CHAPTER VIII.
PAROCHIAL CHAPELS.
t a rather early period, so the evidence leads us to conclude, all the great Saxon landowners had founded a religious house or a rectory on their estates, and these had, first by custom and then by legal recognition of the custom, obtained certain rights; on one hand, the sole right of spiritual ministration and pastoral jurisdiction among the people on those estates; and, on the other hand, to certain payments from them. Many of these estates were very large in area, embracing what at first were tracts of uninhabited and uncultivated country. But as population increased, and new lands were brought under cultivation, the spiritual needs of the new halls and new hamlets which came into being were supplied by chapels; these were built sometimes by the munificence of the lord of the whole estate, sometimes by the pious zeal of the rector who felt himself responsible for these new parishioners; sometimes by the mesne lord to whom the land of the new clearing had been granted; sometimes by the group of farmers whose labour had cleared the forest or broken up the waste.
The old Saxon parish priests frequently had one or more chaplains and clerks living with them and assisting them in their duties;[100] and this continued to be the case down to the Reformation, the bishops taking such steps as they could to perpetuate the maintenance of these chaplains.
When these chapels were erected, care was taken of the rights of the mother church. Constitutions of Egbert, Archbishop of York in 750, decree that the mother church shall not be deprived of tithes or other rights by allotment of them to new chapels. The same is ordered in a council under King Ethelred, by the advice of his two archbishops, Alfege and Wulfstan.
Clun, Shropshire, is an example of the great Saxon parishes. In the time of Richard I., Isabel de Saye gave the church and its chapels to Wenlock Priory for the safety of her soul and the souls of her husband and son, her father and mother, and all her ancestors and successors. The chapels enumerated are at the vill of St. Thomas de Waterdene, de Clumbire, de Cluntune, de Oppetune, and the chapels de Eggedune and Sebbidune, and all other chapels and belongings. The donor, however, reserves her free chapels, viz. the chapel of her castle, and any others.[101]
Shawbury was a Saxon foundation mentioned in Domesday. A certificate of Bishop Roger de Clinton (1130-1148) shows that there were then four villes, viz. of Aston Reynald, Moreton Corbet, Grenvill, and Great Withyford, and that the bishop consecrated chapels in three of them, there being one already existing. The bishop decided that such lands and endowment as the lords of the fees had offered when he consecrated the new cemeteries were offered to the mother church. The church, with its chapels, was appropriated to Haughmond Abbey; the canons of Haughmond being required to present fit chaplains to the Church and assign them a proper sustenance, the residue they might appropriate to their own uses and the entertainment of guests.[102]
Clun Church, Shropshire.