THE ESTATES OF CLERICS AND MONKS

 

1. Emperors Theodosius and Valentinian Augustuses to Taurus, Praetorian Prefect and Patrician.

If any bishop, priest, deacon, deaconess, subdeacon, or cleric of any other rank whatsoever or a monk or a woman who has been dedicated to the monastic life should die without having made a will, and if no parent of either sex, or childer, or persons connected either by the tie of agnation or cognation, or wife should survive, the property which has belonged to the decedent shall be incorporated entirely into that of the sacrosanct Church or the monastery to which the decedent had been dedicated. Excepted from this rule shall be those properties left by clerics or monks of either sex who are, perchance, registered in the tax rolls, or persons subject to the righs of a patron or obligated to the status of decurion. For it is not just that the churches should retain estates or peculia that are due by law to the patron or to thew owner of a landholding on whose tax list one of the aforesaid men had been enrolled, or that they should keep property known to belong to the municipal councils, subject to the fixed general rule and in accordance with the tenor of a constitution formerly issued. Of course, the right of action shall be adequately reserved for the sacrosanct churches, if perchance any person who is bound to one of the aforesaid legal statuses should die while obligated as the result of any business transactions of any other acts relating to the Church. It is provided that if any lawsuits arising from petitions of this kind should be pending in the courts, such suits shall be completely voided. After the publication of this law, no claimant shall be allowed to enter court and to annoy the church stewards or the monks or the procurators, since such a claim is rendered obsolete, and the estate which has been left is consecrated to the very religious churches or monasteries to which the decedent had been dedicated.

Given on the eighteenth day before the kalends of January in the year of the consulship of Ariovindus and Aspar.---December 15, 434.

INTERPRETATION: If any bishop or other person designated in this law, or any man or woman who is a member of a religious order should die intestate without children or near kinsmen or a wife and should owe nothing to a municipal council or a patron, whatever property is left by such person shall belong to the church or monastery which he served. If any of the said persons should wish to make a testament, he shall have the unrestricted right to do so.

 

(trans. C. Pharr 1952: 107)