Parish Priests and Their People in the Middle Ages in England

by Edward Lewes Cutts

The middle classes supplied a great number of the clergy who filled the offices of parish chaplain (= assistant-curates), chantry priest, guild priest, and the like; and many of these, by force of learning, character, and good service, rose to higher offices. Even young men of the servile class were not excluded from the ranks of the clergy. The slaves whom Gregory and Aidan, and others, redeemed and trained as priests, may have been young men of good family taken captive in war; but in the thirteenth and subsequent centuries young men born and bred serfs were not infrequently educated and ordained, and given fair chance of promotion. It is true they were under special legal disabilities. A serf could not be himself ordained, or send his children to school without his lord’s leave, for they were adscripti glæbe, bound to the soil, and their labour and their children’s labour (or a portion of it, carefully defined by law and custom) was an important part of the property of their lord; the canons of the Church, moreover, from a very early period, had made servile birth a disqualification for Holy Orders;[124] but in the thirteenth, and especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there are numerous examples in which a serf gave a fine to his lord for leave to send his son to school, and kindly lords not infrequently gave the right gratis to a promising youth, and his ultimate freedom; and the Church frequently, probably usually, as a matter of course, gave a dispensation de defectu natalium.

From the single manor of Woolrichston, in Warwickshire, we get these illustrations of the text:—In 1361, Walter Martin paid 5s. for the privilege of putting his son ad scholas. In 1371, William Potter fined in 13s. 4d., that his eldest son may go ad scholas and take Orders. Stephen Sprot fined in 3s. 4d., that he might send his son Richard ad scholas. William Henekyn fined in 5s., to marry his daughter Alice. In 1335, William at Water paid for licence for his younger son William ad sacrum ordinem promovendum.[125]

Here is another example. In 1312, the Bishop of Durham gave license to his nativus, Walter de Hoghington, clerk, to receive all Divine orders, and renounced his jus domini.[126]

And this liberal sentiment was based upon the profoundest principle. When the King’s School at Canterbury was reorganized, at the time of the Reformation, some of the commissioners to whom the work was committed wished to limit the school to the children of gentlemen. It was for the ploughman’s son, they argued, to go to plough, and the artificer’s son to apply to the trade of his parents’ vocation; and the gentleman’s children are used to have the knowledge of government and rule of the commonwealth. “I grant,” replied Archbishop Cranmer, who was one of the commissioners, “much of your meaning herein as needful in a commonwealth; but yet utterly to exclude the ploughman’s son and the poor man’s son from the benefit of learning, as though they were unworthy to have the gifts of the Holy Ghost bestowed upon them as well as upon others, was as much as to say that Almighty God should not be at liberty to bestow His great gifts of grace upon any person but as we and other men shall appoint them to be employed according to our fancy, and not according to His most goodly will and pleasure, who giveth His gifts of learning and other perfections in all sciences unto all kinds and states of people indifferently.”[127]

There were always some who took the less liberal view which the archbishop thus nobly rebuked. Even in the twelfth century, Walter Map (one of the clerks in the civil service of Henry II., holding various ecclesiastical preferments; he died in 1209) complains that villeins were attempting to educate their “ignoble and degenerate offspring” in the liberal arts.

The author of the “Vision of Piers Plowman” gives utterance to the same illiberal prejudices as the noble colleagues of Cranmer. He thinks that “Bondmen and beggars’ children belong to labour, and should serve lords’ sons, and lords’ sons should serve God, as belongeth to their degree;” and complains that “bondmen’s bairns should be made bishops, and that popes and patrons should refuse gentle blood and take Symond’s son to keep sanctuary.”[128]

In another place the same writer says, in the same strain—

Now might each sowter[129] his son setten to schole
And each beggar’s brat in the book learne,
And worth to a writer and with a lorde dwelle,
Or falsely to a frere the fiend for to serven.
So of that beggar’s brat a Bishop that worthen,
Among the peers of the land prese to sytten;
And lorde’s sons lowly to the lordes loute
Knyghtes crooketh hem to, and crowcheth ful lowe;
And his sire a sowter[129] y-soiled with grees,
His teeth with toyling of leather battered as a saw.

The writer of “Symon’s Lesson of Wisdom for Children,” in a much more genial spirit, jestingly encourages the children to be diligent in their lessons by holding out the prize of succession to the see:

And lerne as faste as thou can,
For our byshop is an old man,
And therfor thou must lerne faste
If thou wilt be byshop when he is past.[130]