Parish life in mediæval England

by Francis Aidan Gasquet

And for ye dead I-prayed no worde?”

In concluding this brief survey of the material parts of pre-Reformation churches, it is impossible not mentally to contrast the picture of these sacred places, as revealed in the warden’s accounts, the church inventories and other documents, with the bare and unfurnished buildings they became after what Dr. Jessopp has called “the great pillage.” Even the poorest and most secluded village sanctuary was in the early times overflowing with wealth and objects of beauty, which loving hands had gathered to adorn God’s house, and to make it, as far as their means would allow, the brightest spot in their little world, and beyond doubt the pride of all their simple, true hearts. This is no picture of our imagination, but sober reality, for the details can be all pieced together from the records which survive. Just as a shattered stained-glass window may with care be put together again, and may help us to understand something of what it must have been in the glory of its completeness, so the fragments of the story of the past, which can be gathered together after the destruction and decay of the past centuries, are capable of giving some true, though perhaps poor, idea of the town and village parish churches in pre-Reformation days. “There is not a parish church in the Kingdom,” writes a Venetian traveller of England in 1500,—“there is not a parish church in the Kingdom so mean as not to possess crucifixes, candlesticks, censers, patens, and cups of silver.” What is most remarkable about the documents that have come down to us, and which are mere chance survivals amid the general wreck, is the consistent story they tell of the universal and intelligent interest taken by the people of every parish as a whole in beautifying and supporting their churches. In a real and true sense, which may be perhaps strange to us in these later times, the parish church was their church. Their life, as will be seen in subsequent chapters, really centred round it, and they one and all were intimately connected with its management. The building was their care and their pride; the articles of furniture and plate, the vestments and banners and hangings, all had their own well-remembered story, and were regarded, as in truth they were, as the property of every man, woman, and child of the particular village or district.

CHAPTER IV

THE PARISH CLERGY

The head of every parish in pre-Reformation days was the priest. He might be a rector or vicar, according to his position in regard to the benefice; but in either case he was the resident ecclesiastical head of the parochial district. The word “parson,” in the sense of a dignified personage—“the person of the place”—was, in certain foreign countries, applied in the eleventh century, in its Latin form of persona, to any one holding the parochial cure of souls. English legal writers, such as Coke and Blackstone, have stated the civil law signification of the word as that of any “person” by whom the property of God, the Patron Saint, the church or parish was held, and who could sue or be sued at law in respect to this property. In ecclesiastical language, at any rate in England, according to Lyndwood, the word “parson” was synonymous with “rector.”

Besides the rector or parson and the vicar, several other classes of clergy were frequently to be met with in mediæval parishes. Such were curates, chantry priests, chaplains, stipendiary priests, and sometimes even deacons and subdeacons. About each of these and their duties and obligations it will be necessary to speak in turn, but before doing so something may usefully be said about the clergy generally, and about their education, obligations, and method of life. From the earliest times the clerical profession was open to all ranks and classes of the people. Possibly, and even probably, the English landlords of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries were only too glad to bestow livings, of which they had the right of presentation, upon younger sons or relations, who had been educated with this end in view. But in those same centuries there is ample evidence that the ranks of the clergy were recruited from the middle classes, and even from the sons of serfs, who had to obtain their overlord’s leave and pay a fine to him for putting their children to school, and thus taking them from the land to which they were by birth adscripti, or bound. Mr. Thorold Rogers has given instances of the exaction of these fines for sending sons to school. In one example 13s. 4d. was paid for leave to put an eldest son ad scholas with a view of his taking orders; in another 5s. was paid, in 1335, for a similar permission for a younger son. In the diocesan registers, also, episcopal dispensations de defectu natalium are frequent, and show that a not inconsiderable number of the English clergy sprang from the class of “natives” of the soil, or serfs, upon whom the lord of the manor had a claim. Examples also could be given of a bishop allowing his “native” (nativus meus) permission to take sacred orders and to hold ecclesiastical benefices—acts of kindness on the bishops’ part shown to some promising son of one of the serfs of the episcopal domains.

The practice of introducing into the body of the clergy even those sprung from the lower ranks of life was not altogether popular, and the author of The Vision of Piers Plowman has left a record of the existing prejudice on the subject. He thinks that “bondmen and beggars’ children belong to labour, and should serve lords’ sons,” and that things are much amiss when every cobbler sends “his son to schole” and “each beggar’s brat” learns his book, “so that beggar’s brat a Bishop that worthen among the peers of the land prese to sytten ... and his sire a sowter (cobbler) y-soiled with grees, his teeth with toyling of leather battered as a saw.”

In 1406 the more liberal spirit of encouraging learning wherever it was found to exist asserted itself, and by a statute of the English Parliament of that date it was enacted that “every man or woman, of what state or condition he be, shall be free to set their son or daughter to take learning at any school that pleaseth them within the realm.” That such schools existed in the past in greater numbers than has been thought likely does not now appear open to doubt. Besides the teaching to be obtained at the cathedrals, religious houses, and well-known grammar schools, the foundations of education were furnished by numerous other smaller places, taught by priests up and down the country. This is proved by the numbers of students who came up to the Universities for their higher work at the age of fourteen or so, after they had been prepared elsewhere, and the numbers of whom fell off almost to a vanishing point on the destruction of the religious houses, and the demolition of the smaller schools, under cover of the Act for dissolving Chantries, etc. In the Chantry certificates mention is made of numerous parochial schools taught by priests, who also served the parish in other ways, or by clerks supported by money left for the purpose of giving free education. These proofs appear on the face of the certificates, in order that a plea might be made for their exemption from the operation of the general dissolution of chantries and guilds; it is needless to add that the plea had no effect. In some places, too, as for example at Morpeth and Alnwick and Durham, a second school of music, called the “song school,” was kept. At the latter place a chantry was founded in the cathedral for two priests “to pray and to keep free schools, one of grammar and one of song, in the city of Durham, for all manner of children that should repair to the said schools, and also to distribute yearly alms to poor people.” At Lavenham, in Suffolk, a priest was paid by the parish to “teach the children of the town” and to act as “secondary” to the curate.

By the will of Archbishop Rotheram, in 1500, the foundation of a college in his native place was laid. In this will the archbishop, after saying that he had been born at Rotheram, gives an interesting biographical note about his early years—

“To this place a teacher of grammar coming, by what chance, but I believe it was God’s grace that brought him thither, taught me and other youths, by which others with me attained to higher (paths of life). Wherefore wishing to show my gratitude to our Saviour, and to celebrate the cause of my (success in life), and lest I should seem to be ungrateful and forgetful of God’s benefits and from whence I came, I have determined in the first place to establish there a teacher of grammar to instruct all without charge.”