Definition
The corrupt buying or selling of ecclesiastical offices, benefices, or spiritual privileges. In English ecclesiastical and common law, simony most commonly referred to the unlawful presentation of a clergyman to a church benefice — a living or position carrying income and authority — in exchange for money, a gift, or any other temporal reward. More broadly, it encompassed any unlawful agreement to exchange a spiritual or sacred thing, including holy orders, pardons, or other ecclesiastical privileges, for material consideration.
The term derived from the biblical figure Simon Magus, who attempted to purchase the power of the Holy Spirit from the apostles. Anderson's Dictionary notes this etymology explicitly; Burrill flags that Blackstone considered the purchase of holy orders itself the closer analogue to Simon's actual offense.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The buying or selling of spiritual or sacred things, such as ecclesiastical offices, pardons, or consecrated objects.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The crime of buying or selling ecclesiastical preferment; the corrupt presentation of any one to an ecclesiastical benefice for money or reward.
The common and legal meanings track closely here, but the legal definition is narrower in application: the operative legal wrong in English law centered specifically on corrupt presentations to benefices — a technical transaction within the Church of England's patronage system — rather than the broader spiritual category of trafficking in sacred things generally. Researchers working in ecclesiastical law records should focus on benefice presentations; the broader theological sense rarely had legal consequence independent of that context.
Why It Matters in Research
Simony is primarily a term of English ecclesiastical law and will appear in sources dealing with the Church of England's patronage system, particularly during the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. The legal enforcement of anti-simony rules operated through both ecclesiastical courts and, in certain periods, civil courts, which creates a split-source research problem: a single dispute might generate both an ecclesiastical proceeding and a common law action on the corrupt contract.
The key research trap is that simony was simultaneously a canonical offense, a statutory offense under English law, and a ground for voiding civil contracts. Contracts tainted by simony were treated as unlawful agreements and unenforceable, not merely voidable — a distinction that matters when tracing how courts discussed and disposed of related property claims.
American researchers should approach the term cautiously. Simony as a legal category had limited transplantation to U.S. law given the constitutional separation of church and state, but it does appear in early American case law in states where established church structures persisted or where contracts touching ecclesiastical appointments were litigated in civil courts. The Nebraska case cited in Black's 2nd edition — State v. Buswell — demonstrates that the term had enough American legal presence to generate reported decisions, though it was never a mainstream category of U.S. civil or criminal law.
In the Law Mind corpus, simony is most likely to surface in ecclesiastical law treatises, English equity and common law materials dealing with corrupt presentations, discussions of unlawful contracts, and historical canon law sources. Researchers working on patronage, advowsons, or the law of benefices should treat simony as a closely related concept requiring parallel attention.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge tightly on this term. Black's (both editions), Burrill, Bouvier, and Anderson all anchor the definition to the corrupt presentation to a benefice for money, gift, or reward, with Blackstone's Commentaries (2 Bl. Comm. 278) as the shared authority. This is a term where the historical sources are unusually consistent.
Bouvier adds the most doctrinal texture, explicitly noting that simony extended to any unlawful agreement to receive a temporal reward for something holy or spiritual — a formulation drawn from the civil law tradition (Code 1.3.31) and Ayliffe's Parergon, which situates the concept in canon law as well as English ecclesiastical practice.
Burrill contributes the useful observation, attributed to Blackstone, that the purchase of holy orders actually resembles Simon Magus's sin more closely than the presentation-for-money transaction that bore his name in law — a distinction with historical interest but no practical consequence for legal research.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry in the source material is a pagination artifact and contains no substantive simony definition; it should be disregarded.
No historical dictionary entry addresses the American law dimension in any depth, which is itself informative: this was understood as a term of English ecclesiastical law, not a general common law category.
Jurisdictional Note
Simony as an enforceable legal category is primarily English. American law did not develop a parallel ecclesiastical court structure, and simony prosecutions have no significant place in U.S. criminal law. In civil contexts, American courts occasionally applied simony-adjacent reasoning to void contracts for corrupt ecclesiastical appointments, but the term itself rarely controlled the outcome.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Ecclesiastical Law; Benefices and Advowsons; Unlawful Contracts