CHAPTER XVIII.
VISITATION ARTICLES AND RETURNS.
he visitation of the parishes by the Ordinary—the ecclesiastical person who exercised spiritual jurisdiction over them[278]—was an important feature of ecclesiastical administration.[279] We have seen that a canon of the famous Council of Clovesho, in 747, directed bishops to make an annual visitation of their dioceses. As time went on the duty, burdensome alike to the bishops and clergy, fell into disuse, and seems to have been resumed again in the twelfth century.
The Lateran Council of 1179 made a canon to check the costs of visitations: it decreed that an archbishop visiting churches should be content with forty or fifty horses; a bishop with twenty or thirty; an archdeacon with five or seven; and a dean was not to exceed two.[280] The Pontificals contain the “Order of Visiting Parishes:”[281] the bishop is to be met by the clergy in procession outside the gates; Mass is to be said; the bishop is to tell the people the purpose of his coming, viz. (1) to absolve the souls of the departed; (2) to see how the Church is governed, the condition of its vestments, the lives of the clergy, etc.; (3) to inquire into the sins of the laity; (4) to take cognizance of matters which belong to the bishop; (5) to confirm children; also he is to preach a sermon on the sacraments, etc.[282]
From these visitations we obtain full and reliable information as to the personal character and conduct of the parish clergy and their fulfilment of their duties. Five or six of the parishioners, called testes synodales,[283] or questmen, were sworn to give, besides a return of the condition of the church and its furniture, a true answer to certain questions about their clergy, viz. the rector or vicar, the chaplains, and the clerk.
Hugh of Wells, Bishop of Lincoln (c. 1232), issued a paper of twenty-nine questions to his clergy, which is perhaps the earliest of Visitation Articles (“Lincoln,” p. 134, S.P.C.K.). Grostete issued Articles of Inquiry about 1250; and similar articles were issued by Roger Weseham, Bishop of Lichfield, in 1252. In the year 1253 these following inquiries were made “in each and every diocese of the whole kingdom of England” concerning the life and conversation of both clerks and laymen:—[284]