Parish Clerk sprinkling Holy Water.
(Early 14th cent. MS. British Museum, Royal, 10 E. IV.)
One curious custom of his office was to go round the parish on Sundays and great festivals, and to enter the houses in order to asperse the people with holy water, sometimes, perhaps on some special festivals, it would be to cense them, for Absolon, the parish clerk in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” (Miller’s Tale)—
Goth with a censer on the holy day,
Censing the wives of the parish faste.
A MS. in the British Museum of early fourteenth century date (Royal, 10 E. IV.) contains a story which turns on the adventures of a parish priest, as he goes through the parish on this errand. Our illustration, taken from f. 108 verso, shows how, after going into the kitchen to sprinkle the cook, he then goes to the hall to sprinkle the lord and lady as they sit at dinner. In the Harl. MS., 2278, f. 76, is a picture of a parish clerk about to asperse the dead body of a child, the mother withdrawing the winding-sheet for the purpose.[307] It was from this duty that the parish clerk took the name of “Aquabajalus.”
His stipend was made up of customary fees, especially for his services at marriages and burials, which differed in various parishes, and voluntary donations. A custom of this kind is good (says Lyndwode), that every master of a family on every Lord’s day give the clerk bearing the holy water, somewhat according to the exigency of his condition; and that on Christmas Day he have of every house one loaf of bread, and a certain number of eggs at Easter, and in the autumn certain sheaves. Also that may be called a laudable custom where such clerk every quarter of the year receives something in certain money for his sustenance, which ought to be collected and levied in the whole parish.
A great number of the mediæval wills contain small bequests to the parish clerk, and to clerks attending the funeral of the testator.
A story told by Matthew Paris[308] makes us acquainted with the average income thus derived. “It happened that an agent of the pope met a jolly clerk of a village carrying water in a little vessel with a sprinkler, and some bits of bread given him for having sprinkled some holy water, and to him the deceitful Roman thus addressed himself: ‘How much does the profit yielded to you by this church amount to in a year?’ To which the clerk, ignorant of the Roman’s cunning, replied, ‘To twenty shillings, I think.’ Whereupon the agent demanded the percentage the pope had just demanded on all ecclesiastical benefices. And to pay that small sum the poor man was compelled to hold school for many days, and, by selling his books in the precincts, to drag on a half-starved life.”
Boniface, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his Constitutions of 1260, says—
We have often heard from our elders that the benefices of holy water were originally instituted from a motive of charity, in order that one of their proper poor clerks might have exhibitions to the schools, and so advance in learning, that they might be fit for higher preferment.