When local priests travelled to the diocesan synod, it was an important moment of group interaction, where these men encountered both one another and their bishop. Yet meetings between bishop and priest were not restricted to the cathedral grounds and large assemblies. In the course of the late ninth and tenth centuries, a new and innovative form of intense engagement between local priests and bishops emerges more clearly into view in the Latin West, particularly in dioceses found in what is now north-eastern France and south-western Germany, where episcopal power perhaps was felt most strongly. Known as the Sendgericht, it is the subject of this chapter.
The Sendgericht can be thought of as an extension of a much older practice, that of ‘episcopal visitation’, that is to say, the bishop’s inspection of his diocese, which had been demanded in canonical tradition since the sixth century. To this established custom, the Sendgericht added a formal judicial dimension, turning the visitation into an itinerant ecclesiastical court, presided over by the bishop. Whereas at a diocesan synod, the priests of the diocese came together collectively to see the bishop, in the Sendgericht, it was the bishop who came to see the priests in their individual churches, to investigate whether everything was as it should be and to make appropriate judgements in cases where it was not. As Chapter 4 noted, the diocesan synod had many functions and was not especially oriented to examining individual priests. This was precisely the purpose of the Sendgericht, as a moment when local priests were made individually accountable to the bishop. Though to modern eyes this seems a quite different practice from the diocesan (or provincial) synod, contemporaries sometimes called them ‘synods’ all the same, from which the German term Sendgericht derives (meaning, literally, ‘synodal court of law’).Footnote 1 As there is an abundant historiography on this phenomenon from its origins to the early modern period in Germanophone scholarship, we have made no attempt to coin an alternative term in English, and have instead adopted the term to use here.Footnote 2
This historiography has tended to approach the Sendgericht in its early form via the collection of laws explicitly put together for this purpose by Regino of Prüm in the early tenth century, already discussed in Chapter 2. Regino is certainly an important source for the Sendgericht, but this chapter approaches the question in a new way: through a set of manuscript handbooks composed for bishops. These handbooks, which have no direct Carolingian precedents, bring together older material in new ways and seem intended for use in the Sendgericht. Their distribution suggests that the practice of the Sendgericht was more widespread (see Fig. 5.1) than previously thought, and not constrained by the political boundaries of the time.Footnote 3 Examining this surprisingly coherent group of manuscripts provides a fresh albeit indirect perspective on tenth-century local priests, many of whom would have shared in the experience of being visited, examined and judged by the bishop.
Fig. 5.1 Map of the Sendgericht manuscripts and the diocese from which they originate. Created by Erik Goosmann.
Fig. 5.1Long description
The origins are labelled by alphanumeric characters in the following cities. Koln with S, Trier with C, Reims with K 1 and T, Augsburg with M 2. Other marked cities include Mainz and Salzburg. The legends for manuscripts of uncertain origins are given at the top right. They are as follows. North-eastern France and Belgium, K 2. Lotharingia or Eastern France, M 1. Southern Germany, P. South-eastern Germany, H.
The ecclesiastical discipline imposed upon priests further erodes the Eigenkirche model, introduced by Ulrich Stutz during the late nineteenth century and discussed in Chapter 2. Various scholars used the model to explain how local churches appeared all over Europe during the early Middle Ages.Footnote 4 In short, Stutz saw the foundation of a church as an investment that paid for itself via the extraction of tithes. The church’s founders, who could be noble lords, kings or monastic institutions, held complete authority over all matters related to the church and its personnel, resulting in the fracturing of the episcopal power.Footnote 5 The clerics serving these churches were supposed to be servants of the owner and were mostly unqualified and also poor because they were gouged for profit, thus neatly aligning with the anticlerical imagery of priests propagated by critics and reformers of the Catholic Church from the later Middle Ages and especially from the Reformation onwards.Footnote 6 However, in a world where it made sense to compose multiple manuscripts specifically for the purpose of visiting local churches and their personnel, bishops must have had a more considerable say in these matters than Stutz’s model allows.Footnote 7 While the ownership of churches and the appointment of clergy might not have been a clear-cut affair, the level of control that these handbooks suggest bishops exercised through inspection of local churches, priests’ lives and the performance of their office, and also the administration of justice, shows that it is necessary to differentiate between church ownership on the one hand and ecclesiastical authority on the other.
In order to examine the selected episcopal handbooks properly, some preliminary historical context is needed. We, first, outline the development from episcopal visitation to the Sendgericht up to the mid eleventh century, before considering how the Sendgericht functioned in practice. Section 5.3 starts with an overview of the handbooks and is then concerned with demonstrating that the similarities within this manuscript corpus go beyond simply sharing a few texts and include a wider variety of content and also structural elements. We argue that the shared traits visible in the corpus of bishops’ handbooks indicate a set of shared ideas held by bishops over implementing and upholding ecclesiastical discipline, which, in turn, resulted in a shared experience among a large number of priests during the tenth and early eleventh centuries. In Section 5.4, we shall connect the content of the handbooks to key themes addressed in the preceding chapters of this book: priests’ families, their attendance at synods and their income and property, to explore the practical purpose of these books and their potential relevance for contemporary bishops.
5.1 From Visitation to the Sendgericht
Before the Sendgericht, there was episcopal visitation. As early as the beginning of the sixth century, the visitation of bishops to local churches in eastern Spain was referred to as an ancient custom (antiqua consuetudo), and bishops were warned not to accept gifts in return for a favourable evaluation.Footnote 8 In Francia, the earliest extant evidence dates from the eighth century: a statute dated to 742 and issued by Duke Carloman instructed the bishops of his realm to travel through their dioceses to carry out confirmations of baptism and to eradicate pagan practices.Footnote 9 As the territory under Carolingian rule rapidly expanded in the later eighth century during the reigns of Carloman’s brother Pippin III, the first Carolingian king, and that of Pippin’s son Charlemagne, visitation functioned as a way to bridge the gap between a bishop and the locality, to integrate newly conquered territories into the fold and to keep faithful subjects on the right track.Footnote 10 Visitation was not undertaken to identify and prosecute criminals (instructions for this task were provided to the bishop’s lay counterparts, the counts), but to ensure that the moral standing of local inhabitants was up to standard.Footnote 11 From the later eighth century onwards, Carolingian bishops were expected to use visitation in the management of their dioceses.
Between them, the capitularies and conciliar decrees outline a standard or ideal scenario for how visitation took place: people were to be visited once a year by their bishop, who should gather necessary information within a day, a process expedited by questioning the local priest and his flock simultaneously.Footnote 12 This strategy is found within Charlemagne’s capitulary known as the Admonitio generalis of 789, which instructed bishops to travel their dioceses and examine the moral standing of priests, as well as ascertain how they performed their office and the state of the local church, while also making sure that the laity did not leave Mass prematurely.Footnote 13 In this vein, the second set of episcopal statutes issued by Gerbald, bishop of Liège, which likely served as a questionnaire for episcopal visitation, addressed both priests and laypeople. Gerbald even included instructions for the local priest to gather information in advance, mostly about residents who adhered to sinful and unorthodox practices such as divination or the veneration of natural objects, and to report this to the bishop on his arrival.Footnote 14
Historians have pointed to the simultaneous questioning of priest and laity as a defining characteristic of episcopal visitation, in contrast to the Sendgericht, which called for separate examination.Footnote 15 This historiographical distinction is primarily based on the division of Regino of Prüm’s Sendhandbuch into two parts, one for each group. Yet, as we shall see, this way of distinguishing between the practices does not hold up: the handbooks examined in this chapter, whether created before or after Regino’s work, do not always display this particular division. Instead, it is the absence of more elaborate practices such as employing oaths and appointing judgement-finders that seems to distinguish the earlier practice of episcopal visitation from the later Sendgericht.
The development of the Sendgericht began in the ninth century, a result of the new way Frankish bishops came to understand their own office, which Steffen Patzold has characterised as the ‘Paris model’, after the major Council of Paris held in 829. The newly established self-conception of bishops, who saw themselves as guardians of the Christian faith and felt they had to defuse crises by concerning themselves with the moral improvement of the people in their diocese, was expressed for the first time during the council of 829 and developed further during the 830s and 840s.Footnote 16 Bishops focused more and more on the salvation of their flocks as a duty of their office. In this light, the Sendgericht does not reflect attempts to introduce some form of justice in an otherwise lawless world, a perspective based on the idea that the tenth century was a time of political disorder and rampant violence, but instead served as a way for bishops to fulfil their responsibilities on a local level, its origins rooted in ninth-century attitudes to pastoral care.Footnote 17 In comparison to visitation, the Sendgericht imposed a stricter and more immediate form of ecclesiastical discipline. As we have seen, it incorporated aspects of episcopal visitation, during which bishops travelled their dioceses to monitor their clerics and the churches they served. On top of that, the travelling bishops also admonished the laity of each place, with any required judgement of misdeeds taking place on location.Footnote 18 The court of law that took place during diocesan synods, as we learn from ordines for such gatherings, had become increasingly mobile during the latter half of the ninth century.Footnote 19
It is important to note that the Sendgericht did not emerge in a vacuum. Parallel to the development of the Sendgericht, new judicial institutions and practices flourished in the Carolingian empire that employed similar methods of inquiry. Take, for instance, the introduction of the men known as scabini to comital courts, or the ruler’s use of inquisitio to obtain information about the possessions of the royal fisc. Both of these revolved around itinerant investigation and the use of sworn local witnesses, who were chosen not by the contesting parties but by the judge or his representatives, a typical feature of the Sendgericht.Footnote 20 It is, therefore, likely that the Sendgericht emerged from practices already used in both secular and ecclesiastical governance.Footnote 21 While the travelling episcopal court of law was certainly new, the methods used to establish truth and administer justice were not.
The earliest tangible evidence for bishops travelling their diocese and administering justice using the Sendgericht may date to the ninth century, though it is rather allusive. Papal rescripts issued by Pope Nicholas I (858‒67) at the behest of several bishops included recommended procedure for particularly problematic cases.Footnote 22 To cite one such example, what was Bishop Salomon I of Konstanz to do when he knew a deacon or priest had committed a crime, but the evidence was insufficient since the cleric refused to confess and reliable witnesses were lacking?Footnote 23 Salomon’s case suggests that the Sendgericht, with its methods of inquiry into the lives of local clerics and witnesses, may have been common practice in the diocese of Konstanz from the second half of the ninth century onwards. A short address from Trier entitled ‘Opening Remarks in the Parishes‘ (praelocutio in parrochiis), dated to between 830 and 900, may furnish further evidence.Footnote 24 The text appears to describe a cleric acting as a representative of the bishop and addressing some priests, who were to inform him about all wrongdoing in their communities. At the meeting, referred to as a sacred council (sacrum concilium), which sounds from the text like it may be a Sendgericht gathering, the cleric listed everything the priests ought to know and everything they should teach their flocks, in doing so revealing the author’s knowledge of Gerbald of Liège’s second set of episcopal statutes. In addition, the cleric mentioned a group that has ‘sworn [oaths] before the bishop’, who are to inform him if they knew of anyone perpetrating the aforementioned crimes.Footnote 25
From around the year 900 onwards, the picture becomes clearer, as more texts describe the Sendgericht, and in much greater detail. If we return to the famous late tenth-century vita of St. Ulrich, bishop of Augsburg, its author narrates how, when travelling within his diocese, Ulrich entered a local church, where he celebrated Mass and then took his place before the congregation to hold a court.Footnote 26 In contrast to comital judgements, where every case began with an accusation, the aim of the Sendgericht was to uncover transgressions of the clergy or laity in a particular locality through the use of inquisition and witnesses.Footnote 27 Bishop Ulrich asked the ‘wiser and more truthful people under oath’ (prudentioresque et veraciores sacramento) what could be improved and whether anyone had committed any crimes against Christian law.Footnote 28 While co-operation between clergy and laity in a judicial context was hardly new – at a provincial council between 830 and 850, a bishop describes a procedure where priests probe ‘truthful men who have the fear of God before their eyes’ (homines veraces et timorem dei ante oculos habentes) to uncover cases of incest – doing so by means of a sworn oath was.Footnote 29 These three short examples, then, provide us with the characteristic features of the Sendgericht that distinguish it from both the episcopal visitation and the diocesan synod: not only did a bishop (or his representative) travel the diocese to impose ecclesiastical discipline on clergy and laity alike, he brought with him a court of law to administer justice, in which members of the local community played an important role as informants and witnesses. As the bishops assembled at the Council of Koblenz in 922 stressed, it did not matter to whom the church belonged: the bishop had the right to hold a Sendgericht at any chapel or basilica in his diocese.Footnote 30
5.2 The Working of the Sendgericht
Central to the working of the Sendgericht was the selection and questioning of these community members, whether informants or witnesses. Each role could be fulfilled by either a cleric or a layperson, as all witnesses were considered equal.Footnote 31 Yet it is important to note that clerics did not swear oaths, as this was forbidden,Footnote 32 and though witnesses were given equal weight, the selection of witnesses was certainly not an equal affair. As we have seen, both Ulrich of Augsburg and the anonymous minister acting for the archbishop of Trier interrogated the wiser and more truthful, phrasing that may have referred to the morals of prospective witnesses but ostensibly acted as social descriptors, as Ian Forrest has argued for the later medieval church.Footnote 33 In his handbook for the Send of 906, often referred to as his Sendhandbuch, Regino of Prüm refers to secular witnesses as ‘deans’ (decani), men who were minor officials and had been described by Walahfrid Strabo some decades earlier as the counterparts of minor priests serving in tithe churches.Footnote 34 Regino considered them ‘truthful and devout men’ (viri veraces et deum timentes), whose testimony could be trusted.
From the late ninth century onwards, we also have ordines or liturgical instructions for the organisation of local Sendgerichte, texts known as Sendordnungen. Amongst other things, these give a glimpse of how the witnesses were chosen. For instance, a late ninth-century set of instructions known as the Augsburger Sendordnung (which, despite its modern title, was probably from Lotharingia rather than southern Germany) describes how the local priest together with two local officials might select witnesses for the occasion.Footnote 35 As one of the central figures in their communities, the priest was supposed to pick out seven truthful and prudent men alongside a iudex and a maior locus, likely local officials whose presence lent legitimacy to the selection procedure and ultimately also to the bishop’s ruling.Footnote 36 After questioning took place, the ordo explicitly advises the implementation of justice using the testimony of the priest and the witnesses (bonorum laicorum), to strengthen the judgement and silence potential sceptics.Footnote 37 An alternative procedure is described by a canon that might be attributed to the Council of Meaux-Paris (845/6), which tells the close family of a stubborn sinner that they should indeed love their kin, as commanded by God, but not their errors and must, therefore, testify against them. It continues with a short oath for laypeople to swear before they were questioned at a synod or Send gathering, in which they vowed to be impartial, to speak the truth and not to hide anything.Footnote 38 The Kölner Sendordnung, dated to the late tenth century, called for a minimum of three or four witnesses (or more if necessary) drawn from any of the faithful in attendance, whether free or unfree.Footnote 39 It seems, then, that the selection of witnesses and the use of oaths reflected local practice and were by no means uniform. Bishops had introduced similar but not identical procedures to deliver justice in their dioceses from around the middle of the ninth century and implemented these procedures differently depending on circumstances, including the availability of clerical personnel, the size of the local populace and the travelling distances between settlements.
The separate questioning and judgement of clergy and laypeople has traditionally been seen as a defining feature of the Sendgericht. As discussed already, the earliest example of this division into two groups is found in Regino’s Sendhandbuch, which provided questionnaires and collections of canones for each group.Footnote 40 Was this typical for the way the Sendgericht developed during the early tenth century, or a clever invention on Regino’s part? The roughly contemporary Augsburger Sendordnung describes a bishop first questioning lay witnesses and then the local clergy.Footnote 41 While it would be reasonable to conclude that this happened during the same Send gathering, the ordo presents the reader with three distinct questionnaires: about the church, the local priests and the laity, but with no indication of the intended audience for each.Footnote 42 This ordo is found in manuscripts ranging in date from the late ninth to the end of the tenth century, and its short questionnaires continued to be copied until the early eleventh century.Footnote 43 Though we cannot establish exactly how it was used, the Augsburger Sendordnung destabilises the status of Regino’s Sendhandbuch as a turning point in the history of the Sendgericht. The snippets of information pertaining to the Sendgericht discussed so far in this chapter often present us with norms that constitute a framework for the organisation of the Send, rather than evidence of bishops administering judgement. It is more likely, therefore, that the bishop and his representatives had the choice to conduct either joint or separate questioning, especially since, as we shall see shortly, the material to do so was there.
According to Regino, once the bishop had established the accused’s innocence or guilt using the testimony of reliable witnesses, or in more extreme cases after trial by ordeal, anyone who had been found guilty had to be punished.Footnote 44 Bishops often used the second day of proceedings to impose punishments appropriate to the crime.Footnote 45 These included relatively minor penalties such as fasting, similar to penances imposed after confession; the imposition of fines was also common towards the end of the ninth century.Footnote 46 Weightier sentences, such as flogging or other forms of corporal punishment, are also attested.Footnote 47 It is likely that, after the bishop had assigned penance to those who had committed ‘public’ sins (murder, adultery, perjury) and left with his entourage, the responsibility for monitoring the penitential sentence was transferred to the local priest, testament to the centrality to the organisation of Sendgericht and its lasting impact on the locality.Footnote 48 If someone was summoned to appear before the bishop and decided not to show up, all expected peer pressure notwithstanding, this person could be punished, for instance, by being made to subsist on water, salt and bread for forty days.Footnote 49 Fear of excommunication, the last ecclesiastical trump card, was used to force people to undergo their punishment. The priest was not free to bar people from salvation on his own, however, nor could the bishop alone impose this penalty. Excommunication had to happen in consultation with other bishops and the archbishop, and therefore likely took place at a diocesan or provincial synod.Footnote 50 After a sentence had been fulfilled, the last step in the process was reconciliation. Although it generally fell to bishops to reconcile penitents, priests could do the same in their absence so long as they had discussed the matter beforehand with the bishop.Footnote 51 Communication between the bishop and his priests therefore seems to have been frequent, since they must have discussed different kinds of penitents regularly.
As we have seen, bishops were supposed to visit each locality once a year to administer justice. Yearly visits were anticipated, for instance, in the foundation charter of the Brandenburg diocese issued by the east Frankish king Otto I in 948.Footnote 52 These tours of the diocese may have been more infrequent in reality, however, as we learn in a letter written by Bishop Salomon II of Konstanz in 877/8 in which he criticises his long-dead predecessors who had not toured the diocese for nine years; Salomon himself confesses that due to the ‘public disturbances and various other causes’ he had only seen half of his diocese, despite being in his second year in office.Footnote 53 The author of the vita of Ulrich of Augsburg, active between 923 and 973, candidly noted that he only toured his diocese every four years, which he said was in accordance with the canons, without specifying which ones he had in mind.Footnote 54 Bishop Thietmar of Merseberg, writing at the beginning of the eleventh century, admitted there were parts of his diocese he had never visited.Footnote 55 Evidently, visiting an entire diocese during this period took a lot of effort and organisation. By the early eleventh century, the bishops of Limoges seem to have anticipated visiting every church every three years.Footnote 56 It is likely, therefore, that more than a year went by between episcopal visits in most dioceses.
The burden of this duty perhaps explains why bishops sought ways to make this particular task more efficient from as early as the ninth century. Hincmar of Reims, for instance, instructed archdeacons in 852 to lay the groundwork or conduct visits for him, and to provide him with reports at the beginning of July each year.Footnote 57 This delegation of responsibility carried with it its own challenges. Since the local priest was responsible for feeding the visiting party, certain archdeacons took advantage and took large retinues with them, with some even bringing family members for the free hospitality: Hincmar therefore warned his archdeacons not to burden the locals more than was strictly necessary.Footnote 58 A later addition to a manuscript probably made in modern-day southern Germany (now in Munich, and referred to here as ‘M2’), made reference to the amount of bread, beer, wine, mead and horse-feed that archpriests or archdeacons, their retinues and animals were permitted to consume when visiting, demonstrating that the Sendgericht had indeed found its footing in a fairly large part of the former Carolingian empire.Footnote 59
There remains much we do not know about the Sendgericht.Footnote 60 Transcripts or accounts of local visits or judgements are not available to us, for instance, since this was largely an oral affair, without a written record produced by the participants.Footnote 61 Furthermore, the initial tenth-century development of the institution remains unclear and rather one-sided due to the prominence of Regino of Prüm’s collection of canon law in modern historiography. This prominence is easily explained: the collection is comprehensive, well-disseminated and made by a known author, qualities which cannot be attributed to the manuscripts discussed later in this chapter. However, this prominence has obscured contemporary and earlier initiatives to create similar collections. Regino was not alone in his attempt to compose manuscripts for bishops to use when they traversed their dioceses, interrogated its populace and administered justice. Below, we discuss nine manuscripts that we consider to have been handbooks for the Sendgericht. By demonstrating the similarities of their contents and structures, we argue that these books can indeed be studied as a corpus. We then explore how the compilation of these manuscripts overlaps thematically with Regino’s Sendhandbuch. Lastly, we consider what this means for our ideas about how the Sendgericht took place and developed during the tenth century, and the implications this had for local priests.
5.3 Manuscripts for the Sendgericht: Shared Contents, Shared Traits
As we have noted, most historians of the Sendgericht have focused on the remarkable collection of canonical material put together by Regino of Prüm, a spotlight that has left other collections in the shadows.Footnote 62 In what follows, we concentrate on a set of materials compiled by different agencies, which survives not as a single composition but as variations on a theme found in nine manuscripts. If we wish to understand the Sendgericht and its impact on local priests, we need to put Regino’s important work in a wider context.
Nine extant manuscripts produced in the tenth and eleventh centuries with texts for bishops north of the Alps have a number of shared characteristics that make them especially closely related and are the focus of what follows (see Table 5.1).
| Shelf markFootnote 63 | Abbr. | Date | Origin | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Cologne/Köln, Erzbischöfliche Diözesan- und Dombibliothek, Cod. 118 | K1 | s. IX ex. | Reims or surrounding area |
| 2. | Munich/München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 3851 | M1 | s. IX ex. | Lotharingia, France (East) |
| 3. | Cologne/Köln, Erzbischöfliche Diözesan- und Dombibliothek, Cod. 120 | K2 | s. X in. | France (North/East) or Belgium |
| 4. | Châlons-en-Champagne, Bibliothèque municipale, MS. 32 | C | s. X | Trier or St. Peter at Châlons |
| 5. | Munich/München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 3853 | M2 | s. X 2/2 | Germany (South), perhaps Augsburg |
| 6. | Heiligenkreuz, Stiftsbibliothek, 217 | H | s. X ex. | Germany (South/East), later Prague |
| 7. | Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Lat. 3878 | P | s. X or XI | Germany (South) |
| 8. | Salzburg, Bibliothek der Erzabtei St. Peter, a. IX. 32 | S | ca. 1000 | Cologne or Salzburg |
| 9. | Troyes, Médiathèque Jacques-Chirac, Ms. 1979 | T | s. XI 1/2 | Lotharingia, perhaps Reims |
Historians have noted the connections between these manuscripts before, but as it stands, the impression is fragmentary, since each has focused on parts of their content and overlap rather than the whole.Footnote 64 Raymond Kottje, in his study of the ninth-century penitentials of Halitgar of Cambrai and Hrabanus Maurus, noted the connection between K1, M1, C, M2, H and P, since complete copies or extracts from one or both of the penitentials are present in every manuscript in the corpus. Despite their apparent similarities, Kottje stated that M1 and M2 do not depend on each other, although both served as exemplars for S.Footnote 65 H and P, furthermore, depend on M2, albeit indirectly.Footnote 66 In his study of canon law compilations, Wilfried Hartmann divided this corpus into two groups, noting that there must be at least one missing manuscript similar to M1.Footnote 67 The possibility of a similar yet missing manuscript, as noted by Kottje and Hartmann, hints that the corpus, already relatively large with nine witnesses, was actually even larger.
Hartmann suggested that some of the manuscripts (K2, C, S and T) might have been used as episcopal handbooks for the Sendgericht, with the caveat that their varied contents make it particularly challenging to discern their intended purpose.Footnote 68 It is therefore useful to consider other ways to determine how these manuscripts could have been used besides examining their contents. Traces of use left by former owners and readers, such as marginal notes or annotation symbols, can be valuable for this purpose. It is also possible to observe additional connections between the manuscripts by focusing on the composition of the manuscripts rather than the texts they contain. The following analysis will take this approach, highlighting several shared traits in our corpus that have to date been overlooked. Before we can examine the corpus in detail, however, it is necessary to provide a general overview of the selected manuscripts in order to understand their connections more fully.
An Overview of the Corpus
The earliest exemplars (K1 and M1) of the corpus date to the late ninth century, while the latest (T) can be dated to the first half of the eleventh century. They originate from both the west and east Frankish kingdoms and are concentrated in modern-day north-eastern France and south-western Germany. With the exceptions of K1 and S, which can be located, respectively, to Reims and Cologne/Salzburg, none of the manuscripts can be tied to a specific area. Still, Kottje argues that we should situate the production of these books in or near the major episcopal centres of Cambrai, Liège, Cologne, Mainz, Trier and Reims (Fig. 5.1), based on the origin of the contents and the availability of such material in cathedral libraries.Footnote 69 It seems reasonable to assume that if these manuscripts were indeed meant for bishops and their organisation of the Sendgericht, they might originate from regions where episcopal power was strongest. Comparing this map with one showing where diocesan synods were held (Chapter 4, Fig. 4.2) brings out some stark differences: for instance, western and southern France are well represented in the map of diocesan synods but completely absent from the manuscript map. Such differences between the maps suggest that there were strong regional differences with regard to the imposition of ecclesiastical discipline. The absence of the Sendgericht does not necessarily imply that priests were running rampant outside of north-eastern France and south-western Germany; bishops elsewhere likely used other means to control their priests, such as diocesan synods.
As well as these influential episcopal sees, the region of Lotharingia covers a large portion of the region currently under investigation. Other scholars have noted the high numbers of canon law manuscripts produced and exchanged in the area, and bishops there evidently supported the creation and maintenance of extensive monastic libraries.Footnote 70 It is not unlikely that the manuscripts in our corpus were products of this milieu, but it is difficult to establish this with certainty. Cathedral library catalogues present a diffuse image of what kind of manuscripts were being produced between the late ninth and early eleventh centuries. They suggest that canon law and penitentials, the foundational sources for Sendgericht handbooks, only made up a small part of the libraries’ collections, dwarfed in numbers by manuscripts of Scripture, writings of the Church Fathers and liturgical texts.Footnote 71 Still, it seems that the material to compose handbooks for bishops was present, especially in the case of tenth- and eleventh-century Mainz, where we find various collections with canons, capitularies and letters by Hrabanus Maurus, and a copy of Regino’s Sendhandbuch.Footnote 72 Based on their library catalogues, the role of monasteries in the production of such manuscripts looks rather limited and can be excluded.Footnote 73
The early reception (from the middle of the ninth century onwards) of the ‘Paris model’ for the episcopal office at these sees may help explain why the manuscripts from the corpus originate from this particular region.Footnote 74 The early dissemination of the model can be observed in Lotharingia, and specifically at Reims. The writings of Hincmar of Reims, whose episcopal capitula are also found in the corpus (see app. 4.C), contributed to the spread of the model, as did the vitae of bishops from the region.Footnote 75 The production from the tenth century onwards of the first Frankish pontificals in the same dioceses, and the increasingly strong hierarchical structure and administration visible in the introduction of the archdiaconate there, also contributes to this impression.Footnote 76 The simultaneous emergence of the ‘Paris model’ and the handbooks for organising the Sendgericht within the same region and time frame is not surprising: both reflect a heightened sense of episcopal responsibility.
The absence of comparable manuscripts from other parts of the former empire, for instance, north-western France or northern and central Italy, is striking and suggests that ecclesiastical discipline was administered through different mechanisms in these areas. In Italy, Rather of Verona’s failed attempts to reform the cathedral chapter in his north Italian diocese by improving the moral standing and education of those wanting to become priests are emblematic of the very different power constellations visible in this region.Footnote 77 In Normandy the situation was again different, as Grégory Combalbert has shown, since bishops were able to regain control over their dioceses and impose some form of discipline only after the viking raids had ended there.Footnote 78 We might also compare our geographical hotspot to England, where it was traditionally held that bishops were less invested in their priests’ good behaviour and education than their peers on the continent, a perspective that is now shifting.Footnote 79 New studies of manuscripts and texts that strongly resemble the material discussed in this chapter suggest that bishops did in fact attend to issues of ecclesiastical discipline in their dioceses, albeit on different occasions such as the meetings of the shire or hundred-court.Footnote 80 We must be careful, however, not to read too much into the mere presence (or absence) of episcopal handbooks anywhere in tenth- or eleventh-century western Europe without closely examining the contents that make them into a group.
Shared Contents
The nine manuscripts that make up our corpus all share several types of material; this common ground has been identified and covered in detail by numerous scholars, as discussed above. Rather than retrace these similarities, this chapter seeks to show how the handbooks were composed based on a common idea within a distinct region and how this idea, in turn, resulted in a common local experience for priests who were subject to the Sendgericht.
The common idea of what a bishop’s handbook had to contain can be distilled from their contents (see app. 4 for a table showing the contents of all the manuscripts). The main shared texts are synodal and canonical material, episcopal statutes and penitential material. Naturally, there are other overlaps in content in the manuscripts. Take, for instance, the several regulae formatarum, templates for writing letters on behalf of travelling priests, found in C, S and T.Footnote 81 This type of text is certainly relevant to diocesan communication but is excluded from consideration here since it represents only a small share of the texts in the corpus. Instead, in what follows, the most dominant categories of shared material will be discussed to show how each contributes to the function of a handbook for the imposition of ecclesiastical discipline in general and the Sendgericht in particular.
Typical for the corpus is the inclusion of synodal material, a category that comprises texts used for organising a Sendgericht (or diocesan synod).Footnote 82 The manuscripts M1, M2, H and P all contain the Augsburger Sendordnung, which as we have seen acted as an ordo for the organisation of the Sendgericht (referred to in the text as a synodus).Footnote 83 It instructs the bishop (or his representative) to find the local priest and for seven lay witnesses to swear oaths. He should then inquire about the state of the church and its possessions, as well as the priest’s life and how he performed his office, using the three small questionnaires discussed above. Any judgements required by the bishop were then to be delivered, before he moved on to the next settlement. A fifth manuscript in the corpus (T) contains the questionnaires but not the ordo itself, indicating that, even separated from the ordo, such lists of questions had value in the context of episcopal administration.
In other manuscripts within the corpus (K2, C, S and T), we find a different ordo for staging a meeting between a bishop and priests.Footnote 84 The text describes the course of a synod (synodus), during which priests met with their bishop and received instruction, admonishment and (if necessary) correction from him. The text may have been designed for a diocesan synod, but if so its resemblance to the Sendgericht is striking, since it features some of the same personnel (archdeacons), the possibility of bringing cases to the bishop, and receiving judgement for both priests and laypeople.Footnote 85 The ordo is followed by a short text in all four manuscripts; in C and T, it is described as ‘How the ministry is to be examined’ (Qualiter ministerium requiratur).Footnote 86 It lists everything priests were supposed to know, from the Psalms to major feast days. The similarities between the two ordines, including their form (both have short appendices), show the extent to which the Sendgericht can be considered an extension of the diocesan synod and the ecclesiastical discipline the bishop imposed there upon his priests.
Besides the ordines, each manuscript in the corpus contains material that was meant to support readers during these occasions. A well-known synodal sermon already mentioned in this book, the Admonitio Synodalis, is found in T. Intended to be read by the bishop as a lengthy instruction on the performance of priestly office, it would have been appropriate too at a Sendgericht. The author of this anonymous sermon used the first book of Regino’s Sendhandbuch and Hincmar of Reims’ episcopal statutes, which is noteworthy as it shows how the same kind of material was used again and again within the same (synodal) context.Footnote 87 Hincmar’s statutes (see app. 4.C1–2), for instance, are featured in five of the nine manuscripts in the corpus. The Sermo synodalis copied into M2 and H emphasises the same subjects and thus appears similar in purpose and tone, but might have been read out by an archpriest (as discussed in Chapter 4).Footnote 88 In C and T, we find an Admonitio sacerdotum, a shorter text that nevertheless shares its theme (the weight and risks of priestly office) with the other sermons. In T, which also contained the Admonitio Synodalis, it might have functioned as a slimline alternative, preferable when the situation called for brevity. In H, we find a further episcopal sermon added when the manuscript was taken to Bohemia, the ‘Admonition for priests’ (Ammonicione ad presbiteros).Footnote 89 Both address the priest’s role as a preacher, his duties and the required knowledge to perform them and his obedience to God and the bishop. All of these sermons would have been appropriate to read at a Sendgericht or diocesan synod, and their prevalence suggests that in this period multiple people in relative proximity to each other were engaged not only in collating existing sermons but also in composing new ones for this particular occasion.Footnote 90
The second category of material borrowed from canones, an umbrella term for authoritative texts such as the records of councils, papal decretals, writings from Church Fathers and even capitularies. Much of this borrowing utilised earlier collections.Footnote 91 While studies focusing on individual collections certainly have their merit, they can obscure the fact that there is often a wealth of shared material between the collections and, more importantly, also in the manuscripts themselves. The collection of canones in S, for instance, includes letters by Hrabanus Maurus to Bishops Reginbald of Auxerre and Humbert of Würzburg, addressing a wide variety of relevant subjects for the administration of dioceses, including baptism by false priests, the degrees of separation required for marriage and parents who had accidentally slept on their newborn child, leading to its death. The collection of canons found in M1, also known as the ‘Lorraine collection’, and its derivative, the Collectio 77 capitulorum (found in M2, H and P), do not contain this material, but the same letters can still be found elsewhere in these manuscripts (see app. 4.B1–2). It is necessary, therefore, to take a step back and examine precisely what texts these manuscripts share if we want to make broader conclusions regarding their production and use.
Our nine manuscripts share several types of canonical material. As we have seen, Hrabanus Maurus’ letters are well represented, and comparing these letters reveals two areas of dissemination, with north-western (K1, K2 and S) and south-eastern (M1, M2, P and H) groups.Footnote 92 Similar patterns of dissemination can be observed in the corpus when examining canons taken from the Councils of Mainz (852) and Worms (868). Still, even within these groups, there are different configurations of canonical material, either in the form of specific excerpts or in more complete or even extended collections, as is the case for the canons of the Council of Worms. These canons show how compilers engaged with the same material in different ways. In P, for instance, someone inserted two entries from Halitgar of Cambrai’s penitential (c. 820), on how to deal with fornicating priests, into a collection of 181 headings attributed to the Council of Worms. The shared material indicates not only that people were exchanging texts but also that different versions of the same texts were circulating within a relatively small region. Rather than copying complete works, bishops required and utilised specific material for the administration of their dioceses which they used for the compilation of handbooks.
The third category concerns Carolingian episcopal statutes. It is striking that eleven distinct statutes were incorporated into the corpus, testament to continued demand for them by bishops and others, at a time when the production of new episcopal statutes had all but ended. Parts of the statutes of Bishop Haito of Basel (c. 820), for instance, were added to M1 after its production, testament to their continued utility.Footnote 93 The way these texts are grouped in the corpus and their inclusion in various collections such as the Collectio 234 capitulorum and the Lorraine collection also indicates that they were used alongside canonical material. Carolingian episcopal statutes, then, had become part of the same normative framework that contained the material discussed in the previous category. The integration of some of the first episcopal statutes of Gerbald of Liège into a larger collection of mainly royal statutes in M2 and H is evidence of this.Footnote 94 Another reason for their integration could be that they served as guides to visitation, much like the short questionnaires attached to the Augsburger Sendordnung: they addressed many of the same concerns regarding the priest, his church and the community he served. Occasional nota signs indicate that the manuscripts’ users had a special interest in specific information, such as when priests were to use incense during church services.Footnote 95 The abundant presence of the statutes in the corpus shows that their use extended beyond their ostensible purpose – communicating with priests – and had become a more flexible type of material.
Penitential material, the fourth and final category considered here, looks somewhat similar to the preceding two groups of content. Here again, most manuscripts (except for K2) contain more than one example, and like our canonical material, here, too, we can observe various additions. For instance, in M2, Halitgar’s penitential on involuntary homicide was integrated into the beginning of Hrabanus Maurus’ penitential, which also deals with homicide and murder. To this we might compare twelve entries added to Hrabanus’ penitential in K1, K2 and S.Footnote 96 Also noteworthy is the presence of two versions of the same papal letter to Archbishop Charles of Mainz in this addition (app. 4.B3). The integration of slightly different materials on similar subjects shows multiple attempts to create more efficient collections, here to aid readers in judging serious criminal cases. Furthermore, the various types of penitential material included in the manuscript indicate that its compilers were trying to assemble collections for practical use, to enable bishops to administer appropriate penance depending on the sins committed. In M1, the bishop could punish adultery with either three to five years of penance or seven, depending on the collection he used.Footnote 97 It is also likely, however, that each collection covered slightly different ground. The Paenitentiale Trecense in T has no material on incorrect religious behaviour and sexual sins, usually quite common topics; Rob Meens and his co-authors consequently argue that it might have been composed to supplement the penitentials by Halitgar and Pseudo-Theodore, also found in the same codex.Footnote 98 Similarly, the decision not to include the sixth book of Halitgar’s penitential, which differs from the preceding five in that it contained tariffed penances, might indicate a deliberate attempt to avoid overlapping content with the merged penitential of Pseudo-Bede-Egbert, a text in which such punishments predominate.Footnote 99 The practical utility of this material is emphasised by the ordines for administering penance found in some of the aforementioned penitentials and the Paenitentiale Trecense.Footnote 100
This brief survey of the shared content in the corpus reveals a set of traits that we can use to characterise the manuscripts. These books were, first, directed towards practical usage, as indicated by the various ordines and questionnaires. Second, despite not being direct copies of one another, the similarities of content within the corpus show that a certain model for these books existed. At the core of this model was synodal, canonical and penitential material, together with some episcopal statutes. Within these categories, the model was flexible, and various combinations of texts were possible. Yet that does not diminish the impression that certain types of material were considered particularly useful for these handbooks, as demonstrated by the presence of different groups of the same text within the corpus. Third, the appearance of these books dedicated to the same purpose, within neighbouring dioceses and also around the same time, suggests that there must have been some form of exchange between its main actors.
In the following, we examine some of these shared traits by looking at tables of contents, traces of use and compilatory practices, showing that the model extended beyond similarities in content, and reflected shared ideas about what was necessary for the imposition of ecclesiastical discipline in general and for the organisation of the Sendgericht specifically. Moreover, we will show how the corpus can be positioned next to Regino of Prüm’s Sendhandbuch as a source for how priests experienced episcopal discipline and management during the tenth and eleventh centuries.
Shared Traits
The manuscripts share content and also aspects of how this content was presented and used. For instance, each manuscript contains multiple tables of contents (app. 4.E), which take different forms according to their position and purpose. The penitential for Heribald, for example, is equipped with a table of contents directly preceding the text in K1 (pp. 54‒5), K2 (128r‒129r), S (118v‒119r), and M2 (45v‒46v). In P (8r‒9r), however, the table of contents is located away from the penitential at the beginning of the manuscript and covers multiple texts. The last step in this ongoing process of integration is visible in H, which contains two tables of contents: one that covers a large part of the manuscript, including the penitential (1r‒5r) and a second, smaller table of contents for a single penitential (65v‒66r). The tables show that attempts were made to make the material more accessible and further emphasise the practical use for which these books were intended.Footnote 101
The manuscripts also carry traces left by their former users. To cite just a few examples, different hands made additions to the penitentials of Halitgar in P (7v) that covered dealing with fornicating priests. At the end of Pseudo-Bede-Egbert (41r‒43v) in M2, we find an added series of canons meant for the management of priests that addressed their ordination, behaviour, legal status and the churches they staffed.Footnote 102 Comparable subjects are addressed by canons added by multiple later hands in the same manuscript (157v‒158r), entered directly after the Collectio 77 capitulorum.Footnote 103 Evidently, those using M2 needed additional normative guidelines to govern the diocese and, as we have already seen, for organising the Sendgericht, adding specific rules for what the bishop’s servants could demand from the locality in terms of provisions.Footnote 104 Also significant for our understanding of how these books were used and their status is the incorporation of entries from Bishop Burchard of Worms’ Decretum alongside Regino’s Sendhandbuch, which indicates not only that the Decretum and the Sendhandbuch were used within a similar context but also that all these manuscripts existed side by side and were considered to complement each other.Footnote 105 However, while the works produced by these well-known authors should be regarded as historical landmarks, we must not forget that they are positioned alongside anonymous authors and compilers who produced similar works for the same ends: to solve the same kind of problems in managing priests and dioceses.
Smaller additions to these manuscripts, found in the margins, between the lines of text or in other forms of scribal intervention, show that the books were used extensively and in various contexts. This is indicated, for instance, by the numerous corrections found in each of our manuscripts. The most dramatic example concerns a part of Hrabanus’ penitential in S (133rv) that has been scraped away, including its entry in the table of contents (119r) (see Figs. 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4). The particular entry deals with the question of whether the eucharist changed in nature through consecration and remained in this state even after being digested and expelled; clearly the issue was regarded as unsuitable by a later reader.Footnote 106 Another aspect of their use can be gleaned from the later addition of musical neumes, which primarily functioned as didactic devices and therefore suggest that some of the manuscripts might have been deployed in the classroom.Footnote 107 Manuscript H, for instance, was used for instruction in religious chant, while an owner of M1 at some point used the manuscript to teach Latin poetry and metre by adding a famous quote from Virgil.Footnote 108 This kind of insertion of reference to an author (S, 139v), numerous nota-signs and underlinings show that these could also be used for study. While these handbooks were initially intended to be used by bishops for the Sendgericht, over time they became multifunctional tools that reflect the wide array of tasks associated with the episcopal office.
The final shared trait to examine is the dependence on the same source material that underpinned Regino’s Sendhandbuch. The index of sources provided by Wilfried Hartmann at the end of his edition of the Sendhandbuch provides a good place to start our inquiry.Footnote 109 Comparing Hartmann’s index with the sources used in the corpus (app. 4) reveals that Hrabanus’ letters to Humbert and Reginbald, the penitential for Heribald and the penitential from Halitgar, all feature both in the corpus and the Sendhandbuch. The first episcopal statutes by Hincmar of Reims and the canons of the Councils of Mainz (852) and Worms (868) also belong to this group of shared texts.Footnote 110 Parts of the material that have not been discussed here, such as the Admonitio generalis (227v‒238r) and Collectio Dacheriana in T; the collection found in S; and Ansegis’ Collectio capitularium in C, M1, M2, P, H and T, also appear in Regino’s compilation.Footnote 111 Evidently, handbooks for bishops (including Regino’s Sendhandbuch) were composed using similar sets of texts and, for that reason, these should be considered as one group of manuscripts composed within the same region (Fig. 5.1) for the same purpose.Footnote 112
Figs. 5.2 and 5.3 Salzburg, Bibliothek der Erzabtei St. Peter, a. IX. 32, ff. 133rv where an entry of Hrabanus’ penitential has been scraped off. Fig. 5.4 shows this also happened in the table of contents (f. 119r) in the same manuscript.
Fig 5.4 Table of contents (f. 119r) in the same manuscript, showing erasure.
Differences Within the Corpus
The emphasis so far has been on the similarities between these manuscripts, which are indeed striking. But these should not obscure the fact that these manuscripts were not copies of each other, nor were they intended to be. Unlike the manuscripts with staple texts by St. Augustine and St. Jerome that would likely have been present in any library, alongside an array of psalters and lectionaries, the manuscripts discussed here were handbooks composed for individuals performing a single task – the imposition of ecclesiastical discipline – a responsibility that was not as widely shared as participating in liturgical celebrations or engaging in biblical exegesis. Nor were they relevant for all members of the religious community: the enforcement of ecclesiastical discipline in the diocese was reserved for the bishop alone (or his representatives). These manuscripts were personal books to be used by one person or certain people in their circles, and they were meant to be kept at hand. The ‘made to measure’ quality of these books is emphasised by the variation in their contents. While the manuscripts in the corpus contain shared material, none is identical to another, suggesting their composition was shaped by both the local availability of material and personal preference.
Using the same sets of texts did not result in a group of identical manuscripts. We have already seen that small scribal interventions, for instance, in the form of additions, altered and distinguished collections of the material. Yet, their differences are not merely the result of ad hoc contributions to existing material. In compiling these manuscripts, scribes drew from useful existing collections that were, in turn, shaped by earlier selection processes.Footnote 113 In his analysis of the manuscript referred to here as ‘S’, Georg Phillips demonstrated the rationale behind the collection of the material and showed that its compilers drew on the Collectio Dacheriana, just as Regino had, albeit in a different manner.Footnote 114 Where Regino copied the canons individually or in small clusters into his handbook, the compilers of S selected canons from primarily Frankish and Visigothic councils and integrated them as long sequences of consecutive canons with few gaps (99r‒115v).
Notably, towards the end of S (207r‒218r), Regino’s Sendhandbuch itself is treated as an ‘existing collection’ and was used as the basis for a new composition for a bishop on subjects such as church consecration, ecclesiastical judgement, the management of clerics and serfs and an extensive selection of canons on marriage.Footnote 115 The new composition is important for two reasons. First, it shows that while Regino’s work was indeed influential, it was not necessarily considered the best selection of material. Instead of the witness oath Regino includes, the compiler of S incorporates an oath attributed to the Council of Meaux-Paris (845/6), perhaps since it is not as localised to the archdiocese of Trier as Regino’s example and thus appears more flexible in its applications.Footnote 116 Second, the composition of texts in S based on Regino has been written by a different hand (as noted by Kottje) than the aforementioned Frankish and Visigothic canons and does not have any thematic overlap with that particular selection.Footnote 117 The compilers who worked in Cologne (or Salzburg) on the different parts of S were not merely copyists but skilled individuals who were very conscious of the material present in the codex.Footnote 118 On their desks, we have to imagine multiple collections (including the Sendhandbuch), the contents of which they knew and from which they were able to select the material most suitable for their purposes. We can extend this impression to other manuscripts in the corpus as well, using a set of canons from the Council of Tribur (895) that was added to the compilation in S alongside the material taken from Regino’s work. A separate selection from the same version of the Tribur canons can be found scattered through M2, H and P.Footnote 119
If we take a step back and reflect briefly on the shared traits found in the corpus, from the elaborate tables of contents and traces left by former users to the striking similarities between the composition of the selected manuscripts and Regino’s Sendhandbuch, we can establish the following: the corpus not only implies the implementation of the Sendgericht between the late ninth and first half of the eleventh centuries, it goes beyond that, representing a shared idea of episcopal responsibility and ecclesiastical discipline. It was this idea that led to the production of manuscripts that can clearly be identified as interpretations of the same model, shaped in their details by local needs, availability of material and most likely also the compilers’ personal preferences. Notions about the kind of material that was indispensable for a handbook covering the organisation of the Sendgericht were especially prominent within Lotharingian dioceses but could also be found among bishops in the eastern Frankish empire, particularly in the southern German lands. It is likely, therefore, that in these areas there was some form of exchange between the bishops or clerics supporting them in their task, providing a different perspective on the supposed lack of communication between west and east noted by Hartmann.Footnote 120 Such an exchange of ideas, manuscripts and texts could have taken place at councils such as the one organised at Ingelheim in 948, which saw attendance from all the bishops who presided over sees where our manuscripts likely originated.Footnote 121 The usage of material found in episcopal handbooks (including the Sendhandbuch) at this council, and those of Hohenaltheim (916), Koblenz (922), Mainz (950) and Frankfurt (951), emphasises this impression further.Footnote 122 Other moments of exchange between bishops might have taken place at the royal court where bishops were also present, both in the West Frankish kingdom and the Eastern Frankish empire, in various capacities.Footnote 123 What is more, as many of these men had been educated together either at monastic or cathedral schools, we should not underestimate informal networks of exchange based on contact between former teachers and students or between classmates.Footnote 124
Clearly, the model was effective and replicated numerous times, resulting in a fairly large group of bishops who engaged with their priests using a framework of ecclesiastical discipline shaped by local concerns. By implication, local priests would have been assessed using comparable, but not quite identical, sets of canonical traditions. The shared ideas of ecclesiastical discipline visible in our corpus did not lead to uniformity, but rather to guiding parameters that aided compilers and bishops alike.
5.4 Handbooks and the Practicalities of Episcopal Administration
We have emphasised the practical nature of the manuscripts discussed in this chapter, from the numerous tables of contents found throughout the corpus to the presence of ordines for conducting the Sendgericht, running local synods and hearing confession. Yet, descriptive texts and helpful indices alone would not make handbooks useful, particularly if the rest of their contents did not address the quotidian issues tenth-century bishops faced when they met with and assessed local priests.
To examine how effective these handbooks were, let us turn to the material they supplied to readers that dealt with issues discussed in the preceding three chapters: priests and their (extended) families, synods as places for interaction between priests and their bishops, and priests’ transactions concerning property and income. The texts and collections we have considered in this chapter are also the fullest examples of such material (an overview of which is found in app. 4). Even though they represent only a small portion of each handbook’s contents, they, nevertheless, provide a useful cross-section of the ‘model’ for the episcopal handbook.
Let us first turn to the priest and his kin. As shown in Chapter 3, a priest’s family background fundamentally shaped how he engaged with the world outside the local church, especially with regard to transactions such as grants to monastic institutions or sales of land. Yet, the familial relationships of priests play only a minor role in the episcopal handbooks under consideration here. Where such relationships were addressed, they generally appeared in the context of discussions of the abstinence that secular clerics in major orders had to exhibit. The canons of the 868 Council of Worms, for instance, stated that bishops, priests, deacons and subdeacons should abstain from their wives.Footnote 125 Priests were permitted to live with some women (Theodulf of Orléans writes in his first series of statutes that mothers and sisters were acceptable housemates) but were generally advised to stay away from women so as not to be tempted.Footnote 126 The same sentiments are echoed by a sequence of four canons in the Collection 234 capitulorum in T, taken from the Collectio Dacheriana and Louis the Pious’ eighth capitulary, demonstrating that while married priests were still a concern, the way this concern was articulated had not changed from the beginning of the ninth century.Footnote 127 The penitentials found in our handbooks do not alter this impression.Footnote 128 Compilers of the handbooks seem to have been much more exercised by incest among the laity, a subject addressed by various authors who feature prominently in the corpus and found in Gregory the Great’s letter to bishop Augustine of Canterbury, Hrabanus’ letters to Reginbald and Humbert, and the decretal of Pope Nicholas I.Footnote 129 The living arrangements of priests therefore featured only at the margins of the normative frameworks expressed in the handbooks under consideration here.
What about the attendance of local priests at diocesan synods? Contrary to what has sometimes been assumed, we have argued in Chapter 4 that some bishops continued to convene synods for their priests throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries. Though this chapter has focused on handbooks as portable instruments for the mobile Sendgericht, they could have been just as useful for the diocesan synod. The organisation of diocesan synods is featured in an ordo in the manuscripts K2, S, C and T, and much of the other content in these manuals had utility for the proceedings of such gatherings, for instance, when the bishop discussed the lives of his priests (as mentioned in the ordo), or when he used canon law to adjudicate complaints and accusations brought against priests or the laity.Footnote 130 A selection from the episcopal statutes of Archbishop Herard of Tours that were issued in 858, which is found in M1, M2, H and T, includes the injunction that ‘all those called to the synod have to come immediately’ and, as we have seen in the above, this can refer to either a Send gathering or a diocesan synod, as both could be described as a synodus.Footnote 131
Selections of canon law relevant to the disciplining of priests that appear frequently in the corpus include a letter of Pope Nicholas I (app. 4.B3) and an excerpt of canons taken from the Council of Mainz (app. 4.B5). These texts addressed various issues amongst both laity and clergy, from fornication and adultery to involuntary homicide and murder.Footnote 132 The canons also provided a step-by-step guide for how to deal with some of these issues, including the process of accusing and reprimanding a priest, and the various penances that could be imposed upon someone who had committed murder.Footnote 133 That these entries were carefully chosen is indicated by the small number selected (only five of Mainz’s twenty-five canons) and by their appearance in six different handbooks (K2, S, M1, M2, P and H): these were important subjects for which normative guidance was considered particularly helpful. Their overlap with the canons of the Council of Worms, which covered the same issues but were not subjected to such a rigorous selection process by their compilers, throws this into further relief.Footnote 134
The selection from the episcopal statutes of Archbishop Herard of Tours, mentioned just above, also addresses receiving and paying tithes, a central subject of Chapter 2. Priests should obtain their tithes via preaching and admonishing the laity, not through litigation and strife (lite et iurgio), and those withholding their dues owned by the church had, as a consequence, to be expelled from their communities.Footnote 135 The compiler took relatively little from Herard’s lengthy original text, so it is revealing that tithe payment was part of what was included. Part of a sermon on tithes by Caesarius of Arles, who urges his audience not to sin but to give God what belongs to him out of gratitude for what they received, here attributed to Augustine, is found in T (ff. 239v–241r) as c. 231 of the Collectio 234 capitulorum.Footnote 136
The question of tithes occurs elsewhere, too. In a passage from Gregory the Great’s letter included in T (177r), and in the canons of the Council of Worms (868), the way tithes had to be divided is mentioned: usually into four equal parts: one for the bishop (and his retinue), one for the priest himself, one for the poor (and pilgrims) and one for the upkeep of the local church.Footnote 137 In his second series of statutes (app. 4.C2), Hincmar also speaks of the ‘four parts of the tithes’ (decimis quattuor portiones). He does not specify the allocation of each part clearly but stipulates that records must be kept of the parts received by the church and the bishop, while mentioning in another entry that tithes also have to be spent on taking care of the sick and the poor.Footnote 138 Evidently, there was continued consensus on the proper way to divide and spend tithes, first outlined by Pope Gelasius I some four centuries earlier.Footnote 139
In general, our handbooks have relatively little to say on the subject of priests’ incomes and properties compared to other parts of their office, such as their knowledge and pastoral conduct. However, the subject of how priests managed these assets appears, albeit briefly, in conciliar decrees, various episcopal statutes and the Admonitio Synodalis.Footnote 140 Whenever tenth-century priests attended diocesan synods or were visited by their bishops (or both), they would have been made aware of how they were supposed to handle their tithes, gifts and transactions adequately. Halitgar’s penitential, for instance, condemned priests who leveraged their income to act as usurers, thereby exploiting others.Footnote 141 Some amongst them likely knew, as their superiors did (at least those who had read M1, M2, H and T), that practices increasingly normalised in the tenth century – such as dividing church property and revenue between multiple people or serving in more than one church (as mentioned in the early tenth-century Capitula Sangallensia) – went against the canons.Footnote 142 Still, in the eyes of later eleventh-century reformers, it might have seemed that such handbooks’ normative guides were out of step with contemporary problems, showing too little concern for issues, such as lay people owning (parts of) churches, an issue that was at that time considered one of the key issues plaguing the church. Bishops in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, however, seem to have been unconcerned by such financial malpractice and dedicated their time and attention to matters more relevant to them, if we follow the interests of those compiling handbooks.
This brief examination of the practicality of episcopal handbooks for bishops dealing with priests’ families, their attendance at synods, and streams of revenue has two key findings. First, it has shown the limits of the normative framework within which priests and bishops interacted. Certain subjects, such as how priests dealt with property in relation to their families, clearly fell outside this frame: the Sendgericht meant that bishops were certainly more involved in actively managing their priests, yet this did not mean they interfered with every aspect of their lives. Second, it demonstrates that issues considered pressing by one group of contemporaries might decades later pale in comparison to other concerns. Rather than focusing on priestly marriage or the illicit division of churches and tithes, bishops in 900‒c.1050 were concerned with matters more closely aligned to those occupying their Carolingian counterparts.Footnote 143
5.5 Conclusion
Having looked beyond the Sendhandbuch of Regino of Prüm by centring nine manuscripts with shared texts and traits, we can return to the question asked at the beginning of this chapter: What can we learn from these manuscripts about the priests that staffed local churches and served the communities there during the tenth century? The corpus shows that priests within certain Lotharingian and Eastern Frankish dioceses experienced similar ecclesiastical discipline, applied to local churches and their priests by bishops using the Sendgericht, a kind of travelling judicial synod that operated on a village-by-village basis. Ordines for such gatherings (app. 4.A1) show that the expectation was for priests to be visited annually by their bishop or his representative (usually an archdeacon), who inspected the local church and used specific questions to interview the priest, consulting the laity about the same two subjects. The goal of this medieval ‘mid-term review’ was to confirm the local priest was qualified to guide his flock towards salvation.
If the bishop (or his representative) learned of any misconduct or grievances among the community during his visit, he could try to resolve them in the second part of the visit. The priest would then star in a makeshift episcopal judicial court where he could be prosecutor, suspect or witness, some combination of these, or even all three. Along with the priest, laypeople could also participate in the judicial process if they swore oaths to the bishop, a particularly important feature of proceedings if they were to act as witnesses or informants. A visit by the bishop or his representatives was not a formality but (in theory at least) meant the daily life of the local priest was scrutinised and discipline enforced if he failed in any aspect, a process that involved his family, friends, neighbours and flock. The regulation of the priest’s life would have been reinforced when he attended diocesan synods, where many of the same issues were addressed in a collective setting.
The manuscripts studied in this chapter contain material to help their readers organise episcopal visitations, judicial courts and diocesan synods. As well as ordines for these occasions, the numerous collections of canons included are primarily concerned with providing all the required literature for the bishop to serve as administrator and judge for the diocese. For local priests, this meant that their superior had a book at hand that allowed him to impose a model of rather strict ecclesiastical discipline based on the authority of canon law, episcopal statutes, and penitentials (app. 4.B‒D). Did bishops use these books? Even if we are not able to tell how these books were used exactly, the numerous tables of contents (app. 4.E) found throughout the corpus, alongside other signs of use and later additions made to the manuscripts, indicate that we can certainly imagine them in the hands of bishops, or archdeacons acting as their representatives.
These books therefore present us with a framework for how direct contact between the priest and the bishop took place. They were not produced as a thought exercise but intended for practical use and hands-on engagement between bishop and priest, confronting the latter with what was expected of him. These requirements did not differ much from those of previous generations, not least because Carolingian-era capitula that conveyed episcopal expectations of priests continued to be copied and read. The lack of evidence for the fresh creation of comparable texts suggests that the norms of these earlier works were still relevant and useful for tenth- and eleventh-century bishops; we might infer that priests’ knowledge and skills were very similar to those of their ninth-century predecessors.Footnote 144 What had changed was that, through the Sendgericht, bishops had developed novel methods to communicate these established ideas.
To be a tenth-century priest in regions where bishops undertook the Sendgericht meant performing the ministry in an environment with tighter supervision, more ecclesiastical discipline than in the ninth century and more face-to-face contact with the diocesan administration. The books that facilitated this change did not appear everywhere at the same time, since extant manuscripts were first composed in the Western Frankish kingdom in the late ninth century and only appeared further east during the second half of the tenth century. But the striking similarity between the manuscripts in the corpus allows us to see the adoption of the model of the episcopal handbook, with its shared contents and shared traits, in Lotharingia and the Western Frankish kingdom as well as the Eastern Frankish empire. Whether these practices were fundamentally different from those in the previous century seems doubtful. Rather, it seems to be an intensified continuation of the policies already implemented under the Carolingians. The structural elements of organised Christendom, such as the presence of local priests in a church who were kept to a certain standard and the regular payment of tithes, all remained in place and were reinforced via the Sendgericht, as well as by the local synod. We have to differentiate, therefore, between change experienced at the level of the political elite during the tenth century and that of the people attending the local church. The occasional visits of the bishop, who came to check on the priest and administer justice, represent a form of order and continuity that make Regino’s designation of the early tenth century as ‘dangerous times’ (periculosa tempora) feel like an exaggeration.Footnote 145
Even after the tenth century, the material found in the corpus kept being integrated into new collections. Burchard of Worms’ Decretum, for instance, includes large portions of the material listed in Appendix 4 and also drew on Regino of Prüm’s Sendhandbuch.Footnote 146 Other texts, such as the Sermo synodalis and the Augsburger Sendordnung (with its questionnaires), became part of the Collectio duodecim partium, a collection likely composed at Freising in the early eleventh century.Footnote 147 The way these collections were assembled and their choice of sources did not differ much from the handbooks we have examined in this chapter. The Decretum and the Collectio duodecim partium are both examples of eleventh-century collections that provided bishops with important tools for standardizing judicial procedure and providing pastoral care but also, as illustrated by the material they adopted, with a guide to the organisation of the Sendgericht. Much like Regino, Burchard and the scribes of the Collectio duodecim partium were not reinventing the wheel, but participating in a tradition of episcopal handbooks that by the time they wrote was well established. The incorporation of the material from the corpus in these collections shows its broad availability and apparent effectiveness.
Indeed, when Burchard’s Decretum itself became a source for excerpts dealing with the performance of the priestly office and the liturgy, the process we have observed here simply continued during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Its frequent pairing with the Admonitio synodalis shows that the practice of composing practical handbooks for bishops was sustained.Footnote 148 The legacy of the episcopal handbooks discussed in this chapter is, then, that the expectations priests had to meet and the manner in which ecclesiastical discipline was imposed on them became an integral part of their office for centuries to come.
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