This chapter examines the economic resources to which local priests had access, drawing in particular from evidence from the region around Trier in the Moselle valley and Freising in Bavaria. It traces the sources of income available to these priests, including tithes and oblations, and investigates how these revenues changed in the course of the tenth and early eleventh centuries. On the one hand, the scope for action that priests themselves had at their disposal becomes clear; at the same time, however, the chapter also shows how the various sources of income that existed at a local church were formalised during the period under investigation and could become the subject of increasingly complex transactions.

This chapter offers a definition of a local priest. It explores the normative framework inherited from Late Antiquity that defined their status and regulated their behaviour, but also stresses that the label designates a social fact rather than a specific grade within the Church. To illustrate the diversity that the term encompasses and the methodological challenges that studying these people involves, the chapter offers four case studies of particular local priests in different parts of the former Carolingian empire, from Saxony through to southern France.

This chapter looks at local priests and their kinship relations, as recorded chiefly in archives from what is today France. The historiographical focus in this area has been on priests and their wives, but this chapter instead begins with priests and their parents, with a special focus on their mothers. The chapter then turns to priests and their children and wives, and the evidence for how priests made arrangements for these relatives, before turning to their uncles and nephews. The chapter concludes with a study of priests’ families as church owners. Overall, it argues that priests’ kinship ties were not noticeably different from those of the laity, with the possible exception of relations with their mothers, and that change in how these priests feature in charters from the mid eleventh century could be due to shifts in documentary practice.

The conclusion summarises the findings of the book, using two case studies of composite local priests in 900 and 1050 to bring out some of the key changes that had taken place over this period in how the Church functioned at the local level. It considers the causes that lay behind these changes and explores the historiographical implications of these findings.

This chapter investigates how local priests related to their superiors by examining a set of handbooks for bishops that were made in the Rhineland and surrounding regions. These handbooks have been overshadowed in the historiography by Regino of Prüm’s well-known Sendhandbuch. However, Regino’s handbook was not the only collection of material available, and this chapter highlights nine manuscripts that – it argues – were composed for the organisation of the episcopal Sendgericht. Through these itinerary courts of law that these manuscripts point to, bishops imposed discipline on priests in their diocese, who during the tenth and eleventh centuries experienced an increasing degree of control that they had not known before.

The introduction presents the aim and themes of the book within its historiographical framework. It accounts for the relative obscurity of local priests in historical research on the period by examining their role in three influential historiographical approaches and explains the way in which the study of this group of clergymen can improve our understanding of the tenth and early eleventh centuries. As well as setting out the structure of the rest of the book, this introduction provides an overview of the sources examined in the following chapters and briefly discusses the study’s geographical scope.

This chapter looks at moments when local priests came together. It focuses on the diocesan synod, the regular meeting which in theory all priests in the diocese were supposed to attend. Drawing on different kinds of evidence, including liturgies, charters, sermons, hagiography and poems, it argues that local priests attended these meetings more frequently than has been supposed, and examines what sort of things they might have learned and experienced at the synod. It argues for a change in the nature of the diocesan synod from the year 1000, as the occasion became more ceremonial, perhaps as part of episcopal strategies of representation, but perhaps also simply in response to the rising numbers of attendees, as the Church network continued to expand and consolidate.