The systematic mapping out of Britain for ecclesiastical purposes, as designed by Gregory, was therefore never fully carried out. The actual provinces and dioceses were gradually formed, as the various English existing kingdoms embraced Christianity. As a rule, each kingdom or independent principality became a diocese. ♦Territorial bishoprics♦ And, except in the case of a few sees fixed in cities which kept on something of old Roman memories, the bishops were more commonly called from the people who formed their flock, than from the cities which in some cases contained their chairs. For in many cases the bishop-settle, as our forefathers called it, was not placed in a city at all, but in some rural or even solitary spot. It was not till the time of the Norman Conquest that a movement began for systematically placing the ecclesiastical sees in the chief towns; from that time the civic title altogether displaces the territorial.
♦Canterbury.♦
As Kent was the first part of Teutonic Britain to accept Christianity, the metropolitan see of the south was fixed at Canterbury, the capital of that kingdom. It was thus fixed in a city which has at no time held that temporal preeminence which has in different ages belonged to York, Winchester, and London. ♦Rochester.
London.♦ After Canterbury the earliest formed sees were Rochester for the West-Kentish kingdom, and London for the East-Saxons. ♦Dorchester or Winchester. Sherborne, Wells, Ramsbury.♦ The conversion of the West-Saxons led to the foundation of the great diocese whose see was first at Dorchester on the Thames and then at Winchester, and from which the sees of Sherborne, Wells, and Ramsbury were gradually parted off. ♦Elmham.
Dorchester or Lincoln.♦ The East-Angles formed a diocese with its see at Elmham; the Middle-Angles settled down, after some shiftings, into the vast diocese stretching from the Thames to the Humber, whose see, first at Dorchester, was afterwards translated to Lincoln. ♦Worcester, Hereford, Lichfield.♦ The West-Mercian lands formed the dioceses of the Hwiccas at Worcester, of the Magesætas at Hereford, and the great diocese of Lichfield, stretching northward to the Ribble. The South-Saxons, whose see kept its tribal name down to the Norman Conquest, had their see first at Selsey, and then at Chichester. ♦Exeter.♦ Devonshire and Cornwall, after forming two dioceses, were, just before the Norman Conquest, united under the single see of Exeter. ♦The Welsh Sees.♦ The Conquest too brought about the more complete submission of the four Welsh sees, Saint David’s, Llandaff, Bangor, and Saint Asaph. ♦Salisbury, 1078.
Ely, 1109.♦ To the times just before and just after the Conquest belong the union of Sherborne and Ramsbury to form the diocese of Salisbury, and the dismemberment of the huge diocese of Lincoln by the foundation of an episcopal see at Ely. Thus the province of Canterbury with its suffragan sees was gradually organized in the form which it kept from the reign of Henry the First to that of Henry the Eighth.
Meanwhile in the northern province things never reached the same regular organization. ♦York.
Lindisfarn
or Durham,
Carlisle, 1133.♦ York, after some changes, took the position of a metropolitan see, with one suffragan, first at Lindisfarn and afterwards at Durham, and another at Carlisle. ♦Saint Andrews, 1471.
Glasgow. 1492.♦ As the Scottish dioceses broke off from York, they first acknowledged a kind of precedence in the Bishop of St. Andrews; but it was not till a far later time that Scotland was divided into two regular ecclesiastical provinces with their sees at St. Andrews and Glasgow. ♦Edinburgh. 1634.♦ Several of the Scottish dioceses always kept their territorial titles; their sees were mostly fixed in small places; and of the chief seats of Scottish royalty, Dunfermline and Stirling never attained episcopal rank at all, and Edinburgh only attained it in quite modern times. ♦The four Irish provinces.♦ The endless and fluctuating bishoprics of Ireland were in the twelfth century gathered into the four provinces of Armagh, Dublin, Cashel, and Tuam, answering to the temporal divisions of Ulster, Leinster, Munster, and Connaught. It is to be noticed that, in marked contradiction to continental practice, the chief see in all the three British kingdoms has been placed in a city which has never held the first temporal rank. Canterbury, St. Andrews, Armagh, were never the temporal heads of England, Scotland, and Ireland. York, Dublin, Glasgow, though metropolitan sees, were of secondary rank, and London and Winchester were ordinary bishoprics.
§ 6. The Ecclesiastical Divisions of Northern and Eastern Europe.
♦Ecclesiastical division in the converted lands.♦
In the other parts of Europe which formed part of the communion of the Latin Church, the ecclesiastical divisions mark the steps by which Christianity was spread either by conversion or conquest. They continued the process of which the ecclesiastical organization of Eastern Germany was the beginning. As a rule, they strictly follow the political divisions of the age in which they were founded. ♦The Scandinavian provinces.♦ As the Church in the Scandinavian kingdoms became more settled, its bishoprics parted off from their allegiance to Hamburg or Bremen, and each of the three kingdoms formed an ecclesiastical province, whose boundaries exactly answered to the earlier boundaries of the kingdoms. ♦Lund, 1151.♦ Denmark had its metropolitan see at Lund, in that part of the Danish kingdom which geographically forms part of the greater Scandinavian peninsula, and which is now Swedish territory. Its boundary to the south was the Eider, the old frontier of Denmark and the Empire. The suffragan sees of this province, among which the specially royal bishopric of Roeskild is the most famous, naturally lie thicker on the ground than they do in the wilder regions of the two more northern kingdoms. But the Baltic conquests of Denmark also placed part of the isle of Rügen in the province of Lund and the diocese of Roeskild, and also gave the Danish metropolitan a far more distant suffragan in the Bishop of Revel on the Finnish gulf. ♦Upsala.♦ The metropolitan see of Sweden was placed at Upsala, and the province was carried by Swedish conquest to the east of the Gulf of Bothnia, where the single bishopric of Abo took in the whole of the Swedish territory in that region. ♦Trondhjem.♦ In the like sort, the Norwegian province of Nidaros or Trondhjem stretched far over the Ocean to the distant Colonies and dependencies of Norway in Iceland, Greenland, and Man.
♦Poland, &c.♦
The conversion of Poland and the conquest of Prussia and Livonia brought other lands within the pale of the Latin Church and her ecclesiastical organization. ♦Gnezna.♦ The original kingdom of Poland formed the province of Gnezna, a province whose boundaries were for some centuries very fluctuating, according as Poland or the Empire was stronger in the Slavonic lands on the Baltic. Each change of temporal dominion caused the ecclesiastical frontiers of Gnezna and Magdeburg to advance or fall back. The Silesian bishopric of Breslau always kept its old relation to the Polish metropolis, except so far as it was held to be placed under the immediate superiority of Rome. The later union of Lithuania to the Polish kingdom added a Lithuanian and a Samogitian bishopric to the original Polish province. ♦Riga.
Leopol.♦ The earlier Polish conquests from Russia formed a new province, the Latin province of Leopol or Lemberg, a province whose southern boundaries advanced and fell back along with the boundary of the kingdom of which it formed a part. The conquests of the Teutonic knights in Prussia and Livonia formed the ecclesiastical province of Riga, which was divided into two parts by the province of Gnezna in its greater extent.
It will be seen that some of the ecclesiastical divisions last mentioned belong to a later stage of European history than the point which we have reached in our general narrative. But it seemed better to continue the survey over the whole of the Latin Church in Europe, as the later foundations are a mere carrying out of the same process which began in the earlier. The ecclesiastical divisions represent the political divisions of the time, whether those political divisions are Roman provinces or independent Teutonic or Slavonic kingdoms. But the ecclesiastical divisions, when once fixed, were more lasting than the temporal divisions, and many disputes have arisen out of political changes which transferred one part of a province or diocese from one political allegiance to another. Since the splitting-up of the Western Church, the old ecclesiastical organization has altogether vanished from some countries, and has been greatly modified in others, in Germany most of all.