Tithes in the Long 10^th Century

1. Introduction

The concept of ‘Gregorian reform’ has significantly structured research on Latin Europe in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The concept invokes a mass of interlinked goals and historical processes: the detachment of the papacy from the grip of the urban Roman aristocracy, the “papstgeschichtliche Wende” ^[1], the rejection of Nicolaitism and simony, and the striving for ‘liberty of the church’ ( libertas ecclesiae ) ^[2], including the idea that laymen should no longer dispose of churches and ecclesiastical land ^[3]. While the label is still common in both historiography and research, as a historiographical model and analytical concept ‘Gregorian reform’ has come under criticism. Justifiably so, since the attribute ‘Gregorian’ puts too much focus on Pope Gregory VII and masks other actors and their interests. The concept of ‘reform’, as used by historians, is not to be found in contemporary evidence: the actors of the decades around 1100 did not strive for reform; the category was not even available to their thinking. Nor is ‘reform’ a helpful category for historical analysis: the term tempts us to narrate a dichotomous history of the eleventh and twelfth centuries as a long conflict between ‘reformers’ and ‘opponents of reform’. It mixes economic, social, legal and political phenomena of very different kinds into a mishmash, instead of precisely clarifying the historical effectiveness and consequences of each of these phenomena. The many processes of change historians can describe using the concept of reform are extremely diverse, indeed: not only the return to an original state, imagined as an ideal, but also social, economic and religious transformations of all kinds. However, the concept tends to mask all changes before the moment of ‘reform’; it positions the period before not as one of change and dynamism, but as a stasis that required change. Moreover, the concept is normative: in narratives, the ‘reformers’ often appear as the good guys, their opponents as outdated ( and the ‘losers’ during ‘reform’ tend to remain in the shadow of history ^[4] ).

For all these reasons, the concept of ‘reform’ has been criticised by different scholars and from different angles: the spectrum of critics ranges from Gerd Tellenbach ^[5] and Julia Barrow ^[6] to Harald Sellner ^[7], Marco Krätschmer ^[8] and more besides ^[9]. The aim of this paper is therefore not to criticise – or reconceptualise ^[10] – the ‘Gregorian reform’ yet again. Instead, I would like to take a fresh look at one of the many fields of research that have so far been structured by this concept: namely, the handling of revenues accruing to local churches, especially the handling of tithes. What can we say about the history of tithing if we no longer think along the lines of a ‘Gregorian reform’?

2. Tithes in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages

Already in Late Antiquity Christians were supposed to give the tenth part of all their income to God and his churches. Indeed, tithing is well attested as a norm and practice in the West during the fifth and sixth centuries ^[11]. Caesarius of Arles preached on tithes in great detail in the first half of the sixth century ^[12], as did Eligius of Noyon in the seventh century ^[13]. Gregory of Tours considered tithing to be a well-established practice ^[14]. The Council of Mâcon in 585 even threatened any Christian who did not give tithes with excommunication ^[15]. Tithes were to be given in kind, not in money ^[16]. Although we cannot say exactly how many Christians adhered to the rules, the decima undoubtedly formed an important source of income for many ecclesiastical institutions in the early Middle Ages ^[17]. It is essential to remember, however, that tithing was never the only source of income for churches and clergy; they also had landed property, and income from donations and oblationes of the faithful.

Up to the time of Charlemagne’s reign ( 768–814 ), it was not regulated to which church a person had to give the tenth of their income. Only in the first years of the ninth century was a close connection between baptismal churches and tithes established: from then on, the faithful had to give their tithes to the church in which they received the Eucharist and had their children baptised ^[18]. There was one exception, however: from the second decade of the ninth century onwards, ecclesiastical institutions were allowed to keep the tithes produced on their demesne lands. Normally, these so-called ‘Salzehnten’ were allocated to the institution’s hospital and maintenance of the poor. At some point around 850 lay church owners were granted a similar right: they, too, were now allowed to give the tithes of their demesnes to their own churches, instead of to the baptismal church where they had their children baptised ^[19].

Much older were the regulations in canons and papal decretals regarding the question of how tithes were to be distributed once they had been given. In 496, Pope Gelasius had determined that the bishop, the clergy, the poor and the church fabric should each be given one quarter of the income ^[20]. The council of Orléans in 511 and a couple of Spanish councils of the sixth and seventh centuries, on the other hand, provided for a division of the tithe into thirds, for the bishop, the clergy, and the maintenance of the church buildings respectively ^[21].

In German research on local churches and the history of tithing, Ulrich Stutz’s work on so called ‘Eigenkirchen’ ( proprietary churches ) has been influential ^[22]. Following Stutz, German historians have told a rather simple story about tithing and how it developed up to the twelfth century. In the Carolingian period, the ‘Eigenkirchen’ were integrated into canon law; during this process, the question of how to deal with tithes from such churches was also tackled. The ‘Capitulare ecclesiasticum’ promulgated by Louis the Pious in 818/819 was considered an important stage of this legal development ^[23]: with this capitulary, so historians thought, the tithes received by proprietary churches came into the hands of the church’s owner ^[24]. In Stutz’s view, it was precisely the prospect of income from tithing that made the building of a church an attractive investment for laymen ^[25]. This lay strategy – so the traditional story runs – significantly shaped the christianisation of the countryside and its ecclesiastical infrastructure. The practice only changed during the ‘Gregorian reform’. For under the flag of the libertas ecclesiae, the reformers now fought against laymen who had church property at their disposal. Thus, the ‘reform’ strongly affected the Eigenkirchen ^[26]. Around 1100, they were legally replaced by two new forms of control over local churches, namely the incorporation of local churches into ecclesiastical institutions such as monasteries and collegial churches, and the ius patronatus of laymen ^[27]. During this legal transformation, the access the laity had to church tithes necessarily changed, too.

I have argued elsewhere that the Carolingian part of this narrative needs to be revised: tithe revenues did not come into the hands of the owners of local churches through any legal process before the tenth century ^[28]. The synod of Koblenz in 922 recalled verbatim the relevant canon of the synods of Meaux and Paris of 845/846: “If laymen have chapels of their own, it is considered foreign to reason and authority that they should receive the tithes themselves and feed their dogs and whores from them. Rather, the priests of the churches should receive the tithes [ … ].” ^[29] In 927, Archbishop Ruotger of Trier and the participants of a synod he convened in Trier still assumed as a matter of course that it was not lay church owners and bishops who were competing over tithes ( as Ulrich Stutz had assumed ), but priests among themselves: no priest should “dare to snatch the owed tithes from another, but let each one be content with his church and his congregation, because it is written: do not do to others what you would not have them do to you.” ^[30] Ruotger and the participants of the Trier synod obviously thought that tithes usually went to the priests of the churches concerned, not to lay church owners.

Moreover, as far as the scattered evidence allows us to see, lay people did not even usurp tithes from their churches in practice, at least not to any great extent: of all the numerous councils of the ninth century, only one held in Metz in 893 discussed such usurpation as a problem ^[31]. This provision, moreover, remained an isolated case. The question was not dealt with intensively at synods in the next decades either. Instead, we continue to see disputes about tithes between priests ( or between priests and ecclesiastical institutions ) in documents well beyond the year 900 ^[32] – a clear indication that it was priests, not lay church owners, who received tithes.

To put it bluntly: there is no ninth-century evidence for widespread competition between laity and clergy over the tithes of local churches ( as famously assumed by Ulrich Stutz ). Up to the time around 900, it was common for priests who ran baptismal churches to have tithes at their disposal, which usually came in kind. One third or one quarter of this income was to remain with the priest himself; the other parts went to the bishop, the poor and possibly the church fabric. Against this background, it is necessary to have a fresh look at the further development of tithing in the tenth and early eleventh centuries. The concept of ‘Gregorian reform’ has seduced researchers into interpreting the debate of the later eleventh century as a reaction to a structure that had already existed for centuries, essentially since the Carolingian period. Recent research on the long ninth century, however, suggests that – at least regarding tithes in lay hands – it was only in the course of the tenth and early eleventh centuries that new practices emerged which then increasingly came under criticism from around 1050 onwards. How did this process take place?

East of the Rhine, in the realm of the Ottonians and Salians, there are only a few places where the documentary tradition from the long tenth century allows an investigation of tithing practices. The diocese of Freising, with its large stock of ‘Traditionsnotizen’, stands out as an exceptional archive in this period and will therefore form the starting point here ^[33]. In a second step, I shall compare the handling of tithes in the diocese of Freising with the development in the diocese of Mâcon, which also has a dense documentary tradition for the same period, transmitted in the cartularies of the monastery of Cluny ^[34] and the cathedral church of Saint-Vincent ^[35].

The selection of these two dioceses is primarily guided by the richness of the source material in both locations. It is difficult to judge to what extent the archives of Freising and Mâcon are representative of the ( post- )Carolingian world: we have to reckon with processes of regionalisation in the long tenth century. Therefore, while the findings presented here are probably characteristic for Bavaria and Burgundy, future research will clarify whether similar findings emerge from the much more sparse charter transmission of, for example, Provence, Normandy or Saxony.

3. Freising

In the Freising documents of the eighth and early ninth centuries, church tithes are almost entirely absent. This silence is eloquent: in the eighth century, the tithe was not a right that was tied to certain churches. Every Christian had to give the tenth part of his income, but was allowed to decide for himself which church( es ) would receive it. Therefore, the individual church had no fixed tithing income, and certainly no right to tithes. There was only a prospect, based on experience, of receiving such donations from the faithful. There was apparently little reason to mention this uncertain and fluctuating tithe income in legal documents: some tithes were to be expected at every church, but their amount could not be exactly planned ^[36].

This changed under Charlemagne, when tithes were linked exclusively to baptismal churches. Tithes thus became a fixed source of income for a very specific group of churches beyond the bishop’s see ^[37]. At the same time, the income from tithes ( notwithstanding minor fluctuations year-on-year ) became easier to anticipate. This had an advantage, not least for the bishops themselves: the new arrangement made it easier for them to keep track of which churches in their diocese owed them a share of the tithe. It also made the amount of this share predictable; and it made it easier to check whether the faithful had given the tithe in the usual amount. In the ‘breve commemoratorium’ of 842, which lists the accessories and the income of the church of Bergkirchen in great detail, it is noted: “and there are nine villę who give tithes to that church” ^[38]; it must have been obvious how much income per year this meant, at least approximately.

However, there was little reason to mention the tithe in charters documenting some form of legal transfer, since the right of tithing was exclusively tied to baptismal churches. In the very few cases in which a decima is mentioned in Freising documents from the earlier part of the ninth century, it is unclear whether the word means church tithes, or a landlord’s levy of ten percent ( or even simply the tenth part of an estate ^[39] ). This problem concerns the earliest possible mention of a tithe in a ninth-century Freising document: according to this notice, dating from 28 April 842, the priest Hrafolt gave his estate in Berghofen to Freising cathedral; a local church, however, is not mentioned at all. In addition, Hrafolt had it documented that ipsa decima de Presinchiricha [ Preisenberg or Preisenkirchen? ] ad opus senioris nostri redeat ^[40]. The words senior noster could perhaps have meant God here. But was the decima a church tithe when there is no mention of a church in the document? Or did Hrafolt simply transfer a landlord’s tax of ten percent?

In the following decades until the end of the ninth century, only two Freising charters possibly mention church tithes. The first transaction dates from 858. In that year, one Willihelm transferred his entire estate in Rott am Inn to Freising; in return, he received coloniam I et III casarum decimam as beneficium from the Freising church ^[41]. A local church – and this is important – is not mentioned in this document; so it is quite conceivable that Willihelm simply received a farm and a lord’s fee from three other farms as a benefice.

The second transaction in which a tithe is mentioned is clearer: between 860 and 875, Bishop Anno of Freising exchanged property with the nobilis vir Liutfrid. This Liutfrid received a church, a farm and a house in the place Sigmertshausen, plus three mancipia ( Hruodhar and his two children ), as well as arable land, meadows and forest. In return Liutfrid gave a house in Feldmoching, with a farm and three mancipia ( named Hiltiperht, Unfrid and Rihholt ), plus two storehouses, arable land, meadows, and a forest: “And for the church he conveyed to the house of Saint Mary [ i. e. the cathedral church of Freising ] in the same place two hobae and a mill. But this was done on condition that the tithe from that church should revert to the power of the bishop.” ^[42]

Bishop Anno thus expressly excluded the right to tithing, which the church in Sigmertshausen had enjoyed so far, from the exchange. Or to put it more pointedly, Anno diminished the rights of the local church by severing its connection with tithe revenues. This was probably an economic disadvantage for the priest in Sigmertshausen, who could now no longer enjoy his share of the tithe income. Moreover, the condition of the grant made it more costly for the new owner to maintain the church, since part of the tithe could no longer be used for the upkeep of the building, and so Liutfrid had to pay personally for the church’s furnishings. Thus, the episcopal retention of tithe revenues had negative consequences for the value of the church, and presumably in future transactions Liutfrid would receive less for his church.

Another example of a Freising bishop separating the tithe from a church to which it was supposed to flow is provided by a document of Bishop Waldo dating from between 895 and 899. At that time, Waldo exchanged property with a nobilis vir named Cotascalc. Waldo received a farm in Sulzrain and in return gave Cotascalc “a church in Inhausen and the tithe of Inhausen belonging to Haimhausen.” ^[43] Inhausen is a good 20 kilometres southwest of Freising, while Haimhausen is its closest neighbouring village, only two kilometres away. Bishop Waldo now detached the tithes from Inhausen, which had previously flowed to Haimhausen from this church, apparently for the purpose of transferring them to furnish the church of Inhausen. This increased the value of the church in Inhausen, which Anno exchanged for the farm in Sulzrain; at the same time, however, it perhaps also clarified the tithing practice for the neighbouring villages and their two churches.

These two exchanges, which Anno and Waldo conducted in the last third of the ninth century, are the earliest indications that bishops of Freising were breaking the fixed, regular connection between baptismal church and tithe income, and either retained the tithe in whole or in part for themselves, or transferred it to another local church. It is important to note, however, that in this period the bishops did not transfer church tithes detached from their church, and laymen only received tithes ‘in a package’, as an endowment of a church. It is by no means given that the lay recipients could access the tithe in these cases: if the owners adhered to the rules, the church tithe facilitated the maintenance of the church building, for which the owner of a church was responsible, and only increased the overall value of ‘their’ church in future transactions. The tithes stayed in the hands of the priest who performed his ecclesiastical ministerium at the church.

From the last years of the ninth century onwards, mentions of tithes as endowments of a church become much more frequent in the Freising material. It seems reasonable to see this as an indication that the tithe revenues were now less firmly tied to a certain type of church. Thus, it became necessary to mention the tithe explicitly when a church changed hands. The earliest example of this in the Freising material concerns the church in Mauern ( about 20 kilometres northwest of Freising ), which the nobilis vidua Irmburc gave to Freising in 899. The document lists the furnishings of this wealthy church with unusual precision. These included bells, altars, reliquaries, chalices, patens, and chasubles ( one made of silk, one of linen, one of wool ), as well as other liturgical vestments, crosses, a wheel chandelier, curtains and several books ( two missals, a lectionary, an antiphonary, a gradual, and a liber omeliarum, a book containing sermons ^[44] ). Before the associated farm, house, granary, lands ( including a piece of the bank of the river Isar several kilometres away ) and finally also 20 mancipia are listed, it is expressly noted that these are further accessories belonging to the church in Mauern: et omnem decimationem ^[45].

In the course of the tenth century, it became more and more usual to specify whether a church was granted with or without a tithe ( cum decima/sine decima ). The first time this information is found in Freising documents is from the period of Bishop Lambert ( sed. 937–957 ): in an exchange, which was copied in two versions into the Freising ‘Codex commutationum’ under Bishop Egilbert ( † 1039 ) ^[46], the specification ecclesiam sine decima is only found in the more detailed version, perhaps copied verbatim from the original ^[47]. Under Lambert, however, this formulation ecclesia sine/cum decima is encountered more frequently ^[48]. And from his later years, i. e. from 955–957, comes the first evidence for the formulation ecclesia decimata ( “church equipped with tithes” ^[49] ). From then on, this designation became common in Freising material until well into the eleventh century.

Under Bishop Abraham of Freising, the previous practice was continued ^[50]. Significantly, however, even when a church as a whole was excluded from the exchange transaction, it was now explicitly stated that the place in question was exchanged absque aecclesia cum decima ^[51] or absque aecclesia et decima et hoba presbiterali ^[52]. It was therefore no longer self-evident that where the church was excluded from the transaction, the hoba for the priest or the tithes of the church in question were also excluded. The connection between church, tithe, and priest’s hoba was dissolved; each component had to be separately identified as lying outside the remit of exchange.

Furthermore, in the second half of the tenth century it became customary not only to include the tithe endowment in the document, but also to indicate precisely the number of farms ( domus ) which had to give the tithes. In an exchange between Bishop Abraham and the nobilis miles Altuom, roughly dated to between 957 and 972, Altuom received from the bishopric, among other goods, an aecclesia cum decima X domorum ^[53]. In the same period the nobilis vir Selprat received a church in Moosach cum domibi [ sic! ] VII decimata ^[54], but only until the end of his life, and those of his wife Uuirdiga and his son Ellinricus; afterwards, the church was to revert to the diocese. The nobilis vir Adalhart received in an exchange from Abraham, among other things, aecclesiam unam cum XXVI domibus decimatam in Haindlfing, but here too only for a limited period comprising his lifetime and those of his consort Perahtnia and son Ruodpert ^[55].

The new precision in the recording of tithe rights is interesting in that it provides some insight into the size of Freising’s parishes during the second half of the tenth century ^[56]. Unfortunately, we do not know exactly how many people lived in a domus in the diocese of Freising. If we estimate a peasant nuclear family plus servants to be about ten people, then the spectrum of parish sizes indirectly documented in the Freising material ranges from Moosach’s c. 70 members to the parish of Haindlfing, which included c. 260 people, or that of the church in Zeizpoldesberga, which in the years 972/976 was said to be “receiving tithes from 30 houses” and therefore could have been responsible for a flock of about 300 people ^[57]. In addition to the enhanced precision of the description, there is another novelty: the oldest description of the boundaries of a parish in the diocese of Freising dates from the last decade of the tenth century. It begins with a list of the villae, quę decimatę sunt ad Ekkilinchouun ( Hohenegglkofen, around 40 km northeast of Freising ): the description outlines 14 places by name that had to give tithes to the church in Hohenegglkofen ^[58].

Further examples confirming the trends described so far could easily be cited from the Freising material ^[59]. Thus, as an interim result, it is possible to infer that in the course of the tenth century it became less and less self-evident in this Bavarian diocese that tithes were a standard endowment of baptismal churches alone. They could now be detached from such churches, either wholly or in part. Accordingly, it became important to explicitly note in documents whether a church had been granted “with tithes” or “without tithes”, or whether it was an ecclesia decimata. And it became important to record exactly how many farms or villae ^[60] gave tithes to a particular church.

Between the years 972–976, we see the first Freising document in which a church tithe alone ( i. e. detached from a church ) was awarded to a layman, in exchange for other goods. Bishop Abraham exchanged with his vasallus, the nobilis vir Dietric, the decimam, quae pertinebat ad aecclesiam inferioris loci Neninpah ( Großnöhbach ). In return, Abraham received a number of Dietric’s estates in the same place and also in Hetzenhaus. Dietric in turn received the church tithe in Großnöhbach explicitly “in perpetuity”, and with permission to “do with it whatever he pleases.” ^[61] Abraham proceeded similarly in a contemporary exchange with a certain Gozhalm: the nobilis vir received not only a church in Johannrettenbach together with its tithes, but also a third of the church tithes in Reichenkirchen, in proprietatem habendum et exinde quicquid libuerit faciendum. In return for the church and the portion of the tithes, Gozhalm gave the bishopric of Freising one hoba and three mills as well as meadows and forests in the village of Maltein in Carinthia ^[62].

Thus, by the time of Abraham’s episcopacy at the latest, a baptismal church and its tithes no longer necessarily came as a ‘package’. There were local churches with or without tithing rights; church tithes could be completely or only partially detached from one church and given to another; churches that were in principle entitled to tithes could also be given away without them. As a consequence, a church tithe ( or a portion ) could now also be given to a layman, and thus detached from any church. It was therefore now sometimes worth stating explicitly in a charter what was already regulated in the canons of church law: that the priest was to retain one third of the tithe. Bishop Abraham followed this explicitly when he made an exchange with the nun Helmpirch concerning the tithe of the church at Thulbach in the late 970s or early 980s: Helmpirch received aecclesiam I decimatam – excepta tertia parte quę presbiterum contingit ^[63].

A local church was now obviously perceived as a bundle of different rights and sources of income of various kinds: the church building itself, its accessories of liturgical equipment, the duty-free and service-free farm for the priest ( sometimes called hoba presbiteralis ), which had been prescribed since 818/819, the other accessories of farms, land and people, as well as tithes ( or only parts of them, such as a third for the priest or for the poor ^[64] ). All these could now be thought of as individual components of a church and therefore be assessed individually ( or even only in parts ) in legal transactions. Such components could now even be given as future options: in the years around the millennium, Bishop Gottschalk of Freising received five hides in Allershausen from two free brothers called Ediramnus and Volchardus. In exchange, Gottschalk gave them an abandoned place called Haarkirchen, where a church had once existed, together with the tithes of the small village of Kempfenhausen and of the abandoned Haarkirchen – but only “if a church was constructed there” ( si ęcclesia fuerit ibi constructa ) ^[65]. Historians have assumed that the prospect of receiving tithes had motivated lay landowners to build local churches from the early ninth century onwards. While there is no evidence from Freising during the Carolingian period to support this assumption, Gottschalk’s deal from around the year 1000 is exactly this kind of interaction.

Thus, in the diocese of Freising during the tenth century, tithes became a commodity with which business could be done, and which could be exchanged for other equivalent sources of income. Two things are important to our understanding of this process. First, it was initiated not by the unlawful alienation of church property by the laity, but by transactions concluded by the bishops themselves. At least in the case of Freising, however, all these transactions ( which ultimately brought tithes into lay hands ) were exchanges. This is significant for the simple reason that while church law had forbidden any alienation of church property since Late Antiquity, exchanges had been expressly excluded from this prohibition ^[66].

Sometime between 1024 and 1031, Bishop Egilbert carried out an exchange with Abbot Arnold of the nearby Weihenstephan abbey. In this exchange, Weihenstephan received not only ten hobae of censuales – but also decimam ęcclesiae ad Chamara ( but not the church itself ). In return, Freising received an almost equal number of hobae of censuales ( namely eleven ) and in addition, a mill in Freimann ^[67]. The tithes in question must therefore have seemed to the contracting parties, namely the advocates of the two churches and the fideles who recommended the deal, to be roughly as lucrative as the yield of the mill in Freimann.

4. Mâcon

The vast majority of the documents of the cathedral church of Saint-Vincent in Mâcon and of the monastery of Cluny have not come down to us in the original, but only in copies ^[68]. Despite this difference in transmission, the documentary traditions of these two ecclesiastical institutions in the Mâconnais give an overall picture for the long tenth century remarkably similar to that for Freising ^[69]. However, the previous findings can be supplemented and sharpened in some respects using the material from the region around Mâcon ^[70].

Here, too, we have to wait until the late ninth century for the first documents in which church tithes are mentioned. At this stage, tithes became a component of a church, which was listed separately in legal transactions. In other ways, too, we see a similar picture as in the Freising material: for in the diocese of Mâcon, too, the bishops themselves started to sever the regular connection between baptismal church and tithes by reallocating them to other churches. Sometime between 885 and 926, for example, the nobilissimus vassallus Ratbert asked Bishop Gerard of Mâcon ^[71] “that he grant something of a parish to his chapel consecrated in honour of St. Stephen.” ^[72] What was meant by aliquid parrochie was the tithe of three villae, which were listed by name. However, in this case we rather see a kind of internal reallocation of tithes, which ultimately remained at the disposal of the same baptismal church, because bishop Gerard also determined that St. Stephen’s chapel should be subordinated to the vicus ( i. e. the baptismal church ^[73] ) of St. Martin and its respective priest. And if this subordination was ever revoked, the tithes were to “revert” ( redeant ) to St. Martin ^[74].

A similar example is attested for the early 930s from the cartulary of Cluny: the young monastic community built a chapel in the villa Solustriaco ( Solutré ). Bishop Berno of Mâcon consecrated this church in 932 or 933, and at Abbot Odo’s request, Berno also endowed it with tithes from Cluny’s estates in Solutré itself as well as half of the tithes from Les Bulands ^[75].

A third example of a comparable kind concerns the nobilis vir Teotgrinus, who in 907 asked Bishop Gerard for permission to build a chapel on his own land ( in proprio fundo ) in the diocese of Mâcon, which he would then give to Saint-Vincent. The bishop agreed, and on 25 September of the same year Gerard was able to consecrate the new church in honour of Saint Mary. Moreover, he transferred the tithes of three villae, which lay in two different parishes ( parrochiae ), to the chapel. In order to endow the newly erected chapel given to the bishopric, Gerard thus interfered with the tithe rights of two older churches and transferred a – probably rather modest – part of their tithes to the new chapel of Saint Mary ^[76]. In this case, however, there is no indication of the new chapel being made legally subordinate to one of the older churches, whose tithe income had been reduced.

The allocation of tithes, however, did not only serve to endow newly built chapels. The bishops of Mâcon also used the reallocation of tithes as an instrument to stabilise the finances of run-down churches. One such case appears in a document from 950 and concerned the chapel of Saint-Vincent in Sologny ( Solociacus ): the cathedral canon Teuquardus from Mâcon had received the chapel as a precarial grant; but the building had fallen into disrepair and the “inhabitants and parishioners” ( incole et parrochiani ) no longer paid “the owed honour” to the church. So Teuquardus moved the church to a more suitable place and rebuilt it in a better way. He asked Bishop Maimbod of Mâcon ^[77] to consecrate the new church building. The bishop confirmed, among other things, “all the tithes as his predecessors had granted there” ( universas decimas sicut antecessores sui ibi condonaverant ) ^[78]. We lack the sources for these earlier transfers; but in this case, too, it is evident that earlier bishops of Mâcon had themselves transferred tithe rights to a capella. In 950, the confirmation of this income was obviously important to ensure the future of the chapel.

Even clearer is a case from 926, attested by a document from the archives of Cluny but which concerns the diocese of Autun: Bishop Heriveus of Autun had learned from a man named Giso that the latter had a church on his own estate in the villa Tervico within the diocese of Autun, which had become run-down and dilapidated “through the lack of care on the part of the priests” ( incuria sacerdotum ). Giso now asked that the church be endowed with tithes and that his nephew Anno be ordained there to ensure better worship ^[79]. Bishop Heriveus granted this request – but unfortunately without specifying in detail which tithes he allocated to Giso’s church.

In the first half of the tenth century, then, tithes in the diocese of Mâcon ( and that of Autun ) were also released from their fixed connection to baptismal churches; and here, too, the bishops themselves started to disconnect tithes from churches and reallocate them. This new practice could lead to conditions that were quite irregular compared to the legal norms of the time of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious: a document from 906 reports a dispute between the provost and canons of Saint-Vincent in Mâcon on the one hand and the monks of the monastery of Saint Oyen-de-Soux on the other. Both parties claimed for themselves a chapel dedicated to Saint Vincentius in villa Gerii. The dispute was mediated by Archbishop Austerius of Lyon and Bishop Gerard of Mâcon; the canons of Saint-Vincent finally prevailed. In the charter documenting the legal procedure, the term capella is used almost synonymously with the tithes received by this chapel. These tithes were to go in usus fratrum, that is, to the canons of Saint-Vincent for their use ^[80].

It is remarkable that the chapel had tithes at its disposal at all. It is all the more remarkable that these tithes were not to be used for the building maintenance of the chapel or its clergy, but for the canons of the cathedral church of Mâcon. If we wished to reconcile this with the legal norms of the ninth century, then we would have to postulate that these tithes were precisely the share that modern research refers to as the ‘Salzehnt’, that is the tithes that accrued on demesne land and could be used by ecclesiastical institutions for the upkeep of a hospital and for the care of the poor ^[81]. It is also conceivable, however, that tithing practices in Mâcon in the early tenth century had already departed quite far from earlier Carolingian norms, and that the tithes allocated to the capella were in fact to be used exclusively by the canons of Saint-Vincent.

A no less ‘irregular’ picture is shown by a precarial grant from the 970s. With this document, bishop John of Mâcon ^[82] granted the vir nobilissimus Theotbert the tithes of three villae of his diocese. No churches are mentioned, only the decimae, but they were obviously understood here as a pars pro toto, meaning also the churches themselves. In return, Theotbert only had to give paratarum sive eulogiarum servitium, i. e. dues in money or kind which were to be handed over at synods or during visitations for the bishop’s accommodation ^[83]. The use of the word decimae as a synonym for churches suggests that the sanctuaries were primarily perceived as a source of income because they generated tithes.

As in the diocese of Freising, the Mâconnais tithes ( or parts of them ) were increasingly traded without any connection to a church during the later tenth and the eleventh centuries. Two trends can be observed in Burgundy, however, that we cannot see in Bavaria:

( 1 ) The lists of sources of income for churches become even more differentiated in the Mâconnais documents from the eleventh century onwards. Thus, sepulturae ( burial dues ) and oblationes ( ‘voluntary’ gifts from the faithful ) are also mentioned as sources of income ^[84].

( 2 ) From about the middle of the eleventh century, the cathedral chapter and the bishops of Mâcon sought to acquire for themselves tithes which had come into the hands of laymen. Quite a few of these documents seem to be the result of conflicts over tithe rights, even in those cases where the charters’ authors dress up the acquisition of the tithes as a voluntary donation to Saint-Vincent. The act of laymen holding tithes tended to be portrayed as unlawful and sinful, their ‘return’ to Saint-Vincent as a good deed that served to secure the salvation of souls. Occasionally, however, there is also explicit evidence of the purchase of such tithes by the church of Mâcon. The first documents of this kind date from the time of Bishop Walter of Mâcon ( 1031–1062 ) ^[85]. Until the end of the eleventh century, the vast majority of references to tithes in Mâconnais charters concern the ‘reacquisition’ of tithes by Saint-Vincent and Cluny ^[86].

A good example of this type of document dates from the time of Bishop Landricus of Mâcon, i. e. between 1074 and 1096. Through this charter, Gauserannus and Gauffredus ( as well as his wife Stephania ) returned to the church of Mâcon half of the tithes of the church of Lentiniacus which they had wrongfully appropriated. The restitution was expressly so “that the aforesaid bishop of Mâcon and the canons of the same place absolved these aforesaid [ Gauserannus, Gauffredus and Stephania ] and all their predecessors from the sin which they had committed in wrongfully holding part of the tithes of the aforesaid church of Lentiniacus.” ^[87]

Sometime between 1112 and 1139, a similar repurchase of tithes by the canons was clothed in the garb of a judicially enforced restitution of unlawfully held tithes. The priest Bernard of Sedunus was sued by the canons of Saint-Vincent in Mâcon for having unlawfully appropriated two tithes – namely half of the tithes de Civione minore, which had been given as a precarial grant to milites of the monastery of Cluny; and the tithes held by the parish of St. Martin de Bufferiis in the place called de Auderiis. Bernard was ordered to return the tithes from both places to the canons of Saint-Vincent, although he had apparently received at least half the tithe in Civio as a pledge ( sub occcasione vadimonii ). The charter states that the canons had paid Bernard ten Cluniac solidi for the tithe de terra que vocatur Auderiis. In return, Bernard promised “peace” ( pax ) – et per manum archipresbiterorum tenere affirmavit. The text is not entirely clear at this point, but the priest Bernard seems to have received ten solidi to acknowledge that the tithe of de Auderiis was the property of the canons, while retaining the tithe for his own use ^[88].

A bishop from the time of Charlemagne or Louis the Pious would probably have found at least two things about this document astonishing: firstly, he would most likely have been amazed that the canons could now present the acquisition of tithing rights as ‘restitution’ of unjustly acquired tithes. For according to the norms of the first decades of the ninth century, canons were only entitled to receive tithes within the narrow limits of the ‘Salzehnt’, used for the hospital and for the care of the poor. On the other hand, our time-travelling bishop would probably have frowned at the extent to which the tithes had become a source of economic income that could be used in a wide variety of business transactions. Half a tithe had been given as a precarial grant to milites of another ecclesiastical institution; this part was then in turn passed on by the milites as a pledge to a priest, who in turn could finally ‘refund’ this half tithe in a court case – albeit in a rather complex transaction in which he bought the use of tithes in another place for the price of ten solidi…

5. Conclusion

As we have seen, the church of Mâcon endeavoured to acquire tithing rights from the middle of the eleventh century onwards. This strategy of the bishops and the chapter of the cathedral, however, was a reaction neither to the situation which had been created by the Carolingian ‘reform’ at the time of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, nor to the incorporation of the ‘Eigenkirche’ into canon law, nor to the granting of tithes to the owners of proprietary churches by the ‘Capitulare ecclesiasticum’ of 818/819. The development that prompted this ( re )acquisition from about 1050 onwards was much more recent, and more complex.

It was only towards the end of the ninth century that a process began in Bavaria and in Burgundy, in the course of which the earlier rigid connection between baptismal churches and tithes was broken: at first, bishops themselves transferred tithes ( or shares of tithes ) from existing baptismal churches to newly built houses or to poor and dilapidated churches, in order to provide them with a more solid economic footing and to secure their existence in the longer term. From about the middle of the tenth century onwards, it became therefore conceivable to make the tithe the subject of independent transactions that could be detached from any church, whether in total or in parts. From around 950 onwards, we also see that in documents recording transactions including churches, the various accessories of churches ( and especially their regular income ) were recorded with increasing distinction between them. In the Mâconnais, the triad of decimae, sepulturae, and oblationes became more common in the eleventh century.

In the period traditionally described by scholars as that of the ‘Gregorian reform’, the canons of Saint-Vincent and the bishops of Mâcon endeavoured to ‘reacquire’ tithes – whether through legal proceedings, social pressure, or purchases. Behind this endeavour, however, lay not only the idea of libertas ecclesiae. It is likely that, as in many regions of Europe, in the Mâconnais the population grew and production increased at this time. If this is true, the tithe income, as a 10 % tax on the individual, could have become more economically attractive for the church of Mâcon ( though admittedly we cannot substantiate this with concrete figures ). Moreover, the charters do not always document a reacquisition of tithes in the strict sense of the word: reacquisition only applied to the so-called ‘Salzehnten’, which had already been granted to ecclesiastical institutions in the first quarter of the ninth century. In the later eleventh century, however, tithes that had been allocated to baptismal churches two centuries before might also have ended up in the hands of the cathedral chapter, or of the bishop of Mâcon.

What remained, however, and what was further reinforced by the ( re )acquisition of tithes, was a new idea of what constituted a local church: even after the decades around 1100, contemporaries saw a church as a bundle of rights and revenues, each of which could be transacted individually. Compared to the years around 800 or 850, we can describe this as a process of ‘reification’ of churches and their rights ^[89]. These churches were thus subject to a new conception of their nature, which can also be seen in many other places in the post-Carolingian world. This far-reaching change was to have a strong influence on the further history of the church in the Middle Ages. At least in the dioceses of Freising and Mâcon, it took place not as early as around 800 and not as late as around 1050, but in the first half of the tenth century.