CHURCH STRUCTURE
An order of service
Professor Nicholas Orme outlines the hierarchy of the medieval Church – from the pope to the parishioners
It is often assumed that the medieval Church was a monolithic organisation: strict in its beliefs and powerful in enforcing them. In truth, it was more like modern education in Britain: a system with some overarching rules, but one delivered by many different agencies, some of which had quite contrary aims to the others.
The Church was headed by the pope, based in Italy or France. He was prayed for in churches every Sunday, but in practice he was chiefly a legal authority. The laws that governed the Church and regulated people’s moral lives were issued or validated by him. He gave dispensations in individual cases, and sometimes heard legal appeals from the authorities lower down. Otherwise, he had little contact with most churches.
Locally, the Church was run by bishops, who each ruled an area called a diocese. They approved the appointment of parish clergy, oversaw the running of churches, and held Church courts. The latter dealt with crimes against the clergy, moral crimes by the laity, marriages, and wills – matters not yet under the secular courts. They also consecrated churches and administered confirmation to children.
Even so, for most of the time, local churches rarely saw or interacted with their bishops. Indeed, bishops did not have total power over their dioceses. Many monasteries and all houses of friars were independent and run by their own leaders. Certain other churches, especially royal chapels and the parishes belonging to them, were also exempt from control.
full members of the Church at puberty
The most important unit of the Church was the parish and the parish church, of which there were about 10,000 in England by the end of the Middle Ages. Each church was sta ed by a clergyman, called a ‘rector’ or ‘vicar’, appointed by a ‘patron’ who might be the king, one of the nobility or gentry, a bishop, or a monastery. Their choice was approved by the bishop unless it broke the rules about appointments.
The clergyman had to provide daily and weekly services in the church, baptise, marry and bury parishioners, and hear their confessions at least once a year. In return, he was entitled to take tithes (a tenth of all the crops and young animals produced in the parish) and any money offered in church. Some churches had other clergy: curates assisting the clergyman and chantry priests praying for the dead. There were also ‘collegiate churches’, with larger staffs of clergy to stage the daily services in a grander way.
Every lay person belonged to a parish. All were baptised at birth and became full members of the Church at puberty. They were then expected to attend their parish church on Sundays and festival days, to pay tithes and offerings, and to observe the Church’s moral laws. “They had to help maintain half of the church building (the nave) and all the furnishings. Maintenance and fundraising were organised by churchwardens, chosen from the parishioners.
All this describes a perfect system, but in practice, systems are never perfect. Church authorities could be lax, parish clergy could be negligent, and lay people resistant to Church law. From the 1380s there were also Lollards, who dissented from some of the beliefs of the Church, and it was hard for the authorities to deal with more than the most flagrant cases of defiance. In the end, the control the Church exerted over the local clergy and laity was weaker than the claims of the Church would suggest.
Nicholas Orme is emeritus professor of history at the University of Exeter. His latest book is Going to Church in Medieval England (Yale University Press, 2021)