Orders and Rank in the Cathedral of Old Sarum

Abstract

It is a cliché of medieval ecclesiastical history that the clergy was a ‘hierarchy’. When we use this term, we may mean ‘priesdy rule’, but more often we are referring to the way in which the clergy was graded in successive ranks, one above another. Most obviously, the clergy was so arranged in the seven steps of holy orders: doorkeeper, reader, exorcist, acolyte, subdeacon, deacon, priest. But simple stratification by orders was only part of a much more complex hierarchical system, in which the major differentiating factor was office. Both elements–orders and office–were the subjects of a considerable literature in the early Middle Ages: side by side with treatises on orders–belonging to the genre de officiis septem graduum–is a body of writings concerned to define the functions, relations and grades of ecclesiastical offices–the genre de ecclesiasticis officiis. Two related documents telling us of the customs at Old Sarum owe much to tracts of this kind: the Institutio, compiled by stages in the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and the Consuetudinarium of Richard Poore, written c. 1215, which greatly expands the Institutio.