Palmer analyzes an extensive set of data drawn from common law records to reveal a vigorous and effective effort by the laity to enforce the new statutes. Motivated by both economic and traditional ideals, the litigants made the commercial activities of leaseholding and buying for resale and profit the exclusive domain of the laity and acquired the power to regulate the clergy. According to Palmer, these parish-level reformations presaged and complemented other initiatives of the crown that have long been considered central to the reign of Henry VIII.
Palmer analyzes an extensive set of data drawn from common law records to reveal a vigorous and effective effort by the laity to enforce the new statutes. Motivated by both economic and traditional ideals, the litigants made the commercial activities of leaseholding and buying for resale and profit the exclusive domain of the laity and acquired the power to regulate the clergy. According to Palmer, these parish-level reformations presaged and complemented other initiatives of the crown that have long been considered central to the reign of Henry VIII.
Selling the Church: The English Parish in Law, Commerce, and Religion, 1350-1550
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Selling the Church: The English Parish in Law, Commerce, and Religion, 1350-1550
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Overview
Palmer analyzes an extensive set of data drawn from common law records to reveal a vigorous and effective effort by the laity to enforce the new statutes. Motivated by both economic and traditional ideals, the litigants made the commercial activities of leaseholding and buying for resale and profit the exclusive domain of the laity and acquired the power to regulate the clergy. According to Palmer, these parish-level reformations presaged and complemented other initiatives of the crown that have long been considered central to the reign of Henry VIII.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807861394 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The University of North Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2003 |
| Series: | Studies in Legal History |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Lexile: | 1270L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Selling the Church
The English Parish in Law, Commerce, and Religion, 1350-1550By Robert C. Palmer
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright © 2002 The University of North Carolina PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0807827436
Chapter One
The Parish as a Governed CommunityThe parish of late medieval England was a much governed community. As a governance community of the church, the parish was distinct from the manor, even though often coincident with it. The church, and particularly the bishop, had governance rights within the parish, but those rights the bishop shared overtly with the crown, the parish patron, the rector, and the parishioners. These rights-holders were thus both external and internal to the parish, and the interplay dictated the traditional perception of parish dynamics. That traditional perception of the parish was the ordinary language of discourse and thus set the ordinary ideals of clerical conduct. Late medieval actual conduct diverged markedly from this traditional perception, as succeeding chapters will show. Henry VIII after 1529 would bring actual conduct a fair way into line with these traditional perceptions, although in a radically changed context.
Internal Parish Government
The allocations of power within the parish included both the vertical and the horizontal elements characteristic of late medieval governance. The verticalelement was the rector, appointed by the bishop at the nomination of the patron, and legally in charge of providing spiritual care to the parishioners. The rector's position was managerial. He did not necessarily perform the religious services himself, but he was responsible for making sure that the spiritual needs of the parish were met and that the buildings belonging to the parish, including the church chancel, were maintained. The rector also disposed of the various revenue streams that constituted the economic aspect of the parish that, in the end, supported both the parish and the international bureaucratic church organization. The horizontal part of internal parish government was the church wardens, who were selected by the parishioners. They were responsible both for certain parish endowments and activities and for the upkeep of part of the church building, vestments, and church ornaments. The church wardens could complain to the rector's superiors, of course, but otherwise did not control his activities. Since church wardens apparently only became a significant feature of the English parish after the Black Death, their presence provided a new governance dynamic at the local level. The varied interplay between the vertical and horizontal elements of the parish determined the character of the parish. The presence of both elements, however, ensured that the parish was not just a governed unit, but a governed community. That change in parish structure kept it current, so that the parish remained as vital a community as the other communities within which individuals lived: the communities of town and manor, the community of the county and diocese, and the broader community of the realm.
The rector, if resident, could dominate the parish. The rector did not have to be a priest, but he normally was. He received the bulk of the parish income and the responsibility for running the parish. In some sense, the rector is best considered a manager who could but certainly need not have direct involvement with the spiritual care of his parishioners. If resident, he either performed the church services (mass, the liturgical hours of matins and vespers) in person or hired a chaplain to do so. He was responsible for the provision of the other sacraments: baptizing children, presiding over marriages, hearing confessions, performing the last rites for the dying. He managed the economic resources of the parish, economic resources that were often as significant as those that went to the lord of the manor. He received the parish tithes: a tenth of the parish produce, both from the lord's demesne lands and from the lands of the ordinary parishioners. Additionally, the rector normally had the sole benefit of lands attached to the church within the parish, often called the glebe lands, ranging from a few acres in some parishes to large estates in others. The rector claimed the traditional offerings from the parishioners as well as significant occasional profits, such as mortuary fees: often the second best animal or piece of movable property of a dead parishioner. In return, the rector was liable for both royal and ecclesiastical taxation and was responsible for repair of the church chancel. A resident and involved rector could be a powerful personal and economic force in a parish.
The rector, however, was often necessarily absent. Monasteries had their own large agricultural estates, but they also found support from the appropriation of parishes. If a monastery thus appropriated a parish, the head of the monastery or other religious house-whether abbot, abbess, prior, prioress, or master-became the rector of the parish. No one expected the abbot or prior to abandon the religious house and live in the parish. Instead, the rector appointed a perpetual vicar, who received a portion of the church revenue; the bulk of the revenue still went to the rector to support the religious house. The actual apportionment of revenue between rector and vicar, as well as all other elements of the relationship, was under the control of the bishop: when the rector was clearly not present, the vicar had to have the resources to manage the parish. Between a fifth and a third of England's nine thousand or so parishes were appropriated in this way; the number increased to about 3,300 by the Reformation.
Just as parish revenue could support a religious house of monks or friars, the parish could supply the personnel needs of cathedrals and other large churches, as well as the needs of the bishop's administration. Cathedrals had relatively large staffs and proportionately large economic needs. Cathedral personnel were often prebendaries, that is, priests supported by a parish whose revenues were dedicated to endowing a position outside the parish. Prebendaries worked within cathedrals, with the bishop, in church courts; generally, they administered the church. Prebendaries likewise might require the services of a substitute within the parish on a regular basis.
Even when the administrative structure of the church did not dictate an absentee rector, the rector might necessarily be absent. The church was not only the institution of religion; it was also the institution of education. In late medieval England the church did not have the same monopoly of education that it had had in the early Middle Ages and had largely retained in the high Middle Ages. Still, however, the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge were clerical. One occupation of rectors was educational; some rectors were thus absent from the parish and used the parish revenue to attend university to obtain advanced degrees in theology, law, medicine. Likewise, a rector might have received his appointment to the parish from the king in return for service in the king's bureaucracy in the chancery, exchequer, or the courts. The revenue from the parish, in that case, directly supported the state bureaucracy by paying its personnel. Finally, a rector might occasionally go on pilgrimage or prosper and receive a license to hold more than one rectory, sometimes many more than one. Many parishes could thus have a rector who, for an extended time, was necessarily absent. Absentee rectors might appoint a temporary substitute.
Parish rectors were thus vital to the bureaucratic, religious, and cultural life of England, but they were likewise central to the economic life of the country. In an agrarian society with a vital commercial life, the problem of gathering agricultural surplus together available to traders for transport to towns, cities, and merchants was critical. Traders could work easily with lords of manors and with monasteries, both of which would have, predictably, large amounts of agricultural produce that had to be converted into other forms of wealth. Rectors constituted a similar economic node: they controlled more than a tenth of the agricultural produce of the country, regularly extracting, accumulating, and making the produce available for commerce. Lords of manors and rectors of parishes simplified the task of traders in supplying urban needs; otherwise, traders would have had to bargain with dozens of local people in each village. The religious as much as the aristocratic rights of England simplified the economic development and survival of towns by collection of the agrarian surplus within manors and parishes.
Church wardens represented the parish as a community. The parish itself had no control over who would be rector or vicar. After the Black Death, however, parishioners began to participate more substantially and officially in the parish. Church wardens were the guardians of the goods and ornaments of the church; they were the official representatives of the parishioners. They were the people who normally sued or were sued for the parish as a community. Their duties included the reporting of clerical or religious deficiencies to the ecclesiastical authorities. The rector had responsibility for the upkeep and care only of the "ecclesiastical" part of the church building: that part of the church after the nave, including the sanctuary. The rest was the responsibility of the parish, which normally acted through its church wardens.
Church wardens, thus representing the horizontal, communal, lay side of the church, fit well within the context of the time. Edward III's accommodation with his bishops after the Black Death dictated certain substantial elements of royal control over the church. Through the period of the Hundred Years War, roughly coincident with the Babylonian Captivity and the Great Schism, popular perceptions tended to regard papal policy as dictated largely by state politics. John Wycliff's heresy arose during the Babylonian Captivity, when the pope resided in Avignon and was subject to the influence of the French monarch. In both England and France, kings in fact exercised more control over the church. Wycliff's heresy was broader than mere lay control over the church, but lay control was a prominent part of the Lollard agenda. Wycliff's message here was only an aggressive extension of the style of governance that grew in England after the Black Death. While the government attacked Lollardy, royal control over the church demonstrated the way in which heresy often only carried contemporary perceptions rather farther than orthodoxy permitted. The institution of church wardens was completely orthodox, not tainted with heresy. Still, as an active lay participation in the life of the parish, church wardens were not simply an anomalous growth, but rather a distinctive product of a society that increasingly demanded active lay involvement in religious life. Even if the institution flourished initially simply to provide for immediate parish management following the death of many clergy in the Black Death, the presence of church wardens would nonetheless still stimulate attitudes about the proper allocation of power within the parish. Allocation of power within the parish, of course, would eventually carry implications about the role of the laity in the church generally: fact feeds theory.
Still, conflict between church wardens and rectors was not endemic. Relatively little information has survived about church wardens, although there is much more than has yet been brought to light. The division of responsibility for the church building as well as the church wardens' responsibility for the goods and ornaments of the church should have generated substantial frictions even among well-intentioned people in well-run parishes. The lack of conflict was plausibly real. Rectors and church wardens constituted only the formal structure of the parish. Underneath that, the vital and actual operations of the parish worked much differently. Chapters 4 and 5 will thus examine the commercial relationship of leasing that characterized many parishes before 1529.
External Parish Government
External governance of the parish came through the two theoretically independent but actually interdependent court systems: the royal and the ecclesiastical. The king ran the royal governance structure, working through justices of the peace, coroners, the sheriff, and the sheriff's bailiffs at the county level and through the prerogative and common law courts at the central level. The king's law governed individual personal and real property, contractual relationships, commission of crimes and ordinary wrongs, labor relations, a plethora of interpersonal problems; most litigation on these matters began with local litigants who brought cases directly into the central courts. Those litigants at common law, however, were all parishioners, at times in disputes related to parish life. The common law protected also the rights of the patron to nominate the person whom the bishop would appoint as parish priest. Alongside this royal organization was the church organization that placed the pope, whether in Avignon or in Rome, at the apex of the ecclesiastical hierarchy as the foremost bishop, with Christendom divided further into dioceses headed by bishops. Dioceses were grouped together administratively into provinces under an archbishop and subdivided into archdeaconries, deaneries, and finally into parishes. Church governance as exercised in ecclesiastical courts involved doctrinal correctness, church property, probate of wills and testamentary causes, breaking of oaths, usury, individual morals relating to sexuality, marriage, vows: more generally, matters relating either to individual salvation or to the maintenance of the institutional structure of the church. At levels above the parish, church courts served as the means for regulating religious conduct. Matters of other-worldly salvation, however, intertwined with this-worldly affairs: sex, money, land, power. State and church remained independent structures, as dictated by the flexible resolution of the Investiture Controversy of the eleventh century. Still, as in any society, the independence of different governance structures was in many ways restricted to form. Centuries and necessity had forged processes and accommodations that bound England together under the monarch into a comparatively cohesive state.
The person principally responsible for supervising the parish was the bishop. Normally, only the bishop could appoint a person as rector; that is, only a bishop could commission a person to act as the legitimately constituted religious authority in the parish. The bishop thus was responsible for seeing to it that the person to be appointed was sufficiently qualified under church requirements. The bishop was likewise responsible for the enforcement of clerical morality and the running of the parish.
Continues...
Excerpted from Selling the Church by Robert C. Palmer Copyright © 2002 by The University of North Carolina Press
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. The Parish as a Governed Community Chapter 2. The Parish as a Commercial Entity Chapter 3. The Common Law and the Mundane Church Chapter 4. Parish Leases: The Practice Chapter 5. Parish Leases: Conflicts and Consequences Chapter 6. Reforming the Parish by Statute Chapter 7. Enforcing the Statutes of 1529
Chapter 8. The Dissolution of the Religious Houses Conclusion: Conceiving the Reformation Appendix 1. Bailiff Style of Parish Management Appendix 2. Incidence of Nonparish Leaseholds in Common Pleas Appendix 3. Parish Leases from the Plea Rolls Appendix 4. Enforcement Suits under the Statutes of 1529
Appendix 5. Request of a Feoffee Appendix 6. Premunire Bibliography Index
What People are Saying About This
Robert Palmer advances a brilliant, if controversial, thesis about the origins of the English Reformation that will transform the debate and make a lasting impact on the historiography. A genuine tour de force. (John Guy, University of St. Andrews)
Absolutely authoritative and indispensable. . . . Much of what Palmer says is new and significant. . . . This book is part of a welcome trend directing attention back to the early years of the English Reformation.—Times Literary Supplement
An important contribution to the lively field of parish studies.—Ecclesiastical History
This is an innovative and impressive study of the application of common and statute law to ecclesiastical affairs, and the argument is illustrated by a multitude of fascinating examples.—Albion
Palmer lays out a series of provocative arguments in a clear, concise fashion. . . . Palmer's book is a tour de force, bold in its claims, thought-provoking in its analysis, painstakingly researched, and compellingly argued. . . . No one who reads it will come away with their opinions of the English Reformation unchanged.—Anglican Theological Review
Robert Palmer advances a brilliant, if controversial, thesis about the origins of the English Reformation that will transform the debate and make a lasting impact on the historiography. A genuine tour de force.—John Guy, University of St. Andrews
There is much in this book that is interesting, innovative, and almost certainly right. Leasing of parishes in late medieval and early reformation England has not been the subject of any full-scale study. Palmer has done it, and a fine study it is.—Charles Donahue Jr., Harvard Law School