One friar, however, is admitted, Brother “Creep-into-Houses,” but he turns out the worst traitor of all, benumbing Contrition by his false absolutions—

Sloth saw that, and so did Pride,
And came with a keen will Conscience to assail.
Conscience cried oft, and bade Clergy help him,
And also Contrition, for to keep the gate.
‘He lieth and dreameth,’ said Peace, ‘and so do many other;
The friar with his physic this folk hath enchanted,
And plastered them so easily, they dread no sin.’
‘By Christ!’ quoth Conscience then, ‘I will become a pilgrim,
And walken as wide as all the world lasteth
To seek Piers the Plowman;[280] that Pride may be destroyed,
And that friars have a finding,[281] that for need flatteren,
And counterplead me, Conscience. Now, Kind me avenge
And send me hap and heal, till I have Piers the Plowman.’
And sith he cried after grace, till I gan awake.

So ends this dreamer on the Malvern Hills, and so thought many more good Christians of Chaucer’s time. It would be tedious even to enumerate the orthodox authorities which testify to the deep corruption of popular religion in the 14th century. Two books of Gower’s “Vox Clamantis” (or one-third of the whole work) are devoted to invectives against the Church of his time; and he goes over the same ground with equal minuteness in his “Mirour de l’Omme.” The times are out of joint, he says, the light of faith grows dim; the clergy are mostly ignorant, quarrelsome, idle, and unchaste, and the prelates do not correct them because they themselves are no better. The average priests do the exact opposite of what Chaucer praises in his Poor Parson; they curse for tithes, and leave their sheep in the lurch to go mass-hunting into the great towns. If, again, they stay unwillingly in the villages, then instead of preaching and visiting they waste their own time and the patrimony of the poor in riot or debauchery; nay, the higher clergy even encourage vice among the people in order to gain money and influence for themselves. Their evil example among the multitude, and the contempt into which they bring their office among the better laity, are mainly responsible for the decay of society. Of monks and nuns and friars, Gower writes even more bitterly; the monks are frequently unchaste; nuns are sometimes debauched even by their own official visitors, and the friars seriously menace the purity of family life. In short, the reign of Antichrist seems to be at hand; if the world is to be mended we can only pray God to reform the clergy. Wycliffe himself wrote nothing more bitter than this; yet Gower was a whole horizon removed from anti-clericalism or heresy; he hated Lollardy, and chose to spend his last days among the canons of Southwark. Moreover, in the next generation, we have an equally scathing indictment of the Church from Gascoigne, another bitter anti-Wycliffite and the most distinguished Oxford Chancellor of his generation. St. Catherine of Siena, who knew Rome and Avignon only too well, is proportionately more vehement in her indignation. Moreover, the formal records of the Church itself bear out all the gravest charges in contemporary literature. The parish churches were very frequently reported as neglected, dirty, and ruinous; the very service books and most necessary ornaments as either dilapidated or lacking altogether; priests and people as grossly irreverent.[282] Wherever we find a visitation including laity and clerics alike, the clergy presented for unchastity are always numerous out of all proportion to the laity; sometimes more than ten times as numerous. Episcopal registers testify plainly to the difficulty of dealing with monastic decay and to the neglect of proper precautions against the intrusion of unworthy clerics into benefices. Many of the anti-Lollard Articles solemnly presented by the University of Oxford to the King in 1414 might have been drawn up by Wycliffe himself. These pillars of the Church pray Henry V., who was known to have religion so much at heart, to find some remedy for the sale of indulgences, the “undisciplined and unlearned crowd which daily pressed to take sacred orders”; the scandalous ease with which “illiterate, silly, and ignorant” candidates, even if rejected by the English authorities, could get ordained at the Roman court; the system which allowed monasteries to prey upon so many parishes; the pardoners’ notorious frauds, the irreverence of the people at large, the embezzlement of hospital endowments, the debasement of moral standards by flattering friar-confessors, and lastly the numbers and practical impunity of fornicating monks, friars, and parish priests. As early as 1371, the Commons had petitioned Edward III. that, “whereas the Prelates and Ordinaries of Holy Church take money of clergy and laity in redemption of their sin from day to day, and from year to year, in that they keep their concubines openly ... to the open scandal and evil example of the whole commonalty,” this system of hush-money should now be put down by Royal authority; that the ordinary courts of justice should have cognizance of such cases; and that such beneficed clergy as still persisted in concubinage should be deprived of their livings.[283]

To comment fully on Chaucer’s clerical characters in the light of other contemporary documents would be to write a whole volume of Church history; but no picture of that age could be even roughly complete without such a summary as I have just given. We must, of course, discount to some extent the language of indignation; but, to understand what it was that drew such bitter words from writers of such acknowledged gravity, we must try to transport ourselves, with our own common human feelings, into that strange and distant world. So much of the old framework of society was either ill-made or long since outworn; a new world was struggling to grow up freely amid the mass of dying conventions; the human spirit was surging vehemently against its barriers; and much was swept boisterously away.

THE CLERGY-HOUSE AT ALFRISTON, SUSSEX, BEFORE ITS RECENT RESTORATION
(FOR PLAN AND SECTION SEE [P. 97])

Think for a moment of the English boy as we know him; for in most essentials he was very much the same even five hundred years ago. At fifteen or sixteen (or even at an earlier age, if his family had sufficient influence) he might well receive a fat rectory or canonry. Before the Black Death, an enormous proportion of the livings in lay advowson were given to persons who were not in priest’s orders, and often not in holy orders at all.[284] The Church theoretically forbade with the utmost severity this intrusion of mere boys into the best livings; but all through the Church the forbidden thing was done daily, and most shamelessly of all at the Papal court. A strong bishop in the 13th century might indeed fight against the practice, but with slender success. Giffard of Worcester, a powerful and obstinate prelate, attempted in 1282 to enforce the recent decree of the Ecumenical Council of Lyons, and declared the rectory of Campden vacant because the incumbent had refused for three years past to qualify himself by taking priest’s orders. After four years of desperate litigation, during which the Pope twice intervened in a half-hearted and utterly ineffectual fashion, the Bishop was obliged to leave the case to the judgment of the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose court enjoyed a reputation for venality only second to that of Rome. Other bishops seem to have given up all serious attempts to enforce the decree of the Council of Lyons; Stapeldon of Exeter, for instance, permitted nearly three-quarters of the first presentations by laymen to be made to persons who were not in priest’s orders; and he commonly enjoined, after institution, that the new rector should go forthwith and study at the University. To appreciate the full significance of this, we must remember that boys habitually went up to Oxford in those days at from thirteen to sixteen, and that the discipline there was of almost incredible laxity. The majority of students, after inscribing their names on the books of a master whose authority over them was almost nominal, went and lodged where they chose in the town. At the time when Chaucer might have gone to Oxford there were, perhaps, 3000 students; but (apart from the friaries and collegiate provision for a few monks) there were only five colleges, with accommodation in all for something less than eighty students. Only one of these was of stone; not one was yet built in that quadrangular form which, adopted in Chaucer’s later days by New College, has since set the pattern for both Universities; and the discipline was as rudimentary as the architecture. A further number of students were accommodated in “Halls” or “Hostels.” These had originally been ordinary private houses, rented by two or more students in common; and the Principal was simply an older student who made himself responsible for the rent. Not until thirty years after Chaucer’s death was it enacted that the Principal must be a B.A. at least; and since we find that at Paris, where the same regulation was introduced about the same time, it was necessary even fifty years later to proceed against women who kept University halls, it is quite probable that the salutary statute was frequently broken at Oxford also. The government of these halls was entirely democratic, and only at a later period was it possible even to close the gates on the students at night. These boys “were in general perfectly free to roam about the streets up to the hour at which all respectable citizens were in the habit, if not actually compelled by the town statutes, of retiring to bed. They might spend their evenings in the tavern and drink as much as they please. Drunkenness is rarely treated as a University offence at all.... The penalties which are denounced and inflicted even for grave outrages are seldom severe, and never of a specially schoolboy character.” “It is necessary to assert emphatically that the religious education of a bygone Oxford, in so far as it ever had any existence, was an inheritance not from the Middle Ages but from the Reformation. In Catholic countries it was the product of the Counter-reformation. Until that time the Church provided as little professional education for the future priest as it did religious instruction for the ordinary layman.”[285] The only religious education was that the student, like other citizens, was supposed to attend Mass regularly on Sundays and holy days, and might very likely know enough Latin to follow the service. But the want of proper grounding in Latin was always the weak point of these Universities; it is probable that at least half the scholars left Oxford without any degree whatever; and we have not only the general complaints of contemporaries, but actual records of examinations showing that quite a considerable proportion of the clergy could not decently construe the language of their own service-books.

How, indeed, should the ordinary idle man have learned anything to speak of, under so rudimentary a system of teaching and discipline? Gower asserts as strongly as Wycliffe that the beneficed clergy escaped from their parishes to the University as to a place of riot and self-indulgence. If Exeter was a typical diocese (and there seems no reason to the contrary) there must have been at any given time something like six hundred English rectors and vicars living at the Universities with the licence of their bishops; and the Registers show definite traces of others who took French leave. Here, then, was a society in which boys were herded together with men of middle or advanced age, and in which the seniors were often the least decorous.[286] No doubt the average boy escaped the company of those “chamberdekyns,” of whom the Oxford authorities complained that “they sleep all day, and prowl by night about taverns and houses of ill fame and occasions of homicide”; no doubt it was only a small minority at Cambridge of whom men complained to Parliament that they scoured the country in gangs for purposes of robbery and blackmail. But the average man cared no more for learning then than now, and had far fewer opportunities of study. The athleticism which is the refuge of modern idleness was severely discouraged by the authorities, while the tavern was always open. The Bishop himself, by instituting this boy in his teens, had given his approval to the vicious system which gave the prizes of the Church to the rich and powerful, and left a heavy proportion of the parish work to be done by a lower class of hireling “chaplains.” These latter (who, like Chaucer’s Poor Parson, were mostly drawn from the peasant class) were willing to accept the lowest possible wages and the smallest possible chance of preferment for the sake of a position which, at the worst, put them far above their father or their brothers; and meanwhile the more fortunate rectors, little controlled either by their bishops or by public opinion, drifted naturally into the position of squarsons, hunters, and farmers. The large majority were precluded from almost all intellectual enjoyments by their imperfect education and the scarcity of books. The regular and healthy home life, which has kept so many an idle man straight in the world, was denied to these men, who were professionally pledged to live as the angels of God, while they stood exposed to every worldly temptation. The consequence was inevitable; orthodox writers for centuries before the Reformation complained that the real fount and origin of heresy lay in the evil lives of the clergy. In outlying districts like Wales, probably also in Ireland, and certainly in parts of Germany, clerical concubinage was systematically tolerated, and only taxed for the benefit of the bishop’s or archdeacon’s purse. The reader has already seen that this same system was often practised in England, though with less cynical effrontery.