Anglo-Saxon Institutions. 449-1066 61
bishoprics, the latter often coinciding with old tribal
boundaries. The bishops of these dioceses lived, for the
most part, in small places instead of in the cities, as was
the practice upon the continent. The English bishops,
in a very real sense, ruled over districts or peoples and
were far less fixed in residence than were the continental
bishops. The division of dioceses into parishes has been
ascribed by tradition to Archbishop Theodore; but the
parishes grew slowly, largely as great landholders cared
to build and endow churches for their estates—a parish
origin which was the origin also of the prevailing lay
patronage of the localities, the family which had built the
church and endowed it with lands retaining a kind of
proprietorship through naming the priest. But for long
many townships were only irregularly served by travelling
priests from such monastic groups as were in the diocese.
Parishes were not created by superior church authority,
and there was no complete system of parishes for several
centuries. The parish was usually merely the township
regarded ecclesiastically, the region under the care of a
single priest. In the wilder and more thinly settled part
of the country, a parish often included several townships
or hamlets, and, in some cases, has always continued to
do so.
In the little that can be said of the government of the
early church, we note especially how it was related to the
state. Church councils were very irregular. Two that
were held in the time of Theodore seem to have been for
all England; after that they were for the provinces of
Canterbury or York. These were regularly attended by
the bishops and many of the abbots, and, while their busi-
ness was of course ecclesiastical, yet a good many laymen
of importance appear to have attended just as churchmen
were to be found in the witan. Church and state worked
together, for they had the same end in view, the maintain-
ing of as much orderly unity as possible. Indeed it
seems probable that from early in the ninth century the
church council merged into the witan of the West Saxon