It is stated in the “Brief” that “when the principal parochial endowments
were given, papal supremacy was not admitted by the Church of England,
and Roman doctrines were not held.” I have already explained the active
part the popes and legates of Rome had taken to introduce the payment of
tithes in England. There is not a shadow of doubt that the supremacy of
the popes of Rome was admitted by the Church of England when tithes, the
principal endowment, commenced to be paid first by custom and afterwards
by compulsion in the Anglo-Saxon Church. The Roman doctrines followed
the supremacy. The archbishops from the time of Augustine received their
palls from the Pope, and Pope Boniface V., in a letter dated A.D. 624,
conferred the primacy of all Britain on Justus, Archbishop of Canterbury.
The letter contained these remarkable words, “Hanc autem ecclesiam
utpote specialiter consistentem sub potestate et tuitione sanctæ Romanæ
ecclesiæ.”[253]
Again in 634 Pope Honorius I. conferred the primacy to Canterbury, and
again in 668 Pope Vitalian gave the supremacy _over all England_ to
Archbishop Theodore.[254]
It must be noted that the endowments of the Church were not all given
at once, but were spread over a period of about six hundred years. The
period will be longer if we take the time in which the waste and barren
lands of Edward VI.’s Act were brought into cultivation; and again the
lands and corn-rents awarded by the Inclosure Acts of last and present
centuries in lieu of tithes. So the above quotation from the “Brief,”
like a great deal more of the book, is nothing but twaddle. The parochial
endowments commenced on a small scale in the latter part of the seventh
century, when landowners commenced to build churches upon their own
estates, and they increased in the eighth and ninth. First the endowments
consisted of church, parsonage and glebe; then tithes were added first
as free-will offerings. The Norman Conquest made great changes in
the Church of England. The Norman monks, who looked on the Pope and
obeyed him as the supreme head of the Church, introduced a new plan
by inducing landowners to appropriate their churches with their glebe
and tithe endowments to them. To give an idea of the enormous impetus
which had been given to the erection of monasteries from 1066 to 1215,
or 150 years, there were 427 erected in England, possessing extensive
endowments in lands and tithes. Add 130 up to A.D. 1066, and we get 557,
as the total number in 1215. I have selected 1215, for by the Council
of Lateran tithes were henceforth to be paid to the parochial clergy,
thus abolishing from 1215 the system of appropriating parochial tithes
to monasteries and other bodies. The decadence of building and endowing
monasteries commenced with the reign of Richard I. (1189). Tithes were
not given to monasteries until after 1066, and from this year to 1215
they had received the tithes of some thousands of parishes. Of course
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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