INVESTITURE (Lat. in, and restio, to clothe), in feudal and ecclesiastical history, means the act of giving corporal possession of a manor, office, or benefice, accompanied by a certain ceremonial, such as the delivery of a branch, a banner, or an instrument of office, more or less designed to signify the power or authority which it is supposed to convey. The contest about ecclesiastical investitures is so interwoven with the whole course of mediaeval history, that a brief account of its origin and nature is indispensable to a right understanding of many of the most important events of that period. The system of feudal tenure had become so universal that it affected even the land held by ecclesiastics, and attached to most of the higher ecclesiastical dignities, monastic its well as secular. Accordingly, ecclesiastics who, in virtue of the ecclesiastical office which they held, came into possession of the lands attached to such offices, began to be regarded as becoming by the very fact feudatory to the suzerain of these lands; and, as a not unnatural result, the suzerains thought themselves entitled to claim, in reference to these personages, the same rights which they enjoyed over the other feudatories of their domains. Among these rights was that of granting solemn investiture. Now, in the case of bishops, abbots, and other church dignitaries, the form of investiture con sisted in the delivery of a pastoral staff or crosier, and the placing a ring upon the finger; and as these badges of office were emblematic—the one of the spiritual care of souls, the other of the espousals, as it were, between the pastor and his church or mon astery—the assumption of this right by the lay suzerains became a subject of constant and angry complaint on the part of the church. On the part of the suzerains it was replied that they did not claim to grant by this rite the spiritual powers of the office, their function being solely to grant possession of its temporalities, and of the temporal rank thereto annexed. But the church-party urged that the ceremonial in itself involved the granting of spiritual insomuch that in order to prevent the clergy from electing to a see when vacant, it was the practice of the emperors to take possession of the crosier and ring, until it should be their own pleasure to grant investiture to their favorites. The disfavor in which the practice had long been held found its most ener getic expression in the person of Gregory VII., who having, in the year 1074, enacted most stringent measures for the repression of simony, proceeded, in 1075, to condemn. under excommunication, the practice of investiture, as almost necessarily connected with simony, or leading to it. This prohibition, however, as is observed by Mosheini
(ii. 326), only regarded investiture in the objectionable form in which it was then prac ticed, or investiture of whatever form, when the office had been obtained simoniacally. But a pope of the same century, Urban II., went further, and (I005) absolutely and entirely forbade, not alone lay investiture, but the taking of an oath of flilty to a lay suzerain by an ecclesiastic, even though holding under him by the ordinary feudal ten ure. The contest continued during the most of the Ilth century. In the beginning of the 12th c., it assumed a new form, the pope, Paschal H., having actually agreed to sur render all the possessions and royalties with which the church had been endowed, and which alone formed the pretext of the claim to investiture on the part of the emperor, on condition of the emperor (Henry V.) giving up that claim to investiture. This treaty, however, never had any practical effect; nor was the contest finally adjusted until the celebrated concordat of Worms in 1122, in which the emperor agreed to give up the form of investiture with the ring and pastoral staff, to grant to the clergy the right of free elections, and to restore all the possessions of the church of Rome which had been seized either by himself or by his father; while the pope, on his part. consented that the elections should be held in the presence of the emperor or his official. but with a right of appeal to •the'provincial that; investiture might be given by thc einpe ror, but only by the touch of the scepter; and that the bishops and other church dignitaries should faithfully discharge all the feudal duties which belonged to their principality.
Such was the compact entered into between the contending parties, and for a time it had considerable effect in restraining one class of abuses; but it went only a little way towards eradicating, the real evil of simony and corrupt promotion of unworthy candi dates for church dignities. Still the principle upon which the opposition to investiture was founded was almost a necessary part of the medimval system, and Mosheirn (ii. 32i) regards it as "perfectly accordant with the religious principles of the age." . It was, in fact, but one of the many forms in which the spirit of churchmanship has arrayed itself, whether in ancient or modern times, against What are called the Erastian tendencies which never fail to develop themselves under the shadow of a state church, no matter what may be its creed or its constitution.