CHAPTER IX.

In many cases the owners of the estates on which the chapels were situated, or the tenants, or both together, made an agreement with the rector to augment the stipend of a chaplain so that he might give additional services and pastoral care in their ville. Thus, when Gilbert Norman (1130?) gave the church of Kingston-on-Thames to Merton Priory, the parish had already four chapelries, Thames Ditton, East Moulsey, Petersham, and Shene (now Richmond). In 1211 the inhabitants of Petersham complained of the paucity of services in their chapel, and the matter came before the Ecclesiastical Courts. It would appear that lack of funds was at the bottom of the deficiency of service. The prior and convent, “of their great piety, and for the good of the souls of their parishioners,” granted to the vicar and his successors two quarters of corn, oneof barley, and one of oats; and the Abbot and Convent of Chertsey, who were considerable landowners there, also of their good will granted a quarter of corn from their lands there, for the sustentation of a chaplain who should celebrate in the chapel thrice a week, viz. on Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday.[108]A like complaint was made again in 1266, when the appropriators increased their grant to four quarters of wheat, one of barley, and one of oats; and seventeen of the parishioners for themselves and heirs granted a payment of one bushel of wheat for every ten acres of their land, making twenty-four and a half bushels. Other cases in which the people themselves contributed to the support of their priest will be found in the chapter on Chantries.

Clearly the thing to be desired was to get resident chaplains appointed to all the villes with a considerable population, and to that end to get endowments for them, and much was done in this direction in the thirteenth century. We shall find ample illustrations of various features of the work in the forty years’ episcopate of Archbishop Walter Gray. The archbishop wrote to the Pope, Gregory IX., on the subject, desiring, no doubt, to get the support of the Papal sanction for the measures which he desired to take. We gather from the pope’s reply that the archbishop had represented to him that “many parishes in his diocese were so widely spread that the parishioners were at a great distance from their church, and were not able, without much inconvenience, to come to the Divine services; and that it often happened, when the priest was summoned by the sick, that before he could arrive theyhad died without confession and the viaticum;” and no doubt the archbishop had suggested what he desired to do; whereupon the pope grants to him leave that, after due consideration of the distance of places, the difficulties of the roads, and the number of the increasing population, in parishes of this sort, he should build oratories and institute priests in them.[109]

The way in which the archbishop set to work (1233) to strengthen the existing machinery is admirably illustrated in the ordinance which he drew up with the concurrence of the dean for the vicarages with their chapels belonging to the deanery. There were three vicarages, Pocklington, Pickering, and Kellum. Pocklington had six chapels, Pickering four, and it does not appear that Kellum had any. First he strengthened the mother churches by the requirement that each of the vicars should, “besides all other necessary ministers,” have a chaplain—an assistant priest—always with him. Then he consolidated the six chapels of Pocklington and the four of Pickering, two and two, into five vicarages,i.e.two neighbouring chapels were formed into a vicarage, the incumbent of which was to havein nomine vicaragiæcertain endowments, and the vicar was to find the necessary ministers for both chapels; but the dignity of the mother churches was reserved by the provision that the new vicars were to pay a small annual sum to their mother churchesnomine subjectionis.[110]Another illustration of the way inwhich the improved condition of things was brought about is in the case of Roundelay. Sir John de Roundelay and his heirs and the men of that ville had licence (A.D.1231) to establish a perpetual chantry in their chapel every day in the year save Christmas, Purification, Easter (“Parasceues”), and All Saints, and if they had service on Palm Sunday, it was to be without procession and the blessing of the Palms; neither were they to have the celebration of baptism, marriage, or churching; on all these occasions they were to repair to the mother church, and the chaplain and people were to swear obedience to the mother church and its rectors. Sir John provided an endowment for the new incumbent, and the vicar of the mother church was to give him half a mark a year (6s.8d.), in consideration, no doubt, that it had hitherto been a charge upon him to that extent or more to make provision for the partial services at the chapel.[111]

Again, Berneston Chapel, Notts, had been accustomed to have only three services a week. The people had the archbishop’s licence to give an endowment to provide for having full services in their chapelpro habendo plenario servitioby a chaplain and clerk residing there.[112]

There are many other examples in the Archbishop’s Register of similar extensions of the usefulness of the existing ecclesiastical machinery, but these are enough to show the way in which it was done. Therecan be no doubt that the work was done in the same way where it was needed in the other dioceses of the kingdom.

There is a curious instance at Stokesay, in Shropshire. Before the Conquest, the parish church of that estate had been at Aldon, which is mentioned in Domesday. After the Conquest, the status of parish church had been given to a new church at Stokesay, on the same estate, and Aldon Church had been left in the status of a chapel. In 1367, the chief parishioners of Aldon took proceedings against the vicar, Walter of Greneburg, for neglecting them, and he was required by the bishop to find a chaplain to celebrate three days a week—Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday—except on great festivals.[113]

The following seems to be an instance of the transition of dependent chapels into independent parish churches, and an illustration of the way in which sometimes it came about. At Newnham, Gloucestershire, in 1260, an inquisitionpost mortemfound that the Rector of Westbury held the chapels of Newnham and Munstreworth as pertaining to the Church of Westbury. In 1309, in the Pleas before the King, the jurors declared on oath that the churches of Newnham and Munstreworth were mother churches with cure of souls before the time of King Henry III., and in the presentation of the king.

Here is an example at Whalley of the way in which great landed proprietors brought new tracts of theirforest and waste under cultivation, and created new manors.

In a suit in the reign of Edward III., the jurors found that in the time of King John there was not in the aforesaid place of Brandwode any manor or manses, but it was waste, neither built upon nor cultivated, and was parcel of the aforesaid forest of Penhul [Pendle], and it is said that in the time of Henry, the ancestor [proavus] of the present king, the then abbot [of Whalley] built houses on the aforesaid waste of Brandwode, and caused a great part of the waste to be enclosed, which is now called the Manor of Brandwode.[114]

And here is a late example of the people reclaiming waste, and building a chapel for themselves:—

In the end of the fifteenth century the forest of Rossendale was inhabited only, or chiefly, by foresters and the keepers of the deer. Upon representation to King Henry VII., and afterwards to Henry VIII., that if the deer were taken away, the forest was likely to come to some good purpose, it was disafforested, and let forth in divers sorts, some for a term of years, some by copy of Court Roll; so that where there was nothing else but deer and other savage and wild beasts, by the industry of the inhabitants, there is since grown to be very fertile ground well replenished with people. And inasmuch as the Castle Church of Clitheroe, being their parish church, was distant twelve miles, and the ways very foul, painful, and perilous, and the country in the winter season so extremely and vehemently cold, that infants borne to the church are in great peril of their lives, and the aged and impotent people and women great with child not able to travel so far to hear the Word of God, and the dead corpses like to remain unburied till such time as great annoyance to grow thereby, the inhabitants about 1512, attheir proper costs, made a chapel-of-ease in the said forest; since the disafforesting of the said forest from eighty persons there are grown to be a thousand young and old. At the same time, one Lettice Jackson, a widow, vested in feoffees certain lands for the use of the new church of our Saviour in Rossendale. The population seems to have continued to increase, for, thirty years afterwards, the people founded and edified a chapel in Morell Height in honour of God, our Blessed Lady and All Saints.[115]

We have seen that the law carefully safeguarded the rights of the mother churches, as against the new chapels which sprang up. The Church also was careful to maintain their dignity in a way which calls for some remark. The curate of a chapel, on his institution, made a vow of reverence and obedience to his rector. Very generally some small payment was required from the chapelry to the rectorin nomine subjectionis, as an acknowledgment of dependence. The people of the chapelries were required on several of the great festivals of the Church to communicate at the mother church, and on one or more of these festivals to visit the mother church in procession with flags flying.

There was another custom, very like this, on a larger scale, viz. the custom for the parishioners of all the parishes of a diocese to visit the cathedral church in procession on a given day in the year. This seems to have been a very old custom, for which Sir R. Phillimore quotes the Council of Agde and the Decretum of Gratian,[116]and suggests that itwas probably introduced into England at the Norman Conquest. We find it enjoined in the canons of several Diocesan Councils; and it is tolerably certain that it was a general custom.

We suggest that the idea at the back of these customs was not merely that the offerings of the people of the chapelries should not be lost to the rector of the mother church on the three great days of offering; and that the cathedral should receive a yearly tribute from every subject of the bishop. We suggest that the purpose of the custom was to maintain the idea of the unity of the Church. The chapels had received their Christianity from the mother church, and all the “houseling people” in recognition of it worshipped there three times a year. The mother churches received their Christianity from the bishop’s see, and were his spiritual subjects, and once a year went up in procession to worship at the cathedral as an act of homage. And these reunions would, in fact, promote the idea of brotherly communion and Christian unity, as the attendance of the Israelites on the three great festivals at their one temple in Jerusalem tended to maintain the national unity of the people as the people of God.

Nothing is free from abuse. We learn from the Register of Bishop Storey, of Chichester, that in 1478 the people who came yearly to visit the shrine of St. Richard on his commemoration day (April 3), had been accustomed to carry long painted wands, and in struggles for precedence had used these wandsupon one another’s heads and shoulders; wherefore the bishop directs that in future they shall, instead of wands, carry banners and crosses, that the several parishes shall march up reverently from the west door of the cathedral in a prescribed order, of which notice should be given by the incumbents in their churches on the Sunday preceding the festival.

Royal chapels were, on no sound ecclesiastical principle, but by an exercise of the royal prerogative, from an early period held to be outside any episcopal jurisdiction.[117]For example, a series of churches along the old Mercian border, Stone, Stafford, and Gnosall, Penkridge and Wolverhampton, Tettenhall, as having been built by King Wulfhere, or by Elfleda, the Lady of Mercia, claimed exemption from all control. Clinton Bishop of Lichfield (1129-48) tried to bring them under his rule by purchasing them of the king, and annexing them bodily to the possessions of his see but that did not hinder them from still claiming their ancient privileges.

The lawyers[118]say that the king may by charter license a subject to build a free chapel similarly free from the jurisdiction of the ordinary, but they are not able to quote any instances of it. Some barons, however, did claim freedom from jurisdiction for the chapels of certain castles; perhaps on the ground that the castles were royal castles, and thatthey held or had received them from the crown with all their privileges and exemptions. For example, the chapel of St. Mary, in the castle at Hastings, enlarged, if not founded, soon after the Conquest, by the Count of Eu, for a dean and ten prebendaries, was claimed by successive lords of the castle to be a free chapel; and in spite of repeated attempts by the bishops of Chichester to assert their rights, the privilege was successfully maintained till the fifteenth century.

A number of chapels were called free chapels, apparently because they were free from subjection to the mother church of the parish. We have already seen that the free chapels, built for the convenience of outlying groups of population, were at first served by chaplains from the mother church; then the chaplains nominated by the rector resided at the chapelries; and when the chapels were endowed and assigned districts, and obtained the rights of baptism, marriage, and burial, still the patronage to the chapelries was in the rector, and the sentiment of subjection to the mother church was carefully kept up by the payment of a pension from the one to the other, and the custom of a procession to the service of the mother church on one or more great occasions. But in some cases a chapel became freed from this subjection by the action of the neighbouring squire, who, by purchase or agreement, obtained special rights over it; or some private patron built and endowed a new chapel with the stipulation for certain rights. We have seen that, when Isabelde Saye gave the parish of Clun and all its chapels to Wenlock Priory, the donor reserved her free chapels.

Here is an instance of a chapel which is called a free chapel, but was technically a chantry, and clearly intended to serve also as a chapel-of-ease to the town in which it was situated.

In 1309, Edward Lovekyn, of Kingston-on-Thames, had leave to build a chapel there, and endow it with lands and rent. Robert Lovekyn, his brother and successor, withheld some of the income, and was compelled to restore it by threat of excommunication with bell and candle. In 1352, John Lovekyn rebuilt the chapel and increased the endowment for the sustentation of one or more additional chaplains, one to be warden (it does not appear that there ever were more than the warden and one brother), who had a manse. The rules and ordinances are given at length in the book from which we quote. They were to live together in the manse, with separate sleeping rooms, and a common table. The warden was to provide suitable provision, and give to each brother a gown of the same kind which he wore, and forty silver shillings a year for his other necessaries. The warden was also to provide a clerk to serve mass and wait upon the chaplains in their rooms; and to provide honest surplices and amyces furred with black fur to wear in chapel. The warden to be always in residence, and not to take any other cure; not to give or sell any corrody; the warden might have guests at table; if any other had a guest, he was to pay 3d.for his dinner and 2d.for any other meal.[119]Masses to be said for the founder and his family, and also to grace after dinner was to be added, “May thesouls of John Edward and Robert Lovekyn, our founders, and of the Lord William, Bishop of Winchester, and all faithful deceased, rest in peace through the mercy of God.” On the four principal feasts the chaplains were to attend the parish church and make their offerings like other parishioners. In consideration that John Lovekyn gave a manse to the vicarage, his chapel was to have all oblations which came to it.[120]The calendar of the chapels, chantries, etc., at the time of the Reformation, mentions 432 chapels, of which 198 are called “free chapels.”

The calendar of the chapels, chantries, etc., at the time of the Reformation, mentions 432 chapels, of which 198 are called “free chapels.”

THE PARISH PRIEST—HIS BIRTH AND EDUCATION.

The early Saxon bishops were very often men of royal and noble families. The religious houses, which were the centres of evangelization in the early missionary phase of the history, were often founded by royal and noble persons, who were not seldom themselves the first abbots and abbesses, and handed down their houses and offices as hereditary possessions. The parish churches were founded by the lords of the land, who made the advowson appendant to the manor, and very usually brought up a younger son to be the spiritual rector of the family estate. The natural result of all this would be that a large proportion of the Saxon clergy would be men of good family; not by any means exclusively, for we have seen that even slaves[121]were sometimes admitted to Holy Orders, and we have read[122]a kindly warningto priests of noble birth not to despise their brethren of humbler origin; and the law assigned to every priest—quapriest—the rank of thane (p. 77).

We know that the founders of the English churches established schools, and finding their converts apt pupils, soon raised up a learned native clergy. The young men intended for the pastoral office were taught the learning and trained in the ascetic discipline of these monastic schools.[123]

The natural result would be that the Saxon clergy would not only be generally of good birth and breeding, but also religious, learned, and capable men; the natural spiritual rulers, teachers, and protectors of the population of freemen, villeins, and serfs who peopled the estate of which the civil lord and ruler was often the rector’s father or brother.

The Norman Conquest introduced confusion for a time into both monasteries and parishes. Norman abbots intruded into the religious houses, sometimes quarrelled with the Saxon monks, and the first inhabitants of the newly-founded monasteries were usually imported from abroad; as the rectories fell vacant, they would be filled with the sons of the new Norman lords of manors, and there could be little sympathy between the Norman rector and the Saxon flock. But things soon settled down upon a new course. In a very few generations Normans and Saxonsamalgamated. The old monasteries, revived and reformed, and the new ones added to them, were filled with zealous English communities; and in the parishes an English lord of the manor and an English rector ruled an English people. With the thirteenth century we begin a new period of parish history, continuing down to the sixteenth century, and extending all over the country, of which the general features are very uniform; so that it is only necessary occasionally to point out new institutions and phases of character.

Perhaps the most striking social feature of these centuries is the way in which the Church opened up a career to all ranks and classes of the people. The great landed families still maintained friendly relations with the monasteries which their forbears had founded, and sometimes contributed one of their cadets to the cloister, and perhaps in time secured his nomination to the abbacy; the lords of the manors continued to present their younger sons to the rectories; so that there was always a strong aristocratic element among the clergy. The vicars were for the most part the nominees of the religious houses, and the conjecture that abbots and priors, and abbesses, and prioresses, and dignitaries of the houses, not infrequently presented their relatives, and sometimes clerks in the service of the house, is supported by some actual examples.

The middle classes supplied a great number of the clergy who filled the offices of parish chaplain (= assistant-curates), chantry priest, guild priest,and the like; and many of these, by force of learning, character, and good service, rose to higher offices. Even young men of the servile class were not excluded from the ranks of the clergy. The slaves whom Gregory and Aidan, and others, redeemed and trained as priests, may have been young men of good family taken captive in war; but in the thirteenth and subsequent centuries young men born and bred serfs were not infrequently educated and ordained, and given fair chance of promotion. It is true they were under special legal disabilities. A serf could not be himself ordained, or send his children to school without his lord’s leave, for they wereadscripti glæbe, bound to the soil, and their labour and their children’s labour (or a portion of it, carefully defined by law and custom) was an important part of the property of their lord; the canons of the Church, moreover, from a very early period, had made servile birth a disqualification for Holy Orders;[124]but in the thirteenth, and especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there are numerous examples in which a serf gave a fine to his lord for leave to send his son to school, and kindly lords not infrequently gave the right gratis to a promising youth, and his ultimate freedom; and the Church frequently, probably usually, as a matter of course, gave a dispensationde defectu natalium.

From the single manor of Woolrichston, in Warwickshire, we get these illustrations of the text:—In 1361, Walter Martin paid 5s.for the privilege of putting his sonad scholas. In 1371, William Potter fined in 13s.4d., that his eldest son may goad scholasand take Orders. Stephen Sprot fined in 3s.4d., that he might send his son Richardad scholas. William Henekyn fined in 5s., to marry his daughter Alice. In 1335, William at Water paid for licence for his younger son Williamad sacrum ordinem promovendum.[125]

Here is another example. In 1312, the Bishop of Durham gave license to hisnativus, Walter de Hoghington, clerk, to receive all Divine orders, and renounced hisjus domini.[126]

And this liberal sentiment was based upon the profoundest principle. When the King’s School at Canterbury was reorganized, at the time of the Reformation, some of the commissioners to whom the work was committed wished to limit the school to the children of gentlemen. It was for the ploughman’s son, they argued, to go to plough, and the artificer’s son to apply to the trade of his parents’ vocation; and the gentleman’s children are used to have the knowledge of government and rule of the commonwealth. “I grant,” replied Archbishop Cranmer, who was one of the commissioners, “much of your meaning herein as needful in a commonwealth; but yet utterly to exclude the ploughman’s son andthe poor man’s son from the benefit of learning, as though they were unworthy to have the gifts of the Holy Ghost bestowed upon them as well as upon others, was as much as to say that Almighty God should not be at liberty to bestow His great gifts of grace upon any person but as we and other men shall appoint them to be employed according to our fancy, and not according to His most goodly will and pleasure, who giveth His gifts of learning and other perfections in all sciences unto all kinds and states of people indifferently.”[127]

There were always some who took the less liberal view which the archbishop thus nobly rebuked. Even in the twelfth century, Walter Map (one of the clerks in the civil service of Henry II., holding various ecclesiastical preferments; he died in 1209) complains that villeins were attempting to educate their “ignoble and degenerate offspring” in the liberal arts.

The author of the “Vision of Piers Plowman” gives utterance to the same illiberal prejudices as the noble colleagues of Cranmer. He thinks that “Bondmen and beggars’ children belong to labour, and should serve lords’ sons, and lords’ sons should serve God, as belongeth to their degree;” and complains that “bondmen’s bairns should be made bishops, and that popes and patrons should refuse gentle blood and take Symond’s son to keep sanctuary.”[128]

In another place the same writer says, in the same strain—

Now might each sowter[129]his son setten to scholeAnd each beggar’s brat in the book learne,And worth to a writer and with a lorde dwelle,Or falsely to a frere the fiend for to serven.So of that beggar’s brat a Bishop that worthen,Among the peers of the land prese to sytten;And lorde’s sons lowly to the lordes louteKnyghtes crooketh hem to, and crowcheth ful lowe;And his sire a sowter[129]y-soiled with grees,His teeth with toyling of leather battered as a saw.

The writer of “Symon’s Lesson of Wisdom for Children,” in a much more genial spirit, jestingly encourages the children to be diligent in their lessons by holding out the prize of succession to the see:

And lerne as faste as thou can,For our byshop is an old man,And therfor thou must lerne fasteIf thou wilt be byshop when he is past.[130]

The better spirit prevailed. The lower classes had the inevitable disadvantages of their origin to contend with, but every cathedral and religious house had its schools, which were ready enough to admit boys who were seen to possess those “gifts of the Holy Ghost” which might, if duly cultivated, make them useful in Church and State; and it was regarded as the duty of ecclesiastical persons to look out for such boys, and support them in their career. Richard II. rejected a proposal to forbid villeins to send their children to school “to learn clergee;” and the triumph of the more liberal sentiment was legally secured by the Statute of Artificers passed by Parliament in 1406, which enacted that “every man or woman, of what state or condition he be, shall be free to set their son or daughter to take learning at any school that pleaseth them within the realm.”

The career which was thus thrown open to all classes of the people was a much larger one than appears at first sight. Not only all the offices and dignities of the Church, from that of stipendiary chaplain to that of bishop or even of Pope, were open to all comers, but also all the offices of the State which required learning as a qualification were open to every clerk. For the kings took the officials of the civil departments of the Government very largely from the ranks of the clergy; and, by a greatabuse of their patronage, paid them for their services to the State by promotion to the emoluments and dignities of the Church.[131]

Some of the satirists found fault with this state of things, but, in fact, the man of humble birth, who had risen to high rank in the Church by force of his own learning and character, had little to fear from illiberal reflections upon the lowliness of his origin. The men who had risen from the grammar school of some village or obscure town to rank and wealth were so far from trying to hide the obscurity of their origin, that it was the general custom of dignified ecclesiastics to drop their patronymic and take the name of their birthplace instead. Thus, he whom we familiarly call Thomas-à-Becket was known to his contemporaries as Thomas of London; the family name of Thomas of Rotherham, Archbishop of York, was Scot; the family name of the illustrious bishop and statesman, William of Wyckham, was Longe; and that of William of Wayneflete was Barlow.[132]Another good custom was that such men frequently raised for themselves a lasting monument in their native place by founding a free school in the village, or a college or hospital in the town.[133]

From the school of the cathedral or monastery,or of the parish priest, the ambitious student whose means permitted it went to some more famous centre of learning: in Saxon times, to the schools of Canterbury or York or Winchester; in later times, to the universities which were organized under the auspices of the Church in the various countries of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Bologna was famous as a School of Law; Paris took the lead in Theology; Salerno in Medicine. Here, in England, Oxford and Cambridge were centres of learning at the close of the twelfth century, and organized universities early in the thirteenth. Oxford in the thirteenth century had a European reputation second only to that of Paris.

The period from the awakening of new religious and scientific thought in the eleventh century through the two following centuries, was one of great intellectual activity throughout Europe. The isolated Saxon Church had been little affected by the new learning; but the first Norman archbishop, Lanfranc, was one of the foremost scholars of the time, and Anselm, his successor, was more than that, being one of the greatest thinkers of Christian Europe; and from their time onward Englishmen held a place among the most learned men of Europe.

In those days, as in these—and indeed in all days—men had different natural temperaments—some a contemplative and spiritual disposition, some an inquiring scientific turn of mind, others a rationalizing and practical bias; some leaned upon authority, others were speculative and self-confident. Greatfreedom of thought was permitted, and of the expression of thought, and yet England was very little troubled by heresies. From the beginning of the English Church to the beginning of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the excessive doctrines of Lollardism in the fourteenth century—when they seemed to threaten the very bases of social order both in Church and State—alone called forth any serious action on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities against the open expression of religious opinion. These ages, therefore, had their various “schools of thought.”

The most prominent feature of this awakened, religious, and scientific thought throughout Europe was the endeavour to give a rational exposition of the doctrines of the Faith, and to organize them into a scientific system; it pervaded more or less all the other schools of thought of these ages. It will be enough to mention here the two great representatives of the school. Peter Lombard, in the latter part of the twelfth century, wrote “Quatuor Libri Sententiarum” (Four Books of Sentences), in which he arranged under their various heads the opinions of some of the older teachers, especially Augustine and Gregory the Great,[134]and of the newer teachers, and sought to reconcile them by accurate distinctions into a body of doctrine; he gathered together in compact brevity so rich a store of matter, and treated it with so much sobriety and moderation, that hiswork became a standard manual, adopted by the most distinguished teachers, who were content to teach and write commentaries on the “Sentences.” “England alone is said to have produced no less than one hundred and sixty-four writers, who illustrated this famous text-book.” The English Franciscan friar, Alexander of Hales (died 1245), was among the most important representatives of the scholastic theology. The greatest master of the school, however, was Thomas Aquinas, an Italian Dominican friar, who wrote in the third quarter of the thirteenth century. His “Summa Theologica” is the greatest work of its class, and served as a text-book to the students of Europe throughout the subsequent ages.[135]

Another school—of which Hugh, Canon of St. Victor in Paris (died 1141), was an eminent leader—included frequently men of great intellectual power, and skilled in the scholastic theology of their time; but the bent of the school was towards spiritual contemplation and practical piety. They drew their doctrines rather from the Bible itself and the older Church teachers; they dwelt on the Divine perfections and on the relations of the soul to God; their religion was of the affections rather than the intellect. The college of St. Victor was for a long period a centre of this school. Robert Pullein was an eminent representative of its teaching at Oxford. Richard the Hermit, of Hampole,popularized its teachings in the fourteenth century in numerous tractates written in English; and its influence is easily recognized in many of the religious works of that and the subsequent century. “The Imitation of Christ,” by Thomas à Kempis, a good example of the school, is at this day the favourite devotional book of tens of thousands of our devout people.[136]

Other Englishmen, who were among the most famous of the learned men of Europe, were John Duns Scotus, a Franciscan friar, who, at the end of the thirteenth century, displayed a great genius for mathematical science; and Roger Bacon (died 1292), another Franciscan, who possessed an extraordinary genius for physical science, and Occham. These, and such-like, were the men who ruled the thought of the time, and their teachings were eagerly studied and reproduced in the cathedral and monastic schools, and imbibed and assimilated by the scholars; and their general principles at least tinctured the teaching of the parish priests in their town parishes and country villages.

The course of reading in the Schools was four years in grammar (i.e.Latin language and literature), rhetoric, and logic, before the student could be admitted a Bachelor; three years in science, viz. arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy, before inception as a Master; seven years’ study before, as a Bachelor of Theology, he could lecture on the “Sentences;”[137]and, lastly, he must study theBible for three years, and lecture on one of the Canonical Books, before he could take his degree as a Doctor of Theology.

Students went up to the universities at an early age (fourteen or fifteen), and they went in great numbers. In the thirteenth century there were three thousand of them at Oxford. At first they lodged where they pleased, and were under no special oversight and discipline; but soon the university required that every student should be under the care of a recognized tutor; and before long bishops and lay benefactors began to build hostelries or halls, and to provide stipends for students; and out of these arose the mediæval colleges, which provided a home and discipline and tutors, and pecuniary help to poor students; Merton College, at Oxford, was the earliest, founded by Walter of Merton, Bishop of Rochester (1264). The friars, at an early date after their institution, sent their more promising members to the universities; and they cultivated the study of theology, philosophy, and natural science with so much success that within a short time their teachers were famous in all the universities of Europe, and members of their orders were promoted to the highest offices in the Church. Among Archbishops of Canterbury, Richard of Kilwardby, a Dominican, was succeeded by John of Peckham, a Franciscan.

Students of all nations flocked to the most famousseats of learning. Latin was the language in which all instruction was given, and was thelingua francaof all who pretended to learning; the students from the same country formed themselves into national clubs for mutual society and protection. The phrase, “The Republic of Letters,” in those days signified a more real cosmopolitanism than in our days, when men go to their national universities, and meet only their own countrymen there, and when even learned men have not the habit of colloquial Latin.

Our readers may remember Bishop Latimer’s naïve piece of autobiography in a sermon before the king, which affords us an example of the farmer who sent his clever son to the schools. “My father,” he says, “was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own; only he had a farm of three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able, and did find the king a harness and his horse. I remember that I buckled on his harness when he went to Blackheath field. He kept me to school, or else I had not been able to have preached before the king’s majesty now. He married my sisters with five pounds, or twenty nobles, each, having brought them up in godliness and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor; and all this he did of the said farm” (“Sermons,” p. 101).

Besides the youths whose fathers could afford to “keep them to school” out of their own means, thesystem produced a great host of poor scholars, many of whom out of term-time returned to their homes and supported themselves by their labour; others, with or without a special licence permitting them, travelled round the country, alone or in groups, asking for contributions to help them to maintain themselves and complete their education. Longfellow’s “Spanish Student” and “Hyperion” help their readers to realize the groups of students, some thoughtful and ambitious, some full of the gaiety of youth, wandering from town to castle, from monastery to manor house, asking alms with a laugh and jest; and the knight and his lady gladly gave them supper and a shakedown in the hall, for the sake of their hopeful youth; and the prior or rector gave them a donation and a kind wish, with a wistful recollection of his own bygone student days; and people of all classes gave a trifle, for it was a recognized act of piety to help poor scholars.

There are survivals to our own day. The clever Irish boys who used to be picked out by their priests and sent to St. Omer’s, where they were made into scholars and Irish-French gentlemen—a charming type—some of whom rose to high station in their church, is a thing of the recent past. In Scotland, the schoolmaster is still on the outlook for those among his peasant laddies who possess the natural qualities of a scholar; and the minister is ready to give them the higher teaching where the dominie halts; and not only the parents are filled with ambition that the boy should succeed, but the whole village is proud of the honour reflected upon his birthplace.

Among this crowd of ambitious youths of all classes there were sure to be some whose career would be wrecked, by failure in intelligence, industry, and character, and these formed a rather numerous class of sham scholars and worthless clerics of whom we get glimpses from time to time.

In the Norwich Corporation records of 1521, is a copy of the examination of Sir William Green, in whose sketch of his own life we have a curiously detailed relation of the way in which many a poor man’s son became a scholar and a priest. He was the son of a labouring man, Stephen-at-Grene, at Wantlet, in Lincolnshire, and learned grammar for two years at the village school, and then went to day labour with his father. Afterwards he removed to Boston, where he lived with his aunt, labouring for his living and going to school as he had opportunity. Being evidently a clerkly lad, he was admitted to minor orders, up to that of acolyte, by “Friar Graunt,” who was a suffragan bishop in the diocese of Lincoln. After that, he went to Cambridge, where he maintained himself partly by his labour, partly on alms, and availed himself of the opportunities of learning which the university afforded. At length he found an opportunity of going to Rome with two monks of Whalley Abbey, probably as one of their attendants; and there he endeavoured to obtain the order of priesthood, which seems to have been bestowed rather indiscriminately at Rome, and without a title; but in this he was unsuccessful. On his return to England, he was for a short time thrown again on his labour for his living; but, going to Cambridge, he obtained from the vice-chancellor, Mr. Coney, a licence under seal to collect subscriptions for one year towards an exhibition, to enable him to complete his education and take his degree. Had he obtained money enough, completed his education, and obtained ordination in due course, it would havefinished the story of a poor scholar in the regular way; but he fell into bad hands, forged a new poor scholar’s letter, using the seal of the old letter, then letters of orders with a forged seal, and then went about begging alms as a destitute priest;[138]and we find him in the hands of the magistrates of Norwich under the charge of being a spy.

In the register of Lincoln diocese, in 1457, we find a record of one Hugh Bernewell, an Irishman, who went about pretending to be a priest, and undertaking to make a pilgrimage to Rome, and say prayers at theScala Cœli, for any who would pay him. He was found to be an impostor, and was put in the pillory.[139]

The next step in the career of the parish priest was his ordination. We have seen that he might receive the minor orders with little difficulty while still a youth pursuing his studies; but when it came to the sacred orders, he had to obtain a “title,”i.e.a definite place in which to exercise his ministry, and a competent maintenance to prevent the disgrace which pauper clergymen would bring upon the Church. The bishop who ordained a man without a title was liable to maintain him out of his own purse, and there are instances of the enforcement of the liability. A curious instance of it is recorded in the Register of Archbishop Winchelsea of Canterbury, 1297, in a decree that the executors of a bishop, who had ordained a priest without title, should provide for his maintenance when afterwards he became, withouthis own fault, mutilated so that he could no longer fulfil the office of priest.

But a title was not always a cure of souls; any kind of ecclesiastical benefice which afforded a prospect of maintenance was sufficient; for example, membership of a convent or a hermitage. No doubt there were many young men of good families who desired ordination, not with a view to cure of souls, but with a view to being capable of holding ecclesiastical benefices as the rewards of the career which they proposed to pursue in the civil service of the Crown, or of great men. This partly accounts for the ordinationsad titulum patrimonii sui quo respondet se esse contentumwhich are not uncommonly found in the Episcopal Registers, and the similar onesad titulum, of lands and of a ville of five marks of annual rent, and of sixty shillings of annual pension, and the like.[140]A great many poor men’s sons also got little pensions as titles, and then took chantry priest’s places.

The Rules of Examination for Orders were precise and the same in all dioceses. The number of men ordained was very large, and went on rapidly increasing through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; for there were four Orders to be ordained, Acolytes, Sub-deacons, Deacons, and Priests; not only the parishes had to be supplied, but a proportion of the inhabitants of religious houses were also ordained by the bishop on the presentation of the abbot, the candidate’s position in the housebeing a sufficient title.[141]In these ordinations there were frequent dispensations from canonical obstacles; servile condition, illegitimate birth, personal blemish,[142]and insufficient learning.

Some of the newly-ordained were at once instituted to benefices, and licence of non-residence was given to a large proportion of the new rectors, that they might go to school or university to acquire the learning which they did not yet possess.

ORDINATION OF A DEACON.FROM A PRINTED PONTIFICAL (471 f. 2), A.D. 1520.

In Bishop Langton’s “Lichfield Registers” we find, in the single month of February, 1300, licences weregiven on institution for one year’s study, to Alexander de Verdon, Rector of Biddulph, Roger Bagod, Rector of Alvechurch, Nicholas de Aylesbury, Rector of Pattingham, Roger Fitzherbert, Rector of Norbury, and Richard Birchal, Vicar of Tattenhill. In the same month Richard Touchet, Rector of Middlewick, and Simon Touchet, of Mackworth, were sent to college for two years, and Walter de Fordinghay, Rector of Mackworth, for three years. In 1309, William de Draco, a youth of fifteen, was, at the Pope’s instance, licensed to hold a benefice, and Conrad Homerschilt, a German, Rector of Filingley, got five years’ leave of studious absence.[143]

We will assume that the typical parish priest—whose parentage and education at school and university we have seen, and whose fortunes we are following—passed with credit the bishop’s examination, was ordained without having need to put in a dispensation for canonical impediments, was instituted by the bishop without any wish for licence of non-residence, then went off to his living, and was inducted into possession of his church by the archdeacon, with a solemn sense of the responsibilities he undertook, and an earnest desire to fulfil his duty. It will be convenient to us here to divide our study of his life in the parish under several headings: his house and furniture; dress and daily life; and his duties as a parish priest.

PARSONAGE HOUSES.

There is no reason to suppose that the houses of the parochial clergy differed from those of lay people of corresponding income and social position, except in the one circumstance that they sometimes had to provide for the hospitality to travellers to which we will give special consideration hereafter.

The house of a rector, from Saxon times downwards, would be very like that of a lay lord of a small estate, but it is very difficult for us, with our ideas of absolutely necessary domestic accommodation, to realize how rude and simple were then the houses of people of comparative wealth and social position. The house consisted mainly of one room. This room, the hall, was oblong in plan, constructed, except in districts where timber was scarce and stone easily obtained, of timber framework, filled in with wattle and clay, with a lofty unceiled roof. The windows were few and high up in the side walls,not glazed until comparatively modern times, but closed on occasion with shutters; a stone hearth stood in the middle of the hall, with iron fire-dogs on which the burning logs rested. In the better class of houses there was a raised daïs at the end furthest from the door, with a long rude oak table on it, and a single chair for the master of the house behind it; there were other tables of boards and trestles put up when needed, and taken away again when done with, and a couple of rude benches and a few stools; there was a cupboard near the “dormant table,” as Chaucer calls it, on which were displayed the pewter dishes, and horn drinking-vessels, and in better houses, perhaps, a silver salt-holder, and a couple of silver drinking-cups. When there was some pretension to refinement, the roof-timbers would be moulded, the lower part of the walls hung with tapestry, and rushes strewn on the floor by way of carpet; a low screen of wood across the lower end of the hall at the same time made a passage (“the screens”) through the house by which people might pass to the back premises without disturbing the company in the hall, and warded off the draught from the ever-open door. Any one of the hundreds of old halls which remain in all parts of the country may serve as an illustration of this general plan.

A separate building attached at right angles to the lower end of the hall, and opening into the screens just mentioned, contained the cellar, buttery, and kitchen, and might be prolonged to contain other offices, as a brew-house, etc. Another separate building wasattached at right angles to the upper end of the hall, usually of two stories, with its gable to the front; the lower story was often a storehouse, sometimes a “parlour,” the upper story “the great chamber”—the special apartment of the lady of the house, and the one retiring room from the promiscuous company in the hall. This room had perhaps a bay window in its gable, and would be furnished with tapestry, and a few stools, a spinning-wheel, a couple of carved oak chests, and cushions in the window-seats.

As time went on, at the end of the thirteenth century, and in the succeeding centuries, a greater refinement of domestic customs was introduced, and other apartments were added.[144]In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the walls of the hall were built a little higher, and an upper floor put in so as to convert the roof into a sleeping loft, lighted by a couple of dormer windows; and this plan of a central hall with a loft over, its longer side to the front, flanked by a two-story building at one end with its gable to the front flush with the hall, and another building at the other end of the hall containing the offices, was the general plan of the houses of the middle classes of the people.Thousands of them, more or less disguised by later additions, still remain all over the country.

Plan of Rectory House, West Dean, Sussex.

Rectory House, West Dean.

Few of the old rectory houses are left in their original condition. There is a good example of the hall at Weston Turville, Bucks.[145]The parsonagehouse at West Dean, Sussex, of the thirteenth century, is described and figured in Turner’s “Domestic Architecture.” It is built of stone; in plan a hall with a story over it, and the soler at the upper end, approached by a stone newel stair built in a projecting buttress on the north side. The windows of the story over the hall are lancets, those of the hall have a curious kind of tracery. The upper chamber or soler has a good fireplace and chimney-piece of stone, with deeply splayed windows.

Pre-reformation Clergy House, Alfriston.(By kind permission of the publishers of theBuilder.)

There is a parsonage house at Alfriston, within three miles of Dean, Sussex, of the fourteenth century, so unchanged and well preserved that it has been made over to the National Trust for Preserving Places of Historic Interest. It has the usual hall, constructed of oak framing, the interstices being filled with “wattle and dab,” open to the roof with large cambered tie-beams and moulded king-posts. At the upper end of the hall is the soler, of two stories.

Pre-reformation Clergy House, Alfriston.(By kind permission of the publishers of theBuilder.)

There are others of stone at Congresbury (Somerset), King’s Stanley (Gloucester), Wonstone (Hants.), Notgrove (Gloucester); of timber at Helmsley (Yorkshire); and many others. And, just as many farmhouses which were once small manor houses still retain their ancient mediæval features disguised bymodern alterations, so there are many parsonage houses in which the original house of the fourteenth or fifteenth century still remains, and may be traced by a skilful eye amidst the subsequent additions.

We derive our fullest information about the old parsonage houses, however, from literary sources, from the settlements of vicarages which describe the old rectory house, or dictate how the new vicarage house shall be built; from the old terriers which describe the then existing houses, and from the inventories of wills which go from room to room, naming the rooms, and detailing the furniture in them.

Thus a deed of 1356 describes the rectory house of Kelvedon, in Essex, existing at that date—and how long before that date we do not know—which the Abbot and Convent of Westminster, in the settlement of a vicarage there, assigned to the vicar as his residence. The deed describes it as—

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