state of that church and the stabilitasof its lords [seniorum]’, and for
the bishop’s (? spiritual) profit.^130
Expressions of the responsibility of kings for the status ecclesiaego
back to the earliest days of the Church in the barbarian West.
Charlemagne’s chief care was for ‘the state of our churches’, which
became ‘the state of the church’ in the first chapter of an Italian capitu-
lary instructing the various groups of clergy and monks to live accord-
ing to their rules (per ordinem), and all to obey royal justice in respect
of churches within the protection of the palace. The proper election of
bishops was said to profit the rule of the people (regimine populari) as
well as the status ecclesiae.^131 As the first cracks in the empire began to
appear in the reign of Louis the Pious, the demands in charters that the
beneficiaries pray for the stability of the realm were made with increas-
ing urgency, and ‘the state of the whole realm’ became the chief pre-
occupation. This phrase appears in the ordinatio imperiiof 817, when
Louis the Pious divided his landed inheritance between his sons after the
custom of the Franks but sought to preserve the empire’s unity under his
eldest son. A few years later, Louis appealed to his people to be his
helpers in conserving ‘the honour of the holy church of God and
the status regni’, each ‘in his place and order’ (in suo loco et ordine).
The bishops also, when making representations to the emperor about
the Church’s rights and the observation of ‘regular order’, enjoined
prayers for ‘the state of the realm and the commonwealth’.^132 The
deteriorating ‘state of this realm’ was still understood principally as it
affected the Church, which in 833 required a penance of Louis for his
mistakes in the exercise of empire and took the lead in discussions about
‘the present peril and future state’ of the kingdom.^133
But long before Louis’s death in 840, his sons were taking thought for
the states of their separate parts of the inheritance. A capitulary issued
by the eldest son, Lothar, for Italy in 825, imposed provisions necessary
for ‘the state and utility of the realm’ equally upon churches—immuni-
ties not excluded—and the ‘lay order’. No one in occupation of land
should escape the military service due from it by donating it ‘fraudu-
lently’ to a church.^134 In charters, status regninow becomes common-
place. Lewis ‘the German’ (for the eastern section of the Carolingian
‘The state of the realm’ 39(^130) Concilia Aevi Karolini, I (i), 67. 9 ; Formulae, 171.25.
(^131) Y. Congar, ‘Status Ecclesiae’, Studia Gratiana, 15 (1972), 1–31; Formulae, 119.7;
Capitularia, i. 80. 25 , 189 (5), 248. 22.
(^132) Capitularia, i. 270. 36 ; 303, 370. 1 ; Formulae, 421. 29.
(^133) Capitularia, ii. 50–1, 56. 15.
(^134) Ibid. i. 330; Lotharii I et Lotharii II Diplomata, 128. 25 , 308. 1 (statum imperii);
Formulae, 398. 20 , 415. 10 , 508. 5 ; cf. Diplomi Italiani di Lodovico III e di Rodolfo II, ed.
L. Schiaparelli, i (Rome, 1910), 15. 14 (a. 900: a bishop and his successors, their property and
familiato remain under the king’s protection quiete et pacifice... remota totius potestatis
inquietudine, praying pro nobis nostrique regni statu.