VICE-STEWARD. — For the patrimonial administration of bishoprics and monasteries, Roman imperial legislation and the canons of the Eastern councils had already established norms and discipline for cases in which it was not expedient for the bishop or abbot to concentrate administration in their own hands.
Thus in the East a special official, the oeconomus, was created, whose appointment was made obligatory principally by the Council of Chalcedon (a. 451). The institution also passed into the Western Churches, where alongside the Greek word oeconomus, the word vicedominus was sometimes used to indicate the official who, for economic administration, acted in the place of the dominus; these were not priestly functions, but dominical ones.
Today the word vicedominus has disappeared from Western canon law, while the term oeconomus has remained, both in the East and in the West, to indicate almost always a vicarious function, of a character at once sacerdotal and economic.
Since bishoprics and monasteries needed not only an official for economic administration but also one to defend and protect their rights and temporal acts in judgment, in the West this was, corresponding to a similar official existing in the East since the imperial period, the advocatus. The functions of the vicedominus and the advocatus intertwined and merged in the history of the Western Church, especially in Italy: sometimes both are found simultaneously; sometimes there are several vicedominus and several advocati; sometimes a single person absorbs the functions of both. In some phases of their history, the vicedominus and the advocatus were no longer mere Church officials but also officials whose activity was significant for the prince. This depended on the relationship between the power of the dominus, whether bishop or abbot, and the prince.
Vice-stewards are found in Italy in the 6th century, at Rome and Ravenna; and for them especially Gregory the Great lays down
prescriptions in his letters, through which the typical vice-steward is seen, who reappears equally in the Decretum Gratiani. The vice-steward had to be a cleric, and in the episcopal curiae he occupied an important rank, often alongside and above the archdeacon. He was chosen and appointed by the bishop; and if the bishop neglected to do so, provision had to be made, says St. Gregory the Great, by the common counsel of the entire clergy. He had the function of directing the bishop; he participated in all acts of administration; his importance increased in the absence of the bishop, whom he partly supplanted. In the 8th–9th centuries his powers grew with the expansion of the patrimonial and territorial power of the bishop, and the vice-steward became a general agent of the bishop, invested with public authority recognized in Carolingian legislation. By now he was an obligatory official within the sphere of ecclesiastical immunity, an intermediary between this and the public power of the king and prince; he had to administer the immunized lands in the interest of the Church, but also in that of the State. Hence the institution became generalized, the appointment obligatory, in which the royal power or its representatives participated; the vice-steward was required to furnish certain personal guarantees, and over him the royal power exercised jurisdiction.
As internal administrator of the episcopal palace, the vice-steward left few traces of himself; but as the bishop’s agent, enjoying a sphere of immunity, according to some writers he also exercised jurisdiction within the immunized territory, over free men, non-free, colonists, and serfs. Sometimes he exercised the powers proper to the advocatus.
In the 10th and 11th centuries a new phase of the institution is noted. Among the bishop’s vassals there appears a vice-dominus who was mostly a lay lord, possessor of a fortified castle. The feudal movement had stripped the ancient vice-steward of the character of an ecclesiastical dependent strictly on the bishop. The bishop, with the acquisition of a share of sovereign public powers, needed, to secure his vassals, effective protection, a lieutenant usually chosen from among the most powerful lords, to whom, as an appanage of services, he granted a fief.
The functions of the vice-steward, lord of this age, are a mixture of those of the advocatus and the Carolingian vice-steward. The vice-steward is the protector of the bishopric, represents the bishop in judgment, sometimes supplants him in the administration of justice. Other functions are those of the ancient official of immunity, namely jurisdiction and districtus. Others will be curious survivals from the time when the vice-steward was nothing more than an ecclesiastical dependent strictly on the bishop. In some places, where armed protection is no longer needed, he reverts from layman to ecclesiastic. Of the functions consisting in the administration and guardianship of episcopal goods, the vice-steward seems later to have retained only that which makes him guardian of the palace and the bishop’s goods in case of a vacant see. He exercises without scruple the right of interim administration during the vacancy, and the right of spoliation over the movable goods of the deceased bishop (Dante says, of the vice-stewards of Florence, “... when our church is vacant, they grow fat sitting in consistory”).
The condition of the vice-steward varies at each bishopric; other officials limit his powers; he takes part in civic life, even against the bishop; he has a share in the struggles for the formation of the commune; yet he always remains dependent on the bishop. The formation of the commune provokes imbalances that are regulated after struggles, violence, and disturbances. The fief, having become hereditary and alienable, prolongs the conflicts. The struggle is open between bishops, popes, emperors, kings on one side, and vice-stewards and advocati on the other, especially regarding those functions and rights that had become useless or had degenerated. The conflict ends with a new regulation or with renunciations by the vice-steward or advocatus of the fief. The vice-steward or advocatus, mere agents of the bishop, will retain functions and rights sometimes only symbolic, and their presence will be attested only by certain rights and honors, until the abolition of feudalism or the French Revolution. In some places in Italy the vice-steward still exists as a dignity of the cathedral chapter.