Parish Priests and Their People in the Middle Ages in England

by Edward Lewes Cutts

There is a curious instance at Stokesay, in Shropshire. Before the Conquest, the parish church of that estate had been at Aldon, which is mentioned in Domesday. After the Conquest, the status of parish church had been given to a new church at Stokesay, on the same estate, and Aldon Church had been left in the status of a chapel. In 1367, the chief parishioners of Aldon took proceedings against the vicar, Walter of Greneburg, for neglecting them, and he was required by the bishop to find a chaplain to celebrate three days a week—Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday—except on great festivals.[113]

The following seems to be an instance of the transition of dependent chapels into independent parish churches, and an illustration of the way in which sometimes it came about. At Newnham, Gloucestershire, in 1260, an inquisition post mortem found that the Rector of Westbury held the chapels of Newnham and Munstreworth as pertaining to the Church of Westbury. In 1309, in the Pleas before the King, the jurors declared on oath that the churches of Newnham and Munstreworth were mother churches with cure of souls before the time of King Henry III., and in the presentation of the king.

Here is an example at Whalley of the way in which great landed proprietors brought new tracts of their forest and waste under cultivation, and created new manors.

In a suit in the reign of Edward III., the jurors found that in the time of King John there was not in the aforesaid place of Brandwode any manor or manses, but it was waste, neither built upon nor cultivated, and was parcel of the aforesaid forest of Penhul [Pendle], and it is said that in the time of Henry, the ancestor [proavus] of the present king, the then abbot [of Whalley] built houses on the aforesaid waste of Brandwode, and caused a great part of the waste to be enclosed, which is now called the Manor of Brandwode.[114]

And here is a late example of the people reclaiming waste, and building a chapel for themselves:—

In the end of the fifteenth century the forest of Rossendale was inhabited only, or chiefly, by foresters and the keepers of the deer. Upon representation to King Henry VII., and afterwards to Henry VIII., that if the deer were taken away, the forest was likely to come to some good purpose, it was disafforested, and let forth in divers sorts, some for a term of years, some by copy of Court Roll; so that where there was nothing else but deer and other savage and wild beasts, by the industry of the inhabitants, there is since grown to be very fertile ground well replenished with people. And inasmuch as the Castle Church of Clitheroe, being their parish church, was distant twelve miles, and the ways very foul, painful, and perilous, and the country in the winter season so extremely and vehemently cold, that infants borne to the church are in great peril of their lives, and the aged and impotent people and women great with child not able to travel so far to hear the Word of God, and the dead corpses like to remain unburied till such time as great annoyance to grow thereby, the inhabitants about 1512, at their proper costs, made a chapel-of-ease in the said forest; since the disafforesting of the said forest from eighty persons there are grown to be a thousand young and old. At the same time, one Lettice Jackson, a widow, vested in feoffees certain lands for the use of the new church of our Saviour in Rossendale. The population seems to have continued to increase, for, thirty years afterwards, the people founded and edified a chapel in Morell Height in honour of God, our Blessed Lady and All Saints.[115]

We have seen that the law carefully safeguarded the rights of the mother churches, as against the new chapels which sprang up. The Church also was careful to maintain their dignity in a way which calls for some remark. The curate of a chapel, on his institution, made a vow of reverence and obedience to his rector. Very generally some small payment was required from the chapelry to the rector in nomine subjectionis, as an acknowledgment of dependence. The people of the chapelries were required on several of the great festivals of the Church to communicate at the mother church, and on one or more of these festivals to visit the mother church in procession with flags flying.

There was another custom, very like this, on a larger scale, viz. the custom for the parishioners of all the parishes of a diocese to visit the cathedral church in procession on a given day in the year. This seems to have been a very old custom, for which Sir R. Phillimore quotes the Council of Agde and the Decretum of Gratian,[116] and suggests that it was probably introduced into England at the Norman Conquest. We find it enjoined in the canons of several Diocesan Councils; and it is tolerably certain that it was a general custom.

We suggest that the idea at the back of these customs was not merely that the offerings of the people of the chapelries should not be lost to the rector of the mother church on the three great days of offering; and that the cathedral should receive a yearly tribute from every subject of the bishop. We suggest that the purpose of the custom was to maintain the idea of the unity of the Church. The chapels had received their Christianity from the mother church, and all the “houseling people” in recognition of it worshipped there three times a year. The mother churches received their Christianity from the bishop’s see, and were his spiritual subjects, and once a year went up in procession to worship at the cathedral as an act of homage. And these reunions would, in fact, promote the idea of brotherly communion and Christian unity, as the attendance of the Israelites on the three great festivals at their one temple in Jerusalem tended to maintain the national unity of the people as the people of God.

Nothing is free from abuse. We learn from the Register of Bishop Storey, of Chichester, that in 1478 the people who came yearly to visit the shrine of St. Richard on his commemoration day (April 3), had been accustomed to carry long painted wands, and in struggles for precedence had used these wands upon one another’s heads and shoulders; wherefore the bishop directs that in future they shall, instead of wands, carry banners and crosses, that the several parishes shall march up reverently from the west door of the cathedral in a prescribed order, of which notice should be given by the incumbents in their churches on the Sunday preceding the festival.