Part 3 (2/2)
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 n.o.bles 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 invest.i.ture 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 va.s.sal 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 a.n.a.logy 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 Const.i.tutions 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 _conge d'elire_ 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: Invest.i.ture.]
The quarrel between Church and State had centred round the ceremony of invest.i.ture, 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,” invest.i.ture there must be so long as ecclesiastics held great temporal possessions. Here again some of the French n.o.bles clung to the old anomalous form of invest.i.ture, 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 invest.i.ture by the sceptre was retained it was confused with the ceremony of homage. But in Germany and England invest.i.ture 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 invest.i.ture 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.bles. These lawless proceedings provoked the interference of the royal officers, who succeeded in most cases in establis.h.i.+ng 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 n.o.bles as well as by the King. Bitter were the complaints made by the Church against the exercise of both rights. Kings and n.o.bles 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: t.i.thes 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 t.i.the, both the lesser t.i.thes on smaller animals, fruits, and vegetables, and the greater t.i.thes on corn, wine, and the larger animals. The Church also claimed t.i.thes of revenues of every kind, even from such divers cla.s.ses as traders, soldiers, beggars, and abandoned women. Much of the regular t.i.the had fallen into the hands of laymen by gift from Kings to feudal tenants, or from bishops to n.o.bles and others, in return for military protection. These alienated t.i.thes Gregory VII tried to recover; but his need for the help of the n.o.bles 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 t.i.thes 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 t.i.thes 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 t.i.thes as feudal fiefs to defenders of the Church was perfectly legitimate. Religious scruples, however, seem to have caused the surrender of t.i.thes by many lay impropriators, especially to monasteries.
[Sidenote: Bequests.]
There were many other sources of wealth to the Church. An enormous quant.i.ty 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.
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