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THE GROWTH 
 OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
THE GROWTH OF CHURCH 
 INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 BY THE REV. 
 
 EDWIN HATCH, M.A. D.D., 
 
 READER IN ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER, 
 
 2 & 3, BIBLE HOUSE. 
 
 1887. 
 
 H 
 
A. 6o33 
 
 c n A, 
 
 ffti^ 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 ' I "HE present work is an endeavour to give 
 "an answer to questions which are fre- 
 quently asked in regard to the apparently 
 wide differences between the primitive and the 
 modern forms of some Christian institutions. 
 It is designed less for scholars than for general 
 readers who are interested in theological sub- 
 jects. Its aim is to be not controversial, but 
 historical. It is a summary of the results at 
 which the writer has arrived from an inde- 
 pendent study of original sources, and the 
 meagreness with which some important sub- 
 jects are treated is due to the fact that it is 
 intended to be supplemented hereafter by a 
 more elaborate work, which the writer has for 
 some time had in preparation. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 And since the work is thus designed for 
 general readers, and is a summary of results 
 rather than a detailed explanation of the facts 
 upon which they are based, the writer has 
 not thought it desirable to encumber the pages 
 with more than the most necessary references 
 to his authorities. But since the scantiness of 
 the references may convey to some minds an 
 erroneous impression that the evidence also is 
 scanty, the writer thinks it proper to add that 
 he is not aware of having made any state- 
 ment which he is not also ready to support 
 by sufficient proofs. 
 
 The work has the secondary aim of en- 
 deavouring to stimulate students who have 
 leisure for historical study to give more atten- 
 tion than hitherto to the wide field which lies 
 before them in the ecclesiastical history of 
 the centuries which lie between the fall of 
 the Roman Empire and the political settlement 
 of mediaeval Europe. 
 
 Oxford, March \tth, 1887. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 The justification of the fact that Christian institutions have not 
 always been what they are now is to be found in the nature of 
 Christianity, The justification of the particular changes is to 
 be found in Church history. 
 
 The present work is designed to show in outline the historical 
 circumstances under which some of the more prominent institu- 
 tions of modern Christianity came to exist, and which form the 
 justification of their existence .... pp. I — 8 
 
 THE DIOCESE. 
 
 What is the origin of the modern diocese ? How was it that the 
 majority of Christian Churches in the West came to have an 
 incomplete organization ? 
 
 The answer is to be found in the circumstances of the 
 original Christian communities of Gaul and Spain. They were 
 Roman, and not native, and in the cities rathef than in the 
 country. The Teutonic conquest at first both preserved and 
 accentuated this state of things. The organization of the Church 
 preserved that of the empire ; the Romans who remained were 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 reluctant to break through the lines of that organization by 
 multiplying bishoprics ; and the power and prestige of the 
 bishops, which increased as the old Roman party found in them 
 a political as well as an ecclesiastical centre, came in time to 
 render such a multiplication of bishoprics impossible, pp. 9 — 15 
 In Germany and England the bishops were at first missionary 
 bishops, and Gaul and Spain furnished the model upon which 
 organization proceeded when the missionary character of the 
 Churches had passed awayi .... pp. 15, 16 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE DIOCESAN BISHOP. 
 
 How was it that the officers of one community came to have juris- 
 diction over those of another? 
 
 The common answer that presbyters were detached from the 
 bishop's Church to take charge of outlying congregations covers 
 only a small proportion of the facts. In the majority of cases 
 in the West communities grew up independently of the bishop's 
 Church, and their officers were appointed by the owners of the 
 church-buildings. The danger to both faith and morals which 
 this system caused led to a reformation, which was the result 
 of the joint action of Church and State. Two principles which 
 had long been recognised in the East, but which had been 
 commonly disregarded in the West, were finally established : 
 
 1. That all the clergy within the gan, or county, should be 
 subordinate to the bishop of the county town. 
 
 2. That all the bishops within what had been a Roman 
 province should be co-ordinated into a single body, with the 
 bishop of the metropolis at their head . . pp. 17 — 32 
 
 The first of these points was secured by a double provision : 
 (i.) that every year the clergy should report themselves to the 
 bishop ; (ii.) that every year the bishop should make a circuit of 
 his district for the purpose of (a) preaching, (i) confirming, and 
 (<r) exercising discipline, both ecclesiastical and civil pp. 32 — 39 
 
CONTENTS. ix 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE FIXED TENURE OF THE PARISH PRIEST. 
 
 How was it that the officers of these detached and incompletely 
 organized communities came to have a tenure of office which 
 was not dependent on the goodwill of either the community, 
 the owner of the building, or the bishop ? 
 
 It came, in the first place, from the necessity of checking, in 
 the interests of the Church at large, the nomination and dis- 
 missal of clerks by the owners of churches. The endeavour to 
 institute such a check was not in the first instance successful. 
 The rights of ownership were strongly asserted, and several 
 centuries elapsed before they were finally set aside pp. 43 — 5 
 
 It came, in the second place, from the gradual recognition of the 
 claim of detached Churches to enjoy their own revenues. The 
 bishops were for a long time the only spiritual persons who 
 could hold property as such. They held all the property and 
 claimed all the revenues of all the Churches within their district. 
 There were successive stages of compromise by which a bishop 
 received (1) a third or fourth, instead of the whole, of the 
 revenues of such Churches ; (2) presents instead of a fixed pro- 
 portion ; (3) fixed fees instead of presents . pp. 51 — 56 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE BENEFICE. 
 
 How was it that the ministers of detached Churches came to have 
 not merely a fixed tenure, but also a freehold right ? 
 
 The answer is to be found in a combined consideration of 
 the modes in which gifts of land were made to the Church, of 
 the enormous extent of such gifts, and of the prevalent systems 
 of land tenure. The modes of gift were mainly three : (1) by 
 unconditional donation in a man's life-time ; (2) by will ; (3) by 
 donation with reservation of the usufruct. The extent of such 
 gifts was so great as to give rise to many legal checks. But, 
 in spite of checks, the bishops often became the chief land- 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 owners in their dioceses. It became impossible for them to 
 cultivate their lands themselves. Hence the system of leasing 
 Church lands grew up, and was in some cases forced upon the 
 Church by the State. Lands so leased were said to be held 
 
 ad beneficium pp. 61—72 
 
 Sometimes lands were leased in this way, not to laymen, but 
 to the ministers of parish churches, as a source of income. 1. 
 In some cases they were so leased by a bishop, a practice which 
 exists in modern times, under the name of " collation." 2. In 
 some cases they were so leased by a layman, a practice which 
 underlies the modern system of patronage, with the important 
 difference that the feudal rights of the original owner have 
 passed to the bishop pp. 73 — 77 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE PARISH. 
 
 How was it that the local Church came to be regarded as standing 
 in a special relation to the district which surrounded it? i.e., 
 How did the idea of a congregation pass into that of a parish ? 
 The basis of the conception is probably pagan. The Christian 
 superstructure is probably due to two causes, viz., (1) the 
 regulations as to baptism, which required it to take place in 
 certain designated churches ; the inhabitants of a district were 
 required to present their children for baptism in such churches, 
 and a special relation thus came to exist between the district 
 and the "baptismal" church. (2) The regulations as to the 
 payment of tithes. At first a certain liberty of choice existed as 
 to the church to which a man might pay his tithes ; this liberty 
 came gradually to be restricted ; the tithes of every farm were 
 assigned to a " baptismal " church in its neighbourhood . 
 
 pp. 82 — 89 
 
 The area of a baptismal church — i.e., the original parish — was 
 
 that of the. modern " rural deanery ; " the chief officer of such 
 
 a church was an archpresbyter, or rural dean, who exercised 
 
 over the clergy of the district powers similar to those of the officer 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 who bore the same designation in the bishop's church. In 
 course of time, as the population increased, these areas were found 
 too large ; new churches were erected, and tithes were assigned 
 to them ; and every such church came to have round it an area 
 whose boundaries were, in fact, the boundaries of the farms from 
 which they could claim tithes. The conception of the presbyter 
 as an officer with spiritual control over a certain area ousted 
 the conception of him as the minister of a congregation. 
 
 PP- 89—97 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 TITHES AND THEIR DISTRIBUTION. 
 
 Tithes are not an immemorial institution of the Christian Church. 
 They practically date, as a Christian institution, from the eighth 
 . century. They were originally a rent paid for the lease, com- 
 pulsory or otherwise, of Church lands. When they once came 
 into use the amount of the rent so paid suggested an analogy 
 with the Levitical tithe, and the analogy was strongly pressed. 
 They tended to become a payment from all lands, whether leased 
 or otherwise, and were in reality a customary measure of free- 
 will offerings pp. 101 — 108 
 
 Tithes followed the rule of all offerings to the Church in 
 being at first at the disposal of the bishop for all the needy 
 persons on the Church list, and in being afterwards divided in 
 certain fixed proportions. These proportions varied slightly, 
 sometimes four parts being mentioned, and sometimes three ; 
 but the poor and the clergy were always placed on the same 
 footing in both ecclesiastical and civil enactments 
 
 pp. 108 — 117 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE METROPOLITAN. 
 
 The custom of holding periodical meetings of neighbouring bishops 
 led to the systematizing of such conferences by requiring them 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 to be held, as similar civil meetings were held, on the lines of 
 the provinces of the Roman Empire, with the bishop of the 
 metropolis of the province as their president. The system 
 spread from the East to the West, but with the decay of the 
 Empire in the West it tended to fade away . pp. 122 — 127 
 The revival of the system was due to Boniface, and the 
 development of it to Charles the Great. The metropolitans 
 became not only heads of the Church, but also great officers of 
 state. As such they pressed their personal authority. The 
 suffragan bishops were made to feel a subordination which 
 ultimately produced a reaction. The Roman see supported 
 the bishops against the metropolitans, and the pseudo-Isidorian 
 decretals were the successful instrument by which bishops and 
 metropolitans alike were subordinated to Rome. Some powers 
 afterwards came back to metropolitans as papal delegates, and 
 these have to some extent remained, even when the check of the 
 Roman see has been withdrawn . . . pp. 128 — 135 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 NATIONAL CHURCHES. 
 
 National Churches grew out of.the same causes which had produced 
 provincial Churches. The grouping of Christian communities 
 according to the lines of Roman provinces passed into the 
 grouping of them on the more shifting lines of the newly 
 formed kingdoms of Western Europe. The assemblies which 
 took the place of the provincial assemblies were as much civil 
 as ecclesiastical, and out of them came the idea of the nation 
 as constituting not only a political, but also an ecclesiastical unit 
 
 pp. 139—144 
 These points are shown (1) by the fact that the assemblies 
 were summoned by kings, and not by bishops ; (2) by the fact 
 that they consisted of both clergy and laity ; (3) by the fact that 
 their resolutions refer to spiritual and ecclesiastical as well as 
 to secular and civil subjects .... pp. 139 ir 4 
 
CONTENTS. xiii 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE CANONICAL RULE. 
 
 Heathenism died hard, and the Christian clergy were for a long 
 time degraded by contact with it. There is clear evidence that 
 in the eighth century the level of morality and discipline was 
 low. A reaction against current practices came from monastic- 
 ism. Clergy-houses were established, and the majority of the 
 clergy were compelled to live in them according to a common 
 rule of life. The system ultimately became compulsory, and 
 the rule of life was promulgated by the civil power. It aimed 
 (i) at discipline ; (2) at edification and instruction. The first 
 of these was mainly enforced by the penitential system ; out of 
 the second grew many of the schools and universities of the 
 middle ages pp. 157 — 172 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE CATHEDRAL CHAPTER. 
 
 The clergy of a city, who then lived together in a common building 
 and under a common rule, were in the first instance only the 
 clergy of the bishop's church, living under the bishop's eye. 
 In course of time those who thus lived together, though living 
 near the bishop's church, ceased to live in the bishop's house, 
 and came both to be independent and to have an internal 
 organization of their own. I. They came to be independent 
 of the bishop, because they had a right to acquire and hold 
 property : hence (a) they acquired a corporate character ; (<5) 
 their numbers were limited ; (V) the property was subdivided 
 and assigned to individual clerks and their successors; (d) the 
 membership of a clergy-house became a position of dignity and 
 emolument, and the duties of the office came to be assigned to 
 deputies. The result was a practical subversion of the purpose 
 for which both clergy and clergy-houses existed pp. 176 — 182 
 2. They came to have a separate internal organization, 
 whence the modem dean, canons, and prebendaries , 
 
 pp. 183—190 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 THE CHAPTER AND THE DIOCESE. 
 
 The clergy of the bishop's house, who thus came to be independent 
 of the bishop and to have an organization of their own, came 
 also in course of time to absorb the functions of the whole body 
 of the clergy of the diocese. The early distinction between 
 the clergy of the bishop's city and those of the district over 
 which the bishop had jurisdiction led to a distinction between 
 the ordinary and the occasional council of the bishop. The 
 former tended to take the place of the latter ; and the ordinary 
 administration of the diocese, which was theoretically in the 
 hands of the bishop' and the whole body of his clergy, fell first 
 into the hands of the bishop and the clergy who immediately 
 surrounded him, and at last into the hands of the bishop 
 
 alone pp. 193 — 200 
 
 The part of the original theory which survived longest was 
 the election of bishops. There was for many centuries a struggle 
 between Church and State, but where the Church was able to 
 assert its own position the election of bishops was at first by the 
 clergy and laity of the diocese, then by the clergy and laity of 
 the city ; it was only by slow degrees that the election by 
 cathedral chapters became the common rule . pp. 200 — 208 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE CHANCEL. 
 
 The multiplication of clergy-houses tended to separate the clergy 
 from the laity more than before. The separation expressed 
 itself (1) in a more complete local separation in Divine worship ; 
 (2) in a separate dress. 
 
 I. The clergy of a church came to be more numerous and 
 to require a larger space. This led to an increase in the size of 
 ■the choir. And since they were required to attend services several 
 times a day, while the rest of the church was comparatively 
 
CONTENTS. xv 
 
 deserted, the place of the clergy came to be separated from that 
 of the laity by a screen. The altar remained in its original 
 place, and this being sometimes inconvenient for the clergy, 
 another altar was placed in their own part of the church, and 
 the communion of the clergy came to be distinct from that of the 
 laity. Round the choir a passage was sometimes constructed, 
 which had the effect of further isolating it . pp.213 — 221 
 
 2. The clergy of a clergy-house came to be distinguished 
 by a special dress. Monks wore a woollen dress, but clerks 
 might wear linen and fur. In the winter their ordinary dress 
 was a fur coat ; over it in church a linen blouse was thrown, 
 the later " surplice," which thus became the distinctive mark 
 of one who, whether in holy orders or not, lived in a clergy- 
 house pp. 221 — 223 
 
 The altered place of the bishops' seat in church, which, 
 instead of being raised at the end of the apse, in -- position of 
 obvious presidency, came often to be at the end of one of the 
 rows of canons' stalls, is a visible indication of the strength of 
 the canonical system ..... pp. 223 — 225 
 
THE DIOCESE. 
 
THE DIOCESE. 
 
 r I "HE difFerences of outward form between 
 primitive and modern Christianity have 
 been a frequent theme of comment and of 
 misconception. There are some persons who 
 have endeavoured to base upon the existence 
 of such difFerences an objection against Chris- 
 tianity itself. There are others who find it 
 hard to reconcile them with their conception 
 of the Church as a Divine institution. There 
 have been, from time to time, large bodies of 
 earnest men who, being unable to see a justi- 
 fication for this or that particular point of 
 difference, have separated themselves from the 
 main body of Christians, and formed separate 
 communities, in order to restore, as they have 
 thought in their own practice the uncorrupted 
 simplicity of primitive usage. 
 
4 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 The justification of the existence of differences 
 is to be found in the nature of Christianity itself. 
 It was designed to be at once universal and 
 permanent, to embrace all races of mankind, 
 and to meet the needs of successive ages. The 
 presumption is that, this being so, it was also 
 designed to adapt its outward forms to the 
 inevitable changes of human society, and that 
 its earliest institutions were meant to be modi- 
 fied when it gathered new races of men into 
 its fold, and came into close contact with new 
 elements of human life. The presumption does 
 not run counter to any words, or to any clear 
 inference from any words, of the New Testa- 
 ment, and it has been universally accepted by 
 all Christian communities. For however much 
 Christian communities have differed among 
 themselves as to the legitimacy or expediency 
 of this or that particular change, they have all 
 accepted the fact and the necessity of change, 
 and have all diverged in greater or less degree 
 from the forms and practices of primitive 
 times. 
 
 The justification of particular differences, and 
 the justification also of those who adhere to 
 
THE DIOCESE. 
 
 the main body of Christians in spite of such 
 differences, is to be found in the course of 
 Christian history. The differences are great 
 when an ancient is put side by side with a 
 modern form. But between the ancient and 
 the modern form lies a long series of changes, 
 which are linked together by the strong bond 
 of historical continuity, and which pass into one 
 another by an almost imperceptible transition. 
 Each link in the series carries with it its own 
 justification, if it is found to be a natural and 
 inevitable result of historical circumstances, a 
 modification of an institution or a usage which 
 was forced upon a community by the needs 
 of a particular time. It is true that a change 
 which has once established itself has not gained 
 by the fact of such establishment a right to 
 perpetuity ; but on the other hand it does not 
 follow that such a modification of a Christian 
 institution should be abolished as soon as the 
 historical circumstances which gave rise to it 
 have passed away. We cannot, without risk of 
 enormous loss, and only under the rarest cir- 
 cumstances, cut the moorings which bind us to 
 the past. The ecclesiastical institutions which 
 
6 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 have come down to us are, even more than the 
 political institutions, a sacred inheritance which 
 we may legitimately endeavour to improve, but 
 which we cannot lightly abandon. 
 
 It is proposed in the present pages to take 
 some of the more prominent institutions of 
 modern Christianity, and to trace the historical 
 circumstances under the pressure of which their 
 ancient forms were gradually modified until they 
 came to be in effect what they are now. It will 
 be necessary, for this purpose, to deal mainly 
 with a period of history which has been fre- 
 quently neglected, and which having been 
 neglected has been commonly misunderstood. 
 It will be necessary, also, to deal less with our 
 own country than with the continent of Europe, 
 from which, chiefly under the influence of the 
 Roman see, many forms of our ecclesiastical 
 institutions were derived. It will be found that 
 the study of this transition period on the 
 continent of Europe, by the aid of the large 
 mass of documents which remain, will enable 
 us to account for almost all that is distinctive 
 in modern as compared with primitive Chris- 
 
THE DIOCESE. 
 
 tianity. We shall be able to see by what 
 gradual steps the congregational system of early 
 times passed into the diocesan system of later 
 times (Chapters I. and II.) ; how it came about 
 that when the officers of some communities had 
 become subordinate to the officers of other 
 communities, they yet attained a virtual inde- 
 pendence in respect of fixity both of tenure 
 and of income (Chapters III. and IV.) ; how 
 these incompletely organised and subordinate 
 communities came, no less than the bishops' 
 churches, to have a local area of jurisdiction ; 
 and how the growth of the practice of paying 
 tithes added whatever elements might have been 
 wanting to their establishment as new units of 
 organisation (Chapters V. and VI.) ; how the 
 communities came to be grouped together in 
 larger combinations on the political lines, first of 
 the Roman administration, and afterwards of the 
 newly-formed kingdoms of the West, so as to 
 form the important aggregates, or units, which 
 are known as national Churches (Chapters VII. 
 and VIII.) ; how the reaction against the decay 
 of morals, and the revival of monasticism, led 
 to the successful endeavour to create for the 
 
8 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 clergy a higher standard of living, by gathering 
 . them together into clergy-houses, and imposing 
 on them a strict rule of life (Chapter IX.) ; 
 how the clergy, thus gathered together in or 
 near the bishop's own church, came to have a 
 special internal organisation, and a special 
 relation to the other clergy of the diocese 
 (Chapters X. and XI.) ; and finally how the 
 change of organisation impressed itself on the 
 internal structure of church buildings, and how 
 the erection of chancels and chancel screens set 
 the final seal upon that separation of the officers 
 from the rest of the community which, more 
 than anything else, may be said to distinguish 
 the churches of modern from those of primitive 
 times (Chapter XII.) 
 
 The first point which will be considered is 
 that great difference between early and later 
 organisation by which, instead of each con- 
 gregation, or small group of allied congrega- 
 tions, having its complete equipment of Church 
 officers, — bishop, presbyters, and deacons, — 
 bishops ceased to be appointed except in cities 
 or county towns. 
 
THE DIOCESE. 
 
 The causes of that difference are no doubt 
 to be found in the manner in which the Roman 
 Empire decayed in the provinces of the West. 
 To the original position of the empire in those 
 provinces some parallel may be found in the 
 British rule in India; but the manner of its 
 breaking up is the more difficult to describe 
 because no approximate analogy to it exists. 
 In Gaul and Spain every important city had 
 its colony of Roman settlers, in whose hands 
 were not only the executive and judicial 
 functions of the imperial government, but also, 
 for the most part, the municipal administration. 
 In the empire of the first three centuries the 
 Roman colony formed also the centre of that 
 worship of the Emperor which, rather than 
 the worship of Jupiter and Mars, was the 
 official religion. In the later empire it formed 
 the centre and nucleus of Christianity. Like 
 the British in India, whose bishops in the 
 Presidency towns have been themselves Euro- 
 peans, surrounded for the most part by a 
 European clergy, the bishops of the chief 
 cities of the provinces of the West were 
 mainly Roman, surrounded by a Roman 
 
io GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 clergy, and, though they were not without a 
 missionary element, they ministered mainly to 
 the wants of the Roman population. Outside 
 the centres of that population they can hardly 
 be said to have existed. Here and there, on 
 the large estates of Roman owners, there was 
 a chapel for Christian service ; but the mass 
 of the Celtic peasantry was unconverted. The 
 familiar word " pagan " or " villager " comes to 
 us from this time, and indicates this feature 
 of it. Christianity was the religion of the 
 governing classes and their immediate depen- 
 dants ; it belonged to the cities and not to the 
 country; it was almost a part of the imperial 
 regime. 
 
 Upon this state of things came the slowly 
 rolling waves of Teutonic conquest. That 
 conquest was rather an amalgamation of races 
 under a Teutonic king, than a complete sub- 
 version of the existing state of society. It was 
 only little by little that the decaying estates 
 passed from the hands of Roman or Celtic to 
 those of Teutonic owners, and that the ancient 
 small free-holders became the vassals of Teu- 
 tonic lords. The only land that was seized 
 
THE DIOCESE. 
 
 was the public land. The Celts and Romans 
 still formed the mass of the population. They 
 retained their customs and their laws. The 
 framework of the imperial organisation re- 
 mained without material change. And within 
 that framework two features, the one of German 
 character and the other of German usage, pre- 
 served much that was old, and laid the foun- 
 dation of much that was to come. The one 
 feature was that the Germans loved the 
 country rather than the town, and that con- 
 sequently, though great estates changed hands, 
 the cities were left for the most part to their 
 former inhabitants. The other feature was 
 that, following their traditional usage, they 
 did not impose their own laws upon the in- 
 habitants of the territories which they con- 
 quered, but allowed each race to retain, and 
 to be judged by, its own legal code. The 
 general result was that in the cities was gathered 
 together almost all that survived of Rome; 
 the schools preserved the Roman tongue, the 
 courts preserved. Roman law, the Church 
 preserved Roman Christianity. Of all this 
 survival of Roman life, the bishop of the 
 
12 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 civitas was the centre. Round him the aris- 
 tocracy of the old Roman families naturally 
 gathered. He symbolised to them their past 
 glories and their ancient liberties. He was 
 their refuge in trouble, and their chief shield 
 against oppression. His house was not in- 
 frequently the old fratorium, the residence of 
 the Roman governor. Even his dress was that 
 of a Roman official. In him the empire still 
 lived. Nor did his position rest only upon 
 sentiment. There was in addition the power 
 which came of judicial status and of wealth. 
 His judicial status arose partly from the fact 
 which has been mentioned, that the Roman 
 law continued to be in force for Romans, 
 and partly from the fact that he was allowed 
 a right of interposition in cases in which 
 widows and orphans were concerned. He 
 came to have a seat side by side with the 
 Teutonic graf or comes, and ultimately had a 
 jurisdiction of his own. His wealth arose 
 partly from the practice of the Roman land- 
 owners, sometimes in default of heirs and 
 sometimes in spite of them, bequeathing their 
 lands to him as the head of the political party 
 
THE DIOCESE. 13 
 
 to which they belonged ; and partly from the 
 growing custom on the part of the non-Roman 
 element in the population, of endowing the 
 Church with property " in remedium anima" 
 i.e., to save their souls. The city bishop thus 
 became in a large number of instances a great 
 landowner. As such he not only was the dis- 
 penser of ample charities to the poor, but also 
 had a large number of dependants in the serfs, 
 or slaves, upon the Church lands. He was, in 
 short, a personage of such wealth and power 
 that the Frankish king, Chilperic, is reported 
 to have said more than once, " Absolutely the 
 only persons who reign are the bishops : our 
 [i.e. the royal] influence has perished, and is 
 transferred to the bishops of the cities." 1 
 
 The permanent result of this importance and 
 power of the city bishop was, that when the 
 country gradually became christianised, instead 
 of each newly formed community having its 
 complete ecclesiastical organisation, as had been 
 the case in Asia Minor and North Africa, the 
 authority of the city bishop was conceived to 
 
 1 Greg. Turon. H. F., 6, 46. 
 
14 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 extend over all the communities within the 
 district of which the city was the political 
 centre. For in the fusion of Teutonic with 
 what remained of Roman institutions, the 
 Roman civitas was taken as the centre of the 
 Teutonic gau, or county, a union of two systems 
 of administration which was aided partly by 
 the fact that even in Roman times the civitas 
 had round it a certain area or " territorium ' ' 
 (a term which is occasionally used to designate 
 the bishop's diocese of later times), and partly 
 by the fact that the gau, or county, was pro- 
 bably only the revival, or the perpetuation, of 
 an earlier Celtic division. The Roman city 
 had, as a rule, been the chief town of the 
 Celtic clan which inhabited the district ; and 
 in many instances, when the empire passed 
 away, its Celtic name revived again, e.g., Au- 
 tricum became again the (civitas) Carnutum, 
 i.e., Chartres ; Bibona became again the (civitas) 
 Cadurcorum, i.e., Cahors. It was in this way 
 that the diocese, in its modern sense, came to 
 exist ; the conception of it was Teutonic, the 
 framework was Roman : in respect of that 
 framework so completely is it a survival of the 
 
THE DIOCESE. 15 
 
 Roman administration of the West that, even 
 if no other outlines of that administration 
 remained, they could be recovered by tracing 
 those of the ecclesiastical organisation of the 
 Middle Ages. 
 
 In Germany and England the system of 
 assigning large districts to a single bishop had 
 another cause. In those countries the Roman 
 administration had had a feebler hold ; the 
 colonies of Roman Christians were fewer in 
 number and of less importance : it is probable 
 that Christianity was chiefly spread by the 
 Roman legionaries and their camp followers, 
 and that it hardly existed outside the camps 
 or garrison towns. The result was that when 
 the Roman power died, Christianity also, to a 
 great extent, faded away : though there were 
 bishops in both Germany and Britain, it is 
 extremely doubtful whether they were diocesan 
 bishops in anything like the later sense. The 
 diocesan system of Germany dates from the 
 time of Boniface in the eighth century, and 
 that of England from the time of Theodore 
 in the seventh. The bishops of both countries 
 were in the first instance missionary bishops. 
 
16 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 A large tract of country was assigned to them, 
 as it is now assigned to bishops in Africa or 
 India, for the purpose of evangelisation ; a,nd 
 when it was christianised the influence of the, 
 system which had established itself in Gaul 
 spread both over the Rhine and across, the 
 Channel. The example furnished by Gaul, or 
 Franldand as it had by this time become, pre- 
 vented the subdivision of those bishoprics a§ 
 the population became christianised. In place 
 of the subdivision of bishoprics grew up the 
 system of archdeaconries and rural deaneries, 
 which continues in the Church of England to 
 the present day. 1 
 
 It has, no doubt, been sometimes maintained 
 that the diocese in its modern sense is an in- 
 stitution of primitive times. But the recorded 
 facts are far from supporting this view. They 
 show that, in the large majority of cases, a 
 
 1 There is hardly any trustworthy account of the earliest 
 organisation of the churches of our own country except that 
 which is contained in the small tract of Loofs Antiques 
 Britonum Scotorumque ecclesia quales fuerint mores : London 
 (Nutt), 1882. The history of the English Church prior to the 
 Norman Conquest has yet to be written by an impartial 
 historian. 
 
THE DIOCESE. 
 
 bishop, presbyters, and deacons existed for every 
 Christian community. As a rule, a city had 
 but a single community, and consequently a 
 single organisation. The officers were officers 
 not of a district but of a community. Where 
 there was more than one community in a city, 
 there was, as a rule, more than one bishop (the 
 decisive passage on this point is Epiphanius, 
 Hares., lxviii., c. 7, who says that "Alexandria 
 never had two bishops as the other cities had "). 
 At Rome, where the great size of the com- 
 munity prevented its meeting together in a 
 common place of worship, the sense of oneness 
 was preserved by the practice of having only 
 one consecration of the Eucharistic elements, 
 and sending them round by the hands of mes- 
 sengers to the other congregations ; and at 
 Rome also it is probable that the Christians 
 in some of the outlying villages in the Campagna 
 were regarded as parts of the one Roman com- 
 munity. At Alexandria the communities of 
 the suburbs and of the adjoining district of the 
 Mareotis were no doubt regarded in some sense 
 independent of, though subordinate to, the city 
 bishop ; and, so far, Alexandria may be said 
 
 2 
 
1 8 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 to furnish the earliest example of a modern 
 diocese. In Syria also there were communities 
 which had not a complete organisation, and 
 which, like the outlying stations of a modern 
 Wesleyan circuit, were only visited from time 
 to time by the chief officer to whom the over- 
 sight of a district was entrusted. But these 
 exceptional cases do not vitiate the inference 
 which the mass of facts forces upon us, that 
 in the greater part of the Christian world each 
 community was complete in itself. Every town, 
 and sometimes every village, had its bishop. 
 
 All this is so much at variance with the 
 system of the Western Church in later times, 
 and especially with that of the Church of 
 England, as to be hardly credible except upon 
 the clearest evidence. The diocesan system as 
 it now exists is the effect of a series of historical 
 circumstances. It is impossible to defend every 
 part of it as being primitive, nor is it necessary 
 to do so. It is sufficient to show that it is 
 the result of successive readaptations of the 
 Church's framework to the needs of the times. 
 Behind those readaptations we may properly 
 
THE DIOCESE. 19 
 
 believe that the Holy Spirit has been working. 
 It is not necessary to believe that His action 
 in all ages is absolutely uniform. If the history 
 of the mediasval, which in all important respects 
 is also the modern, diocese be read by the light 
 of ordinary history, it will be seen to be as 
 clear an instance as could be found of the truth 
 to which in these pages we must again and 
 again refer, that God works with an economy 
 of power, and that the phenomena of the 
 Christian societies are the results of the opera- 
 tion of forces which He has planted for wide 
 and varied purposes in the hearts of men. 
 
THE DIOCESAN BISHOP. 
 
II. 
 
 THE DIOCESAN BISHOP. 
 
 T T has been shown in the preceding chapter 
 how it came about that the organisation of 
 the Christian communities in the West did not 
 follow the lines of Africa and the East ; and 
 that, instead of each newly formed community 
 having its full complement of officers, there 
 were but few bishops outside the cities or 
 county towns. The next point is to show how 
 it came about that the chief officers of one 
 community, i.e., the city bishops, came to have 
 control over the officers of other communities, 
 i.e., the presbyters and deacons in villages and 
 country towns; in other words, how the con- 
 gregational system of early Christianity passed 
 into the diocesan system of mediaeval and 
 modern times. 
 
 The common hypothesis is that the officers 
 
24 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 of newly formed communities were detached 
 from the bishop's church, and that they pre- 
 served the relation of subordination which had 
 attached to them in their original community. 
 But this hypothesis covers only a small propor- 
 tion of the facts. It is clear that there were 
 ' chapels of ease ' in the suburbs of some cities, 
 and mission stations in some outlying country 
 parts ; it is clear also that missionaries to the 
 great unconverted Teutonic races retained some 
 kind of allegiance to the church or monastery 
 which had sent them oat; but it is clear also 
 that in the greater part of Gaul and Spain the 
 majority of the communities in villages and 
 country towns recognised, or came to recognise, 
 no ecclesiastical superior. For, as a rule, such 
 communities had come into existence under 
 very different conditions from those of the 
 earlier Christian communities, whether in the 
 East or the West. They were not the free 
 associations of Christian colonies who met to- 
 gether, and elected their own officers. They 
 were formed by the owners of great estates 
 who, being themselves Romans and Christians, 
 built chapels in which they and their house- 
 
THE DIOCESAN BISHOP. 25 
 
 holds might worship, and round which the new 
 converts from paganism gradually clustered. 
 Their officers were not elected, but nominated. 
 They were appointed, paid, and dismissed by 
 the owner of the estate on which they served. 
 There was no necessary tie whatever between 
 them and the bishop of the county town. 
 
 In earlier times such a system would have 
 been impossible. All officers, whether bishops, 
 presbyters, deacons, or readers, were originally 
 officers of a particular community, and their 
 status was not recognised, except by courtesy, 
 outside that community. The idea that ordi- 
 nation confers not merely status, but character, 
 and still more the idea that such character is 
 indelible, are foreign to primitive times. A 
 Church officer who travelled with the usual 
 commendatory epistle from the community to 
 which he belonged received in any strange 
 community the honorary privileges, and pro- 
 bably also the allowances from the Church 
 funds, which were assigned in that community 
 to officers of similar rank with his own. The 
 recognition of each other's officers was, in fact, 
 one of the chief characteristics and advantages 
 
26 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 of intercommunion. But the recognition was 
 honorary only. The transference of the officer 
 of one Church to another was at first sternly 
 repressed, and afterwards conceded only under 
 stringent limitations. When allowed, it in- 
 volved reappointment, or, as it would now be 
 called, reordination. Gradually, and by the 
 operation of causes that can be traced, there 
 grew up a conception of the nature of eccle- 
 siastical office which regarded the officers of a 
 particular community as being officers also of 
 the whole body of associated communities. 
 This led to the practice of ordaining persons 
 absolute, i.e., independently of any particular 
 Church. The practice was abused and conse- 
 quently forbidden ; but, though forbidden, it 
 continued to exist : in the seventh and eighth 
 centuries the number of unattached clergy be- 
 came very large, and it was by them that the 
 detached communities of country districts and 
 the chapels on the estates of private owners 
 were mainly served. 
 
 It seems as though there was for a time a 
 real conflict between the system of congrega- 
 tional independence and that of centralised 
 
THE DIOCESAN BISHOP. 27 
 
 episcopal supervision. From the point of 
 view of those who were acquainted with the 
 canons of the Eastern councils it was a time 
 of anarchy. The danger was the greater 
 because Arian opinions were abroad ; and with 
 Arian opinions there was also a relaxation of 
 the stricter moral code of the Catholic world. 
 The picture which is given in the correspond- 
 ence of Boniface with Pope Zachary shows 
 how grave were the apprehensions of one to 
 whom not only Catholic organisation, but also 
 Catholic faith and morals, were dear. " The 
 pseudo-priests are much more numerous than 
 Catholic priests ; there are heretical pretenders, 
 calling themselves bishops and presbyters, who 
 never were ordained by any Catholic bishop, 
 deluding the people, confusing and disturbing 
 the ministries of the Church; there are false 
 vagrants, adulterers, murderers, effeminate 
 sacrilegious hypocrites ; there are treasured 
 slaves who have run away from their masters, 
 slaves of the devil transforming themselves into 
 ministers of Christ ; who, living as they please, 
 without the control of a bishop, and having 
 influential men as their protectors against 
 
28 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 bishops to prevent their wicked ways from 
 being stopped, form ■separate congregations of 
 the people who agree with them, and exercise 
 their heretical ministry not in a Catholic Church, 
 but in country places, in the cottages of pea- 
 sants, where their uneducated folly may be 
 concealed from the bishops." 1 
 
 It is obvious that if such a state of things 
 had continued the faith and discipline of 
 Western Christendom would have been very 
 different from what they have come to be. 
 Though it is with discipline rather than with 
 faith that we are at present concerned, it is 
 pertinent to point out that the victory which 
 was ultimately won was a victory not only of 
 centralisation over independency, but also of 
 Catholicism over Arianism. For both faith and 
 discipline the crisis was supreme ; and it is 
 of singular importance to note that the reforma- 
 tion which shaped the history of the West in 
 all subsequent centuries was' effected, under 
 God, by the co-operation of Church and State, 
 
 1 Letter of Pope Zachary, in a.d. 748, printed in the 
 collections of St. Boniface's letters, e.g., in Jaffe, Monumenta 
 Moguntina, p. 187. 
 
THE DIOCESAN BISHOP. 29 
 
 directly by the legislation of the Frankish 
 princes, indirectly by the influence of the see 
 of Rome. The time was singularly favourable 
 for such a co-operation. On the one hand, the 
 reign of the Merovingians was coming to an 
 end, and their successors needed the moral sup- 
 port of the Church ; they could not reckon on 
 the permanence of their alliance with the landed 
 aristocracy ; they needed some abiding internal 
 bond of cohesion for the heterogeneous elements 
 which they were endeavouring to weld into 
 a national unity ; and they found such a bond 
 in the restoration of the decaying organisation 
 of the Frankish Churches. On the other hand, 
 the position of the bishops of Rome, jn face 
 of the declining power of the Exarchate of 
 Ravenna and the aggression of the Lombard 
 kings, needed the material support which, at 
 the time, only the Frankish princes could give. 
 Both the co-operation itself, and the form which 
 it took, were due to the enthusiasm and genius 
 of our great countryman Boniface. To him 
 more than to any other single cause the main 
 features of the ecclesiastical system of the West 
 are due ; and from the lines of diocesan 
 
30 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 episcopacy which he laid down there was not 
 until the Reformation any considerable depar- 
 ture. 
 
 Those lines were in the main the revival of 
 some elements of the Eastern system, which 
 is found in its most perfect form in the canons 
 of Chalcedon. The knowledge of that system 
 was probably due to Theodore of Tarsus, who, 
 seventy years before, had reformed and re- 
 organised the Church of England. Boniface 
 had been born probably about the very year 
 (a.d. 680) in which, at the Council of Hert- 
 ford, Theodore had first brought the Eastern 
 canons into the West, and the years of his early 
 education in the south of England coincided 
 with the first freshness of the revived ideal. 
 It was consequently natural that when, towards 
 the close of his life, he was summoned by 
 Karlman to help in the reform of the Frankish 
 Church, he should have had Theodore's system 
 before his mind. However this may be, the 
 fact that the system which Boniface established 
 was not indigenous in the West, but a revival, 
 after a long period of comparative lapse, of an 
 Eastern type, is of considerable significance. 
 
THE DIOCESAN BISHOP. 31 
 
 It is the more deserving of attention because 
 of the common tendency to infer an identity 
 between Eastern and Western usages, and a 
 continuity of existence between the usages of 
 the fifth century and those of the eighth, which 
 is not only wanting in historical proof, but con- 
 trary to historical analogy. 
 
 The precise means by which the new system 
 was framed and enacted will be variously 
 described as ecclesiastical, or civil, or both, 
 according to the point of view of the narrator. 
 The enactments are to be found, without 
 variation of phrase, in the collections of Church 
 councils and in those of Frankish laws ; they 
 are quoted sometimes as ecclesiastical canons, 
 and sometimes as civil " capitularies." The 
 preamble, in almost all cases in which it has 
 survived, recites that they were made by the 
 head of the State, with the joint advice of 
 clergy and laity. It may be added that 
 although both State and Church joined in 
 prescribing and enforcing them, the frequent 
 repetition of some of the more important enact- 
 ments in successive meetings shows that they 
 were but tardily obeyed. 
 
32 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 The main features of the new system have 
 been so strongly marked on the face of 
 Christendom for more than eleven hundred 
 years, as to make it difficult for most persons 
 to conceive of a time when they did not exist. 
 They have again and again been treated as 
 part of the essence of all Christian organisation, 
 and departures from them have been treated 
 as violations of Apostolic order. Their his- 
 torical origin consequently both requires and 
 deserves a careful examination ; and it would 
 be difficult to point out a more instructive 
 collection of data for the history of ecclesiastical 
 organisation than the collections of capitularies 
 in the Monumenta Germanic Historica, as 
 edited either by Pertz or by Boretius. The 
 features in question are two : (i) the sub- 
 ordination of the clergy of a district to the 
 bishop of the county town or chief city of the 
 district ; (2) the co-ordination of the bishops 
 of a province into a single body, with the 
 bishop of the metropolis of the province at 
 their head. Of the second of these features 
 I propose to speak in a subsequent chapter, 
 confining myself at present to the first. 
 
THE DIOCESAN BISHOP. 33 
 
 The enactments which bear upon it are com- 
 plementary of each other : one series enacts 
 that a city bishop shall have jurisdiction over 
 the whole area of which the city was the 
 political centre ; the other series enacts that 
 the presbyters within that area shall recognise 
 his jurisdiction. Both series of enactments are 
 extensions of principles which had hitherto 
 been but imperfectly developed. In the earlier 
 Christian communities presbyters were subor- 
 dinate not so much to the bishop as to the 
 whole body of their colleagues ; and even in 
 the seventh century a Council of Seville 1 had 
 restored to office a presbyter who had been 
 deposed by the bishop without the consent of 
 his council. But henceforth the city bishop 
 had a personal authority over the presbyters 
 of a district. The canons of the Eastern 
 councils had been revived, and the bishop was 
 their conservator. To him the presbyters were 
 responsible ; and the presumption that this 
 responsibility was a new feature of ecclesiasti- 
 cal administration is confirmed by two facts : 
 
 1 6 Cone. Hispal., a.d. 619, c. 6. 
 
34 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 (i) that it was enforced by an oath and there- 
 fore made to assume the form not of an inherent 
 or statutory right, but of a contract ; and 
 (2) that Lull, the successor of Boniface in the 
 see of Mainz, in complaining of two presbyters 
 who had refused obedience to him, makes that 
 obedience rest on a decree of the pope to whom 
 he was writing. 1 
 
 These general enactments were supplemented 
 and enforced by provisions for active super- 
 vision. It was required, on the one hand, 
 that every presbyter should report himself once 
 a year to his bishop, and, on the other hand, 
 that the bishop should once a year visit every 
 presbyter's church. Both of these requirements 
 had already existed in some parts of the West, 
 and they were both intended partly as guaran- 
 tees against the use of heretical practices in the 
 administration of the sacraments, and partly as 
 securities for the preservation of the rights of 
 the bishop in regard to baptism. The former 
 
 1 " Cognita enim canonum auctoritate decrevistis ut omnes 
 presbyteri qui in parrochia sunt sub potestate episcopi esse 
 debeant." — Lulli, Epist. ap. S. Bonifat, Epist. No. 114, Mon. 
 Mogunt., p. 279. 
 
THE DIOCESAN BISHOP. 35 
 
 of them was specially intended to secure the 
 right of the bishop to bless the chrism which 
 was used for anointing in baptism, and the 
 holy oil which was used for anointing the sick. 
 The latter of them had several objects in view, 
 and it has also been more permanent. 
 
 (1) The first object was preaching. The 
 functions of presbyters in imperfectly organised 
 communities, as in the city Church, were mainly 
 those of administrators of the sacraments. 
 Preaching was the especial, though not the 
 exclusive, function of the bishop. It was to 
 him and not to the presbyters that the cure of 
 souls was committed ; he, and not the presby- 
 ters, was the " pastor." 
 
 (2) The second object was " confirmation," 
 i.e., the imposition of hands upon the newly 
 baptised. The original theory had been that 
 the whole Church should take part in the 
 admission of a new member, and the presence 
 of the chief officer, for whom certain parts of 
 the rite were reserved, was essential to its 
 validity. Where, as for example in Central 
 Italy, bishops were numerous and dioceses of 
 small extent, it is probable that baptism was 
 
36 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 as a rule, performed only at the bishop's church, 
 and that confirmation, as a separate rite, 
 existed only for those cases in which presbyters 
 had baptzied in an emergency. In some of the 
 most ancient rituals, baptism, confirmation, and 
 communion are successive stages in a single 
 ceremony. But this had become impossible 
 in the great country districts, with scattered 
 and detached communities, with an imperfect 
 organisation, and with constant accessions of 
 new converts from paganism. It was imprac- 
 ticable that all the new candidates for baptism 
 should make an Easter pilgrimage to the 
 county town. Consequently that which was 
 elsewhere exceptional became the rule. The 
 part of the baptismal rite which was ordinarily 
 performed by presbyters and deacons was 
 performed by them, without the presence of 
 a bishop, in a " baptismal," or, as it would now 
 be termed, a " parish," church. The part 
 which was ordinarily performed by a bishop, 
 and which in the West, though not in the East, 
 had come to be considered an inalienable function 
 of the episcopal office, was postponed until the 
 bishop's annual visit. The laying on of hands 
 
THE DIOCESAN BISHOP. 37 
 
 thus came to assume the additional importance 
 which attached to a distinct ceremony, and was 
 ultimately elevated to the rank of a separate 
 sacrament. 
 
 (3) The third object was discipline. This 
 was partly a continuation of the disciplinary 
 functions of the officers of the primitive 
 Churches, with the important difference, that 
 whereas in primitive times the bishop was only 
 the president of a disciplinary council, in later 
 times he acted alone. There are indeed traces 
 that even in his visitations the presbyters of 
 a district were at first associated with him, 
 forming a local court analogous to the court 
 which was formed by the bishop and presbyters 
 in a city; but these traces are infrequent, and 
 at last altogether disappear. For concurrently 
 with this continuation of primitive- functions 
 there was an extension to country districts of 
 the judicial functions which under the later 
 imperial administration, and afterwards under 
 the fusion of the imperial with the Teutonic 
 administrations, had become attached to the 
 office of a city bishop. The two kinds of 
 functions are often confused, and require to 
 
38 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 be distinguished from each other. It is im- 
 portant to note that, from the time of Charles 
 the Great, a bishop on his visitation tour acted 
 in a double capacity, partly as an officer of 
 the Church, preserving the ancient tradition 
 of ecclesiastical discipline, and partly as an 
 officer of the State, exercising powers with 
 which the State had armed him. In the former 
 capacity he was properly the colleague of his 
 presbyters; in the latter he acted alone. But 
 the latter capacity so far overshadowed the 
 former that the primitive tribunal of bishop 
 and presbyters ceased to exist. The bishop in 
 his visitation acted, in fact, as a commissioner 
 of the government, vested with an authority 
 which was precisely analogous to that of the 
 other commissioners by whom Charles supple- 
 mented the action of the central authority, and 
 whose existence has left its trace in our own 
 time and country in the judges of assize. The 
 bishop in his visitation was commonly invested 
 with a commission to inquire into cases of 
 murder, adultery, and other wrongdoings 
 " which are contrary to the law of God, and 
 which Christian men ought to avoid." He 
 
THE DIOCESAN BISHOP. 39 
 
 was, above all, to stamp out the remains of 
 paganism. He was to be an active agent in 
 carrying out the great policy of establishing 
 a Christian empire. In doing so he was not 
 merely to adjudge cases which might be brought 
 before him, but also to inquire into the exist- 
 ence of such cases. He was, in fact, to begin 
 that system of " inquisition " which, however 
 innocent in its original intention, afterwards 
 filled a dark page in the history of Christianity. 
 The weapon with which he was armed was in 
 the first instance the legitimate ecclesiastical 
 weapon of excommunication. Any one who 
 was found to be guilty of flagrant immorality, 
 or of practising pagan rites, was excluded from 
 the Church. And if the ecclesiastical weapon 
 failed of its effect, the bishop might resort to 
 the " secular arm." In any case the king's 
 officers were bound to help him ; and a deter- 
 mined resistance to his sentence involved the 
 severest penalties of the civil law. 
 
 Such was the origin of modern diocesan 
 episcopacy. It grew up in the Frankish 
 domain, under the legislation of the Frankish 
 
4 o GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 princes and kings, by the co-operation of 
 Church and State, at the instigation in the 
 first instance of the great missionary Boniface. 
 For some time previously the Churches in 
 outlying districts had had no recognised eccle- 
 siastical superior. They were now made 
 subject to the bishop of the county town, and 
 the bishop was required to exercise over them 
 an active supervision. It is probable that at 
 the time no other system was possible. It is 
 certain that, at least for the time, the system 
 was an enormous gain. Whatever be its 
 merits or demerits in its abstract relation to 
 Christianity, it must at least be credited with 
 the great work of having saved the Churches 
 of the West from a disintegration which would 
 have involved for the clergy a revival of 
 Arianism, and for the masses of the people a 
 relapse into paganism. 
 
THE FIXED TENURE OF THE PARISH 
 PRIEST. 
 
III. 
 
 THE FIXED TENURE OF THE PARISH 
 PRIEST. 
 
 ' I "HE gradual formation in the villages and 
 country towns of Western Europe of 
 churches with imperfect organisations, which 
 stood at first in no direct relation to the 
 bishops' churches in the old Roman munici- 
 palities, altered in several material respects the 
 conditions under which ecclesiastical offices 
 were held. In the original organisation, even 
 after it had been modified by the transference 
 to the bishop, or to the body of the clergy, 
 of many of the proper functions of the whole 
 community, the officers of a church were 
 appointed, or, in the later phrase, " ordained," 
 to their positions in that church. They could 
 not leave it except under special circumstances. 
 The loss of office in it meant loss of office 
 
44 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 altogether, nor could they lose office except 
 by the action of the body of which they were 
 members. But when, after the breaking up 
 of the Imperial system, the tie which bound 
 each officer to his own church was loosened 
 or broken, and the principle, " Once a presbyter, 
 always a presbyter," came to prevail; when the 
 officers of the communities which grew up 
 independently of the bishop's church were not 
 elected by the community, or ordained spe- 
 cially to an office in it, but nominated by the 
 founder of the church or the owner of the 
 estate on which it was built, the admission to 
 church office and the deposition from it pro- 
 ceeded upon altogether different lines. The 
 owner of a church building claimed and exer- 
 cised the right of appointing and dismissing 
 its ministers at his pleasure and without 
 reference to any other authority. In the city 
 churches the ancient rule remained ; their 
 officers were appointed by the bishop with 
 the approval of his council and of the whole 
 community ; and when once appointed they 
 could not lose their office except for mis- 
 conduct. In the country churches, on the 
 
FIXED TENURE OF THE PARISH PRIEST 45 
 
 contrary, they were simply the servants of the 
 owner, who might pay them what he pleased, 
 and send them away when he pleased, with 
 or without good cause. 
 
 It is proposed in the present chapter to show 
 how the rights or claims of owners in this 
 respect came to be limited, how a parish priest 
 came to have a fixity of tenure, and how the 
 modern rights of patronage are in their origin 
 not a usurpation by owners of the rights of the 
 Church, but a limitation by the Church of the 
 rights of owners. 
 
 It must be remembered that the mass of 
 country churches were not, in the modern sense 
 of the term, consecrated, and that those who 
 had built them retained over them the same 
 right of ownership which they had over other 
 buildings on their estates. They could sell, 
 alienate, or destroy them. They appointed 
 officers to them as they appointed farm-bailiffs. 
 There was no right of interference, either eccle- 
 siastical or civil. It is obvious that in such 
 cases discipline was impossible. There was no 
 guarantee for either soundness of faith or purity 
 of morals if a man's appointment to and tenure 
 
46 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 of office depended not upon the bishop, but 
 upon the landlord. The assertion of some 
 kind of ecclesiastical control was a vital neces- 
 sity. Just as no one could be appointed to the 
 grade of priest or deacon without the inter- 
 vention of a bishop, so it became necessary to 
 insist on the intervention of a bishop when a 
 priest or deacon was appointed to minister in 
 a particular church. But the attempt to insist 
 on it was stoutly resisted. There is probably 
 no regulation which in the course of the earlier 
 Middle Ages required such frequent re-enact- 
 ment, and which shows, by the fact of such 
 re-enactment, that it was constantly broken. 
 Charles the Great endeavoured to treat the 
 matter with a strong hand : — 
 
 " Let Your Utility be aware," he writes in 
 a circular letter or edict to his vassals and ad- 
 ministrative officers, " that there has resounded 
 in our ears an enormous presumption of some 
 of you that you do not obey your bishops as 
 the authority of the laws and canons requires ; 
 I mean that, with incredible temerity, you 
 refuse to present presbyters to bishops : nay, 
 more, you do not shrink from taking other 
 
FIXED TENURE OF THE PARISH PRIEST. 47 
 
 men's clerks, and venture to put them into 
 your churches without the bishop's consent. . . . 
 We therefore bid and require that no one 
 whatever of our vassals, from the least to the 
 greatest, venture to be disobedient to his bishop 
 in things which pertain to God. ... If any 
 one take an opposite course, let him know that 
 without doubt, unless he speedily amends his 
 ways, he will give an account thereof in our 
 presence." 1 
 
 But the rights of property, as they were then 
 conceived, were stronger than even the strong 
 arm of the emperor. Seven times was the rule 
 re-enacted in the latter years of his reign and 
 in the reign of his son ; and it reappears even 
 so late as the eleventh century in France, 
 Germany, and England. 
 
 There were several sides to the regulation. 
 In the first place, from the point of view of 
 ecclesiastical discipline, it was an assertion of 
 the claim of the main body of Christians in a 
 district, as represented by their chief officer, to 
 
 1 Karoli Epistola in Italian missa, Boretius, p. 203 : 
 Edictum pro episcopis, Pertz, i., p. 81 ; also printed among 
 the Epistola Carolina, No. 17 in Jaffe, Mon. Carolina, p. 371. 
 
48 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 control the officers of particular congregations ; 
 it was a denial of the right of Separatists or 
 Nonconformists to exist. In the second place, 
 it was a limitation of the rights of the owners 
 of property which had been dedicated to reli- 
 gious purposes. In the third place, it was a 
 safeguard for the ministers of a church against 
 the caprice or the injustice of those whom, by 
 anticipation, we may call their " patrons ; " it 
 tended to give them " fixity of tenure." 
 
 In modern times this fixity of tenure is com- 
 bined with a freehold right in both the church 
 itself and its revenues. Such a freehold right 
 in the church is of much later growth than 
 the earlier Middle Ages. Its non-existence in 
 the earlier Middle Ages is manifest by abun- 
 dant evidence. For example, (i) there are 
 many surviving documents in which men deal 
 with churches in precisely the same way as they 
 deal with their other property; they describe 
 them as their own churches or the churches 
 of their family property (" propria ecclesia,' ' 
 " ecclesia propria; hereditatis ") ; they bequeath 
 them either absolutely or with limitations, some- 
 times to one person and sometimes to several 
 
FIXED TENURE OF THE PARISH PRIEST. 
 
 49 
 
 persons. (2) There are express and repeated 
 enactments which recognise these rights of 
 owners — e.g., " Churches which have been built 
 by freemen may be transferred or sold, pro- 
 vided only that the church be not destroyed." 1 
 (3) Church writers of the time mention with 
 regret not only that churches themselves were 
 sold, but that also the gifts of several genera- 
 tions of the faithful were sold with them. 2 
 
 But although it was not until about the 
 twelfth century that the ministers of a parish 
 church began to have a right of property in the 
 church itself, they began to claim and to enjoy 
 at a much earlier period a right to its revenues. 
 The right was not conceded as a matter of 
 course. The Roman law, which recognised the 
 Christian communities as corporations with the 
 right of holding property and disposing of it, 
 recognised only a single community in each 
 city. The churches which were built within 
 the "territorium" of a city had no rights 
 distinct from the bishop's church ; the churches 
 
 1 Capit. Francofurt., a.d. 794, c. 54. 
 
 2 E. g., Agobard of Lyons, De dispensatione divinarum 
 rerum, c. 15, in Migne, Patrol. Lat., vol. civ., p. 237. 
 
 4 
 
SO GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 which were built by private persons on their 
 own land were as much their own property as 
 were the barns or cottages. The German 
 occupation of Roman lands did not change in 
 this respect the legal status of either the bishop's 
 church or other churches. The Roman law 
 continued to be of force. Indeed, it is probable 
 that the Germans had no precedent or rule for 
 the holding of property by what we should 
 now call "spiritual corporations." That is to 
 say, the bishop's church continued to hold its 
 property because it was governed by Roman 
 law ; the country churches could not hold 
 property because neither in Roman nor in 
 German law was there any precedent for their 
 doing so. 
 
 The history of the rights of parish churches 
 is the history of the assertion of a double claim, 
 on the one hand that of the church as a whole 
 against private owners, on the other hand that 
 of parish churches against the bishop. 
 
 The first of these claims seems to have 
 successfully asserted itself in the sixth and 
 seventh centuries. It is first found in the decrees 
 of Spanish councils. The Second Council of 
 
FIXED TENURE OF THE PARISH PRIEST. 51 
 
 Braga (a.d. 572, c. 6) speaks of persons 
 building churches on their property expressly 
 that they might share in the offerings, and 
 strongly forbids bishops to consecrate churches 
 so built. The Fourth Council of Toledo (a.d. 
 6.33> c. 33) tells founders of churches that they 
 have no rights in the property of the churches 
 which they have founded, but that the disposal 
 of it belongs to the bishop. The later canon 
 law on the point is based on a letter of Gregory 
 the Great to Felix of Messina, in which he 
 expressly denies to the owner any right in the 
 church, except the right of admission " which 
 is due to all Christians in common." 1 
 
 The second claim had a longer history, which 
 must be traced in greater detail. 
 
 The bishop had been from the earliest times 
 the chief administrator of Church property. 
 Even if it be not true that such administration 
 was in the primitive Church his primary 
 function, it is demonstrably true that when 
 Christianity was recognised by the State, and 
 
 ' S. Greg., M. Efiist, 2. 5, ad Felic. Messan. (quoted by 
 Gratian, c. 26, Caus. XVI., qu. 7, as from Gelasius). 
 
52 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 the churches were made capable of holding 
 property, it was regarded as an inherent and 
 important part of his office. When country 
 churches began to receive gifts of land, the city 
 bishop was the only person who could legally 
 hold them. In some cases he was not slow to 
 claim them. However strongly a man might 
 desire to specially benefit the church of his own 
 district, and however much the ministers of 
 such a church might need support, the city 
 bishop was legally entitled to claim whatever 
 was offered. The most conclusive evidence of 
 this is that which is afforded by the Council 
 of Carpentras in a.d. 527. "A complaint has 
 reached us,' ' say the Acts of that council, " that 
 the offerings which are bestowed by certain of 
 the faithful on parish churches are so taken 
 possession of by some bishops that little or 
 nothing is left to the churches on which they 
 were bestowed ; it seems to us to be fair and 
 reasonable that if the church of the city over 
 which the bishop presides is so well supplied 
 that, by the favour of Christ, it does not want 
 anything, the offerings to parish churches should 
 reasonably be allotted to the clergy of those 
 
FIXED TENURE OF THE PARISH PRIEST. 53 
 
 churches, or for their repair ; if, on the other 
 hand, it appears that the bishop has many 
 expenses and but little property, only so much 
 should be reserved for the parish churches as 
 is reasonably sufficient for the clergy, or for 
 their repair, and the bishop should claim the 
 surplus for himself." This canon fully re- 
 cognises the legal right of the bishop, but it 
 marks the transition to the later state of things 
 in its recommendation that the exercise of that 
 right should be limited to cases in which the 
 necessities of his church required it. But the 
 reasonable course which this canon recommends 
 was not always taken. A hundred years later 
 the Fourth Council of Toledo (a.d. 633, c. 33) 
 applies to the action of bishops in the matter 
 the apostolic words, " Avarice is the root of all 
 evils." " Many of the faithful, for the love of 
 Christ and the martyrs, build churches in the 
 dioceses of bishops, and endow them with offer- 
 ings, but the bishops take the offerings away 
 and convert them to their own uses ; the 
 consequence is that the ministers fail, since they 
 lose their means of support, and the ruins of 
 decaying churches are not repaired." Twenty- 
 
54 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 two years later a council of the same province 
 (the Ninth Council of Toledo, c. i.) took the 
 stronger course of empowering the heirs of the 
 founder of a church to watch over the proper 
 appropriation of its funds, and to bring an avari- 
 cious bishop before the metropolitan or the king. 
 But gradually, and before the last-mentioned 
 councils, a rule had been growing up that the 
 bishop should have a third of the revenues of 
 parishes. There are many traces of the rule 
 in subsequent times, but there is not enough 
 evidence to show to what extent it was generally 
 observed. In North Italy at the beginning of 
 the ninth century there was an express enact- 
 ment against giving any part of the tithes of 
 parishes to the bishop ; but the custom is found 
 several years later on the Rhine and in France. 
 At the great ecclesiastical conference of Worms 
 in 829, and also in the Council of Paris in the 
 same year, the right of the bishop to a fourth, 
 not a third, of parish churches is recognised ; 
 but the bishops are urged to remit their share 
 unless they are in special need of it. 1 Like 
 
 1 Pertz., M.G.H., i., p. 335, c. 5 ; 6 Cone. Paris., c. 31. 
 
FIXED TENURE OF THE PARISH PRIEST. 55 
 
 almost all attempts to fix an unvarying rule for 
 constantly varying circumstances, this attempt 
 to give the bishop a definite share in the 
 property of outlying churches became unwork- 
 able. The growing importance and wealth of 
 most city churches made such a share unnecessary 
 as part of a bishop's revenue ; and at the same 
 time the extinction of the remains of paganism, 
 the inclusion of almost all the inhabited parts 
 of the West in the network of the parochial 
 system, and the consequent large increase in the 
 number of the parochial clergy, provided ample 
 channels for the expenditure of the local funds 
 in the localities from which they were derived. 
 The fixed ratio of revenues was replaced by 
 presents in recognition of the bishop's rights. 
 Such presents tended to be rather involuntary 
 than voluntary, and not unfrequently became 
 oppressive exactions. Sometimes they were 
 forbidden by law, and sometimes they were 
 regulated ; for example, in the Parliament which 
 was held by Charles the Bald at Toulouse in 
 844, it was enacted that a bishop should not 
 require from a parish more than a bushel of 
 barley, a keg of wine, and a pig worth six 
 
56 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 pence, or six pence in lieu of it. 1 In time these 
 payments in kind were all commuted for money 
 fees, and the ancient right of a bishop to a third 
 of all parochial revenues has dwindled in 
 modern times to the payment of small fees to 
 an archdeacon or a bishop on the occasion of 
 his visitation. 
 
 In this way the detached congregations, after 
 having been brought into the ecclesiastical 
 system, retained or regained no small amount 
 of liberty ; in this way also the ministers of such 
 congregations, after having been brought under 
 the control of the city bishop, obtained, on the 
 one hand, a tenure which was not dependent on 
 the caprice of their patron, and, on the other 
 hand, revenues which were not dependent on 
 the caprice of their bishop. " From the begin- 
 ning it was not so ; " the changed circumstances 
 of Western Europe compelled a change in the 
 relations of ministers to their congregations, and 
 
 1 Karoli II., Synodus apud Tolosam, c. 2, Pertz, i., p. 378, 
 "unum modium ordei atque unum modium vim . . . etfrisc- 
 hingam sex valentem denarios aut sex pro ea denarios : " the 
 whole might be commuted for a payment of " duos solidos." 
 
FIXED TENURE OF THE PARISH PRIEST, n 
 
 of congregations to one another. The eccle- 
 siastical system was elastic enough to cover new 
 needs ; and, being elastic, it changed its form. 
 The parochial system grew up underneath the 
 cover of the episcopal system, and as an exten- 
 sion of it. The assignment of separate revenues 
 to the separate parishes prevented an accumula- 
 tion of enormous funds in the hands of the city 
 bishops, which would have been sufficiently 
 dangerous to the State to have brought about 
 their overthrow. The virtual independence of 
 parish ministers, so long as they conformed to 
 general rules, combined the advantages which 
 flow from the multiplication of centres of 
 activity with those which flow from centralised 
 administration. It would be a needless and 
 probably also an untrue optimism to maintain 
 that whatever happened was the ideal best ; but 
 it is none the less clear that the result was not 
 an abnormal outgrowth which needed to be up- 
 rooted, but a legitimate outcome of the action 
 of the ordinary forces of our moral nature within 
 the Christian sphere. 
 
THE BENEFICE. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE BENEFICE. 
 
 T N the sixth and seventh centuries the 
 property of the Church in the West had 
 enormously increased. The number of churches 
 and monasteries was multiplied, and every 
 church and monastery came to have property 
 of its own. With the spread of Christianity 
 in the country districts, and also with the 
 tendency on the part of the survivors of Roman 
 families, in the countries which had been most 
 thickly planted with Roman colonies, to make 
 the Church their heir, there grew up a strong 
 revival of the belief that the gift of money to 
 the Church, and thereby to the clergy and 
 the poor, was a sure means of saving the soul. 
 No small proportion of the deeds of grant 
 which remain, and of the " formulas " or draft 
 forms for such deeds, recite by way of preamble 
 
62 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 that the grant is made by the donor " for the 
 benefit of my soul, and that I may obtain 
 pardon of my sins." The result was that the 
 Church became the richest landowner in 
 Western Europe. 
 
 The modes in which gifts were made to the 
 Church were of various kinds, and as they all 
 have a bearing upon subsequent times, it is 
 necessary to distinguish them from one 
 another. 
 
 i. The simplest and most general mode was 
 that of donation in a man's lifetime. This was 
 effected by word of mouth before witnesses ; 
 and a written instrument, though not essential 
 to its validity, yet was a convenient record of 
 the fact. In Teutonic communities it is pro- 
 bable that no other mode of gift was at first 
 recognised by law ; donation to a church by 
 will seems to have no legal effect, and even if 
 it had, the Church naturally preferred an 
 irrevocable gift during a man's life to the 
 uncertainty of a testamentary disposition. 
 
 i. Where Roman law prevailed, that is to 
 say, among the descendants of the Roman 
 population, even where Teutonic law was the 
 
THE BENEFICE. 63 
 
 general law of the land, donations by will 
 continued to exist. Such donations were 
 revocable during the lifetime of the donor, and 
 seem to have been not always respected after 
 his death, inasmuch as some extant forms of a 
 will bind both the donor and his heirs by 
 a penalty not to revoke or disregard it. In 
 course of time donations by will came to be 
 recognised in Teutonic communities ; but the 
 fact of their Roman origin is shown by their 
 being- drawn not after Teutonic but after 
 Roman forms of donation ; and the fact of 
 their slow recognition is indicated, among other 
 proofs, by the expressions of doubt which Charles 
 the Great referred to his adviser Alcuin. 1 
 
 3. It was probably in consequence of this 
 want of power to prevent revocation during a 
 man's lifetime and of the presumption of 
 Teutonic law in favour of his heirs after his 
 death that a third mode of donation became 
 more frequent than any other, namely, donation 
 with reservation to the donor of the usufruct 
 of the property during his lifetime. It is. 
 
 Alcuini Epist, 253, ed. JafK (127, ed. Froben.) in the 
 Mon. Carolina, p. 806. 
 
64 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 probable that this mode was in the first 
 instance not recognised by law, inasmuch as the 
 element in the transfer of property to which the 
 Northern races attached most importance, and 
 which underlies the modern " induction " of a 
 clerk to his benefice, was necessarily absent from 
 it. But in the extant forms of deed in which 
 property is thus given to the Church there is 
 an express stipulation that the donation shall 
 hold good in spite of the absence of this 
 corporal surrender of the property; and some- 
 times the donor requires that if his heirs bring 
 a lawsuit for the recovery of the property, they 
 shall pay a heavy fine. Sometimes the legal 
 difficulties of this mode of donation were over.- 
 come by making the donation absolute, and 
 adding a petition, which the new owner, that is 
 the Church, was morally, if not legally, bound 
 to grant, that the original owner should continue 
 to enjoy the use of the property without power 
 to alienate it, and with the obligation to keep it 
 in good order. 
 
 It was natural that this tendency to endow 
 churches and monasteries with lands on a large 
 scale, and thus to create a power which might 
 
THE BENEFICE. 65 
 
 be formidable to the State, should meet with 
 checks on the part of the secular authorities. 
 We consequently find that both in the Teutonic 
 codes, and in the adaptations of the civil law 
 which were in force among the Roman element 
 in Teutonic countries, stringent safeguards and 
 limitations were introduced in the interests of 
 a man's family. In some cases the right of 
 donation was limited to those who had no 
 children ; in others no donation was valid 
 unless it had received the sanction of the head 
 of the State ; any person who had a claim upon 
 an estate had to be consulted before it could be 
 alienated, and if his consent were not obtained, 
 he could bring a suit for its restitution. The 
 existence of this tendency to put difficulties in 
 the way of the acquisition of property by the 
 Church is also shown by the frequent enact- 
 ments of councils in reference to it. The 
 penalty of excommunication was constantly 
 imposed upon those who so far " despised their 
 own souls " as to endeavour to retain what their 
 relatives had bequeathed to the " servants of 
 God " and the poor. 1 
 
 1 E.g., the Second Council of Lyons, in a.d. 567, c. 1, " de 
 
 5 
 
66 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 But in spite of all difficulties and restrictions, 
 the landed property of the Church became 
 enormous. The bishops in a large proportion 
 of cases were the chief landowners in their 
 dioceses. They kept the administration of the 
 property for the most part in their own hands, 
 with the help of a vice-lord, " vicedominus," 
 or " economus," who is frequently mentioned 
 in connection with the archdeacon, the latter 
 being the bishop's deputy in spiritual, as the 
 former was in temporal affairs. The lands 
 were worked by serfs and slaves. Of this there 
 are abounding proofs. The slaves were slaves 
 in the strict sense of the term, " chattels " who 
 passed with the land from one owner to another. 
 It was not until long afterwards that the public 
 opinion of the Church declared itself against 
 slavery in any form ; and it may reasonably be 
 inferred that the condition of church-slaves was 
 easier than that of the slaves of private owners. 
 
 quibus rebus si quis animtz sua contemptor aliquid alienare 
 prsesumpserit, usque ad emendationis suae vel restitutionis 
 rei ablatse a consortio ecclesiastico vel omnium Christianorum 
 convivio labeatur alienus " : other similar enactments are 
 Cone. Agath., a.d. 504, c. 4 ; 1 Cone. Arvern., a.d. 535, c. 14 ; 
 4 Cone. Aurel., a.d. 541, c. 14 ; 3 Cone. Paris, a.d. 557, c. I. 
 
THE BENEFICE. 67 
 
 One reason for this inference is that such slaves 
 could become clerks without the difficulties 
 which impeded the ordination of ordinary 
 slaves. There was probably also a more 
 frequent manumission of such slaves ; and 
 their condition when made free was the better 
 because they were under the special protection 
 of the Church to which they had belonged. 
 It may be interesting to quote one of the extant 
 draft forms of manumission : — 
 
 " In the name of God, N., though a sinner, 
 yet, by the grace of God, bishop, wishing to 
 obtain the mercy of God, who says, ' Blessed 
 are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy,' 
 and whose Divine word admonishes us by His 
 prophet, ' Let the oppressed go free and break 
 every burden ' (Isa. lviii. 6), with the consent 
 of our brethren and fellow-citizens, . . . have 
 agreed that we ought to pay a tithe of all the 
 slaves of our church. Therefore we set free 
 from the present day M., a slave of our church, 
 whom we know, as the prophet says, to be 
 1 oppressed,' so that from henceforth he may 
 live for himself, act for himself, work for him- 
 self, become really free, as if he had been born 
 
68 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 of free parents, and have granted to him all 
 the property which he either has or can acquire. 
 And, moreover, if he uses the defence and pro- 
 tection of our Church, let him know that it is 
 given him not to impose slavery upon him 
 anew, but to defend him." 1 
 
 As time went on, and the property became 
 still larger, the personal administration of 
 property by bishops became, to a great extent, 
 impracticable. There grew up a system which 
 has left its mark not only upon the whole 
 Western Church, but also upon the whole 
 economical condition of Europe to the present 
 day. It was the system of lending lands, with 
 or without the payment of a rent, and for 
 a definite or indefinite period, to persons who 
 undertook to cultivate them and enjoyed the 
 usufruct of them, and who came to form an 
 intermediate class between the owner and the 
 actual tillers of the soil. The usufruct of church 
 lands was sometimes thus given to laymen and 
 sometimes to clerks. When given to clerks, it 
 was given without the payment of a rent in 
 
 1 Formula Bituricenses, No. 8, in K. Zeumer's Formula 
 Merowingici et Karolini ami, pars prior, p. 171. 
 
THE BENEFICE. 69 
 
 return : the property was assigned for their 
 maintenance during their lifetime, subject to a 
 power of recall by the bishop in case of their 
 misbehaviour. The clerks were still in theory 
 paid out of the funds of the bishop's church ; 
 but instead of receiving money or food, they 
 received a farm. This was the case also with 
 the canons of a cathedral when the canonical 
 system began ; and hence the later use of 
 " praebenda," which originally meant " rations," 
 and ultimately was applied to the estate which 
 produced the rations. 
 
 When church lands were lent to a layman 
 they were sometimes, even if infrequently, lent 
 without the payment of a rent, but more com- 
 monly, and, after the middle of the eighth 
 century, invariably, lent on condition of a rent 
 being paid to the Church. The amount of such 
 rent was often very small ; but it was at any 
 rate a recognition of ownership. In some cases 
 the land was thus lent to powerful men to 
 secure their support, or to the relatives of a 
 bishop or abbot as a private favour. The 
 records of the Abbey of Fontenelle, for example, 
 relate that a certain Abbot Teutsind (734 — 738) 
 
70 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 gave almost a third of the estates to his relatives 
 and to courtiers. 1 There are deeds extant 
 which provide for the payment of what was 
 obviously the nominal rent of a few pounds 
 of wax ; and the fact that the system was some- 
 times abused is also indicated by the existence 
 of clauses in deeds of gift providing that the 
 land given shall be used for the benefit of the 
 Church, and shall not be lent by the bishop to 
 secular persons. One of the many survivals of 
 the system in modern times is the payment of 
 rent on saints' days. It was on certain great 
 festivals, and especially the festival of the patron 
 saint, that persons would naturally go from 
 country parts to the central church of the dis- 
 trict, and it was, therefore, convenient that on 
 those occasions they should take their rent with 
 them ; hence it was that " Lady-day," being the 
 festival of one to whom a large proportion of 
 churches came to be dedicated, became a com- 
 mon rent day. 
 
 Sometimes this lending of church lands was 
 not voluntary, but compulsory. The head of 
 
 1 Gesta Abbat. Fontanett., c. 10, in Pertz, M.G.H., Scriptt., 
 ii., p. 282. 
 
THE BENEFICE. 71 
 
 the State resumed possession of them, and 
 assigned them to his soldiers. In all cases rent 
 was paid for such lands, nor was the proceeding 
 held in the first instance to be objectionable. 
 The most important instance of it was resolved 
 upon at the Council or Parliament of Lestines 
 (" Concilium Liftinense ") in 743, at which 
 Boniface was present. Neither he nor Pope 
 Zachary, who wrote on the subject, seem to 
 have complained of it, or considered that it was 
 otherwise than necessary. But by one of those 
 misunderstandings of history which gather force 
 as they roll on, this compulsory tenancy came 
 to be viewed as a robbery ; the facts that the 
 exigencies of State were imperative, and that 
 rent was paid for the use of the lands, were for- 
 gotten, and the supposed author of the supposed 
 spoliation, Charles Martel, was pictured by the 
 writers of the Middle Ages as undergoing the 
 fiercest of all the tortures of hell. 
 
 Land thus rented was said to be held " ad 
 precariam," or " ad beneficium." The essence 
 of a " precaria " was that it was revocable ; 
 it was ordinarily renewed on petition every five 
 years, and the ordinary forms of such petition 
 
72 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 have been preserved. The custom of so renew- 
 ing it was probably a survival of the Roman 
 custom of renewing the leases of the public 
 land every five years, i.e., with every new 
 " censor," a custom which had continued to 
 exist even after the censorship had ceased to 
 be active, and which seems to have spread 
 also to the lands held by temples or religious 
 societies, e.g., those of the Vestal Virgins. In 
 Roman law there was a distinction between 
 this tenure by " precaria " and tenure by " be- 
 neficium ; " but the two kinds of tenure did 
 not greatly differ, and in the earlier Middle 
 Ages the two terms were used as convertible. 
 For the custom of renewing by petition gradu- 
 ally died out. A form of grant came to be 
 used which specified that it should be deemed 
 to be renewed from time to time without any 
 process of actual renewal, and this was suc- 
 ceeded by the custom of allowing the beneficial 
 use of land to continue during the lifetime of 
 the beneficiary. It was natural that this system 
 should easily lapse into a system of continuing 
 the lease to a man's heirs. A beneficiary came 
 to look upon his land as passing by a kind 
 
THE BENEFICE. 73 
 
 of right from father to son ; it is clear that in 
 most respects he could do as he pleased with 
 it, the words of the extant deeds " saving the 
 right of the saint " {i.e., the patron saint of the 
 church to which the land belonged) being in- 
 serted as the only saving clause. 
 
 When, on the contrary, the use of church 
 lands was given to clerks, though they had 
 full legal possession during their lifetime, the 
 lands reverted to the Church at their death. 
 
 In course of time the word " beneficium " 
 ousted the word " precaria," and became the 
 common expression which ultimately covered 
 all permanent sources from which church 
 officers derived emolument. It was applied 
 not only to canonries and parish cures, but also 
 to bishoprics and the popedom itself. Its main 
 interest for us is in its relation to parishes; and 
 the history of that relation is especially de- 
 serving of study, now that the whole question 
 of the endowments of the Church is coming 
 into the field of active discussion. The history 
 is necessarily complicated, inasmuch as it not 
 only covers a large period of time, but also 
 embraces many various elem^ *" r - f J;<E «-«nt 
 
74 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 systems of law. But although it is complex, 
 the following distinctions will perhaps help to 
 make it clear: — 
 
 i. Sometimes a bishop assigned part of the 
 lands which had been given to him or to his 
 church to the church of a particular locality, 
 or, in other words, to a parish. In such cases 
 there was no one to interfere with his free right 
 to nominate as the minister of that church, 
 and consequently as the holder of the lands 
 so assigned, any clerk whom he pleased. This 
 came to be technically known as "collatio 
 libera," and afterwards simply as " collatio." 
 The clerk so presented held the lands so as- 
 signed as a " beneficium " of which he had 
 full legal possession, but which reverted at 
 his death to the bishop who had presented 
 him. 
 
 2. Sometimes lands were assigned in a simi- 
 lar way by other persons, especially by the 
 owners of the land on which a church had 
 been built. In the first instance, churches so 
 built, as has been previously mentioned, were 
 regarded as being as much a man's own 
 property as were farm-buildings: the owner 
 
THE BENEFICE. 75 
 
 appointed whomsoever he pleased to minister, 
 and assigned him what funds he pleased for 
 his support. In the second stage of the history, 
 the owner was compelled to present any one 
 whom he so nominated as minister to the bishop 
 of the central town of the district. In the 
 third stage, the right of ownership was further 
 limited by the growing practice of formally 
 setting apart the churches built upon private 
 lands for the service of God, in other words 
 of "consecrating" them. In the next stage, 
 there grew up with the practice of consecration 
 the practice of requiring that a church, before 
 being consecrated, should have a permanent 
 source of income sufficient for the support of 
 its presbyter. The most common of such re- 
 quirements was that of " unus mansus integer/' 
 mansus being, in the land-measure of the time, 
 a plot of ground sufficient to support one 
 person besides the two serfs who were employed 
 to cultivate it. In the first instance the owner 
 of the land upon which the church was built, 
 and of the lands which before its consecration 
 were assigned for its support, i.e., in the 
 language of early mediaeval law the " patronus," 
 
76 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 or " senior " (of which terms " patron " has 
 almost exclusively survived in England, and 
 " seigneur " in France), not only nominated a 
 clerk to the benefice, but also " inducted " him 
 when the bishop's consent to his nomination 
 had been given. In this fact lay the roots of 
 the great " investiture " controversy of the 
 eleventh and twelfth centuries. In the final 
 stage, the rights of private owners in regard to 
 the induction, or, as it was otherwise termed, 
 the " investiture" of a clerk, passed to the 
 bishop, who thereby became, in the strict sense, 
 the feudal lord of all the benefices in his 
 diocese. The rights of the owner came to be 
 limited to simple nomination; when the clerk 
 whom he had nominated was accepted by the 
 bishop, the rights of the owner were in fact 
 suspended until the next vacancy. The homage 
 which was paid for ecclesiastical as for other 
 benefices was paid, not to him, but to the 
 bishop; the oath of obedience which a secular 
 lord exacted from his vassal was exacted by a 
 bishop from the holders of benefices in his 
 diocese; and the feudal relation of a bishop to 
 his beneficed clergy came almost altogether to 
 
THE BENEFICE. Tl 
 
 supersede the original spiritual relation of 
 ordainer and ordained. 
 
 It was by these complex processes, and by 
 the slow evolution of time, that the modern 
 ecclesiastical benefice came into being. In it 
 probably more than in any other existing in- 
 stitution the forms and features of feudalism 
 survive. If it be not apostolic or even primi- 
 tive, it at least belongs to a great series of 
 historical growths which cannot be wholly set 
 aside, either on the ground that the conditions, 
 which gave rise to them have ceased to exist,, 
 or on the gjpund that there are areas of human 
 life in which they fail to do useful work. On 
 the other hand, the fact that the phases through 
 which the institution has passed have been 
 many in number, and various in kind, may 
 properly suggest the question whether, now 
 that the present phase has lasted for several 
 centuries, and also now that modern life has 
 altered some of the conditions under which that 
 phase was formed, there may not be desirable 
 modifications of it which, without altering its 
 essence or breaking the historical continuity of 
 its life, may yet give it a new force for our 
 
78 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 modern needs, and thereby a new strength for 
 accomplishing the work which the Church has 
 yet to do in the human society of both the 
 present and the future. 
 
THE PARISH. 
 
V. 
 
 THE PARISH. 
 
 " I "HE word parish (rrapoi/aa) originally meant 
 - 1 - a " sojourning." It is applied in the New- 
 Testament (Acts xiii. 17), as it is constantly- 
 applied in the Septuagint version of the Old 
 Testament, to the sojourning of the Jews in 
 Egypt. By a natural and not uncommon 
 transition of meaning, it came to be used, in 
 a concrete sense, of a colony of sojourners in 
 the midst of an alien population, such as the 
 Jews were in all the great cities of the Roman 
 Empire. It came hence to be used of the 
 early Christian communities. The Christians 
 of Rome or Corinth formed a colony of 
 sojourners. The only uncertainty which at- 
 taches to the use of the word in its relation 
 to Christians is whether it was simply a trans- 
 ference from its similar use in relation to the 
 
 6 
 
82 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 Jews, or whether the early Christians may not 
 also have used it, as St. Peter uses it (i Peter 
 i. 17 ; compare ii. 11), of the temporary and 
 transitory life on earth in contrast to the abiding 
 life of heaven. 
 
 The TTapoiK.i<x was thus not a local area, but 
 an aggregate of persons. It does not appear 
 to have been applied to a local area until the 
 Church was fully organised, and it was then 
 applied to the area over which a bishop presided, 
 that is to say, to what is now called a "diocese." 
 Such transitions of meaning are not uncommon 
 in the history of language, and the term so far 
 presents no special difficulty. Its application 
 to smaller areas of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, to 
 a " parish " in its modern sense, is a more 
 complicated question, and one which does not 
 admit of a ready answer. The points which 
 have been considered in previous chapters, the 
 building of churches which were not bishops' 
 churches, in towns and country districts, the 
 endowment of such churches with money and 
 lands, the union of the churches of a county in 
 common subordination to the bishop of the 
 county town, are far from accounting for the 
 
THE PARISH. 83 
 
 phenomenon which begins to present itself in 
 the earlier part of the Middle Ages^each that) of 
 such churches was conceived to have a definite 
 area of jurisdiction. 
 
 There is a preliminary question which is not 
 without interest. How was it that the con- 
 ception of such an arrangement came to exist ? 
 How was it that the farmers and peasantry 
 who resorted to a certain building for common 
 worship came not only to consider themselves 
 as forming a distinct ecclesiastical society, but 
 also to regard the district in which they lived 
 as being attached by a special tie to the building 
 in which they worshipped ? It is probable 
 that the idea came into Christianity from out- 
 side. 1 Grimm shows that in pre-Christian 
 Germany districts were attached to heathen 
 temples. Von Maurer in his account of the 
 conversion of the Norse races says that in 
 Iceland, in heathen times, not only was the 
 leader of a new settlement bound to set apart 
 land for a temple, but also the inhabitants of 
 the settlement were bound to maintain the 
 
 1 Deutsche Mythologie, 2te Ausg., Bd. i., 76. 
 
84 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 temple, and to provide the wherewithal for the 
 sacrifices. 1 The inference is that the idea of 
 the mediaeval and modern parish is Teutonic 
 in its origin, and the inference is corroborated 
 by the fact that parishes are first found in 
 Teutonic lands. They have sometimes been 
 traced, like many other ecclesiastical, institutions, 
 to Rome. But the Roman institution of "tituli" 
 is of another kind. The essence of that institu- 
 tion was riot the formation of definite areas of 
 administration and jurisdiction, but rather the 
 assignment of certain churches to certain presby- 
 ters, and of certain funds to certain churches. 
 The only early division of Rome into ecclesias- 
 tical areas was its division into seven wards or 
 " regions," one of which was assigned to each 
 of the seven deacons, for purposes of charitable 
 relief. There is an even less tenable theory, 
 which supposes that it was an early practice 
 for most bishops to parcel out their dioceses 
 into districts, as an Act of Parliament parcels 
 out England into separate and clearly defined 
 
 1 Die Bekehrung des Norwegischen Stammes zum Chris- 
 tenthum, Bd. i., 239; cf. Geschichte des Dorfverfassung in 
 Deutschland, Bd. i., no. 
 
THE PARISH. ■ 85 
 
 areas for local government or parliamentary 
 voting ; but this theory is a mere guess, and so 
 far from being supported by recorded facts, is 
 altogether inconsistent with them. 
 
 But although the basis of the arrangement 
 had been laid in Teutonic lands by pre-Christian 
 agencies, the superstructure is wholly Christian, 
 and may be traced mainly to the operation of 
 two sets of causes, that is, partly to the regula- 
 tions respecting the celebration of baptism, and 
 partly to the regulations respecting the payment 
 of tithes. 
 
 In early times and in the great city churches 
 baptism had been an important function. It 
 was ordinarily celebrated only once a year. 
 The whole organised community, bishops, pres- 
 byters, deacons, and people, took part in it. In 
 the disorganisation which had taken place in 
 the Transalpine countries of the West, two 
 things had happened in respect to it. In the 
 first place, the elaborate ceremonial had almost 
 wholly passed away, and the liberty which had 
 once been exceptional had become the rule, 
 that it might be celebrated at any time and 
 anywhere. In the second place, Arian practices 
 
86 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 prevailed so widely, and Arian clergy were so 
 numerous in country districts, that Arian rather 
 than Catholic baptism had become very general. 
 There was a consequent call for regulations 
 which should, on the one hand, restore the old 
 ceremonial and limit the use of it to certain 
 seasons, and, on the other hand, afford some 
 guarantee that the Catholic formula should be 
 used. With the second of these regulations we 
 are not now immediately concerned ; the first 
 of them has an important bearing on the history 
 of parishes. 
 
 The regulation took the form of requiring 
 that baptisteries should only exist in places in 
 which the bishop appointed them. It was first 
 made in one of the earliest councils of the 
 Carlovingian Reformation, that which was held 
 by Pippin at Vernon, in Normandy, in 755. 1 
 The regulation had the effect of dividing all 
 churches outside the bishop's own church into 
 two classes, those in which baptisms could be 
 performed and those in which they could not. 
 In some respects the history of baptismal 
 
 1 Cone. Vernense, c. 7 ; Pertz, i., 24 ; Boretius, p. 34. 
 
THE PARISH. 87 
 
 churches for the following half-century is 
 obscure ; when they reappear into the clear 
 light they do so in connection with tithes. It 
 is evident that baptismal churches claimed a 
 superior importance over the other country 
 churches ; it is also evident that they claimed 
 a share in the newly sanctioned payment of 
 tithes. It was natural that they should begin 
 to assert a special independence ; and we find 
 a royal enactment in Lombardy in 803 to the 
 effect that henceforward no part of the tithe 
 which was paid to a baptismal church should 
 go to the bishop's church. 1 Shortly after- 
 wards we find a regular form of deed for the 
 constitution and endowment of such churches ; 
 in it a bishop states that certain villages 
 ought to look to a certain church for masses, 
 baptism, and preaching, and that they ought 
 to give their tithes to that church; he also 
 endows the church from the general lands of 
 the diocese with what would now be called a 
 glebe. 2 Such churches came to have a public 
 
 1 Capit. Langobard, c. 10 ; Pertz, i., 1 10 ; Capitulare Mantu- 
 anum, Boretius, p. 195. 
 
 2 De Rozidre, Recueil de F01 mules, DLXIV., torn. ii. 
 
 P- 70S- 
 
88 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 character, and to be more sharply distinguished 
 from the class of churches out of which they 
 had originally grown, and which still continued 
 to exist side by side with them, churches on 
 private property which belonged to private 
 owners. One point of distinction between 
 them is repeatedly insisted upon, namely, that 
 the rectors of baptismal churches must be pres- 
 byters, and not deacons or clerks of lower 
 grade ; the other and chief point of distinction 
 was that baptismal churches came more and 
 more to claim the tithes of the district which 
 surrounded them. Exactly a century after the 
 Council of Vernon, a council or parliament 
 which was held by Lewis II. at Pavia recites 
 the complaint of the clergy that " some laymen 
 who have churches on their own property . . . 
 do not give their tithes to the churches where 
 they receive baptism, preaching, confirmation, 
 and the other sacraments of Christ, but assign 
 them at their own pleasure to their own 
 churches and their own clerks." 1 The com- 
 plaint was listened to, and the distinction 
 
 1 Hludowici II., Convent. Ticin., ii., a.d. 855, c. n ; Pertz, 
 i., p. 432. 
 
THE PARISH. 89 
 
 between churches to which tithes were paid 
 and those to which they were not paid came 
 to be even more important than the dis- 
 tinction between baptismal and non- baptismal 
 churches, and served as the real ground-plan 
 upon which the later parochial system was 
 built. 
 
 It was in the course of the ninth century that 
 this official class of country churches came to be 
 known as "plebes," i.e., peoples. The term is 
 interesting, not only because it serves as an 
 intermediate link between the earlier idea of a 
 congregation and the later idea of a parish, but 
 also because it enables us to connect the facts 
 which relate specially to baptismal churches 
 with another set of facts which relate to their 
 place in the general system of ecclesiastical 
 organisation. 
 
 The chief officer of a baptismal church was 
 not merely a presbyter, but an ^rcApresbyter. 
 The designation was an ancient one, but in 
 earlier times it had been applied only to an 
 officer of the bishop's church. The arch- 
 presbyter was the head of the clergy next to 
 the bishop. There was only one archpresbyter 
 
90 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 in a diocese, just as there was only one bishop. 1 
 His chief duty was to preside at the celebration 
 of Divine service in the church when the bishop 
 was absent. His position survives in that of 
 the dean in the cathedral system of later times, 
 but the name " dean," which comes from the 
 canonical system, which will be considered in a 
 later chapter, has almost wholly superseded the 
 earlier name " archpresbyter." He seems to 
 have had some control over the other presbyters, 
 but he had no concern with the discipline of 
 the lower clergy, which was delegated to the 
 bishop's special assistant, the archdeacon. It was 
 consequently natural that when separate churches 
 came not only to exist within the bishop's 
 jurisdiction, but also to be the chief centres of 
 Divine worship for large areas of population, 
 the officer who controlled such worship should 
 bear the same designation as the similar officer 
 in the bishop's church. We consequently find 
 this to be the case. The Synod of Pavia 
 in 850 enacted that there should be an arch- 
 
 1 Singuli ecclesiarum episcopi, singuli archipresbyteri, 
 singuli archidiaconi," says StJ Jerome (Epist. 125 [95] Ad 
 Rusticum), ed. Vallars., i., 936. 
 
THE PARISH. 91 
 
 presbyter for every " plebes." cc And let not a 
 bishop plead the excuse," said the Synod, " that 
 a ' plebes ' does not need an archpresbyter 
 because he is able to govern it by himself, for 
 however capable he may be, yet it is proper 
 that his burdens should be eased, and that as 
 he himself presides over the mother church, 
 so archpresbyters should preside over country 
 churches, that so ecclesiastical discipline may in 
 no way falter." 1 The duties of a rural arch- 
 presbyter were extended from worship to 
 discipline. He was to watch the clergy of 
 the smaller churches in his district, and to 
 report to the bishop the diligence with which 
 they performed Divine, service. The expression 
 " the people committed to their charge," which 
 had originally been used only in relation to 
 bishops, came to be used in relation to arch- 
 presbyters, and with the conception which that 
 expression implied the office of the modern 
 parish priest may be said to have fairly begun. 
 There were no longer merely detached congre- 
 gations within the general area of a bishop's 
 
 1 Hludowici II., Conventus Ticinensis, c. 13 ; Pertz, i., 
 399- 
 
92 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 jurisdiction, but special areas whose inhabitants 
 were specially entrusted to a particular presbyter, 
 and who were to look to a particular church, 1 
 which was not the bishop's church, for worship, 
 preaching, and the administration of the 
 sacraments. 
 
 Very soon after the definite establishment of 
 this system of baptismal- churches entitled to 
 the receipt of tithes and in the charge of arch- 
 presbyters, we find indications of the nature of 
 the areas of which such churches were the 
 centres. Those areas are called by the two 
 names cc pagi " and " decaniae." Of these the 
 " pagus " is well known. It is the Latin 
 equivalent of the Teutonic " gau," and con- 
 sequently, like the " gau," has two senses, a 
 wider and a narrower, the former corresponding 
 to our English "county," and the other to 
 our English " hundred." Just as the diocese 
 corresponded to the former, so the area which 
 was entrusted to an archpresbyter corresponded 
 to the latter. In this, as in almost all similar 
 cases, the organisation of. the church followed 
 
 1 " Qui ad eandem plebem aspiciunt." 
 
THE PARISH. 93 
 
 the lines of the civil organisation of the country 
 and the age in which that organisation began. 
 The lines were already marked out, and there 
 was no need for disturbing them. They were 
 found in time to need subdivision, but it 
 was only in rare cases that they were found 
 to require rearrangement. The other word, 
 " decania,' ' is one of the most difficult of all 
 the terms which are used in connection with 
 either the civil or the ecclesiastical arrange- 
 ments of the early Middle Ages. Into the 
 complicated questions to which it gives rise it is 
 impossible to enter here. But that it was used 
 of the area of the jurisdiction of the original 
 archpresbyters is one of the certain facts about 
 it ; and in time, though probably not in the 
 first instance, archpresbyters themselves were 
 called " decani " in the country, as they came 
 also to be called in the bishops' churches. 
 
 The original parish in the modern sense is 
 the rural deanery, which was at first not an ag- 
 gregation of several parishes, but a single area 
 with a single head, though comprising several 
 churches and several clerks. The arrangements 
 of the city church thus became the type for 
 
94 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 country districts. The archpresbyter or " dean " 
 of the city church was reproduced in the 
 archpresbyter of the country, or "rural dean." 
 The one was the foremost of the clergy of the 
 city, the other of the clergy of a district. The 
 main point of difference was that in the city 
 church the bishop was always present ; in the 
 baptismal churches of the country he was 
 present only once a year. The functions of 
 the archpresbyter, which in the bishop's church 
 were exercised in visible subordination to the 
 bishop, were in country churches exercised only 
 in theoretical subordination to him. Subject 
 to occasional interference, and subject also in 
 the last resort, though only in aggravated 
 cases, and not without the right of an appeal, to 
 expulsion from the Church, the archpresbyter 
 of a hundred or deanery became more and 
 more the real head of the local organisation ; 
 and by degrees the term " parish " was 
 transferred from the sphere of the jurisdiction 
 of a bishop to that of the jurisdiction of an 
 archpresbyter. 
 
 The formation of parishes less in area than 
 the rural deanery must probably be traced to 
 
THE PARISH. 95 
 
 the growth of new churches which came 
 gradually to claim the tithes of the district 
 which immediately surrounded them. There 
 are many enactments in regard to such churches, 
 and it is clear from the fact that such enact- 
 ments are often contradictory that there were 
 many struggles before the smaller areas finally 
 asserted their independence. It was at first 
 stringently laid down that existing churches 
 were not to be deprived of their tithes in order 
 to provide for new churches ; and the churches 
 which first made good their claim were churches 
 in new districts which were either newly con- 
 verted to the faith or newly brought into the 
 network of organisation. There were large 
 outlying areas which were gradually reclaimed. 
 There were also areas which had had a civil 
 organisation, but which had never had a bap- 
 tismal church. The result was that although 
 in the districts which were thoroughly chris- 
 tianised the limits of the parish were those of 
 the hundred, and the baptismal church was the 
 one tithe-receiving church in the deanery, the 
 arrangements of new districts were of a looser 
 kind, and we find enactments to the effect that 
 
96 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 every church should settle for itself a boundary 
 within which it might claim tithes from the 
 farms. This arrangement gradually led to the 
 recognition of the right of every church which 
 was consecrated and endowed to receive tithes 
 from the land which immediately surrounded it. 
 Far on into the Middle Ages there were still 
 considerable areas of unsettled or common 
 land which were outside all ecclesiastical juris- 
 diction ; and in our own country the final 
 parcelling out of the whole area into defined 
 parochial districts was probably not effected 
 until the era of the poor-laws. But wherever 
 a church had by endowment become a " bene- 
 fice," it became also a unit of ecclesiastical 
 jurisdiction. The original parish priest, that is 
 the modern rural dean, exercised a certain modi- 
 fied and deputed control over all the clergy as 
 well as over all the people within his deanery. 
 But his real power and his original status tended 
 more and more to fade into the background. 
 His office ceased to be attached to a particular 
 church, and might be held by any of the 
 presbyters within the district ; and though the 
 archpresbyter held his own as against the 
 
THE PARISH. 97 
 
 archdeacon in the cathedra], the original relation 
 was reversed in the rest of the diocese, and the 
 once subordinate archdeacon became the ecclesi- 
 astical superior of the rural dean. 
 
 In this way the parish became a prominent 
 element in the later organisation of Christianity. 
 The territorial idea completely ousted the 
 original idea of a community or congregation. 
 The members of the Church were not free to 
 worship where they pleased, or to associate 
 for religious purposes with whom they would 
 The framework was prepared for them in the 
 parochial system. They were part of the flock 
 not merely of one bishop, but of one presbyter. 
 They were committed to his charge, and to no 
 other could they properly look for teaching, for 
 consolation, or for the sacraments. 
 
 Whether it is the ultimate form which the 
 local organisation of Christianity is destined to 
 take, or whether there may be a new form 
 evolved out of the altered conditions of modern 
 life ; whether it is as good for newly converted 
 countries as it was for Europe in the Middle 
 Ages ; or whether India, and Africa, and China 
 might not be left to work out their own modes 
 
 7 
 
98 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 of Christian association, are questions which are 
 easier to suggest than to answer, but which can- 
 not help forcing themselves upon our attention 
 as we see from what complicated elements and 
 by how tortuous a process the modern parish 
 came into being. 
 
TITHES AND THEIR DISTRIBUTION. 
 
VI. 
 
 TITHES AND THEIR DISTRIBUTION. 
 
 "XT O institution of the Middle Ages has given 
 rise to more mistakes than the institution 
 of tithes. Inasmuch as under the Mosaic dis- 
 pensation tithes were of Divine appointment, 
 the continuity of that appointment in the 
 Christian dispensation has been frequently 
 taken for granted ; and inasmuch as tithes are 
 now a main support of the clergy, and, so far 
 as they are in the hands of the Church at all, 
 are devoted to their exclusive use, there has been 
 a constant tendency to assume that the clergy 
 have an inherent and exclusive right to them. 
 
 The subject is not without important practical 
 bearings at the present time ; and it is there- 
 fore desirable, in giving a brief account of the 
 history of tithes in the Christian Church, and 
 of their apportionment, to add some of the 
 
102 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 historical references which place the facts beyond 
 dispute. 
 
 i. The evidence against the view that tithes 
 have had a continuous and general existence in 
 the Christian Church is negative, but at the 
 same time conclusive. It is that for the first 
 seven centuries they are hardly ever mentioned. 
 The regulations of councils, which touch every 
 point of the existing ecclesiastical system, almost 
 wholly ignore them. There are no civil enact- 
 ments concerning them. In the great mass of 
 existing deeds of donation, and of the draft 
 forms which seem to cover the whole relations 
 of the Church to property, they have no place. 
 In the long lists of offences against ecclesiastical 
 usage and discipline there is not one which con- 
 cerns them. It is inconceivable that if during 
 all that time tithes had been generally paid, 
 or their obligation generally recognised, they 
 should have left no contemporary trace. 
 
 Tithes as a Christian institution date, in fact, 
 from the eighth century. They are one of the 
 results of the great Carlovingian reformation. 
 They are not strictly ecclesiastical in their origin, 
 but came to the Church from the State. They 
 
TITHES AND THEIR DISTRIBUTION. 103 
 
 were a rent paid for the leasing of church lands. 
 Such a leasing was sometimes voluntary and 
 sometimes compulsory. It was sometimes volun- 
 tary, as is shown by the large number of leases 
 and draft forms of lease which remain ; and it 
 is certain that in a large proportion of cases 
 churches gained by being relieved from the 
 obligation to cultivate their property. It was 
 sometimes compulsory, for, on the one hand, the 
 State suffered from the fact that a large propor- 
 tion of its territory enjoyed ecclesiastical im- 
 munities, and, on the other hand, there was a 
 supreme necessity of finding some means of 
 livelihood for the soldiers of the great armies 
 which had held Europe against the Saracens. 
 The tenth or tithe of the produce was a tradi- 
 tional and customary rent for lands so leased. 
 No exception appears to have been taken at 
 the time either to the fact of leasing or to the 
 amount of the rent. But the amount of the 
 rent, and the fact that it was paid to the Church, 
 gradually created a new conception of its nature. 
 It was identified with the Levitical tithe. But 
 even then it was hardly considered to be of 
 general obligation. When a race was newly 
 
104 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 conquered and compulsorily converted, an 
 attempt was made to enforce it upon them ; 
 but it is a significant fact that Alcuin, in 
 writing to Charlemagne to remonstrate with him 
 for thus making Christianity a heavy burden 
 to the Saxons, says that even those who had 
 been born and educated in the Christian faith 
 scarcely consented to pay tithes of their sub- 
 stance. The absence of all attempt to enjoin 
 the payment of tithes in the pseudo-Isidorian 
 Decretals is even more significant as an evidence 
 against the general obligation of such a pay- 
 ment than the similar absence in earlier enact- 
 ments. For those Decretals passed the whole 
 Church system under review, and left nothing 
 unsaid which could support the ecclesiastical 
 power by any show of supposed ancient 
 authority. They are an especial witness to the 
 enormous extent to which the analogy between 
 the Mosaic and the Christian dispensations had 
 come to be pressed. And yet tithes are wholly 
 absent from them. It would be impossible to 
 find a stronger proof that at that time tithes 
 were regarded as' a legitimate rent for the use of 
 church lands, and nothing more. It is in the 
 
TITHES AND THEIR DISTRIBUTION. 105 
 
 period immediately succeeding the Decretals, 
 that is about the beginning of the second half 
 of the ninth century, that tithes begin to take 
 a larger place in ecclesiastical literature. The 
 turning-point may be said to be marked by a 
 decree of the Council of Valence in 855, which, 
 though of. only local authority, indicates a 
 current drift of opinion. The. decree deals with 
 payment of tithes as rent, about which some of 
 the lessees of church lands appear to have been 
 slack, and then urges their general payment by 
 all Christians : " With respect to the properties 
 and farms which were once offered by the faith- 
 ful to the ownership of the Church, but are 
 now subject to the power of laymen, ... it is 
 resolved that ninths and tenths be faithfully 
 paid to the churches from which they have been 
 withdrawn ; nay, moreover, let all the faithful 
 most readily offer to God their tithes of all that 
 they possess." Whether they were generally 
 paid in our own country at an earlier period 
 cannot be positively said. They are first men- 
 tioned in the Legatine Synods of 787, but the 
 authority of a document which, though printed 
 by honest editors (the Magdeburg Centuriators), 
 
106 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 has entirely disappeared, and cannot now be 
 tested, is hardly sufficient of itself to prove 
 the prevalence of a usage. The earliest certain 
 mention of them is in the same year as the 
 Council of Valence, which has been quoted 
 above, under Ethelwulf, the king of Wessex ; 
 but Bishop Stubbs and Mr. Haddan, in editing 
 the documents of that year, though they show 
 a strong desire to make out a case for the 
 early origin of tithes, are only able to say that 
 " the bearing of the whole discussion on the 
 subject of tithe appears to be merely that 
 Ethelwulf used the tenth as a convenient 
 measure for ecclesiastical and other benefactions, 
 and that this testifies to an established, or at 
 least a growing, recognition of the tithe as the 
 clerical portion. The measure, whatever its 
 character, affected Wessex only." 1 Within a 
 century afterwards, that is about a century 
 before the Norman Conquest, there is little 
 doubt that the payment of tithes tended to be- 
 come general both on the continent of Europe 
 and in England. The analogy of the Old 
 
 1 Haddan and Stubbs' Councils and Ecclesiastical Docu- 
 ments, vol. iii., p. 637. 
 
TITHES AND THEIR DISTRIBUTION. 107 
 
 Testament was pressed hard upon a generation 
 which was ready to accept it, and a tenth be- 
 came the ordinary measure of a Christian's 
 offerings to God. The mass of the faithful were 
 probably the more"' ready to acquiesce in the 
 injunctions of their ministers to do as Abraham 
 had done because thereby a limit was set on 
 a liberality which had become too free-handed, 
 and the payment of tithes, so far from being 
 regarded in its modern aspect of a needless 
 excess, was in many cases thankfully accepted 
 as a reasonable mean. 
 
 But both throughout the Middle Ages and 
 until the present time tithes have preserved at 
 least one indelible mark of their origin. Being 
 originally a rent, and sometimes a rent for land 
 of which the State had enforced the leasing, 
 they shared with all other kinds of rent the 
 nature of a contract. They were consequently a 
 payment which the State could properly enforce. 
 From time to time indeed, and under excep- 
 tional circumstances, the secular law has lent its 
 aid to the enforcing of other claims of the 
 Church against property. But its enforcement 
 of the payment of tithes has been constant. 
 
108 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 Charles the Great wrote a letter of vigorous 
 indignation to the soldiers who had received 
 church lands, but declined to pay the stipulated 
 rent for them ; and the repeated enactments of 
 his successors show that they were sufficiently 
 alive to the benefits which the leasing of such 
 lands brought to the community to enforce with 
 uniform regularity the contracts which such 
 leasing involved. Nor was there any variation 
 in this action of the State when tithes gradually 
 changed their character of a rent and became 
 the customary measure of what once had been 
 free-will offerings. In the course of the tenth 
 century it becomes difficult to distinguish the 
 one class of tithes from the other. There was 
 no sharp line of separation between them, and 
 the enforcement by law, which had properly be- 
 longed to the one, came to belong also to the 
 other ; hence throughout the Middle Ages and to 
 the present day tithes have been a legal charge 
 upon property, and not the least of the bonds 
 which in most Christian countries have bound 
 the Church to the State. 
 
 2. All offerings to the Church were originally 
 in the disposition of the bishop, who was bound 
 
TITHES AND THEIR DISTRIBUTION. 109 
 
 to dispense them to all who were on the list of 
 the needy, whether they were clergy, widows, 
 strangers, or poor. The earliest general rule is 
 that of the Council of Antioch in 341 (c. 25), 
 which is a general regulation for all Church 
 property. The earliest Eastern rule which 
 specially mentions tithes is in the seventh book 
 of the Apostolical Constitutions (c. 30), which 
 expands a passage of the 'Teaching of the 
 Twelve Apostles. It is as follows : " All 
 firstfruits of the produce of the winepress and 
 threshing-floor, of oxen and sheep, thou shalt 
 give to the priests ; all tithes thou shalt give to 
 the orphan and the widow, to the poor and the 
 stranger." In the West the first mention of 
 tithes is much later, and it will be found that 
 when they are mentioned the distribution of 
 them was governed by the same rule as that 
 of other offerings to the Church. 
 
 Since the point is one of present interest, and 
 also since the facts which bear upon it, though 
 beyond dispute, have been ignored in some re- 
 cent discussions, it will be convenient to state 
 the more important of those facts in chronolo- 
 gical order. 
 
no GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 The earliest regulation is that of Pope Sim- 
 plicius in 47 5. l It rules that of all the revenues 
 of the Church and offerings of the faithful, one 
 fourth is to go to the bishop ; one fourth is to 
 be divided among the clergy according to their 
 several deserts ; two fourths are to go to the 
 fabrics of the churches, and to the maintenance 
 of strangers and the poor. The regulation was 
 recognised in later times by being incorporated 
 in the body of Canon Law (c. 28, C. XII., 
 qu. ii.). 
 
 The next regulation is that of Pope Gelasius 
 in 494/ which gives the same rule as the pre- 
 ceding. Pope Gregory I. 3 finds fault with the 
 practice which had grown up in Sicily of con- 
 fining the division into four parts to the old 
 revenues of churches, and requires that it shall 
 be extended to newly acquired property. The 
 letter of the same pope to Augustine of Canter- 
 
 JafK, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, No. 570; Thiel, 
 Epistolm Romanorum Pontificum Genuince, i., 175. 
 
 2 Jaffe, No. 636 ; Thiel, i., 360 ; and in all collections of 
 papal decretals, e.g., in Dionysius Exiguus ap. Voellus et 
 Justellus, i., 239 ; in the Canon Law, c. 27, C. XII., qu. ii. 
 
 3 Jaffe, No. 1282; S. Greg. M. E$ist. iii., 11 ; in the Canon 
 Law, c. 29, C. XII., qu. ii. 
 
TITHES AND THEIR DISTRIBUTION, in 
 
 bury 1 lays down the same quadripartite division, 
 but its genuineness has been questioned. 
 
 These papal regulations were incorporated in 
 the ordinary form of instructions which were 
 given to a newly ordained bishop and announced 
 to the clergy and people of his diocese ; 2 hence 
 they are found in the letter in which Pope 
 Gregory II. in 722 commended Boniface to the 
 clergy and people of Germany. 3 
 
 So far there had been no special mention of 
 tithes in these regulations, because tithes, except 
 possibly in exceptional cases, did not exist. 
 But about the same time that tithes are other- 
 wise mentioned the quadripartite division is 
 applied to them also. The first special mention 
 of them is in a letter of Pope Zachary in 748,* 
 which says : " The distribution of the tithes of 
 the faithful which are offered in churches should 
 not be in the power of him who offers them, 
 for the regulations of the holy fathers say 
 
 1 J age, No. 1843 ; Bede, H. E., i., 27. 
 
 2 " Synodale quod accipit Episcopus ; " in the Liber 
 Diurnus, ed. de Roziere, p. 23. 
 
 3 Jaffe, No. 2161 ; St. Bonifat., Epist. 19. 
 
 4 Jaffc, No. 2288 ; St. Bonifat., Epist. 68. 
 
ii2 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 that the bishop ought to divide them into 
 four portions." 
 
 The earliest civil enactment on the subject is 
 probably a law which Charlemagne made for 
 Bavaria in 799, 1 which expressly quotes, and 
 re-enacts in regard to tithes, the regulation of 
 Pope Gelasius which has been given above. 
 
 From that time onwards regulations to the 
 same effect were constant ; they required re- 
 petition, not only because different countries 
 required separate enactments, but also because 
 the growing claims of parish churches required 
 some modifications of the rights of bishops. 
 Hence the division came sometimes to be into 
 three parts rather than four, the bishop's part 
 being omitted. Among such regulations are the 
 following : — 
 
 In the Council or Parliament of Aachen in 
 801, the clergy themselves proposed that in 
 order to make sure of the distribution of the 
 tithes being made in accordance with church 
 rule, it should be made before witnesses, the 
 first part for the decoration of the church, the 
 
 1 Capit. Rhispacensia et Frisingensia, c. 13, in Pertz., i, 78, 
 Boretius, p. 228. 
 
TITHES AND THEIR DISTRIBUTION. 113 
 
 second for the use of the poor and strangers, the 
 third for the clergy themselves. 1 
 
 In the Council of Tours in 813, it was 
 enacted that the tithes of parish churches 
 should be distributed by the parish presbyters, 
 with the cognisance of the bishop, for the use 
 of the Church and the poor. 2 
 
 In the Council of Aachen in 817, the rule 
 was slightly varied to the effect that in the 
 richer churches two thirds of all Church revenues 
 should be for the poor, one third for the clergy 
 and monks, and that in the poorer churches 
 they should be equally divided between the 
 clergy and the poor. 3 
 
 In the Council of Paris in 829, it was enacted 
 that although the bishop was entitled to the 
 fourth part of the tithes and other revenues of 
 parish, as well as of other, churches, yet if he 
 had a sufficient income from his own church, he 
 should leave the part which was due to him from 
 parish churches for the use of those churches 
 and of the poor. 
 
 1 Capit. Aquisgran., c. 7, Pertz, i., 87, Boretius, p. 105. 
 
 2 3 Cone. Turon., c. 16. 
 
 3 Capit. Aquisgran., c. 4, Pertz, i., 206, Boretius, p. 276. 
 
ii4 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 The Council of Mainz in 847 enacted that 
 the tithes which were given to parish churches 
 should, with the cognisance of the bishop, be 
 carefully dispensed by the presbyters for the use 
 of those churches and of the poor ; and it went 
 on to state the ordinary rule of quadripartite 
 division. 1 
 
 These regulations, which are contemporary 
 with, and sometimes immediately added to, the 
 original statements of the obligation of tithes, 
 show beyond question that tithes were destined 
 not only for the clergy, but also for the poor. 
 
 It would be improbable, even if no positive 
 evidence on the point existed, that our own 
 country, which followed closely in most other 
 respects the movements and practices of the 
 Churches of the Continent, should have differed 
 from them in respect of the apportionment of 
 tithes. But the positive evidence is clear. The 
 authority of the enactments may be disputable, 
 but they are at least witnesses to a current 
 belief or tendency ; and it can hardly be denied 
 that whatever evidence exists in our own country 
 
 1 I Cone. Mogunt., c. 10. 
 
TITHES AND THEIR DISTRIBUTION. 115 
 
 for the payment of tithes at all in pre-Norman 
 times exists also for their appropriation, not to 
 the clergy only, but also to the poor. 
 
 The ecclesiastical evidence is the follow- 
 ing :— 
 
 " Let the tribute of the Church be according 
 to the custom of the province, that is, let not 
 the poor suffer violent wrong in respect of 
 tithes or in any other respects. It is not law- 
 ful to give tithes except to the poor and to 
 strangers. 1 
 
 "The holy fathers appointed also that men 
 pay their tithes into God's Church. And let 
 the priest go thither and divide them into 
 three : one part for repair of the church, and 
 the second for the poor, the third for God's 
 servants who attend the church." 2 
 
 The definite civil enactment on the subject 
 is in the " Laws of King Ethelred " : — 
 
 " And respecting tithes : the King and his 
 witan have chosen and decreed, as is just, that 
 one third part of the tithe which belongs to the 
 
 1 Capitula Theodori, in B. Thorpe, Ancient Laws and 
 Institutes of England, vol ii., p. 65. 
 
 2 Canons of JElfric, in B. Thorpe, ibid., vol. ii., p. 353. 
 
n6 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 Church go to the reparation of the church, and 
 a second part to the servants of God, the 
 third to God's poor and to needy ones in 
 thraldom." x 
 
 It is true that there are civil enactments of a 
 later date in which the division of tithes is not 
 mentioned ; and from the absence of such a 
 mention, it has been inferred that the claim of 
 the poor to a share in the tithes either never 
 was recognised or has now ceased to exist. But 
 the defence of tithes must proceed upon one or 
 other of two lines of argument which cannot be 
 fused together. They must either be defended 
 as a payment to which, by virtue of civil enact- 
 ments, the Church has a civil right ; in this 
 ase, he claim of the poor to a share in them 
 may be denied, but at the same time the right 
 of the State to pass new regulations respecting 
 them cannot be questioned. Or they must be 
 defended as an ancient right of the Church, 
 resting on Divine law, and independent of, 
 though recognised by, the State ; in this case, 
 the claim of the poor to the share in them 
 
 1 Ethelred's Laws, 9, 6, in B. Thorpe, Ancient Laws and 
 Institutes of England, vol. i., p. 343. 
 
TITHES AND THEIR DISTRIBUTION. 117 
 
 which the Western Churches always recognised, 
 whenever in early times they legislated on 
 tithes at all, can hardly be questioned. The 
 Divine obligation to pay tithes, and the Divine 
 right of the poor to a share in them, stand or 
 fall together ; and the emphatic words of one 
 of the greatest ecclesiastics of the early Gallican 
 Church, in one of the few patristic homilies 
 which deal with tithes at all, may well be borne 
 in mind in modern discussions : — 
 
 " Tithes are required as a due, and he who 
 refuses to pay them has invaded other people's 
 property. A man who does not pay his tithes 
 will appear before the tribunal of the Eternal 
 Judge charged with the murder of all the poor 
 who have died of hunger in the place in which 
 he lives, since he has kept back for his own 
 uses the substance which God has assigned to 
 the poor." * 
 
 ] S. Caesar. Arelat, Homilia XVI., in Migne, Patrologia 
 Latina, vol. Ixvii., p. 1079 ; also printed as Horn. XLI. in De 
 La Bigne, Maxima Bibliotheca Veterum Patrum, torn, viii., p. 
 858. The homily is one of those which were in such repute 
 as to be ascribed to St. Augustine, and it is printed in that 
 Father's works, e.g., in the Benedictine Edition, torn, v., 
 Appendix, Sermo CCLXXVIL, p. 461. 
 
THE METROPOLITAN, 
 
VII. 
 
 THE METROPOLITAN. 
 
 TN the course of the second century of the 
 Christian era the- officers of neighbouring 
 Christian communities began to meet together 
 in conference. There were many points upon 
 which unity of action and unity of discipline 
 were desirable, and the officers met together to 
 frame common rules. At first such conferences 
 were held irregularly. There was no stated 
 time or occasion for them. There was no fixed 
 president. There was. no limitation of the area 
 from which their members were drawn. Nor 
 did they easily take a more definite form. The 
 Greek historians, who record the ecclesiastical 
 history of the fourth century, make it clear that 
 even then the same irregularity continued ; and 
 this is confirmed by the signatures to the acts 
 of the conferences of the period. For example, 
 
122 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 the acts of the Council of Ancyra, which are 
 still preserved, are signed by thirteen bishops 
 from various provinces of both Asia Minor 
 and Syria. 
 
 It was in the course of that same fourth 
 century that a definite system in regard to the 
 holding of such conferences began to grow up. 
 The recognition of the Church by the State, 
 and especially the recognition of the disciplinary 
 acts of Church assemblies by the civil law, made 
 the formation of such a system necessary ; and 
 one of the first acts of the Council of Nicasa 
 was to give its sanction to the custom, which 
 had already begun to prevail, of taking the 
 territorial organisation of the empire as the 
 basis of the territorial organisation of the 
 Church. The empire was divided into pro- 
 vinces, and the Christian Churches within each 
 province came to be regarded as forming a 
 unity. The civil officers of the province met 
 together every year at the chief city, under the 
 presidency of a chief priest ; henceforward, in a 
 similar way, the officers of the churches within 
 a province were to meet together, not once, but 
 twice a year, and the bishop of the chief city 
 
THE METROPOLITAN. 123 
 
 of the province was recognised as having the 
 priority of rank, which is implied in ex-officio 
 presidency. The purpose of the meetings was 
 almost wholly disciplinary \ the time had not 
 yet passed when membership of a Christian 
 Church was held to be incompatible with moral 
 laxity of life, and expulsions from Church 
 membership were frequent. But in order to 
 check unjust expulsions, and also in order to 
 secure that expulsion by one Church should 
 be respected by other Churches, the half-yearly 
 meeting of bishops was constituted as a court 
 of appeal and review. The reason for em- 
 phasising the position of the bishop of the chief 
 city of a province was in like manner almost 
 wholly disciplinary ; it was found needful to 
 have some check upon the free election of the 
 chief officers of individual communities, and 
 henceforward such elections required the ratifi- 
 cation of the " metropolitan." 
 
 But the Nicene canons rather sketched an 
 ideal than established a general practice. Meet- 
 ings of bishops continued to be held, and to 
 pass regulations, some of which are regarded 
 as valid to the present day, without regard to 
 
124 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 the limits of civil provinces ; in some parts 
 of the empire, certainly in North Africa and 
 probably elsewhere,, metropolitans were not re- 
 cognised ; and in the fifth century the Council 
 of Chalcedon 1 based a new regulation upon 
 the fact that the half-yearly meetings had ceased 
 to be regularly held. It was not until the sixth 
 century, and, as far as existing records enable 
 us to judge, it was only in some parts of 
 Western Europe, that the system attained 
 anything like a complete development. The 
 hierarchical organisation of Gaul preserved for 
 modern France the framework of the Roman 
 administration. The metropolis of every Roman 
 province, except one or two of the less im- 
 portant, claimed for its bishop a rank which- 
 is still indicated by the title " archbishop," a 
 title which, though originally indicating a 
 higher rank than that of " metropolitan," 2 
 came practically to supersede it. These 
 Western metropolitans, like those who had 
 been recognised by the Eastern canons, claimed 
 
 1 c. 19. 
 
 2 Isid. Hispal., Etym., 7, 12* adapted by Gratian, Dist, xxi. 
 c. 1. 
 
THE METROPOLITAN. 125 
 
 a veto upon the appointment of bishops within 
 their province, 1 and they had the right of 
 summoning the other bishops of the province 
 to synods. 2 In other respects their rights 
 were only those of presidents ; they acted with 
 their colleagues in the provincial synods. For 
 example, in disputes between bishops, and in 
 appeals from a bishop's sentence, and in a 
 dispute between a metropolitan and one of his 
 colleagues, it was expressly enacted that the 
 synod of his colleagues should decide. 3 
 
 But with the growing interference of the 
 Merovingian kings in ecclesiastical affairs, and 
 the increasing decay of religious life which 
 marked the end of the seventh and the first 
 part of the eighth century, the whole system, 
 both of metropolitans and of provincial synods, 
 tended to pass away in Gaul, and the whirl- 
 
 1 E.g., at the second Council of Aries, in 452, c. 5 and 6 ; 
 at the first Council of Clermont, in 535, c. 2 ; at the third 
 Council of Orleans, in 538, c. 3 ; at the Council of Paris, in 
 
 557, c 8. 
 
 2 E.g., at the Council of Agde in 506, c. 35 ; at the second 
 Council of Orleans, in 533, c I. 
 
 3 So in the fifth Council of Orleans, 549, c. 17 ; and in the 
 second Council of Clermont, in the same year, c. 16. 
 
126 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 wind of Arab conquests swept it away in Spain. 
 There was a growing independence on the part 
 of diocesan bishops, and consequently a growing 
 disintegration of the Church as a whole. For 
 although in primitive times every Christian 
 community was independent of every other, 
 and every Christian bishop was regarded as 
 having received his commission direct from the 
 Chief Shepherd, 1 the revival of this primitive 
 status was likely to be disastrous in the altered 
 circumstances of the ninth century. Faith and 
 morals were alike in danger. The churches 
 were filled with merely nominal Christians ; the 
 bishoprics were in many cases held by court 
 nominees, and regarded chiefly as ofHces of 
 emolument. It was supremely necessary not 
 only to strengthen the hold of the local 
 authority of the bishop over the individual 
 communities, but also to find some means of 
 exercising control over bishops. Consequently 
 
 1 The words of the most powerful of early defenders of 
 Catholic unity are conclusive as to the early conception of 
 the independence of bishops : "Cum . . . singulis pastoribus 
 portio gregis sit adscripta quam regat unusquisque et 
 gubernet, rationem actus sui Domino redditurus." — S. Cyprian, 
 Epist. 59 (55) c. 14: cf. Epist. 55 (51) c. 21. 
 
THE METROPOLITAN. 127 
 
 when Carlmann and Pippin, at the suggestion 
 of Boniface, and supported by the influence of 
 Rome, undertook the reform of the Churches 
 of the Frankish domain, they wisely enacted 
 not only that presbyters should, with certain 
 limitations, be subject to their bishops, but also 
 that bishops should be subject to provincial 
 councils and metropolitans. 
 
 The revived system seems to have been tried, 
 in the first instance, as an experiment and on a 
 partial scale. It is not certain whether one or 
 three metropolitans were at first appointed, but 
 it is clear that even if three were appointed, 
 they did not exhaust the area of the Frankish 
 domain. The development of the system was 
 due to Charles the Great. The enactments 
 which he made in regard to it were repeated 
 and explicit. The metropolitan came to have 
 the ordinary designation of " archbishop." The 
 other bishops came to be less frequently spoken 
 of as his " comprovincials," and to be more 
 commonly designated by the new word 
 " suffragans." 1 The jurisdiction of the metro- 
 
 1 The first instance in which I have found this designation 
 
128 GROWTH OF €HUR€H INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 politan was no doubt intended to be not 
 personal or arbitrary, but exercised, as in earlier 
 times, in the common assembly of the bishops ; 
 and both ordinary bishops and metropolitans 
 were subject to the superior jurisdiction of the 
 emperor. The leading enactment on the 
 subject, which is the more interesting because 
 the principle on which it proceeds survives in 
 our own ecclesiastical procedure to the present 
 day, is known as the Capitulary of Frankfort, 
 a.d. 794. 1 It is as follows : — 
 
 " It is enacted by our lord the King and the 
 holy synod that bishops shall exercise jurisdic- 
 tion in their dioceses. If any abbot, presbyter, 
 deacon, archdeacon, monk, or other clerk, or, 
 indeed, any one else in the diocese, does not 
 obey the person of his bishop, they shall come 
 to his metropolitan, and he shall judge the cause 
 together with his suffragans. Our counts ' ' 
 ("comites" — i.e., the civil judges and adminis- 
 
 is in the Capitulary of a.d. 779, printed in Pertz, MGH, 
 Legum, vol. i., p. 36, and in Boretius, MGH, Legum, p. 46. 
 It next occurs in the Admonition of A.D. 789, Pertz, I.e., p. 
 55 ; in the letter of Charles to the Bishop of Treves, a.d. 
 809-12, printed in Jaff<§, Monutnenta Carolina, p. 409. 
 1 Printed in Pertz, I.e., p. 72 ; Boretius, p. 73. 
 
THE METROPOLITAN. 
 
 129 
 
 trators) " shall also come to the court of the 
 bishops. And if there be anything which the 
 metropolitan bishop cannot set right, then let 
 accusers and accused both come with a letter 
 from the metropolitan, that we" (i.e., the 
 Emperor) " may know the truth of the 
 matter." 
 
 The position of the metropolitans was further 
 strengthened by their frequent employment as 
 imperial commissioners. They were sent, so to 
 speak, " on circuit," not only to see that justice 
 was done, but also to find out whether bishops 
 and other officers did their duty. The fact that 
 not only metropolitans were thus sent, but also 
 civil officers, emphasised the fact that the new 
 functions of metropolitans were derived not 
 from an ecclesiastical, but from a civil source. 
 The system, viewed merely as a piece of 
 administrative machinery, was in theory almost 
 perfect. On the one hand, the parish clergy 
 had to report themselves every year, or twice a 
 year, to their bishop, and the bishops to their 
 metropolitan. On the other hand, there were 
 periodical inquiries by special commissioners in 
 each locality as to the manner in which both 
 
 9 
 
130 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 parish priests and bishops fulfilled their offices. 
 The instructions given to such commissioners 
 show the thoroughness with which the inquiry- 
 was conducted. The following is one of several 
 examples : — 
 
 " We will that they shall diligently inquire, 
 first, about bishops, how they fulfil their 
 ministry, and what is their conversation, and 
 how they order the churches and clergy 
 committed to their charge, and what class of 
 things they chiefly affect, that is to say, whether 
 it be spiritual or secular; secondly, of what 
 kind are the helpers of their ministry, that is, 
 the archdeacons, presbyters, and others, in their 
 several parishes, what zeal they have in doctrine, 
 and what report they really have among the 
 people, . . . whether the bishops in making 
 their visitations are burdensome to the smaller 
 parishes and oppressive to the people, and 
 whether undue claims are made by them or 
 their attendants upon the parish priests." 1 
 
 It is obvious that the position of the suffragan 
 bishops, under so strict a system of subordina- 
 
 1 Capit. Aquisgran., a.d. 828, in Pertz, I.e., p. 329. 
 
THE ME2R0I-0LITAN. 131 
 
 tion and inquiry, tended to become onerous, the 
 more so because of the strong contrast which it 
 presented to the preceding laxity. It is also 
 obvious that the system was one which, resting 
 as it did rather upon imperial than upon 
 ecclesiastical enactments, was not in favour with 
 those who asserted and strongly maintained the 
 independence of the Church. The records of 
 the period also make it clear that some metro- 
 politans pressed their personal authority. 
 Provincial synods again ceased to be held. 
 The support which the State gave to those 
 who had been in most instances its nominees 
 compensated for the absence of ecclesiastical 
 precedents for their action, and there was 
 probably for a time a real danger lest the 
 administration of the Churches of the West 
 should be simply a branch of the ordinary 
 administration of the empire. 
 
 But the re-establishment of metropolitans, 
 which had been so consonant to the general 
 policy of Charles the Great, and which had 
 been thus thoroughly incorporated into the im- 
 perial system, had been only part of the original 
 plan of Boniface. It is clear from his letters 
 
132 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 that just as bishops were to be subordinated to 
 metropolitans, so metropolitans themselves were 
 to be subordinated to the see of Rome. In a 
 letter in reference to one of the synods which 
 he held, Boniface describes this gradation of 
 authority in express terms. After saying that 
 the synod had resolved that metropolitans should 
 obtain their "pallia," the symbols of their 
 authority, from Rome, and should endeavour 
 " in all things to follow the precepts of St. 
 Peter, that we may be numbered among the 
 sheep committed to his charge," he goes on 
 to describe his own bond of obedience to the 
 Roman see ; and he adds, " So, if I be not 
 mistaken, all bishops ought to make known to 
 their metropolitan, and the metropolitan to the 
 Roman pontiff, whatever they themselves can- 
 not do in the way of correcting their flocks ; 
 and so will they be guiltless of the blood of 
 lost souls." * 
 
 This idea that the metropolitans were not 
 the supreme heads of the Churches in their re- 
 spective provinces, but only intermediate between 
 
 1 S. Bonifat., Epist. 70, in Jaffe, Monumenta Moguntina, 
 p. 202. 
 
7HE METROPOLITAN. 133 
 
 bishops and the Roman see, worked silently 
 but powerfully through all the Carlovingian 
 period ; and when, on the one hand, the bishops 
 felt the yoke of the metropolitans to be too 
 heavy, and, on the other hand, the emperors 
 had become too weak to resist a strongly asserted 
 papal claim, the subordination which Boniface 
 had foreshadowed began to be a real fact. The 
 bishops felt that their only immediate chance 
 of freedom from the oppression of their local 
 rulers was in the support which they might 
 derive from the Roman pontiffs ; and it was 
 in the interests of the bishops that a series of 
 documents was composed which has largely 
 affected all subsequent Church history. Into 
 the existing collections of the decrees of councils 
 and the letters of popes were interwoven docu- 
 ments of the same kind, to the uncritical eye 
 not distinguishable from them, which almost all 
 tended in the direction of asserting the subordi- 
 nation of metropolitans to higher powers. The 
 interpolated collection passed for a genuine one. 
 It was adopted by the popes, probably in the 
 first instance without suspicion ; and though 
 now commonly called even by papal advocates 
 
134 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 " the False Decretals," it was for many centuries 
 an unquestioned body of ecclesiastical law. 1 
 
 It was thus as a reaction against the excessive 
 powers with which the policy of the Carlo- 
 vingians had invested metropolitans that the 
 great revolution was brought about which trans- 
 formed the independent Churches of the West 
 into vassals of the Roman see. Metropolitans 
 continued to exist, but they existed only as 
 intermediaries between the pope and the ordinary 
 bishops. The ampler powers which they had 
 come to exercise partly in their own interest 
 and partly in the interest of the emperor were 
 continued to them in the interest of the pope. 
 They were convenient local depositaries of the 
 powers which were claimed by the successors 
 of St. Peter. Though constantly superseded 
 and set aside by legates a latere, and though 
 no longer able, even in a provincial synod, to 
 pronounce a definitive sentence against an offend- 
 ing colleague, they still possessed large powers 
 of administration. To their one original right 
 
 1 The great edition of Hinschius (Decretales pseudo- 
 Isidoriana, Berlin, 1870) by the use of different type for the 
 interpolated portions has made the drift of those portions 
 obvious to any student who can construe ecclesiastical Latin. 
 
THE METROPOLITAN. 135 
 
 of approving or disapproving of the election of 
 a bishop by a Church, they added the right of 
 visitation, of supersession, and of the administra- 
 tion of a vacant see. 
 
 If it be admitted that the primitive freedom 
 of local Churches was no longer either possible 
 or desirable, it may be admitted also that, sub- 
 ject to the control of a great central authority, 
 the powers of the mediaeval metropolitan were 
 inevitable and beneficial. But such an admis- 
 sion hardly touches the question of the status 
 of metropolitans in a Reformed Church in 
 modern times. The effect of the Reformation 
 on metropolitans was practically to leave them 
 all their acquired powers, and at the same time 
 to take away the ecclesiastical check upon the 
 exercise of those powers, and to substitute for 
 it the check of the civil power. The contention 
 of many estimable persons is that this form of 
 check, against which no doubt many arguments 
 may be urged, should be itself taken away. 
 The effect of taking it away would be to leave 
 metropolitans with large powers which have 
 been mainly derived from the State, and which, 
 so far as they have been allowed by the Church, 
 
136 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 have been allowed only with efficient safeguards 
 
 against abuse, uncontrolled, and liable to the 
 
 same abuses as before. A reform of the Church 
 
 which consisted simply, as far as metropolitans 
 
 were concerned, in the removal of a check 
 
 upon the powers which the Canon Law gradually 
 
 gave them, would be a new experiment in 
 
 Church polity which could hardly fail to end 
 
 in disaster. The whole system which the 
 
 Canon Law constructed stands or falls together. 
 
 If the checks upon its machinery be abandoned, 
 
 the machinery itself must be abandoned also. 
 
 The only safe direction which a movement for 
 
 reform can take, in this as in other respects, is 
 
 that of a return, with whatever modifications 
 
 of detail our altered circumstances may demand, 
 
 to the primitive polity, according to which each 
 
 group of Churches, knit together by the spiritual 
 
 bonds of Christian fellowship, managed its own 
 
 affairs, exercised its own discipline, appointed 
 
 its own officers, and committed to the person 
 
 of a president only those administrative and 
 
 executive functions which in all societies must 
 
 be exercised, or at least exercised ad interim, by 
 
 a single officer. 
 
NATIONAL CHURCHES. 
 
VIII. 
 
 NATIONAL CHURCHES. 
 
 HTHE formation of National Churches is an 
 extension, though not in the original 
 direction, of the same process which led to the 
 institution of provincial synods. The original 
 conceptions of Christian association were but 
 two in number — that of the single congregation, 
 and that of the whole aggregate of believers 
 throughout the world. Both were designated 
 by the same word, " Church," but the former 
 was limited by the addition of the name of 
 the locality, — the " Church of God which is 
 at Corinth," or " the Church of the Thes- 
 salonians," — while the latter was simply "the 
 Church," or " the Church of God," or, from 
 the second century onwards, "the General 
 Church " (17 naddkiKr) iKKkrjcria). In the New 
 Testament, and for some time afterwards, the 
 
140 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 Christian communities within a wide geogra- 
 phical area are spoken of, not in the singular, 
 but in the plural : " the Churches of Judea," 
 or " of Galatia." It was only by slow degrees 
 that the fact of neighbourhood was conceived 
 to give Churches a title to interfere in the 
 concerns of another Church ; and the councils 
 of the fourth century show that the recognition 
 of the imperial "province" as the legitimate 
 area of association was also slow and gradual. 
 But that which is slowly formed is often also 
 permanent ; this grouping of Christian com- 
 munities according to the Roman provinces in 
 which they were situated survives to the 
 present day, and an analogous arrangement 
 is extended to countries which, so far from 
 having had a Roman organisation, were altogether 
 outside the horizon of the Roman world. It 
 was a voluntary arrangement. It was generally 
 accepted, in the first instance, because it was 
 found to be convenient. But it was at the 
 time artificial. There was nothing in the 
 nature of the Roman provincial organisation 
 to give it a sacredness which does not attach 
 to other organisations. A grouping of Churches 
 
NATIONAL CHURCHES. 141 
 
 according to the areas of river basins or of 
 local dialects would have been, if less convenient, 
 yet not less Divine. A precisely similar 
 arrangement exists among some of the non- 
 conforming communities of our own time and 
 country. They form "county associations/' 
 which hold annual meetings and exercise a 
 certain kind of supervision over individual 
 congregations ; and, although individual con- 
 gregations are in most instances as free as the 
 primitive communities were to withdraw from 
 the association, or to refuse to submit to its 
 decisions, they usually find it convenient to 
 maintain the bond of connection. 
 
 But a system which is the product of 
 considerations of expediency tends also to be 
 modified by considerations of expediency. In 
 certain of its features the grouping of Churches 
 according to Roman provinces, or combinations 
 of provinces, has been permanent ; but in 
 certain other features it has given way to a 
 system of grouping according to political 
 divisions, in which the organisation of the 
 Roman empire has been superseded or ignored. 
 Provincial Churches have been succeeded by 
 
1 42 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 national Churches. The ideas of grouping 
 according to locality, and of giving to the 
 majority a control over the individual, have re- 
 mained. But the locality is conterminous with 
 the State, and the majority which exercises con- 
 trol is the majority, not of the immediate neigh- 
 bourhood, but of the whole political area. 
 
 The external causes of the change are to 
 be found in the history of the Teutonic king- 
 doms which rose upon the ruins of the Roman 
 Empire. The limits of those kingdoms were 
 constantly shifting, and were determined with- 
 out regard to the limits of existing dioceses or 
 provinces. For whereas the latter had been 
 determined, in Roman times, chiefly by the 
 areas of settlement of the original tribes of 
 Celts, the latter were determined by the areas 
 of settlement or conquest of the intrusive tribes 
 of the Teutons. Each kingdom found an 
 ecclesiastical organisation existing, and endea- 
 voured to incorporate it. The earlier bonds 
 began to give way under the pressure of the 
 new need of keeping the kingdom together. 
 The kings gathered together the bishops and 
 clergy within their domain, irrespective of the 
 
NATIONAL CHURCHES. 743 
 
 earlier arrangements. The bishops and clergy 
 obeyed the king's summons without regard to 
 the questions which have been raised in later 
 times as to the precise nature of his authority. 
 The type of kingly power which presented itself 
 to their minds, and which was in entire harmony 
 with the growing conception of the ministry as 
 a priesthood, was that of the Old Testament. 
 Nor was their obedience the less ready because 
 the summons was addressed, not only to them, 
 but also to laymen. It was as natural that 
 the king should call together both bishops and 
 nobles to consult for the common good as that 
 Josiah should, in ancient days, have gathered 
 together, not only the priests and prophets, 
 but also " the men of Judah and the inhabitants 
 of Jerusalem." And when assembled in such 
 mixed meetings of clergy and laity under the 
 king's authority, they did not attempt to 
 draw a sharp distinction between secular and 
 ecclesiastical affairs. Whatever affected the 
 people at large came within the sphere of their 
 control. Out of such meetings grew the sense 
 of a unity which was not only political, but 
 also ecclesiastical. The nation and the Church 
 
i 4 4 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 of the nation grew from the same roots and 
 side by side. Each was independent of external 
 control, but neither asserted an independence 
 of the other. 
 
 In this general sketch of the rise of the 
 national Churches of the West out of the assem- 
 blies which were summoned by the kings of the 
 new Teutonic kingdoms, there are three points 
 which it is important to note and to prove : — 
 
 (i) That these assemblies were summoned 
 by kings, and not by bishops ; 
 
 (2) That they consisted not only of clergy, 
 but also of laity ; 
 
 (3) That they exercised a control, not only 
 over purely civil, but also over purely eccle- 
 siastical affairs, laying down rules and deciding 
 cases of precisely the same kind as those of 
 the earlier ecclesiastical assemblies of Africa or 
 Asia Minor. 
 
 (1) The first of these points is proved by the 
 statements of the assemblies themselves. In 
 the great majority of cases their resolutions are 
 prefaced by a declaration that the assembly 
 was convoked by the king's orders or with his 
 consent. For example, if we take only those 
 
NATIONAL CHURCHES. 145 
 
 assemblies which have sometimes been claimed 
 as exclusively ecclesiastical, the preface of what 
 is known as the First Council of Orleans, in 
 511, states that it was convoked "at the sum- 
 mons of the most glorious king Chlodwig ; " 
 the Second Council of Orleans, in 533, "at the 
 bidding of the most glorious kings ; " the Coun- 
 cil of Macon in 581, "at the summons of 
 Gunthram ; " the Council of Valence in 584, 
 " according to the order of Gunthram." 1 And 
 if we take the assemblies which, more than any 
 others, determined the constitution of the me- 
 diaeval Churches, the form is even more explicit, 
 for example, " I, Carlman, leader and prince of 
 the Franks, with the counsel of the servants 
 of God and my nobles, have assembled the 
 bishops who are in my kingdom, together with 
 the presbyters, as a council and synod, . . . 
 that they may give me advice how the law 
 of God and ecclesiastical discipline may be 
 recovered, which in the days of past princes 
 have fallen into ruin, and how Christian folk 
 
 1 A list of such statements, which it is not necessary to 
 multiply here, will be found in Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungs- 
 geschichte, Bd. ii., abth. i., p. 201 (3 te aufl.). 
 
 IO 
 
146 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 may come to the salvation of their souls and 
 not perish deceived by false priests." 1 
 
 (2) That the assemblies consisted, not only 
 of clergy, but also of laity, is also proved by 
 the statements of the assemblies themselves, A 
 distinction of times and places must no doubt 
 be drawn. To a certain extent, and under the 
 rule of the Merovingians more than elsewhere, 
 the purely ecclesiastical assemblies continued 
 to exist, and to exercise purely ecclesiastical 
 discipline. Their existence and their action 
 were a necessary part of the judicial system 
 of the time. For the Roman law, which con- 
 tinued to exist for the clergy, recognised the 
 disciplinary functions of synods ; and the exer- 
 cise of such functions was part of the inheritance 
 of freedom to which the clergy clung, not so 
 much in their capacity of clerks as in their capa- 
 city of descendants of the Romans. But these 
 purely ecclesiastical assemblies gradually lost 
 their original importance, and at last almost 
 entirely disappeared. They were overshadowed 
 and thrust out of existence by the mixed 
 
 1 Karlmanni Principis Capitulare, in Pertz, M. G. H., vol. i,, 
 p. 16; Boretius, i., 24. 
 
NATIONAL CHURCHES. 147 
 
 assemblies, which have for Englishmen a special 
 interest, inasmuch as they were the immediate 
 historical precursors and prototypes of our 
 English parliaments. The enacting clauses of 
 the decrees of these mixed assemblies tell their 
 own tale. In the West Gothic kingdom, 
 for example, the First Council of Toledo 
 consisted, not only of bishops, but also of 
 the nobles and officers of the palace (" opti- 
 mates et seniores palatii ") ; in the Third 
 Council of Toledo, the king expressly promul- 
 gates a canon with the consent of the chief 
 men in the kingdom (" cum suorum optimatum 
 illustriumque virorum consensu ") ; in the 
 " tome " of the Thirteenth Council of Toledo 
 King Erwig addresses as constituent members 
 of the assembly, not only the bishops, but also 
 the chief officers of his court (" universitatem 
 paternitatis vestras atque sublimium virorum 
 nobilitatem qui ex aulas regalis officio in hac 
 synodo vobiscum consessuri praslecti sunt"). 
 In the Frankish kingdom, though there is a 
 controversy as to the precise character of 
 some of the Merovingian assemblies, the state- 
 ments of the assemblies after the time of Pippin 
 
148 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 are repeated and clear. The enactments of 
 Soissons, for example, in 744, are made " with 
 the consent of the bishops and priests and 
 servants of God, and by the advice of the 
 counts and nobles of the Franks ; " the first 
 edict of Charles the Great is made "on the 
 recommendation of the Apostolic See, and by 
 the advice of all my faithful lieges, especially 
 the bishops and other priests ; " the canons of 
 Heristall, in 779, are made at a synodical 
 council of "bishops, abbots, nobles, and counts." 
 Even where other laymen are not mentioned, 
 and may possibly not have been present, the 
 king himself was an integral factor in the 
 assembly. For example, in the Synod of 
 Frankfort, in 794, " the most gracious king was 
 himself present," — c< ipse mitissimus sancto 
 interfuit conventui," — and the canons were 
 made " by our lord the king and the holy 
 synod." 1 So it was also in our own country. 
 
 1 The facts which relate to this important synod will be 
 found in the Annates Laureshamenses, in Pertz, M. G. H., 
 Scriptorum, i., p. 36 ; Chronicon Moissacense, ibid., p. 300 ; 
 Annates Fuldenses, ibid., p. 351 : and its acts in Pertz, 
 Legum, L, p. 71 ; Boretius, i., p. 73. 
 
NATIONAL CHURCHES. 149 
 
 The Witenagemot was often as much ecclesi- 
 astical as civil. For example, at the meeting 
 which is known as the Council of Bapchild, 
 near Sittingbourne, the members are specified 
 as Wihtred, King of Kent, Berhtwald, "Arch- 
 bishop of Britain," the Bishop of Rochester, 
 abbots, abbesses, presbyters, deacons, and king's 
 officers. 1 The acts of the Legatine Synod of 
 787, whatever be their value, are subscribed 
 not only by bishops, but also by OfFa, King of 
 the Mercians, and the " Ealdormen." 2 And 
 lest it should be urged that this was a local 
 usage out of harmony with the general usages 
 of Christian Churches, it may be useful to draw 
 special attention to the fact that, when the 
 circumstances of the English Church were 
 discussed in a council at Rome, in 679, it was 
 resolved that Archbishop Theodore should 
 assemble a " general council," or " public and 
 oecumenical synod," whose members are de- 
 scribed in the comprehensive terms of " universis 
 
 1 " Ducibus satrapis " in the MSS. printed in Birch's 
 Cartularium Saxonicum, vol. i., p. 128 ; " manige wise 
 menn " in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. 
 
 2 Haddan and Stubbs' Councils, etc., vol. iii., p. 460. 
 
150 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 praesulibus, regibus, principibus, et universis 
 fidelibus, senioribus majoribusque natu totius 
 Saxoniae." 1 Such meetings were in fact the 
 ordinary assemblies which were part of the 
 common heritage of the Teutonic races. The 
 bishops sat in them as being among the most 
 prominent men and competent counsellors in 
 the kingdom. 
 
 (3) The third point, that these mixed 
 assemblies took, cognisance of ecclesiastical as 
 well as of civil affairs, is also shown by their 
 records. It cannot be disputed that they some- 
 times dealt, not only with the external affairs 
 of the Church, but also with ritual and with 
 doctrine ; nor can it be disputed that they did 
 not confine themselves to laying down general 
 rules, but also sometimes acted as a supreme 
 court, exercising what in later times would have 
 been claimed to be purely spiritual authority. 
 It was in one of these mixed national assemblies, 
 that is to say, in the Third Council of Toledo, 
 a.d. 589, that the " filioque " clause was added 
 to the Creed of Western Christendom ; and it 
 
 1 Haddan and Stubbs, vol. iii., p. 134. 
 
NATIONAL CHURCHES. 151 
 
 is not less remarkable that the recitation of the 
 Creed in the Communion Office \& a survival 
 of an enactment which was made in that same 
 assembly, and made, moreover, not by the 
 ecclesiastical element in it, but by King 
 Reccared alone. 1 In the same way the Synod 
 of Frankfort, in 794, which has, been mentioned 
 above, took cognisance of and condemned the 
 theory of Elipandus, Bishop of Toledo, regard- 
 ing the nature of the Divine Sonship, which 
 is commonly known as " Adoptionism ; " and 
 it is expressly recorded that the condemnation 
 was the act of the whole assembly, not only 
 the bishops, but also the other members. In 
 our own country the " dooms " of Ine, which 
 were made at a Wessex Witenagemot, about 
 690, relate to baptism and the observance of 
 Sunday. 2 The laws of Edgar, of Ethelred, 
 and of Canute, all deal with ecclesiastical as 
 well as with secular matters. The Teutonic 
 settlers in England, in this as in other respects, 
 
 1 The documents will be found in all collections of the 
 councils, e.g., in Bruns, vol. i., p. 212. 
 
 2 Thorpe, Ancient Laws, pp. 44 — 65 ; Haddan and Stubbs, 
 vol. iii., pp. 214 — 218. 
 
152 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 developed their institutions on the same general 
 lines as the Teutonic settlers on the continent 
 of Europe. 
 
 It was in this way, by the holding of 
 meetings at which both the ecclesiastical and 
 civil elements were represented, and which 
 dealt with ecclesiastical no less than with civil 
 questions, that there grew up the conceptions 
 of both ecclesiastical and political unity which, 
 more than physical force, welded together the 
 diverse populations of what are now Spain, 
 France, and England, each into a single whole. 
 The older Roman arrangements lasted on, but 
 only for limited purposes. The province was 
 superseded by the nation in almost all respects, 
 except that of internal discipline. The meet- 
 ings of bishops in provincial councils tended 
 to vanish under the influence of their meeting 
 side by side with the nobles and civil officers 
 in the more important national council. Of 
 the ecclesiastical unit which was so formed 
 the national council was the only representative. 
 The Gallican Church and the English Church 
 exist as units only so far as they are held 
 together by this national bond. They are not 
 
NATIONAL CHURCHES. 153 
 
 mere combinations of Roman provinces, but 
 arose out of circumstances in which the Roman 
 provinces were ignored. The breaking of the 
 bond which binds the national Church together 
 would not necessarily leave the fabric of the 
 Roman provincial organisation in possession of 
 the ground. The question would naturally 
 arise whether the province as a basis of 
 ecclesiastical association was destined to be 
 any more permanent than the nation. If 
 Churches are to form groups, it is better, as 
 a matter of expediency and sentiment, that 
 they should be grouped upon a system which 
 has a past history rather than upon one which 
 is wholly new. But there is nothing to show 
 that a grouping according to the lines of the 
 Roman provinces is more in accordance with 
 the Divine will than a grouping according to 
 English counties. All groupings are artificial. 
 The measure of the Divine will is the spiritual 
 good that comes of grouping. He would be 
 a strong Erastian who should maintain that no 
 combination of Churches is allowable except 
 upon the lines of the political divisions of a 
 given time. He would be no less an Erastian 
 
154 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 who should maintain that the decisions of a 
 group of Churches, which, being held together 
 by the political bond, form the national Church, 
 have a sacredness and a force which would not 
 attach to the decision of a group which had 
 been formed on a non-political system. The 
 great mediaeval institution of national Churches 
 claims our respect as an instrument of spiritual 
 good in the past, and the particular Church to 
 which we belong claims also our allegiance as the 
 instrument with which God has appointed us to 
 work in the present ; but the sacredness of the 
 institution attaches not so much to the fact of 
 its existence as to the spirit which prompts its 
 '' members, nor can it be shown that any blessing 
 rests upon it which does not also rest upon 
 all congregations of " two or three " who are 
 gathered together in the name of Christ. 
 
THE CANONICAL RULE. 
 
IX. 
 
 THE CANONICAL RULE. 
 
 ' I "HE conversion of the Teutonic and Celtic 
 races was a slower process than has some- 
 times been supposed. For several centuries 
 after the adhesion of the Frankish kings to the 
 Catholic faith, although the network of Christian 
 organisation appeared to cover the greater part 
 of the Frankish domain, Christianity was, in 
 fact, only a thin veneer over the surface of a 
 pagan society. It was the religion of the court, 
 and of the survivors of the Roman population ; 
 but it was not the religion of the masses of 
 the people. The Teutonic gods were openly 
 worshipped. In some places their altars stood 
 by the side of the Christian churches. It was 
 thought not only that the two religions might 
 coexist in the State, but also that the gods of 
 their forefathers and the God of the Christians 
 
J 58 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 might be worshipped side by side. Even after 
 the majority of the people began to come to 
 Christian worship, and to receive the Christian 
 sacraments, heathen practices lingered on a con- 
 siderable scale. One of the earliest enactments 
 of Charles the Great, for example, renewed an 
 enactment of his uncle Carlman against "the 
 foolish men who offered sacrifices close to 
 churches in pagan fashion in the name of holy 
 martyrs and confessors ; " 1 and the " list of 
 superstitions and paganisms," which was drawn 
 up by an unknown person in the eighth century, 
 and which still survives in a Vatican MS., is 
 not less interesting to a student of religion 
 than it is to a student of folk-lore. 2 
 
 The survival of heathen practices in religion 
 was accompanied by, and was possibly a result 
 of, the survival of heathen practices in ordinary 
 life. The statute-books of the Teutonic races 
 are unimpeachable witnesses on the point. The 
 
 1 Karoli M., Capitulare Primum, a.d. 769, c. 8; Pertz, 
 M. G. H., Legum, vol. i., p. 34; Boretius, p. 45, renewing 
 Karlmanni Capitulare, a.d. 742, c. 5 ; Pertz, p. 17 ; Boretius, 
 p. 25. 
 
 2 Indiculus SupersHtionum et Paganiarum, in Pertz, vol. 
 i., p. 19; Boretius, p. 222. 
 
THE CANONICAL RULE, 159 
 
 vice of the North, then as now, was drunken- 
 ness. The indications of grossness in common 
 living, in respect of both drinking and eating, 
 are almost incredible, and cannot be here de- 
 tailed ; and even more repulsive are the indica- 
 tions of still grosser vices which accompanied 
 it. Nor was there any powerful influence at 
 work to counteract the current paganism. The 
 relation of the clergy of the time to the morality 
 of the time was not what might have been 
 antecedently expected, or what has ordinarily 
 prevailed. For the period was almost unique in 
 Christian history in its complete relaxation of 
 the bonds of ecclesiastical discipline. Wander- 
 ing bishops ordained wandering clergy, and 
 neither bishops nor clergy were easily brought 
 to acknowledge a superior. In the century 
 which had immediately succeeded the collapse 
 of the Roman administration the majority of 
 the clergy were Romans, citizens of the Roman 
 municipalities, imbued with Roman traditions, 
 and on a higher level of civilisation than the 
 greater part of those to whom they ministered. 
 In the eighth century the clergy, as is shown 
 by their names, were mostly Teutons or Celts ; 
 
160 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 and they do not seem to have been far removed 
 from the ordinary level of their countrymen. 
 Not only had the Christian ministry become a 
 profession and means of livelihood ; it had also 
 become a lucrative profession. The great in- 
 crease in the wealth of the Christian churches 
 had fostered the growth of a class of clergy 
 who were almost completely secularised. They 
 hunted ; they hawked ; they traded ; they lent 
 money upon usury. And with the secularisa- 
 tion of their office came the degradation of its 
 ideal of living. It is no doubt easy to frame 
 an indictment against the clergy of any period, 
 and not only against the clergy, but against 
 any class of society, by raking together, and 
 presenting in one view, all recorded instances of 
 misconduct. But the inference of the low level 
 of clerical life in the eighth century is drawn 
 not from individual instances, but from the fact 
 of repeated legislation. There are laws which 
 are too explicit to refer to an imaginary state 
 of things, and too frequently repeated to be 
 explained by the hypothesis of a rare or transitory 
 phenomenon, against clerks frequenting taverns, 
 staying there until midnight, and tottering about 
 
THE CANONICAL RULE. 161 
 
 the church from drunkenness while engaged in 
 holy offices. 1 
 
 Against this degradation of clerical life there 
 came a profound and permanent reaction. That 
 reaction came from monasticism. The first 
 impulse was given to it by the preaching of 
 monks, in whom we may ourselves take an 
 especial ' interest, inasmuch as they belonged to 
 a great extent to our own islands : to the 
 monasteries of Ireland and Scotland and the 
 south of England. The impulse which they 
 gave was chiefly that of their own example. 
 The influence of that example worked silently 
 for at least a century before it showed itself in 
 the common life of the clergy. But gradually, 
 and side by side with the restoration of ecclesias- 
 tical discipline, which gave birth to the mediasval 
 
 1 See, e.g., S. Gregorii Papae, Excerptum de diversis 
 criminibus et remediis eorum, in Migne's Patrologia Latina, 
 vol. lxxxix., 587 — 593 ; the Carlovingian Capitularies, for 
 example in Pertz, M. G. H., i., 138, 139, 160, 440; the decrees 
 of councils, for example the Third Council of Tours, a.d. 
 813, c. 21, the Second Council of Chalons, in the same year, 
 c. 10, the Council of Cloveshoe, a.d. 747, c. 21 ; and the 
 regulations of bishops, such as Theodulf of Orleans, Hincmar 
 of Rheims, and others, in Mansi, Concilia, vol. xii., p. 283, 
 vol. xiii., p. 993, vol. xiv., p. 393, vol. xv., pp. 475, 505. 
 
 I I 
 
162 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 diocese and the mediaeval parish, rose the in- 
 stitution of semi-monastic life for the clergy, 
 which gave birth to the mediaeval cathedral. 
 The one and the other — for the one was the 
 complement of the other, and both were parts 
 of a great ecclesiastical reformation — were 
 brought about by the co-operation of Church 
 and State, by the civil authority of the Frankish 
 kings, and the spiritual influence of the Bishop 
 of Rome. They agreed in fostering the policy 
 of withdrawing the clergy from ordinary society, 
 of setting before them the ideal which had been 
 from time to time framed for them by general 
 and local councils, and of imposing upon them 
 a common rule of discipline. 
 
 This institution of the "canonical rule," or 
 " common life," for the clergy has had such 
 wide ramifications, and fills so large a place 
 in modern ecclesiastical systems, that it will 
 probably be interesting to trace its beginnings 
 and early developments. 
 
 The first trace of it in legislation is in a 
 decree of the Council of Vernon in 755. 1 It 
 
 1 c. 11, Pertz, p. 26; Boretius, p. 35. 
 
THE CANONICAL RULE. 163 
 
 was there enacted that clerks should live either 
 in a monastery under monastic order, or under 
 the control of the bishop under " canonical " 
 order. In a capitulary of Pippin for his king- 
 dom of Lombardy in 782, 1 the bishop was 
 required to compel his clergy to live under 
 " canonical " order ; and if he failed to do this, 
 the king's officer was to decline to treat them 
 as clerks and to put them on a level with other 
 freemen in regard to liability to military service. 
 That this penalty was an onerous one may be 
 inferred from the number of persons who be- 
 came clerks in order to escape it. The meaning 
 of the term "canonical order" is more explicitly 
 given a few years later in an enactment of 
 Charles the Great at Aachen, which first requires 
 presbyters and bishops to live " according to 
 the canons," and then gives the following sum- 
 mary of what is required from those who live 
 the canonical life : " Let them not be permitted 
 to wander out of doors, but let them live under 
 complete ward, not given to filthy lucre, not 
 unchaste, not thieves, not murderers, not 
 
 1 c. 2, Pertz, p. 42; Boretius, p. 191. 
 
1 64 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 ravishers, not litigious, not passionate, not 
 puffed up, not drunkards, but chaste in heart 
 and body, humble, modest, sober, kind, peaceful, 
 sons of God worthy of being promoted to holy 
 orders, not living lives of luxury or unchastity 
 or other kinds of iniquity in the villages or 
 homesteads adjoining a church without control 
 or discipline." . . . a 
 
 This was the first stage of legislation on the 
 subject. It is obvious that, assuming the truth 
 of the terrible indictment against the clergy 
 which the last-quoted enactment implies, such 
 legislation was needed. It is also clear, from 
 the repetition of such enactments, and from the 
 instructions given to imperial commissioners to 
 see them carried out, that Charles was thoroughly 
 in earnest in this work of ecclesiastical reform. 
 The next stage of legislation was to provide the 
 material conditions for living such a life. The 
 theory was that in cities the bishop and his 
 clergy, and in country places the chief presbyter 
 and the younger clergy, should live together 
 under the same roof. Where the bishop's house 
 
 1 Capitulare Aquisgranense, A.D. 802, c. io, 22; Pertz, pp. 
 92, 94; Boretius, pp. 93, 95. 
 
THE CANONICAL RULE. 165 
 
 was not large enough, another building was to 
 be provided ; but whether it were the bishop's 
 house or another building, it was a " claustrum," 
 or " cloister," a building kept under lock and 
 key, with a common refectory and, above all, 
 a common dormitory. In the third stage it was 
 enacted that those who thus lived together, 
 " according to the canons," and in a common 
 building, should live by a common rule. Early 
 in the history of the movement, about 760, a 
 Frankish bishop, Chrodegang of Metz, had 
 recast the monastic rule of St. Benedict into 
 a form suitable for the conditions of clerical in- 
 stead of monastic life. In a meeting held at 
 Aachen in 816 or 817, Lewis the Pious adopted 
 this rule, with some modifications and additions, 
 and made the observance of it obligatory. In 
 the original form of the rule the bishop and 
 archdeacon were mentioned as the administrative 
 officers of the clergy who thus lived together ; 
 the conception was simply that of a bishop's 
 house, regulated by strict rules of life. In the 
 form which was sanctioned at Aachen the bishop 
 is relieved from the ordinary duty of seeing that 
 the rules of life are observed, and the place of 
 
166 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 the archdeacon is supplied by the " propositus," 
 or provost, an officer who might, no doubt, be 
 the archdeacon, but who had a more general 
 name because some cloisters were detached from 
 the bishop's house, and were consequently out- 
 side the oversight of an officer of the bishop's 
 church. In both forms of the rule the clergy- 
 house was to have only one door for entrance 
 and for exit : it was to contain a dormitory, a 
 refectory, a store-room, and other offices neces- 
 sary for brethren living together in a single 
 society ; the clergy were to receive food and 
 drink in prescribed portions ; those who had no 
 means of their own were to receive clothing 
 as well. 1 
 
 The succeeding Carlovingian emperors con- 
 tinued the policy of Charles and Lewis, and in 
 doing so were supported by the popes. The 
 clergy seem to have struggled against it. At 
 Meaux and Epernay in 845 the rules of Aachen 
 
 1 The canonical rule, both in the form framed by Chrode- 
 gang and in that which was authorised at Aachen, which h^ve 
 been not infrequently confused, has been repeatedly printed, 
 e.g., Mansi, Concilia, vol. xiv., pp. 153, 315 ; Walter, Fontes 
 Juris Ecclesiastici, p. 20. 
 
THE CANONICAL RULE. 167 
 
 were revived with a minuteness and stringency 
 which implies that they had been broken ; the 
 bishops were required to provide cloisters for all 
 their clergy ; if their own houses were not large 
 enough for the purpose, they were empowered 
 to acquire neighbouring land, by compulsion 
 if necessary ; if they had not funds with which 
 to build, the emperor undertook to levy forced 
 contributions for the purpose on the holders of 
 Church lands. The rule became as general in 
 Italy and England as it had become in the 
 Frankish domain, and by the beginning of the 
 tenth century the canonical life embraced almost 
 all the clergy in Western Christendom. 1 
 
 It was a great and beneficent reformation. 
 It rescued the clergy of the West from a grow- 
 ing degradation. It took a deep and permanent 
 root in Christian society, because it satisfied 
 a great need. It gave an ideal of life which 
 appreciably raised the standard of clerical 
 
 1 The canonical life is mentioned in England as early as 
 the Legatine Synods of 787 ; but this fact is only one of 
 several proofs that the canons of those synods, at least in their 
 present form, are of a later date than that to which they pro- 
 fess to belong. See Haddan and Stubbs' Councils, etc., vol. 
 iii., p. 45°- 
 
168 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 living ; and however much some of its collateral 
 effects may be regretted, it has in itself played 
 an important part in the development of both 
 Christian morals and Christian theology. 
 
 Its immediate purposes were determined by 
 the causes out of which it arose ; they were two 
 in number, discipline and instruction. 
 
 i. The discipline mainly consisted in the 
 obligation to eat and sleep in a common build- 
 ing. It thus checked on the one hand the 
 prevalent tendency to gluttony and drunken- 
 ness, and on the other hand the tendency to 
 immorality. The check which it imposed in 
 this latter respect was part of the general and 
 growing drift towards celibacy. That drift 
 must be estimated not by its relation to the 
 conditions of our own setded society, but by its 
 relation to a time in which, through the clash 
 of new forces and shifting populations, morality 
 and civilisation were for a time unhinged. Just 
 as in our own time it is necessary in certain 
 cases, and among certain classes of the popula- 
 tion, to meet a great prevalent vice by a total 
 abstinence from intoxicating drink, so, it may 
 at least be contended, it was necessary to meet 
 
THE CANONICAL RULE. 169 
 
 another great group of vices by withdrawing 
 the clergy altogether from intercourse with 
 female society. It is probable that this element 
 in the idea of a canonical life was foremost 
 in the minds of those who promoted it. The 
 canons of which they thought were the enact- 
 ments of successive councils which restricted or 
 prohibited the marriage of the clergy ; the Roman 
 Council of 853, for example, gives as the ex- 
 press reason for requiring priests to live in 
 cloisters, " that they may avoid the company of 
 women." 
 
 The strict discipline of this common life 
 became the stricter because it was combined 
 with, and largely fostered, the penitential system 
 which has since played so considerable a part in 
 the Christian world. The habit of confessing 
 sins became part of a fixed ecclesiastical rule. 
 The sins which the canonical clergy confessed 
 were mainly offences against the discipline of 
 the common life. Lists of such offences were 
 drawn up, and the penalty for each offence was 
 specified. From the time of the establishment 
 of the canonical system " penitential books " 
 began to multiply ; and there is no darker page 
 
170 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 in the history of Christianity than the state of 
 life which they reveal. The very foulness of 
 the sins for which they prescribe is the best 
 justification for their existence ; for if such sins 
 prevailed even under a system of checks and 
 surveillance, the state of clerical morality before 
 that system began, and which might have con- 
 tinued if that system had not existed, must have 
 been inconceivably immoral. The system, which 
 began by being one of interior discipline for 
 clergy-houses, was gradually extended to the 
 laity ; and the confession of sins, which had 
 been an almost inevitable adjunct of the canon- 
 ical discipline, was ultimately made a condition 
 of admission to communion for all Christians 
 alike. The history of the practice is of especial 
 interest, and also of especial value, in view of 
 its revival within our own borders in recent times. 
 2. The second purpose which the canonical 
 rule was designed to serve was that of edifica- 
 tion and instruction. The hours of the day 
 and night were apportioned to definite occupa- 
 tions, chief among which were those of praying 
 and reading. Seven times in twenty-four hours 
 did the summons sound for prayers and for 
 
THE CANONICAL RULE. 171 
 
 the recitation of the Psalms. The " canonical 
 hours" became a fixed institution of Christen- 
 dom ; and they have left their mark on the 
 daily services of our own Church, which in 
 their form do but perpetuate the daily services 
 of the early mediaeval clergy-houses. Every 
 day the clergy met to celebrate the mass, and 
 every day they also met for the reading of part 
 of either the Bible, or the canons, or the 
 canonical rule, or " treatises and homilies which 
 should edify the hearers." 1 It is probable that 
 the later name for this daily meeting, and after- 
 wards also for the persons who so met together, 
 was derived from the phrase by which it is 
 designated in Chrodegang's rule, viz., " ad 
 capitulum," i.e., to hear a "chapter" read. In 
 this way the prevalent ignorance of the clergy 
 was lessened. Learning began to form a neces- 
 sary ingredient in their life, and the mere fact 
 of their seclusion from other occupations tended 
 to lift them above the level of the time at which 
 a bishop had diligently to inquire whether a 
 presbyter knew the Creed. 
 
 1 Chrodegangi Regula, c. 8 ; and Alcuini, Epist. 50, in 
 Haddan and Stubbs' Councils, vol. iii., p. 502. 
 
i;2 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 One effect of this element in the canonical 
 rule is of especial interest. It was the duty of 
 the elder clerks to see that the younger were 
 taught. In country clergy-houses the duty 
 devolved upon the presiding presbyter, or parish 
 priest ; in city clergy-houses there came to be 
 a special officer, the " scholasticus," who, from 
 the fact that he was also the secretary of the 
 canonical clergy, was also known, especially in 
 England, as the " cancellarius," or chancellor. 
 In some cases, he came in course of time to 
 be detached from the clergy-house altogether ; 
 and in some such cases, others besides the 
 young clerks of the clergy-house clustered 
 round him for instruction. It is possible that 
 the dignified position of the Chancellor of the 
 University of Oxford fonlyvjs/ the historical 
 continuation of that of the schoolmaster and 
 secretary of the canons of St. Frideswide. 
 
THE CATHEDRAL CHAPTER. 
 
X. 
 
 THE CATHEDRAL CHAPTER. 
 
 * I S HE earliest regulations respecting the 
 canonical life appear to have contemplated 
 only the case of the clergy of a city living 
 together in the bishop's house. Consequently 
 in the rule of Chrodegang the bishop was the 
 actual, as well as the nominal, head of the 
 clergy to whom the rule applied. He had 
 the chief seat at the chief table. He assigned 
 to the several clerks their several duties. He 
 distributed the stipends and the clothes. He 
 was the disciplinary officer, not by way of 
 appeal, but in the first instance. Under him, 
 following the traditional lines, the archdeacon 
 was the chief officer of the community. The 
 gradations of rank and function which existed 
 in the church in respect of the discipline of 
 Divine service existed also in the adjoining 
 
176 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 clergy-house in respect of the discipline of 
 daily life. 
 
 But subsequent regulations contemplate the 
 case of other clergy-houses, besides that which 
 was attached to the bishop's church. Con- 
 sequently in the rule which was authorised at 
 Aachen, and by which the subsequent com- 
 munities were governed, the bishop is the 
 nominal rather than the actual head ; the actual 
 head is the " praepositus " or "provost;" and 
 the clergy, who lived together in their several 
 communities, began to have an internal or- 
 ganisation of their own, apart from the general 
 organisation of the whole Christian community. 
 
 It is not proposed in these pages to enter 
 into the history of the other communities 
 which the rule of Aachen covered, and which 
 have generally been known as collegiate 
 churches ; but confining our view to the com- 
 munity of the clergy of the bishop's church, 
 it is proposed to show by the operation of 
 what causes that community came to have the 
 important share in ecclesiastical administration 
 which belongs to the mediaeval and modern 
 " cathedral chapter." The present chapter will 
 
THE CATHEDRAL CHAPTER. i 77 
 
 deal with the growth of (i) its independence 
 and (2) its separate internal organisation ; the 
 following chapter with its status in relation to 
 the diocese. 
 
 I. The primary cause of the independence 
 of the cathedral chapter is to be found in that 
 which is the motive cause of most constitutional 
 changes, both within the church and without 
 it : the " love of money." The clergy who 
 lived in the bishop's house, and under a 
 common rule of life, differed from monks in 
 respect chiefly of not being bound, as monks 
 were, by the obligation of perpetual poverty. 
 They could acquire property. They could 
 amass savings. They had thus a keener 
 interest than monks had in their several shares 
 in the funds of the church. The ancient theory 
 that those funds were at the disposal of the 
 bishop had long been modified by the rule 
 that he should divide them into three or four 
 equal portions, of which one portion was for 
 the clergy and one for the poor. But with the 
 enormous increase in the funds of the church, 
 and with the absence of a sufficient check upon 
 the action of bishops, the rule had come to be 
 
 12 
 
178 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 frequently set aside. The avarice of bishops 
 came to be a constant subject of complaint. 
 The shares both of the clergy and of the 
 poor were inadequate and irregular. It became 
 neccessary to withdraw some of the sources of 
 income from the bishop's control, and one of 
 the first effects of the new power which came 
 to the city clergy from their living in common 
 was the assignment of the lands of the church 
 and of the tithes of certain districts to separate 
 purposes, one portion to the bishop and one 
 to the clergy. 1 The same course was soon 
 adopted in respect of the portion of the poor ; 
 and before long there were three separate funds 
 and three sets of estates, one belonging to the 
 bishop, a second to the clergy, a third to the 
 sick, the strangers, and the poor. The bishop's 
 house, which had formerly been also a clergy- 
 house and a " hospitium " or house for strangers, 
 became simply the bishop's residence, and 
 separate from it, though side by side with it, 
 
 1 A good early instance of this partition of revenues 
 between a bishop and his clergy is that of Paris ; the deed, 
 which bears the date 829, still exists, and is printed by 
 Guerard, Cartulaire de tEglise Notre Dame de Paris, pp. 
 lxii., 321. 
 
THE CATHEDRAL CHAPTER. 179 
 
 were the " cloister " of the canons and the 
 " hospital " for the needy. 
 
 The first effect of this assignment of particular 
 estates to the body of clergy, or " canons," who 
 were living together, was to give to that body 
 a corporate character, an independence which 
 it had not before possessed in respect of the 
 bishop, and a status distinct from that of the 
 other clergy of the diocese. 
 
 A second result was to limit the number of 
 persons who could be placed upon the list of 
 cathedral clergy. Hitherto the discretion of 
 the bishop had been unlimited. The persons 
 whom he ordained took their place, as of course, 
 on the list, and received their share of the 
 ofFerings. But though this discretion continued 
 to be unlimited in respect of country clergy, 
 the number of the cathedral clergy usually came 
 to be fixed ; the canons declined to permit an 
 increase in their number, and a consequent 
 diminution of their individual shares in the 
 common fund, without their consent. 1 
 
 1 A good early instance of this is in the regulation of the 
 Synod of Cologne in 873 (Mansi, Concilia, vol. xvii., 275) 
 confirming the partition of the revenues which had been made 
 six years previously. 
 
180 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 A third result was to subdivide the whole 
 endowment thus given over to the cathedral 
 clergy, and to assign definite sources of income 
 to each individual member of it. It naturally 
 and rapidly followed that the canon to whom 
 lands or tithes were assigned for his support 
 claimed a right of property in them, and that 
 a canonry, from having been merely a claim to 
 a share in a common meal and a common 
 lodging, became a legal benefice, sometimes 
 with large emoluments, and always with the 
 rights of a freehold. 
 
 A fourth result was that canonries, having 
 become places of both dignity and emolument, 
 were sought after as such by persons who had 
 no proper claim to them. So far from being 
 means of providing for the material needs of 
 the clergy of a cathedral or parish church, they 
 came to be sometimes held by laymen, either 
 as sources of income, or as offices of honour. 
 The Roman emperor was a canon of St. Peter's 
 and St. John Lateran at Rome, of Utrecht, 
 Cologne, and Aix-la-Chapelle ; the Pope himself 
 was a canon of Cologne. Even when the 
 dignity was not, as it was in such cases, 
 
THE CATHEDRAL CHAPTER. 181 
 
 altogether honorary, it was sometimes combined 
 with other offices which rendered the proper 
 performance of its duties impossible ; and at 
 first temporarily, but from the twelfth century 
 permanently, canons were allowed to employ 
 substitutes, " vicarii," for the discharge of their 
 strictly clerical functions. So general did this 
 employment of substitutes ultimately become, 
 that the " vicars " of a cathedral chapter came 
 themselves to be constituted into a corporation 
 and to enjoy revenues of their own. 
 
 It was in this way that the retention by the 
 canonical clergy of the right to hold private 
 property came to subvert the original purpose 
 for which they were established. The failure 
 was unquestioned. Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, 
 writing in the eleventh century, states the fact, 
 and assigns as its cause " the coldness of the 
 charity which would have all things common, 
 and the reign of the cupidity which seeks not 
 the things which are God's and one's neighbour's, 
 but only those things which are one's own." 1 
 And in similar language a few years later Pope 
 
 1 Ivon. Carnot., Efiist., 213, ed. Juret., p. 371, 
 
182 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 Urban II. says of the canonical life that "through 
 the cooling of the zeal of the faithful it has 
 almost wholly passed away." 1 The cause of 
 the failure was so well understood, that the 
 great movement which was made in the eleventh 
 and twelfth centuries for the revival and reform 
 of the system turned wholly upon this one point. 
 The distinction between monks and canons in 
 respect of holding private property was abolished 
 by the reforming party, and since a passage in 
 St. Augustine could be quoted in favour of a 
 perfect community of goods among clergy, the 
 name of that great Father was prefixed to a set 
 of rules which rested on the idea of such a 
 community as its leading principle. Hencefor- 
 ward all canons, whether of the bishop's church 
 or of other churches, were divided into two 
 kinds : those who did and those who did not 
 accept the principle of abandoning private pro- 
 perty. The former were called Augustinian 
 or " regular," the latter were distinguished as 
 "secular" canons. From the former came, in 
 the course of the twelfth century, those who 
 
 1 Urban, II., Epist. ad clericos quosdam regul., ap. Mansi, 
 Concilia, voL xx., 713. 
 
THE CATHEDRAL CHAPTER. 183 
 
 followed an even stricter rule, and who, from 
 the birthplace of their founder, Norbert of 
 Premontre, were known as " Premonstraten- 
 sian " canons. These two groups of " regular " 
 canons were popularly distinguished, from the 
 colour of their respective habits, the former as 
 Black, the latter as White Canons. 
 
 II. The history of these developments of the 
 canonical system would carry us far beyond the 
 limits of these pages, and we pass from it to 
 consider the internal organisation of the canons 
 or " chapter " of the bishop's church. 
 
 1. It has been already mentioned that where- 
 as in the original rule of Chrodegang the bishop's 
 representative as head of the clergy-house was 
 the archdeacon, in the rule of Aachen he is 
 called by the more general designation of 
 " propositus ' ' or provost. But the new name 
 was probably not intended to do more than 
 cover the fact that there were communities of 
 clergy living together besides the community of 
 clergy attached to the bishop's church, away 
 from the immediate control of the bishop and 
 the bishop's ordinary representative. In the 
 community of cathedral clergy the archdeacon 
 
184 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 and the provost were, as a rule, the same person. 
 
 Where, as at Rheims, they were separate officers, 
 
 the provost was charged with the administration 
 
 of the revenues of the clergy-house and with 
 
 the provision for the physical needs of the 
 
 clergy ; the archdeacon was charged with the 
 
 supervision of their ecclesiastical functions. But 
 
 whether the office of provost was combined 
 
 with or separate from that of archdeacon, a 
 
 certain difficulty arose from the fact that when 
 
 the clergy passed from the clergy-house into 
 
 the church, another officer took the precedence 
 
 in Divine service. This was the archpresbyter, 
 
 or, as he came to be usually called, the " dean " 
 
 — a term which was so widely in use for other 
 
 and varied purposes, that the origin of its use in 
 
 this particular way cannot be certainly ascertained. 
 
 It was inevitable that between two officers, each 
 
 of whom in turn presided over the other, there 
 
 should be a certain amount of friction ; and it 
 
 is consequently not surprising to find that one 
 
 or other of the two sometimes ceased to exist, 
 
 and that some chapters had a dean without a 
 
 provost, and others a provost without a dean ; 
 
 sometimes also the provost was archpresbyter, 
 
THE CATHEDRAL CHAPTER. 185 
 
 and not archdeacon, and the dean archdeacon 
 rather than archpresbyter. 1 The difficulty was 
 increased by the fact that the exercise of the 
 archidiaconal functions of the provost, and, as 
 time went on, the large increase in the capitular 
 funds which he had to administer, caused that 
 officer to be so frequently absent from the 
 church, as sometimes to lose his right of voting 
 in the chapter. The dean, on the contrary, 
 was not called away by any such extraneous 
 duties, and it is consequently not surprising to 
 find that in a large number of chapters he came 
 to be the more important officer. There was 
 probably the further circumstance in favour of 
 the same tendency that whereas the provost, as 
 archdeacon, was appointed by the bishop, and 
 was regarded as being especially the bishop's 
 officer, the dean was elected by the chapter, and 
 being so elected, was more likely to guard the 
 rights of the chapter against the bishop. 2 The 
 older relation of the two officers survives in our 
 
 1 Instances will be found mentioned by Hinschius {Das 
 Kirchenrecht der Katholiken und Protestanten in Deutschland, ■ 
 Bd. ii., p. 93). 
 
 2 An instance of such election is that of Paris (Guerard, 
 ut supra, p. c). 
 
1 86 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 own country, not in cathedrals, but in the colleges 
 of Oxford, where the head of the society is 
 called by the name of provost or by some 
 equivalent designation, and in the older founda- 
 tions is charged with especial duties in relation 
 to their funds, while the dean occupies a lower 
 place, but is charged with especial duties in 
 relation to discipline and Divine worship. 
 
 After the provost or dean came the officer 
 who, under the name " primicerius," had been 
 mentioned in earlier times as the director of 
 the lower grades of clerks, the subdeacons, 
 acolyths, and readers, but who afterwards was 
 more generally entitled "cantor" or "prascentor." 
 At Cologne he had also the title " chori-epis- 
 copus," or superintendent of the choir, a title 
 which must be carefully distinguished from that 
 of chorepiscopus, or country bishop, of which 
 mention has been made in a previous chapter. 
 
 After the precentor came the " scholasticus," 
 or schoolmaster, who was charged with the in- 
 struction of the younger clerks, and who, from 
 his also acting as the ordinary secretary of the 
 whole body, was sometimes also entitled "can- 
 cellarius," or chancellor. When the instruction 
 
THE CATHEDRAL CHAPTER. 187 
 
 of other persons was added to that of the young 
 clerks of the clergy-house, and the cathedral 
 schools became important centres of learning, 
 the scholasticus had the right to nominate his 
 assistants, who bore the title of " rector 
 scholarum " or " magister scholarum." Mem- 
 bers of the University of Oxford will recognise 
 a survival of this usage in the practice, which 
 has only recently ceased to exist, of the annual 
 appointment of the " Masters of the Schools " 
 by the Chancellor's deputy. 
 
 Besides these there was a varying number of 
 other officers, especially the " custos," or warden, 
 whose office is not easy to distinguish from that 
 of the "sacrista," or sacristan, and was no doubt 
 frequently combined with it, and also with that 
 of " thesaurarius," or treasurer, 1 and who had 
 the care of the sacred vessels and lights and 
 furniture. 
 
 Some or all of these officers, the number 
 and the particular officers varying widely in dif- 
 ferent parts of Christendom, were distinguished 
 as "prelates" or "dignitaries," and also by a 
 
 1 The two offices of "custos" and "sacrista" are distin- 
 guished in the Canon Law (" X. de Off Sacr.," i., 26, 27). 
 
188 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 word which had the same meaning as the 
 fore-going, but which in France and England 
 was more commonly applied to the holders 
 of parochial benefices, that of " personam," or 
 parsons. The other canons were originally dis- 
 tinguished, according as they were in major or 
 minor orders, into senior and junior canons ; 
 afterwards came the distinction into canons 
 capitular and canons non-capitular, according 
 as they had or had not a voice in the chapter, 
 the latter being also known as " domicelli." In 
 time a further distinction followed. In the 
 first instance each canon had his " prasbenda," 
 his proper share in the meat, drink, and clothing 
 which were assigned to the clergy from the 
 common church funds; when this was com- 
 muted for. a money payment, it was still called 
 by the same name ; but when, instead of the 
 payment of a share of money from a common 
 fund, lands or tithes were assigned to particular 
 canons for their support, the term " prasbenda " 
 was transferred to the lands or tithes. And 
 since there were some canons to whom lands 
 or tithes were not so assigned, but who had 
 no more than the ancient right to live in the 
 
THE CATHEDRAL CHAPTER. 189 
 
 common house and dine at the common table, 
 a distinction grew up between those who were 
 canons simply and those who were also " pras- 
 bendarii," i.e., who had an estate which yielded 
 an income. 
 
 If we compare the original theory and practice 
 of the canonical life with its final developments, 
 the transformation will appear strange and 
 almost incredible. The theory was that the 
 clergy should live ■ together, away from the risk 
 of contamination by a corrupt society, in the 
 perfect fraternity of a common dining-hall and 
 a common sleeping-chamber ; they came in 
 practice to live in separate houses, within the 
 cathedral precincts, but yet detached from each 
 other, and to dine together only on great 
 festivals. The theory was that they should 
 take their several places in Divine service not 
 only every day, but many times a day ; they 
 came in practice to be able to perform their 
 duties in the choir in some cases entirely by 
 deputy, and in almost all cases for limited 
 periods and on fixed occasions. The theory 
 was that they were officers of the whole com- 
 munity of which the bishop was the head, 
 
jgo GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 appointed freely by the community and by its 
 head ; they came in practice to be a close cor- 
 poration, whose members were usually elected 
 by co-optation, and who were in many cases not 
 necessarily officers of the community — i.e., in 
 holy orders — at all. The theory was that out 
 of the common offerings a common table was 
 provided; they came in practice to have large 
 separate revenues, each canon having the full 
 rights of a tenant in fee over the lands annexed 
 to his canonry. But the fact that the transfor- 
 mation has been great does not prove that it 
 has been without benefit. Each development 
 of the original principle has, on the contrary, 
 borne splendid fruit. It has passed, like all 
 human institutions, through its periods of over- 
 growth and decay. It has constantly needed, 
 and it needs now, readaptation to new wants. 
 But we cannot hesitate to thank God for the 
 birth and growth of an institution which gave to 
 our forefathers, and has continued to ourselves, 
 not only the buildings and the chapters of our 
 cathedrals, but also the colleges of our univer- 
 sities and the organisation of the universities 
 themselves. 
 
THE CHAPTER AND THE DIOCESE. 
 
XL 
 
 THE CHAPTER AND THE DIOCESE. 
 
 /^VNE of the most important of the con- 
 ^—^ stitutional changes which have taken 
 place in the history of the Western Churches is 
 that by which the clergy of the bishop's church, 
 organised in the manner which has been de- 
 scribed in the two preceding chapters, gradually 
 took the place and absorbed the functions of 
 the whole body of the clergy of the diocese. 
 In earlier times there had been no other clergy 
 than those of the bishop's church. As long as 
 each city or rural district had its complete 
 organisation, the bishop and all the clergy 
 met day after day, or week after week, for 
 the purposes of discipline and administration no 
 less than of worship. In all these respects it is 
 probable that the community originally acted as 
 a whole, and that the sharp line of distinction 
 which came to be drawn in later times between 
 
 13 
 
194 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 the officers of the community and its ordinary- 
 members did not exist. It would be interesting, 
 but it would at the same time involve a longer 
 statement than is here possible, to show by 
 what slow steps the non-official part of the 
 Christian communities came to lose in practice 
 its original share in the administration of their 
 affairs. It would be no less interesting, but it 
 would be no less outside our present limits, to 
 show the steps by which certain important 
 functions which once belonged to the whole 
 community, and afterwards passed into the ex- 
 clusive hands of the clergy, were monopolised by 
 the bishop. The purpose of the present chapter 
 is to show in outline how certain parts of eccle- 
 siastical administration not only ceased to be 
 functions of the whole community, but became 
 the special functions of the cathedral chapter. 
 
 The first distinction that arose among the 
 clergy was a necessary result of the system of 
 not giving to every community a complete 
 organisation. It was inevitable that the detach- 
 ment of presbyters from the church of a city, 
 and their settlement with a quasi-independent 
 position in small towns and rural districts, 
 
THE CHAPTER AND THE DIOCESE. 195 
 
 should produce in course of time a distinction 
 between city and rural clergy. It was no less 
 inevitable that those who remained at or near 
 the bishop's church should meet together more 
 frequently, and be more frequently consulted 
 on questions of administration, than those who 
 lived at some distance from the city. But 
 the main cause of the distinction which after- 
 wards arose was not local separation, but the 
 growth of the system of separate endowments. 
 So long as country presbyters were, like 
 city presbyters, dependent for their maintenance 
 upon the portion of the offerings which was 
 assigned to them by the bishop, they were 
 compelled to make periodical visits to the 
 bishop's church. But when country churches 
 began to have funds of their own, country 
 presbyters began to resort so infrequently to 
 the city, that legislation on the subject became 
 necessary. It was found expedient that they 
 should not only meet the bishop and the other 
 clergy in council, but that they should do so 
 at fixed times. Hence a distinction arose be- 
 tween the presbytery or ordinary counci 1 of 
 the Church, which continued to meet week 
 
196 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 by week, and the larger council [" generalis 
 synodus," " magna synodus "), which met only 
 once or twice a year. The distinction is similar 
 to that which has existed in the constitutional 
 history of our own country between the Privy 
 Council, which is in theory always near the 
 person of the Sovereign, and the Great Council, 
 or Parliament, which is summoned only from 
 time to time. And in the one case no less than 
 in the other a certain section of the smaller 
 body, the cathedral chapter and the " cabinet " 
 respectively, has come to exercise a considerable 
 proportion of the functions which originally 
 belonged to the larger body. 
 
 The final assignment of separate functions to 
 the two bodies was not accomplished until far 
 on in the Middle Ages. For many centuries the 
 larger body consisted of the same members and 
 had the same wide range of duties as before. It 
 did not cease to be in theory, and to no small 
 extent in practice also, what the first organised 
 assemblies of Christians had been. In regard 
 to its members, existing records specify not 
 only presbyters, but deacons and subdeacons, 
 and not only clergy, but laity : whether all 
 
THE CHAPTER AND THE DIOCESE. 197 
 
 members stood on the same footing and had 
 an equal right of voting is uncertain ; but the 
 existence of a variety of elements in the synod 
 is beyond question. 1 
 
 In regard to its functions, the records give 
 instances of all kinds of administrative and 
 many kinds of judicial acts : the creation of 
 parishes and monasteries ; the recognition and 
 confirmation of endowments ; the decision of 
 controversies as to tithes ; and processes against 
 heretics. 2 
 
 The name "diocesan synod," by which the 
 institution is known in its revived form in 
 modern times, is first found in the thirteenth 
 century : but in that century the institution 
 
 1 The following are a few of many instances. At Como 
 in 1010, " all the clerks and laity of the diocese " are specified 
 (Mansi, vol. xix., 315) ; at Besancon in 1041, provosts, deans, 
 cantors, archdeacons, succentors, abbots, archpresbyters, 
 chaplains, deacons, and subdeacons (Mansi, vol. xix., 597) 
 at Constance in 1094, the clergy with the dukes and other 
 chief men of Germany (Mansi, vol. xx., 795) ; at Bamberg in 
 1087, " the whole number of those who were present at the 
 synod, that is, the clergy (who were present) as a part of their 
 holy obedience, the judges and other laymen bound by their 
 oaths " (Hartzheim, Concilia Germanim, vol. iii., 206). 
 
 2 Instances of each of these will be found collected by 
 Hinschius, Das Kirchenrecht, Bd. iii., p. 587. 
 
1 98 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 itself also ceased for the most part to exist : 
 so far as it existed, its members were no longer 
 the whole body of clergy and laity, but only 
 the dignitaries of a diocese with the rectors 
 of parishes ; and its functions were narrowed 
 partly by the growing interference of the papal 
 see in the internal affairs of dioceses, partly 
 by the growing concentration of power in the 
 hands of the bishops, partly by the development 
 of the functions of the smaller council which 
 consisted of the cathedral chapter. 
 
 Those functions arose in the first instance 
 naturally and out of the necessities of the case. 
 There were many kinds of administrative acts 
 which were still regarded as being the acts of 
 the whole Church, but which could not wait 
 for the periodical assemblies. The clergy and 
 laity of the bishop's city and its neighbourhood 
 were taken to represent the whole Church", 
 and their consent was sufficient to give validity 
 to what was done. It is difficult for those 
 who are conversant only with the ecclesiastical 
 usages of later times to realise how hard the 
 original theory died. A long succession of 
 documents might be quoted to show that until 
 
THE CHAPTER AND THE DIOCESE. 199 
 
 at least the middle of the twelfth century the 
 concurrence of clergy and laity in the more 
 important administrative acts of a diocese was 
 ordinarily required. The change came through 
 the influence of the popes. The victory of the 
 ecclesiastical theory in the Concordat of Worms 
 caused a gradual disregard of the laity ; and the 
 determination of the popes to make the cathedral 
 chapters a check upon the tendencies to in- 
 dependence on the part of the bishops caused 
 the disregard of any other clergy but those of 
 the cathedral. The proofs of this are to be 
 found in the additions to the earlier regulations 
 of the Canon Law. One of the earliest of such 
 proofs is a letter of Alexander III., in which 
 he strongly reproves a bishop for frequently 
 consulting the clergy and laity of his neighbour- 
 hood instead of the canons of his cathedral. 1 
 A series of subsequent decretals defines exactly 
 the points in which a bishop could only act 
 with the consent, or with the advice, of his 
 chapter ; and to the present day, in the view 
 of the Canon Law, and subject only to the 
 
 1 c. 5, X. de his quae fiunt a prgelato sine consensu capituli 
 (iii. 10). 
 
200 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 right, which remains in a bishop's discretion, 
 of summoning the larger synod of his clergy, the 
 corporate body of the chapter, and not either 
 the clergy of the diocese as a whole or the 
 clergy of the bishop's city, constitute the stand- 
 ing council of the diocese. 
 
 In many respects it might have been wished 
 that in the working constitution of our own 
 Church the powers of the chapter as a check 
 upon bishops had been retained. Our own 
 system is that of the later Middle Ages, in which 
 the popes, abandoning their earlier support of 
 the chapters against the bishops, gave facilities 
 to the bishops to enable them to dispense 
 with the consent of chapters. The dispensation 
 has in many respects become not occasional but 
 perpetual. The bishops have become possessed 
 of an undesigned autocracy. The cathedral 
 chapters exist as practically independent cor- 
 porations, their diocesan functions, save in one 
 important respect, having practically ceased. 
 That respect is the election of bishops. It was 
 the last function to pass into their hands, and it 
 has remained in form till now. The primitive 
 theory lingered on until a comparatively late 
 
THE CHAPTER AND THE DIOCESE. 201 
 
 period of the Middle Ages. The appointment 
 of all officers had originally been in the hands 
 of the community, but in the appointment of 
 presbyters and deacons the share of the laity 
 had been narrowed down to the simple right 
 of approval, and the share of the clergy to that 
 of bearing testimony, long before the canonical 
 system began. The appointment of bishops, 
 on the contrary, was never surrendered by the 
 communities which had originally possessed it. 
 The share of both laity and clergy in it was 
 continually recognised and reasserted. 1 The 
 reason for so continually reasserting a recog- 
 nised rule was that the growing importance of 
 bishops in the national economy had led to 
 attempts on the part of kings to control or 
 supersede their election by the Churches. The 
 
 1 For example, in the sixth and seventh centuries, by the 
 first Council of Clermont, in 535 (I. Cone. Arvern., c. 5) ; by 
 the third Council of Orleans, in 538 (III. Cone. Aurel., c. 3) 
 by the fourth Council of Orleans, in 541 (IV. Cone. Aurel., e 
 5) ; by the fifth Council of Orleans, in 549 (V. Cone. Aurel. 
 c. 10) ; by the third Council of Paris, in 557 (III. Cone. Paris 
 c. 8) ; by the second Council of Tours, in 567 (II. Cone 
 Turon., c. 9) ; by the fifth Council of Paris, in 615 (V. Cone. 
 Paris, c. 1) ; by the Council of Reims, in 625 or 630 (Cone 
 Rem., c. 25) ; and by the Council of Chalons, in 649 or 664 
 (Cone. Cabil., c. 10). 
 
202 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 interference of the kings took several forms. 
 Sometimes a particular person was recom- 
 mended for election ; sometimes an election by 
 the clergy and laity was set aside in favour of 
 the king's nominee ; probably in all cases the 
 king's consent to an election was required. It 
 is easy to see that in so important a matter 
 the right of approval gradually drifted into the 
 right of nomination. It is uncertain to what 
 extent the form of election by clergy and people 
 was preserved in the eighth century, but it is 
 certain that, for a time at least, bishops were in 
 fact appointed by the sovereign. Then came a 
 reaction. The prevalence of simony caused a 
 revival of the stricter practice of election. In 
 a capitulary of 818 or 819 Lewis the Pious 
 assented to the request of the clergy that 
 bishops should be elected as of old, by the 
 clergy and people, without money or favour. 1 
 For three centuries afterwards there was a 
 constant struggle between Church and State on 
 the subject, the former constantly reasserting 
 its claim, the latter not denying the justice of 
 
 1 Capit. Aquisgran., c. 2, ed. Pertz, i.,, p. 2q6 ; ^Capit. 
 Ecclesiast., ed. Boret., p. 276. 
 
THE CHAPTER AND THE DIOCESE. 203 
 
 the claim but simply setting it aside. Some- 
 times the claim was asked or conceded as a 
 special privilege : for example, at the third 
 Council of Valence, in 885, the king is to be 
 asked to allow canonical election by the clergy 
 and people, but if he insists on sending a 
 nominee of his own, the nominee is to 
 be respectfully examined as to his character 
 and knowledge. 1 Sometimes it was reasserted 
 in the decree of a council ; for example, at 
 Rome in 853, at Reims in 1049/ at Rome 
 again in 1080. The struggle at length came 
 to play an important part in civil as well 
 as in ecclesiastical history, and resulted in the 
 compromise known as the Concordat of Worms 
 in mi. The terms of the compromise were 
 that the Emperor should allow the free election 
 of bishops and their investiture as spiritual 
 officers by the Church ; that the Church should 
 allow the elections to take place in the Em- 
 peror's presence ; and the investiture of bishops 
 
 1 III. Cone. Valent., c. 7, " sed etsi a servitio pii principis 
 nostri aliquis clericorum venerit ut alicui civitati preeponatur 
 episcopus, timore casta sollicite examinetur prijnum cujus 
 vita; sit, deinde cujus scientiae. . . ." 
 
 1 An important council, at which Leo IX. presided. 
 
204 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 as temporal officers by the State. But it is 
 important to note that up to this period, 
 wherever the election of bishops is mentioned, 
 it is an election by the clergy and people of the 
 diocese. The process of narrowing the electoral 
 body was very slow. It can be traced as a 
 natural development through several centuries. 
 An assembly of all the clergy and all the people 
 of a large diocese being practically impossible, 
 the election, though open to all, came in fact to 
 fall into the hands of those who were most 
 interested in it, — the clergy of the city and the 
 most influential among the laity. Hence in 
 records of elections we find mention of, e.g., 
 the magnates and all the clergy, 1 and the count, 
 the viscount, the nobles, and vassals, and all 
 the people, the clergy moreover, the dean, the 
 provost, the archdeacon, and all the clerks. 2 
 But after the Concordat of Worms we begin 
 to find that the laity were excluded from a 
 share in the actual election, their assent only 
 being required. And since there was at the 
 
 1 At Cologne in 933, Vita Brunon., c. 11, ap. Pertz, 
 Scrvptores, vol. iv., p. 258. 
 
 At Bourges in 1052, Mansi, Concilia, vol. xix., 805. 
 
THE CHAPTER AND THE DIOCESE. 205 
 
 same time a strong support of the cathedral 
 chapters by the papal see, it is natural to find 
 that election by the clergy only came to mean 
 election by the canons only. Three stages are 
 clearly marked in the Canon Law of the twelfth 
 century. In the first of them the canons could 
 not act alone, but only with the monks of the 
 city or diocese ; this stage is marked by a decree 
 of the second Lateran Council in 1139, under 
 Innocent II., which declares that if the monks, 
 religiosi viri, be excluded by the canons from 
 the election, the election will be null and void. 1 
 In the second stage it was ruled that the opposi- 
 tion of the monks should not override the votes 
 of the canons, unless the former alleged a valid 
 canonical objection to the election or the per- 
 son elected ; this stage is indicated by a letter 
 of Alexander III. in 1169 to the chapter of 
 Bremen. " Although in the election of a 
 bishop the approval and assent of the sovereign 
 ought to be required, laymen ought not to be 
 admitted to the election. The election is to be 
 made by the canons of the cathedral church and 
 
 1 II. Cone. Lateran., c. 25, ap. Mansi, vol. xxi., 533. 
 
206 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 the religious men who are in the city or diocese. 
 At the same time, we do not say that the 
 opposition of the religious men ought to 
 outweigh the votes of the canons unless it 
 should happen that a clear and canonical im- 
 pediment stands in the way of either the 
 election or the person elected." 1 In the final 
 stage the chapter alone had the right of election, 
 without being required to take the counsel 
 of either monks or secular laity ; this stage is 
 marked by the decrees of Innocent III. and 
 Gregory IX., which were incorporated into the 
 body of Canon Law and formed the governing 
 enactments on the subject for the future. 2 
 
 By the end of the thirteenth century the 
 election of bishops by cathedral chapters had 
 become the common rule of the Western 
 
 1 Alexand. III., Ep. ad Capit. Brem., ap. Lappenberg, 
 Hamburg. Urkundenbuch, vol. i., p. 216, quoted by Hin- 
 schius, Kirchenrecht, Bd. ii., p. 603. 
 
 2 c. 3, X., de caus. poss., ii., 12, " secundum statuta canonica 
 electiones episcoporum ad cathedralium ecclesiarum clericos 
 regulariter pertinere noscantur ; " c. 56 (Greg. IX.), de Elect., 
 i., 6, " Edicto perpetuo prohibemus ne per laicos cum 
 canonicis pontificis electio praesumatur. Quae si forte 
 prsesumpta fuerit, nullam obtineat formitatem, non obstante 
 contraria consuetudine quae dici debet potius corruptela." 
 
THE CHAPTER AND THE DIOCESE. 207 
 
 Churches. The practice of our own country 
 in this respect has been too clearly stated by 
 Bishop Stubbs to need restatement in other 
 words : " The struggle between Henry I. and 
 Anselm on the question of investiture terminated 
 in a compromise which placed the election in 
 the hands of the chapters of the cathedrals, the 
 consecration in that of the metropolitan and 
 comprovincial bishops, and the bestowal of 
 temporal estates and authority in the hands of 
 the king. Stephen at his accession confirmed 
 to the Churches the right of canonical election ; 
 Henry II. and Richard observed the form ; and 
 John, shortly before he granted the Great 
 Charter, issued as a bribe to the bishops a 
 shorter charter confirming the right of free 
 election, subject to the royal licence and ap- 
 proval, neither of which was to be withheld 
 without just cause. . . . The earlier practice, 
 recorded in the Constitutions of Clarendon, 
 according to which the election was made in 
 the Curia Regis, in a national council, or in 
 the royal chapel before the justiciary — a relic, 
 perhaps, of the custom of nominating the 
 prelates in the Witenagemot — was superseded 
 
208 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 by this enactment. The election took place 
 in the chapter-house of the cathedral, and the 
 king's wishes were signified by letter or message, 
 not, as before, by direct dictation." x The his- 
 tory of the struggles which ensued, with vary- 
 ing fortunes, between the clergy, the papacy, 
 and the Crown, falls beyond the limits of these 
 pages. In every such struggle there was gain 
 as well as loss ; and the lesson which they 
 collectively tell is the common lesson of all 
 ecclesiastical history, that no system of Church 
 government, and no machinery for working 
 ecclesiastical institutions, is in itself perfect, but 
 is constantly impaired by the forces of human 
 nature that act upon it. And when so impaired, 
 no legislation is strong enough to bring it 
 back to its original state. Church govern- 
 ment by cathedral chapters belongs already 
 to the remote past; but it is for us and for 
 our successors to solve the as yet unsolved 
 problem how to replace it by a machinery 
 which will be more efficient for the present and 
 the future. 
 
 1 Bishop Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, vol. 
 iii., p. 295. 
 
THE CHANCEL. 
 
 H 
 
XII. 
 
 THE CHANCEL. 
 
 T T is natural to find that the multiplication 
 of clergy-houses, and the consequently 
 increased separation of the clergy from the 
 laity in common life, had a tendency to 
 accentuate the difference between clergy and 
 laity in purely ecclesiastical respects. There 
 are many indications that until the ninth 
 century the line was by no means so sharply 
 drawn as in the Middle Ages and in modern 
 times. The Council of Reims, for example, 
 early in the seventh century enacted that no 
 layman is to be constituted archpresbyter 
 without being ordained clerk. 1 An edict of 
 Charles the Great in 805 enacted, in a similar 
 way, that archdeacons should 1 not be laymen. 3 
 
 1 Cone. Remens., a. d. 625 (630), c. 19. 
 
 2 Capit. duplex ad Theodon. Vill., c. 15, ap. Pertz, M. G. H., 
 i., 132, and Boretius, p. 122. 
 
212 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 A Bishop of Bourges in 850 issued an order 
 to his clergy that a layman should not read 
 the Epistle. 1 It was an indication of the 
 same tendency that stress came again to be 
 laid, and in most countries has continued to 
 be laid ever since, on the use of a distinctive 
 dress by the clergy in ordinary life. Partly 
 through tradition and partly by rule, the 
 clergy had generally continued to wear the 
 long hooded robe (casula) of the Roman 
 provincials, in contrast to the short cloak 
 (sagum) of the Teutons and Celts. In the 
 capitulary which Carlman put forth at the 
 instance of Boniface in 742, and again in the 
 capitulary of his brother Pippin in 744, it 
 was enacted that clerks should not wear lay 
 dress. 2 The rule became invariable that the 
 distinctive dress should always be worn, and 
 that clerks should not go out of doors with- 
 out it. 3 
 
 1 Capit. Rodolf. Bituric, c. 10, ap. Mansi, xiv., 948. 
 
 2 Karlmanni principis capitulare, u. 7, Pippini principis 
 capitulare Suessionense, c. 3, ap. Pertz, M. G. H., Legum, vol. i., 
 pp. 16, 21 ; Boretius, pp. 26, 29. 
 
 3 Cone. Mogunt., a.d. 813, c. 28; Cone. Rom., a.d. 853, 
 c. 12. 
 
THE CHANCEL. 213 
 
 But the main differences between clergy and 
 laity were those which expressed themselves 
 in relation to Divine service. In the first 
 place, a greater emphasis than before came 
 to be given to the idea of the sanctity of the 
 material church and of the material altar. 
 Charles the Great included in the first capi- 
 tulary which he issued a regulation that no 
 priest should presume to celebrate mass except 
 in places dedicated to God, or on tables which 
 a bishop had consecrated. 1 The rule was 
 repeated at Aachen in 801 (802), in regula- 
 tions which are sometimes ascribed to the 
 Emperor and sometimes to the bishops, 2 and 
 having been incorporated in the pseudo- 
 Isidorian decretals, it became so universal in its 
 operation that even to the present day, and 
 in Reformed communions, the celebration of 
 the Eucharist in places other than those which 
 have been specially dedicated to the service 
 of God is commonly regarded with disfavour. 3 
 
 1 Karoli M. Capitulare Generate, a.d. 769 — 771, c. 14, 
 Pertz, vol. i., p. 34. 
 
 2 Capit. Aquisgran., c. 9, Pertz, vol. i., p. 87 ; Boretius, p. 
 106. 
 
 3 The regulations of the ninth century, which governed 
 
214 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 This growing idea of the special sanctity of 
 the church and the altar led to a series of 
 regulations which had the effect of separating 
 the laity from the clergy in church by material 
 barriers which had been unknown in early 
 times. There had always been a special seat 
 for the Church officers ; there had also fre- 
 quently been low railings for obvious purposes 
 of order. But the communion table had been 
 between the place of the clergy and that of 
 the people, and the people had had free access 
 to it. A local Eastern council of the fourth 
 century, in a series of regulations for the better 
 order of service, forbade the laity to go to 
 
 subsequent practice, are important enough to be specially 
 noted: they are, mainly, the Council of Chalons in 813, 
 c. 49, in Mansi, xiv., 104 ; the capitularies of Lewis the 
 Pious and Lothair in 829, c. 12, ap. Pertz, Legum, vol. i., p. 
 342, and in the Council of Paris of the same year, c. 47, and 
 lib. hi., c. 6 ; the capitularies of Lewis the German in 85 1, c. 24, 
 in Pertz, vol. i., p. 415 ; the capitularies of Lewis II. in 856, 
 c. 14, in Pertz, vol. i., p. 440; the capitularies of Charles II. 
 in 876, c. 3, Pertz, vol. i., p. 531 ; the Council of Metz in 
 888, c. 8, in Mansi, xviii., 80; the regulations of Bishop 
 Theodulf of Orleans, c. 11, in Mansi, xiii., 997, and of Bishop 
 Rudolf of Bourges, in Mansi, xiv., 946. The passages of the 
 pseudo-Isidorian decretals are Ex Synod, gestis Silvestr., c. 9 ; 
 Hinschlus, p. 453 ; Decret. Felicis IV., ibid., p. 698. 
 
THE CHANCEL. 215 
 
 the altar to communicate ; x but although this 
 regulation was revived, with many other such 
 regulations, in later times, there is no evidence 
 that it marked a general custom in either East 
 or West. A Gallican council in the middle 
 of the sixth century requires, as a matter of 
 order, that during the service the people should 
 be separate from the choir and clergy, but it 
 adds the express reservation that " for purposes 
 of praying and communicating the Holy of 
 Holies, as the custom is, should be open to 
 both laymen and women." ' 2 The paintings 
 in some of the earliest missals which have come 
 down to us represent the people on one side 
 of the communion table and the priest on the 
 other, with no barrier between them, and 
 obviously about to communicate where they 
 stand. 3 Two changes were gradually brought 
 about : the one excluded laymen from access 
 to the altar, the other from access to the choir. 
 The former was probably the result, mainly, 
 
 1 Cone. Laod., c. 19. 
 
 2 II. Cone Turon., a.d. 567, c. 4. 
 
 3 For example, in the Metz Sacramentary in the National 
 Library at Paris, No. 9428, probably of the ninth century. 
 
216 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 of a change in the conception of the nature 
 of the Eucharist ; the growth of the ideas 
 which ultimately expressed themselves in the 
 theory of Transubstantiation diffused a feeling 
 of awe in reference to the consecrated elements 
 which made unconsecrated persons reluctant to 
 approach them. But the latter was the direct 
 result of the canonical system, and came about 
 rather by the slow force of circumstances than 
 by the action of ideas upon practice. For the 
 establishment of clergy-houses in the immediate 
 vicinity of bishops' churches, and the require- 
 ment that those who lived in them, both 
 young and old, should attend Divine service 
 several times every day, naturally caused a large 
 proportion of the services of such churches 
 to be attended by clergy only. There were 
 two immediate effects which soon came to 
 be marked in the structure of the buildings. 
 
 i . The clergy of a church were more numerous, 
 and required a larger space. The apse was no 
 longer able to contain the presbyters. The 
 accustomed space between the apse and the 
 nave was no longer able to contain the lower 
 orders of clerks. It became necessary to place 
 
THE CHANCEL. 217 
 
 the apse at a farther distance from the nave, by- 
 elongating its side walls. In this way what is 
 now known as the choir, or chancel, was formed. 
 It was a mode of providing room for the 
 increased numbers of the clergy. 1 And when 
 it had been thus formed two other modifica- 
 tions of the structural arrangement became 
 desirable. The diocesan arrangement gradually 
 yielded to the arrangement of the clergy- 
 house : the bishop was so frequently absent 
 that the head of the clergy in the clergy-house 
 became the virtual head of the clergy in the 
 church. But since he could not sit in the 
 bishop's seat, and since, in the absence of the 
 bishop, the apse came to be deserted, a place 
 of honour was found for him at the entrance 
 to the elongated choir ; and since also it was 
 necessary to have due order, and to give fixed 
 places to the several members of the capitular 
 
 1 It may be noted that Paul Warnefrid, in giving an 
 account of Chrodegang of Metz, who first formulated a 
 canonical rule, mentions that he not only introduced into 
 his church the Roman order and the Roman plain-song, but 
 also constructed a presbytery in the two churches of Metz 
 (Paul Warnefrid, Gesta Episc. Mettens, ap. Pertz, Scriptorum, 
 vol. ii., p. 268). 
 
218 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 body, rows of seats, each seat being assigned 
 to a definite person, were arranged along the 
 walls, as in the chapel of a monastery. This 
 is the origin of what are now known as 
 " stalls." 1 
 
 2. The second effect was that the part of 
 the church which was thus almost exclusively 
 used by the clergy, and in which services were 
 performed several times a day, came to be 
 separated from the rest of the church by a 
 screen. It is possible that in the first instance 
 the erection of such a screen was due to the 
 prosaic reason of a desire to protect the clergy 
 from the cold. The reason was, in any case, 
 different from that which led to the erection 
 of screens in Eastern churches, for the " ico- 
 nostasis," or screen, in an Eastern church 
 separates not the clergy from the laity, but 
 the place of the altar, into which only the 
 officiating priest and his assistants enter, from 
 the ordinary place of the clergy and choir ; 
 
 1 Those who have time to study the history of the 
 structural arrangement of churches will find ample materials 
 in the elaborate and as yet unfinished work of Dekio 
 and von Bezold, Die Kirchliche Baukunst des Abenjandes, 
 Stuttgart, 1884. 
 
THE CHANCEL. 219 
 
 it corresponds to the altar rails of Western 
 churches, over which in the Middle Ages a 
 curtain was sometines suspended for the same 
 purpose as that which the iconostasis was in- 
 tended to serve, namely to protect the celebra- 
 tion of the " holy mysteries " from intruding 
 eyes. 
 
 The effect of the introduction of screens 
 had an influence which has left marked 
 effects unto the present day upon the rela- 
 tions of the clergy both to the laity and to 
 the bishop. 
 
 (1) The altar appears to have remained in 
 its usual position, on the line of division 
 between the place of the clergy and that of 
 the laity. When this line of division was 
 marked by a screen, the altar remained just 
 outside it; the laity came up to this altar to 
 make their offerings and to communicate, and 
 it was known by way of distinction as the 
 altar of the laity. But since the existence of 
 a screen made the position of this altar incon- 
 venient to the clergy, another altar was placed, 
 in ordinary parish churches against the wall at 
 the end of the chancel, and in an apsidal bishop's 
 
220 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 church on the chord of the apse ; in either case 
 the communion of the clergy came to be 
 distinct from the communion of the laity, and 
 the distinction was further emphasised by the 
 growth, in a new form, of the idea of the 
 Eucharist as a sacrifice. In course of time 
 chancels came to be very general in both 
 cathedral and parish churches ; and in course 
 of time also the altar of the laity at the entrance 
 of the chancel lost its importance, and ceased 
 to exist. But the collegiate type, with its long 
 chancel, which grew out of the necessities of 
 the canonical life, has left a mark upon the 
 structure of churches which even we in modern 
 times are only just beginning to disregard. 
 The continued erection of long chancels in 
 parish churches is a remarkable instance of the 
 tenacity with which ancient types survive, in 
 spite of the disappearance of the causes out 
 of which they grew. 
 
 (2) In many districts of the West and North 
 it became the practice to construct a passage 
 round the choir, partly for processions, and 
 partly to serve as a base upon which chapels 
 and chantries might be built. Where this was 
 
THE CHANCEL. 
 
 done, it became necessary to protect the clergy 
 from the cold by constructing wooden screens, 
 or in some cases stone walls, along the sides of 
 the choir between it and the passage round it. 
 Hence the place of the clergy was separated 
 even more conspicuously than before from the 
 place of the laity. It was a sort of church 
 within the church, enclosed by walls, entered 
 only by gates, which were commonly shut, and 
 ordinarily accessible only to those who wore 
 a special dress. 1 
 
 For there is another result of the canonical 
 life which has been no less permanent than 
 the structural arrangements of churches. The 
 climate of the North was not less severe in 
 the Middle Ages than it is now, and at the 
 same time artificial modes of producing heat 
 were both fewer and more cumbrous. The 
 cold was warded off not so much by fires as 
 
 1 The best typical example of this " church within the 
 church " which is known to the writer is that of the Cathedral 
 of Albi, where there are not, as commonly elsewhere, any 
 pillars to mark a structural division, but the greater and the 
 smaller church are under a single unbroken roof. The 
 service for the people is held at the western end, the altar 
 being placed under the arch of the tower. 
 
222 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 by the use of warmer clothing than is now 
 commonly worn. Furs were in ordinary use, 
 and the ordinary winter dress of those who 
 lived the canonical life was a fur coat. Such 
 a coat was allowed also to monks, and is 
 prescribed in the statutes of several orders. 
 But between canons and monks there was a 
 point of difference which seems to have been 
 universally maintained. A monk might not 
 wear linen ; a canon might do so. A monk 
 must appear, whether in a church or in a 
 monastery, in his woollen cowl ; a canon threw 
 a linen blouse over his fur coat, and was 
 thereby known to be a canon and not a monk. 
 There is an anecdote in one of the histories 
 of St. Gall which will illustrate this point. 
 Solomon, afterwards Bishop of Constance and 
 Abbot of St. Gall, used in earlier days to go 
 to the monastery, to the annoyance of the 
 monks, without being himself a monk ; it was 
 part of the annoyance that in doing so he wore, 
 as he was entitled to do, a canon's linen dress ; 
 once, when he offered a monk a present of 
 a fur coat, the monk in return offered him 
 a cowl, as being a more proper dress to wear 
 
THE CHANCEL. 223 
 
 in a monastery. 1 Another instance of a similav 
 kind is afforded by the fact that when there 
 was a doubt whether the clergy at Cahors were 
 monks or canons, the fact that they wore sur- 
 plices was held to be proof conclusive that they 
 were the latter. 
 
 The linen blouse which was thus worn by 
 canons, as a distinctive mark of their order, over 
 the fur coat, or "pelisse," was commonly known 
 as the "overpelisse," "superpelliceum," or "sur- 
 plice." It was not a clerical dress, since there 
 were canons who were not clerks. It was a 
 becoming mark of an ecclesiastical order. All 
 who had a title to enter the choir, whether lay- 
 men or clerks, wore it to designate their status ; 
 and it survived the changes of the Reformation 
 because it was in the eyes of all but a small 
 fraction of the Reformers too innocent to be 
 worth abolishing. 
 
 The strength of the canonical system may be 
 estimated not only by the general prevalence of 
 the usages which have been described, but also, 
 
 1 Ekkehardi IV., Casus S. Galli, in Pertz, M. G. H., Scrip- 
 torum, vol. ii., p. 79. The point of the objection is tersely 
 expressed in the phrase " lineus diatim adiit." 
 
224 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 and even more significantly, by the change in 
 the position of the bishop's seat in his own 
 church. In early times there could have been 
 no doubt in the mind of any one who entered 
 a bishop's church that the bishop was its pre- 
 sident. Where the ancient seat remains, as at 
 Torcello or Grado, it is raised high in the centre 
 of the apse ; and even where the ancient seat 
 has been replaced by a later one it is still in an 
 obvious place of authority. But gradually in 
 most parts of Northern Christendom the apse 
 came to be disused. The presbysters sat not 
 round their bishop, but, as I have mentioned 
 above, in their assigned places in the choir. 
 The Eucharist was celebrated by one who stood 
 not, as in early times, behind the altar, but in 
 front of it. The bishop's seat, at first perhaps 
 only temporarily and for convenience in the 
 changed order of celebration, but at last per- 
 manentiy, was transferred from the apse to the 
 choir. The bishop took his seat not as head of 
 the whole body, but as a member of it. He 
 was placed at the end of the row of canons. 
 Sometimes, as in some English cathedrals to the 
 present day, he was required, by a strange irony 
 
THE CHANCEL. 225 
 
 of circumstances, to be himself a canon. The 
 diocese was merged in the chapter ; and the 
 original imnates of the bishop's house, who 
 formed only a portion of the whole number of 
 his clergy, and who were governed in his absence 
 by his deputy, came to affect to recognise his 
 existence only so far as he became one of 
 their number, and sat with them in their 
 row of stalls. 
 
 The sketch which has been given in these 
 pages of the growth of some Church institutions 
 is necessarily incomplete. But even from an 
 incomplete sketch, two points come clearly to 
 light. The one is that many institutions and 
 elements of institutions which have sometimes 
 been thought to belong to primitive Chris- 
 tianity belong, in fact, to the Middle Ages. In 
 the minds of many persons, no doubt, the past 
 centuries of Christianity seem to be all alike 
 shrouded in a common mist, and the institu- 
 tions of one age are not distinguishable from 
 those of another ; but it is impossible to look 
 without regret at the reckless statements 
 which are frequently made in reference to prac- 
 
 iS 
 
226 GROWTH OF CHURCH INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 tices which, however great their practical value, 
 and however great the sanction which long 
 usage has given them, still rest upon proved 
 utility and not upon a positive Divine command. 
 The other point is that ecclesiastical institutions 
 have shown a remarkable power of adapting 
 themselves in successive ages to the new needs 
 of men. They were not made of iron, designed 
 to crush into a single unvarying form the in- 
 numerable types of human character or the 
 shifting phenomena of Christian history. They 
 were gifted with a vitality which, preserving 
 always the same Divine principle of life, was at 
 the same time continually adapting their forms 
 to meet the new conditions of society. Nor 
 can we believe that the form under which we 
 ourselves live is final. The wisdom of our 
 forefathers must yield to the wisdom of our 
 contemporaries, and the wisdom of our contem- 
 poraries will in its turn yield to the wisdom of 
 our children. And yet it is possible even for 
 one who accepts this inevitable law of change to 
 look with regret at some of the ancient forms 
 which are passing into the world of shadows, 
 and to express the hope that .lorn the mists 
 
THE CHANCEL. 227 
 
 of the unrealised future there may come forth 
 institutions as fruitful for good to the souls of 
 men as those of the beautiful but irrecoverable 
 past.