Concordat of Worms - Inheritance and Alienation

Inheritance and Alienation

The most prized and contested rights that attached to benefices were inheritance and security against confiscation. Benefices were lands granted by the Church to faithful lords. In exchange, the Church expected rent or other services, such as military protection. These lands would then be further divided between lesser lords and commoners. This was the nature of European feudalism. Inheritance was an important issue, since land could fall into the hands of those who did not have loyalty to the Church or the great lords. The usual grant was in precaria, the granting of a life tenure, whereby the tenant stayed on the land only at the pleasure of the lord. The tenant could be expelled from the land at any time. His tenancy was precarious. Counts’ benefices came to be inherited as counties were broken up and as counts assimilated their offices and ex-officio lands to their family property. In central Europe, kings and counts probably were willing to allow the inheritance of small parcels of land to the heirs of those who had offered military or other services in exchange for tenancy. This was contingent on the heirs being reasonably loyal and capable. Churches in Germany, as elsewhere, were willing to allow peasants to inherit their land. This was a source of profit to both churches and lords when the inheritors were charged a fee to inherit the land. Most bishops had a different attitude toward freemen and nobles. To these peasants, grants were made in precario or in beneficio, usually for a specified and limited number of life tenures. It was not impossible to recover land left to noble families for generations. But the longer the family held church land, the more difficult it was to oust them from the land. Some church officials came to view granting land to noble families amounted to outright alienation. By the twelfth century great churches in Germany, like those elsewhere were finding it difficult to hold out against the accumulation of lay custom and lay objections to temporary inheritance. The Bishop of Worms issued a statement in 1120 indicating the poor and unfree should be allowed to inherit tenancy without payment of fees. It appears to have been something novel. The growing masses of unfree and the marginal were needed for labor, and to bolster the military of both nobility and the church. By the time of Henry IV, bargaining by the peasants for the benefit of the group was the norm.