[Sidenote: Immunity from lay taxation.]
In seeking freedom from lay taxation the Church did not ask that her members should escape their feudal obligations, nor even that they should contribute nothing to the exigencies of the State. The desire was merely that the clergy should be free from oppression and that the Church should be so far as possible self-governing. Thus Alexander III decreed in the third Lateran Council (1179), that for relieving the needs of the community, everything contributed by the Church to supplement the contributions of the laity should be given without compulsion on the recognition of its necessity or utility by the bishop and the clergy. Innocent III, in the fourth Lateran Council (1215), provided a further safeguard against lay impositions in demanding the permission of the Pope for any such levy. This does not mean that the clergy escaped taxation at the hands of the State; it merely means that while the Popes themselves heavily taxed them for purposes which it was often difficult to describe as religious, the price paid by the Crown for leave to tax the clergy was that a large portion of the money should find its way to Rome.
[Sidenote: Tithes from the laity.]
The clergy were not content with this merely negative position. Besides the right of self-taxation, they claimed that the laity should contribute to the needs of the Church. The chief permanent source of such contribution was the tithe, both the lesser tithes on smaller animals, fruits, and vegetables, and the greater tithes on corn, wine, and the larger animals. The Church also claimed tithes of revenues of every kind, even from such divers classes as traders, soldiers, beggars, and abandoned women. Much of the regular tithe had fallen into the hands of laymen by gift from Kings to feudal tenants, or from bishops to nobles and others, in return for military protection. These alienated tithes Gregory VII tried to recover; but his need for the help of the nobles against the Emperor forced him to stay his hand. The third Lateran Council (1179) forbade, on pain of peril to the soul, the transfer of tithes from one layman to another, and deprived of Christian burial any one who, apparently having received such a transfer, should not have made it over to the Church. This was a definite claim for tithes as a right of which the Church had only been deprived by some wrongful act. But in the very next year (1180) Frederick I, at the Diet of Gelnhausen, declared that the alienation of tithes as feudal fiefs to defenders of the Church was perfectly legitimate. Religious scruples, however, seem to have caused the surrender of tithes by many lay impropriators, especially to monasteries.
[Sidenote: Bequests.]
There were many other sources of wealth to the Church. An enormous quantity of property was bequeathed to pious uses by testators. The attendance of the clergy at the death-bed gave them an opportunity of which they were not slow to make use. The bodies of those who died intestate, as of those unconfessed, were denied burial in consecrated ground; all questions concerning wills were heard in the ecclesiastical courts. The civil power attempted to check the freedom of death-bed bequest, especially in Germany, where it was held that a valid will could only be made by one who was still well enough to walk unsupported. Another common source of revenue came from purchases or mortgages or other arrangements made with crusaders, in which advantage was taken of the haste of the lay men to raise funds for their expedition.
[Sidenote: Wealth of the Church.]
From these and other sources the wealth which poured in upon the Church was enormous. Individual gifts in money or in kind as thank-offerings on all sorts of occasions reached no small of the total; while no religious ceremony, from baptism to extreme unction and burial, could be carried out apart from the payment of an appropriate fee. The clergy constantly complained of spoliation, and no doubt individuals suffered much. The very laymen who, with the title of advocates, undertook to defend a cathedral or a monastery were often its worst robbers. But the endowments and revenues of the Church were so extensive as to raise in the minds of many reformers the question whether they were not largely responsible for her corruptions.
[Sidenote: Immunity from lay jurisdiction.]
The clergy also sought freedom from the jurisdiction of the secular courts; in other words, the Church claimed exclusive cognisance in her own tribunals of all matters concerning those in Holy Orders. The Decretiun of Gratian—the text-book of Canon Law—laid it down that in civil matters the clergy were to be brought before a civil judge, but that a criminal charge against a clerk must be heard before the bishop. Urban II, however, declares that all clergy should be subject to the bishop alone, and the Synod of Nimes (1096), at which he presided, stigmatises it as sacrilege to hale clerks or monks before a secular court. Alexander III (1179) threatens to excommunicate any layman guilty of this offence; while Innocent III points out that a clerk is not even at liberty to waive the right of trial in an ecclesiastical court in a matter between him and a layman, because the spiritual jurisdiction is not a matter personal to himself, but belongs to the whole clerical body. Finally Frederick II, on his coronation at Rome in 1220, forbade any one to dare to indict an ecclesiastic on either a civil or a criminal charge before a secular tribunal. But meanwhile the frequent perpetration of violent crimes by those who wore the tonsure made it imperative in the interests of social order that the Church should not be allowed to defend these criminals in order to save her own interests.