Parish life in mediæval England

by Francis Aidan Gasquet

CHAPTER I

THE PARISH

Any account of parish life in mediæval England must include much more than might at first sight be supposed. To imagine that the story of the parson and his church could adequately represent the story of the parish, even with all that the one had to do for his people and all that in the other was contained and done, is somewhat like thinking that the biographies of kings and nobles and the chronicle of their battles and achievements would tell properly the story of a people or a country. The fact is, that in those far-off days the parish church was the centre of popular life all the country over, and that the priest and other parochial officials were the recognised managers of many interests beyond those of a strictly ecclesiastical nature. Religion and religious observances then formed an integral part of the English people’s very existence in a way somewhat difficult for us to grasp in these days, when the undoubted tendency is to set God and the things of God outside the pale of ordinary worldly affairs, and to keep them out as far as possible. It is unnecessary here, of course, to determine which method is right and which is wrong; but it is useful, to say the least, that the fact of this change of attitude should be borne in mind in any examination into the parish life of mediæval England. To fail to appreciate the intimate connection between the Church and the people throughout that period of our national life will cause the observer to misread many of the facts, upon which a correct judgment of that time must depend. A writer in the National Review does not overstate the truth when he says—

“In the Middle Ages the conscious sharing in a world-wide tradition bound the local to the universal life, and through art and ritual the minds of the poor were familiarised with facts of the Christian faith. By our own poor I fear these facts are very dimly realised to-day.”

THE PARISH

At the outset it will be well to determine the exact meaning of the word “parish,” and to establish as far as is possible the origin of the English parochial system. As an institution, although occupying so important a position from the early Middle Ages, the division of the country into parishes does not appear to have come down from great antiquity. The word “parish”—the English equivalent for the Latin parocia—is derived from the Christian use of the Greek word παροικία in the sense of a district or diocese under the rule and jurisdiction of a bishop. In a recent paper on “The Rise of the Parochial System,” printed in the Transactions of the Exeter Architectural and Archæological Society, the author, the Rev. Oswald Reichel, has treated this question fully and in a most satisfactory manner. What has been so well done need not be done over again. I consequently make no apology for here following very closely his line of argument and presenting his conclusions.

In Rome, Carthage, and other large cities, “for the sake of the people,” as Pope Innocent I. says in a letter written in A.D. 416, there were district clergy appointed to preside at the services on the Sundays. Even then, however, in order that they might not consider themselves “separated from his communion,” he sent to them by his acolytes what he calls the “fermentum,” made by himself, which has been variously interpreted to mean the Holy Eucharist consecrated by him as bishop, or bread he had blessed, as a symbol of the communion of all the district churches with the central one; but which is almost certainly the former.

These district clergy, however, were not parish priests as we understand them. For (1) they belonged to the church of the bishop, though from time to time detailed for duty in the various churches, which existed according to need in each region or division of the city. Over each of these regions a deacon presided as the bishop’s delegate. (2) The direct government of the church and the cure of souls belonged to the bishop in all places within his jurisdiction, and services were performed by him, assisted by the city clergy, on fixed days in various churches in rotation. (3) Although it is possible to trace separate revenues for separate churches as early as the end of the fifth century, the offerings of the churches of a district were not kept apart, but were administered by the deacon of the region to which they all belonged as contributions to a common fund.

It is obvious, therefore, that the district clergy, thus described, cannot be claimed as the origin of our parochial system. The English parish priest was established to meet the needs of the country rather than of the city; and, beginning in the first instance to act as chaplains of landowners, who required the services of religion for themselves or their tenants, they gradually acquired the position of ecclesiastical freeholders. Appointed by the patron, they received their office and their spiritual faculties from the bishop of the see; and, whilst subordinated to him according to law, were yet irremoveable except by the strict process of canonical law and for serious offences.

Whatever may have been the early dependence of the priest on the patron, by the fourth Council of Orleans, A.D. 541, the bishop was directed to control and protect these clergy and in A.D. 813 the Council of Mainz forbade laymen to deprive presbyters of churches which they served or to appoint them without episcopal sanction. It was not, however, till the twelfth century, according to Mr. Reichel, that the country parson had acquired full recognition as the permanent and official ruler of a portion of the Lord’s vineyard presided over by the bishop of the diocese.

The sphere of work of the local clergy was the parish, which was by no means the same as the town, hamlet, or manor. According to an authority, in the thirteenth century the distinction was fully recognised. “For in one town there may be several parishes,” he says, “and in one parish several manors, and several hamlets may belong to one manor.” The parochial system, then, in the Middle Ages, had come to occupy three separate functions. It had acquired, in the first place, the notion of a well-defined group of families organised for the purposes of social order and the relief of needy brethren. Secondly, the word “parish,” applied to the same group, was regarded as a sub-unit of ecclesiastical administration, directly under the parish priest, indirectly under the bishop. Thirdly, it was the name of the foundation property or estate.

From the earliest times in the Christian Church the duty of all to assist according to their means in the support of their poorer brethren was fully recognised. The peculiar method, however, of enforcing this duty by the regular payment of tithes was apparently insisted on in the West by the second Council of Macon in A.D. 585, and in the Council of Rouen in A.D. 650. In England, to speak only of it, by the middle of the tenth century the religious duty of paying tithe was enforceable at law, and this tax was commonly called “God’s portion,” “God’s consecrated property,” “the Lord’s Bread,” “the patrimony of Christ,” “the tribute of needy souls.” This was undoubtedly the view taken in pre-Reformation days of the duty of all to pay the tenth portion of their goods for the use of the Church. What that use was has frequently been entirely misrepresented and misunderstood. In the words of the author of the tract on the Rise of the Parochial System in England—

“it must be always remembered that in the view of the Church, tithes other than first fruits, and tithes of increase, were destined not to provide a maintenance for the clergy, but for the relief and support of the poor; and the rector, whether of a religious house or parochial incumbent, was supposed to administer them for these purposes, he being only a ruler or administrator of them.... During the whole of the time that the English Church was ruled as an integral part of the Western Patriarchate, this view of the destination of tithes, and of the rector’s or administrator’s duty in respect of them, was never lost sight of.”

In regard, then, to the general notion of a parish, and as to how the parochial system was extended and developed in England, Mr. Reichel’s general summary at the end of his tract is important and interesting. It began, he concludes, in Saxon times, and assumed its complete form in the Councils of London and Westminster in the twelfth century. In the centuries which followed, and with which we are concerned, the administration of tithes was frequently entrusted to the actual incumbent, and in some cases to religious houses or collegiate establishments. But in any case the duty of the administrator was understood and acknowledged, and, it must be supposed, acted upon. The mistaken notion as to this has arisen probably from a neglect to bear in mind what happened at the period of the Reformation.

“At and since the Reformation,” says our author, “custom has persistently regarded such administrations as endowments of the parson, clerical or lay, not as gifts to the poor, of which he is only the administrator. Monastic parsons were then simply deprived of them by law, and the administrations they held were granted as property to laymen, whilst, to meet the wishes of a married clergy, parochial incumbents were released from all claims at law for charitable purposes.”

It is important to bear in mind that a properly organised “parish” was a corporation, and acted as a “corporation,” and as such no lords of the manor or political personages had any sort of power or authority over it. They might be, and, in fact, of course always were, members of the corporation--parishioners—and their positions entitled them to respect and gave, no doubt, authority to their suggestions. But the records of the old parishes that have come down to our time clearly prove that “Squire-rule” over parson and people in mediæval parochial life did not exist. Sometimes, no doubt, the “great men” of a place tried to have their own way, but they were quickly shown that the “corporation” of the parish was under the protection of a power greater than any they possessed—the power of the Church; and, as a matter of fact, this was so well recognised that it is difficult enough to find individual instances of any great landlords who were willing to try conclusions with the paramount Spiritual authority. To “Holy Mother Church” all were the same, and within God’s House the tenant, the villain, and the serf stood side by side with the overlord and master. In fact, at times, as when a feast fell upon a day when work had to be done by custom for the lord of the manor, the law of the Church forbade these servile works, and the master had perforce to acquiesce. In other words, the parish, so far as it was organised, had been the creation of the Church, and was free.

“The parish,” writes Bishop Hobhouse, “was the community of the township organised for Church purposes, and subject to Church discipline, with a constitution which recognised the rights of the whole body as an aggregate, and the right of every adult member, whether man or woman, to a voice in self-government, but at the same time kept the self-governing community under a system of inspection and restraint by a central authority outside the parish boundaries.”

One thing especially bound the parish together most firmly. The fact that the belief and practice of all was the same—that every soul in the parish worshipped in the same church and in the same way, that all kept the same fasts and feasts and were assisted by the same Sacraments, gave a unity to the corporation almost impossible now to conceive. But over and above this, the knowledge that parson and people were bound together by the parochial system, and, so to speak, existed for each other, strengthened even the ties of pure religion. In nearly all the documents illustrating parish life of, say, the fifteenth century, there is evidence of the community of purpose of pastor and people which is really astounding. As already pointed out, every rector and vicar throughout England not only regarded himself in theory as a steward of the panis Dominicus (the Lord’s Bread), under which name was meant charity to all that came to claim support; but if the laws of the English Church and Lyndwood’s authoritative gloss mean anything whatever, this sacred duty was carried out in practice. Wherever rectors do not reside in the place of their cures, says Archbishop Peckham, they are bound to keep proctors or agents to exercise proper hospitality or charity as far as the means of their churches will allow, and at the very least to relieve every parishioner in extreme necessity; and the gloss adds that the rector of a church on the high-road and in a frequented place will obviously have to spend much more than one whose cure lies off the beaten track. For this reason, it says, the clergy of the churches in England are well endowed, especially where the calls upon them for this hospitality are great.

This duty of considering the revenues of a parish as common property to be held in trust for the needs of hospitality and the relief of the poor is inculcated in every tract dealing with the subject, and acknowledged in numberless ways. In the will of William Sheffield, Dean of York in 1496, for example, the testator, after making some small bequests, says—

“I will that the rest of my goods be distributed amongst the poor, in all the benefices that I have ever held or now hold—more or less being given according to the length of time I have lived in them and maintained hospitality—for the property of a church is the property of the poor, and for this reason the conscience is greatly burdened in the disposal of the goods of the Church. And for the heavy responsibility of these distributions, Jesus have mercy.”

In another case, in the diocese of Exeter in 1440, a rector is specially praised at a Visitation, and it is declared that he “has done much good, in his parish, because he has rebuilt the chancel of his church, and has added two good rooms, one for himself, and ‘one to exercise hospitality’ in behalf of those who need it.”

Here, before speaking of the working of a parish in pre-Reformation days, it may be convenient briefly to treat about the somewhat intricate question of tithes. The gifts offered by the faithful to the Church for the support of the ministers, the upkeep of its officers, or as an acknowledgment of special services, such as baptisms, marriages, the churching of women, and burials, were roughly classed under two main divisions—tithes and oblations. The latter were personal, and to a large extent voluntary, although custom had somewhat determined the minimum fees which all who could were expected to pay for services exercised in their behalf. In England, as Lyndwood notes, oblations were almost wholly made in the form of money; and by law these offerings were regarded more as being the personal property of the priests than were tithes, and for this reason they might be spent more freely, according to the wishes of the clergy. Still, even in regard to this, the insertion of the word “generally” in the law seems to the author of the gloss to point to the fact that the clergy are not altogether free as to the application of any surplus from these oblations made to them, if for no other reason than because any apparent squandering of such ecclesiastical revenues might “tend to destroy the devotion of the people.” In oblations of this sort, of course, are not included such as were made in kind for the service of the altar and offered to the priest during the Mass, such as the bread and wine for the Sacrifice, brought in turns by the chief parishioners on Sundays and Feast-days.

Tithes are commonly defined as “the tenth part of all fruits and profits justly acquired, owed to God in recognition of His supreme dominion over man, and to be paid to the ministers of the Church.” In the Old Dispensation this recognition was made by Abraham, promised under vow by Jacob, and legally regulated by Moses. In early Christian times, if there is no evidence of the existence of the practice, it is only because the voluntary offerings of the faithful were ample to supply the needs of the Church and its ministers, whilst the community of goods practised by the first Christians hardly allowed the existence of real poverty among them. As the Church grew, its needs, and in particular the less obvious needs of the faithful poor, required some more regular and certain resources than the irregular and voluntary alms of its richer members. So in the Council of Macon in A.D. 585 is found the first express declaration of the Christian obligation of paying tithes, not indeed as a new law, but as the assertion of an admitted Christian principle. In the eighth century these payments began to be regularly made throughout the Western Church, and in England, according to the Saxon Chronicle, in A.D. 855 the father of King Alfred, Ethelwulf of Wessex, is said to have “assigned to the Church the tenth part of his land all over his kingdom for the love of God and his own everlasting weal.” In this it is almost certain that the Chronicle is wrong in the form of expression, and that what Ethelwulf did was to decree the payment of a tithe of the produce, and not hand over a tenth of the land as an endowment of the Church. And here it may be well to remark that there was obviously nothing sacro-sanct about the tenth portion payable for Church purposes. It is merely a portion that is taken to represent what is generally a fair offering to God, and one not too burdensome on those who had to pay. In some cases it might be and indeed, according to custom, was greater or less in different places.

Tithes were usually divided into two kinds—predial and personal; “some coming of the earth,” says the author of Dives and Pauper, “as corn, wine, bestayle, that is brought forth by the land, and such thyngs be clepyd predyales in latyn. Some thyngs comyth oonly of the person, as be merchandy and werkmanschyp, and such bene clepyd personales in latyn.” In these a man is to account his expenses, and then see whether he has gained, and so pay a tithe of his profit; but this may not be done in the case of the predial tithes. In these “he is not to count his expenses, but pay his tithe of all, neither the worst nor the best, but as it comes.”

The Council of Merton, in 1305, set forth a schedule of the things upon which tithes had to be paid by law; this included the cutting and felling of trees and woods, the pasturage of the forests, and the sale of the timber; the profits of vineyards, fisheries, rivers, dovecots, and fish-stews; the fruits of trees, the offspring of animals, the grass harvest, and that of all things sown; of fruits, of warrens of wild animals, of hawking, of gardens and manses, of wool, flax, and wine; of grain and of turf, where it was dug and dried; of pea-fowl, swans, and capons; of geese and ducks; of lambs, calves, and colts, of hedge cuttings, of eggs, of rabbits, of bees with their honey and wax; together with the profits from mills, hunting, handicrafts of all sorts, and every manner of business. As to these, Dives and Pauper, on the authority of canonists, teaches that people should be reminded that tithe is, in the first place, an acknowledgment to God for what He has Himself first given to men. Consequently, all should willingly pay this tribute to Him, and thus continue to deserve His blessings: also, that they should remember that nothing was exempt from this tribute—wind-mills and water-mills, tanneries and fulling-mills, all mines of silver and other metals, all quarries of stone, and all profits of the merchant and the craftsman.

Predial tithe, in a word, was payable on the annual crops of corn, wine, oil, and fruits, etc., and on the natural increase of cattle, including milk and cheese. These predial tithes were distinguished, again, into the Greater tithe—that is, on corn, wine, and wool; and the Lesser tithe on vegetables and fruits, etc. The tithes personal were to be paid on profits of trade and business. All this was acknowledged as sanctioned or ordered by “Divine law or custom.”

All tithes on the land-predial were to be paid to the rector of the parish in which the land was situated or the animals usually fed; all tithes on business occupation, to the parish where the tithe-payer was bound by law to receive the Sacraments. “Tithes personal,” says the author above quoted, “as of merchandise and of crafte, man shall payen to his parish church where he dwelleth and taketh his Sacraments and heareth his service, but tithes predial shall been payed to the church to which the manor and the land belongeth, unless custom be in the contrary.” Difficulties sometimes necessarily arose as to cases where flocks of sheep, etc., were at different times in different parishes, but by episcopal constitutions this was settled on the common-sense principle of dividing the tithe receivable, according to the proportion of the time spent in each parish. It was otherwise in the case of cattle feeding on land in several parishes—“horn with horn,” as the natives called such a practice; in this case the tithe was to be paid to the parish in which the permanent sheds of the cattle at the farmstead were situated. With difficulties of this nature it is not necessary to deal, and the foregoing examples are given merely to show how universal the practice was and how carefully the obligation was fulfilled.

Bishop Peter Quevil, in the Synod of Exeter, held in 1287, lays down several principles which are to guide the authorities in the levying of tithes. It will be remembered that it is from these Constitutions that so much as to the practical working of the Church of England in the thirteenth century is known. From what he says as to tithes, it seems that there was growing up a practice of seeking to deduct the cost of production before counting the tithe. This might seem not unreasonable, but the bishop condemns it, and says that “expenses are by no means to be deducted first.” In the same way he refused to recognise as right any claim to set aside a tenth part of a field and to count as tithe of the whole whatever was grown upon that portion. So, too, in the west country a practice had grown up in certain places for farmers to refuse to pay their dues until the parson had given a harvest feast and a pair of gloves to the workmen. This is forbidden as contrary to law. In the same way, as the bishop says, “many and well-nigh unanswerable questions” arose in the levying of the tithe; but from time to time these were made the subject of synodal directions, as may be seen in Wilkins’ great collection, and in practice these difficulties would appear generally to have answered themselves by the application of a little common sense, assisted by a measure of good-will, which most certainly existed in those days.

It is usually difficult to obtain information about the amounts of the tithe derived from the various sources titheable. Generally the accounts do not set out the items, and give merely the totals. For the diocese of Rochester, however, in 1536, the Valor Ecclesiasticus gives the details in many instances. From these we learn that the tithe generally had a twofold division; for instance, the Rector of Huntingdon, besides £9 a year derived from the rectory house and the rent of 21 acres of pasture, accounted for the tithe of grain and hay, which produced, according to the then money value, 26s. 8d., and the tithe of wool and of lambs, bringing in £4 8s. 9d. He received also an annual average of £17 2s. 5d. from oblations and private donations. In the same way the Vicar of Dartford received £16 13s. 4d. for the tithe of wool and lambs, £2 for the hay tithe, and £25 13s. 4d. for all other tithes and oblations.

A word must now be said about the impropriation of parochial tithes to cathedrals, monasteries, and collegiate establishments. It is very generally stated that this was one of the great abuses of the mediæval Church redressed at the time of the Reformation. Without in any way wishing to defend the practice of assigning tithes to purposes other than the work of the parish in which they were receivable, it should in justice be borne in mind that this was never done without the sanction of the bishop, and upon the condition that the vicar should receive amply sufficient for his support and for the purpose of his parochial work. The notion of “the great robbery” of parishes to endow monasteries, and of the “miserable stipends” on which those who occupied the post of vicars existed or starved, is in view of records not borne out by facts. The “miserable stipends” formed only part of the emoluments of those who served impropriated churches; they had also the lesser tithes and all oblations made to them, and the bishops were bound by law to see, and in fact did see, that their income was sufficient. Moreover, though not very numerous, there are in the episcopal registers a sufficient number of examples to show that the arrangements, made between the impropriators and the vicar, and sanctioned by the bishop, were open to readjustment if necessary. At East Anthony, in the diocese of Exeter, for example, this is exemplified, and the settlement made by Bishop Grandisson is confirmed by Bishop Stapeldon, and the principle is laid down that “the Bishop and his successors have power, should they see fit, to encrease, diminish, or change the amount to be paid to the holder of the vicarage and the conditions upon which it is held.”

It will be useful to take one or two examples of the division of tithes between the impropriator and vicar in an impropriated living. The rectory of Preston, in the county of Kent, for instance, was impropriated to St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, which derived £16 a year from it. Out of this sum 53s. 5d. in money was paid by way of pension to the vicar, and 6s. 8d. in lieu of a certain quantity of corn—in all £3. This, however, was not by any means the whole income enjoyed by the vicar, for he also received from the lesser tithes and personal oblations another £6 15s., bringing his stipend up to the sum of £9 15s. a year, or ample, according to the value of money in the sixteenth century, to live upon. Again, the church of Monketon and that of Birchington, in the same county of Kent, were impropriated to the monastery of Christ Church, Canterbury. From them the monks derived £66 13s. 10d. for their house, and out of this £1 12s. 4d. had to be spent upon the poor of the place, and £12 1s. 8d. was paid to the vicar as his stipend. He received also £11 annually from tithes and oblations, and paid two curates, to serve Birchington and another annexed chapel, £9 13s. 4d. This left him still £13 8s. 4d. as his own annual stipend, which was about three times what he considered sufficient for each of his curates. To take one more example: from the church of Chistlett the monks of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury—who, by the way, were lords of the manor—received from the rectorial tithes £40 a year; the vicar’s tithes, together with the glebe lands, bringing him £30 a year.

It would appear from these instances, which could be multiplied indefinitely, that, except for the fact that tithe was taken from the district where it was raised, the grievance of which so much has been made, is an academic rather than a real one, and one of modern invention rather than one existing in the Middle Ages. That there were complaints occasionally may be allowed. Still, not only were they rare, but in the episcopal registers it may be seen that, in the few instances where they came before the bishop, they were declared to be groundless. They generally arose out of the Visitations when the vicar had been ordered to repair the chancel of his church, or procure some choir-books, or to do some other work for which by law the incumbent was held responsible. The vicar pleaded as his excuse for the dilapidation, or for his inability to do the work required, that the impropriator should be made to do all this, as he took so much of the tithe away from the place. It is rarely indeed that such a claim was considered reasonable, and for the most part the reply was that this had been considered at the time of the original impropriation, and that sufficient had been allowed to the vicar to carry out these legal obligations, and that all things had been made fitting and all repairs seen to before the vicarage had been established.

The grounds upon which impropriation made by lawful authority was justified in the Middle Ages were, apparently, that originally tithe had been paid to the bishop of the diocese for the general good of the entire district. By his administration of these diocesan funds he was enabled to assist good works of every kind at his discretion. When in process of time the parish became a sub-unit of administration, the local tithe passed into the administration of the local parson; but never without the dormant notion, not only of episcopal control, but fundamentally of ultimate episcopal authority over it. Up to the Reformation it was taught that tithe really ought to be divided into four parts: one part to go to the bishop, if he needed it; one to the ministers; one to the poor; and the fourth part for the repair of the church fabric. The notion that it was the great landowners who in the first instance endowed the parish churches with tithes, and subsequently took them, or a portion of them, away and gave them to religious houses and colleges, is for the most part quite imaginary. Tithe was, as already pointed out, the recognition of God’s supreme authority over the world, and a public acknowledgment that all things came from His hands, and the idea, which is a product of modern notions, that it was a charge made upon the land for the benefit of religion, is wholly alien to the spirit of pre-Reformation days. The very fact that this does not explain the existence of personal tithes, shows that the giving of tithes generally did not depend upon the generosity of any landowner or lord of the manor.

Neither was the tithe ever regarded as the absolute property of the incumbent. Besides his recognised duty in regard to the repairs of the chancel, the poor were regarded as having legal claims upon what was received by him. What seems to us a somewhat strange custom was occasionally practised in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This was the farming out of tithes by the rectors, or, in other words, raising money upon their expected receipts. For this the sanction of the bishop had previously to be obtained, and any pledging of the tithe for more than the current year was illegal. Beyond this, where a rector or prelate put his benefice out to farm, according to the law, he was bound to get four of his parishioners, approved by the bishop, to be surety for the faithful payment of the full portion (pinguis portio) of the tithe due to the poor of the parish. “I hold,” however, says the canonist Lyndwood, that this is not necessary “in the case of a rector or prelate, who, after farming out his tithes lawfully, continues to live in his benefice, unless he is suspected of not intending to succour those in poverty.”

The duty of paying lawful tithes was constantly inculcated by synodal decrees, by bishops’ letters, and from the pulpit. Thus John Myrc, in his Instructions for Parish Priests, tells them—

“Teche hem also welle and greythe

How they schell paye here teythe

Of all thynge that doth hem newe

They shuld teythe welle and trewe

After the custome of that cuntraye

Every mon hys teythynge schale pay.”

The author, however, says that he has no need to speak much of that matter, as priests will see to it that their tithes are paid in due time; and in a Sarum Manuale it is found set down that by law “men of religion, freres, and all other,” who “go about and preache Goddes worde,” are commanded to preach eight times in the year upon the nature of tithes and on the obligation of paying them to the parish priests. That this duty was recognised, and that on the whole it was cheerfully complied with in the Middle Ages, would appear to be certain. It is, moreover, no less apparent that these payments were regarded, not in the light of a charge upon the land, but of a genuine acknowledgment to God of His supreme governance of the world, that all things were His, and that in His hands were the ends of the earth. The general spirit in which the obligation was regarded may be seen in the wills of the period, where the testators not only desired that all lawful tithes might be paid from their estates, but very generally left benefactions to their parish churches “for tithes forgotten.”