Next the poet puts upon his stage the daughter of this worthy pair—
A daughter hadden they betwixt them two;
and it is what he says about this young lady which proves most clearly that neither mother nor daughter suffered in the estimation of society from the condition of their birth:
The parson of the town, for she was faire,
In purpose was to maken her his heire
Both of his catel and of his messuage,
And strange he made it of her marriage;
His purpose was for to bestow her hie
Into some worthie blood of ancestrie.
Geoffrey of Childewick, a knight, married Clarissa, the daughter of a country priest, but she was the sister of the famous John Mansell, the minister of Henry III.
A man was called priest’s son, not as a nickname, but as a surname recognized in formal legal documents, as in the “Pleas of the Crown,” c. 1220, Hugo Clark appeals Paganus filius Sacerdotis and others of having beaten him and broken his teeth, etc.[262]
The subject is rather fully illustrated in the MS. Omne Bonum (Royal 6 E. VI.) of the fourteenth century in the British Museum. At f. 295, under the title Clericorum et mulierum cohabitatio, is a quaint picture of a bishop parting a group of clergy from a group of women. At f. 296 verso, under the title De clericis conjugatio, is represented a group of clergy on the left, a group of women on the right, and a cradle containing a baby between the two groups; the text is on the penalties against clerical marriages, but it calls the women uxores—wives. Again, in the second volume of the work (Royal 6 E. VII.), at f. 138, under the title Filii Presbyterum, the picture shows three priests on the left, and women on the right, with three children kneeling between them; the text is on the disabilities of sons of priests.
Another branch of the same subject is the determination of the rulers of the Church that the sons of clerics should not be allowed to succeed to their fathers’ benefices. The hereditary succession of the semi-secular Saxon monasteries afforded a venerable precedent for doing so. The tendency of the feudal system was to make all offices hereditary, and the practice was growing up of making church benefices hereditary, and treating them like lay fiefs; e.g. dividing them between two or more sons, as if they were an ordinary estate; demanding a fine from a new rector as the lord of the manor did from a new tenant; making the condition that the presentee should give up this or that ancient possession of the benefice, or should pay an annual pension to the patron. The end of this would have been that the benefices of the church would have become hereditary, impaired, and secularized.
How far the mischief had already gone is illustrated by two or three examples which we are able to quote.[263] In York, immediately after the Conquest, there was something very like a succession to the archbishopric. The provostship of Hexham descended from father to son, all of them being priests. The Deans of Whalley and Kettelwell, ecclesiastics of great jurisdiction and influence, were married, and their offices descended from father to son for generations. In the episcopal registers we find from time to time sons succeeding their fathers well on in the thirteenth century, notwithstanding the canons and synods which prohibited it.