Parish Priests and Their People in the Middle Ages in England

by Edward Lewes Cutts

CONFESSION IN LENT.
LATE XV. CENT. MS., 25698, f. 9.

The bishop, however, still retained a strong staff about him at the cathedral, for the honour of the Divine service and for general diocesan work; and the old tradition of an ascetic common life would naturally be maintained there, when it was no longer practicable in the scattered rectories. This staff would need organization. One man would be put in general command during the absences of the bishop on his visitations of the diocese; another would be in permanent charge of the schools; another would have special charge of the services; another would be the treasurer of the bishop’s common fund; and thus naturally arose the four dignities of all the old cathedrals—the dean, the chancellor, the precentor, and the treasurer. Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz, the great chancellor of Charles Martel, organized the clergy of his cathedral into a community, adapting the rule of St. Benedict (which was then being pressed upon all the monasteries) to the circumstances of a body of secular clergy. After the Norman Conquest some of our bishops attempted to introduce the same organization into England, at Exeter, and Wells, and, with some modifications, at York; but the innovation did not flourish here.

The development of a more settled constitution of our English cathedral bodies of secular canons took the course of giving the cathedral clergy a more independent corporate life. The first great step towards it was the division of the common property into two portions, one at the disposal of the bishop, the other the endowment of the chapter. The property allotted to the canons was then subdivided, estates being attached to the four great dignities; and, lastly, distinct endowments, called prebends, were assigned to the individual members of the general corporate body; still retaining a common dean and chapter fund divisible annually among the canons, or some of them. The concession to the chapter of the privilege of electing its own dean, completed the work, and made the dean and chapter an independent ecclesiastical corporation. The chapter thus definitely constituted soon acquired new rights and privileges. Already in the eighth century they had obtained the right of being the bishop’s council; then they gained the right, to the exclusion of the rest of the clergy, of electing the bishop; then, that of representing the bishop’s authority during a vacancy. Lastly, the dean, originally intended to represent the bishop during his absence, asserted his independence of the bishop as ruler of the chapter; and it cost Grostete, Bishop of Lincoln, a long and bitter contest to establish his right to “visit” the chapter of his cathedral, a contest in which he said that he was contending for the dropped rights of all the bishops of England.

We have been speaking of the cathedrals which were served by bodies of secular clergy. But some of the cathedral bodies had adopted the Benedictine rule, and were monasteries in which the bishop occupied in some respects, the place of abbot, but the prior was the actual ruler. These were Canterbury, Durham, Norwich, Rochester, Winchester, and Worcester, and the two post-Norman sees, one placed in the great Benedictine House of Ely, the other in the House of Austin Canons at Carlisle.

The bishops soon found it desirable to secure the services of one or more archdeacons to help them in maintaining an oversight of their scattered clergy; soon after the Conquest, the archdeacons had their courts of jurisdiction, in which most of the minor cases of ecclesiastical discipline were dealt with.

The practical oversight of the parochial clergy was maintained partly by synods, partly by visitations. The bishop held an annual synod, to which all the clergy of the diocese were bound to come in person or by proxy. The bishop also went the round of his diocese at intervals, usually of three years. He could not visit every parish, but the clergy met him at several convenient centres, with some of their chief parishioners, and the synodsmen gave in written replies to a set of questions—with which we have already dealt—which constituted a very searching—not to say inquisitorial—scrutiny into the life and conduct not only of the clergy, but of the laity also.

A Constitution of Archbishop Boniface, 1260, directed every bishop to have in his diocese one or two prisons for confining clerics flagitious in crime, or convicted by canonical censure, and “we decree that any cleric who shall be incorrigible in his wickedness and habituated to committing crime to such a degree that if he were a layman he would, according to the secular law, suffer the extreme penalty, such cleric shall be adjudged to perpetual imprisonment.”

The archdeacons held their visitations, making inquiry specially into the state of the fabrics and furniture of the churches and parsonage houses; the rural deans also played a minor part in extending this oversight into every corner of the land.

After this general introduction, it will best serve our purpose of giving a popular idea of the part which a cathedral took in the religious life of the clergy and people, to select an individual example, and treat it a little more in detail.