Annates

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Annates were a payment that every newly appointed church official owed, not to their congregation or their bishop, but ultimately to Rome. The word itself comes from the Latin annus, meaning "year," and the payment was exactly that: the first year's profits of a church appointment, handed over to whoever held the right to collect it. At their peak, annates flowed from thousands of parishes, abbeys, and bishoprics across Catholic Christendom into the papal treasury. They were also called the "first fruits," primitiae, a term borrowed from ancient Greek, Roman, and Hebrew religious practice, where the first harvest was offered to the divine.

  How did a modest gift from a bishop to the pope harden into a mandatory tax on every priest who received a new living? Why did the English parliament, a German monk, and the French Revolution all find themselves in conflict with the same centuries-old custom? And what happened to the money after England broke from Rome entirely?

• 2. From Gift to Obligation

  ›

  Bishops who received their consecration in Rome were, from a very early period, accustomed to present gifts to the ecclesiastical authorities involved in the ceremony. These were voluntary, respectful offerings. Over time, however, a prescriptive right grew up around them: what had been a courtesy became an expectation, and the expectation became a legal claim.

  The formal right of a bishop to claim the first year's profits from a newly inducted priest has its first recorded mention under Pope Honorius III, who died in 1227. But the underlying habit was much older. A custom dating from the sixth century had established that those ordained to church offices paid a fee to the ordaining bishop. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the term annatae referred specifically to the first fruits of those lesser benefices whose patronage the pope had reserved to himself, granted outside the formal consistory.

  Financial pressure accelerated the transformation. In 1305, Pope Clement V claimed the first fruits of all vacant benefices in England. In 1319, Pope John XXII extended the claim to the whole of Christendom, covering all benefices that fell vacant within the next two years. In both cases, the old rights of local bishops were simply overridden by the Holy See, which by then regarded itself as the ultimate source of all episcopal authority.

• 3. Four Kinds of Payment

  ›

  By the time the system matured, annates had split into four distinct categories. The most significant were the servitia communia, also called the servitia Camerae Papae. These were owed by abbots, bishops, and archbishops upon induction, and amounted to roughly one year's anticipated revenue from their new office. The obligation traced back to an older oblation paid to the pope when he consecrated bishops as metropolitans or patriarchs. By the close of the fourteenth century, these payments had been fixed at one year's revenue, standardized across the West.

  The second class, the jus deportuum or annalia, covered benefices that fell under a bishop's control but had been "reserved" by the church for the financial support of the papacy directly. The third class, the quindennia, applied to benefices attached to communities and corporations. Under a 1469 bull issued by Paul II, these bodies did not pay at every new appointment; instead, they settled their annates once every fifteen years. The fourth class was a small additional charge tacked onto all the others, effectively a notarial fee, known as the servitia minuta.

  The Apostolic Camera, the papal treasury, received the proceeds from the servitia communia. The sheer reach of this system, spanning from Scotland to Poland and from Spain to the Holy Roman Empire, meant that even minor variations in local practice had significant financial consequences for Rome.

• 4. Resistance and Protest

  ›

  Robert Grosseteste, the bishop of Lincoln, led the bishops and barons of England in a formal protest at the Council of Lyons in 1245, objecting to the steady expansion of papal reservations. His complaint was straightforward: the more benefices Rome "reserved" for itself, the more annates flowed out of England and into the Curia. The same pattern alarmed rulers across Europe, because the volume of specie draining out of each country through annate payments was large enough to attract national political attention.

  In Germany, the concordat of Constance in 1418 attempted to regulate the system. Bishoprics and abbacies were to pay their servitia in two half-yearly instalments, based on the Roman chancery's own valuations. Reserved benefices would only owe the annalia if rated above twenty-four gold florins. Since the valuations were set so low that none met the threshold, the annalia effectively ceased in Germany, and a similar legal fiction produced the same result in France, Spain, and Belgium.

  Martin Luther attacked the payments directly in his 1520 tract, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. His words were unsparing. He wrote that the pope "has broken the compact, and made the annates a robbery, to the injury and shame of the whole German nation." Luther called on every prince, nobleman, and city to forbid their subjects to pay annates to Rome at all. The Council of Basel, meeting from 1431 to 1443, had already tried to abolish the servitia outright; the concordat of Vienna in 1448 overturned that effort and reconfirmed the Constance arrangement.

• 5. England's Decisive Break

  ›

  In England, the annates had originally been paid mainly to the archbishop of Canterbury. Pope John XXII claimed them for three years in the early fourteenth century, and his successors made the claim permanent. The valuations used to calculate the payments were first set by Walter Suffield, the bishop of Norwich, who compiled them for Pope Innocent IV in 1254. Nicholas III revised them in 1292.

  By 1531 or 1532, the total annual payments to Rome amounted to around £3,000 a year. Henry VIII then prohibited their collection entirely. In 1534, Thomas Cromwell steered through parliament the Act in Restraint of Annates, which did not abolish the payments but redirected them: they were now owed to the Crown rather than to Rome. A fresh valuation was carried out by the commissioners who compiled the King's Books, or Liber Regis, in 1535.

  The money sat with the Crown for over a century and a half. In February 1704, Queen Anne granted the annates to support the poorest clergy in England. The scheme took her name: Queen Anne's Bounty. It was established by the Queen Anne's Bounty Act 1703 (2 and 3 Ann. c 20). Crucially, the act used the 1535 valuations unchanged, and so the first fruits payments remained frozen at their Tudor-era assessments. By 1837, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners reported that the first fruits brought in only £4,000 to £5,000 a year. Church income had grown to around £3 million a year by that point, meaning the true value of first fruits would have been over £150,000 a year had the assessments kept pace.

• 6. Scotland, France, and Poland

  ›

  Scotland developed its own distinct version. The Scots term annat, or ann, referred to half a year's stipend granted to the executors of a deceased minister of the Church of Scotland, beyond whatever salary was owed at the time of death. Unlike the papal annates, which were a payment made by an incoming officeholder, the Scottish version was a benefit flowing to a departing one's estate. The ann could not be assigned away by the clergyman during his lifetime, nor could his creditors seize it.

  In France, repeated royal edicts and even condemnations by the Sorbonne failed to displace the servitia communia. The practice held until the infamous decree of August 4 during the French Revolution in 1789, which swept away the old ecclesiastical property arrangements alongside much of the ancien regime.

  Poland's end to annates came under different circumstances. Alexander II abolished them in 1865, a decision tied to the broader reorganization of Catholic institutions in the Russian Empire's Polish territories rather than to any homegrown Reformation or revolution. In Prussia, the resolution had been even more bureaucratic: bishops there received salaries as state officials, and the government simply made the servitia payments on their behalf. The secularization of the ecclesiastical states in 1803 did the most to end the system across German lands, and what survived was either commuted to a fixed sum under individual concordats or renegotiated separately with each new bishop.