Changes took place much more slowly in the Middle Ages than they do now. First of all, the population was very much smaller, and hundreds and hundreds of acres now covered by big manufacturing towns were then unoccupied land.
At the time of the Norman Conquest the whole population of England only numbered about two million people; and in the time of King Henry VII it was only four millions; so that in the course of four hundred years the population had only doubled itself.
The people were not crowded into the towns. For instance, in the time of King Edward III, Colchester was one of the large towns, yet it had only three hundred and fifty houses, in which three thousand people lived, all told. There were only nine larger towns in the country at that time.
The bulk of the people were living in the villages, in the various manors, not in the towns. Many things prevented the population from growing very rapidly—disease, famine, and war kept it down. Death was the punishment for a very large number of offences, so that it is not to be wondered at that the population did not increase very fast.
The population was divided into two distinct classes—those who were clergy, or clerks, and those who were not. By "clergy" we understand, in these days, "ministers of religion"; but the word had a very different meaning in the Middle Ages.
In early Saxon times religion and learning were very closely related. Colleges and monasteries were centres of learning, and bishops, abbots, priests, and monks took the lead in matters in which a knowledge of reading and writing was required. Folk who had a leaning towards learning naturally became connected with colleges or monasteries. They began as scholars, and then were admitted, or ordained, to one of the lower orders of the ministry—often when they were still only boys.
A Scriptorium, from a miniature painted in an old manuscript (written in 1456) in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It depicts a clerk writing.
There are many thousands of boys to-day who are choir-boys. In early times those admitted to such an office as that had to be ordained, or set apart for the purpose, by the bishop. That ordaining made them clerks or clergy; and they were then under the authority of the bishop or his officers. If they did wrong, they were tried and punished in the bishop's court.