The English Church, 940-1154 by H.R. Loyn

Author:H.R. Loyn [Loyn, H.R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Great Britain, Medieval
ISBN: 9781317884729
Google: iGfJAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-06-11T01:23:13+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Domesday Book: Ecclesiastical Organisation at the End of the Eleventh Century

To understand the development of church organisation in the late eleventh century is a worthy objective and yet in a sense only touches the surface of things. We have, always important, sometimes dominant, the evidence of Domesday Book to take into consideration. Whoever tries to approach the problems connected with the nature and status of the English Church at this period sooner or later has to grapple with the mass of information contained in this record. Historian after historian has attempted the task, often starting with reservations and hesitations, and sometimes with querulous complaints. Some of the complaints are justified. Domesday Book will not tell us what we want to know; and moments of sheer frustration occur when we realise how much was known and not recorded. Yet by and large the historian has much more to be grateful for than to see as matter for complaint. No other community in medieval Europe has so much information packed in relatively uniform style that covers so much of its life, including its ecclesiastical life.

If we approach the problems at three levels, the advantages to us of the Domesday evidence, even more than the difficulties, become apparent. To take first the most prominent level, that of the great dignitaries, new Norman prelates for the most part, exercising power and influence at the centre and in their various localities. Exactness cannot be wished for, but we know that roughly a fraction of something between a little over a quarter and a fifth of the landed wealth of England was in the hands of the Church.1 We can tell also, sometimes directly, often by inference, that the systems of exploitation and accounting on the church lands tended to be more efficient than that on secular estates. Only the royal administration, conducted itself by clerics, could equal the skill of the officers of Lanfranc, the bishop of Salisbury or the bishop of Durham, or, to take an example from a surviving English prelate, that of the Worcester episcopate. Let us look in detail, for example, at Wiltshire, where the bishops of Winchester and Salisbury ranked among the greatest of the landowners. Both bishops won reputations as administrators of the first order. Walkelin of Winchester (1070–98) matured under William Rufus to become, with Ranulf Flambard, the chief financial officer of the Crown. Osmund of Salisbury (1078–99) was a more complex character. He had been king’s chancellor from 1070 to 1078, presiding over the royal writing office at a time when Latin finally replaced English as the sole official language of government. He made substantial contribution to the ordering of liturgy according to the ‘Use of Sarum’. He appears to have acted as a commissioner for the Domesday survey in the south-western circuit; and there is some evidence that suggests that the circuit return known as the Exeter Domesday may have been written at Salisbury. The arrangements made by Bishop Osmund for his lands in Wiltshire were a model of their kind.

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