113. London The Clergy had some share in the government of the kingdom; for the Archbishops, Bishops, and Abbots, had seats in the great council of the kingdom, called the Wittenagemot, ever since Saxon conversion; and the Bishop also sat with the earls as judges in the county courts. In respect of the Doctrines of the Anglo-Saxon Church compared with those of Rome, she allowed Confession, prayers and masses for the dead, and penance; and was advancing towards the admission of the worship of images, purgatory, and the invocation of the Virgin Mary, and of Saints but she rejected Transubstantiation, the Papal supremacy, and all approach to the later doctrine of attrition, (the Viaticum.) The Anglo-Saxon Church, however, held that respect to Rome as might be due from a daughter to a mother Church, but no more; for as yet the Roman bishop was nothing beyond the Patriarch of western Europe, presiding among his equals. Such was the state of the Church at the Norman Conquest. 113. What share had the clergy in the government of the kingdom? CHAPTER III. From the 'Norman Conquest' to the beginning of the 'Reformation' in the reign of Henry VIII. William I.-A. D. 1066.-1087. Popes; Alexander II. A. D. 1061-72. Gregory VII. William I. 114. WILLIAM, the Conqueror, had no sooner gained possession of the country than he called on Stigand, the archbishop of Canterbury, to place the crown upon his head. This prelate, however, refusing, recourse was had to Aldred, archbishop of York. A new æra now commences in the ecclesiastical as well as civil polity of our country; and the relations between England and the Papal See, from the sanction given by the Pope to William's invasion, become more intimate. The leading policy of William, however, was to depress the ecclesiastical power: he proceeded to remove Stigand, who, in a synod held at Winchester for this purpose, was deposed by the Pope's legate, and the see of Canterbury transferred to Lanfranc, a professor of laws of Pavia, whom the King had brought from Normandy, where he held the Abbacy of Caen. A. D. 1070. Lanfranc immediately set about the reformation of the Church; and began by the substitution of a foreign for a native clergy. English bishops 114. What befel Archbishop Stigand on the accession of William the Conqueror? Who succeeded him? What were the first proceedings of Lanfranc? were deprived, and the English clergy displaced to make room for crowds of William I. Normans, and Italians, who soon occupied all the principal sees, and benefices. About this period Pope Alexander II. died A. D. 1073. 115. The Papacy resisted. -The subtle and imperious Hildebrande succeeded Pope Alexander under the title of GREGORY VII.; one of his first acts was to summon the King to do homage for the possession of England. The proud Norman peremptorily refused; yet he admitted the Pope's legates into the country; allowed the payment of Peter's-pence as a benefaction, but not as a tribute. He also declared, that no decision of any Synod should be carried into execution without his permission; that no Papal letters should be published before he had seen them; that no Pontiff should be acknowledged in his dominions without his sanction; and, that no tenant of the crown should be impleaded in the Ecclesiastical courts, or excommunicated without his permission. He confirmed the right of the clergy to great and small tithes, but subjected all the Church lands, which amounted to seven-fifteenths of the kingdom, to the payment of taxes. He also tenaciously retained the right of Investiture, (i. e. by the delivery of a ring and staff, symbols of their pastoral office and union with their Churches, he gave to the bishops livery and seizin of their temporalities, who as feudal barons paid homage and fealty to the King in return): thus he preserved his independence of the Pope, and maintained his authority over the Church; but in other respects he 115. How did William resist the demands of the Pope? [A. A. 1.] What authority did the king exercise over the Church? What enactments did he make? How was uniformity in the public worship secured? By whom was it drawn up? What other alterations were effected in the Service? What was the condition of the Norman bishops? Who succeeded William the Conqueror? G William I. considerably promoted the increase of Romish errors, and the advance of Romish power. We must observe likewise that there was a great want of Liturgical uniformity in the public worship, which produced continued disturbance at last a form was established by authority, drawn up by Oswald, (or Osmund) bishop of Salisbury, based on those of Rome, and which became universal throughout the realm. It was called the Salisbury Missal, (In Usum Sarum), and was in Latin. A. D. 1078. At length the monarch died, and was succeeded by his son WILLIAM RUFus. A. D. 1087. 116. Gregory VII. HILDEBRANDE.-A little before the death of William I., the celebrated Pope GREGORY VII. died. A. D. 1085. It is singular that the Anglo-Saxon age introduces us to one noted Gregory, and the Anglo-Norman to another, of equal, if not greater note. It was GREGORY VII. who laid the foundation of the exalted claims of the Papacy to Supremacy, and Infalli bility in things spiritual and temporal. He maintained that the sceptre of the universe belonged to the successors of St Peter, as Vicegerent of the Almighty. To prove this bold and magnificent conception, he referred to certain Decretal Epistles, since known as the 'FORGED DECRETALS,' which profess to be the decrees and letters of the first bishops of Rome from the time of Clement, the companion of St Paul, A. D. 69. to Pope Deusdedit. A. D. 615. 117. Forged Decretals. The history of these DECRETALS is this:-In the Latin Church there was no tolerably correct chronological collection of the canons until that made after the council of Chalcedon (A. D. 451.), and since known as the Prisca Translatio. A larger collection, and better translation was afterwards made by Dionysius Exiguus, (or the Less') about A. D. 510-25; to which was added a collection of the Papal decrees. In Spain there had been a very early collection of the decrees of the Synods, which from time to time was enlarged, and on the model of that by Dionysius, a collection of Papal 116. Who was Hildebrande? 117. What were the Forged Decretals? William I. decrees added. This was afterwards known as the collection of ISIDORE, archbishop of Hierapolis A. D. 636. When, however, the weakness and disunion of the successors of the great Charlemagne opened the way for new pretensions to authority and power, the Popes seized the opportunity, and to give these pretensions to universal sway an historical basis, there gradually appeared another Isidorian collection, containing the original copy, with many spurious additions, and False Decrees. They were written, probably, between A. D. 829 and A. D. 845, by a member of the Gallican church: Benedict Levita of Mentz is the suspected_author. It consisted of three parts.-(I) contained 61 Decretal Epistles of the Popes of the first three centuries from Clement A. D. 91 or 93 to Sylvester, who succeeded Melchiades. A. D. 314. (In this part, two of the Epistles from Clement to James had appeared before, the remaining 59 are new, and Pseudo-Isidorian).-(II) contained the Canons of the Councils, chiefly from the genuine Isidorian collection.-(III) contained the Decretal Epistles from Sylvester to Gregory, the Great, A. D. 590, or to Deusdedit (or Deodatus). A. D. 615. (Of these, 35 are Pseudo-Isidorian; the rest are mostly from the Isidorian collection). In this collection, which began to be used by Pope Nicholas Í. A. D. 858., is found for the first time the pretended edict 'Edictum Domini Constantini Imp.,' or the 'Donatio Constantini,' which was afterwards acknowledged a fiction by the Emperor Otho III. A. D. 999., and proved to be so by Nicolas Cusanus. A. D. 1432, and by Laurentius Valla A. D. 1457. In these it is declared, that in consideration of the Spiritual authority of St Peter Constantine the Great ceded to Pope Sylvester, and his successors, the Empire of Italy and the West: a donation that long claimed reverence as the undoubted charter of an unalienable temporal sovereignty: and further, in these Decretals it is affirmed that the whole world, in virtue of our Lord's promise to St Peter, then acknowledged the Church of Rome as the chief of all the churches; that she had the care of the whole flock of Christ; that every other bishopric was founded and emanated from Rome, and therefore must be in obedience to it; that no council or any other power on earth, whether Ecclesiastical or Civil, could in any way judge, question, or interfere with these rights and privileges of the Bishop of Rome; that without his sanction nothing done by princes, bishops, or councils, civil or religious, could have any force or authority; and that all authority was dependent on the Roman See, and crowns and mitres at its disposal: these principles Hilde |