There is no denying that the French revolution took an axe to a centuries-old system of manifold dependencies rooted in ecclesiastical landownership.

Lesne, Histoire de la propriété ecclésiastique en France, 6 vols (Lille, 1910–43). During this time, churches and monasteries not only owned basilicas, baptisteries, hospitals, orphanages, libraries, and schools, but from the fourth century onwards also acquired huge quantities of land and had innumerable dependants with different obligations towards their ecclesiastical lords.Į. ‘Church property’ is a rather abstract category suitable for framing ecclesiastical history in possessory terms, from late antiquity to the early modern period. It is argued here that with its underlying network of socio-religious relations, patronate over ecclesiastical freedmen and censuales can be better understood when considered as an element of a ‘temple society’. From the Carolingian period onward, it even became attractive to enter voluntarily into this status. In Eastern Francia (the Rhineland and beyond) this transformed ecclesiastical freedmen into religiously defined social groups with potentially distinct aims, religious tasks, and organizational structures, and a shared notion of freedom. As ecclesiastical institutions regarded their patronal rights over freed persons as part of inalienable church property, the patronal relationship became permanent and inheritable. In an increasing number of situations, however, the patron became an ecclesiastical institution, since slaves and freed persons were often given to churches and monasteries. In many cases it entailed a basic set of obligations. In the early medieval west, patronate, as adapted from Roman law, was a fundamental category in determining the legal status of freedmen.

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