Parish Priests and Their People in the Middle Ages in England

by Edward Lewes Cutts

CHAPTER XV.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR PARISH PRIESTS.

flood of light is thrown upon the subject of a priest’s duties in his parish by the handbooks which seem to have been as common in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as they are in the nineteenth; instructing, advising, exhorting the clergy as to their duties, and the best way of fulfilling them. The Early English Text Society has printed one of these entitled, “Instructions for Parish Priests,” written by John Myrk, a canon of Lilleshall, in Shropshire, not the same man who wrote the “Liber Festivalis.” The oldest MS. of it belongs to the first half of the fifteenth century. It will answer our purpose to give a rather complete analysis of the book, spelling some words in modern fashion, in order to make it more intelligible, without much altering the substance.

It begins:—

Whenne the blynde ledeth the blynde,
Into the dyche they fallen both.

BAPTISM BY AFFUSION.
FROM THE XV. CENT. MS. EGERTON, 2019 f. 135.

BAPTISM BY IMMERSION.
FROM THE XIV. CENT. MS., ROYAL 6 E. VI., f. 171.