CHAPTER IX.
THE PARISH PRIEST—HIS BIRTH AND EDUCATION.
he early Saxon bishops were very often men of royal and noble families. The religious houses, which were the centres of evangelization in the early missionary phase of the history, were often founded by royal and noble persons, who were not seldom themselves the first abbots and abbesses, and handed down their houses and offices as hereditary possessions. The parish churches were founded by the lords of the land, who made the advowson appendant to the manor, and very usually brought up a younger son to be the spiritual rector of the family estate. The natural result of all this would be that a large proportion of the Saxon clergy would be men of good family; not by any means exclusively, for we have seen that even slaves[121] were sometimes admitted to Holy Orders, and we have read[122] a kindly warning to priests of noble birth not to despise their brethren of humbler origin; and the law assigned to every priest—qua priest—the rank of thane (p. 77).
We know that the founders of the English churches established schools, and finding their converts apt pupils, soon raised up a learned native clergy. The young men intended for the pastoral office were taught the learning and trained in the ascetic discipline of these monastic schools.[123]
The natural result would be that the Saxon clergy would not only be generally of good birth and breeding, but also religious, learned, and capable men; the natural spiritual rulers, teachers, and protectors of the population of freemen, villeins, and serfs who peopled the estate of which the civil lord and ruler was often the rector’s father or brother.
The Norman Conquest introduced confusion for a time into both monasteries and parishes. Norman abbots intruded into the religious houses, sometimes quarrelled with the Saxon monks, and the first inhabitants of the newly-founded monasteries were usually imported from abroad; as the rectories fell vacant, they would be filled with the sons of the new Norman lords of manors, and there could be little sympathy between the Norman rector and the Saxon flock. But things soon settled down upon a new course. In a very few generations Normans and Saxons amalgamated. The old monasteries, revived and reformed, and the new ones added to them, were filled with zealous English communities; and in the parishes an English lord of the manor and an English rector ruled an English people. With the thirteenth century we begin a new period of parish history, continuing down to the sixteenth century, and extending all over the country, of which the general features are very uniform; so that it is only necessary occasionally to point out new institutions and phases of character.
Perhaps the most striking social feature of these centuries is the way in which the Church opened up a career to all ranks and classes of the people. The great landed families still maintained friendly relations with the monasteries which their forbears had founded, and sometimes contributed one of their cadets to the cloister, and perhaps in time secured his nomination to the abbacy; the lords of the manors continued to present their younger sons to the rectories; so that there was always a strong aristocratic element among the clergy. The vicars were for the most part the nominees of the religious houses, and the conjecture that abbots and priors, and abbesses, and prioresses, and dignitaries of the houses, not infrequently presented their relatives, and sometimes clerks in the service of the house, is supported by some actual examples.