5 - Grants in alms

Summary

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the granting of land in alms (in elemosinam or in elemosina) was not a matter governed by any particular rules. There seems to have been widespread agreement on two matters only, first, that grants in alms could be made only to churches and ‘men of religion’, that is, religious houses, but only exceptionally to individual monks, nuns, etc., hospitals, bodies of secular clerks such as deans and chapters, and beneficed secular clerks such as bishops, prebendaries and parsons. A grant to a layman, requiring him to hold in pure and perpetual alms from the grantor, a religious house, can be attributed to a mistake on the part of the clerk who wrote the charter. Secondly, in return for the grants, the grantees were bound to pray for the souls of the grantors and such other persons as the grantors had specified. It was this obligation to pray, and not the use of a formula using the term in elemosinam, which differentiated grants in alms from the ordinary secular grants which all the persons and bodies mentioned were able to receive. It can hardly be doubted, for instance, that grants like the following examples were considered to be grants in alms:

Ego B … concedo Deo et Sancto Petro apostolo de E et monachis eiusdem loci villulam quandam … quietam et liberam ab omnibus querelis et calumpniis contra omnes homines sicut meum dominium, scilicet pro redemptione anime mee et patris et matris mee necnon et fratrum meorum R M et G M aliorumque amicorum vivorum et defunctorum. […]