There was plenty of skirmishing over rights to burial away orom the
parish, esp. after the Mendicants became prominent. The right to bury &
the payment of canonical portion, usually set at a proportion of the
overall offerings etc., to the parish priest, were topics of legislation -
e.g., Third Lateran c. 9 - and litigation. See my article in the
Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Medieval Canon Law
(Vatican City, 1988). But there is another aspect of this matter, the
penal, which I would like to underline. The Second Lateran Council (c.
14) forbade the burial of those killed in tournaments in consecrated
ground, and the Third Lateran (c. 20). The latter evewn enjoins this when
the dying man has confessed & been absolved. That council (c. 25) also
extends this threat to notorious usurers who die unabsolved.
There must have been some sense that this was a real threat behind its
use, even if many ignored these censures in order to do whatever they
wanted to do.
tom izbicki
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