ABSTRACT
The great English legal historian F. W. Maitland described the medieval Church as ‘a state’.2 His description was not off the mark. The Church possessed a complex and ordered system of government. It raised taxes that ordinary men and women were obliged to pay. It enacted detailed laws they were compelled to follow. It had an organized system of courts that exercised jurisdiction across every part of Western Europe. It was also very far from a club of like-minded individuals. Once baptized, even as an infant, no person was free to adopt another religion or to embrace atheism. If he did, he could expect to be subject to discipline, even the terrible discipline of stake and fire. It is not an error, therefore, to think about the medieval Church in terms we normally reserve for states.
