Parish Priests and Their People in the Middle Ages in England

by Edward Lewes Cutts

ne immediate result of the Norman conquest was that Archbishop Stigand and several other bishops and abbots were ejected, and foreign ecclesiastics put in their place. It is not necessary to suppose that William acted solely on the desire to put men devoted to his interests into these positions of power and influence, for Edward the Confessor had already appointed some foreign bishops with the object of raising the tone of learning and religion in the English Church; and all William’s nominees were men of character, learning and practical ability. The removal of some of the sees from unimportant villages to the principal town of the diocese was a wise measure. It is said that some of the Norman bishops desired to make the further improvement of replacing the monks, where they existed, in their cathedrals, by canons, but were thwarted by Lanfranc.[73]

The parochial clergy seem to have been left undisturbed in their benefices; only, as the benefices fell vacant in the usual course of things, the new Norman lords of the manor, who had in so many cases supplanted the old Saxon thanes, not unnaturally appointed relatives or countrymen of their own to at least the more valuable of the parochial benefices in their gift.

The Norman conquest of England opened up this country more fully to the influence of the political and religious life of the Continent. The patriarchal authority of the Roman see had long since been acknowledged by the Saxon Church, but hitherto had very rarely intervened and as seldom been appealed to; henceforward it was to become a much more important factor both in the political and ecclesiastical life of this country. The foreign bishops appointed by Edward the Confessor and William, and the foreign parsons introduced by the new lords into their parishes, brought with them the Hildebrandine theories of the relations of the Pope to the Church and to the State. William sought to limit the exercise of the Papal authority in his new kingdom by a decree that the Pope should send no legates and no bulls without the consent of the Crown, and that his own subjects should make no appeal to Rome without the Crown’s permission. But, in fact, a considerable change gradually took place in the practical relations of the English Church to the Roman see. The Saxon Church had been isolated, the bishops and clergy had been eminently a national clergy, with practically no one above them and no one between them and their flocks. The appearance of two legates at the synod of Winchester (1070), which deprived Stigand the archbishop, and, by consequence, several bishops of his consecration, was the beginning of a series of very important interventions of the Pope for good and for evil, which, together with the multiplication of appeals to Rome, modified very much the previous practically autonomous condition of the English Church. Another important change was made by the separation of the civil and ecclesiastical Courts determined upon by William “in the common council, and by the advice of all the bishops and abbots, and all the princes of his kingdom.” It abrogated the old Saxon custom set forth in the laws of Canute (1016-1035),[74] that the bishop should sit with the sheriff in the shire mote, and assist in the administration of justice and the determination of causes; and enacted that, for the future, civil causes should be determined by the secular judge; while, on the other hand, no lay judge should interfere in the laws which belong to the bishop, or in any causes which belong to the cure of souls. The results went further than perhaps William had foreseen. One result was the setting up of independent courts of ecclesiastical jurisdiction over all clerical persons, down to the lowest of the men in minor orders, and in all religious cases, including matrimonial and testamentary causes and questions of oaths. This made the whole body of the clergy a privileged class under a law and judges of their own, and this privilege the Church maintained successfully against the endeavour of Henry II. to bring the clergy under the jurisdiction of the King’s Courts, and continued down to the “submission of the clergy” in the reign of Henry VIII. With this brief general review of the constitutional changes effected at the time of the Norman Conquest we proceed to our more humble task of noting the history of the parochial clergy and of their flocks.

Durham Cathedral.

The new men, military adventurers though they were, among whom the Norman conqueror had divided the lands of England, did not, like the Anglo-Saxon conquerors, trample out Christianity under their feet; nor, like the Danes in their turn, plunder the monasteries and churches; on the contrary, the Normans behaved like Christian men who, having come into power in a country which was in a backward religious condition, set themselves to effect religious improvements in their newly acquired possessions. Every bishop set to work to rebuild his cathedral church, or to build a new one in the place to which his see had been removed. This leads to the inference that the old Saxon cathedrals were comparatively small, in an inferior style of architecture, and perhaps out of repair. Many of the lords of manors seem to have rebuilt the parish churches, and to have built new churches in remote parts of their estates.[75] The bishops also made provision for the spiritual wants of the people more especially dependent upon them; Lanfranc, for example, built two churches and two hospitals in Canterbury, and erected several churches in the manors belonging to the archbishopric.

If we consider the way in which the landed property of the kingdom was resettled after the Conquest, each great tenant of the Crown subdividing his vast estates among the lesser lords who had fought under his banner, we shall see the likelihood that each of these new lords of manors, as soon as the country had settled down in tranquillity, would set himself to make the best of his new acquisitions; to add to their value by breaking up new waste land; to consult his dignity and comfort by improving upon the rude old hall of his Saxon predecessor, or building himself a new manor house. If his manor had only a chapel with imperfect privileges, he would not be content without obtaining for it the status of an independent parish; and the Norman taste for building would lead him to replace the rude timber chapel by a stone church in the improved style of architecture which had lately been introduced. In some cases the new lord built himself a manor house on a new site at a distance from the old one, and a church near to it, and adopted the new church as the parish church, leaving the old one to serve as a chapel to those who lived near it.[76] A great number of village churches in nearly all parts of England still remain, in whole or in part, whose architectural characteristics show that they are of about this period. Ordericus Vitalis, the historian of the conqueror’s sons, says[77] that especially in the reign of Henry I.,[78] by the fervent devotion of the faithful, the houses and temples built by Edgar and Edward, and other Christian kings, were taken down to be replaced with others of greater magnitude and more elegant workmanship, to the glory of the Creator.

Old Shoreham Church, Sussex.

The life of Orderic himself supplies an example. His father was a priest, a man of some learning, who had come over at the Norman Conquest in the train of Roger of Montgomery, afterwards created Earl of Shrewsbury, and received from his lord lands on the Meole, three miles east of Shrewsbury. He found on this estate of Atcham, a chapel built of timber dedicated to S. Eata, and replaced it by one of stone. He had his son Orderic baptized by the Saxon priest of the parish, who also stood as his sponsor, and gave his own name (sometimes spelt Ulricus) to the child. At the age of five years, he entrusted the child to the care of a priest named Siward, to be taught the first rudiments of learning; and five years afterwards, on the death of his noble patron, he devoted both himself and his son to the monastic life in the monastery at Shrewsbury, which the earl had lately founded.[79]