‘Ecclesiastical property’, wrote John of Paris in the first years of the fourteenth century, ‘has been given to communities, not to individual persons. So therefore, no one person has proprietary right and lordship over ecclesiastical property. It is the community concerned which itself has these.’ If an individual person has a right of usage over the property for his maintenance commensurate to his needs and rank, ‘he has this not as an individual in his own right but purely as part and member of the community’. Professor Maitland also recognises that throughout the Middle Ages, ‘it is never forgotten that the bishop who as bishop holds lands … holds these lands as head of a corporation of which canons or monks are members’. It is not to be doubted either that the parson of a parish church exercises his right over the church and its appurtenances in a rather peculiar way. Obviously, churchmen's landholding poses a number of technical and theoretical issues which make it distinct from laymen's legal control of land.

This, however, is not the topic I propose to discuss in the present chapter. Whether a person's access to the control of land is categorised as ownership or usufruct, whether such a control is exercised by the person in his own right or in right of a community: these are questions which do not have immediate relevance to our argument.