Nelson2009 Review - Article Church Properties and The Propertied Church Donors, The Clergy and The Church in Medieval Western Europe From The Fourth Century To The Twelfth

English Historical Review Vol. CXXIV No. 507 doi:10.
1093/ehr/cep004
© The Author [2009]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Review–Article
Church Properties and the Propertied Church:
Donors, the Clergy and the Church in Medieval
Western Europe from the Fourth Century to the
Twelfth*
The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West. By Susan Wood (Oxford:
Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

Oxford U.P., 2006; pp. xiii + 1020. £110).
Before Christianity, all over the Roman world, whatever Roman law
said about ‘holy things’ being non-ownable, in Roman real life family
tombs were owned by families and their maintenance was funded from
family property. Land-holding, the basis of social and institutionalised
power in Latin Europe, was transformed between the fourth century
and the twelfth by the transfer of landed property to churches on a
massive scale. The religious beliefs and sentiments that drove this
transfer were Christian, but had pagan antecedents, as in the example of
Roman family tombs. Historians of late antiquity date a significant
proportion of the transfer to their period, earlier medieval historians the
bulk of it to theirs—that is, the eighth century to the twelfth. But these
transfers were qualified by the persistence of a sense of continuing
ownership rights on the part of lay donors and their heirs. These
enduring rights and sentiments were substantially modified by the
reforms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries; yet an important residue
remained. The friars’ advocacy of alternative funding-streams had
limited effects. Even after the drastic changes brought about by the
Reformation, the Anglican variety of reformed religion stuck with a
form of family ownership of benefices, or the right to appoint clergy,
as ‘preferments’, which devout laymen could regard c.1800 as the
‘temporalities attached to holy things’ evoked in The Making of the
Middle Ages by Richard Southern, in a neatly placed quotation from
Mansfield Park.1
Not Richard Southern but Rodney Hilton gave Susan Wood, she
says, the idea of writing on the proprietary church, and perhaps the
combined influences of these quite different historians confer on her
book its deeply satisfying blend of cool-headed empirical appraisal of
*I am very grateful to George Bernard and Martin Conway for editorial advice and
improvements.
1. R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London, 1953), p. 130.
EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

356 CHURCH PROPERTIES AND THE PROPERTIED CHURCH
material needs and constraints with a finely informed feel for the sense
and sensibilities of those men and women who funded and ran the
churches in question. The work was much longer in the writing than its
inspirer envisaged, yet its ‘range in time and terrain’, and sustained
rethinking of a long-lived historiographical paradigm have amply justified
the wait. Wood has examined published church archives from throughout
Latin Christendom, and through imaginative engagement with them has
brought close the lay patrons and the men, women and children placed
in the ecclesiastical life. Wood’s ‘terrain’ is sociological as well as earthy.
She has thought hard, too, about and across social class: those involved in
managing church property included cabbage cultivators as well as kings.
In the final part of the book, she addresses language and ideas in which,

across the entire period from c.300 to c.1100, pious donation enveloped
the buying, selling, pledging, having and letting-go of churches.
The paradigm of a proprietary church system was a ‘classic German’
one (p. 11), in the sense both that German scholars invented and subscribed
to it and that its roots were attributed to historical speakers of Germanic
languages (read, barbarians) operating first in ‘Germany’ (that is, beyond
the Rhine) but from the fourth and fifth centuries onwards within the
Roman empire. The paradigm lurks in much of the historiography on
the pre-Gregorian Church, and contributes, still, to ‘revolutionary’
readings of eleventh-century Reform. In another part of the wood,
another Wood points out that in recent historiography on the
transformation of the Roman world, the vastly endowed proprietorial,
institutional Church is ‘the elephant in the sitting-room’—which no one
thinks it fitting to mention.2 While Susan Wood’s brisk demolition of
Germanic origins sits well with other historians’ deconstruction of the
‘Germanic’ input into Latin Europe’s legal and social relations, she
reinstates the reality of property in churches as something good to think
about and as central to social practice. She treats it, with a deftness born
of long familiarity, not as a huge, homogeneous, clearly contoured entity,
but as ‘a fluid set of attitudes and practices’ that varied in place and changed
over time, and which were always most comfortable in (to borrow a phrase
from Maitland) a ‘hazy atmosphere’.3 This book needed to be large,
because the ‘attitudes and practices’ had to be captured in so many different
textual representations, while the very idea of church property was ‘fraught
with paradox’. It is the sheer amount of evidence here, but also the
project’s scope—‘the Carolingian Empire and its successor-states both
sides of the Alps’ as well as Spain, England and ‘occasionally’ Wales and
even Iceland—that makes the cumulative case impossible to overlook.
Cumulative means what it says. You will need to read this book as a
whole, and be prepared to follow up a large number of cross-references.
2. Ian Wood, ‘Landscapes compared’, in Early Medieval Europe, xv (2007), 223–37, at 237.
3. F.W. Maitland in F. Pollock and F.W. Maitland, History of English Law Before the Time of
Edward I (2nd edn., 2 vols., Cambridge, 1911), II, p. 12, cited by Wood, p. 754.

CHURCH PROPERTIES AND THE PROPERTIED CHURCH 357
Certain fundamental texts appear early: letters of Gelasius I on bishops’
rights in private churches, for instance, are cited at pages 13–14, and the
Index entry ‘Gelasian rules’ (p. 995) enables you to follow through their
influence. The entry for Psalm 82, with the verse condemning those
who ‘claim the Lord’s sanctuary as an inheritance’, waymarks another
interesting trail from page 137. On the other hand, Augustine’s Sermo
86 (‘Make a place for Christ among your sons … He has deigned to be
a brother, and being God’s only Son, he wishes to have co-heirs’), not
quoted until page 734 at which point n. 34 provides references back
to pages 21–3 etc. is absent from the Index.4 Fortunately for readers,
however, the Index misses few tricks. Purpose-built and on an appropriate
scale (would that that could be said of all scholarly books), it includes,

notably, entries for some 500 actual churches, large and small. Presented
with such riches, a reviewer might seem churlish to complain that more
thematic references (‘kingship’, for example) would have been welcome.
The bibliography of secondary works contains more than 700 items,
and seventeen pages-worth of printed editions, whence many thousands
of charters have been trawled.5 Wood has an unerring eye for the telling
instance.
The book’s organisation is set out very clearly. It is part thematic, part
chronological. Part I (pp. 9–244—the scale is monographic!) surveys
the late Roman period, the kingdoms established in the fifth and sixth
centuries and the ways and means whereby in the seventh and eighth
churches were established, acquired property and were treated as
property, from post-Roman Wales to Byzantium. The synoptic view
enables Wood to test arguments with merely local or short-term
purchase. The notion that gifts to proprietary churches were intrinsically
‘Germanic’ is quietly disposed of by early evidence that such gifts were
made in south-east Wales (p. 96). The claim by some Spanish historians
that, because of the exceptional survival of Roman public law in
Visigothic Spain, proprietary churches hardly existed there is rebutted
by evidence that among Burgundians, Visigoths, Sueves, and Lombards,
fathers could arrange a personal life-share in the inheritance, which
would then endow a co-owned church, as a combined form of old-age
provision and donation ‘for the soul’ (pro anima) (pp. 21–3 with cross-
references to pp. 603, 628 and especially 734, where we find Augustine,
Sermo 86). The suggestion by a historian of Bavaria that aristocrats used
private churches, by way of pro anima donations, to deal with a crisis of
4. Though there is no entry for Augustine, cases where the system of Index cross-referencing
works imperfectly (p. 764, n. 72, p. 785, n. 47, Index p. 992, s.v. dos) are extremely rare. Throughout
the book there are extraordinarily few errata (e.g. Saint-Cybar at p. 335, but rightly Saint-Cybard
at p. 428). ‘Polyptich’, passim, while not wrong, looks odd.
5. A time-lag between bibliographical cut-off date and publication is an inevitable drawback in
a book on this scale. The footnotes to this review-article supply references to some more recent and
forthcoming works.

partible inheritance by favouring a single heir is belied by evidence that
such gifts were not alternatives to, but part of ‘the satisfaction of family
needs and social relationships’ (p. 47). The importance of commemoration
(memoria) is clear everywhere, as is the role of negotiation of interests
within families, between siblings but also between generations. The
exceptionally large numbers of juicy Italian charters are particularly
piquant: carefully prepared ingredients in negotiating strategies.6 The
founders of churches included rulers, nobles and merchants, members
of village élites and town-dwellers with land in the country, as well as
priests. But whoever founded a church in the countryside, ‘it would
tend to become a “village” church, and to be considered “theirs” by the
local people’ (p. 90, citing Chris Wickham).7

A natural affinity with Susan Reynolds’s approach is especially clear
in the ground-clearing sections of Part I. Wood has absorbed much
from Reynolds’s Fiefs and Vassals, a book with which her own is likely
to be compared. Both authors tackle big questions by returning to
basics; both are committed to empirical demonstration, and write prose
as fresh and clear as their thinking. We can talk about property in
churches if we recognise that property always carries both obligations
and rights to dispose, ‘even if not freely’, and that these rights have
modern analogues yet differ crucially from them. But, whereas Reynolds
argued that what look like claims to property are in fact veiled rights to
protect and govern, Wood’s project is to show that claims to property
in churches are, with the caveats just mentioned, what they say (pp.
2–3, and cf. pp. 588, n. 23, and 729, n. 77).8 At the heart of Part I,
cleverly placed after the presentation of the eighth-century evidence and
before a radical reappraisal of rights and claims over monasteries, is a
scrupulous unpicking of the original Proprietary Church thesis of
Ulrich Stutz (pp. 92–100).9 Wood is in line with much modern work in
rejecting ‘Germanic’ and ‘Roman’ ethnic labels: she boldly substitutes
a socio-economic one, ‘landlordly’ (p. 97, n. 41), which she keeps in
inverted commas. Why did landowners want to build and endow
churches at all? The answers show motives as mixed as one might expect,
with varied institutional and economic arrangements to match. ‘There
might be worldly advantages in turning some of one’s land into church
6. G. Algazi, ‘Introduction: Doing Things with Gifts’, in Algazi, V. Groebner and B. Jussen,
eds., Negotiating the Gift. Pre-Modern Figurations of Exchange (Göttingen, 2003), pp. 9–27, at
18–19. Though this important book appeared too late for Wood to take it into account, it would
have been grist to her mill.
7. C. Wickham, ‘Italy and the early Middle Ages’, in K. Randsborg, ed., The Birth of Europe
(Rome, 1989), pp. 140–51, repr. in Wickham, Land and Power. Studies in Italian and European
Social History (London, 1994), pp. 99–116 (with an additional note, 116–18), at 114–15.
8. S. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals. The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford, 1994); equally
relevant in the present context is her Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300, (2nd
edn. (Oxford, 1997).
9. U. Stutz, Die Geschichte des kirchlichen Benefizialwesens, I, i, 1st edn. (Berlin, 1895), esp.
pp. 89–95.

property without really letting it go’ (p. 101). The sense of paradox, or
ambivalence or multi-layeredness is characteristic. ‘The rise of the cult
of saints, while it did not necessarily bring about private church
foundations, must have given [them] a powerful impetus’. A ‘sense of
the holiness of places’, and perhaps of ‘pinning down a mana under a
stone altar for the benefit of one’s family and people’, also contributed
to this (pp. 105–7). A strong perception of religious concerns as
inseparable from family ones, and every bit as real, is key to Wood’s
ensuing discussion of early monasteries and the shaping of new
customary law.
An ‘outside founder’, that is someone outside the community being
founded, who in sixth-century Gaul was usually a bishop, but

increasingly in the seventh and eighth centuries, and in the Frankish
north, a noble, couched his or her foundation-charter in terms of
outright gifts (‘I donate … for ever’, ‘I transfer it out of my ius and into
their dominatio and potestas’) (p. 113); but in the same documents, strings
were often attached, notably the requirement to commemorate the
founder. The precise-sounding Roman-legal terms were in practice
vague, and contestable. If founder’s ius came down to the right to
appoint the abbot, this was less a matter of law than of the reality that
the monastery had been ‘founded for (if not by) a particular person who
was to rule it’ (p. 118). Much of Wood’s evidence in this chapter on
‘Early monasteries’ is Frankish, though Anglo-Saxon material is aptly
interspersed. The next chapter’s full-blown comparative survey of non-
Frankish areas (including England) reveals ‘patterns of family interest’
that are variations on a theme.
Wood’s contribution to the much-debated question of control is a
new emphasis on the axial role of the abbot or abbess, who was at once
spiritual leader and family member.10 This may strike some readers as
surprising, but in fact it makes sense of several distinctive features of
early medieval landscapes, especially in the first phase of a church’s
foundation: the relative weakness of episcopal control, the local
embeddedness of monasteries within family landholdings and the
quintessentially (land)lordly nature of abbatial power (dominatio). That
Benedict of Nursia had ‘avoided’ the legal question of who owned the
property made it all the easier for a monastery to be seen as ‘belonging
to its successive abbots’ or abbesses (pp. 121, 125). Wood conceptualises
different ‘levels’ (p. 126), the spiritual one of the monk’s or nun’s
renunciation of property at profession, and the private-law one, of
proprietorial rights retained until formally renounced at a later stage,
maybe at death’s door—in which case the handing on became
10. Not until p. 190 does Wood explain ‘outside lordship’ as involving extensive exogenous
power (‘the lord has wider lands and other bases’), and control of the office of abbot or abbess: see
below. I am grateful to Julie Mumby for her comments on Wood’s discussion of the Anglo-Saxon
evidence here.

inseparable from abbatial succession, hence the importance of rights of
ordinatio, that is to appoint and install.11 ‘We are not dealing with
ownership as Roman or modern law would understand it. Potestas itself
is sliced up various ways’ (p. 172). Anglo-Saxon attitudes such as
Benedict Biscop’s comment that he would prefer his monasteries of
Wearmouth and Jarrow to be deserted rather than ruled by his unworthy
brother (p. 137), or Bede’s revulsion at ‘bogus monasteries’ (p. 152) or,
stretching the point, Alcuin being allowed (by Charlemagne) at the end
of his life ‘to divide among his disciples the monasteries committed to
him’ (p. 183, citing Vita Alcuini c.11), in this light look not so much
eccentric as par for the course.
Amidst recurring ‘patterns’, what varied and changed were the size

and shape of ‘families’ themselves. ‘Descent-lines’ might be a more
suitable term, evoking something thinner and more tenuous. For, as
Wood observes, a family’s control of ‘its’ church was seldom long
lasting. The proprietary church was either given outside the kin, or
given to a greater church, that is a major monastery or a bishopric.
Generalising a little too strongly, perhaps, from the case of Lorsch, so
well discussed by Matthew Innes, Wood sees an increasing trend in this
direction which coincided with the ‘sudden peaking of pious donations
in much of the West’ around the turn of the eighth/ninth century
(p. 180). Founders’ and/or abbatial control diminished, and ‘outside
lordship’ grew. Wood offers two explanations for this trend. First,
bishops attempted to substitute their own lordship of monasteries for
that of founders, reversing the earlier thrust of episcopal grants of
immunity whereby seventh-century bishops had renounced dominatio,
‘demands for dinners, hospitality or gifts’. The efforts of individual
bishops to assert their power in this way were, however, as yet seldom
successful. Wood’s second, more compelling, explanation forms the
next major strand in the book, namely Carolingian power over
monasteries and higher churches: what she terms ‘a massive assertion of
outside lordship’ (p. 211). Having stated here that Merovingian kings’
appointment of abbots and bishops was ‘not an assertion that the church
[meaning, an individual church] was the king’s property to dispose of,
but an act of sacral kingship or public power’, Wood seems to realise
that she has begged too many questions. No more is heard of sacral
kingship, and Wood immediately contrasts this situation with that
under the Carolingians.
While there had been ‘some attrition’ of ecclesiastical property rights
in later Merovingian Gaul, it was the Carolingian mayors, Wood
argues, who presided over a ‘secularisation’ involving ‘the use of great
11. In Byzantium, Roman civil and canon law requirements on monks’ personal poverty
remained in force but were flouted in practice: on this, and on the powers of founders and founder-
abbots (hegoumenoi) in ideal and reality, see R. Morris, ‘Reciprocal gifts on Mount Athos’, in
W. Davies and P. Fouracre, eds., The Language of Gift in the Earlier Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2009),
forthcoming.

churches themselves as benefices, including all their property or what
was left of it’. This was a matter of ‘practical power, not a legal right’
(pp. 211, 213). In 782 Charlemagne, in a famous case involving the
cathedral church of Trier, ‘came close to implying that the property of
the bishopric itself [was] the king’s to claim in law’. He and his advisers
then worked out ‘remedies’ for secularisation: a system of divisio, which
entailed dividing a great church’s lands so that the ruler kept some
back and ‘determined the conditions’ on which the church held the
rest (pp. 217–18). This produced a lordship in three layers, the king’s,
that of the great church itself and ‘much of [the church’s] landlordship
in others’ hands’. The main basis of Charlemagne’s Reichskirche,
though, lay in his acquisition of ‘new churches of other men’s

foundation’ (p. 228), a string of ‘alienations’, with the king as beneficiary.
Given the pressures Charlemagne was able to exert over ‘other men’,
and given evidence for the forcefulness of his agents where monasteries
were concerned, a certain scepticism is in order about legal niceties or
‘sentiment about what is right’ (p. 229). Wood herself cuts a swathe
through several generations-worth of historiography, to view dominium
or defensio, mundeburdium or tuitio, as in effect ‘interchangeable’. She
observes that ‘“protection” words have been pulled in the direction of
“dominion” words, rather than the reverse’. That pull was at the heart
of ‘the power over men and things that constituted the property-right
of the time’ (p. 233).
In a lively coda to Part I, Wood identifies ‘substantially different
patterns’ (p. 239) in Lombard Italy and Anglo-Saxon England: there
were major royal monasteries (or minsters) in both, and evidence for
very extensive royal lordship, with royal women in conspicuous roles as
founders, patrons and abbesses, but Frankish kings’ rights over churches
in Italy, as before them of Lombard kings, had a legal firmness and
formality less evident in England, where analogous rights might be
established by ‘the monks’ own choice’. You do wonder how much
‘choice’ the major minster-communities of Canterbury and Winchester
had when in 838 they put themselves under the king’s protection and
dominium, and extended this remit to the king’s son. The king’s hired
(interestingly, the same word as that for a military retinue) at the minster
of Damerham sound as if they regarded Alfred as their lord in terms they
thought firm and lawful enough: after all, he had their charters (p. 242).12
Wood notes that, in England, a king’s ‘sharpest property-right in
monasteries’ was not that of appointing abbots, but of becoming
abbot himself, and she rightly notes that Frankish rulers did likewise.
Mercian and West Saxon kings did not talk, Carolingian-wise, about
‘defence’ of churches, but, as in Francia, they exploited minster resources
and then called it lordship, ‘not the other way round’ (p. 244). In the
12. J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005), pp. 325–6, sees this as
symptomatic of ‘the most conspicuous new factor [from the 820s], … stability’.

context of this book’s vast array of evidence of donation and litigation,
England’s one great peculiarity stands out as being its relative dearth of
case material.
The two themes of lordship over churches, and its social layering, are
expanded, elaborated upon, and analysed with great subtlety in the
massive Part II, on higher churches (pp. 247–433), and Part III, on lower
churches (pp. 437–726), which together form the core of the book. The
distinction between higher and lower churches is important, because
royal and princely rights over great monasteries and bishoprics had
distinctively political implications, generated a great deal of
documentation and caused much debate. Yet in a world where lordship
was ubiquitous and its exercise so variable in extent, the distinction

between higher and lower churches is often hazy and there is inevitably
a good deal of overlap and to-ing and fro-ing between subject-matter in
these rich pages. Higher churches were the royal lord’s gifts to faithful
men who were themselves lords. One of Wood’s prime witnesses here is
Hincmar of Rheims, who in his little treatise Churches and Chapels calls
bishoprics and monasteries the lord king’s beneficia: they are gifts, but
they are at the same time honores, offices, to be held, and the attached
duties performed, in a faithful manner (pp. 248–50).13 This is everyday
language, seldom to be found in royal charters. When Louis the Pious
gave an abbot or bishop, as he very often did, ‘the defence of our
immunity’, he meant a privilege, perhaps a lucrative one if it involved
the right to collect dues which would otherwise have gone to the ruler
via royal officials. Louis never granted it to churches under other lords’
dominium. Charles the Bald appreciated a number of services that
churches could owe him: all were distinct from the king’s regular rights
of lordship over property, and they constituted a whole series of special
rights and privileges which Wood rightly considers as not ‘proprietary’.
They included the receiving of annual gifts (annua dona) from selected
monasteries and from bishoprics, payable in horses and weapons, or
straight silver, or oxen or cheeses for palace consumption. They included
temporary possession, in the name of a protection that could be found
extremely burdensome by ‘beneficiaries’, of vacant abbacies or sees: the
later term spolia is telling. They included rights by the king acting in
concert with the bishop or abbot to exact military service from tenants
placed on church beneficia. They included rights to hospitality (gistum)
for the king and his retinue and fodder (fodrum) for their horses, as well
as the use of monastic buildings to incarcerate political prisoners. These
rights evolved differently in different parts of the old Carolingian Empire,
surviving on the whole more strongly in the east, where the Ottonians
13. Hincmar of Rheims, Collectio de ecclesiis et capellis, ed. M. Stratmann, MGH Fontes iuris
Germanici antiqui in usum scholarum separatim editi XIV (Hanover, 1990), p. 84. See further
P. Fouracre, ‘The use of the term beneficium in Frankish sources. A society based on favours?’, in
Davies and Fouracre, eds., The Language of Gift, forthcoming.

called their protective power ‘advocacy’ and continued to exact military
support from many larger churches, than in the west, where by the late
tenth century royal lordship remained over very few churches and the
Capetian kings could appoint to only 12 out of 77 bishoprics in their
nominal realm (pp. 289, 300). In pre-Conquest England, rulers exercised
rights to appoint to bishoprics and major abbacies, and to extract military
services, that ‘look very Carolingian’ (p. 291).
On the whole, bishoprics in Latin Europe did not become proprietary,
Wood concludes, because episcopal structures and rules, visibly
demonstrated in councils, persisted, by and large and with local
interruptions, and because the lordship exercised over them was not
seen by rulers and princes in proprietorial but in ‘protective’ terms.

True, in the French Midi and in Catalonia, as local noble families’
power over bishoprics in the tenth and eleventh centuries extended to
alienating and partitioning shares in them, so ‘the more “private” it
begins to look’ (p. 304); but this is a limiting case, helpfully providing a
control on other regions, and taking us ‘down’, as it were, into a different
layer of regional or local lordship, and hence onto the different
conceptual territory of noble control of lay abbacies and advocacies.
Wood’s nuanced conclusion is that ‘we can if we choose see [advocacy]
as a slice of lordship retained’ by founders’ lay heirs (p. 333), though
separable from lordship in principle and sometimes in practice (p. 337).
This leads into an exploration of the entrenchment of lay lordship
over monasteries from the mid-ninth century onwards in much of
Continental Europe. Wood’s discussions in Part I of the claims of
founders’ heirs (ch. 7) and of abbatial claims to possess their foundations
(chs. 5, 8), has paved the way for a fuller argument here that such
‘incipient’ claims often underlay subsequent noble lordship. Particular
cases met earlier are visited again (Lorsch, Mettlach, Hornbach) and
new ones broached (Werden, Glanfeuil, Vabres, Sarrazac, Aurillac,
Steneland and St-Bertin, Rheinau and Schienen). The case of
Wildeshausen in Saxony, in some ways exceptional, finds here a broader
context in which it can be recognised as a variation on a theme (pp.
348–9). Wood shrewdly observes that when special arrangements are
mentioned in documents, they restrict long-term lordship, and that
‘ordinary inherited outside lordship’ is, by the same token, seldom
recorded, and has to be inferred, or ‘glimpsed’ (p. 351, n. 95). Wood’s
acceptance of the idea that this is ‘an aspect of the emerging emphasis
on lineage’ and symptomatic of ‘new regional powers’ in the later ninth
century (p. 352, and cf. p. 355 on Germany) is less convincing than her
general emphasis, making all due allowance for regional differences and
varying chronologies, on underlying continuities and periodically
re-emerging themes: founder-abbots c.900 (Berno of Cluny, Gerard of
Brogne), like abbesses’ life-interests in their foundations in Ottonian
Saxony (pp. 356–65), are reminiscent of the much earlier examples
presented in Part I.
The tenacity of long-established habits, and habitus, emerges clearly
in the full flood of Gregorian reform in Swabia, in the case of Zwiefalten,
whose patrons’ ‘resolve … to disengage altogether from proprietary
lordship’ was based on ‘assumptions as proprietary as ever’ (p. 371).
Similar ‘patterns’ then emerge no less clearly from a mass of detail drawn
from other regions, with the irresistibly rich Italian material
in particular evoking recurrent echoes of earlier centuries (pp. 395,
399–401, 404). Part II’s brief coda yields an important insight: in the
case of distant monasteries placed under papal dominium, or given to
Cluny, proprietary language was a metaphor, meaning that ‘property
[was] not illusory but a matter of degree, and sometimes of context’,
while ‘the metaphor derived its force from ordinary cases [such as of

Roman monasteries under the pope’s local episcopal lordship] where
the words used meant what they said’ (pp. 432–3).
Part III, ‘Lesser churches’ resources in lands and possessions’, is by far
the longest in the book. These churches, with endowments varying
from the minute to the very large, could be ‘owned’ in a way that great
churches could not. The question therefore becomes not whether these
lesser churches were property, but ‘how and in what degree’. Given a
‘shallower but larger sea of evidence’, Wood adopts an approach ‘both
more generalized and more densely illustrated’. The reading is a delight,
but a reviewer’s summarising task gets no easier. From the sixth century,
canon law laid down that a church, however, small, had land with its
implements and livestock and workforce, together with a working
capital of books, plate and vestments, as its endowment. This was often
called dos by analogy with a bride’s dower (pp. 438–9; cf. pp. 19, 21–2,
and 735–6). Its minimum quantity was specified, as were so many other
things, in Carolingian legislation as equivalent to a small peasant
holding. As Frankish power spread, so did the rules about church
endowment. As, from the start, endowed churches became objects of
lordship, endowing a church, whether you were a group of peasants or
a landlord, meant making a gift that could also be an investment: its
value could grow with tending, and it could give a focus to an estate.
You could endow, yet retain usufruct rights for one or more life-times.
You could give your small church away to a bigger one, as the noble
widow Erkanfrida did with the church that was, literally, her dower,
keeping usufruct and the right to change her mind (p. 449).
Lords often had a major role in allocating ‘their’ church’s revenues,
which came in through tithes and offerings. Carolingian rulers, here
again, issued regulations. With the support of lay landlords, tithes
became a standard source of income, assigned to particular churches
which, from at least the ninth century onwards, had burial-grounds
attached. Your local church was the one to which you paid tithes, and
beside which you buried dead kin. The care of the dead became focused
on this church, its cemetery, its prayers and the offerings you made to
it: a cluster of associations and habits (the word ritus included habitual
religious practices) that became increasingly firmly established between
the ninth and the eleventh centuries in lowland Latin Christendom.
Burial grounds had to be local. Baptism mattered less, observes Wood
in a characteristically practical aside, ‘since babies could be carried or
children walk’ to more distant ‘mother-churches’, which did indeed
retain baptismal rights for much longer (p. 464). Lordship over churches
now included a well-established bundle of economic rights, which
internal colonisation made more and more important across the period.
The chief beneficiaries were sometimes bishops, more often local lords;
but the poor could benefit too if churchmen or lay founders built alms
into their local arrangements. Over time, tithes became so deep-rooted
in custom that ‘lords had come to think of them as theirs because the

church was’ (p. 489). Tithes could constitute a guaranteed income,
sometimes bought and sold as, in effect, entrance fees exacted by lords
from priest-incumbents. Offerings could range from being as gratuitous
as the word suggests to, in effect, fees for priests’ services. Unlike tithes,
though, offerings had an in-built connection with personal encounters
in the church itself, and so retained their ‘giftiness’.14 Whether these
reflected lordly power or ‘choice from below’ is, predictably, a question
with no single answer. There was probably (though unprovably) ‘an
enduring area of choice’ where religious and ritual services were
concerned, not only for the rich and free, but also for the poor and
unfree.
In the remainder of Part III, Wood traces the twin trends whereby ‘as
the Church’s public efforts [in councils and legislation] flag, the private
charters thicken up’. They convey more or less explicitly the assumption
that ‘a lord of a church can both dispose of pastoral revenues and enjoy
them’. In some cases, a lord’s share of two-thirds became customary,
but the evidence, as usual, shows no ‘logical’ application of a canon-law
rule, ancient Gelasian or Carolingian, but rather the embedding over
time of custom variously suggested or implied in documents, and more
seldom explicitly stated. The dozens of cases presented are ‘deliberately
numerous, to show they are not mere aberrations’ (p. 491). The
cumulative result is irrefutable: in France, in Lotharingia, in Germany,
in Italy (with regional variations sometimes involving the continued
reservation of tithes to mother-churches, plebes, pievi), in Burgundy and
in Provence, in Spain, and in England, lords owned church revenues.
Lords also wielded extensive powers over ‘their’ priests. The documents
that show this sometimes also reserve the bishop’s supervisory rights in
canon law; but in western France, for instance, where the ninth-century
language was lordly, by the later eleventh century it had become
‘casually feudal’ (p. 540). Amidst a vast penumbra of legal arrangements—
leases, tenancies, allowances, wages—beneficia abound, with the range of
14. C. Wickham, ‘Compulsory gift-exchange in Lombard Italy, 650–1150’, in Davies and

Fouracre, eds., The Language of Gift, forthcoming.

meanings which that elastic term allowed. While the lord is the priest’s
senior, priests hold beneficia which, as Pope Paschal wrote to Ivo of
Chartres in 1102, ‘are called “juniorities” in your regions’ (apud vos
junioratus vocantur) (p. 569, n. 72). For a monastery as for a lay lord, the
priest to whom a living, or beneficium, was given was in some sense a
hireling, ‘part of the currency of patronage and of property exchanges
(p. 580), though a monastery might perhaps be more likely to insist on
the priest’s celibacy. As with any beneficium, the beneficiary’s family was
likely to take an interest, and ecclesiastical lords tried to counter the
tendency to heritability by making life-only agreements with their
priests. Fidelity to the lord mattered more than chastity. It was not the
Gregorian Reform but later twelfth-century episcopal efforts that made

a substantial difference here.
As with secular property, rights were layered, and coexisted: a castellan
could hold a church from a count, one knight contested another’s claim
to a junioratus. In the eleventh century, there was a notable regional
variation between northern France, Germany and England, where
single lay lordship of churches was usual, and the Midi, Italy and Spain
where larger family groups tended to have held churches in partnership.
Wood is careful to stress that this variation cannot easily be mapped
onto another distinction, between regions where an allegedly older
pattern of extended family (or fraternal) inheritance prevailed, and
regions where primogeniture was already becoming common by c.1000.
Keeping family property undivided, or postponing division, was a
choice, driven by ‘practical economics sometimes sharpened by political
conditions’ (p. 602), which, most visibly in Italy, gelled into one among
several customary options. Its tendency to result in the fragmentation
and loss of church property meant that it was not favoured by
‘Carolingian reforming bishops’; yet in the long run its drawbacks were
often offset by the capacity of families ‘to shrink as well as to expand’
and the capacity of monasteries and bishoprics, as more durable
institutions, to recover fractions of lordship and so reconstitute church-
wholes (pp. 604, 627–37).
Given the mass and complexity of the material, some recapitulation
of topics and evidence is inevitable, but also welcome, because each
re-visiting brings a new facet into view. In addition to all the lordly
churches, and often combined with them, there were churches of
families, of consortia of well-off freeholders or not-so-well-off peasants
(especially in Italy), of gilds (especially in England), of urban and rural
groups and even (especially later) village communities, such as the
seasonally occupied church of fishermen who threw out the chaplain
sent in by the bishop (p. 651). Lordship of churches was everywhere, and
at all times, especially at beginnings: local churches originated in the
ambitions of richer peasants rather than in village communities, and even
twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scandinavian laws, which used to be
read by older generations of German historians as evidence of original
‘Germanic’ communal arrangements, are nowadays seen, more
dispassionately, as having less to do with history than with later efforts
by kings and counsellors to remodel other contemporary realities (pp.
657–8).15 Priests confidently inherited and bequeathed ‘their’ churches,
amidst ‘the usual haziness between tenure and property’ (p. 661). The
jungle of entangled rights seems to become denser, perhaps just because
there is so much more charter-evidence, in the tenth and eleventh
centuries, with ‘bishops in the thick of other people’s proprietary claims
and counter-claims … made by lay lords, their parsons (men with
lifetime rights in a church), and their tenants’ (p. 708), and monastic
tendrils becoming entwined in ‘episcopal’ customs. It is ‘the proprietary
aspect’ that enables Wood to differentiate clearly between ‘a monastery’s

enjoyment of episcopalia in its churches, and exemption of the monastery
itself from all diocesan jurisdiction’ (p. 717): monasteries excluding
bishops had the strongest sense of proprietorship.
In the end, the totality of familiar scenes, like the jumble of memories
of a long pilgrimage, becomes hard to keep in a single frame or even
sequence. The small worlds are indeed parts of a macrocosm, yet they
remain irreducibly multiple, and distinctively themselves. The
porousness of rights, the way in which proprietorship merged and
soaked into other social fabrics, is inseparable from the world of
relationships in which lay people founded, endowed, manipulated and
embraced churches and were themselves embraced by these churches.
Oblation of children, and entry-gifts of those of mature years, are
among the varied forms of giving-while-receiving. Some historians have
been known to talk about ‘controlling’ their material. Wood does not;
but control was never her prime object. What she has striven for, and
achieves, in the thousand-page journey, is a sense of familiarity, even
intimacy, and a flow of understanding, not just of big pictures and
long-term trends but of individual people. Hundreds of voices, including
those of a great many women, are audible, mostly in brief snatches of
direct speech, quoted verbatim from charters that donors had made for
them, but also in the orotund tones of rulers, great lords and churchmen
in regulations, letters or treatises. The founder-abbess Emhilt, author of
her own arrangements, distinguished between, on the one hand, her
giving (donatio) to God, St Mary and the nuns already there, of her
landed inheritance together with the monastery ‘that I myself built on
it’, and on the other hand the handing-over (traditio) of these ‘to the
relics of St Mary that are my own … in my own reliquary’ (p. 126).
Emhilt thus made Mary, whose relics she possessed and with whom,
through those relics, she had a unique link, the monastery’s owner.
In successive refoundations of Exalada-Cuxa from 840–1 to 974, a
15. B. Sawyer and P. Sawyer, Medieval Scandinavia (Minneapolis, 1993), esp. pp. 17–21, 80–5,
108–11; S. Brink, ‘The Formation of the Scandinavian Parish’, in J. Hill and M. Swan, eds., The
Community, the Family, and the Saint (Turnhout, 1998), pp. 19–44, at 23–8.

community of brethren holding ‘in common’ was transmogrified into
something more abbatially-controlled, and then, in the immediate
aftermath of a disastrous flood, handed over to the powerful local count,
whose heirs a couple of generations later were claiming ditio, ‘outside
lordship’ plus ‘active patronage’ (pp. 353–4). A whole ‘underworld of
priests with little security and even less to live on’ (p. 574) comes into
view, as does a single down-at-heel elder brother who landed himself in
an unwinnable dispute with a big monastery and succumbed eventually
to repeated excommunications (p. 638).
Wood’s double achievement is to have demonstrated more fully than
anyone has ever done before the sheer diversity of the local and the
particular yet at the same time the similarities of the patterns that

emerge. The effect is to challenge larger histories that presuppose the
existence of regional, even proto-national, distinctive traits in the earlier
medieval period that naturally became identities, while also revealing
some well-known peculiarities to have been less than peculiar. Take the
Languedoc (pp. 304–5, 618–9): Magnou-Nortier, pleading as it were for
the defence, argued for the survival of canon-law notions, alive and well
since the days when Visigothic kings ruled the southern parts of Gaul,
which she thought explained why, appearances notwithstanding,
bishoprics were not privatised, and why aristocrats saw their rights over
churches not as proprietorship but as guardianship. In contrast, Richard
Southern, acting as it were for the prosecution, called the counts of
Barcelona as star witnesses to spectacularly proprietorial attitudes vis-à-
vis the archbishopric of Narbonne.16 Both these historians deployed the
particulars as parts of much larger theses: Magnou-Nortier as evidence
for the long-term survival in the Midi through to the central middle
ages of Roman-law ideas and ideals about the state, Southern as extreme,
yet somehow typical, evidence for the pervasiveness of simony in the
pre-Gregorian world. By sheer volume of evidence, and the application
of ‘a “common-sense” reading’, Wood, rather than driving these
arguments out of court (that is not her way) shows that they need
re-presenting in a wider frame: many parallels for Languedocian
practices can be found elsewhere, not least north of the Loire, and
Languedocian attitudes were deeply bound up with ways of thinking
about lordship over churches which were compatible with eschewing
simony—hence could lead to just the sort of negotiated and canonically
acceptable resolution to reformist criticisms that Wood sees in twelfth-
century lay patronatus of churches (pp. 892–3). It is worth saying here
that Wood’s criticisms of other scholars are as considerate as they are
considered, and that, throughout the book, her points are directed
mainly against excessive legal-mindedness. A delicious footnote (p. 443,
16. E. Magnou-Nortier, La société laïque et l’église dans la province ecclésiastique de Narbonne (zone
cis-pyrénéenne) de la fin du huitième à la fin du onzième siècle (Toulouse, 1974), pp. 353–5, 393–4,
429–30; T.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, pp. 118–22; cf. Wood, pp. 306–8 and n. 118.

n. 35) gently corrects a German historian who asserted that when the
Polyptych of St-Germain said that some of its estate-churches ‘have’
peasants, only the peasants’ labour, not their holdings, were meant, for
those local churches ‘could not be the subject of the verb “to have”’, but
‘only the monastery or the saint, Germain himself’: the historian’s
misapprehension, Wood observes, was that ‘landlordship within
landlordship [was] impossible’.
Part IV, again of monograph length, moves from the ‘practical’ level
to that of ‘ideas’ which, it soon becomes apparent, are not only legal
ideas. Stutz denied any possibility of a church being the subject of
rights, hence being truly given anything. The owner who gave to his
church gave to himself, ‘merely changing the use of something of his

own’ (p. 731). Wood stands this on its head. Churches themselves, and
saints, were seen as persons, and subjects, as well as objects, of rights. ‘It
was humanly fully possible for a family to think of themselves as owning
a church and, at another level, of the church and the saint who guarded
it as … by a kind of symbiosis owning themselves’ (p. 733).17 In one of
a large number of instances of women giving churches, while retaining
life usufruct, a widow and her daughter give ‘our own church’ of
St Euphemia to a great monastery, and at the same time give some
gardens to ‘our church, oh blessed Euphemia martyr of Christ’. Wood
comments: ‘Paradox is after all built into Christianity itself; and these
expressions need be no more meaningless than the Virgin’s address to
her Child in the carol: “My son, my brother, father dear, why liest thou
thus in hay?”’ (p. 734). Such imaginative relationships of people with
churches could vary regionally (Franks did not operate, but Lombards
did, with the notion of the church as co-heir with a donor’s sons), and
they could be more or less metaphorical. Rank mattered for the way in
which churches and their property were thought of just as it did for
people: a great church had lordship (dominium), but a country priest’s
church belonged to a lordship—‘the priests’s dependence could seep
into the church’s status’. Getting inside the skin of a charter-scribe of
St-Gall, Wood writes that: ‘since the idea of a gift was hazy, if an
endowment was meant to be for ever and irrevocable it might be as well
to say so’ (pp. 736–7). Wood persuades her readers that ‘ambiguity,
fuzziness, and even paradox may bring us closer to the proprietary
church than logic or legal analysis’ (p. 739). If this world seems fuzzy,
hazy, blurred, shadowy to us (these Wood-words are apt), the fuzziness,
haze, blur or shadow is in our seeing, not that of our historical subjects.
In short, there is often a disconnect between evidence which historians
feel professionally equipped to cope with and anachronistic assumptions
and expectations of which historians are less conscious. Wood’s choice
of words puts her in Maitland’s company (p. 754). For neither historian
17. Stutz, ‘Eigenkirche, Eigenkloster’, in J.J. Herzog, ed., Realenzyklopädie für Protestant
Theologie (vol. XXIII, 3rd edn., ed. A. Hauck, Leipzig, 1913), p. 7.

could ‘hazy’ be merely evasive: it sign-posts worlds where sharp-edged
legal categories are obstacles to understanding, and what may at first
seem a blur becomes the nearest thing to a clear vision. On the other
hand, there were distinctions that early medieval people did want to
maintain. Wood writes of ‘the uncertain border between gifts and sales’
(p. 754), yet a finding of a forthcoming team-study is that the great
majority of charter-scribes consistently registered that difference in the
words they used, and the boundary laid down in Christian scripture
and exegesis was more or less self-policed.18
There is no such thing as an extended punchline. It is difficult to
move cleanly from the general tangle of ‘ideas and attitudes’ to the
articulate ‘opinions’ of canonists. General ideas of lordship, especially

royal lordship, of churches, and expert opinions about episcopal
authority, are analytically separable, but had long coexisted and
continued to do so amidst the din of ninth-century shouting-matches.
It is in the context of the Carolingian reformers that Wood returns to
an important point made 550 pages earlier, that the attack was not on
the proprietary church, but only the misuse or ‘secularisation’ of church
property, especially that of higher churches, by lay powers, especially
kings. Pseudo-Isidore, apparently revolutionary in other respects, was
in the mainstream here, while Hincmar emerges from Wood’s
sympathetic but searching discussion (pp. 804–12) as a skilful defender
of lay lordship. Here the key distinction was that between the bishop’s
potestas, his authority to manage and care for, and the lord’s dominium.
A triple reforming imperative is asserted: to defend lesser churches—
that is, priests and their income—against grabbing lords; to defend
diocesan territorial jurisdiction from subversion by grabbing bishops
who might claim enclaves of potestas within a neighbouring diocese;
and to ‘limit and define’ royal lordship of greater churches so that
church property could retain its nature as ‘offered to the Lord: vota
fidelium, pretia peccatorum, patrimonium pauperum’.19 In the rest of this
chapter, the ‘opinions’ of Regino of Prüm, Abbo of Fleury and Burchard
of Worms are seen as essentially ‘old themes’, though they contained
some seeds of new, Gregorian, ones, and in the following chapter,
similar conclusions are reached on monastic reform, with St Peter’s
18. See the contributors to Davies and Fouracre, eds., The Language of Gift.
19. ‘The vows of the faithful, the ransoms of sinners, and the patrimony of the poor and weak’.
Wood notes (p. 794) the origin and special valence of this passage as ‘charged with religious force’.
She balances just acknowledgement of her debt to M. Stratmann, whose exemplary edition of
Hincmar’s De ecclesiis et capellis ‘makes discussion possible’ (p. 804, n. 2) with a critique of
Stratmann’s reading of crucial phrases, ed. cit., p. 12, as ‘implying … a large hole in the bishop’s
potestas (whereas they rather indicate its nature or the spirit in which it should be exercised), and
making them refer solely to the rights of Eigenkirche-lords (whereas … they refer equally to priests’
rights)’ (p. 807, n. 28). See also the in key respects similar conclusions reached independently (but
also drawing on Stratmann) by S. Patzold, ‘Den Raum der Diözese modellieren? Zum
Eigenkirchenkonzept und zu den Grenzen der potestas episcopalis im Karolingerreich’, in
P. Depreux, F. Bougard and R. Le Jan, eds., Les élites et leurs espaces. Mobilité, rayonnement,
domination (du VIe au XIe siècle) (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 225–45.

right to Cluny viewed as ‘an attenuated outside lordship … proprietary
enough in principle to exclude, normally, anyone else’s claim to formal
lordship’ (p. 839), and the idea of ‘Roman’ liberty contextualised as
compatible with founders’ rights and advocacy (pp. 842–6).
The final chapters deal with the impact of the Investiture Dispute,
and Gregorian reform more generally (Wood prefers the lower-case ‘r’),
on the proprietary church. Wood points out that papal decrees were
ambiguous (pp. 852–4), while controversy over investitures where
greater churches were concerned was ‘not centred on churches as
property’ and ended in a compromise whereby outside lordship was
recognised but on a ‘fuzzy’ theoretical basis (pp. 863–4).20 Only now
did new ‘opinions’ begin to make major inroads into old ways of doing

and thinking, for, as Wood warns, ‘the assumptions behind the
possession of churches were being undermined’ (p. 788). Lay lordship
of churches had always been seen as subject to constraints, but ‘now
these constraints were beginning to be seen by leading reformers as
incompatible with lay lordship itself’. Wood argues that the evidence
for the transfer of churches into the lordship of greater churches, which
most local studies, at least for France, show peaking during the later
eleventh century, ‘only seldom implies a total “Gregorian” rejection of
lay lordship’. Other contributory motives included lay need for ‘ready
money, not least for crusading’, and the local efforts of individual
bishops (pp. 865–6). Sometimes lay people transferred what was believed
to have been long ago episcopal property, sometimes what was
transferred were particular rights, such as that of appointing the priest
and taking the first-fruits (cf. rights constituting a junioratus), while
tithes were retained (p. 872). Was it lordship, or possession, that was
being condemned? And were the condemnatory voices overwhelmingly
those of bishops and monks? For lay donors, the concerns involved in
giving away a monastery were different from those affecting the gift of
‘any rural church’ which might have fallen into neglect or been misused.
Only in some regions and some cases can increased anxiety about
simony—itself a very old concern—be shown to have been in play. The
same goes for lay holding of tithes and, a fortiori, for lordship. Without
quite spelling this out, Wood hints that many historians have inferred
from charters associating such transfers with penitence that this was a
new norm, yet they have ignored the very large numbers of churches
donated without any such expression (pp. 880–82).
The real change came only in the twelfth century, Wood concludes,
with the move ‘towards a bureaucratic Church’. Canon-law collectors
and teachers brought precision and rationality to ‘imprecise customary
law that had seeped into the tangled mass of disparate and often regional
laws that constituted the law of the Church’ (p. 886). Gratian’s
20. Southern, Making of the Middle Ages, pp. 139–40, uncited by Wood here, took a similar
view.

systematic collection paved the way for the emergence of the canon
law of patronage. The term ius patronatus had been coined by Tuscan
notaries in the 1080s to differentiate the lordly rights of patrons from a
monastery’s right to ordain an abbot or prior (p. 892–3). It was borrowed
in the 1150s by the Bologna canonist Rufinus, commenting on Gratian’s
citation of Gelasius I to denote a very restricted dominium that excluded
‘lordly power’. It is a wonderfully apt dénouement: a precise-looking
legal term was chosen because it looked precise. Lawyers who operated
with smoke and mirrors could produce a shiny pseudo-clarity that
masked the continuity of good old-fashioned, untechnical, fuzzy
patronage (pp. 892–3). The vocabulary was new, and the lawyer-pope
Alexander III used it with care: the patron ‘presented’ a clerk for the

bishop to ‘admit’ and ‘institute’. In the thirteenth century, Innocent IV
thought old ways of honouring founders and their heirs—by letting
them continue to have first place among the laity in church, for
instance—‘harmless enough to preserve and justify’ (p. 897). Such
rights were no longer lordship, but a special kind of patronage.
Monasteries with such rights, on the other hand, were said to have
dispensatio, management, which was still an attenuated lordship. The
bundle of material resources attached to the priest’s office, his living,
was now termed a beneficium. Where Stutz saw the gist of ‘Germanic
church law’ remaining,21 Wood recognises ‘to a rather limited extent …
a survival … taken into canon law and only partially transformed’
(p. 904). Both scholars highlight the truth that rights to appoint priests
were especially valued by lay lords. Where forms and procedures were
concerned, the decrees against lay investiture had had some bite. In
practice, though, the Church signalled a ‘live and let live’ attitude to lay
patrons, large and small. The patron of a lesser church ‘presented’ or
‘introduced’ his clerk, acknowledging the bishop’s negative right of veto
and positive right to ‘vest’ the clerk with the altar. Opposition to the
new routine came less from lay lords than from married clerks and their
clerical sons, and even that was muted by the end of the twelfth century.
Patronage was recognised as ‘what lordship was now reduced to, or
now called’ (p. 917). Where monasteries or collegiate churches were
concerned, patrons lost lay abbacies, but retained rights of election to
abbacies, extending those rights to such new foundations as Cistercian
houses. The discussion closes with a last, riveting case-study from 1203:
when the nuns of Rosano elected their feisty abbess without the patron’s
consent, the dispute was resolved by the nuns’ acknowledgement of
old-style ‘common-sense evidence’ for comital patronage, reinforced by
the new ‘canon law requirement’ of patron’s consent, while the abbess
kept her post.
21. Stutz, ‘Gratian und die Eigenkirchen’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte,
Kanonische Abteilung 32 (1911), pp. 1–33.

Wood’s book ends quietly, and with another paradox. For higher
churches, ‘the change from dominium to patronage was not great’
(p. 922). Kings and princes abandoned lay investiture but kept what they
really needed, ‘their hold on elections and their profits in vacancies’, and
they granted out abbacies in commendam with papal connivance. In
England, ‘the common law treated patronage as property from the first’
(p. 931). ‘More real change’ occurred at the level of lower churches as lay
lords yielded their rights to church property, while holding on to ‘great
swathes’ of tithes, more valuable than ever in a growing economy
(p. 923). But it was at the local level that ‘proprietary practices, attitudes
and even legal ideas survived’ into the modern Church of England, to
be sympathetically portrayed by Austen’s Sir Thomas Bertram, and

evoked in Wood’s final paragraph in a quotation from Trollope.
Amidst all this continuity, some readers may well want to insist on
change ‘more real’ than local lords relinquishing ‘bits of church land’ of
‘minimal’ economic value. Wood devotes a whole, deeply thoughtful,
chapter to ‘Gregorian reform’. She does not quite address the reciprocity
endemic in ‘proprietary attitudes’, or the quantum shift not so much
‘towards a bureaucratic Church’, as towards a Church freed, or detached,
from the mentality of gift exchange. From the very beginning, the
question of property had always been bound up with that of personnel,
bishops, abbots and abbesses, and priests, responsible for managing
churches and handing them on over time. Once churches themselves,
and gifts to churches, were no longer seen as gifts requiring a return,
then lay donors and families, from kings to knights and rich peasants
too, were put out of that reciprocal relationship. In the eleventh century,
big questions were being raised about, in Tim Reuter’s words, ‘the
acquisition and transmission of office’, and new answers were being
found in a ‘discourse on simony [which] provided … a coded means of
renouncing the church’s normal gift obligations’.22 Lay patrons bought
into the discourse. To do so was to imply rejection of the idea of
reciprocity, the idea that if you gave something to the church you were
owed something in return—the governing principle underlying gifts to
the church up to the Gregorian reform. It was to imply a clear sense of
the contradiction between the gratuitousness of gifts and simony’s
‘implicit promise of service’.23
Yet, if patrons adopted the new terminology, they persisted in their
ancient habits of thinking: about Gelasian rules and about Psalm 82.
They now talked the talk but did not walk the walk. The gift exchange
mode, officially dethroned in the context of thinking about churches as
22. Reuter, ‘Gifts and Simony’, in E. Cohen and M.B. de Jong, eds., Medieval Transformations.
Texts, Power and Gifts in Context (Leiden, 2000), pp. 157–68, at 163–4. For the context of these
changes, see E. Peters, ‘Moore’s Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: Travels in the Agro-Literate
Polity’, in M. Frassetto, ed., Heresy and the Persecuting Society in the Middle Ages. Essays on the Work
of R.I. Moore (Leiden, 2006), pp. 11–29.
23. Wood, p. 856, referring to Peter Damian, is perfectly explicit about this.

property, did not pass into oblivion. Negotiability and reciprocity
continued, naturally, in religious practice as in life in general. The free
gift acquired a new salience which it has never subsequently lost, but the
old ideas of giving while keeping, and giving in order to receive, retained
their hold on attitudes and sentiments in the ‘real’ world. Wood has
made attitudes and sentiments a parallel focus of attention throughout
her book. She has succeeded in comprehending them within social
history, showing their deep embeddedness beneath new thinking,
coexisting comfortably with it, impervious to it. 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 L. NELSON
King’s College London

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English Historical Review Vol. CXXIV No. 507 doi:10.

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

14. C. Wickham, ‘Compulsory gift-exchange in Lombard Italy, 650–1150’, in Davies and

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of New England on June 2, 2015

EHR, cxxiv. 507 (April 2009)

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