[134] In the early summer of the year 1169 the king of Portugal, Afonso Henriques, led an army to the extreme south of his dominions, into the no-man's-land where Christian and Moslem met. An adventurer named Geraldo Sempavor -- Gerald the Fearless, dubbed by modem historians the Cid of Portugal -- had succeeded in capturing the city of Badajoz. He was being hard-pressed by its erstwhile Almohade rulers, and the king went to his relief. The king of León, Fernando II, judging that Badajoz lay within his own sphere of influence and that the Portuguese had no business to be there, hastened south to oppose them. In the confused fighting in the town the Portuguese were routed by the Leonese troops and their king, fleeing on horseback, struck the projecting hinge of one of the gates and was flung to the ground with a broken leg, where he was found and taken prisoner by the Leonese. For Fernando II the event could not have been more fortunate; he was able to extract certain disputed territories in the north as the price of the king's release. One of these was Toroño, the land round Tuy; another was the upper valley of the river Limia, some forty miles to the east; still another was the wild and desolate country which stretches beyond the Limia towards Verín (now in Spain) and Chaves (now in Portugal). The latter territory was divided in the twelfth century into two districts known at the time as Capraria and Lobarzana.

These two areas had for some time been the subject of dispute between León and Portugal; they had also been disputed between the two dioceses of Orense and Braga. For about a generation before 1169 they had formed part of the diocese of Braga. When the king of Portugal abandoned political control of them, so too did his archbishop of Braga abandon ecclesiastical control, and Capraria and Lobarzana became part of the diocese of Orense. What this meant quickly became clear. Fernando II's lieutenant in the region expelled the archdeacon and archpriests of the church of Braga on the orders of the king and handed ecclesiastical control over to [135] two canons who were acting on behalf of the church of Orense. Shortly afterwards an archdeacon was appointed, and under him an archpriest. The archpriest, accompanied by a layman appointed by the king's lieutenant, went to the region to extract as much as he possibly could, as our source frankly tells us, from the parish clergy there because they were still inclined to Braga and unwilling voluntarily to make their due payments to the church of Orense. Intimidation had to be used; the resulting spoils were divided between the archpriest and his lay assistant. This story, instructive in more ways than one, may fittingly serve to introduce the subject of church government.⁽¹⁾

The administrative framework within which Leonese bishops had to operate was similar to that known throughout western Christendom. But for several reasons their task was made complicated. New ways of organizing a church had been introduced, under Franco-papal influence, in the latter part of the eleventh century. A series of popes, legates and immigrant French bishops attempted to impose a pattern of metropolitan and territorial diocesan organization upon a Leonese-Castilan church which had only haltingly known these things before. The process of setting them up and making them work was not easy. Simultaneously, churchmen were faced by the task of extending their ecclesiastical organization into the areas of territory reconquered from the Moslems, and reconstructing a Christian church there upon new foundations. This again was never easy. Bishops could usually count upon the help of kings, but they were to run up against the interests of other groups, notably the Military Orders, and they were to be inhibited for much of the time by sheer lack of resources. Confusion was worse confounded by the fact that there had taken place neither in the old Christian areas of the north nor in the new Christian areas of the south that clean sweep of ancient institutions and customs which would have rendered the work of the innovators incomparably easier. Features of an older order stuck up through rifts in the new like ancient geological features in a [136] younger landscape. Bishops were faced by old territorial divisions, old conciliar practices, old intellectual interests, old loyalties, old attitudes on the part of churchman and layman alike. There were, finally, random complicating factors. Some of these were political, like the gradual drawing apart of the county of Portugal from the kingdom of León; some were personal, like the ambitions of Diego Gelmírez for his church at Compostela; some were social, like the burgeoning of towns along the pilgrimage route, or the violent tenor of like along the southern frontier.

Metropolitan Organization

'A la fin du XI^e siècle ou au début du XII^e, Rome impose a l'Espagne des archevéques.'⁽²⁾ It is true that late Roman and Visigothic Spain had known metropolitans;⁽³⁾ but the organization over which they presided had crumbled after the Islamic conquest. When it was revived by the reforming popes of the Hildebrandine period it had two new features: archbishops were tied to the papacy by the necessity of seeking their pallia from Rome; and as metropolitans set over ecclesiastical provinces, they were given defined powers over their suffragan bishops. It may be as well to run over once more the structure that resulted. Toledo became a metropolitan see in 1086, Tarragona in 1089, Braga in 1099 or 1100, Santiago de Compostela in 1120. As far as the kingdom of León was concerned, the sees of Astorga, Lugo, Mondoñedo, Orense and Tuy were suffragans of Braga. Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo and Coria were suffragans of Compostela; so too were Avila in Castile, and -- though Braga disputed this -- Lamego and Lisbon in Portugal. The sees of Oviedo and León were exempted from any metropolitan supervision and placed under the direct protection of the papacy, a state of affairs that was disputed by the archbishops of Toledo for at least part of the century, as we have seen. Toledo had no certain suffragans in León, but had [137] designs over two further sees. One of these was Salamanca; the other was Zamora, a 'problem' see, over which the three metropolitans of Toledo, Braga and Compostela wrangled for the better part of eighty years.⁽⁴⁾

Was the ecclesiastical province a functioning unit of church government? It looks as though metropolitans wanted it to be. We have seen already that they tried to extend their provinces. León and Oviedo, exempted in 1104-5, were declared suffragans of Toledo by Calixtus II in 1121. León escaped the Toledan grasp between 1125 and 1130, Oviedo in 1157. The appointment of Bernardo, the protégé of the archbishop of Toledo, to the see of Zamora in 1120, is an indication of Toledo's desire to scoop Zamora into her province. The consecration of Nuño of Salamanca by Archbishop Bernardo of Toledo in 1124 was certainly seen at Compostela as an attempt by the Toledan interest to extend metropolitan power over a new see. Metropolitans tried too to ensure that their local sympathizers were placed in control of their suffragan sees, and to exact professions of obedience from them when they consecrated them. That these attempts appear sporadic may be owing only to the patchy nature of our evidence. Giraldo of Salamanca may have had Compostelan connections; Alfonso Pérez certainly did; so too, later on, did Pedro Suárez. Pedro de Ponte of Ciudad Rodrigo was another who was closely connected with the church of Compostela. The professions of obedience sworn to Diego Gelmírez by Sancho of Avila (in 1121) and Iñigo of Avila (1133) are preserved in the Historia Compostellana.⁽⁵⁾ The richest surviving collections of professions of obedience is preserved in the Líber Fidei of Braga. Thus we have from the see of Mondoñedo professions preserved from Pedro (1110?), Nuño (1112), Pedro Gudestéiz (1155), Juan (1169) and Rabinato (1173);⁽⁶⁾ from the see of Astorga the professions of Alo (1122), Arnaldo I (1144) and Fernando I (1156);⁽⁷⁾ from Tuy, those of Alfonso (c.1100), Pelayo Menéndez (1131), [138] Isidoro (1156), Juan (1168) and Beltrán (1173).⁽⁸⁾ The archbishop of Braga was quick to exact professions from the first two bishops of the see of Lamego, restored early in 1147, and from the first bishop of Lisbon, the Englishman Gilbert of Hastings.⁽⁹⁾

These facts in themselves, however, tell us little or nothing about the working of the province as a unit of government. Did the metropolitans hold provincial councils? Did they conduct visitations of their suffragan sees? There is little evidence that provincial councils were held, and we can be certain that they were not held regularly. Let us look at the evidence from Braga. In 1148 Archbishop Joao of Braga held a colloquium in his cathedral church attended by his suffragans the bishops of Porto, Lamego, Viseu and Coimbra and quidam archidiaconus civitatis Ulixbone nomine Eldebredus (though, surprisingly, not the recently appointed bishop of Lisbon).⁽¹⁰⁾ We learn from another source that the king of Portugal also attended.⁽¹¹⁾ Was this intimate little gathering a 'provincial council'? Not one of the Galician suffragans of Braga attended it; and it is clear that the main purpose of the meeting was to hear a summons to the council of Rheims delivered by a papal messenger, the clerk Boso. It sounds rather like the larger gathering assembled at Palencia by Alfonso VII at about the same time, quando prefatus imperator habuit ibi colloquium cum episcopis et baronibus sui regni de vocatione domni pape ad concilium.⁽¹²⁾ We hear of three other assemblies at Braga, one between 1148 and 1166, and two between 1175 and 1188, which may have had the character of provincial councils: but we have little information about who attended, and none at all about the business they met to transact.⁽¹³⁾ The evidence for the holding of these last three assemblies comes from sworn depositions taken towards the end of the century in the prolonged suit between Braga and Compostela over the suffragan sees disputed between them. One of the best ways of demonstrating the [139] subjection of a suffragan was to show that its bishops attended councils convened by the metropolitan. We can be sure that if the Braga party could have mustered more councils to buttress their case at Rome they would have done so. The fact that they referred, and only vaguely at that, to a mere three such meetings in the whole of the second half of the century is a sure sign that provincial councils (or whatever we choose to call them) were few and far between.

The evidence from the province of Santiago de Compostela is consistent with that from Braga. It all comes from the episcopate of Diego Gelmírez, that is to say, from the Historia Compostellana. We have no hint that any councils were held by any later archbishop until the middle of the thirteenth century. Diego Gelmírez held six councils at Compostela, in 1114, 1121, 1122, 1124, 1125 and 1130.⁽¹⁴⁾ But it is very doubtful whether we can call any one of these a provincial council in the true sense of the term. Three of them -- those of 1121, 1122 and 1124 -- were legatine councils, held by Diego during the period while he exercised the prerogatives of a legate of the Roman church; he held them for the bishops of those churches over which his powers extended, not as a metropolitan for his suffragans. Thus the council of 1121 was held ex praecepto domini papae; that of 1124 was attended by the bishops of Astorga, Lugo, Mondoñedo, Tuy, Porto, Zamora, Salamanca and the bishop-elect of Burgos, together with twenty-seven abbots and other religiosis personis et bonis clericis. The character of the council of 1125 must hay have been rather different, for by that date Diego's legation had lapsed. We do not know exactly who attended, but it certainly included, alongside the churchmen, comites et principes, the magnates of Galician lay society. Though they did confer primum de ecclesiasticis negotiis, most of the business of the council seems to have been secular -- for it is well to remember that Diego was playing an important part in the political affairs of Galicia at this time. The earliest council, of 1114, seems to have been different in character again. At that time Diego was not an archbishop. The council was attended by the bishops of Tuy, Mondoñedo, Lugo, Orense [140] and Porto, all of them suffragans of Braga,⁽¹⁵⁾ a number of abbots, and comites et ceteros terrae optimates. Diego seems to have reached back to an earlier tradition of what has usefully been called an 'interdiocesan synod'; for the council was called to report and publish the canons of the council of León, held a month earlier under the presidency of the archbishop of Toledo, for the benefit of those in Galicia who had been unable to attend it; just as the council of Compostela of 1056 was held in order to disseminate the decrees of the council of Coyanza (1055) in Galicia.⁽¹⁶⁾ The 1130 council looks rather like it. It was attended by the bishops of Mondoñedo, Lugo, Porto, Tuy and Avila, together with the abbots totius provinciae, whatever this phrase may mean. Apart from the consecration of a new bishop for Salamanca, the main purpose of the council was to publish the decrees passed at the council of Carrión, held two months earlier by the legate cardinal Humbert.

As for visitations, there is practically no evidence for them at all. Two archbishops of Braga were said to have visited Zamora and to have been received as metropolitans, Paio Mendes (1118-37) and João Peculiar (1138-75).⁽¹⁷⁾ But Zamora, as we shall see, was a rather special case. When João Peculiar passed through Coimbra on his way back from Rome (whence he was returning with his pallium), Bishop Bernardo recepit eum in processione... et dimisit ei domum suam et ivit ad aliam et procuravit eum.⁽¹⁸⁾ So a lord would expect to be received by one of his men. Other reports to the same effect could be cited, but they hardly add up to a systematic scheme of visitation. From Compostela, we have no evidence at all. If Diego Gelmírez wished to see his far-flung Extremaduran suffragans, they came to him, he did not go to them. He was always far readier to visit the royal court than the distant and struggling bishoprics of Avila or Salamanca.

Our evidence, such as it is, suggests that the province was [141] not an important unit in ecclesiastical governments. Metropolitans wanted a following of loyal and obedient suffragans, but the rights they claimed to exercise over them were few, being limited in practice to consecration and the taking of a profession of obedience. There is no evidence for the regular holding of provincial councils properly so-called, nor for regular visitations; though if an archbishop found himself at the seat of one of his suffragans, he expected to be fittingly received. One's impression is that metropolitans desired to exercise no systematic supervision of their suffragans' diocesan work. It is true that they were not required to do so until after 1215. Yet metropolitans in some parts of Europe had taken steps in the period between the Third and Fourth Lateran councils to give their office practical force, by holding councils, by conducting visitations, and by so doing to provide occasions for the exercise of metropolitan jurisdiction. There is no sign that these tendencies were present in León.

Diocesan Boundaries

An enormous amount of energy was expended in the course of the twelfth century in disputes over diocesan boundaries. Such disputes were not peculiar to Spain, but they were more common there than in other countries of western Europe. In England, for example, diocesan boundaries had in general become fixed at an earlier date, and were normally coterminous with the secular boundaries of the shire. In Spain, as we saw in chapter 1, the circumstances of the Reconquista gave rise to a desire to restore the ecclesiastical arrangements of the Visigoths: but partly because these arrangements were imperfectly known, partly because new sees had been created since the Visigothic period, the attempt to give effect to this desire gave rise to quarrelling over diocesan boundaries. A further cause of dispute was political. Hostilities over boundaries were exacerbated where a dispute over political frontiers in the same territory also existed. Finally, we should note the coincidence in time between the age of diocesan boundary disputes in western Spain and the period of strong foreign, Franco-papal, influence upon the church there. Little emphasis had been placed on the territorial diocese during [142] the tenth and eleventh centuries. Behind the disputes of the twelfth one can detect the pressure of orderly minds. The haphazard arrangements of an earlier day were not good enough for them; they wanted instead to see the land neatly parcelled out in territorial dioceses of roughly equal size, with frontiers that were fixed and known.

There were many such disputes during the century. For example, between Compostela and Mondoñedo; between León and Lugo, León and Astorga; between Astorga and Orense, and Braga, and Zamora; between Salamanca and Zamora, and Avila, and Ciudad Rodrigo; and so on. Accounts of them make tedious reading. It will be enough to refer here to three examples. A boundary dispute between the dioceses of Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo was settled by the archbishop of Compostela in 1174.⁽¹⁹⁾ This was a fairly simple case. Ciudad Rodrigo was a new see, founded in 1161, with no Visigothic precursor on that site, and carved out of the diocese of Salamanca. No wonder there was friction. But there were no ancient claims, nor documents to justify them, which might have delayed a settlement. And there was the imperious will of Fernando II to hasten one, together, apparently, with the desire of both parties to reach a compromise. The settlement reached, though possibly shaken from time to time,⁽²⁰⁾ seems to have endured, so one may assume that the arrangements made by Archbishop Pedro Suárez in 1174 worked satisfactorily.

The dispute between Lugo and León was a very different affair. It lasted the better part of a century and gave rise to a great deal of litigation. The course of the dispute has recently been carefully surveyed,⁽²¹⁾ and only a few comments need be made on it here. First of all, it brings out well the way in which these disputes aroused feelings of intense local loyalty among bishops and cathedral chapters. They put the interests of their own church before any others and were prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to protect or exploit [143] them. Second, it demonstrates how difficult it was for men to reach a decision on the basis of the available evidence. The Lugo party resorted to forgery to assist their case; but the effect of forgery was rather to postpone than to hasten a decision. Third, it shows how hard it was to find a tribunal whose decisions the parties to the suit would accept. At various times the kings of León, the archbishops of Toledo and Compostela, several popes and two papal legates, all heard the case; but at various times the decisions of each and all were flouted or disregarded by one or other of the parties.

The dispute between the churches of Orense and Braga, mentioned at the beginning of the present chapter, was of a different kind again. The area in dispute lay between the upper valley of the river Limia to the west and the town of Bragança to the east, which was then, as it is still, the frontier district between León and Portugal. Political tensions added fuel to the flames of ecclesiastical rivalry: significantly, one of the minor actors in the conflict stated that he held his archdeaconry nomine Bracarensis ecclesie et regni Portugalliae,⁽²²⁾ and we have already seen that an important turning-point in the dispute came about as the result of a political event, the capture of the king of Portugal in 1169 and his cession to Fernando II of León of some of his northern territories as the price of his release.

Wearisome though these disputes are (and the reader has been let off very lightly), they do have significance in the ecclesiastical history of twelfth-century Spain. By and large, they were resolved. In many instances of dispute (though not quite all), frontiers were fixed and the territorial diocese established. This was an important administrative achievement, and it brought Spain into conformity with the practice of most of the rest of Latin Christendom. In the course of their progress towards settlement, the quarrels gave rise to everincreasing resort to the papal curia. It is a commonplace that papal jurisdiction enlarged its scope during the twelfth century through the demands of litigants; and this was as frequent in Spain as anywhere else. The fact that boundary disputes were more common in Spain than elsewhere meant [144] that curial intervention in them was one of the more important levers used by the popes to extend their judicial authority over western Spain. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that papal decisions could be flouted and that churches usually needed the assistance of the lay power to enforce ecclesiastical rulings.

Other questions remain, to which no answers can be given. Did the energies which bishops and chapters and local clergy expended in these often unseemly quarrels cause them to be slack in attending to urgent pastoral needs? It may have been so. Certainly it is hard to think of the servants of the bishop of Orense who bullied the wretched populace of Lobarzana and Capraria into producing vota as worthy pastors of their flocks.⁽²³⁾ Was the state of endemic hostility between neighbouring sees an important factor in inhibiting the Leonese church from presenting a united front in the face of aggression on the part of kings? We may guess that it was, but we have no means of measuring its strength. The emotions generated and sustained within the diocesan community in the course of these disputes seem to have been powerful. This community found the focus of its activities and loyalties in the cathedral chapter.

The Cathedral Chapter

The bishops cannot be considered in isolation from their cathedral chapters. We have seen already that there is good reason for supposing that they transacted diocesan business in and with their chapters; and it will be suggested that throughout the century in the kingdom of León the diocese was a living and working, a coherent unit, of ecclesiastical government -- something which it was ceasing to be in some other areas, for instance northern France. At the heart of the diocese was the cathedral chapter. Something, however cursory, must be said about its organization.

Of the twelve Leonese cathedrals all but two had secular chapters during the twelfth century. The chapters of the remaining two adopted the Augustinian rule, Tuy in 1138 and [145] Coria between 1181 and 1185.⁽²⁴⁾ Why did they do this? There is no reason to suppose that the men concerned were ascetically-minded, that they preferred the austerities of a regular life to the ease of a secular. The answer may be that the Augustinian Rule offered solid economic advantages which poorly-endowed cathedrals could ill afford to forego. Common control of property was less likely to lead to waste than the prebendal system, and throughout Europe it tended to be the poorer type of see that went Augustinian; for example Sigüenza in Castile, or Carlisle in England.

Though the ten remaining cathedral chapters were secular, nearly all had certain elements of a common life. We hear of common refectories,⁽²⁵⁾ and sometimes of a common dormitory,⁽²⁶⁾ for the canons. It is to be presumed that in the old-established cathedrals these arrangements were survivals of the observance of an earlier day. One of the canons of the council of Compostela of 1056 had required cathedral chapters to have unum refectorium and unum dormitorium.⁽²⁷⁾ The author of that part of the Codex Calixtinus known as the 'Pilgrim's Guide', who was writing towards the middle of the twelfth century, observed that the Rule of St. Isidore was observed by the canons of Compostela.⁽²⁸⁾ It is not clear what he meant by this, for Isidore composed no Rule for canons, and as a statement of customs obtaining in the twelfth century it is incorrect; but his remark may represent a memory, perhaps confused, of an earlier order of things. We do, however, find these same elements of a common life in some of the newly restored sees, at Zamora and Salamanca, for [146] example, and across the Castilian frontier at Avila.⁽²⁹⁾ So it would seem that the newly-constituted dioceses adhered to the traditional Leonese way -- if Professor Bishko is correct, perhaps we should say 'Franco-Leonese' way -- of organizing cathedral chapters.

We know a little about the organization of these chapters in the twelfth century, considerably more about their organization in the thirteenth. But we must beware of using this thirteenth-century material as a guide to twelfth-century conditions. Some of the changes that took place after 1215 were far-reaching, and even though thirteenth-century capitular statutes may often have done no more than formalize existing customs, we can never be sure of this; and so we must eschew them here.⁽³⁰⁾

The size of chapters varied from cathedral to cathedral, just as it did in England or in France, depending on the resources of the see. We have no evidence about numbers from several sees, and it is unfortunate that these are the smaller or poorer ones -- Ciudad Rodrigo, Coria, Mondoñedo and Tuy. Orense had thirty-six canons in 1198, but we do not know whether this figure included the twelve portionarii who were mentioned at about the same time.⁽³¹⁾ Lugo was bidden by Cardinal Hyacinth in 1173 to have thirty canons and twenty prebendarii, and this was a reduction in size.⁽³²⁾ Bishop Diego established forty canons, tam maiores quam minores, at León in 1120; by 1224 the establishment had grown to fifty canons, twenty-five portionarii and twelve choir-boys.⁽³³⁾ Oviedo might have had as many as sixty canons in 1117⁽³⁴⁾ and Astorga was allowed seventy by Celestine III in 1191.⁽³⁵⁾ At [147] Compostela, Diego Peláez instituted twenty-four canons; Diego Gelmírez increased this to seventy-two; Pedro Suárez later tried to restrict a growth in numbers which dangerously encroached upon the see's resources; yet by 1245 the chapter was eighty-six strong.⁽³⁶⁾

The members of these chapters were of various ranks. At the summit were the dignitaries, among whom were the archdeacons. After them came the canons properly so-called; then portionarii; finally duplarii and pueri. The dignitaries held capitular offices or dignities. The canons and portionarii held prebends, but the portionarii were required to be resident and had no power to deliberate in meetings of the chapter; they look like minor canons. A duplarius is first mentioned in a Compostela document of 1170 where he is recorded as a substitute for one of the dignitaries, saying his officium divinum for him while he is engaged in his non-choral duties;⁽³⁷⁾ presumably therefore the four duplarii found by 1245 were substitutes for the four principal dignitaries. The duplarius was a humble member of the chapter of Compostela, ranking beneath the portionarii minores. Pueri, of course, were choir-boys.

The organization of the cathedral dignitaries which we find in the kingdom of León is, broadly-speaking, similar to the 'four-square' organization familiar in northern France and England, built upon the four offices of dean, precentor, chancellor and treasurer. But Spain had a different nomenclature, which she shared with certain other cathedrals in the south of France, and which might have been introduced thence in the latter part of the eleventh century. The dean was normally called the prior, the precentor was sometimes called the primicerius, the treasurer customarily the sacrista, and the chancellor always the magister scholarum. In the course of the century the nomenclature of northern Europe was gradually adopted, with the exception of the title of chancellor. (Those who hold the office in Spanish cathedrals today are still called maestrescuela.) The stages by which the new titles appeared, and the occasional co-existence for a [148] time of the new with the old, need not concern us here. Certain cathedrals had other dignitaries: at Compostela there were seven cardinals.⁽³⁸⁾

A very few instances of statute-making by bishops and their chapters have come down to us from the twelfth century, most of them from Compostela. Pedro Gudestéiz issued a constitution in 1169 concerning prebendaries who were absent for study, and another in 1170 defining the duties of the magister scolarum.⁽³⁹⁾ Pedro Suárez made certain arrangements relating to the offices and revenues of the dean and the four archdeacons in 1177, which was confirmed by Alexander III in 1179, together with various other capitular reforms of which no texts survive.⁽⁴⁰⁾ A little later the statute concerning absence for study was confirmed and amplified.⁽⁴¹⁾ Pedro Suárez had previously, while bishop of Salamanca, made statutes there requiring stricter observance of the rule of residence; we know of these from the papal confirmation, dated 9 June 1170.⁽⁴²⁾ The only other possible evidence we have of capitular statute-making by a bishop comes from the diocese of Astorga, where Bishop Lope is said to have made some statutes in 1204, but we do not know what they were about.⁽⁴³⁾ This exhausts our evidence for the practice. The following century, by contrast, was to see a flood of capitular legislation, especially in the years 1228-50.

Temporalities were normally divided between bishops and their chapters. It has been said that this process occurred gradually between the years 1100, by which date such a division had been made at Palencia, and 1234, when Gregory IX assumed that it was standard in Spain.⁽⁴⁴⁾ It seems likely that it tended to take place during the first half of this period of about 130 years, and that it may even have taken place before 1100 in some cathedrals. At Lugo, for example, such a [149] division was formally made in 1120, but Bishop Pedro's act speaks of some earlier and similar division effected by Bishop Amor, who had died by 1096.⁽⁴⁵⁾ At León and Oviedo, acta from 1116 and 1117 respectively refer to division of temporalities before the death of Alfonso VI in 1109,⁽⁴⁶⁾ while at Compostela the measure seems to have been carried out by Diego Gelmírez as part of his capitular reforms of 1100-02, though it may go back to the episcopate of Diego Peláez.⁽⁴⁷⁾ The step seems to have been taken by the new sees soon after their restoration. So, at any rate, at Avila, where a division had certainly been made by the time of Bishop Iñigo (1133-c. 1158), possibly before him by Sancho I (1121-33).⁽⁴⁸⁾ At Salamanca the chapter was handling all its own affairs by the 1170s,⁽⁴⁹⁾ an indication that a division had been made by then. We have no information from Zamora, Ciudad Rodrigo or Coria. Where documents survive which recorded the details of these divisions we sometimes have hints of conflict over revenues between bishops and chapters which had occasioned their making. They did not necessarily obviate such conflict for the future. At Astorga, where such a division had been made before 1122,⁽⁵⁰⁾ conflict over revenues was one of the issues in the sordid quarrels towards the end of the century. At Tuy, where a division was made when the chapter adopted the Augustinian Rule in 1138, Alfonso VII had to act ad removendam dissensionem between the bishop and his canons eighteen years later, in 1156.⁽⁵¹⁾

Until a great deal more work shall have been done, we can make only more or less ill-informed guesses about the sort of men who made up the cathedral chapters, and about the means by which they were chosen. One's impression is that it was with the bishops that choice lay in the last resort. It [150] cannot reasonably be doubted that kings were able to reward their servants with capitular office, with the acquiescence of their bishops. Was this acquiescence willing, or not? We do not know. There are a very few examples of papal provision to cathedral prebends during this period, which are discussed elsewhere.⁽⁵²⁾ We do not hear much of conflicts between bishops and their cathedral chapters. Disputes over temporalities sometimes occurred, as we have seen, and Diego Gelmírez found himself at loggerheads with his chapter from time to time. But the evidence for unanimity -- for instance, in the litigation over diocesan boundaries -- is far more plentiful than that for disunion. Bishop and chapter seem to have formed a close-knit community; more so, one may suspect, than was commonly the case over the larger part of twelfth-century Latin Christendom.

Archdeacons and Archpriests

The local administration of the diocese was in the hands of archdeacons and archpriests. Archdeacons were the deputies of the bishops, chosen by them to be their closest administrative assistants: there is no sign of the bishop's Official in Spain at this period. In those dioceses which already existed in the year 1100 there were several archdeacons. The number of them in any one diocese varied in the course of the century, though there was a tendency for them to become fixed in the latter part of it. In the newly-restored dioceses the practice seems to have been for the early bishops to have been assisted by but a single archdeacon, more being created at a later date when episcopal administration became busier. Thus in the diocese of Santiago de Compostela there were at least five archdeacons in the period 1100-08. It seems to have been a favourite number, for we find five at Tuy in 1112, at Lugo in 1119, at Mondoñedo and Orense in 1122.⁽⁵³⁾ At León there were six in 1133, and at Oviedo the amazing figure of eleven in 1117.⁽⁵⁴⁾ At Compostela Pedro Suárez [151] stabilized the number of archdeacons at four in 1177.⁽⁵⁵⁾ At Lugo, too, the number seems to have stood at four in the early thirteenth century.⁽⁵⁶⁾ In the 'new' diocese of Zamora there seems to have been only one archdeacon for about half a century after the establishment of the see; two appear for the first time in 1176,⁽⁵⁷⁾ and the number remained at two for the rest of our period. At Avila likewise, the bishop was assisted by only one archdeacon from the restoration of the see down to the 1170s, when the numbers were multiplied and territorial designations appeared -- a senior archdeacon of Avila, and archdeacons of Olmedo, Arévalo and (for a short time) Plasencia.⁽⁵⁸⁾ The bishops of Salamanca had two archdeacons from at least 1133; by 1174 there were three, an archdeacon of Salamanca, and archdeacons of Alba de Tomes and Ledesma.⁽⁵⁹⁾

Archdeacons were appointed by bishops, as far as we know. Of course, some archdeacons may have owed their position to noble or royal patronage. Among the former should perhaps be numbered Manrique de Lara, archdeacon of León before his promotion to the episcopate in 1181. There are several examples of royal chancery servants who held archdeaconries: to give but two examples, Fernando Curialis and Pelayo de Lauro, who both served as chancellor to Femando II, held archdeaconries in the church of Compostela. Yet the interest which worked in favour of such men must have been channelled through the bishops. We have already seen⁽⁶⁰⁾ that archdeacons tended to be closely associated with bishops in the transaction of diocesan business; and have observed as well that bishops did not seek new servants, the Official and his staff, to replace or outflank archdeacons. There is, indeed, a good deal of evidence to suggest that relations between bishops and their archdeacons were generally [152] harmonious. Besides their prominence among the witnesses of episcopal acta, we find archdeacons in charge of sede vacante administration, for instance at Astorga in 1122 and Oviedo in 1143. In León there is not a trace of jurisdictional disputes between bishops and archdeacons, in marked contrast to the situation in twelfth-century France. The archidiaconate was a well-established rung on the ladder which led to the episcopate.⁽⁶¹⁾ Throughout the century, archdeacons seem to have been closely associated with their bishops. It is another sign of the coherence of the diocesan establishment.

We have observed that territorial archdeaconries appear in the southern dioceses in the second half of the century. In the northern part of the kingdom they are traceable from a much earlier date. In the diocese of Oviedo, Bishop Pelayo in 1117 granted to his cathedral chapter the archidiaconatus Ovetensis, an area with territorial limits which were laid down in the act, limits which were said to have existed prisco tempore. Strong hints of similar territorialization are given in an act of the same date from Astorga. Two documents from the diocese of León, of 1116 and 1120 speak to us quite clearly of territorial archdeaconries. They are implied in the diocese of Mondoñedo in a document of 1122.⁽⁶²⁾ In the diocese of Lugo, four territorial archdeaconries -- of Neira, Sarria, Aviancos and Deza -- are mentioned in late twelfth-century documents; but these areas were referred to as administrative divisions of the diocese in several much earlier papal bulls, in 1123, 1130 and 1131; while an episcopal act of 1120 strongly suggests territorialized archdeaconries. It would seem reasonable to take the process of territorialization in the diocese back to at least the time of Bishop Pedro III (1113-33).⁽⁶³⁾ In the boundary dispute between Orense and Braga all the witnesses who made depositions in 1193-4 assumed that the archdeaconries of Baroncelle and Vinhais were fixed territorial areas, and had been such since at least [153] the episcopate of Bishop Martín of Orense (1132-57).⁽⁶⁴⁾ In the diocese of Tuy there is a possible reference to such territorial boundaries in a document of 1112.⁽⁶⁵⁾

The evidence from the diocese of Compostela is fuller. When Pedro Suárez fixed the number of archdeaconries at four in 1177, he at the same time assigned to each one seven archipresbyterates. The names of these archdeaconries and archipresbyterates may be traced back to an earlier period; and in our sources they are always spoken of as fixed territorial areas. Let us take but one instance. One of the four archdeaconries of 1177 was that of Nendos, the area of which lay between the towns of Corunna and Betanzos. The references to it in the Historia Compostellana make it clear that this was a territorial archdeaconry in the early part of the century.⁽⁶⁶⁾ Juan Rodríguez appears to have been archdeacon of Nendos in about 1108, Paschal II named it as a division of the diocese of Compostela in 1110. Diego Gelmírez acquired several churches in Nendos. Another of its archdeacons, Pedro Crescóniz, was imprisoned by Count Fernando Pérez de Traba in 1134. We have independent confirmation of this Pedro's tenure in a charter of 1118 which refers to his activity in nostra terra ligandi et solvendi and nostra terra is revealed as territorio Nemitus (= Nendos) inter duos fluvios Menendi et Barrosa subtus Monte Castro.

The territories which were attached to archdeaconries -- and archipresbyterates -- in Galicia in the twelfth century may have been the survivals of a very much earlier administrative order. In a remarkable article published some thirty years ago the late Pierre David investigated the structure of the Galician church in the last days of the Suevic kingdom, in the third quarter of the sixth century.⁽⁶⁷⁾ The names of some of the churches which then constituted the 'administrative divisions' of the several dioceses re-emerge as the names of certam territorial divisions of the twelfth century. Thus, for [154] example, the church of Turonio in the diocese of Tuy reappears as the district of Toroño, an archdeaconry by the late twelfth century; in the diocese of Compostela, the Suevic churches of Salinense and Pestemarcos are met with again in Pedro Suárez's archdeaconry of Saines and archipresbyterate of Postmarchos; in the diocese of Orense we meet the church of Bibalos again in the archdeaconry of Búbal. Of course, it is a long jump from the sixth century to the twelfth and most of the stepping-stones in between have been shown -- after Barrau-Dihigo's savagely destructive criticism of the early royal charters -- to be treacherous. We do not, mercifully, have to make it here. But ancient administrative arrangements are notoriously hard to change and the possibility should certainly be borne in mind that the pattern of local diocesan administration which meets us in the twelfth century was in part at least only a palimpsest written over the arrangements of an earlier day, whose lineaments we can only dimly, very dimly, discern.

On the other hand, the officers who were charged with administrative tasks seem to have been new. The diocesan administration of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the very term itself may be inappropriate, is as yet an impenetrably dark business. The title of archdeacon is exceedingly rare in any genuine document earlier than c.1090-1100; the mid-century councils of Coyanza (1055) and Compostela (1056) know nothing of them. In northern France, western Germany and south-eastern England the appearance, multiplication and territorialization of archdeaconries was taking place from the late ninth and early tenth centuries; in southwestern France the same process started later, and was continuing -- so far as we can see, but already we are in very murky territory -- throughout the eleventh century. Did the southern French clergy who acquired bishoprics in Spain from about 1080 onwards bring with them the organization to which they were becoming accustomed -- as they seem to have brought the notion of the territorial diocese, and as the legates who accompanied them brought a scheme of metropolitan organization? Further study alone will enable us to answer this question. All we can say at the moment is that we might expect the answer to be affirmative.

[155] Archpriests stood in the same relation to archdeacons as archdeacons did to bishops. We have been told that 'the general equivalence of the terms rural dean and archpriest is well-established',⁽⁶⁸⁾ and this judgement, founded in the main upon study of conditions in England and France, is applicable also to the kingdom of León. Archpriests do not bulk large in our sources, though we do find them in every diocese. They seem to have been people of fairly humble status: it is noteworthy that several of the archpriests cited in the Orense depositions do not have patronymics, and it is very rare indeed to find an archpriest subscribing an episcopal act. There is a good deal of evidence for territorial archipresbyterates. It is of the same kind as that for the territorial archdeaconry, and we need not bother with it here.⁽⁶⁹⁾

Who appointed archpriests? The Orense depositions are our best source of information about archpriests in Galicia. The witnesses were not being asked to declare the principles of ecclesiastical government and they do not tell us in so many words. Sometimes they said vaguely that archpriests held their offices ab Auriensi ecclesia. Sometimes, though rarely, they brought the bishop into it and could say of archpriests that they tenebant ipsam terram, ab Auriensi episcopo. But nearly always they associated archpriests closely with archdeacons. Thus we can hear of an archdeacon cum archipresbitero suo, or of an archpriest tenentem ipsam terram ab N. archidiacono, and similar phrases.⁽⁷⁰⁾ The actual subordination of archdeacons to archpriests is brought out well in some of the tales the witnesses had to tell. The following testimony was offered by Pedro Sánchez, who had himself been an archpriest in part of the territory disputed between the churches of Braga and Orense:

et vidit sub eo (sc. bishop Martín of Orense) M. Auriensem archidiaconum qui diu tenuit totam ipsam terram ab eo et post ipsum vidit N. [156] Auriensem archidiaconum similiter tenentem totam ipsam terram et quia ipse non audebat ire ad ipsam terram commisit eam V. Danielis a quo iste testis tenuit eam per biennium donec recepit eam Al. archidiaconus Bracarensis. Interrogatus quomodo recepisset eam respondit quod vidit eum venientem ad se et dicentem sibi 'Respondete mihi de ista terra quia mihi data est' et ipse non fuit ausus contradicere et dedit ei redditus sicut solebat dare Auriensi ecclesie. Et cum ipse diceret 'Non dabo vobis redditus quia de Auriensi ecclesia teneo ego terram istam' dixit idem archidiaconus 'Mihi data est terra quia non placet regi... quod Aurienses veniant ad terram istam....'

What did the administrative activities of archdeacons and archpriests consist of? The scanty evidence at our disposal offers us hardly any information. Archdeacons were meant to examine the fitness of ordinands, to make annual visitations of their archdeaconries, to hold meetings of their parish clergy. On one occasion on which we hear of the first of these functions it seems to have been in the hands of the archpriest rather than the archdeacon: we are told -- again by one of the witnesses in the Orense-Braga suit -- that Bishop Pedro of Orense (1157-69) refused to ordain some clerks from Vinhais quia non erat cum eis archipresbiter suus per [157] quem testificaretur utrum essent digni.⁽⁷²⁾ On another occasion, however, the task was in the hands of the archdeacon: Bishop Manrique of León laid down that the Hospitallers' priests were to be presented, before institution, to the archdeacon, qui de sciencia eius et moribus diligenter inquirat.⁽⁷³⁾ Of meetings of the clergy of an archdeaconry we have some hints: thus for example,⁽⁷⁴⁾

et audivit quod Al. archidiaconus dum teneret terram de Capraria fecit letanias cum clericis et laicis ipsius terre in sancta Martha qui locus est in termino de Capraria, et vidit hominem eiusdem archidiaconi venientem ad patruum suum et precipientem ei ex parte archidiaconi quod iret ad ipsas letanias, et propter infirmitatem non potuit ire et misit illuc nuntium suum cum oblatione.

The Action of the Bishops

We have been led insensibly from consideration of the structure of ecclesiastical administration to consideration of its workings, at the local level where archdeacons and archpriests operated. It is high time that we turned to the actions of the bishops. What were they trying to do? Can we indeed discover anything at all about the manner in which they interpreted their task? It is certainly not easy to do so. We could look to bishops' own statements or to statements made by their partisans; we could examine the legislation enacted by them in church councils; we could consider whether the recorded motives of laymen, in their dealings with the church, suggest that bishops were putting pressure upon them to make them act in certain ways; or we could attempt to draw conclusions from the surviving episcopal acta.

The first of these methods is not open to us. We have no treatise from the pen of any one of these bishops outlining what he conceived to be the duties and ideals of himself or his colleagues in twelfth-century León; and to speculate about [159] what he might have written is useless. Statements by partisans of one prelate are to be found in abundance in the Historia Compostellana, but they are not always unambiguously helpful. For example, we are told that Diego Gelmírez, in about the year 1106, ecclesiam S. Michaelis de Bojone de quorundam militum potestate, qui eam quasi pro sua tenebant, justa liberatione liberavit.⁽⁸¹⁾ The writer clearly considered Diego's action a worthy one; it was a justa liberatio. But why? Because the knights were in possession of a church, which a layman might not be? Or because they had seized a piece of property belonging to Santiago? Today we should make a distinction between the pastoral action of a bishop and the watchfulness of a lord over his properties. But this may be anachronistic. Did the writer so distinguish? Did Diego? We shall see later on that there is evident a mingling of lordship and pastoral care in the actions of the Leonese episcopate, a mingling which recalls earlier centuries than the twelfth. At the moment it is enough to point out that the statements of episcopal partisans about their masters' intentions are pitted with snares for the unwary beyond the obvious ones of bias and parti pris.

The evidence of conciliar legislation is also hard to use, but for different reasons. Most of the legislation that we have is simple restatement of that enacted in councils presided over by the pope. It would be unwise to assume (as is sometimes done) that such reiteration empowers the historian to treat these decrees as mere formality. Yet it is difficult to see anything distinctive about the attitudes of the Leonese episcopate when these are cloaked in the words devised by other men, elsewhere. Perhaps we should not be searching for the distinctive. It is significant, after all, that papal decrees were received and respected in León, and the fact will be given its due weight in a later chapter. And sometimes a distinctive note is struck. The canons of the council of Valladolid, held in September 1143 under the presidency of the legate Cardinal Guido, restated the decrees passed at the second Lateran council of 1139.⁽⁸²⁾ One of the canons however, c.22, was not [160] drawn from the Lateran II decrees, and it is reasonable to suppose that it was devised specially to meet a Spanish need. Its concern was that ignotos clericos or clergy de alienis episcopatibus should not be received by bishops sine commendatitiis litteris. It may not be entirely coincidental that the only example of such letters which has come down to us from the period we are concerned with was issued by a bishop who had attended the council and at a date only ten years later -- the curious epistola formata issued by Juan of León in 1153.⁽⁸³⁾ Here we seem to have evidence for episcopal observance of a conciliar decree framed by bishops in concert with a papal legate to meet a need experienced by the Leonese authorities, namely the need for the control of vagrant clergy.

When laymen surrendered proprietary churches into ecclesiastical hands, why did they do so? The only honest answer is that we can never really tell. The motives imputed to them were recorded by clerical scribes, who may have accurately recorded them, may have put their own construction upon them, may simply have snatched at an appropriate formula from the common stock lying ready in the formularies which are lost to us. But let us assume -- a large assumption -- that the recorded motives do tell us something of the actual motives of donors. If these express the sentiment that lay tenure of churches is wrong, we may fairly suppose that someone has been working on lay proprietors, persuading them that they are guilty of a breach of ecclesiastical law. This 'someone' will not necessarily have been a bishop, but, given the concern with this matter displayed in conciliar legislation enacted by bishops, the impulse, if it was there, probably came in large measure from episcopal circles. But was the impulse there? The most common of all recorded motives were such desires as pro remedio anime mee et parentum meorum, pro anniversariis faciendis, pro fratrum orationibus, and the like. Some grants were made in composition for wrongs done. In 1133 Sancho Sánchez gave the church of Ruix to the monastery of San Martín Pinario, 'pro multa mala que feci in ipso monasterio, fregi suum cautum... et raubavi vestras greges cum vestris equabus cum suo kaballo et raubavi vestras vacas [161] et prendidi vestros homines...'.⁽⁸⁴⁾ Again, in 1170, Count Rodrigo gave the church of Sarria to the see of Lugo, pro sacrilegii compositione, because 'olim diabolico furore arreptus, armata manu... ecclesiam sancte Marie de Mal in territorio de Ventosa que est in Lucensi episcopatu, partim demolitus, partim ignis combustione in cinerem redigens destruxi'.⁽⁸⁵⁾ Yet only one document among all those that have been inspected contains a categorical statement of what we are searching for. In 1190 Juan Suárez gave his share (integram porcionem) in the church of Ceruela, which jure hereditario habere debeo, to Bishop Rodrigo II and the church of Lugo.⁽⁸⁶⁾ He or the scribe tells us why, and the reasons are interesting. Inside the church he had struck and wounded its priest, Martín Pérez.Juan, dean of Lugo, sent him to Arnaldo, bishop of Coria, pro absolutionis beneficio, cui a domno papa concessa erat tunc temporis haec potestas. Arnaldo heard his confession, and returned him to his own bishop for absolution, recommending that he make compensation in due form by surrendering his share of the church. When he did so, he acted not only pro peccato illo, but also because his tenure of a share of the church had been against canon law, quam contra sacros canones detinebam. This looks like a clear case of episcopal persuasion acting upon a lay parcener to bring about a proper conformity with the law of the church. It is a unique case; and we should remember too how late in date it is.⁽⁸⁷⁾

The bishops' acta will prove to be our best guide. We find in them no general statements, no enunciation of ideals, no articulate 'programme'. But some notions can be ferreted out of them about what bishops were actually doing, perhaps even, more hazardously, about what bishops thought they were up to.

But before we turn to them, we must look a little more [162] closely at the setting in which bishops worked, the legal and customary environment, the social context. So little work has been devoted to Spanish social history that the following remarks can be offered only with the greatest trepidation. They are necessarily based on impressions, which one day, it is to be hoped, will be corrected. So much by way of apology.

Our concern is with an institution with which we have already made some play, the proprietary church, for it is with the parish churches which serve the spiritual needs of the people that a bishop's work is in the last resort concerned -- who provides them, who has charge of them, what goes on in them. There can be no doubt that there were very many proprietary churches in the kingdom of León in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Let us look at a few examples. In the diocese of Oviedo, the monastery of Cornellana had been founded in 1024 by Cristina, daughter of Bermudo II of León (984-99) and her husband Ordoño, son of Ramiro III (966-84).⁽⁸⁸⁾ Cristina herself entered the house to spend the latter part of her life there. After her death, and whether what occurred was in accordance with her wishes or not we cannot tell, the lands of the monastery, which had been among the lands of the family, were divided among her three children, two sons and a daughter. A further subdivision among heirs took place in the next generation. Of this generation, one of the ladies, Enderquina, married Count Suero Bermúdez. Count Suero was a nobleman of the highest rank and of great wealth; traceable in close association with the Leonese monarchs from c.1098 to c.1133, he was for the author of the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris a vir in consilio strenuus, veritatisque inquisitor. By a series of deals with his relatives he managed to reunite the lands of the monastery into his own hands, after which he made Cornellana and its properties over to Cluny, in 1122. The remainder of the story does not concern us here; what is significant for our purposes is the number of churches which the family had owned. They are enumerated in the charter of donation of 1122. [163] Queen Urraca had given Count Suero one church (ecclesiam) and three or perhaps four monasteria.⁽⁸⁹⁾ He had acquired by inheritance or by his own efforts (de parentibus nostris vel de nostris ganantiis) three churches, half of a fourth and a share (portionem) in a fifth. These were certainly his 'own' churches. Those given by the queen had been granted by charter, per incartationes, the normal mode of alienating property in perpetuity to be held iure hereditario, as countless royal diplomas testify. The others he referred to as his hereditates, along with estates (villas), a fortress (castellum) and male and female slaves (servos et ancillas).

We move westwards into the diocese of Mondoñedo, and a little backwards in time, where we are confronted by the tangled history of the lands of Ermesenda Núñez.⁽⁹⁰⁾ The lady Ermesenda belonged to a family quite as exalted as that associated with the monastery of Cornellana, for she was descended from Count Osorio Gutiérrez, founder of the monastery of Lorenzana in 969 and cousin of the great monastic founder, St. Rosendo of Celanova; one of their aunts was married to Ordoño II of León (914-24); and their grandfather Hermenegildo Gutiérrez, count of Tuy and Porto, had been Alfonso III's mayordomo and conquerer of Coimbra in 878. Ermesenda was the last of her line. She found herself in the quite unusual position of having no kin at all, as she herself explains -- Ego vero non habeo filio quia nunquam habui virum, nec frater, nec soprino, nec ulla gens. Consequently, she had a completely free hand in the disposal of her property. Or so she thought. Others did not so think, and the conflicting claims that arose after her death in about 1084 were not resolved for at least a generation. These lawsuits, though of the utmost interest, are not our concern here, which is rather with an earlier grant she made to the monastery of Chantada in 1073. Here, along with estates, silver plate, books, silken clothing, and the horses, coats-of-mail and swords which she had inherited from her brother, we find casually mentioned una ecclesia media de sancto[164]Christoforo que comparamus de Leovegildo Fataliz. Here again a church is being treated like any other bit of property; it, or a share in it, can be bought or sold; it can be left by will.

We move yet further to the west, into the lands where the great family of Traba held sway. It was a new family, rising from obscurity in the middle years of the eleventh century to surpass all other Galician families by the early twelfth. Bermudo Pérez de Traba founded a monastery for his daughter Urraca, to which he gave the church of Genrozo in 1138.⁽⁹¹⁾ Half of the church he had inherited from his avis et parentibus, and it had come to him in particione inter fratres meos et sorores. The other half had passed at an earlier date from his family into royal hands, but had returned to Bermudo in the form of a grant from Alfonso VII as a reward pro servicio et fidelitate.

Suero Bermúdez, Ermesenda Núñez, and Bermudo Pérez were people who stood very high upon the social ladder. But such people were not alone in owning and trading in churches. Nuño Crescóniz and his wife, with Diego the priest and Suero the priest, and all their relatives, were humbler people, who gave their church (nostra ecclesia) at Aurivizes to the monastery of Carboeiro in 1131, explaining that they had inherited it from their ancestors who had built it and left it to them. So was Suero Froílaz, who gave ecclesia mea propria which he had inherited from his grandfather to the same house in 1142.⁽⁹²⁾ Diego Múñoz was another man of middling rank, though he had splendid connections for his uncle was the great Archbishop Diego Gelmírez. When in 1151 he was about to leave in hostem contra Cordobam he prudently made a will, which has survived. His bequests included a ninth-part share in the church of Brion; an eleventh part of the church of Lauro, and in addition a further third of that church which he held as a fief (prestimonium) of the monastery of San Martín Pinario; a share in another church, whose place-name is now illegible; a fifth part of the church [165] of Transmonte (in which church he and his sister held jointly a full half and two-ninths of the other half); and a share in the church of Ermedelo.⁽⁹³⁾ A few years earlier the heredes of the church of Barrantes, in the diocese of Tuy, had met to constitute the place a Benedictine monastery. These were not big men; they consisted of the bishop of Tuy, his brother Suero and Juan Tirans, and their other relations, and they had to buy the favour of the dominus terre, Count Gómez Núñez, with cash before they could set up the monastery.⁽⁹⁴⁾ It is worth noting, incidentally, that the heirs acted because the church non erat tractata sicut decebat, quia parochiani erant in ea. They were taking their responsibilities as proprietors seriously. Back in the diocese of Oviedo, the two brothers Pedro and Fernando Núñez, who gave the church of Selgas to the see of Oviedo in 1114, were not important noblemen.⁽⁹⁵⁾ They had built the church themselves, and the gift was to take effect only after their death; what was more, si ex nostra progenie aliquis sacerdos fuerit qui eam tenere voluerit, he was to hold the church for life.

Galicia and the Asturias were the areas of large estates and big lords. Though we hear much of churches which had been divided into shares, these shares seem to have been distributed among the members of a single kin. The founders of the churches, who had acquired a founder's rights over them, seem usually to have been individuals, or a man and wife, or two brothers. The same phenomenon is found further to the south, in the lands round Astorga and León.⁽⁹⁶⁾ But here we find something else as well. For this was not the land of big lordships but of smaller holdings, not of large proprietors but of those humbler people whom medieval historians, vaguely and perhaps in desperation, call 'free peasants'. The phenomenon we meet here seems to be that of common ownership of churches by village communities. In 1126 the inhabitants of Corporales, fifty of whom are named, et cuncto concilio de Corporales a minimo ejus usque ad maximo [166] tam viris quam feminis, gave their church of San Juan to the monastery of San Pedro de Montes.⁽⁹⁷⁾ In 1104, fifteen householders, with their wives and children, did the same with the church of Quintanilla. So, later in the same year, did sixteen laymen, some in explicit association with brothers, sisters or children, with the church of Paradela.⁽⁹⁸⁾ It is hard to believe that those who made up these groups were related to one another by ties of blood.

But the underlying notions are the same. However many they be, and whether they be related or not, these are still proprietors of proprietary churches. We are witnessing once more in short 'the persistent tendency to treat the organization of religion as a branch of secular life, and consequently to bring the property on which this organization was based under the same rules as secular property'.⁽⁹⁹⁾

Further to the south, in the lands most recently reconquered, it is harder to find evidence of the existence of proprietary churches. Few documents have survived which relate to this area, in comparison with the great wealth of documentary evidence from Galicia. Yet even when allowance is made for this, one is left with an impression that the institution was rare in the southern dioceses. Of course, examples can be found. The church of Sta. María de la Vega, just outside the town of Salamanca, which was given to San Isidoro de León in 1166 by Velasco Iñigo, his wife Amadonna Domínguez, and his sister Justa, looks like one; it had probably, though not certainly, been built by Velasco.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ In 1159 Count Osorio and his wife Teresa granted to the see of Zamora the tercias in five churches quas hereditario iure obtinemus.⁽¹⁰¹⁾ But examples are few and far between, while in Galicia they are abundant. Moreover, there is some negative evidence suggesting the general rarity of proprietary churches (though the problem of deciding how much weight should be given to it is a delicate one): for instance, it is noteworthy [167] that there is not a single reference to a proprietary church among the twelfth-century charters relating to the abbey of Moreruela, between Salamanca and Zamora, even though it attracted numerous grants from lay donors.⁽¹⁰²⁾ A charter of Alfonso VII, dated 30 April 1154, shows us that when Castronuño was resettled by Count Núño Pérez de Lara (who gave his name to the place) he was given help (adiutorium) by Bishop Navarro of Salamanca and his archdeacon Ciprián, who built churches in and near the new settlement and equipped them with liturgical books and vestments; the king gave the bishop rights over these churches.⁽¹⁰³⁾ So responsibilities were divided; the count had his sphere of action and the bishop his; the bishop's responsibilities and rights were respected and enforced by the king. Was it easier for bishops to protect what they conceived to be their rights in the frontier dioceses than it was in the dioceses of the north? Perhaps it was.

Much remains unclear about these churches. We do not know exactly what the rights of proprietors were. We rarely know what was involved when they surrendered these churches to a bishopric or a monastery. Although a rough pattern in the distribution of proprietary churches within the kingdom of León has been suggested, it remains to test this pattern in the light of further research. And we shall never know what was the absolute number of proprietary churches.

It is time to turn once more to the bishops. We know that proprietary churches were transferred from lay to ecclesiastical hands in large numbers during the century, in León as in other parts of Europe. Most of our evidence for the existence of these churches comes indeed from the documents recording such transfers. Nothing can be said that is not a guess about the rate at which transfer took place. Very little seems to have occurred before the last quarter of the eleventh century; the process was far from complete by the date at which [168] our survey ends, in 1215.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ The bishops may, as we have seen, have actively encouraged the process. There is further evidence for this among their acta, which we must now consider.

Let us take first an early act from the see of León, dated 26 April 1117. It concerned the monasterium of San Tirso, situated near the town of León, which was held by a number of lay proprietors.⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ Bishop Diego had a claim upon it because, as the proprietors were brought to admit, half of it belonged to the cathedral church of St. María of León. A settlement was reached between the contending parties. The proprietors were to surrender the lands of San Tirso and the bishop was to build and settle (construat et populet) the monasterium. The proprietors were to have a hand in the election of its abbot; they were to increase its endowments and to 'defend' it; any of them seeking hospitality was to be received sicut hereditarius, and they were to have the right to enter it si forte aliquis illorum ad inopiam devenerit. The two parties bound themselves under threat of severe monetary penalties to observe the agreement. What was happening here? The bishop was concerned about the rights of himself and his church as proprietors; he was anxious to recover rights and properties which had slipped from his church's grasp. He defined, recognized and confirmed the rights of the lay proprietors who were his partners. He accepted that laymen had such rights, either because he was content to do so, or because he had no other choice.

Two years later, Pedro III, bishop of Lugo, gave the church Sta. Eulalia to one Miguel Peláez.⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ We do not know whether the beneficiary was a layman or a clerk. The grant, duly witnessed by the chapter of Lugo, was framed in entirely secular terms. The only stipulation that the bishop made was that the church should revert to the see of Lugo on Miguel's death. No other controls were imposed; or, to be strictly [169] accurate, none was stated in the bishop's charter. We may think it likely that Miguel Peláez had to swear an oath to the bishop such as that sworn by Pedro Daniéliz in 1130.⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ Pedro too had received a church from the bishop; he swore that he would be the bishop's vassallus sine alio domino for the church quam vos datis mihi ad tenendam; that he would care faithfully, et prudens agricola, for its endowments; and that he would render to his lord the traditional third part of all the tithes. Nothing at all is said about his spiritual duties.

These documents take us into a world in which bishops accepted the proprietary church system; in which they talked about the churches under their care, and handed them out to their subordinates, like so many secular estates; and in which they made little or no attempt to exert an episcopal as opposed to a lordly control over what went on in them. But it was a world whose end was approaching. In 1143 Gonzalo Bermúdez and his wife gave a church which they had built to the see of Oviedo.⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ They were to hold it for their lifetime; afterwards it was not to be leased (detur in prestamine) to anyone but given to a religious man chosen by the bishop and chapter (detur religiose (sic) homini episcopi et capituli dispositione). One would like to know who made this stipulation. The see was vacant at the time, and was being administered by the archdeacon Froilán Garcia. The charter of donation was certainly drawn up by the beneficiaries. Or does the phrase indicate a new attitude among lay donors? Sometimes bishops bought lay proprietors out. In 1158 Bishop Esteban of Zamora came to an agreement with the lay proprietors of the church of Villardondiego.⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ The background to this seems to have been an attempt on the part of the bishop to supplant them by instituting a priest of his own choosing in the church. The contending parties agreed that the priest should be chosen in future after consultation between them; that no other church should be founded in the [170] village; and that the bishop should get his tercias. For all this the bishop paid, with two plots of land. Yet the most vital provision came last of all: et ipse episcopus sit heres in ipsa ecclesia. The church of Villardondiego was to pass from lay to episcopal control. A somewhat similar case may be cited from the diocese of Tuy, the details of which are furnished in an act of Bishop Beltrán dated 30 December 1183.⁽¹¹⁰⁾ Pelayo Menéndez, bishop of Tuy from 1130 to 1156, had acquired from one Pedro Pérez his share in the monasterium of Pesegueiro in return for a grant to him for life only of the church of Santiago in Vigo. On his death his son, Pedro Pérez II, held onto the church of Vigo iniuste. After a lengthy dispute it was agreed that he too was to be allowed to retain the church for his own lifetime, on payment of a steep annual render in cash and under certain other conditions, after which it was to revert to the cathedral church of Tuy.

We also find bishops intervening when laymen granted parish churches to monasteries. In 1163 Archbishop Martín of Compostela confirmed the monastery of Tojos Outos in possession of the church of San Felix at Syaria which had been given to it by one García on the occasion of his departure for Jerusalem: the archbishop noted that the grant had been made per nostram licenciam, and he stipulated that the monastery was to defend the church ab omni heredum voce vel requisicione.⁽¹¹¹⁾

Again, bishops seem to have been anxious to retain control of churches  in newly-founded settlements. In 1161 Bishop Esteban of Zamora granted a fuero to the settlement of Las Morarelias.⁽¹¹²⁾ He laid down that he would build the church there and mittam clericum meum quemcum que voluero. What was more, if the priest were accused of any misdemeanour, he was to be arraigned before the bishop's court, not before the concejo of the village; though the concejo was to be allowed to share any fines which the bishop might impose upon him. One may recall here the emphasis laid by his [171] predecessor Bernardo upon the bishop's church, ecclesia episcopi, in the fuero granted to Fuentesauco in 1133.⁽¹¹³⁾ A later example from further north concerns Benavente in the diocese of Astorga, a new town to which Fernando II had granted a fuero in 1167. A document of 1199 (surviving only in an eighteenth-century abstract) reveals Bishop Lope of Astorga anxious to retain control of all newly-founded churches.⁽¹¹⁴⁾ In the diocese of Salamanca, we have already seen Bishop Navarro controlling the founding of churches round Castronuño, while Count Nuño Pérez de Lara was responsible for the secular repoblación. They seem to have worked harmoniously together, which is only to say that we hear of no squabbles in the documents that have come down to us. Relations were sometimes strained. Fernando II decided to settle Ledesma, in the same diocese, in 1161, and put the arrangements into the hands of Count Ponce de Cabrera.⁽¹¹⁵⁾ The bishop of Salamanca was to have charge of the church of Ledesma. But we learn from a papal bull of 15 July 1166 that Count Ponce had seized the church and given it to the Hospitallers; they had then granted it to a knight who had taken up residence within the church with his mistress. This story bears all the marks of a tale told by the complainants, the bishop and chapter of Salamanca, and the reality proved to be rather less scandalous than this. One suspects that the usurpation occurred in 1163 at the time of the Portuguese invasion of the exposed frontier region on which Ledesma lay, when the needs of defence were pressing and the Hospitallers could make what terms they chose. What is significant is that they were extraordinarily hard to get out. They were still there in 1177, if not later; and they were still being eyed with suspicion -- together with another menacing body, the knights of the Order of Santiago -- in 1192.⁽¹¹⁶⁾

Occasionally, lay proprietors might be expropriated. The abbot of Oya, on the Atlantic coast near Tuy, had been [172] complaining for a long time about the heredes of the church of Sta. Marina at Rosal who refused to surrender a quarter share of the church. In 1200 Bishop Beltrán of Tuy took the opportunity presented by their failure to obey three summonses to attend his court to hear the matter to dispossess them.⁽¹¹⁷⁾ He did this for their contumacy, not because they were holding a church contrary to canon law; but it is significant that the engine of punishment he chose was dispossession, rather than (say) the monetary fine which had been stipulated by bishop Diego of León in 1117.

The evidence so far cited is necessarily scattered both in time and place but it does suggest some tentative conclusions. Proprietary churches were certainly passing from lay into ecclesiastical hands. Bishops were encouraging the movement, with more energy (it would seem) as the century wore on. Their activity had to take on different forms in the different parts of the kingdom. In the north, faced with an entrenched system of Eigenkirchen, they bought out lay proprietors, insinuated themselves as their heirs by bending to their own purposes the well-established legal device of the donatio post obitum, or seized pretexts to get rid of them. It must have been a slow process, and we should guard against too ready an assumption that effort was consistent or progress steady. In the south, where the proprietary church was barely established, their task was the different one of trying to prevent its taking root.

As a corollary of the slow erosion of the proprietary church, we should expect to find the emergence of the notion of the ius patronatus. We do find the terms, and presumably the ideas, but they were late to appear and not widely diffused. The patronus of a church is first mentioned in a Salamanca act of 1181, and appears again in a Zamora act of 1212.⁽¹¹⁸⁾Ius patronatus is referred to in an act of Archbishop Pedro Suárez of 1185 -- which might have been drafted by the archbishop of Toledo's writing-office -- and in one of Bishop Martín Arias of Zamora dated 1214.⁽¹¹⁹⁾ And that is the [173] extent of our evidence. It may be significant that from a decretal letter of 1209 despatched to the bishop of Orense we may learn that the bishop's query which had elicited the letter showed familiarity with the idea but unfamiliarity with the details of canonical practice.⁽¹²⁰⁾

What else were bishops trying to do in and with the parish churches of their dioceses? We might expect to find them trying to supervise appointments to cures; displaying concern for clerical education, celibacy, income and security of tenure; instituting perpetual vicarages; attempting to supervise the building of new churches. Some of these matters have left their mark in our texts, not all. We hear of church-building undertaken by the bishops,⁽¹²¹⁾ and we can see that at least in the second half of the century they were trying so far as possible to control the building of churches. Esteban, bishop of Zamora, gave Pedro Díaz and other merchants of Zamora permission to build a church to serve the hospital which they had founded below the town by the new bridge over the Duero.⁽¹²²⁾ We learn from an act of Bishop Vidal of Salamanca that his predecessor Pedro Suárez had while bishop of Salamanca given one Berengar and his two sons permission to build a church.⁽¹²³⁾ One of the quarrels between the bishops of Astorga and the Hospitallers was that they had built churches without episcopal licence in the diocese.⁽¹²⁴⁾ When Rodrigo II of Lugo granted the church of Monseti to Urraca Adefonsi as a benefice for life in 1182, he required her to build the church there, and laid down exactly how she was to do it and when; the apse and the portal were to be of ashlar and the remaining walls of rubble, and the whole church was to be finished by 1 March 1186.⁽¹²⁵⁾ Guillermo, bishop of Zamora, licensed the knights of the Order of Santiago to [174] build a church at Campluma, near Zamora; his successor Martín allowed one Ramiro to build a church at Lacuna Toral in 1199.⁽¹²⁶⁾ And there are further examples of episcopal control from the same diocese.⁽¹²⁷⁾

In documents of this sort, we hear a good deal about episcopal rights, rather less about the endowments of local churches, and practically nothing at all about the clergy who were to serve them. For example, in the act of Bishop Vidal of Salamanca referred to above⁽¹²⁸⁾ the bishop stressed the money payment that was due from the patron every year and ordered that episcopal interdicts and excommunications were to be observed. Nothing was said about the endowments of the church -- though it was implied that they were adequate, and likely to grow -- nor about the clergy who were to have charge of it. Again, when Martín of Zamora granted a church at Toro to the monastery of Arvas in 1194 he stipulated that tercias were to be rendered to the bishop and laid down that

omnem reverentie subjectionem, et omnia plenaria iura que predicte Zemorensi ecclesie in aliis sue diocesis ecclesiis debentur et observantur ei semper exhibeatis et fideliter observetis.⁽¹²⁹⁾

Some concern was shown for the character of the parish clergy. Successive ecclesiastical councils forbade clerical marriage and unchastity -- Compostela in 1114, Burgos in 1117, Sahagún in 1121, Palencia in 1129, Valladolid in 1143 and 1155. How widespread such shortcomings were we have no means of telling. There is some evidence that throughout the following century they were indeed widespread. Attempts were certainly made to examine the fitness of priests before their institution: we have evidence of this from the dioceses of Tuy and Zamora, and, over the Castilian frontier, Avila.⁽¹³¹⁾ But whether such attempts were regular or sporadic we have no means of ascertaining. Neither do we know anything at all about the steps taken (if any) by bishops to ensure that the lower clergy had a modicum of education.

Bishops would be successful in their aims only if they had at their disposal a machinery of diocesan administration, in working order, to enforce their wishes. The essential elements of such a machinery were visitations, synods and the holding of courts. Visitation is referred to in a matter of fact way in our sources, which is some justification for supposing that it took place frequently, perhaps regularly. Thus the authors of the Historia Compostellana introduced an anecdote about Diego Gelmírez with the words, 'Cum honores et ecclesias, veluti bonus pastor, in sua diocesi sancta visitatione [176] pervisitaret...', and a little later they observed that disorder was so rife in Spain that, 'pontifices... nec etiam suas proprias dioceses secure visitare audebant'.⁽¹³²⁾ A bishop of Lugo could refer at about the same time to the 'prandiis, que mihi reserventur cum ipsam terram visitavero annuatim pontificali more'.⁽¹³³⁾ When the countess Teresa of Portugal gave the monasterium of Azere to the bishop of Tuy in 1125 it is plain that she expected him to visit it at least once a year, for he was to conduct ordinations there per singulos annos.⁽¹³⁴⁾ So too in the dioceses of the central part of the kingdom:⁽¹³⁵⁾ and in the southern parts where we find the bishop of Zamora stipulating in 1208 that si ei placuerit singulis annis visitet ecclesias in the valley of the Guareña.⁽¹³⁶⁾ Monasteries too were to be visited. Receptio was one of the rights going to make up ius pontificale which Nuño of Mondoñedo claimed over the monastery of Lorenzana in 1128; it was part of the ius pontificale which Bishop Martín of Oviedo renounced in favour of the exempt abbey of Samos in 1150.⁽¹³⁷⁾

What actually happened on these visitations? Some clues have already been given. Diego Gelmírez visited not only his churches but also his honores, i.e., his lands. Pedro of Lugo spoke of visitation in his act of 1120 simply because he wished to ensure that he retained for himself the right of procuration. In this connection, the following instances may be noted. The bishops of León insisted upon the hospitality due to them from the monasteria of their diocese in the same sort of terms in which they spoke of that due from the settlements of repobladores upon their own estates. They could lay down both this, 'recipiatur vero episcopus... in ipsis villis et monasteriis descriptis, et detur ei impensa dum in ipsis hospitari voluerit...' and this, 'Procurabunt etiam episcopum splendide et eos qui cum eo erunt, una die in unoquoque anno, idem populatores, si advenerit in ipsa villa, et recipient [177] in domibus suis bestias suas cum hominibus suis et canonicorum ibidem quandocumque advenerint'.⁽¹³⁸⁾ These documents do not specify the size of the episcopal retinue. But some bishops clearly had to bargain. The monks of San Román de la Hornija kept the bishop of Zamora down to an entourage of fifteen horsemen.⁽¹³⁹⁾ Yet bishops expected to be well received. Rodrigo II of Lugo stated that he was to be entertained splendide... tamquam ipsius ecclesie dominum by Teresa Peláez, to whom he had granted a church in prestimonium in 1189.⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ The priest of Requeixu was to receive him whenever he came sicut fidelis vasallus et amicus suum recipit dominum.⁽¹⁴¹⁾ One recipient of a church was required to construct a special building (domum) near the church in which the bishop might be suitably (honeste) received in the course of visitations.⁽¹⁴²⁾ The church of Compostela certainly had houses or palaces of this kind in which the bishops or archbishops might be lodged during visitations: Diego Gelmírez spent his own money on repairs to those in the Tierra de Campos early in his episcopate.⁽¹⁴³⁾

It is plain that visitation was a good deal more than a matter of pastoral care. The hospitality that bishops sought may have formed an important part of their revenue. Bishops expected to do well out of it, and sometimes they did very well indeed; the theft of the relics of St. Fructuosus from Braga was referred to by the authors of the Historia Compostellana as a visitation.⁽¹⁴⁴⁾ The prandia to which they were entitled seems usually to have been exacted in kind, though there is some evidence for commutation towards the end of the century; Guillermo of Zamora exacted one gold piece (aureum) annually from the church of Villafranca de Duero, and Rodrigo II of Lugo ten solidi from the church of Barrantes.⁽¹⁴⁵⁾ It was presumably on the occasion of visitation that [178] bishops collected the other dues which came to them from the parish churches of their dioceses, namely the third part of the tithes and a ram,⁽¹⁴⁶⁾ though we do hear of officials, terciarii, whom the bishop might send to carry out apportionment and collection.⁽¹⁴⁷⁾ Sometimes these dues were commuted too.⁽¹⁴⁸⁾

But it would be perverse to suggest that episcopal visitation was no more than the occasional descent of a rapacious lord, though it must often have looked like that to the visited. Not all visitations need have been as stirring as the occasion when Diego Gelmírez visited the monastery of Antealtares in about 1129-30; the abbot, convicted of having kept seventy (sic) concubines, was deposed, and the monks were told to get their hair cut.⁽¹⁴⁹⁾ We may guess that some of the matters discussed earlier -- church-fabrics, clerical celibacy, etc. -- were investigated during visitations; but we do not really know what went on.

The other occasion for the collection of revenue and for the exercise of pastoral responsibilities was the meeting of the bishop's synod. Here too we have a number of fragments of evidence whose cumulative force is impressive. The abbot of Samos was required to attend the bishop of Lugo's concilium in 1145; in 1154 the abbot of Castañeda was exempted from attending the bishop of Astorga's synodum sive concilium.⁽¹⁵⁰⁾ Manrique of León seems to have held synods twice a year; Martín of Zamora once a year.⁽¹⁵¹⁾ Archbishop Pelayo of Compostela's requirement that the heads of the religious houses of his diocese should attend the celebration of Santiago's day at Compostela every year would have provided the occasion for holding a synod, though nothing was said of one.⁽¹⁵²⁾ One of the counts against the abbot of Celanova in 1198 was that he had refused to attend the bishop of Orense's synod and had prevented others from doing so.⁽¹⁵³⁾ In [179] Castile, we hear of annual synods in the diocese of Burgos in 1205, and of what seem to be regular synods in the diocese of Avila in 1181.⁽¹⁵⁴⁾ But as with visitations, so with synods; we do not really know what went on when they met.

The council of Burgos in 1117 laid down that clerks were not to take disputes with other churchmen to secular tribunals. Presumably the bishops were to hear such cases. But whether the bishops' courts were bodies distinct from the diocesan synod, if so, who sat in them; how far their competence extended; and what sort of business came before them, we simply cannot tell. When the bishop of Tuy expropriated the heirs of the church of Rosal in 1200⁽¹⁵⁵⁾ he summoned them to his 'presence' and he sought the advice of 'prudent men'. When the bishop of Zamora heard a dispute between his cathedral canons and the clergy of the town at about the same date it was heard coram nobis.⁽¹⁵⁶⁾ When an earlier bishop of Zamora heard a dispute between the abbot of Moreruela and the people of Junciel in 1168 he delegated the case to four laymen to judge, and their judgement was ratified by the bishop in his cathedral church.⁽¹⁵⁷⁾ But information of this kind is not helpful. The documents are too lean and sparse, and their wording too vague, to allow us to answer the questions we have posed.
 

Such is the evidence. That it is a pitifully inadequate basis on which to found judgements about the pastoral action of the bishops of León is all too apparent What concluding observations we may offer have necessarily to be somewhat neutral in tone. It is clear that a pattern of diocesan administration -- in large part an imported one -- took root in western Spain during the twelfth century. The indications are that the machinery of government was in reasonably good order. The diocese appears as a working unit of church government; bishops show signs, albeit the evidence is fragmentary, of responsible pastoral care. Yet one is left with an impression that there was little development over the century. (If we are [180] correct in associating innovation with the immigrant French clergy it may be useful to bear in mind that this influx seems to have ceased after c. 1150). Leonese church government in the latter part of the century may have been as old-fashioned as the appearance of the documents which are the main source of our information about it. Secular terms survived in the bishops' acta long after they had been banished from the ecclesiastical documents of northern Europe. New Romano-canonical terms were slow to appear and seem to have been handled with little assurance at first. Bishops seem to have been unfamiliar with practices which were becoming standard elsewhere; it is significant, for instance, that they did not consistently insert themselves into the process by which proprietary churches were surrendered into ecclesiastical hands by insisting that such surrenders be mediated through them alone, as trustees of all ecclesiastical rights in their dioceses. If Leonese churchmen were ignorant of reforming currents of thought, these facts would be the more intelligible: but, as we shall shortly see, there is evidence that relations between these churchmen and the papal curia became close during the course of the century. Yet the legate John of Abbeville was scandalized in 1228-9 both by what he found in Spain and by the absence of what he had hoped to find. He was probably a man who was easily shockable, certainly one whom shock made vociferous; but his judgements cannot simply be set aside. Perhaps it would be charitable to conclude that the administration of the secular church of the Leonese kingdom under Fernando II and Alfonso IX was not all that it might have been.

1. The tale has to be pieced together from a series of depositions taken in 1193-4: AC Orense, Obispo y Dignidades, no. 17.

2. M. Cocheril, Études sur le monachisme en Espagne et au Portugal (Paris-Lisbon, 1966), p. 23.

3. D. Mansilla, 'Orígenes de la organización metropolitana en la iglesia española' Hispania Sacra xii (1959), 255-91.

4. The case of Zamora is discussed at length below, ch. 5 pp. 195-203.

5. HC pp. 323, 537.

6. AD Braga, Liber Fidei, fols. 138^v, 146^v, 150^r, 151^r, 153^r.

7. Ibid., fols. l38^v, 152^v, 153^r.

8. Ibid., fols. 70^v-71^r, 138^v, 151^r.

9. Ibid., fols. 71^r, 118^v, 138^v.

10. Ibid., fols. 117^v-118^r.

11. AD Braga, Gaveta dos Arcebispos, no. 4.

12. León, Archivo de San Isidoro, no. 146.

13. AD Braga, Gaveta dos Arcebispos, nos. 4, 39.

14. HC pp. 191-2, 308, 359, 417-19, 427-30, 500-1.

15. At that time the archbishop of Braga, suspended from office, was prosecuting an appeal in Rome.

16. Cf. G. Martínez Díez, 'El Concilio Compostelano del reinado de Fernando I', AEM i (1964), 121-38.

17. ANTT, Coleccão Especial, Corporacões Diversas, Mitra de Braga, caixa 1, no. 2.

18. AD Braga, Gaveta dos Arcebispos, no. 4.

19. AC Salamanca, nos. 61, 62 (ptd. below Appendix nos. XV, XVI).

20. Papal bulls of 1196 and 1210 hint at some bickering: AC Salamanca, nos. 105, 126.

21. E. Valiña Sampedro, El Camino de Santiago, Estudio Histórico-Jurídico (Salamanca, 1971), ch. 5.

22. AC Orense, Obispo y Dignidades, no. 17 bis.

23. Take this, for example: the archpriest of the archdeacon of Orense 'coegit ipsum testem extrahere vota de ipsa ecclesia quia si non fecisset aufferebant ei domum et quicquid habebat...', AC Orense, Obispo y Dignidades, no. 17.

24. See above, ch.2, pp. 34, 51.

25. E.g., for Astorga, BN MS. 4357, Tumbo Negro, nos. 633-5, 639; for León, AC León, nos. 1362, 1390 (ptd. ES XXVI, app. xlvi, liii, pp. c-ciii, cxi-cxiv); for Lugo, AHN 1325D/11 (ptd. ES XLI, ap. xi, pp. 316-18); for Oviedo, Docs. Oviedo no. 151; for Compostela, HC p. 55; for Zamora, AC Zamora, leg. 8, no. 5.

26. E.g., HC p. 243.

27. C.I, section 2; for the acts of the council, see G. Martínez Díez, 'El Concilio Compostelano del reinado de Femando I', AEM i (1964), 121-38

28. Le Guide du Pèlerin de St.-Jacques de Compostelle, ed. J. Vielliard (4th ed. Mâcon, 1969), p. 120; cf. LFH III, p. 253. For discussion of the appearance of regular cathedral chapters in western Spaln during the eleventh century, see C.J. Bishko, 'Femando I y los orígenes de la alianza castellano-leonesa con Cluny', CHE xlvii-xlviii (1968), 64, 83. Professor Bishko would see here the influence of the Cluniacs.

29. AC Zamora, leg. 8, no. 5; AC Salamanca, no. 19; AHN 18/10, 19/1-3.

30. For thirteenth-century capitular reforms, see D. Mansilla, Iglesia castellano-leonesa y curia romana en los tiempos del rey San Fernando (Madrid, 1945), pp. 193-222.

31. MHV I, nos. 158, 163.

32. AHN 1325F/9 (ptd. inaccurately ES XLI, ap. xvii, pp. 326-8).

33. AC León no. 1384 (ptd. below Appendix no. IV).

34. Docs. Oviedo no. 138.

35. What is known about this lost papal bull is to be found in A. Quintana Prieto, 'Registro de documentos pontificios de Astorga (1139-1413)', Anthologica Annua xi (1963), 189-226.

36. HC pp. 55, 544; LFH IV, ap. liii, pp. 135-8; Mansilla, op.cit., p. 200.

37. LFH IV, ap. xlii, pp. 105-6.

38. See A.G. Biggs, Diego Gelmírez (Washington, 1949), pp. 242-4, and references there given.

39. LFH IV, ap. xl, pp. 99-101; ap. xlii, pp. 105-6.

40. LFH IV, ap. l, pp. 122-4; ap. liii, pp. 135-8 (where incorrectly dated to 1178).

41. LFH V, ap. vii, pp. 21-3.

42. AC Salamanca, no. 77.

43. BN MS. 4357, Particulares no. 71; the bald eighteenth-century summary gives very little information.

44. Mansilla, Iglesia castellano-leonesa, pp. 193-4.

45. ES XLI, ap. ii, pp. 296-301.

46. ES XXXVI, ap. xlvi, pp. c-ciii; Docs. Oviedo no. 138.

47. HC p. 256.

48. AHN 19/1-3.

49. AC Avila, no. 5; AC Salamanca, nos. 57, 60, 78.

50. AHN cód. 1197B, fols. 253^r-255^r.

51. AC Tuy 14/10, 1/7 (ptd. ES XXII, app. vi, xiii, pp. 260-61, 273-7). The two vicarii who appear in a Tuy act of 1152 (ptd. below, Appendix no. IX) were presumably appointed one by the bishop, the other by the chapter, for the separate administration of their divided temporalities.

52. See below, ch. 5, pp. 216-7.

53. AC Tuy 3/22; AHN 1325C/9 (ptd. below, Appendix no. III); HC pp. 376-8; AC Orense, Privilegios I/1.

54. ES XXXVI, ap. liii, pp. cxi-cxiv; Docs. Oviedo no. 138.

55. LFH IV, ap. l, pp. 122-4.

56. This may be inferred from AHN 1326C/9, 10, 20; 1326D/3, 17, 24; 1326E/19, 20.

57. AC Zamora, Libro Negro, fol. 29.

58. AHN 18/5, 8, 10, 12; 19/1-3, 9.

59. AC Salamanca nos. 7, 17, 20, 25, 61 (the latter document ptd. below, Appendix no. XV).

60. See above, ch. 3, pp. 88-97.

61. As may be appreciated from the material contained in ch. 2.

62. Docs. Oviedo no. 138; ES XVI, ap. xxiii, pp. 474-6; ES XXVI, ap. xlvi, pp. c-ciii; E. Valiña Sampedro, El Camino de Santiago, Estudio Histórico-Jurídico (Salamanca, 1971), ap. 2, pp. 230-2; HC pp. 376-8.

63. AHN 1325G/24, 1325H/5; 1326B/24; AC Lugo, leg. 3, no. 2; Libro de Bulas Apostólicas, no. 1; ES XLI, ap. ii, pp. 296-301.

64. AC Orense, Escrituras, XIII/III; Obispo y Dignidades, nos. 17, 17 bis.

65. AC Tuy, 3/22.

66. For what follows, see HC pp. 70, 73, 85, 174-5, 188, 547; AHN cód. 977B, fols. 54^v-55^v.

67. 'L'Organisation ecclésiastique du royaume suève au temps de St. Martin de Braga' in his Études historiques sur la Galice et le Portugal, pp. 1-82.

68. A. Hamilton Thompson, 'Diocesan organisation in the Middle Ages: archdeacons and rural deans', Proceedings of the British Academy xxix (1943), 153-94, at p. 175.

69. E.g., Mondoñedo: HC pp. 74-84, 374-8; Salamanca: AC Salamanca, no. 95; Zamora: AC Zamora leg. 16, 1^a parte, no. 18.

70. The phrases are taken from AC Orense, Escrituras XII/III and Obispo y Dignidades no. 17 bis. The secular terminology is worth noticing.

71. AC Salamanca, no. 95: Inter venerabilem, 7 October 1188.

72. AC Orense, Escrituras XII/III.

73. AC León, no. 1438.

74. AC Orense, Obispo y Dignidades, no. 17.

75. AHN cód. 1044B, fol. 11^r.

76. AC Orense, Obispo y Dignidades, no. 17.

77. AHN 963/20 (ptd. below, Appendix, no. XII).

78. AC Zamora leg. 36, no. 6.

79. AC Orense, Obispo y Dignidades, no. 17 bis.

80. The Ecclesiastical History of Ordene Vitalis, ed. M. Chibnall, II (Oxford, 1969), p. 26.

81. HC p. 59.

82. The Valladolid decrees are to be found in PUP no. 40.

83. Ptd. Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xlv (1972), pp. 127-8.

84. AHN 512/10

85. AHN 1325E/23.

86. AHN 1325H/12.

87. J.F. Lemarignier, in F. Lot and R. Fawtier (eds.), Histoire des institutions françaises au Moyen Age, vol. III 'Institutions ecclésiastiques' (Paris, 1962), pp. 108-9, cites examples of the motive of 'consciousness of wrong-doing' in holding churches from the late eleventh century in France.

88. For what follows, see Colleción de Fuentes para la Historia de Asturias: vol. I, Monasterio de Cornellana, ed. A.C. Floriano (Oviedo, 1949), nos. i-v; CAI para. 2; Docs. Oviedo no. 143; Recueil des chartes de l'Abbaye de Cluny, ed. A. Bruel (Paris, 1894), vol. V, no. 3958.

89. It is a measure of our general ignorance of Spanish ecclesiastical history that we do not know how to translate this word. Certainly, in the present context, 'monasteries' would be misleading.

90. For what follows, see especially AHN 1067/1, 2.

91. For what follows, see AHN 526/7, 13.

92. 'La Colección Diplomática del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de Carboeiro', ed. M. Lucas Alvarez, Compostellanum ii-iii (1958-9), nos. XLII, XLVII.

93. Galicia Histórica, Colección Diplomática (Santiago de Compostela, 1901), no. XXIX.

94. ES XXII, ap. xii, pp. 270-73.

95. Docs. Oviedo no. 136.

96. For example, AC León, no. 1382 (ptd. below, Appendix no. II).

97. Tumbo Viejo de San Pedro de Montes ed. A. Quintana Prieto (León, 1971), no. 135.

98. Ibid., nos. 116, 117.

99. R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London, 1953), p. 128.

100. AC Salamanca, nos. 16, 43; León, Archivo de San Isidoro, nos. 308, 324.

101. AC Zamora, leg. 14, no. 27.

102. AHN 3548-3550, passim.

103. AC Salamanca, no. 18. The churches in the termino of Castronuño numbered no fewer than twenty-two by the year 1177, as we learn from a bull of Alexander III: AC Salamanca, no. 49.

104. Cf. P. Galindo Romeo, Tuy en la Baja Edad Media (2nd ed., Madrid, 1950), pp. 77-8.

105. AC León, no. 1382 (ptd. below, Appendix, no. II). The precise status of the house is not clear. It was a monasterium and it was to have an abbas. But we have no evidence that there were ever monks there in the twelfth century, and later it formed the endowment for one of the prebends of León cathedral.

106. AHN 1325C/9 (ptd. below, Appendix, no. III).

107. AHN 1325C/20 (ptd. below, Appendix, no. VI).

108. Docs. Oviedo no. 155. The terms of the grant should be compared with those of the grant made by Pedro and Fernando Núñez in 1114, referred to above, p. 165. For a church given in prestamine by the bishop and chapter of Oviedo as late as 1165, see Docs. Oviedo no. 180.

109. AC Zamora, Libro Negro, fol. 5^v (ptd. below, Appendix, no. XI).

110. AC Tuy 10/11.

111. AHN cód. 1002B, fols. 187^v-188^r.

112. AC Zamora, Libro Negro, fol. 7^r.

113. AC Zamora, Libro Negro, fol. 15^v (ptd. below, Appendix, no. VII).

114. GRF p. 397; BN MS. 4357, Tumbo Negro no. 607.

115. For what follows, see GRF pp. 44-6; AC Salamanca nos. 46 (1166), 38 (1170), 45 and 50 (1177), 52 and 53 (1178?). The last two of these papal bulls are hard to date, and may well be earlier than 1178.

116. AC Salamanca, no, 100.

117. AHN 1796/4 (ptd. below, Appendix, no. XXVI).

118. AC Salamanca, no. 78 (ptd. below, Appendix, no. XVII); AC Zamora, Libro Blanco, fol. 32^r.

119. AHN 18/17; AC Zamora, Libro Negro, fols. 67^v-69^r.

120. MHV I no. 397.

121. E.g., HC pp. 186-7, 372, 472.

122. AC Zamora leg. 13, no. 26 (ptd. below, Appendix, no. XIII). This was of course not a parish church.

123. AC Salamanca, no. 78 (ptd. below, Appendix, no. XVII).

124. Papal bulls of 4 August 1182 and 27 March 1198 in A. Quintana Prieto, 'Registro de documentos pontificios de la diócesis de Astorga (1139-1413)', Anthologica Annua xi (1963), 189-226.

125. AHN 1325G/13 (ptd. below, Appendix, no. XIX).

126. D.W. Lomax, La Orden de Santiago 1170-1275 (Madrid, 1965), Ap. no. 5, p. 235 (probably of 1185-6); AC Zamora leg. 33, no. 2 (ptd. below, Appendix, no. XXV).

127. AC Zamora leg. 13, nos. 1, 37; Libro Negro, fol. VI^r of preliminary quire with unnumbered folios.

128. Cf. above, p.173, n. 4.

129. AC Zamora, Libro Negro, fol. 65.

130. E.g., AC Zamora, leg. 13, nos. 26, 39 (ptd. below, Appendix, nos. XIII, XXIX).

131. AHN 15 12/3; AC Zamora, Libro Negro, fols. 66^v-67^r; AHN 18/12.

132. HC pp. 59, 147.

133. ES XLI, ap. ii, pp. 296-301 (1120); cf. ibid., ap. v, p. 306 (1138).

134. DMP no. 70.

135. BN MS. 4357, Particulares no. 385 (Astorga, 1213).

136. AC Zamora, leg. 13, no. 13 (ptd. below, Appendix, no. XXXIII).

137. AHN cód. 1044B, fol. 12^r; BCM Lugo III (1949) pp. 256-63.

138. AC León nos. 1362, 1466 (ptd. ES XXXVI, ap. xlvi, pp. c-ciii; ap. lx, pp. cxxix-cxxx).

139. AC Zamora, leg. 13, no. 1.

140. AHN 1325H/8 (ptd. below, Appendix, no. XXI).

141. AHN 1326A/1.

142. AHN 1325G/13 (ptd. below, Appendix, no. XIX).

143. HC p.69.

144. HC p.36.

145. AC Zamora, leg. 14, no. 28; AHN 1325H/l7 (ptd. below, Appendix, no. XXIII).

146. Docs. Oviedo no. 199, where the three renders are lumped together.

147. E.g., AHN 18/17; AC Zamora leg. 14, no. 28.

148. E.g., AHN 963/20 (ptd. below, Appendix, no. XII).

149. HC p. 508.

150. ES XLI, ap. vii, pp. 308-9; ES XVI, ap. xxviii, pp. 484-6.

151. AC León no. 1438; AC Zamora, leg. 13, no. 1.

152. LFH IV, ap. xxiv, pp. 67-8.

153. MHV I, no. 132.

154. Ibid., no. 313; AHN 18/12.

155. Cf. above p. 172.

156. AC Zamora, Libro Negro, fol. 85^r (ptd. below, Appendix, no. XXVII).

157. AC Zamora, leg. 13, no. 6.