Chaucer has not overlooked this feature of the social life of his period. Among the “Canterbury Pilgrims”—
An Haberdasher and a Carpenter,
A Webber, a Dyer, and a Tapeser,
Were all yclothed in o liverie
Of a solempne, and grete fraternity.
In 1404 the Gild of the Holy Trinity was established in Worcester by Henry IV. The chantry which had been founded in the reign of Edward III. was slightly altered from its original purpose; a perpetual chantry of three monks was appointed to sing masses for the soul of Henry, while the priest of the original foundation was required to assist the parson and curator of the parish church, “because it doth abound in houseling people,” as well as to sing mass at his own altar.[565]
The bailiffs and commonalty of Birmingham in 1392, on the basis of a chantry originally founded in the time of Henry II., founded the Gild of the Holy Cross, with chaplains to celebrate Divine service in the Church of St. Martin, for the town contained two thousand houseling people; to keep in repair two great stone bridges and divers foul and dangerous ways; to maintain almshouses for twelve poor persons, and other charities. It built a great public hall, which was called indifferently the Town Hall or the Gild Hall.[566]
We find in the “Calendar of Chantries,” etc., and also in the “Valor Ecclesiasticus,” a number of endowed “services,” under the same kind of saintly designation as the chantries, e.g. our Lady’s Service, St. Anne’s, St. Catherine’s, St. John’s, the Rood, Trinity, etc.; sometimes, also, like some of the chantries, they are recorded under a surname, which it seems probable was that of the founder, as e.g. at Bristol, William’s Service, Foster’s, Pollard’s, Jones’s, Henry’s, Forthey’s.
The payment for these services seems usually to have come through the hands of a warden or of feoffees, and we suppose that they were usually maintained by a gild or fraternity.
At Our Lady’s altar in Rotherham Church, “divers well-disposed persons” founded a chaplaincy to sing “mass of Our Lady every Saturday at eight o’clock.” The Rood Chantry in Skipton Church was founded for a priest to say mass “every day when he is disposed” (does not that mean when he is not, as we say, indisposed, i.e. when he is not hindered by sickness?), “at six in summer and seven in winter, for the purpose that as well the inhabitants of the town as Kendal men and strangers should hear the same.”
The mayor and his brethren at Pontefract provided a chaplain to survey the amending of the highways, and to say the “morrow mass,” which was over by 5 a.m. Also a chaplain of Our Lady to say mass at 8 a.m., and another in the chantry of Our Lady in St. Giles’s Chapel-of-ease there, to sing mass daily “for the ease of the inhabitants.” There was also a “Rushworth chaplain” at St. Thomas’s Chantry, in the parish church.
In Wakefield Church the parishioners ordained a “morrow mass” at 5 a.m. for all servants and labourers in the parish.
There was a strong likeness between chantries and services; but while the chief object of a chantry was to obtain prayers for the departed, and it was only incidentally that it supplied additional opportunities of Divine worship, the service seems to have been intended specially to maintain an additional and probably a grander public service for the glory of God and the help of the spiritual life of the inhabitants of a parish or town, while prayers for the founders and benefactors were only a minor incident of the foundation. Here are a few notes on the stipends of the chaplains, the hire of chapels for the services, etc.