The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West

THE PROPRIETARY CHURCH IN THE MEDIEVAL WEST

This page intentionally left blank

THE PROPRIETARY CHURCH IN THE MEDIEVAL WEST SUSAN WOOD

AC

AC

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

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

This page intentionally left blank

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

viii

Acknowledgments

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

CONTENTS xiii 1

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

9 9 11 16

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

33 33 48

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

66 67 74 79 86

4. The question of origins

92

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

109 111 118 127

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

140 140 147 152 161 166

x

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

176 176 181

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

191 191 199

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

211 211 221 230 235

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

280 292

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

312 312 328

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

339 339 355 372 393 408

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

413 413 418

247 247 251 260 269

Contents

xi

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

437 437 444

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

459 459 478 486 501 512

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

530 541 555 560 575

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

584 584 601 627 637 645 651

18. Priests as proprietors

659

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

681 681 689

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

696 697 711

519 519

xii

Contents PART IV. IDEAS, OPINION, CHANGE

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

729 729 739 754 776

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

789 789 804 812 824

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

830 830 839

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

851 851 864

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

883 883 904

26. The longer term

922

Bibliography Sources and Abbreviations Secondary Works Index

934 934 951 981

D

AN

York

EL

IR

O T R G

se lou

RT U PO

R.

Eb

ro

e

Cl

un y Rh on

St. Gall

R.

R.Sa

s on Ly

R.Rh one

rbo n Roussillon ne

Carinthia FRIULI Aquileia Milan Veneto

LOMBARDY

R. Po Piedmont

s

r

Ma

Emilia Ravenna

Lucca

le seil

TU

SCA

NY

Spoleto

Barcelona CATALONIA

MAGYARS

Rhaetia

ne

Corsica

Toledo

e rch

R. Douro

ARAGON

R. Dan ube Freising BAVARIA Salzburg

ALEMANIA SWABIA

KDM OF BURGUNDY

Arles

SLAVS

Mainz

Alsace

PROVENCE

Na

er

FRANCONIA

Ma

GA

L

Urgel CASTILE

ône

To u

GAS NAVARRE

ne

Pamplona

ron

Burgos

Ga

CO NY

R.

LEON

Od

ine

E AIN UIT AQ onge nt Sai

GALICIA

Rouergue GU ED OC

LAN

Trier

Vie n

Auvergne

Bordeaux Oviedo Asturias

Forez

IA

U RG BU

BERRY

Limousin

R. Rh

POITOU

R.

Thuringia

le

Orléanais S R. S e Blois R. ns eine Loir CHA MPAGNE e Touraine Y Bourges ND

ANJOU

Compostela

R. Mosel

Rheims

Ile de France

Cologne

IN

use

R. M e

A

Rouen

Ostmark

Fulda

H

Brabant Picardy Hainault NORMANDY

r

Magdeburg SAXONY

L

FLANDERS

Maine

e Elb

Westfalia

Cornwall Winchester Canterbury

BRITTANY

R.

FRISIA

Hamburg Bremen Nordmark

ese W

Norfolk Suffolk

R.

Worcester

R.Emms

W AL ES

Lincoln

Abruzzo Rome Ben CA ev M PA ent o NI

LATIUM

A

ARABS

AP

UL

IA

Naples Salerno

Bari

Cal

abr

ia

Sardinia

Sicily

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

This page intentionally left blank

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

2

Prologue

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

Ibid. 55–7.

Prologue

3

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

4

Prologue

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

Prologue

5

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

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

This page intentionally left blank

Part I

Beginnings

This page intentionally left blank

1 The Roman Empire and post-Roman kingdoms

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

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

10

Beginnings

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

Roman Empire and post-Roman kingdoms

11

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

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

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

Beginnings

12

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

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

Roman Empire and post-Roman kingdoms

13

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

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

14

Beginnings

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

Roman Empire and post-Roman kingdoms

15

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

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

Beginnings

16

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

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

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

Roman Empire and post-Roman kingdoms

17

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

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

18

Beginnings

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

Roman Empire and post-Roman kingdoms

19

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

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

20

Beginnings

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

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

22

Roman Empire and post-Roman kingdoms

21

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

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

22

Beginnings

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

Roman Empire and post-Roman kingdoms

23

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

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

24

Beginnings

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

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

Roman Empire and post-Roman kingdoms

25

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

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

26

Beginnings

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

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

Roman Empire and post-Roman kingdoms

27

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

28

Beginnings

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

Roman Empire and post-Roman kingdoms

29

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

Beginnings

30

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

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

Roman Empire and post-Roman kingdoms

31

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

Beginnings

32

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

112

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

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

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

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

Beginnings

34

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

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

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

35

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

36

Beginnings

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

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

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

37

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

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

38

Beginnings

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

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

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

39

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

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

40

Beginnings

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

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

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

41

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

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

Beginnings

42

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

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

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

43

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

44

Beginnings

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

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

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

45

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

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

46

Beginnings

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

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

47

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

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

48

Beginnings

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

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

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

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

49

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

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

50

Beginnings

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

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

51

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

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

52

Beginnings

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

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

53

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

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

54

Beginnings

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

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

55

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

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

56

Beginnings

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

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

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

57

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

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

58

Beginnings

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

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

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

59

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

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

60

Beginnings

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

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

61

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

62

Beginnings

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

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

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

63

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

64

Beginnings

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

Bavaria, Alemania, and Lombard Italy

65

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

See also below, pp. 197, 236–7.

3 The converging of private and parish churches

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

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

Private and parish churches

67

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

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

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

68

Beginnings

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

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

Private and parish churches

69

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

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

70

Beginnings

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

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

Private and parish churches

71

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

72

Beginnings

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

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

Private and parish churches

73

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

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

74

Beginnings

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

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

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

Private and parish churches

75

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

76

Beginnings

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

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

Private and parish churches

77

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

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

78

Beginnings

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

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

Private and parish churches

79

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

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

80

Beginnings

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

Private and parish churches

81

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

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

82

Beginnings

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

Private and parish churches

83

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

84

Beginnings

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

Private and parish churches

85

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

86

Beginnings

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

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

Private and parish churches

87

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

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

88

Beginnings

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

Private and parish churches

89

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

25

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

90

Beginnings

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

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

Private and parish churches

91

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

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

4 The question of origins

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

The question of origins

93

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

94

Beginnings

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

The question of origins

95

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

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

96

Beginnings

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

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

The question of origins

97

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

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

98

Beginnings

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

The question of origins

99

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

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

100

Beginnings

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

The question of origins

101

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

102

Beginnings

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

The question of origins

103

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

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

104

Beginnings

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

The question of origins

105

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

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

106

Beginnings

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

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

The question of origins

107

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

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

108

Beginnings

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

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

5 Early monasteries: their founders and abbots

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

1

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

110

Beginnings

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

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

Early monasteries: founders and abbots

111

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

112

Beginnings

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

Early monasteries: founders and abbots

113

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

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

114

Beginnings

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

Early monasteries: founders and abbots

115

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

116

Beginnings

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

Early monasteries: founders and abbots

117

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

118

Beginnings

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

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

Early monasteries: founders and abbots

119

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

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

120

Beginnings

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

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

Early monasteries: founders and abbots

121

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

122

Beginnings

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

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

Early monasteries: founders and abbots

123

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

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

124

Beginnings

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

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

Early monasteries: founders and abbots

125

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

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

126

Beginnings

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

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

Early monasteries: founders and abbots

127

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

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

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

128

Beginnings

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

Early monasteries: founders and abbots

129

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

11

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

130

Beginnings

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

Early monasteries: founders and abbots

131

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

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

132

Beginnings

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

Early monasteries: founders and abbots

133

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

134

Beginnings

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

Early monasteries: founders and abbots

135

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

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

136

Beginnings

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

Early monasteries: founders and abbots

137

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

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

138

Beginnings

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

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

Early monasteries: founders and abbots

139

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

6 Some non-Frankish patterns of family interest in monasteries

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

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

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

141

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

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

142

Beginnings

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

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

143

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

144

Beginnings

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

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

145

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

146

Beginnings

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

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

147

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

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

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

148

Beginnings

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

149

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

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

150

Beginnings

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

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

151

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

25

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

152

Beginnings

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

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

153

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

154

Beginnings

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

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

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

155

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

156

Beginnings

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

157

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

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

158

Beginnings

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

159

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

160

Beginnings

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

62

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

161

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

Beginnings

162

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

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

163

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

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

164

Beginnings

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

165

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

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

166

Beginnings

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

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

167

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

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

168

Beginnings

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

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

169

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

Beginnings

170

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

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

171

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

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

172

Beginnings

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

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

173

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

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

174

Beginnings

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

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

Non-Frankish patterns of family interest

175

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

71

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

7 Transition to outside lordship of monasteries

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

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

Transition to outside lordship

177

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

Above, pp. 170–1.

5

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

178

Beginnings

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

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

Transition to outside lordship

179

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

180

Beginnings

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

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

Transition to outside lordship

181

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

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

182

Beginnings

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

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

Transition to outside lordship

183

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

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

184

Beginnings

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

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

Transition to outside lordship

185

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

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

186

Beginnings

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

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

Transition to outside lordship

187

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

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

188

Beginnings

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

Transition to outside lordship

189

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

Beginnings

190

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

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

8 The emergence of bishops’ lordship over monasteries

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

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

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

192

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of bishops’ lordship

193

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

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

194

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of bishops’ lordship

195

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

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

196

Beginnings

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

Emergence of bishops’ lordship

197

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

198

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of bishops’ lordship

199

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

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

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

200

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of bishops’ lordship

201

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

202

Beginnings

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

Emergence of bishops’ lordship

203

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

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

204

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of bishops’ lordship

205

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

206

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of bishops’ lordship

207

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

208

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of bishops’ lordship

209

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

210

Beginnings

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

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

9 The emergence of lay rulers’ lordship over monasteries

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

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

1

Below, pp. 292–3.

2

Above, p. 186.

3

Above, p. 75.

212

Beginnings

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

Emergence of lay rulers’ lordship

213

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

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

214

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of lay rulers’ lordship

215

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

216

Beginnings

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

39

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

Emergence of lay rulers’ lordship

217

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

218

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of lay rulers’ lordship

219

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

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

220

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of lay rulers’ lordship

221

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

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

222

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of lay rulers’ lordship

223

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

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

224

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of lay rulers’ lordship

225

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

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

226

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of lay rulers’ lordship

227

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

228

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of lay rulers’ lordship

229

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

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

230

Beginnings

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

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

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

Emergence of lay rulers’ lordship

231

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

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

232

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of lay rulers’ lordship

233

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

234

Beginnings

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

Emergence of lay rulers’ lordship

235

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

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

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

236

Beginnings

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

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

8

Emergence of lay rulers’ lordship

237

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

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

16

238

Beginnings

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

Emergence of lay rulers’ lordship

239

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

240

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of lay rulers’ lordship

241

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

242

Beginnings

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

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

Emergence of lay rulers’ lordship

243

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

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

244

Beginnings

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

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

Part II

Lordship over higher churches, ninth to eleventh century

This page intentionally left blank

10 Kings and princes

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

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

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

248

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

249

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

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

250

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

251

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

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

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

252

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

Kings and princes

253

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

254

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

Kings and princes

255

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

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

256

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

Kings and princes

257

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

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

258

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

259

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

58

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

260

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

261

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

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

262

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

263

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

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

264

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

265

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

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

266

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

Kings and princes

267

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

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

268

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

269

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

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

270

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

271

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

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

12

272

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

Kings and princes

273

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

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

274

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

275

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

52

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

276

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

Kings and princes

277

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

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

278

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

279

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

89 90 91

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

280

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

281

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

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

282

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

283

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

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

284

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

30

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

Kings and princes

285

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

286

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

287

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

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

288

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

289

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

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

290

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

Kings and princes

291

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

292

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

293

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

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

294

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

12

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

Kings and princes

295

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

296

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

297

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

298

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

299

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

53

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

300

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

Kings and princes

301

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

302

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

303

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

304

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

305

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

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

306

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

109

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

Kings and princes

307

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

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

308

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Kings and princes

309

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

310

Higher churches, 9th to 11th century

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

136

Kings and princes

311

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

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

11 Nobles other than founders’ heirs

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

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

Nobles other than founders’ heirs

313

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

314

Higher Churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Nobles other than founders’ heirs

315

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

316

Higher Churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Nobles other than founders’ heirs

317

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

318

Higher Churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Nobles other than founders’ heirs

319

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

320

Higher Churches, 9th to 11th century

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

Nobles other than founders’ heirs

321

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

322

Higher Churches, 9th to 11th century

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

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

Nobles other than founders’ heirs

323

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

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

324

Higher Churches, 9th to 11th century

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

Nobles other than founders’ heirs

325

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

Mansi, XIX. 536–7 (account by Ademar of Chabannes). Deloche (introd. to Beaulieu, pp. xx-xxvi) took Hugh of Castelnau as having displaced an elected monk-abbot (another Bernard) whom bp. Jordan eventually reinstated. Marcus