ECCLESIASTICAL FEUDALISM
Even the clergy had their place in this system. The bishop, formerly “defender of the city,” had often become its count, by traditional usurpation or by express royal concession when the king had united the county and the bishopric, the temporal and the spiritual authority. This made the bishop sovereign of all the lords of his diocese.
Besides her tithes the church possessed, through the donation of the faithful, immense wealth, and in order to protect this from the brigandage of the times she had recourse to secular arms. She chose laymen, men of courage and wisdom, to whom she confided her property that they might defend it, if necessary at the point of the sword. But these attorneys of the monasteries and churches did as the counts of the king—made their functions hereditary, and took for themselves the wealth entrusted to their care. They condescended, however, to regard themselves as the vassals of those whom they had despoiled, and to swear faith and homage under ordinary conditions of natural right and personal service.
Abbés and bishops in consequence became suzerains, temporal lords having numerous vassals ready to take up arms for their cause, courts of justice—in fact all the prerogatives exercised by the great landlords. There were bishops, dukes, and bishop-counts, vassals themselves of greater lords and especially of the king, from whom they received the investiture of the property attached to their churches, or, as it was called, their temporal domain.
This ecclesiastical feudalism was so extensive, so powerful, that in France and England it possessed during the Middle Ages more than a fifth of all the land; in Germany nearly a third. For there was this difference between the church and king, that the latter, a conquest once made, received nothing more, but on the contrary constantly gave away until it came to pass that he possessed nothing but the town of Laon; while the church, if she did lose some of her land (a difficult thing since she had excommunication to defend it with), was acquiring more every day, since few of the faithful died without leaving her something. And so it was that she constantly got more and never or very rarely gave anything up, and then only when it was wrested from her by force.[i]
The manner in which the church often lost her property in feudal times is described by Carl Spannagel:
THE CHURCH AND THE FEUDAL ARMY
The bishops and abbots as land proprietors went into the battle-field at the head of their contingents. They often wore armour under their priestly garments, and they did not shrink from actual fighting in action. The care for souls (if such an expression can be used with regard to a priestly dignitary of the Middle Ages) which even in peace made but a slight demand upon them, must have nearly vanished under such circumstances in the field. The account of Bishop Daniel of Prague attending to the wounded and administering them spiritual comfort has a modern foreign tone about it. Only special royal permission could exempt the bishops and their respective abbots from appearing at the head of their men.
But the king did not make such frequent demands upon the participation of the spiritual dignitaries in campaigns as we are inclined to think. This idea arose from the command of Otto II in 981, which demanded the personal command of their contingents of seven bishops and the seven abbots, whilst twelve bishops and three abbots are told only to send their loricati to the emperor. Substitutes for the bishops and abbots in this case would be priests or vassals of rank of their diocese, or abbotship.