Advowson () or patronage is the right in English law of a patron (avowee) to present to the diocesan bishop (or in some cases the ordinary if not the same person) a nominee for appointment to a vacant ecclesiastical benefice or church living, a process known as presentation (jus praesentandi, Latin: "the right of presenting"). The word derives, via French, from the Latin advocare, from vocare "to call" plus ad, "to, towards", thus a "summoning". It is the right to nominate a person to be parish priest (subject to episcopal – that is, one bishop's – approval), and each such right in each parish was mainly first held by the lord of the principal manor. Many small parishes only had one manor of the same name. Origin The creation of an advowson was a secondary development arising from the process of creating parishes across England in the 11th and 12th centuries, with their associated parish churches. A major impetus to this development was the legal exaction of agricultural tithes specific to the support of churches and their clergy; landowners needed to establish parish churches on their lands in order to retain tithe income within their estates, and to this purpose sought to raise former field churches to parish church status. This was generally performed by a lord of a manor by rebuilding a church within the boundary of his manor, or within that of a newly subinfeudated manor, and then transferring proprietary rights of certain individual named fields, mills or messuages (i.e. houses on the manor which earned rents) to establish a glebe. Where parish churches existed on manors established before the Norman Conquest of 1066, the position is less clear and records generally are scarce from which to reconstruct a history. Britain was split into dioceses, however, and many parish churches were established long before that time, and the process of their creation was likely similarly performed by Anglo-Saxon thanes as by Norman lords and feudal barons. Initially feudal lords exercised seigneural dominium over these new parish churches, exacting an introit fee on appointment, and an annual rent thereafter. The restriction of these seigneural rights to that of 'advowson', purely a right of presentation, developed with the process of Gregorian Reform; in consequence of which payments from spiritual income to lay lords were forbidden. The new process was performed in conjunction with the bishop of the diocese in which