Minster (church)

This is because the term has come to be associated with contemplative regularity, such as that observed by the Benedictine or Cistercian orders, although this does not apply to the situation in Anglo-Saxon England prior to the tenth century.

[9] This suggests that by the tenth and eleventh centuries, mynster was being used to refer to a "superior church" which was regarded as long-established and to which people paid their dues.

The first minsters in the English-speaking parts of Britain were founded in the century after the mission to the Saxons led by Augustine of Canterbury in 597.

In 734 Bede wrote a letter to Ecgbert (Archbishop of York), warning that noble families were abusing the privileged legal status accorded to the clergy, by making excessive landed endowments to minsters under their control.

Early Anglo-Saxon monks might baptize, preach, and administer the sacraments to the laity in their locality, and distinctions were further blurred by the existence of 'double monasteries' of nuns and secular clerks.

In the last resort, however, monks could be free of pastoral obligations, while the secular minster always had its parish ('parochia') over which it exercised extensive and well-defined rights, including control over baptism and burial and the receipt of various financial dues such as church-scot and tithe.

The minster's primary purpose was to support the king and the thegn in the regular worship of the divine office; especially through intercession in times of war.

In the 9th century, almost all English minsters suffered severely from the depredations of Viking invaders; and even when a body of clergy continued, any form of regular monastic life typically ceased.

Of particular importance for these developments, was the royal enforcement in this period of tithe as a compulsory religious levy on arable production.

In the 11th and 12th centuries former lesser minsters and field churches, typically served by individual priests, developed into the network of parishes familiar to this day.

Otherwise however, old minsters might continue collective worship as collegiate churches; their clergy initially being designated as 'portioners', as each canon was supported by a set portion of the college's endowment income.