[124] “But what do you patrons? Sell your benefices, or give them to your servants for their service, for keeping of hounds or hawks, for making of your gardens. These patrons regard no souls, neither their own nor other men’s. What care they for souls, so they have money, though they [souls] perish, though they go to the devil?” (Latimer’s Sermon at Stamford, 9th Nov. 1550, Works, i. 290).—On the general character of the ministers of England, see the Parker Society’s Zürich Letters, ii. 63. Harding calls them tinkers, tapsters, fiddlers and pipers, Jewel’s Works, iv. 873, 209; Jewel admits their want of learning, ib. 910; many of them were made of “the basest sort of the people,” Whitgift’s Works, i. 316; artificers and unlearned men were admitted to the ministry, Archbp. Parker’s Correspondence, p. 120; many had come out of the shop into the clergy, Fulke’s Works, ii. 118; an order was given to ordain no more artificers, Archbp. Grindal’s Remains, p. 241, note; some beneficed ministers were neither priests nor deacons, Archbp. Parker’s Corr., pp. 128, 154, 308; laymen were presented to benefices, and made prebendaries, ib. 371, 312; and an Archdeacon was not in orders, ib. 142, note.—Parker Society’s Index, p. 537—F.
[125] “I will not speak now of them that, being not content with their lands and rents, do catch into their hands spiritual livings, as parsonages and such like; and that under the pretence to make provision for their houses. What hurt and damage this realm of England doth sustain by that devilish kind of provision for gentlemen’s houses, knights’ and lords’ houses, they can tell best that do travel in the countries, and see with their eyes great parishes and market towns, with innumerable others, to be utterly destitute of God’s word; and that, because that these greedy men have spoiled the livings, and gotten them into their hands; and instead of a faithful and painful preacher, they hire a Sir John, which hath better skill in playing at tables, or in keeping of a garden, than in God’s word; and he for a trifle doth serve the cure, and so help to bring the people of God in danger of their souls. And all those serve to accomplish the abominable pride of such gentlemen, which consume the goods of the poor (the which ought to have been bestowed upon a learned minister) in costly apparel, belly-cheer, or in building of gorgeous houses.” 1562. A. Bernher’s Dedication to Latimer’s Sermons on the Lord’s Prayer of A.D. 1552. Latimer’s Works, i. 317 (Parker Soc.).—F.
[126] On the neglect of their duties by the Elizabethan clergy, and shifting the consequences of it on to the laity, see the Doctor’s speech, on leaves 51-53 of Wm. Stafford’s Compendious Examination, 1581 A.D.—F.
[127] See Chaucer, description of his Monk, Prologue to Canterbury Tales, lines 165-207, and my Ballads from Manuscripts, vol. i. pp. 193, 194.—F.
[128] See Ballads from Manuscripts, vol. i. pp. 59-78.—F.
[129] Long side-note here in edition of 1577, as follows:—“The very cause why weauers pedlers & glouers haue been made Ministers, for the learned refuse such matches, so that yf the Bishops in times past hadde not made such by oversight friendship I wote not howe such men should haue done wyth their aduousons, as for a glouer or a tayler will be glad of an augmentation of 8 or 10 pound by the yere, and well contented that his patrone shall haue all the rest, so he may be sure of this pension.”—F.
[130] Such a classical expert as Harrison makes a curious error here. Cæsar, in his Commentaries, tells of the way in which the Britons instantly apprehended his weakness, perceiving during the truce his army’s lack of corn, and thereupon plotting to secretly break the truce and annihilate the Mightiest Julius and his little following (teaching all future invaders a lasting lesson to beware the chalk cliffs of Albion). Cæsar also notes how he himself quietly neutralised these efforts by gathering in corn from the country thereabouts. The Britons, just as much as himself, understood corn as the staff of life, the mainstay of war as well as of peace. The fact is that Harrison thought with two brains, his Welsh one and his Latin one, and, lost in the mists of Welsh fictions, sometimes forgot the most incontrovertible of Latin authorities. Man’s written records of things British start with Cæsar.—W.
[131] By omitting a comma (upon which the fate of empires may sometimes turn), our brother printers of 1587 (for this Scotch paragraph is not in the edition of 1577) have made pope Harrison bestow a mitre upon Hector Boece. That remarkable native of Dundee (who may be said to have invented Macbeth as we moderns know him) was a doctor of theology, and learned in every art, as becomes the first implanter of the tough fibres of Aberdonian scholarship (for, when one has the rare fortune to overcome the capacious skull and strong brain of a son of Aberdeen, the victor well may cry—
“Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain”),
but was never much of an ecclesiastic, although he held a canonry. Note, by the way, that Harrison (and not John Bellendon, as generally stated) was the channel through which Boece’s History of Scotland came into the magic cauldron of Shakespearian transformation. Cardinal Wardlaw, the founder of the oldest of Scottish schools, was a very different man from Boece, being the glow-worm to the grub.—W.