ECCLESIASTICAL FEUDALISM

E1ven the clergy had their place in this system. The bishop, formerly “defender of the city,” had often become its count, by traditional usurpation or by express royal concession when the king had united the county and the bishopric, the temporal and the spiritual authority. This made the bishop sovereign of all the lords of his diocese.

2Besides her tithes the church possessed, through the donation of the faithful, immense wealth, and in order to protect this from the brigandage of the times she had recourse to secular arms. She chose laymen, men of courage and wisdom, to whom she confided her property that they might defend it, if necessary at the point of the sword. But these attorneys of the monasteries and churches did as the counts of the king--made their functions hereditary, and took for themselves the wealth entrusted to their care. They condescended, however, to regard themselves as the vassals of those whom they had despoiled, and to swear faith and homage under ordinary conditions of natural right and personal service.

3Abbés and bishops in consequence became suzerains, temporal lords having numerous vassals ready to take up arms for their cause, courts of justice--in fact all the prerogatives exercised by the great landlords. There were bishops, dukes, and bishop-counts, vassals themselves of greater lords and especially of the king, from whom they received the investiture of the property attached to their churches, or, as it was called, their temporal domain.

4This ecclesiastical feudalism was so extensive, so powerful, that in France and England it possessed during the Middle Ages more than a fifth of all the land; in Germany nearly a third. For there was this difference between the church and king, that the latter, a conquest once made, received nothing more, but on the contrary constantly gave away until it came to pass that he possessed nothing but the town of Laon; while the church, if she did lose some of her land (a difficult thing since she had excommunication to defend it with), was acquiring more every day, since few of the faithful died without leaving her something. And so it was that she constantly got more and never or very rarely gave anything up, and then only when it was wrested from her by force.[i]

5The manner in which the church often lost her property in feudal times is described by Carl Spannagel: