IV. THE CHANCE TO RISE.
We are very prone to think that even though there may have been excellent opportunities for the higher education in the Thirteenth Century and, in many ways, an ideal education of the masses, still there was one great social drawback in those times, the lack of opportunity for men of humble birth to rise to higher stations. Nothing, however, is less true. There probably never was a time when even members of the poorest families might rise more readily or rapidly to the highest positions in the land. The sons of village merchants and village artisans, nay, the sons and grandsons of farmers bound to the soil, could by educational success become clergymen in various ranks, and by attaining a bishopric or the position of abbot or prior of a monastery, reach a seat in the House of Lords. Most of the Lord High Chancellors of England during the Middle Ages—and some of them are famous for their genius as canon and civil lawyers, for their diplomatic abilities and their breadth of view and capacity as administrators—were the sons of humble parents.
Take the single example of Stratford, the details of whose inhabitants' lives, because of the greatness of one of them, have attracted more attention than those of any other town of corresponding size in England. At the beginning of the Fourteenth Century it is only what we would call a village, and it probably did not have 3,000 inhabitants, if, indeed, the number was not less than 2,000. In his book, "Shakespeare the Boy," Mr. Rolfe calls attention to certain conditions that interest us in the old village. He tells us of what happened as a result of the development of liberty in the Thirteenth Century:
"Villeinage gradually disappeared in the reign of Edward VII. (1327-1337), and those who had been subject to it became free tenants, paying definite rents for house and land. Three natives of the town, who, after the fashion of the time, took their surnames from the place of their birth, rose to high positions in the Church, one becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, and the others respectively Bishops of London and Chichester. John of Stratford and Robert of Stratford were brothers, and Ralph of Stratford was their nephew. John and Robert were both for a time Chancellors of England, and there is no other instance of two brothers attaining that high office in succession."
To many people the fact that the avenue to rise was through the Clergy more than in any other way will be disappointing. One advantage, however, that the old people would insist that they had from their system was that these men, having no direct descendants, were less likely to pursue selfish aims and more likely to try to secure the benefit of the Community than are those who, in our time, rise through the legal profession. The Lord High Chancellors of recent time have all been lawyers. Would not most of the world confess that the advantage was with the medieval peoples?
President Woodrow Wilson of Princeton realized sympathetically this great element of saving democracy in the Middle Ages, and has paid worthy tribute to it. He said: "The only reason why government did not suffer dry rot in the Middle Ages under the aristocratic systems which then prevailed was that the men who were efficient instruments of government were drawn from the church—from that great church, that body which we now distinguish from other church bodies as the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church then, as now, was a great democracy. There was no peasant so humble that he might not become a priest, and no priest so obscure that he might not become Pope of Christendom, and every chancellery in Europe was ruled by those learned, trained and accomplished men—the priesthood of that great and then dominant church; and so, what kept government alive in the Middle Ages was this constant rise of the sap from the bottom, from the rank and file of the great body of the people through the open channels of the Roman Catholic priesthood."