INVESTITURE, in feudal phraseology, means the act of giving corporal possession of a manor or office,—an act which was usually conjoined with some significant ceremonial, such as the delivery of a branch, a banner, or some other appropriate symbol of the thing conveyed. Investiture with staff and ring was during and after the 11th century the name given to the ceremony by which ecclesiastical dignitaries were admitted by the civil power to possession of the temporalities of their office. The word investiture (from “vestire,” to put in possession; see Ducange) is later than the 9th century; the thing itself is an outcome of the feudal system. Under the Frankish monarchy the idea came very early into vogue that the right of nominating bishops lay with the sovereign,—an idea that gained currency all the more widely, especially in Germany, as the territorial and temporal character of the bishoprics and abbacies, with their various immunities and privileges of coinage, toll, market, and the like, gradually came into prominence, and their spiritual nature and functions were proportionally obscured. It was indeed but logical that ecclesiastics, so far as they were the holders of lands, should not be exempted from the ordinary obligations of feudatories to their suzerain; nor was this view seriously disputed until after the middle of the 11th century, when the views of Hildebrand (afterwards Pope Gregory VII. ), who aimed at asserting the absolute freedom of the church from all secular control, began to prevail at Rome. Thus a Roman synod in 1063 forbade all clergymen from accepting churches at the hands of laymen; and in 1068 a direct collision took place at Milan between the German court, which had invested a bishop in the usual way, and the populace, who under papal ...