“The Whole Congregation of St. Mary.” The Prosopography of the Freising Cathedral Clergy and the Carolingian Reforms

Abstract

The extensive witness lists appended to the numerous deeds from the Freising cartulary which were transacted at the cathedral itself between the mid-8th and the mid-9th centuries allow a reconstruction of the cathedral clergy in both size and structure. This study examines two groups of witnesses divided chronologically between the pontificates of Bishops Atto and Hitto (810/811) which together comprise 105 selected deeds naming 343 persons who occur a total of 974 times as witnesses. Analysis of these witnesses shows that the longer-serving cathedral clergy numbered only about a dozen with perhaps another dozen serving for shorter periods. Deeds were rarely witnessed by secular clerics below the grade of priest and deacon, but significant numbers of clergy in minor orders may also have been present. Clergy identified as monks occur only rarely in the 8th century, but in the 9th century, beginning under Bishop Hitto (811-835), a small group of persons identified as both monks and priests appear prominently amongst the witnesses. This coincides with Hitto’s efforts to introduce the Rule of St. Benedict which, however, seems to have been resisted, and the division of the cathedral clergy between the orders of monks and canons was only completed under his successor and nephew, Bishop Erchanbert (836-854), who also eliminated clerics as witnesses to secular deeds. These witness lists indicate that large numbers of clergy spent only short periods at the cathedral. The article suggests that many may have attended the cathedral school and then, after completion of their studies and ordination, been assigned to country churches as the bishop increasingly acquired control of them from their lay proprietors. Freising cathedral thus appears to have been at the centre of a unified diocesan system which formed its own clergy at the cathedral and then circulated them to lesser churches under the direction of the bishop in order to implement the Carolingian program of reform or correctio.