9. The complete subjection of the craftsmen for five hundred years to their own companies.
PART II
ECCLESIASTICAL LONDON
[CHAPTER I]
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE
If churches and religious houses make up religion, then London of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries surely attained the highest point ever reached in religion. The Church was everywhere. In Appendices IV. and V. will be found a list of the Parish Churches and their patronage. The abbeys, priories, nunneries, and friaries contained a vast army of ecclesiastics from archbishop to Franciscan friar: hermits, anchorites, pardoners, limitours, somnours, church officers of all kinds, were everywhere in evidence. No street but reminded the citizens by the sight of a spire or a wall, that the Church was with him always, to rule his life and to shorten his period of purgatory, on the simple condition of his obedience. Religion endeavoured to rule the whole of society: religion claimed to control the whole conduct of politics and political economy: but the power of religion has never been equal to her ambition: religion could not put a stop to war, or to the violences and outrages of war. Had she been able to do so, the world would now be held and bound in chains and slavery. Yet it was well that there should be the Church to restrain men in some degree. She kept in her own hands, so far, all learning, all science, all the arts, all the professions. The forms, duties, and rules of the Church attended all men from infancy to the grave. At the bidding of the Church the whole nation, from the King downwards, renounced meat for a fourth part of the whole year. This fact alone marks the enormous power of the Church. For hundreds of years the Church preached respect for human life and self-restraint with more or less vigour, and with more or less success. Sometimes the Church has fallen upon evil times; her ecclesiastics have been ambitious, worldly, licentious, avaricious; but they have always been, as a whole, superior to the world around them. Thus it may be said that the Church might always have been better, but that the world was always worse.
Let us, then, briefly examine into what was meant by the Religious Life of London in the fourteenth century.
There were a hundred and twenty-six parish churches in London. This seems an enormous number for a population of not more than 120,000 or thereabouts. But we have to remember what the Church did for the people. The daily services; the chanting of the daily masses for living and for dead; the funerals, the weddings, the baptisms, the visitation of the sick, the direction of Fraternities, the countless observances and customs of religion, for all these things the Church was the centre, and the parish clergy were the directors.
The boundaries of a parish were not at first rigidly laid down; they overlapped the ward boundaries; they were matters of agreement: it was not until the Poor Law made the definition necessary, that the boundaries were finally and exactly laid down.
The multiplication of parishes was partly due, no doubt, to the desire of expiating sins by building, endowing, and decorating a Church for the good of the Founder’s soul. The census of the City, taken at any time between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, would certainly show an almost stationary figure, lowered upon a visitation of plague, or raised after a long interval without plague, pestilence, fire, or famine. The average represented about a thousand souls to every church. The origin of the City churches cannot, as a rule, be ascertained. The oldest dedications of the churches seem to show that the London parishes were settled before the Norman Conquest: most of the London churches were probably built in or about the eighth century during that strange outburst of religious enthusiasm, the first of so many which have swept over the country.