We will assume that the typical parish priest—whose parentage and education at school and university we have seen, and whose fortunes we are following—passed with credit the bishop’s examination, was ordained without having need to put in a dispensation for canonical impediments, was instituted by the bishop without any wish for licence of non-residence, then went off to his living, and was inducted into possession of his church by the archdeacon, with a solemn sense of the responsibilities he undertook, and an earnest desire to fulfil his duty. It will be convenient to us here to divide our study of his life in the parish under several headings: his house and furniture; dress and daily life; and his duties as a parish priest.
CHAPTER X.
PARSONAGE HOUSES.
here is no reason to suppose that the houses of the parochial clergy differed from those of lay people of corresponding income and social position, except in the one circumstance that they sometimes had to provide for the hospitality to travellers to which we will give special consideration hereafter.
The house of a rector, from Saxon times downwards, would be very like that of a lay lord of a small estate, but it is very difficult for us, with our ideas of absolutely necessary domestic accommodation, to realize how rude and simple were then the houses of people of comparative wealth and social position. The house consisted mainly of one room. This room, the hall, was oblong in plan, constructed, except in districts where timber was scarce and stone easily obtained, of timber framework, filled in with wattle and clay, with a lofty unceiled roof. The windows were few and high up in the side walls, not glazed until comparatively modern times, but closed on occasion with shutters; a stone hearth stood in the middle of the hall, with iron fire-dogs on which the burning logs rested. In the better class of houses there was a raised daïs at the end furthest from the door, with a long rude oak table on it, and a single chair for the master of the house behind it; there were other tables of boards and trestles put up when needed, and taken away again when done with, and a couple of rude benches and a few stools; there was a cupboard near the “dormant table,” as Chaucer calls it, on which were displayed the pewter dishes, and horn drinking-vessels, and in better houses, perhaps, a silver salt-holder, and a couple of silver drinking-cups. When there was some pretension to refinement, the roof-timbers would be moulded, the lower part of the walls hung with tapestry, and rushes strewn on the floor by way of carpet; a low screen of wood across the lower end of the hall at the same time made a passage (“the screens”) through the house by which people might pass to the back premises without disturbing the company in the hall, and warded off the draught from the ever-open door. Any one of the hundreds of old halls which remain in all parts of the country may serve as an illustration of this general plan.
A separate building attached at right angles to the lower end of the hall, and opening into the screens just mentioned, contained the cellar, buttery, and kitchen, and might be prolonged to contain other offices, as a brew-house, etc. Another separate building was attached at right angles to the upper end of the hall, usually of two stories, with its gable to the front; the lower story was often a storehouse, sometimes a “parlour,” the upper story “the great chamber”—the special apartment of the lady of the house, and the one retiring room from the promiscuous company in the hall. This room had perhaps a bay window in its gable, and would be furnished with tapestry, and a few stools, a spinning-wheel, a couple of carved oak chests, and cushions in the window-seats.