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[originally published in K. French, G. Gibbs and B. Kümin (eds), The Parish in English Life 1400-1600 (Manchester: UP, 1997), 15-32]
The English parish in a European perspective
Beat Kümin
Historians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are offering ever more detailed insights into English parish life.[1] Both local peculiarities and national trends start to emerge from the sources, with secular and social aspects attracting increasing attention alongside religious developments. What has not yet been addressed, however, is the potential for wider geographical comparison, perhaps due to the formidable quantity of domestic material still waiting in the archives. This essay attempts to assess the English evidence from a European perspective, with a particular emphasis on the institutional and communal dimensions. It cannot hope to do justice to the vastly heterogeneous experiences of parishioners throughout the Continent, but seeks to establish a basis for future reference and differentiation.
There is as yet no comprehensive introduction to the subject for our period.[2] Most of the information has to be collated from a wide range of ‘national’ surveys (however anachronistic modern boundaries may be) and an almost unmanageable wealth of more specialised studies.[3] The expansion of interest in the topic is clearly a European-wide phenomenon and scholars are identifying further research priorities all the time.[4] Even the most cursory of glances at this material reveals a complex combination of similarities and differences between the English and Continental contexts. The same, however, could be said for any other national Church. The ecclesia anglicana is no more ‘peculiar’ than its French, Italian, or German counterparts. Some characteristics correspond to contemporary norms, others are modified by specific local circumstances. Western Christendom offers a truly mesmerising range of structures and strategies; in what follows, we will focus on just one of its many institutional varieties.
An important caveat, the vagaries of source survival, should be addressed right at the start. The great wealth of episcopal and parochial records surviving for England is clearly ‘unusual’ and corresponding information for Italy, for example, has to be retrieved from scattered notarial records.[5] The range of documentation for any one region reflects a great number of variables: patterns of literacy and education, familiarity with more advanced business practices, the relationship between oral and written culture, storage facilities, losses caused by wars and revolutions - to name but a few. Scholarly assessments must thus be interpreted with a view to their empirical foundation. Studies based mainly on legal evidence and complaints literature, for instance, provide us with a more selective perspective than those supplemented by information on everyday religious life. The relative strength and vitality of the late medieval and early Tudor English Church may owe a lot to the comprehensiveness of its archives.[6]
And yet, whatever the quality of record survival, there were obvious structural differences. Starting at the top of the ecclesiastical pyramid, it is evident that the Roman curia had much greater influence on the Italian peninsula than elsewhere, while the powerful rulers of late medieval Spain, France, and England managed to create embryonic ‘national Churches’ well before the Reformation.[7] The number and size of bishoprics was an equally distinctive factor: England numbered some 17 dioceses, Ireland 34, the German-speaking Church 59, and France 131, while mainland Italy contained no fewer than 253.[8] Some of the German bishops were princes in their own right, with a share in the election of the Emperor, and, like their English colleagues, substantial landed property. The latter, however, exerted political functions only as civil servants of a more centralised monarchy, while many of their Italian counterparts were caught up in the power games of the expanding city states or - if they happened to be based in the very South - endowed with so small a territory and endowment that they were hard to distinguish from, say, a Lancashire parish rector.[9]
On the whole the English Church appears to have been an ‘exceedingly rich’ institution.[10] It held perhaps a third of the landed wealth in the country and maintained a very large number of clergymen. In sixteenth-century Castile there were on average 42 households per secular priest, in the pre-Reformation diocese of Geneva 28, but in England just 24.[11] The German towns of Braunschweig, Rostock, and Hamburg contained 4 parishes each, Cologne 12, Toledo in Castile 28, and Verona 52, but London no fewer than 110. This worked out at one parish per 450 inhabitants for the English capital, while Toledo incumbents looked after some 1,800 souls.[12] The average number of parishioners for England as a whole has been estimated at 300, but - as everywhere - the figures varied greatly from place to place and small flocks were certainly no English prerogative.[13] The nature of the secular framework mattered too. It will be argued below that areas with strong feudal lordship differed significantly from those governed by the peasants and townspeople themselves. As for ecclesiastical jurisdiction, in England it developed comparatively late and under the watchful eyes of a strong monarchy, while the fragmented German political landscape allowed spiritual courts to operate much more freely. On the eve of the Reformation, they became an important reason for the stronger resentment of the Church’s secular powers in Central Europe.[14]
On the other hand, common European features are probably even more striking. The whole of the Western Church, for instance, had been affected by the Gregorian reform and ‘the medieval parish, with its fixed territorial boundaries, its incumbent with tenure of position, its patron with a right to choose the incumbent, its fixed sources of revenue, and its generally secure canonical status’ was one of its most significant results.[15] The fight against excessive lay powers associated with the preceding Eigenkirche system, however, had encouraged incorporations. In Scotland, the quota of appropriated parishes reached a staggering eighty-five per cent by the end of the Middle Ages, in England well over a third. In all these cases, rectorial revenues, and especially tithes, were redirected to extra-parochial recipients such as colleges and monasteries which delegated pastoral duties to poorly paid vicars and curates.[16] Bishops and ecclesiastical institutions also tended to accumulate the lion’s share of parochial patronage. This was true in 45 per cent of North Brabant parishes, in 11 out of 16 churches from a sample of five Hanseatic cities, and in 60-86 per cent of English case studies.[17]
There were further shared characteristics. Every parishioner in Western Europe was - at least in theory - subjected to the legislation of provincial and diocesan synods, as well as the moral and religious supervision of episcopal visitations.[18] Similarly, lay fraternities became a key feature of local religious life. They involved both men and women, townspeople and peasants, with a particular ‘middling sort’ appeal to ‘artisans indépendants et ... commerçants’.[19] Whatever charitable, convivial, or professional activities they developed, they retained a primary focus on prayers for the dead and funeral provisions. The emergence of voluntary associations with members from within and without the parish was somewhat at odds with the established ecclesiastical framework, but on the whole ‘it seems unlikely that [they] were created or used against the institutional church’.[20] Structural similarities, however, did not preclude differences in quality or emphasis. Rural fraternities tended to be less elaborate and more ‘comprehensive’ than urban institutions, Western European gilds are seen as predominantly traditional and ritualistic in character, while groups like the laudesi in northern Italy promoted more contemplative forms of lay devotion and spirituality.[21]
As for pastoral provision, complaints about pluralism, excessive financial exactions, and the personal shortcomings of parish clergymen could be quoted from Kent, the Upper Rhine, Switzerland, Tuscany, and many other places.[22] The existence of varying degrees of ‘anticlericalism’ should thus not be ignored, but it is important to distinguish between personal, institutional, and financial conflicts on the one hand, and challenges to the spiritual and pastoral role of the clergy on the other. In the late medieval Church, judging from an ever more widely shared historiographical assessment, the latter were few and far between.[23] Non-residence was a universal problem, but varied in extent. It seems to have affected just one sixth of pre-Reformation English benefices, but perhaps one in two in France, two thirds of German parishes, between 60 to 70 per cent in certain areas of the Netherlands, and up to 80 per cent in the diocese of Geneva. The observation, therefore, that visitation records from the diocese of Lincoln imply a relatively high satisfaction quota among the local laity, while complaints from the parishioners of Hanseatic parish communities, to take but two examples, were plentiful, may reflect more than just unequal record survival.[24] Furthermore, a comparative look at clerical education confirms the somewhat better - or less dramatic - state of affairs in the ecclesia anglicana. In Italy, there may have been more than a dozen universities by the fifteenth century (compared to just two in England), but they did little in the field of clerical training and seminaries were not established until well after 1500. A similar picture has been drawn for the German empire, but in the diocese of Lincoln the graduate quota among parochial incumbents was a considerable 14 per cent in 1400 and an even more impressive 30 per cent in 1500. Recent quantitative work suggests that our impression of a poorly educated clerical proletariate may be in need of revision for other areas, too. By about 1500 at least 50 per cent of North Brabant rectors and vicars had attended a university, as had a third of the chaplains. These figures remained more or less stable well into the seventeenth century, despite a long-standing historiographical claim of a post-Reformation ‘educational revolution’. Whether university training for the clergy had an immediate influence on the level of Christianization among the laity is of course another question. In the parishes visited by the bishops of Geneva, at least, there may have been few actual graduates, but two thirds of all priests were judged to be ‘competent’ anyway.[25]
Adequate spiritual guidance became a high priority for ecclesiastical reformers. Particularly after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Church embarked on an energetic pastoral offensive. Annual confession and communion, the attendance of mass on Sundays and major feasts, the knowledge of the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and the Credo emerged as minimal requirements throughout the Continent. What mattered was not yet broad scriptural knowledge, but a basic canon of prayers and ritual activities.[26] Equally ubiquitous were examples of individuals who failed to meet even such humble standards, but perhaps again more often in badly provided-for Italian parishes than in northern Europe.[27]
On the background of this complex mixture of similarities and differences, four crucial aspects of European parish life shall now be examined in some more detail: differences in the formation of the parochial network and the appointment of incumbents (i), evidence for overlaps with secular local communities (ii), the expansion of lay institutions and parish activities in the later Middle Ages (iii), and the experience of sixteenth-century change (iv).
(i)
The raison d’être of the local ecclesiastical network was to ensure an adequate administration of sacraments. Baptism and burial stood out as crucial parochial rites, with the cult of the dead often seen as the main spiritual focus of the community.[28] The chronological development of the parish system differs considerably from place to place. The origins in England date back to the seventh and eighth centuries, when royal and episcopal initiatives established a number of collegiate ‘minster’ churches with a large territory. Following a rapid proliferation of private seigneurial chapels between the tenth and twelfth centuries, these proto-parishes gradually fragmented into smaller units centred on newer and more accessible churches. The final network was completed by the thirteenth century and not fundamentally rearranged until the nineteenth.[29] Looking across the Channel, one finds that the multiplication of localised parishes may have occurred somewhat earlier, as in France, where most studies point to the period between the eighth (Carolingian initiatives) and late eleventh centuries, or considerably later as in Northern Italy, where some minster or pievi churches survived well beyond 1400.[30]
On the whole, the expansion of parochial provision is attributed to the ‘lords’, who in turn acquired control over local religious life and clergy under the system of the privatised Eigenkirche.[31] But there were alternatives such as the ‘communally owned churches’ in some areas under Germanic law, particularly in Scandinavia, but also in Frisia and elsewhere. To take the Norwegian example, from about 1000 every legal district erected one central church, often on an old pagan cult site, and several neighbourhood churches, all under communal government. Besides providing furnishings, ornaments, and bells the inhabitants also built the churchyard wall, administered the tithe, and even elected the priest.[32] A second wave of the phenomenon originated in late medieval Switzerland, where - partly by way of privileges attained at the foundation of their capital cities, but partly by sheer bullying and military power - local communities eroded seigneurial patronage and acquired not only presentation rights (backed up by papal bulls), but the administration of tithes and even a share of ecclesiastical jurisdiction.[33] Here, as in Tyrol or in certain French parishes, priests had to sign detailed contracts before they were entrusted with the cure of souls. Many of these agreements lasted for only a year or two, and in case of failure to provide ‘value for money’, clergymen were sacked without much ado.[34]
But how common was the appointment of incumbents by the parishioners? It remained exceptional and depended on relatively weak lordship, but examples can be found among Italian pievi (where elections required a two thirds majority), French parishes, churches in the Pyrenees and the Basque Provinces, as well as in German urban and rural communities such as Dithmarschen in Lower Saxony, the virtually lordship-free areas of Frisia, or in towns like Braunschweig or Cologne.[35] Dietrich Kurze has identified 107 cases in Central Europe, and a quota of up to ten per cent of advowsons in certain regions. In addition, particularly in German Imperial Free Cities, town councils could exercise rights of patronage, occasionally over up to a third of the churches.[36] The same, on a more modest scale, applied to London or Norwich, but elsewhere in England the feudal and ecclesiastical hierarchy managed to monopolise the privilege.[37]