That is one of the drawbacks of official life. You cannot tell a school manager what you really think of him. If his church had been a school, we should have taken a tenth off his grant after a year’s warning; and the next year, if his school was still uninhabitable, we should have struck it off the list.
No doubt in Norfolk, as elsewhere, a great change has come over the country clergy. Most of the valuable livings in that diocese were in the gift of the Cambridge colleges, and probably at Cambridge, as at Oxford, clerical fellows hung about the combination rooms for years, either giving indifferent lectures, or, in the preferable alternative, merely consuming the college port; while they waited for the shoes of richly beneficed incumbents, who showed an indecent reluctance to put them off. It was often discovered, when the long-deferred inheritance fell in, that there was lurking in the background a virgin, who had but too often passed the flower of her youth, and who thus tardily became Rectoress Consort. A strange couple they would be to administer the affairs of a country parish.
But though too often hampered by lack of training, and sometimes by lack of zeal, in their ecclesiastical duties, they did much for education. The traditions of a college living required, long before the Act of 1870, that there should be a parochial school, and they built generously, if “not according to knowledge”: strange schools in the University-Gothic style; externally picturesque; internally ill-lighted, ill-ventilated, ill-warmed; but no worse than you would find in the great public schools. And Mrs. Rector looked after the sewing, and the girls’ ailments; and both husband and wife were diligent attendance officers, bribing, threatening, persuading parents and children.
Let me not omit to add that some of these ex-dons were of the salt of the earth, though not too earthy. I knew them only as school managers, but it was sufficiently clear that in such cases the school was part of an admirably organized parish: their acquaintance with the children, and their complete knowledge of the home life of the children never ceased to surprise and interest me: the discipline and the school work were proof of the Rector’s watchful eye; and the greeting of the teachers showed the affectionate respect in which he was held.
Three great changes have come about in the last forty years. The abolition of clerical fellowships has cut off the supply of academical idlers. It is hard nowadays for a college to find men to take the college livings. “And oh, the heavy change,” the collapse of agriculture in corn-growing, and the consequent fall in rental of glebe lands, and in tithe, have all but extinguished the old-fashioned broadcloth Rector. Thirdly, recent legislation has all but extinguished the criminous clerk, and made it comparatively easy to stir up the mere idler.
Are the people grateful? I doubt it. They grumbled at the old style, and they grumble at the new style; but they made more out of the old style. A few years ago I happened to be in Wales, and, meeting a fruit-seller with a cart bearing the name of Llanbeth, I got into conversation with him, and casually enquired whether my old friend, the Rev. J. Jones, sometime Rector of Llanbeth, was still living. No: he was dead, and Reverend Williams reigned in his stead. I expressed sorrow.
“Fery different gentleman now,” said the fruit man, disparagingly: “I am parish clerk, and I know: fery different gentlemen eferywhere. Yes, sure.” And the wretch leered hideously.
“Well, I will tell you,” he continued unasked, “they are men that have failed at the Institushun (meaning the Training College, then at Carnarvon); that iss what they are.”
“After all,” I suggested, “they are better men now?”
“Well, I will tell you: they are more men of the world: that iss what they are.”