostolic See and ‘conveyed’ it through an intermediary, to have ‘all the liberty of other free monasteries of this kind’, paying the usual gold coin as ‘tribute’.60 Henry V’s diploma of 1114 explains that the monastery was ‘possessed in hereditary right’ by the late count Werner, and confirms successive acts of Werner’s as if they were parts of a single act. First comes (from 1082) his conveying ‘the place of Muri’ to its patron saints and into the ‘property and potestas’ of successive abbots, for the monastery’s needs and the monks’ use (words consistent with the locus so far meaning the village and estate); then his establishing—‘lest God’s service should ever be destroyed by his descendants’—that the monastery should never be ‘under the yoke of any earthly person or power, except the domination, potestas, and ordinatio of the abbot alone’; and finally ‘abdicating’ any right in the monastery and conveying it to the Apostolic See.61 The middle passage (evidently copied from Hirsau’s 1075 charter) is difficult to place in relation to the Acta’s narrative, but it might belong to some renewal of the 1082 act in 1086 when Muri had an abbot again, making it now a renunciation of lordship, and leading on to the conveyance to Rome. The 1114 diploma adds Werner’s establishing the monks’ free potestas ‘not only of choosing but of appointing’ their abbot (probably meaning that they will invest and install him),62 and his eldest son’s having the advocacy ‘not in benefice or by his own right’ but for disinterested defence.63 By this time, mainly by Urban II’s doing, founderfamilies were allowed to retain their advocacy in monasteries given to Rome, 57 He is said to have regretted having ‘so separated the place from himself ’; the change is attributed to the elected advocate’s inability to provide protection (ibid., c. 11, p. 36). 58 59 From St Blasien, but independent (ibid., c. 11, pp. 35–6). In Victor III’s enforced absence. 60 Ibid., c. 12, pp. 36–8. On the document see Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 120–3; Jakobs, ‘Adel’, 60–2. 61 Acta, c. 14, pp. 41–4 (again called a carta libertatis). See Jakobs, ‘Adel’, 62–3 (and n. 81 for bibliography). 62 Count Werner by implication invested earlier abbots (Acta, c. 9, p. 31: Udalrich resigning the abbacy ‘conveyed it into his hands’). 63 Bishop Werner’s ‘1027’ charter was probably forged to support the request for this diploma (Kiem, Das Kl. Muri, part B, Urkunden und Briefe no. 1 and n., 107–10; Jakobs, ‘Adel’, 43–5). Meanwhile count Werner had been advocate until his death (1096), succeeded by two sons in turn (Acta Murensia, c. 13).


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although notionally receiving it from the abbot or convent.64 In this and other respects the Hirsau formula of 1075, effectively rejected by Gregory VII and dropped by William of Hirsau himself, had become in part a model for the ‘liberty’ of other monasteries.65 This is part of the general compromise towards which the papacy was, by then, hesitantly moving. At the same time the idea of papal property in monasteries was becoming sharper-edged,66 while losing some of its lustre. The idea of liberty was always separable from papal lordship, or indeed from any lordship apart from that of God and the patron saints. By the twelfth century substantial monasteries wanted real autonomy (increasingly workable for a large community with an elective head);67 Petershausen in mid-century prided itself on its liberty from any earthly lordship at all, including Rome’s, and boasted that whereas ‘other monasteries, which are called free, have to pay a gold coin worth 5 solidi to Rome annually, Petershausen owes nothing at all to Rome, Constance, Mainz, king, duke, or anyone, except to be devoted to the religious life’.68 Rome’s lordship might, however, still be preferable to that of another bishopric or a great monastery;69 putting an old monastery under another’s lordship (even though that, too, was the lordship of saints) destroyed its ‘liberty’.70 The papacy was sometimes responsible for this: some distinguished but disordered houses under papal lordship were set under Cluny or Saint-Victor,71 though Gregory VII had been anxious to disavow any intention of transferring them as property.72 Meanwhile abbeys, being among the objects of lay investiture, sometimes ran into trouble about this under Gregory VII.73 But for them the problem was not new. Investiture of the abbot, prior, or provost was the one thing that could mark 64

For Gregory VII’s rejection and Urban II’s toleration of hereditary advocacy see Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 118–28; Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 210–13. 65 66 Episcopal as well as papal. See Bu¨ttner, ‘Erzstift Mainz’, 35–6, 50. Above, p. 433 note 114. 67 Liberty for the new Orders was different again, identified not with autonomy but with government under a constitution. 68 Casus mon. Petrishusensis, I cc. 37, 38 (SS XX. 636); Miscoll-Reckert, Petershausen, 195–208. 69 See Schreiber, Kurie und Kloster, 23–5. 70 Where it was disputed, as by the monks of Saint-Bertin after their surreptitious subjection to Cluny in 1099 (Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 106–7), it could be represented as proprietary to discredit it in the new age; see Hirsch, ‘Untersuchungen’, 426–7 and n. 1, from John bp. of The´rouanne’s letter to Calixtus II. See IognaPrat, ‘Syste`me’, 43–4; Poeck, ‘Abbild’, 103–4. 71 Not always by papal initiative, e.g. Saint-Gilles, 1066 (Cowdrey, Cluniacs, 95); Ve´zelay (ibid. 85–7; Bouchard, ‘Monasticism’, 379; Cherest, ‘E´tudes’, Mon. Vizel., 8–21), originally by the count of Nevers (1027). The mid-12th-c. Ve´zelay chronicler complained of ‘Cluniac servitude’ as well as ‘the count’s tyranny’, and saw the papacy as usually unhelpful (Chron. iv, Mon. Vizel., 516–18). 72 See his letters to Saint-Gilles (Goiffon, Bullaire no. 12) and to Lagrasse (P. Schmid, ‘Marseiller Kirchenstaats’, 194–5). 73 e.g. Saint-Mihiel, Verdun’s new abbot (?1076) had to resign his abbacy to Gregory and be reinvested by him at Rome, for accepting investiture from countess Sophie of Bar (not recorded however until 1117, see below, note 85).

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out the lord of a monastery from a mere protector or advocate;74 consent to the abbot’s election could not do this since it could mean anything from a rigidly necessary consent as lord (probably expressed by investiture in any case), to informal consultation as a friend, or a ceremonial role allowed as a courtesy (shading into witnessing).75 And since lordship itself was sometimes abjured, investiture became a recognized problem with a variety of solutions, and a matter of ideology in some reformed monasteries well before the Investiture Contest. At Fruttuaria, king Arduin’s charter of 100576 provided that a new abbot, designated by his predecessor or elected by the monks, should take the staff from his living predecessor’s hand, or failing that from the altar; this may always have happened at Cluny.77 The founders of Caramagna in 1028 required its abbesses to take their staff from the altar (to be put there, when the abbey reached its intended autonomy, by one of the nuns with the others’ consent).78 By contrast, Farfa’s customs of c. 1042–3 specify (most unusually) the presence at the abbot’s election of ‘the lord (senior) to whom the abbey belongs’, and that the donatio be received from him, implying some form of investiture. But investiture with the pastoral staff is to be done by the bishop after blessing the abbot-elect; and it is specified that while the bishop holds his own pastoral staff, the staff intended for the abbot-elect lies on the carpet beside him while he waits prostrate for his consecration, and is then handed him by the bishop with the words ‘receive the staff of pastoral office . . . ’.79 About this time Ralph Glaber told an improbable story about the emperor Henry III rebuking an abbot for having put him in an ignominious position, by the would-be ingratiating gift of what turns out to be a stolen horse. He orders the abbot to ‘put down your staff of pastoral rule, which you believe you should wield by the largesse of a mortal man’; the king then picks it up, puts it beside an image of Christ, and tells the abbot to ‘go and take it from the hand of the Almighty King, so that in future you need not be indebted for it to any mortal man’.80 From then on the abbot ‘flourished in all liberty’ (freed morally from the need to purchase favour, which Glaber would see as simony).81 Glaber died in 1046; these ideas about the significance of investiture are pre-Gregorian. So—appearing first in 1037—is the quite different line of thought found in some French election records, which accepted 74 Even investiture, however, could sometimes become a formal ritual detached from real lordship: see above, p. 389 (Languedoc); 397 (Tuscany). 75 Even at Cluny the count of Maˆcon (or duke of Burgundy as count) was expected to ratify the record of proceedings, 954 (Cluny no. 883, misleadingly punctuated) and 993 (no. 1957), being at that time in some 76 sense advocates (see Fechter; Cluny, Adel, 32–3). Above, note 24. 77 This can be inferred. See Tellenbach, Church in W. Europe, 295 and n. 169. 78 79 Above, pp. 401–2. Consuetudines Farfenses, quoted by Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 141. 80 Libri V, v. 24, 248–50 (my translation). 81 The context of the story was Henry III’s abhorrence of simony (c. 25).


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the lay ruler’s use of the pastoral staff for investing an abbot or abbess but carefully represented this as standing for the temporalities or ‘outward’ things, the spiritual or ‘inward’ cura being given by the bishop’s subsequent blessing.82 That, for instance, was how Orderic Vitalis described the institution in 1059 of Robert of Grandmesnil, one of the founders of Saint-E´vroul, as its abbot.83 For the abbot to take his own staff from the altar or from a saint’s tomb (sometimes misleadingly called ‘self-investiture’) meant that he received his charge from God or the monastery’s patron saint or saints. It was a not unusual arrangement by the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries,84 with variations. The staff might be put on the altar for him by a secular lord;85 or taken off it and handed to him by the dean or prior, signifying his holding office by the community’s election, not by any lord’s will.86 At Hirsau, investiture by the dean having taken the staff from the altar (prescribed in the 1075 charter) was not in fact adopted: under the Customs drawn up later by abbot William, when the invited bishop has blessed the abbot ‘he and no one else is to give him the pastoral staff ’.87 This suggests that it was among the features of the 1075 charter that Gregory VII disapproved of; and it has been held that this was because investiture by the saints, marking their ‘ownership’ of the monastery, reinforced the Eigenkirche idea that Gregorian reform was out to combat.88 This is most unlikely, considering that objections to churches being treated as property at all (as distinct from disposed of by laymen) were as yet seldom even adumbrated; to object to their freedom from ‘the yoke of any earthly power’ being based on a heavenly lordship would be as adverse to new as to old ideas of monastic liberty. Gregory may conceivably have wished to promote the lordship of St Peter alone, through Peter’s successor; but it is more likely that he simply disliked the implications of internal investiture immediately after election, forestalling episcopal or papal approval.89 But at this point the already live question of investing abbots or priors was about to be swept up into the wider investiture controversy; and on a broader 82 Done at Montier-la-Celle (dioc. Troyes; countess and count of Blois), 1037–8 (Fulbert, Letters, 273–4, app. B. 1), and Saint-Aubin, Angers, 1055 (St-Aubin no. 28), both with the reformer Albert abbot of Marmoutier as intermediary. See Guillot, Comte, I. 154–60, 181–92. The principle anticipates the moderates’ argument in the Investiture Contest. 83 HE II. 74–5; and see his accounts of further Saint-Evroult occasions (1066, 1091; evidently based on election records), excerpted by Yver, ‘Absence’, app. 1. 84 See Mayer (Fu¨rsten, 76–7) on Luxembourg, 1123. The abbots of Cormery were supposed to take the staff from St Martin’s tomb at Tours (above, p. 335). 85 As agreed with the count of Bar for Saint-Mihiel, Verdun, late 11th c. (St-Mihiel no. 65, relating their later rejection of this as unlawful and the then count’s guirpitio, 1117). 86 See Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 73 n. 2, 81–2; Jakobs, Hirsauer, 86 (but making these practices carry an uncon87 vincing weight of theory, 86–102). Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 57, 60, 78, 112. 88 Jakobs, Hirsauer, 18, 23, 96–103; id., ‘Rudolf von Rheinfelden’, 104–5. 89 See Mayer, Fu¨rsten, 110–11.

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front, monastic liberty would soon be an element in the Gregorian conception of the liberty of the whole Church.90 Although the idea of a generalized monastic liberty had not been unheard-of in the mid-ninth century, being the theme of at least two forgeries,91 in the real world liberty of various kinds and degrees was envisaged only as belonging to individual monasteries. Over the following century and a half, conscientious popes had acknowledged the lordship of rulers in royal or princely monasteries and affirmed its manifestations in investiture and in approval or even control of elections.92 Only a few founders had been individually moved to renounce lordship, and with no implied disapproval of the many who did not. Now this lordship was coming under scrutiny. 90 Cowdrey, Cluniacs, makes a strong case for Cluny’s contribution to this, not ideologically but as its ‘crowning example’. 91 ‘Gregory to all bishops’, in Pseudo-Isid., with the bishops’ reply, Libertati monachorum congaudemus; and the invented decree of Nicholas I (MGH Epist., VI no. 158) for all monasteries in Gaul. 92 e.g. Nicholas I for St Calais, 863 (ibid., no. 159); Leo VII for Fleury, 938 (Bouquet, IX. 220; see Tellenbach, Church, State, 93 n. 1); Silvester II, 1003, for dukes of Aquitaine at Bourgueil PL 139. 285–6.

24 Gregorian reform and the proprietary church

24.i. The Investiture Dispute and its polemic The long-established practice of lay lords putting clerics into possession of their churches by handing them the symbols of office became under Gregory VII and his successors an aspect and later the focus of conflict and negotiation with emperors and kings, and of polemical argument about right order in Christian society. The fifty-year contest as a whole is beyond the scope of this study,1 but three questions need to be considered here: narrowly, how the investiture decrees bore on lesser churches, and with what intention; more broadly, whether applying them to great churches was seen as freeing these from proprietary lordship; and generally whether Gregorian reform was in essence an attack on the proprietary church. The questions interlock, but we can start with the first. The reformers’ objection to lay investiture reflected their concern with the hold that rulers had on great churches, and the simony often resulting from this or indeed (on a more exacting view of simony) built into it. But virtually all the decrees against lay investiture were so drafted as to apply to lesser churches too. Nicholas II’s great Easter council of Rome in 1059 appears to have decreed sweepingly ‘that no clerk or priest should in any way obtain a church through laymen, either gratis or for a price’;2 this is often seen as the first investiture decree.3 The surviving record is only a heading, however; the actual canon may have been about lay nobles disposing of lesser churches by their own 1

What follows depends largely on Benson, Bishop-Elect, 203–50; Tellenbach, Church in W. Europe, cc. 5–8; Blumenthal, Investiture Controversy; Morris, Papal Monarchy, cc. 4, 5; Cowdrey, Gregory VII. 2 c. 6 (Mansi, XIX. 898); renewed by Alexander II, 1063 (ibid. 1025; recorded in the same abbreviated form). 3 Tellenbach, Church, State, 108–12; id., Church in W. Europe, 175–8; Laudage, Priesterbild, 206–10, 218–34.

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untrammelled power.4 In either case, the active campaign against lay investiture began only when Gregory VII was pushed into it by conflicts with Henry IV over particular bishoprics (followed soon by trouble with Philip I of France).5 Gregory’s decrees of 1075,6 1078 (twice), and 1080, Victor III’s of 1087 at Benevento, and Urban II’s at Melfi in 1089 and Clermont in 1095, all mention ‘lesser’ or ‘lower’ or ‘other dignities’ as well as bishoprics and abbacies, and other laity besides the king. The autumn 1078 decree spells this out emphatically, forbidding any clerk to ‘receive investiture of a bishopric, abbey, or church from the hand of emperor, king, or any lay man or woman’.7 At Clermont in 1095 there were two distinct clauses: no cleric was to receive any ‘honor of a church’ from a lay hand, and ‘kings and other princes’ were forbidden ‘to make any investiture of ecclesiastical honores’.8 There followed Paschal II’s repeated renewals between 1102 and 1110, as conflict continued with Henry IV and his successor and began with Henry I of England and Robert of Normandy; for the Empire, not settled until 1122. In all this long dispute, bishoprics and great abbeys were what mattered; the eventual agreements avoided even mentioning lesser churches;9 but these had been seen throughout as presenting a similar problem. It is not clear what the ban on lay investiture entailed for a lower church. Before the reform, the making of a bishop involved several public ceremonies after the formal election: dealings with the ruler (commitment to fidelity,10 and investiture with ring and staff by the ruler’s hand); consecration by bishops; enthronement in the cathedral.11 The making of a new village priest was simpler but probably less standardized. He would (unless already a priest) have been sent to the bishop for ordination; and either before or after this12 have been in some way put into possession of the church building and glebe (or of a priest’s part), the lord probably receiving some undertaking from him and handing him some symbol—a liturgical book, bell-rope, or key; or perhaps opening the door to him, or leading him to his seat in the chancel, or whatever was the local custom. 4 Borino, ‘L’investitura laica’, 345–52; R. Schieffer, Die Entstehung des pa¨pstlichen Investiturverbots (Stuttgart, 1981), 48–84, and app. I, esp. 222–3. Cf. Tours 1060 c. 4, ‘no one is to accept from laymen a church great or small’ without the diocesan bishop’s consent (Mansi, XIX. 927). 5 Tellenbach, Church in W. Europe, 179–82; for different emphases see Morris, Monarchy, 113–15; Cow6 drey, G. VII, 94–119. Cowdrey, 4. VII, 103–7, 120, and nn. 7 Reg. G. VII, vi. 5b (Epist. Sel., II. 403); cf. legatine council, Poitiers 1078 (Mansi, XX. 498). 8 Somerville (ed.), Councils of Urban II, I, esp. (from the various sources for Clermont) 77 (LL cc. 13, 14); 113, 115 (Bodl. cc. 1, 22). From Clermont onwards there were associated objections to any priest becoming a layman’s ‘man’. 9 Calixtus II’s 1119 decree at Rheims had been intended to cover ‘all churches and ecclesiastical possessions’ but was narrowed to ‘bishoprics and abbeys’ after protests (perhaps mainly about the new inclusion of ‘possessions’, affecting widespread private interests). 10 See Minninger, Von Clermont, 24–41. 11 Sigbert of Gembloux (below, note 86) attributes enthronement to king or emperor. 12 Priests were sometimes put into possession by the lord before going to the bishop (Gerhoh of Reichersberg, De edificio Dei, c. 60, Libelli, III. 171).

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At any level, for a ruler or lord to lose these symbolic functions would be to lose much of the appearance of lordship, and so of lordship itself. But that the complete elimination of lay lordship was aimed at in practice, or even seen as the ideal outcome, is not certain. What mattered most, for greater churches, was free canonical election: bishops by clergy and people (however this was now understood), abbots or abbesses by their community; and a formal consent by the ruler (if only as the chief layman) seems to have been acceptable to most reformers,13 including Gregory VII himself.14 For lower churches the notional possibilities would be that the priest be chosen by the parishioners (with episcopal consent); or by the diocesan bishop alone; or by the lord as in the past, but the bishop actually making the appointment, demonstrated by his representative putting the priest into possession. The first may not have been widely contemplated, though cardinal Deusdedit in the 1080s proposed election by ‘people, clergy, and neighbouring priests’ (evidently envisaging a collegiate clergy).15 The second option—choice and appointment by the bishop (perhaps with popular consent), with lay lords not even presenting candidates—may be what many reformers would ideally have preferred,16 but we cannot be sure. If c. 6 of the Roman council of 1059 is adequately summed up in its heading, it would exclude a layman even from choosing a candidate; but the heading may mislead.17 Later papal or conciliar statements that might be thought to condemn lay lordship in principle can be ambiguous or vague. We have seen this at Gerona in 1078 (‘we know that churches are not suitable for laymen’);18 that year’s Lent investiture decree may have implied such condemnation, but the evidence is shaky.19 And when Gregory VII in 1074—a year before his first investiture decree—instructed the new bishop Hugh of Die ‘not to consecrate churches, or allow divine service in those that are consecrated, until they have been freed from lay hands . . . and restored to their own ius and his episcopal providentia’,20 this does not explain what ‘lay hands’ must let go: physical occupation, or putting the clergy into possession, or any claim to lordship at all. The possible echo of Gelasius’s ruling,21 with added emphasis on the church’s autonomy or ‘belonging to itself’, certainly suggests the last. Gregory’s reference to the bishop’s providentia 13

e.g. Humbert, Libri tres adversus symoniacos, iii cc. 5, 6 (Libelli, I. 204–5). Cowdrey, G. VII, 105–8, 407–9, 420–1, 539–40. 15 Below, at note 66. For this as a reforming aim in Italy see Boyd, Tithes, 109–12; Toubert, Latium, 924–9; later upheld in principle by Gerhoh of Reichersberg (as above, note 12, cc. 60–1), but impossible for most of the rural West (as Colin Morris remarks, Monarchy 105). 16 Again, Deusdedit (below, at note 66). An unusually explicit statement of this, mid-12th c., is Gilbert 17 Foliot’s (below, p. 909). Above, at note 4. 18 Above, p. 828. 19 Berthold of Reichenau’s account, which is virtually all we have (SS V. 308–9, 310), probably telescopes two different decisions. 20 21 Reg. G. VII, i. 69 (pp. 99–100), informing the count and people of Die. As below, note 63. 14

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was, however, entirely traditional; and this—the diocesan bishop’s potestas over all churches and clergy—had been central to the council of Coyanza in the kingdom of Leoń, back in 1055.22 Its third and longest clause, dealing with ordinary churches, began by asserting ‘that all churches . . . are to be in the ius of their bishop’.23 The continuation of this in one version—‘nor are laymen to have any potestas over churches or clergy’—is the result of later revision;24 the council was not demonstrating a precocious rejection of lay lordship, but asserting traditional standards based on the old Visigothic canons: chiefly that the church be properly manned and decently equipped, with a stone altar duly consecrated.25 Coyanza led to further councils in Spain, and prepared the way for Gregorian influence;26 but it did not anticipate Gregorian principles. As for the view that Gregorian reform was essentially an attack on the Eigenkirche,27 this not only assumes that great churches were in fact being ‘treated as property’ and that this was what made lay investiture objectionable, but it overlooks the multiplicity of attitudes and practices that the reformers were challenging. The Eigenkirche was one in a syndrome of practices addressed by reforming legislation and the collections that supported it (aspects of a traditional, patrimonial society in which powers or functions were seen in more or less proprietary terms, but now under pressure from proliferating private interests and the increasing importance of money). These practices included alienation of church property, largely by the clergy;28 hereditary claims of laity or clergy alike to altaria, prebends, offices, custody of treasures;29 the want of ‘common life’, especially in cathedrals; ‘headless clergy’ in the service of lords (not necessarily serving any church); the marriage or concubinage of clergy, and resultant property claims of their children (not necessarily nor even usually to the church itself); and simoniac traffic in offices and Orders, to many contemporaries not ‘traffic’ and not sinful, but a matter of decent gift-exchange.30 Of all these, the two last were what most preoccupied reformers from the mid-tenth century onwards. Simony could take the form of a cleric paying a lord or ruler for a church, but was often between clerics (typically a bishop-elect needing or wishing to make a gift to 22

Texts A and B, ed. Garcıá Gallo, ‘Coyanza’, 286–302; for the date, ibid. 345–56. iii. 1 (ibid. 291); based on Toledo III c. 19. 24 Garcıá Gallo demonstrates that A (from Coimbra) is the authentic conciliar record and B (from Oviedo) a (12th-c.?) revision. 25 iii. 4–11 (ibid. 291–3). Clauses limiting the laity’s rights are iii. 2 (clergy to do no servitium to laymen unless voluntary and authorized by the bishop) and 16 (laity not to live with women in the church’s dextri 26 nor possess any right there). First evident at Gerona 1078. 27 See Stutz, ‘EK als Element’, 45–8 (in trans., 65–8); P. Fournier, ‘Proprie´te´’, 499–500. 28 See esp. Peter Damian’s letter to ‘bishop V.’, Epist. iv. 12 (PL 144. 321–4). See Gilchrist, ‘Canonical Collections and Economic Policy of G. VII’, Studi Gregoriani, IX (1972). 29 For vivid Italian instances, Southern, Making, 128–30. 30 See Tellenbach, Church in W. Europe, 167–70; Meier-Welcker, ‘Simonie’, esp. 82–8. 23

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his consecrators); while the relationship between clerical marriage and lay lordship over churches was ambivalent: a lord might accept a priest’s son’s claim as part of the natural order of things, or reject it because he had other plans. Any of the abuses could be linked with the proprietary church, or with the ruler’s hold on great churches, but that was not what made the abuses objectionable, nor what was seen as their root:31 this was rather the general ‘mingling of sacred and secular things’.32 The positive ideal of reform—broadly, to restore the imagined apostolic age, in a ‘right order’ centred on the mission of St Peter33—was far richer than a simple objection to churches being treated as property. Nonetheless the Gregorian case did so develop as to include a theoretical attack on the Eigenkirche, at least against lay lords. Rulers investing clerics with bishoprics and abbeys were indeed behaving as if these were in some sense their own to dispose of;34 and perhaps under customary law (now in its last decades of dominance), ‘as if’ and ‘in some sense’ do not make much difference. There are no sharp lines between the lords of bishoprics and great abbeys, of lesser monasteries, and of rural churches, but a continuum of degrees of proprietary ideas and behaviour. Lay rulers were sometimes depicted as crudely considering great churches their property. The Lorsch chronicle relates or invents two abrupt orders from the young Henry IV to abbot Odalric (who had incurred archbishop Adalbert’s enmity), one summoning him to come to Goslar at the feast of All Saints ‘if you wish to have anything in our kingdom’, the second, when Odalric was unable to obey this summons, addressed to ‘Odalric, monk’, expressing astonishment that he has wanted to ‘retain our abbey against us, neither serving us for it, nor rendering any obedience to our patronus Adalbert to whom we have given it’, and commanding him ‘without delay to give up what is ours, and . . . hand over the staff to our messenger to bring to us’.35 Eadmer reports William Rufus losing his temper when archbishop Anselm urged him to fill vacant abbacies, saying ‘aren’t my abbeys mine? You do as you like with your manors; am I not to do as I like with my abbeys?’36 Such stories may well be true. But rulers did not defend their 31 Colin Morris (Monarchy, 26–8) makes Eigenkirchentum a key to the actual abuses, but this is different from seeing it as the reformers’ target. 32 Southern, Making, 130. On the dread of ritual impurity, R. I. Moore, ‘Family, Community and Cult on the Eve of the Gregorian Reform’, TRHS, 5th sec., 30 (1980), 65–9; Morris, op.cit., 98–105; on the ferment of popular and noble zeal and intolerance, Leyser, ‘On the Eve’, 1–19. 33 See Morris, op.cit., 98–9, 110–11; Cowdrey, G. VII, 507–64. 34 This is not to say that they were thought of as ‘fiefs’ (as argued with seductive clarity in 1908 by Scharnagl, Der Begriff der Investitur). 11th-c. French abbatial election records recording a lay ruler’s investiture (above, pp. 378–9) have ‘of whose ius (or ditio) the monastery is’, not ‘of whose enfeoffment’ 35 or the like. Lorsch I nos. 123–4 (1065). 36 Hist. Novorum, 49–50; see Brooke, Churches and Churchmen, 139–40.

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practice by saying ‘these churches are ours’, even if they slipped into such expressions in heated moments. Their serious defence—written by their clerical supporters, often reformers themselves—was that it was customary, or supported by papal privileges,37 or necessary for the security of the kingdom and for peace and concord, or justified by the protection they afforded to churches and their possessions; with an occasional rather desperate resort to theocratic kingship.38 Nor did Gregorians in the main attack lay investiture by saying ‘you are treating these great churches as if they were your property’,39 but on the grounds primarily that sacred office and the cure of souls could not be conferred by laymen, and secondarily that even the church’s possessions were not theirs to give to a new holder. The first point probably initially needed to be made against those that thought a king or emperor could indeed do what the symbolism seemed to imply. Thietmar of Merseburg early in the century looked back to the emperor Otto I ‘committing the pastoral care’ to a new bishop of Halberstadt ‘by the staff ’;40 neither Otto nor Thietmar would ever have seen this as conferring sacramental powers, but it did mean giving him his spiritual office and jurisdiction. That was how the Gregorians—initially cardinal Humbert—saw investiture with ring and pastoral staff, consequently as outside the laity’s competence.41 Defenders of lay power, however, mostly drew back from claiming that kings could confer spiritual office and claimed that this was neither intended nor implied in bestowing the ring and staff; all that investiture meant, they argued, was the grant of the church’s possessions to their new holder; these were distinct from the spiritual office and could be conferred separately.42 But the objection to lay investiture was only partly that it implied presumptuous or sacrilegious claims by the laity (among whom kings and emperors were now firmly classed),43 whatever they might say about their modest intentions; it was objectionable chiefly because it overrode canonical election44 and was almost bound to involve simony, if not by an outright payment then (following Gregory the Great’s definition) by the ingratiating behaviour required or the implicit promise of service.45 It was to rebut charges of simony that the 37

Forged at Ravenna in the 1080s (Tellenbach, Church in W. Europe, 269 and n. 62). A range of such arguments was deployed by Guy bp. of Ferrara (below, at notes 82–3, 93–5); Guy of Osnabruck, Liber de controversia (Libelli, I. 467–9); Orthodoxa defensio imperialis, cc. 4–5, 7–8, 11 (ibid. II. 537–40); Sigbert of Gembloux, Tractatus de investitura episcoporum (ibid. 502–4); cf. Placidus of Nonantula on what ‘some say’, Liber de honore (ibid. II. 566–639), cc. 73, 117–18, 154. 39 40 But see below, at notes 77–8. Chron., ii. 21 (p. 62); see Minninger, Von Clermont, 29–30. 41 See Scharnagl, Begriff, 15–18. The ring represented ‘the seal of heavenly secrets’, as well as marriage to his church (Humbert, Libri tres (Libelli, I. 25–253), iii. 6 (p. 205, lines 24–8)). 42 For this argument’s first appearance on the imperial side see Benson, Bishop-Elect, 224–5. 43 See Laudage, Priesterbild, 218. 44 Humbert, Libri tres, iii. 5 at p. 204; Mangold of Lautenbach, Ad Gebehardum liber (Libelli, I. 300–430), c. 51. 45 Peter Damian, Contra clericos aulicos, PL 145. 464–5; Deusdedit, Libellus contra invasores (Libelli, II. 292–365), i. 15 and ii. 1. See Meier-Welcker, ‘Simonie’, 65–7. 38

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distinction between office and possessions—essential for any compromise over investitures—had already been deployed, for more than two centuries, long before investitures were in question, by churchmen arguing that all they had bought was the church’s temporal possessions, not the spiritual office or episcopal Order.46 It was in this now highly charged context that Humbert and Peter Damian attacked the argument. Possession of one implies possession of the other, says Humbert (about 1058): ‘neither can be bought or sold without the other.’ But this leads him, via the sacrosanctity of ecclesiastical possessions,47 to lay control in general. Those responsible for simony are above all the lay rulers, who claim ecclesiastical possessions, dominate synods, and set themselves above metropolitans in choosing bishops when they ought only to consent to their canonical election.48 From this he moves on to lay investiture with ring and staff and the presumptuous implications of this:49 not dropping the thread of simony, but weaving it together with lay presumption.50 Peter Damian a few years later attacked the simoniacs’ argument from a different angle, writing to Alexander II about arguments put forward by two chaplains of duke Godfrey’s, that those who buy a bishopric before being consecrated bishop were not guilty of simony because ‘it is not the church that is bandied about but the property; not the episcopacy that is bought but the possession of lands’. This makes two separate men out of one: a venal buyer of riches and an apostolic recipient of bishop’s Orders; but the two are indivisible. Here he moves on to investiture, not however to attack it as an associated evil, but to demonstrate the fallacy in the simoniac argument. What, says Damian, does the form taken by investiture tell us? A branch or an ordinary staff might be taken to stand only for the possessions; ‘but how can you exonerate yourself from traffic in bishop’s Orders if a secular ruler, after receiving or being promised money, handed you the pastoral staff?’: without this grant of the episcopal office, he would not have been consecrated bishop.51 ‘I return now to investiture, and inquire into your boast that you did not buy the church but only its lands. When the prince put the staff into your hands, did he say ‘‘receive the lands and riches of that church’’ or rather, as is certain, ‘‘receive the church’’?’52 In any case, since the 46 Criticized by Wala, later by Abbo of Fleury (above, pp. 798, 820), and by Guy bp. of Arezzo c.1031 (Benson, Bishop-Elect, 209–10 and n. 18). 47 Libri tres, iii. 1–4, ending with the Pseudo-Isidorean Laicis, quamvis religiosi, above, p. 825. 48 Ibid. iii. 5, discreetly criticizing Henry III. 49 Humbert was thus condemning lay investiture at the time of Nicholas II’s 1059 council, a point marginally in favour of taking its c. 6 as a ‘first step’ to this (above, at notes 2–4); see Laudage, Priesterbild, 183–4. 50 Libri tres, iii. 6. Cf. Placidus of Nonantula, Liber de honore, c. 117, running simony and lay investiture together. 51 Epist., PL 144. 218–20 (the second-person address draws Alexander’s attention to his own appoint52 ment as bishop of Lucca). Ibid. 221A (see Scharnagl, Begriff, 23–4).

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possessions are themselves sacrosanct, why should it be thought sinless to buy them?53 Simony is to be shunned both by the consecrating bishops and ‘by secular princes who—even though unjustly (licet iniuste)—in any way confer churches on future rectores’: in other words, even if they are unlawfully investing new bishops they might at least eschew simony.54 None of this quite amounts to an attack on the Eigenkirche, although the idea that the laity were dealing impiously with sacrosanct possessions, office, and persons undoubtedly flickered across to the churches themselves. The climax of Humbert’s rebuttal of the claim that office and property could be separated was that ‘the Lord has so sanctified his tabernacle and its ministers that whatever belongs to them is sanctified’:55 it is the sanctity of the church or altar that sanctifies its possessions. But even here the point is not directly about lordship over the church.56 And when Peter Damian stresses the ruler’s words ‘receive the church’, the point is not to say how wrong or impossible this is (though he may have thought it so); he is stating a fact about the words used in order to show that investiture cannot be seen as giving the possessions only.57 In discussing the different kinds of simony in his criticism of court clerks, including payment by future service, he puts it in terms of buying the church itself;58 but what shocks him is that this actually happens, rather than that the system allows it. Obviously neither Humbert nor Damian thought a church any less sacred than its possessions or its ministers, but their arguments were focused on sacrilegious dealings with these, with only an occasional glance at proprietary claims on the church itself. Anselm of Lucca, however, accused the antipope Clement III’s supporters (soon after Gregory VII’s death) not only of tearing the Church apart but of reducing it to servitude, ‘saying that everything is subject to the emperor’s ius— bishoprics, abbeys, absolutely all the churches of God; whereas the Lord said ‘‘My Church’’, ‘‘My dove’’, ‘‘My sheep’’.’59 But even this attributes to the imperialists an extreme view of imperial power over the whole Church in terms of ius or property, rather than explicitly rejecting the idea of property in churches; rejection is implied in his scripture-based rhetoric, but not as focused nor as sharply put as by Abbo of Fleury long ago.60 In Anselm’s Collection, book vi on the

53 After relating the accepted history of the early Church’s endowment, he applies to this the Mosaic law: ‘Everything consecrated to the Lord . . . is not to be sold and cannot be bought back; what has once 54 been consecrated is holy of holies . . . ’ (based on Leviticus 27: 28). PL 144. 222D. 55 Libri tres, iii. 25 (based on Leviticus 21: 23). 56 57 Humbert does not pause to make this connection. Above, at note 52. 58 Contra clericos aulicos, PL 145. 465–6. 59 Liber contra Wibertum, Libelli, I. 517 (see Scharnagl, Begriff, 48). Cf. v. 3 in his Collectio, 60 ed. Thaner, 231–2. Above, pp. 820–1.

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appointment and status of bishops includes texts relating to lay investiture,61 with much also about simony and the bishop being married to his church, but nothing strongly suggesting that rulers were treating bishoprics as property. The shorter book v, on churches generally, includes largely familiar texts on old matters of sacrilegious dealings with church lands, offerings, and tithes.62 It does, however, include two texts (genuine, and new to the collections) fatal to the proprietary church: near the beginning, Gelasius’s conditions for consecrating a church for its builder (solemn endowment, and recognition that ‘he is to have nothing of his own right except the access due to all Christians’);63 and further on, Justinian’s statute that res sacrae are no one’s, that this covers ‘sacred buildings’, and that ‘holy things such as the walls and doors are (in a way) in ius divinum and therefore not in anyone’s property’.64 A systematic case against the proprietary church was made at last by cardinal Deusdedit, in his ‘Libellus against invaders and simoniacs’, in the 1080s. First he emphasizes the principle that bishops should be chosen by clergy and people, stating that Christian emperors from Constantine to Louis the Pious recognized this, ‘not wishing to claim for themselves any judgment or dominium over the clergy or possessions of churches’; but that evils resulting from its neglect (simony in particular) led Gregory VII to make his decree against ‘receiving a bishopric or abbacy from the hand of a lay person’.65 After discussing simony at length, in book ii, and the proper relation of clergy to laity in book iii, he moves in book iv to the general point that by God’s words to Aaron, ‘the priests alone were commanded to put clergy into the temple’; and goes on to show that lay power was debarred from appointing lower clergy as well as bishops. The texts cited include two from Justinian, from which Deusdedit concludes that ‘for the sake of peace and charity’ the principle of election by clergy and people should apply to the manning of lesser churches, proposing to remove from the laity all power to appoint or remove priests, even (it seems) their power to propose suitable candidates.66 From this he moves to more traditional concerns: that clerks not be expelled from churches by lay power, nor protected by lay patronage against their superiors; and ‘that ecclesiastical possessions should not be ruled by secular men’.67 But he goes on, more radically, to say ‘it remains to be shown that it

61

62 Collectio Anselmi, vi. 6, 20, 62–3. Ibid. v. 9–10, 31–8, 40–5. Ibid. v. 7, from Gelasius, epist. no. 34; cf. v. 11. Gelasius’s letter no. 14, above, p. 13 note 13, used in earlier collections, leaves out the crucial requirement. 64 Collectio, v. 46, from Justinian, Institutes, ii. 1. 7, 8, 10. But Anselm’s context is the alienation of church 65 property. Libellus contra invasores, i. 1, 2; i. 16, led up to by i. 3–15 (Libelli, II. 301–15). 66 Ibid. iv. 1, 2 (355–6); see Scharnagl, Begriff, 54–5. 67 Libellus iv. 3–5; backed by Pseudo-Isidorean and authentic texts, including laicis quamvis religiosis . . . (above, note 47). 63

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is not licit for laymen to have dominium in a church’;68 here at last an explicit attack on lay lordship of churches as a step in his main line of argument ‘against invaders and simoniacs’.69 Even here, the theoretical objection was not that this was ‘treating churches as property’ (as Abbo had fleetingly seen it), but that it was a kind of property unsuitable for the laity.70 He goes beyond this, however, when (like Anselm of Lucca) he quotes the passage from Justinian that res sacrae belonging to ius divinum are ‘nobody’s’, and identifies these things as including church buildings (aedes sacrae) as well as things given for the liturgy.71 A generation later,72 Placidus of Nonantula set out a large number of more traditional texts and explications on the sacrosanctity of endowments and other offerings, their proper freedom from lay power, and the bishops’ authority over them:73 notably, that ‘what has once been offered to God is bound to his ius for ever’; ‘what has been consecrated to the Lord is holy of holies’ and ‘belongs to the ius of the priests’; gifts of the faithful, being offerings to the Lord, ‘ought not to be turned to uses other than ecclesiastical and for . . . Christian brothers and the needy, being vota fidelium et precia peccatorum’; any other use is sacrilege and will be punished like the crime of Ananias and Saphira.74 Much of this could pass as ninth-century. But its drive is towards the undoing of Paschal II’s capitulation over imperial investiture;75 and near the beginning he has given these texts a new bearing on the rights of founders: ‘What is once given to the church, is Christ’s for ever, nor can it be alienated from the church’s possession; so that even the builder of the church himself, once he has devoted it to God and had it consecrated, can have no ius in it afterwards.’76 Further on, Placidus raises in his own words the basic question of property in churches in the context of lay investiture. What does investiture signify? . . . that by this sign, we show that we have given to someone something of our property. For when we want to grant what is ours to someone to possess, we are careful to invest him with it, signifying . . . that what we give belongs to us by right, and that he who receives it possesses what is ours through us. So by its very name is most plainly shown how impious it is to want to ‘invest’ the sanctuary 68

Ibid. iv. 5, 6, including (like Anselm of Lucca) the Gelasian conditions for consecrating a church. In his (earlier) Collection (ed. Wolf von Glanvell), relevant texts are unargumentatively scattered among a mass of traditional material. 70 For reformers in general, monastic property in churches was acceptable; diverting churches to 71 monasteries was the best way to get the laity to give them up. Libellus, iv. 7. 72 1111, evoked by Paschal II’s capitulation at Ponte Mammolo. 73 74 De honore, esp. cc. 7–13, 31–6, 43–52, 149–50. cc. 43, 50, 52, 56. 75 e.g. Placidus’s comments in cc. 18–19 (‘rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’ does not mean allowing him to appoint the Church’s pastors), 35 (if the laity are not to dispose of a church’s possessions, still less should they appoint its rector), 37 (he is not excluding lay rulers from a role in elections but from 76 dominating them), 53–69 (on lay investiture). Ibid., c. 7. 69

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of God; for the prophet declares with a weighty threat that it is a great sacrilege for any man to want to possess the sanctuary of God

(here quoting the familiar verse from Psalm 82, at last straightforwardly applied).77 And ‘if anyone says ‘‘the churches are mine, and I made them—for they were made out of my kingdom, and should serve me, and they cannot have rectores unless I give them’’, is he not claiming in ius proprium what is God’s?’78 By this time the rulers’ claim to be giving only the temporalities needed a more sophisticated basis, in the face of the argument that even what kings had given, as well as other ‘devout laymen’, was given inalienably to the church and therefore to God, not capable of being given again to the individual prelate. One solution sought in the early twelfth century was to distinguish, within the temporal things, between what originated as offerings or endowments from the faithful (including much of what kings had given), belonging irremovably to the church, and what was granted by rulers out of their regnum and arguably delegated to each successive prelate, by way of tolls, markets, mints, advocacies, counties, and other public rights or jurisdiction, with some estates that could be viewed in the same way, all as regalia—royal things.79 It was regalia in this sense, not the landed property in general, that Paschal II in 1110–11 tried to make prelates renounce and Henry V take back (which would have destroyed his hold on the bishoprics as single units of property and power);80 and it was these that Calixtus II in 1122 allowed the emperor to confer by his sceptre.81 Alternatively, endowments and offerings from whatever source could be represented as properly subject to royal grant, despite their sacrosanct character, on the grounds that even these were given and held under ‘human law’ or ‘the laws of kings’. Well before the distinction between regalia and endowments was floated, the imperial supporter Guy bishop of Ferrara, in his treatise of 1086, set out one of the Gregorians’ important texts—St Ambrose’s case for not surrendering a church demanded by the emperor—but claimed that it was no impediment to imperial investitures since these conferred only secular things: All things belonging to the episcopal office are spiritualities . . . granted by the Holy Spirit; but secular jurisdiction and everything granted to churches by princes of the world

77

Ibid., c. 68; cf. cc. 73, 86, 119. See index: Psalm 82. Ibid., c. 118. On ‘making’ churches, cf. Humbert (Libri tres, iii. 15, p. 217, lines 18–19): lay rulers should remember that ‘it is not for them to make churches, but to defend them when made’, implying that only ecclesiastical authority can ‘make’ a church. 79 See Blumenthal, Controversy, 165 on Manegold of Lautenbach. 80 Published February 1111. The resulting violence in Rome meant that Henry V never needed to extricate himself from the plan and got, temporarily, a virtually unconditional surrender of investitures from 81 Paschal II. See esp. Wilks, ‘Ecclesiastica and Regalia’, 69–85. Classen, ‘Wormser Konkordat’. 78

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and by secular men, such as are estates and lands and all regalia, although they have passed into ius divinum, are called secular things because granted by secular men.82

Everything conveyed by emperors would revert to imperial iura if not renewed (even though they had indeed been given to God and had ‘passed into ius divinum’), because no emperor could give away for ever what would belong to his successors.83 The later author of an ‘orthodox defence’ of the emperor argued briefly and less eccentrically that investiture by king or emperor with ring and staff conveyed royal protection and confirmation of the church’s ius in its secular, temporal, or corporeal things.84 Sigbert of Gembloux in his ‘letter against pope Paschal’ (1103) declared that clergy supporting the emperor were only doing their duty, since the Church had earthly possessions per iura regum, by the laws of kings; deploying Augustine’s interpretation of the scriptural injunction to ‘honour the king’ (1 Peter 2: 17) much as Hincmar had done (that is, to argue that the sacrosanctity of church property did not exclude royal rights over it or responsibility for it); and he quotes Ambrose: ‘If you have riches, you are obliged to Caesar’, and ‘If you wish to owe nothing to any earthly king, give up everything and follow Christ’.85 In his later treatise De investitura episcoporum, rather than distinguishing within temporalities between endowments and regalia, royal things, he identifies all temporalities as regalia.86 From this ‘it follows that the king, who is one among the people, and head of the people,87 should invest and enthrone the bishop, and should know to whom he has entrusted his city against enemy invasion’ in transferring public rights to the bishopric. From a bishop without wealth or power there would be no need for homage. This was what justified investiture by the emperor; in investing with ring and staff he was giving the temporal possessions only, not the spiritual office; the symbols had a double meaning and therefore should be given twice, by the emperor for temporalities and (at the consecration) taken from the altar for the pastoral care.88 Ivo of Chartres had already similarly based the royal right to confer temporalities on Augustine’s principle of their belonging to iura humana for which the king alone was responsible as caput populi. Both Ivo and Sigbert saw this as covering all temporal possessions, including donations by ‘devout laity’; but 82 De scismate Hildebrandi (Libelli, I. 529–67, at 564–5); deploying the usual distinction between spiritualities and temporalities though calling the latter ‘secularia’. See Benson, Bishop-Elect, 225–8. 83 On Guy’s misleading implication that investiture happened at a change of emperor see Scharnagl, 84 Orthodoxa defensio imperialis (Libelli, II. 534–42; c.1111), c. 5. Begriff, 51. 85 As summarized by J. Beumann, Sigbert von Gembloux, 102–3, 120–1, 139–40. 86 Tractatus de investitura episcoporum (Libelli, II. 498–504, at 502); for Sigbert as author see Beumann, 87 From Augustine, commentary on St John’s gospel. op. cit. 88 Tractatus, p. 501. This double investiture was already sometimes practised (see Humbert’s criticism, Libri tres, iii. 6).

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whereas Sigbert made temporalities and regalia synonymous,89 these definitions were not important for Ivo, who in any case saw nothing intolerable in investiture by whatever rites were customary, provided that the ruler himself saw it as standing only for temporalities.90 For strict Gregorians, however, this view of all possessions as held under ‘human law’ or ‘the laws of kings’ was not compatible with and certainly could not outweigh the sacrosanct and inalienable character of a church’s endowments;91 they continued to reject any dependence on the ruler for a new bishop’s acquisition of temporalities.92 At the same time kings could not possibly give up all claim to dispose of these (sometimes vast) complexes of wealth and power, or at the very least to require undertakings of fidelity from their holders. Any compromise had to be a fudge, allowing the ruler merely some role in granting the temporalities, with a less religiously charged symbolism. But neither the controversy nor its ending was centred on churches as property. The Gregorians, having the best of the argument logically (since most men on both sides shared basic assumptions about the Church’s mission), did not need to make much out of accusing their opponents of regarding churches as property. And imperial and royal partisans did not make such a claim any part of their formal case. Guy of Ferrara, after arguing that ‘worldly things’ needed to be regularly regranted, said it had been conceded by popes that emperors ‘should have the investitures of churches—I do not say of the consecrated walls and altars, which are not theirs, but of ecclesiastical possessions’.93 So he looked glancingly at the possibility of the emperor owning the actual churches, only to deny it. If his explicit inclusion of other people’s donations under the emperor’s power might be seen as ‘a late manifestation of Eigenkirche thinking’,94 to exclude the church building and altars would exclude the core of the whole ‘owned’ complex, the very thing that held it all together; arguably Guy was nearer to rejecting ‘proprietary church’ ideas than to clinging to them. His case for the king being able to regrant other men’s donations was not that they were pertinences of a church belonging to the king, but that all these things were ‘secular’ because given by seculars, and therefore (he implies) under the secular power’s 89 See Beumann, op. cit., 140 and n. 584. It will have been regalia in this wide sense that Henry V wished to be seen as conferring. 90 Ivo to Hugh abp. of Lyons, 1097 (Libelli, II. 645): whether by hand, nod, word, rod, ‘what does it matter, provided that kings do not regard themselves as granting anything spiritual . . . ?’ 91 Placidus, De honore, cc. 56, 143, 152; and esp. 151, against counting ‘duchies, marches, counties, advocacies, mints, cities and castles, villae and rura’ as regalia for the emperor to bestow: great things as well as small are offerings and therefore sacrosanct. 92 See Benson, Bishop-Elect, 247–50. This did not mean rejecting the obligation to serve the king: see Tellenbach, Church in W. Europe, 283 (and below, p. 919 note 95). 93 De scismate Hildebrandi, ii (p. 565), referring to the forged papal privileges (above, note 37). 94 Ibid. 564 (omnia quae a mundi principibus et secularibus hominibus aecclesiis conceduntur); Scharnagl, Begriff, 51–2.

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protection. Nor does he see the king’s action as granting the bishopric in benefice, but as confirming past donations to the church. In the last resort, however, Guy falls back on the king’s right to appoint bishops because of his anointed status, rather than invest them because of his secular jurisdiction over all property.95 Much later, a supporter of Henry I in England— probably Gerald archbishop of York, before his change of heart—tried to rebut the papal case by reviving the idea of the king as no mere layman96 (an idea by now not widely or wholeheartedly held even by anti-Gregorians).97 For this the position of lords of churches in general could go hang; the king-priest idea would neither help nor be helped by any argument for the proprietary church. For those more central defenders of the lay power who made no claim that it could confer the spiritual office, the arguments for lay investiture or (more important) for a role in choosing the office-holders had to be more ‘public’ than any claim to proprietary lordship. The actual agreements reached in 1107 for England (and in practice around the same time for France), and in 1122 at Worms for the Empire, did not deal in ideas but in practices that both sides, weary of schism, could accept.98 With variations, they left the lay ruler without the right of investing with ring and pastoral staff, but able in one form or other (in Germany, by the sceptre) to give possession of the temporalities or those of them counting as regalia, receiving homage and fidelity oath for this in England at least, while in the Empire ‘whatever is due by right for these things’ evidently means the same.99 In effect, the outside lordship of rulers and others over greater churches or their prelates was recognized, in terms that we may call broadly ‘feudal’;100 though its limits and its theoretical basis were inevitably left fuzzy, with room for trouble and dispute.101 The question of lower churches was left outstanding.

24.ii. Donations of churches and the impact of Gregorian ideas Twelfth-century reforming bishops evidently still expected lords to offer them candidates when lower churches fell vacant, and perhaps normally allowed lords 95 De scismate, 566; Scharnagl, op. cit., 52–3. Placidus refers to the argument that a king’s anointing qualified him to invest with churches, and rebuts its biblical foundation (De honore, c. 118). 96 See Cantor, Church, Kingship and Lay Investiture, 172–97 on the Anonymous tracts, esp. 190–7 on those relevant here, with quotations, 191–3 and nn. 97 This is not to say that kingship had been or ever could be completely desacralized (see Tellenbach, Church in W. Europe, 350 and n. 8); but kings were now seen as laity even though anointed and ruling by 98 God’s grace. See Benson, Bishop-Elect, 303–5. 99 Classen, ‘Wormser Konkordat’, 412, 420–2 and n. 50, 423–5; Blumenthal, Controversy, 157–9, 165–73. 100 Classen, op. cit., 426–31. 101 Ibid., 431–45. Gerhoh of Reichersberg bitterly criticized the compromise (see Benson, op. cit., 307–13).

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to put the priests in physical possession of the building and glebe. Rather than challenging these ancient rights, reforming bishops urged lay lords to give their churches away to greater churches, assuming, for the most part, their at least partial competence to do so. Nonetheless, ideas were shifting. In the past, what a lord was doing wrong in diverting or appropriating endowments and revenues was not, to general educated opinion, that he treated church and land as his property, but that he did this without respecting the constraints implied by what the church’s endowments or offerings were for, or by its belonging at another level to a saint and indeed to God. Now these constraints were beginning to be seen by leading reformers as incompatible with lay lordship itself. Evidence for the influence of this emerging principle, among diocesan bishops, monks, and the pious laity, has to be sought mainly in the transfer of churches out of lay lordship into that of greater churches; it will be argued here that this evidence only seldom implies a total ‘Gregorian’ rejection of lay lordship. Much work on the charter material, especially in France, has aimed to establish whether the chronology of lay lords’ donations of churches fits the thesis of the impact of Gregorian reform, whether other evidence of their motivation supports this,1 and for Cluny and its dependencies in particular, how the evidence bears on Cluny’s contribution or commitment to Gregorian reform.2 The transfer of churches to monasteries and bishoprics was already a trickle in the eighth century, increased in the ninth, and (taken over all) became a steady flow in the tenth and eleventh. But most studies show a summit during the later eleventh century, the flow thereafter slowing or stopping (in some dioceses having almost eliminated lay lordship or patronage, at least of parish churches). This pattern could hardly not be due in part to the Gregorian reform, but there are other factors: monasteries were flourishing (their religious prestige attracting donations, their economic wealth promoting purchases, of churches as of other property); the lay nobility needed ready money, not least for crusading. Relevant questions include whether there were significant changes in the proportion of churches to other property,3 or of sales to donations (itself a tricky distinction). 1 e.g. (from 1944 to 1981) Fliche, ‘Premiers re´sultats’; Mollat, ‘Restitution’; Che´deville, ‘Restitutions, Saint-Vincent du Mans’; Devailly, ‘Restitutions, Bretagne et Berry’; id., ‘Une enque`te en cours, Bretagne’; id., Le Berry, 250–68; Chevalier, ‘Restitutions, dioc. de Tours’; Aubrun, Limoges, 183–93. For Italy, Dormeier, Monte Cassino, 24–52, 58–62, 81–8 (more general), 95–106; Feller, Les Abruzzes, 819–23. For Spain, Orlandis, ‘Los laicos’, 270–4, 277–85; Mattoso, Monachisme, graph no. 2 (dioc. of Oporto). 2 Schreiber, Gesamm. Abh., I. 92, 337–42; Mager, ‘Verha¨ltnis der Cluniacenser zum EKnwesen’; Fechter, Cluny, Adel, 20–5; comment by Tellenbach, ‘Reformmo¨nchtum und die Laien’, 395–9. On the historiography and for further bibliography, Cowdrey, Cluniacs, pp. xiii–xix and nn. 3 Mager, op. cit., 216, table: for Cluny the proportion of churches to other benefactions did increase in the 11th c., esp. its second half. But (pending the completion of the Mu¨nster–Dijon enterprise, and Dr Hillebrandt’s forthcoming book) charter dates narrower than abbot Hugh’s abbatiate (1049–1109) are scarce.

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The activity of individual bishops in getting churches from the laity is one indication that reforming ideas were at work, although the efforts of the most energetic seem mainly for the benefit of their own cathedral church;4 others may want to benefit particular monasteries, or to assert their own authority, rather than to eliminate lay rights. There is a difference between purposefully coaxing or threatening the laity into giving up churches, and allowing monasteries to acquire churches where the point may be to get a foothold for diocesan authority in what would have happened anyhow. In the later eleventh century the bishops’ authority was safeguarded by making their consent necessary for such acquisitions. The legatine council at Poitiers in 1078 required the bishop’s consent for ‘abbots, monks, and canons’ to acquire churches ‘that they have never had’ (while the priest should ‘answer to the bishop for the cure of souls’, a more useful idea than that the ‘altar’ belonged to the bishop); and a Roman decree that year forbade abbots to hold tithes and other revenues ‘which belong to the bishops according to canon law’ without the bishop’s consent.5 These rules were brought together at Melfi in 1089, when Urban II made the bishop’s consent necessary for a layman to give tithes, churches, or any church property to monks or canons.6 Meanwhile investiture decrees forbidding reception of a church ‘from a lay hand’ would, strictly interpreted, prevent monasteries accepting lay donations of churches at all (a point that Anselm of Canterbury raised with Paschal II).7 There are two separate ideas in all this overlapping legislation, that the fate of churches in his diocese should be in a bishop’s control, and that laymen had no power to give churches.8 Bishops’ consent to the donation of churches was very frequent by the late eleventh century;9 sometimes with some expression of approval of the monks’ success in getting it given them.10 Alternatively it might be given by the bishop as well as by its lords: or rather, be so represented.11 There might be little or no real 4

e.g. Hugh I of Grenoble (1080–1132), Hildebert of Le Mans (1097–1125), Ulger of Angers (1125–48). Poitiers c. 6, Rome (1078) c. 9 (above, pp. 852 note 7, 828 note 35). Melfi c. 5 (Mansi, XX. 723), repeated at Rome 1099. See Constable, Tithes, 90–1; id., ‘Monastic Possession’, 320–1; Violante, ‘Monachesimo’, 38–43 (but not distinguishing decrees that may be concerned only with investiture). 7 Anselmi Opera, letter no. 223 (the pope’s reply, probably 1102), at pp. 126–7: ‘whether a bishop or abbot may accept from the hand of lay people churches that they have in their dominium, since they donate them not to a person but to a bishopric or abbey’. For the same ambiguity see Westminster 1125 c. 4 (C&S I no. 130, p. 789); Rouen 1128 (legatine) was more clearly not about investiture. 8 Paschal II’s answer to Anselm’s question made both points (see below, at note 30). 9 e.g. (at random, between 1088 and early 12th c.) St-Cyprien no. 283, Ange´ly nos. 220, 195, 212, Cluny no. 3656, St-Pe`re, 534–6. Apparent pre-Gregorian instances probably always have a special explanation, e.g. St-Maixent no. 95 (1041) was virtually founding a monastery. 10 e.g. Vendoˆme no. 448 (1124): bp. Rainald II of Angers confirms ‘certain churches of our diocese, which you have recalled from the hand of laymen to ecclesiastical liberty’. 11 The lay donation (recorded in their own charter, or the bishop’s, or a cartulary note) might precede the bishop’s donation by a year or more (e.g. Ange´ly nos. 244, 317; St-Gondon no. 28 with no. 24), or (rarely) follow it (St-Maixent nos. 172 with 197), but was usually about the same time (e.g. Gellone no. 155 with nos. 446–8, 450–2, 460–1; Uzerche nos. 33–4; St-Maixent nos. 158, 182 (with no. 292), 244; St-Aubin no. 174; St-Martin-des-Champs nos. 183–5. 5

6

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difference between consent and participation, especially when lord and bishop acted on the same occasion; though a bishop’s claim to give or have given it comes closer to invoking episcopal potestas in all churches, or at least the bishop’s function of giving the altar or the cure of souls. Sometimes the bishop’s donation is evidently a real one because the church was originally episcopal, though requiring a layman’s pious renunciation to make it effective.12 Sometimes, at the other extreme, the bishop’s ‘giving’ of churches or altars seems merely authorizing their past possession; or their potential acquisition, as when in 1111 John bishop of Orleans ‘donates’ to Saint-Gondon two parish churches ‘lately bound to the lordships of secular men’, and urges the monks to strive ‘to snatch and liberate them from the hands of secular men’—in other words to get them donated by their owners.13 Most cases fall between these extremes, and the record is often equivocal. In 1099, for instance, Ansellus bishop of Beauvais’s notice of Saint-Martin-des-Champs’s acquisition of an ‘altar’ (here perhaps meaning the church) has Ralph of Pontoise, having learnt that the laity ought not to possess altars, give it ‘by our concession’ to the monastery; but Ralph and his family had in fact given it a fortnight earlier, as a gift for his wife’s burial, with no mention of the bishop’s consent.14 The bishop’s charter was given at Beauvais in the presence only of clergy, while from the family’s point of view (and probably the monks’) they had made an independent donation for their own purposes of something of their own. A stronger assertion of the bishop’s authority and of the lay lord’s incapacity was for the lord to surrender the church into the hands of the bishop, who then gave it to the monastery; there are examples from most parts of France,15 mostly from late eleventh century onwards, but including—if the charter is genuine—a surprisingly early and explicit case from Nantes in 1064, when bishop Quiriac is represented as compelling the nuns of Ronceray to renounce, and receive from his hands, a church that they had ‘by gift of a lay person’ or ‘secular power’.16 12

e.g. (the layman’s tenure probably arising from a long-past bishop’s benefice) St-Cyprien nos. 150, 152, 154. 13 St-Gondon no. 29. Cf. Bourbonnais no. 8 (1084), abp. Richard for Saint-Ursin, Bourges, ‘giving’ all the churches they can acquire (listing 15) ‘provided they are not the property of another church’. 14 St-Martin-des-Champs nos. 86, 87. 15 A good, explicit example is St-Pe`re, 511–12 (1116–29, the bishop’s charter); cf. St-Sernin, Toulouse no. 61 (1080–98); Tre´port no. 6 (1107); Bourbonnais nos. 12, 13 (1106, 1108). By contrast Bourbonnais no. 11 (1100), Saint-Pourçain’s record of acquiring a church by a bishop’s real donation, had to emphasize the bishop’s and canons’ capacity to give it. 16 See Ziezulewski, ‘Airard’, 439–40, linking Quiriac’s principles here with his predecessor Airard’s. But the charter (Ronceray no. 429) sounds unlikely for the 1060s, even in a pocket of reform; and there is a context for its possible forgery in the decades-long defence of Ronceray’s right to the church against the monastery of Luçon (ibid. nos. 433–8). Ziezulewski’s view that the bishop’s mediation of such donations was already required in 1059 is unconvincing (Rome 1059 c. 6 is concerned with granting churches to individual clerks or priests); the first relevant legislation seems to be Westminster 1102 c. 22 (C&S I no. 113, p. 677). The Ronceray charter has Quiriac claim to be following Airard’s example, but Airard’s ‘mediating’ seems to be mainly of tithes, etc. (below, note 40).

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But (here again) there may often have been little difference between the bishop consenting or cooperating and the donation being made through him,17 especially when the lay donor also made (later or earlier) a direct traditio to the monastery.18 What was done probably depended often on the donor’s status; in 1128 it was only after consulting the pope that count Theobald of Blois was prepared to fall in with the procedure of donation via the bishop.19 Often a bishop sought the surrender of a church or an altar because it was known or believed to have once been the bishopric’s or cathedral’s property, ‘long unjustly lost’, or ‘held unjustly’ by the donors and their ancestors. When Ulger bishop of Angers (1125–48) recovered several collegiate churches, he absolved the donors of one of these from guilt incurred in holding its abbacy;20 but for the rest the wrong implied is simply that of holding what belonged to the bishopric or chapter, seen as the sin of usurping church property.21 Another collegiate church in Angers had been recovered a century earlier, by bishop Hubert, from the lay family that held its abbacy; Hubert’s successor Eusebius (1047–82), relating this, describes him as ‘deploring the subjection of church possessions to lay rapacity’;22 these may be Eusebius’s sentiments rather than Hubert’s, but they are more traditional than Gregorian; Hubert could well have used such words. Recovering episcopal churches usually meant getting back what former bishops (or secularizing rulers)23 had granted in benefice. Philip bishop of Troyes (1083–1108) recovered—and gave to Molesme, at his brother’s request—a church that his brother held in fief from Troyes; commenting in his preamble that ‘it is a very great wrong (nefas) for ecclesiastical possessions to come into the hands of laymen, especially fighting men’.24 The wrong here is not the newly identified one of laymen claiming lordship of churches, but the old one of the alienation to laymen of a higher church’s possessions. This is marked in Provence, where many churches, some once episcopal, some monastic, had come into the hands of laymen. Peter III, archbishop of Aix, 17

The lay donation to the bishop is often conditional on his passing it on to the monastery, e.g. Cluny nos. 3661, 3732; ibid. no. 3445 (originally to Saint-Pe`re); Molesme no. ii. 588 (the last two in terms of a ritual ‘divesting’ and ‘reinvesting’). See Barth, Hildebert, 128–33, 146, 180–1, 191–4; Brett, Eng. Church, 142–4. 18 Preceding the transfer to and by the bishop (Cluny no. 3445) or following it (1117, St-Pe`re, 565; the family came to the monastery and ‘granted the donum of the church that the bishop had made’). 19 20 Barth, Hildebert, 192–5. Cf. Tre´port no. 12 (count of Eu). Above, p. 327. 21 Above, pp. 326–7. Cf. St-Cyprien no. 152 (1086; with nos. 150, 153–4); Liber albus Cenom. no. 109 (c.1111). Sometimes it was the monastery’s property that the bishop helped them recover (see Barth, Hildebert, 184; Che´deville, ‘Restitutions’, 210). It is, however, often unclear whether a church was ‘possessed unjustly’ because it had belonged to the bishopric or monastery, or because possessing it at all was wrong. 22 Above, p. 326. 23 Maˆcon no. 536 (1096–1124), recovery of a church ‘which was of the ius’ of St Vincent ‘from lay people who had held it for a long time under the casamentum of a tyrannical power’. 24 Molesme no. i. 144.

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records in 1093 that he has handed over to abbot Richard and the monks of SaintVictor certain churches which they have been able—when he had failed—to rescue from lay power (the monks evidently already have the churches, but the archbishop nonetheless ‘conveys, grants, and confirms’ them).25 He also confirms certain churches known to have been given ‘of old’ to Saint-Victor by archbishop Pons; one of them had been removed by simony and ‘held in a secular manner by irreligious clerks’ (perhaps secular clergy put in by an archbishop overriding the monks’ rights), but recently restored to Saint-Victor by the zeal of certain lay nobles.26 In 1098 Augerius bishop of Riez made a similar grant, confirming the monks’ possession of churches in his diocese and undertaking to help them recover others; one church, however, he had himself previously restored to the monastery, and of this he speaks differently: ‘I give it, or rather (since it belonged of old to Saint-Victor) I give it back and relinquish it.’27 In such cases, verbs such as reddere have their straightforward meaning of restoring things to their rightful proprietors. But the wrong done was obviously heightened when it was believed that laymen should not have churches at all. Laymen holding a church belonging to Maˆcon are described as surrendering it ‘fearing the decree of the council of Clermont and thinking of the peril to their souls’;28 in the absence of any decree at Clermont (1095) about episcopal property held in benefice, this must refer to the clause forbidding lay people to ‘retain altars or churches for themselves any longer’.29 So words of restitution may sometimes reflect the idea that certain things, regardless of their history, could not properly be in lay hands and are being ‘returned’ to clergy or monks as their fitting proprietors. French historians have indeed conventionally called all transfers of churches to bishoprics or monasteries in this period ‘restitutions’, as if all fell under a general principle that giving them up was giving them back to the Church. One might expect to find this principle expressed in terms of the primitive unity of diocesan property, or at least of the bishop’s potestas over all churches and church property in his diocese. Paschal II did deploy this idea in writing to Anselm: a layman surrendering a church to the diocesan bishop is ‘not giving it but giving it back, since all churches in every diocese ought to be in the bishop’s potestas’.30 In the Midi, this antique vocabulary appears in a 1090 agreement between Godfrey bishop of Maguelone and William lord of Montpellier, in which William quitclaimed several churches to the bishop ‘to be freely in his and his 25

26 His predecessor Peter II had already done so in 1082 (ibid., no. 221). St-Victor no. 920. Ibid. no. 697 (cf. no. 619). 28 Maˆcon no. 536 (‘1096–1124’, probably late 1090s: anyhow too early to refer to Clermont 1130 c. 6 29 (below, p. 885). LL c. 20 (above, pp. 828 and note 37). 30 Above, note 7. 27

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successors’ potestas and ordinatio’.31 But had the idea been dominant—seeing episcopal potestas in Prudentius’s rather than Hincmar’s sense32—it should have driven an all-out effort to reconstitute the wealth of the bishoprics as a matter of principle. Although that may apply to some dioceses,33 in general it was to monasteries that churches were given, with the bishops’ acquiescence and often their help.34 If churches of the bishopric’s property had slipped into lay hands they ought to be recovered, but some could then best be used for pious or peacemaking donations;35 getting and keeping churches as episcopal property was no longer essential for exercising authority over them. If, occasionally, a bishop used the leverage of a church’s consecration to make the founders renounce lordship, this too might be for a monastery’s benefit.36 Bishops who tried to persuade the laity that they should not ‘have’ churches may sometimes have been responding to mid-century legislation intended to condemn those who physically occupied a church’s houses and barns and enjoyed its lands and revenues. What the laity were being pressed to give up was often their hold on offerings, tithes, or church lands (though they might choose to do this by giving up the church itself); eleventh-century bishops’ efforts to get these surrendered do not by themselves amount to rejecting lay lordship of churches. Back in 1022, Pons archbishop of Arles gave a church to Saint-Victor because ‘laymen possessed it, and this displeased me’;37 but he went on to say that it seemed ‘safer that servants of God rather than laymen should possess sanctuary land (terra sanctuaria)’; in the Provençal context it is likely that the place had fallen out of ecclesiastical use altogether, and that laymen’s occupation of consecrated ground, not their lordship over a working church, was what Pons objected to.38 31 Liber instrumentorum memorialium: Cart. des Guillems de Montpellier, ed. A. Germain (Montpellier, 1884–6), no. 40. Cf. above, p. 711, from Auvergne. 32 This was not a period that gave priority to such arguments (see Constable, Tithes, 87–8 on a N. Italian tithe dispute, 1060). 33 See Bligny, L’ E´glise, 96–116 on Grenoble (though bp. Hugh did give churches to monasteries, ibid. 108–9). 34 An instance is bp. Quiriac’s grant c.1070 (Gallia Christiana, XIV. 173–4) of several churches of Nantes’s to a monastery already holding them, with advance consent to any future lay donations, except those coming originally from Nantes’s possessions for which the bishop’s and canons’ consent must be sought. This does not claim (as Barth took it, Hildebert, 189) that all churches in the diocese belonged to the bishopric. 35 e.g. 1112, Couture nos. 33–4, settling a long dispute about six churches, originally Le Mans’s, which the monastery had accepted from laymen. 36 See below, at note 41. In Spain it might be for future incumbents’ benefit: above, p. 653 at note 17, and more obscurely PMHD no. 514 (1074; the textum scripture donationis that the founder makes, without which the bishop ‘would not come’, donates the endowments to the church, not the church to the bishop). 37 St-Victor no. 208 (unidentified church of ‘St Hermes’). 38 Cf. in Poitou, 1029, bp. Isembert’s partially rhyming notice (Cluny no. 2816) on the church at Mulgon being subjected to Cluny by viscount Cadelo and his son (in semet reversi, in bonum conversi, pio affectu, humili vultu): what they have repented seems to be their treatment of the church, or perhaps having reneged on a plan to give it to Cluny (ibid. no. 2744).

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In Navarre in the same year, 1022, it was not a bishop but king Sancho who set under the monastery of Leire places that a lay conventus held in its dominium, where he had decided to ‘root out the habitation of seculars and gather a conventus of servants of Christ’; here too the point seems to be that places dedicated to religious life are actually occupied by laity.39 Airard bishop of Nantes—a reformer from Rome—spoke in 1050 (probably) of those ‘usurping the fruits of churches and the tithes and offerings of altars’, of a decree of pope Leo IX that the laity should give these up to the ministers of churches, and of his own efforts to enforce this, so that ‘many gave back to me (reddiderunt) all the tithes and offerings of churches and altars that they held’ (of which he now passes Roald’s on to Marmoutier): not, from what he says, the churches themselves.40 Richard archbishop of Bourges (1071–93) is represented, in an arguably forged charter, as refusing to consecrate a new altar in a parish church ‘until the laity who were sharers in the offerings . . . promised to take nothing further from it’; even if the charter is acceptable, Richard’s objection here was not especially ‘Gregorian’ (though he may indeed have come to Bourges from Hildebrand’s circle in Rome).41 Naturally such efforts remained necessary long after the campaign began for the surrender of churches themselves,42 if only because of the fragmentation of churches and tithes in the last days of the proprietary church. Bishops still wrote of recovering ‘altars’, where altare may be merely a variant for ecclesia, but may mean specifically the office of priest (or control of this) and the pastoral revenues, as (probably) when Rainald archbishop of Rheims wrote in 1091 of his efforts ‘that altars that the negligence of our predecessors granted into the ius of lay people should be recalled at any opportunity to ecclesiastical persons and, emancipated from unjust servitude to secular men, be granted to servants of God according to canonical sanction’; the ‘violent usurpation of certain powerful men had occupied’ the altar in question, until he ‘commanded . . . that they restore it to us’.43 It was mostly altars, altar revenues, priest’s portions, and so on 39

Orlandis (‘Los laicos’, 273–5) defends the authenticity of this passage. Cf. the same king’s charter (1032, Irache no. 5) requiring a small monastery to go eventually ‘not to secular knights but to sanctuaries of God’. 40 Morice, Me´moires, I. 402–3. Roald’s own donation charter (above, p. 564: direct to Marmoutier, and not mentioning the bishop) was indeed of ‘churches’ as well as ‘altars and tithes’, but Airard’s words refer unambiguously to people giving up the latter, ‘among them Roald’ who ‘left it to my judgment what I would do with them . . . and I gave them all to St Martin’. Ziezulewski takes broadly this view (‘Airard’, 436–8, 441–2) but emphasizing ‘properties’ rather than revenues. The church of Be´re´ which Airard goes on to concede to the monks was one they had built on episcopal land wrongfully given them by a local lord. 41 Chapelle-Aude no. 21. For the charter as a forgery for a dispute begun in 1113 see Van de Kieft, E´tude (1960), esp. 27–8, 33–4, 41–3 (text in app., no. 5); Devailly, Berry (1973), 254 and n. 3, defends it effectively, however. See also below, note 90. 42 e.g. Maˆcon nos. 531 (with 566), 533–5, 541, late 11th c.; cf. Barth, Hildebert, 201–4 on William bp. of Le 43 Cluny no. 3661 (See index: Tours-sur-Marne); see Mager, Verha¨ltnis, 209–10. Mans (1144–87).

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that (between 1115 and 1121) Philip bishop of Troyes spoke of ‘wresting away’ from the laity who ‘held them unjustly’, to give to Montier-en-Der.44 These were oldfashioned but perennial issues. It may be a variant on such objections when bishop Ulger records that two men have given to Angers whatever they had in the church of Andard, ‘that is the right, if so it may be called, of appointing the priest, and the firstfruits’; and that a knight, fallen ill, gave ‘whatever of ius and potestas he said he had’ in the church of Combreé, here too putting in a priest and taking firstfruits.45 When, as here, what laymen give up is particular functions or revenues rather than the church itself, these might be all that they had in the church (perhaps, regionally, a junioratus).46 Alternatively, appointing the priest and taking the firstfruits may be all that the bishop has managed to extract from them, even well on into the twelfth century. At Andard the donors agreed to go on giving the priest his allowance (modiatio), which points to their still having tithes or glebe. This was explicit for Crosmie`res, where a family group gave bishop Ulger the appointment and removal of the priest, and disposal of firstfruits and other things belonging to the priest’s part, but kept tithes and lands unchallenged: ‘the bishops would not attack anything of theirs, neither tithe nor land nor any possession of laymen’ (perhaps meaning anything held from the family by other laity).47 As late as 1150–1 bishop William of Le Mans’s notice about a couple and their eight sons ‘giving up into our hand the church of Ancinnes’ had to spell out the lords’ shares of tithes and offerings as going with it;48 and the reasons given—the anathema on ‘laymen who put priests into churches by their own presumption, and do not blush to take tithes and other ecclesiastical benefices for their own uses’—would have been understood in Charlemagne’s time. It would, however, be artificial, by the mid-twelfth century, to distinguish such objections from condemning the proprietary church itself: that (earlier) it need not imply this does not prevent its normally doing so later; in twelfth-century reforming legislation the proprietary church is often condemned for or even defined by its consequences.49 And some bishops’ charters or notices from the later eleventh century do more-or-less clearly condemn lay possession of or lordship over churches themselves. William bishop of Clermont, giving to SaintPourçain a church surrendered to Clermont by its lay owners, comments that Urban II’s excommunications have led ‘many to give up into the hands of their bishops the churches and ecclesiastical property that they had acquired simoniacally or unjustly’.50 This, however, is ambiguous: did it simply qualify the objection to lay lordship, or did it imply (either rhetorically or legalistically) that 44 47 50

45 Montier-en-Der nos. 63–4, 66, 68. Angers nos. 174–5, 217. 48 Angers nos. 141, 168. Liber Alb. Cenom. nos. 129, 130. c.1100, Bourbonnais no. 11.

49

46 See index: jundreagium. See 3rd Lateran (1179), c. 14.

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lay lordship was by nature unjust and simoniac?51 Some later statements are clearer. At Chartres, bishop Geoffrey de Le`ves records (1116–29) that a lay lord surrendering a church to be given to Saint-Pe`re asked to be absolved ‘for having long possessed it against God and against the salvation of his soul’.52 In 1140 Hugh archbishop of Rouen declared to Saint-Wandrille that he had won certain churches and chapels for them, ‘in past times harassed by hereditary oppression’; the clerk William who had occupied them (incombebat) ‘by the accursed authority of his inheritance’, finally confounded by the authority of the canons and the anathema of popes, ‘restored the churches into our hand’ and earned absolution by repenting of what he had ‘perversely held’.53 Even so, it remained not always clear whether what was condemned was lordship or possession: that is, at one extreme the capacity only to send a candidate to the bishop and invest him somehow, or to give this capacity away; at the other, the disposal of altar revenues, unrestricted appointment of the priest, direct occupation of land and buildings (around 1100, the old quotation from Psalm 82 was used in Normandy about physical occupation by a priest’s widow and heirs, and in Burgundy about the donor’s former grant of a third of a tithe to a layman).54 Looking at the legislation to which the bishops seem to be responding—not so much the investiture decrees as Gregory VII’s warning to laymen in 1078 against holding churches and tithes, and Urban II’s decree at Clermont in 1095 forbidding lay people to hold altars or churches—does not help since the legislation is itself ambiguous in the same way.55 However, some bishops’ documents include reservations about donors’ entitlement to what they are giving (a clerk ‘of whose ius and patrimony the church was, according to the former custom of the world’; a couple giving ‘whatever they had, if they had anything’ in a church),56 which unaggressively but unambiguously imply that their lordship itself is in doubt. And in the last resort, making the bishop the intermediary for donations to a monastery (interchangeable with other procedures though this may have been, or done merely to keep the monks’ title on the right side of the law) implied that the would-be donor had something to renounce but arguably nothing to give.57 51 As is implied by the frequent rhetoric that spoke of monks ‘snatching’ (extorquere, eripere, etc.) from the hands of laymen, or even ‘from the jaws of wolves’ (1130, Cormery no. 59), things that the laity had in fact donated. 52 St-Pe`re, 511–12. Cf. St-Martin-des-Champs no. 171 (1123–4), bp. Peter of Beauvais. 53 St-Wandrille no. 70 (1140). But William may have been heir to married priests rather than lay lords. 54 55 Tre´port no. 4 (1101); Maˆcon no. 563. Above, pp. 852–4. 56 St-Maixent no. 175 (Peter II, bp. of Poitiers, around 1090); Angers no. 217 (bp. Ulger); cf. St-Martin-desChamps no. 166 (Gilbert bp. of Paris ‘wishing . . . to free ecclesiastical things from lay possession, if however it can be called possession’). 57 See Ziezulewski, ‘Airard’, 438 n. 31, on a Roman-law maxim that might underlie this (though perhaps it would hardly be needed).

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Much of our evidence for disapproval on principle of lay lordship or possession of churches thus comes from the wording of bishops’ charters or notices. But the words are not always reliably the bishops’ own: we depend mainly on cartulary copies or versions. And further evidence comes from the monks’ own accounts of how they acquired churches, or from the donors’ charters, or from cartulary summaries of donors’ charters in a monastic narrative, explicit or implicit. That a church was better not accepted straight from lay hands is sometimes represented as the monastery’s idea. In 1117, in a donor’s charter for Saint-Pe`re, Chartres, this is explicit: William of Islou has a moiety of a church and its revenues, but has often heard and at last understood ‘that laymen . . . hold ecclesiastical things unjustly and against the salvation of their souls’, so wants to donate it to the monks of Saint-Pe`re for his own and his family’s souls. But they have refused, on the grounds that they could not lawfully accept it from him, or he give it to them. They have advised him to go to the bishop and surrender the moiety to him, and ‘ask him to give it to them’. And so it was done, the bishop ‘investing’ the abbot in the presence of many (including the two brothers from whom William held it); later, William and his wife and sons came to the monastery and ‘granted the donum of the church that the bishop had made’.58 The chronicle of Affligem (written after 1122) relates that when a lady and her two sons offered the monks an altar, ‘we were afraid to accept a gift of God from the hand of lay persons’; so the donation was made through the bishop of Cambrai.59 It may usually be more a matter of safeguarding the donation than of strongly felt principle. It was more significant—because it bore on the monastery’s own status—when (according to Cıˆteaux’s foundation notice) Robert of Molesme declined to accept the church of Cıˆteaux itself from viscount Renard’s hands ‘because he was a layman’ and it was ‘of divine ius alone’.60 But the early Cistercian refusal to accept other churches at all was an objection to possessing things that St Benedict had never authorized: ‘churches, altars, offerings, burials, other men’s tithes’, certainly, but also ‘ovens, mills, villages, and peasants’;61 Robert’s or Stephen Harding’s aim was poverty and freedom from the world, rather than criticism of the proprietary church. As for the donors’ views, their charters will (by this time) normally have been drafted for them by the beneficiaries or occasionally the bishop (except perhaps in the south, well provided with notaries); but we can take it that donors knew and approved the thoughts or sentiments attributed to them, and that these, read 58

St-Pe`re, 565. c. 19 (SS IX. 416). Cf. c. 20, on another church which the young count Robert gave them, but ‘had its altar given us by the bishop of Noyon as being a spiritual gift, although it was of his [Robert’s] ius’. 60 Cıˆteaux no. 23. ii. Renard and his wife gave the land to Robert and his companions by ‘legitimate donum’; but for the church, Renard renounced it rather than making a traditio. 61 Exordium parvum (ed. Guignard, Monuments primitifs), c. 15. 59

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aloud to their friends, relations, tenants, and lords, would be understood and with luck sympathetically received.62 Sometimes the donor may have dictated or suggested something in the charter, probably in the narrative explanation. But our perceptions depend on having an original charter (fairly unusual) or a reliable cartulary copy or prećis (hard to be sure of); much of the cartulary evidence is opaque, and may tell us only what the monks thought, and thought that their lay benefactors ought to think; or merely what it was conventional to say. There will also have been some later editing of cartulary entries. However, not too much stress need be put on this, since if it had been common it would have led (unless the cartularist had an acute sense of historical plausibility) to Gregorian sentiments being attributed to donors (or indeed bishops) acting long before the Gregorian reform; and this does not seem to have happened, or not much. There are some oddities from tenth-century Cluny, in both lay and episcopal documents. In 929 a chapel (in which a number of people had an interest) was given to Cluny with the puzzling comment that ‘it seems entirely suitable . . . that that chapel (which has neither tithes nor anything for which a secular lord should be served) should belong to a monastery or monks rather than to secular domination’.63 Any idea that not having tithes qualified a church for freedom from lay lordship seems unlikely,64 whether for a post-Gregorian cartularist (in any case the charter survives also in a separate copy) or in a tenthcentury charter; it might mean rather that the gift was unalloyed by the drawback of tithes being appropriated by lay lords. There are one or two other passages, relevant to tithes rather than churches, which may be cartularist’s insertions, although too odd to have a straightforward ‘reform’ explanation.65 There are other, probably genuine pre-Gregorian comments, in lay as in episcopal charters, that have convincing pre-Gregorian explanations. Sometimes what is deplored is simply the usurpation or secularization of church property.66 The advice that in 1048 the priest Ralph claimed to have elicited from the bishop of Rennes, on how to leave his property (secular and ecclesiastical), was to give what was God’s to God, and this did indeed apply chiefly to his own church; but it was advice on what a church-owning priest could most fittingly give for his soul’s salvation (deployed in the charter to lead up to donation to the Holy Saviour’s 62

See Bull, Knightly Piety, 155–6; Innes, State, 31–3. Lay couple’s charter, Cluny no. 378 (Barive copy and cart. A); see above, p. 758. 64 Constable (‘Cluniac Tithes’, 592 and n. 5) took it to mean that the chapel was ‘treated as an allod’ because it had no tithes. 65 See above, p. 491 note 27, on Cluny no. 493; cf. also no. 373. See Constable, ‘Cluniac Tithes’, 591–2. 66 e.g. Angers no. 32 (1047–55): Aremburgis, with consent of husband and sons, gives her inherited church in traditional terms, except that the preamble deplores the present-day existence of ‘countless despoilers of God’s sanctuary and very few supporters of it’. 63

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church at Redon).67 When (occasionally) concern for a church’s future appears as the reason for giving it away, the emphasis is on its security and permanence, or on rescuing it from ruin; it usually goes with the intention of making it monastic, with freedom from lay lordship mentioned in that context if at all.68 As for giving away an existing monastery or collegiate church, perhaps serving family needs or enshrining valued relics, this was likely to need a more particular reason than giving any rural church; but the reason may be that it is ruined or deserted, or simply in need of reform, rather than that it ought not to be in its founders’ lordship at all. The sentiments attributed to the knight Manigenius in his charter of 1037, giving Saint-Cyr-le`s-Rennes to Saint-Julien of Tours, have the innocence of his pre-Gregorian world: I have built from its foundations a certain monastery, which had been almost completely destroyed by the passage of time. Having done this, I thought I should put servants of God there, in the monastic habit, to serve God and St Cyrus (who is revered there) and to pray for my and my relations’ souls and for my sons’ fortunate succession.

So he sent for abbot Richer of Saint-Julien to come and advise him, and it was settled that the monastery should be under the government of the abbots of Saint-Julien for ever. Then he endowed it, ‘and Warin bishop of Rennes, in whose presence this was done, seeing that I though a layman was so providing for myself in the life to come, not wishing to be left out of this act of alms’ gave a neighbouring field pro salute anime sue (the bishop thus represented as emulating the founder’s piety rather than authorizing anything).69 In a similar spirit of modest conservative piety a generation later is the donation in 1067–8 by Gervais of Chaˆteau-du-Loir of his church there to Marmoutier for a monastery, hoping for God’s mercy ‘if I can recall to their original state the things given to God by my elders for the use of his servants, but now abandoned and laid waste’.70 These same considerations appear repeatedly in Provence and the Midi, where former or prospective monasteries were being given to Saint-Victor and to Cluny under great reforming abbots (Isarn, Odilo) active long before reformers at Rome, and their successors who were friends and allies of Hildebrand before and during his pontificate without (it seems) sharing his eventual aim of ridding the Church of lay lordship. As for the donors (mostly counts and viscounts, with 67 Redon no. 294. To obviate any challenge Ralph has given all his other lands to his kinsmen; not implying any principled condemnation of lay lordship of churches. This is one of several instances cited not quite convincingly by Mollat (see following note). 68 Mollat’s citations (‘Restitution’, 402) for pre-Gregorian rejections of lay lordship are mostly of this 69 kind, e.g. Savigny nos. 635, 639 (c.1031, 1037). See index: Manigenius. 70 Cart. de Chaˆteau-du-Loir, ed. E. Valleé (Le Mans, 1905), no. 27 (with a traditional pious narratio: being committed to the life of earthly warfare, he cannot come to God by fasts and prayers, but wants to give something to those who do).

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bishops who were their brothers or uncles), their charters state their wish to restore ruined churches and renew monastic life in them, which they were evidently convinced was best done by giving them to the famous abbots whom they might have wished to patronize in any case.71 In 1032 the Baux-Rians family gave endowments for the rebuilding of Saint-Jean d’Esparron, ‘long since destroyed by the pagans’, now to be once more occupied by monks: ‘Thou, Lord, art just, and holy canons prescribe that where there has been a habitation of monks there should not be a habitation of laity’; it is lay occupation, not lay lordship, that the charter has them reject, with an old canon-law reference.72 In Navarre, where there was a cluster of donations of newly founded small monasteria to Irache, we find founders in 1052–4 excluding their ‘sons, daughters, and descent’ from any share in the church; and in 1066 a nobleman declaring of his and his wife’s foundation that ‘none of my sons or nepotes, nor anyone of my descent, is to say that it is his’.73 Neither of these condemns outside lordship, or lay lordship, as such;74 and in the former case at least, the exclusion follows immediately after specifying that monks and nuns are to ‘inhabit’ the monastery—suggesting that what the founders feared at a practical level was direct rule and occupation by their heirs. In 1060 the donors to Saint-Victor of the collegiate church at La Canourgue (Loze`re) described it as once renowned but now ‘so subject to the domination of laymen that married knights are provosts and deans there’ and traffic in its property:75 here too the abuse was not outside lordship but lay occupation and office-holding (by men who doubtless thought themselves real canons). So in donating monasteries or collegiate churches, pre-Gregorian expressions of remorse or disapproval were mostly for neglect or misuse. Otherwise (as for lesser churches) what was deplored could be wrongful possession: in Languedoc in 1062, two lay lords giving away their two (apparently collegiate) churches said they had been terrified by a decree from a council of Toulouse (1060–1) that no layman could be saved if he kept a ‘wrongly invaded’ church in his possession.76 And what either underlay abuse, or made possession wrongful, could be past simoniac dealings.77 Heightened anxiety about simony was coming into play in 71 e.g. HL V no. 267 (1064): Roger count of Carcassonne has been persuaded that his derelict monastery of Saint-Andre´, Agde, ought to be restored; he fears divine judgment, because the offerings of the faithful used (he claims) to support 300 monks and now only one; his best course is to give it to St Victor. 72 St-Victor no. 269 (referring to Chalcedon c. 24). Cf. St Hermes, above, note 37. All this was linked to 73 the Peace of God movement. Irache nos. 11, 38. 74 See above, pp. 835–6, 840, by implication perfecting one’s alms by renouncing family claims. 75 St-Victor no. 832. 76 HL V no. 262; male invasam might mean usurped as well as encroached on (see above, p. 828 note 39 for these lords’ response). 77 Donations variously emphasizing this include those of Canourgue to Saint-Victor, 1060 (above, note 75); viscount Ademar’s of Saint-Martial to Cluny, 1062 (Cluny no. 3383); count Bernard of Be´salu’s of SaintMartin of Lez to Saint-Pons of Thomie`res, 1070 (above, p. 389).

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the south from about the time of this apparently ferocious council; promoted by new and disruptive notions of what constituted simony (so that a traditional outlay on suitable prospects of episcopacy or abbacy for a younger son was now frowned on).78 In 1070 the important monastery of the Barcelona comital family, S. Maria de Ripoll, famous for its library and neither in ruin nor decline, was given to Saint-Victor by Bernard count of Be´salu as ‘wrongly possessed by simoniacs from the time of bishop Oliba’;79 the count with abbot Bernard’s help has ‘cleansed’ it from heretical contagion (that is, from simony seen as heresy) and expelled its ‘pseudo-abbot’ Miro, who had tried to get control simoniacally; the count now subjects it to Saint-Victor as the best safeguard against simony.80 Here and elsewhere there were some assertions of monastic freedom. But when, in Gascony in 1064, Heraclius bishop of Tarbes and Bernard count of Bigorre giving Saint-Lizier to Cluny in perpetuity ‘wish it to be free and absolved from all service both to our descendants and to any secular or ecclesiastical power’,81 this is not an acknowledgment that lordship over it was unlawful: it is nearer (as in the past) to making an absolute unqualified donation.82 By contrast, in Normandy about that time Maino of Fouge`res, giving a collegiate or once-collegiate church to Marmoutier, declared its original and existing freedom rather than decreeing it for the future: giving it as it had been founded, ‘involved in nobody’s sharing, burdened by no custom but free from all exaction, absolved from all outside domination, and clear of any future claim’. Yet he begins, ‘I give a certain church of my ius’, and duke William confirmed it as being ‘of his casamentum’; the point seems to be that nobody else has any possible claim, and presumably also that neither Maino and his family nor the duke will make any exactions.83 In Gregory VII’s time and even in and after Urban II’s, what (if anything) is recognized as wrong, in donors’ charters as in bishops’, is still more often than not nothing to do with Gregorian objections to churches being under lay lordship, but rather with a spreading responsiveness to largely traditional principles driven harder from mid-century by reforming popes. Sometimes—now as earlier—this was about simony,84 still a much more emotive issue than lay investiture and its implications. Often it was about lay possession of tithes or offerings, or of the 78 Above, pp. 307–8, on Wifred abp. of Narbonne. On the unrecorded council of Toulouse, MagnouNortier, Socie´te´, 462–3; in general, ibid. 509–16; Southern, Making, 118–24. 79 Distinguished abbot of Ripoll (and of Cuxa) from 1018, later also bishop of Vich, died 1047 (see 80 Southern, Making, 119–21). St-Victor no. 817; see P. Schmid, ‘Marseiller Kirchenstaat’, 185. 81 Cluny no. 3402. Cf. Bernard Tumapaler giving Saint-Mont to Cluny c.1055: ‘wishing the monastery to be free from the potestas of all lay rulers and all unrighteous men, and subject only to God and the apostles Peter and Paul and the place of Cluny’ (St-Mont no. 1; cf. no. 7). 82 Cf. some Italian foundation charters aiming at autonomy (above, pp. 398, 840–1). 83 ADNorm. no. 162 (c.1050–64; Savigny-le-Vieux, autonomous by c.1100, future head of the Savignac 84 order). Above, at notes 50–1.

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fevum presbiteratus.85 In Gascony in 1093 two brothers relinquished to Sore`ze whatever they had in a church, ‘fearing the pains of Hell because laymen ought not to have tithes’;86 in Anjou about 1100 a layman gave up offerings kept back by his parents when giving their church to Saint-Aubin, he having fallen ill and been told by a priest that possessing them would exclude him from the last rites under measures of pope Urban’s.87 Not quite the same, in the Me´doc about 1099, is a couple’s ‘relinquishing’ to Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly (into the abbot’s hand and that of the legate, archbishop Amatus) of a church’s feudum presbiteratus, which ‘contrary to canon law, the priests used to have by our ancestors’ and our hand, and render us many servitia for it’ (probably mainly hospitality).88 They had not taken over the priest’s portion, but invested the priest with it; it was that breach of new decrees, and perhaps their heavy demands, that they recognized as a ‘great sin’. And when, in monasteries, laymen gave up the abbatia with words of remorse or repentance,89 they had been at fault not for behaving like a lord but for occupying property and holding sacred office. Other laymen’s charters from the Gregorian and post-Gregorian period come nearer to saying that the fault lay in being lord of the church at all. In the 1080s two laymen say they are surrendering their inherited church because Richard archbishop of Bourges has excommunicated ‘those laymen who hold God’s churches as a patrimony’; another acknowledges ‘that even though I am illiterate I have offended the Lord’, having seen the archbishop exhorting local magnates ‘to give up churches and the possessions of churches that they and their ancestors have long unjustly held’.90 Count Stephen-Henry of Blois and Champagne gave away in 1085 a parish church that had been held from him by a knight, now renounced by the knight’s heir who similarly ‘held, though unjustly, the church itself which no layman holds justly’;91 in 1097 William of Asse´-le-Riboul gave away the church there ‘which I was holding, not without sin’.92 But in any of these cases the ‘holding’ may have been direct possession rather than exercising lordship;93 and it certainly was so when Barbota in 1104 gave away her inherited 85

86 Above, at notes 43–8. HL V no. 384 (1093). St-Aubin no. 322. A woman and her children who gave up to Saint-Aubin a third of the tithes they ‘unjustly’ held (ibid. no. 323) hoped that this was enough to mitigate God’s anger ‘until the Lord increases both our means and our will’ to give up the rest of ‘what we now share with Him’ (in providing such 88 wording the monks were doing their best for a perhaps really poor donor). Ange´ly no. 304. 89 e.g. Bertrand of Durfort (see index). 90 Cart. de Vierzon, ed. Devailly (Paris, 1963), no. 78; Chapelle-Aude no. 24. Cf. no. 29, judged a 12th-c. forgery by Van de Kieft (E´tude, 21–2; like no. 21, above, note 41) but accepted by Devailly (Berry, 252–3). 91 Mager, ‘Verha¨ltnis’, 181, from Lespinasse, Cart. La Charite´, 200–1. Mager explained the emphasis here as indicating something special about this particular church, such as its parochial status; but it could simply point to direct possession of the actual church. 92 To Saint-Nicholas, Angers (Asse´-le-Riboul no. 1). 93 Or of course, still, ‘unjust’ because the church was properly the monastery’s or cathedral’s, e.g. Ange´ly no. 66; Bull, Knightly Piety, 211–12 (restitution to Auch). 87

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church (where she had put in chaplains at will), having ‘learnt from the bishop of Nantes that I ought to give it up’.94 However, the old Pseudo-Isidore canon forbidding lay interference in res ecclesiasticae95 was beginning to be cited as if it applied to simply being the lord of a church;96 ambiguous texts were probably increasingly understood in their severer sense. In the Auvergne, the Saint-Flour record of the disputes over the churches of Oradour and Chaudesaigues speaks of the lay claimant as one of those who have said ‘let us possess the sanctuary of God’,97 the familiar refrain here applied to claiming an actual church.98 And by this time there are unambiguous expressions, not so much sceptical of the donors’ right as implying its non-existence under church law: in Poitou in 1088 viscount Boso and his wife and sons convey to Saint-Cyprien ‘their abbey of St Romanus of Chaˆtellerault, which is of their ius according to the world’; about 1095 a number of people join in giving a castle church, ‘because they said it was in their ius according to secular custom’.99 But charters, notices, and cartulary entries regularly combine such disapproval or disavowals with the standard words for transferring property (implying that it is the donor’s, if only as the world sees it); and furthermore present this as a praiseworthy pious donation with the usual rewards. Some bishops (being able to afford it) regularly gave material countergifts for what had been ‘possessed unjustly’, for the sake of peaceful and secure gains.100 And a string of quotations demonstrating reforming opinion may, cumulatively, give a false impression. For all the while, other churches were being given and accepted as ordinary pious donations without any expression of penitence for having had them being attributed to the donors, or any disapproval voiced by monks or bishops;101 while a bishop going through the routine of allowing the donation of a church to a monastery may be concerned primarily for proper procedures,102 if not simply for his own share in the alms and its rewards.

94

95 See index: Barbota. Above, p. 825. e.g. in Vendoˆme no. 395 (c.1100): a lay donor of churches is persuaded that their possession has endangered his soul because ‘the facultas of disposing of ecclesiastical things is not to be attributed to any of the laity’. Cf. St-Pe`re, 565 (c.1117). 97 98 St-Flour no. vi. 47 (part of an inventoria composed perhaps c.1130). See above, at note 54. 99 St-Cyprien nos. 283, 429 (monks’ notices; cf. bishops’ documents, above, at note 56). 100 See Bienvenu, ‘Pauvrete´’, Le Moyen Aˆge, 83 (1966), 419–21, on bps. Ulger and Geoffrey le Mouche of Angers; Bligny, L’E´glise, 89, 108, on Hugh bp. of Grenoble. 101 See Schreiber, Gesamm. Abh., 102–26; Mager, Verha¨ltnis, 179–83, 186–90; Chevalier, ‘Restitutions’, 135–6; Mollat, ‘Restitution’, 405–9. Most late 11th-c. donations of churches in Saint-Jean d’Ange´ly’s cartulary suggest no motives other than traditional; at Angers even in bp. Ulger’s time, many lay donations of churches or rights in them are recorded as ordinary property transactions (e.g. Angers nos. 185, 190, 195–9; 215, 217–18, 221), apart from such mild reservations as ‘whatever they had, if they had anything, in 102 the church . . . ’. e.g. Cluny no. 3656 (1091, bp. Pibo of Toul). 96

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In Italy admissions by donors that their lordship had been wrong in itself are rarer but clearer than in France, the clearest being based on particular papal judgments which seem less ambiguous—or better reported—than the legislation. Urban II in 1092 adjudged the church of S. Maria de Domno at Salerno to the archbishop, against the Norman duke Roger defending his hold by ‘the custom of Lombard princes’: Lombard custom here was ‘bad and unjust’, since no layman ought to ‘ordain’ churches or have them under his potestas, but all should be under the potestas of the bishops.103 However, Urban was perhaps only ruling out that extreme form of lordly potestas that in these regions had required bishops to renounce most of their authority;104 Roger had unilaterally expelled an archpriest and appointed another; what he now conceded was the archbishop’s right to ‘ordain and dispose canonically’. A more downright rejection of any lay claim whatsoever was made in a lawsuit brought to Gregory VII at Ceprano in 1080, about ‘inheritance and property’ in a local church, St Magnus. Against the layman Landulf who ‘sought the church and its possessions as his property’, the priest Mainard declared that ‘property in the church and its possessions should not belong to you, nor will I give it to you, because churches and their possessions ought not to belong to laymen but to bishops and the churches’ rectores’.105 Gregory gave judgment for Mainard apparently on this ground alone; the priest had thus avoided giving any mundane defence of his tenure (which may well have been inherited)106 while voicing what he doubtless knew were his judge’s principles. In 1089 a lord renounced a church that he had just rebuilt and had consecrated, into the hands of Urban II himself (on his way to or from his council of Melfi) and of the archbishop of Benevento (probably its consecrator), and then with their consent or indeed command offered it to Monte Cassino ‘so far as belongs to me’, having been warned by pope and cardinals that it was ‘not just or canonical for any church to be subject to any lay person, nor licit for him to have any ius or potestas in it’.107 Later, this principle could be asserted by a litigant far from the papal court. In 1105 the rector of S. Nicolo of Bari objected before the archbishop to the rights claimed there by a shipmaster Leo (one of those who had taken part in the raid that brought back St Nicholas’s relics), on the grounds that it was wrong for any lay person to have any dominium in a church or its property beyond common access for prayer and worship (echoing the Gelasian formula for the rightlessness that the builder of a new church had to acknowledge);108 ‘understanding this’, 103

Pflugk-Harttung, Acta inedita, II no. 184; see Stutz, ‘Alexander III’, 21 n. 1. See index: absolutio. 105 ed. Santifaller, Quellen G. VII, no. 187, or Borino, ‘Note Gregoriane’, Studi Gregoriani, IV (1952), 106 465–6. See index: Mainard. 107 108 Dormeier, Montecassino, 57–9. By now in the collections (above, p. 859). 104

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Leo renounced his share.109 And without evident litigation, a donor gave his moiety of a church to Monte Cassino in 1101 to obtain God’s mercy towards him and his relations, ‘because I have heard from wise men that no layman should have a holy place under his potestas’; another, for La Cava in 1115, declared it ‘wrong for a layman to hold churches in his potestas or to be lord of them or take any census from them’.110 But as Dormeier remarks, these and a few other instances do not amount to much in all the mass of Italian donations of churches (and certainly do not imply any triumph of Gregorian principles).111 With so little, though sharp, in Italy, and in France so much, but hazy, a great deal of change in theory and practice had yet to take place. 109

Bari V no. 40. Dormeier, Montecassino, 61 (with n. 243 on adeum as deriving from adytum, ‘all-holiest’); ibid. 104 (the only clear La Cava case according to Dormeier, but see Loud, ‘The Abbey of Cava’, 169). 111 As late as 1158 the bp. of Vieste (Apulia) made some laity give away their church because as the Bride of Christ it should be ‘mother and queen of all the faithful’, not subject to any lay person; their charter has them condemn the ‘detestable custom of the Lombards’ by which they had held the church hereditarily (Tremiti no. 111; see Martin, La Pouille, 641). 110

25 Towards a bureaucratic Church

25.i. The emergence of the canon law of patronage At the beginning of the twelfth century we find Anselm of Canterbury and Paschal II at mild cross-purposes, when Anselm asks whether it would be proper to allow the king to retain certain lands of a bishopric or abbey in exchange for giving them a church—no less useful—that he holds in his hand. Anselm’s question is whether this would count as buying the church; Paschal’s answer amounts to condemning it because it would allow the king to keep church lands (‘it would seem to be assenting to sacrilege; divina are no one’s, and what is once offered to God should not be usurped for other uses’). Anselm is worried about buying a church; Paschal about letting church lands go; neither of them seems concerned about the king’s capacity to give a church at all.1 This is symptomatic. Conscientious churchmen in the eleventh century might quietly accept, or want to modify, or hotly repudiate the proprietary dealings with churches current in their time; and if to repudiate, not be agreed or perhaps even clear as to what exactly they rejected: the impious or presumptuous use of certain symbols in the conferring of churches, or the practical power to confer them at all; the occupation of property and enjoyment of revenues that should have been the clergy’s, or the barest claim to lordship. The decrees of popes and councils were often ambiguous, while polemical writers and canon-law collectors before Gratian were not much concerned to gather up and examine the matter. By the middle of the twelfth century this was changing: canonists were beginning to look at the law about the practices and claims of lords in an analytical way, with the same dialectical approach as was being applied to theology; and by the late twelfth century popes and their judges-delegate were applying the emerging law of patronage to actual cases, and developing the law in the process. 1

Anselmi Opera, letter, no. 223 at p. 127.

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The story can be begun with the First Lateran Council of 1123. Here Calixtus II confirmed the Concordat of Worms, celebrated the end of the papal schism, and turned the Church’s attention to outstanding matters including the condition of lower churches. Certainly large numbers of these were being given to monasteries, but this did not solve the problem of good order in the parochial system; while countless lower churches (often newly founded) remained in lay lordship, and for these the objection to lay investiture was still unsatisfied. It is not clear how live it was, however, since it was not directly addressed at the council.2 The familiar text beginning ‘laity, however religious they may be . . . ’3 introduced a warning that ‘if any ruler or other layman claims for himself the dispositio or dominatio of ecclesiastical possessions, he is to be judged sacrilegious’.4 But when the old, basic principle was restated that ‘the cure of souls and the dispensation of ecclesiastical things should be in the judgment and power of the bishop’, this was in the context of forbidding clerics—archdeacons, provosts, deans—to confer the cure of souls without the bishop’s consent. And a canon insisting that ‘in parish churches the priests are to be appointed by the bishops, and answer to him about the cure of souls’ (a firmer statement than in the past that the actual appointment is made by the bishop, but not ruling out a lay lord’s presentation) goes on to forbid priests to ‘accept churches or tithes from laymen without the consent and wish of the bishops’; concerned essentially with the bishop’s authority, not with banning lay investiture.5 There followed under Honorius II a flurry of legatine and provincial councils,6 reiterating legislation partly Gregorian and partly older. At Palencia in Leoń in 1129 clergy were not to ‘receive or accept churches by the hands of laymen’; the laity were not to possess ‘thirds’ or offerings, ‘but everything belonging to churches is to be in the bishops’ dispositio’.7 French councils, and papal councils in France, were concerned (as regards lower churches) largely with the familiar issues of priests serving more than one church, churches lacking a priest, priests being married and their sons ordained, and hereditary claims to churches, offices, and prebends where merit ought to prevail.8

2 Calixtus’s investiture decree at Rheims, 1119, had had to be modified to read ‘bishoprics and abbeys’ 3 Above, p. 825. instead of ‘all churches’ (above, p. 852 note 9). 4 c. 4 (Mansi, XXI. 282–6; Hefele-Leclercq, Conciles, V. 631–9 is from another version, differently 5 numbered). cc. 7, 18 (Mansi, XXI. 283). 6 See Hefele-Leclerq, Conciles, V. 645–75; Fliche, Du premier Concile du Latran a` l’ave`nement d’Innocent III, part i (¼ Fliche et Martin, Histoire, IX. i), 132–6. 7 cc. 10, 6, 16 (Mansi, XXI. 385); also, obscurely, ‘no one is to possess a church within 84 paces by hereditary right’ (c. 2), probably meaning church land within the notional cemetery and minimum endowment (see index: dextri). 8 e.g. 1127, Nantes cc. 5, 6 (for province of Tours); 1128, Rouen cc. 1 and 2; 1130, Clermont cc. 4 and 11; 1131, Rheims cc. 4, 5, 9, 15 (Mansi, XXI. 353–4, 375–6, 438–9, 459–60).

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However, radical assertions of the wrongness of lay lordship in churches (clearer than eleventh-century assertions of this)9 were made by Innocent II at Clermont in 1130 and Rheims in 1131, where the laity were enjoined under threat of excommunication to surrender to the bishops the churches that they held;10 and this was repeated at the Second Lateran Council of 1139, along with a renewed and unqualified ban on lay investiture.11 Meanwhile at Rheims in 1131, according to one version, ‘it was decided that churches were free and absolved from the hand of laymen as soon as they were consecrated’;12 a clarification reflecting a tendency of canonists to assimilate consecrated things to the dedicated res sacrae of Roman law.13 But this idea was in general deployed only to reinforce the exclusion of lay lordship, not to attack the concept of property in churches. A judgment at Ravenna in 1141 did so deploy it, however, in a case between the archdeacon and the canons of Reggio, partly concerning a chapel that the archdeacon had founded and ‘claimed as his own’; the archbishop declared that it should be ruled by the bishop and canons alone, because by ‘both divine and human laws’ (that is, canon and Roman) it was divini iuris and ‘in no one’s property’ (in bonis nullius).14 But perhaps such a radical judgment—rejecting the founder’s claim not (on the face of it) simply because it challenged diocesan authority, but because it was proprietary—was more plausible in Ravenna, where diocesan property had to a large extent survived, and close to the seat of Roman-law revival at Bologna. In England the attitude to lay lords was less demanding. At a legatine council of Westminster in 1125, ‘no abbot, no prior, absolutely no monk or clerk . . . is to receive a church or tithe or any ecclesiastical benefice by gift of a layman, without the consent of its own bishop’: this would cover both gifts to great churches and grants to individual clergy,15 but the former without requiring donation via the bishop, and the latter on lines already familiar for over three centuries.16 Some of its other decrees were in substance equally traditional;17 the only decree specially of its time (and characteristic of the country) was against clerks claiming their father’s churches or trying to appoint their own successors; and it is to them, not to lay lords, that the council applied the old curse from Psalm 82 on those who say ‘let us possess God’s sanctuary for an inheritance’.18 The council of 9 This is signalled at Rouen 1128, c. 3: reiterating that churches and tithes must be given to monasteries through the bishop, it uses the loaded words that the laity must ‘restore to the bishops what they have usurped’. 10 Clermont c. 6, Rheims c. 7 (Mansi, XXI. 439, 459–60, 465–6; on the two versions of Rheims see HefeleLeclercq, Conciles, V. 697–9). 11 cc. 10, 25 (Mansi, XXI. 523–33; Hefele-Leclercq, Conciles, V. 823–4 for a very different version). 12 c. 10, Mont-Saint-Michel version (Mansi, XXI. 465). 13 14 Thomas, Droit, 47–8; above, pp. 859, 860. Muratori, Antiquitates, V. 159–60. 15 Cf. abp. Anselm’s question about distinguishing these, above, p. 366 note 7. 16 17 c. 4 (C&S I no. 130) is thus doubtfully about lay investiture at all. e. g. ibid. cc. 1–3, 8–9. 18 Ibid. c. 5.

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Westminster in 1127 condemned the giving or receiving of churches or tithes ‘without episcopal consent and authority’,19 this time clearly envisaging individual clerks (and not specifying lay lords as the givers).20 Not until Westminster 1138 (again legatine—and now in Stephen’s reign)21 is there a ban on lay investiture unqualified by any reference to the bishop’s consent: ‘no one at all is to accept a church or any ecclesiastical benefice from a lay hand.’22 Meanwhile back in 1127 the opening decree at Westminster, prohibiting the selling or buying of churches and ecclesiastical benefices on pain for a clerk of being degraded from his Order, decrees for a layman ‘that he be held an outlaw and excommunicate, and be deprived of potestas in that church or benefice’:23 implying that a layman may lawfully have such potestas to start with.24 Altogether the reforming councils of the West in the 1120s and 1130s seem never to condemn property in churches or deny its existence, but only here and there require lay lords to renounce it; they are only mildly concerned about lay investiture in lesser churches; and they repeat traditional decrees against abuses (such as simony, or taking tithes and offerings, or putting in and removing priests without resort to the bishop) where the objection seems still to be not that churches are treated as property but that this is done without respecting the proper constraints. In any case, eliminating lay lordship or redefining it as patronage was hardly a task for hard-pressed popes and bishops in council. It was largely an intellectual problem, arising from the new need for precision and rationality as much as from Gregorian principles. And the old concept of property in churches was not part of a distinct system of Germanic church law that should be swept away, but a matter of imprecise customary law that had seeped into the tangled mass of disparate and often regional laws that constituted the law of the Church. Sorting this out was a task initially for canon-law collectors and teachers. The major collections of Gregory VII’s time and its immediate aftermath had drawn lavishly on newly explored sources and exploited some old ones more thoroughly (Pseudo-Isidore especially), but dropped much of the old material as not being authentically ‘Roman’, that is, not taken from or at least consonant with universal councils and papal decrees. The next generation, however, perhaps more pragmatic and certainly more concerned to be comprehensive and to attempt to reconcile conflicting canons, brought back old texts that had been dropped, such as the Carolingian texts on private churches and on tithes: absent 19

Ibid., no. 132 c. 10. The clerk might ‘receive’ the church from a lay, monastic, or clerical lord; what matters is the 21 Held while Canterbury was vacant, just before Theobald’s election. bishop’s consent. 22 23 Ibid., no. 139 c. 5. Ibid., no. 132 c. 1. 24 There is the same implication in c. 5 of 1138 (note 22, above): if a clerk has ‘given or promised’ anything for a church ‘the donatio shall be invalidated and both giver and accepter punished’. 20


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from Anselm of Lucca for instance, but present in Ivo of Chartres.25 Ivo’s huge Decretum, in its part iii, ‘about the church and ecclesiastical possessions’, begins with the fundamental nature of the Church and the origins of churches;26 from there on it is less well organized, and includes a mass of more-or-less traditional texts, drawing of course on Pseudo-Isidore and the Visigothic councils, but also largely (and knowingly)27 on Carolingian legislation; and with no less willingness than Burchard almost a century earlier to reproduce such wording as ‘what honour the priests should owe to their lords for churches’, or the heading ‘About laymen who have their own churches’.28 In the middle of this old material is a short run of important passages from Justinian on the obligations of church builders,29 leading into others already current on church property as sacrosanct but also dependent on ‘human law’.30 In Ivo’s far more concise and useful Panormia31 the relevant parts are the first five sections of book ii (still not very systematically organized, but their being selective makes his emphasis clear). The first two deal entirely with the bishop’s authority over endowments and offerings, the founder’s or benefactor’s powerlessness over these, and the overlapping matter of consecration, including what seems to be a summary of Justinian’s Novella on the consecrating and endowing of a private church.32 The section on ‘priests and their churches’ includes a run of traditional texts (every priest to have one church and be content with it; laymen not to put in or throw out priests without the bishop’s consent; no munera to be paid by priests for a church).33 In the section on tithes, the heading to a composite text, on a church’s lands, serfs, and cattle being in the bishop’s potestas while tithes and offerings are divided between bishop and clergy, makes an original connection: that from this text ‘the founders of churches must know that they have no potestas in the churches’ possessions’.34 It was Gratian’s systematic collection with interspersed comments and conclusions (completed perhaps about 1140) that set the stage for the ius patronatus to emerge in his successors’ writings and soon in papal decrees.35 Of his Causae— hypothetical cases on which he hung questions, with relevant canons grouped under them—the most important for the proprietary church were the tenth and 25 See Kuttner, History of Ideas and Doctrines of Canon Law (Aldershot, 1992), 7–8 (more generally, 1–9), 26 357, 360–2. Decretum, iii (PL 161. 199–264), cc. 1–7. 27 28 At least once naming the emperor Louis as the source (c. 175). Ibid., cc. 92, 281. 29 Ibid., cc. 190–2. For the now greatly increased knowledge of Roman law see Kuttner, op. cit., 6 30 Decretum, cc. 193 (Justinian), 194 (St Augustine), 195 (scriptural). and n. 17. 31 32 33 PL 161. 1041–344. Ibid., ii cc. 4–24 (cols. 1083–8). Ibid., cc. 42–9 (cols. 1091–2). 34 Ibid., c. 61 (col. 1095). 35 Gratian, Decretum, ed. Friedberg, CIC I. See Stutz, ‘Gratian und die Eigenkirche’ for a thorough analysis. But his conclusion that Gratian arrived at the ius patronatus in all but name is convincingly rejected by Peter Landau, Ius Patronatus: Gratian was minimizing the proprietary right of founders’ heirs, not framing a new institution to replace it.

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sixteenth.36 Causa 10 is at first sight the more relevant: ‘a certain layman seeks to separate from the diocesan lex a basilica made by him; the bishop claims that the church with all its endowment belongs to his dispositio.’ This part of the Causa leads to the first question, ‘whether a basilica with all its dos should belong to the bishop’s ordinatio’; and for the obvious answer Gratian deploys first a battery of the old familiar texts that assert episcopal potestas or ordinatio, including those from Visigothic Spain explicitly directed against the claims of founders. He moves on to a string of texts asserting the bishop’s control of offerings and his duty of visitation (entitling him to hospitality or other dues), ending with three that condemn any taking of offerings by the laity;37 and finally he answers his first question: ‘By these authorities is shown that churches with all their possessions belong to the bishop’s ordinatio, and that both the churches and their offerings and properties are immune from the dispositio of laymen.’38 All this was fundamental to any attack on lay property in churches. But the first half of the Causa on which the question is hung is oddly remote from the twelfth century in its wording, clearly coming straight from the first, sixth-century canon cited.39 And the content of the rest of the Causa is bizarre: the bishop, successful against this founder, goes on to ‘rage cruelly through the parishes with soldiers of the comitatus, striving to usurp whatever belonged to the churches as due to him’. On this hangs question 2: ‘are bishops allowed to usurp churches’ possessions?’, which is answered at once to the effect that the bishop’s potestas over church property ‘is to be understood as the power of dispensing, not of scattering or dilapidating’, with a run of texts to support this.40 In fact, Gratian’s concern here is to reconcile texts that assert the bishop’s power with those that limit or define it; Causa 10 is an artificial construction to accommodate these particular texts. Nor does he remotely suggest that defining the bishop’s power in this non-proprietary way leaves room for the founder’s dominium; what had been crucial between Hincmar and Prudentius almost three centuries ago was by now an extinct question.41 It is Causa 16 that carries Gratian’s positive ideas about lay founders and their heirs, although the case posed—this time a realistic one—does not mention laymen at all. It concerns a claim made by the clergy of a baptismal church to a parish church in its district, which has been in an abbot’s possession (and served by one of his monks) for forty years. The first six questions all arise naturally from 36

Referred to in what follows as C. 10, C. 16. Some other relevant passages are in C. 1 q. 3 (on simony) 37 cc. 8, 12, 13. C. 10 q. 1 cc. 1–6; cc. 7–15 (c. 14 is from Lateran I, 1123). 38 Dictum after c. 15. 39 Le´rida c. 3: Si ex laicis quisquam a se factam basilicam consecrari desideret, nequaquam eam . . . a diocesana lege audeat segregare (Gratian reads eam—referring to the church itself—not the original ea, its possessions; 40 see above, p. 15 note 24). C. 10 q. 2 cc. 1–8. 41 Above, pp. 805–9.


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this case (and bear importantly on monastic proprietary churches and tithes).42 But question 7 asks: ‘If laymen had held that chapel (as is the practice with some) and renounced it into the abbot’s hands . . . can the abbot hold it with the consent of the bishop and clergy?’ (relevant to the case as being a possible origin for the monastery’s rights). Here Gratian begins with a dictum: the canons show that no one may accept a church from the hand of laymen; churches as well as their possessions are in the bishops’ potestas; ‘laity cannot possess tithes or churches either by their own authority or by that of bishops’;43 bishops who give churches to the laity (whether or not for a price) are making the house of prayer into a house of merchandise and a den of thieves. After texts to establish this,44 there follows another dictum, that ‘since churches and their offerings stand only in the bishops’ potestas it is clear that they cannot be received from any other hand than theirs’; leading into one of the crucial canons, Orleans I c. 1945 (which he had not used in Causa 10), and a mixed lot of canons prohibiting laymen from conferring ecclesiastical dignities or disposing of church property.46 Then comes c. 26 (important because much of the later discussion of patronage took the form of comment on it), taken from one of pope Gelasius’s letters authorizing a bishop to consecrate a new church for its builder, who ‘must know that apart from access to the congregation,47 which is due to every Christian, he is to have nothing there in his own right’.48 After another two relevant texts,49 Gratian changes tack. A dictum that, ‘if the founders of churches begin to verge on penury’, they could receive the necessities of life from these churches introduces c. 30, the Visigothic canon to that effect;50 and this is followed by a ground-breaking dictum, which first sums up the negative conclusion so far (‘If then they [the laity] have no potestas of dispensing ecclesiastical possessions, still less are they capable of committing the churches themselves to anyone to rule them, or taking them away from anyone else’), and then broadens the whole matter: ‘But here we have to distinguish: what right do 42 Esp. q. 1; see Constable, Tithes, 182–3. These qq. illustrate well Gratian’s methods of pointing out conflicts and resolving them. 43 See Stutz, ‘Gratian’, 22, 24; sua auctoritate must mean by virtue of being proprietor. 44 C. 16 q. 7 cc. 1 and 3–8 (mainly on the proper destination of tithes); c. 9 is a passage from Origen, headed ‘he who commits a church to the undisciplined is a seller of doves’, i.e. a merchant doing business in the temple; with perhaps another layer of meaning, the church itself being ‘Christ’s dove’. 45 C. 16 q. 7 c. 10. 46 cc. 11–25, including recent legislation against lay investiture, and older canons authentic and otherwise. Stutz (‘Gratian’, 22–3) saw the canons and dicta of C. 16 q. 7 up to this point as unimportant to Gratian’s view of the Eigenkirche, assuming that Gratian’s real concern was to formulate a substitute for it. But if Gratian only wanted to minimize it, all this was to his purpose as a systematic assemblage of 47 relevant texts. processionis aditum: see Niermeyer, s.v. processio, sense 2. 48 C. 16 q. 7 c. 26; see above, pp. 13–14, 790, 859. 49 A Pseudo-Isidore text about building and consecrating churches which ‘are not to be oppressed by anyone’, and the standard Carolingian rule that laymen were not to evict priests from churches (cc. 28, 29). 50 Toledo IV c. 37 (above, p. 25 at note 58; actually for any benefactors, and for their children).

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the founders of churches have in them, and what do they not have? They have the ius providendi, et consulendi, et sacerdotem inveniendi’ (the rights of looking after the church, giving advice or being consulted, and finding or providing a priest: all this shortly to be backed up by texts); ‘but they do not have the ius vendendi, vel donandi, vel utendi tamquam propriis’ (the right of selling or giving or using as their own).51 His summary here omits what he has just dealt with, the claim to be fed in desperate poverty; but this was hardly a ‘right’, rather something that could properly be done for him. Stutz held that Gratian saw it as a substitute for ius utendi,52 the right to use and enjoy the church’s property, but the connection is probably the other way round: allowing the founder to be fed in need implied that he had no ius utendi.53 The other negatives—no right of selling or giving the church—Stutz took as a tacit rejection of c. 54 of Charlemagne’s council of Frankfurt54 (one of the two pillars of the Carolingian Eigenkirchenrecht as Stutz saw it), deliberately omitted by Gratian because it could not be reconciled to the rest.55 But there seems no reason to think that Gratian even knew it.56 The texts that follow to support the positive side of this dictum begin with two further Visigothic canons.57 The first allows the heirs of the builder or endower of a church to defend and care for it in certain ways, described as having solertia and solicitudo;58 the second allows the founders, ‘as long as they survive in this life’,59 to choose suitable rectores for their church and offer them to the bishop to ordain; if the bishop spurns the founders any appointment he makes instead is null.60 This canon was known to the Carolingians who accordingly insisted that the bishop must not turn down a lord’s suitable candidate; but neither the Visigothic canon nor the Carolingian rule had been included in recent collections. The Gregorians may have been unwilling to recognize it; Gratian’s acceptance of it was essential to the future ius patronatus. His next canon reinforces this strongly, being the crucial passage from Eugenius II’s council at Rome in 826, declaring both that ‘a monastery or oratory canonically built is not to be removed from the builder’s dominium against his will’, and that he should be allowed to commend it to a priest of his choice with the bishop’s consent.61 51

52 C. 16 q. 7 dictum post c. 30. ‘Gratian’, 29. So it appears at the end of the negative points rather than as the first of the positive. 54 55 Above, p. 790 (licet eas tradere, vendere). ‘Gratian’, 24, 26. 56 His wording is not at all close to it; and was it in any collection? 57 Toledo IX cc. 1 and 2 (above, pp. 20, 24). 58 To invoke ecclesiastical authority against its priest if necessary; prevent harm coming to its possessions; secure fines or compensations for harm done (C. 16 q. 7 c. 31). 59 In 655 the bishops probably meant the original founder’s lifetime, but Gratian may have taken it as applying to founders’ heirs while they exist (he puts together cc. 30–3, of which 30 and 31 explicitly concern children or ‘sons and grandsons’, without raising the question; also cc. 35, 36, on co-heirs. 60 C. 16 q. 7 c. 32. 61 Ibid., c. 33, correctly attributed to Eugenius II (and to Leo IV who confirmed it). This is the second of Stutz’s ‘pillars’. 53


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This canon is on the face of it contradictory to all that has gone before, not in allowing the founder’s choice of priest (although the wording of this could have invited a quibble),62 but in accepting the founder’s dominium.63 Yet Gratian does not overtly try to harmonize them. Stutz’s view was that Gratian could not omit the decree of a pope and a Roman synod but only pass over it in silence; if rationalizing it at all, probably taking it as tolerating the dominium as a nudum ius, carrying no material consequences (the choice of priest being a separate matter already covered).64 But perhaps even for Gratian property was still a matter of degree, so that his assemblage of discrete ‘rights’ could add up to a light and slight dominium. In any case Gratian does not leave this awkward canon unqualified. He continues with a dictum: ‘However, the forethought and admonition of the bishop should be respected by the founders’, introducing Carolingian rulings for churches belonging to co-heirs, which show co-heirs as bound to observe the bishop’s requirements.65 After this comes a dictum that again brings us back to the original question 7: ‘So, as may be gathered from these authorities, churches are not to be received from the hand of laymen unless with the bishops’ consent’ (followed by canons from the 813 councils forbidding laymen to appoint or eject priests from churches without such consent);66 and a further dictum that just as monks could with the bishop’s consent ‘receive tithes wrongly possessed by laymen from their hands, and hold them firmly for ever’,67 so they could receive churches; supported by a canon from Urban II that ‘monks are not to receive tithes or churches from laymen without the will of the bishops’.68 Stutz said that all this was not much to Gratian’s purpose (which he took to be the construction of a new right of patronage).69 But it answers Gratian’s initial question 7 by supporting the right of monks to receive churches from the laity, and furthermore answers it in a fairly conservative way, not insisting on surrender into the bishop’s hand as did those who would deny that a layman could have anything to give; it fits Gratian’s evident recognition of a minimal dominium for founders. This leads into one final, partly positive point about dealings in churches. Under the heading ‘No one is to be allowed to turn a monastery to his own ius; however, he may convey it to another for ordaining’, he gives an old passage from Benedictus Levita which has pope Silverius decree ‘that no king or any 62

It implies that the lord appointed with the bishop’s consent, rather than the bishop appointing the lord’s candidate. 63 This is supported by the following c. 34 (it is not reasonable ‘that anyone should by his own judgment claim a monastery from its founders’ dispositio against their will’), as cited from Gregory I by Anselm of Lucca, and misunderstood because taken out of context (above, p. 842 note 29). 64 Stutz, ‘Gratian’, 24–5. 65 C. 16 q. 7 cc. 35–6, from 829 capitulary and Tribur 895; attributed by Gratian (as earlier by Burchard) 66 to Gregory the Great. C. 16 q. 7, dictum post c. 36; cc. 37, 38. 67 Attributed by Gratian to Jerome (see Constable, Tithes, 183 n. 2). 68 69 C. 16 q. 7 c. 39 and dictum ante. ‘Gratian’, 23.

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man be permitted to convey a monastery, unless to another monastery; nor to exchange it, unless with another monastery; nor by any fiction to sell it’.70 On the negative side, this looks much more likely to be Gratian’s source for saying of a founder ‘he has not the right of selling or giving . . . ’ than c. 54 of Frankfurt which Stutz supposes him to have ‘somehow’ seen, suppressed, and contradicted.71 On the positive side—its immediate context—it and the following canon support the right of a monastery to acquire churches from the laity, so finally answering ‘yes’ to his original question. What Gratian had done, then, was to define the rights of founders or their heirs and reduce them to a bare minimum, rather than to arrive at a replacement that was patronage in all but name.72 It is notable, however, that he never in C. 16 q. 7 refers explicitly to the ‘lords’ of churches, or to churches as ‘his’ or ‘theirs’, or quotes Carolingian canons or capitularies that do so; and as Stutz emphasized, he brought to life for his own times the Visigothic legislation that had remained largely a dead letter.73 And it was on the basis of his work, initially in the form of glosses on it, that later canonists worked out the law of patronage.74 The earliest move towards this surfaces in a work known as the Alençon Summa, from the mid-1150s, which explains the word dominium in Gratian’s citation of Eugenius II’s 826 decree as ius advocationis; elsewhere this author speaks of ‘the advocate, on whose ground the church is sited’.75 Advocatio (in Norman French ‘avoeson’, whence English ‘advowson’) was already established as a word for lordship in a church;76 later, patronatus and patronus were more common but advocatio and advocatus remained in use. ‘Patron’ for the founder’s successor appears first in the Quaestiones Stuttgardiensis soon after 1155;77 its author wrote of the patron as a tutor or curator.78 Soon after this, between 1157 and 1159, Rufinus was the first canonist to write of ius patronatus.79 He did not conjure this expression out of thin air. It had been used by Tuscan notaries, either side of 1100, to describe what lords chose to keep when giving 70

C. 16 q. 7 c. 40, from Benedictus Levita I. 386 (cf. Burchard, Decretum, III. 23). 72 See above, at notes 54–6. See Landau, Ius Patronatus, 4–7, against Stutz. 73 Stutz, ‘Gratian’, 31. Magnou-Nortier, however, cites a late 11th-c. Pyrenean collection including a long passage from Toledo IX c. 2 (Socie´te´, 426). 74 This has been thoroughly surveyed by Landau, Ius, from whom most of the following quotations from decretists and decretalists are taken. See also Addleshaw, Rectors, Vicars and Patrons (concise and 75 lucid); Thomas, Droit, part 2 (still useful). Landau, Ius, 8–9; 9 n. 31. 76 See below, p. 916. Advocatio was available for this meaning in Normandy because of the absence there of official advocacy. 77 Earlier, patronus can be found used for a lord (above, p. 472), or less rarely for an abbot (above, p. 183 note 20), as it could still be in early 12th-c. Spain (1107, Burgos no. 66 with no. 67: contrary to Orlandis’s reading, Estudios, 157). 78 Landau, Ius, 9–10 and n. 34. For Stephen of Tournai, however, (c.1160) ‘there is a difference between an advocate and a patron: a patron is a founder, an advocate a defender’ though the same man may be 79 both (ibid. 12–13). Rufinus, Summa, ed. H. Singer. 71


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monasteries to Camaldoli; it seems to have meant primarily approving the prior of Camaldoli’s choice of abbot or prior;80 something similar was probably meant when a non-monastic church was given ‘for ordaining’ to Monte Cassino in 1082, but reserving patronatus.81 The puzzle is that whereas Rufinus and later canonists made it a substitute for dominium—what dominium got reduced to or replaced by—its earlier usage in Italy makes it separable from a still extant dominium conveyed to a new lord. Perhaps the abstract, untechnical noun patronatus (sometimes patrocinium) had been found useful for the continuing role that donors of churches increasingly wanted, leading some notary to coin and others to adopt the neat legal-sounding term ius patronatus for what was stipulated in donation charters: meaning chiefly the veto on appointments, but probably already carrying other ideas—duty to protect, right to be honoured. This ‘patronage’ seems to have been seen at this stage as an element in lordship, which could be detached and kept (only then needing to be named) when the rest of it was given away.82 But Rufinus in Bologna could pick it up as a useful ready-made term for the very restricted dominium tentatively (and piecemeal) described as lawful by Gratian. Rufinus introduces the phrase in his comment on Gratian’s citation of Gelasius I’s conditions for consecration (C. 16 q. 7 c. 26). He goes well beyond Gratian here, distinguishing sharply between lordship or property-right and the right of patronage. ‘Lest it be said on the other side that the founders of churches hold anything of lordly power (dominativa potestas)’, Gelasius ruled that founders could claim nothing beyond other men; ‘but this is to be understood of the right of buying or giving or using as one’s own, not of the right of patronage’:83 what is ruled out is ‘lordly power’. And commenting on Gratian’s citation from Eugenius’s council of Rome (C. 16 q. 7 c. 33), where the Alençon Summa had spoken of ‘dominium, that is the ius advocationis that he has in the monastery by virtue of dominium’ (leaving open the status of dominium itself), Rufinus says firmly ‘ius patronatus, improperly here called dominium’.84 Soon afterwards Stephen of Tournai described the ius patronatus as ‘rather the solicitude of service than the 80 This is reasonably clear for S. Martino, Campriana, 1083 (Arezzo no. 252) and Carisio, 1102 (Ann. Camald., III no. 119: salvo honore patronorum, scil. ut simus huc ad mittendum abbatem temporaliter—‘putting in’, formal installation or investiture of some kind); explicit for Trivio, 1103 (ibid., no. 120); probable for Fontebona/Berardenga, ?1098 (no charter, but see Cammarosano, ‘La famiglia’, 122–4). There is no definition or explanation for Poppiena, 1099, or Morrone, 1109 (Ann. Camald., III nos. 104, 148), though both associate it with defence. See W. Kurze, Monasteri e nobilta´, 284–6. See also below, p. 916, note 76. 81 Dormeier, Monte Cassino, app. no. iv; with later instances (1123–4, 1140), ibid. 86–7. Dormeier’s argument that reserving ‘patronage’ must have been normal seems doubtful. 82 The donor of a chapel in 1015 reserving access and appointment of its priests (Cremona, sec. xi no. 23) might well two generations later have called this ius patronatus. 83 Landau, Ius, 12; Rufinus, Summa, 368–9. This text remained the chief focus for later decretists’ 84 discussions. Summa 371; see Landau, Ius, 8–9.

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power of lordship (potestas dominii): that is, to see that the church’s possessions are not scattered and destroyed’.85 Canonists tried to frame definitions of this new, or newly identified, institution. John of Faenza (after 1171) defined it as ‘the authority and power of looking after (providendi) the church, arising from benefits conferred on it before its consecration’: the first indication that its basis could be seen as acknowledgment of or gratitude for benefits conferred. Others repeated this definition, or varied or added to it while retaining the words auctoritas or ius and potestas.86 Earlier, Rufinus summed up its content: ‘it consists especially in two things’, ‘provision’ for the care of the church’s possessions, and ‘choice of priest or prelate’; to which Stephen of Tournai added the patron’s subsistence when in need.87 The Summa Coloniensis in the 1160s strung together, as due to the patron, honor, onus et emolumentum, his ‘honour’ being ‘the choice of parson’, his ‘burden’ to defend the church, his ‘payment’ to be fed in need; this provided a mnemonic for generations of students.88 There was scope for argument on what took priority in making a patron: building, providing the site, or endowment.89 These three possible bases for patronage were outlined by Rufinus, who saw any of the three as independently valid, though remarking that ‘there are some who say that he who built a church is its patron not because he built it, but because he founded it on his soil’.90 The possibility of competing claims and the question of which contribution had priority was first discussed in Anglo-Norman works of the 1180s,91 and remained debatable for some time. Usually the same founder would have provided site, endowment, and building expenses in any case. What was essential was ‘bringing the church into being’;92 it came to be agreed that to make a patron (as distinct from a benefactor) endowment had to precede the church’s consecration.93 But whereas in the past what was normally and naturally decisive in originating 85 Ius, 12. Cf. Master Roland on C. 16 q. 7 c. 30 (ibid. 13 n. 50): ‘Solicitude is left to the founder’s sons and grandsons . . . which we think should be called service rather than dominium.’ 86 Thomas, Droit, 116–17 and nn.; Landau, Ius, 13–14, 118–23. 87 Rufinus, Summa, 369; Landau, Ius, 128–9. 88 Ius, 129. Hostiensis (c.1250) has a scanning version (with honor expanded to include recognition of status): Patrono debetur honor, onus, emolumentum. Praesentet, praesit, defendet, alatur egenus, ‘to the patron is due honour, burden, and reward: he presents, he is foremost, he defends, he is fed in need’ (Commentaria (Venice, 1581), 146v–147r). 89 Gratian’s texts had referred variously to building, endowing, or ‘founding’ (C. 16 q. 7 cc. 27, 31, 33). Later canonists sometimes used fundare narrowly for providing the site or fundus (for this usage in 90 charters see Meyer, ‘Klostergru¨ndung’ 183–97). Rufinus, Summa, 369. 91 Landau, Ius, 24–8. 92 Huguccio (late 12th c.), on C 16 q. 7 c. 26 (Landau, Ius, 168 n. 590) emphasized this (and linked ‘building or endowing or conferring the site’ by vel, not aut). 93 Specified in Innocent IV’s Apparatus, otherwise following Huguccio (ibid. 32 n. 105). By then (mid-13th c.) there was a scanning mnemonic: Patronum faciunt dos, aedificatio, fundus (Hostiensis, as above, note 88).


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lordship over a church was being lord of its site,94 the fact that where its patronage lay was open to academic and occasionally judicial debate was a mark of its theoretical difference from lordship. The Anglo-Norman canonists’ view in the 1180s, which gave priority to providing the site—and used the word possessio for this, as did Rufinus—can be seen as a hangover from the proprietary church.95 It could also be argued, in theory, that patronage rights were peculiar to the actual founder of a church, excluding his heirs or successors.96 Since the whole point of canon-law patronage was to provide a substitute for dominium (whether or not all canonists so saw it), this view was unlikely to prevail. Rufinus held that patronage could go to heirs by blood, but not to ‘outsider heirs’; others (in the 1160s) disputed even this restriction, on Roman-law grounds, and theirs became the established view.97 As for partition between co-heirs, Rufinus and others applied to patronage the Carolingian rule for churches, that they must be held in common; but Innocent IV in the mid-thirteenth century, his thinking more liberated from old assumptions, questioned this restriction on the grounds that having the ius patronatus was not the same as having the church.98 Another problem, linked with the question of inheritance, was that of transactions in patronage (donation, sale, exchange); naturally the various earlier views were derived from those about churches, but Huguccio said of a layman’s ius patronatus, ‘if it can be had, why cannot it be given?’.99 Other matters already being discussed or touched on by Rufinus and his near-contemporaries included what physical or legal persons could have it, and its legal character (as between ‘spiritual’ and either ‘patrimonial’ or ‘corporeal’).100 Refinements on these matters have little to do with the old proprietary church. But other questions raised within the century, about the practical content of patronage, were old problems seen in a new light. There was the question of rents and annual ceremonial presents;101 and much more important, the scope of the ius presentandi. This ‘right of presenting’ was what chiefly made patronage worth having, and claiming, defending, bestowing, bequeathing, or dividing; to the point that it was 94 dominus fundi (e.g. below, at note 117; a term not often needed, however). See Gellone nos. 135, 42, 384 (1011, c.1070, 1074): donors’ title described as de voce fundi possessionis; and Gorze nos. 150, 160 (1127, 1152): bishops of Verdun reserve churches to the priory Amel ‘that as it first possessed the fundus, so it should in future possess both the fundus and its superstructure’ (echoing the Roman-law maxim superficies solo cedit). 95 Landau, Ius, 17–20, 24–6. 96 Justinian’s novella 123 c. 18. i, perhaps still unknown in the West, had included the builder’s heirs as able to nominate clergy for an oratory. On Gratian’s position see above, note 59. 97 98 Landau, Ius, 51–7. Ibid. 58–63. 99 Thomas, Droit, 150–8 (esp. 155 n. 2, Innocent IV); Landau, Ius, 69–70, 94–5, 102–5. Sale of patronage, initially seen as either simoniac or impossible, came to be thought lawful provided it was sold cum universitate—as part of an estate (see Thomas, Droit, 155–8). 100 Landau, Ius, 38–50, 116–18. For Rufinus ‘it is corporeal, but not merely that: rather it is mixed with the spiritual’ (Summa, 370); cf. Alexander III’s ius spirituali annexum (below, at note 130). 101 Custom was allowed some weight; so was Huguccio’s argument (generally adopted) that land not for consecration might be subjected to a rent at the time of its donation (Landau, Ius, 130–3).

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often used almost interchangeably with ius patronatus. The earliest commentator on Gratian’s Decretum, Paucapalea, had not much to say on C. 16 q. 7; but he did see a need to qualify its c. 12—from Gregory VII’s decree against ‘anyone receiving from the hand of any layman’ a bishopric, abbey, or lower dignity—by adding, ‘unless with the pope’s or bishop’s consent the founders themselves may wish to commend that church to any priest for the sacred office’; a move away from Gregorian or post-Gregorian silence or vagueness on the matter, even if he meant only the literal founders (and used old-fashioned language). Rufinus spoke of the patron having ‘the potestas of finding and choosing a priest and offering him to the bishop’ for the bishop to appoint, and Stephen of Tournai more briefly of ‘choosing the priest and offering him to the bishop’.102 ‘Offer’ seems to leave it to the bishop to approve or not. The Summa Parisiensis, however, held that patrons could expel and replace anyone that the bishop put in without consulting them; others emphasized the bishop’s obligation to accept the patron’s choice; yet others, that he must consent to a ‘good’ candidate (the patron having no right to present a ‘bad’ one) unless he has specific objections to him.103 Soon, more precision was sought by Huguccio and others on what made a clerk ‘suitable’ (rather than merely not criminal), how this should be decided, and whether a bishop need say more than ‘he is not suitable’.104 Meanwhile Gratian’s only contribution to the parallel question of elections of heads of religious houses—the passage from Gelasius I about ‘the monks’ election and the possessionis dominus’—was interpreted by Rufinus and others as allowing the patron to be one among the electors; others thought this not allowable, but seem to have replaced it with the patron’s right to consent.105 So well before the end of the twelfth century almost all aspects of the ius patronatus were being discussed by canonists, sometimes in a highly theoretical way. But by that time the material to explore had been (and was still being) enormously enlarged. Papal judgments or pronouncements had begun to create authoritative law on this as on other matters, and were already being put together in the new collections of ‘decretals’, later to appear under the title De iure patronatus in the official Decretales (1234).106 One especially useful to canonists for further defining the ius patronatus was a ruling of Clement III’s in 1190, stating (in answer to specific questions) first that one who builds a church with the local bishop’s consent is thereby its patron; secondly, that in a conventual church the patron as such has no part in its prelate’s election but his assent may be asked 102

Paucapalea, ed. J. F. von Schulte (1890), 90; Landau, Ius, 128, 146–7, and nn. 521–6. Landau perhaps distinguishes these positions too sharply from each other. 104 Landau, Ius, 148–9; for further developments, 150–91. Emphasis on the bishop’s choice led to the verb eligere (for the patron’s role) lapsing in favour of presentare or representare. 105 106 C. 18 q. 2 c. 4. Liber Extra, iii tit. 38 (CIC II. 609–21); ‘X 3. 38’ in what follows. 103


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afterwards, whereas in a chapel with a single priest the patron may choose this priest and present him to the bishop for institution; and thirdly, that the patron should have ‘the honour of procession’ and be supported if he fell into poverty, ‘as is ordained in holy canons’.107 It was mainly on this decretal that thirteenthcentury decretalists hung their exposition of the whole titulus on the right of patronage. It ruled out the idea that only the giver of the site could be patron; it established the patron’s role in electing heads of religious houses (on lines already long-established in many places);108 and it legitimated, as ‘the honour of procession’, what may have been traditional ways of honouring founders and their heirs—being met in procession, or having first place among the laity in church— by now thought harmless enough to preserve and justify.109 But the most creative period for a working law of patronage had already passed. This was the long pontificate of the lawyer pope Alexander III (1159–81), clearly using what the decretists had been working out but not dependent on this, and approaching the matter not as legal theory but as judicial practice: giving judgments and answering questions, and thereby determining what was accepted as law. His concerns—even as late as the Third Lateran Council in 1179—included the old issues of laymen burdening churches and their people, disposing of tithes, putting in and removing clergy without reference to the bishop;110 this last addressed in the old vocabulary of ‘granting churches to clerks without the bishops’ knowledge or consent’ or ‘appointing clerks in churches by their own presumption’. But mostly he used the new vocabulary that described the best practice now emerging: the patron ‘presenting’ a clerk for the bishop to ‘admit’ and ‘institute’; and on these matters he consistently hammered home that all the patron could do was present a suitable clerk, that that by itself was of no effect in conferring the church on a new parson, and that only the diocesan bishop could do this. The context was usually a dispute between clergy. In a letter to Roger archbishop of York,111 Alexander rules that if laymen have granted churches to clerks without seeking episcopal consent, ‘and afterwards (moved by repentance) present others to the bishops for the same churches’ whom the bishops then institute, ‘their institution should stand, the former grant being null and utterly void’. The same letter deals with the claim of a ‘suitable’ clerk to a church to 107

X 3. 38. 25 (evidently in an Italian context). See above, pp. 378–9, 398–9; in England Newnham P., Beds. (1166 foundation charter, Newnham no. 7; with elaborate 13th-c. exposition, ibid. no. 1). It became normal for the patron to present the elect for the bishop’s approval (Wood, English Monasteries, 46, 47). 109 For this interpretation both Hostiensis and Innocent IV cite rather perversely the texts in Gratian’s C. 16 q. 7 cc. 26, 27 (above, at note 47) limiting the founder to processionis aditum. 110 Lateran III c. 14 (Mansi, XXII. 226); see also cc. 5 and 7 (ibid. 224–5) on clerks being ordained absolute, or charges made for a priest’s admission to a church. 111 Excerpt in X 3. 38. 10. Many of his decretals arose out of English cases (see below, pp. 909–10). 108

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which he had been presented by the patron but not yet accepted by the bishop, against another, also ‘suitable’, whom the same patron presented later and the bishop approved and instituted. The archbishop has asked whether the later presentee should be removed in favour of the first, or preferred to him: the pope’s answer is that the later one should be preferred, since ‘until the presentation has been approved by the diocesan bishop, what has been begun by the patron is not validated’ (ratum).112 This does more than reiterate the old requirement that the bishop’s consent be obtained: it makes clear that this consent, embodied in the emerging procedure of admission and institution, was what actually made the appointment or conferred the church (not only the cure of souls). The principle was refined and reinforced by Lucius III in a letter to the bishop of Norwich;113 and in an important passage from a long letter of Innocent III’s to Eustace bishop of Ely, answering a question significantly more legalistic than archbishop Roger’s: when lay patrons present two successive candidates for a church and the bishop rejects the first and institutes the second, has the first acquired any right in it from having been presented, and if he appeals, should the other be provisionally removed on that account? The gist of Innocent’s reply is that between a layman’s presentees the fact that one has been instituted settles the matter.114 Meanwhile Alexander III had begun to lay down deadlines for lay patrons to present their candidates (needed especially when the patronage had been in dispute), after which the bishop was to choose and admit a parson; carrying the same implication that the bishop’s role is essential, the patron’s not.115 The same principle applied to the donation of churches to religious houses, as always not very clearly distinct from granting them to individual clerks (chiefly because it often amounted to giving the monastery the priest’s office and revenues).116 Alexander wrote to his judges-delegate about a church for which the canons of Gisburn ‘had the grant of the dominus fundi’ (lord of the site) while a clerk R. ‘had the donatio’ of the archbishop of York and ‘not of the dominus fundi’; Alexander’s ruling was that if the facts were as reported the archbishop’s grant should prevail, ‘since it is for bishops to confer the benefices of churches, and for 112 X 3. 38. 10 and 5. See M. R. Cheney, ‘Alexander III and Roger Bishop of Worcester: The Exchange of Ideas’, MIC series C, Subsidia 5 (Vatican City, 1976), 218. 113 X 3. 38. 24: if two equally suitable clerks were presented one after the other by a layman the choice should be left to the bishop’s judgment; if by an ecclesiastic or a collegium their first choice should prevail (consistent in both cases with Alexander’s rulings, since neither candidate was yet in possession). 114 X 3. 38. 29 (1204). Innocent here refers to (and blurs into one, attributed to Alexander) both Alexander’s and Lucius’s rulings (see Landau, Ius, 156). For the whole letter see Select Letters, no. 22 (but the translation ‘can the first properly be removed from that church?’, p. 74, must be mistaken: the first has never been in possession; idem has to be the second presentee). Cf. X 3. 38. 28, Innocent III to archdeacon and chancellor of Auxerre (1206). 115 X 3. 38. 12 (no deadline specified); ibid. 22; Lateran III. c. 8 (Mansi, XXII. 222). 116 See above, pp. 702–4 (long before the theory of incorporation or appropriation was worked out).


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laymen who have the ius patronatus to give their assent’. Here what the layman had tried to do was to give the church away, rather than grant it to a clerk; but since granting it to a clerk was what the archbishop had done, the ruling seems to reduce the layman’s role in either operation to mere consent.117 More in the mainstream is his letter to abbots, priors, and clergy of the diocese of York, forbidding them to claim any church by a layman’s donation without ‘the authority and consent of the diocesan bishop’, or to hold it if so acquired unless by long prescription or the bishop’s later consent: ‘laymen cannot transfer to others a right that they do not have.’118 This ruling does not address the potential distinction (not always observed by Alexander) between giving patronage and giving churches. This comes, however, in two other decretals of his. In his letter to the archbishop of York already quoted, he declared null any charter by which a layman purported to have ‘granted’ or ‘given a church’ to a collegiate body; unless the bishop’s consent is added to this ‘nothing has been done or given, for a church cannot be given by a layman’;119 the clear implication is that only the bishop can really give it, and that his consent to the donation would effectively do this. But he goes on: ‘It is certain however that the patronage could by right be conferred on them by a layman, with the bishop’s authority and consent’;120 he has at last distinguished the church from the patronage as an object of transactions. In a slightly earlier letter to the bishop of Winchester he answers a question about a layman who gives a church to a religious house without consulting the bishop, yet at the church’s next vacancy presents a clerk whom the bishop institutes: in this case the original grant to the monastery cannot impede the subsequent institution, being of no weight in law since a layman cannot give a church without the bishop’s authority, though he could have given the ius patronatus (here, apparently without that authority).121 In neither of these decretals is the status of a donation of patronage really clear, but in both the terminology is firm: ius patronatus is distinguished from ecclesia. Consistently with his dominant principle, Alexander almost always spoke of the bishop’s ‘authority’ rather than his ‘consent’ for giving a church to a monastery, and even occasionally used ‘consent’ for the lay donor’s role.122 But though the same principle governs his rulings about conferring churches on parsons—that only the bishop does this, not the patron—it does not determine 117 Included in the earliest decretal collection ‘Appendix to Lateran Council’, 15. 22 (Mansi, XXII at col. 342); see also Landau, Ius, 150–5; but not in X 3. 38, probably because of its awkward fit with other rulings. 118 X 3. 38. 11 (?1160–78); Landau, Ius, 72. 119 ‘Appendix’ 15. 2 (Mansi, XXII. 336). For these last words X 3. 38. 5 substitutes the more abstract ‘what is given by one who is unable by right to donate it, is to be held as not given’. 120 These words are omitted from X 3. 38. 5 (perhaps because they leave things rather unclear). 121 X 3. 38. 8 (1177). 122 See X 3. 38. 20, speaking of churches assigned to the chapter of York ‘by assent of the lord of the site and authority of the diocesan bishop’; cf. above, at note 117.

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his vocabulary to quite the same extent: he still speaks in traditional terms of the bishop consenting or approving or being consulted, along with the newer terms of admitting and instituting. More interesting is his scrupulous adherence to the emerging law in recognizing and safeguarding the patron’s ‘right’. A clerk whose brother had given him the ius patronatus of more than one church is to have them back from priests and others who have ‘occupied them . . . without his will and assent’; his brother’s grant to him (if established as fact) has made him the lawful patron.123 In a letter to judges-delegate about conflicting presentations to a church in Salisbury diocese, the first by a knight who held the manor ad firmam from the monastery of Wilton, the second by the abbess, Alexander rules against the archbishop’s judgment that the knight’s presentation was of no weight. If the ius patronatus was not explicitly excepted from the lease, and if his candidate was instituted before the dispute between him and the abbess began, the church should be adjudged to that candidate provided he is suitable. But—in the same spirit— should the patronage itself ultimately be adjudged to the abbess, the parson in possession should ‘answer to her for the temporalities’, that is, acknowledge Wilton’s lordship.124 This lordship over the temporalities did not apply to lay patrons,125 but their right (in effect, to present next time) could be safeguarded in other ways: if a bishop instituted a parson of his own choice when the deadline had passed during litigation between laymen, this parson should be re-presented by the eventual winner.126 And the centuries-old idea of the bishop’s obligation to accept a suitable presentee was still alive, acknowledged by Innocent III in the context of a lay patron’s second presentee keeping the church if he has been instituted: Innocent ruled that if the bishop had ‘maliciously’ refused the first (and suitable) presentee he must provide him with another benefice, as a penalty for his—the bishop’s—wrongdoing.127 At the Third Lateran Council, Alexander began a canon about disputed or multiple presentations by co-heirs or other plural patrons with a remarkable sentence referring to certain ‘founders of churches or their heirs’ who abuse ‘the potestas in which the Church has up to now sustained them’.128 It chimes with earlier decretists in calling the right of presentation a potestas; that it depended on the Church allowing it was what some canonists now held; the canon was used later to support the view that the Church’s gracious concession had changed the 123

124 X 3. 38. 14 (in Salisbury and Lincoln dioceses). ‘Appendix’, 15. 5 (for names); X 3. 38. 7. Below, at notes 145–6. 126 X 3. 38. 12 (Alexander III to bishop of Langres). Cf. ibid. 27, Innocent III in 1199 (to bishop of Coventry, in a similar context): ‘this should not prejudice for the future him who wins the ius patronatus’. 127 X 3. 38. 29. 128 c. 17 (Mansi, XXII. 227). Alexander’s taking for granted that founders’ heirs had the same rights as the founder must have helped to dissipate theoretical doubts about this. 125


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law by creating a potestas.129 Meanwhile Alexander asserted (rather than established) that disputes about patronage belonged to the church courts, and formulated the principle behind this: that though not purely spiritual it was ius spirituali annexum, a right attached to what was spiritual (the disposal of ecclesiastical office), and therefore not to be bought and sold, or disputed and adjudged, under secular law like ordinary property.130 Among the English ‘customs’ defined in the Constitutions of Clarendon in 1164, one that Alexander condemned was c. 1, claiming for the king’s court any dispute ‘about the advowson and presentation of churches’.131 But the English custom was tolerated in the end, having been tacitly conceded by Alexander; that is why the mostly English cases that produced the decretals were almost all not about claims to the patronage but about claims to what can conveniently be called incumbency—rightful possession of the church by a parson.132 And the worst English problems about incumbency arose not from lay patrons but from married priests and their clerical sons. At the other end of Europe, in southern Italy, the pope faced a different problem in the recognition by past bishops of the extreme claims of Lombard founders, an unwelcome legacy for their successors. Stutz studied in depth a judgment of Alexander’s in 1171,133 in favour of the archbishop of Capua’s claim to authority over a monastery there, against its abbess’s defence of ‘liberty’ subject to none but the Roman church and the prince of Capua. Whereas the archbishop’s claim was based primarily on the ‘common law’ that all churches ‘belong to the bishops in whose territory they are founded’, the abbess’s depended largely on privileges from past princes.134 These must have been ‘absolutions’ or ‘liberations’ of the kind that Lombard rulers in southern Italy had given to their own churches and got confirmed by diocesan bishops (and at least once by a pope).135 Alexander III dismissed these privileges from rulers as having no possible force, since ‘neither they nor other laity can give this kind of liberty to churches’.136 What had to be taken seriously was the abbey’s three papal privileges: of these, one was authentic but irrelevant;137 the other two in Alexander’s view were 129

Landau, Ius, 124. Letter to Henry II: ‘Appendix’ 47. 4 (Mansi, XXII. 414); X 2. 1 (tit. De iudiciis) 3. See Thomas, Droit, 150–8, 161–4; C. R. Cheney, From Becket to Langton, 109–18. 131 Stubbs, Charters, 164–5. For the same claim in 13th-c. France see Thomas, Droit, app. nos. 16–25. 132 See Gray, ‘Ius Praesentandi in England’, esp. on the crucial link between the two areas of jurisdiction in that the incumbent had to have been presented ‘by the true patron’ (482–4). Cf. X 3. 38. 19 (Innocent III to abbot of St Alban’s): a clerk instituted on the presentation of someone subsequently found not to have been in possession of the patronage (as established presumably by ‘darrein presentment’ in the lay court) 133 can ‘by English custom’ be removed. ‘Alexander III gegen die Freiung’, 3–37. 134 Ibid. 3–6. Her crowd of witnesses could only assert the monastery’s freedom, not indicate ‘signs’ of it. 135 Ibid. 13–14, 18–26; See index: absolutio. 136 Stutz, op. cit., 5 and n. 2, 14–15. Urban II in 1092 (on S. Maria de Domno, above, p. 881) had declared that ‘in this matter the custom of the Lombards was bad and unjust’; Alexander III did not even argue 137 this point. Hadrian IV’s (a confirmation of possessions and status). 130

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forged, for him evidently the only possible explanation for their content.138 We may compare with this his principled but tactful approach in 1177 to the privileges granted by two archbishops of Bari to a citizen, Philip, ‘freeing’ a church he had founded: Alexander ostensibly confirms these, in a document superficially conforming to traditional episcopal privileges of the region; but what it allows to Philip and his heirs is to choose the chaplain and present him to the archbishop, or to consent to the election of its head should the church become monastic or collegiate.139 In fact they were to have—bestowed on them by the Church—the ius patronatus as it was now understood. It was largely due to Alexander III that churches belonging to monasteries came under patronage law. Obvious as this might seem, decretists did not at first apply the idea to them, rather taking for granted that monasteries or chapters had churches of their own in a way that was now being eliminated for the laity. What Gratian provided did not easily fit into the new law of patronage. To solve what he saw as a conflict of canons over monks investing priests with parish churches, he distinguished (unrealistically) between a church that the bishop had given to a monastery ‘with all its right’ (cum omni iure suo), and a church that they had built on their own land. In the former the monks could invest the priest (by implication in the old way forbidden to the laity); in the latter only the bishop could do this (though with ‘the builders’ consent and choice’), while the monks could claim the priest’s ‘due subjection’ with regard to the temporalities only.140 Stutz saw this as distinguishing those churches that would later be described as ‘incorporated’—the monastery swallowing all their endowment and revenue and making its own arrangements for their service (subject to diocesan authority)— and those that would be subject merely to patronage. But Landau points out that even in Gratian’s second category the church is not under mere patronage: monks (or a bishop in another’s diocese) have ‘external possession and management’ (dispensatio) in it,141 unlike a lay patron. Early commentators saw this as entitling the monastery to invest the priest with the temporalities (institutio temporalium), and John of Faenza explicitly distinguished this from ius patronatus; it was the act of a lord, and thus beyond what patronage allowed (indeed it was sometimes called dominium).142 So churches of this kind were still under proprietary lordship, weakened like that of lay lords by the loss of full investiture but not diminished to mere patronage. 138

Ibid. 7–10, 16–18, 26–9, 35 (the view was probably correct in the case of Zacharias at least). Ibid. 36–7, from Pflugk-Harttung, Acta inedita, III no. 259. 140 C. 16 q. 2, dicta before and after c. 1 and in conclusion, and c. 6 (from Clermont 1095 c. 4); ibid., q. 5, opening and closing dicta. See Stutz, ‘Gratian’, 15–20; Landau, Ius, 46–7. 141 Stutz, ‘Gratian’, 10–13, 17–18, 20; Landau, Ius, 47, quoting Rufinus. 142 Ius, 47–8; 91–2 and nn. 327–8 (early 13th-c. comments on C. 16 q. 2). 139


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The change in legal thinking that made it nonetheless not lordship but a special kind of patronage was begun by Alexander III. It is almost there in his instruction to the monks and regular canons of the province of Canterbury, ‘that in churches in which you have the presentation, when they are vacant you are to present to the diocesan bishops suitable clerks who should answer to them for spiritualities and to you for temporalities’;143 and in c. 9 of the Third Lateran Council, that ‘in their churches that do not belong to them pleno iure they are to present priests to the bishop to be instituted’, responsible to the bishops for the parochial care and rendering account to the religious for the temporal possessions.144 Canonists after this could see the monastery’s control of temporalities as an adjunct of a special kind of patronage,145 and finally as an aspect of it, simply making the patronage more substantial than a layman’s (pinguior: fatter). For a time, canonists gave different accounts of what this extra content could amount to economically: whether no more than a fixed pension, or everything except a stipend for the clergy; the opinion prevailed that taking anything beyond a fixed pension needed an episcopal privilege.146 The difference of opinion probably arose from the wide range of actual practice, since this special monastic patronage was in reality a straightforward survival of the proprietary church. It is less clear that this is the right way to look at churches belonging to a greater church pleno iure (corresponding to Gratian’s cum omni iure suo). These were distinguished in the thirteeenth century from churches where the extra ‘fatness’ of the monks’ patronage stretched to taking much of the revenue for themselves, not just by the degree of exploitation but by having been ‘incorporated’ or ‘appropriated’.147 By this the monastery or chapter was not merely allowed, as lord or patron, to restrict the parson’s living, but to take over the entire property and revenue of the church (normally at the death or resignation of a parson), itself becoming the church’s parson or rector, and supplying a chaplain or vicar.148 This made the church more completely the monastery’s or chapter’s property than it could ever have been for a lay lord, and needed for that very reason to be rationalized as ‘parsonage’ (as well as justified by ‘poverty’).149 There 143

See ibid. 48. Mansi, XXII. 222–4. See Schreiber, Kurie und Kloster, II. 15–16; on the Rhineland, Wirtz, ‘Donum’, 138–50 (esp. 148 n. 1). 145 Huguccio on C. 16 q. 7 c. 32 is close to this: ‘if a church is the patron, being able to possess a church and its property it invests as regards temporalities’; whereas an individual churchman founding his own church would have ‘no more right in it than a layman, that is, only the right of patronage’ (Landau, Ius, 146 49–50 and n. 168). Landau, Ius, 49–50, 86–7, 91–2, 137–9. 147 ‘Incorporate’, ‘impropriate’, and ‘appropriate’ seem to be interchangeable. 148 Papal authorization of it appears first in decretals of Innocent III (Landau, Ius, 140; see Select Letters, no. 22 at 74–5). What was new was the assertion of centralized control and standard rules, not of course the practice itself, nor bishops’ attempts to authorize it (above, pp. 575–8, 582–3, 701–4). 149 So Schreiber’s (Kurie und Kloster, II. 15–18) and Stutz’s (‘Gratian’, 12–13) distinction between churches under a monastery’s patronage and those brought fully into its property still holds good; it always 144

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were of course variations on these two types, and there might be little difference between them if the incumbent had a limited portion like a vicar’s although counting as a rector, the monks although ‘patrons’ being allowed to take what was seen as surplus to his needs.150 In either case, the idea of the ecclesiastical benefice was now emerging, itself closely linked to the ius patronatus, and deployed for churches in lay patronage too. When canon law had taken founders’ rights out of the comfortable fog of custom, what the priest was given to live on changed its legal character. Some lords in the past had granted priests for life the church itself with all its pertinences (often, like any other kind of property, under the name of ‘benefice’); others, only a priest’s portion of land and revenues, under various names (sometimes ‘priest’s benefice’); in any case given by the lord.151 With the ban on lay investiture and the practice (replacing it) of the archdeacon giving physical possession of the church, came the idea—by a transition still obscure152—that whatever the priest had to live on went with his office, both being bestowed on him by the bishop or his deputy. For this—including what was held by a perpetual vicar (in thirteenthcentury terminology)—the word ‘benefice’ came into regular use by the midthirteenth century. A good deal of highly technical legal theory developed round it.153 Like patronage itself, the benefice came to be seen as a ius spirituali annexum, and never lost its partly sacral quality;154 yet it was also a form of property, being the temporary property of the priest. To that rather limited extent it can be seen as Stutz saw it, as a survival from the days of the proprietary church, taken into canon law and only partially transformed.155

25.ii. Change on the ground in the twelfth century Alongside the development of the new canon law on patronage was real change in what actually went on, each feeding the other; without adjustments in the practice of bishops and lords the new law would hardly have been formulated, let alone applied, and without the new law forming from Alexander III onwards the allowed for movement and intermediate stages. But they underestimated how different from ordinary patronage was what canon lawyers allowed a monastery’s (or a bishop’s) patronage to cover; and see below, p. 926. 150 151 See the four categories set out by Landau, Ius, 142–4. See Chapter 16, passim. 152 See Mollat in Dict. de droit canonique, II (1937), 407–9, and bibliog. 409–10 (esp. for Po¨schl, 1926); D. Lindner, ‘Das kirchliche Benefizium in Gratians Dekret’, Studia Gratiana, 2 (1954), 378–85. 153 See Landau, Ius, 159–70. 154 G. Olsen, ‘The Definition of the Ecclesiastical Benefice in the 12th c.: The Canonists’ Discussion of Spiritualia’, Studia Gratiana, 2 (1967), 431, 434–46. 155 On its survival into modern canon law see Kuttner, History of Ideas, 361–2. For Stutz, seeing it as the supreme survival of ‘Germanic church law’, it was a central preoccupation.


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practice would have remained unstable because un-bureaucratized. At the beginning of the twelfth century, what called for changed responses was primarily the continuing decrees against lay investiture, along with occasional condemnations of any lay dominium in churches. Not only some not-unambiguous legislation but a few quite clear papal judgments had carried this broader condemnation, as we have seen in Italy.1 When what looks like this radical view was asserted by Innocent II at Clermont in 1130 (‘that the laity who hold churches are either to restore them to the bishops or be excommunicated’),2 this was taken home by the archbishop of Tarragona and provoked an extraordinary collective response at a peace assembly at Barcelona next year. Here count Raymond-Berengar III and his son Raymond, with all the Catalan nobility and all who had made any demands on churches, relinquished into the archbishop’s and bishops’ potestas all the churches with their alods and offerings and functions that the churches now have or should have or that will in future be justly granted them, and also the clergy and their goods and chaplaincies,3 and all donatio of churches, so that the archbishop and bishops shall have all these freely and manage them at their pleasure, according to the canons and for the honour of God and His church.4

But this is more ambiguous than it looks: it might put churches, clergy, and possessions into the bishops’ potestas in the sense only of their proper authority, and perhaps renounce exploitation rather than all lordship; even renouncing donatio, the giving of churches to priests, might mean giving up the ritual of appointment or investiture rather than any role at all. Whatever it meant, it looks like an isolated expression of short-lived enthusiasm;5 the 1130 Clermont decree had to be reiterated at Le´rida as late as 1174 (though by then ‘saving the ius patronatus’); in 1204, when king Peter II of Aragon renounced his role in appointing clergy, his nobles’ reaction amounted to ‘speak for yourself ’.6 The normal response to such decrees, in France and elsewhere, seems to be that some families or individuals gave churches away to a monastery who might not otherwise have done so (or not so soon), but as a pious donation of something that was theirs to give, and using the old proprietary language; while rulers’ donations sometimes reveal quite sharp limits to their acceptance of canon law.7 1

2 3 Above, p. 881–2. Above, p. 885. capellaniae, perhaps meaning priest’s portions. Cortes de los antiquos reinos, I no. 3 (at p. 51, after various peace enactments). See Vincke, ‘U¨bergang’, 457 on abp. Ollegar’s presence at Clermont and at Barcelona. 5 Cf. 1143 legatine council of Valladolid for Castille (with king Alfonso VII), publishing most of the Lateran II (1139) decrees but not the radical c. 10 requiring the laity to surrender churches; see Bidagor, Iglesia, 139–40. 6 Crońica de S. Juan de la Penã, c. 34 (Aragonese version, p. 81; Latin version, pp. 135–6): he has to declare ¨ bergang’, 459–60. that he does so. See Vincke, ‘U 7 In the late 1130s countess Ermesind of Moha gave four churches to Saint-Vanne, Verdun, two of them already given by her late husband, neither he nor she apparently seeking episcopal consent (Altlux. UB 4

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Meanwhile for the countless churches still in the lordship of the laity, the investiture decrees were applicable. But for these churches, ‘not to be received from the hands of a layman’ was either uselessly narrow if it merely referred to the formalities of putting a priest in possession, or impossibly demanding if taken to imply that the lay lord had no right in the church at all. What mattered in practice was that the bishop should have a veto on the choice of priest and authority over him when in office; and in principle, that the bishop should be seen to confer on him the cura animarum. Bishops and church councils had never lost sight of the practical points (and probably never without some effect);8 and the idea that the bishop did not merely consent to the appointment but conferred the cure of souls was in play in France by 1031.9 In Flanders in 1087, when the marquis Robert freed his collegiate church of Tronchiennes, reserving only investiture with the provostry, he added that ‘the bishop of Noyon is to give the cure of souls to him to whom the marquis of Flanders gives the provostry’.10 This formula is sometimes seen as a temporary and unsuccessful compromise based on distinguishing between temporalities and spiritualities as embodied in ‘church’ and ‘altar’.11 But rather than a conscious or systematic attempt to allot a proper role to the laity (or even a new move by lords to claim the temporalities as their property, instead of the church itself),12 it seems to result from individual bishops, faced with the actual power of lords lay and monastic, trying to secure their long-recognized right to consent and to push it an important shade further, to participation in the appointment, variously described. Nor did their efforts ‘fail’ and have to be replaced with a new set of principles: rather, they enabled new principles to emerge gradually, finally establishing that the clerk had to petition for the cure of souls before getting possession of the church. What brought this about was not aggressive legislation, militant bishops, or rationalizing canonists, but changing attitudes and developing routines: a gradual and largely obscure change on the ground, leading most lords to accept that they had to present their chosen clergy to the diocesan bishop who would confer the office on them (and who could at least expect them to attend his synods).13 Inevitably most of the evidence of this actually happening is for monastic rather than lay-owned churches;14 but when the Life of St Gilbert of Sempringham speaks of his father nos. 315, 364 (1096, 1135–9) ); count Theobald of Blois’s 1128 donation was reluctantly done through the bishop (above, p. 868), but reserving guardianship and ‘customs’ in the church’s temporal possessions. 8 9 10 Above, pp. 520–4. Above, p. 826. ACFlandres no. 7. 11 e.g. F. Kempf, Handbuch der KG (ed. H. Jedin), III (Freiburg, 1966), 428. 12 As Barth saw it (Hildebert, 197–8); but lay lords’ claims on their churches’ produce or rent-revenue do not need such explaining. 13 See Barth, Hildebert, 153–6, on bishops’ efforts to get lay lords’ priests to their synods. 14 Brett, English Church, 144–6, on charter evidence from Henry I’s time; Wirtz, ‘Donum’, 124 n. 2, 126–31. Cf. Angers no. 79 (1113), agreement between bp. Rainald and Saint-Florent, Saumur, about a church


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the knight Jocelin ‘presenting him to the bishop, by the custom of the country’, for Sempringham and another church ‘founded in his dominium’, this may well be acceptable evidence for early twelfth-century practice in England.15 Sometimes it is made clear that the lord who presents the priest also puts him in possession of the church or its temporalities.16 Here and there, however, a lay lord’s right to do this was questioned on the grounds that it was forbidden to laymen. In 1133 abbot Wibold of Stavelot-Malme´dy writes to Heribrand who holds in fief the monastery’s castle of Logne, changing the arrangement allowed by former abbots for filling the castle church and one other when their priest died, that ‘you would give the churches by your hand, and would yourself present the parson’ (by implication, to bishop or archdeacon) ‘for investiture with the altar’ (‘altar’, here, in its sense of the office and its revenues). Wibold, not prepared to concede ‘that the possession of churches should be given by a layman’, has arranged instead that Heribrand present to him or future abbots ‘a suitable parson’, whom the abbots would invest (‘give him the churches by their hand’) and present for the bishop’s or archdeacon’s donum altaris.17 Here what used to happen would probably have been acceptable to many bishops, except that taking or sending the candidate to the bishop evidently here followed, not preceded, putting him into the church; but so it would under the new arrangement. The abbot’s real purpose was probably to make sure that the churches remained Stavelot-Malme´dy’s and not the castellan’s; but a strict adherence to the letter of the (now old) investiture decrees gave him a knockdown argument. For the most part, in that region and beyond in the Rhineland, lords lay and monastic went on ‘giving’ the church to their candidates in some way, and from the 1130s were usually described as having the donum or donatio or investitura of the church,18 while the bishop or his archdeacon gave the ‘altar’ (this too as donum or investitura).19 It was in these terms, in the 1150s, that a dispute was dealt with at Cologne between an abbess and a lay lord who were joint lords of a church, taking turns to present to it. What we have is the written complaint of the abbess’s candidate’s father, Arnold of Blankenheim, to the archbishop of Cologne as diocesan. It was the abbess’s turn, Arnold says, and she had given the donum whose priest was to be appointed ‘by their choice and by our grant, having been first presented to us as is right and customary’. 15 Mon. Angl., VI. ii. v (but other vocabulary here—Jocelin’s patronatus and Gilbert’s personatus— belongs to the time of its composition, ?early 13th c.). Charters granting churches to individual clerks (mainly from rulers or ecclesiastics) remained much like grants of land, with no mention of presentation to the bishop, but this may nonetheless have happened (cf. Brett, op. cit., 144 on the parallel matter of ‘apparently old-fashioned grants’ of churches to monasteries). 16 e.g. above, at note 10; below, at note 25; Wirtz, ‘Donum’, 130. 17 Stavelot-Malme´dy no. 157. Here the verb I translate as ‘present’ is conducere (see below, at notes 24–6). 18 True of lay lords as well as monasteries (see Wirtz, ‘Donum’, 137 n. 2, 138 n. 1). 19 Ibid. 132 and n. 3, 133 and n. 1, 136–7 and n. 2. It does not imply that church and altar were separate properties, but that there were two aspects to giving a cleric possession.

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ecclesiae to his clerical son; but the lay lord Henry of Limburg had unilaterally given the church to his own son Henry, who had got to the archdeacon ahead of Arnold and his son and secured the donum altaris from him.20 The abbess had complained, the archdeacon had arranged a hearing, and judgment had been given ‘that the donum altaris should not have been given to anyone unless the possessors of the church had agreed between themselves about the donum investiturae’21 (Arnold’s complaint was that Henry’s son had been contriving a delay).22 Wirtz sees this case as demonstrating that prior investiture by the lord (here the abbess) determined the case even though the other candidate had been admitted by the archdeacon.23 But it is not clear what the archbishop’s decision was, and it could have turned rather on whether the presentation had been made by the right person (in later terms, ‘the true patron’). In the twelfth-century Rhineland alternatives to donum or investitura appear in the words conducere and conductus, usually translatable as ‘introducing’: ‘leading into’ the church, an act of lordship.24 But as early as the mid-eleventh century, in Lorraine, Saint-Vanne of Verdun had a privilege from Leo IX allowing them to choose a parson, invest him with his living, and ‘conduct’ him to the bishop or archdeacon ‘to receive the cure of souls’;25 and this usage of conducere—‘leading’ the clerk (or, in practice, sending him with appropriate documents) to ask for and receive the cura animarum—became dominant late in the twelfth century as a synonym for ‘presenting’.26 In France, meanwhile, the terminology of ‘presenting’, or of conducere in that sense, appears here and there in the early twelfth century; for instance in the settlement of a dispute in 1120–4 between SaintMartin-des-Champs and Peter the Orphan about the church of Annet, mainly about a sharing of tithes, but also—Peter having claimed that ‘a priest could not be put into the church except by him’—that ‘putting in (missio) and expelling the priest belonged to the monks alone, they alone presenting him’ (conducere).27 But monasteries in Anjou, Maine, and Touraine could be given the ius ponendi—the right to put clerks in—without mention of the need to present them to the bishop;28 and in mid-century lay lords might still possess this apparently unqualified power of ‘putting in’.29 However, they sometimes renounced it specifically 20 Here ‘giving the donum’ (of church or altar) evidently does not mean giving the power to dispose of 21 it, but rather ‘making the gift’ to a clerk to serve it. i.e. about which of them should invest. 22 Wirtz, ‘Donum’, 139–40 and 139 n. 2 (quoting at length, from a 12th-c. letter-collection). 23 24 Ibid. 138–9. Implying that the priest is the lord’s tenant or lease-holder. 25 26 Ibid. 146 n. 1. Ibid. 142–7. 27 St-Martin-des-Champs no. 176. Cf. Saint-Florent, Saumur, 1113 (above, note 14); and Cluny no. 3890 (1110, dioc. Clermont). In 1150–1 ‘presentation’ was included in what the chapter of Le Mans gave back for life to two clerks among the sons of the donor of the church of Ancinnes (below, note 29). 28 See Dillay, ‘Re´gime’, 264–5. 29 In 1150–1 bp. William of Le Mans accounts for a family’s surrender of the church of Ancinnes (Liber albus Cenom. no. 129, with no. 130) by their ‘well remembering the apostolic decree’ anathematizing ‘laity who put priests into churches by their own presumption’.


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and to the bishop, a more reform-conscious move (even if the bishop’s acknowledgment half-recognized their former power to do it)30 than simply giving the church to a monastery, and more radical than the still-continuing surrenders of firstfruits, offerings, and (to some extent) tithes. Behind all this lies the growing activity of diocesan bishops, especially in making terms for consecrating newly founded or rebuilt churches and settling disputes about the parochial and property rights of churches and clergy, of a kind that often impinged on the rights of lords (though here too the early twelfth-century evidence is mainly for monasteries as lords).31 There followed, over the middle decades of the century, the build-up in England particularly of an impressive body of bishops, many of them learned in canon law. Such men’s acceptance of what seems to have been the current modus vivendi with the lords of churches did not necessarily prevent them remembering that lay lordship—and therefore even presentation, let alone investiture—was in principle questionable. In the 1140s Gilbert Foliot as abbot of Gloucester wrote on behalf of a layman Adelard to Jocelin bishop of Salisbury, asking that Adelard be allowed to present a parson for the church of Finchampstead. He concedes Jocelin’s ‘laudable’ wish to be foremost among bishops ‘in snatching churches from the hand of laymen, so that they may not even present parsons’, and acknowledges that ‘it would be right that the presentation of parsons should not belong to laymen, just as the donation of churches does not’; but he urges the claim of old custom, and the wisdom of not proceeding harshly against small men when nothing has been attempted against the great.32 Whether or not Jocelin was more motivated by wanting livings to dispose of than by high principle, the extreme position was evidently still a possible point of view before Gratian’s teaching was published and took hold.33 Gilbert Foliot himself as bishop, however, shows no sign of even countenancing this opinion.34 For during his episcopacy (of Hereford 1148–63 and London 1163–88) a new phase began, providing him and his colleagues with impeccable grounds for allowing lay presentations, and a vocabulary for speaking of lords as ‘patrons’ or ‘advocates’ and as having ius patronatus or advocatio. A high proportion of Alexander III’s preserved decretals arose out of English cases sent him on appeal, or brought to his attention by bishops asking for advice or rulings as 30 Bp. Ulger could credit lay lords with giving him this ius ponendi sacerdotem, sometimes qualified by ‘if it may be called a right’ or ‘which they say they have’ (Angers nos. 141, 174–5). 31 See e.g. Barth, Hildebert, passim; Barlow, 1066–1154, 47–53; Brett, English Church, 113–31, 148–61. But see ibid. 147–8 for an important case involving a lay lord’s donation. 32 Foliot Letters, nos. 17, 18. 33 On canon-law collections known in England by mid-12th c. see Barlow, 1066–1154, 145–6 (Canterbury had Gratian’s decretum soon after 1150). 34 See his letter (no. 257, datable only ‘1163–c.1180’) to a colleague asking him to institute a relation who has been presented to a church by someone unnamed.

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diocesans or judges-delegate (probably often prompting his opinion);35 these bishops were mostly conscientious, able, and concerned for law and good order, even though during the Becket crisis they were trapped in commitment to Henry II’s ‘customs’ until in 1172 Henry released them from their promises to observe these customs.36 It was in Alexander III’s time (1159–81) that the routine procedure for appointing a priest was settled:37 presentation by the patron, for a church really vacant; ‘admission and institution’ by the bishop (including investiture by ring or staff or book, conferring the cure of souls); and ‘induction’ (or ‘installation’ or ‘corporeal institution’ or sometimes, again, ‘investiture’, with keys as the normal symbol) by the archdeacon or rural dean at the church itself 38 (rather than leaving this to a lay patron; this is the only new development).39 The variety of terminology strongly suggests a background of established regional or national practices, feeding into as well as drawing on the routine promoted by the pope. In England the chief evaders of this routine seem to be married priests and their clerical sons, rather than troublesome lords.40 Alexander’s general advice to Roger bishop of Worcester in 1164 (obviously asked for) states that he has heard that there are married clerks holding benefices, and others, sons of priests, who succeed to their benefices ‘as it were by hereditary right’ and are then ‘unlawfully promoted’ to holy orders; this is not to be allowed, and those already in possession are to be removed (though this last was later dropped).41 Frustrating these priests’ sons could mean upholding the rights of patrons (lay as well as monastic), as when a clerk Milo in the diocese of Worcester complains that, having been properly presented to a church by the ‘lord of the fundus’,42 his institution has been impeded by the late priest’s son; Alexander rules that since it is uncanonical 35

See Brooke, Medieval Church and Society, 78 and n. 18; M. Cheney, Roger of Worcester, 196, 209–12; C. Duggan, ‘Decretals of Alexander III to England’ (1986), in Decretals and the Creation of ‘New Law’ (Aldershot, 1998). 36 For the weight of the bishops’ promises see A. Duggan, Thomas Becket (London, 2004), esp. 44–5, 78–9, 101; for release from these at Avranches (crucially important for the future), Materials, VII, end of the legates’ reports, epist. nos. 774–5 at pp. 522, 523. 37 e.g. in Lateran III cc. 9 and 17. In c. 9 (concerning monasteries’ churches), where Urban II had spoken of ‘not putting in priests without the bishops’ counsel’ (Clermont 1095, Cencius-Baluze cc., c. 4), Alexander says of monks ‘they are to present priests to the bishops for instituting’. See M. Cheney, Roger, 81–2. 38 See Addleshaw, Rectors, 18–22; Kemp, ‘Towards Admission’, esp. 157–60, 169–71; Thomas, Droit, 144–7, citing variations of terminology (to which was soon added ‘collation’: conferring, by a diocesan bishop having the patronage). 39 Of investiture on the spot Thomas held that ‘Il euˆt e´te´ logique qu’elle fuˆt faite par le patron’ (Droit, 147), but this overlooks the sacrality of the church itself and of its possessions. 40 For an earlier generation’s more relaxed approach see the settlement between Saint-Vincent of Le Mans and a priest’s brother, approved by bishop Hildebert’s court (c.1103, St-Vincent no. 132); and the abbot’s promise of a church donated to Marmoutier to any clerical son or nepos of the present priest, allowed by Hildebert (1125, PL 171. col. 1783; Barth, Hildebert, 146–7). 41 42 See M. Cheney, Roger, app. II, no. 61 (trans., 69–70). Note the still uncertain terminology.


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for ‘sons to succeed fathers in churches’, the bishop is to install Milo (if the facts are clear). On the other hand, in the same diocese a clerk has complained that though he had been canonically in possession of a chapel, a knight despoiled him of it (apparently presenting another clerk) on the grounds that the petitioner’s father ministered there; he is to be put back into possession if he was indeed turned out by lay insolence (consisting here, presumably, in evicting a priest without episcopal authority), and provided his father was not rector or perpetual vicar.43 So patrons (lay or monastic) tended to push out the old priestly families;44 it was virtually only they who could do this (by presenting someone else who then successfully claims the living). Sometimes, however, the patron might be behind a priest’s son’s succession, either still taking this for granted or having been paid or promised a pension to secure it.45 Some married priests avoided the illegal direct succession by acquiring the advowson of another church and presenting their son to it; Robert Foliot bishop of Hereford obtained a ruling from Alexander III against this.46 The 1175 council of Westminster decreed also that ‘no one be allowed to transfer a church to anyone by name of dotalicium’, and that anyone doing this was ‘to be deprived forever of the patronage of that church’; in the context this must refer not to lay patrons but to married priests providing for a priestly son-in-law.47 Such moves were parasitic on the shift from property in churches to patronage, apart from the probably unusual case of the priest-lord—precursor of the ‘squarson’—who had inherited church and manor together.48 Back in 1138–9 it was probably some such priestly background that enabled a married layman to defend his possession of the church of Luton by hereditary right and what he represented as military service.49 On lay lordship or patronage the bishops’ terminology and practice were in transition.50 Gilbert Foliot, for instance, sometimes confirmed laymen’s and laywomen’s donations of churches to monasteries without fuss about whether 43 M. Cheney, Roger, app. II nos. 19, 26 (with detailed discussion, 73–4): X 1. 17. 4, 8 (CIC II). ‘Hereditary succession’ came to be interpreted as direct succession, ‘without any parson coming between’ (ibid. 74–5 and app. II no. 57; cf. Westminster 1175 c. 1). 44 Of two clerks disputing a Cambridgeshire church (1172–7), one was apparently presented by Thorney abbey, the other was grandson of the last holder who was said never to have been instituted, so had probably himself inherited it (Cheney, Roger, 135 and app. II, no. 27 and note p. 330). 45 See the bishops’ draft proposals for Westminster 1175 (where it was not, however, dealt with), and the ruling then obtained from Alexander III (which assumes that any pension needs the bishop’s consent). See M. Cheney, Roger, 174–5, 185, 219–20; C&S I. 969, 978–81. 46 Jaffe´2 no. 13954; see J. Barrow, ‘Hereford Bishops’, 6. Cf. X 3. 38. 6 (CIC II). 47 c. 9 (C&S I. 987). 48 See C. R. Cheney, From Becket to Langton, 116 (Roger of Huntingfield in the 1190s), 126–7; and see index: Thurgarton. 49 Van Caenegem, Eng. Lawsuits no. 296. Only after difficult litigation was it won by the clerk to whom earl Gilbert as lord of Luton had given it. 50 See Brian Kemp’s thorough analysis, ‘Towards Admission and Institution’, including (pp. 160–7) detailed surveys of 12th-c. formulae in five English dioceses.

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they were able to give them,51 though sometimes himself also ‘granting’ the church after the lords had given it;52 or granting its dominium which the lord has given (and adding to this the personatus which is for him to give).53 But elsewhere Foliot has a man and his mother give to the Hospitallers not a church, nor its dominium, but its advocatio; and in a combination of old and new, he confirms a charter giving to the monks of St Neot’s a layman’s ‘right of lordship and advowson’ (ius dominii et advocationis) in two churches.54 When he makes the monks or Hospitallers ‘parsons’ or gives them the personatus (saving the present priest’s rights until death or preferably resignation),55 he may still speak of the lay lords’ ‘donation’ or ‘grant’ but combine this with their ‘presenting’ the monastery or its head as they would an individual clerk, for the bishop to ‘invest’ with the personatus.56 Or he may have them ‘present’ but claim all the donating as his, done at the lords’ request: their ‘petition and presentation’.57 Only occasionally does he call a lord ‘patron’ or speak of his ius patronatus.58 Two examples of Gilbert Foliot’s work can show the new law taking hold. As judge-delegate in a case between the abbot of Ramsey and a priest Godfrey about a Norfolk church, Burnham Deepdale, he reported that a knight Walter who had presented Godfrey for the church now ‘publicly acknowledged that the ius patronatus belonged to Ramsey’ and ‘resigned into our hand and granted to Ramsey’ any right he might have in it or its fundus; the priest Godfrey publicly confessing that he had ‘received the personatus by unjust presentation’, resigned it into Foliot’s hand of his own free will; Foliot then assigned to the abbot and monastery ‘both the ius patronatus and the church itself ’ to possess for ever.59 As diocesan he promoted lay plans for the church of Stifford in Essex: Gilbert Malet the king’s steward had given it to Rochester cathedral priory, but needed to clear away a claim by his tenant, the local lord Roger of Stifford, who had long claimed the ius patronatus as his own. Roger now surrendered this to Malet,60 and presumably in return, obtained the living for his own son (which was probably how he had planned to use his supposed patronage). Foliot declares that he has ‘given 51 e.g. (as bp. of London, 1163–88) Letters, nos. 380, 385, 458 (but no. 387 has quantum ad laicam donationem 52 spectabit). e.g. nos. 382 (here calling the donors ‘founders and advocates’), 388, 437. 53 Ibid., no. 333 (1148–55, as bp. of Hereford). In the related no. 332 (‘original or contemporary copy’) he remarks that a layman gives the right of presentation when he gives a church, whereas only the bishop gives the personatus. 54 Ibid., nos. 383, 449 (as bp. of London). See below, at notes 77–80, for early usage of advocatio in 55 England. e.g. nos. 332–3, 383, 389, and in note 57, below. 56 Ibid., nos. 383, 435. See Kemp, ‘Towards Admission’, 156, 160, 161, 165 (an early and simply worded example from Norwich, 1121–45). 57 Foliot Letters, nos. 445, 446, 389 (c.1179–80, c.1181–3, c.1186); already implied in no. 304 (1148–55). 58 See what follows (and no. 445, c.1179–80). 59 Ibid., no. 429 (original, ‘1163–78’: probably before Consts. of Clarendon 1164, since the case would have breached c.1). 60 Ibid., no. 431 (1163–c.1180. This does not say that Roger had given it up to Malet long ago, as the editors read it).


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and granted the church of Stifford to Ralph of Stifford, son of Roger, at the petition and presentation of Gilbert Malet its advocate, and constituted him parson’. Later, however, Ralph was persuaded to resign the church (in effect, the parsonage) and the bishop conferred it on the prior and monks of Rochester, ‘instituting them as parsons in it’ at the ‘presentation’ of Gilbert Malet. Meanwhile Ralph continued to hold the church (possibly all of it) as the monks’ vicar; only after his death were the monks to ‘have and hold the church and convert its fruits and offerings to their own uses’.61 When Foliot allows monks the ‘parsonage’ of churches he seems to be confidently operating his own routine.62 Along with these (in effect) appropriations went the arrangement of vicarages—adequate benefices carved out of the ‘parsonage’ (whether a monastery’s or an individual absentee parson’s) for a resident serving priest as vicar. Efforts to secure this had been made by an archbishop of York quite early in the twelfth century,63 and were evidently becoming systematic by the second half, independent of any recent legislation or even much papal guidance, although Alexander III sometimes provided valuable backing in the matter.64 Appropriations were one means of eliminating hereditary priests, and accordingly a vicarage might be allotted to an otherwise disappointed heir (as with Ralph of Stifford).65 How far the laity accepted real change, in England or elsewhere, is difficult to assess. Old terminology of ‘giving and granting’ churches—whether to individual clerks or to greater churches—survives in charters and chronicles,66 naturally enough, but not necessarily reflecting unreformed practice. In the diocese of Salisbury (just before 1162) Robert son of Fulcrad notified bishop Jocelin that he had ‘given and granted’ the church of Padworth in perpetual alms to a clerk Robert de Port; we have the bishop’s response, a charter more correctly saying 61 Ibid., nos. 432–5. The editors’ tentative dating of these charters and related events does not quite work: no. 431 must postdate no. 432 and may be no earlier than no. 433; nos. 433 and probably 434 must be earlier than ‘?c.1186’, since no. 435 (of 1186) was occasioned by the groundless claim of a canon (whose time as farmer of the church has to be fitted in) made ‘as time went on’ after the transactions of no. 433. 62 Cf. Morey, Bartholomew of Exeter, 72–3; M. Cheney, Roger, 78–80. See Kemp, ‘Towards Admission’, 169–72 on 12th-c. English bishops’ use of the term impersonatio both for instituting a clerk and for what would later be appropriation. 63 Between 1109 and 1140 (C. R. Cheney, From Becket to Langton, 133–4). 64 Ibid. 131–7, with app. ii (pp. 182–5) on Lincoln; M. Cheney, Roger, 80, 172–3; Morey, Bartholomew, 72–4 and app. ii, no. 2; L. Voss, Heinrich von Blois Bischof von Winchester (Berlin, 1932), 159–62, with app. ii, nos. iv. a–c. Papal legislation for adequate and perpetual vicarages begins in 1215, Lateran IV c. 32 (Mansi, XXII. 1019). 65 This may be why vicars appear slightly suspect in letters of Alexander III to the bp. of Norwich: liable to encroach on the parson’s right rather than vice versa (X 2. 28. 4; cf. Westminster 1175 c. 12), and possibly impeding the bishop’s appointment of a successor (X 5. 31. 6). 66 The (late 12th-c.?) Norman-French chronicle of Wigmore abbey repeatedly has lay lords ‘give’ village churches to the monks (J. C. Dickinson and P. T. Ricketts (ed.), ‘The Anglo-Norman Chronicle of Wigmore Abbey’, Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club, Herefordshire, 39 (1969), 422–35: parallel text, translation sometimes obscuring the terminology).

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that he, the bishop, has ‘granted and donated’ the church (again, ‘in perpetual alms’—evidently meaning the parson’s secure tenure for life) to the clerk Robert, at Robert son of Fulcrad’s presentation, and has canonically accepted him into the parsonage.67 In eastern England between 1158 and 1166 Gervase Painel and his wife (the widowed countess of Northampton) wrote similarly to the archdeacon of Leicester informing him of their gift of a church to a clerk, or rather to a clerk’s nepos, Richard: ‘you are to know that I have given him the church of Waltham in perpetual alms’, and asking him to support Richard ‘in this my donation’; here too we have the bishop’s charter recording that he has ‘accepted and introduced’ Richard (‘the clerk Stephen’s son’) ‘to the parsonage of the church of Waltham, at the petition and presentation’ of earl Simon (Gervase’s stepson), Gervase, and countess Isabel;68 either this was how he chose to read the couple’s letters, or they and the young earl really had sent some more emollient message or messenger with Richard. The transaction itself looks transparent enough; but behind it, in this instance, lies a tangle of old-fashioned property interests besides the lay couple’s patronal claims. There was a live and perhaps hereditary priest of Waltham, Thorold, whom Richard evidently bought out but reinstated as his vicar. The bishop reports, probably immediately before admitting Richard to the parsonage, that Thorold ‘has resigned the parsonage into our hand, ceded it to Richard as parson of that church’ (no price is hinted at, but Richard much later is called ‘the buyer’), and ‘received it from the hand of Richard to possess in his name’; he will pay Richard two gold coins a year and serve him faithfully (presumably as serving priest of the church, though nothing is said of his duties nor even of what he will have of the church’s endowments and revenues: possibly everything).69 Meanwhile Gervase Painel and countess Isabel, to whom (along with the sitting priest Thorold) Richard owed the parsonage, had not been unquestionably able to give it him. Isabel’s first husband, Simon of Senlis II, had ‘donated the church’ in Stephen’s reign to the nuns of Beauvais. These nuns had in 1186 given its ius patrocinatus (in the almost up-to-date terminology of their charter), ‘which they possessed by the alms of earl Simon and Isabel his wife’, to the nuns of Nuneaton;70 it was a case brought by Nuneaton against the parson Richard (or his son), held before judges-delegate about 1189–90, that elicited the past history from Gervase and his wife. Gervase reports earl Simon’s donation and goes on, without comment, to say that on marrying the countess after Simon’s death ‘I bestowed the church on 67

Addleshaw, Rectors, 17 (from H. E. Salter, Facsimiles of Early Charters in Oxford Muniment Rooms (1929), nos. 25, 26). For bp. Jocelyn’s later charters see Kemp, ‘Towards Admission’, 160–2. 68 Stenton, Danelaw Charters, p. lxxiv and nos. 337–8, 339. 69 Ibid. no. 340. Richard held the parsonage for many years, becoming a clerk but not a priest. 70 Ibid. no. 342.


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Richard the purchaser’ who had it for many years, and later at Richard’s request ‘I gave and granted the church to his son Richard’. He goes on to report the agreement by which the Beauvais nuns gave to Nuneaton ‘their ius that they had there’; and that he and his wife have now ‘donated and granted the church’ to Nuneaton. The judges eventually confirm an amicable settlement between Nuneaton and the clerk Richard, allowing him to ‘possess the church’ for life for the modest rent of 4s. Nothing is said about the church’s service; but late in the century a chaplain Gumfrid has such firm rights in the church that—far from holding it for rent from the nuns—he grants it to them ‘to hold from me ad firmam as long as I live’, paying him the substantial rent of 10 marks a year and bearing any episcopal or other dues ‘as if they had reduced the church to their own use’.71 He may have been an heir to Richard, or to the long-ago priest Thorold (whose roots in the place were probably deeper). There are puzzles about this church’s history between the 1150s and the 1190s, but it shows up the survival not only of proprietary language but of proprietary arrangements at the clerical level, which a mid-century bishop might condone and his successor forty years later perhaps know nothing about. In other countries survivals of the old language into the later twelfth century can readily be found, sometimes clearly reflecting old assumptions and practices.72 In Benevento, a church that a layman ‘gave’ to the abbess of S. Maria in 1200 had already been ‘given’ for life to his sister on her entry as a nun, by their father;73 in Languedoc in 1180, when a couple with their three sons and one daughter ‘gave back’ a church and its dependent churches to Le´zat, they also gave to their fourth son for life ‘all the ius and dominium that they had justly or unjustly in those churches and their tenancies’.74 Even in Paris, as late as 1206, Matthew count of Beaumont declared that he would ‘appoint’ or ‘set up’ a priest (in a church that he and the bishop were founding jointly) ‘whose benefice, whenever it falls vacant in whatever way, I and my heirs shall be able to confer freely on another suitable parson’; the bishop confirmed these rights to the count and his successors, using the same verb conferre for what the counts can do with the benefice, a verb more properly reserved for the bishop’s role. But count Matthew had acknowledged himself ‘bound to present this parson to the bishop of Paris and his successors’, and the bishop’s charter noted this and asserted the parsons’ 71

Ibid. nos 343–5. An extreme example is the old Apulian lady who in 1167 could get a notary to draw up a charter for her church that asserted the church’s ‘freedom’ against the bishop, and her heirs’ rights to ‘recall it into their own ius’ (pleasantly related by Martin, La Pouille, 638). 73 E. M. Jamison, ‘The Abbess Bethlem’, in Oxford Essays . . . H. E. Salter (Oxford, 1934), 53–4, 64–5; app. nos. 11, 12. 74 Le´zat no. 216 (Saint-Christaud-de-Volvestre, on which Le´zat had a long-pursued claim): probably an entry gift, accepted to eliminate further claims. 72

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subjection to the bishops;75 so the practice, here, was probably more acceptable than the language. On the other hand, in England and elsewhere we find the new terminology used too early (if it is genuine) to mean what it came to mean,76 or (later) in ways suggesting that it is not fully understood, or that not much has really changed. When in 1164 the first clause of the Constitutions of Clarendon reserves to the king’s court conflicts arising (‘between laymen, or between laymen and clerks, or between clerks’) ‘about the advocatio and presentatio of churches’,77 the king’s advisers would have known what procedure was coming to be seen as canonical (supporting this provided it remained in the king’s court’s jurisdiction); nonetheless in speaking of advocatio they were using a word familiar to the AngloNorman laity in a sense not yet determined by the canon law of patronage.78 Thus in two versions of a charter from Lincolnshire early in Henry II’s reign, one gives ‘the church of Haugh and all its pertinences’ to Greenfield Priory while the other gives its ‘advowson and donatio’ (that is, the power to give it);79 other charters joined advowson with dominium.80 A variant on possible misunderstandings—or a regional understanding, shared presumably by the monks concerned—was to claim to have given the church itself while reserving the ‘patronage’, and this not only in late eleventh- or early twelfth-century Italy. The early Italian usage should not be seen as anticipating mid-twelfth-century doctrine: as it were, ‘we must not have dominium so we will give it away and settle for patronage’: they wanted to give their monasteries to Camaldoli for their own positive reasons, and to keep some control of appointments for those same reasons.81 Later, it may be nearer to reserving the least material and most dignified aspect of lordship; perhaps it was so in Apulia when a lay founder gave his church at Bitonto to La Cava reserving his ius patronatus, as 75

See Thomas, Droit, app., nos. 8. 1 and 2. Wahrmund’s citations for 11th-c. and even for mid-12th-c. use of patronatus or ius patronatus at Passau (Patronatsrecht, 53–4) were shown to be forgeries by J. Dorn, ‘Miszellen’, ZSSKA 37 (1916), 391–5. French instances (Couture nos. 11, 32, of c.1050 and c.1100, may be cartularist’s editings and in any case mean nothing like canon-law patronage; for 12th-c. usage moving towards its later meaning see Dillay, ‘Re´gime’, 262 and nn. Thomas’s 8th-c. Italian instance (Droit, 107) comes from Muratori’s heading, not the 77 text. On donations to Camaldoli see above, pp. 892–3. Stubbs, Charters, 164–5. 78 e.g. in Mon. Angl., IV. 65 (no. 2), 1115–48 (see Welsh Ep. Acts, D 140); cf. Brett, Church, 143 on a grant by Evrard bp. of Norwich (1121–45). Advocatio may still have meant primarily the right or liability to be vouched to warranty (see Leges Henrici Primi, ed. Downer, 404 on c. 82, 6), but the lordship almost implicit in this would imply the right to nominate priests. 79 Stenton, Danelaw Charters, pp. lxxii–iv and nos. 140–1, both originals and by the same hand with the same witnesses (at a rural deanery chapter): suggesting uneasiness about the wording. 80 Early in Stephen’s reign, the empress Matilda gave Bordesley (Worcs.) the ius advocationis et dominationis of a church (quotation kindly given me by Howard Colvin, from W. de Gray Birch, ‘Charters of Mathilda, Empress of the Romans’, BAA. Jnl., 31 (1875), 393); cf. Avicia de Romili before 1166 (Stenton, Danelaw Charters, p. lxxiv, n. 4); and Gilbert Foliot, (at note 54, above). A variant was advocatio et jurisdicio 81 (Brett, Church, 147–8). Above, pp. 396–7, 840, 892–3. 76


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we know from his abandoning that too in 1175.82 In 1192, in Leoń, a lord Berengar gave a small monastery of his own foundation to the monastery of Sahaguń, while stipulating that he, his wife, and male descendants should—strictly one at a time—‘have the ius patronatus’, being consulted about property dealings, and having this patronage ‘if they are legitimate parishioners of that church’ (attend it for the sacraments, perhaps) ‘and choose to be buried there’. The donor and his wife and two named sons were each, when patron, to have a ‘portion’ every day, while subsequent patrons were to have what a monk had;83 any near kinsman of Berengar’s who fell into great need should be received ad charitatem at Sahaguń or at the donated church; in procession, the monks should pray at Berengar’s and his wife’s tomb.84 This looks like a free interpretation of the old Visigothic concessions to founders, regardless of what canonists and popes had been making of these in the past fifty years; and although (in one redaction) the abbot cannot appoint a prior without the patron’s consent (consilium), this is not presented as the essence of ius patronatus.85 Where the canon law of patronage was really taken on board, however, it was recognized as what lordship was now reduced to, or now called; and by the end of the twelfth century most lay lords’ charters of donation show the ius patronatus (in England, that or advocatio) as what they have given, not the church itself.86 But here too it is not clear how much change in attitudes or behaviour this reflected. Clearly the sophisticated response to the new law was to accept it and manipulate it,87 and this was more likely where it had in some degree been anticipated in practice. In England, Henry II’s statement of his customs made no claim to unfettered appointment of priests for himself or other lords: presentation to the diocesan was by now itself customary; what was essential was to keep disputes about it in his own jurisdiction (which would soon be providing a remedy for defending possession—that is, having presented last time—as well as for claiming right).88 Only shortly before Becket’s murder is there a hint of some perceived threat to actual rights, when Henry stirred up lay anger against Becket for 82 Martin, ‘Lignage et pie´te´’, in Horizons marins. Itineraires spirituels, ed. H. Dubois et al., I (Paris, 1987), 201–4 and document no. 1 (1175; in no. 2 the founder’s son safeguards the family connection by a chantry arrangement, 1195). Martin sees ius patronatus here as the new canon-law patronage (p. 203); but that was a replacement for dominium, not (as here) a separable element of it. Cf. Feine, Studien, II. 56–7 (late 12th-c. 83 Aversa); below, p. 930 (Latium). The difference intended is not clear. 84 Sahaguń nos. 1467–8 (‘multiple originals’). 85 This, and the requirement that the patron be a ‘parishioner’, distances it from showing the institution of patronage ‘perfectly defined’ as Orlandis claimed (Estudios, 157–8). 86 See Dillay, ‘Re´gime’, 262–3 for Anjou, Maine, and Touraine. The Mowbray Charters for the later 12th c. give sometimes churches, sometimes advowsons or patronage; good examples of slowly changing terminology are nos. 175–80, 271 (donation to Kenilworth priory of the church of Smite (dioc. Coventry) by its parson Samson of Aubigny and its lord/patron Roger of Mowbray, 1145 and 1160s–1170s). 87 See Southern, Making, 134. 88 See Gray, ‘Ius Presentandi’, 482–90, esp. 490: to establish ‘darrein presentment’ the proper ecclesiastical procedure had to have been followed.

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allegedly obtaining a papal ‘privilege’ for himself and the bishops—presumably some ruling—‘about donations of churches, taking away the advowson of earls, barons, and the king himself ’.89 By contrast, in Norway in the 1150s and following decades the whole Gregorian programme (and even the Carolingian compulsory tithe) was a novelty, and king Magnus’s concessions to it fuelled support for his eventual supplanter Sverri. The propaganda ‘saga of King Sverri’ speaks of ‘the old law and practice’ by which the king and free householders built churches at will at their own homesteads, controlling them and appointing their priests; ‘but the archbishop claimed rule and authority in every church as soon as it was consecrated, and over all those whom he permitted to officiate there’.90 And Sverri’s manifesto of about 1198 (when the archbishop was in exile and the kingdom under interdict) upholds a conservative picture of good order now overthrown, and complains that by the bishops’ ambition and greed ‘our tithes and charitable offerings are demanded with threats . . . We are urged to build churches, and when they are built we are driven from them like heathen. We are urged to undertake the cost, but are given no rule over them . . . ’. Money is sent to Rome ‘to purchase excommunications and anathemas, which are sent to our land as recompense for our Christianity and the consecration of churches. These are the gifts and presents brought to us in return for our tithes and other property: we are given gall to drink instead of wine, and poison instead of God’s blood.’ The clergy were not set up to rob and oppress the people, still less to send them to Hell by wrongful excommunication, but to tend God’s sheep. The king should not be removed from his ‘oversight’ in the Church when lesser men ‘have this if they are the maintainers of churches’ (by virtue of inheriting or buying an estate with a church on it, or building a church at their own cost and endowing it with land).91 The argument here is built on quotations from Gratian (including his summing up of founders’ rights), selectively used to defend the traditional regime regardless of later canon-law developments. In the old days, says Sverri’s manifesto, kings appointed bishops, abbots, and others by their own judgment; they may since then have agreed to consult the chapters, but certainly not to renounce their powers of appointment.92 This too was a simplified, rather archaic response to problems that most of the West now 89 William fitz Stephen’s Vita, Materials, III. 128; see M. Cheney, Roger, 96. This might refer to some proposed time-limit for presentations, or renewed condemnation of lay jurisdiction in the matter (unlikely just then); or be an inflated version of some move to reclaim benefices in Becket’s lordship filled in his absence by the king. 90 The Saga of King Sverri of Norway, trans. J. Sephton (London, 1899), 144–5 (c. 117). See Ve´steinsson, Christianization, 172–3 for a summary of political events. 91 ‘Anecdoton Sverreri’, probably c.1198, in Saga of King Sverri, at 241–2, 246–7, 251. I slightly modernize 92 Ibid. 254–5. Sephton’s translation, and change his misleading ‘patrons’ to ‘maintainers’.


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tried to leave dormant.93 The end of the Investiture Contest left bishoprics and great monasteries under the lordship of rulers who no longer invested their incumbents with the symbols of office, but still to a large extent determined their election, invested them in some way or other with their temporalities after enjoying the revenues during the vacancy, and received an undertaking of fidelity from them.94 Over bishoprics and the greatest royal monasteries this was, as it had always been, an exercise of royal or princely authority,95 though in different degrees taking the form of outside lordship (in England now highly explicit);96 these churches had not been freed from ‘proprietary’ treatment, because they had (in general) never been under it. For monasteries and collegiate churches under other lay lords, what had freed most of them from being in some degree directly exploited as property was the gradual ending of lay abbacies; what now left many of them nonetheless open to lay exploitation was not (except in vacancies) property in the monastery, but advocacy over its lands and men. Where this was absent or harmless, monasteries not given away were left under an outside lordship not greatly affected by the end of lay investiture. Popes and canonists thereafter tried to reduce advocacy to mere protection, to eliminate or modify lords’ claims in vacancies, and to promote free election; but the lord’s consent to the election was conceded (if it had ever been denied), and was the chief element in his ‘right of patronage’ by the late twelfth century (prevailing over other suggestions by canonists perhaps because it was not too far from what was previously happening, or supposed to happen).97 In common usage (rather than in canon law) he could as well be called ‘lord’ as ‘patron’ and was often called both, with no less lordship left him than he might have over lay landholders (by now virtually owning their land although subject to certain charges on it). Only for the new Orders was this lordship deliberately rejected (or, in England, restricted to a token lordship over frankalmoin tenure), with mixed success.98 93 Even in France, however, conservatives may still have felt, with the contemporary author of the Alençon Summa (on C. 16 q. 7 c. 12), that a king should have as much right in choosing a bishop as he or any private person had in choosing priests for churches on their land (quoted by Landau, Ius, 9 n. 31). 94 See Benson, Bishop-Elect, 228–38; Classen, ‘Wormser Konkordat’, 416–45. There was still room for disagreements and accommodations. 95 So William of Champeaux assured Henry V in 1119 that he (William), having (as bp. of Chaˆlons) received nothing from the French king’s hand, yet served him for everything that anciently belonged to the respublica and had been given to the Church (ibid. 421–2). 96 See esp. Consts. of Clarendon c. 12 (Stubbs, Charters, 166) on vacancies (‘When an archbishopric, bishopric, abbey, or priory in the king’s lordship falls vacant, it should be in his hand, and he is to receive from it all its revenues and products as from his demesnes’), elections (under royal control), and homage. For Germany see Classen, op. cit., 427–42 (Henry the Lion, Frederick Barbarossa). The 12th-c. vocabulary is feudal, but see Brett’s lapidary conclusion, ‘Eng. Abbeys’, 300. 97 See above, p. 897 and note 108. 98 See index: Aldersbach; Wood, Eng. Mons., 13–14; Gallacher, ‘Conditions of Land Tenure’, 106–16 (but following Bennett Hill in exaggerating the significance of a few small sums of scutage reportedly due in England, 1166: see S. Wood, short notice, EHR 84 (1969), 824). In 1234 Gregory IX declared that he had

920


Both the vocabulary identifying ‘lord’ and ‘patron’,99 and the importance set by patrons on their consent to elections, are evident in the long and richly detailed witnesses’ depositions in a Tuscan lawsuit before judges-delegate in 1203.100 The dispute, between the Guidi family and the nuns of Rosano, was about the nuns’ election of an abbess, Agatha, made without the participation or consent of the present count Guy. The surviving testimony is almost all on the Guidi side, its chief purpose being to establish that they were Rosano’s patrons. The depositions build up a picture of the present count’s grandparents endowing the monastery with land and a gold chalice (or the like, variously remembered) and having its church consecrated;101 of the counts being publicly known as ‘lord and patron’ (or ‘lord and defender’, ‘patron and defender’, or just ‘patron’ or ‘lord’); of their occasional protective actions; and of their intervention in (or more recently consent to) the election of abbesses (indeed outright appointments in the remoter past by the now aged Sofia abbess of Pratovecchio, aunt of the present count and virtually acting count in his minority).102 Many testify to the Guidi regularly staying in the monastery and being entitled to lavish supplies; a dozen say that the Guidi were prayed for at Rosano; some add that on arriving they were ceremonially met by the nuns at the bridge over the Arno (the sort of thing that later canonists described as legitimate ‘honour’ to patrons, and that may have fed into the canon-law construct from older customs).103 Others, mostly clergy, testified to the course of Agatha’s very rapid election and to the count’s formal protest and (perhaps) move to take custody.104 On the other side we have only scrappy notes, revealing little more than that Agatha’s proctor intended to defend her election and deny that the count was patron.105 forbidden princes and nobles to impose exactions or burdens on Cistercian monasteries ‘by occasion of ius patronatus, or advocatia or custodia, that they have in them’ (Auvray (ed.), Re´gistres de Gre´goire IX, no. 1729): so conceding that these rights may exist. 99 For England see Wood, Eng. Mons., 8–13. Bps. of Lucca used it for their patronage also of nonmonastic churches: Mem. Lucc., IV. 3 no. 220 (1170), IV. 2 no. 141 (1195). 100 Chris Wickham drew my attention to this case and generously lent me his own copies of virtually unobtainable printed matter and his transcriptions of unpublished dorsal notes. On the case see id., Courts, 213–16 (our accounts overlap but have different preoccupations). The depositions are in Stra´ (ed.), Rosano, 243–74 and (for what she omits) Davidsohn, ‘Una monaca de 12o S.’, Archivio Storico Ital. (ser. 5), 22 (1898), 234–41. 101 Guy VI and his wife relocated and refounded Rosano, mid-12th c.; earlier Guidi had dealings with it, later 11th c. (Rosano nos. 9–11, 16–17). 102 There are hints (ibid. 250, 255, 266) that Rosano might be or become dependent on Pratovecchio (and so on Camaldoli); the question was raised whether Sofia was acting ‘as a nun or as count’ in making abbesses for Rosano (dorsal note), but the general tenor of the testimony was to include her with the counts. 103 Known instances are not common, but for an English instance see Wood, op. cit., 127–8 (on Walden abbey); see also C. R. Cheney, From Becket to Langton, 157 (13th-c. rulings excepting the patron from the laity excluded from the chancel). 104 Depositions of various pievani who had been the count’s messengers to Rosano (Rosano, 255–7 and 273). Count Guy sent his daughter (another Sofia), apparently to take up residence in a house in the precinct: perhaps to establish a notional custody in what he insists is a vacancy. 105 In the abbreviatura following the depositions (ibid. 274–84, at 281–4). The even scrappier and often obscure notes that follow (ibid. 284–6 and dorsal notes as above, n. 99) include references to Urso the actual or supposed 8th-c. founder (see Stra´, Rosano, p. ix): this could be a chink in the Guidi case.


921

Some of the lay witnesses were asked what they meant by ‘patron’, and answered variously: ‘defender and lord’; ‘defender and builder’; ‘the one who builds a church on his land, and gives it some of his property’ (‘at its consecration’, in one well-informed answer); one witness ‘does not know’; one ‘indicated well what a patron is’. In a different context abbess Sofia said (with some slipping between the generations) ‘that the iuspatronatus belongs to count Guy, because the church is on his land, and he had it consecrated, and gave the dos’.106 As Wickham points out, none of this indicates any dispute about the nature of patronage; what mattered was publica fama, and the accumulation of a mass of common-sense evidence for the Guidi being patrons as generally understood. This would not imply any right to dismiss the abbess; their proctor asked the judges to annul her election because made without the patron’s consent107 (which canon law now required). What happened is unclear. But there is evidence that judgment was given for the count’s patronal right, on the understanding (or at least with the result) that he exercised this right by confirming the nuns’ choice of Agatha.108 If so, a charter of the countess’s for Rosano on her husband’s behalf in 1204, usually read as renouncing patronage, was actually only renouncing measures hostile to the nuns in return for their acknowledging it.109 The power of ‘consent’ thus vindicated was almost certainly more than a formality, and may usually have been negotiated in advance of the formal election.110 Nonetheless it is not evident that the Guidi had a preferred candidate,111 and their chief object may have been to maintain their patronage by exercising it. That a ‘lord and patron’ could simply appoint and dismiss an abbot or abbess seems as outdated in practice as it was in principle.112

106

107 Ibid. 249–50 (Sofia’s deposition). Ibid. 274, 285–6 (abbreviatura). Mittarelli (mid-18th-c. historian of Camaldoli) so reports the judgment, of which he had evidently seen a record (Ann. Camald., IV. 196–7). 109 Rosano, app. no. [3] (1204): detailed account of her visit of reconciliation, setting the cloister ‘free and absolved’, and asking for ‘restitution according to the sentence laid down’ by the 1203 judges, which makes sense as asking them to restore possession of the patronage to the count. The nuns were still apprehensive of penalties in 1209 (ibid., no. 61); but Agatha was still abbess then and up to 1224 (Ann. Camald., III. 278). 110 At Rosano there was a practice whereby the already-settled election was formally declared by one senior nun saying ‘I choose . . . ’. 111 There seems no hint of any intention to make their daughter abbess. 112 For England see Wood, op. cit., 40–8. R. Brentano (A New World in a Small Place: Church and Religion in the Diocese of Rieti, 1188–1378 (Berkeley, 1994), 100–5) relates from unpublished Rieti archives a dispute (1215, 1230) between the bp. of Rieti and the Hospitallers of S. Basilio, the bishop contesting their right to a church as resting on the act of a layman, the late lord Rainald; in response they represent Rainald’s power as more than patronal, appointing and removing abbots (according to one witness, ‘without asking the bishop’); he emerges as (in Brentano’s words) ‘an antique figure’. 108

26 The longer term

Behind the changes of the twelfth century that brought into much of Europe the procedures and terminology of the ius patronatus were broader long-term shifts of interest, which can only be fleetingly touched on here. Sources of wealth were more extensive (crusading, commerce, colonization), and forms of lay piety more diverse; unlocalized miracles of the Virgin partly superseded the local, concrete, relic-based miracles of other saints.1 New paths to religious reassurance—and to prestige and deference—were opening besides the founding of churches or monasteries to be kept under close family control; while as states and legal systems developed, the close cohesion of a kindred or extended family centred on its own monastery became less possible and less necessary. The few monasteries founded after the mid-twelfth century were mostly in the new Orders, which tended deliberately to reject exclusive links with founders and benefactors. And while securing one’s salvation was still widely seen as a matter for economic outlay, it could be done by other kinds of giving, some of it more philanthropic, often urban, and requiring money or movables rather than land: contributing to cathedral building; soon, endowing colleges or hospitals, or supporting the friars, or more narrow-mindedly founding chantries. These changes must have contributed to making the control of proprietary churches in the old way less universally desirable. For higher churches the change from dominium to patronage was in any case not great.2 Lay investiture with the symbols of office had been traded in by rulers for a recognition that the temporalities or the regalia were held from them or held under their laws, while in practice they kept their hold on elections and their profits in vacancies. However, their modest retreat was important in principle, and made possible later advances by the Church towards freer election, or (for bishoprics) control by any two of the three parties, chapter, ruler, and pope. The patron of a monastery would still have an indirect interest in the monks’ 1

See Southern, Making, 246–54.

2

Above, pp. 918–21.

The longer term

923

patronage of lower churches, a claim to hospitality beyond what other great men might demand, and a concern about the running of the place; but these did not imply any direct exploitation apart from more-or-less modified rights in vacancies. His interest in the abbot’s election might not go beyond wanting them to choose a good manager (his younger sons having other openings, and the abbacy not specially attractive to a young nobleman if monastic debts were heavy and hard work ahead).3 When, on the other hand, rich abbeys (in France and Italy especially) attracted the noble and ambitious, from the late Middle Ages to prerevolutionary times, the way into their abbacy was by royal favour and papal authority through the in commendam system, allowing an abbey to be administered by someone not qualified to be abbot: a cardinal or other secular cleric, a layman, a child. Popes resisted or connived at these arrangements, or conceded them to rulers by concordats; or even conceded—and undertook to confirm— rulers’ outright appointment of bishops and abbots.4 For lower churches there is more real change in the twelfth century, and therefore more to explain. Declining interest in having one’s own church as exploitable property was partly a matter of losing hold, especially in western France where the fragmentation of rights in churches was far gone even in the eleventh century; not so much from partible inheritance as from past lords disposing of particular rights and revenues,5 or bits of church land, which might then themselves be divided among a lay or clerical holder’s children. The church’s remaining economic value to the founder’s family might be minimal, making them receptive to advice that holding it imperilled their souls, or simply willing to give it away (perhaps wanting the church rescued) while allowing or helping the monks to acquire what was held by others. And these others, too, might sooner or later be willing enough to sell or give their fragments to a monastery, as a source of ready money or an easy way to give something in alms. What anyone gave—lord or man—might have to be qualified with ‘such as he had’, ‘whatever they had’, ‘whatever he had in the church and its belongings’.6 This fragmentation, however, was regional, at least in the degree required to make churches hardly worth keeping. It must be more widely important that the laity seem increasingly to have other access to ecclesiastical wealth, above all to tithes which they could have acquired in many ways besides being lords of tithe-receiving churches. Although tithes were often given away, great swathes of them remained in lay hands throughout the later Middle Ages and beyond, 3

See Coulton, Five Centuries, III. 477–8 on middle-class, managerial abbots. Ibid. 430–47, 660, and app., 680–6 (lively and wide-ranging examples); R. Doucet, Institutions de la France au XVIe S. (Paris, 1948), II. 696–9, 705–9, 712–13; Laprat in Dict. droit can., s.v. ‘Commende’. 5 Such as the priest’s entrance-gift, specified offerings, burial dues, or tithes (rights sometimes expressed as the ius of this or that, separated from ius presentandi or the core ius fundi). See Plo¨chl, 6 Kirchenrechts, II. 369. On all this see above, pp. 872, 873. 4

924


originating sometimes in grants from a lord of the entitled church, but also in grants or leases from bishops, or by retention of tithes from a colonizer’s own new lands; and changing hands by sale, exchange, and further leasing, enfeoffing, or farming.7 A collection of customs of Milan about 1216 says that for laymen to have tithes was forbidden in canon law but allowed by local custom; Hostiensis said that in Spain, France, Burgundy, and Germany tithes were held by laymen ‘by general custom’;8 and canonists distinguished between the right to tithe and the usufruct of tithe, laymen being allowed the latter.9 In eastern Germany and beyond, princes both allotted and enjoyed tithes in the thirteenth century, not as church-owners but as rulers.10 So although in thirteenth-century Germany and Flanders tithes sometimes appear as an appendage to ius patronatus,11 it was not necessary to be lord or proprietor of a church to have access to tithes once due to it. All this, however, explains a fading interest in owning churches,12 rather than the positive value of patronage as a substitute. In the vaguely worded donations or surrenders of ‘all that we have’ it is usually left unstated (being probably too normal to need stating) that ‘what they had’ included the appointment or presentation of a priest. But for three men and their wives giving the church of Crosmie`res to Angers in 1125–36, it was evidently this and not much else that they were willing to give up (expressed in an already old-fashioned way: ‘the right of putting in and ejecting the priest, that is, of giving and taking away the presbiteratus’).13 The general acceptance of the ius patronatus, by lords not giving their churches away, depended on the reverse of this attitude becoming dominant: that is, on lay lords valuing the presentation (and perhaps the ‘honour’ that canonists allowed to patrons) more than whatever they had had from the lands and revenues,14 given that numerous tithes did in fact stay in their hands. A lord who had never done much more than appoint a clerk to hold all or most of the land and revenues in return for a rent or pension, and who had normally sent this clerk to the diocesan bishop for ordination or consent, would lose little or nothing by accepting the new procedures; in such cases reformers did not, on the whole, need to say ‘you must give up being a lord and settle for being a patron’, but something more like ‘nowadays we call this being a patron’. Indeed 7

See Boyd, Tithes, 166–77 (and for refs. to older literature, 169 n. 16); Hartridge, Vicarages, 7–9, 201–3. Coulton, Five Centuries, III. 157, from Summa Aurea. Peter of Blois thought the threat of anathema against laymen holding tithes one of many rules that oppressively multiplied ‘transgressors’ (PL 205. 235). 9 Boyd, Tithes, 172–4. Avignon 1209 c. 7 (quoted by Thomas, Droit, 88) implies this distinction. 10 11 Schlesinger, ‘Kirche im Sorbenland’, 356–7. Thomas, Droit, 110 n. 2, 111 n. 2. 12 See also Boyd, Tithes, 154 on ‘noble families of Milan, Lucca, Turin’ gradually losing interest in their 13 Angers no. 168. rural churches in the later Middle Ages. 14 This reversal is particularly clear in some late medieval instances from Scotland and Ireland of a layman giving a church (i.e. its rectorial tithes?) to a monastery while reserving for himself the presentation of the vicar (Hartridge, op. cit., 96). 8

The longer term

925

he might, by accepting this, recover control of the incumbency in a church that had slipped into the hands of hereditary priests, or even get control that his predecessors had never had. There must always have been lords whose chief interest in a church was not in its direct exploitation but in its disposal, to someone they needed to provide for, or who paid a good price or promised an increased annual pension. Forbidding such entrance payments and blocking increases in rent would simply shift the lord’s interest towards his choice of candidate. So would any increased observance of the old ban on lay lords taking tithes and offerings or encroaching on lands. Tithes they or their tenants probably have and keep (or use for pious donations); some land probably stays in their or their tenants’ hands, its origin forgotten; but whatever land and revenues they do release for the priest’s part simply increases the value of what they have to dispose of to a younger son, dependent kinsman, or useful servant, or to the prote´ge´ of someone they need to oblige. A small manorial lord of a single church was likely to want it for a son or nephew, now as in the past; but for middling or great landlords (including bishops—not so much monasteries and chapters) and above all for rulers, the positive value of having good livings to give to literate and educated servants was greatly enhanced by the growth of more professional estate-management, more bureaucratic government, and more elaborate processes of justice; it was the chief means by which rulers paid their increasingly numerous civil servants,15 producing a system of royal patronage which could itself be manipulated from below by ambitious clergy with local knowledge. A satirical poem against such clergy presents their rise as the triumph of modern cunning over kindlier old ways, in a story of a genial, hospitable parson, having held a church for forty years, tricked by a king’s clerk into resigning it for the benefit (he believes) of his sister’s son; the clerk then produces a royal writ securing for himself the next vacant living in the king’s gift, which of course is this one.16 The value of such patronage depended on what the bishops were prepared to swallow. Some were fairly easy to satisfy;17 but they were less likely now to be offered the totally ignorant or illiterate, or perhaps the scandalously worldly or the under-age (though this last did happen);18 while canon law itself required them to accept a suitable clerk presented by the true patron. Conflicts of interest 15 See W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the 14th Century., (Cambridge, 1955), 30–46; P. C. Saunders, ‘Royal Ecclesiastical Patronage in England 1199–1351’, Oxford D.Phil. thesis (1978). 16 Nigel Wireker, Contra curiales et officiales clericos, ed. T. Wright, Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets of the 12th Century., I (RS, 1872), esp. 168–73; story at 172–3. 17 See M. Gibbs and J. Lang, Bishops and Reform 1215–1272 (Oxford, 1934), 162–4. 18 Robert Grossteste, bp. of Lincoln, had tactfully to resist a request for a benefice for the earl Ferrers’s underage son, against the legate cardinal Otto’s arguments in the boy’s favour (Epist. (RS, 1861), no. 52; cf. no. 17). For Grosseteste’s much severer views about the king’s clerks see ibid., no. 126.

926


with the bishops arose, not on the whole on the principle of presentation,19 but over the deadline after which the bishop should appoint; and over pluralism and absenteeism, without which the patronage of churches and prebends was not very useful to a ruler, and which most bishops would accommodate up to a point, determined increasingly by canon-law technicalities. Meanwhile the growing money economy and agricultural boom meant that by the thirteenth century any fixed payments or rents to patrons were worth less and the windfall of a vacancy worth more,20 parallel with the windfalls of lordship generally. The new procedures, the clarifying hierarchy of church courts, the struggle to define what should count as spiritual and what as temporal, Alexander III’s efforts at consistency and fairness, were aspects (in Max Weber’s terms) of shifts in the direction of a more ‘legal, bureaucratic, and rational’ regime; so were the uses of literacy and the developing administrative routines that made the patronage system acceptable and useful for magnates and rulers. But that is not to say that the decks were cleared. If the importance of churches as property declined in relation to other interests, it did not come to an end; and while patronage was a replacement for the old proprietorial lordship it was also a survival from it. Proprietary practices, attitudes, and even legal ideas survived in varying degrees both despite the new system and within it. Churches appropriated or incorporated by monasteries are the most obvious case of the legal survival, or re-creation, of property in churches, in great numbers from the thirteenth century onwards. Stutz saw this as a deliberate enlargement of proprietary right by popes and bishops, both countering and exploiting the ‘Germanic system of church law’ once the reduction of lay lords’ rights had removed the danger of their making similar claims for themselves.21 But any aspiration of lay lords to something so different from ordinary lordship is most unlikely; and appropriations began long before lay lordship was in retreat. The rationale was that the monastery became the permanent collective parson or rector of the church (and patron of its vicarage); but appropriation might be sought to legitimate former proprietary dealings and long-standing claims to dominium. Naturally enough, such churches were commonly thought of as the monasteries’ property by ordinary people and by the monks themselves.22 Even 19 This is not to say that no priests were appointed without episcopal consent; see below, at notes 34–5, on 13th-c. Spain. But in England the benefits of the new royal remedies for disputing advowsons depended on observance of the new canonical procedures. 20 Whether (for ordinary churches, and lay patrons) this normally included custody is unclear (Peter 21 Landau’s trawl of canonists evidently found nothing on this). Stutz, ‘Gratian’, 10, 12–13. 22 See Barlow, Durham Peculiars, 36 n. 3: in a 1221 inquiry into the monks’ custody of vacant churches, Walter freeman, asked by what right a monk had custody, ‘said he did not know, except that the church was theirs’. Later 13th-c. English monks spoke of having ‘bought churches’ or ‘parishes’ (Coulton, Five Centuries., III. 183).

The longer term

927

where only ius patronatus was so far in question, a high degree of exploitation might be taken for granted. In the 1250s the archbishop of Trier allowed the monks of Orval to found a church for a new settlement in remote and wooded territory, ‘which may be fruitful for you, both in payment of tithes and in other renders . . . ’; the new church was to be under the monks’ ius patronatus, and its rector to have a suitable portion allotted him, ‘the rest of the tithes and renders to be converted to your use’.23 As a new church for a growing population, its tithes expected to grow greatly and not yet scattered to other owners, it could still offer the old profits to its founders, and they being monks could still take them. But even for the laity, there are mid-thirteenth-century charters in Languedoc that deal with moieties of a church itself (and moieties of a moiety), as property that local laity acknowledge holding in fief from Le´zat;24 and the moieties have pertinences of the old kind—offerings, tithes, firstfruits, lands, rents, and customs—which seem to constitute what the lay tenants should enjoy ‘if the laity recover the churches and tithes that they used to hold in the diocese of Toulouse’ (referring probably to dispossessions in the mid-1240s). The ius patronatus itself (by now what lay lords normally dealt in) had its pertinences too; and although these were supposed to be limited to modest fixed ‘pensions’ they are sometimes listed much as a church’s used to be—‘the ius patronatus of the church at Strobnitz, which is known to belong to us by just patrimony and hereditary succession, with all its endowments, tithes, and other pertinences’.25 This might mean no more than that these things constituted the value of what the patron could bestow. But the early fourteenth-century survey of Habsburg property, listing over seventyfive churches, claims ere and gewalt—roughly translatable as direct possession and power—in the churches’ goods, and implies the receipt of a surplus rather than merely a pension.26 In Spain, a diocesan synod of Compostella in 1229 spoke of ‘produce, rents, and services’ due to patrons in Galicia by ‘bad custom’ (and having to be tolerated);27 and one at Leoń in 1288—probably still drawing on the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215—had to legislate for adequate livings for clergy 23 Lamprecht, Wirtschaftsleben, I. i. 117, quoting from Orval’s cartulary. This is an example of ‘fatter’ patronage, not sharply distinct from appropriation (above, p. 903). 24 Le´zat nos. 589, 591 (Apr. and Oct. 1247; Saint-Sernin, Bessac). One moiety had been given by its lay owner in 1031 (no. 588). 25 1286, quoted by Thomas (Droit, 111 n. 2, from Hohenfurt. UB) with other German instances (sometimes ambiguous as to whether these are pertinences of the church or of its ius patronatus, suggesting that this hardly mattered). See Pfleger, ‘Entstehung’, 97–104 on late medieval Alsace. 26 Stutz, ‘Das habsburgische Urbar . . . ’, ZSSGA 25 (1904), 227–37. The Habsburg lordship (herschaft) is described as granting or leasing the kilchensatz (‘church matter’; 229), or simply the churches (232–3, 234–5), i.e. appointing the priest, and doing this as the recht stifter, true founder (228–9, 232–3), while having ‘advocacy over churches, benefices, and possessions’ and therewith dues or taxes from the cultivators. 27 c. 6 (Hist. Compostella, V, app. no. 16): ‘we do not say that these patrons are actually to be deprived, although according to the canons they should be’; see also c. 18.

928


presented to churches by laymen as well as by monks, and for patrons not to take so much as would prevent this.28 In late fourteenth-century Castille even more proprietary practices and concepts, remote from the canon law of patronage—lay lords’ ownership (as they still firmly saw it) of churches and tithes, and their independent appointment of priests—were attacked by bishops at the Cortes of Guadalajara, and defended by a theory of their origins put forward by lawyers for the laity.29 With a famous twelfth-century forgery behind them,30 they argued that in the Arab invasions Christianity was preserved from oblivion by mountain chieftains who took tithes and in return found priests to say mass; later laws, such as those of the Fourth Lateran Council, were interpreted as excepting ancient rights.31 This intensely conservative attitude may explain the sentiment of a late thirteenth-century poem in Portuguese, in honour of the Virgin Mary, which tells a story of gambling for a private church bringing it into the possession of St Mary of Rocamadour: Two men were playing at dice With great and proven obstinacy And one was rich, the other had nothing Except just a church, With which he was making his stake; It was of his lineage, And his property, as an inheritance.

He gives it to St Mary, apparently in mid-game, wins, and says: ‘Lord, let it be yours; for I have won it for you by your great mercy.’32 He seems to be envisaged as depending on it for his livelihood; there was to be an implication of this, however rhetorical, in the case made for lay owners at Guadalajara.33 Appointing priests without presentation to the bishop had been a concern of legatine and diocesan councils in thirteenth-century Spain. A reforming legatine council at Le´rida (1229) still had to legislate for heavy penalties (following ‘the 28 Lateran IV c. 32 (against the ‘vicious custom’ whereby ‘patrons of parish churches, and others claiming the profits for themselves, leave for the priests . . . such a scanty portion that they cannot be suitably sustained . . . ’); Espanã Sagrada, 36, 250–1. Cf. (c.1200) Gerald of Wales, Itinerary (Opera, RS 6. 21–2) on powerful men in Wales as patrons or defenders often usurping all a parish church’s rights, leaving to the clergy only the ‘altar’ with offerings and small tithes. 29 Torres, ‘Doctrina’, 407 n. 9, 413–23, from the ordinances of the Cortes (1390) and Lo´pez of Ayala’s Crońica de Juan I. The decisions made allowed for laity having ‘just title’ in churches or tithes. 30 Jaffe´2 þ5562, forged reply of Urban II to Peter I of Aragon’s letter asking inter alia for his knights to be left in possession of churches on whose revenues they depended (above, p. 509); the only part of Peter’s letter that Urban in fact left unanswered (Jaffe´2 5552). See Kehr, Papsttum, 30–2; Orlandis, ‘Los laicos’, 288–9; Bidagor, Iglesia, 143–5 (esp. on the forgery’s wide distribution and influence). 31 The matter was still under discussion in the 18th c., the theory shifting from Arab invasion to imperial authority and colonizing lords’ powers (Torres, ‘Doctrina’, 423–38). 32 R. Prieto Bances, ‘Unas palabras sobre la ‘‘iglesia propia’’ ’, Revista Portug. de Hist. 4 (1949), 155–68. 33 As above, note 29. Scandal would be given at home and abroad if nobles were to be seen as ‘having no other inheritance in the world than this to live on’.

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constitutions of pope Alexander’) on clergy ‘exercising the cure of souls without the bishop’s or archdeacon’s authority and officiating by the authority of the patron’ in churches where ‘the lay patron scorns to present clerks to the bishop’;34 other legatine councils in Spain that year probably said the same.35 But this was sometimes allowed by special custom or privilege. There were lay nobles in parts of France who could on special occasions or in special circumstances ‘confer’ churches on candidates of their choice, up to the eighteenth century; while the kings of France could do this regularly in certain churches exempt from episcopal authority, as could the kings of England in their royal free chapels.36 In Germany patronage was often controlled or taken over by the prince, or dependent on his grant, which would tend to shelter it from the full enforcement of canon law. Transactions in patronage hardly differed from transactions in churches. Being a ius spirituali annexum, it was supposed not to be sold except as a pertinence of an estate in land; but this could be managed, as when in 1345 the nuns of Zurich, needing to sell the patronage of a parish church to a rich burgomaster, converted part of its endowments into a separate estate with the church as an element in it, and sold him that;37 while in Norman law, patronage counted as going with land in any case (and so as ‘real’ rather than ‘personal’) because it went with the church’s own site or fundus. Since it was ‘annexed to what is spiritual’, disputes about it were supposed to come to the church courts but were almost everywhere claimed by lay rulers and settled by their courts38 (provided that the plaintiff either took it there in the first place or was made to take it there by the defendant).39 In Normandy it was found after Philip Augustus’s conquest that lay jurisdiction had led to the bishop’s right of devolution after four months being overridden; not surprisingly, the Capetians preserved the Norman custom (with modifications) and largely adopted it for other regions, where up to then the bishops’ courts had been able to hear patronage cases.40 Meanwhile the developing law and practice of the rector’s or vicar’s benefice was itself fairly ‘proprietary’, although it too was supposed to be spirituali annexum. The surviving right for a monastery as patron to confer the temporalities or living, sometimes 34 c. 18: J. Tejada y Ramiro, Coleccioń de Cańones (1849), III. 329–42. It could be this practice, rather than presentation itself, that Peter II gave up in 1204 (above, p. 905). 35 Only Le´rida’s statutes survive; see P. Linehan, The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the 13th Century (Cambridge, 1971). Cf. however diocesan synods, at Compostella (1229), c. 6, on priests acquiring shares in churches ‘not by canonical institution but by abuse, for instance only by reason of patrimony, or only through the patrons’ (above, note 27); cf. ibid. 223 and 226; and Leoń 1267, ibid. 230. 36 Mollat, ‘Restitution’, 423; id., ‘Collation pleńie`re’, 107–8; Denton, Royal Free Chapels, 142–51 (esp. on the legal and theocratic basis for this). Cf. O. Chadwick, Victorian Church, II. 212 on ‘donatives’ in 19th-c. 37 England. Soudet, ‘Seigneurs patrons’, 320. 38 39 Above, p. 901; see Thomas, Droit, 163–6. Gray, ‘Ius Praesentandi’, 481–90. 40 Soudet, op. cit., 320–3.

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receiving an oath of fidelity for it,41 preserved the idea that the incumbent was a tenant and his benefice a holding; at least partly reflecting the proprietary character, or proprietary past, of patronage, though more broadly an aspect of the traditional, patrimonial character of all office. Patronage itself developed differently in different countries. In Latium, so close to Rome, it could be a remnant, often reduced to its merely honorific aspect, left to lords who had surrendered proprietary lordship to the bishops;42 in central Italy generally, many surviving rights of presentation fell to the communes during the thirteenth century.43 In Normandy lay patronage remained important; in the late sixteenth century the ‘honour’ of precedence in church could be disputed by rivals even to bloodshed.44 Here and in England it may be that primogeniture made landed families set extra store on preserving their ecclesiastical patronage; whereas in some dioceses of France, so many churches had been given to monasteries or bishoprics that lay patronage was of little account. Meanwhile the right of bishops to confer certain churches in their diocese by their own choice was seen by canonists as an exercise of authority only, but in England this ‘collation’ rested on authority and patronage combined.45 Patronage remained part of western canon law, but applied to ever fewer churches. And having been itself a step in the ‘legal, rational, bureaucratic’ direction, it was generally emasculated for most of Europe, in minor respects at the Reformation or Counter-reformation, more radically in the Enlightenment and revolutionary periods, in favour of more modern methods of providing pastoral care (whether bureaucratic and centralized, or democratic).46 Although patronage is recognized in the Church of Rome’s Codex of modern canon law, it appears as a special privilege at the bishop’s discretion, involving potentially very costly responsibilities, some ceremonial dignity (such as having one’s family tree displayed in the church) where this is customary, and presentation after being notified of the vacancy by the bishop. No new ius patronatus is to be created; existing patrons are to be urged to accept spiritualia suffragia instead of patronage or at least instead of presentation; the regulations apply only for those declining to do this.47 It was in England that the new system was most thoroughly accepted, worked most successfully, and lasted longest; but this goes with its being itself more 41 e.g. Montier-la-Celle nos. 252, 244 (1185 and 1195, successive bps. of Troyes); cf. Barlow, Durham Peculiars, p. xiii, n. 1 (1221); Dillay, ‘Re´gime’, 267 nn. 4, 5 (1232, 1247). 42 Toubert, Latium, 891–4: not making clear, however, that lordship itself had been transferred rather 43 Above, p. 657 note 43. than reduced (see above, pp. 893, 916). 44 J. Cauvet, Du droit de patronage eccle´s. dans l’ancienne Normandie, Mem. de la Soc. des Antiquaires de 45 Normandie, 20 (1853), 364. Maitland, ‘Corporation Sole’, 86 and n. 1. 46 Stutz, s.v. Patronat, Real-Encyklopa¨die., XV, esp. 18–22; Lindner, s.v. ‘Patronat’, Lexikon f. Theol. und Kirche, esp. 193–5. 47 Codex Iuris Canonici (Rome, 1918), nos. 1469, 1455.3, 1455.1, 1457, 1450.1, 1451. Significantly, the old rule about being helped if fallen into poverty ‘through no fault of their own’ is prescribed even for former patrons who have renounced their patronage (1455.2).

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fundamentally ‘proprietary’ in England than anywhere else. Thirteenth-century baronial and clerical protests about papal provisions and papal taxation of the clergy deploy thoroughly traditional arguments about patrons’ interests, material and religious;48 and the common law treated patronage as property from the first, grounded in Henry II’s successful assertion of his court’s jurisdiction in patronage disputes.49 Maitland brilliantly showed how ‘the old notion of the patron’s ownership of the church died hard’, from various judicial comments, as in 1333–4 that ‘not long ago men did not know what an advowson was, but granted churches’, and from points of procedure, treating advowson as if it were property in the glebe;50 while the problem of who or what did ‘own’ a church and its glebe if not the patron—leaving out saints, or the poor, or the universal Church, since ‘persons who can never be in the wrong are useless in a court of law’—was never really solved or even clarified. On the whole it seemed to Maitland ‘that a church is no person in the English temporal law of the later Middle Ages’, that is, it could not satisfactorily be seen as owning its own building and glebe, and a succession of individual parsons had not the capacity to represent a church that a monastic community or a chapter had. In the Year Books of the later Middle Ages the church appears as an object, ‘the core of an exploitable and enjoyable mass of wealth’, being let to farm or liable to pensions and annuities, far more than as a subject owning property or making transactions. In particular its capacity (or that of ‘the parson and his successors’) to receive donations was unclear; and such tendency as there was to speak of churches as persons diminished over time.51 The idea that the patron had the ultimate freehold in the glebe ‘was never quite forgotten’, being deployed (although not prevailing) in a case in 1430, as coming into play in a vacancy: ‘if a parson dies, then the church is empty, and the freehold in right is in the patron, notwithstanding that the patron can take no advantage of the land’; and in 1520, when one justice said that the parson had the fee simple of the glebe in the church’s right, but another said that ‘it seems to me that the fee simple is in the patron’.52 Such opinions went beyond treating the advowson itself as an immaterial piece of property. All this relates closely to the idea of the parson’s benefice: he has a freehold for life in his ‘rectory’ which consists of the church, churchyard, glebe, tithes, and rectory house, or in a ‘vicarage’ with a house but only a share of glebe and tithes. The Reformation did not change the law in England but brought patronage into new hands by the dissolution of the monasteries. Some advowsons came (or 48 References and brief discussion in Wood, Eng. Mons., 150–5. These arguments were still relevant in 1350, as recited in the Statute of Provisors preamble (Statutes of the Realm, I. 316–17). 49 50 51 Above, at notes 38–9. Maitland, ‘Corporation Sole’, 86–7. Ibid. 87–91 and 90 n. 1. 52 In between, Littleton resorted to saying it was a fee simple ‘in the clouds’ (ibid. 91–5). The clumsy and artificial idea that emerged was that the parson was a kind of corporation in himself, a ‘corporation sole’ (ibid. 97–103).

932


had already come) into the possession of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Many more came to lay patrons, probably already exceptionally numerous in England.53 Laymen—often the current farmers of a church or its tithes54—acquired the monasteries’ advowsons, and often, in appropriated churches, the rectorial tithes as well, becoming lay rectors with the presentation to a vicarage or the power to appoint a perpetual curate.55 With this powerful new interest behind it, the medieval patronage and benefice system continued to flourish in England, Wales, and Ireland, as long as ecclesiastical livings remained attractive to fellows of colleges wishing to marry (before the later nineteenth century) and to younger sons of the gentry; while the ‘squarson’—squire and parson combined—was occasional but far from rare, even if we reserve the term as we should for the landowner in orders presenting himself to the living, perhaps having inherited after being ordained; as distinct from the clergyman buying an advowson in order to present himself.56 Other advowsons were bought by Trusts (from 1817 onwards) in order to promote clergy of particular tendencies, usually Evangelical.57 With nineteenth-century reforms to eliminate serious abuses58—and later the gradual standardizing and relative shrinking of clerical stipends, removing the incentive for abuse—the system continued intact far into the twentieth century, and survives precariously to the present day. Anthony Trollope, in his The American Senator of 1877, has an overbearingly high-minded American visitor declaim to his unhappy host the irrefutable rational criticism of it as a way of manning a Church. ‘A freehold possession of men’s souls!’ he concludes (meaning the parson’s benefice): ‘the fact is, Mr Morton, that the spirit of conservatism in this country is so strong that you cannot bear to part with a shred of the barbarism of the Middle Ages.’59 It might be fairer to say that the advowson system is like some enduring institutions of secular government (local and national), whose mix of tradition and antiquated bureaucracy evolved from the precociously effective royal government and justice of tenthto twelfth-century England (an evolution compared by Weber to cities early to adopt gaslight being late to scrap it for electricity). The system could and can be defended as promoting more diversely talented parish priests, or better suited to their particular parishes, than the bishops left to themselves might 53

See Newman, ‘Parochial Patronage’, 280–6. See Hartridge, Vicarages, 201, 203–4, 208; A. Savine, English Monasteries at the Dissolution (Oxford, 1909), 113. 55 See Makower, Constitutional History of the Church of England (1895), 330–6; Bo¨hmer, ‘EKntum’ 352–3; Rosemary O’Day, ‘The Law of Patronage in Early Modern England’, JEH 26 (1975), 247–60. 56 See O. Chadwick, op. cit., II. 209: in 1878 one in nine of all livings in private patronage ‘had clergymen who were not only the incumbent but also the patron’. For traffic in advowsons, ibid. 211–12. 57 e.g. the Simeon Trustees (ibid. I. 449), founded 1817 and (with others) still active. 58 See Chadwick’s lively account of abuses, scandals, and reforms, ibid. II. 210–14. 59 World’s Classics edn. (1931 and later), 78–9, 288–9. 54

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choose.60 Bishops nowadays can bypass it by appointing priests-in-charge instead of incumbents; even where a rector or vicar is instituted, several parishes will have had to be combined into one living, the patrons perhaps taking turns to present, or their rights becoming merely formal. And for half a century or more, individual lay patrons have commonly sought the bishop’s advice on whom to present. Nonetheless, only some four decades ago a lay patron in the diocese of Bath and Wells was said to have found a parson satisfactory to bishop and congregation by advertising in Horse and Hound. 60 On this and many other arguments by Victorian Anglicans see Chadwick, op. cit., II. 207–9. At the present day, colleges as patrons often have funds with which they ease the lot of their incumbents.

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INDEX Any place-name not otherwise qualified stands for a church or monastery.

Aachen: legislation (818–19) 69, 263, 295, 439, 447–8, 464, 487, 523, 525, 530–1, 556, 561–2, 792; listing of services 270–1, see also Notitia; royal chapel 285, 288 Aadorf 346, 416, 491 Aba, founder abbess of Niwenhof 178–9, 189 Abbacella, see Appenzell abbacy: acquired or absorbed by greater monastery 416–17; lay 312–28; object of property 137, 267, 312–14, 316, 318, 341, 368–9; reserved for founder’s family 281, 343–4, 369, 399–401, 416 ‘abbatia’, meanings of 264 n. 50, 317–18, 327, 381, 382, 387–9 abbesses: election of 169, 281, 283, 359; life tenure specified 188–9, 205–6; members of founding family 146, 163, 357–6; queens and princesses as 213, 235, 238, 239–40, 314–15; role and power of 122, 123–5, see also double monasteries; see also abbots Abbo of Fleury 377, 489, 700, 706, 812, 858; collection of canons 818–24; letter to Bernard, abbot of Beaulieu 821; letter to ‘G’ 819, 820; opinion, polemic 113, 377, 489, 700, 706, 820–4 Abbo of Provence, layman 114, 116, 195 Abbo of Rochefort 327 abbots and abbesses: appointed by outside lords 169, 186–7, 188, 211–14, 235, 239, 241, 242–3, 249–50, 290–1; chosen by predecessor or seen as predecessor’s heir; 96–7, 128–9, 131–2, 157, 169, 171, 176, 181, 241, 393, see also designation; deposed 202, 249, 287, 290; elected by community 149, 181, 211, 259, 283, 285, 26; as fideles of the king 248, 292; founders or their heirs acting as 400, 401; founding or owning the monastery they rule 118, 123–7, 187, 202–3, 206–7, 225, 226, 229, 234, 384; role and power of 121–5, 149–50, 165, 428; ruler as 266–7 Abruzzo, churches and founders in 61 n. 100, 608 absolutio, liberatio 88, 91, 197, 721–4, 735, 815, 901–2 Acbert, nobleman 491, 693–4, 747

Acca, abbot of Oundle 128 Achard 496, 570 Achiprand, priest 57 Acosta, monastery 718 Acta Murensia 844, 846 Ada, daughter of Folrad 744 Adalard 346 Adalbero: archbishop of Augsburg 351; bishop of Metz 421, 425, 430; brother of count Eberhard 362–3; count of Ebersberg 366, 368, 369, 469, 598 Adalbert, archbishop of Bremen 277–8, 286, 370–1, 855 Adalbert, count 400–1 Adalbert, priest 535 Adalgar, bishop of Autun 420, 421 n. 25 Adalgisel, see Grimo Adalgisus, priest 394 Adalfrid, priest 36 Adalguda 616 Adalhart 43–4, 449, 456 n. 87, 755 Adalolf, count of Flanders and abbot 316, 321 Adalolt, priest 746–7 Adalpert 469, 598 Adalsind: abbess of Dorniaticum 136; wife of Wolfoald 112 Adalun 43 Adam the provost 500 addenda to Frankish law (818–19) 735 Addi 31 Adefonsus 673–4 Adela,abbess of Pfalzel 125 n. 47 Adela, countess of Blois 748 Adela, countess of Flanders 385 n. 86 Adela of Elten 363–4, 596 Adelaide, countess of Narbonne 766 Adelaide, countess, abbess of Romainmoutier 313, 324, 418 n. 36, 834 n. 35 Adelard, 661 Adelbert, priest 661 Adelold, priest 803 Adelguda 115 Adelmo, monastery 397 ‘Adeltruda’, Northumbrian princess 56 n. 60, 64, 775 Ademar, brother of Arnald 643

982

Index

Ademar, count of Valence 375 Ademar, viscount of Limoges 376, 379, 382, 386, 877 Ademar of Chabannes 325, 335 Adenus 780 Adili, monastery 172 Ado, deacon 767–8 Ado, founder 119, 130–1; see also Jouarre Adoald, priest 56–7 Adrald 455, 638–9, 686, 764 Adria, bishop of 89 Adroald, lay lord 123 Adso, cousin of Acbert 693, 747 Adventius, bishop of Metz 421 advocacy 281–4, 328–31, 351, 428, 815, 842–6, 919; and family plans 281, 332–4, 337, 357, 360–1, 365–6, 369–71; and immunities 328–9, 330–1, 331–2; reserved for founders, donors, or their heirs 281, 332, 333, 337; in relation to lordship 329, 331–8, 367, 892 advocate: choice of: appointed by prelate 281–4, 259, 299 n. 55, or by outside lord 281–4, 331–2; elected by abbot and convent 283, 333, 371–2, 426; restricted to family members, see advocacy; founder’s heir or outside lord as 329, 335–6, 379; as magnate protector 329–30, 330, 331, 351; as potential oppressor 330; variety of status and function 329–33; women as 361 n. 41 advowson 332, 892, 916, 931–2 Aeddila, widow 359 Aelfhelm 409 Aelfric, archbishop of Canterbury 409 Aelfric of Eynsham 411, 675, 816 Aelfric the Small 600 Aelfwine, clerk 552 Aelgar, priest 650 Aethelbald, king of Mercians 153–4, 206, 240, 242 Aethelburga, abbess of Fladbury 205 n. 60 Aethelburga, abbess of Withington 158, 205 n. 60 Aetheldreda, founder of nunnery at Ely 239–40 Aethelflaed 291 Aethelgifu’s will 408 n .5, 552, 555 Aethelhard, archbishop of Canterbury 241 Aethelheah, abbot 157 Aethelhelm 599 Aethelmaer 408, 409 n. 17, 410–11, 510 n. 67 Aethelred II, Unrede, king 291 nn. 91, 94, 408– 10, 816 Aethelred, lord of the Mercians 291 nn. 91, 94 Aethelric, magnate158–60, 206

Aethelwald king 120, 123, 128 Aethelweard, ealdorman 408, 409 Aethelwine, ealdorman 408, 409 Aethelwold, bishop 291, 408 Aethelwold Moll, king of Northumbrians 64 Aethelwulf, king 241 Affligem 384–5, 417–18, 698 n. 11, 874 Afrikesrod 596 Agatha, abbess 920, 921 Agatho, pope 198 Agaune, St Maurice 106, 120, 221 n. 1 Agde, council (506) 67, 311 Agilbert, bishop of West Saxons, later of Paris 119, 130–1, 296 Agilberta, abbess of Jouarre 119 Agilhard, count 422 Agilolfing dukes 33–4, 99 n .56, 584, 690 n. 4 Agilulf, king 235 n. 1 Agiprand, clerk 63 Agnes, abbess of Nivelles 132 Agnes, countess of Anjou 585, 590 Agnes, widow of Abbo of Rochefort 327 Agnes, widow of Hubert 640 Agobard of Lyons 447, 461, 488 n. 9, 527, 530, 556, 795–8, 801–2, 811 Agobert, bishop of Chartres 710 Aidan, monk-bishop of Lindisfarne 156, 296 n. 35 Aiga, countess of Turenne 344 Aiglibert, bishop of le Mans 200 Ailred of Rievaulx’s ancestors 677–8 Ailsi of Longney-on-Severn 599, 600 Ailwin, priest 582 Aimeric, abbot of Le´zat 781 Aimeric, clerk 581 Aimeric, priest 537–8, 661 Aimo, author 819 Aimo, count of Bolenois 382, 417 Aimo, layman 63 n. 111, 543 Aio, priest 671 Airard, bishop of Nantes 501, 827, 871 Aistulf, king 56 n. 63, 60 n. 92, 86, 237, 769 Aiuald, priest 169 Aky 553 Alapert, priest 62 Alberic, bishop of Langres 472 Alberic, count of Maˆcon 693 n. 29, 743 Alberic, lord of La Pommeraye 493 Albert, abbot of St-Aubin, Anjou 322–3 Albert, abbot of S. Fidele, Strumi 667–8 Albert, abbot of Marmoutier, 849 n. 82 Albert, count of Calw, 843 Albert, count (Poppiena) 396 Albert, count (Salerno) 634 Albert, count of Vermandois 289, 381, 396

Index Albert, knight 577 n. 13, 591–2 Albert of Chartres 495, 569–70, 710 Albi, bishopric 302–3, 305–6, 308, 619 n. 95, 715 Albina ginealogia 532 Albuin of Broussade 750 Albune 35 Alcherius, priest 535–6 Alcuin 131–2, 183, 213, 297 n. 43, 415, 460 Aldersbach 431 Aldhun, bishop of Durham 311 n. 143 Aldrichszell 225 n. 42, 260 Aldwin, bishop of Limoges 428 Alemania: dukes of 117; early land ownership in 112 n. 27; early parishes in 79–80; foundation formulae in 732; owner priests in 35 n. 18, 37; tithes in 504; see also Swabia Alençon Summa 892–3, 919 n. 93 Alexander II, pope 843–4, 857 Alexander III, pope 897–903, 909–13, 926 Alfer, abbot 735 Alfer, count 735 Alfred, king, 291 n. 94; Laws 121, 153 n. 12, 160 n. 65; will 242 Alfswith, wife of Herman 655 alienation of churches: following endowment 446; of monastery 260–3, 284–5, 290, 323; prohibited 262–3, 396–8, 417, 731, 733, 755; of ruined and impoverished churches 445 Alipert 51, 167, 170 All Saints, Lincoln 649, 676 All Saints, Schaffhausen 843–4 Alluyes 537 Almerad 665 alms, grant in 737–8 almsgiving 113, 172 alod 101, 355, 605, 619, 747, 758, 766, 775, 782, 875 n. 64 alodial right 34, 112, 116, 502, 595, 660, 733, 736, 775 Aloytus, abbot 626 Alpheida, abbess 314 Alphonse, count of Toulouse 392 Alprand, priest 665 Alsace: advocacy in 334 n. 47; ducal family of 112, see also Elicho; owner priests 660 Alsleben 281 n. 18, 357–9 altar, see altare altare: and bishop’s authority 699–701, 704–7; idea of as separate from church 821–4; meanings of 697–9, 871–2; of monastery 381–2; see also redemptio

983

altars: making of 36; several in one church 733 n. 27 Altdorf, see Weingarten Altmann, bishop of Passau 469, 691 n. 15 Altomu¨nster 366 Altuin, bishop of Brixen 751 Aluric, priest 553 Alvingham 446 Amalfi, three citizens 549 n.79, 754 Amalfrid, founder of nunnery 115 Amandus 111 n. 21, 112 n. 30, 123 n. 37 Amatus, bishop of Oloxon 879 Amaury Crispin 326 Amblard of Brezons 376 Amblard of Nonette 376 Ambrose, treatise De investitura episcoporum 862 Amel 655, 702 n. 42, 706 n. 73 Amelius, bishop of Senez 302, 725 Amelius, bishop of Uze´s 690 n. 5 Amelius, priest of St-Gilles 432 n. 109 Amelius Simplicius 641 Ancard, priest 61 ancilla dei 28, 36, Rattruda 54 Ancinnes 872, 908 nn. 27, 29 Andlau 351, 837 nn. 61, 63 Andrew, priest (Apulian) 551 Andrew, priest of Varaize 573–4 Anduze, lords of 619 Angalpert, priest 57 Ange´ly, St-Jean de: acquiring churches 454, 495, 572, 592, 594, 631, 639–42, 749, 755; recovering church 879 Angers, bishopric, acquiring churches 567, 571 n. 89, 585, 762, 872, 924 Angers: collegiate churches in 325–7; nunnery (7th c.) 113 n. 40, 122 n. 31; see also St-Aubin Angilberga, empress 320 Angilmar, archbishop of Vienne 70 Angla, lay abbess 213 Angouleˆme: bishop of 538; counts of 335, 428 Aniane 127, 184, 225–6, 230 nn. 1, 2, 232 n. 23, 234, 252 n. 6, 260 n.1, 385, 388, 770 Anjou: counts of 290, 326, 335, 379–80, 518, 590; lords’ hold on churches and tithes in 493–4, 496, 500, 524, 640, 879; priests’ tenure property in 567, 580, 664; priests’ appointments in 523 n. 33 Anna, king of E. Angles 239 Annet 908 Anno, archbishop of Arles 766 Anno, archbishop of Cologne 286, 426 n. 57 Anno, fidelis 746–7 Ansa, queen 167, 235 n. 2, 238 Ansbach 224, 225, 225–6, 228–9, 230 n. 1, 260

984

Index

Ansbert, bishop of Autun 28 Ansbert, bishop of Rouen 128 n. 10, 212 Ansegis 248 n. 11, 251 n. 35 Ansellus, bishop of Beauvais 865 Anselm, abbot of Nonantula 86, 172 Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury 512, 866, 869, 883 Anselm, bishop, Provost of St Maurice, Agaune 320 Anselm of Bra 773 Anselm of Lucca, canonist 842, 858–9, 860, 887 Ansfrit, nobleman 598 Anskar, bishop of Bremen 477 n. 112 Ansketil, priest 512 n. 78, 578 Ansoald, bishop of Poitiers 113 n. 36, 195 n. 40 Anspald 54 Antibes, bishop of 475 n. 96, 725, 726 Antibes, bishopric 301–2 anti-monastic reaction, 10th c. England 411 Antioch, council of (341) 806, 808 Antwerp 729 Appenzell 575, 681 appropriation 703–4, 903, 926–7 Apulia: dealings in fractions 635; leases and other transactions 550–1, 608 Aquileia, bishopric 295 Aquitaine, dukes of 194, 290, 301, 309, 319–20, 378 Aragon, knights in 509 Arauca, monastery of 633, 674 Arbeo, bishop of Freising 38, 42, 162–4, 802 arcagium, archadium 455 n. 79, 567 archdeaconry, in lay hands 717 Archembald, princeps of Bourbonnais 761 Archembald of Lastours 591 Archembald (Touraine) 494 Archenfield, priests of 559 archpriests, laymen as 26, 75, 98 Arduin, count 91 n. 43, 467 n. 51; king 841, 848 Aredius, Gallo-Roman cleric 26–7, 30, 96, 124–5 Arelda, 237 Aremburgis 875 n. 66 Arezzo, bishopric 263 n. 37, 665, 778 Arezzo-Siena dispute 87 n. 14 Argentueil 215 Arian, priest 669 Arians and Arianism 16–18, 48, 92, 95–6, 215 Aribald, bishop of Reggio 783 Arichis II, duke of Benevento 236 nn. 9, 13 Ariolf, priest 786 Arlanza, 669, 672 Arles: archbishop of 612; archbishopric of 419 n. 4; councils (314) 521 n. 14; (524) 26 n. 67; (813) 528; (1059) 307; counts of 301 Arles-sur-Tech, monastery 72 n. 47, 451, 717

Arluf-Marseilles family 615–17, 725 Armagh, 142–4 Armagnac, count of, founder of Saint-Mont 478 Arn, archbishop of Salzburg 41, 215, 461 Arnald (of Moirax) 587 Arnald, bishop of Le Mans 709 Arnald, brother of William of Luppe 642 Arnald Rodoard 497–8 Arnold, priest 581 Arnold Aniano, brother, son and nephew of Odo Aniano 619–20 Arnold of Blankenheim 907–8 Arnold Loup 632 Arnulf, archbishop of Tours 709–10 Arnulf, bishop of Orleans 330 n. 15, 819 Arnulf, count of Flanders 315–16, 321–2, 379 n. 51 Arnulf, duke of Bavaria 300, 315, 660 Arnulf, king 356, 420, 422, 449, 660, 746–7 Arnulf, priest 538 Arrald, bishop of Chartres 711 Arrou 494, 567 n. 59 Artald and wife Hildegard 758 Artemius, priest 672 n. 79, 674 Artheze´ 593 Arvald, priest 633, 671 Ascelin Chotard 711 Ascheim, council of (756) 38, 790 Ascheric, lord 483, 492, 498 n. 78 Asse´-le-Riboul 879 assise utrum 738 n. 57 Astolf 766 Astorg 376 Asulari, churches at 51, 52 n. 33, 56–7, 62 Asur Fernańdez, count 765 Atanulf 615 Ato (Italian) 58, 59 Ato (Leon 925) 625 Atripert, child of Fortes 56–7 Atta wife of Hathegard 596 Attigny, council (822) 795; (874) 74 n. 61 Atto, bishop of Freising 64, 81, 163–5, 532, 779 Atto, bishop of Vercelli 817 Atto ‘ le Fou’ 771 Atto, priest 490, 526–7, 560 Attolae curtis, see curtis Auban, St Pierre at 632 Auch, archbishop of 478, 783 auctoritas 186 Auderigus, priest 673, 674 Audibert I, bishop of Antibes 301, 725 audientia of ducal palatium 236 Audoin, bishop of Rouen 111 n. 21, 117, 125, 130, 192 n. 10, 221 Augerius, bishop of Riez 869

Index Augsburg, council of 522, 814 Aujac 592 Aulla 401 Aumerade, bishop of Riez 724, 725 Aunipert, abbot of S. Quirico 169–70 Aurillac 345, 350, 837 nn. 61, 63 Aurinand 61 Auriol, St Nicholas at 471–2 Auripert, priest, brother of Flavipert, 51 Auriperta prestitera 61 Austripert, clerk 56 Austriperta 168 Austrulf, abbot of St-Wandrille 212 Autchis 169 Autprand 328, 395–6 Autun: bishop of 414; bishopric 261 n. 15, 419, 724; Merovingian foundations in 186 n. 42, 214 n. 35 Auvergne: lords’ hold on churches and tithes 492–4, 568–9; fractions 636–7; priest’s tenure 581, 661–2 Auxerre, bishopric 199, 216, 250 n .28, 712 n. 8 Ava, widow 403 Avellana, S. Pietro of 398, 402 n. 52 Avennay 204 Aversa, S. Lorenzo 723 Avesgaud, bishop of Le Mans 691, 700, 707, 710–11, 713 n. 19, 714, 717 Avicia de Romilli 553, 916 n. 80 Avitus, bishop of Vienne 18 Avranches, agreement at 910 n. 36 Aymo, priest 495 Ayraldus, abbot of Manlieu 250 Azay-le-Rideau 687 n. 42 Azela, abbess of Elten 364 Aznar, abbot 669 n. 61, 671 n. 75 Bagnorola, see S. Benedetto Balda, abbess of Jouarre 119,131 Baldric 363–4, 596 Baldwin abbot of Bury 553 Baldwin II, count 316, 321 Baldwin IV, count 709 Balon, Joseph 115, 736 Balthild, queen 111 n. 18, 193–5, 222 Baltic churches 650–1 Baltram, hermit 831–2 Bamberg, bishopric 285, 288 n. 67, 299–300, 429 ban, banal lordship, see seigneurie banale Banõla 234 n. 39 ‘Bapchild’ privilege 240 n. 43, 241 baptism fees 478 baptismal rights 66–9, 72, 73, 79, 82, 87–8, 91, 462, 467, 596–7, 722, 790, 793 Bar, monastery 539

985

Bar-le-Duc 702 Barbaricini 655 Barbatianus, priest 665 Barbota, Breton woman 575, 578, 580, 638–9, 879–80 Barcelona: assembly (1131) 905; bishops 72 n. 46, 383; comital family 289, 302, 374; counts 308 n. 125, 387–8, 390; troublesome priest in 74 n. 61 Bari, archbishop 524, 550, 902 Bari, seaman’s gild of St Nicholas 654 Barisy-aux-Bois 111 n. 21, 123 n. 37 Barking 157 n. 45 Barlow, Frank 676, 719 Barnerius, monk 508, 614 Basil Fissard 496, 499 n. 87 Basileus, priest 666 Basle, bishopric 286 Bastnach 489 Bath 159 n. 58, 205, 242–3 Battle 511, 576 n. 6 Baume 352, 415 Baux-Rians family 508, 615–16, 877 Bavaria: advocacy 330, 333; bishops and bishoprics 38–9, 80–1, 298, 300, 440, 477, 532, 692–3; foundation and endowment 36–40, 644, 732; law 35, 43–7; lesser churches 33–45, 79–80, 460, 504–5, 532–3, 652 n. 6, 660; monastic foundations 161–2; nobles 34–5, 99, see also genealogiae; transactions and litigation 644, 755–6, 779 Bavarian councils (800–3) 34 n. 9 Bayeux, bishop of 715 Beata, widow 42, 116 Beatrix of Beárn, countess 375 Beatus, abbot of Honau 129–30, 134 Beaugency 383, 484 Beaulieu (Limousin) 324–6, 344–5, 351, 371 n. 70, 471, 692, 836; acquiring churches 591, 661, 740, 682, 766; founding or dealing with churches 470, 780–1, 785 Beaulieu-les-Loches 433 Beauvais, nuns of 814–15 Bec, foundation of 384 n. 84 Becket crisis 910, 917–18 Bede 31, 120, 123, 128, 130, 131, 133, 158, 198; on bishoprics 296–7; on kinship and nobility 132 n. 38; letter to bishop Egbert 152 Bedeem, priest 70, 662 n. 15 Bego 376, 386 n. 94 Bellecelle 252 n. 9, 262 n. 18 Belleˆme family 309 n. 133, 715 n.30

986 Benedict, abbot of Honau 129–30 Benedict, abbot of Vabres 344, 350 Benedict of Aniane 127, 150, 225–6, 229, 234, 266, 270, 425, 830 Benedict of Nursia, see Rule Benedict Biscop 129, 131, 137, 185 Benedict Levita 799–800, 803, 891–2 Benediktbeuern 161, 163 benefice, ecclesiastical 904, 929–31 benefice, general 214–15, 314, 745–6 benefices: abbacies as 313–15; bishoprics as 247, 248–51, 267, 294, 918–19; churches as 89, 531–3, 540, 741 n. 16, 744–6, 748–50, 794, 868; church lands used as 313, 451–2; monasteries as 199, 205–6, 211–17, 220–1, 233, 238, 254, 261, 263–4, 267, 285; plebes as 548 n. 75, 558 beneficium 189, 248–50, 531 n. 10 Benevento, duchy and dukes of 64, 86–7, 182 n. 7, 197, 236–7, 721 Benevento: bishops and archbishops of 86–7, 197, 881; council of (9th c.) 90 n. 39, 800 n. 80 Berardenga, monastery 402, 403, 406, 407, 893 n. 80 Berardenghi family 402–3 Berarius, bishop of Rennes 205 Berchar, abbot 133–4, 201 Berengar, bishop of Be´zie´rs 782 Berengar, viscount 305, 306 n. 115, 307–8 Berengar (of León) 917 Berg, monastery 225, 251, 262 n. 17, 264 n. 48, 271 Bergamo, bishopric 395–6 Berizo, son of Hildebrand 403 Berkeley 158, 178 Bermond, lord of Sauve 388 Bermondsey 198 Bernard, abbot of Beaulieu 324–5, 821 Bernard, archbishop of Vienne 797 Bernard, count of Be´salu 388, 389, 877 n. 77, 878 Bernard, count of Bigorre 878 Bernard, count of Couserans 303 Bernard, count of Pe´rigord 381 Bernard, count of Toulouse 344 Bernard Aimard 305–6 Bernard Arbert 768 Bernard Pons 774 Bernard Tumapeler, count 373, 383, 386, 632, 639, 840 n. 9, 878 n. 81 Bernard, viscount of Turenne 386 Bernard, viscount of Albi 305–6 Bernassonne 387 Berno, abbot of Cluny 352, 384, 415, 835

Index Berno, bishop of Maˆcon 693 n. 29, 743, 815 n. 26 Bernold, bishop of Maˆcon 70 Bernward, bishop of Hildesheim 503 n. 12, 631 n. 29 Beromu¨nster 366–9, 604 n. 128 Berry: offerings in 518; priest’s part in 563 Bertha, count’s widow 502 Bertha, daughter of Louis the German 746 Bertha, founder of Borghorst 362 Bertha, wife of count Gerard of Vienne 837, 837–8 Bertha, wife of count Sigeric 361, 362 Bertha, wife of Odelric Maginfred 401 Berthegund 130, 137 Berthild, abbess of Hilwartshausen 359 Berthold, founder count 470 Berthold of Reichenau, chronicler 843 n. 39 Bertold 342–3, 349–50 Bertolf, count 427 Bertrada 114, 224 Bertram, bishop of Le Mans 112–13, 311 n. 144 Bertram, bishop of Bordeaux 293 n. 10 Bertran 481 Bertrand, abbot of Moissac 392 Bertrand de Durfort 382 Bertuin, monk-bishop 123, 134, 159 Besançon, bishopric 724 Besse, men of 508 Betto, abbot of Gorze 421 Betto, fidelis of Louis the Pious 229 n. 84, 340–1, 341 Be`ze 136, 213, 328 n. 2, 577–8 Be´ziers: bishops of 303, 308, 470, 770, 782–3; dealing in customs 713–14 Be´ziers, bishopric: aquiring churches 617–18, 641, 661, 761–2, 765; as church owner 536; tithes 517 Biberbach, St Martin 36 n. 24, 45, 47 n. 100, 80 n. 8 Bibra 284, 362 Bidagor, R. 515 Biddle, Martin 648–9 Bilenus, clerk 384 Bilhild, abbess 125, 193 n. 18 Billing: count 284, 362; family 360 n. 30; see also Frederun Binham 513 n. 10, 644 Birndorf 471 Bisantius, deacon 666 bishoprics: as church-owners, see bishops as; election privileges for 295–6; family control of 301–9; family interest in 293–4, 300, 301–2, 302–9, 309–10; as lords of

Index monasteries, see bishops as; new, creation and status of 296, 298–300 in ruler’s gift and lordship 247–51, 254, 267, 287, 290–3, 300–1, 798, 918–19; vacancies of 267–8, 919 bishops: as abbots 202, 203, 418–19, 422–3, 425, 429–31; appointed by rulers, see bishoprics in ruler’s gift; authority of 76–7, 696–7, 799, 800, 815, over churches and clergy 15, 80–1, 84–5, 86–8, 192, 520–1, 577, 699–707, 791–2, 792–3, 866–8, over monasteries 113, 186–7, 191–9, 203, 207–8, see also, altaria, priests; as church owners 15–16, 28, 76–9, 80–1, 83, 87, 689– 95, 712–13, 800–3; of private or family churches 310–11, 424–5, 691, transactions 691–5; cure of souls conferred by 523, 702–3, 706, 712, 826, 906; ’customs’of 711–17, 828–9 ; encroachment or exploitation by 19–20, 82, 184, 192–3,194–5, 195–6, 419; expelled, deposed, dispossessed 209, 249, 293, 296; and extra-diocesan churches 15–16, 76–7, 689, 696; as fideles of the king 248, 292; as lords of monasteries 199–200, 418–33, family and private interests 310–11, 423–5, lordship limited or modified 424, metaphorical 432; married 301–2, 310; parishes made by 69–70, 72–3, 81, 91; potestas of, how understood 19, 38, 52n. 26, 87, 789–90, 793, 801–2, 805–9, 811, 813, 817, 819, 820, 824, 854, 869–70, 881, 888, 898, 905; property and authority of, how related 76, 77–9, 196–9, 207–8, 696–7, 711–26, see also potestas; tithes allocated by 476, 477–8, 700; third or quarter of church revenues for 11, 20, 24, 82, 97, 476–8, 718 see also tertia; sacramental functions of 192, 194, 520–1; secular power of 194–5, 293–4; successor chosen by 293–4, 297, 310, seen as heir of 132 n. 35, sons as 310 Bitonto 916–17 Bivin, lay abbot 421 Bivin, lord of Doncourt 466 Blaceman’s church 599 Bleurville 334 n. 47, 369 Blois-Champagne, counts of 300 n. 68, 319 n. 70, 323, 333 n. 41, 834 n. 37 Blois, Notre-Dame at 195 Bobbio 88, 123, 184, 196, 215, 235 n. 1 Bobigny 708 Bocla 596 boc, charter, see bookland bodium 502, 697

987

Bodo, canon of Maˆcon 561 Bodo, brother of Sidag 597 body and soul, traditio 670; see also corpus et anima Bohemia 85 n. 63 Bo¨hmer, H. 719, 732–3 Boissy 448, 499 n. 85 Bologna, bishopric 86, 87 Bonadico, monastery 397 Bonichis, priest 56 Boniface, archbishop of Mainz 33, 38, 75, 81, 135, 181, 187 n. 50, 201–2, 213, 216, 223, 227, 228, 240, 243, 297–8, 690, 790 Boniface, son of Berizo 407 Boniface, duke of Tuscany 505, 507 Bonneval 498 Bonoald, priest 59 bookland 152–9, 160, 242, 598, 675, 678 books, plate, and vestments 438, 444, 571–2, 661 Bordesley 916 n. 80 Borghorst 280 n. 3, 362 Borrel, count of Barcelona 289 n. 74, 379, 766 Boso, duke 321 n. 72 Boso, priest 580 Boso, viscount 880 Bouchard of Vendoˆme 714 bourg 452–4, 484 Bourg-Dieu 836, 837 Bourges: archbishops of 694 n. 39, 821; chapter 538 n. 56, 761; council (1031) 520 n. 39, 523, 568, 826; diocese 663 n. 20 Bourgueil 378, 380, 494, 850 n. 92 Bouxie`res-les-Dames, nunnery 425 Boyd, Catherine 546 Bra (Piedmont) 507 Bracding 758 Bradfield 158 Braga, councils: I (561) 18 n. 9; II (572) 18, 19, 20, 22–3, 101 n. 68, 509, 736; federation 148–9 Brancoli 56, 57 Brand, priest 552 Brandenburg, bishopric 299 n. 55 Brandeston 675–6 Brantog, bishop of Halberstadt 596 Brauweiler, monastery 364, 366, 426 n. 56, 427 n. 66, 652–3 Bredon 205 n. 59 Breedon-on-the-hill 83 n. 36, 198 Breme, freeman 627 Bremen, bishopric 250 n. 28; archbishopric 371 Brentford, synod of (781) 205 n. 59, 242 Bre´zolles 710

988

Index

Brie, see Faremoutiers Brienne-le-Chaˆteau, count of 708 Brignolles, churches in 616 Brihtmaer of Gracechurch 650 Brion 628 n. 12, 635–6 Brionde, see St-Julien Brittany: churches as entry gifts 643; married bishops in 310; owner priests in 662, 663–4; parishes in 73; priest’s reserved part in 562, 564, 572; tithes detached and fragmented 500; tithes to lords 494, 496; transactions in churches 758, 766, 772 Brixen, bishop and bishopric 604, 751 Broc 654 Brocklesby 628 Brogne 352 Brooke, Christopher 645–6 Broue´jouls 498 Broussade, see St-Georges Brun and Adaland 357 Brun and Otto, Lindolfings 356 Brun, see Bruno Brunhild, queen 215 Bruning 596, 718, 815 Bruno, archbishop of Cologne 285 n.44, 356 n.41 Bruno, archbishop of Trier 582 Bruno, bishop of Langres 841 Bruno, bishop of Passau 81 n. 19 Bruttium, bishop of 13 Bruye`res-le-Chatel 112 n. 26, 185 Bru¨hl, Carl 274 Bubenheim 443–4 Bucge, daughter of Dunne 158 Burchard, archbishop of Lyons 320 Burchard, bishop of Wu¨rzburg 187 n. 48, 206, 290, 298 Burchard, count of Nellenburg 844 Burchard, count of Vendoˆme 290, 751 Burchard, duke of Swabia 314, 748 Burchard of Montmorency 592 Burchard of Worms, collection 824–6 Burgundians 18, 95 burial: customs 30, 103–5; gifts, offerings, or payments for 71, 446, 460, 478, 638 n. 652; inside church forbidden 103 n. 87, 803, 804; of outsiders to estate or parish 483, 484–5, 498; ad sanctos 103–4 burial-place: choice of 483–5; family churches as 46, 119, 156, 160, 407 n. 85, 424; royal 227, 239, 243 burial rights of churches 68, 462; and community interest 484–5; and seigneurial power 484–5 Burnham Deepdale 912 Burton-on-Trent 375 n. 2, 408–8, 409–10, 582 Bury St Edmund 552

Bussen 604 Byrhtferth’s Life of Oswald 409 Byzantine Empire 95, 96, 97 Cadelo, viscount 631, 870 n. 38 Cadwallon 601 Caesarius of Arles 112–13, 193, 199 n. 4 Cagliberta, abbess 205 Cahors, bishopric 320 n. 6, 821 Calixtus II, pope 430, 861, 884 Calw, counts of 843 Camaldoli 393, 397, 403, 407, 892–3, 916, 920 n. 102 Cambrai, bishop of 874 Campania, leases of churches 548–51 Campori 53, 609 Camprodon, see St Pierre Cancor, count 226–7, 339–49 Cannes-Ecluse 378 canonries 290; occupied by kings 300 n. 63 canons 832–3 canonesses 281 n. 8 Canossa, archbishops of 89, 753 n. 99 Canourgues, La 877 Canterbury, archbishopric 206, 243; Domesday Monachorum 719 capella 69 Capet, Hugh 289, 290, 323; accession 819 Capetian kings 279, 818; services owed by higher churches 279, 288–91 Capitulare de villis 30 capitularies, dating of 238 n. 27 Capua 901 Capua, see S. Lorenzo Caramagna, founders of 401–5, 840, 848 Carbo, abbot 394–5 Carcassonne, bishop of 768 Carcassonne, bishopric 303–4, 305, 306, 306, 308 Carcassonne and Foix, comital family 303 Cardenã 625–786 Carisbrooke 485 Carilef, Life of 124, 256 Carisio, monastery 893 n. 80 Carlat, viscount of 568–9 Carloman, mayor 75, 114, 204 n. 49, 215, 223–4, 294 n. 16, 298 Carloman, son of Charles the Bald 267 Carolingian: character of royal lordship of higher churches 218–20, 231–4, 251–2, 257 n. 43, 259, 260, 263; family foundations 222–4; legislation 26, 69–70, 438, 447, 522–3 Carpentras, council (527) 11 n. 12, 25 n. 62 Carthage, councils of (398) 104 n. 91; (525) 193 n. 11, 194 n. 22

Index Casauria 61 n. 100, 397 n. 29 Cassel 502 Cassiana 59, 172 Castellane 725; family 612 n. 50 Catalan Pyrenees: appointment of priests 524; bishops’ authority in 623; group foundations 620–1, 653; owner priests 623, 662; tradito to consecrating bishop 621–3; transactions and litigation 752, 766, 787 Catalonia: bishops, customs in 721; church contents in 456–7; reforming response in 905; tithes in 468; transactions in 752 cathedral chapters 688–9, 717 Caunes 324 n. 39, 387, 388, 390, 765 Causeram 395, 741 n. 12, 753 Cava, see La Cava Cavour, monastery 428 n. 69, 507 Ceadda, see Chad Cedd, first abbot of Lastingham 123, 128 Celestine III 509, 510 celibacy of priests 547–8, 583, 854–5 cella, cellula 262, 341 cemetery or sanctuary, uses of 452–4 Cenel Conaill, family 145 census, significance of 189, 202–3, 252, 254, 370, 417–18, 422–3, 428, 432, 711–12 Cenwulf, king 199, 243–4 Ceolburg, abbess 158 Ceolfrid, abbot 129, 132, 134 Ceolfrith 153–4 Ceolred, king 157 Ceprano 881 Cerdanã, Cerdagne, count of 307 Ceredig and Iddig 32 Ce´risy 715 Cerne 408, 410–11, 510 n. 67 Cerzat, see Trizac Chad, brother of Cedd 128, 297 Chadalo, son of count Perchtolt 604 Chailly (Sens) 70 Chalcedon, council of (451) 19, 191, 192, 193, 451, 791 n. 16, 805 Chalon-sur-Saoˆne, councils of (mid-7th c.) 26, 121, 789; (813) 466 Chalon-sur-Saone, count of 589 Chaˆlons-en-Mayenne 204–5 Champagne 588, 742 Champigny 708–9 Chardonnay 561, 572 n. 95 Charibert 114, 223–4 Charlemagne: as abbot 266; and advocacy 329; acquiring monasteries 224–8; agenda (811) 188 n. 57, 791 n. 23; and Bavarian bishoprics 298; last capitulary (813) 460 n. 9, 652; as church-owner 30, 468, 527–8,

989

584, 778; on deathbed donations 737; and Italy 86, 89, 172, 215 n. 38, 238–9, 777; as lord of higher churches 213, 214–17, 230–5, 249, 255, 259, 260, 267, 295; and reform 439–40, 522, 790–2; and Saxony 79, 297 n. 44, 658; and secularization 75–6, 216; and tithes 460 Charles the Bald: as abbot 266–7; capitulary (855) 340; capitulary of Pıˆtres (869) 812; as founder 258; granting lay abbacies and lesser monasteries 261, 341, 416, 746; as lord of greater churches 233, 250, 255–6, 259, 261, 263–4, 267, 270, 131, 315; policy towards the church 219–21, 233, 250, 268, 340, 343, 354, 557, 803, 810; secularization and restitutions 77, 263–4 Charles the Fat 251, 258, 267, 271, 315, 347, 395, 419, 745 Charles the Simple 260, 265, 316, 318, 746, 747 Charles Martel, mayor 75, 117, 179, 202, 212, 215, 224, 231 Charroux 225, 226 n. 51, 230 nn. 1, 2, 257, 837 n. 64 charters, early use of 26, 33; see also foundation charters Chartres: bishops 195, 523, 710; bishoprics 268 n. 78, 712–13; cathedral chapter 689 n. 60 Chaˆteau-du-Loir 876 Chaˆteau-Gontier, lords of 326, 694 Chaˆteau-la-Valliere 499 n. 83, 664 Chaˆteau-Renard, lords of 508 Chaˆteau-Renault 500 Chaˆteaubriand, count of 823 Chaˆtelaillons family 537 Chaudesaigues 581, 880; see also Oradour Chauvigny 484 Cheddar 242 Chelles 111 n. 18 Chelsea, council of (816) 105 n. 99, 199, 241 Cheney, Mary 553 Cheping, son of Alveva 649 Chertsey 153 n. 8 Chester, St Werburgh’s 412 Cheyette, Fredric 303 Chiemsee 81, 201 n. 22, 419 n. 4, 420 n. 12 Chievely 482 Childebert I, king 104, 219, 256 Childeric II, king 134 Chiripahc (Bavaria) 165 Chorges 614–15 Chramnoald 30 chrism, 27, 29, 712, 716, 718, 719, 720

990

Index

Christchurch Canterbury, donors of churches to 649–50, 677 Christchurch, Twynham 600 Chroccus 30 Chrodechild 133 Chrodegang, archbishop of Metz 209, 226–7, 340, 420–1 Chrodoin family 29–30 Chrotchar, deacon 195 Chur, bishopric 78–9, 216, 235 n. 48, 293 n. 11, 24 churches as buildings: lords’ interest in their condition 454–5, secular uses of 455; multiplying 10, 11, 16–17, 67, 74, 79; as pertinent to estates, see estate churches; as self-contained estates 27, 30, 34–5, 49, 99, 437–8 Cilla 158 Cissa, abbot 132 Cistercian: monasteries 431; refusal to accept other churches 874 circada 712 Cıˆteaux 874 civil personality, see personality clas churches 85 Claudian, priest 170–1, 173, 177 Clement III 896–7 Cleomnia, widow 60 Clermont, councils of (1095) 697 n. 7, 698–700, 762 n. 60, 824, 828, 852, 869, 873; (1130) 885, 905 Clichy, council of (626–7) 10 n. 9 Clofesho, councils of (747) 121, 240 n. 46, 297 n. 39; (798) 206; (803) 241 Clonmacnois 144–5 Clopton 675 Clothair, king 186 Clotild 112 n. 26, 185 Clovis II 222 Cluny: acquiring churches 324, 375, 454, 538, 611, 635, 643, 693, 704, 708, 743,747–8, 757–8, 760, 877–8; acquiring monasteries 323–4, 375–8, 388–9, 391, 393–4, 396–7, 412, 833–5; attitude to lay lords 833–5; as church-owner 441, 561,682, 696, 703, 755–6; dependent monasteries 386 n. 91, 417–18, 432, 834–5, 847; designation and investiture of abbots 183 n. 18, 835 n. 47, 848; foundation and status 289, 352, 374, 384, 431 n. 39, 832 n. 20, 835, 839–40 Clusa, St John at 398–9 coarb 143, 146, 147 Coblenz, council (922) 486 n. 13, 522, 814 Cocon, St-Jean-Baptiste 67 n. 8, 472

Codex Iuris Canonici 930 Coenred, king of the Mercians 157 Colgu, abbot of Lusk 145 collation by bishop 930 collegiate churches 372, 408, 419, 687–8; see also monasterium Collins, Roger 786 Colmań family 145 Cologne, archbishops of 429, 596, 703 n. 55, 907–8; archbishopric 296 n. 29; and monasteries 358, 359, 364–5, 423–4, 426–7; and tithes 473 n. 80, 477 n. 107 Cologne, council (887) 522 n. 27 Colomiers 573 colonization 34, 79, 110, 162, 332 n. 35, 469, 625, 661–2, 681 n. 2, 752, 927 Colswein 648 Columba, abbot of Iona 145 Columbanus 120, 124, 133, 134, 215, 231 n. 7, 235 n. 1; his circle 120, 125, 194 comarba, see coarb Combreé 872 commenda 331 n. 23, 383, 664–5 Commercy 529, 538 n. 60 Common Rule of Fructuosus 23, 147–9, 150–1, 152 Compiegne, council of (823) 795; monastery 256 n. 41, 258, 267 Compludo 148 Compostela, episcopal rights 719 Compostela, synod of (1229) 629 n. 16, 674 n. 95, 927, 929 n. 35 Conall, abbot of Lusk 145 Conchad, abbot of Sletty 145 Concordat of Worms 884 Cond 685 conducere, conductus 908 confraternity 120, 132, 179, 375, 500, 501, 511, 538, 555, 583, 592, 683, 759 Conques, see Ste- Foi Conrad, abbot of St Michael, Hildesheim 631 Conrad, king of Burgundy 285–6, 313, 320, 324, 586, 747 n. 61 Conrad, king of Germany 534, 780, 814 Conrad II 288 Conrad III 271 n. 16 Conrad, Salian count 360 Conrad of Wettin 337 Conradine family 284 consecration of church or altar 12–14, 21, 101, 104; conditions for 207, 790; cost of 623 n. 125; records 114, 444 consent of lord or ruler to election of abbot 186, 211, 249, 403, 414; or of bishop 293, 295

Index consent of lord to tenant’s donation 597, 605, 749; of relations to donation 591–5, 597; of tenant to lord’s donation 748–9 Constance, bishop of 471; bishopric 80, 202–4, 253, 310, 367 Constitutions of Clarendon 901, 910, 916, 919 n. 96 Cookham (Abbey) 206, 242, 243 Corbie 186, 211, 215, 256, 489 Corbigny 414, 418 n. 36 Cormac 145 Cormery 255 n. 27, 257 n. 45, 413–14, 415, 849 n. 84 corpus et anima donations 625, 670, 758 n. 28 Corsica 167 Co´rus Be´scnai 143–4 Corvey 79, 271 n. 12, 282, 286 n. 50, 287 n. 60, 837 n. 64; acquiring churches 264 n. 48, 281 n. 14, 596, 682; founding a church 681 Cosroh 34 n. 4, 38 n. 36, 39, 46–7 Costoja 451 Cotesdiu, sister of Bishop Hitto 44 Coucy, 71 councils, Frankish (740s) 75–6; (813) 522, 791–2 count-abbots 315–16 countergift 531, 758–9, 760–3, 769; remedium animae 101, 155, 322 Courcemont 540, 564–5, 570, 627 n. 2, 773; see also Me´zie`res Courtisols 448 Cousages 780–1 Couture, La, see St-Pierre Cowdrey, John 839 Coyanza, council of (1055) 509, 854 Cozolt, dean 780 Crais 499 Craon 585 n. 4, 749, 788 n. 73 Credayo, monastery 393–4, 396, 397 Creti (plebs) 506 nn. 34, 35 Crispin 56 nn. 59, 64 Crodegar, duke 205 Croix-St-Ouen 264 n. 48 Crosmie`res 872, 924 Croso 162 Crossac 664 Crot 455 n. 78, 686, 764 Cruas 234 n. 39, 253 n, 17, 419 n. 4, 538 n. 62 Cruce´ 636–7, 764 Crundmaél, abbot 145 Cugnon 117–18 Cunault 341 Cundalpereth, priest 44 Cuneza, noblewoman 632 Cunzo 46

991

Cuono (Zwiefalten) 371–2 Cuono, chorepiscopus 420 cure of souls conferred by bishop 523, 702–3, 706, 712, 826, 906 curtis Attolae 71, 72, 76, 77, 439, 446, 652, 808 Cusanweoh 156 Cusset 422 custody in vacancies 290; see also vacancies customary law 20, 100, 108, 730, 776, 789, 800, 855, 886 Cuthbert, archbishop 240 Cuthswith, abbess 159 Cutts, E. L. 678 Cuxa, see St-Michel de Cwenthryth 242 n. 61, 244 cycles of gift-giving 47–8, 53 n. 38, 406 n. 83 Cyneberht 153 Cynehelm, son of Cenwulf, 244 Cynethryth, wife of Offa 206, 242, 244 n. 77 Cynewulf, king of the West Saxons 206 Cysoing 352 n. 98, 456 n. 81, 661 n. 10 Dado, see Audoin Dagobert, king 117, 123, 125, 195 Dagworth 627 Dalmatius of Bourbon 589 Damerham 242 Damian, priest 63 Dammartin, count of 708 Dampierre-sous-Brou 496–6, 497, 567 Dancharat, priest 37 David, deacon 671 David, priest, and sons 508 Davies, Wendy 31–2 De abbatibus, poem 156, 179 De ecclesiis et capellis, see Hincmar of Rheims deathbed donations 60, 592, 737 dedication inscriptions 599 n. 84, 645 n. 42, 648 Dedo, palatine count 370 Deerhurst 83 n. 36, 156, 160 defence, ducal: Benevento 87, 236–7; Spoleto 237; see also royal defence defence and lordship, how related 233–4, 236–8, 252–4, 255, 255–6, 280–1, 289, 732–3 defrauded benefactor 20 defrauded poor 25 Deicolns, St, life of 831 demesne tithes 464–7 Demod, nun 597 Deóls 352, 374, 837 n. 2 derbfine 140–3, 146 Derby, urban founders 648 Dereman’s church 599

992

Index

Desiderius, abbot of Monte Cassino 770 Desideus, count 607 designation by predecessor of abbot 96–7, 127–31, 149, 157, 169, 171, 181, 183, 184–6, 241, 393; bishop 293, 294, 297, 310 Desterigo, clerk 543 Deusdedit, cardinal 853, 859–60 Deusdedit, priest 56 Deusdet 385, 664–5 Deusdona, priest 56 Deutz 524, 596, 826 n. 16 development value of church and cemetery 453–4, 825 dextri 438, 452 n. 55 Dietmar, nobleman 762 Digne, bishopric 301 Dijon, see St-Beńigne Dijon tithes 475 diocesan boundaries 204, 715; property 9–10, 19, 198 divisio of monastic property 263, 266, 269 divisio between bishopric and county 77–9, 199, 216 Doda, woman 751 Dodo, bishop 399 Domelina 580, 639 Dome`ne 386 n. 91 Domesday Book: churches in 83, 443, 448, 449, 559, 586, 627, 630, 648–9, 653, 767, 771; on churches’ property right 738; monastic founders’ descendants in 411–12; priests in 559, 630 Domesday Monachorum 719 dominicatura 308, 376, 387, 388 dominium, meanings of 3, 233, 241–2, 405; 12th-c. discussion 88, 890–5 Domitilla, a Breton 711 dona, annual gifts to ruler 270, 273–5, 289 Donni 61–2 donum, meanings of 304–5, 306–8, 387–8, 389, 390 n. 116, 699 n. 19, 907–8 Donze`re 226 n. 52, 260 n. 15, 261 n. 18 Dormeier, H. 882 Dornatiacum 136 Do¨rnten 656 dos 19, 21, 22, 438, 735–6; see also endowment double monasteries 125, 130–1, 132, 151 n. 27 Doucelles 697, 698 n. 16, 710–11 Dragebord, bishop of Speyer 199 n. 4, 213 Drax 553 Drogo, priest 746 Drogo, bishop of Metz 696 n. 1, 706 n. 71 Drogo of Pevensey 511 Druim Lias 144 Dubdacrich 81 n. 15, 420 n. 12

Dubhan, abbot of Honau 129, 231, 234 Duda 159 Dulas, castle church 601 n. 101, 686 n. 34, 719 n. 59 Duleek 145 Dumfrad, priest 766 Dunne, abbess of Withington 158 Durand, abbot of St-Victor 617 Durham, bishop of 678 Durtal 640 Eadmer, priest 676 Eadmer of Canterbury 855 Eadstan 648 Eangyth, abbess 160 n. 4, 179 n. 16, 239 n. 35 Eanmund 156 Earconbert, king of Kent 240 Ebalus, viscount 564 Ebbo of Deóls 352, 374, 836, 837 Eberhard, count (8th c.) 114, 116–17, 120, 179, 194; (9th c.) 831; (10th c.) 362, 504 Ebersberg 361, 362–3, 366, 368, 369, 839 n. 3; acquiring churches 469, 504, 598, 762; dealing with tithes 505 Ebolus, bishop of Limoges 319, 322 Ebroin, bishop of Poitiers 343, 350 Ebroin, priest 661 Echternach 30, 116, 186, 201, 223–4 edacht 45, 145 Edgar, king 408, 466, 513 Edward, king 559, 676 Edward the Confessor 291 Edwin, priest 552 Egbert, bishop 152; Dialogues 137 Egbert, king 241 Egfrith, king 239, 297 Egibert 261 Egilbert, archbishop of Trier 652 Egilolf 45–6 Eilaf 678 Eilbert 289 Eilswit 360 Elias, son of Aelgar 650 Elias Rufus 500 n. 89, 592 Ejo 46 Elderigo, priest 674 Eligius 117, 195, 221 Ellanmar 43 Ellinrat, king Arnulf’s mistress 449 Ellwangen 214 nn. 26, 28, 225, 226, 228, 271 Elne, bishops of 622, 536, 766; bishopric 302, 304 n. 97, 744 Elten 357 n. 10, 358–9, 360 n. 35, 362, 363–4 Ely 239–40, 675

Index Emhilt, founder-abbess of Milz 126, 182, 187 n. 48 Emma, abbess of Hilwartshausen 359 Emma countess of Poitou 378, 380 Emisoind, founder 237 Enfonville 318 Engelburc 45 Engelsiana, heiress 591, 593 Engern 284 Engilbert, priest 534 Engilfrid, nephew of Albune 35 Engilhart, priest 41–2 Engilmar, abbot of Berg 251 Enguerrand, bishop of Cavaillon 616 Entrages 615 entrance gifts (for appointment as priest) 528, 549–51, 556–8 entry gifts (for admission to monastery) 345–6, 497, 572, 642–4 Eon de Blaison 326 n. 118, 382 n. 70 Epaonense, council (571) 519 Epernay, capitulary (846) 799 episcopalia, see bishops’ customs episcopatus 304–5 Epolding-Mu¨hlthal 46 Erchanbert, bishop of Freising 48 Erchinoald, mayor 104, 123, 134, 179 n. 19 Erfo, abbot of Monte Amiata 171 n. 48, 235 n. 3 Erfurt, bishopric 298, 503 Erging, see Archenfield Erkanfrida, widow 441, 449, 641 Ermenburg, widow 640, 746 n. 56 Ermengard, countess of Be´salu 451 Ermengard, countess of Chalon 319 Ermengard, viscountess 387, 390 Ermengaud, archbishop of Narbonne 305, 307, 688 n. 48 Ermengaud, count of Urgel 306, 308 Ermengaud, nephew of bishop Sala 308–9 Ermenhild, abbess of Ely 240 Ermesinda 624 Ernuin, priest 649, 676 Ero, deacon 671 Eslonza 542, 654 estate churches 26, 27, 30, 49, 83–4, 90–1, 99, 437–8, 473, 513 Estfred, priest 623 Estinne, council (743) 75 n. 8 Ethelburg, abbess of Faremoutiers 133 Ethenulf 535 Eticho family, 112, 114, 117, 232 Etpurc 441 Eufrasia, abbess 168 Eugenius II, pope 793 Euphemia 495

993

Eusebius, bishop of Angers 694, 716, 868 Eustace, bishop of Ely 898 Eustadiola 27, 112 Eustasius, abbot of Luxeuil 124 Exalada, St Andrew at 353–5 exemption from diocesan jurisdiction 432, 717 Eye (Herefordshire) 679–80 Eymino, priest 561 Eynsham 408–9, 410–11 Ezzo, count 364 false capitularies, see Benedict Levita false decretals, see Pseudo-Isidore ‘false monasteries’ 147–8, 151–2 family law 17, 21–2, 101; Alemanian 34–4; Bavarian 35, 162–3; English 154–5; Frankish 28, 29 n. 87; Irish 140–1, 146–7; Lombard 50, 55–6, 57 n. 71, 58–61, 168–9; pre-Frankish German 355; Saxon 363; Visigothic 21–3; Welsh 32; see also ‘free share’ Fara, founder-abbess 124–5,126–7, 132 Faregia 671 Faremoutiers 124–5, 132, 133 Farfa 170–1, 184, 198, 235 n. 3, 238–9, 328, 432 n. 106, 848; acquires churches 53, 63, 64, 167–8, 393–5, 399, 505, 505–6, 609, 682–4, 757, 765, 766, 777; dealings with churches 506, 547, 630, 631, 754; litigation 777, 784 Farges 743 Farnham 156 Farnulf, priest 535 Farulf the Bulgar 89, 692 n. 23 Faulo 196 Feine, H. 94, 95, 96, 99–100, 731 Feleburg, nun 157 Felicity, religious woman 64 n. 127, 197 n. 49, 236 Felix, bishop of Lucca 196 Felix’s Life of Guthlac 132 Felten, H. 255 Fenestre 622 Ferdinand I, king 671 Ferrie`res, abbey of 261, 416 Fe´th Fio 144, 145 fevum presbiterale 450, 826, 827, 878–9; see also presbiterium fidelity required of bishops and abbots 214, 248, 294, 864; sworn by priests 539, 563, 583 Figeac 386 n. 94, 376 Filerad, priest 62 Filibert 111 n. 21, 113 n. 36 Finchale 686

994

Index

Finchampstead 909 firstfruits (early) 460 fisc, grants of 112, 119; judicial status of 256–8 Fischbeck 281 Fischingen 38, 531 Flacy and Senan 577 Flavigny 114, 188, 194, 213, 231, 256 n. 39, 419, 420 Flavipert, priest 50, 169 Fleury (St-Benoıˆt-sur-Loire) 701, 749, 850 n. 92 Fleury-en-Vexin 115 Flonheim 30 Floreffe, Premonstratensian abbey 502 Florestan, abbot 149–50 Florus, deacon of Lyons 798 Foix, comital family 303; see also Carcassonne and Foix Folcrad, priest 527 Folembray 71–2, 76–7, 652, 808 Foliot, see Gilbert, Robert Folker’s charter 342 Fontebona 400, 402; see also Berardenga Fontenelle, see St-Wandrille forest 34 n. 9, 223 n. 24, 229 Fortes, priest 57 Forthred, abbot 159, 198 n. 62 Fortunatus 59–60, 60–1, 172 Fosses 134 Fosse´s, see St-Maur foundation charters 112–15, 123–5, 373–5, 398– 405; for lesser churches 414, 443–4 Fradilan, priest 670 Fraericus115 frankalmoin 919, see also ’free alms’ Franco, bishop of Paris 823 Franco, bishop of Worms 286 Frankfurt, council and capitulary (794) 461, 521 n. 13,790, 890, 892; council (951) 285, 286 Frankfurt, royal chapel 585 Frederick, bishop 336 Frederick, bishop of Mu¨nster 336–7 Frederick, duke 287 Frederick, founder 336 Frederick, palatine count 370 Frederick I, archbishop of Cologne 718 Frederick I, duke of upper Lotharingia 286–8 Frederick I, Barbarossa , emperor 407 Frederick II, duke of Lorraine 335 Frederun, abbess 359 Fredianus, priest 57 ‘free alms’ 737 free share 21–2, 35, 41, 43 n. 83, 58–61, 101, 141, 167, 177, 734, 735 Freising, bishopric: acquires churches 36–8, 40, 42, 449, 534, 660, 662; acquires

monasteries 161, 163–4, 179, 208, 215, 420; exchanges churches 770; dealings with tithes 469, 515; litigation 779 Fretherun, widow 596 Fridixilo 674 Fridulus 62 Friduperht 39,44 Friduwi 356 Frieso 469 Fritheric, clerk 554 Fritzlar 201–2, 228 Friuli, monasteries in 171 n.48 Froila Gonsa´lez 626, 769 Frossay 643, 663 Frotar, bishop of Toul 273 n. 34, 425, 472 Frotard 384 Frotarius, bishop of Nıˆmes 305–6 Frotwin, clerk 490, 526, 560 Fructuosus, abbot-bishop 147, 148; his Common Rule 23, 147–52 Frumolt, clerk 532–3 Fruttuaria 770, 835, 840–2, 848 Fulbert, bishop of Chartres 709, 713 n. 14, 823 Fulchoius 641 Fulcrada, nun 640 Fulda 114, 201–2, 214, 223, 227, 229, 233 n. 36, 258, 269, 271, 288, 431 n. 99; acquires churches and monasteries 182, 187, 189, 503, 563, 596 Fulk, archbishop of Rheims 316 Fulk I, count of Anjou 750 Fulk III Nerra, count of Anjou 323, 377, 378–9, 433, 585, 593, 750 Fulk, viscount of Marseilles 724 Fulk of Durfort 382 Fulk son of Jordan 572 Fulrad, abbot of St-Denis 187–8, 228 Furholzen 37 Fursa 104, 134 Gaidoald, physician 167 Gaidoin 54, 58 Gaidulf, index 394 Gallargues 374 Galliano 609 Gallocanto, S. Nicolo of 607 n. 27, 634 Gammo, founder of nunnery 115 Gand, see Ghent Gandersheim 281, 356, 358, 362 Garcıá, king of Pamplona 771 Garcıá Gallo, A. 82 Garcıá Refugano 786 Garewine 649 Gareóult 614–15 Garnett, Gerorge 738

Index Garsind, heiress of Be´ziers and Agde 303 Garsind, countess of Anduze 386 Garsind, countess of Toulouse 619, 715, 748 Gaucelm, bishop of Fre´jus 302, 725 Gaudin of La Volue 571–2 573 Gauslin of Anthenaise 571 Gauzald, priest 566 Gauzbert, abbot of Marmoutier 323 Gauzbert, abbot of Moissac 391–2 Gauzlin, archdeacon 716–17 Gauzlin, abbot of Glanfeuil 343, 350, bishop of Toul 424–5 Gebhard, bishop of Constance 424 Gebhard, bishop of Wu¨rzburg 424 Geifrid, clerk 56–9 Gelasius I, pope 13–15, 96 Gelasian rules 13–15, 51, 181, 299, 790, 853, 859, 881–2, 889 Gelduin, archbishop of Sens 701, 706 n. 73 Gellone 386, 388 Gemma, wife of count Landulf 88 Geńestal, R. 514–15 Gengenbach 430 Geoffrey, bishop of Beauvais 702 Geoffrey, bishop of Paris 708 Geoffrey I, bishop of Chartres 707, 716 Geoffrey I Greymantle, count of Anjou 322–3, 330, n. 19, 377 n. 36 Geoffrey II de Le`ves, bishop of Chartres 873 Geoffrey II Martel, count of Anjou 323, 418, 585, 590, 593, 750, 838 n. 75 Geoffrey III the Bearded, count of Anjou 749 Geoffrey IV, count of Anjou 326, 762 Geoffrey of Bouillon 758–9 Geoffrey of Chailland 571 Geoffrey, eldest son of Ralph Toared 635 Geoffrey Fouel, 709 Geoffrey de Jarzy 481 Geoffrey Malramnus 750 Geoffrey de Trailli 511, 600 n. 75 Geoffrey of Semur 589 Geoffrey Ridel, duke of Gaeta 394–5, 395 Geoffrey of Vendoˆme 500 Geoffrey, priest of Maze´ 583 Geoffrey, priest of Nuille´-sur-Vicoin 571–2 Georg Schreiber 834 Gerald, archbishop of York 864 Gerald, bishop of Limoges 309, 428 Gerald, chaplain (Poitou) 538 Gerald, priest (Auvergne) 581 Gerald Moretus 507 Gerald, count of Aurillac 345 Gerald of Turlande 750 Gerard, bishop of Toul 287 Gerard of Brogne 321, 323, 352

995

Gerard, canon of Chartres 536 Gerard, count of Metz 770 Gerard, count of Vienne 345, 350, 837–8 Gerard, priest in Angers 585 Gerard the seneschal 500 Gerberga, abbess of Gandersheim 356 Gerberga, foundress of Oedingen 358 Gerbstedt 336–7, 360 Geremar, abbot 125 Gerhard, provost of Riechenberg 656 Gerhoh of Reichersberg 852 n. 12, 853 n. 15, 864 n. 101 Gero, count, founder of Alsleben 357, 658, 675 Gerona, legatine council 828 Gerona: bishops of 457, 536, 721; councils of (1068) 479 n. 7, (1078) 513, 828, 853 Gerresheim 426 Gersind 729 Gertrude, abbess 128, 132 Gervais of Chateau-du-Loir 876 Gervase, bishop of Le Mans 590, 592, 710, 714, 716 Gervase Painel 914 Gervold abbot of St-Wandrille 213 Geseke 357–9, 423–4, 426 Geton, count 626 Gevuld, priest 671 Gewere 101, 730 Ghent, St-Pierre 702–3 gifts 101, 114; see also counter-gift Gigny 352, 384, 415 Gilbert, count of Chalon 319 Gilbert Foliot, bishop of Hereford, then of London 909, 911–12 Gilbert Malet 912–13 Gilbert of Sempringham 906–7 Gilbert of Tonbridge 598 gild church 649, 650 Giles, St 432 Gilling 123 Girberga, daughter of Willa 748 Girbert, abbot of St-Maixent 319 Girbert, chaplain of Commercy 529 Giroie, of Montreuil 714–15; family 683 Giroie of Rennes 760 Gisburn 898–9 Gislebert, duke and lay abbot 330 n. 20 Gislebert, priest 565 Gisulf II, duke of Benevento 236 Glanfeuil 350, 738 n. 61; see also St-Maur Glastonbury 244 Glismont, Lotharingian woman 443–4, 555 Gloucester, St Peter’s of 160 godar (pl.), see godi Goderisius 53, 45 n. 46, 64 n. 124

996 Godfrey, bishop of Maguelone 869 Godfrey, duke of Lorraine 582 Godfrey, duke of Tuscany 668, 857 godi (sing.) 93 Godrannus 374 Godric, hermit 686 Godric, priest (Suffolk) 675 Godric, son of Garewine 649, 676 Goffart, Walter 218–21, 233, 259 Goibert 345–6 Goirand of Gonfaron 475 Gomez, famulus Dei 626 Go´mez Gonza´lez, count 752 Gondesind, abbot 626 Gontard, archdeacon of Turin 841 Gonzina, countess 626 Goody, Jack 176–80 Gorze 209–10, 227, 420–1, 425, 430; dealings with churches and tithes 466, 582, 583, 655, 744 Gosbert (Maine) 581 Gosbert of Bar-sur-Seine 588 Goscelin of Ste-Maure 493, 569 Goscelin villicus 749 Goseck 336, 370–1 Goslar, St Cecilia 596–7 Gotesdeu, famulus Dei 742 Gothmar 536, 622 Gottweig 469 Goudargues 389 Gouet family 494; see also Matilda, William Gozbald, abbt of Altaich 746 Gozpert, count 389 Gracechurch 650 Gradeloc 772 Grandmesnil, family 683 Grandvilliers 756 Gratian 883, 887–92, 902, 903 Great Yarmouth 651 Greek monks 548–50 Greenfield Priory 916 Gregory I, the Great 10, 193, 525, 825, 842, 856 Gregory V 784 Gregory VII 431, 669, 828, 842–4, 847, 849, 851–3, 858–9, 878, 881 Gregory of Tours 106, 130, 293 Gergory and Peter (Naples) 607, 654 Grenoble, bishopric 507–8, 724 Grimo 27–8, 68, 113–14, 204; Grimoald, Pippinid mayor 117, 221 Grimoald, chancellor 253 Grimoard, bishop of Angouleˆme 428 Grunrin, priest 70 Guadalajara, Cortes of 928

Index Guaifer I, prince of Salerno 404–5, 734 Gualo, bishop of Paris 717 Guarmund, clerk 563 Gudifrid 61 Gudina, widow 633 Guetichis, priest 63 n. 109, 87 Guidi family 396, 406 n. 78, 667, 920 Guillot, O. 32 Guimara˜es 543, 626, 633 Guiniterius 507 Gumbald, priest 538 Gumbert, bishop Nivard’s brother, 204 Gumbert, priest 63 n. 11, 543 Gumfrid, abbot of Monteverdi 174 Gumfrid, chaplain 915 Gundbato, deacon 533 Gundbert, abbot of Steneland 345–6, 455–6 Gundeland, abbot of Lorsch 226–7, 234, 339 Gundo, abbot of S. Silvestro 169 Gundoin family 29 Gundric, deacon 561 Gunduald, priest 52 Gundwald 374, 377, 383 Guntbert, founder of Ansbach 225–6, 228–9 Guntelm, clerk 49, 58 nn. 74, 76, 79 Gunther, count of Chiemgau 165–6, 207–8 Gu¨sten 745–6 Guthlac 108, 132 Guy, abbot of St-Aubin 322 Guy, abbot of St-Wandrille 212, 214 Guy, bishop of Ferrara 861–2, 863, 864 Guy, bishop of Lucca 88 Guy III, count of Grenoble 507 Guy, count of Maˆcon 497 Guy, donor to La Couture 577 Guy, lord of Sauge 775 Guy, nephew of Berno 352 Guy, nephew of Vitalis 583 Guy and wife Waldrada 616 Guy of Lastours 591 Guy of Laval 710 Guy of Spoleto, count 341 Guy of Spoleto, emperor 314 Guy, Poitevin knight 568 Guy, viscount of Limoges 309, 322 Habsburg survey 927 Hadewic, wife of count Bertolf 427 Hadrian I, pope 243 Haeha, abbot of Bradfield 158 Hahndorf 656 Haholt (Bavarian) 41 Haholt, founder of Geseke 357 Halberstadt, bishops of 299, 342, 685–6, 856 Hamelin of Langeais 590

Index Hamelin of Chaˆteau-du-Loir 593 Hamelin, priest 664 Hammelberg 123 Hamo, dapifer 598 handgemal 46, n. 97, 94 n. 19 Harduin, bishop of Tournai 709 Harduin, count 746 Haringen 656 Hariolf 225, 228 Hartham, chorepiscopus 217 Hartman, W. 48 Hartmot 253 Hartpert, priest 660 Hartung, Wolfgang 47–8 Harvey Messor 501 Hastie`re 318, 425 Hasungen 426 Hathegard 596 Hatto, founder of Schienen 347, 350 Haugh (Lincs.) 916 Hauskloster 121, 361, 365 Hautvilliers 106 n. 11, 133, 201 Headda, abbot 198 Headda, priest 158, 675 n. 97 Hector and wife Cana 507 Hector, monk 639 Hed 357 n. 1, 361 Heden, convert duke of Thuringia 123, 125, 206, 298 Hedwig, Andreas 442–3 Heesligen 361 Heidenheim 125, 135, 179 Heilrat 44 Heimrich, son of Cancor 226, 228, 340 heirs: aggrieved 176–7, 340–1, 362–5, 592–4; chosen 55–8, 129, 153–5, 157, 159–60, 178, 668; natural 129, 130, 154–7, 159–60, 172, 176–8, 668; qualified 55–6, 58, 138, 158, 168–9, 178 heir or coheir: Christ as 734; churches as 21–3, 50, 734–5; saints as 427 Helgafell, holy place of 93 Helizar 374 Hell, fear of 148, 879 Helmarshausen 285, 362 Helmburg, benefactress of Hilwartshausen 362 Helmberg, foundress of Fischbeck 281, 358 n. 16 Helmker 41–2 Helmric 596 Hemele 159 Henry I the Fowler 284, 288, 362, 525, 660, 814 n. 15

997

Henry II, emperor 278, 279, 281, 285, 288, 299, 300, 358, 359, 364, 429, 431, 788, 825, 841 Henry III, emperor 366, 368, 369, 826, 848 Henry IV, emperor 277–8, 286, 843, 852, 855 Henry V, emperor 846, 861 Henry I, king of England 552, 649, 679, 788, 852, 864 Henry II, king of England 788, 910, 931 Henry of Limburg 908 Henry, count of Stade, 361 Henry, nephew of Leo IX 369–70 Henry, son of Ulrich of Lenzburg 366 Heraclius, bishop of Tarbes 878 Herbert Losinga, bishop of Norwich 651 Herbert of Vermandois 300 Herbert of La Guierche 570 Herbrechtingen 187 Herewald, bishop of Llandaff 675 Heribrand 907 Heriburg, abbess 130 Heristal, capitulary of (779) 460 Herlemund, bishop of Le Mans 205 Herman 655 Herman, bishop of Toul 701, 707 n. 81 Hermann, archbishop of Cologne 358, 364 Hermann, bishop of Volterra 397 Hermann, count 505 hermits 384–5, 417–18 herring fishermen 651 Hersfeld 79, 227–8, 228, 269, 271, 288, 315, 742; acquires churches 285, 288, 456, 604 Hertford, council of (672) 198 Hervey of Doucelles 710–11, 714 Hervey, priest of Me´zie`res 565, 570, 573 Heusinger, B. 274, 277, 278 Hexham 128, 198; deans of 677–8 Hezelo, bishop of Hildesheim 596 Hilarus, pope 294 Hildebrand, abbot of St-Bertin 321 Hildebrand, husband of Ava 403 Hildegard, wife of Otpert 746 Hildegund, abbess of Geseke 359 Hilderic, abbot of Farfa 328 Hildigrim, bishop of Halberstadt 255, 346, 422 Hilduin, abbot of St-Bertin 346 Hilgod, knight 709 Hilpisch, S. 131 Hiltiport 45–6; see also Huosi Hiltisnot 189 Hilwartshausen 281, 358 nn. 16–18, 359, 362 Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims: as annalist 266; Collectio de ecclesiis et capellis 804–12; diocesan activity and

998

Index

Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims (cont.) legislation 440, 477, 483, 514–15, 520, 522, 523, 528, 810–11; dispute with Hincmar of Laon 71–2, 76–7, 439; opinion and polemic 248–9, 250, 477, 804–12; letter from Quierzy 248, 272–3; as young clerk 250 Hincmar, bishop of Laon 71–2, 76–7, 523, 808, 812 Hirsau 843, 847, 849; reform 371 Hitto, bishop of Freising 39, 42–5, 48, 440, 532, 533, 779 Hiudiperga 395 Hohenaltheim, council of (916) 525, 814 Hohemburg 117 holy places 93–4, 105–8, 156 Holy Trinity, Aldgate 650 Holzkirchen 224–5, 260 homage done by priests 563–4; by prelates 864 Homblie`res 289, 381 Homulus, clerk 63 Honau 129 Honnecourt 115, 136 honor, honores: bishoprics and abbeys as 259, 265, 292, 294; the lands of great churches 302–3, 304, 308; use of term 248, 249, 250 Honorius II, pope 884 Hornbach 114, 183 n. 20, 286, 341–2, 343, 368–9 hospitality 238–9, 240, 270–4, 278–9, 288, 415–16, 422, 423, 429–30, 557 Hospitallers in England 912 Hostiensis 924 Hrandolf 742 Hrodoin, clerk 36, 43 Hrodhelm 44 Hrothware, abbess of Withington 158 Hubert, bishop of Angers 326, 694, 868 Hubert, viscount of Vendoˆme 750 Hubert, lord of Durtal 640 Hufo 39–40 Hugeburc, nun and author 135 Hugh, abbot of Cluny 325, 377, 388, 587 Hugh, archbishop of Besançon 691 Hugh, archbishop of Rouen 873 Hugh, bishop of Bayeux 694 Hugh, bishop of Coutances 713 Hugh, bishop of Die 853 Hugh, bishop of Digne 301 Hugh, bishop of Grenoble 507 Hugh, bishop of Troyes 704, 707 Hugh, duke of Burgundy 535–6 Hugh, earl of Chester 412 Hugh Capet, king 289, 290, 323, 818, 819 Hugh of Castelnau 324–6

Hugh, Charlemagne’s son 425 Hugh, Charles Martel’s nephew 212 Hugh, clerk of Cruce´ 764 Hugh of Alluyes, knight 499, 501, 664 Hugh Doubleau, archdeacon 709 Hugh the Great 315 Hugh of La Borie 773 Hugh Letbald 589 Hugh de Montfort, lands of 627 Hugh de Surge`res 749 Hugh, son of Acbert 747 Hugh, son of Baldric 648 Hugh of Vendeuvre 567 Hughes, Kathleen 141 Huguccio 895–6 Humbert, cardinal 856, 857, 858, 861 n. 78 Humbert (of Autun) 576 Humbert of Marigny 493 Humphrey, Norman baron in Apulia 551 Hunroc, priest 526 Huntingdon, see St Mary’s Hunwald, abbot of Moissac 392 Huosi clan 45, 161, 784 Huosi Reginpreht 161–4 Hupold, priest 37, 42, 660 Hurstmonceaux 676 Hurvodius, clerk and priest’s son 663 Husito 44 Hutthorpe 446 Hwaetbert, abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow 129 Hwicce, underkings of 158, 205, 242 Ibbo 27 Icelandic sagas 93 Igue´rande 693–4, 747 Ile-Barbe 252 n. 10 Ile-Bouchard 496, 498, 709 Ileva 633 Illminster 166 Illtrud 124, 130 Ilsenburg 685–6 Imbart de la Tour 98–9, 730 Imma, countess 359 Imma, nun 165 Immena 344 Immina, daughter of Heden 206 Immo, vassal to Lothar I 746 immunity 110, 181, 224, 230, 232, 235, 251–2, 281–3, 299 immunity-defence 234–5, 239, 251–9 impropriation, see appropriation incastellamento churches 90 incorporation, see appropriation Inden 266; abbot of 425 indivisio 629–30, 633

Index Indo-European background 94 n. 15, 100 Indre 208–9 Ine, king of the West Saxons 461 Ingelbald, a Breton 711 Ingelheim, council (948) 489 n. 13, 522, 814 Ingezo 393–4, 396 Ingelram, priest 661 Ingitrude, abbess 130, 137 Inkberrow 159 Innes, Matthew 47–8, 180 Innocent II, pope 430, 717, 885, 905 Innocent III, pope 898 Innocent IV, pope 895 investiture 290, 292, 323, 378–9, 418, 426, 428, 847–9; decrees 851–4; and lesser churches 851–3, 864–5, 884, 885, 886, 906, 097; modes and symbolism 250, 289–90, 401–2, 843, 849, 856, 861–3; in Languedoc 308–9 Investiture Contest 738, 851–64, 919 Iona 145 Irache 642, 643, 655 n. 30, 771, 877 Ireland: abbesses in 146–7; abbots in 143–6; pastoral care in 85 Irish family law 140–1 Irish monks in Francia 129, 134 Irish-Frankish monasticism 123, 124; see also Columbanus Irmburc, widow 449, 504 n. 18, 743 n. 28 Irmina, abbess of Oeren 222 Irminfrid161–2, 164 Irminswind, abbess 165 Irmintrude, wife of Nicetius 27 Isabel de Warenne, countess 641 Isabel, countess of Northampton 914–15 Isanhart, clerk 42 Isarn, abbot of St-Victor 302, 876 Isembert, bishop of Poitiers 484, 485, 538–9, 691 n. 14, 870 n. 38 Isernia, S. Maria at 88–9 Isola, S. Salvatore at 403–4, 406–7, 407–8 Itherius, abbot of St Martin of Tours 413 Itta, foundress of Nivelles 128, 134 Itta, intended abbess of Fontebona 400 ius patronatus 887, 892–7, 916–17 ius presentandi 895–6 Ivo of Chartres 703, 862, 887 Jarlannus, clerk 561 Jarzy 481 Jocelin, bishop of Salisbury 909 Jocelin, father of Gilbert of Sempringham 906 Joceran of Fautrie`res 589 John, abbot of S. Benedetto, Bagnorola 394, 395

999

John, abbot of St Gall, bishop of Constance 203–3 John, archbishop of Bari 91 John, archbishop of Salerno 666 John, bishop of Hexham 31 John, bishop of Lucca 52 n. 26, 753 John, bishop of Luceria 723 n. 75, 769 John, bishop of Orleans 867 John of Beverley, bishop of York 297 n. 42 John, imperial count 606 John VIII, pope 420, 431, 432 John XI, pope 839 John XII, pope 299 John XVIII, pope 88, 815 John, deacon, founder of S. Martino, Florence 610 John, priest (Apulia) 667, 668 John, priest (Auvergne) 661 John, priset (Salerno) 607, 666 John of Faenza 894 John of Isernia 394–5, 395 John infantulus 610 John, Eric 154 Jonas, bishop of Autun 802 Jonas of Orleans 487, 487–8, 490, 527, 556, 793, 795 Jordan Froterius 572 Jordan, provost 309 Joseph, bishop of Freising 41, 161 Jouarre 119, 130, 131 Juan Pe´rez, clerk 542 Judicahel 643, 663 Judith, abbess of St-Genie`s-des-Mourgues 379 Julian Pomerius 794 Juliana, abbess of Wenkheim 189 Jumie`ges 212, 215, 517, 663, 694 jundragium 565, 569–70, 571 junioratus, see jundragium Justinian, emperor 15, 96, 122, 859, 860, 887 Justus, unworthy priest 24 Justus and Pastor, Saints, relics of 307 Juvenal (in Umbria) 399 Juvigny 71,77 Kappenberg, collegiate foundation 427 n. 63, 431 n. 94, 685 n. 31, 718 Kardellus, priest 669 Karlburg 206–7, 224 Kazili 751 Keddington 446 Kemnade 217 n. 16, 359 Kemp, Brian 679 Kempten 257–8, 260, 287 n. 61 Kenilworth 552 n. 103, 917 n. 86 Kephahilt, widow 38 Kerfirid, 44

1000

Index

Kernand, son of Cotesdiu 44 Kesselheim 284 key of church 327, 511, 540, 565 Kilian, St 297–8 Kingston, council (838) 251 Kingston Bagpuize 599, 610, 628 Komburg 426, 427–8 Kremu¨nster 161, 238–9 Kumwiede 283–4 Ku¨bach 366 n. 77 La La La La

Canourgue 877 Cava 683, 882, 916–17 Celle-St-Avant 569–70 Couture 113, 577, 700, 707, 714, 717, 759 Lagnes, valley of 724 Lagrasse 382, 383, 416 Lambert, abbot of Schienen 347–8 Lambert, count 374–5 Lampert of Hersfeld 277 Lancelin, lord of Beaugency 383, 484 485 Landau, Peter 902 Landeloh, 743 Lando, bishop, abbot of St-Wandrille 212 Lando, count in Salerno 607 Landolf, count (Capuan) 398–9 Landpert, son of Beata 42 Landric, lord of Dampierre 495–6, 497 Landric, priest 661 Landulf, count of Isernia 88, 815 Landulf, claimant at Ceprano 881 Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury 559, 719 Lanfranc, clerk 547 Langres, bishopric 419, 724 Languedoc: abbatia, meaning of 382, 387–8, 390; episcopatus, meaning of 387–8, 390; lesser churches treated as property 617–20, 641–3, 693, 744, 748, 761–2, 765–6, 771, 774, 781–3; owner-priests in 661, 664–5; priest’s part in 563–4, 567–8; tithes and offerings taken by lords 492, 494, 497, 509 Lantfrid 164 Laon, bishopric 250 Laon, Salaberga’s nunnery at 125 Lastingham 120, 123, 128 Lateran Council: First (1123) 686, 884; Second (1139) 885; Third (1179) 897, 900, 903; Fourth (1215) 927–8 Launebod, dux 104 Launegild 60, 607, 737, 763 n. 64 Lautree, viscounts of 424 Lavasal, monastery 718

lay abbacy 214, 263–4, 270–1, 287–8, 312–28; criticism of 799, 830–1, 879 lay abbots 187, 266–7, 312–28, 372, 382, 391–3, 831 lay lordship of churches questioned or condemned 855–61, 865, 866, 867, 869, 873, 879–80, 881–2 Le Cousson 665 Le Jan, Re´gine 339 Le Mans: bishopric 204–5, 219–20, 232; bishops of 587; chapter of 697, 709; count of 457; forgeries 200, 204–5, 219, 256, 258, 802 Le Puy, bishopric 424 Le Rozier 539 n. 67, 385 Le Tuffe´ 200 leases of churches: to donor of church 395–6; hereditary 63–4, 754; to laity or nonserving clergy 89–90, 546–9, 551, 753–4; to serving priest 63, 88, 543–50, 753–4 legislation Visigothic 18–22, 32–5, 447, 789; Gaulish 25–6, 519; Carolingian 30, 69–70, 447, 460–1, 464–7, 521–2, 556, 789–94, 799– 802, 813–14; English, pre-Conquest 464–5, 815–16 Leire, monastery 542, 871 Lempteus 797–8 Leo III, pope 241, 243–4 Leo IX, pope 369–70, 431, 826–7, 829, 871, 908 Leo, shipmaster of Bari 881–2 Leodonius, priest 618 Leofgifu’s will 552 n. 99 Leofric, earl, and wife Godgifu 408 n. 7 Leofstan, abbot of Bury 553 Leominster 484 n. 32, 586 nn. 7, 9, 679 Leoń, bishop of 768 Leoń, council of (1288) 927–8 Le´rida, councils of (546) 15, 18 n. 9; (1174) 905; (1229) 928–9 Le´rins 301, 302, 384, 508–9, 612, 725 Les Pins 590, 750 Lesne, E. 78, 118, 121, 324, 262 Letbald of Diogoine 589, 640 n. 16 Letheringsett 644 Leubovera, abbess of Ste-Croix, Poitiers 133 Leudonius, priest 618 Levy, E. 754 Le´vy-Bruhl 183, 184 Lewes 412, 576, 683 Leyriac 587 Leyser, Karl 356 Le´zat, abbacy of 388 n. 107; acquiring churches 456, 619–20, 632, 641, 643, 661, 755, 774, 915, 927 Libellus Virgili 207–8 Licairac 497

Index Lieuran-Cabrie`res 617–18 Lie`ge, bishopric 318, 352, 425 Lillebonne, council (1080) 559, 576, 579, 829 Limanes 445, 672 n. 79, 674 Limburg 334 n. 47, 360 Limeux 115, 136 Limoges: bishops of 470, 471–2; bishopric 309, 692; council (1031) 324–5; viscounts of 428 Lincoln: bishopric 552; churches 646, 648 Lindisfarne 156; confraternity book 132–3 Lintgen 465–6 Liobsind 118 n. 76, 157 n. 44 Lisieux, bishopric 712–13 litigation 776–88; over monasteries 170, 339–40, 364–5 Little Dunmow 469 n. 57 Liubila, abbess of Monheim Liudger, founder of Werden, bishop of Mu¨nster 125–6, 296 n. 35, 342, 346 Liudger, founder of Ridigippi 4226 Liudolf, bishop of Osnabru¨ck 348, 356 Liudolf, count 596 Liudolfings 283–4, 356, 362 Liutard 810 Liutfrid, count (mid-9th c.) 252 n. 7 Liutfrid, count (mid-10th .c) 313–14 Liutgard, abbess of Elten 363, 363–4 Liuthard, bishop of Paderborn 421 Liutold 371 Liutprand, Lombard king 50 n. 17, 60–1 Liutprand, chaplain 745, 747 Liutwin, count-bishop of Trier 217 Lizzano 86, 87 Llanbadarn Fawr 85 n. 62, 511 nn. 71, 76 Llandaff, bishop iof 601 Llandaff, Book of 31 Llandaff, list of priests 601, 675 Llantwitt 124 Lobbes 267, 418 Loberuela, see S. Salvador Lombard family law 60–1, 734–5; deathbed donations 60–1, 737 London churches 646, 647, 649–50, 677 Longney-on-Severn, see Ailsi Longuion 113 Lonogisil 124, 125 Loppa, widow 200 Lorsch 30, 178–9, 189, 226–7, 234, 277 n. 73, 282 n. 24, 286, 287 n. 62, 339–40 Lorvaõ 670, 768 Lothar I, emperor: Italian legislation 88–9, 737, 793; as lord of lesser churches 665; as lord of monasteries 260–1, 313, 328, 341, 416, 746, 778

1001

Lothar II, king of middle kingdom 267, 296 n. 29, 313, 420–1, 745, 831 Louis I, the Pious, emperor: as abbot 266; and Bavarian bishoprics 298; grants of lesser monasteries 260, 261, 340–1, 416; immunity-defence 225, 234–5, 251–6, 256–9; and Italian royal foundations 239; and lay abbacy 313; on lesser churches 439–40, 465, 487, 522, 792–3; as lord of greater churches 203, 219, 225, 226, 234–5, 251, 252–6, 274, 295, 387; and other lord’s monasteries 343, 414, 415; policy 252, 263–4, 270, 792–3; securalization 794; and serfs’ church 446; and a serf-priest’s church 526 Louis the Blind, king of Provence 250, 746, 747 Louis the Child, king of E. Franks 314, 351, 748 Louis the German, king of E. Franks: grants and privileges 347, 349, 421, 745, 746; as lord of higher churches 248, 253, 257–8, 264, 272, 315; and serf-priest 525, 526 Louis the Stammerer, king of W. Franks 248 n. 7, 325 Louis the Younger, king of E. Franks 356, 585 Louis IV, king of France 289, 318, 373, 381, 838 Lo¨ffingen 785 Louzes 134 Lu¨beck, K. 223 Lucania, bishop of 13 Lucca, bishops of 630, 770; bishopric 51, 51–2, 395, 630 734, 770 Lucca, churches, see S. Agata, S. Columbano, S. Dalmazio, S. Frediano, S. Lucia, S. Maria, S. Maria Ursimanni, S. Michele, S. Pietro Somaldi, S. Quirico, S. Silvestro, S. Martino in Colle Lucedio 48 n. 2, 206 n. 65 Luceria, bishopric 769 Luceria, family in 606, 608 Luche´ 500 Lucius III, pope 898 Luco 396 Ludowic (of Mainz) 632 Lul, archbishop of Mainz 201–2, 223, 227–9, 460 Luogosano: S. Felice at 86–7, 236; S. Maria at 86–7 Lupus, abbot of Ferrie`res 261, 273, 275, 416 Lupus, duke of Spoleto 167–8 Lure 831 Lusk 145 Luton 449, 911 Lutzelau, nunnery 116 Luxeuil 120, 127, 215 Lyons, archbishopric 724

1002

Index

Macandradus, priest 38, 531 Maˆcon, bishopric 216, 341, 497, 535, 724, 869 Maˆcon: bishops of 471, 535, 693–4, 741, 743; bishop and chapter 688–9 Maˆcon, council (581/3) 26 n. 67 Magniprand, clerk 56 n. 60, 62, 64, 775 Magnou-Nortier, Elisabeth 304, 308, 387, 389, 391, 450, 536, 618, 620 Magnulf, founder-priest 623 Magnus, founder 64 n. 126, 86–7, 236 Magnus, king of Norway 918 Maguelone, bishop of 472 Maillane 509 n. 54 Maillezais 380 Mainard, priest 669, 881 Mainbod, bishop of Maˆcon 491, 693 Maingod 588, 641 Mainz: archbishopric 201–2, 299, 333, 426, 503; diocese 227 Mainz, councils: (813) 521 n. 13; (847) 257; (852) 629; (888) 522 n. 27 Maiolus, abbot of Cluny 323, 394, 535, 561, 742, 770 Mairois 619 Malicorne 593, 640 malo ordine 778 Malonne 123 manaig 141–3, 144 Manasses, abbot of Flavigny 414 Mangold 370 Manigenius 378, 386 n. 94, 876 Manno, priest 663 Mansfeld, counts of 337 mansus as minimum dos 439, 530–1, 556–7, 736 Marchiennes 263 Marculf, formulary 111, 112, 113, 184, 230, 293 Marlingford 552 Marmoutier 262–3, 323, 525–6, 686, 763, 764, 871; acquiring churches 500, 564, 576, 590, 638, 709, 876, 878 marriage gifts or portions churches as 502, 640–1 married priests 55, 572–3, 674 married bishops 301–2, 310 Marseilles, see St-Victor Martinenga family 394, 757 Martıńez Dıéz, G. 24 Massa di Burra 88 Massano, monastery 236 Massay 352 Matfred, viscount of Narbonne 305 Matilda, mother of Otto I 283–4 Matilda Gouet 568 Matilda, wife of count Ezzo 364

matricularius 476, 477, 490, 514–15, 528 Matthew, count of Beaumont 915 Matthew of Sourdon 570, 773 Matthew, lord in Anjou 473 Matto 189 Mattonoid family 189, 419 n. 10 Mauringo 70 Maximilian, martyr 107 Mayer, Theodore 282–3, 284, 286 Maze´ 493 n. 44, 518, 579 n. 29, 750 Meaux-Paris, council (845–6) 69 n. 25, 262, 340, 488, 514, 515 n. 20, 521 n. 17, 531 n. 11, 799 Medenbach 681 Meersen, treaty of 250 n. 24, 745 Megenher 681 Megingaud, lay abbot of St Maximin of Trier 831 Megingoz, bishop of Wu¨rzburg 133, 189 Megingoz, nephew of bishop Megingoz 189 Meginhart 38 n. 37, 735 Meginperht, deacon 532 Meinwerc, bishop of Paderborn 81 n. 19, 534, 596 Meiol, son of Oazo 36 Meissen, bishopric 299 Mel of Bari 608 Melfi, council (1089) 852, 866 melioratio 59, 60, 640 n. 13, 748 Melle 641 Memleben 284–5, 288, 732 n. 20 memoria 84, 12, 178, 345–6, 362, 364–5, 372, 415, 737 mensa 263–6, 287–8, 291, 318–21, 419–22, 688–9 Merewalh of the Magonsaete 154 n. 20, 157 Me´rida, council (666) 11 n. 12, 20 Merisvit, abbess of Ridigippi 422 Merovingians and great churches 215, 221–2, 229–30, 230–1 Mersch 441, 641 Merseburg, bishopric 299 Mesenich 652–3 Metelen 356 Mettlach 201 n. 17, 217, 219 n. 65, 249, 340, 341, 779; polyptich 471 Me´vouillon family 613, 724 Metz, bishopric 204, 209–10, 226, 267, 425 Metz, council (893) 440, 489, 514 n. 15 Meurig, king in Wales 601 Mezcunda 693 Me´zie`res 540, 564–5, 627 n. 2, 772–3; see also Courcemont Migron 494, 643 Milan, customs of 924

Index Mildburg 157, 160 Milesind, wife of Alberic 493 military service 269, 270–1, 275, 276, 282, 291, 738, 798 n. 67 Milly (dioc. Maˆcon) 70 Milo, bishop of Trier 199, 217 Milo, clerk 910 Milz 30 n. 94, 126, 136, 182, 187 n. 48; see also Emhilt Minden, bshopric 356, 423 Minigo, priest 42 Minster-in-Thanet 199, 242 n. 61 Miro, abbot of Ripoll 878 Miro, bishop, brother of count Oliba 73 n. 49, 623 n. 123 Miro, count 354–5, 623 Miro, iudex 634 Miro Garibert 374 Mison family 612, 614, 783 Moda 119; see also Jouarre Modestus, priest 674 Mohingara, Bavarian kindred 45, 46–7 Moirax 587, 774 Moissac 27, 391–2 Molesme 385 n. 88, 450, 579; acquiring churches 452, 492, 497, 499, 529, 567, 577, 687, 694–5 868 Mo¨llenbeck 356, 423, 426 monasterium, meaning of 49, 82, 82–3, 109, 152, 166, 191, 197,471, 472, 624 monastic: autonomy 115–16, 181–2, 847, 878; pacts (Spanish) 148–51; property, status of 15, 18–19, 97, 109, 115–16, 192 n. 5, 196 n. 43 Monboy, castle 374 Monceauex, castle 386 Mondsee 81 n. 19 Monheim 352–3 monks and clergy, differentiation 141, 191–2, 199 monks and pastoral care 79, 685–6 monks’ personal property 126–7, 148, 149–51 Mont-St-Michel 381–2, 772 Montano, priest 149–59 Monte Amiata 235 n. 3, 238–9 Monte Cassino 135, 182, 404, 506; acquiring churches 393, 394–5, 398, 608, 609, 683, 881, 882, 893 Montbeugny 444, 802, 803 Monteils 569 Monteverdi 167, 171 n. 44, 172, 173 n. 61 Montfollet 453 n. 61, 499 Montier-en-Der 106 n. 112, 143, 827, 837 n. 64; acquiring churches 759, 872; as church-owner 698, 704, 707, 708,742

1003

Montier-la-Celle 849 n. 82 Montieramcy 849 n. 82 Montione, see S. Salvatore Montivilliers 715 Montjean 493 Monmartre 575 Montmirail, castle 570 Montmorillon, lords of 540 Montolieu 234, 387, 388, 390 Montreuil 714 Moosberg 420 Morris, Colin 644 Morrone 608, 893 n. 80 Mo¨rschbach 470 mortgaging churches 771–4; see also tithes pledged motives for foundation 100–8, 114, 118–21, 136, 148, 151, 154–7, 160, 162–5, 171–2, 180–1, 396–8, 402; for giving away 178–9, 205, 396–8, 415, 417, 424, 683–4, 687; for reform 832–3, 834, 840 Mottisfont 481 Moustiers family 612, 665, 724, 725 Moutier-Grandval 111 n. 18, 252 n. 7, 285–6, 313–14, 586 Mouzay, see Stenay Moyenmoutier 287–8, 315 n. 29, 431 n. 92 Mu¨hthal-Epolding 46 Mummola, abbess of Bruye`res-leChatel 185 mundeburdium 165, 209–10, 422, 423, 426, 427; see also defence Mu¨nster, bishopric 337, 427 n. 63; bishops of 342,718 Muno, priest 672 Muno Rodriguez, count 671 Munt 101 Murbach 114, 116–17, 120, 179, 194, 216, 231, 682 n. 6, 732 Muri 334, 844–6 Namur, count of 502–3 Nandolf, priest 62 Nantes, bishop of 663–4; bishopric 829 Nantold, bishop of Apt 725 Naples, churches in 91, 646 Narbonne, archbishopric 305, 307–8; canonica of St Paul 390–1 Narbonne, council (1054) 513, 828, 829 Natalis, priest of Alluyes 537, 565 Navarre, donations of churches in 642, 643, 877 Naveil 590, 592 n. 43, 709, 763 n. 67 Nazarius, St, see Be´ziers Nazirimida 172 Neauphlette 605 Neckarau 446

1004

Index

Nefingus, bishop of Angers 694 Nellenburg, counts of 843–4 Nelson, Janet 641 Neuching, council (771) 81 n. 14 Neuernheese 421–2 Neuilly-en-Dun 563, 566 n. 50 Neuville (Champagne or Lorraine) 698 Neuville (Maine) 500 Nevers, counts of 335 n. 61, 747 Newhouse 628 Nicetius 27, 30 Nicholas I 220, 347, 431, letter to 837 Nicholas II 467, 851 Nicholas, priest, son of Algar 751 Nicholes, priest in Apulia 667, 668 Niederaltaich 33–4, 161 Niedermu¨nster 117 Nıˆmes, bishopric 302, 303, 661; bishops of 481, 781 ninths and tenths 75–6; see also nona et decima Nithard of Mu¨nster, bishop 596, 718, 815 Nithard, monk of Dijon 841 Nivard, bishop of Rheims 133, 201, 204 Nivelles 128, 132, 135–6 Niwenhof 178–9, 189 nolle quod voluit 394, 757 n. 24 nona et decima 75–6, 199, 216 Nonantula 86, 172, 238–9 Nonvolia, mother of Juvenal 399 Norbert, St 502 Nordulf 29, 68 Norman, son of Bernard 772–3 Northumbrian Priests’ Law 816 Norway, resistance to change 918 Norwich, churches in 646, 648 Nothelm, king of South Saxons 153 Nothgyth 153, 159 Notitia of Aachen (819) 270, 738 Notitia Arnonis 34 n. 3 Noto, archbishop of Arles 770 Notre-Dame, Le Mans 204 Notre-Dame, Blois 195 Notre-Dame-des-Moustiers 379–80 Nottarp, H. 298–9 Novalesa 114, 116, 184n .21, 254 n. 23, 260 novalia, novel tithes 471 n. 75 Noyers 454, 489, 493, 496, 498, 563, 568, 569, 581 Nuille´-sur-Vicoin 571–2 Nuneaton 914 Oato, priest 35, 39 n. 46, 469, 660 Oazo 36 Oberalm 34 n. 8, 80 n. 8, 532 Ocretano 61 n. 100 Odalric, abbot of Lorsch 855

Odelerius, father of Orderic Vitalis 412, 600 Odelric Maginfred, marquis 401 Oderisius Borrell 398 Odila 498 Odilo, abbot of Cluny 324, 376, 876 Odilo, duke of Bavaria 33, 532 Odile Mieroz 589 Odo, abbot of Cluny 352, 839 Odo, abbot of Glanfeuil 343 Odo, abbot of Simorre 781 Odo, bishop of Bayeux 627–8 Odo, bishop of Chartres 536 Odo, king of France 315 Odo I, count of Blois 323, 748 Odo Aniano 619 Odo Bernard 782 Odo of Orbais 687 Odo Stigand 372 n. 4, 467, 500 n. 95, 513 n.10 Odo, son of Wazo 588 Odobellus 377 Odolpert 543 n. 25 Odolric, silversmith 569 Odulf, count 261 Oediger, F. W. 364 ´ engus 145 O Oeren 284, 285, 287 n. 63 Offa, king 182, 205–6, 242–3 offerings: allocation to churches 459–64, 478–86, 517; for baptism 478; for burial 478, 483; for feasts of the Church 479; lords’ enjoyment of 486–501, 512–18; for Lent 479; for marriage 478; for penance 478; peasants’ choices 482–5, 486; as pertinences 485–6, 491; for priest personally 485–6 517, 518; seigneurial control of 484–6; voluntary 483, 485, 486; see also tithes and offerings Offinc 653 Ogier, archbishop of Mainz 258 Ohrdruf 201–2 Olgiate 611 Oliba, count 451 Olmedo 575 Olomund, abbot of Montolieu 234 Onã 673,683 Onolf 36, 43 open-air holy places 93 Oradour 498 n. 80, 500 n. 91, 880; see also Chaudesaigues Orange, council of (441) 15–16, 76–7, 523, 690, 807–8 Orange family 301, 384 oratories: bishops’ concessions to 68–9; clergy of 26; for households 11–12, 66, 98–9, 105; isolated 90; restrictions on 66

Index Orderic Vitalis 663, 714–15, 849 Ordgar 408 ordinare, ordinatio, meanings of 40 n. 62, 49–50, 520 n. 11, 524, 544, 610–11, 721 n. 63 ordination ‘absolutely’ 520–1; outside the diocese 520–1, 581; to a ‘title’ 520–1 ‘Ordmer’s church’ 599 Ordulf, son of Ordgar 408, 410, 412 Ordwy, Canterbury cathedral monk 512 Orgar, deacon 650 Orlamunde 442 n. 29, 470 Orleans, councils: I (511) 10 n. 9, 11 n. 14, 15, 722 n. 54, 805; III (538) 11 n. 14, 25 n. 62; IV (541) 10 n. 9, 26, 67, 96 n. 30, 521 n. 14; V (549) 25 nn. 62,63 Orm, son of Gamal 767 Ornina, see S. Lorenzo Ortlaip, monk 37 Orval 927 Osbert, priest, son of Griffin 677 Osbert, sucessive deans of Eye 679 Oshere, king of the Hwicce 158 Osmund, bishop of Salisbury 482 Osnabru¨ck, bishopric 597 Ostrogoths 95 Oswald, bishop of Worcester 409 Osuin, king 123 Oswy, king 123 Otbellum 159–60 Otbert 745–6 Otgar 288 Othelm 189 Othlo, monk and author 366 Otilo, cousin of Reginpreht 162 Otmar, abbot of St Gall 202 Otteric, priest 77, 652 Otting 38, 165–6, 207–8 Otto, bishop of Bamberg 426 n. 61, 430, 431 Otto, count of Bolenois 382 Otto, margrave 470 Otto I, emperor: grant of lesser church 747; and investiture 856; and monasteries 281, 288, 358–9, 360, 361, 362, 425; as monastic founder 283–4; and new bishoprics 288, 299 Otto II, emperor 284, 285, 287–8, 348–9, 357–9, 362–3 Otto III, emperor 286, 357–9, 359, 363–4, 419 Otto, duke of Saxony 315 Ottonian royal lordship of higher churches, character of 276, 280, 282–3, 287, 288 Oundle 128 Outwell, see Otbellum Oviedo, bishopric 770 Oviedo, see S. Vicente

1005

Pach 779, 780 pacta et placita 541–3 pacts, monastic 148–51, 624 Paderborn, bishopric 285, 421–2, 534, 595–6 Padworth 913–14 pagan: burials 94, 104–5; offerings 460; temples 92–4 Pagan Mansell, knight 474 Pagno 260–1 Palencia, council (1129) 884 Palliol family 508 Pamplona, bishop of 718 Pando, brother of bishop Teuto 777 papal lordship of monasteries 345, 432–3 papal protection of monasteries 196, 198, 202, 227, 345, 351, 432 papal protection and royal defence 254, 283, 432 papal provisions and taxation 931 parata 712 Paray-le-Monial 589, 840 n. 9 Paris, bishop of 915–16 Paris, councils: (614) 26 n. 67; (829) 794; (846–7) 256, 629 parish and estate: how related 68–9, 73, 79, 90–1, 473–5; gaps in the system 473, 485; lords’ interest in defining 497–8 parishes: creation of 67–8, 70, 72–3; urban 74, 84, 647 parochia, 6th c. meaning of, 66–7 parson, parsonage, see persona, personatus parson’s freehold 931, 932 partible inheritance 595, 601–2, 603–4; application to churches 341–2, 366–7, 603–4, 628–9, 636, 640; see also indivisio partition of revenues, canonical 476–8 paruchia 143, 144 Pascal, priest 551, 635 Paschal I, pope 243 Paschal II, pope 852, 860, 861, 866, 869, 883 Paschasius Radbert 249 Pasquarius, bishop of Nantes 208–9 Passarus 635 Passau, bishopric 38 n. 37, 165, 430 n. 82, 735 pastoral revenues: growing value 486–7; lords’ profits and uses 487, 497–9, 501–12; see also tithes; first fruits; offerings Patrick of Sourches 758–9 patronage: canon law of, see ius patronatus; development in different countries 916–18, 930–3; jurisdiction over 901, 916, 917,929, 931; transactions in 929–31; see also advowson

1006 patronatus, early uses 892 patronus, early uses 368–9, 892–3; for abbot 183 n. 20 Paucapalea, commentator 896 Paul Aurelian 134 Paul son of Pando 777 Paulinus of Nola 100 Pavia, councils: (845–50) 467, 652 n. 6; (850) 465 Peasemore 482 Peace of God movement 452, 612, 614 Pelagia, mother of Aredius 26, 96 Pelaio Eriz 633 Pellemoutiers 134 Penãmiań 624, 653 Perahtold 729 Perchtolt, count 604 Peredeus, bishop of Lucca 52 n. 30, 57 n. 66, 61, 732 n 23 peregrini (strangers) 133, 144, 231–2 Perhtcoz, abbot of Schliersee 163 Perignac 594 Pero, priest 534 personality (civil, legal) 50–1, 55, 109, 181–2, 233, 259, 729–32, 733 Persiceto, duke of 172 Peter, abbot in Apulia 393 Peter, abbot of St Paul’s, Narbonne 390–1 Peter, abbot of St-Victor 614 Peter III, archbishop of Aix 868 Peter, bishop of Arezzo 777–8 Peter, bishop of Gerona 303, 305, 308, 387 Peter, bishop of Sisteron, then Vaison 301 Peter, bishop of Spoleto 328 Peter Raymond, count of Carcassonne 388 Peter I, king of Aragon 509 Peter II, king of Aragon 905, 929 n. 34 Peter, provost of Nıˆmes 768 Peter Damian 827, 857, 858 Peter, son of Abbo of Rochefort 327 Peter Arnald 567–8 Peter of Blois 924 n. 8 Peter Gaucelm, priest 565 Peter Giraudi, chaplain 538 Peter, partner of Gregory 607 Peter of Martignac 632 Peter, the Orphan 88 Peterborough Abbey 645, 649, 676 Petershausen 847 Peudeugne, tithe of 573 Pe´ronne 104, 134 Pfa¨vers 258 n. 53, 280 n. 4, 286 n. 47, 314, 780, 839 nn. 3, 5 Phalempin 379 Philip, bishop of Troyes 694, 708, 868, 872

Index Philip I, king of France 290, 852 Philip II Augustus, King of France 929 Philip, citizen of Bari 902 Philip of Eye 679, 680 piae causae 14 n. 19, 122 Pibo, bishop of Toul 539, 702 Pierrefeu 617, 726 Pilgrim, archbishop of Cologne 523–4 ‘pilgrims’, see peregrini Pinedos, count 770 Pippin II, mayor 115, 116, 215, 250, 297 Pippin III, mayor, king 75–6, 186, 202, 212–13, 213–14, 215–17, 219, 223, 223–4, 227, 231, 232, 460, 462, 790 Pippin, son of Charlemagne 665 Pippinid mayors, monastic founders 111, 114, 194, 211 Pirmin, monk-bishop 116–7, 133, 179, 188, 341 Pisa, bishop of 63–4 Pistoia, see S. Bartolomeo; S. Pietro Pıˆtres, capitulary (869) 812 Placidia 15, 96 Placidus of Nonantula 860 placitum, meaning of 776 Planty 694–5 plebs, plebes: as bishopric’s property 87–8, 558; as lay property 88–9, 89–90; in lay control 468; as monastic property 86–7, 88; election of priest 652; see also baptismal churches Plectrude 222 Pleurs, lords of 705 n. 61, 708 Poitiers, churches and parishes in 74, 646 n. 3; see also Ste-Croix Poitiers, council (1078) 866 Polirone 404 n. 65, 406 Pommeraye, La 493, 578 Poncia, widow 573 Pons, abbot of St-Ve´ran 384 Pons, archbishop of Arles 869, 870 Pons, bishop of Marseilles 724 Pons, count of Toulouse 303, 306, 308, 391 Pons of Bras 508 Pons, son of Deusdet 498 Pons Fulco 616–17 Pons Rostaing 641 Pons of Turlande 636 Pons Umberti 771 Pontefract, monks of 554, 582 Ponte`ves family 615 Pontlevoy 373 n. 13, 704 n. 94, 713 n. 17 poor, defrauded 25; provision for 477, 514–15 Poppiena 396, 893 n. 80

Index Poppo, abbot of Stavelot- Malme´dy 277 Possedonius, bishop of Urgel 234 possession of churches by laity: condemnation ambiguous or vague 828–9, 853, 872–3, 879–80, 883; condemnation clarified 885 postal system 110 n. 15, 269; post-horses 557 potestas: ambiguity of 3, 721, 722; degrees of 54, 172, 173; meanings of 233, in Languedoc 619 potestas ordinandi 172–4, 175 Pothie`res 345, 837–8; see also Ve´zelay Pottho, imperial catepan 524 Poto, son of Poterisus of Luceria 769–70 Prades-Se´gur 483 n. 28, 498 Prataglia 609–10 prayer as service due or return expected: from lesser churches 55; from monasteries 113, 251, 269–70, 271, 759 precarial exchange 580, 660, 693, 742–4 precarial grants 502, 533–6, 741–2 presbiterissa 505 presbiteratus, presbiterium, terminology 560, 561; see also priest’s part; fevum presbiteri priests: appointment of 24–5, 49–50, 57–8, 63, 245, 379, 521–5, 647–8, 792–3, standardized routine 910, terminology 523–5, 544; bishop’s role in appointing 521–3, 790, 814, 825, 829, 890–1, 900, 906–9, 910, 928–9; election of 853; fidelity required 539, 542; hereditary hold on church 73, 541, 546–7, 552, 672–3, 674–5; movable property of 528–9, 542, see also spolia; one, resident, for every church 519–20; ’ordaining’ successors 56–8, 73, 444–5, 495, 666, 667–8 as owners of churches 537, 659–80; under personal lordship 539, 556, 736, 813–14; rents or services to lords 448, 487, 488, 509, 555–60; as serfs or exserfs 525–7, 792, 814; standard of living 529; status in the community 525–30, 792; as tenants of whole churches, see priest’s tenure; as tenants of part only, see priest’s living; visiting from motherchurch or monastery 519–20, 600; with wage or allowance 574–5, 578 priest’s living or reseved part 439, 492–4, 504–5, 512–13, 518, 537, 539–40, 561–6, 575–81, 596, 689; given to a monastery 577–8; in lay hands 498, 566–9; hereditary interests in 572–4, 580–3 priest’s tenure of church with all property and revenues 530–55; close to propertyright 541–2, 544, 554–5, 665–7, 669, 671–2, 673- 679–80

1007

priesthood: ordination to, by bishop 520; qualifications for 520 primogeniture 595, 598, 640 n. 13 Primuliacus 68 princely status of great churches 271, 282 Prinz, Friedrich 107 priories, Cluniac 418; based on parish churches 501 privileges, bishops’ for monasteries 193–5; founders’ initiative 195 procuratio (supplies) 279 profiliatio (adoption as sons) 626 property of individual churches 9–11, 19–20, 25–6; attributed to God and patron saints, altar or locus, clergy, monks, nuns, rectores, abbesses 730–1, 733; compatible with churches being property 426–8, 732–3, 737–9; conditional or revocable 737–8, 755–6; perpetuated or inalienable 737–8, 757–8; sacredness of 794, 797–9, 801, 811–12, 857–60, 863 Protasius, of Exalada, late Cuxa 353–4, 662 Provaglio 394, 397 n. 30 Prudentius, bishop of Troyes 803, 811, 813, 870, 888 Pru¨m 114, 216–17, 223–4, 261, 489; acquiring churches 260, 503, 745–6 Psalm 82; cited 137 n. 78, 663 n. 25, 796 n. 63, 797, 836, 860–1, 880, 885 Psalmodi 388, 390 n. 122 Pseudo-Isidore 799, 802, 880, 886, 887 Puble´mont 750 Puch 31 Puciano 606 Quaestiones Stuttgardiensis 892 Quedlinburg 281, 283–4, 358, 363; council (1085) 828 Quentovic, port 261, 415 Quierzy, council (858) 248; letter from 248–9, 272–3 quinta 22, 603 n. 4 Quiriac, bishop of Nantes 867, 870 n. 34 Raban Maur, archbishop of Mainz 257–8, 271, 793 Rachifrid, son of Fridulus 62, 64 n. 119 Rachiperga, daughter of Guntelm 49 Rachiprand, clerk 62; priest 559 n. 2 Radald, clerk 560 Radbod, bishop of Tournai 430 Radegund, queen and abbess 133, 193 Ragambald 766, 780–1 Ragamfred, mayor 212 Ragamfred (9th c., Limousin) 661

1008

Index

Raginfrid, bishop of Rouen 212, 213 Raimbald, archbishop of Narbonne 481 Raimbald, bishop of Sisteron 301 Rainald, abbot of St-Calais 250–1 Ranaild, archbishop of Rheims 708, 871 Rainald, bishop of Paris 823 Rainald, priest (Rouergue) 562, 564 Rainald (Angevin) 694 Rainald, lord or Craon 749 Rainald, nephew of Gerald of Aurillac 435 Rainald (Saintongeais) 639–40 Rainard, count of Toul 369 Rainoard, priest 665 Ralph, archbishop of Bourges 324, 344–5, 351, 557, 692, 766, 770, 780–1, 836 Ralph, bishop of Chichester 511 Ralph, count of Turenne 344 Ralph, king of France 300, 838–9 Ralph, viscount (Anjou) 500 Ralph, miles of bishop of Bayeux 694 Ralph of Beaugency 453 n. 61, 499 Ralph la Flamme 496 Ralph Glaber 455, 848 Ralph, priest (dioc. of Rennes) 875 Ralph, priest (Poitevin) 565 Ralph Taisson 715 Ralph Toared 635 Ralph of Pontoise 867 Ralph of Stifford 913 Rammesau 729–30 Rampo, son of Lupo 766 Ramsey 408–9, 912 Ranulf of Brion 635 Rappoltskirchen 34 Ratbod 531 Ratchis, abbot of S. Michele Pugnano 169 Rather, bishop of Verona 817–18 Ratisbon, see Regensburg Ratpert (of Pistoia) 52, 55, 55–6, 58, 60 n. 90, 167, 169 Ratpert, chronicler of St Gall 203, 253 Rattruda, ancilla Dei 54 Ravello 606 Ravengiersburg 33, 426, 427, 429–30, 470 Ravenna, archbishop of 885; episcopal authority in 95 Ravennate, leases in 753 Ravensburg, castle 365 Raymond-Berengar III, count of Barcelona 303, 306–7, 905 Raymond, count of Carcasonne and Foix 303 Raymond, count of Marsica 398 Raymond, count of Rodez 785 Raymond Trencavel, viscount 303, 306, 308, 387, 388, 390

Raymond I, count of Toulouse 344 Raymond II Pons, count of Toulouse 374, 836, 837 Raymond IV, count of Toulouse 388, 389, 390 n. 12 Raymond of Saint-Mont 639 Raymond Matfred 774 Razo of Diessen, count 662 Reading 679 Rebais 111 n. 21, 112 n. 30, 117, 195, 221, 419 Recelbert, chaplain 582 ‘receptive churches’ 654 Reculver 199 rector 78, 122; rectrix 317 redemptio 701, 702, 706–7, 714 redemptio altaris 699–700 Redon 494, 537, 643, 663, 875–6 Redoret, priest 663 Regenbald, rector of S. Martino, Florence 610 Regenbald (son of Regenbald, rector of S. Martino), bishop of Fiesole 610, 611, 667, 668 Regensburg, bishopric 298, 449; nunneries at 276–7 Reggio, bishop of 720, 754; canons of 885 Reginar, count and abbot 265 n. 57, 321 n. 72 Reginbod 503, 596 Reginheri 469 Regino of Pru¨m 817, 824 Reginold 596 Reginpreht, abbot 161–2, 163, 164 Reginpreht of Reginsprehtshusen 35 Regnolf 51 Regula Benedicti, see Benedict, Rule of Regula Communis, see Common Rule Regula Consensoria 150–1 Regularis Concordia 327, 410, 833 Regula Magistri 121 n. 19, 122, 128 n. 3, 130 n. 19, 185–6 Reichenau 117, 202, 227, 229, 231, 258, 272 n. 27, 287, 348, 747 Reichskirche 228, 287 Reichskirchengut, Reichsgut 258–9, 279 Reichsunmittelbarkeit 282 Reinfrid (Maine) 597 Reinmod 471, 596 Reinold, abbot of St-Calais 255 relatio episcoporum (829) 792–3, 809 n. 40 relevamentum, relevatio, see redemptio relics: counted among churches’ possessions 444, 456, 457; cult of 103–5, 106; dealings with 425; ownable outside any church 104, 457; themselves propertyowning 126

Index relief, bishop’s, see redemptio Remaclus, abbot-bishop 118, 194 n. 26, 204 n. 52 remedium animae: as continuing condition of gift 737; as countergift 758–9 Remigius, St 826 Remiremont 125, 127, 131, 213 n. 22, 277 Renald, lord of Chaˆtillon-en-Bazois 641 Renard, viscount 874 renders in kind to ruler 271–2, 273–9 282; see also servitium regis Rennes: bishops of 310 n. 141; diocese of 663 n. 20 Renton 554 renunciation of lordship 835–6, 840–1 Repton 329 Rettenbach 40 Reynard, priest 493, 576 Reynolds, Susan 588, 749 n. 77 Rheims, archbishopric 204, 267, 300, 803, 827 Rheims, councils: (1049) 512, 698, 699, 826–7, 829; (1119) 884 n. 2; (1131) 885 Rheinau 346, 350 Ricaus of Forcalqueiret 508–9, 614, 615 Ricdag 360–1 Ricemir 24 Richard, abbot of Hornbach 342 Richard, archbishop of Bourges 867 n. 13, 871, 879 Richard II, duke of Normandy 663, 771 Richard, son of Erfast 648 Richard, son of Osbert, priest 677 Richard, clerk of Waltham 914–15 Richardis, wife of Charles the Fat 267, 351, 468 Richer, abbot of St-Julien, Tours 876 Richer, archbishop of Sens 577 Richilda, prospective abbess of Fontebona 400–1 Richimund, clerk 58 Richoara 495 n. 58, 640 n. 16, 760 Riculf, bishop of Elne 491 Ridigippi 330 n. 16, 422 Rieti, bishopric 921 n. 112 Rigald 785 Rignald of Arjac 639 Rigomer, saint 457 Ripert, bishop of Gap 613, 724 Ripoli, see S. Bartolomeo Ripon 128, 198 Riufarre´ valley 622 Rivallo, priest 663 Rivie`re 709–10 Riwin 631 Rixolf, priest 51

1009

Roald 564, 576, 871 Robert, abbot of Molesme 579, 874 Robert, archbishop of Trier 744 Robert Foliot, bishop of Hereford 911 Robert, bishop of Langres 569, 577 Robert, bishop of Le Mans 220, 255 Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln 925 n. 18 Robert, bishop of Metz 744 Robert, count of Tours 315 Robert I, count of Flanders 502 Robert II, count of Flanders, 906, 502 Robert I, duke of Normandy 381–2, 715 Robert II, duke of Normandy 852 Robert I, count and lay abbot, later king of France 262, 265, 321, 323 Robert II, king of France 818, 819 Robert, viscount of Autun 319 Robert, royal chaplain 745 Robert, chaplain of Darrington 554 Robert of Busançais 694, 750 Robert, son of Fulcrad 913 Robert of Grandmesnil 849 Robert of Grandvilliers 756 Robert of Hommet 373 n. 13, 713 Robert, son of Osbert 677 Robert de Port, clerk 913–14 Robert, son of Ralph, son of Herluin 751 Robert of Saint-Urcize 581 Robert of Sourdon 565, 570 Rocas de Vouga 671 n. 38 Rocbaron 508–9 Rochester, bishopric 598 Rochester, monks of 913 Rodegar, priest 536 Roderigo Danieliz 633 Rodez, count of 387 Rodobbio, 394, 396, 397 Roffulo, son of Fridulus 62 Roger, archbishop of York 897–8, 899 Roger, bishop of Lisieux 712, 714–15 Roger, bishop of Worcester 910 Roger, castellan of Lille 379 Roger, count, founder of Charroux 225, 229 Roger, count of Comminges 781–2 Roger I, count of Foix 387 Roger II, count of Foix 303, 305 Roger III, count of Foix 303, 377 Roger, duke of Sicily 881 Roger, earl of Shrewsbury 412, 475, 600, 683 Roger Bigod 598, 675 Roger, founder of Lintgen 465 Roger, dean of Eye 679 Roger of Muret 563–4 Roger of Stifford 912

1010

Index

Roger, dean of Whalley 679 Roia, woods of 471–2 Romagnoles 640 Romainmoutier 313, 324, 418 n. 36, 834 n. 35 Roman founders 12–16 Romanus, abbot of Murbach 117 Romaricus, abbot of Remiremont 127, 131 Rome, church of: monasteries commended or donated to 428, 431–3, 837–9, 844, 846, 847 Rome, councils: (826) 521–2, 793, 890–1; (1050) 827; (1059) 827, 851–2, 853; (1078) 828, 866 Romuald, duke 87 Ronceray 867 Roquebrune 615 n. 68 Roric (dioc. Trier) 744 Roric (Westphalia) 643 n. 34 Rorich, miles 598 Rosano 406 n. 78, 920 Roscelin (tenant of Sens) 378 Rosenwein, Barbara 592, 741 Rosnay l’Hoˆpital 704 Rossano 384 n. 84 Rosselm 90 Rostagnus (late 9th c.) 781 Rostagnus (early 11th c.) 374 Rostagnus, brother of Odo Bernard 782–3 Rothad, bishop of Soissons 803 Rothgard, abbess of Hilwartshausen 362 Rouen: archbishops of 290,715, 717 n. 42; province of 300–1 Rouen, councils: (1096) 829; (1128) 885 n. 9 Rouergue, count of 307 Roussillon, comital family 302 Routpert 469 royal defence 117, 219, 230–5, 253–4, 343, 357, 358, 360, 369 Ruald, knight 500; see also Roald Rudolph I, king of Burgundy 313, 320, 324, 415, 661 Rudolph II, king of Burgundy 285 Rudolph III, king of Burgundy 286, 324 Rudolph, son of Count Unroch 720 Rufinus, canonist 892–6 Rule of St Benedict: aims of 181; on election 181, 186 nn. 39, 40; Italian regard for 169, 171; on property 122; on relations with bishops 192 Rule of St Columbanus 122, 128 n. 3 Rupert, bishop of Salzburg 107, 532 Rusandus, priest 666 Ruthard, archbishop of Mainz 428, 597

Saalfeld 426 Sabina, bishops of 631, 771 n. 16 (OK??) Saethryd, abbess of Faremoutiers 133 Sahaguń, 509, 625, 673, 718 n. 51, 719, 917 St Alban, Mainz 681 St Alban, Herts 717 St Andrew, Exalada, see Exalada St Andrew, Valtarga 622 St Andrew’s, bishops of 720 n . 61 St Andrew’s, York 648 St Augustine’s, Canterbury 182 n. 12, 239 St Benet, Holme 554, 677 St Blasien 844, 845 St Botolph without Aldgate 650 St Botolph, Colchester 685 n. 31 St Brigid, Kildare 146 St Cecilia, Goslar 596–7 St Clement Danes 650 St David’s, bishops of 719 n. 59 St Emmeram, Regensburg 533; see also Regensburg St Gall: acquiring churches 34, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43–3, 314, 491, 531, 604, 660, 732, 743, 747; acquiring monasteries 116, 416; characters of 34 n. 11; as church-owner 468, 534, 691 n. 15; donors’ reservations 740; endowment of 112 n. 27, 415 n. 18; formulary 249 n. 20, 831 n. 7; as founder of churches 575, 681; and litigation 780, 785; status 202–4, 208, 229, 253, 254, 256 n. 39, 258; timing of donations 682 St George’s, given to Passau 44 St George’s, Winchester 649 n. 14 St Germanus, Cuxa 353–5 St Gothard 656 n. 36 St Gregory’s, Kirkdale 767 St Helen’s ,Worcester 554–5 St James, Mainz 632 St Lambert, Mainz 30 n. 94 St Magnus (Ceprano) 881 St Magnus (Constance) 691 n. 15 St Martin, Biberbach, see Biberbach St Martin at Avicozeshusir, 45–6, 784–5 St Martin Orgar 650 St Martin, Winchester 649 n. 14 St Mary Castlegate, York 648 St Mary’s, Huntingdon 676–7, 767, 771 St Maurice, Magdeburg 272 n. 22, 273 n. 35, 279 n. 89, 283 St Maximilian, Pongau 165 n. 32, 532 St Maximin, Trier: acquiring churches 441, 465–5, 641; as church-owner 465–6, 502, 641; and lay abbots 313, 315 n. 30,

Index 319 n. 56, 321 n. 72, 831; and reform 288; status 254 n. 23, 285, 288, 319 n, 56 St Michael (in Westphalia) 681 St Michael, Hildesheim 631, 751–2 St Michael Cornhill 650 n. 20 St Moninna’s 146–7 St Neot’s 912 St Olave’s, Exeter 739 n. 64 St Patrick, see Armagh St Paul’s, London 649–50, 751 St Peter’s, Gloucester 160, 601 n. 101 St Peter in macellis, Winchester 649 n .14 St Pilt 188 n. 55 St Servatius, Maastricht 284 St Stephen, Banõla 289 St Trudpert 114 n. 50 St Verena, Strassberg 449 St Victorsberg 534 St Vincent, see Maˆcon St Zeno, Isen 165 n. 34 St-Aignan, Orleans 188 n. 59, 222 St-Amand 230 n. 6, 264 n. 41 St- Amour 743 St- Anatole (St-Anatholy) 567–8, 771 St-Andouque, Cocon 472 St-Andre´, Agde 877 n. 71 St-Andre´-le-Bas, Vienne 319 n. 65, 419 n. 5, 497, 580, 771 St-Antonin, Fre´delas 381 n. 64 St-Aubin, Angers: acquiring churches 496, 500, 572 n. 92, 580, 593, 572 n . 92, 638–9, 641, 748, 760, 879; altars confirmed 709 n. 93; as churchowner 480–1, 579, 716, 763; and litigation 788 n. 73; status of 289, 322–2, 377 n. 36, 379, 590, 849 n .82 St-Beńigne, Dijon 692 n. 18, 701, 713 n. 18, 835, 840, 841; acquiring churches 641, 691; acquiring monastery 382, 417, 418 St-Bertin: acquiring altars, churches, monasteries 115, 435–6, 455–6, 706 nn. 71, 74, 707–8; status131 n. 5, 254 n. 23, 316, 319 n. 55, 321–2, 847 n. 70 St-Be´rain-sur-Sanvignes 589 n. 29 St-Blin 701 St-Bonnet 470–1 St-Brevin 638–9 St-Broin-les-Moines 567 St-Calais 200, 218–21, 232–3, 249, 250–1, 255, 256, 258, 259, 850 n. 92 St-Chaffre 261 n. 16 St-Chinian 234 n. 44, 257–8, 262 n. 23, 381 n. 64 St-Christophe, Volvestre 619–20, 915 n. 74 St-Cle´ment, Craon 585 n. 4 St-Cybard 335, 428

1011

St-Cyprien, Poitiers 380, 484, 537–8, 538–9, 565, 643, 880 St-Cyr-le`s-Rennes 378, 386 n. 94, 876 St-Denis: acquiring churches and monasteries 27, 188, 224, 694; churchowner 811; render of wine 274; status 182, 184 n. 26, 193 n. 20, 215, 222, 228, 262, 266, 321; tithes and 487 St-Denis, council (993) 819 St-Die´ 217 n. 49, 219 n. 65, 224 St-Eloi 419 n. 8 St-Etienne, Caen 713 n. 18 St-Etienne, Nevers 382 n. 68 St-Evre, Toul 369, 424, 424–5 St-Evroul: acquiring churches and tithes 480, 587 n. 17, 588, 663, 683, 760 n. 45; as church-owner 715; foundation 373, 386 n. 91; status 378, 386 n. 91, 480, 849 St-Flavien (Haute Marne) 352 St-Florent, Saumur 379 n. 49, 480–1, 572, 761 n. 53, 762 n. 61, 906 n. 14 St-Flour 375–6, 491–2, 498 n. 80, 576, 581, 636, 750, 761 St-Fromond 373 n. 13, 713 St-Genie`s-de-la-Mer 389 n. 108 St-Genie`s-des-Mourgues 374, 379–80, 383 St-Georges, Broussade 636,750 St-Germain, Auxerre 216, 265 n. 54, 217 n. 16, 324, 333 n. 41 St-Germain-des-Pre´s: acquiring monasteries 115, 264 n. 48; as churchowner 442–3, 448, 455, 531, 556, 605, 681; status 222 St-Germain-Lembrun 68 St-Germer-de-Fly 125, 250, 251 n. 35 St-Gilles 382 n. 69, 388, 389, 432–3, 837 n. 63, 847 nn. 71, 72 St-Goar 216–17, 219 n. 65, 220, 249, 417 n. 28 St-Gondon 761 n. 53, 762 n. 61, 867 St-Hilaire, Poitiers 319, 419 n. 3 St-Hubert 489 n. 18 St-Imetier 341 St-Jean d’Ange´ly, see Ange´ly St-Jean-Baptiste, Cocon 472 St-Jean, Brignolles 615 n. 68, 616 n. 72 St-Jean, Chaveyriat, see Chaveyriat St-Jean, Esparron 877 St-Jean de Losne, Council (673–5) 26 with n. 72 St-Josse 190 n. 69, 261, 275, 415–16 St-Julien, Auxerre 216 St-Julien de Brioude 68, 316 n. 42, 319, 661–2, 682 St-Julien, Lagnes valley 612 nn. 50, 51, 724 St-Julien, Tours 378, 381 n. 64, 587, 713 n. 19, 714, 715, 759 n. 35, 876

1012

Index

St-Just (Provence) 724 St-Just (Anjou) 326 St-Laurens-le`s-Maˆcon 382 n. 70 St-Leger, Autun 28 St-Leger, Poitou 686 St-Le´zin, Angers 323, 326, 382 n. 70, 762 St-Lizier 878 St-Lomer 261, 453 n. 61 St-Loubert 587 St-Loup, Chablis 262, 264 n. 48 St-Loup (Touraine) 381 n. 64, 759 n. 35 St-Lubin, Brou 319 n. 70, 495, 569, 580–1 St-Macaire 481 n. 13 St-Maixent: acquiring churches 451, 538, 565, 569, 572, 580, 588, 594; status 255 n. 28, 313 n. 7, 319, 320, 686 St-Marcel-le`s-Chalon 25 n. 63, 221 n. 1, 319, 386 n. 93, 840 n. 9 St-Marcel, Sauzet 374–5 St-Martial, Limoges 319 n. 70, 376 n. 34, 379 n. 52, 382 n. 69, 428, 877 n. 77 St-Martin, Auxerre 321 n. 72 St-Martin-du-Bosc 530 n. 2 St-Martin, Caux 762 n. 55, 785 n. 51 St- Martin, Ecajeul 372 n. 4, 500 n. 95, 513 n. 10 St-Martin, Lez 389, 392 n. 139, 877 n. 77 St-Martin, Lie`ge 750 St-Martin, Longchamps, see Longchamps St-Martin, Magrens 644 n. 35 St-Martin, Seéz 511 n. 71 St-Martin, Tournai 430 St-Martin, Tours: acquiring churches 26, 262, 264 n. 48; lordship over Cormery 335, 413–14; status 221, 254–5, 262, 266, 315–16, 321 St-Martin-des-Champs 574, 577 n. 13, 588, 591–2, 697, 708, 717, 867, 908 St-Martin-des-Puits 382 St-Maur-des-Fosse´s 184 n. 26, 234 n. 39, 290, 343, 343–4; see also Glanfeuil St-Maurice, Agaune 320, 498, 586; see also Agaune St-Maurille, Angers 326, 428 n. 74, 694 St-Maximin (Provence) 508, 615 n. 67 St-Meárd-de-Gorzon 566 n. 46 St-Me´dard, Soissons 186 n. 42, 222 St-Me´dard, valley of (Provence) 614 St-Melon, Pontoise 290 St-Michel, Cuxa 316 n. 42, 622 St-Mihiel, Verdun 112 n. 23, 195, 224, 230 n. 90, 335, 702, 847 n. 73, 849 n. 85 St-Mont: acquiring churches 632, 664; as church-owner 642, as lender 773; litigation 783; status 373 n. 9, 383, 478, 639, 834 n. 40, 840 n. 9, 878 n. 81

St-Nicholas, Angers 879 n. 92 St-Opportune-en-Retz 496 St-Pe`re, Chartres: acquiring churches 454–5, 494, 537, 578, 588, 592, 637, 686, 749, 760, 764, 873, 874; acquiring priest’s part 565, 566–7, 569, 580–1; as churchowner 638, 644, 707, 716 St-Philibert, Tournus 413 n. 2 St-Pierre, Angers 327, 762 St-Pierre, Brignolles 616 St-Pierre, Camprodon 289, 771 n. 115 St-Pierre, Frossay 663 St-Pierre, Rioms 613 St-Pierre, Rode`s 289 St-Pierre-de-Ferrie`res 377 St-Pierre-sous-Chaˆtenois 369 n. 96 St-Pierre-de-la-Couture, see La Couture St-Pierre-le-Vif 193 n. 20, 428–9 St-Pons, Thomie`res 374, 389, 619 n. 91, 715, 836, 837, 838 n. 73, 877 n. 77 St-Pourçain 711, 867 n. 15, 872 St-Quentin 266, 535 St-Remi, Rheims 274, 442, 447, 448, 455, 556 St-Riquier 269 n. 89, 733 n. 27 St-Romain, Chaˆtellerault 880 St-Saturnin, Angers 326–7 St-Saturnin, Value´jols 636 St-Savin-de-Rustan 375 St-Savournon 563, 568 St-Seine 419 n. 10 St-Serge, Angers 481, 567–8, 709 n. 93 St-Sernin, Bessac 927 n. 24 St-Sernin, Toulouse 536 n. 42, 567–8, 573, 771 St-Servais, Maastricht 419 n. 5 St-Soar, Genouillac 381, 832 n. 18 St-Sulpice, Boutges 518, 566 n. 50 St-Symphorien, Autun 25 n. 63, 28, 333 n. 40, 493, 563, 18, 576 St-Symphorien, Romans 594 n. 53 St-Trond 204, 427 n. 64, 430 n. 90 St-Urbain 701 St-Ursin 867 n. 13 St-Vaast 266, 279, 321, 501–2, 706 n. 74 St-Vanne, Verdun 561, 905 n. 7, 908 St-Ve´ran (La Daurade) 384 St-Victor, Marseilles: acquiring churches 302, 375, 446, 508, 508–9, 568, 612–13, 665, 721, 724, 725, 870, 877; acquiring monasteries 374, 388; as churchowner 580, 612–17, 682, 868–9; as exemplar 844; and Gregorian reform 876; and litigation 783; monasteries, dependent or subjected 417, 847; and tithes 475 St-Victor, Nevers 384

Index St-Vincent, near Vernet-les-Bains 623 St-Vincent, Riels 774 n. 135 St-Vincent-du-Mans 570, 581, 711, 716, 761, 772–3, 910 n. 40 St-Wandrille 128 n. 10, 209 n. 80, 212–13, 213, 215, 218, 221, 254 n. 23, 258–9; acquiring churches 677 n. 111, 756,873; as churchowner 702, 706 n. 73 Ste-Colombe, Sens 259 n. 63 Ste-Colombe-sur-Seine 569 Ste-Colombe, cell of Le´zat 619 Ste-Colombe, cell of St-Martin, Tours 251 n. 35, 266 Ste-Croix-en-Plaine 334 n. 47, 369–70 Ste-Croix, Poitiers 133, 231 n. 7, 330 n. 19, 578 Ste-Foi, Conques: acquiring churches 451, 481 n. 13, 484–5, 496–7, 498, 557 n. 16, 562, 566, 576, 636, 639, 664, 692 n. 17, 765, 768; as church-owner 483, 484–5, 535 n. 38 Ste-Genevie`ve 222 Ste-Glossinde 425 Ste-Lizaigne 27 Ste-Marie-de-Camon 383, 416 Ste-Marie, Chorges 614–15 Ste-Marie, Melun 318 Ste-Matie-de-Fenestre 536 Ste-Marie-de-Peyrissas 781–2 Ste-Marie, Salernes 615–16 Ste-Perpe´tue, Brignolles 508, 616 Ste-Perpe´tue (dioc. Nıˆmes) 481 Ste-Waudru 334 n. 53 SS. Felipe e Giacomo, Lucca 170 n. 43 SS. Felix and Regula, Zurich 746 SS. Peter and Paul, Canterbury, see St Augustine’s SS. Maria e Ippolita, Lucca 547 n. 61 SS. Pietro e Gregorio, Lucca 175 n. 72 SS. Sergio e Baccho, Naples 544 n. 32, 734 Sandino, deacon 670, 769 Sala, bishop of Urgel 306 Salaberga 125 Salomon I, bishop of Constance 314, 691 n. 15, 748, 780 Salomon III, bishop of Constance 203 n. 39 Salomon family 310 Salomon, Angevin knight 567 Salomon of Brittany 250 n. 25 Salomon of Lavardin 590 Salonnes 187, 188 n. 58, 234 n. 38 Saluster 377 Salvian of Marseilles 10 n. 4 Salz, capitulary (803) 69 Salzburg, archbishopric 33, 41, 99 n. 56, 165–6, 179, 207–8, 298, 419 n. 4, 690 n. 4 Samson, St 133, 141

Samson of Aubigny 552 n. 103, 917 n. 86 Samuel, son of Chroccus 30 S. Adiutore 634 S. Agata, Rieti 53 n. 41 S. Ambrogio, Milan 50 n. 34, 90 n. 34 S. Andrea, Adria 89 S. Andrea, Asis 669 n. 60 S. Andrea, Compito 609 S. Angelo, Monticunule 62 n. 108 S. Angelo, Morronne 397 n. 25 S. Angelo, Rieti 237, 777 S. Antimo 777–8 S. Bartolomeo, Pistoia 52, 55, 167, 173, 238 n. 30 S. Bartololmeo, Ripoli 127 n. 1, 168, 171–2, 174–5 S. Basilio, Rieti 921 n. 112 S. Benedetto, Bagnorola 394–5, 395 S. Benedetto, Po, see Polirone S. Columbano, Lucca 49 nn. 7, 9, 52 n. 30, 61, 173 S. Cristina, Folgoso 718–19 S. Cugat 497 n. 74, 509 n. 60, 621 n. 109, 752 S. Dalmazio, Lucca 49 n. 9, 52 n. 25, 55 n. 2, 56 n. 60, 62, 64, 775 S. Eugenia, Siena 167, 168, 171 n. 44, 400 S. Eustachio, Rome 784 S. Felice, Luogosano 197, 236–7 S. Fidele, Strumi 667–8 S. Fiora 754 n. 107 S. Frediano, Lucca 184 n. 28, 196 S. Georgio 167–8 S. Giovanni, Vietri 558 S. Giulia, Brescia 314 n. 24 S. Gregorio, Benevento 236 S. Juan de Las Abedesas 73 n. 54, 379 S. Juan de Corias 770 S. Julian de Bos 671 S. Lorenzo, Aversa 711 n. 3, 721, 723 S. Lorenzo, Capua 723 S. Lorenzo, Ornina 609–10 S. Lorenzo, Picciorano 656 n. 35 S. Lucia, Balnearia 666 S. Lucia, Lucca 169 n. 31, 178 S. Maiolo, Pavia 394 S. Maria, Grata 234 S. Maria, Benevento 915 S. Maria de Britonã 151 n. 28 S. Maria in Cellis 398 S. Maria, Cremona 237 S. Maria de Domno, Salerno 88 n. 21, 91 n. 44, 405 n. 75, 721–2, 881 S. Maria, Florence 611, 668 S Maria, Isernia 815

1013

1014 S. Maria, Lucca 54 n. 45, 55 n. 55, 56, 171 n. 48, 173, 175 n. 74 S. Maria Novella Florence 398 S. Maria de Ripoll 372 n. 2, 737, 878 S. Maria Sesto 547 n. 60 S. Maria Senatoris, Pavia 54, 171 n. 48, 195 n. 48, 237 S. Maria de Serrateix 73 n. 49, 379 n. 51, 384 n. 82 S. Maria Theodata, Pavia 54, 746 n. 52; see also Rihswind, abbess S. Maria Ursimanni, Lucca 54 S. Maria in Vico Alais 58 n. 78 S. Marino, Pavia 267 S. Martino in Colle, Lucca 397 nn. 24, 25 S. Martino, Florence 57 n. 70, 610–11, 667–8, 785 n. 50 S. Martino, Gello 63 S. Massimo, Salerno 50 n. 17, 404–5, 548, 721–2, 723 S. Michele, Cerreto 395–6 S. Michele, Cipriano 61 nn. 97, 98, 167 n. 16, 169 n. 28, 170 n. 42 S. Michele, Colognora 58 n. 75 S. Michele, Lucca 166 n. 5, 169 n. 28 S. Michele, Pugnano 169 S. Miguel-del-Fay 374, 377, 383, 774 n. 135 S. Miguel de Pedroso 150 n. 21 S. Millań, Cogolla 82 n. 30, 625, 673, 718 S. Miniato 62 S. Nicolo, Bari 881 S. Nicolo, Gallocanto, see Gallolanto S. Nicolo, Sangemini 394, 395, 399 S. Pedro Gran d’Escales 662 n. 18 S. Pedro de Rocas, inscription at 22 S. Pedro de Soto 670 n. 65 S. Pietro d’Asso 77–8, 779–80 S. Pietro, Avellano 398 S. Pietro, Castellione 174 S. Pietro Cielo d’oro 171 n. 46 S. Pietro, Mosciano 652 n. 5 S. Pietro, Pistoia 52, 55, 55–6, 167, 169, 171 n . 48, 173, 238 n. 30 S. Pietro Somaldi, Lucca 54, 56 n.63, 64 n. 121, 237 S. Quirico, Lucca 64 n. 117, 169–70, 171 n. 41 S. Romań, Penãmiań 624, 653 S. Rossore, abbot of 655 S. Salvador de Loberuela 765 S. Salvatore, Brescia 171 n. 46, 235 nn. 2, 5, 237, 238, 317 n. 45 S. Salvatore, Escheto 657 n. 46 S. Salvatore all’Isola, see Isola S. Salvatore, Montione 64 n. 121, 753

Index S. S. S. S.

Salvatore, Silvamunda 842 n. 28 Savino 397 n. 29 Severino 605–6 Silvestro, Lucca 49 n. 7, 62 n. 106, 1 69, 173 S. Silvestro, Nogara 656 n. 35 S. Sofia, Benevento 64 S. Sofia, Ponticello 197 n. 49, 236 S. Sofia, Salerno 404 n. 69, 549 n. 85 S. Vicente, Oviedo 149–50, 671 S. Vincenze, Volturno 64 S. Zeno, Campione 49 n. 11 S. Zeno, Verona 202 n. 34, 252 n. 10 Sancha, queen (wife of Ferdinand I) 671 Sancho II, king of Castille 681 n. 2 Sancho III, king of Navarre 871 Sancho V, king of Navarre 626 Sancho, king of Pamplona 82 n. 30, 718 Sandino, deacon 626, 670–1, 769 Sange 480–1 Santiago, see Compostela Santillana-del-Mar 15 n. 22 Sardinia, churches in 95 n. 25 Sapientia, nun 165 Sarrazae 344–5 Sarrazina 671 Satolas 465, 797–8, 801, 835 Saturninus, priest 672–3 Sauve, lords of 619 sauvete´, see salvetas Savigny 492, 495, 535, 561, 743, 761 Savigny-le-Vieux 878 n. 83 Scauniperga, duchess 87 Schaffhausen, see All Saints Scha¨ftlarn, monastery 35, 46 n. 97, 161, 162, 163–4, 165 n. 35 Scha¨nis 369, 457 n. 93 Scharnitz-Schlehdorf 43 n. 85, 162–5, 177, 204 Schienen 346, 347–8, 350 Schlesinger, W. F. 299 Schliersee 161, 163, 164, 165 n. 35, 207 Schornsheim 742 Schreiber, Greog 538, 834 Schu¨bert, H. 95 Schwarzach 314–15 Scocia, daughter of Wadrada 616 Scotland, parishes in 84–5 secular abbacy, see lay abbacy; in Languedoc 390–3 secularium prioratus 327, 410, 833 secularization: of a great church’s lands 211, 263, 288, 291; of a great church’s churches 77, 199, 216–17, 690; of a great church itself 211–14, 263–5; protests

Index about 794–5, 799, 812; regulation by lay ruler 75–6, 215, 217–18 Seés, bishopric 309 n. 133, 587, 715 Seguin, tenant of Hugh Letbald 589 seigneurie banale 330, 332, 463, 473, 497 self-conveyance 41–2, 54 n. 47, 101 n. 66, 161, 162, 167; see also corpus et anima Seligenstadt, council (1023) 522, 698–9, 825–6 Seminatus, clerk 520 nn. 7, 8 Semmler, Josef 19 n. 15, 26 n. 70, 113 n. 41, 200 n. 5 Sempringham 906–7 Senan, see Flacey ‘senior basilicas’ 221 Senon 655 Sens: archbishops of 378, 428–9; city monasteries of 419 Sens formulary 521 Sepmes 493, 563, 569 Septimania, Louis the Pious’s monasteries in 387 sepulchres, privately owned 483 n. 30, 775 Sergius IV 72 n. 43 servitium regis 274–9 servus, see slaves or serfs Sesendoara 623 Severus, priest 533 Sevignac 664 Se´vran 708 Sewy 599 Sexburg, abbess of Ely 240 Sexfontaines 382, 417, 418 Sheppey 240 Sherborne 601 n. 101 Shillington 788 nn. 68, 70 Shrewsbury 412, 600, 683 Sicard, wife of Count Roger of Foix 377 Sichelm, bishop 58 Sicherad, priest 62 Sichimund, archpriest 58 Sicily, settlement between bishops and barons (1097) 504 n. 29 Sidag (9th c.) 595–6 Siegburg 426, 576 n. 5, 686 n. 35 Siegfried, archbishop of Mainz 427, 429–30, 470 Siegfried, abbot of Schaffhausen 844, 845 Siflaed 552, 553–4 Sigbert, boy king 117 Sigbert of Gembloux 852 n. 11, 862–3 Sigeric, count 361 Sigfrid, bishop of Le Mans 714 Sigfrid, bishop of Mu¨nster 81 n. 19, 471 n. 74, 596 Sighard, abbot of Berg 225 Siginand, artist-priest 260, 747 n. 58

1015

Sigismund, king of Burgundians 106 Signes family 616 Sigobald, abbot of Saint-Calais 232 Sigovesus 216 Silo, king of Asturias 114 n. 42, 737 Silo, priest in Pavia 547 Silos, abbot in Castille 575 Silverius, pope 891–2 Silvester II, pope 378 Silvester, priest 535 Simon II of Senlis, earl of Northampton 914 Simon III of Senlis, earl of Northampton 914 Simon of St-Opportune-en-Retz 496 simony: anxiety about 403–4, 877–8; concept and definition 293, 307–8, 820–1, 856–7, 858–9; reformers’ preoccupation with 826, 854–5, 859 Sindiho, intended abbot of Schliersee 207 Sindilo, clerk 36 Sindlhausen 36 Sioville 467 Siponto, bsihopric 87 Sippenkloster 121 Sisciac 27 n. 75 Sisteron, bishopric 301 Sithiu, villa 123; see also St-Bertin Siward 412, 600 Slane, abbots of 145 slaves or serfs: included in endowment 440–1; as church founders 526; as priests 15, 24, 63 n. 109, 525–6 Slavs 95, 100, 299, 440 Sletty 144 n. 38, 145 Snorri 93 Sofia, abbess of Pratovecchio 920, 921 Soissons, councils: (744) 75 n. 8; (853) 801; (866) 255 n. 23 Solignac 111 n. 21, 117, 195, 221, 255 n. 33, 257 n. 49, 272 n. 30 Sologny 70 Sondervermo¨gen 729 Sonning 482 Sophie, countess 335 Sorde 631 Sore`ze 879 Souday 496, 570, 685 n. 28 soulscot 461, 481–2 Speyer, bishopric 286, 441, 604, 690 n. 5, 696 n. 2 Spoleto, dukes of 64, 170, 237, 776, 777 spolia 268, 304–5, 308, 528–9 sponsalicium, see dos ‘squarson’ 932 Stade, comital family 359 n. 25 stauritas 91, 654

1016

Index

Stavelot-Malme´dy: as church-owner 533, 579–80, 685, 750; foundation of 117–18, 221, 223; and lay abbot 313; as lender 773; status 316 n. 41, 277, 282 Steinheim 653, 655 n. 29 Stenay and Mouzay 582–3 Steneland 345–6 Stephanus, Life of Wilfred 128, 297 Stephen Harding, abbot of Cıˆteaux 874 Stephen count of Blois 324 Stephen V, pope 349 Stephen VIII, pope 837 n. 62 Stephen of Bergamo, deacon 560 Stephen lord of Neufchaˆteau, 701 Stephen, monk (Castille) 786 Stephen, monk of Ste-Foi 636 Stephen of Joinville 742 Stephen, son of Robert of St-Urcize 581 Stephen of Tournai, canonist 893, 894, 896 Stettwang 225 n. 42, 260 Stifford 912–13 Stiftung 12, 13, 14 n. 19, 50 n. 16, 95 n. 25, 103 n. 84, 113 n. 35 Stigand, priest 677 Stodilo, bishop of Limoges 692 Stoke-by-Nayland 409 n. 17 Stonham 653 Stori 598 Stour-in-Ismere 154 n. 16, 159 n. 58, 205 n. 59 Stradigius 661 Strassberg, St Verena at 43–3 Strobnitz 927 Strumi, see S. Fidele Sturm, abbot of Fulda 181 n. 3, 201–2, 214, 223, 229, 233 n. 36, 270 n. 7, 271 n. 17 Sturmi (Glam.) 85 n. 62, 481 n. 14, 601 n. 100 Stutz 16, 78, 92–6, 99, 165, 561–2, 729–32, 800, 890–2, 901–2, 926 Suanburg, widow 597 Suidger 298 Sulpicius Severus 68, 102 n. 73 Sulpicius, deacon 383, 416 Sulpicius, donor to St-Pe`re 760 Summa Coloniensis 894 Summa Parisiensis 896 Sunderad, nephew of bishop Peredeus 61 superficies solo cedit 731, 733 surveys of church property 258–9, 268–9 Susa 402 n. 53 Susteren 184 n. 26, 186, 201, 223, 260, 261, 747 n. 58 Sutton Courtenay 552 Sverri, king 918 Sweden, church’s ’gift land’ in 438 Swertlin 599

Suidbert, bishop and abbot in Frisia 131 Suindaha (Schwindau or Schwindach) 44–5 synodal dues 706, 712 Taccitus, Germania 90 n. 3 Taizy 442 Talmond 590 n. 31 Tarchnat, priest 44–5 Tarragona, archbishop of 905 Tassilo, duke of Bavarians 81, 460 Tatbert, abbot of Ripon 128 Tauxigny 471 n. 70 Taviani-Carozzi, H. 754 Tavistock 408–9, 410, 412 Teano, bishop of 721, 723 n. 77 Tecelin, viscount 759 Tecelin, clerk 566 Tedric, fidelis of Charles the Simple 318 Tegernsee 81, 161, 163, 166, 233 n. 32, 831 n. 7, 839 n. 4 Tegrim, clerk in Florence 610–11, 667–8 Tegrim, son of Hildebrand 430 Telchild, abbess of Jouarre 119 Tenestrina, abbess of N-D., Le Mans 204 tenths, secular 475 Teodfred, vassel of Walter count of Dreux 749 Terentiano 170–1, 177 terra altaris 698 tertium, bishop’s third in Spain 718–19 Tertry, battle of 115 Tescelin, viscount of Rosnay 704 Tessier, G. 265 Tetbald of Vendoˆme 590 Tetbury 156 n. 32 Teuderic (dioc. Toul) 472 Teudo caput ferri 588 Teutha (of Pisa) 399 Teuto, bishop of Rieti 777 Teutprand 58, 169 n. 28 Teutsind, abbot of St-Wandrille 212 Tewkesbury, monks of 552 Textus Roffensis 598 Theobald III and I, count of Blois and Champagne 704 Theobold IV and II, count of Blois and Champagne 868 Theobald Crispin 326 Theodelin, abbot of Maillezais 380 n. 59 Theoderic, bishop of Chartres 709, 713 n. 17 Theoderic, priest of Bar 539 Theoderic, son of Riwin 631 Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury 296 Theodore’s Penitentials 31, 121, 122–3, 239 n. 34, 185, 462 Theodore, vir devotus 63

Index Theodrada, abbess, Charlemagne’s daughter 215, 314 Theodrich, founder 470 Theodulf, count (dioc. Rheims) 528, 810 Theodulf, bishop of Orleans 75 n. 7, 528 n. 70, 741 n. 16, 791 n. 24 Theotrath, wife of Hrandolf 742 The´rouanne, bishop of 707–8 Theuderic II, king 120 Theuderic IV’s privilege for Murbach 231 Thietburg, abbess of Vitzenburg 357 Thietmar of Merseburg 281 n. 18, 300 n. 66, 361, 595, 856 Thietmo, margrave 336–7 Thionville (Diedenhofen), see Yutz Tholey 27, 113, 204 Thomas, first abbit of Farfa 235 n. 3 Thomas, clerk, son of Thurbern 554, 677 Thomas, clerk (of Renton) 554 Thor Longus 84 n. 52, 443 n. 37 Thorney Abbey 511, 676, 771 Thorold (soke of Peterborough) 645 Thorolf Mostrarskegg 93 Throand, count 187 n. 48, 225, 229 Thurbern, priest 677 Thurgarton 677 Thurston 553 Thusey, capitulary (865) 446 n. 8 Thwaite (Norfolk) 677 tithe-rights: basis of allocation 68–71, 74, 80–2, 84, 90, 99, 462–3, 470–1; bishop’s authority in allocating 68–71, 461, 469–71; lord’s inerest or control 462, 465–70, 472–3, 492, 503, 508, 513, 578; for old churches 464–5, 467–9, 472; for private churches 463, 465, 468–9, 471–3, 792; see also tithes tithes: allocation, see tithe-rights; detached or fragmented 479–80, 498–9, 499–50, 501, 516–17, 923–4; disposal of own or tenant’s tithes 465, 466, 475, 479, 508; lord’s enjoyment of 468, 479–80, 488–98, 507–8, 512–13, 517 923–4, see also tithes and offerings; monastic 466–7, 686, 819, 821; paid by church’s own tenants 475, 508; obligation to pay 460–2; secular tenths 460 n. 3, 463, 508; secularized tithes 475, 508; territorialized 479; in towns 475 tithes and offerings: canonical partition of 514–16; lord’s enjoyment of 794, 827, 872, 878–9, and see tithes titulus (title to a priestly office), see ordination Tivoli, church near 609 Tobiella 786

1017

Tochi, see Toki Toki 648 Toledo, councils: III (589) 18–19, 805, 806; diocesan (597) 20, 21; IV (633) 11 n. 14, 19, 20, 25; V (638) 20; IX (655) 20, 20–1, 24, 81, 523; XVI (693) 11 nn. 12, 14 Tori, see Stori Torres Lopez, M. 97 Tortona, bishop of 196 Toscanella (San Salvatore at) 543 Tota, queen 718 Toto of Campione 49 n. 11, 53 n. 34 Toto of Vitoio 58 n. 76 Toubert, P. 547, 684 Toul, bishopric 287–8, 369, 419 n. 5, 431 n. 92, 827 (OK???) Toulon, bishopric 726 Toulouse, bishopric 821 Toulouse, counts of 301, 308 n. 125, 309, 780–1, 839 n. 78 Toulouse, councils: (844) 810 n. 44; (1056) 307 n. 120. 390 n. 123, 513, 516, 828; (1061–2) 828 n. 39, 877–8 Tournai, bishopric’s churches 695, 709 Tours, archbishopric 262–3; archbishops of 433, 664; nunnery at 137; see also St-Julien; St-Martin Tours, council (1060) 513, 828, 829, 852 n. 4 Tours-sur-Marne 518 n. 38, 702 n. 46, 703, 705 n. 61, 708 town parishes 74, 84 Toxandria, region 30 tradere seipsum, see self-conveyance traditio of church by symbols 161, 375–6, 600, 632, 691, 749, 779, 781 Trani, bishop 721, 723 n. 77 Trasmir, confessus 633 Trasoald 55 treasure in Heaven, laying up 10, 28, 42, 759 Tremiti 686 n. 33, 687 n. 41, 775 Trencavel family 303, 308 Treón 716 Tribur, council (895) 462 n. 12, 464, 483 n. 30, 629, 814 Trier, bishopric, archbishopric 216–17, 267, 273, 284, 285, 419 n. 5, 744, 779, 927 Tronchiennes, monastery 502 Trollope, Anthony 932 Troarn 373 n. 12 Trosly, council (909) 557, 813, 814 n. 14, 830–1 Troyes: bishop of 579; diocese of 803 Tructesind Gutieriz 633 Tructuldis 618 Trudo, founder 204; see also St Trond Trumhere, first abbot of Gilling 123

1018

Index

Trutbold, freeman 447 tuath 142–4, 144 Tulle 386, 470–1, 471–2, 564, 681 Tupholme 628 Turenne: viscount of 472; vicecomital family 324 Tuti Grecus, see Dubdacrich Tutilo, priest 36, 40–1, 45 ‘twelfths’ in Naples and Amalfi 634–5 Ufegeat, nephew of Wulfric spot 409 Ulger, bishop of Angers 326–7, 473, 473, 524, 691, 868, 872 Ulrich, bishop of Augsburg 310 n. 138, 330 n. 18, 815 Ulrich, count in Alemania 346, 416, 491 Ulrich, count, lord of Ebersberg 366, 368 Ulrich of Lenzburg, count 366–8, 369 Unald family 568 Unroch, count 720 urban basilicas 193, 194, 195, 196 Urban I, pope, letter 802 Urban II, pope 325, 335, 509, 698, 703, 828, 866, 881 Urgel, bishopric 72 n. 46, 306, 307, 308–9, 621–2 Urgel: bishops of 524; consecration records 620–2 Ursio, priest 579 Ursmer, abbot of Lobbes 118 n. 76 Ursus, priset (8th c.) 54, 173 Ursus, priest (10th c.) 57 Ursus, duke Odilo’s chaplain 532 Usson 540 Utrecht, bishopric 201, 297–8 Uzerche 565–6 Vabres 344, 350, 377 vacancies: of higher churches, custody or possession in 250, 266–8, 288, 290, 292, 296; of lesser churches, lords’ care or profit in 450 Vacariza 625, 670 Vaison, bishopric 301 Valasco Scemeniz 626 Valence, council (855) 440, 447, 448, 800 Valerius, hermit 24 Valerius, priest 534 Vallauris, lordship of 301–2 Vallombrosa 393 n. 5 Value´jols 636 Varaize 573, 581–2 Vaucluze 586 Vence family 384 Valila, Catholic Goth 12–13

Vendoˆme: acquiring altars 709, 711; acquiring churches 484, 499, 585, 709, 750, 763; church-owner 493, 518; comital patronage of 590 Venerandus, priest 665 Ver, council (755) 69–70, 214, 217–18, 339 n. 3 Verberie, council (863) 219–21, 233 Verdun, bishopric 27, 113 Verdun, treaty of 250 n. 24, 259, 268 Vergauille 361 Vergil, bishop, see Virgil Vermandois counts 316 n. 39, 335 n. 61 Vernet-les-Bains 623 Verneuil, palace 274 Veroli, bishopric of 546–7 Veroli, inhabitants of 608 Verona, nunnery at 172 Vertemate 611 vestitura (lawful possession, or sign of this) 340, 495, 538 Ve´zelay 254, 335 n. 61, 345, 380 n. 61 vicinia 654, 656–7 Victor, bishop of Chur 78 Victorides, senatorial family 78 Victorius, dux 68 vicus 24–5, 66, 98 Vielmur 424 Vienne: archbishop of 535–6; archbishopric 250, 535 Vienne, council (892) 522 n. 27 Vietri 550, 606; see also S. Giovanni Vignoles 481 villa: meaning of 68, 70; as a parish 67, 71 ‘village’ church 90 Villasabariego, men of 653–4 Villeneuve-St-Georges 448 Villenouvette 470 Vincent, Ailwin’s son 582 vir illuster 111 Virgil of Salzburg, bishop 165, 207, 532 Vitalis, bishop of Bologna 86 Vitalis, priest in Maine 577 Vitalis, priest of St-Lubin 581 Viterbo, oratory in 63 Viterbo, lease in 543 Vitzenburg 357 Vivian, count 266, 131 n. 6, 341 Vivian, son of Doda 751 Voigt, Karl 172, 197, 237, 316–17, 733 Volterra, bishops of 407 Volvestre, see St-Christophe vouching to warranty 409 Vulgar Roman law 17, 154, 754 Vurmher, 39–40

Index Wago, son of count Perchtolt 604 Wala, abbot of Corbie 249, 798 Walaho, count, abbot of Hornbach 342 Walbcek 361 Walchun, bishop 116 Waldalen 136 Waldburg, sister of bishop Liuthard 421–2 Waldburg, St, relics of 352 Waldin I, the Old of Malicorne 640 Waldin II 593 Waldin III 593 Waldker 779 Waldo, abbot of Pfa¨vers 314 Waldrada, mistress of king Lothar II 831 Waldrata, widow 37 Wales, private and parish churches 85, 601 Walfred, nephew of Winisci 403 Walfrid, founder of Monteverdi 167, 172, 17 Walprand, clerk, son of duke Walpert 169 Walpurga, abbess of Heidenheim 135, 179 Waltbert, count, grandson of Widukind 348–9 Walter, bishop of Orleans 439 n. 10 Walter, count of Brienne 588 Walter, count of Dreux 588 n. 20 Walter, son of Flahaut 588 Walter, son of Gradulf 570 Walter of Gorzon 565 Walter infans 568 Waletr iuvenis 590 Walter (Poitevin) 588 Walter Siccabot 711 Waltham Holy Cross 408 Waltram 202 Waltrich, bishop of Passau 165 Waltrich, founder-abbot of Scha¨ftlarn 161, 163 Wamba, king 20 Wando, abbot of St-Wandrille 212 Wandregisil, count, founder of StWandrille 123 Waning, 7th c. count 136 n. 68 Wantisden 628 Warin, count of Rosnay 704 Warmunt, abbot of Schliersee 207 Warner, lord of Hornbach 342 Warnfrid 167, 400 Warnfrid gastaldus (of Siena) 167–8, 400 Warnfrid (of Monteverdi) 167, 172 warranty, see vouching to Wazo 592 Wearmouth-Jarrow 121 n. 19, 128–9, 131, 132, 134, 137–8 Weber, Max 76 Weingarten 365

1019

Weissenburg, see Wissembourg Welbeck 554 Welf, duke 37–2 Welf family 365, 366 Wengen 604 Wenilo, archbishop of Sens 419 Wenkheim 189 Wenlock 157, 160, 291 Werberg, abbess of Sheppey 240 Werden 130 n. 20, 255–6, 276–7, 282, 342–3, 346, 349–50 Werinher (dioc. Regensburg) 517 Werinpreht 35 Werner, count of Gru¨ningen 371 Werner, Habsburg count 334, 848–6 Wessobrun 251, 262 n. 17, 271 West Saxons, bishopric of 296 Westbury-on-Trym 158–9, 160, 178, 205, 206 Westminster, councils: (1102) 447 n. 16, 579; (1175) 911 Whalley, great parish of 83 Whistley 482 Whitby 239 White, Stephen 591–2 Wibold of Stavelot-Malme´dy 907 Wicburc, abbess of Geske 358 Wicher, priest 45 Wicher, lord of Chaˆteau-Renault 500 Wicheram, Frankish duke in Tuscany 64 n. 121, 753 Wichman, count, founder of Elton 363–4 Wichman the Younger, count 364 Wichman, count in Thuringia 503 Wickham, Chris 49 Widbold, abbot of St-Aubin 322 Widerad, abbot 114, 188, 194–5, 213, 231 Widukind 348, 349 Wifred, archbishop of Narbonne 305, 307–8 Wifred, count of Barcelona 737 Wigbert, designated abbot of Farfa 171 n. 47 Wigbert, abbot of Fritzlar 210–2 Wigbert, St, relics of 228 Wigeric, count, bishop Adalbero’s father 318, 425 Wihtred, king of Kent 240–1 Wikbert, bishop of Verden 348 Wildeshausen 234–5, 348–9 Wilfrid, bishop of the Northumbrians 83, 128, 159, 179, 198, 201, 297, 307 Wilgils, hermit 131–2 Willa, countess (10th c. Tuscany) 398 Willa, viscountes of Conflent 748 Willa, daughter of Gundwald 374 Willeram 173–4 William, abbot of Hirsau 844, 845, 847

1020 William of Volpiano, abbot of St-Beńigne 382, 417, 418, 770, 771, 834, 840–1 William, bishop of Clermont 872 William, bishop of Toulon 275 William, count of Be´salu 305 William, count of Cerdagne 305, 307 William, count of Nevers 382 n. 68, 384 William, count of Toulouse 391 William I the Pious, duke of Aquitaine 352, 374, 835 William III, duke of Aquitaine 319 William IV, duke of Aquitaine 319, 380 William V the Great, duke of Aquitaine 309, 380 William VI, duke of Aquitaine 301 n. 69, 309 William I the Conqueror, as duke of Normandy 290–1 William of Warenne I, earl of Surrey 412 William of Warenne II, earl of Surrey 576 William I the Conqueror, king of England 290–1, 512 n. 82, 586 William II, Rufus,king of England 552, 855 William, son of count Arnald 587 William, son of Arnald 774 William, son of Bernard Aimard 306 William of Arques 676 William of Asse´-le-Riboul 87 William Giroie 588, 663, 714 William Gouet 569, 570 William Havard 635 William of Islou 874 William of Fe´rte-Mace´ 716 William of Le Mans 872 William of Luppe 642 William, lord of Montpellier 869 William, brother of Odo Bernard 782 William of Martignac 632 William, son of Giroie 714 William de Sumbone 760 William Unald 567, 568 William de Warenne II 576–7 Willibald, bishop of Eichsa¨tt 134–5, 201–2, 298; altar of St Willibald 353 Willibrord, bishop of Utrecht 30, 116, 123, 181, 201, 222–3, 297–8, 690; testament 729, 127 n. 63 Willigis, archbishop of Mainz 470, 653, 690 Willihelm 165 Williswind 226 Wilton, monastery 900 Winchcombe 239, 249 Winchester, churches in 646, 648–9 Winchester, council (1076) 559

Index Wine, bishop of London 293 n. 8, 296 n. 35 Winebert, knight 592 Winetahausen 284 Winigis, count 400, 401 Winisci 403 Winkling 517 Wisericella 37 Wiserich 37 Wissembourg 29–30, 111 n. 17, 199 n. 4, 215, 215 n. 34, 269, 275–6, 284 Witbert and Ratbod 531 Witbold, intended abbot of St-Wandrille 213 Withington 158, 205nn. 58, 60 Witigow, abbott of Reichenau 287 n. 60 Witlaic, abbott of St-Wandville 212, 218 Woffenheim, see Ste-Croix-en-Plaine Woking, 182, 198 Wolconard, abbott of Berg 225 Wolfoald 112 n. 23, 195 Wolfpot, priest 38 Wollasch, Joachim 190 Wolvene 346–7, 350 women’s religious role 180; see also double monasteries Worcester, bishopric 83, 158–9, 179, 187, 206, 242 Worcester, cathedral priory 554–5 Wormald, Patrick 155 Worms, bishopric 286 Worms, settlement of (1122) 864, 884 Worth 599 Wulfad, archbishop of Bourges 812 Wulfgeat, abbot of Burton 410 Wulfheard, son of Cussa 159 Wulfhere, king of the Mercians 240, 293 n. 8, 297 Wulfmaer, priest 552 Wulfred, archbishop of Canterbury 199 Wulfric of Haselbury 529 Wulfric Spot 408–9, 409–10, 411 Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester 483, 599 Wu¨rzburg, bishopric 202, 206–7, 224, 297–8, 315, 419, 505 Wynnebald, abbot-founder of Heidenheim 125, 134–5, 298 Wyrund, abbot of Hornbach 342 York, churches in 646, 648 Yvrac, chaplain of 538 Zacharias, abbot 64 n. 126, 236 Zacharias, pope 38, 69 n. 26, 186–7, 521, 790 Zalama, priest 670, 672 Zeitz, bishopric 299 Zwiefalten 333, 371

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