ARCHDEACON AND CLERGY.
XIV. CENT. MS., 6 E VI., f. 132.
We shall see hereinafter that by ages of worrying legislation the canons succeeded in compelling the clergy to keep their wives in petto; but the sumptuary canons were a dead failure.
The authorities made attempts to get them observed. It is related that at a certain Visitation, the bishop ordered the canon to be read and then had the hair of the clergy cut short on the spot. Grostete of Lincoln refused to institute to a cure of souls a deacon who came to him untonsured, dressed in scarlet, and wearing rings, in the habit and carriage of a layman, or rather of a knight, and almost illiterate.[166] Some of the vicars of York Cathedral[167] were presented to the bishop in 1362 “for being in the habit of going through the city in short tunics ornamentally trimmed, with knives and basilards hanging at their girdles.” Similarly, in the diocese of Bath and Wells, from an inquiry made by Bishop Beckington (1443-1465), we learn that the vicars of the cathedral affected the dress of the laity: they had the collars of their doublets high and standing up like lawyers, and the collars of their gowns and cloaks very short and low; against which practices the bishop made ordinances.
Many of the clergy, however, persisted in wearing the same sort of clothes as their neighbours of similar position in society, very much as they do now, with little differences which were enough to mark their clerical character. They wore the tonsure—the complaint was they would not make it larger, like the monks; they wore a special head-covering—or some of them did—which is mentioned in their Wills as a “priest’s bonnet;”[168] but they persisted in wearing their hair cut like other people’s, and short-skirted coats when it was convenient; their ordinary dress was of red or blue, or half a dozen other colours, instead of grey or black; and nothing could prevent them from wearing “zones” ornamented with silver, and a basilard—a hanger, or short sword—hanging at their silver zone, instead of a girdle of leather and a pair of beads. The mention of coloured gowns (togas) and of silver zones and basilards[168] in the wills of the clergy is so general as to produce the conviction that the wearing of them by the more well-to-do of the secular clergy was almost universal.
In the illuminated MSS. of all ages there are to be found representations of the secular clergy not only in their official robes, but also in their ordinary dress. The best and clearest examples of these which we have met with are in the Catalogue[169] of Benefactors of the Abbey of St. Albans, already quoted, and we are able to give engravings[170] of some of them.
Sir Richard de Threton. Sir Bartholomew de Wendon.