When the Church Became the Landlord

Words to Know

Tithe — one tenth of your income or your harvest, given to the church. From an old word meaning tenth.

Capital offense — a crime punished by death.

Mortmain — “the dead hand.” The legal situation of land given to the church: an institution never dies, so the land never comes back out.

Excommunicate — to formally shut someone out of the church.

Start with an ordinary farmer.

It is the year 800. He lives in what you would call France or Germany. He has a field, some animals, and children.

Every year, one tenth of everything he grows goes to the church.

Not as an offering. Not because he decided to. Because it is the law, and men come and collect it.

Here is how that happened.

In the law I was raised on, one tribe out of the twelve — the Levites — was deliberately given no land at all. No fields, no inheritance, nothing to farm. They served at the sanctuary, and they lived on the tenth that the other eleven tribes brought in (Numbers 18:20–21).

Read that twice. The tithe exists because the priests were landless. It is not a tax on the poor to fund a landowner. It is the arrangement that keeps a landowner from existing.

And every third year, the tenth did not go to the priests at all. It was set down inside your own town gates and shared out among four kinds of people: the Levite, the foreigner, the orphan and the widow — that they may eat and be satisfied (Deuteronomy 14:28–29, and again at 26:12). ¹

So hold the picture. A landless priesthood, and one year in three the whole tenth goes to the people with nobody to feed them.

Now watch what it becomes.

In the year 779, Charlemagne made it a tax.

Charlemagne was king of the Franks. At a place called Herstal in 779 he issued a law that turned the tithe from a religious practice into a legal obligation across his empire, collected by royal officers. ^{2 3}

Now ask the question this book keeps asking. What did the king get?

A king does not hand a tenth of a continent to somebody else out of piety. Charlemagne bought three things. He bought an administration, because the only people in his empire who could read, keep accounts and draft a law were churchmen. He bought legitimacy: on Christmas Day in the year 800, in Rome, Pope Leo III put a crown on his head and called him emperor. ⁴ And he bought a way of turning conquered people into taxpayers.

Go deeperHow the capitulary ran, and what it cost Leo

His name was Charles; history remembers him as Charlemagne, Charles the Great. The law he issued at Herstal was a capitulary, which is what his written laws were called.

He ran his empire by sending inspectors out in pairs to check on his counts and his courts, and the standard pair was a count matched with a bishop or an abbot. The church was not only receiving his tax. It was staffing his government.

The legitimacy he bought had a price on the other side too. In 799 Roman factions who wanted Pope Leo III gone attacked him in the street, and he fled north to Charlemagne, who sent him back to Rome under armed protection and settled the matter in his favor. The crown Leo placed on Charlemagne's head the following Christmas was a debt being repaid, not a gift.

The same king forced baptism at the point of a sword.

For about thirty years Charlemagne made war on a people to his north called the Saxons, in what is now northern Germany. They were not Christians, and they would not submit. Here is the chain:

• 772: The war on the Saxons begins.
• 780s: His law for the conquered land, the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, makes refusing baptism a capital offense. Nobody is sure of the exact year. ⁵
• 782: The royal annals record 4,500 Saxon prisoners beheaded in one day at Verden, on the king’s order. ⁶
• 785: The Saxon war leader Widukind gives up and is baptized, with Charlemagne as his godfather.
• 804: The war ends.

Some historians argue that the Verden number is inflated or that a scribe wrote the wrong word. Nobody argues about the law.

Go deeperWhat else the Saxon law made a capital crime

The law did not stop at baptism. It made death the penalty for eating meat during Lent, for burning your dead instead of burying them, for killing a priest or a bishop, and for breaking into a church to steal from it.

The Verden killings followed a Frankish defeat in the Süntel hills; the annals record the beheadings as the king's answer to that loss.

Widukind's baptism was not a private conversion. With Charlemagne standing as his godfather, it was the signature on a surrender.

Now here is the link nobody shows you.

That same Saxon law — the one that made refusing baptism a capital offense — also required the Saxons to pay the tenth. ⁷

Follow the line. Conquest, then baptism, then the tithe. A baptized subject is a taxable subject. The font and the tax roll are the same document.

That is why the two halves of this lesson are one lesson. The sword did not merely spread a religion. It extended a revenue base.

And a man inside his own court said so at the time.

Alcuin was an English scholar whom Charlemagne had brought in to run his school and advise him. He wrote to the king that faith is a thing of the will and cannot be produced by force, and that the tithe being squeezed out of the conquered Saxons was destroying the very faith it was supposed to serve. ⁸

He did not stop it. The law stood. But he is the first name in this unit, and he was writing from the inside, which is the hardest place to write from.

Go deeperWhere Alcuin came from, and the question he asked

Alcuin came from York, and he was the most educated man at Charlemagne's own court, which is exactly why the king wanted him there. He owed the king everything for that position, and he risked it anyway.

He used that standing to ask the king a pointed question: had the apostles themselves ever demanded tithes?

Now here is how the church came to hold the land.

The land came in five ways, and every one of them is on the record.

• Dying men left land to monasteries in return for prayers for their souls, forever.
• Kings and nobles gave estates to bishops and monasteries.
• Land could go in but never come out, because a monastery never dies, marries or leaves an heir. The lawyers called this mortmain, the dead hand. In 1279 King Edward I of England had to forbid gifts of land to the church without his licence. ⁹
• Church land paid less tax than yours. In 1296 Pope Boniface VIII forbade clergy anywhere to pay taxes to a king without the pope’s permission. ¹⁰
• A monastery could take over a village’s tithes and pay a substitute to do the parish work out of the leftovers. The Latin for substitute is vicarius, which is where your word vicar comes from. ¹¹

Go deeperThe charters' words, and what mortmain cost

The charters recording those gifts still use their own words: for the salvation of my soul and the souls of my ancestors. Thousands of them survive.

Kings and nobles who endowed bishoprics wanted more than piety: prestige, literate officials, and a bishop willing to crown their son.

An ordinary family's land paid a fee to the lord every time it changed hands, when a son inherited, a daughter married into another family, or an heir took over after a death. A monastery never inherits, marries or dies, so none of those fees were ever paid, and none of that land was ever lost. Edward I's 1279 statute, De viris religiosis, existed because the crown was losing exactly those fees.

Boniface VIII's order was a formal bull, Clericis laicos, and it threatened excommunication for any king who demanded the tax anyway. Philip IV of France and Edward I both defied him and largely won.

The word for a monastery taking over a parish's income was appropriation. The monastery kept the big tithes, the corn, the hay and the wood, and paid its substitute out of the small tithes on eggs, milk and garden produce, the money left for baptizing babies, sitting with the dying and burying the dead.

So how much land was it, actually?

The honest answer is a range, not a number. There was never one survey of Europe, and historians counting it region by region usually land somewhere between a fifth and a third of the cultivated land. ¹² I will not give you a tidy percentage, because there isn’t one and this book does not invent one.

Think about six hundred years of that.

Imagine an organization that receives ten percent of everything an entire continent produces, every single year, forever, and then decides for itself how much of it ever comes back out.

Now imagine that for six hundred years.

In many villages, the largest building after the church itself was the barn where the church stored the grain it collected. It was a stone barn the size of a small cathedral. Some of them are still standing — you can walk into the one at Great Coxwell in Oxfordshire, which belonged to a Cistercian abbey and is about a hundred and fifty feet long. ¹³

That is the picture I want you to hold. A stone barn, full of other people’s food, with a cross on it.

Now suppose the farmer said no.

The tithe was collected through the church’s own courts, and their weapon was excommunication. No sacraments, no church wedding, and no burial in the churchyard when you died. In England, if you stayed excommunicated, the bishop could send your name to the king, and the sheriff would put you in prison until you gave in. ¹⁴

Go deeperThe office that jailed you

The bishop did not deal directly with the king. He certified your name to the king's Chancery, and it was the Chancery that set the sheriff on you.

A denied burial in the churchyard was not a technicality in that world. It was a wound the next lesson will show you in full.

So: the church court declares you out, and the king’s sheriff holds the cell door.

Now go back to the beginning of this lesson. One tenth, for a tribe with no land, and every third year the whole of it for widows and orphans and foreigners.

That, eight hundred years on, is a man in a cell.

Now go back and read what I actually said about that.

When a village would not receive my friends, I did not tell them to burn it. I told them to shake the dust off their feet and walk on to the next town (Mark 6:11).

Walk on. That was the whole penalty. You leave.

On the tithe itself, I told the most religious men of my day that they tithed their mint and their dill and their cumin, measured out to the leaf, and had left undone justice, and mercy, and faith (Matthew 23:23).

I did not say stop tithing. Go and read it; I said do not leave the other undone.

The complaint was never about the tenth. It was about a religion that could measure the herbs and not notice the widow.

And on the barn, I told a story about a rich farmer who pulled down his barns to build bigger ones. God said to him: you fool, tonight your life is required of you, and then whose will all this be? (Luke 12:16–21).

Read it again standing in front of a stone barn a hundred and fifty feet long, with a cross on the gable, holding a tenth of everything a village grew.

Go deeperThe farmer's own words, in full

The farmer's own words to himself did not survive the summary: I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones, and store all my goods there, and say to my soul, take your ease, eat, drink and be merry (Luke 12:16–21).

That is a man planning to retire into pleasure on the strength of a single harvest, the night before he dies.

Now let me give the other side its best case, because it has one.

The monks copied the manuscripts. The church ran the only hospitals and the only schools. The Cistercians drained marshes and made farmland that had not existed before. And the tithe was the only public welfare system Europe had. Every sentence of that is defensible, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Here is my answer. None of it requires that the tenth be compulsory, collected by the king’s officers, with a jail at the end of it. None of it requires that the land, once given, may never go back.

And none of it explains the third year. The law that started all this set aside one year in three for the widow, the orphan and the foreigner. Nobody ever abolished that. It was simply absorbed. The tenth kept being collected and the destination quietly changed, from the four kinds of people who had nothing to an institution that had everything.

Go deeperThe third year, and what became of it

Real monks really did shelter travelers and nurse the sick, not only copy manuscripts and run schools.

Their case cannot answer the third year. Go looking for the century when it stopped, and you will not find a decree ending it, because none was ever issued. The poor simply became a line item inside somebody else's budget, a share decided by the very institution that controlled the income.

That is the whole lesson. Not theft. Absorption.

An institution with a guaranteed income from the poor is a different animal from a movement of the poor. It has something to protect. And from this point forward, whenever you find the church on one side of a fight, ask a simple question first:

Which side owns the barn?

Check It Yourself

Look up: Numbers 18:20–21, then Deuteronomy 14:28–29.

You will find: that the tithe existed because the priests were given no land, and that every third year the whole of it went to the foreigner, the orphan and the widow inside your own town.

Then look up: Matthew 23:23, Luke 12:16–21 and Mark 6:11. Compare the last one to a law making refusal of baptism a death sentence.

For the history: the Capitulary of Herstal (779), the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, and the Statute of Mortmain, 1279, all printed in English in collections of medieval sources and findable online.

The Short Version

• In my people’s law, the tithe fed a landless priesthood and, every third year, the poor.
• In 779 Charlemagne made it a legal tax, and got a civil service and a crown in return.
• He made refusing baptism a capital offense for the Saxons and made them pay the tenth.
• Gifts, grants, mortmain and tax exemption left the church holding a fifth to a third of the land.
• I told my friends that when a town said no, they should walk away.

Think About It

1. What changes about a church when it can no longer go broke?
2. Nobody ever ended the third-year tithe for widows and orphans. It was just absorbed. What is being absorbed in your church’s budget right now?