Lay abbacy

Lay abbot (abbatocomes, abbas laicus, abbas miles) is a name used to designate a layman on whom a king or someone in authority bestowed an abbey as a reward for services rendered; he had charge of the estate belonging to it, and was entitled to part of the income. The custom existed principally in the Frankish Empire from the eighth century until the ecclesiastical reforms of the eleventh.

Numerous synods held in France in the sixth and seventh centuries passed decrees against this abuse of church property. The Merovingians had bestowed church lands on laymen, or at least allowed them their possession and use, though not ownership. The Merovingian kings were also in the habit of appointing abbots to monasteries which they had founded; moreover, many monasteries, though not founded by the king, placed themselves under royal patronage in order to share his protection, and so became possessions of the Crown.

This custom of the Merovingian rulers was taken as a precedent by the French kings for rewarding laymen with abbeys, or giving them to bishops in commendam. Charles Martel was the first to bestow outright extensive existing ecclesiastical property upon laymen, political friends and soldiers.St. Boniface and later Hincmar of Reims picture most dismally the consequent downfall of church discipline, and though Boniface tried to reform the Frankish Church, the bestowal of abbeys on secular abbots was not abolished.

Charlemagne also frequently gave church property, and sometimes abbeys, in feudal tenure. The Abbey of St. Riquier (Centula) in Picardy had secular abbots from the time of Charlemagne, who had given it to his friend Angilbert, the poet and the lover of his daughter Bertha, and father of her two sons. After Angilbert's death in 814, the abbey was given to other laymen.

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