Читать книгу English Monasteries - A. Hamilton Thompson - Страница 25

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Although monks and canons were bound to individual poverty and all who attempted to accumulate a private store of money were liable to punishment, the greater monasteries were large landowning corporations. Their early benefactors bestowed gifts of manors and churches upon them for which they were bound in return to the sole service of praying for the souls of the donors. Such alienations were regulated by the statute of mortmain (1279). Benefactions continued under the procedure established by this act, and the monasteries thus became owners of a very large number of parish churches. The custom of appropriation and its effects on the fabrics of parish churches has been stated in another volume of this series[4]. The constant plea for appropriation was founded on the insufficiency of the funds of a monastery to fulfil its duty of hospitality to wayfarers and of relief to the poor. In churches of which monks were proprietors, the vicar was a resident secular priest. Monks were not allowed, save in very exceptional cases, to serve the cures of parishes, which would have interfered with their duties in quire and cloister. Wherever we find it stated in print that an incumbent of a parish church or chantry was a monk, we should hesitate to believe it without consulting the original record of his institution. Canons, on the other hand, whose orders began in the association of secular priests under a rule, were given more licence in this respect. Premonstratensian canons were generally allowed to serve the parish churches belonging to their houses; and bishops granted similar licences, though not without demur, to Austin canons. It is sometimes stated that the object of the Augustinian order was to supply parochial clergy to churches on their estates. If this was so, the custom was severely checked in the thirteenth century; and, when in the later middle ages the number of appropriated churches served by Austin canons considerably increased, the quire services in their monastic churches suffered to an extent which was never contemplated by their founders.