Nullus clericus amercietur de laico tenemento suo, nisi secundum modum aliorum predictorum, et non secundum quantitatem beneficii sui ecclesiastici.
A clerk shall not be amerced in respect of his lay holding except after the manner of the others aforesaid; further, he shall not be amerced in accordance with the extent of his church benefice.
Amercement of the clergy. The churchman was to receive the same favourable treatment as the layman in all respects, and to enjoy one additional privilege. In proportioning the amercement to the extent of his wealth, no account was to be taken of the value of his “church benefice.” A sharp distinction is here drawn between laicum tenementum (or, as the 10th of the Articles of the Barons expressed it, laicum feodum) and beneficium ecclesiasticum. This antithesis between “lay fee” and "alms"—that is, between lands held by barony, knight’s service, or any other secular tenure on the one hand, and lands held by frankalmoin on the other—was a familiar one in the Middle Ages.[[612]]
Only the former was to be reckoned in fixing the defaulting clerk’s amercement. This would leave the bishop or abbot exposed to a higher payment proportionate to his barony, while exempting the parish priest from any assessment on account of his rectory and glebe. It would almost seem that in the normal case the incumbent with no wealth but the produce and rents of his benefice would thus escape from amercement altogether; yet, if he had no lay tenement, he might still have chattels, or might at least pay instalments from the annual increase of his crops. This exemption in favour of those who held lands in “alms” may have proceeded from several possible motives. Frankalmoin enjoyed many privileges, including, in the reign of Henry II., complete immunity from the jurisdiction of all secular courts.[[613]] Perhaps the Exchequer did not dare to levy contributions upon such lands. In any view, it would have been manifestly unjust to treat the clerical incumbent as though he were the owner in fee simple of the church’s patrimony.
The word “clerk” was a wide one, including not only the ordinary parish priests (whether rectors or vicars) with the deacons and those who had taken minor orders, but also the monks and canons regular (whose vows of poverty, however, left no loophole for the legal retention by them of private property which could require protection). It included also the higher clergy, great prelates, bishops and abbots, whose status was, however, complicated by their ownership of Crown lands. Their character of “baron” was often more prominent in constitutional questions than that of “clerk in holy orders.” Their treatment in the matter of amercements is a case in point.[[614]] There could have been no doubt from the first that a bishop “in mercy” must submit to have his barony taken into consideration in fixing his amercement. It would almost seem that the great prelates were not intended to benefit in any way from this exemption. Such is the suggestion conveyed by a slight alteration effected in the Charter of 1217, which substitutes for the wider “clericus” of the text the more restricted expression "ecclesiastica persona"—words which in the thirteenth century denoted the parish clergy, and were used much as is the word “parson” in colloquial speech at the present day.
A certain looseness in the arrangement of the Latin words of this chapter, as it originally stood in 1215, seems to have suggested the need for improvement. Alterations, apparently of a verbal nature, were made with some evidences of care in Henry’s reissues. The “de laico tenemento” of 1215 was omitted altogether in 1216; but a reference to the “lay fees” of the clergy was reintroduced in 1217, subject to a complete reconstruction of the sentence to make it read smoothly, and so avoid the possibility of misconception.[[615]]
[612]. See supra 66-70 and cf. Constitutions of Clarendon (c. 9), which distinguish tenementum pertinens ad eleemosinam from ad laicum feudum.
[613]. See Constitutions of Clarendon, Ibid. The Crown soon withdrew this immunity.
[614]. Cf. Pike, House of Lords, 254.