ORDINATION OF A PRIEST. FROM THE LATE XII. CENT.
DRAWING, HARL. ROLL, Y 6.
CHAPTER VII.
THE FOUNDATION OF VICARAGES.
he Norman founders of monasteries not only gave to them lands and moneys, but also the parish churches, of which they had the advowson. It can hardly be said that in so doing they gave what was not theirs to give, for the idea was still prominent in men’s minds that the church which a landlord or his antecessor had built for himself and his people was, in a sense, his church, and that he was at liberty (as he is to this day) to give his rights in it to some one else; moreover, the ancient custom of assigning the tithe of his lands to various religious uses, at the owner’s discretion, was still not obsolete,[80] so that the assignment of part of the tithe away from the parish in which it was raised to a religious community at a distance shocked no one’s conscience. Already before the Conquest, in France, the admirers of the new monastic orders had largely adopted the practice of endowing the new religious houses which they founded with the parochial benefices in their patronage; and the practice had found some imitators in England.[81] The Norman lords, between their thank offerings of English benefices to their monasteries at home, in Normandy and elsewhere, and their zeal in founding monasteries on their new English estates and endowing them with their parish churches, in a very short time bestowed a great number of parochial benefices upon the religious houses.
Sometimes a manor was given to a monastery with the appendant advowson of the rectory, which merely put the religious house in the position of any other patron; but in such cases the community usually, either at once or before very long, obtained some share of the income of the benefice, and ultimately, in most cases, its absolute appropriation.[82]
But in the more usual case the benefice was given to the religious house in such a way that the community became the “rector” of the parish, with, on one hand, all the responsibility of the cure of souls and the maintenance of the charities and hospitalities of the parish, and, on the other hand, with possession of all the endowments, fees, rights, and privileges of the rector. It is only charitable to suppose that the lords of manors, who thus gave over their advowsons, thought that they were doing two good things: first, putting the spiritual interests of the parishioners into the hands of men of superior unworldliness and spirituality, who would do better for them than the old squire-rectors and their hired chaplains; and secondly, devoting the surplus revenues of the benefices to the maintenance of religious organizations, which would use them to the glory of God and the spiritual profit of the people in many ways. These benefices were called appropriate benefices, from the customary phrase used in their conveyance, ad proprios usus of the abbot and the community.