Parish Priests and Their People in the Middle Ages in England

by Edward Lewes Cutts

The canon on sons of priests forbade the prelates from presuming henceforth under any pretext, or by any fraud, to appoint or admit any to benefices which their fathers held by any kind of title, either to the whole or to part, and that they who already hold such benefices shall be deprived.

In 1265, Cardinal Othobon presided over a national council at London, which was of great authority, and was regarded subsequently as a rule of discipline for the English Church, in which the preceding legislation was again repeated.

The Council of Reading, under Archbishop Peckham, in 1279, refers to the canon of Othobon contra concubinarios, and orders that archdeacons shall read it at their visitations and see that it is read by the rural deans at their chapters (the laity being excluded), and in case of neglect they shall fast on bread and water on the six week days (unless infirmity hinder them) until they have read or caused it to be read at the next chapter.

Were the laity excluded to screen the infirmities of their pastors, or because the expression of lay dissent would have encouraged the clergy in their contumacy? May we conjecture that, in spite of the urgent commands of the archbishop, the reading of the canon was often omitted, and that the archdeacons and rural deans excused themselves from the consequent penance under favour of the saving clause?[257]

The legislation is itself a witness to the existence of the practices which it tries to suppress. We need no further proof that in the thirteenth century many of the clergy were married men, that in some cases they lived openly with their wives in their dwelling-houses, or, in other cases, they visited them openly in separate houses provided for them; that they refused to give them up in spite of repeated synodical decrees; that clerics who were not themselves married countenanced their married brethren; that even the dignified officials whose business it was to take proceedings against them, hung back from doing so.

After the middle of the fourteenth century this subject disappears from the acts of the synods; not because the clergy had come universally to obey the former canons, but because the question had found a solution, which we proceed to describe. Celibacy was confessedly not a Divine ordinance, but an ecclesiastical regulation, and so long as the two evils were avoided (1) of the parochial benefices being overburdened by the demands of an avowed family; and (2) of the hereditary descent of benefices by the absence of lawful heirs; the ecclesiastical authorities might be satisfied with the obedience of a large proportion of the clergy, and willing to connive at the solution of the question to which the rest resorted.

The solution was as follows: The secular cleric was not bound by any Divine ordinance to celibacy, and did not, like the monks, take any vow of celibacy on admission to Orders. It was only an ecclesiastical regulation; and he took leave to evade the canon. If he married, the marriage was not void in itself, it was only voidable if brought before the Ecclesiastical Court during the lifetime of the parties; but he had taken his precautions in view of that contingency; the marriage was irregularly performed in some particular, or performed in such circumstances that it was incapable of legal proof. It was something like the morganatic marriages of German princes, illegal, derogatory, not conferring on wife and children the status and rights of legal wife and children, but still not in fact, or in the estimation of society, immoral and disreputable.

It is notorious that in the fifteenth century there were many ecclesiastics, from the popes downwards, who had wives, but not living in their houses, and not presented to the world as wives,[258] and they had children who were presented to the world as nephews and nieces. Warham, the last Archbishop of Canterbury before the Reformation, is said (by Erasmus[259]) to have had a wife who was not secluded from the knowledge and society of his friends; Cranmer certainly married his second wife, the niece of Osiander, before he was archbishop, and did not sever his ties with her after he became archbishop. And it is clear that these relations were not regarded as immoral and disgraceful; in fact, the common sense of mankind gives easy absolution for the breach of inequitable laws.[260]

But there is no doubt that the ambiguity of such relations, at the best, laid open those who entered into them to just censure, and must have lowered their own moral tone and that of those thus connected with them. Neither is it to be denied that enforced celibacy, and the loose notions encouraged by such connections as those here described, led to a certain amount of profligacy which admits of no excuse or palliation.

So the ultramontane policy at length won a victory—of a sort. It succeeded in preventing the clergy from having wives by conniving at their concubines; it left no legitimate sons of rectors to claim the heritage of their fathers’ benefices, and gave dispensations to their illegitimate sons; it established a celibate priesthood, with all the scandals and suspicions associated with it; it withdrew its clergy from the ordinary affairs of life, and at the same time from the leadership of the current practical life of the people. In a biting phrase of the time of Matthew Paris, “The pope deprived the clergy of sons, and the devil sent them nephews.”