382
NOTES AND QUERIES. [ii s. m. MAY 20, 1911.
in Mr. Reichel's treatises, nor does he discuss
the question of the amount of the local
endowment, or of the establishment of a
general standard or fixed minimum for such
endowment subjects that appear to be
interrelated, and to promise valuable results
on investigation.
The idea of a communal church was first suggested to me, years ago, by an item in an early Pipe Roll concerning some Devonshire hamlet, to which I unfortunately lost the reference. In my * Introduction to the Churchwardens' Accounts of South Tawton ' (Trans. Devon Association, vol. xxxviii. pp. 515-16, 1906) I quoted from the Tithe Commutation List of 1844 that the glebe lands in the possession of the Dean and Chapter of Windsor, apart from 3 acres in the possession of the Vicar, contain by estimation 31 acres 3 r. 21 p. These glebe lands lie in widely separated situations, recalling the disposition of the acre strips under the open-field system ; and their combined area corresponded fairly closely to the typical " virgate " of the man who contributed two oxen to the year's ploughing.
In this connexion I noted in Smith's 'Diet, of Christian Antiquities,' under ' Parish,' the statement that in 541 A.D. it was enacted (by 4 Cone. Aurel.) " that churches founded by private persons should be sufficiently endowed " ; and a citation to the effect that St. Gregory (Epist. 12) permitted an oratory to be founded, or consecrated, within a certain castle, on condition that the proper endowment were given ; which he specifies as " a farm with its homestead, a yoke of oxen, two cows, four pounds of silver, a bed, 15 head of sheep, and the proper implements of a farm." Happening, further, to note in the 'Victoria History ' of co. Notts that at Southwell there was a prebend c f two bovates [ = one virgate], I wrote to the editor of that division, asking whether he had found 30 acres to be a general endowment, and was warned by him in reply (December, 1906) that the prebend in question was an exceptional institution, quite distinct from the parochial system, and further that the two bovates " were probably fiscal in character, bearing no necessary ratio to the number of acres actually on the soil," &c. ; so that " this instance could not be taken into account in any attempt to establish such a general- ization."
I have not set about the task of collation of pertinent data, but in The English His- torical Review of January, 1908, p. 117, in a review by E. W. Watson of a book by Paul
Thomas (Leroux, 1907) entitled ' Le Droit
de Propriete des Lai'ques sur les ^glise*
et le patronage lai'que au Moyen-Age,' I
find the following highly interesting passage r
" Mr. Thomas confines his inquiry to the case of churches founded on private estates, by the munificence of their owners, and assumes, in accordance with abundant evidence, that an arbitrary gift was their normal origin. But there is evidence of another tenor, which he does not take into account. There is a curious uniformity about the extent of glebe-land attached to an English benefice. Where the history has not been confused by the exchange of tithe for glebe, or in earlier times by appropriation, it usually amounts to two yardlands,* and was so assessed. in all parts of England : the same was the case in Saxony.
" There must have been uniform cause ix> produce a uniform effect. Private endowments would have varied indefinitely, nor would they have brought the glebe into regular relation with the common-field system.
"Whatever the origin of the nstitution . . . . can it be of pagan descent, and the Rector of Goodmanham be the holder of Coifi's glebe ? It appears to be methodical, and to connect the local priesthood rather with the village com- munity than with the lord, and this falls in with some very early evidence, and some continuous practice, of the election of priest by people, and' of his being of their own class."
The foregoing may profitably be com- pared with the chapter on 'The Village Church the " Tun Kirke " of A.-S. Docu- ments,' in Mr. Baldwin Brown's work on ' The Arts in Early England,' vol.i, 1. Re- ferring to Prof. Maitland's deduction from certain D. B. items that there were at that period, at any rate, villages where the land was held and worked by a body of freemen in common, as at Cheuentone in Kent, where (T.R.E.) the estate was held in common by villeins, Mr. Brown submits that such a body of freemen may, conceiv- ably, have built and maintained, out of the common resources, a church with its needful apparatus and ministrant. He points out that at Cheuentone there was a church standing at the time of the Survey ; and that, if this already existed T. R. E., the villeins (above referred to) must have been its pro- prietors. Dr. Albert Hanck (in ' Church Hist. Germ.'), he adds, supposes a collabora- tion of the members of a free community in the establishment of a local church ; but there is no documentary evidence of such except one charter of 778 A.D., handing over to the Episcopal church at Freising
- A " yardland " is generally defined as *2
bovates or 30 acres = a virgate; but Webster's diet. gives as an alternative" 15 acres : obsolete. In the latter case the 2 yardlands would coincide with the South Tawton " about 30 acres."
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