HISTORIANS STEADILY ACCUMULATE detailed evidence to show how the medieval church acquired its landed wealth. Generally this was a process whereby lay people, ranging from royalty to commoners, gave land in varying quantities to religious houses, other major churches and holders of high ecclesiastical office. Also well studied is ‘the plunder of the church’ in the sixteenth century when much of that landed property found its way back into lay hands. Curiously, however, one major aspect of the church's territorial possessions has attracted much less attention: the way land was acquired, and to an extent retained, by parish churches and their clergy. By looking principally at Suffolk, it is the purpose of this essay to look more closely at the history of ‘glebe’ – the landholding or tenement, including a dwelling, which was provided in the great majority of parishes for the support of a resident cleric. Over a thousand years or so, the glebe has given successive priests and ministers a place to live, land to farm directly or to rent to others and, since the mid-nineteenth century, land which could be sold to provide an alternative income from investments.

The Origins of Glebe

Recent archaeological and documentary research has thrown valuable light on the origins of parish churches. Many were founded in the later Anglo-Saxon and Norman period (broadly ninth to twelfth centuries) by lay landowners, and sometimes by groups of freemen. The cumulative effect was to fill the gaps between older ‘minsters’, which had formed the looser and more collegiate system ofMiddle Saxon times (seventh to ninth centuries). These new and more localised places of worship, known to historians as eigenkirchen or proprietorial churches, were primarily for the benefit of the founder's family and household. Thus, in her will of c.990–1066 Siflaed of Marlingford in Norfolk referred unambiguously to ‘my’ church and ‘my’ priest. By 1086, however, Domesday Book was displaying the beginnings of a new terminology. It referred to some local churches as ‘church of this vill (ecclesia huius ville)’, and occasionally used the words ‘parish’ and ‘parishioners’ in their modern senses.