Wood, What motive to build a church?
Origins linked to property, insecurity, and assertion of status..
The Source:
Susan Wood, The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West, Oxford University Press 2006
Praise for the book:
“Here, then, sustained across nearly a thousand pages, seen through the bifocal lenses of a richly paradoxical theme, is a comprehensive vision of the earlier medieval world, in which every piece of evidence touched on is handled with respect, every person with sympathy, and the interrelationships between ideas and practices analysed with rare finesse. This book is not Mansfield Park or Barchester Towers: it is a historian's Middlemarch.” ― Janet Nelson, English Historical Review
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. 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 [inc. Susan Reynolds]. So something needs to be said here in defence of recognizing ‘property’ in churches.
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, 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 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 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 property-owning 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.
Chapter 4
The question of origins
[excerpt on the ‘motives’]
[In considering the seigneurial/aristocratic motivations for founding/building a church] … there are at least two different things to be explained: 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. 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. 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.
It is possible that barbarians more easily regarded churches as their own without refinement or qualification, 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.
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.
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 [remedy for the soul?]—being realized invisibly and out of time).
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.
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 under- equipped) so would offerings be. 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.
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. 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.
For some, 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. 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.
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; possibly a right of sanctuary.
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), partly by inference from the founders’ circumstances and the churches’ fortunes, partly from the intentions attributed to founders by the composers of their charters: 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, and sometimes to live a more-or-less monastic life himself. 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.
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). Sooner or later one of his heirs or successors, or he himself, may give the church away to a 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; 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.
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.
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. 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.
But there was also a strong private strand to it, 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, and making this their burial church, the focus of their own identity and seal of their status.
Before long, the fragmentation of saints’ bodies multiplied their presence, while things or stuff that the saints had touched or worn came to have the same power of reassurance. When it became normal to put relics, however minimal, in or under an altar at its consecration, 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, and the dux Launebod in Toulouse at the place of St Saturninus’s martyrdom. 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 Péronne, Erchinoald’s own foundation and intended burial-place.
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; 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 ancestors. 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. 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, but linked now with having the saint’s patronage.
For Romans or barbarians alike, a lesser landlord’s small oratory, with relics (however minimal) 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); 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), 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.
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), but perhaps much earlier in the building of oratories for some pre-existing cemeteries.
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 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. Or he might build it (and get relics for it) to shelter and honour a place already felt to be holy, perhaps remote from habita- tion, itself to prove an attraction for settlers seeking its protection. 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, or even that his body had once rested there. …
… Or it might be ambivalently hallowed by its pagan past, 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); or at or near other kinds of old holy place—hill, grove, tree, or spring—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. …
… 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; and historians recently have emphasized that conversion involved a long process of assimilation. …
… 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, or too dangerous for anyone but a powerful holy man to inhabit …
… Meanwhile most lesser churches were probably built on mundane sites, chosen on practical grounds to satisfy a landowner’s ambition for a monumental burial-place, 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.
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