THE SECULAR CLERGY
[Sidenote: The work of the Church reformers.]
The great movement in favour of Church reform, which had emanated from
Cluny, had worked itself out along certain definite lines. It is
important to ask how far it had succeeded in achieving its objects. We
have seen that it was a movement of essentially monastic conception
aimed at the purification of the secular clergy. And we have seen that
the evil to be remedied had arisen from the imminent danger that the
Church would be laicised and feudalised. From the highest to the
lowest all ecclesiastical posts were at the disposition of laymen who
treated them as a species of feudal fief, so that the holders, even if
they were in Holy Orders (which was not always the case), regarded
their temporal rights and obligations as the first consideration and,
like all feudal tenants, tried to establish the right of hereditary
succession in their holdings. Thus the work of the reformers had been
of a double nature; it was not enough that they should aim at
exorcising the feudal spirit from the Church, at banishing the feudal
ideal from the minds of ecclesiastics: it was necessary to effect what
was indeed a revolution, and to shake the whole organisation of the
Church free from the trammels which close contact with the State had
laid upon it. It began as a reformation of morals; it developed into a
constitutional revolution. There was involved in the movement both an
interference with what might be distinguished as private rights and
also a readjustment of public relations. The reformers headed by the
Pope ultimately decided to concentrate their efforts on the latter.
Hence we may begin by enquiring how far they had succeeded in freeing
episcopal elections from lay control.
[Sidenote: Episcopal appointments.]
There were three several acts of the lay authority in connection with
the appointment of bishops to which the Church reformers took
exception. The King or, by usurpation from him, the great feudal lord
had acquired the right of nominating directly to the vacant see, to
the detriment, and even the exclusion, of the old electoral rights of
clergy and people; and while in some cases nobles nominated themselves
without any thought of taking Holy Orders, frequently they treated the
bishoprics under their control as appanages or endowments for the
younger members of their family. Then, before the consecration, the
bishop-nominate obtained investiture from the lay authority by the
symbolic gifts of a ring and a pastoral staff or cross, not only of
the lands and temporal possessions of the see, but also of the
jurisdiction which emanated from the episcopal office. Finally, the
prospective bishop took an oath to his lay lord, whether King or
other, which was not only an oath of fealty such as any subject might
be called upon to take, but was also an act of homage, and made him an
actual feudal vassal and his church a kind of fief.
[Sidenote: Right of election.]
The result of the long struggle was that in the matter of episcopal
appointments, speaking generally, the right of election was not
restored to clergy and people, in whom by primitive custom it had been
vested, but that the laity, with the possible exception of the
feudatories of the see, were banished altogether, the rural clergy
ceased to appear, and, after the analogy of the papal election by the
College of Cardinals, the canonical election of the bishop in every
diocese tends to be concentrated in the hands of the clergy of the
cathedral. It was a long time, however, before the rights of the
cathedral chapters were universally recognised. Henry I of England in
his Concordat with Anselm (1107) and the Emperor Henry V in the
Concordat of Worms (122) both promised freedom of election. Philip I
and Louis VI of France seem to have conceded the same right without
any formal agreement. But many of the great French feudal lords clung
to their power over the local bishoprics, and in Normandy, in Anjou,
and in some parts of the south nearly a century elapsed before the
duke or count surrendered his custom of nominating bishops directly.
But the freedom of election by the Canons of the cathedral, even when
it was conceded, was little more than nominal. In England, France, and
the Christian kingdoms of Spain no cathedral body could exercise its
right without the King's leave to elect, nor was any election complete
without the royal confirmation. By the Concordat of Worms elections
were to take place in the presence of the King or his commissioners.
By the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164) English bishops must be
elected in the royal chapel. King John tried to bribe the Church over
to his side in the quarrel with the barons which preceded Magna Carta,
by conceding that elections should be free--that is, should take
place in the chapter-house of the cathedral; but even he reserved the
royal permission for the election to be held, and the _congé
d'élire_ in England and elsewhere was accompanied by the name of
the individual on whom the choice of the electoral body should fall.
It was not the rights of the electors but the all-pervading authority
of the Pope which was to prove the chief rival of royal influence in
the local Church.
[Sidenote: Investiture.]
The quarrel between Church and State had centred round the ceremony of
investiture, because in the eyes of the reformers the most scandalous
result of the feudalisation of the Church was the acceptance at the
hands of a layman of the spiritual symbols of ring and crozier. But as
Hugh of Fleury had acknowledged in his tract on "Royal Power and
Priestly Office," investiture there must be so long as ecclesiastics
held great temporal possessions. Here again some of the French nobles
clung to the old anomalous form of investiture, but otherwise the
example of the imperial lands, of the royal domain of France and of
England was generally followed, the gifts of ring and staff were
conceded to the Metropolitan, and where no special form of investiture
by the sceptre was retained it was confused with the ceremony of
homage. But in Germany and England investiture with the lands of the
see preceded consecration, so that while on the one hand it was not a
bishop who was being invested by a layman, on the other hand the
refusal of investiture would practically prevent the consecration of
any one obnoxious to the Crown.
[Sidenote: Homage and fealty.]
With regard to the feudal ceremony of homage a distinction came to be
drawn by writers on the Canon Law between homage and fealty, and
ecclesiastics were supposed to limit themselves to the obligations of
the latter, which were those of every subject. The ceremony was not
precisely the same as in the case of a lay noble being invested with a
fief; but in France, at any rate, the Crown never really abandoned its
claim to a feudal homage, and in any case ecclesiastics were expected
to fulfil their feudal obligations. Even Innocent III acknowledged
this in a decree (§43) of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), and in
interceding with Philip II of France on behalf of two bishops who had
been deprived of their temporal possessions for some neglect of
military duty, he argues that they were "ready to submit to the
judgment of your Court, as is customary in such matters."
[Sidenote: Regale.]
Arising out of these feudal relations certain rights over the
possessions of ecclesiastics and ecclesiastical bodies were claimed by
the Crown, which were the cause of serious oppression. According to
the Canon Law, the bishop was only the usufructuary of the lands and
revenues belonging to his see. The lands and revenues belonged to the
Church. But inasmuch as these had been originally in most cases the
gift of the Crown, the King claimed to deal with them in the method
applied to feudal holdings. By the right of _regale_, on the
vacancy of a see through death, resignation, or deprivation of the
bishop, the royal officers took possession of the temporalities, that
is, the land and revenues, and administered them for the profit of the
Crown so long as the see was vacant. The Crown did not hesitate to use
the episcopal patronage and to fill up vacant canonries and benefices
with its own followers, and it often took the opportunity to levy upon
the inhabitants of the diocese a special tax--_tallagium_,
_tallage_, or _taille_--which a landlord had a right of
exacting from his unfree tenants. It was to the interest of the Crown
to prolong a vacancy, and attempts to limit the exercise of the right
were of little practical effect.
[Sidenote: Right of spoils.]
An even more extraordinary claim was to the right of spoils (_jus
spolii_ or _exuviarium_). The canonical law forbidding the
bishop to deal by will with the property attached to his see, was
interpreted as applying to everything which he had not inherited. Thus
the furniture of his house and the money in his chest were claimed as
of right by the canons of his cathedral, but were often plundered by
the crowd of the city or by the local nobles. These lawless
proceedings provoked the interference of the royal officers, who
succeeded in most cases in establishing the right of the Crown to all
movables that the bishop left. The earliest notice of this royal claim
in Germany is found in the reign of Henry V. It was in full use under
Frederick I. William II is probably responsible for introducing both
the _regale_ and the _jus spolii_ from Normandy into
England. In France these were claimed by the feudal nobles as well as
by the King. Bitter were the complaints made by the Church against the
exercise of both rights. Kings and nobles clung to the _regale_
as long as they could, for it meant local influence as well as
revenue. In most cases, however, the right of spoils had been
surrendered before the thirteenth century. It is to be remembered that
ecclesiastics themselves exercised this right, bishops, for example,
claiming the possessions of the canons and the parish priests in their
dioceses. The Popes in relaxation of the Canon Law gave to certain
bishops the right of leaving their personal property by will, and the
canons also are found encouraging their bishop to make a will.
[Sidenote: Claims of the Clergy.]
As a set-off against these claims of the Crown upon the Church, the
clergy also advanced certain claims. These touched the two important
matters of taxation and jurisdiction. The Church claimed for her
members that they should not be liable to pay the taxes raised by the
secular authorities, nor should they have causes to which any
ecclesiastic was a party tried in the secular courts.
[Sidenote: Immunity from lay taxation.]
In seeking freedom from lay taxation the Church did not ask that her
members should escape their feudal obligations, nor even that they
should contribute nothing to the exigencies of the State. The desire
was merely that the clergy should be free from oppression and that the
Church should be so far as possible self-governing. Thus Alexander III
decreed in the third Lateran Council (1179), that for relieving the
needs of the community, everything contributed by the Church to
supplement the contributions of the laity should be given without
compulsion on the recognition of its necessity or utility by the
bishop and the clergy. Innocent III, in the fourth Lateran Council
(1215), provided a further safeguard against lay impositions in
demanding the permission of the Pope for any such levy. This does not
mean that the clergy escaped taxation at the hands of the State; it
merely means that while the Popes themselves heavily taxed them for
purposes which it was often difficult to describe as religious, the
price paid by the Crown for leave to tax the clergy was that a large
portion of the money should find its way to Rome.
[Sidenote: Tithes from the laity.]
The clergy were not content with this merely negative position.
Besides the right of self-taxation, they claimed that the laity should
contribute to the needs of the Church. The chief permanent source of
such contribution was the tithe, both the lesser tithes on smaller
animals, fruits, and vegetables, and the greater tithes on corn, wine,
and the larger animals. The Church also claimed tithes of revenues of
every kind, even from such divers classes as traders, soldiers,
beggars, and abandoned women. Much of the regular tithe had fallen
into the hands of laymen by gift from Kings to feudal tenants, or from
bishops to nobles and others, in return for military protection. These
alienated tithes Gregory VII tried to recover; but his need for the
help of the nobles against the Emperor forced him to stay his hand.
The third Lateran Council (1179) forbade, on pain of peril to the
soul, the transfer of tithes from one layman to another, and deprived
of Christian burial any one who, apparently having received such a
transfer, should not have made it over to the Church. This was a
definite claim for tithes as a right of which the Church had only been
deprived by some wrongful act. But in the very next year (1180)
Frederick I, at the Diet of Gelnhausen, declared that the alienation
of tithes as feudal fiefs to defenders of the Church was perfectly
legitimate. Religious scruples, however, seem to have caused the
surrender of tithes by many lay impropriators, especially to
monasteries.
[Sidenote: Bequests.]
There were many other sources of wealth to the Church. An enormous
quantity of property was bequeathed to pious uses by testators. The
attendance of the clergy at the death-bed gave them an opportunity of
which they were not slow to make use. The bodies of those who died
intestate, as of those unconfessed, were denied burial in consecrated
ground; all questions concerning wills were heard in the
ecclesiastical courts. The civil power attempted to check the freedom
of death-bed bequest, especially in Germany, where it was held that a
valid will could only be made by one who was still well enough to walk
unsupported. Another common source of revenue came from purchases or
mortgages or other arrangements made with crusaders, in which
advantage was taken of the haste of the lay men to raise funds for
their expedition.
[Sidenote: Wealth of the Church.]
From these and other sources the wealth which poured in upon the
Church was enormous. Individual gifts in money or in kind as
thank-offerings on all sorts of occasions reached no small of the
total; while no religious ceremony, from baptism to extreme unction
and burial, could be carried out apart from the payment of an
appropriate fee. The clergy constantly complained of spoliation, and
no doubt individuals suffered much. The very laymen who, with the
title of advocates, undertook to defend a cathedral or a monastery
were often its worst robbers. But the endowments and revenues of the
Church were so extensive as to raise in the minds of many reformers
the question whether they were not largely responsible for her
corruptions.
[Sidenote: Immunity from lay jurisdiction.]
The clergy also sought freedom from the jurisdiction of the secular
courts; in other words, the Church claimed exclusive cognisance in her
own tribunals of all matters concerning those in Holy Orders. The
_Decretiun_ of Gratian--the text-book of Canon Law--laid it down
that in civil matters the clergy were to be brought before a civil
judge, but that a criminal charge against a clerk must be heard before
the bishop. Urban II, however, declares that all clergy should be
subject to the bishop alone, and the Synod of Nimes (1096), at which
he presided, stigmatises it as sacrilege to hale clerks or monks
before a secular court. Alexander III (1179) threatens to
excommunicate any layman guilty of this offence; while Innocent III
points out that a clerk is not even at liberty to waive the right of
trial in an ecclesiastical court in a matter between him and a layman,
because the spiritual jurisdiction is not a matter personal to
himself, but belongs to the whole clerical body. Finally Frederick II,
on his coronation at Rome in 1220, forbade any one to dare to indict
an ecclesiastic on either a civil or a criminal charge before a
secular tribunal. But meanwhile the frequent perpetration of violent
crimes by those who wore the tonsure made it imperative in the
interests of social order that the Church should not be allowed to
defend these criminals in order to save her own interests.
The fiercest struggle took place in England. Henry II did not deny the
right of the Church to jurisdiction over her members; but he demanded
that clerks found guilty of grave crime should be unfrocked by the
ecclesiastical court, and that then, being no longer clerks, they
should be handed over to the royal officers, by whom they should be
punished according to their deserts. Archbishop Thomas Becket answered
that it was contrary to justice and the Canon Law that a man should be
punished twice for the same offence; that the punishment by the Church
involved the offender's damnation and was therefore quite adequate;
and that finally he himself was officially bound to defend the
liberties of the Church even to the death. Henry II attempted to solve
the difficulty by issuing the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164), the
third clause of which decreed that the royal officer should determine
whether any matter in which a clerk was concerned should be tried in
the secular or the ecclesiastical court, and that even if it went to
the latter, the King's officer should be present at the hearing. As
the price, however, of his reconciliation with the Papacy after
Becket's death, Henry was obliged to withdraw the Constitutions.
The position of the Church on this question was clearly stated by Pope
Celestine III in 1192. If a clerk had been lawfully convicted of
theft, homicide, perjury, or any capital crime, he should be degraded
by the ecclesiastical judge; for the next offence he should be
punished by excommunication, and for the next by anathema; then, since
the Church could do no more, for any subsequent offence he might be
handed over to the secular power to be punished by exile or in any
other lawful manner. This, of course, was a direct licence to the
ill-disposed clergy to commit more crimes than were allowable for a
layman; but the laity had to proceed cautiously in opposing it. In
1219 Philip II of France demanded that a clerk who had been degraded
should not be protected by the Church from seizure outside
ecclesiastical precincts by the royal officers with a view to his
trial in a secular court. But here again, both at his coronation as
Emperor in 1220 and again in the code of laws drawn up for his kingdom
of Sicily in 1231, Frederick II confirmed the privileges of the Church
in the matter of jurisdiction. On the latter occasion, however, he did
reserve cases of high treason for the royal court. Almost the only
immediate effect of these protests on the part of the State was that
Popes and Councils enjoined on the ecclesiastical courts greater
severity of treatment of offenders, even to the extent of perpetual
imprisonment in the case of those whom the lay tribunals would have
condemned to death.
[Sidenote: Increase of ecclesiastical jurisdiction.]
But this exclusive jurisdiction in all matters that concerned her own
members was only a part of the authority claimed and exercised by the
Church in the sphere of justice. Synods of the clergy did not hesitate
to take part in the enforcement of civil law and order, and threatened
with severe ecclesiastical penalties all who did not observe the Truce
of God, or who were guilty of piracy, incendiarism, or false coining.
At one time they attempted thus to suppress usury and trial by ordeal,
which at other times they allowed. They even legislated against
tournaments and against the use of certain deadly weapons in battle by
one Christian nation against another. But apart from the special
circumstances which called out and so justified the legislation, the
Church claimed at all times jurisdiction over certain classes of lay
persons and in certain categories of cases. Thus all persons needing
protection, such as widows, minors, and orphans, came under the
cognisance of the ecclesiastical courts, and to these the Popes added
Crusaders. Furthermore, all cases which could be regarded as in any
way involving a possible breach of faith were also claimed as
belonging to the jurisdiction of the Church, and these included
everything concerning oaths, marriages, and wills. Naturally the
Church had cognisance of all cases of sacrilege and heresy. These
excuses for interference in the transactions of daily life were
susceptible of almost indefinite extension, especially since the
Church asserted a right to hear cases of all sorts in her courts on
appeal on a plea that civil justice had failed. Even so stout a
champion of the Church as St. Bernard complains bitterly that all this
participation in worldly matters tends to stand between the clergy and
their proper duties. The secular powers constantly protested. Even
when Alfonso X in his legal code allowed that all suits arising from
sins should go to ecclesiastical courts, the Cortes of Castile
constantly protested. The chief attempts to check the growth of
ecclesiastical jurisdiction were made in France. Even under Louis IX
the barons combined to resist the encroachments of the Church, and
resolved that "no clerk or layman should in future indict any one
before an ecclesiastical judge except for heresy, marriage, or usury,
on pain of loss of possessions and mutilation of a limb, in order
that," they add with a justifiable touch of malice, "our jurisdiction
may be revived, and they [the clergy] who have hitherto been enriched
by our pauperisation may be reduced to the condition of the primitive
Church, and living the contemplative life they may, as is seemly, show
to us who spend an active life miracles which for a long time have
disappeared from the world."
[Sidenote: Simony.]
The result, then, of the efforts of the Church reformers to free the
Church from the State had been an enormous increase in the power of
the Church. But these efforts were in the beginning only a means to an
end, and that end was the purification of the Church itself. We have,
therefore, to ask how far the attempts to get rid of simony and to
enforce the celibacy of the clergy had met with permanent success.
Before the movement in favour of reform the traffic in churches and
Church property was indulged in by laity and clergy alike. Not only
Kings and nobles but bishops and abbots received payments from those
who accepted ecclesiastical preferment at their hands, and were by no
means always careful that ecclesiastical offices were acquired by
those in Holy Orders. Church property, in fact, was treated by those
who represented the original donors as if it were the private property
of the patron. The reform movement of the eleventh century, at any
rate, succeeded in making a distinction between the right of ownership
and the right of presentation, and in limiting the power of the patron
to the latter. Beyond this nothing much was permanently effected in
checking the traffic in things ecclesiastical. Preferment continued to
be used as patronage: offices and dignities in the Church were given
to children, and preferments were accumulated upon individuals until
pluralities became a standing grievance. Councils and Popes still
thundered against simony, but with the extending authority of Rome the
staff of the papal curia was increased, and the traffic in things
ecclesiastical at Rome was notorious.
[Sidenote: Clerical marriage.]
The efforts of the reformers in checking clerical marriage had not
been much more successful. The law now stood as follows: the first two
Lateran Councils (1123, 1139) prohibited matrimony to priests,
deacons, and sub-deacons; but to those only in one of the three minor
orders of the Church it was still allowed, although Alexander III
ultimately decreed that marriage should cause them to forfeit their
benefice. It was some time, however, before these decrees could be
enforced, and even the Popes found themselves compelled to deal
leniently with offending clergy. Thus Pascal II allowed to Archbishop
Anselm that a married priest not only might, but must, if applied to,
minister to a dying person. Attempts were made to forbid ordination to
the sons of priests, at least as secular clergy, but such regulations
were constantly relaxed or ignored. Pascal II actually allowed that in
Spain, where clerical marriage had been lawful, the children should be
eligible for all secular and ecclesiastical preferment. In the remoter
countries of Europe--the Scandinavian lands, Bohemia, Hungary,
Poland--the decrees against clerical marriage were not accepted until
far into the thirteenth century. Even in part of Germany, notably the
diocese of Liege, the clergy continued openly to marry until the same
century. But even in countries where the principle was nominally
accepted it triumphed at the expense of morality. For example, in
England the decree was published in Council after Council throughout
the twelfth century and was undoubtedly accepted as the law. But in
1129, after the death of Anselm, who had opposed the expedient, Henry
I imprisoned the "house-keepers" of the clergy in London in order to
obtain a sum of money by their release. Furthermore, both in England
and elsewhere, bishops finding it impossible to enforce the decree,
frankly licensed the breach of it by individual clergy in return for
an annual payment. It is interesting to note that several important
writers of the age speak with studied moderation on this question. The
great lawyer Gratian admits that in the earlier period of the Church
marriage was allowed to the clergy. The Parisian theologian, Peter
Comestor, publicly taught that the enforcement of the vow of celibacy
on the clergy was a deliberate snare of the devil. The English
historians, Henry of Huntingdon, Matthew Paris, and Thomas of
Walsingham, speak with disapproval of the attempts to enforce it, and
even St. Thomas Aquinas holds that the celibacy of the secular clergy
was a matter of merely human regulation. Thus the protest of the
reformers of the eleventh century in favour of purity of life among
the clergy had met with the smallest possible success, but like all
such protests, it helped to keep alive the idea of a higher standard
of personal and official life until such time as secular circumstances
were more favourable.