If patristic tradition on the subject of wealth and possessions often appears ambivalent in its attitudes, then perhaps one of the reasons for this is that this tradition grows from an exegesis of Gospel teachings on the subject that themselves are far from being straightforward, even though they are immensely forthright. Clement of Alexandria, for example, has frequently been accused of twisting the simple and immediately obvious demand of Jesus: ‘Sell all you have and give to the poor’ (Mark 10.21) and subverting a radical vision of Jesus into a comfortable exhortation that any pious property-owner, bourgeois or aristocratic, could be happy to live with. If the rich young man had understood Christ’s real message, as Clement would have it (not so much to renounce his ownership of goods as to free his heart from attachment to them), then he might not have had such a crisis about following Jesus. Whether or not Clement’s case is, in the end, convincing as an exegesis, it none the less successfully raises all the implicit problems of interpreting the New Testament teachings on wealth in any kind of universalist sense—as teachings that are meant to apply to all, and for all time. And there are, consequently, many dangers in being too ready to dismiss Clement’s allegorism as an anachronistic exegesis, not least the danger of reverting to a different kind of biblical fundamentalism than the one Clement thought he was attacking; for contemporary biblical criticism, as it attempts to separate out the original message of Jesus and the insights of his later disciples, and to locate the original words in their correct historical and sociological milieu, has rightly warned us against over-confidence in our historical interpretations of Gospel material.

The work of Basil of Caesarea (c.330–79; Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia from 370) as an organizer and theologian of the monastic life has long been recognized as an important part of his activity as a bishop, and has been extensively studied. The principal authentic ascetic works of Basil which have formed the basis of this study are traditionally known as his monastic rules, though this description is not strictly accurate, since the rules are in fact composed of a series of questions and answers about the organization and administration of monasteries, about the theological principles of the monastic life, and about the interpretation of particular texts of Scripture. Basil’s answers almost always refer to Scripture, and show his asceticism to have been based firmly on obedience to the commandments of Christ as he interpreted them, particularly to the commandments of love of God and love of neighbour, which are discussed at the beginning of LR. Basil believed that obedience to the commandments could best be practised in the context of the common life, rather than that of the solitary monk.

In the early ninth century, the Frankish Church was unashamedly, triumphantly, rich. The Franks were assured that God loved them. Thanks to the intercessions of churchmen, God had promoted the expansion of the Frankish Empire: in a world of social relations organized and expressed through the exchange of gift and countergift, it seemed only fair that God, or rather his Church on his behalf, should share in the profits. ‘Give tithes to the Lord’, Smaragdus urged a young Carolingian king: ‘He subjected many realms to you, and commanded powerful peoples to serve you’.

The traveller between Venice and Trieste may, if he knows where to look, catch a glimpse of a rather aggressive campanile in the coastal plain south of Cervignano. Slightly detached from the great basilica of Aquileia, rebuilt and then dedicated in 1031, the campanile was almost certainly intended by its builder, the Patriarch Poppo, as a gesture of derision towards its contemporary counterpart in Venice. With its foundations firmly skewering an Early Christian mosaic floor, it today overlooks a farmyard midden, the skeletal remains of a huge Roman city, and, of course, the splendid basilica.

England was a rich prize for William the Conqueror to have won at the battle of Hastings. His conquest was followed by a major redistribution of the wealth of his new kingdom. By the end of his reign, a tenurial revolution had swept through the lay landholding community, leaving only a handful of Anglo-Saxons as tenants-in-chief. The Church had undergone considerable changes of personnel; only one bishopric was still in English hands (Worcester), and of the greater Benedictine houses only Bath and Ramsey were still ruled by English abbots. Domesday Book, the great survey of England made in 1086, although difficult to interpret, provides much information to enable an examination of ecclesiastical wealth, its nature, and its distribution, in the late eleventh century.

In the year 1033, the Bishop of the city of Arezzo in Tuscany awarded to the hermits of Camaldoli all the tithes of buying and selling by citizens of Arezzo, urban and suburban, and by all merchants and dealers in the diocese. In so doing he gave classic expression to the hierarchy’s view of money-making. ‘I wish you to know what a great sin it is not to give God tithes of the profits of your business dealings, which you can rarely or never conduct without grave danger of fraud or crime.’ The poorest peasant, he went on, did not presume to avoid paying tithe on the fruits of the just labours of his hands. The merchant, indeed, had urgent need to give generous alms over and above the tithe for the remission of his sins.

With the revival of Roman and the development of canon law in the twelfth century a doctrine of supreme and universal jurisdiction began to be expounded with increasing vigour by the papacy. By the thirteenth century those learned in Roman and canon law began to distinguish in more subtle ways between jurisdiction on the one hand and holy orders on the other; between the capacity to make law and to discover law; between legislating and adjudicating; and, most importantly, between ruling and owning. Jurisdiction had become one of a cluster of terms used to define aspects of rulership, authority, prelacy, and imperium. It combined the idea of rightful administration with the legitimate and authoritative use of coercive force.

This examination of the bequests made by medieval Dubliners for the health of their souls is based almost exclusively on evidence drawn from wills of the period. The medieval ecclesiastical sources of Dublin are by no means abundant, and wills in particular have survived badly. Only one register of wills remains, covering the period 1457 to 1483 and containing seventy-four testaments. To this may be added a further twenty-four wills, found in a variety of ecclesiastical and municipal sources, ranging in date from 1270 to 1500, giving a total of ninety-eight wills in all.

It is now generally accepted that the Order of Templars was destroyed not because of its heresy but because of its wealth. Having outlived its usefulness in the Holy Land, it fell a victim to the forces of financial, jealousy, not entirely unprovoked. Although in England the Order did not hold such an influential position as it did in France, it was nevertheless wealthy and very highly privileged. Edward I, himself a crusader, had in 1290 renewed and amplified a charter of Henry III which exempted the Templars from almost every kind of secular taxation, in addition to guaranteeing such valuable rights and immunities as they already held by authority of the Pope. On their English lands they enjoyed the rights of sac and soc, with all the appurtenances of a private court, and in addition they were quit of scot and geld, feudal aids, tallage and lastage and carucage, and of all tolls, charges, and payments connected with fairs throughout the land. They paid no tax on the export of wool, which their northern estates produced in abundance; in 1390 it was claimed that this privilege, in the counties of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire alone, accounted for more than half the income of the London Temple. They were free of demands for watch and ward, castle-guard, and requisitions for building the King’s works. They were exempt too from forest law, and could create assarts at pleasure; nor need they cut the claws of their dogs. Moreover, they could claim the forfeits, fines, and chattels of all felons taken upon their lands, even when these had been judged in the King’s court.

It is a truth widely recognized, though perhaps insufficiently emphasized, that late-medieval England contained large numbers of unbeneficed clergy. The difficulty of studying such men lies in their elusiveness; they made little impact on the obvious source for a study of the English Church during this period, the bishops’ registers (apart from their appearances in the ordinations lists), for these are essentially concerned with benefices and benefice-holders. There is, however, one class of material which tells us much about the unbeneficed, namely the assessments made in connection with clerical poll-taxes. Levied in the years 1377, 1379, 1380, and 1381, these poll-taxes demanded what was virtually a clerical census on each occasion. The resulting returns are a boon to church historians and provide an unparalleled amount of information about the unbeneficed clergy, described in these documents as ‘chaplains’ and ‘clerks’. If we are to have a realistic picture of the late-medieval Church, the unbeneficed should receive more attention. Moreover, it is suggested that an examination of this class can throw light on the relationship between the Church and wealth during this period.

Records which survive of interrogations, principally of Waldensian followers, in Fribourg in 1430 preserve for us the figure of a k. person who had clearly been much seen on the streets of Fribourg in the 1420s, a town gossip. The woman in question was called Surer, nicknamed ‘the Fat’. One of the reported street-corner conversations has Surer the Fat talking to an earnest credens, a follower of the Waldensian Brothers. Her opening gambit was this: ‘The confessors of the sect’, she said, ‘must be very wealthy’. As an inquisitive gossip she knew about the offerings made to the Waldensian Brothers by their many lay followers in Fribourg, and from other witnesses we know that Fribourg street-corner conversations were rife with rumours about the Waldensians, both general ones about their evil character and more specific ones about their diabolist practices. These may have included a particular allegation about wealth which had first acquired currency in later fourteenth-century Austria.

The life and works of Reginald Pecock continue to fascinate, though they are a well-reaped field from which little new can be gleaned. Students of Pecock have naturally concentrated on the sensational and significant aspects of his career and writings: political historians on his trial and deposition, and the political motivations which may have lain behind these; ecclesiastical historians, following Gascoigne, on his defence of the abuses of the late-medieval Church, especially of non-preaching and non-resident bishops. Historians of thought have seen a modern rationalist exalting thejudgement of reason above the dogmas of Faith and Scripture. Historians of doctrine have been concerned by his rewriting of the Apostles’ Creed, omitting the descent into hell. Biblical historians have questioned whether he used the later Lollard Bible, or undertook his own translation of the Vulgate. Protestant historians have with Foxe claimed as their own a bishop whose attack on the Lollards paradoxically demonstrated his close affinity with them; the less evangelically committed have praised a tolerant protagonist anxious to enter into dialogue with his opponents rather than to coerce them with ‘fire, sword or hangment’. Historiographers have welcomed a scholar possessed of a Renaissance sense of history. Linguistic historians have detailed his contribution to the development of the English language by his pioneering use of it as a vehicle for theological assertion.

In the reign of Pope Martin V relations between the papacy and the English Crown were dominated by the struggle of the papacy to obtain the repeal of the Statutes against Provisors. The outlines of the story are well known, and recently Dr Davies has filled in the political details, particularly concerning bishoprics: Martin V, having tried from the outset of his pontificate to persuade the Crown to repeal die Statutes, finally lost patience and, in 1427, suspended the Archbishop of Canterbury as legatus natus until Chichele pleaded the papal case before Council and Parliament.

In, a book of 1567 on the lives and actions of past popes and cardinals written by Girolamo Garimberto, in the section on avarice, is to be found this judgement on Cardinal Francesco Armellini (1470–1528). ‘He truly is to be considered rich who is content to live with what he has, while he who is unhappy with what he has accumulated may be considered poor; and measured in these terms one can say that Francesco Armellini was very poor indeed.’ Given his posthumous, and indeed his contemporary reputation, of which this passage is entirely typical, Francesco Armellini would appear to be an ideal figure through which to approach the general subject of the Church and wealth in this period.

In a letter of December 1523 describing his troubles with Julius II in the previous decade, Michelangelo related how the Pope had commissioned him to paint the twelve Apostles in the lunettes of the Sistine Chapel. Soon after starting his design the artist became convinced that the project was off to a bad start. ‘I told the pope that if the Apostles alone were put there it seemed to me that it would turn out a poor affair. He asked me why. I said, “because they themselves were poor”.’