According to Langland’s poem, the country clergy left their livings and came up to London:—
“Parsons and parish priests plained them to the bishop | that their parishes were poor sith the pestilence time; | to have licence and leave at London to dwell | and syngen there for simony, for silver is sweet. | Bishops and bachelors, both masters and doctours, | that have cures under Christ and crowning in token and sign, | that they should shrive their parishours, preach and pray for them and the poor feed, | live in London in Lent and all”—
some of them serving the king in the offices of Exchequer and Chancery, and some acting as the stewards of lords.
It is undoubted that the business of the courts in London received a great impetus after the mortality, as one can readily understand from the number of inheritances, successions, and feudal claims that had to be settled. Several of the Inns of Chancery date from about that time. Gascoigne, who was “cancellarius” at Oxford about 1430, and had access to the rolls of former “cancellarii,” was struck by the increase of legists after the commotion of 1349: “Before the great pestilence there were few disputes among the people, and few pleas; and, accordingly, there were few legists in the realm of England, and few legists in Oxford, at a time when there were thirty thousand scholars in Oxford, as I have seen in the rolls,” etc.[357]
The country clergy, such of them as remained in their cures were a notoriously illiterate class; according to Knighton, they could read the Latin services without understanding what they read. Langland makes a parson confess his poor qualifications to be the spiritual guide of his flock; on the other hand he was not without skill in the sports of the field: “But I can fynde in a felde or in a furlonge an hare.” At one of the manor courts in Wiltshire in 1361, a gang of the district clergy were convicted of night poaching[358].
Such being the state of matters among the upper and middle classes, it is not surprising to find a lax morality among the lower orders. The ploughman is as severe a satirist of his own class as he is of the rich. In London we have a picture of the interior of a tavern crowded with loafers of all sorts “early in the morning.” In the country also the contrast is drawn between the industrious and the idle class:
“And whoso helpeth me to erie [plough] or sowen here ere I wende | shall have leve, bi oure Lorde to lese here in harvest, | and make him merry there-mydde, maugre whoso begruccheth it: | save Jakke the jogeloure and Jonet of the stewes, | and Danget the dys-playere, and Denot the bawd, | and Frere the faytoure and folk of his order, | and Robyn the rybaudoure for his rusty wordes.”
To live out of wedlock was nothing unusual:
“Many of you ne wedde nought the wimmen that ye with delen, | but as wilde bestis with wehe worthen up and worchen, | and bryngeth forth barnes that bastardes men calleth.”
Ill-assorted marriages also appear to have been common: