[Apostolus dicit,] omnes causas æcclesiæ debere apud sacerdotes dijudicari. Si qui vero æcclesiastici crimen aliquod inter laicos perpetraverint, homicidium, vel fornicationem, vel furtum agentes, hos placuit a secularibus in quos peccaverunt omnimodo occupari; nisi animo fuerit æcclesiæ pro talibus satisfacere. Laici vero qui sacrilega se contagione miscuerint velatis, non eodem modo quo lex publica fornicarios puniri percensuit, set duplicato xxx siclorum pecunia, hoc est lx argenteos volumus dare ecclesiæ adulterantes, quia graves causæ graviores et acriores querunt curas.
The Apostle declares that all ecclesiastical causes should be settled by priests. But if any ecclesiastics have perpetrated any crime among laymen, homicide or fornication or theft, it has been decreed that they be followed up in every case by laymen against whom they have sinned, unless it be the intention of the Church to make satisfaction for them. But laymen who shall have joined in sacrilegious intercourse with nuns [shall be dealt with] not in the same manner as the public law decrees fornicators to be punished, but double—by the sum of xxx sicli—i.e. we wish adulterers to give to the Church lx argentei, because severe cases require severer and sharper cures.
This passage once again makes it clear that in this ecclesiastical document of the Archbishop of York 30 sicli = 60 argentei or Roman drachmæ.
Ecclesiastical causes to be settled by priests.
And, apart from this monetary question, the clause is interesting as marking the claim that all ecclesiastical causes should be settled by the clergy themselves.
In case of crime by an ecclesiastic against a layman the Church reserved the right to stop the layman’s prosecution by payment of the wergeld or other satisfaction. At the same time the Church was to claim double compensation from laymen committing crime against nuns. It is impossible to disassociate this document from the letter of Bede describing the religious anarchy of the diocese caused by the abuses of the loose monastic system in vogue, and urging the newly appointed prelate, who was not yet Archbishop, to undertake their energetic reformation.
The Church succumbed to the wergeld system.
But for the present purpose the real worth of these statements is the independent evidence they give of the continued strength of the wergeld system and the force of tribal custom in the Northumbrian kingdom before the Norse invasions. The sense of individualism in Christianity was opposed to the solidarity and joint responsibility of the kindred. But instead of fighting against the wergeld system the Church had actually succumbed to it, and adopted it for its own advantage, placing a money price upon the blood of its several ecclesiastical ranks, making the value of the priest four times that of the monk.
The system of compurgation, again, was a part of tribal usage. The Church adopted it and graduated the worth of the oaths of its various grades according to secular usage, making the oath of the priest in evidence four times the value of that of the monk.
In other words, in England, as on the Continent, the clergy, instead of combating tribal custom in these matters, took their place in the order of secular rank according to their several grades, bishops claiming the wergeld of princes, and priests that of thanes, with, however, the obviously useful reservation that if their secular rank by parentage and birth should be higher than their ecclesiastical grade, the higher wergeld should be theirs.