Parish life in mediæval England

by Francis Aidan Gasquet

“it must be always remembered that in the view of the Church, tithes other than first fruits, and tithes of increase, were destined not to provide a maintenance for the clergy, but for the relief and support of the poor; and the rector, whether of a religious house or parochial incumbent, was supposed to administer them for these purposes, he being only a ruler or administrator of them.... During the whole of the time that the English Church was ruled as an integral part of the Western Patriarchate, this view of the destination of tithes, and of the rector’s or administrator’s duty in respect of them, was never lost sight of.”

In regard, then, to the general notion of a parish, and as to how the parochial system was extended and developed in England, Mr. Reichel’s general summary at the end of his tract is important and interesting. It began, he concludes, in Saxon times, and assumed its complete form in the Councils of London and Westminster in the twelfth century. In the centuries which followed, and with which we are concerned, the administration of tithes was frequently entrusted to the actual incumbent, and in some cases to religious houses or collegiate establishments. But in any case the duty of the administrator was understood and acknowledged, and, it must be supposed, acted upon. The mistaken notion as to this has arisen probably from a neglect to bear in mind what happened at the period of the Reformation.

“At and since the Reformation,” says our author, “custom has persistently regarded such administrations as endowments of the parson, clerical or lay, not as gifts to the poor, of which he is only the administrator. Monastic parsons were then simply deprived of them by law, and the administrations they held were granted as property to laymen, whilst, to meet the wishes of a married clergy, parochial incumbents were released from all claims at law for charitable purposes.”

It is important to bear in mind that a properly organised “parish” was a corporation, and acted as a “corporation,” and as such no lords of the manor or political personages had any sort of power or authority over it. They might be, and, in fact, of course always were, members of the corporation--parishioners—and their positions entitled them to respect and gave, no doubt, authority to their suggestions. But the records of the old parishes that have come down to our time clearly prove that “Squire-rule” over parson and people in mediæval parochial life did not exist. Sometimes, no doubt, the “great men” of a place tried to have their own way, but they were quickly shown that the “corporation” of the parish was under the protection of a power greater than any they possessed—the power of the Church; and, as a matter of fact, this was so well recognised that it is difficult enough to find individual instances of any great landlords who were willing to try conclusions with the paramount Spiritual authority. To “Holy Mother Church” all were the same, and within God’s House the tenant, the villain, and the serf stood side by side with the overlord and master. In fact, at times, as when a feast fell upon a day when work had to be done by custom for the lord of the manor, the law of the Church forbade these servile works, and the master had perforce to acquiesce. In other words, the parish, so far as it was organised, had been the creation of the Church, and was free.

“The parish,” writes Bishop Hobhouse, “was the community of the township organised for Church purposes, and subject to Church discipline, with a constitution which recognised the rights of the whole body as an aggregate, and the right of every adult member, whether man or woman, to a voice in self-government, but at the same time kept the self-governing community under a system of inspection and restraint by a central authority outside the parish boundaries.”

One thing especially bound the parish together most firmly. The fact that the belief and practice of all was the same—that every soul in the parish worshipped in the same church and in the same way, that all kept the same fasts and feasts and were assisted by the same Sacraments, gave a unity to the corporation almost impossible now to conceive. But over and above this, the knowledge that parson and people were bound together by the parochial system, and, so to speak, existed for each other, strengthened even the ties of pure religion. In nearly all the documents illustrating parish life of, say, the fifteenth century, there is evidence of the community of purpose of pastor and people which is really astounding. As already pointed out, every rector and vicar throughout England not only regarded himself in theory as a steward of the panis Dominicus (the Lord’s Bread), under which name was meant charity to all that came to claim support; but if the laws of the English Church and Lyndwood’s authoritative gloss mean anything whatever, this sacred duty was carried out in practice. Wherever rectors do not reside in the place of their cures, says Archbishop Peckham, they are bound to keep proctors or agents to exercise proper hospitality or charity as far as the means of their churches will allow, and at the very least to relieve every parishioner in extreme necessity; and the gloss adds that the rector of a church on the high-road and in a frequented place will obviously have to spend much more than one whose cure lies off the beaten track. For this reason, it says, the clergy of the churches in England are well endowed, especially where the calls upon them for this hospitality are great.

This duty of considering the revenues of a parish as common property to be held in trust for the needs of hospitality and the relief of the poor is inculcated in every tract dealing with the subject, and acknowledged in numberless ways. In the will of William Sheffield, Dean of York in 1496, for example, the testator, after making some small bequests, says—

“I will that the rest of my goods be distributed amongst the poor, in all the benefices that I have ever held or now hold—more or less being given according to the length of time I have lived in them and maintained hospitality—for the property of a church is the property of the poor, and for this reason the conscience is greatly burdened in the disposal of the goods of the Church. And for the heavy responsibility of these distributions, Jesus have mercy.”

In another case, in the diocese of Exeter in 1440, a rector is specially praised at a Visitation, and it is declared that he “has done much good, in his parish, because he has rebuilt the chancel of his church, and has added two good rooms, one for himself, and ‘one to exercise hospitality’ in behalf of those who need it.”

Here, before speaking of the working of a parish in pre-Reformation days, it may be convenient briefly to treat about the somewhat intricate question of tithes. The gifts offered by the faithful to the Church for the support of the ministers, the upkeep of its officers, or as an acknowledgment of special services, such as baptisms, marriages, the churching of women, and burials, were roughly classed under two main divisions—tithes and oblations. The latter were personal, and to a large extent voluntary, although custom had somewhat determined the minimum fees which all who could were expected to pay for services exercised in their behalf. In England, as Lyndwood notes, oblations were almost wholly made in the form of money; and by law these offerings were regarded more as being the personal property of the priests than were tithes, and for this reason they might be spent more freely, according to the wishes of the clergy. Still, even in regard to this, the insertion of the word “generally” in the law seems to the author of the gloss to point to the fact that the clergy are not altogether free as to the application of any surplus from these oblations made to them, if for no other reason than because any apparent squandering of such ecclesiastical revenues might “tend to destroy the devotion of the people.” In oblations of this sort, of course, are not included such as were made in kind for the service of the altar and offered to the priest during the Mass, such as the bread and wine for the Sacrifice, brought in turns by the chief parishioners on Sundays and Feast-days.