Introduction

Thanks to a great deal of recent research, the vital importance of the humble local priest in Carolingian Francia is becoming ever clearer ^[1]. These priests were the “bottlenecks of local correctio”, in Carine van Rhijn’s famous phrase, and the “men in the middle”, because they were the chief and necessary mechanism through whom royal and episcopal initiatives could reach the majority of the population ^[2]. They were also, in conceptual terms, an innovation. As David d’Avray has recently emphasised, the Late Antique Christian legacy centred on bishops and their clerical staff in urban contexts, paying relatively little attention to the vast rural worlds surrounding the cities ^[3]. Carolingian Francia was in contrast a rural empire in both practice and thought. The notion of a network of thousands of small churches embedded in rural settlements, each one staffed by a resident priest along with a small team of assistants, was to a large extent an invention of the Frankish church under the Carolingian rulers and their episcopal advisors. Recent work on surviving priests’ handbooks has shown how far this network really was a lived reality, not just a paper scheme dreamt up at church councils ^[4].

What, though, happened to these local priests after the structures of Carolingian rule were challenged? How did the network, and the role itself, develop in the absence of the political framework which had worked so hard to establish it? The question has traditionally been approached through the lens of the ‘proprietary church’ narrative proposed by Ulrich Stutz. According to this narrative, lay landlords, with the tacit blessing of Carolingian rulers, steadily tightened their grip on rural churches until dislodged by the heroic struggle of ‘Gregorian’ reformers, who gradually restored churches to ecclesiastical control. However, it has been argued by Steffen Patzold that this concept of the ‘proprietary church’ was a systematisation of the nineteenth century, not of the tenth or eleventh centuries ^[5]. In reality, bishops never surrendered jurisdictional claims over local churches, and owning a church never brought full exemption from episcopal oversight.

In the light of these doubts about the proprietary church system and new research on the ideological centrality of the local priest to the Carolingian programme, the question of what happened to these priests in the tenth century has become urgent, since it is essential both to understanding the nature of the Carolingian legacy and for articulating how this legacy linked to the heated debates about the location of authority within the church in the later eleventh century. It is this question which our research programme, ‘Priests in a Post-Imperial World’, jointly funded by the UK’s ‘Arts and Humanities Research Council’ and Germany’s ‘Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’, is committed to answering, and we are pleased to present the first results of this research programme here as a set of four connected articles.

The first two articles concentrate on the evidence for the lived reality experienced by local priests in the tenth century in post-Carolingian territories. In her article, Alice Hicklin looks at the evidence for how local priests were embedded in kinship networks in the post-Carolingian French countryside. The question of local priests and kinship has usually been approached through the lens of the eleventh-century debates over celibacy. These debates are often interpreted as reflecting the attempts of the institutional church, centred on Rome, to wrest local clergy out of kinship networks, not least to inhibit the appropriation of church assets by family groups. In her article, however, Hicklin shifts the focus away from the vertical lines of succession that have dominated the historiography, and towards instead the horizontal forms of kinship that are in fact much more prominent in the charter evidence. Here it is priests’ siblings that take the limelight. These kinship groupings were not inherently detrimental to effective pastoral care, but can instead be read as demonstrating how far local priests were an established part of the rural social landscape.

In his article, Steffen Patzold looks at evidence for how these local priests were financially supported through the tithe. The tithe was an old levy, already well documented in the sixth century; but soon after 800, it was exclusively reallocated to baptismal churches by Charlemagne, creating a key resource for local churches. By the late eleventh century, it is clear that many local tithes were in the hands of secular lords, to the chagrin of several vociferous clerics. But when and how had this process of alienation begun? Against the traditional interpretation which locates its roots already in the ninth century, Patzold uses charter evidence from Mâcon in Burgundy and Freising in Bavaria to show that this transfer took place rather later. Initially, bishops transferred tithes to support the emergence of new churches; then they began to transfer churches along with their tithes. Only in the course of the tenth century did they begin to confer tithes as independent alienable assets upon secular supporters. The move to ‘restore’ tithes to ecclesiastical control in the late eleventh century was, in other words, aimed at reversing a relatively recent phenomenon.

The final two articles both examine changes in the normative frameworks for local priests in the tenth century. Bastiaan Waagmeester takes a single tenth-century manuscript, Troyes, Médiathèque Jacques-Chirac, Ms 1979, and uses it as a window onto how bishops imposed ecclesiastical discipline on the local priests in their diocese and continued to monitor them. Waagmeester shows how all this manuscript’s contents can be read as helping bishops in this task. He pays particularly close attention to a collection of canon law material in this manuscript, the ‘Collectio 234 capitulorum’, as a textual resource that was designed to help bishops manage their subordinates, and which reveals their priorities in doing so.

Finally, Charles West offers a new assessment of the ‘Admonitio Synodalis’. This is a short work in the form of a sermon that summarised Carolingian-period legislation on the duties and requirements of local priests, and which was copied extremely extensively in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. On the basis of some hitherto overlooked tenth-century manuscript evidence, West suggests that far from representing an almost timeless stability, as its 1964 editor proposed, the ‘Admonitio’ was in fact adapted and shortened in ways that have much to tell us about changing normative frameworks of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Together, these four articles offer a more nuanced picture of local priests in the tenth century, drawing on different and complementary bodies of evidence, and diverse methodological techniques for evaluating this evidence. In so doing, they provide the foundations for a new narrative about the establishment of local pastoral care in the successor states of Carolingian Francia. Local priests stood at the intersection between local communities, in which they lived and from which they drew the resources they needed, and the episcopal supervision which determined expectations around the role, and developed infrastructures for monitoring it. Changes in these relationships affected not only this group of relatively junior clergy, but all the communities and individuals under their care, which is to say the great majority of the population of the Latin West. As our project continues over the next few years, we hope to generate fresh insights into how this intersection developed over time, and to explore the implications for the religious history of medieval Europe more broadly.