While I know more about Carthusian spirituality than legal matters, as far as I know, they did function as landlords over their endowments, including lower criminal jurisdiction, which was exercised by an advocate. But they as best they could insisted on a consolidated endowment to create a large "eremus" or wilderness, from which peasants were at least in part removed. (Recall Hugh of Lincoln's "tricking" of Henry II to give the peasants removed from the royal estates at Witham extra compensation in the _Magna Vita Sancit Hugonis_ by Adam of Eynsham). The Carthusians also secured privileges from the 12thc popes to prevent the advocate from entering the eremus to exercise lower criminal jurisdiction jurisdiction there until after they had invited him. As time went on they did acquire more scattered endowments at a distance from the eremus with peasants living on them and in many instances a consolidated endowment was not possible even at the start. But that was always their goal. As time went on they became more and more caught up in the "normal" landholding patterns, so that by the 17th century in Austria and southern Germany, at least (they had been ruthlessly suppressed in Northern Germany, the northern Netherlands, England, of course; I'm not familiar with the situation in Spain and Italy) they had become quite similar to the large Benedictine abbeys with all the power and authority as large landowners typical of Melk, Seittenstetten, Klosterneuburg (Augustinian Canons). However even then, their priors refused the title of Prelate when offered to them by the Habsburg emperors (it was forced on them in the 17thc, I believe--sort of an early form of Josephinism, the Austrian "enlightened despotism").
Dennis Martin
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