download

416
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
Battle only the leuga or small district round the abbey; but at
Evesham and St. Albans it included a group ofchurches with
their
parishes, and occasionally a group ofthe abbey's churches
(as at Glastonbury) was exempt while the abbey itselfwas not.
This class of exemption, besides being small, became fixed as
the result of a series of suits in the twelfth century; it was enx
tirely local and private in character. On the other hand, certain
orders were totally exempt. The Cistercians had begun by
asserting their dependence upon the diocesan, but as they
asserted with equal force the inviolability of all their statutes
and uses, and complete freedom of election, the bishop was in
fact debarred from all effective jurisdiction, and in time the
whole order became officially exempt. Cistercian example
carried the Premonstratensians along the same path, and the
mendicant orders were dependent directly upon the papacy
from the beginning. The bishop could, indeed, in the case of
the monks and canons prohibit the first entry into his diocese,
but with the friars this was in practice impossible, and though
for a time the bishops retained the power of prohibiting the
friars from hearing confessions and preaching in the diocese,
this also was curtailed in favour ofthe mendicants by the papal
privileges, and an equilibrium, fair to both parties but guaran/
teeing adequate facilities to the friars, was only established in
1300 by the celebrated bull Super cathedram of Boniface VIII,
which remained substantially effective till the Council of
Trent.
But the exemptions of the regulars, though extensive and
applying also to the precincts, had at least some elements oforder
about them and were chiefly personal in their effects. Far more
galling to the bishop were the numerous enclaves in his diocese
that withdrew numerous parishes and their clergy and some
of his own churches and functionaries from his jurisdiction.
There were, in the first place, the churches of other diocesan
bishops. These, relics ofthe old system ofproprietary churches
and ill/defined diocesan boundaries, were churches owned
by a bishop situated within the diocese of another. Known
in England by the name of 'peculiars'
these had always de^