CHAPEL, a place of religious worship, either a subordinate division of a church, or a separate building distinguished from a church by the special conditions of its foundation or use. Capella, the diminutive of cappa, a cloak, was the name given to the shrine in which the cloak (cappa brevior) of St. Martin was kept and carried about by the Frankish kings on their journeys, when oaths were taken on it. This peculiar use was transferred to any sanctuary containing relics, the priest of which was called capellanus or chaplain. By a further extension, the word was identified with all places of worship which were not mother churches (ecclesiae matrices), so as to include a large number of miscellaneous foundations. Most nearly akin to the original meaning is the application of the term to the oratories attached to royal residences. Thus the Sainte Chapelle, the palace chapel at Paris, consecrated in 1248, was built by St. Louis to enshrine the relic of the Crown of Thorns, ransomed by him from the Venetians, who held it in pawn from John of Brienne, the Latin emperor of the East. In the next century, chapels were founded by princes of the French royal house at Bourges, Riom and else where for which the same title was adopted. Such chapels royal were usually founded as collegiate establishments, like Edward III.'s chapels of St. Stephen at Westminster and St. George at Windsor. Collegiate chapels were also founded by prelates and noblemen in connection with their castles and manor-houses, such as the chapel of St. Mary and the Holy Angels at the gate of the palace at York, founded by Archbishop Roger (1154-81), and that of St. Elizabeth before the gate of Wolvesey Castle at Win chester, founded by Bishop John of Pontoise (1282-1304).
The chapel of the castle or manor-house, however, was generally served by a single domestic chaplain. For oratories in connection with private houses an episcopal licence was required, so as to safeguard the rights of the churches in whose parishes they were established. Though frequently within the house itself, they were also erected as separate buildings, and some, which served as churches for the lord of the manor and his tenants, acquired the status of free chapels, which implied exemption from parochial and archidiaconal, and occasionally, though not always, from episcopal jurisdiction. Certain churches, in the patronage of the Crown or owing their foundation to the king, were regarded as royal free chapels and free chapels on manors probably originated in the grant of special privileges to their owners by the Crown. In time, such free chapels, governed by rectors, sometimes lost their peculiar character and were reckoned as parish churches; but, where the status of a free chapel remained, their incumbents were held to be without cure of souls.
Parish Chapels.—More numerous, however, than free chapels were the chapels in outlying hamlets of large parishes, maintained by the inhabitants and served daily, or on certain days in the week, by chaplains provided at the expense of the parochial in cumbent. Some of these, which, as time went on, acquired rights of baptism and burial, were parochial chapels; others, merely chantry chapels in small villages, without such rights, were, prop erly speaking, chapels of ease. The origin of such foundations was usually the difficulty experienced by the inhabitants in attend ing the mother church in bad weather, when the streams were swollen and the roads impassable. In Leicestershire, early in the thirteenth century, there were more than a hundred of these de pendent chapels in about two hundred parishes, and the propor tion elsewhere was not very different.
Subordinate Buildings.—The idea of a chapel as a subordi nate or dependent building is implied by its use for the areas appropriated to the minor altars within or projecting from the walls of a church. The services held in these were called chantries (cantariae), and, by a transference of ideas to which there are many parallels in mediaeval usage, the chapels themselves were often known as chantries. Of the use of chapel to signify the oratory of a private establishment, the most familar examples are the chapels of colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Similarly the places of worship in hospitals, almshouses, etc., are called chapels, as well as those which, like chapels of cemeteries, are generally restricted to some special use. Proprietary chapels, founded in London and other English towns during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, were established, with a licence for divine service, by private individuals or groups of trustees. The growth of Nonconformity, however, gave the word a particular application to dissenting places of worship. In Ireland the term has clung persistently to those of the Roman Church, a survival of an old use which in England was derived from the chapels or religious establishments maintained by Henrietta Maria and other Roman Catholic queens. But, apart from this, the modern tendency is to abandon the employment of the word for special classes of religious building, and to give the title church to all indiscriminately.
There are many instances in mediaeval wills and inventories of the application of the term chapel to sets of vestments and altar furniture, as constituting the necessary fittings of a private oratory. Another transference of the sense occasionally found is from the chapel itself to the collective members of the foundation.