The Struggle for Benefices in Twelfth-Century East Anglia

Summary

The demand of the papal reformers of the late eleventh century that the Church should be free to fulfil its divine mission, unfettered by secular domination and interference, was directed not only against the tyranny of emperor, kings and princes. Equally abhorrent was the control exercised by laymen over the local churches established on their estates by their ancestors; such proprietorship was unacceptable whether it was at the hands of magnates, lesser lords of single manors or groups of townspeople. It is undeniable that the novel idea that it was sacrilegious for a layman to hold ecclesiastical property or to confer office within the church elicited a widespread response, just as did the simultaneous assault on clerical marriage. It has been suggested that by 1200 a quarter of English churches had passed into the hands of the religious orders, and in those which remained in lay hands, untrammelled lordship had been reduced, in theory at least, to little more than the right of presenting a priest, who must be suitable, for institution by the diocesan bishop. The main argument of this paper, however, which is based on evidence from the diocese of Norwich in the century before the Fourth Lateran Council, is that there has been a tendency to exaggerate the extent to which the laity relaxed their grip on ecclesiastical patronage; that the religious, to whom so many local churches were surrendered, assiduously imitated their lay predecessors in the effort to extract therefrom financial profit, to the extent even that they sanctioned heredity succession to benefices when it was to their advantage; and that the advowson itself came to be regarded by monks, canons and nuns as a marketable commodity.

The vast majority of the innumerable charters which record the donation by lay lords of their churches to monasteries give little indication of the sentiments which lay behind the gift, beyond the statement that it was made for the salvation of the donor and his kindred. The general climate of opinion is well illustrated by the sermon of Bishop Herbert Losinga, woven around the text ‘Alms extinguish sin as water does fire’, and by the exhortation of Roger de Clare to his men to contribute to the new works at Stoke by Clare, in which he expressed the pious hope that God would repay their offerings one-hundred-fold.