(6) HOMES FOR POOR CLERGY AND FOR LAY GENTLEFOLK
Diocesan clergy-homes were provided during the thirteenth century in most ecclesiastical centres. At Canterbury, the Archdeacon built (before 1225) the Poor Priests’ hospital (Fig. 4). St. Richard of Chichester began p024 a similar charity at Windeham in his diocese. Walter de Merton designed a small institution at Basingstoke for “ministers of the altar whose strength is failing,” and incurables of Merton College. There were three beds for chaplains at St. Wulstan’s, Worcester, and the Stratford gild intended to initiate a hospital for the diocesan clergy. To St. Giles’, Lincoln, were admitted “needy ministers and servants and canons not able to work.”
Similar retreats arose in the following century. The Bishop of Exeter built near his palace at Clist Gabriel a home for twelve blind, infirm, ancient or disabled priests, deacons and sub-deacons. The Dean of York maintained six infirm chaplains in St. Mary’s, Bootham. Clergy-homes were usually founded by ecclesiastics; but in 1329, a London layman, Elsyng by name, touched by the sufferings of the clergy in that time of scarcity, began his almshouse, ordaining that among the hundred pensioners, blind, paralytic and disabled priests should be specially cared for. The need is evident from a deed concerning St. Giles’, Norwich (1340). The house had been founded for the poor “and principally to minister the necessaries of life to priests of the diocese of Norwich, who, broken down with age, or destitute of bodily strength, or labouring under continual disease, cannot celebrate divine service”; but the number of such priests and infirm persons “flocking to the hospital hath so grown and daily groweth” that assistance was urgently required. Although the priesthood was temporarily diminished by the pestilence of 1349, clerks acting as chantry priests were again numerous during the fifteenth century. These unbeneficed clergy, it was said, “when depressed by the weight of old age, or labouring under weak health . . . p025 are by necessity compelled to wander about, begging miserably for food and raiment . . . to the displeasure of Him whose ministers they are.” To put an end to this scandal, “the fraternity of St. Charity and St. John Evangelist” was founded in London (1442), and this clerical almshouse was commonly called “The Papey.” Gregory, who was mayor in 1451, describes it in his note-book:—
[♦] PLATE IV. HOSPITAL OF ST. GILES, NORWICH FOR AGED CHAPLAINS AND OTHER POOR
“Pappy Chyrche in the Walle be twyne Algate and Beuysse Markes. And hyt ys a grete fraternyte of prestys and of othyr seqular men. And there ben founde of almys certayne prestys, both blynde and lame, that be empotent.”
Persons of gentle birth who had suffered reverses of fortune often retreated into convents, or were received into hospitals with a semi-official position. During the fifteenth century one or two institutions arose to benefit those decayed gentlefolk who, as one has said, are of all people “most sensible of want.” Staindrop College maintained a staff of priests and clerks, and certain gentlemen (certi pauperes generosi) and yeomen (pauperes valecti) who had been in the Earl of Westmorland’s service. The “New Almshouse of Noble Poverty” (Nova Domus Eleemosynaria Nobilis Paupertatis), which Cardinal Beaufort intended to add to the original establishment of St. Cross, was never fully completed, but there are still four brethren of the professional class on the Cardinal’s foundation.