DONATIVE

A donative is when the king, or any subject by his licence, founds a church or chapel, and ordains that it shall be merely in the gift or disposal of the patron, and vested absolutely in the clerk by the patron’s deed of donation, without presentation, institution, or induction. This is said to have been anciently the only way of conferring ecclesiastical benefices in England; the method of institution by the bishop not being established more early than the time of Archbishop Becket in the reign of Henry II. And therefore Pope Alexander III., ( Decretal , 1. 3, t. 7, c. 3,) in a letter to Becket, severely inveighs against the prava consuetudo , as he calls it, of investiture conferred by the patron only: this however shows what was then the common usage. Others contend, that the claim of the bishops to institution is as old as the first planting of Christianity in this island; and, in proof of it, they allege a letter from the English nobility to the pope in the reign of Henry III., recorded by Matthew Paris, ( A. D. 1239,) which speaks of presentation to the bishop as a thing immemorial. The truth seems to be that, where a benefice was to be conferred on a mere layman, he was first presented to the bishop, in order to receive ordination, who was at liberty to examine and refuse him: but where the clerk was already in orders, the living was usually vested in him by the sole donation of the patron; until about the middle of the twelfth century, when the pope endeavoured to introduce a kind of feudal dominion over ecclesiastical benefices, and, in consequence of that, began to claim and exercise the right of institution universally as a species of spiritual investiture. By the act 14 & 15 Vict. c. 97, sec. 9, the right of perpetual nomination of an incumbent may be acquired by the person or body, their heirs, ., who shall procure a church to be erected and endowed.