Definition
The secular, worldly revenues and landholdings of the Christian church, particularly those held by bishops and other ecclesiastical figures by grant or permission of the sovereign. Two senses operate in legal history:
1. (Narrow, English ecclesiastical law) The lay fees — lands, tenements, and related revenues — granted to bishops by the Crown. Because bishops held these estates directly from the king, they sat in Parliament as barons and lords. Temporalities in this sense are the feudal, earthly dimension of episcopal endowment, as distinct from spiritualities (the bishop's revenues and authority derived from his ecclesiastical office alone).
2. (Broader, general ecclesiastical property law) The full range of money revenues and property income belonging to a church or religious body — including pew rents, donations, subscriptions, collections, burial and cemetery fees, and other secular sources. This broader usage extends well beyond the English feudal context to church property disputes in American courts.
The term appears almost exclusively in the plural. The singular, temporality, carries the same meaning but is rare in legal usage.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "The temporal or worldly possessions of the clergy"; the plural of temporality.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Temporality — "The state or quality of being temporary; also, something temporary"; in ecclesiastical usage, "secular properties or revenues."
The common language meaning is not wrong, but it is too thin to navigate legal sources. The legal term carries specific freight: the feudal mechanism by which the Crown conveyed land to bishops, the parliamentary status that followed, and the procedural right of the sovereign to seize or restore those holdings. Researchers who encounter "temporalities" in ordinary language may underestimate how technically loaded the term is in English legal and constitutional history.
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Common Confusion
TEMPORALITIES vs. SPIRITUALITIES: The distinction between these two terms is foundational. Spiritualities are the revenues, rights, and authority a bishop holds by virtue of his ecclesiastical office — tithes, offerings, and income from purely clerical functions. Temporalities are the secular landholdings and revenues held from the Crown. Both categories composed the total income and authority of an English bishop, but they were legally distinct, separately administered during a vacancy, and subject to different rules of custody and forfeiture. Conflating them in historical research produces serious misreading of vacancy proceedings, attainder effects, and church property disputes.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
GUARDIAN OF THE TEMPORALITIES: During a vacancy in a bishopric — between the death or removal of one bishop and the installation of the next — the Crown appointed a guardian (custos) to administer the temporalities. Revenues flowed to the king during this period. This custodianship was a recognized feudal right and a recurring subject of medieval legal conflict.
RESTITUTION OF TEMPORALITIES: The formal act by which the Crown restored a bishop's lay fees after his consecration and before (or upon) his taking possession of the see. Until restitution was granted, the bishop could not receive the temporal revenues of his office. This ceremony was legally distinct from the ecclesiastical act of consecration.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in English ecclesiastical, constitutional, or feudal property history will encounter temporalities constantly — in records of episcopal vacancies, attainder proceedings, Reformation-era confiscations, and parliamentary membership disputes. Several traps exist:
First, the term's meaning is era-sensitive. In medieval and early modern sources, temporalities almost always signals the narrow feudal meaning: Crown-granted lay fees, parliamentary baronies, and the custody/restitution machinery. In 19th- and early 20th-century American cases (illustrated by the Maryland case cited in Black's 2nd edition), the broader meaning — general church revenues — begins to dominate. Do not assume consistent usage across centuries or jurisdictions.
Second, the temporalities/spiritualities divide was administratively real. Ecclesiastical records, vacancy accounts, and legal proceedings frequently track the two categories separately. A researcher who does not hold the distinction clearly will misread which revenues a guardian controlled, which the bishop retained, and which were subject to royal seizure.
Third, in Reformation and post-Reformation English history, the word appears in highly charged political contexts — the dissolution of monasteries, the subordination of the church to the Crown, and debates over the proper extent of royal versus papal authority. The term's legal content overlaps significantly with constitutional and religious controversy. Law Mind researchers connecting ecclesiastical records to constitutional history should follow the related term SPIRITUALITIES and trace the ecclesiastical courts entry for jurisdictional backdrop.
Fourth, American researchers: the term is largely historical and English in its primary legal sense. Where it appears in American cases, it typically involves disputes over church property, the scope of charitable trusts, or the taxation of religious organizations. The feudal-parliamentary dimension drops away entirely.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries converge on the core definition: temporalities are the lay fees of bishops held by Crown grant, conferring baronial status and parliamentary membership. All four cite or echo Spelman as the foundational authority. This is a rare instance of near-perfect consensus among the historical dictionaries.
Bouvier adds the useful specificity that these are revenues "from livery of the king" — emphasizing the feudal livery mechanism — and cross-references the Guardian of the Temporalities entry, which is the right next stop for procedural detail.
Burrill provides the Latin source term (temporalia) and the same Spelman citation, confirming the term's civil and canon law pedigree alongside its English common law usage.
Black's 2nd edition is the most useful for American researchers: it alone adds the broader revenue meaning and grounds it in an actual Maryland decision (Barabasz v. Kabat, 86 Md. 2), flagging that by the late 19th century American courts were applying the term to general church income rather than to feudal land grants.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the procedural mechanics of the Guardian of the Temporalities in vacancy administration, the restitution ceremony, or how the temporalities/spiritualities distinction operated within ecclesiastical court jurisdiction. Researchers needing that level of detail must move beyond the dictionary sources into treatises on English ecclesiastical law.
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Jurisdictional Note
The primary legal home of this term is English ecclesiastical and constitutional law, where it retains historical force in records spanning the medieval period through at least the 19th century. In the United States, the term appears in church property litigation and charitable trust law but carries no feudal or parliamentary dimension. Scottish and Irish ecclesiastical law used the term in related but not identical ways, particularly in the context of church establishment and disestablishment.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Church Property
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Ecclesiastical Law
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Restitution of Temporalities
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