Page:William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (3rd ed, 1768, vol II).djvu/35

 Ch. 3. he does, by the one act of collation, or conferring the benefice, the whole that is done in common caes, by both preentation and intitution. An advowon donative is when the king, or any ubject by his licence, doth found a church or chapel, and ordains that it hall be merely in the gift or dipoal of the patron; ubject to his viitation only, and not to that of the ordinary; and veted abolutely in the clerk by the patron's deed of donation, without preentation, intitution, or induction. This is aid to have been antiently the only way of conferring eccleiatical benefices in England; the method of intitution by the bihop not being etablihed more early than the time of arch-bihop Becket in the reign of Henry II. And therefore though pope Alexander III, in a letter to Becket, everely inveighs againt the prava conuetudo, as he calls it, of invetiture conferred by the patron only, this however hews what was then the common uage. Others contend, that the claim of the bihops to intitution is as old as the firt planting of chritianity in this iland; and in proof of it they allege a letter from the Englih nobility, to the pope in the reign of Henry the third, recorded by Matthew Paris, which peaks of preentation to the bihop as a thing immemorial. The truth eems to be, that, where the benefice was to be conferred on a mere layman, he was firt preented to the bihop, in order to receive ordination, who was at liberty to examine and refue him; but where the clerk was already in orders, the living was uually veted in him by the ole donation of the patron; till about the middle of the twelfth century, when the pope and his bihops endeavoured to introduce a kind of feodal dominion over eccleiatical benefices, and, in conequence of that, began to claim and exercie the right of intitution univerally, as a pecies of piritual invetiture.

this may be, if, as the law now tands, the true patron once waives this privilege of donation, and preents to the bihop, and his clerk is admitted and intituted, the advow- Rh