Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword (1989)
- Preface
- INTRODUCTION
- Chap. I Ecclesia Anglicana
- Chap. II The Western Church in the eleventh century
- Chap. III The law of the Western Church
- PART I THE LAW OF THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND
- PART II THE RELATIONS OF ENGLAND WITH THE PAPACY
- Appendix: English Manuscripts containing collections of Ecclesiastical Law
- List of manuscripts referred to
- Index
Chap. II - The Western Church in the eleventh century
from INTRODUCTION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword (1989)
- Preface
- INTRODUCTION
- Chap. I Ecclesia Anglicana
- Chap. II The Western Church in the eleventh century
- Chap. III The law of the Western Church
- PART I THE LAW OF THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND
- PART II THE RELATIONS OF ENGLAND WITH THE PAPACY
- Appendix: English Manuscripts containing collections of Ecclesiastical Law
- List of manuscripts referred to
- Index
Summary
I have made it sufficiently evident that, when I speak of the English Church, I understand the phrase to connote nothing more than that part of the Church which was constituted in England. I do not deny that it had a certain definite unity of its own, since the Papacy, by adopting this territorial nomen-clature, recognised it as a constituent part of the whole Church. But we must be careful to appreciate the character of this unity, and not to attribute to it something that it only acquired at a much later date. The unity was of a secular and not of an ecclesiastical character, and was only an expression of the fact that all its members were the subjects of one king. So, too, the Norman Church had a distinct unity, in that all its members were the subjects of one duke. The fact that king and duke were the same man did not unite the two Churches. Secular conditions, which gave each Church its unity, kept the two Churches separate, even though the Norman Church supplied the English with most of its bishops and abbots; they ceased to be members of the Norman and became members of the English Church. Elsewhere this is equally true. We can speak of the German Church or the French Church (of which the Norman was in a sense a part) to imply that part of the Church situated in the territories ruled by the king of Germany or the king of France.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989