Folia Canonica 5. (2002)
STUDIES - Kenneth Pennington: Bishops and their Dioceses
8 KENNETH PENNINGTON dioceses remained small units. In England and Northern Europe they were much larger territories.2 In no case did the ecclesiastical diocese conform to the boundaries of the ancient Roman territory. During the Christianization of Europe, for reasons we can often not discern, bishoprics were sometimes founded in insignificant civitates, a practice that ran counter to the precepts of canon law. Although a few anomalies remain on the ecclesiastical landscape, in later times many of these dioceses were either abolished or moved to larger civitates. In the first fifteen centuries ecclesiastical geography is an ever changing landscape that does not follow any set of rules. There is also a difference between the imagined territory of the Eastern and Western churches. The Western church views itself as hierarchical with vertical jurisdictions; the Eastern church as a collegial church with horizontal bonds between communities of believers. This is a simplification, but it contains central elements of truth. If the entire ecclesia primitiva considered itself to be communities of believers without a hierarchical jurisdiction, the main question confronting those of us interested in ecclesiology is how and why the Western church departed from this model.3 Although cartographers have confidently given us maps of the territorial structure of the church, these maps can only approximately and very inaccurately describe the j urisdictional authority of a bishop in any particular period of time.4 The early church councils forbade bishops from exercising jurisdiction outside their civitates, but bishops were rarely limited by territorial boundaries. To give an example: The English bishop of Winchester, St. Aethelwold, was an enthusiastic founder of monasteries. Most ofhis foundations were far outside the boundaries ofhis diocese. When he died in 984 in the monastery that he founded at Beddington 100 kilometers North'ofWinchester and outside the boundaries of his diocese, he was carried from Beddington to Winchester in a great procession to be buried. His death replicated his life. During his episcopate he spent much of his time outside the diocese. It is not surprising, therefore, that when he died he was far from the seat ofhis diocese. In the tenth century a bishop’s jurisdictional authority was defined far more by the network of personal and family connections than by the territory over 2 R. Brentano made this point when he compared the Italian and English churches in 7vvo Churches: England and Italy in the Thirteenth Century, Princeton 1968 (reprinted Berkeley-Los Angeles 1988) 62-66. 3 See the remarks of T. Ware, The Orthodox Church, Hammondsworth 1980, 243-268. 41 am very indebted to the splendid article by T. Reuter for the previous and following paragraphs on the episcopacy in the tenth and eleventh centuries: T. Reuter, Ein Europa der Bischöfe: Das Zeitalter Burchards von Worms, in (ed.) Bischof Burchard von Worms 1000-1025 (Quellen und Abhandlungen zur mittelrheinischen Kirchengeschichte), Mainz 2000, 1-28.
