Investiture

Investiture, in feudal and ecclesiastical history, means the act of giving corporal possession of a manor, office, or benefice, accompanied by a certain ceremonial, such as the delivery of a branch, a banner, or an instrument of office, more or less designed to signify the power or authority which it is supposed to convey. The contest about ecclesiastical investitures is interwoven with the whole course of medieval history. The system of feudal tenure had become so universal that it affected even the land held by ecclesiastics. Accordingly, ecclesiastics who, in virtue of the ecclesiastical office which they held, came into possession of lands began to be regarded as becoming by the very fact fendatory to the suzerain of these lands; and the suzerains thought themselves entitled to claim, in reference to these personages, the same rights which they enjoyed over the other feudatories of their domains. Among these rights was that of granting solemn investiture. Now, in the case of bishops, abbots, and other church dignitaries the form of investiture consisted in the delivery of a pastoral staff or crozier, and the placing a ring upon the finger; and as these badges of office were emblematic—the one of the spiritual care of souls, the other of the espousals, as it were, between the pastor and his church or monastery—the assumption of this right by the lay suzerains became a subject of constant and angry complaint on the part of the church. On the part of the suzerains it was replied that they did not claim to grant by this rite the spiritual powers of the office, their function being solely to grant possession of its temporalities. But the church party urged that the ceremonial in itself involved the granting of spiritual powers; insomuch that, in order to prevent the clergy from electing to a see when vacant, it was the practice of the emperors to take possession of the crozier and ring, until it should be their own pleasure to grant investiture to their favourites. The disfavour in which the practice had long been held found its most energetic expression in the person of Gregory VII., who having, in the year 1074, enacted most stringent measures for the repression of simony, proceeded, in 1075, to condemn, under excommunication, the practice of investiture, as almost necessarily connected with simony, or leading to it. But a pope of the same century, Urban II., went further, and (1095) absolutely and entirely forbade not alone lay investiture, but the taking of an oath of fealty to a lay suzerain by an ecclesiastic. In the 12th century the pope, Pascal II., agreed to surrender the possessions and royalties of the church on condition of the emperor (Henry V.) giving up his claim to investiture. This treaty, however, never had any practical effect; nor was the contest finally adjusted until the celebrated concordat of Worms in 1122, in which the emperor agreed to give up the form of investiture with the ring and pastoral staff, to grant to the clergy the right of free elections, and to restore all the possessions of the Church of Rome which had been seized either by himself or by his father; while the pope, on his part, consented that the elections should be held in the presence of the emperor or his official, but with a right of appeal to the provincial synod; that investiture might be given by the emperor, but only by the touch of the sceptre; and that the bishops and other church dignitaries should faithfully discharge all the feudal duties which belonged to their principality. See CHURCH OF ENGLAND, FEUDALISM.