Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages / Third Edition

by Edward Lewes Cutts

The elevation of the house may be conjectured with as much probability as its plan. Standing in front of it we should have the side of the hall towards us, with the arched door at its lower end, and perhaps two windows in the side with carved wood tracery[309] in their heads. To the right would be the gable end of the chamber with soler over it; the soler would probably have a rather large arched and traceried window in the end, the chamber a smaller and perhaps square-headed light. On the left would be the building, perhaps a lean-to, containing the buttery and cellar, with only a small square-headed light in front. The accompanying wood-cut of a fourteenth-century house, from the Add. MSS. 10,292, will help to illustrate our conjectural elevation of Kelvedon Rectory. It has the hall with its great door and arched traceried window, and at the one end a chamber and soler over it. It only wants the offices at the other end to make the resemblance complete.[310]

A Fourteenth Century House.

Of later date probably and greater size, resembling a moated manor house, was the rectory of Great Bromley, Essex, which is thus described in the terrier of 1610 A.D.: “A large parsonage house compass’d with a Mote, a Gate-house, with a large chamber, and a substantial bridge of timber adjoining to it, a little yard, an orchard, and a little garden, all within the Mote, which, together with the Circuit of the House, contains about half an Acre of Ground; and without the Mote there is a Yard, in which there is another Gate-house and a stable, and a hay house adjoining; also a barn of 25 yards long and 9 yards wide, and about 79 Acres and a-half of glebeland.”[311] The outbuildings were perhaps arranged as a courtyard outside the moat to which the gate-house formed an entrance, so that the visitor would pass through this outer gate, through the court of offices, over the bridge, and through the second gate-house into the base court of the house. This is the arrangement at Ightham Mote, Kent.

The parish chaplains seem to have had houses of residence provided for them. The parish of St. Michael-le-Belfry, York, complained in its visitation presentment, in the year 1409, that there was no house assigned for the parish chaplain or for the parish clerk. That they were small houses we gather from the fact that in some of the settlements of vicarages it is required that a competent house shall be built for the vicar where the parish chaplain has been used to live; e.g. at Great Bentley, Essex, it was ordered in 1323, that the vicars “shall have one competent dwelling-house with a sufficient curtilage, where the parish chaplain did use to abide, to be prepared at the cost of the said prior and convent.”[312] And at the settlement of the vicarage of St. Peter’s, Colchester, A.D. 1319, it was required that “the convent of St. Botolph’s, the impropriators, should prepare a competent house for the vicar in the ground of the churchyard where a house was built for the parish chaplain of the said church.” At Radwinter, Essex, we find by the terrier of 1610 A.D., that there were two mansions belonging to the benefice, “on the south side of the church, towards the west end, one called the great vicarage, and in ancient time the Domus Capellanorum, and the other the less vicarage,” which latter “formerly served for the ease of the Parson, and, as appears by evidence, first given to the end that if any of the parish were sick, the party might be sure to find the Parson or his curate near the church ready to go and visit him.” At the south-west corner of the churchyard of Doddinghurst, Essex, there still exists a little house of fifteenth-century date, which may have been such a curate’s house.

From a comparison of these parsonages with the usual plan and arrangement of the houses of laymen of the fourteenth century, may be made the important deduction that the houses of the parochial clergy had no ecclesiastical peculiarities of arrangement; they were not little monasteries or great recluse houses, they were like the houses of the laity; and this agrees with the conclusions to which we have arrived already by other roads, that the secular clergy lived in very much the same style as laymen of a similar degree of wealth and social standing. The poor clerk lived in a single chamber of a citizen’s house; the town priest had a house like those of the citizens; the country rector or vicar a house like the manor houses of the smaller gentry.

As to the furniture of the parsonage, the wills of the clergy supply us with ample authorities. We will select one of about the date of the Kelvedon parsonage house which we have been studying, to help us to conjecturally furnish the house which we have conjecturally built. Here is an inventory of the goods of Adam de Stanton, a chaplain, date 1370 A.D., taken from Mr. Tymms’s collection of Bury wills. “Imprimis, in money vi^s. viii^d. and i seal of silver worth ijs.” The money will seem a fair sum to have in hand when we consider the greater value of money then and especially the comparative scarcity of actual coin. The seal was probably his official seal as chaplain of an endowed chantry; we have extant examples of such seals of the beneficed clergy. “Item, iij brass pots and i posnet worth xj^s. vj^d. Item, in plate, xxij^d. Item, a round pot with a laver, j^s. vj^d.,” probably an ewer and basin for washing the hands, like those still used in Germany, &c. “Item, in iron instruments, vj^s. viiij^d. and vj^d.,” perhaps fire-dogs and poker, spit, and pothook. “Item, in pewter vessels, iiij^s. ij^d.,” probably plates, dishes, and spoons. “Item, of wooden utensils,” which, from comparison with other inventories of about the same period, we suppose may be boards and trestles for tables, and benches, and a chair, and perhaps may include trenchers and bowls. “Item, i portiforum, x^s.,” a book of church service so called, which must have been a handsome one to be worth ten shillings, perhaps it was illuminated. “Item, j book de Lege and j Par Statutorum, and j Book of Romances.[313] Item, j girdle with purse and knife, v^s.” on which we have already commented in our last chapter. “Item, j pair of knives for the table, xij^d. Item, j saddle with bridle and spurs, iij^s. Item, of linen and woollen garments, xxviij^s. and xij^d. Item, of chests and caskets, vj^s. ij^d.,” Chests and caskets then served for cupboards and drawers.[314]

If we compare these clerical inventories with those of contemporary laymen of the same degree, we shall find that a country parson’s house was furnished like a small manor house, and that his domestic economy was very like that of the gentry of a like income. Matthew Paris tells us an anecdote of a certain handsome clerk, the rector of a rich church, who surpassed all the knights living around him in giving repeated entertainments and acts of hospitality.[315] But usually it was a rude kind of life which the country squire or parson led, very like that which was led by the substantial farmers of a few generations ago, when it was the fashion for the unmarried farm labourers to live in the farm-house, and for the farmer and his household all to sit down to meals together. These were their hours:—

“Rise at five, dine at nine,
Sup at five, and bed at nine,
Will make a man live to ninety-and-nine.”

The master of the house sat in the sole arm-chair, in the middle of the high table on the dais, with his family on either side of him; and his men sat at the movable tables of boards and trestles, with a bench on each side, which we find mentioned in the inventories: or the master sat at the same table with his men, only he sat above the salt and they below; he drank his ale out of a silver cup while they drank it out of horn; he ate white bread while they ate brown, and he a capon out of his curtilage while they had pork or mutton ham; he retired to his great chamber when he desired privacy, which was not often perhaps; and he slept in a tester bed in the great chamber, while they slept on truckle beds in the hall.